The Lilith Blog

September 19, 2008 by admin

Ten Ways in Which the "Selichot Season" Concert of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra Differs From a Concert Anywhere Else in the World

1. The concert begins when a world-famous clarinetist enters from the back row playing Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), encouraging the audience to sing along.

2. In between musical pieces the aforementioned clarinetist uses his instrument to blast a Tekia, Shvarim, Truah, Tekia, sounding even better than a real shofar! (Could’ve fooled me.)

3. Three cell phones go off during the slow, quiet mandolin solo, destroying the audience’s rapt concentration.

4. Each time the conductor speaks (which is often), someone from the back row yells out “Lo shomim” (we can’t hear!!); and then someone from the front cries out, “Az lo tishmeu” (so you won’t hear!!).

5. The conductor announces that does not plan to pay the pieces in the program – as far as he is concerned, the program notes are entirely incidental.

6. In between movements, half of the audience claps, and the other half hisses at the clappers for this apparently egregious violation of concert etiquette.

7. The pianist inserts a few bars of Hatikva into the cadenza of Haydn’s piano concerto, and the audience members remain unfazed.

8. The clarinetist stamps his feet and begins dancing with wild Hasidic-like gestures during his solo.

9. The address of the theater, which happens (aptly) to be “5 Chopin St.,” is spelled “5 Shop-in St.” on the concert program. Shop in, stop in, drop in, and hear some music while you’re at it!

10. When the mandolin soloist is introduced, the conductor says that “not only is he the best mandolin player in the world – he is also single!”

–Chavazelet Herzliya

The Lilith Blog

September 17, 2008 by Modesty Blasé

Language Au Pair

Q. How many Beis Yakov girls does it take to change a light bulb?

A. 100. One and 99 to say Tehillim.

Women scuttle to each other’s homes during the week to huddle and recite Tehillim (Psalms) in an attempt to ward off illness or death or entreat God’s kindness for a good shidduch or income. Women are the corrections of a community: when disasters strike, the rabbis often blame the women for gossiping or immodest dress. (Gossiping while dressed immodestly is a double whammy and even worse.) As if women don’t have enough to do, now they are responsible for the spiritual well being of a whole community and are instructed to say Tehillim as the remedy needed to avert further disaster. What was the Tehillim tipping point? How did these verses come to substitute serious learning and empowerment for women? Isn’t it strange that while women’s voices are accorded tremendous power to change the divinely ordained course of events, they have virtually no voice in the decision-making process of a religious community? Perhaps that is the real reason why communities start to go awry.

***

Overheard at the butcher the other day.

“I really want to organise a mother and baby morning that has a bit more substance to it. Some learning or something more interesting than just baby talk.’

‘That sounds great. I’d love to come. Did you have any ideas in mind?’

‘I was thinking about swapping recipes. I need a really good honey cake recipe.”

I have never made a honey cake. I don’t bake my own challah. My children don’t eat home-made cookies. And I have never served strawberries hand dipped in chocolate. And I am proud. The race to prove one’s domesticity is endemic in Golders Green and Hendon. Highly educated housewives who have abandoned their career aspirations are channelling those energies into producing festive treats that come to define their role within the family. I argue that we must support local businesses such as kosher bakeries if we want a sustainable community. I am also not convinced that it is cheaper to make one’s own honeycake. Aside from the costs of eggs, honey, flour, electricity and water to clean up, there is the cost of a woman’s time – a figure that many women don’t value and never bother to calculate. In the run-up to Rosh Hashanah, we are exhorted to use our time to prepare spiritually for a new year of challenges. How did a woman’s spiritual preparation get hijacked and transformed into baking the tastiest honey cake in town?

