"Will They Taste What We Taste?": Cooking Up Ladino with Benny Ginsberg-Margo

Growing up in a polyglot household, Benny Ginsberg-Margo developed a deep fascination with the intersection of language and identity. With mixed Sephardi and Ashkenazi roots, he developed a connection to Ladino after encountering it during his bar mitzvah. As a linguistics student and WikiTongues fellow, Benny launched Mersi Muncho, a Ladino cooking YouTube channel, to revitalize the language and celebrate Sephardi culture. In this episode, he shares his vision for Ladino’s future as a community language for generations to come.

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Benny Ginsberg-Margo is an undergraduate student of Linguistics at McGill University in Montréal, Québec. He is interested in language documentation and revitalization, especially in First Nations communities. He comes from a diverse Sephardi-Ashkenazi background, growing up speaking English and Hebrew and later learning Spanish, Mandarin Chinese, and French. Benny is also a Wikitongues Language Revitalization fellow, working to make recipe videos in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), with his channel, Mersi Muncho.