On Jewish women's miraculous capacity for asexual reproduction

David Schraub just alerted me to Rabbi Elianna Yolkut's op-ed, which is a response to Dennis Prager's, which is, in turn, a somewhat fish-in-a-barrel, stunningly out-of-date article blaming Jewish women (and decadent university life) for what Prager sees as an insufficient number of Jewish babies. What with WWPD's longstanding but underutilized "Jewish babies" tag, I must weigh in.

Anyway, the glaring problem with Prager's article, which Yolkut points out, is that he doesn't seem to realize that it takes two to tango, and by "tango" I mean produce a baby of the Jewish persuasion. Not necessarily two Jews, given that any child a Jewish woman gives birth to emerges in full Hasidic garb. But human reproduction being what it is, Jewish babies don't come from cultivating the tree clippings of a particularly fertile Jewish woman. That men also somehow enter into baby-making and baby-raising might seem relevant. Indeed, if the idea is that a Jewish woman can bear a child without having intercourse or otherwise involving male reproductive materials, I think we're looking at a festive December 25th chez Prager.

Prager blames fancy schmancy educated women for not wanting to be housewives, as if it's 1970 or who knows, and as if there are great numbers of men who want women with no outside income or ambitions. It's a big jumble of beyond-stale, beyond-refuted arguments about career gals and their wanton ways. But he does make one interesting, highly original point: female fertility declines with age. We women had never heard this before, so it's good he brought our attention to it.

Yolkut, meanwhile, gets it right:

We women are not our wombs. We contribute more than just children to the dilemma of Jewish continuity and growth. We are rabbis and teachers, we are synagogue presidents and we are the breadwinners and the primary volunteers.

And!

Mr. Prager, you want more Jews in the world? Stop chiding women for not having more children, and start finding ways to offer reasonable, paid and significant family leave in all Jewish communal organizations. Start working to find a solution to funding day schools and synagogues that are out of reach for so many. Try helping the rabbinical establishment figure out how to educate dynamic and engaging new leaders so they might draw more people close to Torah. But take your hands off women’s bodies. They do not belong to you, and neither do their sharp, thoughtful and complex minds.

Precisely. There are other conclusions one might draw - that we shouldn't be in the business of systematically influencing the number of X babies by any means, for example. But as an observant-Jewish refutation, it's spot-on.

"'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people'"

Sometimes a story fits so perfectly with a WWPD tag that it simply demands a post, even if it's a difficult one to write, and one that leaves me with more questions than answers. 

Roni Abramson writes in Haaretz (behind a quasi-paywall) about the difficulties of getting an abortion in Israel. Not because Jewish law is especially strict in this regard, but because More Jewish Babies. The Holocaust, Jewish men marrying out... if you're a Jewish woman with Jewish-woman-parts, what you do with those parts is of great interest to a great many people who aren't you or your family. Abramson describes her own ordeal, as well as a sign she saw at a rally that read, “'The Jewish womb belongs to the Jewish people.'” Gosh. As an owner of one of said wombs, I'm going to have to say no, it does not. (Ross Douthat already claimed all American wombs for the American people. Dibs and all that.) 

Despite a professed interest in Jewish natalism, I hadn't known the details of Israeli abortion law - all I'd known was that Israel places a high priority on fertility. Impossible to link to, but also in my head as I write this post: heaps and heaps and heaps of anecdotal evidence. 

While I personally didn't need convincing, I fear that the specifics of Abramson's story, though, may not win over the unconvinced:

Of all the examinations and personal questions I had to endure about the status of my relationship and the quality of the condoms I bought, the meeting that stands out the most is the one with a social worker. The pleasant woman who chose the most giving profession on earth tossed questions at me from an official form. She could not understand why a healthy, educated young woman of 24 would not want to continue her pregnancy. 

“Why do you want to have an abortion?” she asked in astonishment. “Because even though I want to keep on living with my partner and have children with him eventually, I’m still studying for my bachelor’s degree and working part-time, so I don’t see any way I can raise this baby.” Surprised at my honesty, she asked what my partner thought. “He feels the same way I do,” I answered. “We want to live together without children at this stage in our lives.”

Maybe it's that I've been reading about the perils of thinking one can always have a baby "eventually," but as much as I agree with Abramson that she was treated terribly, and that nothing good can come of society outlawing abortion in these circumstances, this is a case where I see the right but - and here, the perils of overshare, the temptation it brings to judge individual cases as opposed to societal trends - find myself wondering if this is really the case that best gets the point across. If you do want kids, and with your current partner, and so does said partner, but at 27 (say) rather than 24... I suppose where I'm going with this is, there are reasons other than More Jewish Babies, other than an abortion-is-murder stance, that someone might question the wisdom of this particular woman's decision. Especially given that (as is my understanding? has this changed in recent years?) Israel has more of a social-safety net.

But maybe that's precisely what makes this the right story to use to make this point. If we learned of a woman carrying a fetus with major, life-threatening deformities, or one that resulted from rape or incest, or if the "woman" was a 16-year-old girl, or a grown woman without a partner/support system, we might conclude, individual circumstances trump More Jewish Babies, assuming we were on the MJB bandwagon, which, of course, we are not. But here, it's a clear-cut case of choice. Abramson knew what was right for her, and as much as the reader might find this not the best reason to get an abortion, it's not about the reader, but the woman who would or would not be carrying this pregnancy to term. Only Abramson could know what was right for her, and it shouldn't have had to fall on her to articulate why she wanted an abortion in a way that some panel (or Haaretz reader!) found sympathetic. It comes down to something every woman at a given time knows - if she's prepared to give birth to (and likely raise) a child at that point or not, something that quite possibly can't be explained sufficiently to others whose uterus it is not.

In other words, even if some will find Abramson's reasons "decadent," the deciding vote, womb-wise, goes not to the party with the best argument, but to the one whose womb it is.

Requisite Jewish Christmas post

If you're Jewish, and do the thing of treating non-celebration-of-Christmas as the major, definitive Jewish holiday, what actually goes on on this day for those who do acknowledge it remains something of a mystery. That it is often a drag, or just something like Thanksgiving, never occurs to you. It must all be really magical, or else why are Jews obligated to show their non-celebration of the day by being miserable? By bemoaning the fact that nothing is open, even things that you would never notice weren't open on some random weekend?

It was only as an adult, I think, that I realized there was a whole tradition of Jewish Christmas, a cheery day with Chinese food, movies, and of course singles mixers, so that more non-Christmas-observing babies might be born. Although it's possible my family did this (not the singles mixers, just the dumplings) and I somehow never put it together that this was part of some larger tradition, and assumed it was that one would year after year run through all the things that weren't possible and come up with Chinatown and movie theaters by process of elimination. (Childhood's a bit of a blur, I suppose. No "Angela's Ashes" coming from me.)

Also as an adult, it's something of a fluke that I don't celebrate Christmas - my husband's family does, but they live far away, off in Gérard Depardieu territory - well, the same country. If I were one of the Jews who had always dreamed of celebrating the holiday, I could do as apparently many in my situation do and use intermarriage as an excuse to go all-out. This is, if the social-media site mentioned below is any guide, a thing. The quasi-guilty, massively-enthusiastic celebration of that which was once taboo. But I don't really get this - it's precisely because the non-Jewish world is no longer a mystery that Christmas is no longer a mystery, just a holiday my husband's family does and mine doesn't acknowledge, much like his family, not being American, doesn't do Thanksgiving. Not exactly the same - it's different to be Jewish in a majority-Christian country. But not all that different. If I were in Belgium this time of year, I'd go in for it, especially given that the "it" of all Belgian celebrations involves eating copious amounts of delicious pie. Although Easter's somewhat more intriguing, what with the chocolates. And because non-celebration-of-Easter isn't one of the major laws of secular Judaism, I can eat as many white-chocolate-praliné eggs as I want guilt-free. Jewish-guilt-free, at least.

But the weirdness of December 25th for the likes of me, it really is about being Jewish, not merely non-Christian. It might be PC to frame it as time of the year is for non-Christians, but from what I can tell, other non-Christians either just don't care or celebrate it as a secular holiday. And obviously not all Jews care - some go in for it (old-time German Jews, more recent Russian-Jewish immigrants) even without an intermarriage as cover. But I do wish - as I think I ask every year - that the secular-of-Christian-extraction community would get that this is and is likely to remain a thing for some Jews, and would not insist that Christmas is a secular rather than a religious holiday, get-over-yourselves-already. And that this isn't because Jews are being difficult, but because Jews are projecting onto Christianity that same blurry is-it-a-culture-or-a-religion identity that constitutes Judaism. Christmas, to many Jews, feels Christian, is Christian, even if it's a secular/cultural/"pagan" variant. Along the same lines, even if you-the-secular-but-of-Christian-extraction don't identify as Christian, you may be identified as such by Jews, who are merely responding to the fact that they get identified as Jews regardless of religious affiliation. If any of that makes sense.

At any rate, a holiday that involves putting up a decorated tree and placing gifts under it doesn't seem even remotely compatible with ownership of a naughty and hyperactive (impervious to dog runs, woods walks...) miniature poodle. No menorah, alas, for the same reason.

