The Lilith Blog

December 15, 2020 by Polina Kroik

The Sufgania That Made Me Feel At Home In a Place That Rarely Felt Like One

In pre-pandemic years, when Hanukkah drew close, I’d find myself wandering the streets of New York in search of the perfect sufgania. I’d walk down to Breads Bakery in Union Square and order one of each kind, jelly-filled, plain, chocolate covered, then furtively bite into them on the way to the subway. The next day I’d travel all the way to the Lower East Side and get half a dozen, neatly arranged in a white cardboard box. This time I’d patiently wait until I got home, and slowly consume one in my overheated kitchen, hoping perhaps that the familiar setting would also infuse the fried pastry with a taste of the past.

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July 27, 2020 by admin

The Ashkenazi Table •

Explore the heart of Ashkenazi Jewish food in a course featuring hundreds of never-before-seen archival objects, lectures by scholars, and video demonstrations of favorite Jewish recipes by renowned chefs. The essence of these Jewish foods has remained constant even as the recipes have evolved and changed with the migration of Jews around the world. Featuring Joan Nathan, Michael Twitty, Alice Feiring, Mitchell Davis (James Beard Foundation), Niki Russ Federman & Josh Russ Tupper (Russ & Daughters), Jake Dell (Katz’s Deli), Darra Goldstein, Liz Alpern & Jeffrey Yoskowitz (The Gefilteria), Lior Lev Sercarz (La Boite), Adeena Sussman, Ilan Stavans, Leah Koenig, Michael Wex—and more. Free if you register before December 31. Take the class at any time, at your own pace. yivo.org/Food

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January 10, 2019 by admin

On Class, Identity, and Prejudice

In uncertain times, you want to improve the world and still hold on to what you value. It’s hard, and this issue of Lilith explores some of the tensions. How to ensure reproductive justice; why it’s so hard to slough off shame around having—or not having—money; what kept Jewish women out of good jobs, and more. Money can affect what we think of ourselves, though its inflection has changed for women in different eras.

What class are you?

When I was a college student, a history professor opened his first class of the term by hollering, “What class are you?” The students, a little weirded out, called back the year each expected to graduate. The professor then launched into his lecture on how in bygone times the answers would have been “working class” or “shopkeeper,” or maybe “landed gentry.”

Class distinctions have percolated into people’s consciousness once again. On the campus and on the street (i.e., on social media), there’s steady commentary on privilege, both from those uncomfortable possessing it and from those suffering its absence. Stratification by social class is always clear to those on the ladder’s lower rungs, and others need to keep their empathy handy. Example: At a college gathering, I heard an alumna announce that she’d never understood her fellow students’ chronic complaints about the facilities. “The dorm rooms were warm in winter. There was always enough heat and always enough food,” she recalled. As my late grandmother would have responded, “Some people complain that the pearls are too thin, and some people complain that the soup is too thin.”

Earning money and growing it.

Alongside the abstractions of class and caste and privilege are women’s burgeoning practical concerns about finances. I was invited recently into a conversation with Jewish women in their 30s who wanted to explore their feelings about money. They’d mostly, proudly, paid down any education and credit-card debt, and the evening started with “Buy now or keep renting?” and “How much can I give away?” They sounded confident, but half an hour in, every woman in that room had confessed anxiety about not “doing money” well enough. They want to be as good at managing it as they are at their day jobs. They want to get As. They came into young adulthood during the global financial crisis of 2008 and they want to have a hedge against awful things that might happen in the world. None of the dozen women— some married, some in a relationship, some single—was depending on a partner to provide this financial safety net. Avoiding the dependencies of their mothers’ generation, their goal is to hold their future financial security, whether from earnings or inheritance, in their own hands.

Identity, anxiety and prejudice.

How you speak and where you were born can be proxies for money, as status indicators. In the early 1900s, immigrant Jews were thought to be a drain on the economy, and Jewish welfare organizations rushed to assure the authorities that these Jews would not be a public burden. Being indigent was shameful. Fast forward, and the shame has shifted; some are uneasy not about poverty but about having wealth, thanks to damning, millenniaold slurs about Jews and money, while a new wave of immigrants bears the brunt of social and political scapegoating.

