Here’s something to lift Melanie’s spirits. Or perhaps anger her further.
Though I “defended” Ann Coulter two posts ago from the big whoop about her statements regarding Jews on CNBC’s “The Big Idea,” I had to share this video which does a great job of critiquing Coulter in general, for all of her offensive, hateful views, and asserting Jewish pride. It’s catchy, too:
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
You probably don’t have to think too hard to guess what my feelings are of the stereotypes of Jewish women as guilt-inducing shrews. I’m not much of a fan, to say the least. (For more on debunking that particular myth, check out Joyce Antler’s latest book, You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother) However, some stereotypes do, in fact, come from somewhere, and the truth of the matter is that I am the most guilt-susceptible person you’ll meet. It’s actually quite fantastic.
And as much as this sounds like something I should be working out on an analyst’s couch, I like to see it another way. I think guilt has a lot of power to impel our virtue. As case in point, I give you my recent decision to attempt to stop buying new sweat-shop made clothing. This leaves me far fewer options than you’d imagine, although I’ve been getting sound shopping advice from such organizations as Co-Op America. My mother—perhaps the Ur-source of both my guilt and my values—accused me of launching this new scheme just to make it impossible for her to buy me clothes. (No comment.) As I explained to her, I just can’t deal anymore with the thought of seven-year-old children sewing my garments for pennies a day. I wish I could say it was a nobler sentiment than that—but I’d be lying. The sheer guilt of it started to turn into lead in my stomach, and a new Rosh Hashanah resolution was born.
Of course, guilt, like modesty, honesty and other fun –sty values, is only useful when it’s self-produced. We can’t count on others—like, say, those in positions of power—to be powered by guilt as much as by their own proclaimed altruism. But what we can do is harness our own feelings of guilt, when they arrive, and let them pull us toward more ethical behavior. That way, we can help turn that pesky stereotype on its head and improve the world at the same time—killing two birds with one stone. (They’re metaphorical birds, though, so don’t feel too bad about it.)
Other resources for sweat-shop free clothing:
No Sweat
The Progressive Jewish Alliance
Conscious Consumer
Mexicali Blues
–Mel Weiss
The back to the land movement – when city folks packed up and moved to rural places to try out their country legs – enjoyed its heyday in the 1960s and 70s. Margaret Hathaway’s new book, The Year of the Goat, tells the story of two sincere “back to the landers” born slightly out of time.
The book follows the 40,000 miles Hathaway and her (now husband) Karl Schatz took in search for the perfect goat cheese. Okay, maybe they were actually searching for a little bit more than cheese.
Hathaway was a freelance writer who managed Magnolia – a bakery in New York that has a reputation (and line out the door) for butter cream-frosted cup cakes. Schatz was a photo editor for Time Magazine. Together they shopped at the green markets, lived in their Brooklyn apartment, and generally enjoyed city life. But they wanted something more than the five boroughs could offer, and set off on a year-long journey to discover if working with goats would dominate their next chapter of their lives.
Along the way, Hathaway and Schatz meet what the website calls, a “vivid cast of characters-including farmers, breeders, cheese makers, and world-class chefs,” including a Texas-born Muslim living in Maine and helping the local Somali community in Lewiston acquire fitting goats for their religious festivals, and a Messianic Jew who keeps Shabbat as well as a herd of goats.
Delightfully, Hathaway’s honest, whimsical prose and Schatz’s photography make The Year of the Goat just as captivating as the couple’s story. Although their tale is nothing new (many people before them have found themselves drawn to the land, or simply yearning for a new story), it’s told with such earnest passion and curiosity, that it’s impossible not to root for these two as they wind their way around the country.
Find out more about The Year of the Goat at www.yearofthegoat.net. And if you’re in New York on November 8th, be sure to check out the Goatstravaganza – a celebration of finding one’s dream and, of course, all things goaty.
–Leah Koenig
Do you ever have that thing where you get really involved with your own life for a few days, and you don’t read the newspaper or hit the blogs or scan the headlines of the dude with NY Daily News who’s standing over you on the subway every morning with the same interest or gusto, and when you take a moment to regroup and reacquaint yourself with the landscape, you kind of want to scream? That’s been my thing the last couple of days.