Sigh, natalism

I can now add to my list of minor achievements that I was telling Ross Douthat he was wrong about natalism before it was cool. I am now, it seems (thanks Conor! welcome new readers!) a genuine authority on the subject.

But I'm not sure I have it in me to slog through all of the latest round of this, especially now that others (Katha Pollitt, etc.) have done so. There are two issues with natalism. First is the obvious - does the world need more people? More as in any additional people (yes) or as in a greater number than we've got now (not necessarily, perhaps the opposite)? Obviously if humans were not making more humans, if Keanu-bots had replaced human men, rendering the sperm-producing variety obsolete, and our species were really grinding to a halt, there would be cause for alarm. But that does not seem imminent. Natalism is never about the species, but whichever subset whichever thinker/politician wants to make more (or fewer - we're talking pro-natalism, and I believe natalism's the shorthand) of. In this case, Douthat wants more Americans. (The "Jewish babies" tag isn't because Douthat wants more Jews especially - no reason to think this - but to direct readers to my posts on natalism in the Jewish community.)

That we need an at-least-replacement birthrate at all times, and that the state is justified in intervening, are things Douthat basically assumes. His brilliance (yes, brilliance) is in reframing the debate, so that it's not about whether we need more 'merican babies (of course! it's a given!) but rather, whether the fighting-word of "decadence" properly captures the reason birthrates aren't skyrocketing. He's changed the terms of the debate, acting as though anyone who doubts we need more American babies/that it's OK for the state (or a NYT op-ed writer) to demand this holds some kind of fringe position.

The problem with natalism is obvious if one considers biology: there is very nearly no way to ask that more babies come into the world that doesn't disproportionately burden women. Child-support laws, DNA testing, social pressure to marry the woman you've knocked up, whatever, none of this compares with actually having said uterus.

The only way to encourage baby-production without burdening half the species is to remove whichever obstacles currently prevent women (and maybe girls) who do want children from having them. As in, if there were more maternity leave, if it were socially acceptable to have a child under 25, or, heck, at any point past puberty, then yes, there'd be more babies around. And I suppose we could encourage the tiny minority of the population who are transmen with the original plumbing to do their patriotic duty - this would be the only possible way a natalistic demand would burden men.

There are, in other words, a handful of ways to increase the birthrate that don't involve asking/ordering women to have more children, but once you go down the road of MORE BABIES, routes inoffensive or even beneficial to women are the exception. Instead, maybe you'll restrict family planning. If it's difficult to track down birth control and illegal to get an abortion, then guess what, you're more likely to procreate. Natalism's immorality comes from the fact that it's about prioritizing non-existent beings over ones who already exist, namely women. Not fetuses, who are or are not babies depending your views on this. Entirely theoretical offspring of people who went out on a date this one time and didn't really click but by putting their own preferences over immediate procreation revealed their profound, selfish decadence. Reproductive decisions arguably make the biggest impact of any such decisions in a person's life, especially if that person is a woman. Individuals' decisions should not come down to whichever minuscule (and dubious) benefit for the country an additional child would confer.

"Special privileges"

Calling Flavia, Flavia's commenter "i," and the usual WWPD audience:

The following just appeared on my Facebook newsfeed: "Young, Privileged, and Applying for Food Stamps." I immediately knew that this would not be an article about food-stamp fraud, that is, about wealthy people getting food stamps (for kicks?) by manipulating the system. My guess, however, wasn't exactly right. I'd assumed this would be about an upper-middle-class kid regressing to the mean, or, I suppose, dropping below it. Cut off by the parents, and learning just how little a degree in Medieval Tapestry is worth in this economy. Or at least something about a PhD on welfare. Instead, it's by - and about - Katrina Briski, a white, college-educated young woman from, in her words, "a working-middle-class-family background." An example she gives of "suburban comforts" she's had at her disposal is Chipotle. This is "privilege"?

But that's exactly what's interesting about the essay. The author has somewhere along the line latched onto the idea that she is privileged. Not merely that she should be grateful for what she has, which most everyone should be, but that she comes from the stratum of society that ought to feel guilty for all it has. Even though what she has - white skin and a state-school non-STEM BA - is not exactly an Andover-Princeton-Goldman trajectory. Going by the information she herself provides, Briski neither started out nor ended up (thus far - she's young yet) wealthy or high-status. There are others relative to whom she is privileged, and her race, level of education, and childlessness defy stereotypes about who requires government support. Given her age and life situation, she might be more "broke" than "poor," although it's really too soon to tell. But "privileged," without painstaking contextualization, would seem to misrepresent the author's place in the world.


One might speculate that this perception of herself as "privileged" has informed her career choices, such as taking unpaid internships. One might also speculate that this self-perception is what prevented her from getting a job at Trader Joe's - if you come across as "privileged," you probably will have trouble finding work at a supermarket. I say this not to judge Briski's choices. Quite the contrary, these strike me as rational choices for someone who - presumably in the course of her education - came to believe that she had better own her privilege... despite not owning a heck of a lot else. I am judging the system that produces these expectations.


This phenomenon - by no means unique to the author - seems pretty clearly related to the fact that so many Americans now go to college, and college, which continues to think of itself as a thing-for-the-elite, continues to teach students noblesse oblige. "Service." The idea that it's greedy to want pay from one's first jobs. This, even when the students have massive debt and are not in much of a position to hand out helpings of oblige to others. 


For all the talk of unchecked privilege, I suspect there's also a great deal of overestimated privilege among Young People Today, who've dutifully learned about all the systematic oppressions that don't apply to them, yet find themselves quasi-unemployable and fully without the trust funds one somehow imagines every white, college-educated kid has to his name. Relative privilege is something, but it doesn't pay the rent. Thus, I think, OWS.

******

In further "privilege" news, the NYT's "Room for Debate" on circumcision bans has, not unexpectedly, drawn a horde of passionate commenters. Men who weren't circumcised and who imagine the procedure to be some kind of penisectomy (having evidently not taken in the number of children in Hasidic families), men who were circumcised as infants and who attribute whatever's gone wrong in their lives to their parents' fateful decision to make them a millimeter or whatever smaller in that area, and women... no, not so many women.

One can get to the point at which one thinks, 'hey, I grew up thinking this was sensible, but now that I stop and think about it, it is at least worth discussing,' until one comes across this winner, who believes that Americans accept male but not female circumcision not because one is mutilation and the other not so much, but because of some kind of nefarious cabal:

Does the author really think that male circumcision really gets a pass because it is (a) a religious practice, and (b) relatively safe? Is there really no importance in her reactions to the question of factor (c): that circumcision is part of a religious tradition that has very special privileges in the USA? Isn't it really the case that some religions are more equal in the eyes of the law than others?

Thus far, that comment has gotten 12 "recommends." Walt and Mearsheimer, I've found your next cause. The Euphemistic Circumcision Lobby.

United in studiousness and lactose intolerance

-As someone who both is intermarried and studies intermarriage (the backstory), I read with interest this account of a couple, Helen Kim and Noah Leavitt, who study the very form of intermarriage they're in - Jewish-Asian. Of the seven (mostly) well-known couples of the past half-century mentioned in the story about their marriage and subsequent research, all are Jewish men married to Asian or Asian-American women. 


While the academic paper itself addresses gender, it seems worth noting that the Styles-audience-oriented summary does not. The omission might be read as political correctness - if we don't articulate what's indicated by the data provided, we need not open that particular can of worms. Instead, we learn that Jews and Asians both value education. Leading one to wonder, if we are to accept the 'model minority' label... are Jewish women and Asian men raised in families that value waking up in the late afternoon for a day of pot, video games, and staring at a wall?


My only semi-informed hypothesis is that the somewhat higher rates of intermarriage for Jewish men (as opposed to women) and Asian women (as opposed to men) only partially explain why popular culture has deemed only one variant of Asian-Jewish (hetero) intermarriage a thing. I think it may also relate to popular (and offensive, and false, let's be clear) assumptions that when Asian women or Jewish men marry out - with each other or otherwise - they're somehow moving up in the world. That they've transcended the limitations of their backgrounds and bravely set out to make their own ways. Whereas the corresponding assumption is that when Asian men or Jewish women do so, it's only because they've failed - after trying and trying and trying some more - to snag a mate within the community. For this reason, I suspect that the visibility is not proportional to the reality. But... yeah, this isn't the era or variety of Jewish intermarriage I study, and is based mostly on impressions backed up by Googling around and finding whichever hundreds of blog-commenters have had the same impression, so for deeper analysis, look elsewhere.


-Speaking of Asian-Jewish affinity, Mark Bittman informs us that 90 percent of Asian-Americans and 75 percent of Jewish-Americans are lactose intolerant. Another estimate for Jews (not the first one mentioned) is higher still. I'm reasonably up on the Ashkenazi genetic failings, but I must say I'd ever heard of this. Still, my complete lack of anecdata for Jewish lactose intolerance doesn't mean this isn't ravaging my community, if not my stomach in particular. (I also haven't heard of adults, Jewish or otherwise, drinking several glasses of milk a day, or being encouraged to do so, but maybe this is a regional thing. I figured "Got Milk?" was the dairy industry luring kids away from soda, not adults away from water.) 