***

Ellul is a month of transition: young girls from the community leave their families and depart for ‘sem’ – be it Gateshead in northern England, Jerusalem or New York, while a new stream of Eastern European au pair fodder enter these families and can be found at the gates of every Jewish primary school as the new term begins. The experiences of these two groups of young women – roughly the same age – could not be any more different. Esti, Sara and Michal are leaving home with a credit card and a suitcase full of new clothes with sleeves just that bit longer than what they could get away with in London. Petra, Jana and Olga will arrive on a bus at Victoria station in London with a small amount of cash and a rucksack filled with workaday jeans and plastic slippers.

Esti and her classmates know that they will be indulged for a year in what parents regard a ‘reward’ for their daughter’s hard work during high school. Esti plans on meeting her friends in Emek Refaim, Jerusalem’s trendy café strip, where they will demand latte and cake in condescending tones. Their parents will text several times a day and phone regularly and there will be constant monitoring of their activities by a cabal of mothers who fly out for the weekend to visit their daughters. If they could install an international baby monitor in their daughters’ dorm room, they would be listening to it all day long from the comfort of their Hendon triple lounge.

In stark contrast, Petra and the new friends she has just met on the bus have no idea what is waiting for them as they cross the threshold of the religious Jewish family they have agreed to work for. Her parents can’t afford to visit, she will spend Christmas alone in her bedroom and it’s likely that she will work second or third jobs to supplement her au pair income. For many young girls the au pair experience is a wonderful time, but occasionally it is a disaster and the au pair finds herself in a dangerous position.

Every Jewish mother who sends their daughter to sem feels fairly confident that a relative, friend or yenta on the block will look after their daughter if she is in trouble. Every mother in Eastern Europe is also worried, but she is not so confident that there is a safe and supportive environment waiting for her in London.

It’s easy to dismiss the au pairs that we have come to rely on. I have often heard women refer to their au pair as a ‘peasant’ or they make a joke about her family’s role during the Holocaust – ‘I’ll bet her grandfather was raping my grandmother.’ These “jokes” are borne of deep suspicion and internalized trauma that deeply damage the relationship between the au pair and her family. Sometimes I think that hiring these au pairs is an unconscious form of revenge: by regarding the au pairs negatively, they are defending their own family’s honor.

Here’s an Ellul thought: instead of imagining that the au pair’s family were collaborators, perhaps they were actually righteous Gentiles.

Fortunately, there’s still enough time to ask for forgiveness before Yom Kippur.

–Modesty Blasé

Cross-posted to the The Jerusalem Post blog.

The Lilith Blog

September 15, 2008 by Mel Weiss

What Political Rhetoric Do We Take For Granted? You “Decide”

Having referred to myself last week as a burgeoning partisan lunatic, I’ve decided not to endanger Lilith’s non-profit status with a long enraged rant about political issues right now. I’d rather discuss political rhetoric, as that’s a pretty fruitful field of lunacy, too.

If one of the downsides to having female candidates in the running is the rampant misogyny we’ve gotten to see for the last eighteen months, one of the upsides has obviously been watching comedians rip that misogyny to shreds. (And, as twenty-three people have asked me in the last twenty-three hours, have you seen the SNL skit yet? Because if you haven’t, you should. And if you’re a feminist and you haven’t—well, damn, what are you waiting for? Check it out!)

Finally, we get to enjoy being the subjects of the joke in a relevant way! These jokes, when properly wielded, also serve to bring even feminist
sensitivities to the relentless news cycles. And in thinking about how the language of this looooooong election has played out, this kind of joking revelation can be a welcome break—and also really powerful.

It’s fascinating what we’ve come to take for granted in American politics. One day, fuming, I started showing my girlfriend a day’s worth of email “alerts” about the danger of an Obama administration for Israel. She’s pretty politically savvy, so when she ask, “Do you think any serious candidate for President would ever consider downgrading American support for Israel?” (I said, “Nope,” but more on that another time), I knew we’d both realized how hegemonic political support for Israel has become. (Not counting President Carter, of course.) It is self-evident that Obama’s perceived lack of support for Israel is a political liability—this we can agree on regardless of our various perspectives on the veracity of such claims. It’s a fixed part of our political landscape.

