The Lilith Blog

November 6, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Stolen

Today I bought a new bike. The used one I’ve been riding ever since I moved to the Bay Area was so heavy that I could hardly lift it up the five steep stairs required to mount the train, which I take to commute to work. I got tired of watching other commuters lift their bikes with one hand while sipping their lattes. And I got tired of waiting for my bike to be stolen.

Bikes are my path to free. I ride to go, to get places, and to feel the wind. I’ve ridden for as long as I can remember, and I remember vividly that moment that my father first let go and sent me flying down the hill, the weight of him behind me suddenly gone, the exhilarating fear of being on my own a sudden and ample identity. When my family lived in Israel when I was in middle school, I learned to ride with no hands, and would cruise the hills of Jerusalem, arms dangling, breathing the sweet air, and the speed. Once, while riding home, my shoelace got stuck in the chain, and the cute boy who lived down the block and was always outside dribbling a soccer ball cut it free with his pocket knife; I wore the shoelace as a bracelet for months.

My bikes have a history of being stolen just before I need to figure out how to get rid of them. Mac, named for MacGyver, the pink and white bike I rode in Jerusalem, ended up on the back of an unmarked truck piled with goods. I saw the truck taking off down the block on my way home one day, and chased it for a while. Then I watched it until the bike faded into a sky indistinguishable from the hills. Nora, my orange folding bike which I rode while living in Germany, was stolen when my friend borrowed it. She called the police, frantic, to report: “mein Fahrrad war stolen!.” Their response was to correct her grammar – “mein Fahrrad ist gestollen worden,” and wish her luck. When I was in college, my bike was stolen by the campus police, to teach me a lesson. I was always locking it up in the wrong places. I got a lecture, and a number tattooed onto the belly of the bike. There are thefts in these thefts, and also gifts, propelling me on to the next adventure.

Mornings, as I pedal into the day, my daughters’ cries for hugs and maks (our onomatopoeia for kisses) are weights upon my back. As I stand to pedal hard into the wind, the sunshine bright upon my face, I realize that I no longer soar free, alone. They have stolen that bike, the light bike I can lift on my shoulders, and take far away. They have gifted me with a weightier, more cautious vehicle, an added weight that I no wonder struggle to lift upon the train. Now, they run behind me. Soon they’ll let go, and mount their own bikes, and I, panting behind them, then stranded, weightless, will learn to set them free.

–Maya Bernstein

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

November 3, 2009 by admin

The Fall Issue is Out!

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The Lilith Blog

October 23, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Happy

Michelle Obama is hula-hooping for health on the South Lawn of the White House. Jamie Oliver’s going to teach obese America how to cook their vegetables, and eat them too. Herbivores, frugivores, and locavores are putting their stakes in the ground, amidst the moist dirt of organically grown slow food.

Meanwhile, my 20-month-old daughter went to synagogue over the holiday of Simchat Torah and learned the word “candy.” We were spending the holiday with my parents, and my girls were dressed in traditional New York Jewish holiday autumn glory, patent-leather shoes and red wool coats. On the way to synagogue, I noticed that other children on the sidewalk were carrying big plastic bags (luckily for them, they don’t live in Palo Alto, where plastic bags are illegal; I considered hauling them back West by the thousands, to sell on the sly at Whole Foods).

On the way home from synagogue, those children’s bags were full, Halloween-like, with candy. Lollipops, chocolates, sucking candies, soft candies, Fruit Roll Ups, Gushers, Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, Craisins, York Peppermint Patties, Snickers, M&Ms, gum, Jelly Bellies, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Luckily, being from Palo Alto, we were limited to our pockets.

This is not solely a New York phenomenon. When my oldest daughter was a young toddler, at our local synagogue, a kind-hearted older kid gave her a lollipop and opened it for her, in the course of the two minutes I’d turned my back. I was aghast, and immediately took the lollipop away. Tragic crying ensued. I decided that this attempt to shield my child from the relentless world of synagogue sweets was futile. I gave her back the lollipop. She sucked on it with wide eyes and a tear-stained face, then pulled the lollipop from her mouth, smiled, and said, for the first time, “Happy.”

Rabbi Eleazer of Worms, who, in the 12th century, formalized the ritual of putting honey on the slates of Jewish children attending Heder for the first time, would be delighted. This is one approach to teaching children how to love Judaism. My younger daughter hears the word “Torah” and immediately says “candy.” My older daughter learned to associate shul with “Happy” at a tender age.

