January 26, 2021 by admin

Rep. Elissa Slotkin Calls Out Anti-Semitism in Her Michigan District

There’s a normalization of hate, a permissiveness around antisemitism that has grown, so that people commenting on Facebook pages are alluding to my being a Jewish candidate. There are memes put out by the man I was running against that are for me really right on the line of antisemitism, with me holding money bags and “Slotkin” spelled with a dollar sign. My opponent will not denounce the Proud Boys. He will not denounce these hate groups. It’s one of those things where you know if the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center label you a hate group it should be really easy for any candidate around the country to denounce that hate, especially now, and the fact that they won’t shows how normalized and how concerned they are about not offending those folks…

In my district, I have about 4,000 Jews, a small Jewish community of East Lansing. The majority of Jewish Michiganders are closer to Detroit than I live. I live on my family farm; I grew up in the Jewish community of suburban Detroit. Right before Covid, I brought in the Attorney General, I brought in some senior FBI folk from Michigan, and the ADL, because we’ve seen a fourfold increase in antisemitic events in Michigan. It’s spraypainting of swastikas outside of cafes run by more progressive people, the destruction of a sukkah outside of Michigan State Hillel. It’s a series of things; they aren’t violent, but what the FBI really told us about is a ladder of escalation. And when you add to that the conspiracy theories that have now been mainstreamed about Jews, that have literally led to violence in Poway and Pittsburgh. It’s just a different tone and feeling out on the campaign trail.

—
SUSAN WEIDMAN SCHNEIDER and JOAN ROTH, “Elissa Slotkin: How 2020 Looks from the Midwest,” Lilith Blog, October, 2020.

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January 25, 2021 by Sarah M. Seltzer

From the Editor: How Are We, Really?

A former staffer in the Lilith office would always answer the perfunctory “How are you?” question with an enthusiastic, “I’m doing great, thanks. How are you?” These days, both the question and its cheery, upbeat rejoinder seem out of place. We’ve had to change how we say hello and goodbye.

“Sholem Aleichem” is the common greeting in Yiddish, with its reflexive response: “Aleichem Sholem.” I would hear this exchange as a child, both from elders via the Old Country and from younger folks paying their respects not as mimicry but with an understanding of how sweet the underlying sentiment is: “May peace be upon you; Upon you may there be peace.” I always loved the sureness with which this exchange was conducted. Identical in Hebrew, we traditionally chant the lines as an opening to Sabbath rituals. In Arabic the words are the same. The beseeching and its underlying wish are kindly, benign, sincere, maybe even a little banal. Fair enough. These days we would settle for such hopefulness with which to start any encounter.

But greetings like “How’s it going?”—or even “How are you?” which really demands no answer—feel off-limits to us now, as does that blithe “I’m doing great.” Now, we have to probe deeper. None of us can assume anymore that the person on the other end of any conversation is free from suffering, and I find myself beginning even a simple business email (maybe you do the same) asking for reassurance: “I hope this finds you well, as well as circumstances permit.” Our openings are fraught with the underlying assumption that all lives are under threat this very moment, not something most of us have had to consider during our lifetimes, and never for so long. Certainly after a terrible natural disaster, or 9/11, or—recently and horribly—attacks on synagogues, other houses of worship and peaceful demonstrations. But now the onslaught feels consistent, and long-lasting, with no certainty as to when, or even how, the pandemic will end.

Approaching the one-year anniversary of when the Covid-19 virus broke into our consciousness and our communities, I’ve been thinking about how my everyday exchanges signify a different kind of connectedness and concern than they did before. Even strangers now conclude a routine phone call with “Stay safe.” And we now attend to and value the labor of the grocery store clerk and the delivery person—to say nothing of health care workers and eldercare aides who make possible such limited safety as we are able to muster.

Traditionally, religious Jews respond to the pro-forma greeting “How are you?” with “Baruch HaShem,” thank God. Today, even for non-believers, this pious response may connect with how we’re feeling—and I don’t mean merely religion-by-rote, wherein this response can be as unthinking as saying “Bless you” by reflex when you hear a sneeze. (Of course, in our present circumstances, if anyone sneezed you’d run for cover and wash your hands.) What I mean is that I am perpetually conscious of feeling grateful. You too? Despite horrendous losses of life and of health, losses of jobs and prospects and plans for the future, we hear all around us “I feel lucky to have food to eat, or …a place to live, a friend to call….” Or for a book to read, a podcast for company, or a few minutes to spend with a kid talking about something other than the virus’s disruptions and dangers.

Along with recalibrating how we greet people, we’re redefining what constitutes happiness for us now. We’re grateful on this small scale at the same time as we recognize the poisonous behaviors from callow and careless officials who were entrusted with public health and safety and who instead cast aside science, good sense, empathy, responsibility and more to exacerbate our danger rather than ameliorating it.

