Benjamin Ginsberg-Margo came back to Colorado from his first year of college at McGill University in Montreal to spend a typical summer—relaxing with friends, reconnecting with family, enjoying the outdoors—and cooking.
But in this case, Ben’s cooking has a higher calling.
As the recipient of a Wikitongues Language Revitalization Fellowship, Ben has created a YouTube channel with programs demonstrating how to make a variety of traditional Sephardic foods.
It’s obvious that he knows his way around the kitchen—kudos to anyone who makes their puff pastry from scratch. But what is more impressive and significant is this—in the videos, he gives cooking instructions in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language spoken by Sephardic Jews around the Mediterranean.
“I asked myself, ‘What do Jews love, whether they are Ashkenazi or Sephardic, and the answer is food,” he says. “I love to cook, so I decided to make a resource for people to hear Ladino casually through a cooking show.”
Estimates of how many people around the world still speak Ladino range from 60,000 to 200,000. It is now considered an endangered language. With his cooking videos funded by the Wikitongues Fellowship, Ben Ginsberg-Margo has set out to keep Ladino and Sephardic cuisine alive.
Family history leads to COVID project
It’s fair to say that Ben was born for this mission. His family has both Ashkenazi and Sephardic roots—his mother traces her family to Portugal and his father’s family hails from Israel. When he was in middle school, three key events sparked Ben’s interest in learning to speak and write Ladino.
It started when he heard a lecture by Dr. Devin Naar at the University of Washington in which Naar recounted his exploration of his own family history as a descendent of Greek Sephardic Jews. Not long after that, Ben became a bar mitzvah and was excited to recite Ein Keloheinu in Ladino, a tradition at his family’s synagogue. Finally, during eighth grade, COVID lockdowns hit.
“My dad sat my brothers and me down and said, ‘You are not going to be lazy bums during the pandemic!’” Ben recalls. “So, we all committed to doing something special, and I said I was going to learn Persian.”
The Persian project didn’t last, but Ben replaced it with a Ladino project. He found a vocabulary list for Ladino and memorized 10 words every day. He discovered a Ladino dictionary to expand his vocabulary. He started keeping a journal with simple entries in Ladino. Typical entry: “I went to the grocery store. None of the eggplants looked good. I’m not going to eat eggplant.”
Perhaps most significantly, Ben began thinking like someone who sees language as a living thing that can fade into extinction.
“I realized when I bought the dictionary that if no one buys the book, it will go out of print, and that hurts everyone’s chances to learn Ladino,” he says. “All the native speakers are older, so we are losing them. The Ladino speakers in my family did not pass the language to my parents and they did not pass it to me. If I don’t pass it to my children, it’s going to vanish.”
By his own admission, Ben loves linguistics. He credits his parents with teaching him that Native American tribal languages are dying at a rapid rate. He started his own linguistics club at Cherry Creek High School. He grew up speaking Hebrew (thanks to his father, he says), studied Chinese in high school, and is learning French in college. He is majoring in linguistics at McGill.
“Linguistics just tickles my fancy,” he says. “It draws me in more than anything else. When I start focusing on something, I really do a deep dive. That can be both a blessing and a curse.”
Mersi Muncho
Ben describes Ladino as Spanish with a Hebrew influence. When the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal in the 15th century, they brought Ladino to the many countries they migrated to and it evolved to include Aramaic, Turkish, Greek, and Arabic elements, Ben’s primary dream is to create a Ladino textbook and learning materials—essentially a curriculum that could enable someone to teach Ladino to a new generation of students.
Before he takes on that project, he plans to produce 25 episodes of his cooking in Ladino show. He calls it “Mersi Muncho” which translates to “Thank you very much.” The shows are entirely in Ladino with English captions and introduce viewers to recipes for traditional foods, including burekas, hraime, nazuk, and sofrito, in an engaging way.
“I think the way to keep a language alive is through eating,” he says. “The very few Ladino words my family passed along to me all related to food, so I think that was the source of this whole idea.”
He is a one-person production crew—collecting the recipes, translating them, writing the script, filming, editing, and, of course, doing the cooking.
“When I write the script, I have to sit with four dictionaries,” he says. “What is the word for ‘tilapia’? If it’s not in any of the dictionaries, what do I do? That is the challenge.”
He is also creating a website to host the recipes and their history in Ladino, English, and Hebrew, another part of his rescue mission to save Ladino and Sephardic heritage for future generations, one delicious recipe at a time.
“Linguists can help a community preserve its history and culture,” he says. “If I can do that with my life, it would be a good thing. But only time will tell.”