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The Lilith Blog
November 2, 2011 by Maya Bernstein
Business Trip
http://www.flickr.com/1flatworld
Six years ago it was evening, and the light came gently through the slats of the hospital window shades, and the room was strangely calm, and it was all so new, and then she was in my arms, a being of radical energy, and I sang to her. Today it was morning of breakfasts and lunches and searching for car keys and rushing and phone calls and singing and dancing of birthday and presents and then of my leaving. Now daytime is flying beneath me is desert before me is evening of working and teaching and she is behind me.
She cried while I applied eye makeup and when I left to catch my flight.
I pinky-promised that I’d try never to travel on her birthday again, but as I sit here tumbling away, I know that this promise didn’t console her. And I know that no matter what I decide or decides me in the future, there will be times when I am not there when she needs me, when she is going in one direction and I in another, when I cannot give her what she needs when she needs it.
As the distance between us grows, in time, in space, I realize that I must learn how to better help her navigate the distances that inevitably arise. Perhaps this is my most important job as her mother.
Today, six years later, I learned something. I write it, share it, so as to attempt to better etch it into my own being, with the hope that it may help me diminish the future distances.
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October 28, 2011 by Tara Bognar
Of Buses and Borough Park
Image via Wikicommons
Segregating a certain class of people to the back of the bus has an intense resonance for anyone raised on stories of the Black civil rights struggle, Rosa Parks, and the irresistible narrative of how far we’ve come. So it’s not surprising that a story about the quasi-public New York city bus, the B110, where “the women is in the back. The men are in the front” [sic] has spread far and wide from the Columbia University newspaper that ‘broke’ the story.
Blogger Unpious describes the general tenor of the media response: “Like a school of hungry piranhas, the secular media seems to have discovered misogyny in the Chasidic world and they’re having themselves a feast.” He has a thoughtful critique on the dynamics of outside criticism on this insular community:
The outrage of outsiders won’t effect change largely because outsiders don’t seem to actually care about the plight of Chasidic women. Rather, they seem driven by a general distaste for all things Chasidic and, in this case, by the larger symbolism of back-of-the-bus discrimination. To them, Chasidic women are pawns in a larger struggle to root out discrimination everywhere, a worthy cause, no doubt, but one that Chasidic women, by and large, will not care for. Moreover, outsider outrage produces a defensive posture within the Chasidic community – on the part of both men and women – and speaking out against discriminatory practices, even by the tiny minority who might do so otherwise, becomes even more unlikely. I have yet to see those indignant outsiders bother to speak to actual living, breathing Chasidic women (or men, for that matter) to gauge how they feel about it.
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October 27, 2011 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
A Conversation With Nancy K. Miller
Nancy Miller never meant to become a detective. But the distinguished professor of English literature of English and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of more than a dozen books found herself intrigued by the discovery of a small family archive after her father’s death. A handful of photographs, a land deed, a postcard from Argentina, unidentified locks of hair…What had these things meant to her father? And what did they mean to her? So Miller embarked upon a quest: for people, for places, for meaning. The result, “What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past,” was just published by the University of Nebraska Press. In the interview below, Miller talks with Lilith’s Fiction Editor, Yona Zeldis McDonough, about her new book.
What prompted you to write a book about your ancestral objects? Lots of us have things of this kind but wouldn’t have thought to write about them.
I probably would never have undertaken the research for this book, let alone written it, if I had not received a phone call in the summer of 2000 from a real estate agent in Los Angeles telling me that I had inherited property in Israel from my paternal grandparents—and that he could sell it for me. Not just for me, but all the heirs, which meant my sister and my first cousin (whom I had never met), if he was still alive. I succeeded in locating my cousin in Tennessee. His daughter had begun doing research on the family and had found a website already in place for all the immigrants to America with our family name: Kipnis. I had been resigned to not knowing anything about my father’s side of the family. And suddenly, one discovery led to another and I got caught up in the fascination of the quest to find out everything I could about these mysterious relatives and what had happened to them.
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October 26, 2011 by Julie Sugar
Skipping Shabbos and Drawing Lines
http://www.flickr.com/incendiarymind
It’s 4pm, and I am sitting with my friend at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Philadelphia. I have chosen not to think of the day itself as Shabbos. I am skipping Shabbos day, you see; it’s just Saturday.
We’re looking to split an appetizer and then a dessert. She points out something on the menu, and I see that (like almost everything else on the menu) it includes meat. “Oh, I can’t eat that,” I say. She knows that I don’t eat non-kosher meat, but didn’t realize that particular dish wasn’t vegetarian.
I hesitate.
Because what’s the difference when my observance level is in flux lately, anyway? Where is the line? Why don’t I eat non-kosher meat? I decide to not order a dish with meat in it: I don’t want to deal with whatever feelings of guilt I may feel while eating it, or afterwards. Better to explore one big Jewish challenge at a time, starting with Shabbos—one week at a time.
See, I love Shabbos, I really do. I don’t want to give it up. But it is unclear now what the shape of that day will look like… where the lines are. The line used to be halakha, Jewish law, but I am no longer convinced that is the right metric for me for Shabbos, or for the Jewish life I want to live. Frankly, I’m not sure it ever was. I just don’t know, though. Picking and choosing is a slippery slope.
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October 24, 2011 by Merissa Nathan Gerson
The Satin Kippah
Recently at a gas station I saw a kippah on the security camera. It struck me as odd and exciting to see not only a kippah but a woman with a kippah at a Berkeley, CA gas station. It took a moment to register the black dress, the pink belt, and a wave of fear arrived when I realized the woman in the security camera was me.