I’m not sure how I feel about that, to be honest, but I’m far more intrigued by the hilarious video by The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee.

If you’ve been a little confused by all this accolades for Bristol Palin’s decision to carry through her pregnancy (I know, I know, this was last week’s news cycle, but this thought had to percolate—sorry!), well, Sam Bee and I are there with you. Decision? Like…a choice? So, you mean, you’re just accepting a natural the idea that she had a choice? Because think about it: if she deserves credit for “making the right choice” then we’re pretty much accepting the fact of that choice as something normal. Is this some strange sign of victory—to have made so much of the existence of such a right that it’s taken for granted—in the rhetoric of its political enemies? Are we at Israel’s level of political-jargon stick-to-it-ive-ness with the choice thing yet?

We can only hope. But I think it is important to pay attention to such things. If people are going to take choice for granted at the same time they bitch and moan about it, we should point that out. Maybe one day support for choice, too, will be as obvious a sign of political normalcy as support for Israel.

–Mel Weiss

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 8, 2008 by Mel Weiss

Introducing the Republicans: Convention #2

This week, the politics column of the Lilith blog presents a special guest blogger. Laura Matson, the woman who first introduced me to Minnesota and all its charms, was our blogger-on-the-ground for the Republican Convention in St. Paul. She and I spent a lot of prep time discussing one main question: what are the issues that drive a Jewish Republican woman? What political concerns create such an identity? (For Laura, who recently left the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding to continue her studies, these sorts of religion/identity questions are meat and potatoes. Hard to imagine what we talk about, right?)

As a ferociously liberal woman who ties her Jewish values into her political identity, I have to say it’s a question that fascinates me. And Laura, who as you’ll hear was not raised Jewish but is vastly Jewishly literate, it was a question she sought to answer by speaking to as many women at possible at a special event put on by the Republican Jewish Committee. Hearing women’s own words, we agreed, was the feminist way to find our answers.

As you’ll hear, it is an interesting landscape, populated mostly by people concerned about the issue of Israel. (A group I’ve written about here before.) While I don’t have to agree with this line of thinking, I can at least applaud the sentiment. And, as the election enters its final phase and some of us (cough cough) turn into partisan nutjobs, I think being able to empathize even a little with one’s political opponents is important. Someone’s going to win this election, and someone’s going to lose. I have pretty strong feelings about who’s on which end of that, but when we wake up on November 5th, we’re all still Americans. It was something Laura, a consummate Minnesotan who always manages to be both feisty and kind, picked up on. “Actually,” she said on to me on the phone from the Xcel Center parking lot, “everyone’s been really nice.”

Onwards and upward…

–Mel Weiss

My day with the RJC Women

At the beginning of the week, I attended an event sponsored by the Republican Jewish Coalition at Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis. I am not Jewish, nor am I, truth be told, a journalist, but since the GOP had chosen my hometown for its festivities, my good friend Mel Weiss offered me the chance to do some on-the-ground reporting. I jumped at the opportunity, and despite our inability to secure a press pass for the actual convention (in hindsight, this was probably in my best interest), I stumbled upon a luncheon honoring Hadassah Lieberman and the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. The luncheon, sponsored by the RJC, was a project of its woman-centric branch, the National Women’s Committee.

I arrived at Neiman Marcus in the late morning, while the attendees claimed their nametags and perused the silent auction items. Initially, I wandered around, observing the guests and trying to get my bearings in this bastion of high fashion. I overheard one woman describe her fashion and expenditure tastes to another as they admired the auction items, “I’m into maximalism—not minimalism.” Though not everyone in attendance was there for the Tory Burch boots, I spoke to a few women who had attended at the behest of their employer, a lobbying firm representing non-union construction shops, as well as a few legislative representatives and members of their staffs.