It started when my mother, a health-care social worker, said I wasn’t allowed to bring up SCHIP, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. That’s because after initially passing the bipartisan bill, Congress was unable to muster the votes to overturn President Bush’s veto. (Do you know how your representatives voted? Find out!) The plan would have increased the program’s budget $35 billion over five years—an average of $7 billion a year. You might say that as a Republican, President Bush and the thirteen missing votes are concerned with fiscal spending. That might be true, if the proposed budget for 2008 didn’t include a 6.7% increase. (FYI, the biggest discretionary funding hike by far goes to Defense—natch! Health and Human Services, the department that deals with children’s health care, gets the barest nudge upward, while the EPA and Labor departments actually lose percentage points. Life’s funny like that.) You might, like some Republicans have chosen to do, say that the bill doesn’t focus enough on poor kids, that it caters to the middle class. To that, I’d say you need to check your facts, and I’d also counter with the concept that “poverty” has actually become something of a gray area. America has an almost unprecedented number of people living in what’s known as “near-poverty.” In fact, the number one factor pushing those in “near-poverty” into poverty is a medical trauma that isn’t covered by insurance. So you can see why our fearless leader would be so afraid that this bill would “federalize health care.”
There’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is, domestic abuse is a problem in the Jewish community. The good news is, as a spate of recent articles show (because October happens to be Domestic Violence Awareness Month), the community is acknowledging the problem and trying to do something about it, rather than sweeping it under the rug as has been the typical reaction to such “shandas” in the past.
Here in the U.S., the Jewish Alliance to End Domestic Abuse [JAEDA] is taking part in a multi-faith effort to end domestic violence, using religion — which has sometimes been a factor in keeping women in abusive marriages — as a means to address the issue. “Domestic abuse,” [JAEDA] chairwoman Ellen Woll told the St. Petersburg Times, “is just as prevalent in the Jewish community as in any other, but women tend to stay longer and don’t necessarily go to agencies for help.” Her group aims “to raise awareness of domestic violence in the Jewish community and to strengthen Shalom Bayit (peace in the home) through education and advocacy programs.” JAEDA is also focused, along with the multi-faith effort based in Florida, on training clergy — who are often the first advisers religious women seek out — to deal with issues of domestic abuse. It’s tricky territory because religion can be a double-edged sword when it comes to these matters:
Faith for many women is “what keeps them alive in the darkest hours. It’s also what may keep them in a relationship that might kill them,” said Linda Osmundson, executive director of Community Action Stops Abuse, or CASA, founded by a Roman Catholic nun, the late Sister Margaret Freeman.
The same could certainly be said of Jewish women.
But the tide seems to be turning in that regard. There has been a major rise in reporting of domestic violence among the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, which, being more insular than more left-leaning sectors of the Jewish community, has perhaps been worst about suppressing such matters in the past. Ynet News has the details:
The number of calls made to hotlines for victims of domestic violence in the Orthodox community has increased three-fold over the past few years, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Thursday.
The number of haredi women who called the hotlines jumped from 477 in 2004 to 1,402 in 2007, while the number of women who were housed in shelters for battered women each month nearly doubled, from 24 to 40 on average.
The increase is seen as the result of more rabbis taking a firm stance against wife-beating and encouraging women to seek help and report abuse, and of women’s increased awareness about the dangers of domestic violence. There is also a network of shelters designed specifically for haredi women.
The problem is also being acknowledged, but not adequately addressed, in a different segment of the Israeli population — Ethiopian immigrants. There have been a disproportionate number of spousal murders by Ethiopian men, the result, reports the JTA, of various social conditions that make life in Israel particularly difficult for Ethiopian men, who’ve had a hard time adapting:
In Ethiopia, men were the undisputed heads of their families. In Israel, however, they often are slower than their wives and children to adapt and learn Hebrew, and in turn they have trouble finding work. Often they find themselves adrift in a modern society they find alien and in which their own families begin to see them as weak and unimportant.
“We never heard of women being murdered like this in Ethiopia,” says Negist Mengesha, director general of the Ethiopian National Project. “In Ethiopia there were traditional tools for dealing with conflicts.”
In Israel, many Ethiopian immigrants say, there aren’t enough social workers who speak Amharic or enough social services to adequately address the needs of the community.
Interestingly, while the Ethiopian and haredi communities seem very different, and while spousal murder has not been as much of an issue in the haredi community, the patriarchal structure of Orthodox life has been one of the factors in keeping domestic abuse in the closet for the ultra-Orthodox. What has made things better are the changing attitudes of their leaders and the increase in services to help women in need. Perhaps that kind of change from within the Ethiopian community, along with increased social services from the Israeli government, is what is needed.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
A few weeks ago, I shared a Shabbat meal with mostly strangers – a last minute invitation, friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. Like so many other Shabbat dinners I’ve attended, the beautiful food on the table inspired conversation as, “Mmm, this is so good,” turned into a larger discussion about foods we eat and don’t eat. I waxed poetic about kale (as I tend to do), and other people around the table compared their own food-preference notes.
