"[T]wo different Rabbis wanted sex"

As is so often the case, another newspaper comment has managed to outdo the article it's appended to. Not in, like, research, nuance, etc., but in discussion-fodder. Susan Katz Miller's essay on raising children as Christians and Jews is plenty thoughtful, if unlikely to convince anyone whose concern is Jewish demography. Meanwhile, commenter "anonymous12," Jewish on her father's side, has this to say:

As the daughter of a Jewish father who was anti-religon and a mother who was from Christian stock but had no practice, I grew up figuring it out on my own. I have always been drawn to Judaism and in my thirties, I reached for it. I have never figured out if the rejection I experienced was because I was a pretty blonde single women who looked like a Swede ("Are you here for a new husband, dear?"). After making attempts to achieve an Orthodox conversion (and being accused of being a "xtian infiltrator"), I tried a Conservative conversion and wasn't welcome, and then Reform (two different Rabbis wanted sex), I gave up and stayed away. I once went into a shul to ask a question and the two women behind the counter actually nearly broke their necks trying to answer my question to my friend who had given me a ride, because she happened to have dark features--so perhaps Jewish people could drop their own stereotypes. Over and over I experienced a complete disregard for my interest, beliefs, heritage and sincerity.

Recently I moved to a new city and made a casual connection with a very mixed congregation that is very open and liberal. The Orthodox may howl, but I promise you that unless you "look Jewish", show up to convert in order to marry a Jew you already know (no shopping), and/or look like a troll, you're not actually very welcome at all. 

Every person deserves a faith community and after years of loneliness I have a place to go for the holidays where I am welcome.

For those who don't read the block-quotes, the commenter's claim is that her prettiness and blondness prevented her from being welcome in Jewish communities. Well, except that some rabbis wanted to sleep with her. (Wasn't there a "Seinfeld" about this?) She was simply too sexily non-Jewish for all but the most progressive of congregations.

Having never experienced life as a non-Jew, or as a stunning blonde, who am I to say if that's how it might have gone? Conversion to traditionalist forms of Judaism is a notoriously difficult process. And Jews aren't somehow magically immune to broader societal racism, so if someone non-white had a tough time, unfortunately I wouldn't be surprised.

But in this case, allow me some skepticism. The sticklers for Jewish law aren't concerned with your hair color (note the number of blond Hasids! and I don't mean married women with blond wigs), just with your mother's Judaism or lack thereof. Nor do you receive automatic Jewish status if you "look like a troll." (Sheesh!) I don't believe Bar Refaeli, Natalie Portman, etc. have been excommunicated.

There's a lot of particularity out there, and some of it's easy to take personally if you don't see that it applies across the board. A bit like when people will fly to Israel and think that the airport security were sizing up them for insufficient Jewishness, when it's like, no, they do this to everyone. That, and it's so ingrained in the culture that Jewish men would be weird around Swedish-looking women that a woman who fits that description may well attribute any weirdness she does experience to her physical features. Meanwhile, says Science, men are only looking at us from the neck down anyway.

Time travel

The Atlantic posted a personal essay by a Nazi sympathizer - an American of German "Aryan" origin, as she puts it - married to a Jew. She doesn't understand why Jews make such a fuss about that nice Mr. Hitler, who's only just trying to solve Germany's Jewish problem. Those around her are fascinated by her "interracial" (as she puts it) marriage to a Jew, so she's decided to head to her typewriter and tell the world about her very exotic experience.

In case the typewriter didn't give it away, the article's not recent. It's from 1939, but it seems when the magazine first put it online, in 2011, that wasn't entirely clear. (There's now an editor's note in addition to a small-print dateline.) And so brings us the convergence of all my interests: Modern Jewish history! Historical intermarriage! Internet comments! Where oh where to begin?

-We kind of have to begin with the fact that some commenters - that is, commenters today, what with the scarcity of internet commenters in 1939 - agree with the author. As in, they think they're reading a new article, and it's one they agree with. And you know what? I can sort of see why they think it's a regular Atlantic article, not from the archives. It's a personal essay, a relationship essay, by a woman, written in a conversational tone. That to me says 2011 more than 1939. It's the agreement that's unsettling.

-Then there's the tremendous difference between what the article tells us about the author given when it was written, and what it would tell us about her if it had been written even a few years later, let alone in 2011. If you take a look at a timeline from the period, that whole invading-Poland thing hadn't happened yet. The U.S. wouldn't enter the war for quite a while. And if you consider the lag between when something was written and when it was published back in the age of print journalism, that this appeared in a January 1939 issue means it was written, almost certainly, in 1938. So plausibly before Kristallnacht. Point being, what "Nazis" meant to an American at that time, what Nazis were at that time, was radically different from what we hear when we hear that word.

-But, but, the author and her husband did argue about Nazi anti-Jewish policy! Evidently someone saw the Nazis for what they were! But here's the thing: Political anti-Semitism wasn't yet associated with death camps, what with that having not happened yet. By 1938, even, it was plenty clear Nazis weren't fond of Jews, but not remotely clear what they were going to do about it. When you read today about a regime with a repressive policy towards gays or Roma, you may disapprove or protest, but you're probably not in all-out panic that gas chambers are being set up. While it would have been a nice gesture for the author to condemn a regime abroad that had it in for her husband, her level of callousness isn't as extreme as it seems, reading the essay today.

-If the essay is about Jewish assimilation in America, it's also, in a more subtle way, about German-American particularity. The author describes a very specific kind of family culture, something about vacationing in the mountains and not having a warm relationship with relatives, as if that's just American, which, no. I can think of plenty of groups, apart from Jews, who'd be more "Jewish" than "German" in this regard. (See: many groups of non-German Catholics.) I venture to say there'd have been culture clash had this woman married into an Italian or a Belgian family.

-While reading the essay is a lesson in avoiding anachronism, it's also a reminder that, well, that there's a reason 'some of my best friends are X' has taken on the meaning it has. It's entirely possible for your best friend or spouse to be X, and for you to be intensely bigoted against that group. While we have no reason to think the author would have supported the Final Solution, there's not much of a sense, either, that being married to a Jew in some way stopped her from holding anti-Semitic views typical of her era. Or even above and beyond. She has quite the deeply-theorized anti-Semitism going, and has clearly given The Jew a lot of thought:

'But look at the matter from the political side,' I advise Ben. 'When a Swede or a Chinese settles down in a foreign land, such as the United States, the Swede makes haste to become a thorough American—at any rate he lets his children become thorough Americans; the Chinese, realizing that this is impossible, lives aloofly in Chinatown, minds his own business, and keeps out of American political affairs. The Jew, however, wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Like the Chinese, he clings to his own race, culture, and tradition; he trains his children to cling to these just as tenaciously. Then, like the Swede, he sets out to annex all the privileges of Americanism. He wants to rise to the top of the Gentile social structure, to wield power in Gentile politics of the community, state and nation. He wants to be left alone, but he also wants the country in which he lives to take good care of him. He wants to have full citizenship in that country, yet retain his citizenship in the Jewish nation.

I think the proper response here, the only one that can properly, and in a nuanced way, comment on this is: oy. 

For non-blonds UPDATED

By now, everyone's seen the story of the blonde girl found in a Roma home. Commenter Quasimodo asked for my thoughts, which I started getting into in the comments, but this may merit a whole entire post of its own:

-Let's please not start assuming blond children of not-blond families are somehow suspect. This, for so many reasons. Such as: Adoption happens across ethnic lines. Lots of light-haired children grow up to be dark-haired adults. Police of the world, don't start swooping in and removing blond children from families to which they belong.

UPDATE: Too late, via.