Eventually the women were ushered to their fuchsia-clothed tables by various Neiman Marcus employees and RJC volunteers for the dining and fashion show portions of the afternoon. Yes, there was a fashion show. Tall, thin models walked down the aisle while the few members of the press corps sent text messages and one of the ladies at the table next to me quipped, “Jewish ladies are eating, they’re modeling. We’re all doing what we do best.” The fashions were Urban Outfitters meets Jackie O, neon leggings and wide collars. The women nearest me were particularly enamored of the shimmering floor length gowns.

(more…)

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

September 2, 2008 by Modesty Blasé

Pink is the Word

Frum women dangle. Their car keys, usually attached to photos of their children and grandchildren, their house keys, iPod, supermarket card and gym locker tokens are all hanging off them. In one hand they are holding clunky wallets brimming with credit cards, dry cleaning receipts, parking tickets and cash. In the other, they are clutching onto an important database of sociological data currently held on the SIM card of their mobile phone. Find the phone and you will unlock all the important numbers a woman needs to know: shaytel macher, kosher butcher, mikvaot, rabbi, my cleaner and her sister in Poland.

However, one item sits on the other side of the electronic mehitzah – the Blackberry. This symbol of manly achievement eludes most frum women, for it symbolises corporate power and importance. It means you’ve got a well paying job.

However, this may all change now that the pink Blackberry has been launched in the UK. If a woman’s accoutrements are her calling card, then surely the pink Blackberry will become a lifestyle item for the religous woman allowing her to retain her modest femininity while telling the world that she too, is a very important person with a very busy schedule.

Pink used to be an innocent colour: Barbie dolls, bridesmaids dresses, icing on the birthday cake. Our pinky was for pretending to be posh while holding a cup of tea and we had no idea that a pinko was a communist sympathiser. How things have changed: now teenage girls around me are fully aware that the pink collar lapel is for breast cancer. Young mothers are dying around them, and many of these teenage girls are involved in charitable efforts to raise money for cancer research. They also know that lesbians have politicised the colour pink, and that the pink pound refers to the disposable income of gay people. So, who is the pink Blackberry really for – drag queens, soccer moms or lipstick lesbians?

Gay issues now have a prominent place on the social agenda. For example, Stonewall, a gay advocacy group recently put posters up all over the London underground railway, “Some people are gay. Get over it.” When my children saw this they giggled, and then were embarrassed when they realised that I had also seen it. I am being forced to discuss these issues with my children at a relatively young age, long before they have had a chance to understand their own sexuality, let alone begin to understand how Judaism views homosexuality. The media is a prominent vehicle for promoting a gay lifestyle: on YouTube, Lizzy the Lezzy, an English born Israeli is emerging as a gay icon. In her feature, Lizzy the Lezzie does Gay Israel, she poses the question, ‘Why is it good to be gay in Israel?’ An attractive woman replies, ‘Because there are so many gorgeous girls.’

Thousands of young girls are listening to Katy Perry’s popular track, ‘I kissed a girl.’ The lyrics are very provocative and disturbing:

I kissed a girl, and I liked it.
The taste of her cherry chapstick.
I kissed a girl, Just to try it.
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it.
…

No, I don’t even know your name,
It doesn’t matter, you’re my experimental game,
Just human nature. it’s not what good girls do,
Not how they should behave.
…

I kissed a girl, and I liked it.
Us girls we are so magical,
Soft skin, red lips, so kissable,
Hard to resist, so touchable.
Too good to deny it…

Now I know why some parents only let their children listen to Uncle Moishy.

But I don’t live in a bubble and our frum teenagers know a lot more about homosexuality than we can even imagine. The conversation in the religious community tends to focus on male homosexuality, and is usually summed up in a couple of sentences: ‘Homosexuality is forbidden by the Torah. You can’t be religious and gay.’ The fiasco surrounding the Gay parade in Israel, or formal Jewish participation in Gay parades abroad distracts attention from the day to day, and often poignant struggle of religious Jews who realise that they are gay.