Old anti-Semitic tropes about powerful, rich Jews are surfacing again in hate-filled tweets and public rants. Jewish college students hesitant to identify themselves as living in well-off suburbs tell new friends they’re from “New York” rather than Scarsdale, “L.A.” rather than Beverly Hills. And we know that Jewish women in particular feel caught in a classic trap, deplored for being consumers who squander parental or spousal dollars and also put down if they aspire to be the ambitious earners themselves. (See Lilith’s numerous articles on the damaging JAP image and its sister stereotypes.)

Philanthropic models in the shadows?

Perhaps these lingering stereotypes explain why some women are reluctant to stand out from their peers. Take a look at the facing page. A firm feminist principle at Lilith has been to demonstrate that every gift counts, and so all are listed, regardless of size.

There’s a downside, though, when you level donor distinctions. Anonymity, and masking dollar amounts, means that philanthropic role models are in the shadows. Philanthropy— giving of your resources in support of the values you hold—is an important identity marker. Your name on the list demonstrates to others what you hold dear, and you feel good when you give to a cause that inspires or challenges you. Nonetheless, we play down the feel-good aspect.

It’s a little like warning teen girls about the perils of sex (STDs! Pregnancy!) without mentioning that sex can be fun. Keep pleasure in mind as you do your own philanthropy, at any level. We hope you enjoy yourself along the way; it’s a chance to mitigate the gloom.

Here’s wishing you—and all of us—a year of ample resources and deep empathy, a year rich with meaningful connections.

Susan Weidman Schneider

Editor in Chief

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January 10, 2019 by admin

Fiction: The Proper Care of Silver

Marianne wonders if people still say housekeeper. Maid sounds too Southern, and cleaner sounds industrial and it’s just the two of them here today, so without knowing the terminology—despite years together— they empty the sideboard of Marianne’s grandmother’s silver. Nana had used her oven to store shoes but owned a silver service for 22, including large wine holders cleverly designed to store ice in a hidden compartment. Nana had come to Washington Heights in 1939 with money rolled up and stashed in her vagina. Right in the hoo-ha, she’d told Marianne. Not once had Marianne seen the service used.

“What was she thinking, bringing it all here?” Marianne says aloud to Zelia. Despite knowing Zelia won’t understand, Marianne explains how sad it is, having such pieces all go untouched. Marianne pictures Nana, spidery hands clasped in her lap, waiting for partygoers who never show up. How tragic, she thinks, but then, just as quickly, she thinks how well preserved the set is now, right there in her sideboard. “See,” she points out to Zelia, “it’s like new!”

Zelia, perched on a folding ladder, passes a silver wine holder to Marianne who places it next to its pair on the empty dining room table. Small, decorative lions on the holders gaze out at them as though they, too, are baffled as to why this massive cleaning effort when both Lily and Daniel declared they aren’t coming for Passover this year; Lily because she is celebrating Easter with Mark’s father who has no one else with whom to eat lamb and mint, and Daniel because William’s parents asked them first, which only makes Marianne feel she—the mother—should have asked at Thanksgiving although if she had she’s sure to have been scolded for thinking too far ahead. “It’s not a competition,” Daniel had told her, his voice sounding interplanetary with hands-free. “That’s exactly what it is,” she’d said. “Well,” Daniel had said, “Maybe we’ll show up. Who knows.”

“Ohmygod.” Zelia, unsteady on the ladder, drops Nana’s teapot and it lands with a muffled thud on the carpet. “Ohmygod.”

Zelia knows only a few scattered words of English. Oh my god is all-purpose—torrential rain ohmygod; Marianne’s father has lymphoma ohmygod. If Marianne needs to convey anything she has to act it out—wipe the shades in exaggerated motions or mime mopping the bathroom floor all the way to the grimy corners. Anything serious and she emails Zelia’s fifth-grade daughter to translate.

Marianne had written the instructions for today because it was crucial that the silver be handled gently, that Zelia not scratch it or put it in the dishwasher as she’d done the year before. Marianne doesn’t criticize Zelia for living in this country eight years and knowing basically nothing, but when Zelia’s sister visited from New York and demonstrated her fluency (and sisterly love by splitting the housework that week) it did make Marianne think that if only Zelia would force herself to learn she’d be so much better off. She could negotiate more hours or apply for positions with people who had child care needs or have a job that didn’t require counting forks, though it was possible Zelia liked counting the utensils, proving they were all still there, not stashed in her lunch bag and brought home to sell or to melt down and then sell.

“Oh, it’s OK!” Marianne picks up the teapot, overly cheerful to hide her disappointment. The thin spout is dented and the lid dinged. The thing survived Nazis and 70 years of tarnish and hiding in Washington Heights but can’t survive four seconds with the Brazilian housekeeper.

