Sam Zerin blogs about raising his son in Yiddish. You can read all of his previous entries, including the blog’s introduction, on his website.
Sam Zerin
By Sam Zerin
-
Community Is Screen Time Helpful for Bilingual Babies?
Parenting would be so much easier if babies came with manuals! Well, the good news is, there are seemingly millions of baby manuals sold in bookstores and parenting blogs. The bad news is, they all contradict each other, as Ava Neyer has brilliantly demonstrated in her hilarious blog post, “I Read All The Baby Sleep…
-
Community Yes, You Will Have Haters. Speak to Your Kids in Another Language Anyway.
My mother’s parents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want the kids to know what they were talking about. Yeah – her parents, and everyone else’s, too! Of course, it’s ironic that now I’m speaking Yiddish – and only Yiddish – with my own child, specifically so that he’ll learn and use the language. It’s also…
-
Community Adapting ‘Boy Books’ and ‘Girl Books’ for a Progressive, Yiddish-Speaking Family
In my latest blog post, I complained about the gendered struggles I face, as a liberal Yiddish-speaking father, while reading and singing Yiddish children’s books and songs to my son. On one hand, I’m faced with a mother-oriented literature that erases my own lived experience as a father who changes diapers, cooks meals, brings his…
-
Community Daddies Can Read to Their Children, Too!
I’m a young father, raising my (currently 1-year-old) son in Yiddish. I speak, read, and sing to him exclusively in Yiddish, while my wife uses primarily English. It’s been a wonderful experience, but it’s also been strange and complicated, for many reasons, and not least of all because of my gender. As I explained in…
-
Community Fire, Fire! The Challenges of ‘Kid Brain vs. Adult Brain’
Last week, I was invited to read a Yiddish poem at the first of our library’s “Favorite Poem Community Readings.” The event, which happened last night, is part of a national, decades-long peace initiative called the Favorite Poem Project, in which Americans are asked to transcend divisive cultural boundaries by reading each other their favorite…
Explore
Most Popular
- 1
Film & TV Bonhoeffer biopic tells of a pastor turned would-be Hitler assassin — but is the story true?
- 2
News What Mike Huckabee’s ‘Kids Guide to Israel’ says about his views
- 3
Culture At 95, Shaindel Schreiber is still dispensing babka and advice on the Lower East Side
- 4
Fast Forward Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi: 5 things Jews should know
In Case You Missed It
-
News Israel reached a ceasefire in Lebanon. Why does Gaza seem so hard?
-
Culture Barbra Streisand recorded here — and so did Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, John Lennon and, uh, The Village People
-
Fast Forward Lee Zeldin, Trump’s pick to helm EPA, says he received bomb threat with ‘pro-Palestinian themed message’
-
Opinion We can be thankful this year — and Jewish wisdom can help
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