What I don't follow about the broader debate about whether we should drink cows' milk (or, by extension, the even broader one about whether any number of commonly- and long-since-eaten foods are intended for human consumption) is the argument that because milk is designed for calves, humans - adults especially - shouldn't be drinking it. Are any naturally-occurring ingredients designed for the express purpose of consumption by human adults? Isn't it all just stuff with some other purpose that we happen to be able to extract nutrients from? Doesn't the fact that cows' milk is intended for calves mean that we, unlike calves, couldn't survive on that alone?

A sensitive subject

When I read about the German court that ruled against circumcision for religious reasons (i.e. as practiced by Muslims and Jews), I confess that my thoughts immediately, involuntarily, embarrassingly, went to that scene from Europa Europa, where the Jewish boy hiding out and trying to pass as a Hitler Youth is confronted with the anatomical alteration that would immediately give him away. It was probably in that context that I first learned about circumcision.


Because I suspect I'm not alone in having been raised in such a way as to be let's say startled when I see something in the news about the German state restricting the behavior of Jews and other religious/ethnic minorities, I want to be very clear that Germany banning circumcision of minors is in no way 'history repeating itself.' (In the words of Basil Fawlty, incapable of taking his own advice, "Don't mention the war!" A tenet I realize I violated in the paragraph above, but in the interest of explaining how not to look at this issue.) There are plenty of reasons to oppose chopping off part of a child's genitalia that have nothing to do with anti-Other discrimination. If Germany really thinks male circumcision is harmful, then this shift is about protecting Jewish and Muslim boys. Germany should not feel compelled, on account of that-which-shall-not-be-mentioned, to allow Jews and other ethnic/religious minorities to continue traditions that it deems child abuse.


This issue brings to mind the French "ostentatious religious symbols" ban. The point of the measures is not to exclude everyone of a certain ethnicity, but to force assimilation to the country's values. That said, as with the headscarf law, these interventions can't always be taken at face value. While we don't interpret the headscarf law to mean that France is gearing up for anti-Muslim genocide, we do wonder if the French tradition of anti-Muslim (esp. anti-North African) xenophobia, rooted in French colonialism, doesn't enter into this, alongside genuine concerns about sexism and the veil. Laws like these do exclude, but they do so on the basis of behavior. Which is still bad, from an "Anglo-Saxon" (U.S. and U.K.) multiculturalist perspective, but it could be worse. 


Still, if there's reason to suspect that a "concern" for minorities is, in part, a pretext for go-back-where-you-came-from, let's-stay-homogeneous, you should be allowed to point this out. It should be possible to have a conversation about where the enthusiasm for banning religious circumcision is coming from, without accusing everyone with this stance of malice (some people genuinely think it's child abuse), and without accusing whichever contingent is acting for less-than-savory reasons of being a Nazi.

Anyway, the issue is compelling, and not just because we get to read about Putzke the penologist in an article about male genitalia. It's compelling because it's incredibly complicated.

It shouldn't be all that difficult even for, for example, American Jews, doubly used to the idea of male circumcision, to see that if you think about it in the abstract, the practice sounds bizarre. And any argument along the lines of, 'but this is how our religion has always done things' is, on its own, unconvincing. This argument basically invites a list of the harmful things done in the name of religion, things the state absolutely has the right to outlaw, such as honor killings, and most obviously female "circumcision," which in fact causes harm.

The complicating detail with male circumcision is that, as odd as it is if you stop and think about it, as weird as it must sound if you grew up unfamiliar with the concept, it's unclear that the act constitutes harm. It has some benefits, most obviously the STD-related findings. We vaccinate young girls (and boys) against HPV, as backup in case abstinence/barrier methods fail/are not used, not in lieu of encouraging safer sex. Depending where you live, I suppose the choice your parents made (whichever it was) might make you more or less appealing to sexual partners, although this is the sort of thing I suspect neither makes nor breaks any relationships other than the ones that begin under the absolute sleaziest, swapping-of-photographs circumstances. Claims that uncircumcised men will never get a date in America, or that circumcised men will never enjoy sex are self-evident nonsense.

The "harm" the German court referred to - that "the child's body would be 'permanently and irreparably changed', and that this alteration went 'against the interests of a child to decide for himself later on to what religion he wishes to belong'" - doesn't quite make sense. An irreversible change, yes. Not definitively a change for the worse, but if you believe any choice parents make that's permanent is a problem, then this would be a problem. It's certainly "harm" if you think of it as, imagine if parents abducted their 20-year-old son and had this done to him against his will. How much of that aspect carries over when it comes to those much younger is debatable.

Meanwhile, and this is what I really can't fathom, how does being circumcised determine your religion as an adult? It expands your options, right? Makes it less of a problem if you do want to join up with one of the ones that require this. I've never heard of a foreskin requirement for atheism or Christianity. Is a baby who's been baptized not allowed to change its mind later on? There are plenty of kids and adults whose parents did whichever ceremony, often to please the grandparents, and the kid's hardly even aware of it, perhaps entirely unaware. (In the U.S., of course, being circumcised, even if you're Jewish, doesn't mean you had a bris.)

As you may have gathered, I'm something of an agnostic on this issue. I see the arguments for OMG-it's-barbaric, and for OMG-Germany-is-calling-Muslims-and-Jews-barbaric. All I know is that this practice should be banned, and that if I ever have a son, you're not going to know either way.

It's Parochial Tuesday at WWPD

-The NYT had the good sense not to open up for comments its article about how The Jews are demographically inundating New York.

-Sweden had the bad sense to let one of its citizens hold forth on The Jews on Twitter using the @Sweden handle. Or did it? The "rant" (claims Slate) doesn't seem anti-Semitic at all. It's a Swedish woman who doesn't know any Jews (but is named Abrahamsson!), wondering if Jews are a race or religion, and asking why Jews are hated. That's 100% naive, well-meaning Gentile. This woman thinks you can't tell a Swede from a Jew, god bless her. Someone, send her American Pastoral.

-Yossi and Jagger, in happier times.

Wax nostalgic

A Styles masterpiece, in keeping with the theme of the post below: a story about how girls - young ones! pre-high-school! - are now getting expensive salon beauty procedures just to look good for summer camp. Summer camp! The height of childhood innocence! S'mores and swimming in the lake! Now you need to get waxed for this? Civilization has ended!

The other, perhaps concurrent intended response is, a hairdryer or razor, fine, but in These Economic Times, when grown women must D.I.Y. their own maintenance, hundreds of dollars spent at the salon girls too young to even have their own babysitting money feels, well, unfair.

We're meant to be horrified, in other words, in two diametrically opposed directions. To think of the 11-year-olds being prodded at as both spoiled and child-abused, to envy their access to superior depilatory techniques and to compare favorably our own relatively rustic childhoods, when kids were kids, y'know?

Contrarian mumblings:

-Legs get hairy, get shaved. But the bikini area! Does this mean that girls now need to look like porn stars to fit in at camp?

Obviously not. I take "outer bikini area" to mean what's still technically a part of the leg, exposed when one wears even a relatively modest, one-piece swimsuit. And some people are really hairy there, which I'd imagine they might be self-conscious about if they're 11. Puberty hits girls younger and younger, so this is probably an issue for many; the desire to have this hair removed wouldn't be about wanting to seem older, I'd think. Body hair does not always conveniently show up at the age at which getting rid of it is generally deemed appropriate. There's nothing sexual-as-in-the-having-of-sex about the hairiness or the demand, on the girl's part, to have it removed. Sometimes a girl starts needing a bra at 11, this we accept (although if she were fitted for a $300 La Perla, there could be a Styles article about it). Some girls, some women, never need/want waxing, some never need/want a bra; technically no one need-needs either. But the horror the story is meant to provoke comes largely from that word: bikini.

-Isn't it tragic that girls at summer camp would worry about how their hair looks after swimming?

If you take a step back, you see that we're only supposed to be shocked about the permanent-hair-straightening treatments because the girls getting them, we might assume, are white. It's old news that many black girls arrive at summer camp - and wherever else - with chemically-straightened hair. White girls, on the other hand, are expected to be low-maintenance about their hair, at least during Innocent Childhood, certainly during Carefree Summer. White girls are expected to offer clueless remarks to black girls about how much of a waste of time it is to fuss with your hair, at camp. So high-maintenance, sheesh. When it's like, easy for you to say, if you have wash-and-go straight or straight-ish or Botticelli-ringlet-ish hair yourself.

The girls profiled in this article, as is not spelled out but abundantly obvious to those of us from the same community, are white and Jewish, and Jewish girls at Jewish summer camp have long been dealing with our quasi-political frizz. While keratin straightening, specifically, may be problematic for reasons entirely separate from the pride-in-frizz-or-lack-thereof of likely-Jewish adolescents, there are not-as-toxic ways of de-poufing hair, and it's neither new nor strange that girls at summer camp would have this concern. It's unfortunate that not all natural hair textures are celebrated equally, but the answer is not as straightforward as compelling the conformist 11-year-old (which is to say, the 11-year-old) to go around artifice-free. Especially when her mother does not, and thus wouldn't even know how to instruct her to style that natural hair texture except to straighten it. Which brings us to...