“Never mind,” Marianne tells her and makes a big show of putting it with its imperfect lid next to the wine holders. If Daniel shows up he will certainly notice the ding. Martin will not.

Marianne will have to show her husband, displaying for Martin the small lid on her palm like a game show hostess with a tiny hummingbird prize, and narrate what happened. The ladder, the cleaning. Martin will shake his head and examine the spout as though a.) he were a silversmith rather than a radiologist who spends his days in the dark and b.) this mishap opens the door for him to have his bi-weekly whinge session about Zelia. “If I can’t find my socks I guess I should look in the produce drawer…”

“Okay,” Zelia says and hops down from the ladder. Marianne sticks her hand out to steady the cleaner, both of them working together to fold the stubborn ladder and begin on the silverware drawer, which is a chaos of cutlery, knives wedged into fork tines. Zelia is speedy at organizing these and Marianne takes a moment to marvel at her delicate fingers, the gentle ting of each item as she fits it in exactly the correct spot.

“That looks good,” Marianne tells her and Zelia beams, the one dead and slightly gray tooth of hers prominent in the late morning sun.

Marianne chose this room for its light, bought the house without Martin even seeing it. She was pregnant with Lily then, Daniel age four or nearly so she remembers, because he used the bathroom all on his own as she wrote a deposit check. Martin didn’t mind. He praised her, actually. We have the kind of marriage, she’d bragged to friends, where we don’t have to even talk about things. She’d meant she had jurisdiction, unlike one friend who couldn’t even buy a mug—a single coffee cup—without her husband’s approval of color, design. But perhaps in the end those small conversations were necessary, crucial in a marriage—who buys a house without even discussing it?

Zelia fits the final knife into its slot in the blue velvet holder, points to the empty space where knife number twelve should be. “I don’t know.” Her voice is lyrical, music in the vowels. Iiiidunnnoooo. She doesn’t know.

She could have walked off with spoons stuck into her bra and Victoria’s Secret sweatpants and Marianne probably wouldn’t have said anything. Even when Martin’s wallet went missing for two weeks and he was driving to the hospital without an ID and having to ask the attractive night nurse to buzz him in, Marianne didn’t accuse Zelia of any wrongdoing. And, sure enough, it turned up when Marianne went to get Martin’s car inspected. He’d locked it in the glove compartment before the trip to Marrakesh, taking only a single credit card and his passport. “There are other cleaners,” he’d said.

And there are. Lois has a housekeeper who bakes tortillas when her grandchildren are visiting. And there are certainly services that come in, speak English, and don’t leave the scrub brush in the bathroom sink or rearrange the living room furniture because they feel it’s better that way. There are better cleaners. But if Marianne lets Zelia go and this new, miraculously efficient and bi-lingual woman comes, and she leaves the house tidier and—this would be the key—orderly in a way that is rational, meaning their clothes are segregated by owner not color and the golf clubs are not with the similarly sized standing dustpan—well, then what in God’s name would Marianne talk to Martin about?

Because the sad truth of it is that Zelia’s foibles are some of their best conversations these days. Martin will listen— with his eyes and face and ears—as Marianne recounts today’s escapades and she will be rapt as he flings open drawers and closet doors to reveal the latest gross injustice with his dress shirts or the wrapping paper saved from Lily’s engagement shower to which she had only been invited by phone. Martin’s fingers might accidentally lose themselves over her knuckles and maybe he’d have taken Cialis and maybe. Well.

Zelia and Marianne have a generous understanding. Marianne never criticizes her terrible cleaning or suspect organizational skills and Zelia can’t—or doesn’t— judge her employer for a.) Marianne’s messy house, jam rings on the fridge’s glass shelves, hair in the soap or b.) having a cleaner when it’s just her and Martin now or c.) the fact that Marianne gives Zelia’s daughter presents on birthdays and Christmases even though she never asked if this was okay and, as Daniel pointed out, speaks more to Marianne’s needs than to the girl’s.

