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January 10, 2008 by admin
Meeting of Minds
Last night I had the good fortune of attending a completely packed lecture at the 92nd Street Y called, “Hedonistic, Healthy, and Green: Can We Have
it All?” Featuring Michael Pollan (of The Omnivores Dilemma fame), Dan Barber (Head Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns), and moderated by Joan Dye Gussow (This Organic Life: Confessions of a Suburban Homesteader), it was the kind of event that sustainable foodies like me drool over. These are our movie stars, the people we choose when asked, “which famous person would you most want to take to dinner?”
The event itself was pretty straightforward: glowing introductions, 10-15 minutes from both speakers (Pollan on his new book In Defense of Food and
Barber on the fate of Boris, an over-the-hill – ahem – pig, that after much consideration by Barber’s team at Stone Barns, was turned into 500
pounds of the most delicious sausages he’d ever tasted and shared (20% of Boris’ sausages were donated to a local food bank), followed by questions
from Gussow and then from the audience.
The real meat of the evening was not in the format of the event, but in the meeting of these amazing minds. For Pollan, Barber, and Gussow, this
is life: travelling, speaking (often about the same thing), and answering questions. But for the audience, watching the exchange between these
sustainable food “rebbes” felt like watching your grandmother make her favorite recipe. It looked so simple and obvious, and you left feeling
full and nourished and inspired to try it yourself.
Many ideas were presented over the course of the evening, and I highly recommend purchasing In Defense of Food and making the trip to Blue Hill
at Stone Barns (even if you keep kosher and can’t eat in the restaurant, walking around the grounds – an old Rockefeller property – and seeing the
working farm would be worth it.) But to give you a taste, I’d like to focus on three, somewhat disconnected (but of course also connected)
points I heard either for the first time last night, or heard again in a new way.
B’tei Avon!
1. Food Tastes Better with a Story – Barber said that one of the reasons Boris’ sausage was so delicious, is that diners knew his back story. Not
only could they match their food with a source, but they could follow along the heartbreaking decision-making process Barber went through in
deciding ultimately to slaughter Boris.
So much of the food we eat in America comes frozen or processed or from far away. We don’t know who grew it, and – in many cases – human beings were replaced by machines in its processing. On the flip side, knowing where our food comes from, and the people and animals involved in bringing it to us, makes it all the more delicious and satisfying to eat. Barber said, “When you have a story to tell about food, people taste things they wouldn’t otherwise taste.”
2. Iowa and Food Politics – On the blog Serious Eats
Ed Levine asked the question, “which presidential candidates have actually articulated a food policy?” With all of the press around the Farm Bill this year, and so much interest around food and eating, you’d think that food would be a contending topic in the debates.
The full answer to Levine’s question is very complex, but Pollan gave one part of it, which I found really fascinating. He said that the Iowa
Caucus is actually a problem for farm policy. Politicians, he said, must bow down before the commodity crop subsidies and ethanol lobbies that rule
the state. It could be very dangerous for them to propose progressive food policy, and risk losing support in the first state everyone looks to
in the primaries.
3. Making Time to Cook – Many people claim that they don’t cook for themselves because they simply don’t have the time. Indeed, one of the
panelists quoted the statistic that the average American spends a mere hour and a half preparing their food every day.
That said, the same American spends 4 hours watching television and countless hours answering emails and surfing the internet. Where do those
hours come from, the panelists asked, and wouldn’t they be better spent preparing delicious meals to enjoy with our families and friends?
–Leah Koenig
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January 7, 2008 by admin
Orthodox Jewish Women Wear Burkas — and Their Men Don't Like It!
It seems made-up, but it’s not.
A group of haredi women in Israel have taken a cue from their Muslim neighbors and taken modesty to new heights (for Jews), donning burkas on the streets of Ramat Beit Shemesh and other ultra-Orthodox enclaves. Under the tutelage of one devout — and apparently ascetically inclined — mother-of-ten, these women have decided that the basic modest black outfit and wig or head-covering of their peers isn’t modest enough for them. They don’t want their flesh seen at all by men outside of their families, and wearing burkas does the trick.
Haaretz reported on the story in Hebrew but a rough synopsis in English can be found on the Muquata blog.