-Sure, adult women have their insecurities. But do we really want to be telling young girls that they're bodies aren't just fine the way they are?

Embracing the natural look - whatever that means - is something that for most of us comes, if it ever does, with time, with exposure to communities where whichever forms of artifice are considered gauche. (Only to learn that, in these milieus, the aspects of artifice that are enjoyable and not tied to a desire to conform are also, often, condemned as frivolous, but I digress.)

If we're thinking about 11-year-olds and their beautification requests in terms of preserving innocence, we're thinking about it wrong. By the time a girl demands the means/permission to address hairy legs or frizz, that particular innocence - which, again, we need to remember is something entirely different from sexual/romantic innocence - is long since kaput. If a girl, once self-conscious, is told to embrace what's naturally hers... by a mother who's waxed and coiffed, in a community where frizz and hairiness as good as don't exist, you can see how that girl would feel something other than pride in her ethnic-ness, hairiness, whatever. If this mother refuses to support her daughter's decision, this will be 2% noble protest against those standards, 98% making the daughter feel powerless, infantilized, miserable.

-If there's anything to protest here, it would be: a) cases where the impetus for follicular artifice - as opposed to merely the money facilitating it - comes from the parents/mother; or b) the fact that back in the day, girls taught one another how to deal with unwanted/unruly hair, and bringing parental supervision and adult-level funds into this might take away a different sort of childhood innocence, the one that's about Becoming A Woman. Maybe the mothers of girls are under a particular responsibility in terms of halting the proliferation of "necessary" beautification procedures. But this would need to change via their own choices first.

Atheist cosmopolitans with a keen sense of smell

-Mark Zuckerberg has the audacity not to live according to the religious principles of a rabbi who doesn't know him personally, but who feels entitled to speak out on his faith or lack thereof: "We can hope that his declaration of atheism was or is a part of youthful rebellion that will fade with time."

-Black women and hair, Jewish women and noses. (Also: black women and noses, Jewish women and hair.)

-Says Dan Savage:

One reason people tend to overestimate the percentage of Americans who are gay and lesbian: we clump up in cities. We're a relatively tiny minority, it's true, but even if you accept the lower estimates (2%) there are still more gay and lesbian Americans than there are Jewish Americans (1.7%).

OK, one more genre: The "Bad" Jew, Redux

It's like Philip Roth, Woody Allen*, that entire generation, that entire outlook, never happened, and it's still provocative - still fresh - for a Jew to be "bad." It's as if there are still secular Jewish parents who care about intermarriage, and that you finish your gefilte fish. Last month, a Facebook friend posted something intended to be edgy about how don't tell his ancestors but he was putting up a Christmas tree with his non-Jewish wife. I wanted to be like, dude, you're fifty years too late, but restrained myself. Mostly because I don't make a habit of leaving potentially inflammatory wall comments, let alone for acquaintances I haven't talked to in years. But also because this attitude is at once incredibly dated and so-very-now.

We are seeing a revival - and, I hope, a last hurrah - of the "unapologetically paranoid, guilt-ridden, self-loathing Diaspora kvetch." A touch of nostalgia for a time when "Jew" meant Ashkenazi, male, and with an overbearing mothah. ("Howwwwahd, somebody's at the doaaahhh.") It feels stale, yes, but motifs are persistent.

The mystery, it would seem, is in how the "bad" Jew can persist, when it's not as if anyone's secular Jewish parents care if they stray in this or that capacity from traditions the parents probably never even observed. We need to remember that if multigeneration secular Jews are not interested in being "bad," there are always going to be the newly-secular children of observant Jews - and lots of them, what with the observance-babies connection. Another source would be our friends the former-Soviet Jews. Thanks to them, we have a new cohort of Ashkenazis prepared to talk about the intersection of the immigrant and Jewish experience. We have, that is, Gary Shteyngart.

And because we're living in a women-are-like-so moment, and because it's probably easier for men than women to defect from orthodoxy, do not expect to hear much about secular Ashkenazi Jewish women's particular concerns. (Didn't you know? We're all either nagging our Jewish husbands or complaining to Mary Richards about our perpetual singledom while engaging in futile battles with our inherently Jewish weight problems.) So by all means, expect more and more NY-centric fiction (sorry, Amber) by neurotic male protagonists preoccupied with blond or East Asian women; the Holocaust; and their own inability to fix things around the house.

A note, for the sake of clarity: This kind of "bad" Jew is something else entirely from the kind of Jew whose Jewish identity compels him or her (remember l'Affaire Benedikt!) to become a serious critic of Israel, or an enthusiastic supporter of the Palestinian cause. (On the distinction, presented in different terms than I'm using here, see Marc Tracy on Matt Gross as versus Philip Weiss.) These are not the "ASHamed Jews" of The Finkler Question. No, the "bad" Jew is proudly non-observant, proudly unaware of what's going on in the Middle East, and thus incapable of being a supporter or harsh critic of Israel. The "bad" Jew doesn't simply marry out (as many of us secular Jews do, because there isn't much compelling a non-believer outside of Israel not to do so), but inscribes his (always his) marriage to a non-Jewish woman (the "bad" Jew is heterosexual, the revival of a "type" that came about before LGBT issues were on the mainstream agenda) into a pre-set narrative.

*Trivia of the day: the Mariel Hemingway character in Manhattan was based on an affair Woody Allen had with a Stuyvesant student. Shteyngart's alma mater! Seinfeld's fling with a Nightingale girl, fair enough, but geez!

Second attempts

-Sometimes I write a whopper of a post, and it will then occur to me a few days later that what I'd meant to convey could have been done far more efficiently. Case in point: what I was getting at here, without realizing it, was that the food movement is fundamentally about romanticizing poverty. Which is why, on a superficial level, its goals can often seem entirely compatible with having nothing. They romanticize not having a dishwasher, so it can seem as though of course what they're advocating is universally accessible. After all, they're not demanding that you go out and buy heaps of yuppie kitchen equipment. Meanwhile, what they are asking is plenty inaccessible - not just to the proverbial single mother barely making ends meet with her three full-time jobs, but also to run-of-the-mill middle and upper-middle class Americans who have been given no compelling reason to give up TV (tsk tsk!) or reading or staring at a friggin' wall in exchange for time with mortar and pestle.

-Case in point, II: The typical reaction to the anti-Israeli-American-Jewish-marriage (or anti-Israeli-emigration) ads has been a diasporic nuh-uh, asserting that there are vibrant Jewish (and culturally Israeli!) families and communities in 'merica. This is on the one hand true, and on the other hand missing the point. The point, that is, of Zionism. (I am, of course, especially curious to see David Schraub's response, so David, if you have a moment...)

All along, the point of Zionism (and the reason I consider myself a Zionist) was to make the world better for a) Jews, and b) the Jews. Which is to say, it's on the one hand about making life more pleasant (or, circa the 1930s and early 1940s, feasible) for those who happen to have been born Jewish, and on the other, about Jewish continuity, which is to say, the perpetuation over generations of Judaism and of individuals who consider themselves Jewish.

Which is to say that it's entirely in keeping with Zionism - just ask Herzl! - that some Jews won't want in on the Jewish state, and will make use of the freedom that the existence of a Jewish state in the world helps provide them to not care an ounce about their Jewish identities, and to blend unnoticed into whichever mainstream or not-mainstream population they see fit. Why is that fundamental to Zionism? Because one of the problems Zionism was and is (or ought to be) about resolving is the idea that Jewishness is a) externally-defined, and b) fate. Jewish? That's going to be the central fact of your life. Zionism's about letting it be that if you want, and really making something of it in that case, and if not, not. Others who do care can certainly do their caring in the diaspora, but if their principle interest is continuity, they might want to head on over to Israel, where "Jewish" is the default. Given this dynamic, it's not so surprising that one would see a great deal of back-and-forth migration between Israel and the Jewish diaspora.

The point here, though, is that Zionism ideally isn't about forcing anyone to be more Jewishly-involved than they'd like. So things like these ads, that use negativity as a tool, don't fit with its mission. Israel either offers something positive for you, in which case great, live in Israel, or you wish to embrace your freedom as a human being (without being in any way impeded by being a Jew) to be a fashion blogger in L.A., a taxi driver in NY, a receptionist in Mississippi, etc.

Jewish-Jewish intermarriage under attack

Jeffrey Goldberg has brought our attention (and Helen Rosner, via Facebook, my attention) to an ad campaign, sponsored by the Israeli government but being shown in the States, urging Israelis to... divorce their American spouses, Jewish or otherwise, and return home? Presumably asking them not to marry Americans and settle in America in the first place, but then there's the fact that they're being aired here, not there.

Analyzing these ads properly would mean writing (yet another) dissertation on the question of Jews and intermarriage, but I'm thinking one, for me, is enough. So you're getting this in blog-post form, complete with tangential musings.

