The Lilith Blog

September 8, 2008 by admin

Entry# 4: One Month Anniversary in the Cancer Chronicles

To say the words feels equivalent to conjuring fiendish spirits. To write out the significance of this approaching month- this precarious, shifty month- feels equivalent to summoning thieves, to doing rain dances after cyclones. To give words to it feels heedless and irresponsible. If I speak the words, I evoke it, I summon it, I lift it wool-heavy from its timid placement on the coat rack. Instead, I do what I’ve learned best from the women in my life: balk, cower, and worry. Instead, I find myself like the woodpecker, knocking three times when asked, flitting to the nearest wooden peg during dialogue whenever asked, “And how is her health…?” This part of me whispers Shah! This part of me wants tight-lipped silencio!

But I have a choice in this matter and instead I speak. Instead, Reason flirts with Optimism, makes a sultry pass and I write.

This September is our one-month anniversary. This September is a hot racecar winding round the track a third time, and we do not know who or what grips the wheel. We wait for it while trying not to wait. In September 2006, she was diagnosed with breast cancer for the first time. A lumpectomy and round of chemo later, we huffed and squatted at the finish line, by then already springtime.

Then like an annual summoning, like a court mandate, like a persnickety ex-lover, September 2007 arrived unwelcome back on our doorsteps. She didn’t want to race it again. She did it anyway. If I could’ve saved her…she saved herself. A double mastectomy and second year of chemo later, she tumbled leopard high, through the finish line. We waited, upholstered in Gatorade and banana. We waited, arm-wide. Strident with hoorahs.

It’s a funny thing when people ask, Is it gone? It’s not a miscarriage or a swallowed penny. It’s not an annoyingly lodged object that once gone, you are cleared of. (People seem to know this, but ask the question anyway.)

I’ve grown to know cancer as its own economy, fluctuating always, weakening strengthening, threatening to shake what I hold most valuable. We can’t know if and when it’s gone (exactly). We can’t know if and when it’s back (exactly). When people ask the money-question “Is it passed?” I presently quip- Oh! But it’s day by day.

This September 2008 marks the third September. There I have said it. But I am not afraid of staying silent, only of not speaking enough. And we are speaking bright and amber-tongued. This month also marks the celebration of her 60th birthday. I am not a jinxer (I declare) I am a daughter. And we are high leapers, living wild humble family-filled lives.

–I. Kramer

The Lilith Blog

September 4, 2008 by admin

10 Ways to Know that Summer is Over in Jerusalem

1. You can no longer find cherries anywhere, but the first blood-red pomegranates are in all the markets and even on some of the trees (like the one in my backyard).

2. You hear the sound of the shofar! (If you are jogging in the streets at 7am, or, um, attending Shacharit – I guess.)

3. The pizza parlors and ice cream shops are crowded with frum 18-year-olds from America in knee socks (knee socks!), all just arrived for a year of yeshiva study, playing with their cell phones/Ipods/cameras (who can tell the difference?) while chewing big wads of bubble gum and chatting in loud Brooklyn accents….

4. The honey jars are by the cash register in all the supermarkets – the impulse buy of the season.

5. Colleagues start using the excuse, “Oh well, it’s nearly time for the holidays, when nobody does any work anyway.”

6. You can eat Shabbat dinner at a normal hour again.

7. The billboards on all the streets are plastered with ads about lectures on repentance: Tshuva! Tfillah! Tzedakah!

8. If you swim after 10am, you will not be splashed and bashed by the rowdy campers who hijack the pool all summer (hurrah!).

9. After a three-week lull, people start getting married again (like the very young and innocent-looking Hasidic couple whom I inadvertently bumped into last night on their way from the chuppah to the yichud room, when I took a wrong turn out of the cell phone shop in an otherwise deserted business complex in Givat Shaul that apparently also contains a very modest wedding hall….)

10. You open your daily planner to jot down a note for next week, and discover that you have come to the end of the book. Time to copy all the names and addresses into a new planner – whose names will be written in that book? Whose will not? Who by fire, and who by water?

Yes, the holiday season has arrived…..

–Chavatzelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

August 20, 2008 by admin

The Saber vs. The Pen: Jewish Women in the Olympics

Like most everyone with a television set the world over, I too have been watching the Olympics — and getting more excited about sports and my country than I expected to be. When an article mentioning U.S. Fencing Team member Sada Jacobson, who is this year’s silver medalist in the women’s saber competition and who just happens to be Jewish, caught my attention (Jacobson “was honored in 2002 by the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame with the Marty Glickman Award,” according to her bio), I found myself wondering how many other, non-Israeli Jewish women are competing in this year’s Olympics.