I want to know how parents are discussing the complexities of this situation with their daughters, particularly just before they go to ‘sem’ on their gap year after high school. 18 year old girls, away from home, are very vulnerable and research has shown a high incidence of eating disorders in the close confines and somewhat pressured world of the religious seminary. What about sexual experimentation in such an environment where access to boys is usually quite limited? The rules of ‘shomer negiah’ (the touching of the opposite sex which is forbidden before marriage) certainly don’t apply.

Being slightly pinko myself, I try not to judge people’s personal relationships and I don’t want my children to be homophobic, racist or sexist. If biology is destiny, then surely we are obligated to support a religious person who acknowledges their homosexuality and does not want to lead a double life that will inevitably end in tragedy for all those he or she duped. Nevertheless, a gay religious person is also destined to a life on the margins, whether that be within their own community or when they venture out into the general society that may not understand their religious convictions. Do we want our children to have conventional married lives merely because it removes the angst of not belonging?

So, until our daughters are married they may just have to settle for a pink Blackberry which advertises itself as “the phone that gives you everything you need – without sacrificing everything you want.” Yes, the pink Blackberry may just be the man that every single frum woman is waiting for.

–Modesty Blasé

Cross-posted to the Jerusalem Post blog.

The Lilith Blog

August 27, 2008 by Mel Weiss

Punch-drunk on Democrats: Convention #1

Before anyone calls partisan bias, let me assure you this blog has some excellent programming planned for the Grand Old Party’s party, too–but the Dems are up first, and I am hooked. Okay, so we’re not going to talk about last night, which was pretty damn pareve, Senator Kennedy aside. I’d much rather talk about tonight.

But first, an aside: I’m sitting here watching convention coverage alone, because my girlfriend just can’t stand this kind of coverage. She says it’s just rhetoric, rhetoric, propaganda, rhetoric. It’s certainly a fraught watching experience, and I’ll cop to being a difficult person to watch it with. And she’s entirely right–it’s intense, with a lot of in-your-face repetition–the key phrases become clear very quickly–and language that manages to be both charged and totally meaningless.

And yet, I’m addicted. You have to dig below the surface, a little, understand the symbols and the codes to what’s going on, and you also have to be able to follow the rapid fire patterns of rhetoric, commentary, commentary on the commentary, all of it circular and self-referential. Essentially, I think it’s possible that what I feel for the Democratic Convention is what some folks feel about Talmud study. I don’t know if that means that I should give Talmud a try, but it certain adds a nice veneer to my news addiction.

Anyway, the convention has really picked up tonight. (Can I channel Rebecca for a moment to note that almost all the funny lines have gone to women?) I’m surprised but pleased to see a frequent reference to the economic benefits of a “green economy.” And I was pleased beyond measure to see that the people on stage have represented many aspects of a real America.

I’m writing this before Senator Clinton speaks, because I can’t trust myself to be in writing shape afterwards. I have spent months assuring most people that there is no way that there are “Clinton Democrats” who won’t vote for Obama–and vehemently denying that this is an issue among women in particular. Convention-floor interviews with delegates have shaken that belief, and I can’t help but feel a little frantic. It’s the DNC, folks. We’re all Democrats.

When you hear rhetoric about equal wages for equal pay, about using green jobs to regrow our national economy, improving our educational system, about giving tax breaks to middle class families and making big business accountable for their actions–if you hear that, and it stirs you, then why let pettiness hold those ideals back?

Ted Kennedy struck a lovely note last night as he spoke glowingly of our potential for “renewal.” Renewal is a concept that I can’t help but think of as Jewish, especially at this tome of year, when the High Holidays are starting to peak their heads over the horizon.

So let us renew, and remember our many trailblazers, and celebrate our ideals. In the meantime, I’m going back to my “studying.”