-Anti-intermarriage arguments - including ones against international but same-faith marriage - are doomed to failure because intermarriage is a symptom (or, in more neutral terms, a result), not a cause, of whichever feared demographic or cultural shift. In this case, Israelis are living in the U.S. anyway, because this is where they've found work in hummus, New York real estate, theoretical physics, or something else entirely. Once here, they meet Americans, often American Jews. Often, Israelis arrive here already married to other Israelis, in part because of the IDF, so if they're arriving for grad school or a postdoc (sorry, my anecdotal evidence tilts towards academia), they're a good bit older than the rest of the cohort. But if they do marry Americans, it's because they were already in America for reasons other than the theoretical allure of theoretical American spouses. Individual and structural forces unrelated to marriage were at work. But it's easier, simpler, and more emotion-tugging to discuss complex issues in terms of marriage and family, so that's how we get to these commercials, and anti-intermarriage discourse more generally.

-Herzl's notion that Israel's existence would normalize Jews, making them a people like any other, may have failed in international-relations-and-perceptions terms (Israel as the Jew of the world, and all that), but it did succeed in one area, which is in how American Jews perceive of Israeli Jews. Israeli women are somehow immune to negative stereotypes about (American, but potentially also British, French...) Jewish women. It's not precisely that they're "shiksas" (although, Bar Refaeli), but more that the salient thing about them is that they're foreign. That, and because of the different ethnic mix, while they certainly look Jewish, they often don't look Jewish in American terms, which is looking Ashkenazi. Israeli men, meanwhile, are imagined to be physically stronger and less intellectual/neurotic than their American Jewish equivalents. Again, it's related to a much older (and also socially constructed, etc., etc.) Sephardic-Ashkenazi divide, but it's also something relatively new.

And my understanding from the approximately ten trillion Israel-American Jews (varying degrees of each identity) I know is that it cuts both ways, but especially in terms of American Jewish women having not the best reputation among Israelis, the "JAP" stereotype being if anything greater among this set than among American Jews.

-The ads themselves are despicable, or would be if they weren't so ridiculous. The "Christmas" ad - and I say this as someone who periodically holds forth on why Christmas shouldn't be a national holiday in the U.S., and who's long tried to explain to the mystified why non-celebration of Christmas is such a big deal for some Jews, and as someone who's a big ol' Zionist who periodically threatens to up and move to Tel Aviv - makes Israel look a whole lot less appealing as a destination. If this is my takeaway, what would others' be? Its message is ostensibly that America is the dangerous land of assimilation, but it ends up reading as, Israel is a dying country, Judaism a dying faith, and the vibrant future requires Jews to stop worrying and learn to love Christmas. I mean, is the ad targeted at the nostalgic elderly, and if so, why show it in the States if it's aimed at Israeli grandparents?

And, it's a bit like when the grandfatherly Israeli man who led my Birthright Israel brigade ordered the young men assembled to note how attractive the young Jewish women around them were. In that it immediately makes one think the reverse, or else why would this need to be so painstakingly pointed out? That there need to be ads telling Israeli expats/emigrants to get misty suggests that Israelis are on the contrary delighted to be living abroad.

-It's maybe kind of refreshing - and I say this as someone who's incredibly against natalism, that is, government policies that interfere with individuals' childbirth decisions in order to increase, decrease, or alter the nation's demographics - that Israel isn't taking the straightforward "Jewish babies" approach, and is specifically concerned with the production of Israeli babies. But, as Goldberg notes, the idea is obviously that American-Jewish babies are as good as Episcopalian anyway.

-Everyone loves a good story of Jews opposing sweeping categories of Jewish-Jewish marriage. Like with the Syrian Jews, who apparently consider other Jews unacceptable marriage partners. Why does everyone love this kind of story? Because there's something in it for everyone. Think Jews are insular? These stories tell you nothing you didn't know. Think Jews get lumped into one box too often, and that the immense diversity of "Jews" needs more attention? These stories show that Jews are not one unified bloc after all.

-But are these ads even about the dangers of intermarriage? It seems like they could just as easily be about the threat of emigration, period. After all, an Israeli couple that moves to the States will send its kids to American schools, where those children will hear about Santa Claus, whether the parents like it or not.

-I know that the proper, politically-correct response here would be to say that there is of course vibrant Diaspora Jewish life, and that Israel needs to respect the existence of non-Israeli Jews. My own thoughts are... this, but not entirely. It seems possible - probable? - that over the course of who knows how many generations, the only Jews left will be ultra-orthodox or in Israel. If this bothers you, do something about it, but that something shouldn't be telling those already in committed relationships with non-Jews - or in milieus in which the default is a non-Jewish spouse - to marry in. If nothing else (and I could think of some other good reasons), because this approach is futile.

-While my overall stance re: Zionism - which I was reminded of by David Schraub - hasn't much changed since I first began thinking about this issue, my understanding of Israel has somewhat. No, not in terms of realizing that the Israeli government does icky things, or that religious extremists over there have too much power. This much I've long since understood, so I never had some kind of idealized vision of Israel. Rather, I've become increasingly aware through my own daily life of how thrilled so many Israelis - even ostensibly rah-rah-Israel Israelis - are to get out. To move to New York, to be academics in America, etc. They want out, but who wants in? I keep thinking that Israel would work just fine if those who believed in it (including yours truly, blogging from the Whole Foods, where the shuttle has dropped me for two hours, time I might have spent tilling the kibbutz fields) actually lived there. But it takes a big catalyst to up and move there, so if those whose default is to live there are moving here? For Israel to work, Jews don't merely have to live there. They - we - have to want to live there, and follow through.

-What with having stolen away a man from a foreign country myself (and never mind that he'd in all likelihood be living in the States regardless), I'm trying to picture a Belgian ad warning young Belgians of the dangers of moving to America and marrying an American. I could totally create this ad. It would show a Belgian at an American supermarket, looking at the sad bread selection, then going on Skype and watching his or her family tuck into a fresh loaf from the bakery. That's all you'd need.

The Other's Others

There is now a summer camp specifically for Jews of color. As a Jew who went to a WASPy tennis camp where I had less skin pigmentation going on than most of the blonds, I suppose this camp would not have been for me. Whether it's a good idea for anyone is another story.

The way Steven Philp presents it, American Jews of color are in fact more oppressed than Americans of color in general. Oppressed by other Jews, that is. He appears to agree with the camp director that, as she puts it, "'we as a community are not great at dealing with the Other [...] We had centuries of persecution making us wary. We have a tendency to be more suspicious than welcoming.'"

This seems... dubious. While it's surprising in America to meet a black or Asian Jew, just like it was surprising the other day when I heard an Asian-looking woman get an Asian-language response back from the ex-football-player-looking blond guy sitting next to her, do we really think Jews are especially intolerant of those of color? I've spent enough time with relatives of another generation to know that Jews are fully capable of being racist, but do we really think Jews are especially racist? What about the Civil Rights Movement? What about the congregations with lesbian rabbis, where many of the kids are the full-rainbow offspring of intermarriages? It's certainly isolating to be of a different race than those around you, but are things worse for a black kid adopted into a white Jewish family than one adopted into a white Catholic/Protestant/Mormon one, assuming a homogeneous community?

And! What about the fact that when Jews exclude on the basis of genealogy - something not all Jews do! - they tend to be equal-opportunity about it? (What with the fact that the traditional divide between Jew and Gentile long predates modern ideas about "black and white.") If you're a Jew for whom intermarriage is OMG the worst, even if there's a conversion to Judaism, it's if anything a tiny bit less tragic if the non-Jewish spouse is another minority than if a snub-nosed blonde is involved.

Also confusing in the Moment piece is the notion that the Jewish traditions of many American Jews are very much in the "latkes and gefilte fish" vein. I get that Ashkenazi cultural hegemony is an issue in Israel and in the Jewish world more broadly, but if you're an American Jew and one of your parents is Ashkenazi, the other a convert to Judaism bringing the "color," or if you're the of-color adopted child of two Ashkenazi American Jews, you don't magically have the culture of one of the somewhat darker-skinned Jewries, the Mediterranean ones with inevitably far superior cuisines. Your Jewish culture is Ashkenazi-American culture.

But the real problem is this: The well-meaning refrain is always that there's no such thing as 'looking Jewish,' and that anyone who says otherwise is a) anti-Semitic, or b) denying the existence or authenticity of Jews of color. Meanwhile, most American Jews are Ashkenazi. This is why, we might want to recognize, American Jewish culture has been as Philp not-so-neutrally puts it "dominated by" Jews of that culture. This isn't the same - as Philp seems to think - as a high percentage of Jews being "white," as though this were some undifferentiated category and we might as well be Swedish. I mean, yes, the bulk of Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews would be "white" by the standards of all Americans who are not white supremacists, insofar as anyone (Arabs, really dark-complexioned Greeks, etc., included) for whom that's the closest-to-accurate box counts as such.