But when I bunkered down to tally up the Jewish-sounding names on the U.S. team’s website, it soon became obvious that my method was so inaccurate as to be worthless, and that the task, in general, is rather petty. (Not to mention that there are A LOT of Olympians and I have better things to do with my time.) What would be the point of saying there are such-and-such-number of Jews on the team? Am I so insecure about the athletic capabilities of Jewish women that I have to do a head count to prove that we, too, can be Olympians?

These questions run much deeper than the Olympics, though. We, Jewish journalist and civilians alike, often try to claim Jews who’ve made it into the mainstream spotlight (Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song,” anyone?). But does it really matter that Regina Spektor went to a Jewish day school? That Seth Rogen mentions his Jew-fro in “Knocked Up?” That Sacha Baron Cohen was spotted at an Upper West Side synagogue on the High Holidays or that he spoke in Hebrew instead of Kazhak all through the “Borat” movie? And do I really care that Amy Winehouse (God help her) got married under a chuppah?

The answer, I find upon some reflection, is yes.

And here’s why. Secular, pop-culture has for so long been white-washed of any ethnic markers. The movies and TV have generally been an equalizer, creating a common American culture of assimilation. Many early American films, like “The Jazz Singer,” for example, dealt with the tension between the younger generation’s assimilation and their parents wanting them to hold fast to their tradition — and assimilation usually won out. Hence actors and performers changing their ethnic-sounding names to more zingy, “American”-sounding monochres with marquee appeal. And actors today, or a generation ago, still do this. (Hello, Winona Ryder?) In the last decade or two, ethnic practices were brought into media as a politically correct nod to multi-culturalism. But the pop-Jews mentioned above, and numerous other Jewish blips in pop culture that have come up lately, have come about organically, from people’s honest connection to their culture and their willingness to flaunt it, or at least talk about it. And seeing those examples of famous people who’ve “made it” in mainstream culture still clinging to their Jewish identity makes us all feel, at least subconsciously, a little prouder of our own roots, and like we, too, can be super stars, whether or not we go to High Holiday services.

And that’s OK.

Now, how to get out of this cultural diatribe and back into the Olympics? Oh yes. Sada Jacobson. Surely Judaism has little if nothing to do with her and other unaccounted for Jewish Olympians’ athletic prowess. But the point we can take away from this is that their being Jewish didn’t hold them back. Clearly there are many Jews who value athletics, but as a community, athletics for the sake of athletics is not a particularly valued pursuit, particularly not for women (and, no, spending 45 minutes on the treadmill three times a week does not an Olympic runner make).

One need only look to the sports leagues in Jewish day schools, where the cool sport that gives team members the most social capital is boys’ gym hockey (no ice, not even a field, just gym). And there is no equivalent hockey team for girls.

But it needn’t be that way. True athletics is not about running around a gym getting sweaty. It’s about form, skill, discipline and dedication – values that can be transferred to any task – physical or intellectual. So I call on all the yeshiva girls out there to go out and show the boys up: pick up a pair of ice skates and a hockey stick and start practicing for a girls’ ice hockey league, by far more impressive and more difficult than gym hockey.

Or, better yet, pick up a saber and start a fencing team. Because, while as a writer I hate to admit it, sometimes the sword really is, if not actually mightier than the pen, at least mightier-seeming, and seeming mighty is sometimes the key to being so.

–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

August 12, 2008 by admin

Swimming in the Early Days of Av

My friend Roni saw me on my way to the pool last week and was surprised to see where I was going. “You? Swimming during the nine days? I’m shocked! Even I don’t swim during the nine days.” She was referring to the well-known custom of refraining during the week before Tisha b’Av from pleasurable activities, including buying new clothes, eating meat, and bathing for pleasure (an activity that is commonly thought to include swimming). Rather than try to defend myself, I asked her, “Why don’t you?” She thought for a moment and then responded, “Because how else would I get in the right mindset for Tisha b’Av? I don’t eat meat, and I rarely buy new clothes – so it’s only the prohibition on swimming that actually reminds me of the time of year.” I was glad that I had asked her, because in hearing her explanation as to why she does not swim, I realized why I do.

