by Elana Sztokman

It has been over 50 years since American women have had birth control pills to help manage fertility and family planning, yet it seems that the battle for women’s body autonomy is still not over. Just when we think that the future looks bright, that there are medical advances and widespread educational programs for consciousness-raising, some movement from the ultra-conservative Right emerges and reminds us that when it comes to women’s bodies, pockets of American society remain in the Dark Ages.

The latest trend is to make not only abortion illegal but even preventive measures of contraception.

There are people out there who would like to equate the use of contraception with abortion, and of course equate both of these with murder. This is not just the Catholic Church talking, either, but also various Christian denominations leading the call. The Rev. Dr. Matthew C. Harrison, president of the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod, was quoted in the New York Times last week, telling a House committee on the subject:  “We object to the use of drugs and procedures used to take the lives of unborn children,” referring not to abortion but to contraception. The idea that a bunch of Christian preachers are testifying in Congress about the future of women’s ability to use contraception is no less than frightening.

I may have inadvertently stepped into this with the article that my colleague, L Ariella Zeller, and I wrote about abortion in Israel in Lilith’s winter issue. We mistakenly conflated RU 486 and the abortion pill. Monica Whitcher, President of CHOICE: Campus Health Organization for Information, Contraception, and Education at Vassar College, corrected us in an email to Lilith’s editors, “RU486 is an abortion pill and terminates an established pregnancy. The morning after pill, by contrast, PREVENTS pregnancy, by either preventing the sperm from entering the egg, or by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting into the uterus.”  I do apologize for the mistake and for unintentionally adding fuel to this fire.

I must admit that when Ariella and I wrote this article, I don’t think I was fully aware of how bad the social discourse on women’s fertility had gotten in the United States. Focused as we were on trends in Israel (where we both live), we were looking at the way attitudes and cultures inform public policy here. Certainly a married, fertile woman who wants an abortion for a healthy fetus is discouraged and frowned upon in Israel; a woman we interviewed who was told– officially–by the doctor on the panel that she had psychological problems because she did not want to be a mother is a case in point. But in the end she was fine, obtained a legal abortion, nobody stopped her, and she has recovered. There is no sense of real “threat” in Israel. On the contrary, when all is said and done, very few people in Israel are really paying attention to this issue–for better and for worse. But in the States, the threats to women’s future are much more intense, and more tangible.

That religious leaders with such abhorrent views appear to have so much power to affect legislation about women speaks to very dark trends in America. That these forces enter what should be safe spaces for women – such as the board of Komen—Race for the Cure, an organization presumably dedicated to women’s health – indicates a virus that retrograde thinking about women’s bodies is spreading around America.

by Rabbi Mindy Avra Portnoy

Like so many people who harbor secret sins and obsessions, I thought I was alone. And then one day, in the midst of a conversation, no doubt about high-level theological issues (or maybe where to go for lunch), with my friend and rabbinic colleague, Leah, I blurted it out: “did you ever read Cherry Ames when you were young?” She looked startled for a moment, and then responded, “I LOVED Cherry Ames!” Turns out, she and I are not the only ones who did (and do).

When I was a child, Cherry Ames was a favorite. Although I also read the Bobbsey Twins and Anne of Green Gables series, Cherry was the standout. Was it her black curly hair (like mine?) Was it her feisty independence? Was it her ability to solve every problem, not only of the medical variety, but mysteries of every kind? Was it her cute bedroom furniture in her home town of Hilton (Illinois)? Although I never expressed an interest in being a nurse, the Cherry Ames series (23 volumes in all), which portrayed a young woman who seemed to have a new doctor “suitor” in every book, yet always moved on to a new job leaving the would-be boyfriend behind, surely must have had some career-inspiring influence on me.

Somehow, unlike my Pee Wee Reese doll, several of my Cherry Ames books survived through adulthood. And I managed to find the remaining ones in second-hand bookstores and eventually on the Internet.