So, how will our new greetings, with their concern for and gratitude toward others, translate on a larger scale? Dare we hope that even if our own prospects shrink we’ll nonetheless look for ways to help others grow theirs? You know that characteristically the poor give more generously to charity, as a percentage of income, than do the wealthy. Will those who have prospered begin to give more, both to meet daily needs and to drive our society towards justice? Will the gratitude for our own small and large blessings spill over into good deeds, so that we can be reasonably sure down the line of having good health and good government, more fairness and less bias, more food and less hunger, more safety and less peril? May it be so. And may peace be upon you. Sholem Aleichem.

Susan Weidman Schneider
Editor in Chief

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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

January 6, 2021 by Yona Zeldis McDonough

A Q&A with Jennifer Robson, Author of “Our Darkest Night”

It’s 1942, and Antonina, a young Jewish woman, is no longer safe in her native Venice. With help from a benevolent priest, her father finds her shelter with a family of farmers outside the city. Although she knows she should be grateful for the chance to escape, Antonina grieves the separation from her parents and is terrified of accidentally exposing the charade she is forced to perform — assuming the role of the young farmer’s wife. Novelist Jennifer Robson talks to fiction editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about Our Darkest Night (William Morrow, $17.99), her newest novel that is devoted to Antonina’s brave and harrowing story. 

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Pictures & Primary Sources •

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Did Alzheimer’s Turn My Husband Into An anti-Semite?

Plenty of Jews who “marry out” ask their new partners to convert. I wasn’t one of them. Yet I’m deep-in-the-bone and dyed-in-the-wool Jewish. My parents were card carrying Zionists from the Midwest who’d met at Habonim, a Zionist youth group. My father dropped out of the University of Michigan in 1949 to go to the newly formed state of Israel.

“Israel?” said his mother, clearly not keen on the idea. “What’s in Israel? Sand, s—- and flies.”

My mother disagreed. Barely 17, and as starry-eyed with the dream as he was, she followed him there. They lived first in a kibbutz and later on a moshav; my brother was born in the first and I in the second, making me a sabra, with a Hebrew name and Israeli birth certificate. My parents left Israel when I was a year old, but the country loomed large, almost mythical, throughout my childhood, even though I didn’t return until I was 18. When I did, it felt like a homecoming.

But when I fell in love with my husband, it was his very non-Jewishness that made my Jewish girl’s heart flutter. Born and raised in Portsmouth, NH, he was a Yankee through and through, part of a big, extended Catholic family, most of them
still in the area.

The first Christmas we knew each other, he brought me to his boyhood home, a charming white house. He raved about how the backyard had been filled with lilacs in the spring; I could almost imagine their scent. We passed his Nana’s house on State Street, where he’d stop by; together, they did the Jumble in the newspaper while he ate a generous slice of the incomparable apple pie she’d baked. Then there was the Whipple Elementary School, the pond where he’d learned to skate, his father’s sporting goods store on Market Street, where it had been his job to string the tennis racquets and dust the stacked boxes of model airplanes. Molson’s, the drugstore/ luncheonette, was gone, but he wished I’d been able to taste the ice cream Mr. Molson churned in the basement—vanilla, chocolate, peach, and his favorite, coffee.

We drove along the coastline—all 18 miles of it—and he introduced me to his cousin Bobby, who had a lobstering business. As a teenager, he’d worked for Bobby during the summers, and in the years before sunscreen was as much a requisite as toothpaste, he told me his skin burnt as red as those poor lobsters when thrown into pots of boiling water. Further up the coast was where his family would rent a cottage for a few weeks in August; he and his siblings dug for clams along the shore and his mother cooked them in a pot right on the beach. A few years later, as a budding artist, he went there on his own, setting up shop on the boardwalk and drawing portraits of passers-by. We visited the cemetery where his relatives were laid to rest: grandparents, uncles and aunts—most memorably to me the one called Elspeth.

I came back from that visit in love with Portsmouth—and with him. His New England upbringing seemed to have been lifted straight from a Norman Rockwell illustration. Its wholesomeness and its divergence from my own spoke to me. I didn’t need or even want him to be Jewish—I wanted him to be just who and what he was.

The attraction of opposites was reciprocal. If there had been any Jews during the years he lived in Portsmouth, they must have stayed on the sidelines, for he didn’t know them. So, to him, I was an exotic creature—dark-haired, fast-talking, hands
always moving. If his R.P.M. was 16, mine was 78—on a slow day. He loved the Yiddish words I tossed lightly in his direction—gatkes was a particular favorite—and the world they conjured. He could listen to my grandmother’s endless (and endlessly
repeated) stories about the “old country” with true and rapt interest; basking in his attention, she dubbed him “a prince.”