-There isn't some great, global 'blondness belt' where everyone's rich, extending from comfortably socialized Scandinavia to New England WASPs, Southern belles, and California surfers. There's also this little thing called Russia. (Closer to home: Appalachia. Also: the "Gypsies" of Ireland.) Other Eastern European countries as well. This matters in terms of how we try to make sense of this incident. It's being discussed as if there's obviously some Western middle-class or wealthy family whose missing child this is. When the full story may - in any number of ways, some more upsetting than others - relate to the family of origin being poor and desperate. Of course, there could well be an impoverished Russian family whose child was abducted, or a rich British one, say, who for some reason dropped their baby by the doorstep. But point is, 'blond' doesn't say as much about socioeconomic or global origins as we might think.

-We don't want to overshoot the mark and start talking about the privilege of abductees who happen to be pretty blonde girls. Abducted is still abducted, and is still unthinkably worse than being dark-haired and/or plain in the comfort of your own home. Same deal if the abductee comes from a well-off family. This came up (where else?) in a Jezebel thread about Elizabeth Smart, with commenters debating whether maybe the real message of the story was that access to services for the abducted isn't as equal as we'd like. When something truly horrific happens to someone rich, it's still horrific. It's not as if being abducted from your childhood bedroom at knifepoint by a deranged would-be cult leader and getting raped by him and abused by his wife is an ordinary poor or working-class experience, either.

-Every time a minority is accused of refusing to integrate, I get suspicious. Are we sure it isn't that the majority won't have them? This, in response to anti-Roma bigots who - like everyone who's been to a European tourist destination - has a story, but feel compelled to extrapolate from that story that they were mugged or near-mugged not because Roma have no other options in some areas, but because they're just like that. When looking at issues of integration, what matters isn't just whether the government has some plan in place involving schooling or who knows. It's also how a minority's received socially.

-Can we please not make this a discussion about how those terrible, selfish Jews insist on claiming that they were WWII's only victims? Who exactly are the Jews not aware that Roma, gays, and the disabled also had the Nazis to contend with? Or aware but denying this? I'll grant that what we learned in Hebrew school or whatever might have been about roundups of "Gypsies," so there may be some misuse of terminology, if no more among Jews than the general population. But really. It would be nice if, every time the Roma came up, anti-Semites didn't come out of the woodwork to hold forth on how Jews think they're so special, with their fancy Holocaust. On behalf of The Jews, I'll say that what we don't appreciate is when other aspects of that period of history are brought up in such a way as to deny the Jewish experience. As in, without an 'actually Jews didn't have it so bad' angle tagged onto the discussion of the suffering of other groups.

-While this really doesn't have anything to do with Jews directly, it does bring to mind the blood libel. Not that this couple was falsely accused of having a kid they hadn't officially adopted (that may be right), nor that they were at all accused of planning to serve the kid for dinner. (They do stand accused, by Internet commenters, of prostituting her out, based on no particular evidence as far as I can tell.) But just this idea that there's something particularly squicky about a blond child being lost to the blond community, and something particularly nefarious going on in the non-blond population.

Concealing, "shrinking"

Man, I wish I were still guest-blogging over at Autumn's, because I think this may be more for her audience than mine, but here goes:

There's this thing in beauty writing where the woman recommending whichever product or approach must not have the 'problem' being 'corrected.' See: Gwyneth Paltrow's diet advice. See also: a woman without under-eye circles learns how to conceal under-eye circles. And also: a wrinkle-cream recommendation from a young woman who "[hasn't] started to think about that yet."

Somehow I relate this to "Japanese" hair-straightening. There's this sense in which the women in the market for advice on how to fix whichever perceived flaw will be drawn to images of women who don't have it, or who barely do, or who wouldn't be thought to. I suppose that's just how advertising works, period. But if there was ever a moment to get all Naomi Wolf about the beauty industry, it would be when advice on whichever miracle product, presented as ostensibly editorial, can only be given via the images of a woman on whom nothing changes. Like, if the thing worked, it would be demonstrated on a woman who didn't so visibly not need it.

(Oh, and Fourtinefork, thanks to a big-enough drugstore.com coupon, I got the Nars concealer. It's OK, not miraculous.)

*****

This Upworthy video has been making the viral rounds. It's a young woman's slam poem (just ignore the background snapping and groaning) about men, women, and body image. And I'm having trouble deciding what to make of it. On the one hand, if I were the sort who snapped and groaned to express agreement with the sentiment, I'd be snapping and groaning with the best of 'em to what Lily Myers has to say. (Instead, I've long since misplaced the black turtleneck I think I once owned.)

On the other, if the poem is indeed strictly autobiographical - which, maybe it's not, but every reference seems to be about it being "about her family" - it's some fine reverse-parental-overshare. While the ethics of spilling about one's parents and grandparents are different from those of spilling about one's kids, it seemed a very personal glimpse of mom at home, one she might not want shared with the positive-thinking masses. And, she called her male relatives fat. While Myers makes a good point about the difference between male and female body-image concerns (while at the same time making a much bigger point about gender and assertiveness - thus the strength of the poem), it's not as if men don't have any. I can't imagine any man I know being pleased to hear himself called rotund in a viral video.

But is this her family? Or is it a poem, and therefore fiction? College-student slam poetry, where my literary-analysis tools fail me.

Jews' "sheer sexiness," and the insist-too-much paradox

At various points in the gargantuan stack of paper called my dissertation, I needed to cite something to do with modern-day intermarriage panic. Because the way it works, in academic writing, is that the fact that I know from living and breathing that the American Jewish community has long concerned itself with this topic isn't sufficient. That's not how scholarship works, nor should it. You can't footnote 'Take my word for it.' So in the process, I ended up finding that the whole 'intermarriage finishes what Hitler started' line comes up more often in references to anti-intermarriage sentiment (such as) than in the anti-intermarriage articles themselves. It's not that there isn't panic, just that it's often less hysterical than its more hysterical extremes.

In any case, if only I'd seen this sooner. I've now read Jack Wertheimer's essays and a couple of the others, but will need to read the lot of it. Mosaic Magazine (which... how had I just found this?) has an very useful array of the range of standard Jewish opinion on the matter, albeit the most informed and intelligent array one is likely to find. (And hey, a UChicago student is among the participants!) 

I have, as you might imagine, exactly ten trillion things to say in response even just to the parts of this series I have read, and maybe five trillion ideas of ways and places to pitch whichever aspect of my response doesn't get channeled into the academic version of this that I'm also working on. And I suppose, Petey, I also have thoughts on the new finding that Jews are actually Northern Italian, although this is really a single thought, one I'd already expressed on Facebook, which is that this explains why my apartment is basically the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, Casa Della Bisou. But in the interest of not blathering on altogether forever, I'm going to narrow this post down to the awkward question that always comes up with this topic: How, or really if, Jews who oppose intermarriage should try to eroticize endogamy.

Sylvia Barack Fishman, probably the leading scholar in the field of contemporary Jewish intermarriage, writes: "Individuals, families, and communities need to show, by example and by word, why Jewishness matters—to create in sons and daughters an appreciation of the appeal, and the sheer sexiness, of Jewish men and women." This came up on my Birthright trip as well, when the group leader asked the young men in the auditorium to behold the beauty of Jewish women. The first part - "why Jewishness matters" makes sense, but the second? There's nothing like a well-meaning authority figure telling you that someone - or some group - should do something for you erotically for that not to happen. While I personally have no trouble believing Jewish men can be good-looking, somehow the statement that I, as a Jewish woman, ought to think this summons the image of Brian Krakow - the guy you know you should like, but can't get yourself to. 

Which brings us to the problem with addressing intermarriage with more outreach along existing lines. As it stands, Jewish events aimed at the maybe-not-yet-married age demographic are virtually always thinly-veiled attempts at matchmaking. College students are invited to attend Jewish "singles" events, as though one can be an urban American single at 19. What if you just wanted to see an Israeli movie, or learn about the Dreyfus Affair, and if you happened to be unattached and met someone romantically, so be it? Why couldn't it all be a bit more casual? College itself, for instance, doesn't feel, while you're there, like an elaborate plot to mate you off to someone on a similar socioeconomic path.