Unlike Roni, it would be impossible for me to forget what is going on in the Jewish calendar now. I feel like I have spent much of the last month getting ready for Tisha b’Av. I have been teaching classes for the last few weeks about the symbolism of the Temple for the rabbis, and I wrote an essay about this same subject. I have also been to several lectures about Tisha b’Av, most notably a class last week at Beit Avichai about forms of mourning in Jewish tradition, and a shiur last night about tragedy from ancient Greece to Shakespeare to the Talmud. I have leyned several of the haftarot from Jeremiah and Ezekiel about the sinfulness of the people and the destruction that awaits them. When not leyning these haftarot, I have been practicing the perek of Eicha that I will chant at the Kotel tomorrow night. In addition, my chevruta and I have been learning the fifth perek of Gittin, which includes all the stories about the eve of the destruction of the Temple. (Unfortunately, although Daf Yomi is also on Gittin, we hit the fifth perek two weeks after Tisha b’Av, which is appropriately tragic.) And for the past two weeks, I have been reading the final chapter of the first volume of Rabbi Benjamin Lau’s Chachamim, which deals with Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai (most famous for his cry, later paraphrased by Patrick Henry, “Give me Yavneh and its sages!”), the zealots, and the events surrounding the destruction of the Temple. I even inadvertently invited Bar Kamtza for dinner this Shabbat!

Through it all, though, I have been swimming nearly every day in the Olympic-sized Jerusalem swimming pool on the ground floor of the office
building where I work. To my delight, the pool has been considerably less crowded this past week, since so many of the religious people don’t swim.
(On Monday night, when there is “all women’s swimming” for the sake of religious women who will not swim with men, the pool was nearly empty; for
the first time ever I had an entire lane to myself!) While I swim, the melody of Eicha often runs through my head, and sometimes when I swim
backstroke, I find myself practicing out loud. At other times I keep the copious notes I am taking on Rabbi Lau’s book in a plastic sleeve at the
edge of the pool, and review the material between laps. Swimming is one of the few activities I do that does not involve feeding new ideas into my
brain. When I swim, I reflect and process and digest. If not for swimming, I don’t think I would remember half of what I have been studying all summer about the history surrounding Tisha b’Av. Perhaps, then, I could have answered Roni by saying, “Why do I swim? Because it helps me remember all about Tisha b’Av!” The reasoning might be hafuch-al-hafuch (that is, topsy-turvy), but it’s true.

–Chavatzelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

August 6, 2008 by admin

Jewish Women Leaders: Mourning One's Loss, Watching Another On the Rise

Let’s face it. It’s hard for women to rise to the top in the Jewish world. Whatever the reasons, only a handful of women sit at the highest echelons of major Jewish organizations. And so we mourn the loss of June Walker, former head of Hadassah who spent this last year as Chair of the Conference of President of Major American Jewish Organizations, not just for the many contributions to the Jewish community but for the example she set for Jewish women, and the doors she opened.

Walker was only the second woman in the Conference of Presidents several-decades-long history to hold the position of Conference of Presidents chair. As the JTA notes, the nomination was “something of a departure for the Presidents Conference, the main communal umbrella body on foreign policy, which in recent years has been headed by prominent businessmen.” In contrast to the Wall street businessman, Walker was “a respiratory therapist, former college professor and health-care administrator,” and “a longtime community activist.”

In other words, she rose to power in the Jewish world not because she wielded her checkbook, but because she was smart, dedicated to the community, and hard-working.

Aged 74 at her death, Walker was born at a time when women had to fight even harder to climb the professional ladder: “Walker went a long way beyond the housewifely routines inculcated by her mother,” notes the JPost, “who insisted that women should ‘iron their husbands’ underwear.'” Regardless of whether she did or did not follow her mother’s directive, it didn’t stop her from rising above the station such a sentiment would seem to advocate for women.

Even a seven-year battle with cancer didn’t sideline Walker from pursuing her duties for Hadassah, the Conference of Presidents and various other Jewish organizations. In the weeks before her death, she attended the 94th National Hadassah convention, presided over a meeting of the Conference, and attended various other events.

But as we mourn the loss of this remarkable woman, we can also take heart in, and keep our fingers crossed for, the rise of another strong female Jewish leader — Tzipi Livni. Currently the front-runner to succeed Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when he steps down in September, Livni would be the second woman to ever hold the position. But she still has a hard-fought battle ahead of her — and part of that fight will no doubt revolve around her being a woman.