The new fashion has the religious authorities, none of whom have advocated this trend, baffled. As Muquata’s Jameel writes, “The radical Beit Shemesh tznius [modesty] patrol is even scratching it’s [sic] head whether someone managed to out do them, and leave them in the dust with the liberal left.”
Mother in Israel also has a post on the story and brings out an important point from the Haaretz article, that such obsessive modesty is akin to anorexia — “it’s obsessive behavior based on a desire to deny one’s femininity,” she writes.
This comparison to anorexia seems right on, but goes deeper than just the denial of femininity. [Side note: I’m no psychologist but growing up female in upper-middle class Jewish circles, I’ve come to learn a thing or two about anorexia.] Both anorexia and the burka-wearing phenomenon stem from an obsession with reaching an unrealistic ideal set up by society, be it a model’s lean and long figure or a model of modest virtue and spiritual purity. Both are ideals which the average woman cannot live up to, but trying to do so is an expectation of women in Western and fervently religious societies, respectively. The quest to reach both ideals involves self-denial, literally and figuratively. Anorexics deny themselves food in an attempt to wither away their physical selves (often the feminine curves that come with womanhood, as Mother in Israel points out), while burka-wearers are denying themselves the material pleasures of pretty clothing and physical comfort (it’s hot under there and hard to see) in an attempt to deny their physicality, to be purely spiritual beings. And both phenomena are about control, but here’s where the comparison veers off.
Anorexia is often said to be an attempt for the individual going through difficult circumstances beyond her control to take back some semblance of control by determining her food intake and controlling her own weight. Yet, when controlling her food intake and weight becomes an obsession, it ceases to be in her control. And when she becomes so skinny that she looks as though she’ll break in half, she has gone beyond society’s ideal and is not considered desirable but rather sick and unattractive.
These burka-wearing Jewish women have also becomes undesirable to their society, yet they maintain control over their social status. They’ve taken modesty to such extremes that their society deems them freaks — one man has even taken his wife to the beit din for violating shalom bayit [peace in the house], and he was issued a divorce because his wife was considered so outlandish. Yet, unlike with anorexia, these women still maintain a kind of control. Muquata, paraphrasing/translating Haaretz, calls the trend a “radical chareidi feminist ‘invention’,” and, while, on the one hand, the idea of wearing a burka as a feminist act seems absurd; on the other hand, insomuch as these women have been socially chastised yet persist in their behavior, there is an element of subversiveness to it that lends them power. They are adopting the ideal of modesty that to some extent has been ingrained in them by male religious authority (and no doubt by female authorities, too), but they are doing so on their own terms. They are taking the power of dictating women’s dress away from the male religious authorities in their community, deciding for themselves what modesty means and, in classic fashion, being persecuted for it.
These women have the right to wear whatever they want, but we should also question the values that have led them to such extreme decisions, and the society that perpetuates those values.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
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January 3, 2008 by admin
Vaera: Plagued by the Parsha
I knew it was a mistake to take on so much Torah reading this week. I ought to have learned my lesson by now. But when the minyan gabbai (who is thankfully no longer myself!) called to ask me if I would read the majority of the ten plagues this week, I got excited about the drama of the story, and agreed, perhaps too readily. Since then, I have been afflicted by the Parsha Syndrome – the events I am leyning have started to shape my life in ways that are most unwelcome….
Let’s see, where did it begin? First, I woke up early in the week with beating, pounding tooth pain. I felt like someone was dropping several pounds of mortar and bricks on me, all of which were landing squarely in the tiny surface area of one of my top left teeth. The more I felt oppressed, the more the pain increased and spread out, so I came to dread the pain.
Finally I appeared before the dentist, who had been in the middle of a root canal treatment on one of my other teeth. “What would you like me to do about the pain,” he asked. “Take it away!” I pleaded. “And when would you like me to do that?” he asked. “Tomorrow!” I cried. (I still haven’t figured that one out. Tomorrow?) He said, “I will do in accordance with your word, so that you know that there is no one like your great dentist.” His fingers were in my mouth during much of this conversation, though I think I still got the message across in spite of
my impeded speech.