Mostly, I'm just skeptical that unless we return to an era of something drastically less casual - arranged or quasi-arranged marriages, or unless all Jews up and moved to Israel, any sort of large-scale change in this area could occur. Points of contact among Jews can be increased, but without a full-on secession from the mainstream community, socialization will continue between Jews and non-Jews. And if every time Jews are placed in close proximity, there needs to be this overt now go mate vibe, a certain number of Jews with an interest in Jewish culture end up not going to what they fear will be a meat market. 

It would be much simpler to say (as used to be said) that marriage is about reproducing the community, forging allegiances between families, and whether or not you find your spouse "sexy" is irrelevant. But once spouses are to be chosen on the basis of individual desire - which is to say, once a baseline of chemistry needs to be there before either party even considers compatibility in other areas, not that chemistry trumps incompatibility - it's only natural that the conversation about how to stop intermarriage would veer towards the ill-fated project of asking Jews to find one another hot. 

Flannel's many returns, and other items

-I don't think there are enough articles about the woes of academia. By way of forcing a connection between the two latest, while Eileen Pollack's story is plenty interesting and at times quite convincing, I'm not sure Exhibit A of sexism is one's professors not encouraging one to pursue a doctorate. In my experience - and this is kind of what Pollack finds - this just isn't something professors do, and why? Because academia's a risky choice - yes, even in STEM fields, perhaps there all the more so, considering the amount of money someone with such skills could make elsewhere. It's like converting to Judaism - you have to be turned away, but persist.

Of course there isn't spontaneously this interest in pursuing a PhD distributed equally across the population (thus the noticeable overrepresentation of grad students whose parents hold PhDs in the very same field), so there's still the argument that even if outreach to undergrads isn't the norm, it needs to happen with respect to some populations, women among them. Which again, perhaps so, but wouldn't the appropriate thing to do be to steer the kind of women who might have gotten physics PhDs but it never occurred to them into management consulting, say, and away from gendered-female floundering? How much of the diversity issue in STEM academia comes from the fact that if you're talented in one of those areas and from a marginalized population, you might be more tempted to convert those skills into something more lucrative?

-This is, I suppose, the standard defense of Jewish intermarriage, and it (indirectly) gets the essential right: intermarriage is the result of assimilation, not some kind of act of assimilation on the part of previously isolated Jews. All I'll add, in a busman's-holiday, contrarian way, is a reminder that high rates of intermarriage can evidently coincide with high levels of endemic anti-Semitism.

-How is flannel "back"? I ask because I remember (and have Uniqlo-purchased evidence of) the flannel revival of maybe four or five years ago. If flannel was so-very-now in 2009, isn't 2013 too soon for a new revival? Is this about a) shorter attention spans, such that we are now reviving things from a few years ago, or b) a different kind of flannel - the previous was hipster, farmer-chic, while the current version involves 1990s edginess gone Fashion. I've never known this to happen before - for a trend likely still in everyone's closet from the last time around coming back, but with a different framework.

Complexities of desire

-The NYT deems a recent murder of a white man as not racially motivated for the following reasons:

A closer look at the shooting shows it was not about race. One of the three suspects was white, another had a white mother and a third had many white friends, including a girl he had been dating. 

Yes, if one of the alleged offenders is also white, and there was no other detail suggesting racial animosity, this would be a strange one to investigate as a hate crime. But what interests me here is the notion that someone can't be racist against a particular race if they have a parent who's that race, if some of their friends are, or if their significant other is. As came up on occasion in my dissertation, anti-Semites with Jewish lovers or spouses were plenty common in 19th-century French fiction, and not unheard-of in life. And the more familiar American example: do we really think all black people with white ancestry are the product of unions born of interracial understanding? And, you know, the some of my best friends thing?

-So, the first Prudie letter here. While there is, once again, far more going on than the angle I'm focusing on, what's interesting for WWPD persistent-motif purposes is the way female desire sometimes gets expressed as the desire to be desired. The backstory for the too-busy-for-links/the "Dear Prudence" boycotters: a married woman has this outrageous, insatiable sex drive, but because her husband isn't available every five minutes or whatever, she fears that he doesn't find her attractive. Mismatched libido - or maybe it's just that she's not particularly monogamous, it's not clear (the "I fantasize constantly about having sex with others" bit, and the cheating on her first husband one...), but in any case, why does she articulate this as being about how pretty she is? Is this, as Prudie concludes, because of this woman's "shriveled and needy ego"? While I second Prudie's suggestion that the woman seek help, this seems only an extreme example of something that goes on even among the not-unhinged: women following whichever script it is that asks them to articulate their own urges for beautiful (which is subjective) men as a wish to be thought beautiful by men.

Yom Kippur assortment

-UChicago's grand tradition of producing graduate students, confirmed.

-Unlike apparently everyone else on Goodreads, but like the friend who recommended it to me in the first place, I really enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot. I'd read and liked Middlesex a while back, but don't remember it well enough to compare the two. What inspired me to read it now was how often "the marriage plot" came up in my dissertation defense, and it started to occur to me that I had only the most general sense of what that meant. (Jane Austen, etc.)

What I hadn't known - and what may have made me like the book slightly less - was how much of the thing would be set, like, right where I was sitting as I read most of it. No, not just in the same town. The same academic community's housing. I hadn't had any idea that Eugenides lived in this town, but knowing that he does, it makes much more sense. What's the opposite of 'escapist'? Is it time for me to discover science fiction?

-Given that at least one of my readers comes here for lipstick discussions, let me state for the record that the Bite Beauty lipstick in Pomegranate is the perfect red. Less because of the shade - they all look more or less alike - than because of the texture. Goes on great, but more importantly, fades to a tint, rather than to bits of red lipstick clumping on chapped-ness you hadn't known you had, and that might well have been created by the lipstick itself. And blended with the dark 1990s red, becomes the perfect Carrie Brownstein shade. 

Rhoda Studies 101

So I've now watched from the second (not the first - it's unavailable) episode of the notorious "JAP" Bravo reality show, up through I'm not saying what number. Possibly too late to write about it for a thing that isn't WWPD, unless I find a timeless angle, which... I think I might, so maybe more later, elsewhere. But for now:

The first thing I noticed: the "Princesses of Long Island" - most of them, at least - retain their original noses. A definite change from earlier generations of the same milieu. Is it that they really own their Jewishness? Is it just some kind of Ashkenazi-Sephardic divide, with the former (for some obvious historical reasons I could think of) more likely to have undergone this procedure?

I point this out not to gratuitously bring up noses, but because the original-nose-retention (in the midst of a great deal of artifice otherwise) seems somehow emblematic of the show. The whole unapologetically-Jewish thing. A few seconds hardly go by before we're reminded that the women - who seem basically like reality-TV women everywhere, and who one half expects to start speaking in Essex accents - are Jewish. Did they mention recently that they're Jewish? This, despite only one of the women being a practicing Jew, or seeming at all plugged into anything culturally Jewish, for that matter. The others have evidently been instructed by producers to play up the Jewish angle, to drop various Hebrew expressions that don't make any sense in the context, and seem incredibly forced. One asks all men she meets if they're Jewish, in a way that seems beyond artificial. So basically the same relationship to Jewish-Americanness as "Jersey Shore" had/has (?) to Italian-Americanness. Or the TV-show version of this.

Maybe the show is anti-anti-Semitic. It represents Jews as big drinkers and not remotely clever or intellectual. Overanalyzing everything? Overachieving? Overrepresenting the group in graduate schools? Not so much! Oh, and if the "JAP" is frigid, well, our pal Erica clears that up.