Recently, as I was re-reading the entire series (not a particularly time-consuming pursuit), I was stunned to find the following sentence on page 101 of Cherry Ames: Visiting Nurse (volume 8): “the old man (Mr. Jonas, owner of a grocery store and delicatessen)…was just as likely to discourse to her on literature, the history of the Jews, and the moral writings of Spinoza, if she had time…”

Spinoza in Cherry Ames?! And a few sentences later: “Ah, Mama, we do not live by bread alone… I am only explaining to Miss Ames the grammar of classical Hebrew…”

I could not believe my eyes. Cherry Ames, the quintessential Midwestern Gentile, was learning Hebrew from a New York deli owner. I hastened to share the information with my colleagues of the WRN (Women’s Rabbinic Network). After explaining to them my long-time interest in the series, I wrote: “I’m now re-reading the entire oeuvre (!) and just learned to my great surprise that Helen Wells (the author) refers to Spinoza , etc…. who knew?! So is anyone else a secret fan out there? I actually think that Cherry Ames was a great role model for girls in the ‘50’s…she was very independent and had a career to which she was devoted and often put ahead of the more common option of marriage at a young age. And she had dark curly hair!”

Shockingly, 13 of my colleagues (an above-average response to a posting) responded, nine of whom also shared my appreciation for Cherry. One colleague wrote, “wow, who knew. I haven’t ever known a single soul who loved Cherry Ames besides me…” Another: “I read them over and over” and a third was delighted to take my duplicate copies off my hands.

But the revelation was not quite complete. A few days later, I was having coffee with my friend, Claire. I told her my Cherry Ames saga, and my surprise at the Jewish references. She asked me the author’s name. “Helen Wells”, I told her, until Julie Tatham took over the writing after the 8^th volume. “Well, I’m sure that’s not her real name,” quick-thinking Claire responded, “don’t you think she must have been Jewish to write that?”

And so it was on to Google, to discover that Helen Wells was in fact originally “Helen Weinstock”, a social worker turned writer, a native of Illinois, whose family moved to New York when she was seven. According to the Cherry Ames page on the Internet, she studied at NYU (graduating in 1934) where she became the first female editor of the school’s literary journal. In addition to the Cherry Ames series, she also wrote the Vicki Barr flight attendant series and other books for young people. In an interview with the author Bobbie Ann Mason (in The Girl Sleuth, 1975), Wells (a.k.a Weinstock) commented on her own work: “It’s like writing in a straitjacket—or on a tiny canvas with only three colors to work with. Yet within this tiny scope one can try to be honest, to be fun, to project real feeling, honest observations, values one believes in. Literary values? The series have none. Entertainment values, yes.” (page 109)

Almost two decades after the earliest Cherry Ames books, Wells authored Doctor Betty (1969). I graduated from high school that same year, entering a world where women could now be depicted as doctors as well as nurses—and not so much later (1972), become rabbis too.

Helen Wells (nee Weinstock) died in 1986 (the same year my book Ima on the Bima: My Mommy Is a Rabbi, was published). She lived long enough to see phenomenal changes in the career aspirations of women.

I hope she knew that the pretty young nurse with the dark eyes, curly hair and cherry-red cheeks, whom she created, helped pave the way for all of us who reveled in her adventure and her spirit.

Rabbi Portnoy is a Rabbi at Temple Sinai (Washington, D.C.) and the author of five children’s books, including “A Tale of Two Seders” (Kar-Ben/Lerner, 2010) and “Ima on the Bima: My Mommy is a Rabbi” (1986). She is a graduate of Yale University.

Here’s the latest from the Women’s Roundtable Podcast, with Lilith editor in chief Susan Weidman Schneider, Lilith assistant editor Sonia Isard, and the Forward’s Naomi Zeveloff and Gabrielle Birkner. In this installment, we take a look at abortion in Israel and the ways in which Jewish women are shaping American politics. Plus–the ladies tackle the topic of “what Jewish feminism means to me.”

Join the conversation in the comments section below!