But Ashkenazi is, like Swedish, particular, distinct, and we tend to look kinda-sorta identifiable. (Thus how, even though my family's from Russia/Romania/etc., what I look sure isn't Slavic, although from the Pale of Settlement I inherited an extra bit of pale.) This is not a tragedy. Yes, some Ashkenazi Jews are blond, but I don't see how it's disrespectful to the authenticity of their Ashkenazi-ness or their Jewishness, to admit that that's not what Ashkenazi Jews tend to look like. It's not only that it's not anti-Semitic to say that there is, in America, an ethnic look that's typically Jewish. I'd go so far as to say that it's anti-Semitic to claim that that's anti-Semitic, as though there's something shameful about being pale and non-snub-nosed (not the same as hook-nosed, which would be an anti-Semitic description; sorry, this is a complicated issue), with dark, poufy hair. I mean, the fact that it's considered offensive to refer at all to Ashkenazi physicality might hint at the fact that this physical appearance has in the past and continues to this day to constitute something other than privilege. It just might.

(And... someone always, always, always has to complain that nothing was mentioned about the Palestinians. This is not about Israelis or even Zionists! These are a bunch of lefty Jews in California, who probably are on the case already. And this is already a story whose message is that Jews are especially racist, sorry it doesn't make that point from every possible angle. Good grief.)

Parc Slope

-These sure look familiar. I'm assuming the fact that I have the cheaper (but still not cheap!) version means I don't have the original, although I got mine a while back, so maybe this is an example of that alleged phenomenon, high fashion borrowing from the masses?

-Oh, to be able to grow garlic. This lifestyle of living in tiny rooms to better serve Academia is not conducive to that particular goal.

-Big surprise: the #1 article "recommended for me" at the NYT is one tailor-made for one of the tags on this ol' blog: Jewish Babies. Not sure what to make of Israel-as-IVFsville. On the one hand, I share the quoted feminist's concerns about the physical repercussions of that much IVF, and have my own feminist qualms about what it means to encourage baby-making, given who, for social and biological reasons, bears the brunt of this demand. Oh, and the social conservative/Dan Savage in me wonders if it's so fantastic for the state to encourage the formation of single-parent homes. (Supporting existing ones is another matter.) On the other, if the beneficiaries really are as "Jewish and Arab, straight and gay, secular and religious" as the article claims, then we can at least rule out the idea that this is exclusionist political natalism. So as icky as political natalism is under the best of circumstances, this is... the best of circumstances. Those who want a kid are helped, there's less Octomom potential because of the subsidies, and, even if this is all on some level about Jewish Babies, it appears that most everyone's happy. So... consider me undecided on this one.

-This was recently posted to one of the seemingly infinite social networking sites (OK, one of the three) I'm on these days: "has anyone else ever noticed that people with children feel much more free to invade your personal space than people without?" S/he who is the origin of the quote may identify him/herself, or not. I was going to respond there, but it had become a massive thread going all over the place, and I came too late to the party. So, here instead. Yes, I have noticed this. It first bears a mention that kid-complaints are virtually never about children themselves, virtually always about parent behavior, which is why it's always bizarre to me that they're cast as being about whether or not one finds babies cute. It next bears a mention that I've never been all that worked up about lax parenting/over-indulged kids, or else how would I have lasted four years in-and-around Park Slope? I tend to think, not having kids, that I don't know how difficult it is to care for them, so, not my business.

But I must respond here, because OMG was this ever the situation in Paris. It's true for the most part on public transportation, where someone can be eight months pregnant or 80 years old and whatever, but anyone who gets on with a kid under 10 is immediately owed two seats, one for himself, one for the kid. But it's also true in parks. I would sometimes need to Skype from such places, some of which do indeed have the alleged free weefee. In this one park, the park closest to the dorm that actually had this service, Skyping involved first walking through a soccer-ball zone, my head (and laptop) popular targets for this multi-ball extravaganza. Small French children, a lot stronger kickers than one might imagine! But I had to get through in order to avoid what was ostensibly the kids' part of the park, the one with what I've just described, as well as a playground/play area/whatever. I would then go up some stairs to the drunks/rebellious youths/quiet readers section, and park myself a) wherever there was a signal, and b) wherever I'd be least offensive to readers/bothered by drunks.

So. This strategy worked, for the most part, except for the odd soccer ball migrating from the lower level, and for the games of tag or "le tag" that would sometimes involve a huge gaggle of gamins darting in front of as well as behind the bench I was sitting on. But when it totally, utterly failed was when parents would decide to bring their tots intentionally to the upper level, to play a game of 'whee, jump off the ledge,' the ledge being the edge of some plantings, a couple/few feet above the ground, not like jumping out a window. At the end of said ledge, smack in the middle of where "whee" was meant to culminate, was the only bench it made sense for me to sit on. One father, in particular, found this adorable, more adorable still when she gravitated to my bench, extra-adorable when the fruit of his loins confused my laptop for a toy and began grabbing at that. And I was all, hello, I'm a grad student, this is the most expensive thing I own, and I live in such close quarters that I have to communicate with folks back home from public parks. In my head. I probably just shot a glance intended to say that, but, in a city where friendly smiles are less expected even than in NY, no message was conveyed, I suspect. Meanwhile the toddler herself was, in fact, adorable. The father friggin' out-Park-Sloped Park Slope.

Anyway, this is kind of a thing in Paris, where children are normally so well-behaved, dressed impeccably, etc., leading visitors to wonder if children back home are as uncontrollable as alleged. But, possible misanthropic wifi-seekers, the park is where they're allowed to run free.

Zionist indoctrination assortment

-As someone who managed perfectly well to grow up Jewish, to go to my fair share of Hebrew school, and to miss the part where I was supposed to be indoctrinated in terms of what I was supposed to think about Israel, I never know what to make of the current proliferation of articles like this. I do know that the ridiculous all-caps comment that is at the time of my typing the only comment to the piece, whose author believes "JEWS SHOULD STAY UNITED BEHIND ISRAEL," before moving on to the topic of POGROMS, is not helping matters.

-Huh. (Via.) So maybe some Birthright trips are more about Zionist indoctrination, less about anti-intermarriage intervention. Clearly, as a Herzlophile who had just recently started dating the non-Jewish man who is now my husband, I picked the wrong trip.

-Thanks, David Schraub, for the shout-out in the comments at a Forward blog. As for the post itself, a defense of the Benedikt essay that I will try mightily not to mention any more after this post,* it unfortunately reinforces my impression of Benedikt as a kind of post-Zionist American-Jewish Sarah Palin crossed with Emily Gould-ian New Brooklyn overshare aesthetics. We're supposed to respect her decision to write "in an almost childlike voice," and to nod understandingly when she later explains that the point of the essay was "'definitely not to talk policy or really even politics.'" Why? On what basis are we giving the essay a second chance? Because "Allison is a friend" of the blogger. Well, in that case. Forget 'bad for the Jews.' This is bad for young women in or aspiring to be in opinion writing.

*But no promises, what with its Chua-esque way of sucking you in.

Intermarriage and (anti-) Zionism

In the comments below, Erika Dreifus points us to Jeffrey Goldberg's top-notch post on Allison Benedikt's article, Benedikt having provided a somewhat random and apparently unappreciated shout-out to Goldberg that implies that he's somehow behind her. Which made me think how, while I agree with every bit of Goldberg's response to this, I'd just recently disagreed with another post of his. And yes, there's a connection. Namely: what is the relationship, if any, between Jewish intermarriage and Jewish anti-Zionism? Because we have, on the one hand, Benedikt, who ties together her disillusionment with Israel with her discovery of non-Jewish guys. On the other, Goldberg, who, though by no means a rah-rah Zionist, is more squarely on the friend-of-Israel end of things... and he just got through saying that a Jewish man who dates or marries out probably has messed-up ideas re: Jewish women, and is not manly enough to take them on.

Where to begin, from all the various Gender and Jewish Studies angles. We have the machismo of Zionism, from Nordau's Jewry of Muscle down to the heartthrob IDF soldiers they put on the Birthright buses, just to make the Diaspora dudes look extra-pasty. We have the stereotype of Jewish men as mama's-boys, making the ones with a "shiksa" (because yes, the year is 1959) rebellious real men. But I digress.

Some of the negative responses to Benedikt's essay - but not, to his credit, Goldberg's - have treated her having married out and her disillusionment with Zionism as of a piece, and have condemned both in the same breath. Benedikt herself encourages this, attributing her shift from rah-rah Zionism to anti-Zionism to some Gentile gentlemen who'd courted her, and in doing so, opened her eyes to the fact that OMG Israel isn't perfect.

For the intelligent reader, the questions to ask regarding the "romantic" part of the essay are: 1) why is this woman so dependent on dudes she's romantically involved with to tell her what to think about world affairs? and 2) why does she put up with her husband acting like an ass? And indeed, some responses get at this.

But for the not-so-sharp reader with knee-jerk inclinations in a direction diametrically opposed to Benedikt's, the moral of the story is, here's a nice Jewish girl lost to intermarriage. See, this is what happens when a Jew marries out.