Should I be offended that this show kinda-sorta claims to represent me, a Jewish woman about their age, living not on Long Island, fine, but in New Jersey, which might be exactly the same thing? (There was an intro shot of a tristate-area strip mall that brought me right back to my most recent supermarket trip. And I'm half thinking, 'but I just bought groceries, how am I back there?') Probably. I'm not, but only because of a likely misguided belief that no one would imagine I belonged to that subculture. I'm about 50 primping-steps away from being socially acceptable in that world. But to someone from well outside it, by virtue of being American, Jewish, female, and not a complete hippie, I may well read as a "JAP." Which is why all American Jewish women effectively have to find this stereotype offensive.

As with all minorities, we're probably all the same to outsiders, yet small internal differences seem immense to us. Growing up, I virtually never encountered this subculture for any length of time (once at summer camp, at 8, and then not again until Birthright Israel, at 23), other than to have it drilled into me from day one that I was not and should not ever be that. That princessy-ness was simultaneously anti-feminist and repulsive to men. Not sure how I came to grow up with this message - it seems to more often come from Israeli-American communities. Maybe an urban vs. suburban thing? A clash between those with more cultural capital than economic and those in the reverse situation?

There's a kind of mutual class snobbery between whatever the thing I was brought up as and whatever that is. The only instance of bullying I can remember from my childhood involves that sleepaway camp, where I was harangued for not blowdrying my hair (I was 8!), and having clothing that clashed (is that still a thing?). But the very same Jewish women who are most attuned to issues of gender-and-marginalization are probably the ones most wary of coming across as "JAPs," despite this being nothing more than a gendered stereotype, with intersectionality written all over it. It's complicated.

As Jessica Grose pointed out, this show really harps on the age of the participants, displaying their age with their name, which is not a normal thing done on reality shows. (We don't get the ages of their dates, parents...) Grose sees this as highlighting that these grown women live like children, which they do. But as Rachel Arons picks up on, the age is what brings drama to the proceedings. Time is running out. They're all on the cusp of 30. Which has tremendous significance for them, because they need to be married by that age. The moment all the women are 30, some kind of timer goes off.

Which... I don't even know. That view is hardly unique to this one subculture. But they're stuck in a frustrating middle-ground, culturally. Traditional enough that it's a tragedy if they're 29 and single (and that it would be tragic if they married out), but not enough that someone in the community has it together to find them spouses.

And then you get the show's Snooki (the very short, quirky one) getting quasi-proposed to by her father, with a diamond ring, with her mother present, to mark her 30th birthday. One of those reality-TV moments you can only hope was scripted.

What is anti-Semitic about the show, I suppose, is that it perpetuates the idea of the perpetually single-and-desperate Jewish woman, the one whose very Jewishness somehow rules out the possibility of her pairing off, yet makes her all the more keen to do so ASAP. (You'd know about this if you'd taken Rhoda Studies 101.) The single woman in American mainstream culture virtually is a Jewish woman, so thoroughly has that cliché caught on. A certain New York-area accent and 'Semitic' appearance is shorthand for 'perennially single-and-doesn't-want-to-be sidekick'.

And yet! Women in this subculture do get married. Happens every day, I'd imagine. There are, after all, men of the same subculture, who contrary to what Philip Roth might have you believe, tend to prefer their female equivalents, and not to be running off with low-maintenance WASPs (whom they'd be meeting where, exactly?). These particular women are, one gets the sense, unusual in their milieu for still being single at their age. A subset of a subculture. Yet the show's message is, look at how repulsive Jewish women are to the opposite sex! Who would want anything to do with them? When it's like, a) not all Jewish women are anything like this, and b) of the ones who are, this does not seem to be an impediment to pairing off.

"Lovers," mason jars, and internships

A weekend! No observations of Ivy reunion rituals, but fun all the same:

-Saw "Lovers and Other Strangers," a 1968 play (and 1970 movie I'm now dying to see - with Cloris Leachman aka Phyllis, and Diane Keaton's film debut) co-written by Renée Taylor aka Sylvia Fine. Fran's mother on "The Nanny," and thus the performer behind one of the best quotes of sitcom history, or so I thought in 2004. (Almost nine years have passed, but I still think it's pretty great.) I have next to no knowledge of theater - community or otherwise - but the acting was quite impressive. The sound technique that involved draping microphones over the cast's foreheads was somewhat distracting, but as if I'd know how one deals with performance acoustics, so all is forgiven.

Like I said, theater performance, I have no idea. The script is something else. The overall mood of the play was very much early-1970s sitcom. Which meant both the rhythm and world of comedy I know well (Rhoda Morgenstern could have popped by at any minute) and a certain dated-ness to the proceedings. Somehow one can look past that sort of thing when watching "The Bob Newhart Show" on the couch. But in public, in 2013, it becomes extra-salient. Things like a scandal over whether a woman will or won't spend the night with a guy she's just met, the obstacle being her commitment to second-wave feminism (and general women-are-like-so nuttiness). Or: a man furious that his wife has taken a job outside the home. The play is a series of vignettes, set - in this production - in different years, from the late 1960s up to the present. The "2002" vignette included a cake from "Whole Foods," but was otherwise set entirely in the "All in the Family" universe.

But most jarring, dated-ness-wise, was the casual homophobia of an era before Stonewall, AIDS, or same-sex marriage. In one vignette, a woman calls her ex-marine husband a "faggot" when he refuses to have sex with her that night. In another, it is debated whether or not a well-known performer from long ago was a "fairy." In neither of these cases are gay people being directly insulted - the characters are being (gently) ridiculed for these conversations. But in both, it's just... insulting in a way that wouldn't go over in 2013. Which brings up that WWPD persistent motif: the tendency of writing from earlier eras to be offensive by today's standards, and the question of what to do with that information. I'm used to looking at this question as it relates to novels (specifically 19th century French novels and their remarkably nasty representations of Jews, no matter the author - looking at you, Zola), but it's more complicated, I now see, when it comes to performing text written in a not-so-enlightened Then.

Here's what this production did with that information: They made the final vignette, "2013," one about cold feet before a wedding, about a lesbian couple. Because it's 2013! There are weddings with two brides! While the sentiment was admirable, the execution somewhat less so. It was a bit of men-are-like-so sitcom humor about male fear of commitment. While there are no doubt lesbians who fear commitment, this twist was so far beyond the sophistication of the script that it took a while to sort out that this even was a same-sex couple, and not a couple girlfriends-in-the-pre-enlightened-sense chatting about another wedding. As in, it's not that this was unrealistic, but that the universe of the play was one of clingy dingbat (R.I.P.) women and macho, philandering men.

Anyway, those who know more about theater than I do (Flavia?) can weigh in, if interested, about how such issues are generally/ideally approached.

-Went to Brooklyn Flea Philly. It did indeed seem much like Brooklyn Flea Brooklyn, which is to say, a lot of curated knick-knacks such that, if you're there to shop, you'd perhaps be better off at a thrift store. But the point is obviously people-watching, which was if anything better at the Philadelphia equivalent. Places other than New York just have space, so around the market itself were a large number of outdoor cafés. I had heard tell of Philadelphia hipsters - that Philadelphia had a Williamsburg/Greenpoint/Bushwick - but my prior experience of Northern Liberties brought me to what must have been the wrong edge of it. Wrong as in, there was just nothing much there, maybe two cafés over many blocks, otherwise just... residential? This time, though, I got a sense of the full scope of the area, and... I wasn't in Princeton anymore! I had a Mason jar iced Stumptown coffee and a lemon bar five times the size one would have been in New York. Fabulous.