Welcome to this week’s installment of Lilith’s Link Roundup. Each week we post Jewish and feminist highlights from around the web. If there’s anything you want to be sure we know about, email us or leave a message in the comments section below.

http://www.flickr.com/gazeronly

On Tuesday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declared Proposition 8, California’s law banning same-sex marriage, unconstitutional. The ban will unfortunately remain in effect due to pending appeals. [San Francisco Chronicle]

On Friday, President Obama announced that religiously affiliated institutions would no longer be required to provide contraception coverage in their employer-sponsored insurance plans. Instead, insurance companies will be required to provide women with additional contraception coverage at no additional cost to their premium. [Washington Post]

Due to the recent attacks on women in Israel, the U.S. State Department is now advising American tourists to dress modestly when visiting Old City Jerusalem and ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods. [Huffington Post]

The Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) has called for a boycott on stores selling “sexy” Purim costumes after Israeli retailer Shoshi Zohar featured “near-pornographic” costumes for women in its latest catalog. Concerned about the message that the costumes send, WIZO chairwoman Gila Oshrat stated, “This should not be the way we educate our children. These kinds of sexist ads increase attacks against women and portray us as cheap.” [The Shmooze]

During last week’s Super Bowl, the New England Patriots paid tribute to the late Myra Hiatt Kraft, the wife of team owner Robert Kraft, by wearing her initials on their uniforms (as they have throughout the season). Kraft, a philanthropist and supporter of Jewish charities, lost her battle with Cancer in July 2011. [Jewesses With Attitude]

For more coverage on the latest news stories, follow us on Twitter at @LilithMagazine.

Three Promises

(The New York Jewish Film Festival, presented by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, ended Jan. 26. Look for these films at other festivals and, hopefully, in commercial distribution.)

“Three Promises”

Charm is not a word usually associated with Holocaust remembrances, but take a look at “Three Promises,” the Serbian short with English subtitles that had its world premiere at the New York Jewish Film Festival. It tells the story of Serbian Jewry through beautifully animated collages of black and white photographs from one family’s album. The album survived the Nazis. Most of the family, like almost all of Belgrade’s 10,000 Jews, did not.

The album brings them back to life. It’s a valentine to the past, combined with the horrors.

Almost overloaded with Belgrade’s Sephardic Jewish history, the script by Edward Serotta tells the love story that triggered “Three Promises”: the promise a wife made to her husband to protect their daughters, the promise a priest made to this woman to hide the girls, and the promise one of the daughters made to herself that the priest would be recognized as a Righteous Gentile.

The love story is extraordinary. A Slovene Catholic woman visiting relatives in Belgrade falls in love with a man who is Jewish and crippled. She embraces not only him but his family and his religion. Years later, thanks to a Slovene priest in Belgrade, their two daughters survive to tell the tale.

All is done with a light touch to piano, bird songs, a choir of young voices and the stunning operatic mezzo-soprano of one of the daughters.

Delicately told, yes. Candy coated, no.

Horror plays a major role. A tiny paper cutout of a van to gas its occupants toddles across a black and white photograph of the Jewish hospital where the girls last see their father. A pastel map of 1930s Europe turns brown with an excrement-colored coating pouring from Germany into Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland.

The 19-minute film is finding an audience. “Three Promises” will be shown at the Cincinnati Jewish and Israeli Film Festival Feb. 16. A major public screening is set for March 15 in Belgrade, presented by the Jewish community and underwritten by the German Embassy there. That same day in New York, the Sephardic Jewish Film Festival will be screening “Three Promises” at the Center for Jewish History. And you can screen it here.

Serotta, the journalist, photographer and filmmaker who directs Centropa, the Central Europe Center for Research and Documentation in Vienna, hopes the film will be used for Holocaust education in Serbia and Slovenia.

But why limit the film’s message to parts of the former Yugoslavia? Not just a deeper awareness of Holocaust history but an appreciation of the power of humanity hopefully won’t fall on deaf ears elsewhere. And if it does, there will be subtitles.

***

A propos of the Lilith cover story on naming ourselves, the female names in “Three Promises” tell the tale: the Catholic woman who took a Jewish first name as well as her husband’s Jewish family name; their daughters, who changed their first names to non-Jewish names and took their mother’s Catholic family name to protect themselves; and the one daughter who kept her Christian name after the war to honor the priest who saved her life.

“The Silent Historian”

There should be research on whether a sub-industry exists of women documentary-makers digging into uncomfortable family history.

Certainly this Dutch film is a case in point.