Like Walker, Livni is well-respected and even well-liked, but in a race for Israel’s top political position, the question facing her is, is she tough enough? To help beef up her “toughness” factor, Livni has hired former aides to “warrior-politician” Ariel Sharon to help run her campaign, reports the Telegraph.

But her main competition in this political contest, former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, has hired the “New York based Republican political consulting firm of Arthur Finkelstein, most recently known for the ‘Stop Her Now’ campaign against Hillary Clinton.” We can only assume that means he’s gearing up for a no-holds-barred attempt to use Livni’s gender against her in his campaign. And it could work:

Naomi Chazan, a former member of the Knesset, or Israeli parliament, said that the leadership of Ms. Meir, who served from 1969 until 1974, was an exception rather than the rule, and had opened few doors for female successors. “She (Ms. Livni) is going to be attacked, subtly and not-so-subtly, because of her gender,” she said.

But if anyone has shot at overcoming gender biases and proving she is tough enough for the position, it’s a woman who served as a Mossad secret agent, the “daughter of Jewish guerrilla fighters” who “was told war stories in her childhood by Menachem Begin.”

Both Begin and Sharon, Livni’s role models, were tough-as-nails men who ultimately fought for peace. That’s just the combination Livni is now offering Israel, with a record devoid of corruption, and it’s just the combination Israel needs.

–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

July 24, 2008 by admin

The Israeli Prisoner Swap and the Hadassah Convention

The Zionist Women’s Organization, Hadassah, had its annual convention last week in Los Angeles. Plenty of noteworthy goings on went on there. But that will have to wait for another post.

Right now I’m more interested in what happened at last year’s convention in New York. Having attended the closing brunch of the convention, I posted my thoughts about Hadassah then, but I didn’t post about the most moving — and tragic — part of the event, when captured Israeli soldier Ehud Goldwasser’s mother, Miki, and his newlywed wife, Kamit, addressed the audience, on what happened to be his birthday, pleading for help to get Ehud and the three other missing soldiers back. Fortunately I still have my half-finished draft of the post, titled “Mother-In-Action: Ehud Goldwasser’s Mother Raises Her Voice.” In the last few weeks her words have become both more and less relevant, more and less tragic.

Miki Goldwasser related how when she first learned that her son was missing, she had to be sedated, kept calm by pills just to be able to function. Such is the shock a mother feels at losing a child. But she also shared that she soon came to her senses and realized that being sedated was not going to solve anything: “No more pills,” she said, “from now on, I’m fighting!”

And that’s what she did, traveling around the world, talking to Jewish audiences and world leaders, begging them to do anything they could to put pressure on Hezbollah to release her son and the other missing Israeli soldiers.

Well, now her fight is over. The remains of Goldwasser and fellow captive soldier Eldad Regev were returned to Israel last week as part of a prisoner swap with Hezbollah that’s been making headlines for weeks.

I have heard family members of missing soldiers speak before and I recall them always saying something along the lines of, ‘We just want to know whether he is alive or dead. Not knowing is worse than knowing he is dead.” But Miki Goldwasser never said that. She seemed convinced that if she fought hard enough, she would see her son alive once again. We now know that he was killed in the initial attack over two years ago. In hindsight, this makes her efforts all the more tragic.

And yet, was the fight worth any less than if she had gotten her son back alive? Of course not.

It makes me sick to think of the unevenness of the “swap” — Israel returning five Lebanese prisoners, one a multi-murderer, alive, and the remains of many others, in exchange for the remains of two Israeli soldiers. Yet in the end, the exchange of bodies is a sick business, pure and simple. Life and death are both transcendent. Neither can be quantified, and there is no such thing as an equal exchange.

And there are still Israeli soldiers missing. Negotiations over the release of Gilad Shalit, who has been held hostage by Hamas and its allies for over two years, appear to be at a standstill.

As the fast of Tisha B’Av approaches, historically a very bad time for the Jewish people, author Lisa Alcalay Klug is spearheading “a campaign to focus our collective energy, thoughts and prayers on bringing about [Gilad Shalit’s] freedom.” Klug writes in a Facebook message:

In your own way, whatever way that is, please put your mental and spiritual attention on bringing about his safe return–alive–to his family, his country and his people. This year, Tisha B’Av falls on August 10th. When/if you fast, in addition to the traditions of the day, please also have in mind the safe return of a live and well Gilad Shalit.