-Less fabulous: Thomas Friedman's new thing where he promotes some start-up he has a personal family connection to, and somehow uses that as a springboard for advising Young People Today to take unpaid internships as possible, to do the lowliest tasks for no pay, and to "add value" to companies that can't quite get it together to pay you anything. This is going to be missed, because it emerged the same time as the more compelling you're-being-watched information, but it's still a big deal:

Since so many internships are unpaid these days, added Sedlet, there is a real danger that only “rich kids” can afford them, which will only widen our income gaps. The key, if you get one, he added, is to remember “that companies don’t want generalists to help them think big; they want people who can help them execute” and “add value.”

Interesting jump there.

This is also particularly delightful: "Internships are increasingly important today, they [Friedman's family friends] explained, because skills are increasingly important in the new economy and because colleges increasingly don’t teach the ones employers are looking for."

There's of course no evidence provided that unpaid internships provide any particular skills, or - more pertinent - that employers view them as work experience. By all means, work for free! (I.e., pay to work!) Why? Because it might mean you'll get a contact. (It would be altogether entitled to expect it to lead to a job.) Networking!

But also: when was the Golden Age of colleges as vocational school? I know this is supposed to be code for 'students today just drink, sleep in, and learn far-left drivel', but it's not as if the critical thinking and Great Books of a traditional liberal-arts education provide the skills needed to become a "product manager," let alone to know that such a job exists.

It just does seem awfully convenient to define today's college grads as uniquely incapable of entering the workforce without one or multiple stints in unpaid employment.

Why fiction is better

Sung J. Woo, a novelist, wrote the most recent "Modern Love," and it's one of the better ones. It's about his Korean mother's insistence that he continue to eat her food, even while in his own home. With his wife. Who's also cooking. It's a new spin on a great many old subjects: food as love or control, the immigrant experience, the conflict of modern and traditional ways of life, in-law tensions. It's a sweet story, and while there's the awkwardness that makes for good humor writing, no one's dirty laundry, by the standards of this genre, is exposed.

It does leave one big question open - why doesn't his wife just join him in eating his mother's delicacies? - but you can read between the lines. The wife doesn't love her mother-in-law's cooking. Either she doesn't like Korean food, or she doesn't like this Korean food, or the fact that she herself "has been a food writer and restaurant critic" means that she has specific enough ideas about food that she knows what she likes, or wants to try many different things, or at any rate doesn't want to commit to however many decades of this particular woman's cooking. Or it's a symbolic thing, and however delicious the leftovers, the wife doesn't like the idea of her husband's childhood extending into his own middle age. Whatever the reason, it's out of manners, presumably, that he's not overtly spelling this out.

I will admit that my first thought, as I was reading the essay, was that if this guy, who lives not that far away in NJ, has some succulent Korean leftovers he can't finish, particularly if there are dumplings involved, I could help out with that. But that was clearly not the big-picture point of the essay. 

Clear to me, at least. Not to other readers, at least not to the subset of readers who feel compelled to comment on the essay itself. They read the thing not as a story, but as a man offering up his life to be judged. And judgment - "Modern Love" allows comments! - is forthcoming:

Why doesn't he have more respect for his elderly mother? Why isn't he just grateful that his mother is alive? Why doesn't he adopt a rescue dog that will help him with the leftovers? (I don't believe any dog, however procured, should be fed kimchi, or spicy and/or cabbage dishes from any cuisine.) Why doesn't he donate the food, as if there's some obvious place one brings homemade leftovers. Why doesn't he give the leftovers to his co-workers? (Maybe because he's a novelist?) Why does the wife insist on cooking, when someone else would happily do so for her, for free? Why doesn't the wife learn how to make Korean dishes from her mother-in-law? How dare she squander this opportunity? (Does no one else notice that the elephant in the room is, the wife doesn't like her mother-in-law's cooking?) And so many more. 

Readers react, in other words, as if Woo had written a letter to an advice columnist, and is asking for the appropriate course of action. And you can't really blame them, because Woo has, in this case, offered up not his psyche channeled into fiction, but a story that purports to be the utmost truth about his own life and his own motivations. Readers of "Modern Love" can't be expected to - aren't being asked to - take some sophisticated literary-analysis approach, in which they realize that even in 'autobiography,' there's on the one hand the writer the person, on the other, the character created by the writer, a character that shares his name and biographical details, but that is at best a huge distortion of the real-life individual, impacted by various biases - that of the author, who (not Woo especially - just all of us humans) wants to be liked, that of the author who's trying to tell a compelling story, and more. No, the essay is to be read as an email from a friend about a situation he's dealing with. Your job isn't to assess the prose of the email, the narrative, but rather to tell your friend to get a grip.

Fiction, meanwhile, gets around this. Not only does it not purport to tell about real people. It's also intentionally ambiguous. There is no answer to how we should advise a character to behave. We are supposed to sympathize with flawed characters. We are often meant to sympathize primarily with one character, and not to be losing sleep over whether that character offended the mother-character by not eating her leftovers.

All of that said, I am interested in these leftovers.

Not so post-racial after all

-Count me among those who had no idea that in 1887, some Germans founded a colony in Paraguay based around the idea of Jews being awful. 1887. I need to remember that not everyone else is over-steeped in modern Jewish history, and thus not everyone is thinking, huh, so a year after Drumont's La France juive. Hitler didn't take power until 1933. The Dreyfus Affair? 1894-1906. 1887! Asylum-seekers, it seems, from the Jewish menace. Which is an often-forgotten angle, right? Anti-Semites weren't - aren't - just people who think they're better than Jews. They're people who think they're being oppressed by Jews.

-A reader sent me this story about being Jewish in a U.S. prison. It should be read in conjunction with Nick's post here (discussed here). Sample passage:

It is an inviolate rule that different races may not break bread together under any circumstances. Violating this rule leads to harsh consequences. If you eat at the same table as another race, you'll get beaten down. If you eat from the same tray as another race, you'll be put in the hospital. And if you eat from the same food item as another race, that is, after another race has already taken a bite of it, you can get killed. This is one area where even the heads don't have any play. 

This makes it difficult for me, of course, to fit into the chow hall. Jews, as we all know, are not white but imposters who don white skin and hide inside it for the purpose of polluting and taking over the white race. The skinheads simply can't allow me to eat with them: that would make them traitors of the worst kind — race traitors! But my milky skin and pasty complexion, characteristic of the Eastern European Ashkenazi, make it impossible for me to eat with other races who don't understand the subtleties of my treachery and take me for just another [white person]. So the compromise is that I may sit at certain white tables after all the whites have finished eating.

There's a whole lot to say about this, but one interesting takeaway is the reminder that anti-Semitism is listed separately from racism for a reason. The problem for anti-Semites is sometimes that Jews look different (the affront to blondness - see above), but it's also sometimes that Jews don't look different.

-And in more "traditional" racism, the cure to the late-20s, where-is-my-life-going Westerners' blues is apparently treating African women and children like zoo animals. Writes a British advice columnist:

Visiting some of the most challenged areas in Africa, rechristened by Bob Geldof the "Luminous Continent", you're surprised by an infectious degree of joy among women and children that's in direct contrast to their circumstances. Whether it's at a refugee camp in Chad or a malarial ward in Mozambique, kids kicking an air-filled plastic bag in lieu of a football in the slums of Nairobi or market women in central Monrovia packing up after an 18-hour day, the laughter is irresistible. 

Here we struggle to achieve similar degrees of happiness, pop antidepressants to get through the day and squander time living vicariously through soap-opera storylines and celebrity elevation and decline.

While snap-out-of-it advice may have been called for in this particular situation (or not - some funks are deeper and more biochemical than others), it's unclear what this digression adds, yet abundantly clear what it detracts.

Such good English

The Americanness or lack thereof of the still-living accused Boston bomber is really several different questions. The first was straightforward enough: who is this person? And when that wasn't known, one possibility of course was that he and his brother arrived from abroad specifically to carry out a terrorist act. That's not an unreasonable or xenophobic outcome to list among the possibilities when news reports emerge connecting Chechnya with an act that sure looked/looks like terrorism.