Simonka de Jong wanted answers to the bizarre and hurtful behavior of her grandfather Loe de Jong, a leading researcher on World War II Dutch history. After his death, de Jong’s family discovered personal documents that he had concealed about his twin brother, whose fate had been unknown to his children.

Fiction might have been more satisfying than reality in this tantalizing hunt for the truth. But certainly a young filmmaker’s attempt to bring family members together in search of answers is worth recording as time runs out on those who remember the war.

“Lost Love Diaries”

Another Holocaust mystery in Holland. In this case, Israeli filmmaker Yasmine Novak presses her mother, Ellis, to go back with her to the Netherlands in search of clues to the fate of the first great love of her life. When he didn’t return after the war, Ellis married another man and they moved to Palestine. Until her husband died, 65 years later, she never opened the diaries of her first love, written in the underground. Stranger than fiction, she had received the diaries, sender unknown, on her wedding day.

It’s a slight film propelled by an aging woman’s frantic but no-nonsense search for anyone in Holland who might know about her first love’s fate. And there’s the underlying time-travel irony that if this woman had been reunited with her first love after the war, the filmmaker daughter would never have been born.

It’s the love stories and the mysteries of the Holocaust that can bring something fresh.

http://www.flickr.com/wesbrowning

How seriously do we take reproductive rights and freedoms?

Israeli Prison Services (IPS) just agreed to fund fertility treatments for two convicted murderers who met and married while incarcerated. The two have the right to conjugal visits and their freedom to procreate is not restricted, but unlike other Israelis, they would not normally be entitled to state funding for fertility treatment. They were prepared to argue, in front of an administrative court, that that restriction violates their right to have children.

Equal access to reproductive freedom is a right long fought for by feminists. Still, reproductive freedom has meant different things to women in different social, economic, and cultural positions. In the United States, poor women, women of color, and women with physical and mental disabilities have fought against forced sterilization and even forced abortion, while other women must fight for access to voluntary contraception, sterilization, and abortions.

The idea that the state should actively decide who may have children touches on core issues of personal autonomy and bodily integrity. In the United States, even people who are convicted of abusing or murdering their children are not legally prevented from having other children.

If everyone else in Israel has the right to state funding for fertility treatments, can it be just, legal, or moral to deny that right to someone just because they are incarcerated? What if their life sentences mean that any children would inevitably become the wards either of the state or another family member? (According to current law, the child may be raised by their mother in prison until two years of age).

Because IPS voluntarily granted funding, no Israeli court had to make that decision.

by Rabbi Mindy Avra Portnoy

Who picks peaches in August? Certainly not people like me, a rabbi who always anticipated the Jewish High Holidays by beginning to think about writing sermons as early as May. And by August – don’t ask!

But this year is different – now I’m semi-retired (and my husband retired 6 months earlier) and we are out on a weekday (!) in August picking peaches at Larriland Orchard in the countryside not far (but very far psychologically!) from D.C. Perfect sunny day, not humid, breathable air unlike much of the rest of the summer.

The two young women who are handing out the baskets for peach retrieval explain how to select the best peaches. No green on the flesh, a little hard (they’ll ripen in 3-5 days), these rows over here, not the ones farther back. For a born-and-bred city girl like myself, these directions are invaluable. And next to apples (for which I’ll return in a month), peaches are the easiest fruit to pick. The basket fills quickly, long before I’m tired or bored.

As we return to the vending stand to pay for our peaches, we find the two young women (interns? members of the family?) discussing the problem of their sensitivity to peach fuzz, how their constant exposure causes a kind of allergic reaction. Who knew?

Returning to the car, I begin contemplating this phenomenon, heretofore unbeknownst to me. Peach fuzz… the dark side of nature… environmental hazards?.. and suddenly, I realize what I’m doing. I’m thinking “sermon”; how can I possibly use this anecdote in a sermon?

But I don’t need to do this anymore. My only responsibility now is to eat the peach; and several nights later, to bake a pie or two to share with my book group. I don’t need to derive any powerful lessons (whether actual or contrived) from the orchard experience.