Under the silverware caddy are ripple-edged Haggadahs that haven’t been used in years but which Marianne refuses to recycle because they might be used again (they won’t) and they were her mother’s (they weren’t used then, either) and since Daniel and William were already exploring birth options, they might want them (they don’t—Daniel will make his own). “I just can’t be free of them,” Marianne says, fully aware that Zelia won’t get her Passover joke. She points to the Hebrew text. “Prayers.” Zelia smiles. Last year, Marianne had made a vat of matzoh ball soup, and presented Zelia with a bowl. Marianne thought Zelia would try it and understand something about Judaism or at least have a snack that wasn’t the Coke and Filet-o-fish she normally brought for lunch, but Zelia dumped the soup into the farmhouse sink, assuming Marianne wanted her to wash the bowl.

“I wash?” Zelia reaches for a small silver cup.

“Polish,” Marianne says, miming scrubbing and immediately wondering if she still has silver cleaner. “You have to do it gently, like this.” She leads her to the sink. Zelia watches as Marianne finds the polish, uses the pads of her fingers to apply the blue-gray goop and with the smallest trickle of tepid water, rinses while scrubbing with a paper towel. “It’s Elijah’s cup. You put it on the table and wait for him.”

Later, Marianne can hear Zelia on the floor above—putting laundry away in the wrong place, arranging pillows in a way that would make sleep or getting into bed impractical at best, possibly scraping the hardwood with the new vacuum.

Marianne, ripe from the success of polishing the chalice, has a pile of silver, even the dented teapot, by the sink, her hands slicked with tarnish. You won’t believe it, she will tell Martin, I had to do the silver myself. Imagine paying 20 dollars an hour to clean your own house!

Zelia gathers her lunch from the fridge and slings on a coat the color and texture of abandoned tires; it once belonged to Marianne. “I go.”

“Ok,” Marianne says, her fingers puckered in the water. Isn’t it early for Zelia to leave? Has she done all she can? She should say something.

“No. I go…” Zelia holds her arms, the Target lunch bag swinging and crackling as she appears to do yoga or swim.

Then Marianne understands, Zelia miming an ocean wave now, flying. “Vacation?”

“Noo. I sorry. Back to Brazil.” She said this before once and then came back because it had been a six-week leave. Marianne felt her insides fold up. Zelia wouldn’t even need the handed-down coat in Brazil.

Marianne stood looking for something to give Zelia for her trip—because it could be just that, a misunderstanding or language error, right? This Brazil trip could be just a holiday, nothing permanent. She’d just open the door with her key and come right back into Marianne’s life as though there had just been simple miscommunication.

Or maybe Marianne wouldn’t lock the door and she’d find Zelia right there having milky coffee at the kitchen table. Wasn’t that possible? Nana or the kids or Martin and the cleaner all sipping and waiting for her to find them, almost as though the door had been propped open the entire time.

Emily Franklin is the author of a novel, Liner Notes, and a story collection, The Girls’ Almanac, and young adult books. Her work has been published in The New York Times, NPR, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

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January 10, 2019 by admin

Cliques and Class in Hebrew School

“Have you ever met a poor person?”

IT WAS MY FIRST YEAR TEACHING HEBREW SCHOOL, and I wasn’t especially good at it. Yet the school paid well per hour—maybe too well for the amount of work I put in—and I needed the money, because my salary as an adjunct instructor in the city university system didn’t cover my bills.

The Hebrew school was located in a wealthy synagogue in Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Jewish day schools I had attended on scholarship from 3rd through 12th grade. I was teaching the same subjects I had learned back then: Hebrew, Torah, Jewish history. Teaching Hebrew school brought back an adolescent discomfort: feeling like a charity case in an uptown Manhattan Jewish community. We were not so poor by national standards. Still, my sense of feeling poor was constant when I spent time among peers who, I imagined, did not know about need. My family lived in a 275-square-foot tenement apartment in SoHo where I shared a bedroom with my two siblings. I never had classmates over, because my mother was embarrassed.

Every Thursday afternoon, I reluctantly took the train from my apartment in Brooklyn to teach at the Hebrew school, sweating in my winter coat. Other people move to New York to expand their worlds. I was taking the same subway line I’d relied on in middle school and high school.

At the synagogue, I would watch the kids and their nannies climb the building’s sleek, glass-enclosed staircase up to my fourth grade classroom, which bore the name of a prominent donor. I resented the evident wealth and comfort of the administrative staff; I resented my students and their parents. One of my students, Harper,* had a last name matching a classroom down the hall. She reminded me of the girls I sought approval from in my elementary school: rich, pretty, and domineering. Harper and her two best friends—her disciples—sat together at the U-shaped table, dressed in identical pink shirts with sparkly print that spelled peppy garbage like “#Teamweekend.” For a few weeks, they referred to themselves as “Teamweekend” and the other girls begged to be members of the team. “You have to apply,” Harper said.