But once we did learn the story - a 19-year-old American citizen of Chechen origin who'd been in the States since age 8 - it seemed to me that this guy is of course American. Perhaps (well, definitely, assuming allegations are true) a terrible American, a genocidal maniac or a pushover prepared to become one to impress his older brother. But yes, sorry, an American. Who isn't an American 'of X origin'?

Which is why I couldn't figure out the coverage. He speaks (or spoke - seems he's not saying much) good, American English without an accent? Well how on earth else was he going to speak? He had lots of American friends? Yes, as does tend to happen if someone attends school for that many years in the U.S. This wasn't some kind of elaborate cover for a future act of terrorism, some kind of disguise hiding his authentic self. Presumably, given that timeline, this was his authentic self.

And I'm reminded of the expression, "an assimilated Jew," a phrase that suggests that all Jews, no matter their upbringing, start from some fundamental, 100%-Jewish state, and any evidence they give of having any other primary identity (American, transgender, vegetarian), anything they wear that isn't Hasidic garb, is some kind of sneaky artifice. This young man is not like an American. He is an American. One who all signs point to, just committed a truly atrocious crime.

The question, it would seem, is then whether this crime was a way of announcing treason, announcing intent to wage war on behalf of a foreign entity. But that should be a question, not a default assumption when a criminal is... white but not Christian? White but with a foreign-seeming name? Someone with relatives living abroad?

And then there's been this other aspect of the coverage-broadly-defined, about how the attackers were ungrateful to this country that welcomed them. I mean, if you've lived somewhere since childhood, is this even a matter of gratitude, or gratitude above and beyond what anyone born in the U.S. might feel? Should your debt to America be different from that of someone born here? Should you be on best behavior above and beyond the usual? Put another way: it's evil to commit a crime of this nature no matter what. But is it somehow more evil if you happened to have been born on foreign soil?

The obvious issues this brings up are how they go about this specific trial, and immigration policy more broadly. But the less-obvious, no-less-important one is national identity. Who gets to count as all-American? (The older brother's wife, says a British tabloid.) Given how many Americans have hyphenated identities, given the negligible cultural difference between someone born in the States to foreign parents and someone who came over as a young child, where exactly is this line to be drawn, if not at citizenship?

Do we really want to slide into being like so many (all?) other countries, in which one is a "foreigner" regardless of one's papers, regardless of how many generations your family's been in the country, assuming one is not of the majority religion and ethnicity? Do we want to be like Europe, where if your family isn't from that square kilometer since forever, you may be blamed for failing to assimilate, when in fact you were never in a million years going to be allowed let alone encouraged to integrate? No we don't - my pride in America comes largely from the fact that we don't do this. Or: of course we do this, but not nearly so much as other places, because of our (almost) everyone's descended from immigrants heritage, because of such things as birthright citizenship, and simply because political correctness here - and this is a point in PC's favor - discourages claims that only one group of citizens counts as authentic. Our relative lack of radicalized Westerners-of-foreign-origin comes precisely from our (relative) willingness to accept that anyone can be American. Good luck with that in France and so forth.

Which brings us to a certain complicating factor. Who exactly is this unhyphenated majority? Who are these Real Americans whose crimes might be blamed on such unhyphenated-white-guy concerns as mental illness (not that only white Christian men suffer from it - merely that this is the go-to explanation for bad behavior when one cannot point to the inner city or Islam) and hatred of liberals? I do like the woman who's so American that she wants no. more. foreigners., but she's from, oh, Greece. And then there's the inconvenient fact that one of the victims was a Chinese national here as a graduate student. Being honest-to-goodness foreign is no shield against being murdered in America for representing wholesome all-Americana... if, again, this attack was even about hurting America-as-a-nation.

Clearly, powers-that-be must investigate all angles, and sure, maybe it turns out they were part of some larger operation. But in terms of how we talk about it in the mean time, might something be gained by referring to this as an act of domestic terrorism? Not attributing to two evil doofuses (or "losers," as their amazing broigus uncle put it) something as profound as an act of war.

Intermarriage Studies

Sometimes an author's name's familiar, but you don't know why. If you have a touch of the graphomania, you can search your own since-2004 bloggings, and you're likely to dig up something. So it went with Naomi Schaefer Riley. Anyway, here she is! She's the writer who was fired from the Chronicle of Higher Education after she declared the field of Black Studies preposterous on account of the dissertations it produces... dissertations she hadn't read, and that sounded unremarkable, certainly no worse than dissertations in other fields.

Anyway, if the retort to her last intervention into the national conversation was that her own husband is black, she's now able to use the very same husband in (preemptive?) response to criticism of her latest project: a dire warning about intermarriage in America. But it's OK, because she herself is intermarried. (Anyone who thinks marrying out means overall positive attitudes towards intermarriage, let alone towards the group into which one has married, might want to check out Drieu la Rochelle's 1939 novel Gilles. An admittedly extreme example.) Whatever the case, the important fact here is that we can safely assume Riley would approve of my dissertation topic. (French Studies with a hint of Jewish Studies.)

While I haven't yet been able to track down her book, I did read her op-ed in the NYT, presenting her findings. Which leaves me with a bunch of questions to have at the ready for the book itself:

1) Why should "secular Americans" be upset that interfaith marriages "tend to diminish the strength of religious communities, as the devout are pulled away from bonds of tradition and orthodoxy by their nonmember spouses"? I guess one could argue (does Riley?) that even the secular might be upset by the no doubt disproportionate impact this has on religious minorities, but even so. If you aren't generically pro-religion, the waning of religiosity might seem a good thing.

2) "Religious leaders I interviewed — and not only Jewish ones — were broadly worried about interfaith marriage." Is this sentence merely a reaction to the information right above it re: the higher divorce rate Riley found among intermarried Jews (but not Catholics... but what about Jews married to Catholics?)? Or is it about the common assumption that Jews are the group most angst-ridden about out-marriage?

3) Is there even a meaningful category called "interfaith marriage"? Meaning: does the marriage of a Catholic and a Protestant (both of whom could be of English ancestry, or German, etc.) much relate to marriages that also cross ethnic or socioeconomic lines - marriages in which "religion" is less about piety and more a proxy for other such factors?

4) Why are we so concerned about what happens when children are born to "people who married between ages 36 and 45"? "Those who marry in their 30s and 40s, especially educated professionals, are often at the most secular points in their lives. These couples tended to underestimate how faith can grow in importance as they got older and had children." How much older are 45-year-old women going to get before having children?

5) If the older a couple is when they marry, the more likely they are to be interfaith, and if interfaith couples are more likely to divorce, that is interesting, given that we're always hearing that if you want your marriage to last, you should wait until the five remaining minutes of your fertility to say "I do." Is it that once you get to an older cohort, there are more people who had first tried and failed to marry in, and they (or their families-of-origin) see these marriages as somehow less-than?

6) Why this project, why now? People - OK, Jews - have been issuing the very same warnings about intermarriage since intermarriage first became legal/plausible.

Sweeping

When the "Girls" backlash (and backlash to backlash...) first broke, and everyone was saying that the show was too white, my thought - and that of approximately 10,000 of the 300,000 weighing in - was that the problem wasn't so much "Girls" being too white as that shows by-and-about white people are the only ones getting made. A TV show about a small group of friends is never going to be a sweeping portrait of society, or even one borough.

What is frustrating, however, is when a work that does claim to be a sweeping portrait of society manages to be one, but only to a point.