The dentist prescribed antibiotics, and I promptly filled the prescription. The next morning, I woke up with a few red spots on my legs. It looked as if someone had taken soot from a kiln and thrown it up to the sky, so it all landed on my thighs. By the afternoon, the red dots had spread all over the surface of my lower body, so that no one was able to see my lower body. Then it spread, and only in the region of my face were there no dots. I itched all over, as if infested with lice or with a very severe pestilence.
Then I summoned the doctor at Terem and said to her, “I plead with you to remove these spots from my lower body.” The doctor told me that I was allergic to the antibiotics, but I should keep taking them lest the tooth flare up again. To relieve the itching, she prescribed antihistamines. When seven days had passed, she told me, I would finish with the antibiotics and be myself again.
The doctor did not tell me, though, that antihistamines make you drowsy. And so I got into bed and stayed awake itching, but then slept late into the mornings. I would try to wake up in the morning and feel a very heavy darkness surrounding me, a darkness so heavy that I could feel it. For three days I could not get up from bed, and I missed daf yomi and swimming and arrived bleary-eyed at work. I began to wonder: How long would this continue to be a snare to me?
Today I had to make another dentist’s appointment to deal with the infection that led me to take the antibiotics in the first place. I was supposed to see the dentist as soon as possible, but I know better than that. I scheduled the appointment for two weeks from now, parshat
Beshalach, when we are safely out of Egypt and free of the plagues. Given that I’ll probably leyn next week too, I’m not taking any chances.
–Chavatzelet Herzliya
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December 28, 2007 by admin
Jewish Women Sing Their Songs Out Loud, Albeit Different Songs
What could possibly shock Hollywood, California, anymore? Robin Garbose is hoping a dose of modesty will do the trick. She is about to stage what is probably the first-ever Hollywood film premiere for a female-only audience. Garbose, a professional director who became religious at the start of her career in Hollywood (she says it happened between her first time directing an episode of the eighties sitcom “Head of the Class” and the episode’s broadcast), is making her feature-film directorial debut with “A Light For Greytowers,” which has a mostly female cast and is, she claims, “the first-ever ‘for women only’ feature movie musical.”
The film premieres this Saturday night, December 29th, at the Sherry Lansing Theatre at Paramount Studios. The cast, which includes Broadway actress and Orthodox Jew Judy Winegard, is made up of professional actors and well-trained students from Kol Neshama, an Orthodox girls performing arts academy Garbose started a few years ago. The “gala event” is intended to raise funds for scholarships to Kol Neshama’s camp program. Writes Garbose in an email invite to the premiere, “It is my heartfelt belief that this film — which is the collective work of many talented artists — will truly be a dazzling Kiddush HaShem, IY”H.” The Forward has more on Garbose and the film.
On the opposite end of the Jewish-women-performing spectrum, equally as dazzling though in a much dirtier way, is “Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad,” also the subject of a recent Forward article. Rather than talking about “Kiddush Hashem,” the comedians and burlesque-esque performers of “Nice Jewish Girls” deliver quips like “You get dinner on JDate and laid on Craigslist” (that one belongs to the show’s founder Susannah Perlman) and dance around scantily-clad onstage, shimmery and shimmying, and in front of men, too.
It’s safe to say Robin Garbose, who sometimes consults her rabbi when making directorial decisions, would not consider “Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad” in line with the values of her film; yet both projects, in their own distinct ways, celebrate the talent and power of Jewish women. And both would be great fun for an (age-appropriate) “girls’ night out” outing.
Just another reminder of the wonderful diversity amongst Jewish women.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
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December 26, 2007 by admin
Season's Greetings–And Eatings
We’ve made it to the final stretch of the “holiday season” (read: the inclusive euphemism for Christmas and New Year’s Eve). Despite my friend’s insistence that, “no one says Merry Christmas in America” (he’s from England where supposedly everyone says Merry Christmas as if they have a tic, and now lives in New York City), the holidays – and particularly Christmas – can literally be felt, regardless of one’s religious beliefs.
This phenomenon holds particularly true with food. No matter that Chanukah celebrations peaked half a month ago – holiday food is ubiquitous. From late November through New Year’s Eve, red-and-green wrapped chocolates seem to pop up out of nowhere. Alcohol, cookies, pie, and heavily salted snacks also take on “how-did-that-get-into-my-hand?” properties. And whether we spend Christmas dinner with friends, or celebrate the “Jewish way” with Chinese food and a movie, holiday foods have a tendency to find their way, often in excess, into our mouths.
