January 26, 2021 by admin

“Dr. Jill Biden Earned Her Title.”

Wall Street Journal writer Joseph Epstein’s condescending attempt to convince Dr. Jill Biden to drop the Dr. in favor the “Mrs.” which he opens by saying “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo,” is actually an attempt to belittle her. And to belittle all women who have the audacity to display their legitimate credentials, which, once again, they have earned.

The message is clear: her identity doesn’t matter. Her achievements are irrelevant. Her intellect is offensive. She—and all women—should stay in our lane, which is to be happy assuming the title of wives to our husbands.

The most enraging part of this rant is his attack not just on academia itself, but on Dr. Biden’s actual research. Her dissertation explores ways to retain community college students. Epstein
dismisses this as “not promising.” It is not just promising but vital. Dr. Biden’s research is deeply worthy, highly relevant, and vital to the future of our nation. Epstein’s dismissal of community college students and indeed community college professors, of which Dr. Biden is a proud example, reveals an elitist, classist, and myopic view of the nature of education and
its value. So who the hell is he—with his honorary doctorate and his BA—to dismiss it? Who the hell is he to claim expertise on anything to do with her research at all? I know he is a man, but Dr. Biden is a doctor of education. Trust me, on this (and many other things), she knows more.

The pandemic has taken a deep toll on everyone; female academics have been particularly hard-hit compared to their male counterparts. We also understand what motivates Epstein’s article, and it’s not a concern that someone will mistakenly turn to Dr. Biden in a medical emergency. Epstein proudly rejects a title he did not earn, even as he resents the conferral of honorary degrees on, in particular, Black women. Every woman who has ever earned a doctorate and been asked for coffee or directions to the professor’s office has met a man like Epstein. But, with one of the most visible women in the country proudly using her title and inspiring so many other women to insist on theirs, perhaps our chorus can cause him and others like him, including the WSJ editors who continue to support the article, to just for once shut the hell up and listen to the experts: the women with doctorates like me and Dr. Jill Biden.

—

SHARRONA PEARL, The Lilith Blog, December, 2020.

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January 25, 2021 by Sarah M. Seltzer

My Secretly Jewish Italian Grandmother

Summer 1959. School is out. Two months to read what I want to read instead of what my teachers tell me to read. A little out of breath, sweaty from peddling my bike a mile back from the library, I am sitting cross-legged on my white chenille bedspread carefully fanning out the books I borrowed today. The plan is to read non-stop and return them all tomorrow, then get some more. My mother’s voice interrupts telling me it’s time to go downstairs to help her mother. I don’t want to stop reading, but I love my grandmother, so I whisper to my new books that I will return soon and stroke the cover of one on the way out of the room. 

As usual, when I enter her basement apartment, my grandmother is sitting at a green card table, knitting. Her hands continue to knit even when she looks up and smiles at me. She has turned off her daytime soap opera and already has her box of pale blue stationery and a ballpoint pen set out. It’s the day I am supposed to act as her secretary so she can write letters to old friends who moved away from New York. Except for counting, which she does in Italian, my grandmother speaks English all the time. She thinks I write better in English than she does, however, so this is my new summer job. Dragging a chair over from the dining room, I join her at her table. The clicking of the knitting needles continues. 

“Put the date,” she says. I write it and wait, pen poised. “Dear Anna and Axel,” she continues. These are two of my grandfather’s Swedish friends who used to live nearby but moved to  Arizona. My pen briefly glides over the paper. Then, silence. 

“What do you want me to write, Grandma?” I ask. 

“You know,” she answers, sounding a bit irritated. “Like we always do. Tell about the weather.”  

Dutifully I write about the nice weather we are having. Every letter she asks me to write starts out the same way. Either we are having good weather, or we are not. Slowly, through question and answer, I draw more information out of her, enough to reach the other side of the paper. I sigh with relief. We are halfway done. My grandmother, who lived through both world wars, does not like to waste things. By her definition, using a second sheet for a letter is wasteful. All I have to do is get a few more comments,  enlarge my letters a bit so they take up more room, and we will be finished soon. While she is thinking of what to say next, my mind wonders if I could just rush the project by making up some stories of my own to tell Anna and Axel. Perhaps my grandmother wouldn’t notice. 