Out-marriers deserve neither the credit nor the blame for having broken free of the confines of the American Jewish Establishment. We ought to think of intermarriage more as the result of assimilation (or, if you prefer, integration, or if you prefer an in-depth discussion of these terms, the introduction to my dissertation) than as an intentional act of assimilation.

But there's a sense among some Jews that marrying out is a kind of political statement, that it's an act undertaken in order to break from the community. By "among some Jews," I mean both some Jews who oppose intermarriage and some who are themselves intermarried. The former think of intermarriage as an act of aggression against the dwindling Jewish people, the latter consider it an extra-nice piece of evidence that one is not some kind of sheep, following everything they were told at Hebrew school, and that, as such, marrying out is of a piece with opposing The Zionist Oppressor.

Historically - as in, from "Portnoy" on - it's been Jewish men who've taken this approach to retroactively ascribing meaning to their inter-ethnic romances. Benedikt's foray into originality is to be a Jewish woman stricken with this neurosis. As Benedikt describes it, dating or better yet, marrying a "goy" comes from the same place as questioning Israel's right to exist. Or, as I suspect this actually went down, Benedikt happened to get together with this one guy Mark, then another, John, and has retroactively attributed this to a coherent (well, coherent-ish) Life Narrative.

Here's how to better reconcile all this: Two things are happening simultaneously. American Jews are interacting far more than ever before with our non-Jews neighbors, and Israel is coming to seem more and more distant to American Jews (who did not happen to have bizarre epiphanies about the Dreyfus Affair their senior years of college). These two things are related, insofar as, if you feel very comfortable in America, if one of your own parents isn't or wasn't brought up Jewish, you're likely to feel less of a connection to the Jewish state. The same factors that, for this population generally, lead to more Jews marrying out are also leading to fewer Jews feeling terribly pro-Israel.

The way these two shifts are not related, however, is that, while individual American Jews (like everyone else) get to decide, on the basis of whichever mix of evidence and emotion, what to think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we (like individuals in all other communities) don't get to decide how integrated a world we're born into, which schools our parents will send us to, and how open members of other communities we meet will be to dating or marrying us. People do not marry who they marry to make a point. Most of us can only stand so many people for so long, and when we find someone we actually want to spend that much time with, and when it's mutual, we do not sneeze at this. Once we're under the you-choose system of spousal selection, as opposed to, here's your second cousin, be fruitful and multiply, it becomes very, very difficult to reject the possibility of a marriage to someone you know you can and want to be with for the rest of your life. (Remember, the yuppies of today aren't divorcing like they used to.) Thus you'll find Jews highly suspicious of Zionism, highly critical of the American-Jewish "establishment," married to other Jews, as well as Jews who are full-on Zionists - critical, perhaps, of Israeli policies, but overall pro-Jewish-state - married to non-Jews. Not because members of either group are hypocrites, but because spousal selection and politics are not the same thing.

Granted, it's not that people just up and wake up married to whomever. Jews who, though super-duper-integrated, care about raising at least nominally religiously-Jewish children, might well encourage their future spouses to convert. Other highly-integrated Jews might care more about Zionism (yes, we're out there), making a potential spouse's views on Israel more of a potential deal-breaker.* Either way, however, we're left with the fact that integrated Jews these days do not, as did those of a previous generation, arrive at young adulthood with a sense of Jews and Gentiles coming from totally different worlds. Whereas it once required extra effort to marry out, it now requires that, if anything, to marry in. The generations before us did not nobly reject the possibility of non-Jewish partners. This simply wasn't done in those days. (With all kinds of historical caveats I won't get into here.)

*Remember - and Benedikt's essay does not hint at this - that there are non-Jews at various points on the neutral-to-Zionist spectrum as well. If anything, because those who did not grow up Jewish don't associate Zionism with that-which-I-was-made-to-believe-as-a-child, if they're less emotional in rejecting Zionism, they're perhaps also less so in accepting it, if that's the route they go down. Which in a sense, even though I grew up plenty ethnically/culturally Jewish, describes my own experience. I was not sent to Zionist indoctrination summer camps, and don't remember having given much thought to Israel before or after my family toured it on a bus with other Americans when I was 8. That is, until I read Herzl, etc., in college. So I don't really associate Zionism with pleasing my family, doing what I'm told. So it's likely that a Jew more pro-Israel than postadolescent Benedikt would be put off by a guy like John's continuous anti-Israel scream-fest, and would have opted instead for someone else, not necessarily for someone Jewish. It's important to remember that this John, going by the essay, is rude, anti-Israel, and non-Jewish, and that these three things are basically unrelated.

"[A]n irresistible combination of sexiness, intelligence, ambition, and a deep capacity for love"

Withywindle has requested that this Jeffrey Goldberg post get the WWPD treatment. The relevant passage, Goldberg's response to Weiner's having repeated the cliché about Jewish women and oral sex, below:

On the issue of Weiner and Jewish women. my intuition, plus knowledge of his dating pattern, plus the fact that he married a non-Jew, plus the aforementioned pathetic text, suggest to me that this putz has some problems here. I'm not going near the question of what Jewish women do or don't do in bed, but suffice it to say that Jewish women are terribly, and contradictorily, stereotyped by society, and, often, by Jewish men themselves. Either they're dark, hot-blooded sluts (a common Wasps fantasy, by the way -- some of my best friends are Wasps with Jewish women-fixations) or they are, as Weiner would have it, the frozen chosen. The truth, of course, is that all women are different, but I've noticed a couple of things over the years: 1) A great number of Jewish women possess an irresistible combination of sexiness, intelligence, ambition, and a deep capacity for love; and 2) Many Jewish men, the less manly-men, in particular, are intimidated by these superstar Jewish women. It's hard to say that Weiner didn't go for a strong woman (a woman from another desert-based religion, by the way), but his text suggests a kind of caricaturing I find a little bit disgusting.

There's a lot to unpack here, and unpack I shall.

-Given Weiner's age and background, it's not surprising that, in the context of already-offensive-and-taboo-by-its-very-existence correspondance, the stereotype about Jewish women not giving oral sex would have been at-the-ready. It doesn't seem, from what Goldberg excerpted, at least, that Weiner meant anything particular by it, that he himself really believes that stereotype, that it has impacted his choice of wife, or that we have tapped into something profound in Weiner's unconscious. It's precisely the kind of dumb and un-PC crack I could imagine a man of that demographic making in a real-life conversation, thinking it's somehow OK because the woman in question is Jewish. We don't need WWPD to point out that Weiner was putting far too much online. The issue is, it's not a remark that tells us anything other than, these are the kinds of off-color jokes this guy grew up with.

-Given that Jews make up a tiny percentage of the population, and that Weiner's not a religious Jew, that he ended up marrying a non-Jewish woman in no way suggests the man - for all his issues - has issues with Jewish women. It's not clear how much Goldberg could possibly know about a 46-year-old's entire dating history, but even if Weiner's never has a Jewish girlfriend, this shouldn't be interpreted to mean he's been actively avoiding them. (Maybe they've been avoiding him!)

-Oh, on that parenthetical's note... The assumption that a Jew's marrying out is a Grand Statement about that Jew's negative feelings re: Jews of the opposite sex is virtually never applied to Jewish women. The assumption is inevitably, re: Jewish men, that they have this automatic pool of Jewish women just dying to marry them, whereas Jewish women who marry out are assumed to be just making the best it after having spent ages 18-35 waiting in vain for Jewish Prince Charming to accept their advances. I don't see Goldberg's post as challenging that; if anything, it's perpetuated.

-Goldberg claims that "often" it is "Jewish men themselves" who stereotype Jewish women. Make that virtually always. Not that all Jewish men stereotype Jewish women. Rather, that non-Jews are not really part of this discourse, so of those who stereotype Jewish women, 99.99% are Jewish men. Non-Jews may have notions about Jews, by which they typically mean Jewish men, but are not losing sleep over the question of the "JAP." The exoticized Jewish woman was once a thing, but has not made it into contemporary American popular culture. While it's true that some non-Jewish men (such as Goldberg's WASP friends) have this inclination, the vast majority are not thinking either way about a woman's Jewishness, whereas far more Jewish men are, whatever it is they choose to make of it. Serious anti-Semites aside, few non-Jews are assessing the Jewishness of everyone they meet, whereas many Jews are doing just that.

-Goldberg is not furthering the discussion by adding, "A great number of Jewish women possess an irresistible combination of sexiness, intelligence, ambition, and a deep capacity for love." How seemingly positive, seemingly innocuous, but... Why would we think Jewish women would be any more... any of these things than any other women?

-Or, for that matter: "Many Jewish men, the less manly-men, in particular, are intimidated by these superstar Jewish women." I don't know where to begin with this one, really. I would have thought that we as a society were past the point of insulting men by questioning their masculinity - so what if a guy's more on the feminine side? But if we're just going to go with Goldberg's notion, wouldn't a more-feminine man go well with a more-masculine woman, which, if you read between the lines of Goldberg's strong-Jewish-woman argument, is what he's getting at? Or is his point that Jewish men who lack virility (gosh, where does this leave the fact that DSK's wife-by-his-side is Jewish?) need to go for ultra-feminine women in order to feel masculine, so for such men, lady-Jews are out? Either way, this mix of manly=good, Jewish women=masculine is... ick, along the same ick lines as equivalent patronizing discussions about "strong" black women who are simply too much for black men.

