The Lilith Blog

March 9, 2010 by Amy Stone

Rapunzel, Rapunzel

Rapunzel, Rapunzel. Disney thinks your name is too girly girly and is calling its upcoming Rapunzel 3D cartoon vision “Tangled.” The Disney
Juggernaut fears that giving the film a girl’s name will turn off boy moviegoers.

What’s going on here? Disney cartoons based on the Brothers Grimm tales – Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty – and the non-Grimm Pocahontas, Little Mermaid, Mulan, and more and more – seem to have done just fine with the time-tested girls’ names for the title. And Tim Burton’s current twisted “Alice” will probably do better than it deserves.

But presumably the marketing mavens don’t want a downer like a girl’s name for a film title. But if we’re cynically talking money (godforbid), why not call it “Hair” (OK – that’s already taken) and make a fortune on Disney brand hair products for hair-obsessed girls?

Rapunzel is such an icon for hair beyond belief. Right up there with Lady Godiva. And we all know the power of hair. When my Freudian psychiatric social worker mom asked my boyfriend of yesteryear why men like long hair, he told her: “It looks so good on the pillow.”

And the Jewish men who wrote the Jewish laws sure knew it. Only single women are permitted to seductively let their hair fly free. Married? Keep it under wraps. I don’t know what the thinking is on Orthodox women covering their heads with Dolly Parton- or Rapunzel-length wigs. Is this the letter of the law defying its spirit?

The beloved Grimm Brothers’ heroines have long been deconstructed by feminists appalled at their passivity. “Sleeping Beauty” indeed.

At least “Twisted” promises a feisty teen heroine with its release over Thanksgiving weekend.

And, by the way, it’s worth looking at the Grimm version of “Rapunzel.” The opening lines will surprise you: “There were once a man and a woman who had long, in vain, wished for a child. At length it appeared that God was about to grant their desire.” Sounds like Abraham and Sarah. And if that weren’t Jewish subtext enough, click on the preview for “Tangled” – the music with its soulful clarinet sounds like Jewish schlock. Tangled indeed.

–Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

February 1, 2010 by Amy Stone

Responding to Haiti

Yes, everyone seems to be jumping on the disaster bandwagon. You’d have to be living in a cave to escape the media debate over Israel’s rapid response setting up and staffing an Israeli army hospital in Port-au-Prince. My synagogue is having a (kosher) bake sale to encourage kids to get involved, and Thursday night (Jan. 28) a Yiddish concert was held to help that unluckiest of nations.

If the benefit got people to give who wouldn’t have given otherwise and if a large percentage of the money raised went to an effective
charity, then nice going.

But not so nice when charities rush to a disaster site just to get face time.

I don’t know if this applies to the list of Jewish charities getting involved in helping Haiti, but I would sure check out the most effective way to contribute.

Charity Navigator, one of the main charity watchdogs, makes a fine place to start. (Although nothing is ever simple. Starting next year, Charity Navigator will be replacing the traditional approach of measuring the ratio of money a charity spends on administration and money spent on programs with actually measuring the charity’s effectiveness. But, alas, when it comes to Haiti we can’t wait.)

The one Jewish organization that gets top Haiti billing from Charity Navigator is American Jewish World Service. For one thing, AJWS has been working with local partners on the ground in Haiti for years with programs that make sense.

The AJWS earthquake relief efforts are being carried out by their local partners, and their long-term projects – when world concern has turned to the next crisis – are just what the country desperately needs. The projects include agricultural development with training for women’s peasant organizations.

AJWS President Ruth Messinger is impressive. Back when I was working for Women’s American ORT, I got to see her response to disaster fund-raising projects up close. Our organizations were among the dozen or so Jewish organizations that would set up special campaigns to raise money responding to specific crises. Ruth was the one executive who would come with carefully researched projects that could be immediately implemented and would make a difference. And many of these were for women.

Back to Haiti.

Even without a horrific earthquake, Haiti desperately needs help now and into the future. In the coming year or two or 10, Charity Navigator can be expected to evaluate just how effective American Jewish World Service and all the competing philanthropic programs are. Meanwhile, if you want to give money through a Jewish organization, AJWS seems a worthy channel.

–Amy Stone.