Everyone in Teamweekend had gluten allergies and received a special snack: plain Pop Chips. They emptied the Pop Chips on the table and smashed them with water bottles. Then they crunched on the small pieces all through class to make the snack “last longer.”

One student who did not beg to belong to Teamweekend was Ella, who reminded me of myself: a kid on scholarship. Her parents were social workers while mine were struggling artists. She was a weirdo in a pink newsboy cap who read textbooks about ancient Rome under the desk. I had been a weirdo, but a conformist one, studying the other girls so I could dress in poor approximations of their outfits— cheap knock-offs from a store called Kidztown.

On my first day of teaching, Teamweekend said that they had to pee, all at the same time. Uncertain in my new position of authority, I wanted the girls to like me more than I wanted the class to run smoothly.

“Only one at a time,” I said hesitantly.

“Are you new?” Harper asked. I could tell you what she looked like—full cheeks, freckles, long straightened hair—but what matters more is that, at 10 years old, she spoke with a kind of assurance that I imagined came from the combination of looks and financial comfort. “You seem new to me,” she said.

I let them pee at the same time. They returned to class 20 minutes later, giggling. The other students looked at me to see how I would handle this affront to my authority, except Ella, who continued to read about Marcus Aurelius, oblivious to the dynamics around her. After class, I went to Duane Reade and bought a bag of plain Pop Chips.

Hebrew school was just one of many sources of anxiety in my low-income life. My weeks were full of bureaucracy: applying and then reapplying for Medicaid; waiting on line at the billing office at Hunter College to ask why my paycheck was late. But Hebrew school played an outsized role in my emotional life. On Thursday nights, I would pour red wine and tell my boyfriend stories about the bitchy things Harper had said: “Harper called me out for wearing the same jeans two weeks in a row.” Or, “Harper said she liked the substitute teacher better than me because she had a S’well brand water bottle.” Or, “Harper told another girl that when a boy called her fat, it was ‘honestly really funny’.”

I would also talk about Ella: always chewing her hair at her desk, sitting wrong on her chair—sideways on her knees with her butt in the air—writing a fantasy story or drawing another map of the Roman Empire. During group work, the other girls refused to work with her. She’d tell me that she was fine; she wanted to work alone. But I couldn’t watch her, absorbed in another solo project, without my chest tightening. I wondered if she really didn’t care what the others thought of her. “To be honest” (to borrow my students’ favorite construction), I hated her for eliciting such uncomfortable tenderness.

When it was time for bed, my boyfriend would often play a podcast set on a sleep timer. One night, the podcast host’s cheerful voice in the darkness recounted a story about his 10-year-old daughter, who had used his wife’s $65 face cream to make “slime” in her bedroom. Slime, the host explained, was a mixture of different bathroom products that, in the right proportions, became a blob you played with. Tweens and teens across the nation were mixing it and selling it to each other. The slime market was “flooded.” I wondered what slime looked like? What made it so popular? As I drifted out of consciousness, twisted in the sheets, I imagined a liquid green slime, dripping from our bedroom walls.

Towards the end of January, Harper began bringing in slime. She snapped open the lid of a Tupperware container during my lesson, giving hushed orders to the rest of Teamweekend. She divvied up a sparkling gelatinous blob for her friends to play with. “Put it away,” I said, transfixed by the way the girls manipulated the slime, stretching it out and letting it ooze down to the desk. It stuck to their pencils and workbooks. “Just one second,” Harper said.

Harper told the other girls that she had made the slime at her ski house. In the summer, she explained, “I’ll have my own slime room in the Hamptons.” In the following weeks, this was a line I often recounted at parties, unclear if I was appalled or delighted by the image of her alone in a room by the sea, mixing slime. The slime was as trippy and loud and ugly as the Lisa Frank folders that had been status symbols when I was in elementary school. Harper had turned moisturizer, contact lens solution and glue into something exclusive, as only gatekeepers can do.