I look up from the paper to find her studying my face. “Read me what we have so far,” she says. 

At her command, I recite. 

“That’s enough,” she says. “Put love and sign my name. There’s a stamp in the box.” 

Doing as I am told, I carefully fold the letter, a reasonable facsimile of what she dictated, and slip it into its envelope before writing the address. After my grandmother inspects it for accuracy, she lets me lick the stamp and place it on the corner of the sealed envelope. Next comes our little joke. To cure the aftertaste of the glue on the envelope and stamp, she smiles and motions with her head toward the end table where there is a glass bowl full of M&Ms. The candy, she assures me, will take away the taste of the glue. 

What’s even better is that now, for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes while my grandfather is in the bedroom finishing his afternoon nap, she will let me ask a few questions about her childhood in Venice. I seem to be the only curious one in the house. Though we bought a home in this town so my family could send me to Catholic school with my cousins—my mother’s sister promised her the nuns would teach me to be a better-behaved girl—what no one in my family knows is that while my mother’s mother and I are alone, she is telling me tales of the Ghetto Vecchio, the old Jewish quarter in Venice, Italy where she was raised as the youngest daughter of Leone Curiel, the father of a large Orthodox Jewish family. This summer day she listens as I practice reciting the Shema in Hebrew—“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” When my grandfather, who has woken up from his nap, enters the room and turns on the television, we stop. My grandmother puts the pen back in the stationery box, replaces the cover, and gets up to put it in a  drawer and make coffee for my grandfather. I give her a quick kiss and bound up the stairs toward my bedroom and my books.  

Not knowing about the secret conversation, my mother nods in approval as I pass by, satisfied that I have done the appointed letter-writing task. 

No one upstairs knows for a long time what actually happens at the end of my visits to the basement apartment. From the beginning I understand without being told that these stories and these prayers are meant only for my grandmother and me and do not tell the rest of my family. That summer and for a long time after, my grandmother and I live a secret life, Marranos in the midst of Long Island, afraid of being caught out in the open by our family.  

Growing up with a secret complicates life. In the bible when God asks Adam, Abraham, or Moses, “Where are you?” it seems like a nonsensical question since He presumably knows everything. But the question is not about a geographical location. Instead, God seems to be asking “Where is your soul?” The correct biblical answer is “Hineni—here I am.” The reply must come from a confident, Jewish self, one united with the tribes of Israel. But if God asked me that question in my twenties, I would not have had an answer. I didn’t seem to know. When I was with Jewish friends, their conversation sometimes made me feel like a Catholic outsider, yet when I was with Christian friends, a voice inside told me I was Jewish.  

By the time I was approaching my thirtieth birthday, both my father and grandmother had died. Their passing released me to search without guilt for more information about my grandmother’s family and about Judaism in general. I moved to Manhattan, joined a Modern Orthodox synagogue, and started going to adult religious classes. Hebrew was a tough language to learn as an adult, but I managed the long Saturday morning services by listening to the congregants chanting words with the letter lamed inside (ל) that looked like a swimmer in an ocean of words waving at me from far offshore. 

In the winter of 1982 when El Al airlines was offering big discounts to coax back ticket buyers after a long strike, I decided to visit Israel. An Orthodox friend fixed me up with his cousin Elisheva who lived on Misgav Ladach, a street within yards of the Western Wall.  

One of her sons asked if I would like to go to Sabbath services at a little shtiebel nearby, two rooms sufficient to separate men from women but a space not big enough to be called a synagogue. Alone in the women’s section, I sat on a stone bench as far away from the open doorway as possible. Men’s voices chanting in Hebrew drifted through a curtained window. Shivering with cold and nerves, I picked up a prayer book and tried to join my voice to theirs but felt too frightened to chant. Two figures loomed in the doorway, scaring me until I realized they were just other women arriving to join the service.  