I just finished - and am going to reveal the plot of, if you haven't read it and were planning to - Tom Wolfe's 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities, a sweeping portrait of New York in the pre-Giuliani age of puffy-sleeved evening gowns, back when the Upper West Side was plausibly scrappy. One of the book's great strengths is, we get all these characters separately, but also how they perceive one another. But we only get three perspectives: McCoy, the white Protestant banker, Kramer, the insecure Jewish government-lawyer, and Fallow, the alcoholic British journalist - all three white and at least middle class. We get a bit of a glimpse into the mindset of various working-class white (Jewish and Irish) men, but anything beyond that is too unknowable-Other. Obviously, no work can address the entirety of human experience. But when a work is about themes like race, class, and heterosexual intimacy, but only manages to convey the range of viewpoints of white men, this is distracting. Not as in distractingly un-PC. Distracting as in, it feels somehow incomplete.

Women in the novel are on the one hand central to the action - an affair is what ultimately brings down McCoy - and on the other, at best sketches of characters. They exist in two varieties - wife whose looks are fading, and pretty-young-thing love interest. Which is no doubt how many men see it. But a novelist might want us to have the perspective of McCoy's wife and mistress, and so forth. Particularly the mistress, who, you know, killed someone. One does not need to have been especially influenced by Women's Studies 101 to want to know what's going through this character's mind. Zola, who Wolfe apparently admires, and who (if I know anything, I know this) certainly wouldn't meet 2013 standards of political correctness, would jump around to different perspectives, male and female. There's this one moment in The Bonfire of the Vanities when we get a glimpse of how Kramer's mistress sees him, and it's brilliant. Obviously Wolfe is capable of such observations. Why aren't there more?

More to the point: African-Americans! Specifically, this is a story about a confrontation between the poshest and most sheltered parts of white New York and the most dangerous and tragic parts of black New York. Black characters - mostly male ones - are incredibly important to the plot - a community leader/Al Sharpton stand-in; a hit-and-run victim in a coma who, fine, can't say much; a teenage crack dealer; and an aspiring middle-class mother stuck in the projects. The only thing we learn about how any black people feel is, they don't like it when one of their own is killed. Well, go figure. But the idea that we might know what a black character is thinking is somehow well outside the bounds of conceivability. This is a problem not because, for some anachronistic and PC reason, I'd like this to have been a book about black New Yorkers. It's a problem because it is a book about black New Yorkers. See the difference?

It would be one thing if the book honed in only on McCoy, looking at only at how the hierarchy looks from the precarious top of it. But then there's Kramer, and Fallow - the jumping-around. It would also be something else if the stance of the book was that the fall of McCoy is an unmitigated disaster, that some lives really are worth more than others. If, in other words, the book were a racist comment on societal decadence. And some well-written novels (see: late-19th C France) have, alas, been along those lines, and what to make of those is its own conversation. But McCoy is a douche, an overgrown dudebro, in modern parlance. He's an entitled Wall Street fool who thinks he can get away with murder, or close. He's not entirely unsympathetic, or the book wouldn't work. But the reader is also supposed to feel a bit of schadenfreude, a bit of, he got an exaggerated version of what was coming to him.

At any rate, I was wary of reading this what with having really disliked that Charlotte Simmons book, but overall, I suppose, despite the caveats above, a recommend.

The ultimate busman's-holiday post

-There's a new production of Romeo and Juliet, and while Romeo is white, controversy of controversies, Juliet is black. Having not given much thought to Shakespeare since high school required this (I somehow made it through college without taking a single English class), I'm not sure what race Romeo and Juliet have been in earlier productions. I remember something about men playing the male and female roles, but that was a very long time ago. Presumably their are Shakespeare-auditioning actors of all races. Is this pairing a first? I have no idea, but would doubt it. All I know is, Dodai Stewart of Jezebel isn't pleased, arguing that this casting was a way to cause controversy and sell tickets. Which... seems not very Jezebel. The problem here - if a problem there must be - is that Condola Rashad is the daughter of famous people, and therefore - however talented - a likely beneficiary of nepotism. The problem is not that a black woman has been a) cast in something, or b) cast alongside a white man.

-Stanley Fish presents Naomi Schaefer Riley's new book (that, fine, I probably have to read) on inter-religious marriage in America today. And the findings are... basically the same objections one found in 19th century France. (Although Riley herself is apparently intermarried, and therefore presumably OK with intermarriage.) That even those who think they're secular will, with Life Experience, find that they are, deep down, super-religious after all. That secularism is a childish flirtation, and that once one is a real grown-up, the desire to worship latkes or peeps or whatever will set in and not budge. Well. As a fake grown-up, one who's not yet 30, doesn't have kids, and is still technically a student, I may have to wait for my inner Hasid to emerge.

One thing not like 19th C France - Jews, Riley found, are actually the religious group most likely to marry out. And yet, the stereotype of the insular, intermarriage-fearing Jewish family (esp. Jewish mother-of-son) persists. Discuss amongst yourselves, while I track down this book, as I will probably need to cite this tidbit in my dissertation.

One thing I can't quite wrap my head around:

[F]aith has become “racialized”; that is, we have come to think that “like skin color [it] is a trait that need not divide us.” But, Riley demurs, believing that faith “is a superficial characteristic the way race [and] ethnicity are” doesn’t make it so. In fact, “religious identity … can and should be considered” as more substantive than racial identity; and like any other substance it remains in place even when the commonplaces of multicultural doctrine tell us that it shouldn’t really matter.

Given that it appears "interfaith" in this conversation appears to mean Jews marrying people who are either Catholics or Protestants, it would seem that Judaism was "racialized" long, long ago. Nazism? Dreyfus? Spanish Inquisition? But for most everyone, religion, culture, etc. are all wrapped into this one thing called Your Background, and it's tough to say what's what. The Christmas tree example Riley brings up - is this about religion? What if, as happens often enough, a non-Jewish spouse who never went to church nevertheless expects a tree? Is that atavistic Christianity? Isn't the far more likely explanation that, in otherwise secular couples, the tree is desired - or not -  for cultural reasons?

How pastiness came to Palestine

Can philosophy - as opposed to blogging, or Facebook status updates - fix the Middle East? Philosopher Joseph Levine's op-ed gives it a go, taking various dubious premises, submitting them to calm, logical analysis, and coming up with an answer that's pretty much obvious: "There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state." Well, yes. No one who thinks seriously about this issue hasn't grappled with it. Why would it be anti-Semitic to point it out? Sheesh.

What's to be done about that conflict, though, isn't remotely obvious. If you believe Israel-as-a-Jewish-state and Israel-as-a-democracy are both important (or that a one-state solution would be nice on paper but disastrous for everyone involved), it's impossible to end the conversation with a declaration that "Jewish" and "democratic" are in conflict, so. It's fine if Levine doesn't believe the "Jewish" angle has any moral justification, but it would be nice if he saw why others do and then argued against that.

Before I proceed, the usual disclaimer: this post is not a call for rants on the general topic of Israel. So, no tangents promoting a one-state solution or a Greater Israel, no knee-jerk recitation of a speech you've prepared for whenever anything having to do with the region comes up.

So, Levine's op-ed. So far, so reasonable:

The key to the interpretation is found in the crucial four words that are often tacked on to the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” — namely, “… as a Jewish state.” As I understand it, the principle that Israel has a right to exist as a Jewish state has three parts: first, that Jews, as a collective, constitute a people in the sense that they possess a right to self-determination; second, that a people’s right to self-determination entails the right to erect a state of their own, a state that is their particular people’s state; and finally, that for the Jewish people the geographical area of the former Mandatory Palestine, their ancestral homeland, is the proper place for them to exercise this right to self-determination.

Levine says he will focus on the second - whether self-determination means a right to a state - but pauses for a moment on the first:

However, I do think that it’s worth noting the historical irony in insisting that it is anti-Semitic to deny that Jews constitute a people. The 18th and 19th centuries were the period of Jewish “emancipation” in Western Europe, when the ghetto walls were torn down and Jews were granted the full rights of citizenship in the states within which they resided. The anti-Semitic forces in those days, those opposing emancipation, were associated not with denying Jewish peoplehood but with emphatically insisting on it!

