Your Savage coverage continues UPDATED

While I've been a fan of both of their writing for a good while, when it comes to issues of social liberalism/conservatism, I tend to agree with Dan Savage far more than I do with Miss Self-Important. Yet I found myself largely in agreement with MSI's recent take-down of Dan Savage's critique of monogamy. This, I suspect, has something to do with the fact that where Savage falters, MSI and I appear to agree, is visible simply at the level of common sense. No particular political or religious slant is required to see where things might not go smoothly if the presumption of monogamy were eliminated.

Basically, while the OMG-non-monogamy reaction to arguments like Savage's is usually applied to shock regarding non-monogamous marriage, what this would mean for that institution, as far as I'm concerned, the issues are at least as profound when it comes to introducing non-monogamy into pre-marital relationships, the sort that might end in marriage, or might not. Like I said, my fear, with Savage's monogamy-neutral stance, is that, in deciding that bringing in "other people" is fully compatible with staying in a relationship, young adults would start marrying partners they're kind of eh about, despite still being attracted to other people to the point of wanting to actually pursue relationships with those other people. The assumption of monogamy helps you be sure that when you settle down, you do so with the right person. By "right person," I don't necessarily mean Fate, just someone you can see yourself remaining monogamously tied to, even if, yeah, no one ever knows exactly what they (let alone their spouse) will be up to 15, 35 years down the line. Like I said, a presumption of non-monogamy isn't so great for the other partner who, fine, gets to avoid the hurt of being dumped, but who's not with someone all that enthusiastic.

What came up in the comments at MSI's, and what I ought to have mentioned before, is why this is a problem for everybody involved. Say you're 19, or 25, and you're in a relationship that's going OK, not great. You find yourself interested in other people. You can either a) dump the person you're with, or b) open up the relationship. Option (a) assumes monogamy - if others remain interesting, this gf/bf isn't it. How limiting!

Option (b), however, involves self-identifying as 'just not a monogamous person.' While there are no doubt some out there who are just not monogamous people, there are so, so, so many people who had a wandering eye when in so-so relationships, but in the one they end up in (or in ones in which it's the other person who loses interest first), they're fully capable of monogamy and indeed prefer it. This is, of course, that old cliché - 'he never told me he loved me, then three weeks after we broke up, he was engaged to someone else' - but there's truth to that. This is why when your bf/gf says, 'I just can't do monogamy,' you're right to be suspicious, not that cheating has necessarily occurred, but that the person you're with simply can't do monogamy with you. This is a safe assumption, even if .0001% of the time, the guy/gal really can't do monogamy, period.

As even Savage will grant you, monogamy's a whole lot more practical than any arrangement that has to be "negotiated," especially if kids are involved. (More on that in a moment.) So even if you leave out OMG traditional marriage, OMG traditional morality, think of Jesus, think of the children, it is, all things equal, a heck of a lot easier to be happily monogamous than to arrive at (optimistically) an equivalent level of happiness through negotiated non-monogamy. So it's inefficient, if nothing else, to decide that some huge percentage of the population is unfit for monogamy. Better that both partners in a relationship in which one or both are eh get the chance at monogamy that splitting from each other offers.

OK, so that's Part I. Part II: It's important, as MSI notes, that for all Savage's requests that children be protected, that marriages remain intact for their own good, he never seems to realize that children can be born outside wedlock. Now, perhaps unlike MSI and the social-conservative writer she links to, I don't think this is an issue of, heteros should only have sex with people they're prepared to have a kid with. Aside from that being unrealistic, it's unnecessary given the availability of effective contraception, and can potentially lead to ill-suited marriages between people who really just wanted to have sex. What I do think is, you want to be very sure the other person's on the same page. With college students/college-bound/recent-grad young people, often enough the man and woman are both horrified at the thought of a pregnancy. If it's near-implausible that either one wants there to be a pregnancy, or even that either would be even kinda-sorta OK with that result (even if both are, objectively speaking, pro-choice), more than one effective method of contraception is used, and pregnancy's a very unlikely outcome.

Once you involve people who are perhaps older, less panicked about pregnancy than your average ambitious and future-oriented 19-year-old, perhaps even with comfortable incomes and audible biological clocks, or even just once you involve multiple people, period, variables increase, and it's tougher to be on the same page. That, and the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy impact more people. Savage - take note, Chris Bodenner - does acknowledge that STDs can be a problem here, but kids, unlike STDs, are frequently a desired outcome of sex. What might result is an above-board version of the Aahnold situation, sure, but also it could be the wife who's then pregnant, not with the husband's child, or perhaps... and so many questions - continue the pregnancy? do we care whose kid it is, and what if some of us do, others not? And, once born, the same issues arise regardless of gender breakdown - what's this kid's relationship to its parent outside the marriage and its siblings born within the marriage? Discretion becomes a bit more complicated when "poly" produces a next generation.

UPDATE

Note this, from Prudie, in response to a 27-year-old woman whose bf of two years has been having an affair, or as much as an "affair" as one can have not two years into a dating relationship, and who seems committed to getting through it: "You two aren't married, you don't have kids, so I'm wondering why this mess seems worth all the work." Whether the relevant threshold is marriage, kids, cohabitation, or a certain number of years together - there's a point in relationships when it makes sense to stay together even if things are not good but not atrocious, when we might be sympathetic to Savage's plea to make it work. That time isn't when relatively little has been invested in a relationship.

Your daily Francophilic Zionism

"Little Aleph Millepied would be screwed in an Israeli playground."

-A Gawker (not Jezebel, sorry, mistake fixed) commenter, on Ms. P and her fiancé's choice to give their son the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet as a first name, resulting in a unusual name in English, and a potentially comical one in the original, with the not un-comical French last name coming right after. Luckily, should they decide to move there, no one in Israel speaks French.

Ever wondered what Heidelberg is like?

Hint: it's not anything like the Bavarian restaurant in Yorkville that bears its name.

That's personal! UPDATED

As someone who writes in the first person on this here blog, and who often finds herself writing about other such writing, I've often thought and sometimes written about how one approaches this genre/this set of genres. By "genre(s)" I mean everything from "overshare" essays about love life, body image, etc., to articles or blog posts that mix a personal story with one of broader significance (think Amy Chua on parenting, Allison Benedikt on Zionism, or, indeed the Drezner's tenure tale, to give just three recent examples that have come up on WWPD). The authors/bloggers in question might be people somewhat in the public eye - that is, writers/academics/bloggers with readers outside their immediate families - but are not sufficiently famous/glamorous that strangers would be giving the slightest thought to their personal lives if they hadn't put it out there. So a Kissinger or Britney autobiography doesn't count, but a Park Slope parenting tell-all by someone well-known in sustainable-food circles does. (I.e. not people who would make it into this amazing/upsetting German celebrity magazine that's all about famous people whose bathing suits don't fit properly. Amy Winehouse's bikini top needed some serious adjusting, as did Kate Moss's bikini bottom. This is what's on the cover of the magazine, in the checkout area along with the tobacco and hard liquor selection. No Whole Foods, this Rewe.)

If you're writing one about yourself:

-Be clear with yourself (and, if relevant to what you're writing about, your loved ones) where you draw the line. Dan Savage, for example, talks about oh just about everything (note the "tail" query in a recent podcast), but not his sex life with his husband. First-person, personal-issues-topic, tone of openness, none of this requires actually spilling all. Where you draw the line is sometimes best not to spell out for readers, because this is information in and of itself that curious sorts will extrapolate from. But, as with Savage, sometimes common sense supports a decision, and there's no harm in stating it outright.

-Remember that the "you" your readers are getting is one based purely on the text provided, and others provided previously. If you hint at your husband being a tyrant (Benedikt), or a pushover (Chua), readers will round up. And you don't get to complain about this, because they didn't just randomly pick you out of a crowd and decide to discuss your marriage. You put it out there. Remember that however harsh the criticism, it's not you-you being criticized, so even if you end up learning valuable things about yourself, you don't have to take this personally. It's not your marriage in its entirety. Its the tiny glimpse offered by a couple of anecdotes.

UPDATE (and expect more such updates):

-Your children are yours to raise. They're not yours to write about. I know I'm repeating myself, so I won't restate all the arguments here, but this really does belong in the official WWPD guide to writing and writing about personal essays, as PG's comment below inadvertently reminded me. Kids who are under your roof, especially, are not in a position to consent to being written about, so even if they were totally OK with it, what would that even mean? In this Facebook age, no one has much of a right to reinvention anymore, with all those friends from middle school virtually present at all times. But at least leave the potentially humiliating anecdotes of childhood to the children who've lived them, to retell years later if they so choose.