Led by the rhythm of the men’s voices in the room behind us, the three of us entered the cadence of the service. As we approached the verses that symbolically welcome the bride of the Sabbath, we stood and turned toward the doorway, ready to bow. Our feminine voices mingled with the crosscurrents in the air: church bells from the Christian quarter, the electronically amplified cries of the muezzins calling worshipers to Allah, masculine voices chanting Hebrew in the room behind us. As the intensity increased, the swell of sound transmuted into a kind of corporeal presence like the floating figures in a Chagall painting. That night it was possible to believe words could create flesh. “Bo-ee callah,” sang our voices as we bowed. “Behold the bride comes.” Raising my head, I peered past the doorway into the dark as if phosphorescent wedding veils, moonlit, shimmering, would flutter into view. 

Such a spiritual evening should have solved my identity issues, but it didn’t. The following afternoon, while I was standing inches from the Western Wall trying to say afternoon prayers, a small twig with firm, green leaves suddenly dropped onto the pages of my prayerbook. It had fallen from one of the plants that sprouted in the cracks and crevices of the stone wall. Instead of thinking how miraculous it was that a healthy plant could grow in such inhospitable ground, I found a different metaphor—that twig was me, a living thing seeming to flourish but broken off from its base, so destined to perish. When I returned to New York, it seemed time to admit that I had not gained a real foothold in the Orthodox congregation where I had taken so many classes. I left and moved to Greenwich Village. 

Changing neighborhoods, of course, does not solve all life’s problems. They just end up following you. At the time I was a Wall Street securities analyst covering the publishing industry. One day, while reading an interview in Publisher’s Weekly with Cynthia Ozick, an American writer deeply informed not only by classic Jewish thought, but also by the ancient Greeks and Romans, I was struck by her use of the dreaded phrase “half-Jewish” when answering the interviewer. Sleep eluded me that night. Her choice of words made me remember things people had said to me in the Orthodox congregation, even at Shabbat dinners, even though it was forbidden to mention a person’s background if they had not grown up in a traditional Jewish household. Her words stung, so I decided to do something about it. 

A week later I was sealing an envelope that contained a short letter questioning her use of “half Jew” and a much longer typed document in which I asked Ozick if she was aware that her protagonist Ruth Puttermesser had gone on an adventure between two paragraphs in one of her published books. Then, I proceeded to tell her what the character had done. Ozick was my senior in age and talent, a brilliant Jewish intellect, and my Puttermesser tale was a kind of fan mail meant to amuse, but also to remove any sting from the first note.  

No reply was expected, but some weeks later a 200-word, hand-written postcard arrived with script as tiny as the postcards written by my great-grandfather in Venice to my grandmother when she came to America at the outset of the twentieth century. Ozick was quite generous in her praise of my letter but said she did not understand my position. In a stern but caring voice like my grandmother sometimes used, she emphatically stated that I was not “half-Jewish,” and correctly expressed the idea that no such category existed under traditional Jewish law. One was either Jewish or one was not, in other words. “You are hardly ‘split,’” she wrote. “No human being is. You are what you have chosen to be. Identity runs in the brain, not in the blood.” She ended by asking if I had read Lampedusa’s The Leopard. 

This last question showcased why Ozick is considered an intellectual Jewish writer who is also immersed in the non-Jewish world. The novel she had mentioned concerned the Risorgimento, the 19th-century social and political struggle that ended in the consolidation of the separate territories on the Italian peninsula into the unified Kingdom of Italy. What a perfect metaphor to send someone whose life goal was the consolidation of her separate selves!  

But then, by accident, by design, by miracle, a second metaphor made itself apparent. Ozick had started out writing the postcard with a green ballpoint. Virtually halfway through—right before the word “half-Jewish”—the pen had run out of ink and she had changed to a much darker tone. Though expressing a single message, the postcard was visually split in half. More than thirty years later, I still smile when reading the card because it became the metaphor that finally and irrevocably glued me together: I am a single sentence written in two colors. It was a grand, if paradoxical, sentiment that any hyphenated American would appreciate. 

Sixty years after that summer as my grandmother’s amanuensis, now an old woman and grandmother myself, thanks to Cynthia Ozick I can whisper whole-heartedly when called to read the Torah in my congregation: Hineni.  

Carolyn Ariella Sofia teaches writing at Stony Brook University. She is working on a memoir about meeting Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosinski.