During this time of year, I often find myself dancing between indulging in these foods, and worrying about gaining weight. On the one hand, I adore surprise chocolate – in fact I think it might be the best kind of chocolate. On the other, I’m bound up in the worry that I might not fit into my pants after December. I enthusiastically read (and then generally fail to implement) the guides to “avoid holiday weight gain” or “get thin in the New Year” that pop up around the internet. Guilt ensues. I make a few pathetic stabs to stop myself but feel rather helpless until the last Ghiradelli square is gone.
The whole thing can be rather stressful and leaves me craving January when all this “holiday season” business is finally over.
Still, I know there is untapped wisdom to be found around holiday eating – wisdom that goes beyond “avoid the eggnog.” At the Hazon Food Conference this past month, Nati Passow of The Jewish Farm School gave a keynote during which he said:
“I’ve heard the expression, “eat to live, don’t live to eat.” The idea being, don’t just go from one meal to the next always thinking about food. But I believe that as a society, we could use a little more living to eat. We need to give more attention to our food, not less. We need to celebrate real food, not consume it in liquid or energy bar form. We need to take hour long lunches, have meals with friends, bake our own bread, brew our own beer, grow our own corn.”
I think Nati is on to something. Perhaps one answer to the holiday feeding routine lies in a shift of focus towards living to eat, instead of struggling to curb our cravings and feeling guilty when we don’t succeed. This idea might sound counterintuitive at first – doesn’t living to eat lead to eating way too much?
But living to eat as Nati describes it does not mean eating huge amounts of absolutely everything. It means releasing our deep-seated fears and taboos around food. It means focusing our lives and celebrations around healthy, nourishing meals. It means getting involved with our food by growing it or learning to make it from scratch. It means eating more “real food,” – food that fills and sustains us without needing to gorge on it.
The holiday chocolate is not going to go away, nor should it. But my blessing for the rest of this holiday season (and throughout the year), is that instead of fighting with our food, we all discover what it truly means to live to eat.
–Leah Koenig
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December 24, 2007 by admin
Fighting Back
A gut-wrenching blow was recently dealt to the Orthodox feminist cause. The kind of punch to the stomach that makes your insides churn and your whole body shake, leaving you stunned and speechless for a minute as you fathom the damage done to you. But that, after a minute, when you realize you’re okay, makes you angry at whomever tried to damage you: Anger propels you to fight back, and you attack like a crazy person, out for blood from the person who wronged you.
That’s the kind of punch the National Council of Young Israel dealt when it decided recently to bar women and converts (the latter is a separate blood-boiling issue) from becoming Young Israel synagogue presidents, and banning women’s prayer services and megillah readings from its synagogues. The NCYI also decreed that it must approve all of its synagogues rabbinic hires.
(Forgive my above hyperbole, but this really makes me mad.)
The NCYI’s new bylaws are about a lot more than feminism. They’re essentially an attempt by the Young Israel’s national umbrella organization to assert control over its constituent synagogues and, insomuch as Young Israel is the only modern-Orthodox synagogue “brand,” it’s an attempt by the NCYI to impose its iron will over what it means to be modern Orthodox, suppressing diversity and taking away individual congregations’ and rabbis’ ability to make decisions about what is appropriate for their own communities. Yeshiva University’s paper, the Commentator, has a comprehensive report of the NCYI’s modifications and the YI synagogues’ reactions to them, but for the purposes of this post, we’ll focus on the repercussions for Orthodox feminism.
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December 17, 2007 by admin
Jewish Women Coming Clean
Emmy award-winning journalist Connie Collins shared some advice her mother gave her with an audience of mostly Jewish women at a book launch party last month: “When you grow up, marry a Jewish man,” she said, “because they don’t drink.”
The book being launched was “Jewish Sisters in Sobriety,” and Collins, who has a family history of alcoholism (and is not Jewish), served as panel moderator at the launch party on Nov. 27th.
(For the record, I was unable to attend the event. The above was related to me by the book’s PR person, Wendy Hirschhorn.)
