Undzer mishpokhe
Beginning Yiddish classmates Rebecca Araten, Ethan Nosanow Levin, Carolyn Beard, and I created a curriculum supplement designed to teach nonbinary Yiddish family vocabulary.
“… during our second semester of Yiddish, when it came time to discuss our relationships with our families, we realized that there were critical gaps in what we could communicate. How could we speak about our niblings, when the only words we were offered were “plimenik” for nephew and “plimenitse” for niece? How could we talk about our nonbinary romantic partners, or discuss models of parenthood outside of the tate-mame formulation? How could we escape a binary understanding of gender in our Yiddish learning, when that binary was restricting our ability to talk about our relationships and ourselves? […]
In order to address this gap, our class sought to create the materials that we wish we had been able to use when learning how to describe relationships in Yiddish. Under the supervision of Dr. Sara Feldman, we created the “Undzer Mishpokhe” (“Our Family”) curriculum supplement to share a resource for teaching gender-neutral family vocabulary with a broader audience of teachers, students, and Yiddishists.”
