It's been amazing how many people I've been able to reach over TikTok in a year. I posted my first Yiddish video on May 6, 2021. Hundreds of videos later, I managed to receive in under a year 1 million likes across all my videos, and 44k followers! Some of my content has reached hundreds of thousands of people, like this video in which I teach on the Germanic origins of Yiddish.
Besides the United States, I've reached a large audience in Germany. In fact, over half of my followers are German speakers. These viewers regularly engage with all of my videos, their comments express a genuine interest and appreciation for the Yiddish language, literature and culture. (Germans really love how similar Yiddish is to their language!)
For the months of June and July of 2022, I will be traveling throughout Germany, educating on the Germanic origins of the Yiddish language. For more details, see my gofundme campaign here.
This new German-speaking audience inspired me to offer Yiddish language courses tailored to German speakers. Last semester, I offered my first-ever class of this kind, Jiddisch für Anfänger (Yiddish for Beginners), and it was a great success!
It's been very important to me to build community amongst my followers, so I created t-shirts based on my content. I have a strong base of young LGBTQ+ followers, who love my videos on queer terminology in Yiddish. The most popular of the t-shirts feature the word "Feygele". This means "Little bird", or more colloquially "Gay". Traditionally it has been used as a pejorative, but we are reclaiming it.
I also had a t-shirt made for my German followers that reads "Ich liebe Jiddisch" (I love Yiddish). On my upcoming Deutschland Tour, I will be selling these shirts at Yiddish meetups I have planned throughout Germany. It's amazing to me that there are already Germans walking around the streets of Berlin in this shirt!
The merch can be ordered here. (Since I take off for Germany soon, please order asap, especially if you are in the United States).
Here's a gallery of people proudly wearing these shirts.
(And here's a video of one of my TikTok followers wearing the shirts on their account!)
I'm certain that there is potential to reach millions of more people around the world. While in Germany, I plan to make at least 300 videos, which should definitely attract many more German viewers.
I'm looking forward to the opportunity to educate on the beautiful Yiddish language. Here's to another successful year of creating Yiddish content on TikTok, L'Chaim L'Chaim!
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