The power of collective fast and prayer is believed to have saved the Jewish people from genocide during the time of Queen Esther.
The redemption of the captive is one of our most compelling missions as a people and as brethren on this planet. Years ago, our collective efforts brought Natan Sharansky from bondage into freedom–mishibud l’geulah. Together, we can redeem Gilad Shalit.

Spread the word!

–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

July 11, 2008 by admin

Jewish Women Artists Emerge at Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Photographic Account

Catie Lazarus with the evening’s prize, a “schlep” bag containing a can of Meshugge-Nuts.

Co-sponsored by the Young Friends of the Museum and emceed by the very funny comic Catie Lazarus, the event was another in a long line of exciting programs being held at the museum, and a chance to see some talented artists — many of them women — before they hit it huge.

The evening opened with a great short set by the four-person “punk klezmer” ensemble Luminescent Orchestrii, including an original tune whose refrain went, “Who put the pudding in the punim?” You gotta love any band whose members came together “through their love of Balkan and Gypsy music.” But seriously, their eclectic mix of influences melded together well, and, at least as far as attire went, it was the bands’ female members, Sarah Alden and Rima Fand, who put the punk in punk-klezmer.

Eve Lederman telling a story, because that’s what professional storytellers do.

But the real stars of the evening were emcee Lazarus and fabulous storyteller Eve Lederman, co-author of Letters From My Sister: On Life, Love and Hair Removal. Lazarus kept the show moving along and the audience laughing (along with her jokes, not at her). My favorite lines were when Lazarus referred to the New York Times wedding page as “the Jewish sports page,” and when, while discussing ridiculous-sounding Upper East Side names for children, she said, “Just name the child Visa, it sounds slightly ethnic.”
Next to Lazarus’s energetic comedy, Lederman’s demeanor was calm and quiet, perhaps a deliberate device to make the audience listen all the more closely. And with a perfectly-timed delivery and impeccable writing, her tale-telling was a real treat. Her first story was about her one-time, same-sex sexual encounter with her best friend (a blond bombshell who I witnessed being accosted, loudly, in the bathroom by an overzealous audience member — “Are you the one from the story? Can’t miss you, a tall blond in a roomful of Jews!” — Oy.) The second story was about the aging owner of the Orchard Corset Shop, an old-time Lower East Side bra shop, and her Hasidic son who helps run the store. Orchard Corset is also the subject of Lederman’s documentary “A Good Uplift.”

The work of another talented female storyteller, filmmaker Pearl Gluck (“Divan”), was showcased as part of the big finale, Okunov’s fashion show. An excerpt from Gluck’s in-progress film about the designer kicked off the Okunov part of the night. Gluck’s work has taken a special interest in formerly-Hasidic rebels like the 21-year-old Okunov, who, endearingly, still pronounces clothing as “cloything.”

As much as the evening was about celebrating emerging artists, it was clearly also an opportunity to showcase the Museum of Jewish Heritage and attract a wider audience than the usual Jewish-museum-goers. I, for one, think it worked, bringing together a variety of Jews and non-Jews.  Case in point: At the cocktail hour after the performances, one of Okunov’s African-American models, hobnobbing with the artsy Jewish crowd, suggested Okunov design a bra made of kippot. How strange and strangely satisfying it was to tell her that one already exists.

In real life, the models looked more like robots — or human hangers — than dolls. Not a little disturbing.–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

July 8, 2008 by admin

Entry #3: Transcendence

Why does it feel impossible to imagine your mother as anything but that, when up until you she was everything but that?

I remember when I was eight years old. The sun peeking in, cool dew blanketing the lawn, her voice a tether rope pulling me from sleep. Her voice rod-stout and firmly soiled. My world moved in motion circling hers, child keeping up. These mornings we’d rise early, chain our mutt to the leash and leave my sister sleeping, cross the street and walk the gravel backroads around a forgotten lake. The early morning was an allergist’s dream, fields strewn with sword grass and cockleburs. Power walking now, as if collecting all the dew and laying it on our bodies. Body-damp, this was our morning ritual.

One day, my mother’s exercise routine changed. One day she laced herself in gumption and began to run. The mutt and I kicking at her heels, scraggly, chipped in motion. I remember the shock, the betrayal at her running. How could she? She was not my mother then, she was a woman running, pitted in her needs and not mine. Was I so ego-swelled? I remember her, lifting sheer out of her motherskin, part animal.