The Lilith Blog

December 15, 2009 by Amy Stone

'Tis the Season

My doctor goes into a shockingly racist rant about the government’s being incapable of managing health care as proved by H1N1 vaccine just going to “pickaninnies in the ghetto.”

A truck turning into Broadway completely crushes the passenger side of a car stopped at a light. The driver leans on his horn.

My fellow tenants are resorting to primal screams at the handyman to express their displeasure with the endless months of construction.

We are in holiday meltdown.

As someone who is Jewish and married, I am not under Christmas pressure or anxiety over a dateless New Year’s Eve. But what is it about the end of the year that drives people to insanity?

We’re told the suicide rate is highest over the Christmas-New Year’s season-–people who can’t go on in their loneliness and unhappiness as all the rest of the world appears coupled and happy. And we assimilated Jews could well be among those numbers.

I will spare you my enumeration of the sadness of New Year’s Eve dates grimly in search of joy. Better to be alone than to experience existential loneliness in the company of others desperately seeking holiday happiness. But I will confess the loneliness of one New Year’s Eve many decades past. Home alone in my six-floor walkup, weeping on my red velvet
mermaid couch.

The phone rings. I pick it up. Not prince charming but my best friend since high school calling to wish me a happy new year. She can tell I’m in tears and counsels me: “If you’re crying you shouldn’t answer the phone.”

And so we go into another year.

Actually, there’s a lot to be said for the Jewish new year spent in soul searching and reflection. No pressure to have a date.

In fact, the shofar’s call is not so far removed from the blowing of horns welcoming in the goyishe new year. We hark back to the ancients who banged on anything at hand to scare off evil spirits as humankind passed through the liminal space between the old year and the new.

Personally, this time around I’m planning to cook, eat and drink my way into the next Gregorian decade. 2010 has a nice ring to it and I’m going to welcome it with one husband, one friend and two dogs.

There’s a lot to be said for a low-key approach to the end of one year and the start of another.

–Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

November 3, 2009 by Amy Stone

The Joyless “Wedding Song”

Tunis 1942. Allied planes rain down bombs on the ancient streets of Tunis. Jackbooted Nazi soldiers march through the labyrinth alleys. But the images that stick are the excruciatingly lengthy close-ups of the pubic hair being wrenched off the Jewish teenager for her “Oriental”-style wedding and the shorn vagina ready for delivery to a man old enough to be her father.

“The Wedding Song” (“Le Chant des mariées) – now playing at New York City’s Quad Cinema – is about little girls’ dreams of marriage and the exigencies of war for the chums, now teenagers, one Jewish, one Muslim.

French and Arabic language with English subtitles, beautiful photography of blue-washed Tunisian interiors, touchingly innocent adolescent girls and the desperately poor Jewish mother marrying off her daughter to a wealthy doctor. Filmed almost entirely in close-ups that capture the increasingly claustrophobic world of the two girls.

The second film by French-Jewish director, screenwriter and actress Karin Albou tells the tale of 16-year-olds Nour (Olympe Borval), an innocently romantic Muslim, and her outspoken Jewish friend Myriam (Lizzie Brocheré). Director Albou plays Myriam’s mother.

The pairings are a bit too neat – Nour’s passion for her fiancé; Myriam’s stubborn refusal to accept hers. Nour’s lack of schooling and lack of freedom; Myriam’s more modern existence.

But “The Wedding Song” is worth seeing for the tender depiction of friendship in a hopeless personal world against the bigger hopeless picture of Tunis under attack. It’s a place where Jews and Muslims who have lived together for generations are torn apart, and the Jews who flee back home from Vichy-governed France find life under siege.

To support the film with your seat, catch it while it’s still playing in New York and look for it, hopefully eventually from Netflix.

And ponder what the attraction is for reducing women to the pre-pubescent vagina, hairless as an apricot.

You can see a clip of the film here.

–Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

October 14, 2009 by Amy Stone

The Heretics – What’s Not to Like?

What’s not to like about a film called “The Heretics” from No More Nice Girl Productions. A film where the filmmaker, Joan Braderman, over B&W footage from her radical past, explains, “I considered myself an anarcho pagan post-situationist democratic socialist feminist. But as a woman who was I really supposed to be?”