We each fell in love with the way the other was not like us—vive la difference. And it was those differences that carried us happily through our life together. When we married, it was—by mutual agreement—in a civil ceremony, but we celebrated
Pesach and Rosh Hashana with my mother. When our son was born, it was he who urged the bris rather than the purely medical circumcision offered by the obstetrician. I took to his holidays, Easter and most especially Christmas, which I celebrated with all the suppressed longing that only a Jewish girl can have.

We raised our children with a sense of respect for each of our backgrounds; for them, there was no sense of “other” but a strong sense of “both.” I occasionally experienced flack from other Jews who criticized my decision to intermarry, and
especially for not giving our children a more tangible Jewish education. I brushed them off. We were happy. Case closed.

And then, in his seventies, my husband received a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, a development that changed his life—and mine. As a spouse-turned-caretaker, I struggled with my new role, trying to frame it within the positive. He still knew me, and he still knew the kids. He was still moved—transported even—by the kind of art
he’d always loved. He still took photographs, his life’s work, although he no longer used the Leica that had practically been another limb, or spent hours in the darkroom developing them. He still loved coffee ice cream.

Between my reading and my discussion with his doctors, I knew what to expect: the repetition, the disorientation, the agitation, the sun-downing. I steeled myself against his occasional outbursts, the paranoia and delusions—I was having an affair with the contractor who redid our kitchen, I had tried to poison him, I was stealing his money, I was planning to leave him.

None of this was even remotely true, but reason didn’t have any purchase against the erosion taking place in his mind. I found I could either try to distract him—a phone call to one of our children might help—or wait it out. The moods always
passed, as did his memory of them. “I said that?” he’d ask incredulously. “I didn’t mean it. I’m so sorry.”

But then there was a night on which, in the middle of such an episode, he uttered these words: “You know what the problem is? It’s that you’re a Jew and Jews are a vile people—you’re from a vile race.”

It was the most shocking thing I’d ever heard him say, and for a moment, it seemed to upend everything I thought I knew about him. About us. It was also, in a strange, dark way, kind of…funny. After all, it was a little late to be bringing it up now; the Jewish card had been played early on—from the beginning, in fact.

He went on in this vein for a while and then something in his mood turned; his anger lifted, forgotten. But I couldn’t forget. The other insults, the accusations had been easier to disregard. These words were insidious, heat-seeking missiles aimed right at my heart. What if on some inchoate level, he’d always felt this way? Wasn’t that the old warning? He says he loves you now, but the first time you have a fight, it’ll be dirty Jew. That won’t be us, I had smugly thought. Well, now it seemed that it was.

And that wasn’t the last of it either. On several other occasions, he’d start in on those same accusations, using the same or similar language. Of course I knew that though it was his voice I was hearing, those weren’t his words. They were lines from
a script deeply embedded in our culture and written by the disease, the one that had taken up residence in his brain and was inexorably reshaping it.

But knowing that didn’t entirely diminish their power to wound. Instead, they dredged up every anti-Semitic taunt I’d ever heard: Christ-killer, big nosed, greasy, greedy, money-loving, money-grubbing. Their venom made me question my faith in who we’d been together, and the life we’d made. What if I’d been wrong about all of it, and that there was—and always had been—some deep and yawning chasm between us? What if, as Tom Lehrer had sung back in the 1960’s, “…the Catholics hate the Protestants/the Protestants hate the Catholics/the Hindus hate the Muslims/and everyone hates the Jews”?

Then, for reasons not readily understood, the attacks—at least the anti-Semitic ones—stopped. At the recommendation of his neurologist, his medication was increased, and his moods became less volatile. I learned to see some of the triggers—a touch of impatience in my voice, for instance—and to control them.

We are, for the moment, on safe ground. Or safe enough. He can still laugh at a Yiddish phrase; I’m still the Queen of Christmas. But as has been made clear to me, this disease has only one direction, and that direction is down. I can only hope I’m strong and resilient enough to be remain the loving wife I’ve always tried to be, and the loving caretaker I’ve had to become. Part of that will mean stopping my own ears to the hateful words that can threaten to undo it all.

Yona Zeldis McDonough’s most recent novel is Not Our Kind,
written under the pen name Kitty Zeldis. She’s been Lilith’s
Fiction Editor since 2000.

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Why Did the Funeral Procession Cross the Road? •

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Why My Hair Falls the Way it Does •

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Meet the Black Jewish Artists in Lilith’s Digital Spotlight

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Informed Engagement •

Encounter, a nonprofit educational organization, seeks to grow the Jewish community’s capacity to contribute to a durable resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in which all parties live with respect, recognition, and rights. It invites Jewish leaders to expand their view of this conflict and to be a positive force for communal change. You can access a library of articles, videos, podcasts and other media by staff and past participants that encourage a deeper understanding of the conflict from a range of perspectives.

encounterprograms.org