I took a job at a Masorti Conservative congregation’s Hebrew School earlier this year. Part of the job description included a clause that I was to wear a kippah while teaching Torah, while in the synagogue sanctuary, or while eating. The expectation was welcome after a year in a Modern Orthodox community where my sporadic use of a kippah never failed to garner laughter and shock, and sometimes a feminist nod.
On the contrary, at this Masorti synagogue I am obliged to wear one and fit in just fine. But when I exit the building, almost immediately, I make a point to remove the kippah. The only outside of synagogue kippah wearing occurs when I help the students cross the street to the park. And for even just that there is always a self-conscious awareness. I imagine the thoughts of the on looking cars and park dwellers like I did helping my wheelchair-bound friend cross the street in high school. Their imagined thoughts, like “look at the Jewess and her flock,” or “wow, poor guy, look at this woman helping him,” both bothered and affirmed me.
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October 19, 2011 by Danica Davidson
A Conversation with Gloria Feldt
Right-wing challenges to women’s access to safe and legal abortion, and to other reproductive rights, are being mounted in many locations. Gloria Feldt (www.gloriafeldt.com), former president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, is a leading activist for women’s rights. Author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power, Feldt has some ideas about how we can seize back this important agenda.
How did your background as a Jewish teen mother get you where you are today?
When I was young, I felt different for being Jewish in a small town in Texas. I think that that feeling of differentness made me want to be the all-American girl when I was a teenager. And being the all-American girl in rural West Texas in the 1950s meant getting the boy, getting married, having babies, packing your husband’s lunch, having a picket fence.
I became pregnant. On one level, it was unintentional. On another, I think it was intended. I was conforming to the role society was telling me I should play.
As I became more mature, I began to reflect on my upbringing. I began to work to help other people get their civil rights, people who’d been treated as different. Fighting for other oppressed people began to give me strength. I became grateful for knowing what it was like to be different. I was also informed by the Jewish ethic, tikkun olam, even though those words were never uttered in our house, as far as I can remember. But once I came to understand that concept, I understood the Jewish imperative for social justice had influenced me.
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October 18, 2011 by Andi Arnovitz
Synchronicity: On the Rescue of Gilad Shalit
There is much too much synchronicity in the air right now. It’s hard to breathe. I am desperate for a mundane randomness in events but I find everywhere I turn there is a plethora of parallels, of metaphors; an abundance of symbols. There is no escaping the weight of the times in which we are living: one too many coincidences are no longer coincidences.
Tuesday Gilad Shalit is due to return home.
Being an artist, with a vivid imagination, I have spun many moments for him in my head:
The cacophony of Hebrew pummeling his ears for the first time in five years.
The physical pain of daylight.
The peculiar and personal smell of his father’s neck.
More of something. Anything.
Music.
Privacy
Eating his favorite cake, a cake which surely Aviva is baking for him, measuring slowly, carefully, sifting the flour and sugar, crying, the salt from her tears a just substitute for the table salt the recipe requires. Wondering, as she stirs and mixes, what she will find, what sort of son is being handed back to her now, and where in the book of mothering are the directions for what lies ahead?
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October 18, 2011 by Naomi Danis
Waiting for Gilad
I took my laptop to bed last night tuned to Ynet to wait and watch with the people of Israel for the release of Gilad Shalit, and it seemed to take forever. The logistics were complicated, the politics complex–I was reminded of Blu Greenberg’s comment that when there is a rabbinic will there is a halakhic way. Waiting, we were all suspended in a mix of longing, fear, hope, and sadness too. I love the barely restrained affectionate intrusive sense that everyone cares about each other in this still very young country. I believe that Aviva and Noam Shalit’s devoted tent dwelling and mobilization of others for an important cause should be an inspiration for other tent dwellers all over the world, whose efforts, will, I hope, bring about good. I pray for Gilad’s fulfillment in his freedom after captivity, and for peace among Israel and its neighbors.
Naomi Danis is Lilith’s managing editor.
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October 18, 2011 by Sonia Isard
Occupy Your Mind
http://www.ourbodiesourselves.org
Looking for a little light reading as you Occupy [Wall Street/Judaism/what have you]? You’re not alone. Elizabeth Gumport reports back on “the missing—or lost!—link between health class and internet pornography” that is Our Bodies, Ourselves. Thank you, People’s Library, for reminding us to find new meaning in the classics!
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October 18, 2011 by Amy Stone
Occupy Sukkot/Occupy Judaism – Would you go to jail for this?
Down at Zuccotti Park (aka Liberty Plaza) we had the choice of the sukkah we go to and the sukkah we don’t go to. It was the day after the Occupy Wall Street protesters refused to move out of the park for a sanitation department cleanup. The occupiers cleaned up the park and the establishment backed down, at least for the moment. What better place to celebrate Shabbat-Sukkot.
Photo by Amy Stone
Before the cleanup showdown, Daniel J. Sieradski, the “post-Orthodox” organizer behind the Kol Nidre service next to the park, had assembled a Chabbad popup sukkah in Zuccotti Park. The halachic hovel was unfit for man or beast – especially in high winds and rain. Friday evening Sieradski was vacating, while a few yards away, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) were getting ready to celebrate Shabbat and Sukkot under a sturdy non-halachic shelter. “Shake, shake, sniffy, sniffy” Participants were instructed to shake the lulav and sniff the etrog.
Then the cops moved in. No tents allowed. What is this, anti-Semitism? (Just joking – haha.) What about that tent over there? Policewoman explains that the huge tarp attached to a few trees is “not a tent. It’s an umbrella.” The guidelines are obviously in flux. The head of JFREJ, Marjorie Dove Kent, takes a hands up/hands down vote (fingers wiggling OWS vote style) on whether we want to risk arrest.
We barely have our Judaism or our politics together but the majority definitely does not want to risk arrest on this issue at this time.
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