Then, one woman from “out of town” (meaning Manhattan to my borough of Brooklyn) mentioned that she and her fiancé were on a diet and had joined Jenny Craig to shed weight before their wedding. “I love it,” she gushed. “They deliver all my meals, and I can just pop them in the microwave and there’s dinner. I don’t even have to clean up afterwards – I just throw away the container.”
Gulp. As she spoke, the progressive-foodie Brooklyn bubble in which I exist deflated with an audible hiss. Was it really possible that someone preferred shrink-wrapped, disposable, industrial food to delicious, lovingly prepared real food? I focused on the meal in front of me and didn’t say anything. Honestly, I didn’t even know where to start.
It wasn’t until later that I was able to unpack why her comments bothered me so much, aside from my own initial knee-jerk food snobbery.
Part of the problem was that she was on a diet in the first place. This girl was beautiful – neither gauntly skinny nor overweight. Jenny Craig has undoubtedly been successful for many people struggling with obesity, but in a society (American) and culture (Jewish) that are both obsessed with being thin to the point of sickness, it saddened me that she felt unnecessary pressure to mold herself to some unrealistic svelte ideal for her wedding.
Another distressing aspect was her reliance on the Jenny Craig system. What happens after her wedding if she stops Jenny Craig and does not have the resources to create her own healthy food? Of course, cooking does not bring joy to everyone. Just as I glibly say I “hate math,” there are people who “hate to cook,” which this woman freely admitted during dinner. But I can’t help but think that part of people’s aversion to cooking is simply due to never being taught how to do it.
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, offers these guidelines to healthy (in all senses of the word) eating: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” The second two pieces of this mantra make immediate sense – don’t overstuff yourself, and eat more vegetables, beans, and grains than meat, eggs, and dairy.
“Eat food” is a little less straightforward. Doesn’t everybody eat food? That depends on whether you consider convenience products like “Gogurt” and Pizza Hut Pizza Bites food.
Pollan suggests that we should focus on eating “real,” whole foods as opposed to the pre-made, shrink-wrapped stuff that often comes loaded with preservatives and salt.
Understandably, this woman is a busy law student with an equally busy lawyer fiancé. But learn how to make delicious, nourishing foods like basic grains (wild rice, quinoa, cous cous, millet etc), greens (kale, spinach, broccoli, collards, etc.), and proteins (tofu, salmon, chicken, beans etc.), is neither difficult, time consuming, nor expensive. And once one starts eating these satisfying foods, the pre-packaged stuff quickly becomes less appetizing. In the long run, I think the money my dinner mate and her fiancé spend on Jenny Craig would be better spent on a trip to a nutritionist or a short series of weekend cooking classes to teach her healthy, sustainable eating for life.
–Leah Koenig
I feel bad for Ann Coulter. It’s not that she isn’t, as comedian Kathy Griffin put in the comedy special I saw on TV last night, “a crazy @&#@%,” but the current anti-Coulter campaign, led by the National Jewish Democratic Council, is unfair.
In response to comments Coulter made about Jews in an interview on CNBC’s “The Big Idea,” The NJDC is calling for the media to stop inviting her to do interviews:
Today, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) called on mainstream media outlets to stop inviting Ann Coulter as a guest commentator/pundit and strongly condemned recent comments that Jews should be “perfected” by accepting the New Testament and that America would be better off if Judaism were “thrown away” and all Americans were Christian.
“While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment,” said NJDC Executive Director Ira N. Forman. “Just as media outlets don’t invite those who believe that Martians walk the earth to frequently comment on science stories, it’s time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics.”
First, Coulter, a lawyer and journalist, commenting on politics is not quite the same thing as a martian-believer commenting on science stories. Bad analogy.
Second, the shocking thing about her comments is not that she holds those views but that she had the audacity to proclaim them on national television. She was not calling for Jews to be wiped off the face of the Earth, merely honestly expressing her Fundamentalist Christian views, the same views held widely by many Christian Fundamentalists — that Christianity is a perfected extension of Judaism, in that Jesus died for their sins and absolved them of having to keep the Jewish laws, and that, ultimately, all Jews (and other heathens) should, and will, become Christians. If you watch the video, you can see that Coulter really was trying to explain herself and convince host Donny Deutsch that she was not trying to be offensive. But she was also not willing to take it back.
Third, the reason the media has kept on bringing the always-offensive, often hate-mongering Coulter back is because of her provocative views and her lack of inhibition in expressing them — she’s good for ratings! Even The Jewish Press, the most conservative, religious Jewish newspaper of them all, has interviewed Coulter — twice! — and the second time they admitted to inviting her back because her first interview was “the most viewed article on our website for 2006.”