It also fails the official WWPD anecdata test. In my experience, there is indeed a sort of Jewish man who makes a point of not dating Jewish women, one without any real parallel among Jewish women, and one that makes up only a small percentage of Jewish men dating or marrying out. What differentiates these from the majority of hetero Jewish men - who are either with non-Jewish women for non-neurotic reasons or with Jewish women - is that they've gotten wrapped up in the cultural expectations of what they should go for. It's not so much that these men have rejected hordes of Jewish lady-friends, but rather that when they find themselves with non-Jewish women - the likely result of living in a majority-non-Jewish society - they articulate this in a way that retroactively ascribes meaning to it, that makes it sexy. Since, "Dirty Dancing" aside, there's no trope (in our society) about it being extra-erotic for a Jewish woman to be with a non-Jewish man, Jewish women, even neurotic ones, tend not to do this.

This sub-subset of Jewish men - the ones who not only date/marry non-Jewish women, but who also make a big thing of it, have in common either that they were raised to feel like marrying out was the end of the world (something that doesn't necessarily go hand in hand with having been raised religious), or that they've been exposed to the Roth-Allen monster at an impressionable age, and/or just generally identify with (the comedy of) an earlier era, one in which "shiksa" had some kind of cultural significance. I would not say these men are any more or less "manly" than any others. Whatever they are, they're a dying breed.

I suppose, though, that what rubbed me the wrong way about Goldberg's well-meaning post was both that it amounts to the author congratulating himself for having married a Jewish woman, and how it does so. Just as some Jews who marry out describe this retroactively as a choice that was all about open-mindedness rejecting the confines of Judaism, some who marry in present this as some kind of destiny, as though they would never ever ever in a million years have considered marrying out. When - and I don't claim to know anything about Goldberg's dating history - often enough, those who make this claim dated in and out alike, and merely happened to find the right person "in." People - Jews and not, on this topic and on others - like to justify their life choices. In this particular context, it's especially irritating. Assuming we have choice in the matter, we marry who we want to marry, not to make declarations of universalist tolerance or particularist loyalties.

So that's the that. The "why" is, doing so implies that for a Jewish man to marry in is to make some kind of sacrifice for the greater good, or to have come to the conclusion, rationally, that Jewish women gosh darn it are sexy, no matter what anyone says to the contrary. It's like when my Birthright trip organizer announced, to the guys, that Jewish girls are beautiful. It reinforces the notion that we all come at the topic thinking that Jewish women are repulsive. Basically, by attempting to pathologize out-marriage - rather low, one might think, on Weiner's list of sins - Goldberg ends up supporting the ideas he's ostensibly out to challenge.

Amy Chua Amy Chua Amy Chua UPDATED

The NYT is on the case. Judith Warner, Room for Debate, Motherlode, Fashion & Style. This woman, who will teach you how to raise show poodles, is everywhere. This is her moment! How kind of her to agree, "between what she called a '24/7' effort to 'clarify some misunderstandings,'" to give a phone interview to the Times. As though that wasn't a key part of said effort. Anyway.

I have not, I confess, combed through all of this. Doing so - comments included! - will be my reward for getting through a substantial to-do list after arriving in Paris. But I did appreciate this, from Warner: "simply by marrying a Jew, and not a Chinese man, she [Amy Chua, remember her?] worries that she is 'letting down 4,000 years of civilization.'"

Given how much emphasis many American Jews place on intermarriage as a Jewish issue, as though Jews are the only ones whose culture is worth honoring, and as though any non-Jewish partner is by definition a hearty Protestant Nebraskan or a New England WASP, or at any rate, an unhyphenated American, because really, isn't the world divided between Jews and the whites who inspire Ralph Lauren?, it's amusing to be presented with the other side of a scenario that we all know exists: minority-minority intermarriage.

UPDATE

How is an American Jewish mother that much more "Western" than an Asian-American one? I had more thoughts on this before a heck of a trip, and so will maybe muse on this later, but didn't intend to take the post down, just to update.

Mealy Diasporic tomatoes

For American Jews, "intermarriage" typically implies a particular scenario: it's the husband who's Jewish, and the non-Jewish partner represents a WASP elite, or at the very least a mainstream white Christianity devoid of all hyphenation and neurosis. A male Jewish outsider penetrating (get it? get it?) Real America. The Jewish-communal cry is for 'our' men not to be tempted away by a 'shiksa.' This may be an image with more to do with certain mid-to-late-20th-century fiction and film than with real-life, 2010 couples, but regardless, that's "intermarriage" in America.*

Not so in Israel. Apparently. The narrative there is a whole bunch of the other way 'round - the would-be intermarriers are Jewish women, not men, and the would-be non-Jewish spouses are Arabs. The genders are swapped, as is the role of the Other. (See also.)

What's bizarre about this, among other things, is that the rabbis' wives who've made opposing such marriages their cause claim to be fighting "assimilation." Meanwhile, if anyone's assimilating, it would be the Arab men who, according to the rabbis' wives, pose as Jewish: "'Yusuf turns into Yossi, Samir turns into Sami and Abed turns into Ami.'" Although I guess their claim is that Frieda becomes Fatima once the marriage takes place. I mean, who knows. The subset of Jews who'd get worked up about Jewish women and Arab men working together in a supermarket are in no place to start throwing women's-rights critiques at the Arab or Muslim world.

But I can't say I've given much thought to intermarriage in Israel. Marriage in Israel more so, because the rules are a mess, to the point that even a gung-ho Zionist looking to marry a fellow Jew might be well-advised to do the actual marrying elsewhere. But I'd always assumed that living in Israel made marrying in the default for Jews, and, based on that assumption, have encouraged theoretical secular American Jewish parents who decide to throw theoretical fits when they find out that their children they've raised with no religion or areligious Judaism whatsoever are lo and behold not committed to marrying in to consider that maybe, if this was their main concern, and they had no interest in participating in Jewish communal life here in the States, they might have considered moving to a place where it's possible to have Jewish grandchildren by default.

But I don't revel in being uninformed, particularly when it comes to topics related, however tangentially, to my research. So I Googled, and... hmm. So perhaps the intermarriage debate in Israel is just a wacko extension of the one going on in the Diaspora, as opposed to a home-grown one centered on the rare cases of Jews marrying out within Israel? This from 2009:

The Israeli government has launched a television and internet advertising campaign urging Israelis to inform on Jewish friends and relatives abroad who may be in danger of marrying non-Jews. The advertisements, employing what the Israeli media described as 'scare tactics', are designed to stop assimilation through intermarriage among young diaspora Jews by encouraging them to move to Israel. 

Unnerved yet? If not, there's also this:

One-third of Jews in the diaspora are believed to have relatives in Israel. According to the campaign's organisers, more than 200 Israelis rang a hotline to report names of Jews living abroad after the first TV advertisement was run on Wednesday. Callers left details of e-mail addresses and Facebook and Twitter accounts. The 30-second clip featured a series of missing-person posters on street corners, in subways and on telephone boxes showing images of Jewish youths above the word "Lost" in different languages.

More Googling, and the story only gets creepier, but at least it seems as though the campaign isn't representative of all (most? how much?) Israeli opinion on the matter. Anyway, I realize I'm more than a year late on this, but good on Esther Kustanowitz for pointing out how low it is to compare intermarrying Jews to people who are actually, well, missing or dead.

This is all kinds of blech. It strikes me less as racist, though, and more as tremendously counterproductive, if the goal is more Jews in Israel. The opposition to intermarriage doesn't seem to be all that different if Jews are the marginalized group, as in the Diaspora, or if the fear is that Jews will abscond with a marginalized group within Israel. If Yusuf wants to be Yossi, why not encourage this? Why take measures seemingly designed to repel the last remaining Diaspora Zionists (ahem, ahem), who had the audacity to fall in love before hopping on a Birthright party-bus. (Yes, I am slightly concerned my face made it to one of those flyers.) I mean, maybe some interfaith couples would like nothing more than to reside in Tel Aviv, subsisting on iced blended coffee and superior tomatoes and cucumbers year-round. Stories like this and I'm kind of like, fine, I will eat mealy Diasporic tomatoes, so be it.

*To those who say this cliché is ancient history, that I'm stuck hovering around 1997 culturally, well, perhaps so, but take this NYT Style list, "The 110 Things New Yorkers Talked About in 2010:" We get, on the one hand, "Chelsea Clinton marries a nice Jewish boy," and on the other, three items down, "Natalie and Benjamin." Chelsea Clinton and Natalie Portman are comparably famous, around the same age, and famous from the same age, give or take. Their dudes are both best known for being their dudes. It's not that there aren't Jewish women off with (dashing European, why not?) non-Jewish men. It's that we as a society are only interested in labeling intermarriages as such when they fit the familiar scenario. Consider also that moviegoers have yet another opportunity to meet Fockers this holiday season.