Growing up, there was never extra money for the small things I wanted, year to year: Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies and, later, Juicy Couture zip-ups. I once begged my mom to buy me Lisa Frank stationery, a folder with golden retriever puppies sticking their heads out of a blue and fuchsia sand castle on a psychedelic beach. Even then I knew that the folder did not match my true taste, which was muted. But it didn’t matter whether or not I liked Lisa Frank. Possessing that ridiculous folder made me feel like a girl who had her own pink and floral bedroom—and health insurance that covered visits to the dentist’s office. I treated the folder like a golden egg, wiping it down with damp tissues in the bathroom when I spilled on it. One day, a girl I admired for having her pulse on the latest trends noted the folder, which I had conspicuously placed on top of my books. “Finally you got something good,” she said. Finally.

As an adult, I hadn’t really moved past that period of aspirational consumerism. I began to read articles about slime on my phone on the subway. I saw a luxury brand of slime advertised on a women’s fashion site—playing with slime, they argued, was a form of self care and stress relief. You could order fancy slime on Etsy in different colors and flavors: unicorn birthday cake, watermelon sangria, lavender milk and orange blossom. Soon, I was following slime-focused Instagram accounts created by tween girls.

“We should have a slime party,” I suggested to my adult friends. “We could drink and just, like, make slime,” I offered. And they agreed, though without my enthusiasm. They didn’t understand that Harper had made it cool.

In February, in a unit on tzedakah, my students acted out hypothetical situations: Your friend does not have enough money to pay for lunch. You have extra money but do not want to embarrass her. What do you do? The student who played the girl with money spoke loudly and cheerfully. “I’ll give you money!” she beamed. Meanwhile, Harper played the poor girl. As part of her performance, she folded into herself, looked down and spoke meekly. “I’m sad and poor,” she whined. She wrapped a sweater like a shmatte around her head and coughed as though sick with tuberculosis. I groaned audibly.

“Harper, have you ever met a poor person?” I asked her. The room was silent. I wanted the students to know that you couldn’t always tell, just by looking at a person, whether or not they were “poor.” Or could you? I wanted to tell her, I am poor, to shock her. I wanted to write it on the white board in the wrong kind of thick, black marker—permanent. But Harper was just a kid; a projection. And I wasn’t going to do anything that would upset the Hebrew school administration. I was hesitant even to ask them questions about my paycheck lest I seem too desperate.

BY SPRING, HARPER WOULD COME IN EACH WEEK with containers labeled according to variety: “butter” slime, “fluffy” slime, “glow in the dark” and “glitter.” She distributed these to select girls in the class: always to Teamweekend, and occasionally to an additional girl of her choice. Then the slimeless girls would beg to be allowed to touch the slime. “Just a poke,” they pleaded. There was a specific way to touch it with your fingertips that the girls had studied from Instagram videos. Even Ella took interest, awakened from her usual dream-state by the allure of slime. She’d sit close to Harper and try to touch it without asking. I once heard Harper tell her, “Look, some people just have bad hands for slime.”

One week Ella found a small Ziploc bag of slime in her elementary school bathroom. She brought it to my class and presented it to Teamweekend: “I got some slime!” she said with pride. It was discolored and hardened. It didn’t ooze and stretch like fresh slime is supposed to. “To be honest,” Harper said, “that is so gross.”

So I began the exhausting process of confiscating the slime. No one would agree to put it back into the Tupperware, so I’d go get the assistant principal, who was firmer with the girls. “If I see the slime out again,” she’d say, “I will be calling your parents.” Sniffling and frowning, the girls would put the slime back into the containers. I always hoped they would forget the Tupperware so that I would get to take it home. But no one ever did.

When the first green buds bloomed on barren trees, I had my friends over to make slime. I poured wine. We drank and put on music and smoked my dry weed. While everyone was busy talking in the living room, I eagerly went to the kitchen to mix the glue and other ingredients, feeling my hands sweating as I sunk them deep into the goop.

It was not joyous as I’d expected it would be. In fact, I found that I could not get the slime off my fingers. The glue stuck to the kitchen counter and dripped on to the mat on the floor. My friends were similarly unenthused. They poked at the slime absent-mindedly, half-heartedly indulging the activity I had endorsed. “This looks weird,” one friend asked. “Are you sure you have the proportions right?” Soon, the bowl of slime was set aside as we focused on wine and gossip.

The next morning, I was down on my hands and knees, peeling slime off the kitchen tiles, scratching it off the woven mat. A dull hangover made my recollection of the night seem more embarrassing than it probably had been. Had the slime made me look kind of desperate? Maybe the problem was my hands, I thought. What I had always suspected was true: I had bad hands for slime.

*Names and details have been changed.

Shayna Goodman is a writer in New York City.

