I, for one, think we should all be raising our kids with chutzpah. And Oscar winner Viola Davis agrees.
On the March 17 episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, the “Fences” star shared how much she loves people with chutzpah, that Yiddish word for “audacity,” from tiny toddlers to audacious young people.
It all started with a conversation about one chutzpah-full young Jewish man, Timothee Chalamet (who is, it’s hard to believe, already 30, but will always be a young man to me). Chalamet mentioned Davis last year when he accepted a SAG Award, saying that he was in the pursuit of “greatness” and wanted to be just like her. And while the speech did spark debate, Davis said she loved it.
“It was a speech about excellence. It wasn’t about celebrity, it wasn’t about ego. I completely understood it, and it was beautiful,” Davis told Access Hollywood not long after the event.
On Poehler’s podcast, she shared more thoughts on Chalamet’s speech, including the fact that her teen daughter was so excited to hear him giving her mother a shout-out (“That was it for her, she’s 15,” Davis recalled).
“What I loved about the speech is he has a spirit of excellence… Some people don’t have the spirit of excellence,” she goes on, saying that she didn’t see ego in the “Marty Supreme” star’s speech, but rather ambition. Or, as she later says, chutzpah, adding that she loves “young people with an attitude.”
“The world is going to get at you. It’s going to kick your ass, just leave you in the dumpster. So it’s really great when you go out in the world, and you have the chutzpah — yes, you have that self-possession, right? Yes, that’s what I want with my kid,” Davis said of her daughter Genesis.
She also said she loves little kids with chutzpah. “I love a bad kid, like a 2-year-old bad kid… [At] my first wedding, I had a little bad kid who stuck his whole finger in my cake. I thought it was the best thing in the world,” Davis reminisced.
Dr. Becky Kennedy, the popular parenting influencer and author (who is also Jewish herself!), shared on her social media how much she loved this quote from Davis, though she said that there is no such thing as a bad kid but instead good kids “whose behavior brings up a bad story in us.” She urges parents to reframe moments like Viola’s cake incident by telling themselves, “I have a good kid who’s impulsive, a good kid who is curious.”
Both Dr. Kennedy’s video and the way Davis used “chutzpah” are so in line with the evolution of this word, which came to Yiddish from Mishnaic Hebrew, and is used both in the Germanic Jewish tongue, in modern Hebrew, and by English speakers around the world (though mostly here in America).
In both Modern Hebrew and traditionally in Yiddish, it is meant to be a negative descriptor, but as it came into mainstream English use, it took on a more positive connotation.
Having chutzpah means being fierce, audacious, daring, motivated — it means being brave enough to be yourself. While both cake-destroying toddlers and Bob Dylan-portraying actors who say they want to be the best could be seen through a lens of negative chutzpah — unacceptably audacious — Davis uses the word in the purely positive context. And honestly, those of us raising little ones with chutzpah love her for it.
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