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The Lilith Blog

November 24, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Life Without Lipstick

This has been the year of devastation. Just to start, there’s the staggering death toll from COVID, the collapse of the economy, the millions out of work, threatened by homelessness—and that’s not even saying a word about the savage animosity surrounding the election or the reckoning with American racism that has resurfaced in recent months. 

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The Lilith Blog

July 30, 2020 by admin

Why My Hair Falls the Way it Does

When I was 11 years old, my father sat me down on a broken, four-legged stool that had been in our apartment for years. Facing me, he began to hum the tune of a Tracy Chapman song. As I sat staring at him, I noticed his long dreads and the scar he had from when he was a boy in Jamaica. I prayed the song would never end.

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July 27, 2020 by admin

A Beloved Sci-Fi Novel Says a Lot about Gender and Politics

Kids today. (This isn’t going to be what you expect.) They navigate the world of gender fluidity freely. They don’t stumble upon words or terms. They are the natives in this world, and it can feel like we—the older generations—are immigrants in this land. We seem dated to them, from another time and place when things were needlessly complicated and needlessly cruel.

I was struck, when the pandemic led me to pick up the classic science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin, by how prescient it is about this generational split. Once we were all the protagonist Genly Ali, an envoy from another world struggling to communicate with the Gethenians, struggling to convince them that his and other worlds exist, struggling to get them to understand the value of what he is offering them: knowledge, power, peace. And he’s struggling partly because he cannot understand their world, in which there is no war (but it’s coming); in which there is no gender.

Even as the novel seems timeless, and prophetic, and even as it offers us hope of another way of being as both individual beings and as citizens, there are reminders that it comes from another time and place. The default pronoun for the genderless Gethenians is “he,” and most of the scenes involve traditional male labor. We read nothing of childbearing, and little of cooking, cleaning, and nurturing, even as we bear witness to moving moments of kindness, all the more powerful for the backdrop of a harsh, cold, and cruel environment. Quite literally: this is a freezing, freezing land.

It’s also a land of great hospitality. In the land of snow and ice, that’s a necessity, but it’s also a value. This kind of hospitality for strangers in a strange land alongside family and friends is another radical lesson, even as it is one that for many of us within the Jewish community is easily understood. When you have a long history of being outside, you create a world that welcomes others in. Including outsiders (and gender non-conformers!) like Genly Ali, who don’t quite fit in and can’t quite understand or be understood.

We are all—but not The Kids today— Genly. We too, reading this now 51-year-old book, struggle to understand a world in which there is no gender; in which sexuality is limited to a set time each month—called Kemmer—for which one gets time off to satisfy these needs without embarrassment or judgment, or even pause; in which everyone can be both a mother and a father; in which there is no division of labor, no division of professions, no division of value, no division of desire.

When you remove gender, it turns out, you change everything.

That’s one of the enduring lessons of this remarkable novel, but it’s far from the only one. It’s also a finely drawn portrait of daily life and a great quest, with world-altering stakes. It’s a political treatise, musing about the relationship between nation-state and aggression, and asking whether those stages can be skipped entirely through a model of Enlightenment that is both aspirational, and, to these despairing eyes, impossibly naïve. And yet also deeply prescient. The novel asks: would you work with someone you hate to save the world you love? And, as it progresses and that hatred abates, the novel asks: would you sacrifice your life to save someone you love?

—

Sharrona Pearl is an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Drexel University. Her most recent book is Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other

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June 25, 2020 by admin

Roseanne (Yes!) on Yidn in Utah

Growing up Jewish in Utah was a kind of Diaspora experience of its own. The Bible is quoted from regularly, and is often at the heart of even casual conversation.

I pored over it, looking for examples that upset prevailing logic, such as the passage in Genesis that says, “The sons of God visited themselves upon daughters of man and saw that they were fair.”

My Mormon friends got a blank look when I showed them that one, and a shocked look when I showed then the passage in Psalms where David says to God, “My skin is black,” because Jesus was a descendant of David, and at the time Mormons considered black skin a curse from Cain.