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September 6, 1976 by admin

The High Price of “Failure”

Give her the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her within the gates. (Proverbs 31:31)

If anyone needs to be convinced of the urgent necessity for re-evaluating our sex roles, let her spend a week at a Jewish family service agency. The following observations stem from the writer’s experience over a 7-year period working as a psychiatric social worker in two such agencies in two medium-sized cities.

Women’s liberation has tended to ignore the particular group of women that form the clientele of such agencies. I have yet to be at a meeting where there is talk about organizing the lower middle class wives of husbands who have not moved fast enough in the intensely upwardly mobile urban Jewish culture. Yet, many of the women from this group have had their lives profoundly stunted by rigid Jewish notions of male and female roles. The Jewish mother has been seen as pure grotesque; it is about time we see her as victim as well as vampire.

First, a word about the husbands who come to Jewish family service agencies. Most of the men whom I have interviewed over the years see themselves as occupational failures. They are working, but not at jobs that give them the necessary status that the Jewish culture demands that they have. They work as taxi drivers, salesmen, small store owners in stores that are not doing very well, harassed high school teachers who must take a night job to make ends meet, mechanics, factory workers, and so on. (The reason social workers see such people is simple. If they were more “successful,” they would have the money to go to a higher status, more expensive kind of mental-health treatment, from analysis, to a week at Esalen.)

These men exhibit a profound sense of failure. They literally sag under the enormous pressures on Jewish males to succeed in this country. Given their culture, they are not mensches, they are schleps and they know it. They have not excelled in some intellectual endeavor, or they are not a success financially. “There goes my son, the doctor,” “that’s no profession for a nice Jewish boy,” are gag lines they have been weaned on, gag lines that give the clear message of the kind of financial and intellectual standards that are expected. The South American machismo is mild compared to the machismo pressure they have received.

This pressure, has, of course, produced some remarkable results. The Jews are the great American success story, and their rise has been phenomenal. 1 was struck by the fact that almost every husband I worked with had a close relative who was described as having made it in some visibly distinguished way. One constantly heard, for example, of “my brother, the surgeon,” or “my nephew who just got into Harvard.”

What this does to a man who has not “made it” in the merciless terms of the Jewish culture is obvious. It does not come as much of a surprise, that a man selling shoes while his brother is a famous doctor should be filled with self-contempt. However, the question rarely asked is, what happens to the women under these circumstances?

The wife is operating under two commandments, considerably more crucial than the first ten she was given. The first is that her “success” identity must come primarily from what her husband does. Second, under no circumstances is she to be allowed to be vocationally more successful than her husband.

It is clear that although wives are applauded for standing behind their husbands, they had better not be seen standing in front of them. Thus a wife needs a successful husband, simply to have room to maneuver in.

If no such person is available, the trap begins to close, and it closes in a very specific way. If the culture tells the wife that the normal way of achieving identity is through what her husband does, then his career, or lack of one, must become an all-consuming concern for the wife. As she exists in a culture where enormous success demands are made, this becomes even more paramount.

However — and this is the terrible catch — the woman cannot achieve this goal for herself. Her culture tells her that she must work through her husband to get her status in the community. Thus, if the husband is “unsuccessful,” the wife must do everything to help him to do better.

And lo, the famous Jewish woman emerges, the shrew, the bitch, the nag, the schemer. Everything is tried by these women, except the one thing that might take some real pressure off, that is, to find one’s own way somewhat apart from the husband. These wives are aware of the kind of angry, nagging people they are turning into. They are frightened, and often filled with self-hate. Anger and disappointment with the husband inevitably follow, for the one avenue sanctioned by society for the wife to walk forward on is being blocked by him. So she nags, suffers and hopes and hopes, more often than not becoming ultimately bitter.

In the last resort, the wife sometimes turns to the only other glory allowed, that is, the reflected glory of the sons. If this turn toward the son and away from the husband is made, the wife’s contempt for the husband is often increased. There are few more painful and debilitating emotions to live with than contempt for one’s husband, and the wife begins to feel like the monster that she is often portrayed as. No caricature of the Jewish mother can match the actual self-mocking, self-hating descriptions that a social worker hears daily at a Jewish family service agency. (The havoc that this wreaks in the son, as he wins the oedipal battle, is a horrifying, but better known story.)

