This term reminds me of both the wonderful and terrible things that are produced by Columbia University.
Starting with terrible: Using a term like “milchig” in a publication like The Jewish Press is undoubtedly “Ashkenormative” in that it presumes that all readers have familiarity with the term, when in fact Jewish communities use many different terms for dairy products. “Ashkenormativity” is something that we Ashkenazim would do well to unlearn.
That said, the definition of “Ashkenormativity” that appears in a guide book distributed to all incoming Columbia students is “a system of oppression that favors white Jews based on the assumption that all Jewish folx [sic] are Ashkenazi or from western Europe.” This is an extraordinarily nefarious and insidious definition, which turns a form of cultural insensitivity into a “system of oppression” and racializes it.
Yet without Columbia we would not have the Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ). In the 50s and 60s, Columbia Professor Uriel Weinreich recorded 6,000 hours of Yiddish spoken by thousands of native speakers from all over Europe. More recently, Columbia (and its Judaica librarian, the incomparable Michelle Margolis) obtained a grant to digitize the data. It’s an incredible project that shows the importance of research institutions.
Funny enough, the data shows that using the term “milchig” isn’t just “Ashkenormative” but it’s “Litve-normative!” Polish and Ukrainian dialects of Yiddish used “milich” – two syllables – for milk, not one (“milch“) like in Greater Lithuania. And some adjectival forms added a “d” before the suffix “ig/ik.” In addition to “milchig,” you had “milchdig,” “milechig,” “milichdig” and other permutations!