But is this really what we want to teach our children? To associate religion with empty calories and fleeting sweetness, which leaves in its wake sticky fingers and an aching tummy, which must be later toned with hula-hooping? Shouldn’t we instead be serving them nutrient-rich, filling, and fulfilling foods? Isn’t that what we hope our Judaism provides us and our children? Something substantial and substantive?

And yet. I love the autumn in New York. And there is something especially magical about being in my parent’s Sukkah, especially, on a cold, brisk morning, for breakfast. And there’s no Sukkot breakfast like Entemann’s Crumb-Topped Donuts, freshly baked in the Bronx. As I took a bite one morning this past trip, my flax seed and oatmeal thousands of miles away in sunny California, I couldn’t help but smile, and mumble through the powdered crumbs, “Happy.”

–Maya Bernstein

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

September 22, 2009 by admin

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September 22, 2009 by admin

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The Lilith Blog

September 16, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Chicken Soup

My foray into vegetarianism began in 8th grade, and, if I correctly recall, had something to do with a dead squirrel. It was a year of rebellion for me: I got kicked out of class for the first time; cut class for the first time; and even joined an illicit “pizza group,” composed of me and a bunch of guys who would call the local pizzeria from the school’s pay phone every week, and share a pie behind the school cafeteria. My proclamation that I would no longer eat meat was, according to my parents, part of a “phase,” and my mother continued to serve chicken soup and brisket every week on Shabbat.

When my husband and I began dating seriously, we had long discussions about the values of kashrut, the Jewish dietary laws, and concluded that vegetarianism was an important extension of the philosophy we believed was underlying the system. Kashrut is part of an overall scheme of enhancing awareness; its focus is the relationship between the external and internal worlds. The Torah’s injunction not to eat certain animals and not to mix milk and meat could be understood as an imperative to be hyper-conscious of what, and how, we consume what is beyond us and make it our own. In keeping with the interpretation of Rav Kook, who argued that the Torah’s ideal was that all human beings be vegetarian, with our sensitivity to environmental factors, and with our shared desire to accumulate as little “stuff” as possible (kosher kitchens include two sets of everything – pots & pans, cutlery, sponges, sometimes sinks – to keep meat and dairy separate), we decided to keep a vegetarian kosher home.

Everything began to subtly unravel when kids came into the picture. When I was pregnant, I learned that, in terms of satisfying my appetite, one piece of chicken equaled at least three pints of ice cream. I started cooking chicken on Friday nights in aluminum pans. We ate on paper, convincing ourselves that it was temporary. When the kids were born and we visited my parents, I watched with wide eyes as they shoveled meatballs and schnitzel , meatloaf and stuffed cabbage into their mouths, as if they were starving. Friday night chicken dinners on throw-away dishes became our norm. One year, my parents visited for Thanksgiving, and my mother convinced us to make turkey. We bought a mammoth aluminum pan and a real knife, which, after devouring the bird, we subsequently wrapped in red tape and stuck it in the back of a drawer with plastic ice-pop holders.

This week marked another landmark in our losing battle; I decided to make chicken soup. You can’t do that in a tin foil pan. The kids have had nasty stomach flus, and, after three days of their losing fluids and refusing to eat anything, I decided that it was my responsibility as their Jewish mother to make a big pot of chicken soup. I borrowed a pot and a ladle from a friend, and improvised on my mother’s recipe. In went the chicken, the onion, the carrots, the sweet potato. I realized I had no celery, and the vegetarian in me was already raging. Something green! Something must go in the pot to reveal that this is a chicken soup de resistance, a pot of fluid cooked by someone who believes in vegetables! In went the droopy green beans from last week’s farmer’s market. In went the forgotten cauliflower from the back of the fridge. In went the turmeric. Yes, turmeric. I lowered the flame and took a whiff, a blushing bride, a novice once again. My first chicken soup.

The kids refused to eat it. My mother was aghast that I put cauliflower in chicken soup. It’s supposed to be a clear broth! That’s the whole point! Have I taught you nothing? My husband and I didn’t think it was too bad. As we sat and ate bowl after paper bowl with our little plastic spoons, the kids asleep and dreaming of kneidelach, I said to my husband: we should really buy our own pot and ladle. Maybe a bowl and a soup spoon or two, while we’re at it. He grunted from the kitchen, where he was trying to fit the enormous pot into the fridge, and muttered something about Tupperware.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

September 8, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Back To School

Ah – crisp September – You are most welcome here! O Chill in the Air, Dear Crunch of the Apple, Ye Shavings of Sharpened Pencils.

This time of year has taken on precious new meaning for me in motherhood: it marks the return of blessed routine. This year, our eldest daughter started Pre-K, a joyous occasion, marked by nightly readings of Knuffle Bunny Too, and the purchase of a pair of shoes that are two sizes too big, to compensate for the fact that all summer long her sandals were two sizes too small.

