When I first got married, whenever I spoke with my mom she always seemed to know what was happening in my life before I told her. For a while I couldn’t figure it out—was I more forgetful than I thought? Could I actually be losing my mind? But I soon realized, no, it was that my husband had spoken to his mother who then spoke to my mother who was now speaking to me. With their combined information sources, my mother and mother-in-law knew more about my life than I did.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, they are machatunim.
A Yiddish word related to the Hebrew word chatan (groom or son-in-law) and chatunah (wedding), machatunim refers to the parents of your son- or daughter-in-law—although it is sometimes used colloquially to refer to the entire family. Machatunim is also one of those strange words that don’t have a direct English translation. “It’s an alternative to the convoluted sentence ‘the mother of my son’s wife,’” says Ruth Nemzoff, author of Don’t Roll Your Eyes: Making In-Laws into Family.
Nemzoff says it is not happenstance that there is no convenient word like machatunim in English; rather, it is a symbol of how contemporary mainstream culture views the connection it describes. “From an American tradition, the relationship is more like, ‘Lovely to meet you at the wedding—I’ll see you at the grandkids’ weddings,’” she says. Jewish culture views marriage as not just two people coming together but two families. (Similarly, the word consuegros in Spanish means the parents of one’s child’s spouse.)
Keep your machatunim close, because they are who you will be sitting with in the world to come.
Machatunim is a relatively modern word, but the question of what it means when two families join has been discussed for millennia. When the Talmud lists family members who cannot serve as witnesses for one another (Sanhedrin 28b), it is noted that: “The father of the groom and the father of the bride can testify about each other. They are considered to each other only like a lid on a barrel,” i.e., they are connected but not truly related. However, later halachic minds go back and forth over whether machatunim should be allowed to judge one another’s cases, noting that such in-laws may not be blood relatives but they can love or hate each other just as fiercely.
In the Hasidic and Orthodox worlds, the machatunim relationship is indispensable. As most matches are arranged, “often the parents meet even before the children,” says Chaya Nove, a linguist focusing on Hasidic communities. And even after the engagement, the machatunim are usually the ones planning the wedding details and negotiating finances, “so the rapport between the two families is extremely important.”
Machatunim, Nove says, become your family along with all the social norms that go with it. Machatunim are invited and are expected to attend each other’s weddings and funerals, call to wish each other Shabbat Shalom and other familial niceties. Nove cites a popular Jewish adage that says to keep your machatunim close, because they are who you will be sitting with in the world to come.
The machatunim relationship carries weight outside religious circles as well. Ellen Scolnic, co-author of The Dictionary of Jewish Words, recalls how when her father-in-law first met her father, he greeted him as “my mechutin!”—using the male singular of machatunim (the female singular is machatainista)—and that it created an instant connection. The merging of families, however, is not always easy. “Every marriage is an intermarriage,” says Nemzoff. “Even with a marriage between the boy and girl next door they will have different customs and traditions.” And today it can be even more complicated when your machatunim are not necessarily Jewish—leaving a cultural gap that can be hard to close.
But in-laws don’t need to be outlaws. Annie Korzen, the 83-year-old actress and TikTok star whose video about the word went viral last year, says she has made efforts with her machatunim because she knows it’s important to her daughter. And in the end, whatever tensions exist can usually be put aside for the sake of children or, more important, grandchildren. “Children need to have an extended group of people who they know love them and care for them,” says Korzen. “The expression ‘it takes a village’ is actually true.”
And here, perhaps, lies the true importance of the machatunim: They expand the family beyond the narrow walls of the nuclear household.
We are constantly told by studies and policymakers that the family is in crisis—parents are flailing, and fewer children are being born. The current administration’s answer is to champion the so-called “traditional” nuclear family, defined as a married mother, father and their children. But what if that’s wrong? What if the solution lies not in affirming the family unit, but in expanding it outward—building a scaffolding of extended family who together create the support network children need to thrive? As Nemzoff reminds us, “The more people that love kids, the better.” And who better to embody that love than the machatunim?