–Mel Weiss

UPDATE: Man, Clinton cleared the fence with that one, critics be damned. In honor of that whopper, enjoy another Convention show-stopper from our illustrious past.

The Lilith Blog

August 20, 2008 by Modesty Blasé

Smart is Out, Mediocre is In

“These clever girls,” a friend said to me the other day, “they’re taking it too far now. My son isn’t going to want such a clever one. It’s not going to be so easy for her to settle down, make a home…”

“My daughter is doing brilliantly at university,” said another. “But I don’t know what good it’s going to do. It wouldn’t hurt her to be a little less clever….at least in public.”

For the first time in Jewish history, mothers are encouraging their daughters to underachieve. They shouldn’t be too pretty, too smart or too competent for fear of scaring the boys away. It’s particularly nerve-wracking for Orthodox mothers who are concerned that their daughters are pricing themselves out of the marriage stakes with all their accomplishments. “With a PhD under her sheitel,” thinks the anxious mother to herself, “a man is going to worry that my daughter will never be happy changing nappies and making kugel.”

I have spotted a trend, and you are reading about it here first: smart is out, mediocre is in. Many religious women in their 40s who went to university and worked briefly in their profession relinquished their fledgling careers to raise their families. While some of them dabble in voluntary activity and others are underemployed in part-time jobs, most of them are frustrated and bored. They were given the world, but their passport to travel has expired.

Fearing that the same thing will happen to their daughters, they are not encouraging their daughters to pursue high-flying careers, rather, they are persuading them to think strategically about jobs that will allow them to combine a family and work that is interesting enough. To address this issue, one secondary school in North-West London has introduced beauty therapy training as an alternative to A levels (an academic high school diploma). One has to applaud initiatives for less academically able students, but have they no imagination? Is beauty therapy the best they can come up with? You can’t get more mediocre than that.

I have been struggling to understand this phenomenon, and have come to view this quest for mediocrity as another component of the “modesty continuum” that started with an obsession about hem lengths and collarbones. Much has been written about modest clothing and if you simply Google “modest clothing,” you’ll find a plethora of websites catering to Jews, Muslims, Plymouth Brethren, Latter Day Saints and other modest-conscious groups.

Young women on the modesty continuum understand the sartorial expectations of the religious community, even if they seek ways to subvert it. For example, the little black dress deserves a study of its own. When I was a child, black dresses were for fat old ladies. Now, they are the uniform of religious women. Young girls and teenagers are clad from top to toe in all shades of black during the week, on Shabbat and at weddings. Only the most naive would suggest that this rather drab clothing is a sign of self-effacing piety worthy of applause. Rather, the very knowing, slim-line silhouette of these attractive young women is alluring and these young women with their little black dress aspirations are very wittingly imitating the chic elegance of New York’s skinniest. On the modesty continuum, where contemporary rabbinic edicts are often based on a concept of ‘not imitating the surrounding non-Jewish culture,’ there should be public burnings of these little black dresses.

Mothers have recognised the difficulties in controlling their daughters’ dress code, hence the move to control their daughters’ expectations. It IS difficult to combine a career and motherhood, but striving for mediocrity is not a viable strategy. Subduing young women in the hope that potential husbands will find them more attractive is a damning indictment on religious men and cannot be the basis for a healthy partnership between the sexes in the modern Orthodox world.

The only solution in the short term for these clever women is exporting them to Mount Isa, a remote mining village in northern Australia where the mayor, John Molony, and the glut of bachelors will be there to welcome them. “If there are five blokes to every girl, we should find out where there are beauty-disadvantaged women,” he suggested to the Australian media, “and ask them to proceed to Mount Isa.” Asked to comment on how he defined beauty, the mayor explained, “There is such a thing as disposition, temperament, manners, general attractiveness, attitude and demeanour; all those things tend to make a person attractive.”

Yes, just the sort of qualities to be found on the modesty continuum.

–Modesty Blasé

Cross-posted to the Jerusalem Post blog.

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