Oh, the good ol’ days – in this case 1977, the year a group of women artists drawn to New York created “Heresies,” a feminist publication on art and politics. All-night political arguments in primitive loft spaces in Soho. Each issue put out by a different group of women so everyone learned everything in the days when magazine paste-up really involved paste. The shock of the straight women in the collective excluded from input into issue No. 3 – “Lesbian Art and Artists.”

1977 – the year after Lilith magazine’s first issue.

“Heresies” published 27 issues, from 1977 to 1993. And “The Heretics,” a 91-minute movie, goes out with an all-women crew to catch up with some of these fine women. The film premiered last weekend at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It will be screened at MoMA one last time, tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 15) at 7 p.m. before hitting various film festivals.

Lots of the women are white haired now, and as tough and talented as ever.

In some ways, “The Heretics” is a walk down memory lane, to a time when everything was new, when consciousness raising groups truly raised our consciousness, and we really thought we could change things.

Well, maybe we have. The fact that “feminism” is no longer a magic word, the fact that a whole generation of women weren’t even born when Lilith and Heresies were conceived. The Heretics talk about the putdown by the men who controlled the art world 30 years ago and whose highest compliment to a woman artist was, “You paint like a man.” Groan. Heresies, the magazine, was examining the politics of art and the art world but substitute “Jewish” for “art” and we were all awakening around the same issues.

Joan Braderman, one smart woman, uses humor to keep the film from becoming a nostalgic or cobwebby rant from our impassioned Younger Selves. And lots of the women interviewed see their younger selves with humor. One of the Heretics recalls, not with pain but with understanding, how when she said the magazine needed a budget and a business plan she was shouted down. (Lilith, on the other hand, slaved over our budget and business plan. Who knew? We didn’t and neither did the [male] foundation director pushing us
through these hoops. He did point out that our proposed budget, arrived at out of total mental agony, predicting wildly successful returns, was wildly amiss. Alas.)

The Heresies collective never had a generation of interns to carry on. (Who knows whether Lilith interns will run with Jewish feminist issues as they see fit.)

At the end of the film, a 20something finds a trove of old Heresies issues, and she’s filled with joy. Hey, even non-Hollywood films yearn for happy endings.

–Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

April 23, 2009 by Amy Stone

The Haggadah Dilemma

The matzahs are gone; the ongoing question remains: Has anyone found a satisfying haggadah?

For the past two years, we’ve used the slim paperback egalitarian “Family Haggadah” by Elie M. Gindi. Not great but good and plenty of room for personal input.

But the search for a better haggadah remains far more daunting than the hunt for the afikoman.

Speaking personally, the great mother-daughter generational battle for me was sparked in the 1980s with the realization that our charoset-smeared, wine-stained Union Haggadah — the Reform “Union Haggaddah Revised,” dating back to 1923 — was so sexist that even the matzah was man-made.

I less than graciously forced Aviva Cantor’s socialist-Zionist-animal rights haggadah (first published in Lilith) down the throats of my family. It was a one-time event. At the end, my father, in one of the more gracious responses to the experience, said, “This is not our style.”

And so each year I imagine the wise women of the feminist seder now in its 34th year — Esther Broner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin et al — gathered for their ever-evolving telling of the story while the rest of us page through piles of haggadot, wishing we’d gotten an earlier start on the search for haggadah satisfaction.

Any breakthroughs?

— Amy Stone

The Lilith Blog

April 13, 2009 by Amy Stone

Pesach dead hand of the past

(April 8, 2009)

I am fuming. I was just in West Side Judaica (Manhattan’s Upper West Side) where a little boy was saying to his grandparents, “We need a Miriam’s Cup.”

Grandfather (60-something, could pass for a liberal-congenial-spirit): “No, we don’t.”

Moi (seething): “Yes you do.”

Grandfather: “What did Miriam do?”

Moi: “She provided the well of fresh water that kept the Jews alive in the desert.” (I was so enraged, I didn’t even mention Miriam led the women a
song of rejoicing after the crossing of the Red Sea.)

Grandfather: “That was after Passover.”

Moi: So angered, it didn’t even occur to me to say So was Elijah.

But final shot: Grandmother taking Kos Miriam selected by the little boy to the cash register, where the Orthodox male will ring up the sale.

Hag sameach.

–Amy Stone