I was struck by many wives’ attempts to make their families intellectual. Since Judaism emphasizes the importance of the mind the book, the “love of reading” in the modern Jewish family is something that is generally felt to give high status. I often heard a wife complain bitterly that her husband never read. She would then follow with an elaborate strategy of how she was trying to make him read more. This involved buying books, joining book clubs, nagging, screaming at him, and so on. The same kinds of strategies were used with the children.

However, when I asked if she liked to read, or was making any effort to read more, more often than not, the answer was no. The crucial fact was that the wife did not feel that my question was relevant. Her activity could not define her family as an intellectual family, only her husband or perhaps her children could do that. Therefore, she felt powerless to define herself and act on her own behalf. Once this sense is taken away, one’s real ability for true growth, change and health is severely crippled.

A look at the greatest play written by a 20th-century American Jew is enlightening in this regard. Willie Loman, in Death of a Salesman, is a recognizable person to any social worker in a Jewish family agency, although Arthur Miller chooses not to label him as Jewish. Willie is absolutely obsessed by his own failure. He is eager for his sons to make the success that he didn’t. He even has the typically successful older brother who haunts him. One has the feeling that Miller conjured Willie out of the guts of his own experience.

Not so with Mrs. Loman. She is all Loving Concern. She is never angry, never ambivalent, never contemptuous, always understanding. She always sides with the husband against the sons. She is maternal strength, the female rock. She sits there, sewing her torn stockings, offering comfort. And as she does so, she is driving Willie closer and closer to suicide. I do not think that Miller meant to make that point. I think he was much more interested in a more general statement about false American standards, than with female and male roles. But Miller was perceptive enough to have Willie tortured by his wife’s life-long suffering.

Linda Loman is portrayed as a totally sympathetic romanticized figure. One has the feeling of a Jewish boy writing his fantasy of what a good gentile wife should be. One could not find two more different wives, for example, than Mrs. Loman, and Mrs. Portnoy. These two women came from the pens of two of our finest Jewish writers, and it comes as no surprise that the bad wife is Jewish, the good wife, gentile.

Miller never suggests that Linda play an alternative role, as he suggests for Willie. The play is rightly entitled Death of a Salesman, not The Life of a Salesman’s Wife. Miller has Linda suggest that if Willie had done something else — grow things in the earth, for example — he might have been a happier man. But Miller never suggests that if Linda had not been such a giving, long-suffering wife, had not lived entirely for and through her husband, she might have been happier and Willie might not have had to commit suicide.

The second commandment our Jewish wife lives by, “Thou shalt not be more successful than thy husband,” is obeyed by many women by doing volunteer work. In a culture in which “you get what you pay for,” the unpaid wife can feel that she is not a real threat to her husband.

However, many of the women I have interviewed feel excluded from this kind of activity because even the volunteer position is dependent on the status of the husband. The facts of Jewish life arc that if one’s husband has little status or power to give, the wife often feels unwanted on the Board, the Sisterhood, etc., and tends to stay home. Her resentment is aimed at her husband who is unable to give her the entree, rather than at the system that tells her that her ticket of admission to the voluntary activity can only come from him.

A possible second route the wife can take is to go and get a paying job. Often wives have little education that prepares them to do anything but boring and low-paid work. Despite or perhaps because of the frequent real financial need of the family, even this kind of job is sometimes seen by the wife as a threat to the husband’s masculinity. The wife’s concerns about hurting her husband’s already much beleaguered sense of self, are invariably mixed with anger and contempt for the man she now regards as her feeble partner.

An even more difficult problem comes when the wife wants to plan a more ambitious career for herself, one that will enable her to develop and grow in a world of outside work. Here, the second commandment, “thou shalt not surpass thy husband in money, prestige, or job satisfaction,” has devastating results. For if one’s husband has a job in which he feels successful, this enables the woman to develop without fear of surpassing him. If, on the other hand, as in these families, the husband has little job satisfaction of either a financial, intellectual or status nature, the woman feels her space for growth painfully limited. I have observed an amazing variety of cop-out strategies that wives use to prevent any really constructive vocational development for themselves. After the cop-out often comes resentment against the husband, physical symptoms, profound depression and a feeling of being dead inside.

All in all, it is not a pretty picture. But sex oppression it is, and it’s about time we begin to look at it.

Mary C. Schwartz is an Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, State University of New York at Buffalo. She has taught Social Work there for six years, and has published numerous articles on the subject of casework issues concerning women. Before teaching, she practiced for seven years at Jewish Family Service agencies in two different cities. She is married and has two children.

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