If you, the parent, believe what you need to say about parenting is really that important, find some way of doing so that in no way implicates your own, identifiable, real-life children, and sorry but yes, they're still identifiable even if you're a woman who kept her name, and their last name is that of their father. Write about Parenting, not your parenting, because your parenting is also their upbringing, and what if they, unlike you, never become big-deal writers/bloggers with an audience? Or better yet, write fiction, and even if some readers suspect resemblance to truth, you've probably mixed things up a bit, right?, and even if you've used their real names (which I wouldn't advise), it's not really about them.

Caveat: This doesn't carry over to if the personal writing is about having a child with severe mental retardation or severe autism, or worse (and yes, I'm thinking of this essay). In such cases, a) the chances that the child will read or write about his own childhood are slim to none, and b) this kind of writing could be immensely helpful to other parents going through the same thing, canceling out any remaining ickiness about discussing the private moments of a real-life person who can't give consent to being written about, or about the possible necessity of mentioning the siblings' childhoods as well. But if the issue is, your 12-year-old is begging for designer jeans, your 16-year-old keeps flubbing the PSAT, your charmingly articulate four-year-old's fixated on scat, this is not for you to report to all. If you need reassurance in these non-tragic matters, some combination of general-terms writing, fiction-writing, and private conversation with other parents about raising kids will have to suffice.

If you want to criticize one:

-Don't even begin if the person who wrote the thing is, say, your boss, your best friend's girlfriend, your neighbor with whom you share childcare duties. The recipient will take personally criticisms of personal writing, even if in an ideal world that would not be the case, so there will be real-life consequences. But even then, it's tough to criticize the personal writing of someone you know well or have strong feelings about, because that background is coloring everything you think about some measly 800 words.

-So, assuming the author is a relative stranger, or the kind of personal essay/opinion writer who actively invites criticism of his work, stick with the text(s) provided. If it's in there, it's fair game.

-Do not throw in personal details about the author beyond what's provided in the article/post or in other articles/posts by the same person. This goes both for if you're critiquing the writing of an acquaintance about whom you know details beyond what's provided, and for if you're improvising your own assumptions via speculation. Both are irritating, because there's no way to refute arguments that are based on personal details above and beyond what you're willing to provide publicly. As in: it's fair game to point out that someone hurling a YPIS ("your privilege is showing") is himself a graduate of Andover, if this is in some public bio of the individual. It's not fair game to be like, 'and at Andover, he always made a big deal about how his pink polos were Lacoste,' or, 'his parents so obviously could pay the full tuition, no way was he on scholarship.' It might be awfully tempting, but don't.

If you want to defend one:

-Don't say that all criticism of the piece is inherently unfair, because it's just one person's personal experience and don't judge, etc., etc. Writing for an audience, even writing in the first person, doesn't get a pass wrt being judged. Because, as noted above, it's not the writer-as-person who's being judged, but the persona as he comes across in the piece of writing.

-By all means include that disclaimer about being friends with the author, and defend your friends when you think they've been misunderstood, but don't then expect readers who know neither of you to find this persuasive.

There's probably a good bit more that could be added, so consider this a proto-guide at best.

Indolence

Today's reading is about the legendary laziness of The Jewish Woman. This was a big deal, apparently, in the world of 19th C French cliché, but how big a deal everyone's going to have to wait for my completed dissertation to find out. I will say, though, that this is making me awfully self-conscious about wanting every so often to take a Daily Mail break...

A procrastination directory

-If you have time to kill, and want a YPIS extravaganza, follow the NYT article and comments, and then Jezebel thread on expensive-stroller theft in Park Slope and similar. And I so called this one! Remember my post title using "key words" that proved "key" indeed? Obvs something about Park Slope strollers was forthcoming. Thanks NYT!

-If you have still more time on your hands, check out the comments here. Seems some men are really peeved that women wear strange colors of nail polish these days. Peeved, that is, because, as they will explain, the look is not about pleasing men. And beauty rituals not aimed at snagging a man are not only a waste of time and money, but trashy, grotesque, and whorish. I'll be sure to remember that the next time I apply the mint-green Essie.

-If you have the time but want to use it more productively, consider Daniel Drezner and his wife's reflections on his tenure denial and week of unemployment five years ago. It does have a bit of Second After Sartre-ism to it - the academic/intellectual subset of First World Problems that I've just coined, in reference to Simone de Beauvoir's woes - but this is acknowledged. (Obviously, if you're even in a position to maybe be getting tenure from UChicago, and if your situation is "covered in the press," you're probably doing OK by the standards of academia, as compared with the adjuncts at Obscure U.) If there was a YPIS to be hurled, it was in Erika Drezner comparing the whole thing - a man who was all along going to be fine professionally, and professionally was all that was at stake - to a biopsy. Not really the same thing at all, sorry.

But what really struck me was the gender angle. Specifically, Erika Drezner referring to her husband as the "family breadwinner." Not that it's financially inconceivable for a prof at a place like Chicago to be the higher-earning of two working spouses, but just because I can't imagine a female academic being described in this way. This bit, too: "Once you have unpacked, settled in, found yourself a good book group, a gym, a place to get coffee, once the kids are back in school and have made friends, once the new place feels like home, you may think, 'This is better.'" Now, from the bio, it's clear that both Drezners work outside the home, and her job title also sounds quite impressive, but this just seemed very much in the old-school model of, the woman can drop everything and follow the man. The fact that getting settled in a new job isn't mentioned, but joining a book club is, stands out.

This interests me, obviously, not at the level of the seemingly thriving marriage of two people I don't know, but in terms of gender and academia more generally. The pattern (that I've seen anecdotally, with the rare exception - anyone care to challenge?) is that coupled straight female grad students are with equal-or-higher-earning (or, if still in school, equal-or-higher-earning-potential) men, while straight male grad students in couples are with same-or-lower-earning (-potential) women.

Now, typically situations like this are discussed in more or less misogynistic terms of, those entitled women/those maternally-focused women, who insist on men who are higher-earners than themselves. I look at it differently. (And FWIW, my husband was, until he graduated about five minutes ago, also in a doctoral program, and is still in academia.) While this breakdown might mean there's less disposable income in the male grad students' households, but it also means that grad school in a "fluffy" field (aka one you can't leave to make a ton in finance/industry, aka political science is, I'd think, not radically different from French in this respect) ends up getting Primary Career status for men, dabbler status for women.

This, in turn, impacts both how male vs. female grad students are perceived in their departments and by society at large, as well as self-perception, and extends beyond the straight and/or coupled. A man who chooses to focus on Great Books is assumed to have such important things to say about those books that he's forgone higher earning opportunities. (Remember "too brilliant to bathe"?) A woman who chooses to do the same is assumed to be keeping herself busy in some kind of glorified finishing school until the babies arrive. This is, of course, not a problem for the women who are in grad school with that attitude, but such women are, in my experience, unusual.

While this is very First World Problems-ish, if the end result is a bunch of women PhDs, married to hedge fund managers (the extreme case, and not that of anyone I know personally), and teaching high school or giving up work outside the home altogether, it's a problem all the same within academia. It's my sense - anecdotally! - that women virtually all enter top programs ambitious, and that once arrived, the dabbler/Serious Scholar gender dichotomy gets established. It gives women less incentive to stay in the field, and more to pair off with someone who will take the pressure off of turning academia into a "breadwinning" career.

Privilege successfully acknowledged, without excessive YPIS hand-wringing

While I greatly admire Tavi Gevinson's writing, and am most honored to be included with her on Jessica Furseth's latest list of "excellent wordsmith bloggers", there's something that never quite sat right with me about the Tavi phenomenon. Gevinson, child (now, at 15, not-so-child) fashion blogger extraordinaire, was meant to represent an alternative to the mainstream. A self-identified feminist, she was meant to be all about self-expression-through-dress, minus the dreaded beauty standards that usually come with it. So promising! As someone who's pro-self-expression-through-dress, and anti-dividing-time-between-skin-cream-shopping-and-calorie-counts-on-yogurt-containers, I was very much on board.

But given that the current beauty ideal in fashion is 'Nordic preadolescent', however many silly hats and oversized '90s-nostalgia sweaters naturally-blond-and-tiny Tavi piled on, I was always stuck thinking that there was only so much she, however well-meaning, could do with the personal-style format. Photos of someone not only thin, young, and white, but for whom wrinkles, frizz, acne, and hips are not an issue, have a certain edge when it comes to looking like conventional high-fashion photography. As in, what, on Tavi, looks Fashion would, on most anyone else, look ridiculous.

Of course, it's not Gevinson's fault that she looks like... whatever the precise opposite would be of the title character of "Precious" as styled for that movie. And as Fashion Week photos of the blogger with actual fashion models attest, Gevinson's significantly shorter than they are - in keeping with the child-prodigy thing, but something that would certainly limit her participation in the fashion world to that class of interesting-to-look-at-but-could-never-actually-model-clothes. And, if her appearance happens to coincide with runway trends, these tend not to much overlap with middle- or high-school ideals, so her self-deprecation about her looks reads as sincere.

Gevinson herself appears to understand the issues this poses, as evidenced by the post Furseth just linked to, one that's worth reading in full. That this is a new understanding for Gevinson is forgivable, consider that she's, well, 15:

I took this picture a couple months ago, going for some Heathers/Twin Peaks vibes, but started thinking too much about how I look in it and avoided posting it for a while. I wasn't insecure, quite the opposite -- I didn't want to post this photo because I look good in it. And, as someone whose "thing" for so long has been "Challenge beauty standards! Screw convention! Look like a grandmother on ecstasy at Fashion Week!", that somehow felt hypocritical.

As an outside, i.e. non-Tavi, observer, it's tough for me to see a difference in the photo she's referring to and the many that preceded it in the history of her blog/of other Tavi-coverage. She has always looked Fashion, and if she's now OK with conventional attractiveness (some makeup, no glasses, things I wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't pointed them out), she hasn't exactly transformed herself into a Kardashian. But what matters is that she gets a) that there's a relationship, inevitably, between her looks and her message, and b) that acknowledging and trying to understand it is effective. Important to note is what she's not doing - she's not beating herself up, nor is she just kind of saying, yes, I have certain types of privilege, and leaving it at that.

DTMFA and "other people"

As a Dan Savage admirer with some qualms about his philosophy, I was nearly fully on board with Mark Oppenheimer's take, fully 100% in terms of his clear laying-out of Savage's message and its significance.

Basically, Savage's critique of monogamy is most easily ripped apart in terms of gender. Whether we're attributing it primarily to nature or cultural expectations, women, on average, connect sex with emotion/a relationship more than men do. This means that something that works for some (and I agree with Oppenheimer that, with legal SSM, increasingly fewer) gay male couples (including Savage and his husband) will not work as well for straight or lesbian couples. But there's also the common-enough tendency of the male partners of women to expect fidelity from their girlfriends/wives, while not holding themselves to the same standard. (The male partners of men, meanwhile, however jealous and hypocritical some may be, do not have this gendered script to fall back on.) The two things tie together - men in straight relationships assume that women only cheat if they've formed an emotional connection with someone else, and think that this justifies a level of anger beyond what would be reasonable if it were just about "release" outside the home. So, even if we think it's unfair and social-construction-y that this is how it is, this is kind of how it is in the world as it exists, meaning that Savage's notion (and this I think was somewhere in the article) ends up reading as giving men permission to stray, and not really doing a heck of a lot for women.

But my own main objection to Savage's take on monogamy is not at all gender-specific. Savage may have coined "DTMFA" (Google if curious), but he generally assumes, even when a couple is unmarried and has no kids, that the very fact of having a partner means someone wants to stay with that person. Rather than being skeptical of every 'he's a great guy, but...,' as a good advice columnist should be, he earnestly accepts that nearly everyone in a relationship wants to make it work. When, a hefty percent of the time, someone whose 'relationship issue' is that they want to see other people... wants out. I suspect that many if not most who are happily, monogamously married - men and women, gay, bi, and straight - can think back to a time when they'd made a monogamous but short-of-engagement commitment to some other boyfriend or girlfriend and, somewhere down the line, been alerted to the fact that they didn't want the perfectly nice relationship to go any further precisely by the fact that they were noticing other people left and right. Prior to settling down, the continued interest in other people - specific other people, or just the idea of other people - is how you know an otherwise decent relationship isn't going to work. That's the signal.

So, after using the other-people barometer to determine, from high school on, whether a relationship should go further, it gets awfully confusing if you're supposed to now look at 'exploring other people' as compatible with staying put. See, all you need to do is call the person you'd have otherwise dumped your "primary partner," negotiate some terms, and everyone's happy! Never mind that however much hurt there'd be initially, it's a whole lot better - unequivocally, assuming not a marriage/kids scenario - to be dumped by someone who's desperately curious about other people, and to then go on to find someone else who's not.

For the most part, Savage ignores the banal reality that the desire to 'see other people' is often enough less about sexual curiosity and more about wanting to leave a relationship. To his credit, he sometimes suggests that couples first establish themselves as solid via monogamy, and only once stable bring up the possibility of other people. But when does "stable" announce itself? How would that ever be mutual?

Which is, I think, where Oppenheimer's going here:

My sense is that this kind of radical honesty may work best for couples who already have strong marriages. Where there is love and equality and no history of betrayal, one partner asking if she can have a fling may not be so risky. Her partner either says yes, and it happens, you hope, with only the best consequences; or the partner says no, in which case their relationship endures, maybe with a little disappointment on one side, a little suspicion on the other.

That is the ideal situation. What if the revelation that a partner is thinking about others creates a shift, one that plagues the marriage? Words have consequences, and most couples, knowing that jealousy is real and can beset any of us, opt for a tacit code of reticence. Not just about sex but about all sorts of things: there are couples who can express opinions about each other’s clothing choices or cooking or taste in movies, and there are couples who cannot. [....]

Where a relationship is troubled, and one partner senses, correctly, that aloneness is an imminent threat, then the other partner asking for permission to have a fling is no neutral act. If you are scared of losing your partner, you may say yes to anything she asks, including permission for an affair that will wound you deeply.

Savage's ideal of keeping couples together despite the desires of one or both partners to see other people is actually conservative as well as quite lovely when he's referring to, say, the parents of young children, or ideals for the marriage union. That is, when there's something to preserve. But in run-of-the-mill boyfriend situations, girlfriend situations, the other-people barometer ought to be maintained.

Anti-Semitism and First World Problems

I'm going to leave discussion of what's going on at Yale to those with personal connections to that university/the relevant organizations, and move on to one of the questions that came up in the discussion with somewhat broader significance. At Slate, historian David Greenberg asks,

"How did a concern with anti-Semitism, whether scholarly or political, come to be seen as the province of the right?"

Greenberg's points are sound, and I certainly agree with his assessment of this particular round of liberals being wary to discuss contemporary anti-Semitism. But he doesn't, I think, get to the root of the question, one that has just about zilch to do with Israel, let alone Walt-Mearsheimer. We're about to go back a century before the founding of that country, so bear with me:

Long ago, a half-century before what we generally think of as the beginning of anti-Semitism (that fin-de-siècle moment, spanning from the coining of the term to the exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus), there were a whole lot of people all worked-up about The Jews. Writing anti-Jewish tirades and so forth. Angry about the Rothschilds, the railroads, and modernity, these sorts have been labeled retroactively "economic anti-Semites." Not yet so interested in racial theorizing, this set objected to Jews not on the basis of religion, but because they saw Jews as too rich and powerful. Economic anti-Semitism fit in with populism, and was housed - you guessed it - on the left. Indeed, it was only during the Dreyfus Affair that anti-Semitism stopped being a socially acceptable element of socialism in France. Prior to that, hating Jews was perfectly compatible with fighting for social justice.

While everything was warm and fuzzy for a little bit, in France, at least, after Dreyfus was freed, but soon enough, Europeans remembered that Jews make a super convenient shorthand for that which populists like to mobilize against. Then there was the Holocaust, which I'm not getting into here, because I'm assuming my readers a) have heard of it, and b) know that economic resentment of Jews entered into it, even though many Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe, were plenty poor, as my atavistic ability to improvise ways to cook a small quantity of potatoes in a way that makes them seem like they're a lot of potatoes attests.

Fast forward to today. We're now living in an age of dividing the marginalized from the privileged, one in which the former get Studies programs, the latter not. (Of course, I study French Studies, so forget what I just said.) While "marginalized" as defined in America these days is not entirely about class, the fact that Jews are understood to be a group of well-off white people means Jewish-specific concerns are understood as by definition First World Problems. The Jewish woman who feels compelled to straighten her hair is simply a white woman with frizz, and ought not to claim hers as a hair-politics concern. The Jewish man rendered uncomfortable by Sarah Palin's praise of Real America should obviously STFU, already, because he's some privileged dude living in city, and every last sitcom since forever is based on his lifestyle. It's not that everyone living today, like me, is neck-deep in 1840s France. It's that there's a certain continuity in how Jews are understood. I mean, even in the 1840s, one French commentator explained that while the Jews were once oppressed, they were now actually all-powerful, but big whiners who complained about being persecuted. Plus ça change comes to mind.

Let me be clear: it's not that it's fundamentally in keeping with being on the left to be anti-Semitic. And I haven't begun to get into the ways in which anti-Semitism fits neatly with many strands of conservatism past and present. But the reason liberals today aren't shouting from the rooftops about anti-Semitism is the same as why they weren't long ago: Jews aren't, or more accurately aren't viewed as, marginalized. Being on the left has always been about supporting the downtrodden, and since anti-Semitism is and always was about accusing Jews of being insufficiently downtrodden, there are only these rare moments when the obvious left-wing position is to get worked up about anti-Semitism - moments when anti-Semitism's on-the-ground influence is so great (think the Dreyfus Affair, the Holocaust) that thinking of Jews as victims becomes uncontroversial.

Where does Israel fit into this? The idea that Zionism was and continues to be the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, a flawed movement but a legitimate liberation movement akin to the postcolonial ones all the same, this gets lost because Israel is a wealthy enough country with a white-ish population. The fact that Israel was founded by those Europe had rejected on account of their "Oriental" "race" and told to "go back to Palestine" gets lost and replaced by the idea that Israel's a country dominated by a bunch of white Europeans - with all the global privilege that entails - who have no place in the Middle East. But the issue isn't really Israel, or even the fact that the Palestinians are indisputably suffering, somewhat more disputably the non-white party in the conflict (disputably because, Ohad Knoller aside, Jewish Israeli's aren't all that white) - it's about how Jews are perceived at home. I suspect that many in America picture Israel as basically a wealthy American suburb, a great big West End Avenue by the sea.

Anyway. Ideally those on the left would see that anti-Semitism is an odd kind of bigotry that surfaces the most when its victims seem to be doing the best, i.e. when they seem the least underdog-ish. And there's no reason understanding this wouldn't be compatible with more straightforward social-justice advocacy, including for the Palestinians. Occasionally some on the left do see this, even in good times, but these tend to be Jews, and, as Greenberg notes, only a handful of Jewish liberals, at that.

Vows, the Gary Shteyngart version

-I totally know the Vows couple! OK, not the couple, but I very much remember that cashier from Blue Apron, largely because she was once part of a chamber music group playing outside the store, which is very much in keeping with the spirit of the place, which is, there is no doubt, the most pretentious food store in the entire world. (A pretentious food store has classical music playing inside. One with live classical music out front thus takes the organic-or-preferably-flown-in-from-France cake.) A gourmet shop, in Park Slope, for people too rich for the Co-op (I once overheard a conversation among well-heeled-looking 50-somethings about their "three houses"), or, ahem, grad students who had written rants about the Co-op on their blog and on Gothamist, had been written up angrily in the Co-op's newspaper, and as such could not join even once living so nearby, as in directly around the corner, it was kind of idiotic not to. Blue Apron also has (or had, when I lived across the street from it, in a kind of disastrous apartment where carbon monoxide was considered a kind of eh situation the landlord might ignore - people, do not live in central Park Slope) a fantastic cheese selection, Baked brownies, lox, croissants on the weekends... just enough to make gilded/suffocating atmosphere of the place worth dealing with. I complained about it when it was there, then, in Battery Park City, where the options are Gristedes or Gristedes, I came to miss it terribly.

That aside aside, from a Grad-Student Anti-Defamation League perspective, nothing like a story of someone entering a doctoral program and leaving after a few weeks to become a barista, ultimately finding fulfillment working at a coffee bar in Grand Central Station. And from a literary perspective, if I didn't know that the bride was a real person, I'd think the whole thing was a story by Gary Shteyngart.

-"Happily Divorced" is such a disappointment. As a Fran Drescher admirer, I'm kind of crushed. The show consists of exactly one joke - the main character's ex-husband, being gay, likes moisturizer, musical theater, and the color pink, OMG! - repeated ad nauseum in slightly different incarnations each time. One would think, in this post-"Will and Grace" age, we'd be past the idea that "gay" = liking "gay" things, and would have arrived at "gay" = attracted to members of the same sex. But there's no evidence of this character, who has left his wife because he now likes men, being even remotely interested in men. In "fuchsia," yes, in designing clothes, yes, but XY-chromosomed individuals, no. And if this basic premise weren't offensive enough, there's a cringe-inducing minor character, a Latino servant who occasionally interacts with "Miss Fran" and "Mr. Peter," whose presence on the show is so dated, so how is this even possible, that the ex-couple's black female sidekick friend (played by Tichina Arnold, who was/is the best thing about "Everybody Hates Chris") seems like a semi-developed character, even if this character, too, is offensive-cliché central. And, if anyone Jewish reading this wants to be offended as a Jew, there's the fact that we have, as with "Grace," the premise that a straight, attractive Jewish woman's natural companion is a gay man.

But even for the impossible-to-offend, the problem with the show is that there's nothing there. It's not believable that the costars were ever a married couple, that the ex-husband's dealing with suddenly coming out as gay after 18 years of marriage to a woman, that the ex-wife's dealing with the result of this, that either of them are doing anything more than reciting a script they've niftily memorized on what is clearly the set of "The New Adventures of the Old Christine," a similar show that is, alas, a great work of art compared with this one. And the premise is based on Fran Drescher's real life, co-created by the newishly-out ex-husband Peter! How is it so off? Mostly though, the show just feels empty, because the non-plot of Nanny Fine's husband being gay isn't rescued by any sub-plots. The other characters (see above) have no stories of their own. Fran's parents on the show are in the Generic Jewish Parents model, but with so little nuance - like when a black family on a TV show is played by actors with no resemblance to one another aside from all being, according to U.S. definitions, black - that they seem to come from a totally different world than the Fran alter-ego. The mother should be lecturing in Jewish Studies somewhere, i.e. is not the mother of Nanny Fine. Where's Sylvia? And Yetta? I miss Yetta.

-Ombré, round two, has happened, thanks to readily available and inexpensive adolescent-angst hair products in Heidelberg. Basically the same as the first attempt, except the tips fade not to orange but to blond - not platinum, because my hair doesn't do that, but light enough that the pink ought to show up just right. However, because I was, against my request, sold the weaker bleach, by the time it had done its thing I was too sick of having hair goop in that I'm going to have to save the pinkification for another day. I mean, I get that they're trying to be helpful, but obviously if your plan is to rebleach just the tips of your hair, you're not losing sleep over whether the hair-color you use is going to give you split ends. Obviously, if I decide to/need to look conservative, a haircut will be in order.

Pink hair and ice cream

-I've been following the latest re: DSK, and finally caught up on the Allison Benedikt saga, its migrations to Andrew Sullivan, its myriad reappearances on Jeffrey Goldberg's blog, etc. And I have nothing new to add about any of this.

-Just got a link to this Haaretz article about a controversy at Yale from the H-France mailing list, and will need to hear more from the people I know who are involved on, perhaps, both or several sides. The academic study of anti-Semitism is indeed a tough one. On the one hand, no one (sensible) wants to reduce Jewish Studies to repeated, nuance-free declarations of how universally hated Jews are and have always been, and how Jews who fail to toe the party line (whether on Israel, on intermarriage, or on any other issue) are basically Nazis. On the other, it's so unusual to find serious academics who'd even consider going that route that if anything one finds a reluctance to discuss anti-Semitism at all, as though to so much as utter that term - even in a scholarly context, say, when discussing 19th C publications and political parties that self-identified as anti-Semitic - is to set forth such hysteria that it's better to be safe and focus on "vibrant" Diaspora history. (That's not even getting into the far touchier issue of contemporary anti-Semitism.) When the reality is, vibrant coexisted with... not so delightful. The trick is to explain precisely what was going on, without an agenda that's about saying how wonderful or how horrible things were. (Assuming "things" = 1840s Paris, say. Late-1930s Berlin's another story, and "vibrant" kind of loses applicability.) Oh, and to be able to write about anti-Semitism, among other topics relevant to Jewish history, without viewing everything through the lens of anti-Semitism. If that makes sense. For the sake of the chapter I'm working on, which is maybe half about Edouard Drumont and his influence, I sure hope it does. Because it is odd that often the best times for Jews were also among the worst, the most integration alongside the most hostility. (Well, not the most-most, but a good amount.) But, in the interests of not further blurring the line between Chapter Six and this blog post...

-How's this for something positive about Germany, to counteract the previous item which was of course not about contemporary Germany. Ice cream in Heidelberg is one euro - one! - per cone. In Paris, the same portion is 3.50€. Oh, and it's also much better here. Whatever benefits to my system the separation from Le Boulanger des Invalides might have had, consider them reversed.

-Also delightful: I found the source of punk hair dye in Heidelberg! Not difficult, as it's on the one big street. The tips of my hair, now orange from the best non-punk dye Paris had to offer, will soon be platinum, and soon after that, "Pastel Pink." So excited!

Where it comes from

Thank you, Christopher Hitchens:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it's good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues.

He's right, but he might have added that being from a small town shouldn't disqualify someone from holding office, either. He might have, that is, if only because that's how some Slate readers appear to have (mis)interpreted it, and readers who think that's what he's getting at will find his argument much easier to dismiss.

Anyway, I'm going to attempt to answer Hitchens's rhetorical question. In America, at least, the small-town candidate ideal comes from several places. One is the obvious - it's about identifying with Non-Flashy America, and thus getting voters who see themselves as normal - and who, whether or not from small towns, associate them with normalcy - to identify with you. Next, it's about claiming a more authentic tie to America than those from big cities could possibly have. Thus "Real America." If doing so is a subtle way of reminding voters that you're not - not ethnically, not culturally - even the tiniest bit Jewish/black/gay/Latino, then all the better. It's this second way that most, I think, relates to the way the rural is or has been valued in European politics.

Finally, and this might be specifically American, emphasizing one's rural roots is a way of showing, in a meritocracy, that one has gone the greatest possible distance, using only one's own efforts and talents. Scrappiness oneupmanship - that same quality that has kids who grew up in Brooklyn Heights claiming "outer-borough" status as a way of making them feel like the fact that they got into Oberlin is an earth-shattering, against-all-odds achievement - is also at work in politics.

While we normally think of politicians' odes to the small town as, well, pro-small-town, the message is actually not so flattering. It's about making the politician look good, and giving him a grand coming-of-age story. But it works, politically, because it speaks to both audiences - those who get warm-and-fuzzy at the mere mention of a town of under 100,000, and those who admire anyone who made it out.

Romantic notions shattered by moisissure

The end of the dorm era has, at last, arrived. I'm nearly 28 years old, so about time, too. The contents of my room did apparently fit in luggage, save for items it wouldn't have made sense to bring, such as one gigantic if now twice pre-owned mini-fridge I was not entrepreneurial enough to try to sell. I watched as one by one, nice-seeming and nice-looking French 50-year-olds arrived in what I can only guess were nice cars to pick up their intellectually Supérieur 20-ish offspring and their stuff. This immediately brought back for me how it would go at the end of the year in college, when kids from the Midwest would just haul everything into the minivan, when the fools from carless NY families who at 17 had had romantic notions about getting to know other regions of the country had to figure out, at 21, how to get years' worth of stuff (and books!) back via an ATA flight. Where was my pickup? Over by the Gare de l'Est, effectively.

Not back home just yet though. I'm now in German university housing - a guest house and not a dorm - and the contrast between the two establishments could not be greater. Every possible cliché about the value placed on cleanliness in the two countries is supported by the way these two buildings are kept up. Here, there's a mix of near-continuous cleaning service and ubiquitous lists of instructions to keep your room and the common areas clean. (The staff, it seems, will clean but not "tidy.")

Meanwhile, back in Paree, an egg that had been dropped/thrown in the staircase still remained, weeks after the fact. That which is smeared on the walls of the communal bathrooms isn't going anywhere. Two of the most basic facts about keeping a bathroom functional - stocking it regularly with toilet paper and having a sink that actually runs water - were beyond the capacity of the powers that be. (Train restrooms and other public toilets began to seem pristine.) For reasons I will never understand, the janitor responsible for the kitchen would put only one of the two possible jumbo garbage bags in before the weekend, during which time the kitchen trash is not taken out, meaning that when he'd return on (optimistically) Monday, the kitchen would be basically a trash heap, however well-meaning the residents. The ideal of students cleaning up after themselves - always, with college students, an ideal at best - was rendered futile by the fact that so many people were sharing each kitchen that the moment one person/group finished up, the next needed and had already begun using the limited burners and counter-space, leaving a layer of grime beyond what a quick scrub on off-hours might fix. The showers were so moldy that, it was agreed, one left dirtier than one entered.

All came full circle when, when I asked about the check-out procedure, I was told, in the tone of someone scolding a child, to "nettoyez bien" my room - the standard instructions, and ostensibly there's a fee if you don't - and of course what was going through my mind was how, when I arrived, the room I'd been assigned contained the previous resident's (s'?) food and drink containers, towel, assorted other garbage, and, oh, used pad.

Also generally agreed upon by internationals: the dorm was disastrous by Western if not all-but-refugee-camp standards. As in, this was not, as might be suspected, a case of a bunch of entitled Americans, accustomed to air conditioning and cable television, large suites, plush beds, and a coffee shop serving iced soy lattes downstairs. The only Americans - the only grad students, period - who'd think to sign up for this kind of exchange (i.e. at ~30, living in a Parisian college dorm) are quite low-maintenance. Which made for a great group of people, actually, but which also meant that when anyone did complain, the complaints were pretty legit.

Overall, the semester was... a mix. I'd swing back and forth between thinking OMG free room in the center of Paris, with all the glamor that implies, all the proximity to primary sources and primo croissants it came through with... and thinking that the living conditions were a bit much to ask, even by grad-student-in-expensive-city standards. There's this notion - again, romantic - about grad students, held by society at large, as well as those who were once grad students themselves (although with this latter group, there's perhaps a touch of, 'if I had to do it...') that they should live in squalor, that any revulsion the grad student expresses about said squalor is a sign that the person's not cut out for a life of the mind. So I realize that the above description of Parisian dorm life will be met with a giant 'meh', and advice from the Dear Prudences of the world that if I wanted Paris and sanitary living conditions, I ought to have chosen a different career path and taken occasional vacations to hotels where, optimistically, filth would not be such an issue.

Weight-think

When studying Simone de Beauvoir for those qualifying exams, I remember being struck by how much of her feminism seemed to be about allowing female geniuses to flourish just as well as male ones do. As a non-genius reader of Beauvoir, it occurred to me that perhaps this was part of what feminism should be about, but really, most of us, male or female, are not staying up nights wondering if we'll be ranked first, or second after Sartre. The question of whether women will number among the super-duper-elite is important, with crucial trickle-down impact as well, but not everything.

So it goes with the problem of women's weight-think. By "weight-think" I mean the extent to which even women who are not all that worried about weight are worried about their weight, and are on some level, at meal times but other times as well, distracted by calories-in, calories-out calculations, thigh-fixations, etc. Isabel Archer describes it well; all I'll add is that it's a mindset that impacts far more women than those anyone would think to classify as having "a problem" in that area, that it extends beyond the yuppie sort, and that it's a major question feminism-of-the-"first-world" needs to be dealing with. Women are wasting massive amounts of time and energy on this, are not necessarily the healthier for it, and - and this I keep repeating - a good number of the women obsessing, if they "let themselves go," would still be quite slim, perhaps just not as thin. (The obsessing tends to be worst among the women for whom magazine-cover proportions seem at least theoretically attainable, so yes, there are some class variations in this.)

Here, as with feminism generally, one finds several interrelated but ultimately separate issues. One is that weight-think prevents some brilliant women from achieving great heights. This, in turn, is a problem both for those women and for society as a whole, which thus continues to associate "achieving great heights" with maleness. The other is that weight-think prevents average/mediocre women from thinking about other things, from enjoying their lives, etc. It's likely that weight-think keeps some women from reaching the "brilliant" category, but even without weight-think, most women, like most men, would not.

The issue, then, isn't - and here, I suppose, Isabel and I may disagree, but I'm not entirely sure, having never read A Room of One's Own - that women must lose themselves in work. Some should, yes, but neither most men nor most women are doing work they're going to lose themselves in. (This in response to commenter Sarah at Amber's.) It's that, as Isabel explains, "self-acceptance" at whichever weight isn't the whole answer. The goal shouldn't be for all women to look in the mirror and see "beautiful." It's for "beautiful" not to be the main important quality in most women's lives, not even most young women. Most women are sufficiently attractive as to attract a partner if they wish to do so; most, even after extreme dieting, will in no way other than measurements resemble runway models. We don't need to be telling ourselves we're just as hot as Angelina Jolie. We need to remember that objective, all-are-in-awe-of-it physical beauty, being largely fixed as well as temporary in its rare occurrences, is not a good goal towards which to channel 98% of one's mental energy. 5%, perhaps. It's not that attention to appearance should or realistically could be totally disregarded. But it should not come close to 100%. Physical beauty is both less important and less attainable than the woman weighed down by weight-think understands. Better to think about something else.

So it's great if weight-think is replaced by finding a cure for AIDS, or by being a more attentive stay-at-home mom. But even if weight-think just gets swapped for taking a walk, watching TV, reading a book, or doing some mundane task at work and thinking about, say, whether Pippa's single again and what this means for Harry, this, too, counts as progress.

(I could go on, re: the difference between devoting mental energy to one's beauty and the kind of physical adornment that's about self-expression and not OMG-cellulite, re: it being much better to ponder whether the toenails shall be pink or purple than how many calories are in that yogurt, but I think the above is enough for one post.)

Oh, Rosedale

I've spent the last few days in semi-vacation (Parisian dorm staycation) pre-Heidelberg Eiskaffe-and-dissertation extravaganza, finishing up the last of the shampoo I don't want to schlep across Europe, and buying as many French books as I'm willing to haul around. English-language-wise, my two latest attempts at non-work reading - Coningsby (done, ugh) and now The House of Mirth, which I'm about midway through so no spoilers please - will both end up sneaking their way into the dissertation. I'm now accepting recommendations for novels in which none of the following topics come up: 19th C/fin-de-siècle Western Europe/U.S., Jews, intermarriage, marriage strategies of the Western upper classes.

Other recent observations:

-Le Boulanger des Invalides Jocteur continues to be the center of the culinary universe.

-What French poodle? Everyone here has a yorkie. If not a yorkie, a Jack Russel.

-Naniwa-Ya might be the best Japanese restaurant I've ever been to, but I'll allow that I was quite hungry by the time we got there, so it might merely be the place with the best (and saltiest, not unrelated) agedashi tofu I've ever tasted. It was at any rate remarkable in that, despite fresh and perfectly-flavored food, the prices were low, not merely by Japanese-restaurant standards, but also by Paris ones. (6 euros for a bowl of soba noodle soup, for example.) This, I figured, was because in Paris, at least on the rue Sainte-Anne, Japanese places can function a bit like Chinatown ones in NY - cheap ethnic food for diners who don't care about decor or mind being rushed out quickly.

-The rue des Rosiers, however, I do not understand. It's not really Paris's Jewish neighborhood these days (that would be in the 9th), and the falafel is kind of standard-issue European-town-big-enough-to-have-falafel. I just relearned this, but seriously, why the lines?

-The place to go for a cold coffee beverage is Le Pain Quotidien. Sorry, purists who don't go to Paris for that kind of Americana, but damn it's hot, and neither the public transportation nor the dorm room have a/c, anything resembling a fan, etc. If you get the regular iced coffee with milk (not the iced "crème"), what arrives (or did today, at least) is what would normally be called an iced cappuccino, the price no higher than that sort of thing is in NY, which is to say reasonable treat-price, which is to say I don't even want to think of what 3.20 or whatever is in dollars because it's depressing. Add a bunch of sugar and you're transported to Tel Aviv, or some more PC Mediterranean locale.

-Friggin' soldes. Why did these have to begin while I'm still here, not in July when I thought they would, and when I'm not especially looking to buy any clothing? I did, however, end up getting somewhat spectacular jeans from what's apparently a very upscale boutique, for 30 euros - Shine's rue Montmartre branch can't seem to get rid of 'em. They do have a certain quality-denim look that I pretend does not exist when the only such items go for $200, but will freely admit does when they fall into my acceptable price range for pants.

"I relied heavily on my Jewish safety net"

Anyone who wondered if perhaps "philo-Semitism" is just a variant of anti-Semitism, look no further. Simon Doonan says he doesn't understand Galliano's anti-Semitism, because Jews - rich Jews - helped him (Doonan) make it in the fashion business, Jews who could hire him, help him with money troubles, find him a lawyer, or buy his clothes (technically the clothes he arranges in store windows). Because obviously if Jews were not so financially helpful to Doonan, despising them would be totally OK.

And for the record, neither the fact that Doonan is gay and as such a member of another marginalized group, nor his marriage to a "nice Jewish boy" (and can we please retire that phrase), makes any of this OK. (Déjà vu).

A feminist triumph

More wedding-talk from Slate writer Jessica Grose, who got married not long ago and has evidently been gazing into the navel of the existential angst the idea of marriage gives her for some time. This latest piece begins in the traditional educated-woman-discovers-self-not-impervious-to-gender-and-age-appropriate-desires manner that all defenses of entering into a heterosexual marriage, as a woman, must:

In most ways, I did not fit the bridezilla stereotype: I did not care about the color of our tablecloths; I haphazardly filled our registry with the things my mom told me we should have (as I type this, dust collects on our Le Creuset mortar and pestle); I let my bridesmaids pick their own dresses; my on-the-cheap bachelorette party involved a stoned viewing of Clueless followed by a sleepover rather than a gaudy, overpriced, forced march through Las Vegas.

To which a skeptic might respond:

-She had bridesmaids.
-She had a bachelorette party.
-She had a registry.
-With fancy stuff on it.

It is entirely possible to be 100% married without any of those. Ergo, no low-maintenance-ness award. But we're to believe that, but for her intense quest for bridal bodily perfection in the months leading up to her wedding, Grose was laid-back about the whole thing. And who's to say if she was or wasn't? All brides compare themselves to a "bridezilla" extreme that basically no bride will meet. Anyone who did not get transformed into a human Barbie, who did not rent the entirety of Monaco for the occasion, is so totally low-key.

The article itself, though, made me cringe. Not because I'm opposed to girliness or wedding extravagance (as I've mentioned here before, I bought wedding-but-also-post-wedding shoes at Repetto that cost more than the dress, and they were/are spectacular), but because... this is just so, so much more of a problem from a feminist perspective (well, my own feminist perspective) than white dresses, name-changes, father-givething-daughter-away, and engagement rings combined. Grose, you see, opted for the bridal diet-and-workout makeover, and defends this in the way that someone who kind of realizes how ridiculous this was, but also kind of doesn't, might.

[My personal trainer] told me that before we would start training that day, he needed to weigh me and assess my body fat with a caliper. I should explain here that I wasn't embarking on this transformation as a total sloth—I ran or attended spin class four or five times a week and my BMI was already in the low end of normal. I was already in reasonably good shape. Or so I thought.

"It's not a complete disaster," the trainer said after looking at the digital read-out on the caliper. "And what are your goals?" he asked. I told him I wanted to lose maybe five pounds, but mostly I just wanted to look really good in my strapless gown. "We can do," he told me, "but you need to come three times a week, and follow the diet."

And:

My then-fiancé looked over my shoulder at the Spartan list of acceptable foods I was allowed to consume. I would come to refer to this as the "squirrel food diet," because nuts and berries seemed to be such a crucial part of it. Otherwise, it was the standard diet that women's magazines encourage month after month after month: Breakfast involved egg whites. Lunch and dinner were 4 ounces of fish or chicken and greens. The nuts and berries were snacks. No booze, no sugar, no fun allowed.

"This is insane," said my fiancé. "You don't need to lose weight." 

"It's not about losing weight," I told him. "We're going to have those photos for the rest of our lives and I refuse to have dinner lady arms in them! I promise to be sane about everything else wedding-related."

Ah yes. The woman who isn't even fat, but who's bought into the idea that women - particularly those about to get married - should be on diets. Annoying to read about from a YPIS angle for women with BMIs north of the writer's, especially for those without fiancés reassuring them that they're tiny, but also for those of any gender or relationship status who think it's kind of important for women to, you know, eat. Yes, yes, even the low-normal BMI sorts should exercise, but there's no pretending it's about "health" if you're already borderline underweight and your goal is, in part, to lose five pounds. (Relevant "Mean Girls" quote coming to mind.)

I'm sure some will say, it's her body, she should do whatever makes her happy, and being five pounds underweight for one's wedding is unlikely to cause permanent damage. (Natalie Portman, she of the temporary tininess for "Black Swan," has just given birth to a Millepied, so this must be true.) To which I'd respond, it's a bit like the whole thing with "ex-gays." If some folks would prefer to view themselves as straight, for religious reasons or whatever, and get more pleasure from that identity than they would from a same-sex relationship, so be it, in theory. But in reality, these things do not occur in a vacuum, and the "ex-gay" is likely contributing to making life worse for those who'd rather be openly gay than closeted and pious, not to mention for the women they play at being "straight" with.

Women who diet unnecessarily are not always evangelists for doing so, but writing an article like this, phrasing it as a "defense" of the pre-wedding body-overhaul, adds up to as much. I'm not sure what the correct language is to describe this kind of writing ("pro-ana"? "pro-orthorexia"? "triggering"? people more up-to-date on Jezebel - which Grose used to write for! - than I am, help me out), but, guaranteed, it will make other already-thin women wonder if maybe they could stand to lose a few.

But! Grose's overall message, the basis for her "defense," is that her exercise routine was about empowerment. Thus the reference to wanting arms like Michelle Obama's - how liberal and liberating! And thus this, the strangest bridal-makeover-as-empowerment story I've ever heard:

That I was willing to keep at it made me realize that this makeover was about more than just vanity. I was getting much, much stronger. After several sessions I could lift the heavy boxes of wedding goodies that were being shipped to us on a near-daily basis without the aid of my fiancé.

A feminist triumph!

A rude Parisian waiter UPDATED

One of my fellow grad students made a truly brilliant observation: the French Paradox isn't eating cream sauces yet remaining thin and healthy. It's the fact that ATM machines distribute only 50s, while nowhere, not even supermarkets, will allow you to pay with one. Granted I get around this by taking out 40 at a time, and by doing the bulk of my spending at Monoprix (aka groceries), which for whatever reason finds cartes acceptable.

But sometimes I do want to pay for something in cash, and I'm then reunited with the French (Parisian?) obsession with exact change. No question about it, wherever you're paying, exact change will be appreciated more than a tip.

Meanwhile, as someone who does not live in Europe permanently or have a European bank account or anything, I do not have a stash in my room of the heaps and heaps of coins that would allow me to pay exact at all times. I clearly have no business being in Paris.

This evening, I met a friend - another grad student, we're everywhere! - for a drink. The total came to four euros for his beer, and a rather steep five for my glass of wine. (Steep because this is France, and, though Paris, not a touristy or upscale neighborhood.) From the get-go, the waiter at the place made it clear that he was not pleased to have to seat two Americans. Maybe my NYU tote bag was a mistake. Maybe my friend and I - he's also American - dared utter a syllable one to the other that gave off a whiff of anglais. Whatever it was, even though it was a beautiful evening, and there were available tables outside, as well as virtually all tables free inside, we were led to a table inside and in the back. I asked if outside was possible, and lo and behold it was. Similar efforts were required to see the list of wines by the glass. Through all of this, our waiter threw in just enough English words to make it clear: he was onto us.

Then came the bill. We each just had a 10, and again, we're both grad students, and with the current exchange rate, these were not exactly happy-hour drinks, so something at least close to paying for our own drinks was ideal. I asked for change. Non. By way of an explanation, our waiter opened what looked like the book from the check some other table had just paid and showed that there was only one five in it. Meanwhile, this was a reasonably large café, reasonably mid-evening. Really, no change at all?

Suspecting that some misogyny on top of the anti-Americanness might be at work, I asked my friend to give it a go when the waiter returned, and he again insisted that there was simply no change at all, not even à l'intérieur. The fact that after this, we were not planning to tip, was not an issue, not because a tip is never given in this situation (it can be, but is by no means expected), but because it was more important for the waiter to make it clear how his little neck of the woods in Paris was positively ruined by having to deal with Americans, those horrible people who not only communicate with one another English but, as residents of a country with another currency and across an ocean, do not keep massive stashes of European change in their pockets.

UPDATE

In keeping with the theme of Franco-American relations, some recent photos. By way of explanation, most are of a pro-French-language protest. Then there's graffiti that might be evidence of Jewish (like, pro-Jewish) terrorism, and possibly something to do with Freemasons, in what's Paris's non-tourist Jewish neighborhood, that is, not the Rue des Rosiers. The driving-school one is a fun double-entendre, the Vietnamese restaurant one evidence of the extent to which Anglophone hegemony has not taken over Paris. The Alsatian latkes are Alsatian latkes, and strike me - good peddler/usurer-descendent I probably am - as rather steep at nearly 19 a kilo. The ad asking French folk to visit America is from a good number of decades before sneaker-shopping on lower Broadway became the Frenchperson's vacation of choice, before the euro changed everything. The dachshund is a rare example of a long-haired miniature in this land of wire-haired standards.

Do Jews hate pie?

I've just begun the second season of "Twin Peaks," which I'd somehow missed when it was new, apparently because it was on the same time as "Cheers," which either I or those who controlled the television when I was a young child preferred. After a touch of disorientation during the pilot (what are Mr. and Mrs. Ross, Susan's parents, doing in the woods?) I've really gotten into it.

So I was struck by the arrival of forensics expert and "city slicker" named Albert Rosenfield, whose job is to help fellow "city slicker" FBI agent Dale Cooper (played by a youngish Kyle MacLachlan, sigh) solve a small-town Washington State murder. Brash, rude, and, if we're going to go by the Sheldon-of-"Big-Bang-Theory" school of mental diagnoses of television characters, somewhere on a spectrum, Albert's favorite thing in the world is telling the good folks of Twin Peaks that they're inept morons, at times comparing them to non-human animals. Dale, meanwhile, has fallen for the town, for its rustic, don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to charms. This, despite the fact that the town's a sordid place, far more violence per capita than a big city, I'd bet, but I suppose this is the whole Lynch/MacLachlan thing where the dark underside adds to the charm. Dale especially likes the town's coffee and pie, which seems reasonable, and no, I'm not being sarcastic.

Anyway, whereas both Dale and Albert are outsiders in Twin Peaks, Albert's the outsider. We certainly can't fault the locals for despising him, given that his attitude towards them is a bit like Benedikt's husband's towards Jews who have not sworn eternal anti-Zionism.* They don't hate him because his name is Rosenfield. They hate him because he's being an ass.

What we can look at critically is the choice to give a Jewish-sounding name to the urbanite who just doesn't get Real America, never has, never will. My question, then, is not whether the show is anti-Semitic, but whether this perhaps tells us something about the extent to which Jews are viewed, in contemporary America (the 1990s weren't that long ago), as the very epitome of Unwholesome America. (Last discussed in the comments here.) It's not that any number of other groups - yuppies, gays, etc. - don't exist in big cities and or not associated with big cities. It's that Jews are shorthand for "big cities" in a way that these other groups are not. Thus explaining why Jews might hear a dog-whistle operating when Palin, etc., hold forth on the Real America.

Granted, "Twin Peaks" is just one show, and a not-so-recent one at that. Nothing has been proven once and for all. Although I will say that my first thought re: the "Seinfeld" connection was that Susan's parents were cast from "Twin Peaks" precisely because they would, for 1990s viewers, have represented precisely the Wholesome America that George's parents, the Costanzas, did not. Oh, and the whole "log cabin" situation.

*See, I told you Benedikt's essay had a Chua-like staying power!

Comes full circle

I intended the title to this post as a humorous list of the key words that go into NYT-reader-bait articles. Due, no doubt, to the title, WWPD is currently #1 on the "Times Topics" page about yoga.

And with that, an end to the day's graphomaniacal extravaganza that, thankfully, extended to the dissertation as well.

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.

Organic yoga arugula Park Slope strollers

It's obviously only a matter of time until the NYT allows comments - and comments there shall be - on this Styles article that hits, oh, just about every possible Styles mark: coastal, upper-middle-class, well-educated, blah blah, couples who divorce, in an era when only the plebs are supposed to do that. Bad parenting, in this post-post-post-"Mad Men"-era society! Where there were Styles clichés left out, author Carrie Bradshaw - no, Pamela Paul - threw them back in, adding "yoga" and "organic" for good measure. Oh, and of course, those profiled come across on a superficial level as saints, but between the lines as privileged fools. You know what? I don't believe there's a "Pamela Paul." I think this was some excellent work on the part of the paper's Style Article Generator.

Anyway, I've taken the bait. (Maybe I'm homesick, who knows. No Park Slope parenting in Paris. Still very much try-not-to-drop-the-cigarette-ashes-onto-the-head-of-the-kid-in-the-stroller in these parts.) So:

-Obviously, you don't know the personal business of the other playgroup parents, so yoga moms, fine, should not be so judgey of the few among them who divorce. Maybe there was nastiness behind the organic-sustainable curtains that you don't know about, and the split really did have to happen. But even if not, even if the parents divorced for no good reason, for god's sake be civil with acquaintances.

-But maybe it is reasonable that people are judgey about divorce when there are young kids involved, in a way that would not have been as reasonable back in the day. It's not just about peer marriage vs. traditional gender roles, as Paul suggests. It's about choice of spouse. If you felt you had to marry in order to have sex, or if there was no effective birth control when you were young and single, then there's a heck of a lot better of a chance that you ended up with someone you were never that thrilled about to begin with. If you go into marriage knowing what else is out there, knowing, even, that you've been happy living with your future spouse for years already, then perhaps it is more embarrassing to divorce, all things equal, than if things don't work out between you and the guy who took you to the soda shop a few times before your wedding.

-The divorced parents quoted say a variant of, 'It's like they think it's bad parenting to divorce when your kids are young.' And the author is on their side. "[S]plitting up with tender, vulnerable children in the mix is seen as a parental infraction." At which point I'm like, yes, all things equal, it is bad parenting to divorce not long after having kids. Divorce should absolutely remain legal, and is sometimes unavoidable - again, with individual cases, best to avoid pronouncements about the avoidability or not of their divorces, exception being if they choose to brag about their infidelity in the Vows, in which case judge away. But without speaking to any individuals' situations, yes, all things equal, it is a nice gesture to your young children to stay with your spouse, if at all possible. Nicer, even, than remembering to get the organic carrot purée from the Co-op.

-"A common belief is that if the divorce is done properly, the children benefit more from the separation than from living in a family with a compromised marriage." Common among... recently divorced parents interviewed for this article. I know, I know, why look for Science in a place like this.

-But wait. Is the article about divorced parents? No, it's about Mommy Wars. How's this for a nice parenthetical? "(Indeed, according to many divorced men, now more involved in their children’s lives than their predecessors, they do not feel the same level of scrutiny.)" Indeed, maybe cutting a few of the superfluous mentions of organic milk would have made room to unpack the gender dynamics of this in the article's three pages.

-Requisite Dan Savage worship: While I think Savage is a bit too optimistic, if we want to call it that, about how easily the typical straight (or gay!) couple might set up an open relationship, while I think he greatly exaggerates the extent to which couples even want such relationships (skewed, perhaps, by political scandals, and by the fact that it's those not happy in their relationships, or who want affirmation in their non-monogamy, who call him), he does have a point about how, if it's a choice between splitting up a family and negotiating some kind of not-quite-monogamous set-up, the latter probably has its advantages.

The French out-French themselves

My phone was buzzing just now, and I realized that, given how hopeless I've been at entering the numbers of the admittedly limited number of people I know in Paris into my phone here, there was a decent chance this was not a wrong number. I said hello, then heard the other end hang up. Then saw I had a text message. An apology for misdialing... and a remark to let me know that I have a nice voice.

(I will not get into the lack of toilet paper - again! - in one of the stalls, with the other one fast running out, or the drunken man yelling, possibly in German, audible even with the window closed. Perhaps one of the goals of this exchange, in which the 30-ish live in dorms, is to make American profs of French happy to live in remote parts of the U.S., where one can have a large house, a general lack of seduction-culture, and all the toilet paper one has ever dreamed of.)

Holding on tight to my 20s UPDATED

I know everyone wants to hear about Zionism, maybe about college admissions, but instead you're getting a hair post. Ombré, at long last. Fading to more to strawberry-blond, more to yellow-blond depending on the light, as the photos indicate. Another hour or so of bleach would have probably been necessary for the effect I'd imagined, the one that would fade to platinum and thus permit blue dye to show up properly over it. Pink, I remember from experience, works fine on this shade. Anyway, I kind of like it as it is, am in the land of no pink hair-dye, and am kind of not up for smelling bleach again any time soon. Two major advantages to this look, for those among my readers who might be craving a change of coiffure: 1) Yes, bleach damages hair, but if you have long hair, or hair you heat-style, or both, your ends are damaged anyway, and you already own whichever gunk is necessary to hide that fact, and 2) however odd it comes out, the great thing about dyeing the tips of long hair is, next haircut and it's gone. This is not an "I need a radical change" kind of D.I.Y., more the risk level of trimming one's own bangs.

UPDATE

For an example of the professional version, on coloring virtually identical to my own, see the Man Repeller here, or post-salon-styling (presumably) here. Damn. I'm thinking I may as well open an ombréing salon in my dorm room. "In the heart of the Latin Quarter, for a mere 75 euros, you too can have the bottom third of your hair bleached for an hour, the bleach washed out, and bleach once again applied to just the tips for another hour, then go wash the whole thing out yourself in one of the moldy showers down the hall."

Another courageous American Jew takes on Zionism

Reader (and writer!) Erika Dreifus sent me a link to this, and all I can say in response to the article is, oh, Allison Benedikt. You are so friggin' cool. You snuck cigarettes with the cool kids before it was cool, you were Zionist when that was cool, and now, now that it's no longer the thing for Jews to be like that, you're ambivalent about Israel. Ms. Benedikt, I don't want your Zionism. I'd rather, with your approach to world affairs, that you not be on any side of anything I'm associated with.

The entire piece - the author's strange and only mildly erotic journey from Zionist summer camp to intermarriage (!) and disillusionment with Israel (!!!) goes a bit overboard with the coming-of-age, loss-of-innocence theme. I mean for goodness sake, look in an encyclopedia or online depending what year this was and bingo, you can find out who Jabotinsky was. Middle school is one thing, but if you reach late high school, let alone college, without learning about the various major contentious issues of the day that most relate to you personally, you have only yourself to blame. Interested in Zionism? Perhaps read a book about Zionism. In college? Take a class. I found it harder and harder, as the article went on and its protagonist grew older and wiser, to sympathize with someone whose political opinions came only from friends and boyfriends. Mainstream newspapers! One publication from the left, one from the right! Otherwise, oh Jewish Palin, I don't give a Mediterranean fig about your sensitive take on the I-P conflict.

It's no great mystery to the careful reader where the author gets her oh-so-informed approach to the news from: "[M]y parents don't do facts on this issue. They do feelings."

And,

"I watch the news in horror and talk to my Mom on the phone every day, whose opinions vacillate wildly depending on who she is speaking with or how attacked she feels by the anchors on TV."

Oh, and this, buried in the article, I'll bury in this post in kind: "Through sheer force of will and also nepotism, I get a magazine job." From her family she got an inability to form informed opinions on world issues, and, right out of college, a journalism job in New York. A winning combination.

(If the point of this piece is to make American Jews more rah-rah Diaspora, bits like this don't help: "Because [the summer camp is] all Jews, I'm considered cute." Yes, yes, Jewish girls are grotesque and can only attract attention if set apart from the strapping Real Americans. But this, though a gratuitous reiteration of an annoying cliché, I can't really criticize, because it's conceivable that this was her experience.)

Overall, my response to this piece was, in part, to desperately wish I hadn't railed on against the expression "your privilege is showing," because oh, it would apply here. Not just lines like, "I tell my sister that when I move to New York in the fall [after college], I'm going to 'do my own thing,'" followed immediately by the convenient journo job. More the notion that someone who has not only not experienced anti-Semitism personally, but someone for whom the idea that Jews might be, in some broader sense, hated, is inconceivable if in her own life is comfortable.

But it's not really about privilege at all, but about ignorance. Yes, as a Jew, you will get some non-Jews who will find it oh so delightful that they can now explain how evil they think Israel is to a real life Israelite. Maybe the non-Jewish boyfriends who told the author how wrong she was not to be horrified by Jewish nationhood were in no place to be lecturing someone from a marginalized group on the justice of its liberation movement. (Requisite disclaimer: the issue isn't that they "criticized Israel," which of course even non-Jews with Jewish significant others are allowed to do, or that they attempted to expand the admittedly narrow horizons of the author, but that, at least as she tells it, they didn't come at this from the perspective of, whatever one thinks of current Israeli policy or even the founding of the state, it was the national movement of a seriously oppressed people.) Just as she readily accepted that Jews were the eternal victim when this was fed to her at summer camp, the author swallows whole the idea that no, no, it's Israel that's in the wrong. So... I'm left, I suppose, where I started, thinking that I wouldn't especially want someone like the author on the pro-Israel end of things, given the kind of rhetorical support she'd be able to provide.