It didn’t bother the NJDC back then that Coulter bashed women, Muslims, and liberals. Now that she’s offending Jews, suddenly she needs to be banished from the media. It’s so typical.
The NJDC is not wrong in calling on the media to stop encouraging Coulter, but they could have done so in response to the myriad of other “unacceptable” views she has expressed in the past. The NJDC claims Coulter crossed a line with this most recent interview, but the truth is, she’s crossed that line many times over. The male-run NJDC just didn’t notice until it was their line she crossed.
You can watch the video or read the transcript to see exactly what the hullabaloo is about.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
It seems that the question of communication versus righteous anger just won’t leave us alone. Frank Rich’s op-ed piece in this Sunday’s New York Times made me feel shame and rage in equal parts, and I spent the day indulging myself in various righteous media-related favorites, reliving furies current and present. I agree with Rich: we can’t let the fire go out on the issue of the war and its mighty fallout, and I’m ready to own up to every moment of complicity I’ve given this administration—not just on this issue, but on all of it: global warming, health care, public education, you name it.
But sheer anger won’t solve our problems. I’ve been on a Katha Pollitt kick recently—even after a summer of Molly Ivins, reading Katha Pollitt is kind of like getting your teeth kicked in by the truth. She’s clearly brilliant, and I am in awe of her. But she’s terribly alienating. However relatively topically as compared with the momentous other issues that face us, the symbolic battle over abortion is clearly of vast import on the political playing field. I have thought long and hard about abortion, choice, the relationship between how a government deals with abortion and what kind of roles women can fulfill in that society, what religion really says about abortion—and I feel I have nuanced, if very strongly held, opinions. But I don’t think I could really sit down and have a conversation with someone radically anti-choice: the rage gets in the way. While this may not bother me much personally, how will we ever get anything solved? How can we reach a compromise through all that anger?
(Of course, sometimes conversation is possible, even where unexpected or unlikely; I learned this week about Encounter for the first time, a program that seeks only to kindle a new conversation about Israel and Palestine. I will admit both the program and the frankness of the discussion around it were greatly heartening: I need to be reminded sometimes that these things are indeed possible.)
And then there’s the question of how much anger we women allow ourselves to exhibit publicly. Certainly our Woman in the Field, such as Senator Clinton is, isn’t great at it. Although Clintonian appeasement is often hailed as an important asset (by me as well as by far more knowledgeable politicos), you know and I know that Clinton saves her public rage for whatever Pres. Bush has done, and only releases it in a carefully staged manner. And well enough for her—the cries of “shrill!” come whenever she opens her mouth, anyway. But faced with such backlash, what should we as women do? Do we accept that women will always have to “be careful” what they say in the public eye? Do we respond to outdated and essentialist assumptions that women only ever want to talk things out with loud anger? Do we acknowledge that there may be some truth behind that stereotype? Do we prize our particular positions or our flexibility more? Or do we vary?
I want to find a balance, in my own life and politics, between anger and conversation. Without a combination we’re stuck, and it is, without a doubt, a vital time to keep moving forward. Your suggestions for this possibly life-long task are welcome: how do you find this balance?
–Mel Weiss
Last Monday I went to an event called “Eating Local in Brooklyn,” hosted by the uber-foodie organization, Slow Food NYC. I didn’t realize, walking in to the event, that I would walk out wanting to read local in Brooklyn instead.
Sitting down to nibble the pickled, Brooklyn-grown eggplants and sip beer brewed in the borough, I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. It started off with the normal chit-chat:
“I live in the neighborhood,” she said (me, too).
“I’m a freelance writer,” she said (cool, me too).
“I started a women’s food-focused book club in Brooklyn,” she said.
“WOAH, can I join,” I blurted out, totally serious and completely surprised by my own enthusiasm.
I’d joined book clubs before, but left after a few meetings, dissatisfied with the book selection, the group dynamic, or both. Often, the book choices felt random and scattered, leaving me craving some continuity. But this – this! – idea, seemed like a no-brainer. In the last few years, as the food movement has grown, dozens of food-related books – political,
personal, anthropological, etc. – have sprouted up (I can rattle off more than 10 of them, even without the aid of Google). It’s almost overwhelming. How could I ever read them all? Well, for one, I joined the book club.