I'm not sure if this reveals ignorance of or indifference to the history of modern, pre-Holocaust anti-Semitism, but I read it, reread it, and couldn't make sense of it. (A commenter, whose take isn't quite the same as mine, points out something similar.) Opponents of emancipation in 1790, 1820, weren't "anti-Semitic," exactly, as there wasn't "anti-Semitism" until the late nineteenth century. Were they anti-Jewish? Yes, typically, but so were those who favored emancipation, who (please do read my exciting dissertation) wanted Jews to intermarry so as to rid France (apologies for not covering all of Europe) of the dreaded Jewish diseases and general ickiness.

Then, however, when anti-Semitism-proper did arise, anti-Semites were awfully set on the idea that Jews were a people, and not just any people, but foreigners from Palestine. Jews had long heard that they'd be accepted if only they assimilated. Then, all of a sudden (and in France, it was quite sudden! 1880-ish) the message became that they would be all the more hated if they did assimilate, and that the least objectionable Jews were the ones who didn't try to integrate into mainstream (or, worse, elite) society. If this is baffling to those of us studying this shift from here in 2013, imagine how it was to experience it.

While French Jews did not by and large respond to this turn of events with rah-rah Zionism, there was a certain amount of, 'well, whatever we do, we'll be hated, so we may as well stop trying to deny our distinctiveness.' Across Europe, Jews who very much had embraced emancipation began to find that they were being defined as a people, and a people from Palestine. Once you're constantly hearing that you are foreign, and from Palestine, an "Oriental," not a European, maybe this impacts how you see yourself? Maybe you'd prefer to be just French, but in the face of anti-Semitism, solidarity with other Jews seems like the only ethical option? Zionism didn't come from Jews spontaneously deciding that they were a people. It didn't entirely come from anti-Semitism (and obviously this blogging does not get into pre-Herzl Zionism or non-Zionist Jewish nationalism or the pre-Zionist Jewish presence in Palestine, on account of this is not a Jewish-studies textbook but a blog post) but that sure played a role.

And... once a certain threshold of Jews embraced Zionism, once Zionism got itself a state, then yes, the anti-Semitic contingent, which had been asking pasty European Jews to go back to Palestine, began faulting Jews for having done just that. To say that some criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is not to say that it all is. Why should that be so complicated? It does get murky, because sometimes entirely valid and much-needed criticisms are inspired by not-so-savory agendas. But it's pointless to say that because the plight of the Palestinians is a pet cause of many anti-Semites, the plight in question doesn't exist or need to be addressed. However, I do not have the exact borders for the ideal solution to this crisis at the ready, so in the interest of not pretending to solve the crisis from the comfort of WWPD, allow me to proceed...

What's problematic (anti-Semitic? eh) is to willfully ignore - if you know it - the whole go-back-to-Palestine part of modern Jewish history. To willfully ignore how sincerely Western European Jews wanted to be and indeed were French, German, etc., and how this came to feel difficult if not impossible even before the Holocaust. It's not anti-Semitic to look at the situation that currently exists and think, gee, it is weird that a so-called democracy defines itself religiously. I know this history, identify as a Zionist, and think this all the time. The problem comes when people fail to see the connection between modern Western anti-Semitism and Zionism, or when they view it as 'the Holocaust makes Jews think they can get away with anything.' Late-19th-century anti-Semitism was fundamentally about telling European Jews that they weren't European. If one loses track of this, one does indeed begin to wonder what all these European Jews - white folk! (ah, but not to their contemporaries) - were doing in the Middle East of all places, if not gratuitously colonizing.

And this is how it came to pass that modern, pasty Jews (not, of course, that modern-day Israeli Jews are all that pasty) came to believe their effectively had to be a Jewish state in Palestine of all non-pasty places.

Does this mean everything the current Israeli government does is admirable? No. Does it mean "Jewish" trumps "democratic"? Not necessarily. What it does mean is that "Jewish" isn't random chauvinism to be brushed aside effortlessly. It needs to be, if nothing else, addressed.

Almost done, I promise, but had to address this as well:

This fundamental point exposes the fallacy behind the common analogy, drawn by defenders of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, between Israel’s right to be Jewish and France’s right to be French. The appropriate analogy would instead be between France’s right to be French (in the civic sense) and Israel’s right to be Israeli.

I'm sure it would be news to France's citizens and residents of North African, Jewish, or other 'immigrant' origin that France only feels itself to have a right to exist as a civically French state, but that everyone of every background is, on the ground, equally welcome. France doesn't need to be all 'we're a French state for French people, and yes we mean ethnically' because France is so confident in its ethnic-Frenchness. Not in the fact that all French citizens are ethnically French - in fact, plenty are not. In the fact that "French" is both a nationality and an ethnicity. Yes, it's contested, but I believe the word 'hegemony' might fit in here somewhere. What is French history, what is a French house of worship, what is a French holiday, what is French hair, what is a French food, etc. A French France is such an on-the-ground established fact that France has the luxury of saying it's just a nation, not an ethnicity, while in practice being both. Israel... does not have this luxury.

Now, maybe no state should, and there's your answer. But not really, because as long as others do, the justification for one Jewish state - however reduced in size - exists.

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.

What your great-grandmother recognized as de-frizzing serum UPDATED

-A Frenchwoman lectures an American audience on chic, which she humbly implies she was born with. A Frenchwoman in a track-suit. But she's French, so it's OK. And to the commenters who apparently agree with this lady's notions that buying Greenmarket produce cancels out smoking and evidently copious sunning (no French Paradox for wrinkles), let me say my piece on this: if she were to take a real live-and-let-live stance, to say, look, I'm a Fashion person, a professional Frenchwoman-in-NYC, this is how I choose to be, I'd say go for it. And those who tan are under no obligation to smoke, those who smoke under no obligation to eat junk food. What bothers me is that these nutty ideas work their way into popular notions of what's healthy, and "health" becomes conflated with "what thin people do," or "what rich people do." Or maybe what bothers me is the outfit, the woman, and what it means that the two are being celebrated together. If this woman weren't thin, white, (rich, French), and were otherwise dressed the same, gold chains, gold hoops and everything, I kind of think she wouldn't have this platform.

(Meanwhile, this post caught my eye because there are some Cerfs in my dissertation. Is she or is she not related to the great Cerf Berr, leader of the Alsatian Jews during the Revolution?)

-Why I'm evasive when people ask me where I'm from, and, deeming "New York" too vague, keep pressing. I will not name the neighborhood. That alone, if you know enough about the city to be digging, should be your answer.

-Complete and utter cheapness fail: I spent about $20 on a container of 100% tsubaki oil. Cheapness justifications: allegedly a little goes a long way, and my understanding is that with this product, I get the essential ingredient of the newly-discovered Shiseido hair products, but without paying extra for ingredients like water and whichever fragrances or unexciting chemicals that are in all shampoo-and-conditioner. And, I suppose, without whichever chemicals, but honestly, I don't know anything about either this oil or what's in regular shampoo, and don't buy into this notion that because something has a high-tech name, it's worse for you/your hair/your soul than whatever your great-grandmother would have recognized as de-frizzing serum.

UPDATE

Tsubaki hair oil proves everything I hoped it would be and more. If I could only relive my frizzy middle- and high school years knowing about this product.

WWPD elsewhere

Want to know where Woody Allen meets fashion-bloggery? Click here. 

This is most exciting, both because it's been ages since I've gotten off my grad-student behind to do some freelance writing, and because my dissertation is largely about articles in the (nineteenth-century, French) Jewish press. I am at one with my subjects! Someone can cite me as a primary source in their dissertation 150 years from now!