Why does it feel impossible to imagine her as anything but that when up until now she was everything but that? I circled back, this is what I saw.

Before the mother was a divorcee searching for love in the form of a man. Before the mother was a woman working for the wage and for the dream, scraping a marriage like leftovers, hoping for seconds. Before the mother was a peasant-dressed hippie on Haight Street was a hope-drenched hair-ironed college student was a brooding adolescent. Before the mother was a sensitive child was a take-charge toddler was a babe longing for less formula and more breast. Before the mother was a babe simply wanting more from a curtain-drawn mother.

Illness changed everything. I divorced my child role, I committed to every other. (Infancy.) I remember chemo weeks, driving away from the hospital with her asleep in the front seat, watching the dash marks on the road. At home tucked in bed, she slept dreamlike. I’d check in periodically, bare silhouetted head covered in shelled light. All of the rooms in the house felt quiet with the presence of a newborn. (Childhood.) I remember the importance of the spreadmarks of peanut butter and banana sandwiches, the critical placement of pink sippy straws in gingerale, the devoutly watched movies of dogs as famed-heroes.

I remember senility too. (Senility I say.) When she fell face first in a bus station and my racing heart. Her declarations. ‘I’m never going to see my future grandchildren’ she’d bemoan, wrapped in a turban and facing the television. Or, ‘When you’re all at my funeral…’ I seized these moments urgent as opportunity. ‘I’m not having this conversation with you.’ I spoke to the whole room (the sleeping beagle; the stepfather, bifocaled and Sodoku-playing). Miraculously she conceded. Somehow my words secretly soothed her. Somehow she sensed my refusal to discuss her funeral plot was a rejection of her deterioration and a call out to live.

Who was she before mine?

Before the babe was a clot like a red comet arced in motion. Before the clot was nothing but sky, was a constellation punched into the shape of a woman’s body. Before we knew who we were we reached for each other high as constellations and motioned as comets would. Before we were joined we blanketed the sky, checkered in electric light. We weren’t always cut and jigsawed. We weren’t made for each other but here we are.

Who was I before hers?

I am still her child, but a juggler too, eyes skyward, each ball in flight.

–I. Kramer

The Lilith Blog

July 8, 2008 by admin

Knees and Shoulders: Even Modesty Should Have Its Limits

Modesty is in.

So proclaims a recent Newsweek article, “Girls Going Mild(er)”, that notes an emerging movement to encourage girls to dress modestly. And, right in line with this trend, is a line of dolls that encourages modest Jewish values in Jewish girls. While this trend certainly has its positive points, it also must lead one to ask, how modest is too modest?

Newsweek reports that a slew of websites and clothing companies are catering to

…a growing movement of “girls gone mild”—teens and young women who are rejecting promiscuous “bad girl” roles embodied by Britney Spears, Bratz Dolls and the nameless, shirtless thousands in “Girls Gone Wild” videos. Instead, these girls cover up, insist on enforced curfews on college campuses, bring their moms on their dates and pledge to stay virgins until married.

Not surprisingly, many of these modesty-promoting organizations are rooted in religion, and one of the major proponents of this movement is an Orthodox Jew, Wendy Shalit, who has written books encouraging modesty.

Now a trend of modesty may seem all well and good, but the pressing question is, as Jennie Yabroff asks in Newsweek, “[I]s the new modesty truly a revolution, or is it merely an inevitable reaction to a culture of increased female sexual empowerment…?” Put another way, if we consider scantily-clad, uber-feminine, style-obsessed celebrities like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton representatives of a first wave of the post- (read: anti-)feminist backlash, is modesty merely its second wave, a reactionary movement taking women back into the kitchen (barefoot and pregnant)?

To show the potential of this movement to be just that, I want to consider the modesty trend in light of a true story that a friend related to me recently.

His relative from Israel, a young woman, came to New York for a visit and, like most Israelis visiting the States, wanted to go shopping. She was taken to the discount downtown department store Century 21 and headed to the lingerie department to look for bras. After picking out her selections, she went to the fitting room to try them on but was told that she could not try bras on in the fitting room. So she did the logical thing: she left the fitting room and proceeded to strip, trying the bras on in the middle of the store, for all to see.

While this is not the way most of us would behave in the situation, and not behavior we would consider modest, I can’t help but admire this woman’s moxie. The story reminds me that the opposite of being modest is being bold, and that a little or a lot of boldness is often required to get what you want. And so, when I think about the focus on teaching our daughters to be modest, I worry that what starts with encouraging them to cover their bare shoulders will end with encouraging them to stifle their opinions, desires and ambitions.