I felt powerful, strange, and exotic all at the same time, to think that it was my people’s history that formed the basis of the dominant culture’s codes of moral, legal and scientific wisdom. Paradoxically, my ancestors and my God were at the center of everything holy to the culture from which my people were excluded.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, Roseanne knew by the age of three that she was going to be a comic and have her own show. She would entertain family members on Friday evenings when they would all gather in her grandmother’s apartment for Sabbath dinner. The reviews she received convinced her she was indeed the Center of the Universe, which she believes to this day. “Roseanne ” debuted on ABC in October 1988 and continues to be a top-rated series on television. Roseanne’s autobiographies, Roseanne: My Life As A Woman, and My Lives (published in 1994) also established her as a best-selling author.

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June 25, 2020 by admin

Jewish Before I Was American

My grandparents, my aunt, uncle, two cousins, my parents and I lived in one Williamsburg, Brooklyn brownstone until the early 30s. I spoke Yiddish before I learned English. I was taught to read and write in Hebrew and in Yiddish. Aunt Dora generously shared her public library books of Yiddish poetry and stories with me. We read daily Yiddish newspapers. “Yiddishkeit” was part of my everyday life, not just reserved for Shabbat and holidays.

I wrote about my early years in my first juvenile novel {Ruthie, Meredith Press, 1965). Thinking back to those Williamsburg years, I realize that I became a Jewish person before I became an American person.

Norma Simon is the author of more than 50 children’s books, 13 on Jewish holidays or subjects; 2 new ones due out in 1997 on Passover and Hannukah (HarperCollins). She moved to Cape Cod 27 years ago.

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April 20, 2020 by admin

Generation 1.5 •

Russian-Jewish-Americans—“Generation 1.5”—have their own particular identity issues. A unique adult Jewish learning program wants to empower them to explore this multilayered identity, and become leaders, volunteers, and philanthropists. Founded in 2015 by seven Russian-speaking Jews, the Jewish Parent Academy aims to build a Russian-Jewish-American community educated about its Jewish and Russian heritage, taking responsibility for its needs, giving back to the broader Jewish community, and building Russian-Jewish-American community connections.

jpacademy.org

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The Lilith Blog

February 24, 2020 by admin

You Are Your Name

You are your name. In India, where I’m living for seven months as a Fulbright scholar researching the relevance of archaeological relics today, I’m constantly reminded of this. 

“My daughter’s name is Zianna, it means bold and strong,” an acquaintance tells me.

“My name is Arushi, it means first ray of the sun,” says another new friend. 

“My name is Pormishra, a god. It means, a god,” says a waiter.

“I am Suraj, the sun,” says another. 

When I respond that my name is Elizabeth, Indians often say, “Oh, the queen. You are a queen.” Glad to dissuade them of any connection between my name and India’s former colonial rule, I tell people, “Actually, Elizabeth is a Hebrew name, it means house of God: beit means house; el means God.”

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July 9, 2019 by admin

An Unanticipated Birthright Effect

In college, a Jewish friend told me her experiences during an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel. I was impressed when I learned about Taglit-Birthright Israel and its mission to ensure that Jewish young adults have the opportunity to visit and learn about Israel. Last year, as a graduate student, I traveled there with several Jewish classmates. I was moved by—and somewhat envious of—their strong sense of shared identity and how the trip nurtured it.

I couldn’t forget that feeling. The PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” in which Henry Louis Gates Jr. investigated the family history of well-known Americans, was another reminder to me of how powerful it can be to learn about the genetic and cultural ties that connect us all to stories and communities much bigger than us. 

This year, I finally organized a trip for a group of my black friends and classmates and me to explore our own heritage. On that trip I learned to cook jollof, a rice dish that is a staple of West African diets. I learned about investment opportunities in Nigeria, including cashew farms and start-ups. I had my hair braided. I visited castles where enslaved people were kept in dungeons before they exited through the door of no return. We discussed Nigerian history over dinner and learned about the political turmoil and wealth of the country… I reflected on what life would be like if I lived in a nation where I was part of the dominant racial group.

MERCEDES BENT, “The Trip I Hope All African-Americans Can Take,” The New York Times, May 4, 2019.

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