“Jewish Sisters in Sobriety” is a project of Jewish Alcoholics, Chemically Dependent Persons and Significant Others [JACS] and the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York [JWFNY]. A compilation of confessionals by recovering alcoholics and substance abusers of all ages and denominational affiliations — from completely secular to ultra-Orthodox — who are female and Jewish, the book is designed to combat the shikur-is-a-goy [a-drunk’s-not-Jewish] stereotype Collins’ mother was counting on. But, more particularly, “Jewish Sisters in Sobriety” reminds us that shikur isn’t just a shiksa.
Anyone who’s ever attended an AEPi frat party, or an after-shul kiddush, knows that Jews do drink, but we tend to think those kiddush-whiskey guzzlers are predominantly male, and those college-boozers, male and female, will grow up and sober up. The book reminds us that neither are necessarily the case, and encourages Jewish women battling addiction, and their loved ones, to seek help. Just knowing that others are going through similar struggles, and that, yes, Jewish women can be addicts, can be a great push to get treatment.
Raising awareness about these issues has been the work of JACS for years, but it’s interesting that the JWFNY is a partner in the endeavor. The ten-year-old organization is “committed to addressing the unmet [my italics – RHF] needs of Jewish women and girls in the New York area and beyond.” That’s a fairly provocative mission statement. It means JWFNY focuses on the kind of issues that have traditionally been swept under the rug by the Jewish community. That includes sexuality, body issues, domestic violence and substance abuse, to name a few of the areas on which JWFNY’s programming focuses.
According to their website, they look for grantees who come up with “provocative solutions” to these problems and “that experiment with new ways of looking at the landscape of the lives and concerns of Jewish women and girls.”
If you would like to get involved with JWFNY, click here, and if you need funding for a provocative solution to a pressing social issue affecting Jewish women or girls, here’s how to apply for a grant.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
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December 12, 2007 by admin
Sustainable Simchas
I spent 5 days of the last 7 talking about, thinking about, creating, and eating FOOD. How did I accomplish such a luxurious feat? By attending (or, rather, helping to organize and run) Hazon’s 2nd Annual Food Conference: Planting the Seeds for the New Jewish Food Movement.
The conference included a mix of hands-on cooking demonstrations and challah baking, as well as panels and sessions on topics related to health and body image, sustainable agriculture, kashrut, Jewish cultural foods, brachot (blessings), food policy, and the ethics of eating. The greatest upside was meeting the 240+ rabbis, farmers, chefs, gardeners, nutritionists, and food enthusiasts who attended the conference. The downside was that, at any given moment, there was just so much going on…participants joked about cloning themselves to experience everything the conference had to offer.
One session that I was especially sorry to miss was “Sustainable Simchas.” Most simchas (weddings, b’nai mitzvot, Shabbat onegs, etc.) generate a
significant amount of waste, whether held at a synagogue (styrofoam hot cups and unseasonal fruit platters featuring watermelon in the dead of
winter), a wedding hall (does one really need a sushi station, hamburger station, and a mashed potato bar?), or in one’s home (cases of plastic soda bottles and a mountain of paper plates.) The panelists offered suggestions and resources to create thoughtful, joyous celebrations (weddings, b’nai mitzvot, Shabbat onegs etc.) without the environmentally unfriendly baggage.
One particularly fascinating aspect of the panel – aside from just being interesting and useful – was that all the panelists were women. (Even despite the general predominance of male presenters at the conference.) One woman, Edith Stevenson, ran a kosher catering service out of her synagogue. Another, Dasee Berkowitz, is currently developing a service called JLife Consulting, which helps young couples and families plan Jewish simchas. A third, Barbara Lerman-Golomb, helped create the “green synagogues” program with the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL).
Noticing this helped me realize just how much throwing simchas and party-planning in general continues to be “women’s work” in the Jewish community. I don’t necessarily think this is a bad thing – on the contrary, it puts these women in a position of influence to make a positive environmental difference with their family and community celebrations. Still, as I and my mostly-female co-workers ran around the Food Conference setting up chairs and making sure snacks were in the right place at the right time, it seemed like important “food for thought.”
For more resources, check out the “Sustainable Kiddush” resource list at The Jew & The Carrot.
–Leah Koenig
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