Take the Jewish-values line of Gali Girls dolls referred to earlier. It’s a nice idea to have a line of dolls that model Judaism for young girls — dolls that they can relate to and that can be used as a tool with which to teach Jewish ritual and values in a fun and natural way. Plus, the line of historical Gali Girls, which come with books about them like American Girl dolls do, sound really interesting (there’s one about a girl in a Jewish community in China).

But what’s not as nice is the internet video ad that sells the Gali Girls as a modest alternative to the scantily clad Barbie-type dolls that are teaching young girls to dress inappropriately. The problem with that message is twofold (at least). First, implying that dolls, rather than everything else in popular culture, are the culprits encouraging girls to dress inappropriately is just plain silly. Second, the idea of limiting Jewish girls’ play only to the realm of Jewish girls and women is (and here’s where the Orthodox world is going to disagree with me) potentially damaging to Jewish girls and the women they will one day become.

For all the criticism of Barbie dolls as being bad role models for girls, it’s been my experience that children don’t look to inanimate dolls as role models; rather, they use dolls to act our their own imagined stories and games, which can be taken from wherever. For example, while my own childhood Barbie games tended to involve the stuff of the romantic comedies and teenage dating movies I watched as a kid, I remember playing with a more religious friend whose Barbie games revolved around Jewish weddings. Barbie was the kallah and Ken was the chattan. Same dolls, very different storylines.

The point is, it doesn’t necessarily matter what the intent of the doll-makers is — children will use the dolls for their own purposes, based on their own experiences or their own wild imaginations. The Gali Girls may come with Shabbat candles to light but they can just as easily be used to act out the story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or even a Brittany Spears video, or — God forbid — the story of Mary and Joseph.

However, that said, I wonder how much limiting children’s play only to dolls with such a specific and modest intent as the Gali Girls might also make the scope of their imagination more modest. The one good thing about Barbie is that she can do everything. She’s a rock star, a news anchor, a mom, an athlete, a beauty queen and everything in between. Though it may be subtle, the plethora of Barbies out there shows little girls the variety of possibilities for their own lives. Even the American Girl dolls teach kids about aspects of American history and culture that are different from their own.

Whether it’s Gali Girls or not (and I really have no problem with the dolls themselves), the idea expressed in that video ad of limiting girls’ play only to dolls that look and act just like they do, or like their Bubbe thinks they should, is just another way to shelter religious girls and stifle their potential ambitions for their adult selves.

Not to mention making something that’s supposed to be fun and expansive — playtime — just plain dull.

–Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Lilith Blog

June 25, 2008 by admin

Entry #2

‘I have a secret to tell you.’ The room is painted mustard. Her voice is a thread  above a whisper. They watch her like a dreamed President. She stands before them with a promise; they all want the truth. No one is older than 10 in her 5th-grade classroom. 15 sets of eyes are sunken into 15 watching heads. 15 gangly bodies hunker down in 15 little desks. Expectant, giddy, they lean like rabbits at the stick.

After months away, she’s come back to them. Back to this school, this room, these wooden desks, this nubby carpeting. They wrote her cards because she was sick. “When will you come back?” “Get better and come back soon!” Their questions seemed to chirp and pucker, voices unused and new. She was their teacher, and they missed her.

She stood before them, speaking in edifying, lesson-planned tones. “I’m sorry I was away for so long, but I was sick…with cancer. Does anyone have any questions for me about it?” Hands shoot up high as pipe dreams. No one’s ever asked them something like this. It feels like an opportunity. It’s when they’re done asking that she whispers it.  “I have a secret to tell you. This isn’t my real hair; it’s a wig (eye-bulge, jaw-drop). I’m not telling any other classes, it’s a secret. And…if you close your eyes, I’ll show you.” A fellow teacher in the back of the classroom stifles her laughter, such moxie.

Fifteen sets of eyes shut like snakes in the night, 15 bodies feel bright and chosen. When they open, she’s before them, bald, transformed, Queen-like.

The next day she sees one of her fifth-graders in the hallway. The girl scampers over squinty-eyed, “Is that a wig?” she wants to know. My mother nods. The wave of specialness returns to the girl. She feels relieved that it’s just as she was told the day before. No one’s hiding, despite the costuming.

–I. Kramer