In Hebrew, it's harder than you'd think to write "student" in a gender-neutral way. A CU Duo changed that.
When Lior Gross (Ecol, EvoBio鈥18) enrolled in a Hebrew course at CU, Jewish Studies instructor Eyal Rivlin foresaw a challenge. Gross identifies as gender nonbinary 鈥 neither male nor female 鈥 and uses the English personal pronouns they/them/their. But standard Hebrew requires masculine or feminine identifiers for many words.
The sentence 鈥淚 am a good student,鈥 for example, requires Hebrew speakers to assign gender to both 鈥済ood鈥 and 鈥渟tudent.鈥
鈥淚f you don鈥檛 have a word to conceptualize your experience, then you can鈥檛 connect to others and you feel really isolated about it,鈥 said Gross, who graduated in December and plans to become a rabbi.
So, student and teacher drafted new gender-inclusive Hebrew language rules and introduced the , which they describe as 鈥渁 third-gender grammar systematics for Hebrew.鈥
The project essentially creates a third gender category by adding the suffix 鈥-eh鈥 to most words, and can聽be used for both nonbinary individuals and mixed-gender groups, which previously were referred to using the masculine plural.
鈥淚t was probably either really hard or maybe even impossible within Hebrew to identify as nonbinary,鈥 said Rivlin, an Israeli army veteran who also is a professional recording and touring musician.
The new rules are useful for Hebrew, he said, and 鈥渁lso for educating students about diversity."
Gross and Rivlin have received positive reviews from the nonbinary community and others eager to spread their approach, they said. Some people have introduced it to their own universities and congregations.
Gross sees the project as a natural continuation of traditional Jewish teachings.
鈥淥ne of the biggest things that resonates with me about Judaism,鈥 they said, 鈥渋s the encouragement of doubting and questioning and pushing back and holding multiple right answers.鈥澛
Read more about the project at聽here.
Photo by Patrick Campbell
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