It’s a new way of living – but fortunately, as a Jew, I know a term for it – “lishma”. We are urged to study the Torah, for example, “lishma”, for its own sake, but not because we will derive some advantage – economic, professional, psychological – from doing so, but simply “for its own sake”. And so with peaches, and on a more macro level, nature itself. After 31 years of preaching, I need to re-learn how to do this.

In the meantime, I’m still a student at heart, so I can’t resist a peek at on-line descriptions of peaches and peach fuzz. I learn from Wikipedia that peaches are first mentioned in Chinese documents in the 10^th century B.C.E., although the name “peach” derives from “malum persicum” (“Persian apple”); that Thomas Jefferson had peach trees at Monticello; and that there seems to be some debate about whether allergic reactions to peaches come from a reaction to the lipid transfer protein (LTP) in peaches, or the bristles on the fuzz itself.

My guess is that had I been preparing a sermon, I would have focused on either the hidden and unexpected dangers of nature (then connecting to the earthquake and hurricane of this meteorologically-challenging summer); or Korean traditions about the peach trees’ association with longevity and happiness. And there’s apparently also a Vietnamese story from the 18^th century as well…

But for now, for this year, I’ll just stick with the tantalizing taste of the peaches themselves. And really appreciate them. There’s a lesson in that, too, especially for my over-achieving baby boomer cohort heading into retirement. Peach fuzz lishma… Nature for its own sake… life for its own sake.

In Darkness, a film by Polish director Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa), is based on the true story of Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), a Catholic sewer worker and petty thief who, though not especially fond of Jews, is willing to court danger in 1943 Nazi-occupied Lvov in order to make some easy cash, and hides a group of Jews underground for over a year.

Jolanta Dylewska’s startlingly beautiful color cinematography lends a heartbreaking immediacy and vividness to all the lives depicted, and the film’s photographic feat creates a powerful contrast between the above ground light and the underground darkness, conveying more than a metaphorical moral gravitas. Shot in Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, German, Yiddish and even a little Hebrew–all with English subtitles–the film feels thankfully un-Hollywood, and it depicts a humanity replete with kindness and selfishness, cruelty and courage,fortitude and desperation, hope and goodness, with the Jewish characters, too, shown in all their human frailty.

There were moments in the film when I wanted to cover my eyes, like one of the characters who covered her own eyes and her daughter’s, but however troubling and terror-filled, this compelling film tells an important story we may never understand, but ignore at our peril. As the director noted, it continues to echo in different places in the world, from Rwanda to Bosnia.

The Polish entry, In Darkness has been shortlisted for an Academy Award for best foreign film, and opens in New York on February 10 at the Angelika Film Center & Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

Welcome to this week’s installment of Lilith’s Link Roundup. Each week we post Jewish and feminist highlights from around the web. If there’s anything you want to be sure we know about, email us or leave a message in the comments section below.

http://www.flickr.com/branditressler

On Tuesday, Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced that it would no longer be funding Planned Parenthood’s breast cancer screening program due to its new policy that blocks organizations under investigation from receiving grants. Though Susan G. Komen denied that its decision was motivated by a secret political agenda, critics pointed out that the new policy was enacted just a few months after U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns launched an investigation to determine whether or not Planned Parenthood had used government funds to pay for abortions. In addition, Susan G. Komen’s newly appointed Senior VP for Public Policy Karen Handel is anti-choice and vowed during her run for Governor that she would eliminate funding to Planned Parenthood for breast and cervical cancer screenings. Despite whether or not Komen’s new policy was a cover-up for political motivations, the organization faced a major backlash and announced on Friday that it would be reversing its decision. [The Atlantic]

A new study reported that while women make up 68% of the voluntary sector’s workforce in the U.K., only 43% of the country’s charities are lead by women. In addition, the study found that women are grossly under-represented in the religious sector, as only 15% of religious organizations have female leaders. [eJewish Philanthropy]

Anti-choice politicians may want to reconsider their stance on women’s reproductive rights. A new report revealed that there is no correlation between restrictive abortion laws and reduced abortion rates. In fact, the report showed that between 1995 and 2008, countries with fewer restrictions had lower abortion rates than countries with more restrictions. [Ms. Magazine]

