At a brunch during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, California assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan was wearing a hat with two Stars of David flanking the slogan “Jews for Momala.” “It’s important for the world to know that Jews know Kamala supports them,” she told me. “She’s a part of our community, she’s in our community, and that’s what the ‘Momala’ highlights.”
“Momala,” of course, is the nickname that Vice President Kamala Harris’s stepkids Cole and Ella Emhoff, the son and daughter of Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, gave Harris when she joined their family a decade ago. It rhymes with her name (whose correct pronunciation the Second Family has been at pains to emphasize), and it sounds Jewish, at least to Jews, so the net effect is of a generalized multicultural coziness. “Those of you who belong to blended families know that things can get complicated,” Emhoff said in his convention speech, “but as soon as the kids started calling her Momala, I knew we’d be OK.”
But is there really anything Jewish about the name Momala? Jews probably experience it that way because of the homophone mameleh (which can also be spelled mamale or mamele), an old-fashioned Yiddish endearment that literally means “little mother.” Oddly, and unlike the Emhoffs’ “Momala,” this isn’t a term generally used to address one’s mother at all (though you’ll see it defined that way in various online sources). Rather, like other Yiddish diminutives such as tateleh (little father) or even bubbeleh (little grandma), it’s a way of addressing children, seemingly as a nod to their future status as parents—in this case, mothers. As the language columnist Philologos wrote in Mosaic magazine in 2020, when the newly elected vice president’s domestic arrangements first drew attention, “Hearing a woman hidden from sight in the next aisle of the supermarket say, ‘Mamaleh, itst koyft men nisht keyn kendy bars,’ ‘Mamaleh, we’re not buying candy bars now,’ you would be right to assume she was talking to her small daughter and not to her elderly mother.”
The cultural baggage of ‘momala’
Like much else in traditional culture, this kind of nicknaming encodes a certain anxiety about future fertility. Calling a baby “bubbeleh,” Leo Rosten writes in The New Joys of Yiddish, “carries the expectation that the child in the crib will one day be a grandparent”—and will address a child as bubbeleh in turn. Both senses of the diminutive—the actual and the potential “little mama”—come together in the title of a classic Yiddish movie from 1938, Mamele. Set in interwar Lodz, Poland, the film, a musical comedy, stars the iconic Molly Picon as a young girl who, after the death of her mother, is forced to take care of her unappreciative and undeserving father and siblings.
These intricacies and double meanings probably don’t figure into Cole and Ella Emhoff’s choice to call Harris “Momala,” since, according to media reports, the kids don’t consider themselves Jewish. But there’s another level on which the word suits their blended family: It captures a certain commonality between Jewish and South Asian cultures. Samira K. Mehta, a scholar of religion and family studies at the University of Colorado Boulder who has written about her mixed Jewish and South Asian ancestry, says the two cultures have multiple points of contact that make them a good emotional match—among them, the love of traditional cuisine, the attachment to extended family and a continuing, complicated struggle between tradition and modernity.
“When I was growing up,” Mehta recalls, “my grandparents and aunties would come visit from India and stay for quite long visits, and their absolute favorite thing to do, over and over, was to watch Fiddler on the Roof.” The struggle with arranged marriage, in particular, spoke to them profoundly. Mehta spells out the parallels: “The first daughter picks the man she wants, but it’s still an arranged marriage. The second one picks someone outside arranged marriage, but still acceptable. The third daughter marries out of the religion!”
While stipulating that there are many South Asian cultures and subcultures, and her family’s and Harris’s may be different, Mehta sees the Emhoff-Harris clan as one more example of a family structure that’s increasingly common—and emotionally comfortable—for Americans of all backgrounds. The word “Momala” may be unique to the Second Family, but in an election campaign that’s featured an unusual amount of rhetoric about family formation and child-rearing choices, what Emhoff called “my great, big, beautiful blended family” could be what the future looks like for more and more American families—Jewish and otherwise.
Opening picture: Cole Emhoff, Vice President Kamala Harris, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff and Ella Emhoff on Father’s Day, 2024. (Photo credit: The White House)
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