But, alas, each gain comes with loss. The summer days, their lazy, lingering, twilight evenings are gone. And the introduction of school marks the return of normal work-life for parents, and the incorporation of a new parent into the house – the teacher – creating a sometimes vicious love-triangle. We know that at some point in our daughter’s schooling, it is of course inevitable that she will come home with information that we disagree with, and may even conflict on a profound level with our beliefs and practices.

When I was in fifth grade, in the mid 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was raging. I asked my mother what AIDS meant, and my understanding after that conversation was that it was a terrible sickness one could get if one was married, at the same time, to multiple people. At the time, I was learning about Jacob at school. The teacher explained that he married Leah, and then Rachel, and then Bilhah, and then Zilpah. Well, I put two and two together, raised my eager little hand, and asked “Why didn’t Jacob get AIDS?” Let’s just say that the teacher didn’t appreciate the question. A diatribe of “that’s a STUPID question, how could you ask such a thing, etc.” ensued. My parents talked to the teacher, but, ultimately, it appeased them more than it helped me. I had learned my lesson – sometimes the worlds of school and home don’t align.

When our daughter came home from Chabad last year and pronounced that all boys wear kippot, we gently told her that some Jewish boys wear kippot, and some don’t, and some Jewish girls do too. She countered with – “but Morah (Teacher) told me that only boys do,” and when we said, yes, some boys do, but some don’t, and some girls do too, she burst into tears.

Can we trust our children to sift through conflicting information? And – at what age, if any, is it appropriate to tell a child that her teacher may have been mistaken? That her teacher shared one perspective, but there may be others? Is home-schooling the only answer? Or is this how children learn that there is a complex, multi-faceted universe of truths, facts, beliefs, and opinions out there? Maybe our job is to hold them as they cry, mourning each year the coming of September, and the annual loss of innocent simplicity it brings in its autumnal wake.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

August 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Homesick

In his article “Siberia II” in last week’s New Yorker, Ian Frazier packs his readers into his dilapidated van, and takes them for a ride across Siberia. He describes the numerous places he visited on his summer-long trek in August, 2001, including Irkutsk, the Paris of Russia, its famous Lake Baikal, which, as Frazier describes, “reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land,” and Birobidzhan – “a swamp in the middle of nowhere,” which, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties under Stalin, was an attempted Jewish homeland, occupied by many thousands of Jews, including Americans, and which now has a Jewish population of less than four percent.

His description of a detour to one city in particular, Blagoveshchensk , which means “annunciation,” and which is separated from the Chinese city of Heihe only by the Amur river, across which pagodas are visible, struck me as particularly poignant. He writes: “The benign and hopeful sunniness of Blagoveshchensk reminded me somehow of Palo Alto, California. Blagoveshchensk and other Amur River cities could be the Golden East, as California was the Golden West. Or maybe this notion was just my homesick imagination.” Now, I have been living in Palo Alto, CA for almost five years, and must admit that I’ve never perceived its sunniness as “benign and hopeful.” Its predictable weather – a few months of chilly rain in the “winter,” followed, and preceded by, months and months of humid-less bright sunny days – has struck me as lacking diversity, even oppressive.

Instead of appreciating where I am, I’ve found myself missing, irrationally, the places I’ve lived before. I come to appreciate each place I have lived only when I have moved away. When I lived in Frankfurt, Germany, my neighborhood reminded me of Jerusalem’s German colony, and my apartment, with its bathroom light-switch outside the bathroom, and its trisim – Israeli shutters – made me feel immediately, albeit ironically, at home. When I moved from Frankfurt to Boston, the Charles River reminded me of the Main; I would bike around it, experiencing Frankfurt’s body of water for the first time. Palo Alto’s tree-lined streets, which seem constantly to be shedding their crunchy leaves, no matter the season, make me miss the glorious New England autumn. And the Bay Area’s clusters of Eucalyptus trees and their perfumed aura make my heart yearn, desperately, for Jerusalem.

Frazier’s piece struck a chord in me, because it affirmed that, perhaps, for the rest of my life, the places I live will remind me of the homes I’ve once had, and, especially, the homes of my childhood. And yet, these very homes, surrounded by their light and smells, will be the childhood homes, the soul-homes, of my children. One day, they will be travelling somewhere, and, like Frazier, will yearn for the “sun and blue sky and reddish-gold tint” of their first home in Northern California, their “mother-home,” which, to their mother, is a foreign land.

–Maya Bernstein