Dina Bakst, founder and president of A Better Balance: The Work and Family Legal Center, attributed a gap between U.S. discrimination laws and disability laws to the lack of job security for pregnant women. She explained that while federal and state laws protect pregnant women from discrimination in the workplace and the Americans With Disabilities Act requires employers provide disabled employees, including pregnant women suffering from medical complications, with “reasonable accommodations,” “pregnancy itself is not considered a disability [therefore] employers are not obligated to accommodate most pregnant workers in any way.” Hoping to combat this problem in New York, State Senator Liz Krueger and Assemblywoman Aileen Gunther recently introduced two bills that would require employers to provide pregnant women with reasonable accommodations that are recommended by their health care providers. [NY Times]

Heeb magazine reported that last week, 24-year-old Marina Weisband resigned as director of Germany’s Pirate party. Weisband had been attacked regularly for being Jewish, but denied that anti-Semitic hate mail played a role in her decision to resign. Instead, she attributed her resignation to fatigue and a desire to to obtain her her graduate degree. [Heeb]

For more coverage on the latest news stories, follow us on Twitter at @LilithMagazine.

(The New York Jewish Film Festival, presented by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center,ended Jan. 26. Look for these films at other festivals and, hopefully, in commercial distribution.)

What does it say about the state of American Judaism that the New York Jewish Film Festival’s final offering was the documentary “Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort”? Sad to say, we are talking the resort of last resort.

The Kutsher’s story testifies to the drive and determination that made Kutsher’s a  piece of Jewish Americana for more than a century. This is the tale of three generations of Kutshers who oversaw the rise and watched the demise of the resort formula they perfected. Three meals a day – all the kosher food you could eat; free, top-flight entertainment; fun for the whole family; and the Kutsher niche – famous athletes on staff.

There was plenty of room for strong women in the Kutsher family. In 1907, Louis and Max Kutsher and Max’s wife, Rebecca, had saved enough money as tailors on the Lower East Side to buy farmland in Sullivan County in upstate New York. Like other Jewish farmers, they took in boarders from the Lower East Side. When guests turned out to be more profitable than chickens and cows, the Jewish resort business was born, responding to working-class Jews finally able to afford vacations but barred from gentile-only resorts.

The second generation Mrs. Kutsher was a true partner in turning Kutsher’s Farm House into Kutsher’s Country Club. Milton and Helen Kutsher married in 1946 and by the 1950s, Milton was taking major business risks to expand Kutsher’s to more than 1,000 acres and create a luxury resort growing so fast guests were signed up for facilities before they were built.

The heroes of the film are Helen Kutsher and son Mark. This was truly a family operation. As Mark says of his mother, “She could be in a mink coat and pick up a gum wrapper two bellboys had left for the night porter.” And it was a family operation with heart. When asked if a certain waiter was still there after 30 or 40 years, Helen Kutsher’s reply was, “Of course. He doesn’t have anywhere else to go.”

Husband-wife filmmakers Ian Rosenberg  and Caroline Laskow have preserved a lot of Kutsher’s history – though they were called to task at the film festival world premiere for not including Kutsher’s as the great Jewish singles mating ground.

The film is bookended with jokes by Freddie Roman, whose humor is, putting it politely, crude. Why mourn the end of Borscht Belt comedians when you can get more timely tasteless humor on “South Park”?

But how can you preserve a once glorious institution when no one wants to go there?

Kutsher’s is still offering a kosher Passover but the family no longer runs the place. Mother and son continue to hope that legalized gambling will spark a rebirth of the Catskills resorts. Meanwhile, they see the form of fun the Catskills resorts invented — unlimited food and family entertainment, everything included — taken over by the cruise business.  If only Kutsher’s could be converted into a gigantic floating resort with a responsible Kutsher captain at the helm.

But the younger generation jumped ship. Instead of sticking around the dying resort business, Mark’s son, Zach,  plus partners recently opened Kutsher’s Tribeca in Manhattan’s trendy lower west side. No mention of kosher on the menu.

As for the New York Jewish Film Festival’s closing with “Welcome to Kutsher’s: The Last Catskills Resort”: Since there’s no way Kutsher’s could fit into a time capsule or be captured in a museum exhibit, it’s fortunate that we Jews like to get our heritage at the movies.