The club focuses mostly on non-fiction food books (e.g. Fast Food Nation, Food Politics, and Omnivore’s Dilemma), with the occasional – and more rare – work of fiction (they are considering reading Like Water for Chocolate next). The women-only club meets at a different member’s Brooklyn apartment each month, usually theming the accompanying potluck around the book. For example, the last selection – Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant – was brought to life by the members bringing their favorite “dish to eat alone,” to share with the group.
Bringing women together around food and books – what could be better? As a new member of the group, I don’t yet feel entitled to invite new members. However, here are a few tips to inspire your own foodie book club, and a few titles to get you started (I focused even further on Jewishly-related food books).
Secrets to a starting a successful bookclub:
- LEADERS No matter how interesting the book is, conversations do not always start or focus themselves. Rotate the task of “leading” the discussion, or at least starting the group off with a question or two to make sure conversation flows.
- FOOD Always have food at the club – you can serve a larger meal or potluck before or after the meeting, but stick to easy-to-eat snacks for the discussion.
- ORGANIZE Never leave a book club meeting without designating the next book and meeting time/place. It’s too tedious to do this organizing work over email.
- BOOK LIST Before your first meeting, ask each member to research and recommend 3-5 titles the group should consider reading. Each time a new member joins, ask them to contribute.
- BLOG Start a book club blog – it’s free and easy, and a great way to keep all important info (dates, books, etc.) in one place.
Jewish-food themed book suggestions:
- Miriam’s Kitchen, Elizabeth Ehrlich
- Anything by Ruth Reichl (e.g. Comfort me with Apples)
- The Year of the Goat, Margaret Hathaway
- Down to Earth Judaism: Food, Sex, Money, and the Rest of Life, Rabbi
Arthur Waskow
- Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music, Mark Kurlansky
For many more great food book ideas (not necessarily Jewishly themed, but great nonetheless), check out The Jew & The Carrot blog’s “Books we Love” section.
–Leah Koenig
The observance of the Simchat Torah holiday, the time when Jews celebrate the end and beginning of the Torah reading cycle, was particularly celebratory — and historically significant – this year. It marked what is believed to be the first ever women’s Torah reading on the Lower East Side of Manhattan – and it was the first time I have ever layned [chanted] from the Torah. That may not seem momentous for those of you of a Reform or Conservative bent, or even from more progressive Modern Orthodox circles, but for the Lower East side’s uber-traditional Jewish community, which doesn’t even have a Conservative synagogue, it was a big deal. Big enough of a deal that the rabbi of a neighboring shul made a (clearly defensive) joke about us needing another woman for a minyan (the fact that that seems a ridiculous, funny notion to him just shows the extent of his traditionalism, and, for the record, we didn’t.) It was a big enough deal that when my mother reported back to the women at her synagogue, one more typical for the neighborhood than mine, about having gone to the reading at the Stanton Street Shul — the thing that excited them most, the thing they wanted to talk about more than the actual reading was what it was like to actually hold the Torah.
In my mother’s synagogue, as is the case in most Orthodox synagogues I’ve been to, when the Torah is taken out of the ark, a man walks it around the men’s section while the women all clamor over to the mechitza trying to stick their prayerbooks over the partition to touch and kiss the Torah. At the Stanton Street Shul, thanks to Rabbi Yossi Pollak, the Torah is actually passed to a woman and carried through the women’s section, so I and the other women in the congregation get to hold the Torah on a regular basis.
But I was reminded in particular what a big deal the carrying of the Torah can be the night before our historic reading. On the night of Simchat Torah, during the hakafot, the seven revolutions made dancing and singing with the Torah, many synagogues, including Stanton Street, take the last Hakafa outside. It’s a very public statement, which inevitably draws gawkers from the neighborhood, wondering what this strange spectacle of Jews dancing and singing with strange scrolls is all about. I even noticed a guy snapping a photo on his camera phone. His lens was trained on the circle of men — some of whom were hasidim who had walked over the Williamsburg bridge to help make merry — but we women had our own dancing circle and we drew interest, too.
One of the bystanders, a woman I would estimate to be in her mid-40s, looking a little rough around the edges – which is not untypical for the non-Jewish, non-gentrified segment of the neighborhood’s population — approached our little group and said, in a thick New York accent, “I’ve never seen a woman holding a Torah before.” Her name, she said, was Sarah (pronounced the Yiddish way), and she proceeded to tell us that she had grown up Orthodox, had gone to right-wing Orthodox girls’ yeshivot, and had been disowned by her father for marrying a non-Jew. Many years had obviously passed since then, and she didn’t look like they had been easy on her. I couldn’t help thinking, perhaps self-righteously, that if, as a girl, she had seen women holding the Torah, things might have been different.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman