The Zionist Left

If I've tired of discussing Israel, it's because I can't seem to write a post I haven't already written. When I saw Leonard Fein's excellent article in Dissent explaining what it means to be a liberal Zionist, I was struck by not only the article's objective truth, but its tragic hopelessless. If you think Israel as a Jewish state is a good thing, even if your ideal Jewish state would be downright communist, you have no place on the left. I've said it before, and I appear to be saying it again. Does this make the Dissent crowd Republicans? Conservatives? No, not necessarily. But it's telling that when do-gooder Nicholas Kristof defines the bad and good Israelis (a nuanced approach), he opposes those who fight for Jews, albeit from the right, and those concerned with the Palestinians, needless to say from the left. It is inconceivable by a mainstream or marginal Western (and I do not include Israel as Western) liberal standard that a good Jewish liberal might be interested in doing good for Jews, or for Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis alike. If you are a Jewish Israeli advocating for gay rights, redistribution of wealth, and less stringent marriage and conversion laws, that is, causes that are not specifically about the Palestinians, you are invisible as far as the left anywhere but Israel is concerned.

In defense of secularism, shirts

Jews! Nudity! Brooklyn! Manhattan! New York Magazine's latest cover story has it all.

As is the case, I'd imagine, for most secular Jews, my relationship to Ultra-Orthodox Jews is conflicted. On the one hand, I realize that if they start getting attacked on the streets, this means anti-Semitism, and is bad news not just for them, but for those like myself. On the other hand, getting an arranged marriage at 17, dressing for the Polish winter in the New York summer, and the many rules interfering with such questions as gentiles looking at wine; men and women shaking hands; and taking the elevator on Saturday (unless it stops on every floor) strike me as, well, horrible. (Depending on which part of the faith we're talking about, the fact that I'm pro-Israel further distances me from many in these communities, who believe that Israel should not have been established.)

Unlike some others, I feel comfortable disapproving of their lifestyle while respecting the fact that they no doubt disapprove even more vigorously of mine. And it's great that we can all, for the most part, live in peace in this country. But the point is, whatever solidarity I feel with Hasids and others of this ilk comes from a sense that we share ancestry and enemies. That's the extent to which I can relate. While the sight of the Ultra-Orthodox gives some less- or non-Jews a feeling of guilt, a sense that look, these people are the real deal, I feel nothing of the kind. For a sense of why, have a look at this movie. A willingness to stand out in public (admirable) and oppress in private (less so) does not make any particular group of Jews the 'authentic' ones.

That said, what on earth was New York Magazine doing, putting a topless shot of an ex-Hasidic woman's 4-year-old daughter, sitting with her (clothed) mother, on the cover? Yes, yes, provocative, I get it, but why put the child in more danger than she'd be in otherwise? This is America, for god's sake, not Europe. We are not so cavalier about nudity in these parts. I doubt if the average 'of course I breast-feed in public' Park Slope mom would agree to having her daughter photographed in this way, on the cover of a major magazine, even if the magazine's proceeds benefitted local farms, green tote bags, and Obama. In other words, the cover is bad taste defined.

As for Mark Jacobson's article itself, the conflict of authenticities between the old-time liberal New York Jewish great-grandparents and the hippie-gone-Hasid grandmother is quite interesting. If only the piece didn't begin with a reference to the above-mentioned child "sitting, princesslike, in the child’s seat," soon to be followed by a mention that certain Hasids "only came to Wal-Mart for the big sales." Princesses, sales, princesses, sales... something is starting to click. This story, is it by any chance about Jews?

Two conservatisms?

Graduate students are often advised to tone down their arrogance. This is a problem I wish I had, but, as I've mentioned before, can't seem to summon. Not only is grad school humbling, but the comments I get on this blog reinforce my conviction that I am ignorant of everything, perhaps even my own name. Take this most recent one:

There is nothing like unflinchingly pompous liberales trying to explain "conservativism" while neither understanding liberalism, conservatism, or democracy.

I'm assuming that I, and not a prior comment-leaver, am the "unflinchingly pompous liberale," so I'll respond to the accusation that I do not understand liberalism, conservatism, or democracy. My response? I don't, it's true.

That said, I do find conservatism more interesting to think (and read) about than liberalism/leftism, mainly because it's less obvious what conservatism should entail. Is the point to maintain the status quo? To revert to a Golden Age? To create something altogether new, but that just happens to appeal to everyone's bigoted great-uncle? Speaking only of contemporary America, not of these 'ism's as total abstractions, it seems to me that, now that the Bush-neoconservative route has become so terribly unpopular, conservatism could go in one of two directions. One direction, the populist direction, entails conservatives embracing relativism as one would expect to see it on the left, and saying that sure, high-quality food; birth control; college; tolerance of homosexuality; and delayed marriage are fine for elites (a group that, needless to say, includes most conservative or liberal commentators), but these things are not objectively better, so the government should not push the values of the elite on the masses. The other direction, the 'elitist' one, would involve a more uniform embrace of the idea that one thing can be better than another, even if the 'better' thing is one particular to the upper classes. The reason I do not outright call this the elitist route is that some things that are objectively better by conservative standards will turn out to be favored by the well-off (farmers' markets), whereas others (two-parent households) will be favored by the less well-to-do parts of society. So, if not elitist, than what--'objectivist' sounds right, but has already been taken by something else...

Conservatism as it currently exists in the U.S. is a hodge-podge of these two ideals, of (feigned) scorn for anything intelligent and of appreciation for the finer things, be they food items, books, or... you name it. The inability of these two strands to coalesce into something coherent is most readily seen in the conservative critique of higher education. Half the time it's a tragedy that American teens are watching junk on TV and not reading Plato, while the other half of the time, college is a waste and 99% of our youth would be better off with a few weeks of vocational training and a gentle push to the nearest plumbing job. We should all be poring over the Great Books... or, wait, we should stop wasting our time on such fluff as learning the more commonly-spoken foreign languages. Which is it?

To an extent, the two ideals can be reconciled--maybe the point is that a select few should be receiving a liberal education while the great majority had better sign up for those classes that teach you how to fix air-conditioners. But if that's the case, how is the elite to be chosen? If we go with the current educated elite, that is, if we keep things as they are, the elite stays liberal. What about this scenario is conservative? But ultimately, even if these two strands can be reconciled in the case of education, and on other questions as well, it strikes me as more natural for them to split, for the lowest-common-denominator conservatism, the one that accepts and at times promotes bigotry and ignorance in the name of populism, to split from the aim-high conservatism, the one that risks alienating some followers, but stands to gain others by offering up a well-defined set of ideals to which all should strive, but to which, inevitably, some will come closer than others.

Organic bakesale for McCain?

There is only one realm where those on the left can comfortably say that Thing A is better than Thing B, and that realm is food.* Organic, local, and homemade are just plain better than the alternatives. You think Doritos taste better than Greenmarket potatoes? White, processed bread's better than home-baked whole wheat? You're wrong, end of story.

John Schwenkler argues that the trend in rejecting processed foods in favor of the natural and the local should have its home on the right of the political spectrum, that is, the exact opposite of the place where it currently resides. I agree** that the emphasis on the local, the regional, and the rejection of the new all sound like ideas that should be coming from conservatives, not liberals. The one place I disagree with Schwenkler is in the idea that caring about food quality is made less of a conservative cause on account of its association with elitism. The real-food movement is conservative not despite its elitist tendencies, but because of them. To be conservative is to reject the notion that Things Fall Apart is just as good as The Iliad, that Bach is no different from Britney. A conservative feels confident declaring one thing superior to another, without stopping to consider whether said declaration offends those of lower class or minority groups. For a conservative, there's none of this Bourdieusian taste-is-relative ideology, there's simply high and low, quality and junk.

(via.)

* OK, and Obama. Obama is All That Is Good, if less so this past week or so.

** For the record, now that I'm linking to that other post, I do not think social conservatives want anyone having babies at 15. They do seem to think girls like babies, about which I continue to have some doubts.

How not to be a pretentious grad student

Normally Dear Prudence is spot-on. But one of her answers today misses a few key things, things I only noticed because the letter began, "My husband and I are both graduate students at different universities, and we both teach introductory-level classes in our fields as part our programs." That is, a situation not too far off from my own experience. The letter continues:

My husband, however, refers to this teaching requirement as his job—as in, when people say, "What do you do?" he responds, "I teach at College X." He will not bring up the fact that he is a graduate student and will evade questions about his role unless I mention that he's a student, not a full professor. This is causing some tension between us. I feel that he's being untruthful and trying to make himself look more accomplished and successful. (No one we know, at our age, is a full-time faculty member at any university.) But he thinks I'm undermining and disrespecting him when I tell people that he's in grad school. Am I being petty, or is he being pretentious?

Prudie responds,

You're being petty, and he's being pretentious. If you'd kept your critique private, he'd definitely be ahead of you in pretentiousness, since he's deliberately trying to inflate his role at the university. But you acknowledge that you get so bugged by this that you point out to people just how silly your husband is; that's pretty petty. Is this a new character trait of his? If so, you need to talk about what may be causing this overcompensation. Perhaps he's having trouble with his thesis. Maybe he's worried he'll never finish or that, even if he does, it won't be good enough to get him the kind of faculty position he covets. Check in with him about how he's feeling about his life—and make the discussion separate from this squabble. And when you're socializing and he shades his description of what he does, don't say anything. Respond to the questions about yourself straightforwardly, and decide it's not your job to grade his answers.

Ah, the age-old dilemma for the PhD student of what to say that you "do" when someone asks. The answer has less to do with pettiness or pretension than with getting your audience right. When you're 23 or 24 and someone asks about your work, and you respond with, "I'm a student," you are basically telling this person that you are in college, that you are largely supported by your parents, that you are, for all purposes, a child. You probably start your weekends on Thursday, hook up with a different person every weekend, and are like not totally sure what you're going to do when you grow up. There are certain situations--say, when looking to rent an apartment--when explaining what a PhD program is would not be convenient and might well be futile. That's when saying, "I teach at X University" comes in handy. It's the quickest way of saying yes, I can pay rent, and no, I will not trash this apartment. (If, at 30, while wrapping up your dissertation, you answer with, 'I'm a student,' that too offers its share of concerns.) What both Prudie and the letter-writer miss is that this answer is an entirely fair one to give, whether one is tenured, an adjunct, or a new T.A. Just try telling a T.A. with a stack of papers to grade that reaches the ceiling, with a class full of students with varying degrees of interest in the material, that this does not really count as teaching.

If pretension does enter into it, it's not the 'I teach' versus 'I'm a student' debate, but rather, whether you say, 'I'm a grad student' or 'I'm a PhD/doctoral student.' In most social situations, no one is accusing anyone of being a spoiled 18-year-old, so there's really no need to say you teach. But how much information do you need to give? 'Grad school' sounds so general, and no one faults a med or law student for specifying his field of study. But to say 'PhD' is to say 'not an MA,' which, depending on the context, can come across as snooty and overly specific. But not specifying leads to all kinds of inane discussions about what you're going to do after grad school, because, by implying that you're getting an MA, you throw yourself back into the pool of those undecided about precisely what they'll be doing after they graduate. Then again, how inaccurate is this assessment, when you consider that no one in a PhD program can confidently say, 'I'm going to be a professor,' without coming across as, well, pretentious?

The answer is, again, to know your audience. There are times when nothing short of, 'I teach,' will satisfactorily convey that you are an adult. There are other settings when specifying exactly what program you're in and what your research topic is will actually be of interest to other people, but those times are exceedingly rare. The trick is to come up with the shortest possible way of saying what it is you do, then quickly change the subject to whatever the other person does, although this advice is, I would say, not specific to grad students.

Not from these parts

Every time I'm confronted with a new part of the city, it takes me a while to figure out where one finds the important stuff (good coffee, cheap lunch) within blocks of wherever I need to be. Being from New York does not help when it comes to figuring out where the nearest passable café is in Midtown. That said, after working near Bloomingdales and doing work in the New York Public Library, I've got the 42nd-59th stretch of the area pretty figured out. What's more of a challenge is the neighborhood, whatever it's called, near CUNY's graduate school, that is, 34th and 5th. Where should I be getting pre-German coffee? The mocha I got at the closest place--a Starbucks--on the first day of class was made with milk that had seen better days--a bad sign if you can tell this over the taste of half a cup of chocolate syrup--so I'm prepared to go a couple blocks of out of the way for a place more vigilant about refrigeration/expiration dates, where syrup is not necessary. Suggestions?

Adult education

It's true what they say about age and language study. As I approach my quarter-century (a girl from my high school class was in last week's Vows; I'm officially alte), I realize that I cannot keep the noun, determiner, and adjective case endings in my head all at the same time. Memorizing charts of endings in isolation works well enough, but combining the material, without the charts (which I've ostensibly memorized) in front of me? Not so much. My ancestors spoke a variant of this language, but I did not inherit this particular acquired characteristic. One word after the next looks familiar, but the grammar... I'm starting to understand where my own students are coming from when they think that I invented French grammar especially to confuse them. But French is so much easier! This is objective fact, and has nothing to do with my years spent dealing with one language versus a couple weeks spent with the other. But seriously. How can a language make the definite article so involved? Do German people have to do a gigantic math problem (or twelve) every time they read a sentence? Or does this feeling when confronted with German sentences (who am I kidding, German word phrases) go away after a while?

2.1

Alas, the structure of our politics makes it increasingly difficult to address the plight of those for whom race and poverty have become inexorably intertwined. For example, even though we know that children of married parents are significantly less likely to have trouble in school or to wind up poor or in prison, politicians on the left continue to oppose programs to encourage marriage. -Stephen L. Carter

The developed world is experiencing a wave of pro-natalist sentiment that threatens to bully the childless, tax the single, and reorient states toward the production rather than the protection of citizens. In most developed nations with below-replacement fertility, governments are attempting to align incentives so that women will use their bodies for the purpose of childbirth. [....] Modern fertility panic stems from a desire to reshape polyglot cultures, to regain control over women’s reproductive choices, and to locate a single, easy-to-understand culprit for disparate social problems. As they have for hundreds of years, societies are projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs. -Kerry Howley, via

Technically, marriage and childbirth are two separate issues. That said, in reality, there's a connection between the movement to encourage marriage and the push for asking women, ever so gently, to push out 2.1 or more. If you disagree with that statement, then don't read on, since that's the assumption on which the rest of the post is based.

I'm incapable of discussing this issue as articulately as I'd like, so above, you have two quotes that roughly sum up the two sides. (See also this debate.) On the one hand, there's the idea that, all things equal, marriage is better than all other arrangements, children (within the context of marriage) are a positive good for society, the more the better. What's ignored is whether, once you look at society family by family, where all things are not equal, individuals might have good reasons not to be married, not to have kids. What's also ignored is whether, good reason or not, there's any inherent, unquantifiable value in letting people make their own decisions. Take the clichéd single woman of a certain ago who wishes she'd married and reproduced two decades earlier. Social conservatives point to this and say, aha, we should encourage women to do what they will later come to wish they'd done. Social liberals (well, this one, at any rate) would say, a woman has many over-18 years to decide these matters for herself, and that it's better to be childless and regretful as the result of one's own choices than living with children you may love and a husband you may not who've been hoisted upon you by the government.

For social liberals, the point is not to say, all studies that say marriage is good for kids, kids are good for society, etc. have no validity. Rather, it's important to keep in mind the drawbacks--for all involved--to unwanted marriage and unwanted children, as well as the positive good that is letting people sort their personal lives out without government encouragement one way or the other. Just because name-the-social-ill might be fixed by encouraging marriage does not mean that encouraging marriage is the only way to address a given problem; it's certainly got to be among the most intrusive. The micro-example I've already addressed--natalism in American Judaism--is clear enough. If the goal is more Jews, this can be accomplished either through urging Jews to inmarry and have tons of babies, or through improving Jewish education, making it easier to convert in, or any number of measures that do not ask anything special of women in general and uteri in particular. On a broader scale, one can debate American pro-natalism with similar arguments.

What I have yet to see addressed is the new, or newly popular, social conservative argument: promoting marriage-and-kids is not about Christianity or tradition or patriarchy, or even about, in some generic sense, what's best for our children. Rather, promoting traditional values just happens to be our best way of helping the poor and the lower classes. One can find this argument in Grand New Party and elsewhere (via). The idea is, social liberalism disproportionately hurts all but middle and upper-middle-class families. This is, I would say, social conservatism's strongest argument. It's not one I find convincing, but it's one social liberals (especially those who are also all-around liberals) will have the toughest time addressing. It's conservatives, not liberals, who, traditionally, feel comfortable saying Thing A is superior to Thing B, and that's that. So while there will always be those who declare that traditional family life is better because it's traditional, and now there are those why say traditional arrangements are better for reasons having to do with statistics and social justice, there's no one out there arguing that birth control and reproductive choice are superior to the alternatives, and that's that. Or, such people exist, but they are either libertarians or conflicted, unconvincing liberals. Which is to say, conservatives are free to defend 'tradition' whether or not it can be shown that doing so helps the poor, whereas liberals, that is, those who are defending the Sexual Revolution, now have a tougher, but important, case to make.

She should eat a sandwich

Celebrities are constantly being advised to eat sandwiches. Today I decided to make the most of time off and live as much like a celebrity as a grad-school budget allows, which is to say, I managed to get my hair cut at a place where I was able to avoid compromising my principles, checking account, or hair. Whee! Much improved. How does this relate to sandwiches? I figured since I was living the life of a woman of leisure, I might as well stop in, pre-haircut, at the Italian sandwich shop next door. Both the sandwich place and the hair salon were cash-only, which made it really, tangibly obvious that the two trips cost close to the same amount. But what a sandwich! Who knew mozzarella, arugula, and artichokes combined so well?

The moral of the story is, Sullivan Street is one of the greatest places in New York. And if we'd been more amenable to the offer of a woman on Craigslist to take over her lease, so long as we bought $2,000 (!) worth of her furniture (one hopes this came with a sandwich), Jo and I might be living on Sullivan, and not in Park Slope, at this very moment.

Am I permitted one comment about Park Slope? It's not about strollers. It's about the danger of taking slogans too literally. The 'going green' trend need not involve replacing one's pre-trend t-shirts with green ones, and using a green tote bag to do one's shopping. You will walk around Park Slope and discover that everything you see is green-the-color, because apparently a tote bag in any other color signals a cold-hearted disregard for future generations. [Disclaimer: I've even got one--my mother got it free somewhere, and hasn't asked for it back (do you want it, by the way?) so I'm guessing she's as enthusiastic about the look as I am.]

Perfection!

Two of my favorite things in the whole world are French macaroons and longhaired dachshunds. This is why I must remember to check Kei's blog more often.

The politics of hair

I wanted to get a haircut--to look more chic, to reduce hair-drying time, the usual reasons. I'd passed a place right next to the Housing Works bookstore, and decided that my next cut would be from there. It looked surprisingly chic for a salon located in the back of Ricky's, a punk-oriented drugstore chain. The prices? $35 and up for men, $50 and up for women. Why more for women? Because life is unfair. I was willing to accept the unfairness of life, but was less thrilled to learn that $50-plus meant, given the current length of my hair, $70-plus. The irony of this is that my hair only got as long as it is because I was putting off getting a haircut on account of it being so expensive.

So, question: it is, as anyone who's done either knows, far simpler to cut long hair than short. Setting aside the question of gender--not all women let their hair get as long as I have--why was my haircut (which, alas, I did not end up getting) assessed at $70? Did my best Century 21 t-shirt-Uniqlo skirt combination leave me looking especially well-to-do? (Not a chance.) Needless to say, I don't think it was personal--the combination of long hair and femaleness was enough to merit the "plus" fee of at least $20, enough to rule out any post-haircut purchases at the used bookshop next door.

Since technically nearly all barber shops are unisex and charge maybe $15 for a cut, perhaps the fault lies with me for buying into the consumerist myth that men and women require different types of haircuts. Haircuts are thus a whole lot like deodorants, yogurts, breakfast cereals, razors, socks... the more you think about it, the more we've found ways as a society to attribute gender to products for no apparent reason. But! While I'm sure countless women have long since figured out that, short of tampons, personal care products are gender-neutral, I doubt many have abandoned the salon for the barber. And I'm not sure if going to someone accustomed to cutting short hair (I'm assuming long-haired men also go to salons) wouldn't be a mistake. I want to challenge norms that demand I pay $70 for a haircut, but I'm not keen on looking mannish.

One possibility is Crops for Girls, a place I've heard good things about. It specializes in short, affordable haircuts for women. Which sounds about right, except that a) even the longest of the short cuts are shorter than what I want, and b) the prices, though reasonable, are well above what a man would pay for an equivalent haircut. Another would be to spend like wild at a salon I know gives good haircuts (I splurged once a couple years ago) and that does not differentiate between men and women. The final possibility? Deciding that long hair is so very now, and not dealing with the situation until my hair reaches the length of my commute.

Ashkenaz

Herzl was way, way off when he said that the Jewish state should use German and not Hebrew, Hebrew being, according to Herzl, too challenging. After day 1 of German class (the day after turning in my grades for the French class I co-taught--this is an action-packed summer, linguistically at least) I can say for sure that Herzl did not know what he was talking about. Hebrew does not have fifty different ways of combining an article and a noun. Words in Hebrew might well be written in silly letters, but they are, in most cases, quite short. Granted, for native German speakers (or German-influenced 19th C Central European Jews), German would have been easier than Hebrew, which was kind of Herzl's situation, but objectively, ordering a train ticket in German has to be tougher than doing the same in Hebrew.

After my class, I met up with Jo for dinner at the Second Avenue Deli. Somewhere between the matzo ball and the kreplach, I'm hoping something of German or German-like language started to sink in.

Never thought I'd say this,

but I wish I were Kim Cattrall.

Make it stop (seriously)

Over a year ago, a man wrote in the New York Times about how, although he went to school in Boston, his children, especially his teenage twins, are not quite Boston material. These twins may not go Ivy, but presumably they're capable of reading simple English, which is why I was surprised to see that this same man has yet another article in the paper about these very same twins, about their continued mediocrity:

"My twins never had the same view of high school that I did. Through ninth grade I’d pressed them relentlessly about their class work. But as much as I yelled, as much as I grounded them, they did not become the top students their older brother and younger sister are. I don’t know how to explain it. They’re smart. They’d been in gifted programs. They just weren’t interested."

I didn't immediately remember the author's name, but soon enough it was clear this was a follow-up to that other, memorably cringe-worthy parenting article: "I had been a top student [...]" Ah yes, the Harvard man coming to terms with his academically-challenged twins.

He seems to have outdone himself this time, though, mining the family photo album for an adorable childhood shot of the twins (Overshare of the Year Award, we have a winner; I know I'd like to see my own childhood pics juxtaposed with tales of my high school failings), and by offering up a passage that so one-ups any from the previous year's installment:

"As an education columnist, I had long advocated for vocational schools, but thanks to Adam, I saw the importance firsthand. Adam had been miserable in A.P. English Composition during junior year, but in senior year he loved the carpentry course at our county vocational school, hopping out of bed before dawn to catch the bus."

Really. The time has come to end the first-hand-account parenting articles once and for all. Or, if newspapers refuse to take that step, then at the very least, how about refusing to print the ones whose subjects are more than old enough to read the piece at the moment it appears.

Pickiness and minimalism

I've had an iPod with video capacity for well over a year. I had yet to use this function until maybe a week ago, when Jo showed me how podcasts work (oh the Humanities!). Soon after I inadvertently stumbled upon the most addictive videos ever, which are cutting into my usual subway activities of reading and open-eyed napping. The videos? Mark Bittman, aka The Minimalist. Each video podcast is a mini-cooking show just long enough that you see the dish from start to end, but short enough that if you are distracted by what Bittman's cooking, you won't miss more than a couple subway stops.

Inspired by watching Bittman cook dish after dish that in reality I know I'd never want to eat, but that looks so good when prepared in minimalist cooking-show glory (scallops in cream sauce and deviled eggs, in particular, are both items I'd immediately eliminate from a menu when deciding what to order, but Bittman convinces us that both are plate-lickin' fantastic), I decided to photograph my own latest culinary achievement. I'm not a bad cook, but as a photographer, I appear to be hopeless, so while it looks like somebody vomited on a salade niçoise...



... I promise that I prepared not one but two elegant and delicious light summer meals. (Jo confirms my assessment, both of the photo and of the reality behind it.)

But back to Bittman. As I've mentioned, of all the dishes I've watched him prepare (and it's getting to be a whole lot) I can't think of a single one I'm likely to make. This is because Bittman will cook everything, whereas I have an aversion to mayonnaise, cream sauce, whipped cream, sour cream, butter (except in pastry), and a wide range of foods (but especially, it seems, condiments) beyond those I've mentioned. I'm certain that when I eat out, I unknowingly eat and enjoy all the foods I find too disgusting to make at home. You will see that I wrote earlier in this post that I am not a bad cook. Well, is this possible for someone who's never outgrown aversions to so many common ingredients? I'm thinking not, which is why for me, the Bittman videos are educational, showing me that foods I like are made with foods I ostensibly wouldn't touch.

Apolitical thought of the day

Forever 21 would be amazing if it only stocked clothing in something below a (large) Medium. I'm not saying the store should go all H&M on us and make an 8 that fits like a zero--the opposite and perhaps more unpleasant end of the cheap-fashion spectrum--but it's really frustrating to look through a rack of surprisingly well-designed sub-$20 and even sub-$10 bright-yellow flapper dresses only to realize it's never going to happen. (After seeing two women with my complexion wear and look fabulous in bright yellow, I'm on the quest for a dress of that color, but cheap, because I will soon enough decide that the color does not look good on me at all.)

Is the Pill organic?

On what evidence does Kay Hymowitz base her assertion that "girls tend to like babies"? Puppies, sure. Kittens, why not. But babies? I could point out that neither I nor my female friends ooh and ahh at every toddler, but that would be missing the point. Hymowitz would respond that it's just that in my milieu, girls are brought up to hold the 'unnatural' view that having a child in one's teens or early twenties is a nightmare scenario; our aversion is the result of our urban-liberal elitism, which cancels out the maternal instinct that would otherwise kick in around 10th grade--or given today's still-earlier onset of puberty, 5th or 6th.

Hymowitz explains, "In most cultures in human history, 15- or 16-year-olds were seen as viable mothers (only after being married off, of course), so biological urge coincided with social need. But in more complex societies like ours, in which a long period of education and wealth accumulation is necessary to prepare for an advanced labor market and marriage, adolescent baby lust poses a big problem."

Sadly, we've reached a point where both the right and the left lament all manner of human progress, embracing biological determinism and dreaming of a return not to a 1950s Golden Age, but to an 1150s one. Not only should 15-year-olds find husbands for their babies rather than restraint and/or birth control to keep from having one. We should also avoid eating anything our "great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food." (Guess anything that isn't gefilte fish is out; comments at Gawker make similar points.)

Michael Pollan and the real-food movement presumably do not share much of a fan base with social conservatives telling young girls that it's natural to want a baby of their own. But the notion's the same: the Pill is not something your great-great-grandmother would recognize as a contraceptive. To advocate use of birth control, or even prolonged abstinence, is to fight nature, and nature, many would have it, wins every time. For Pollan and Hymowitz, "complex societies like ours" are something to be ashamed of. To disagree with this view isn't to denounce environmentalism, or to say that to be civilized is to do the exact opposite of every biological impulse. It's just to say, a) when used in these sorts of pseudoscientific discussions, 'natural' is (pardon the academic language) a construct, and b) the capacity to go beyond our biological inclinations, and to eat foods that do not happen to be growing/crawling in front of us, these are what make us human, and so should not be condemned with such enthusiasm.

I know nothing

"The new graduate student's lack of humility is a stunning thing, perfect, seamless, and unbreakable."

Would that this were true. If taking grad classes and attempting original research hadn't taught me that I know nothing, teaching for the first time ever last fall sure did the trick. How could a grad student not be humble?

Beyond the requisite blogger-narcissistic use of my own case as an example, I'll add that I've rarely if ever witnessed PhD students behaving the way Megan McArdle says so many of us do. While a time does come when you realize you know more about your narrow topic than nearly anyone else out there, you will learn, whenever you bring up said topic, that your friends, even your friends in grad school, even those with similar interests, will only want to hear so much about it; the challenge of showing why your narrow topic has broader significance keeps you (you=me, but I'd imagine others as well) convinced that you do not, in fact, know everything. Plus, I've never known any of my classmates to "develop an amused contempt for anyone who is not in a PhD program." On occasion grad students idealize life outside academia, convinced that those with real, grown-up jobs have it made. That said, it could be that egotism in grad school and beyond correlates with gender, thus explaining why, in my humanities cocoon, I see so little of the behavior McArdle describes. I can't say with confidence that McArdle is wrong, because what do I know?

That said, in the quest to be one of those people who reads a book (or, has started a book) on a topic and holds forth on that topic with utmost confidence, I'm now reading Eric L. Goldstein's The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity. The book contextualizes the question of whether Jews are white, a question I've addressed with limited confidence after reading exactly no books (directly) on the subject. Also, turns out I'm unintentionally doing background reading for my off-blog research--it's amazing how whole paragraphs about 19th century American Jewry could be about the French variety. I had no idea that American Jews prior to the American Revolution were considered a Jewish "nation," only to have to define themselves religiously once they became citizens of something else called a nation that had to come first. Surprisingly, the main difference between the experience of Jews in the 19th century US and in France at the same time has nothing to do with the rather significant differences between the French and American revolutions and their aftermaths. The difference? In the U.S., blacks were (and are) the minority group, whereas in (metropolitan) France, Jews held this role. That, more than any philosophical difference between France as a nation and America as a nation, seems to have played the biggest role. More thoughts--expressed arrogantly, I hope--when I've, well, finished it.

What's Right?

About a year ago, I asked, "why bother calling yourself 'on the left' when you disagree with much of what the left as it actually exists has to say, and agree with at least as much (or on the issues you find most important) with the right as with the left." This was in response to a Dissent Magazine event where I'd heard various proposals for reforming the left that were, in all practicality, calls for shifts to the right, given what the spectrum looks like these days.

Now I'll join some others in asking the same question of the right. Why call yourself a conservative if what you want to see from conservatism is that which is commonly understood as liberalism? Unlike Amidon and Yglesias, I could accept without too much questioning that Grand New Party is a conservative book. It's far too good of a rebuttal to that New Yorker article on the evils of the right for that to be the case. I suggest reading the article, then the book. That said, a conservatism that is anti-Bush and anti-status quo poses some of the same problems as a liberalism sympathetic to the pro-life movement and to the War on Terror. The purpose of the book is how to rescue the Republican Party and the conclusion is that the party should help the working class; had the book been about how to improve the lot of the working class, would the answer have been, by reviving the Republican party?

Side note: there's a similarity between the way conservatives--the authors and others--discuss the Sexual Revolution and the way liberals, particularly liberal academics, treat the question of women's rights in other cultures. It seems the argument goes something like this: the Pill benefited middle-class and wealthy women, but this same sexual freedom hurt the poor. In other words, it is elitist to call ready access to birth control an unqualified good. Some conservatives practice what they preach and some do not, but this doesn't matter because it's not us who require governmentally-imposed restraint, it's them. Sure, we have no problem with gay marriage, but they, well, to respect them one temper one's enthusiasm for gay rights. Being for gay rights thus comes to be defined as elitist, because elites are leading the fight.

This argument, if I'm getting it right, reminds me of the postcolonialist-left take on women's rights abroad, the argument against which neoconservatives argue with understandable enthusiasm: sure, in the West women demand freedom and define freedom as X, Y, and Z, but if we are to respect other cultures, we must respect their vision of freedom. If women in a given culture must stay indoors, we should explore their freedoms and influence within the indoor sphere, and must consider that men, too, are limited by not being allowed to take part in this sphere. We must consider that women forced to cover themselves head-to-toe are no less free than Western women coerced by the Great Sephora into covering their faces with brightly-colored goop. In other words, it's Orientalist and xenophobic to suggest women's rights, as understood across the political spectrum in America, have an obvious application abroad.

I'm baffled by why those who argue that at home, birth control and legal abortion are absolute goods, are not the same people who argue that feminism, as it's generally understood in these parts, applies to women not just across class, but across national boundaries. Either "sexual freedom" means the same thing everywhere, or it does not. Maybe I just need a more relativistic understanding of relativism, but I'm confused. What am I missing?

Bigots!

A restaurant recently opened on the 4th Avenue edge of Park Slope, called "Bigotes." This is one letter short of certain failure in the neighborhood, but so long as the letter doesn't tumble from the sign, they should be in the clear.

Paul Gowder asks, "What is bigotry?" He sees a difference between "[t]hose who hold a negative attitude toward, e.g., blacks, women, and Jews" and those put off by evangelical Christians. Predictably enough, a commenter asks,

"[...] how you think prejudging a Christian is any different from prejudging a Jew?"

According to Gowder, the difference comes from two facts: that "there are no known true reasons to hold a negative opinion of those groups [blacks, women, and Jews]," and that Christians, unlike BWJs, are not discriminated against in contemporary America.

Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons to hold a negative attitude towards any group. One could point to Jews, blacks, or women as the disproportionate cause of whatever one dislikes about the world today, backing this up with statistics.

Yet the commenter who sees no difference between hating Jews and hating Christians misses the point. What makes Jews, along with blacks, and women, different from evangelical Christians is simple enough: choice. One chooses to be an evangelical Christian, whereas one is Jewish (whether or not one believes), black, or female for life. One can point to rare cases of Jews who change names, convert and blend into society at large without people remembering that they are Jewish, although of course to point out such people would be to, um, remember that they are Jewish. The equivalent for gender is of course sex change, which is also quite rare. For race, there is, I don't know, Michael Jackson? In nearly all cases, black, female, and Jewish are immutable qualities. So to hate people on account of a quality over which they have no control is true bigotry, whereas to hate a group on account of its voluntary behavior is pretty much fair game. Thus it is not anti-Semitic to hate Hasids, not racist to hate followers of Al Sharpton, and not sexist to hate women who identify with "Sex and the City."

Black Vogue

Vogue asks, "Is fashion racist?" A better question: Should we look to fashion for justice? Reading about the new "black issue" of Italian Vogue, all I could think was, ugh. Why ugh and not, how brave? For one thing, imagine an all-white version of Essence. Seems unlikely? 'Letting' black women into Vogue is a way for Vogue to say, we define fashion, and if we say you count, you count, but if not, you don't. Next, it's telling that the editor of Italian Vogue remarks, proudly, "'Mine is not a magazine that can be accused of not using black girls.'" Um, "girls"? Aren't models women? OK, not all, but Liya Kebede, the model offered as an example of a "black girl" used by the magazine, was born in 1978. What's telling is not that a black woman is called a "girl," but that in 2008 it is only in the fashion industry that this would happen; Kebede is a "girl" not because she is dark-skinned, but because she is a model. But more to the point: following the "black" issue will be what, exactly? What could it possibly mean to write, as Cathy Horyn does, that "Racial prejudice in the fashion industry has long persisted because of tokenism and lookism." What sort of hiring process for models would not entail "lookism"? If a "black" issue is a temporary move away from hiring models on the basis of their looks, how are black women supposed to see this issue as a step in the right direction?

We are supposed to celebrate models who represent 'real' women, but time after time, the 'plus-size' models are a) not all that large, and b) conventionally-attractive, curvy, pin-up-ready blondes. We are supposed to be delighted whenever a non-white model makes an appearance, but only those who 'count' as minorities but look plenty white have any success. Regardless of blondness and skinniness, no one under 5'8" has a shot at this profession, which must be generally accepted as just, since even the diversity-celebrating, emaciation-shunning America's Next Top Model has a height requirement, and no one (well, nearly no one) ever suggests this is unreasonable. Excluding black or overweight women is tragic; excluding the petite, well, life isn't fair. Same goes for women who look 'ethnic' but do not fit into a neat box of 'the black one,' 'the Asian one,' or 'the Latina.' Once the tokens have made their appearances (or not, as the case may be these days), it's back to Slavic blondes, with no room to spare for those who neither appease nor generically please.

The list could go on--what about the middle-aged? the undeniably plain-looking? --but the obvious answer to all of this is, as long as some women could work as models and others could not, all attempts at affirmative action, whether on account of race or weight, will feel like tokens, or will serve as reminders that one can be 'too' black to be a black model, too fat to be a plus-sized model, and so on. I say, how about an end to attempts at making fashion appear equitable, an end to the hypocrisy, and let magazines and designers render themselves useless by printing images of the same girls over and over again. Eventually someone will wake up and realize, look at all these new people being born, look at all these people happily coupling off, and notice how few of the women pursued by men and envied by their fellow women in any way resemble models. Then it won't matter that models all look like one another and not like regular women, that is, if modeling still exists as a viable career.

An endless array of olives

I did not leave Brooklyn for the whole weekend. That said, I managed to see Swedish furniture and mermaids; eat Turkish food and yuppie cupcakes; and attend a Republican book party. All in Brooklyn.

This is somewhat helping me with my regret of the moment, which is that Jo and I did not move to Queens. Astoria, or Greater Astoria, or whatever the area was we took a look at, seemed far superior to Park Slope. When I mentioned to anyone that I was considering this move, my sanity was questioned. But why? Why would lower rent, less smugness, a comparable commute, and proximity to Greek cafés and groceries possibly seem like a bad idea? The answer is that Everyone Loves Park Slope. It's the Obama of neighborhoods. If you don't like it, no, if you don't love it, you're the one with the problem. As someone who likes--but does not love (or for that matter hate, or else I'd have moved)--both the candidate and the neighborhood, I do sort of feel like a bad person. There's so much about it that's great, and while what initially drew me to the area still holds, there are drawbacks to liberal paradise, the East Coast edition.

But I'm kind of, kind of, coming around. Thanks to Northern European household accessories (and to a certain Northern European individual capable of installing said accessories--window shades, at last!), my apartment no longer looks like a grad-student hovel. Sure, for an infinite selection of olives (a dreamlike vision, much like that of having a dishwasher) I have to go all the way to Sahadi's, not to a corner grocery store, as might have been the case in Astoria, but as first-world problems go, this is minor indeed. The contrarian in me wants to hate, but the UChicago alum in me who remembers life without ready access to non-rotten fruit and fancy cheese is still a little bit thrilled.

Argh!

It's a good thing I've got months' worth of pasta and years' worth of reading material, because I am never leaving the apartment again.

Contemporary journalism genre #432:

"'Harvard is unimportant,' by Harvard grad X." Such an article may also be about Yale, Columbia, or elite schools generally, but Harvard always presents a better case.

Along with genre #671, "The Diaper-Changing Memoir," genre #432 needs some serious overhaul. If you are going to write about how name-the-Ivy, your alma mater, isn't all it's cracked up to be, by announcing this in a major publication, you've already contradicted yourself. After-the-fact regrets about having not gone to a more humble institution--however sincere--do not ring true when these regrets express themselves in the form of articles meant for a general audience. Of all the subjects an article could be about, only one--'the Ivies aren't so great'--requires, by definition, an author with an Ivy affiliation. As I commented--more succinctly it seems--on Rita's blog, "If you didn't go to Harvard and say Harvard doesn't matter, no one will believe you. If you did go and say this, and say it in a national newspaper, no one *should* believe you."

An echo-chamber effect ensues, with many readers (including but not limited to those who did not go to elite schools) immediately understanding that the article would not exist if it's argument were true, or if the author actually believed his own argument. What's left is a small group of people, rightly proud of their accomplishments, pondering and questioning the meaning of said accomplishments, because taking a critical stance is more noble and sophisticated than rah-rah school pride.

Neither childrearing nor the quality of elite universities need be declared a taboo subject, but there ought to be a better way.

(Via Rita and Amber, respectively.)

Forced segues

-Gawker on the Weekly Standard on Hyde Park. Huh?

-On the topic of 'huh,' today was Day 1 of teaching myself Dutch. Ik ben extremely confused by the word order, but as skilled as ever at rote memorization of verb conjugations. Give me a language and a stack of index cards... But, as I learned when showing off my new Dutch skills to Jo, I am still incapable of pronouncing a single word of this language.

-Quite possibly, the problem is that I am too short to speak Dutch. Both the Dutch and the Flemish are ridiculously tall. This is my attempt at a segue into Amber's post (and the many interesting comments) on the lunacy that is height-extension surgery. To these individuals, the men going berserk because they fail to reach 5'10", I suggest a foray into Flemish cinema. You will soon enough learn that even where everyone is tall, things can be gloomy from time to time.

As for short men not getting dates... who knows? My guess is that (to generalize; comes with the territory) short men don't want to date short women, a) because they don't want short children, and b) because the ability to attract a conventionally 'hot' lady (and such a woman is, apologies to Ms. Portman, tall) is itself a form of compensation. Of course you will not get short women complaining that 'only' tall men like them, except, I'd imagine, in specific cases when a specific short woman likes a specific short man. But in general, this kind of complaint gets classified with 'I'm too small, even the XS at chain stores doesn't fit me,' or, better yet, 'I have two dishwashers.' A thought best kept to one's self.

Women, of course, are not supposed to care about our own height, just weight. Well, to quote the song, I wish I was a little bit taller. Not to attract men--on the subway in the summer, there's more male attention than any woman could possibly appreciate--but so that, for once, I would get the right of way on a crowded sidewalk. It has never happened, because everyone is taller than I am, and the taller person gets the right of way. This sounds unimportant but in lower Manhattan, it would make all the difference in the world.

-Speaking of lower Manhattan, the keffiyeh is now officially over, because I saw two very obviously Modern Orthodox high school girls wearing them. It is now just a trendy scarf, whatever attachment it was supposed to have with an accompanying trendy cause is now a thing of the past.

-And finally, on the subject(s) of gender and politics, I finished the Coontz book, The Way We Never Were, whose title I seem to have gotten wrong in my last post on the subject. If it had been about how the traditional family as social conservatives imagine it never really existed, then it would have been amazing. Instead, while she does address this (and has, quite well, more recently), there were a lot, a lot, of mentions of how much better things would be if Americans would only look to contemporary (1990s) Europe, or better yet to precolonial-period Native Americans, and model our families after theirs. So much for trying to convince a right-wing, center-right, or even centrist audience of her arguments. That Scandinavia is fantastic does not make me want a village raising my (theoretical) child. But moreover, her refusal to attribute any antisocial behavior to personal or communal failings--unless the behavior is exhibited by white, Protestant, middle-class heterosexual men--brings a good amount of the book into the territory of Left that reminds me why I would feel uncomfortable with that label.

Coontz fails to address the "Sex and the City" question, that is, what to make of the many women--some fictitious, some not--who want nothing more than a 'traditional' family, but through their own misunderstandings of/halfway approach to feminism, end up single and menopausal. Granted in 1992, one would have to have been remarkably prescient to mention "Sex and the City," but the phenomenon it explores was not invented with Carrie and Big. Whether or not we should, by an abstract feminist standard, most women I know--and, I'd say, most men--want good ol' hetero monogamy for themselves, even while most are plenty accepting of other routes for those that ideal would not satisfy. Regardless of why we want this, we do, so in this sense, a turn 'backwards'--albeit one that allows for change, encouraging, for example, legally-recognized gay marriage--is less intrusive than suggesting we abandon the nuclear family altogether.

One letter off

I was curious to see what the latest socialite blog was all about (the perils of having your vacation fall when everyone else is away/at work), missed a letter, and ended up here instead of here. I can't be the only one who made this mistake.

Nostalgia debunked

I'm reading Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Weren't. First off, this is the first non-fiction book I've read since who knows when that's not about France, Jews, or both, and so is an appropriate choice for my not-quite-summer not-quite-vacation (my coteacher is on this week). As for the book itself, it's strongest point is that the 'golden age' social conservatives point to when discussing the family cannot be pinned down to any one period, because the age never existed. She also points out that just because there was no golden age does not mean some things haven't gotten objectively worse in recent years. (So many negatives in that sentence. Sorry!)

The counterargument that keeps popping up in my mind--and may well be answered somewhere in the second half of the work--is that all Coontz shows is that no modern period was one of idyllic family life. The Victorians and the 1950s suburbanites may not have met the standard to which social conservatives hold the American family. But what about the family of the 15th century? How were marital relations during the Spanish Inquisition? Given the place in reactionary thought of resistance to both Enlightenment values and 19th century liberalism, why would we assume that the conservative golden age of the family (which, I agree with Coontz, is always implied but never pinned down) is somewhere in the post-Voltaire epoch?

More on the book once I've, well, finished it. Till then, an unrelated thought: if you're a grad student living in New York, feeling sorry for yourself that you live in a city filled with fantastic-sounding restaurants, but only go on occasional nights out, to places that look fancy but are deemed "cheap" by mainstream publications, I highly recommend this website. All you do is enter the name of a favorite restaurant (or, strangely, school cafeteria) and you will learn things about what goes on behind the scenes that will make you want to have pasta at home every night till you graduate.

Orientalism today

The J.Crew catalog arrived, and it has a theme: Morocco! This means that the models and their polo shirts are ostensibly in Morocco; the clothing itself is no more Moroccan than usual. It takes some suspension of disbelief to imagine that anyone would pack for Morocco and bring along exclusively clothes from J.Crew. Some of the photos, though, are really something else. I can't seem to find a way to link directly to the image (it flashes briefly on the J.Crew homepage, and is in the catalog), but there's one shot of one of the blonder models, in full prep garb, encountering an exotic water salesman, a dark-skinned 'native' complete with all manner of headgear and layers. The catalog includes a description of this colorful character--the man, of course, not the model. Needless to say, there is no mention of where one can purchase the man's rather impressive hat, or whether it also comes in Heather Gray in the size of your choice.

If you are looking for postcolonial-minus-the-post attire, you could always go with Banana Republic, on account of the name, but a better choice might be Tory Burch, whose line was "inspired by outfits her mother wore while vacationing in Morocco." It's hard for me to picture what this even means--what an American (I'm guessing Burch's mother is/was American) would wear in a specific foreign country. Does tourist clothing vary by destination? I'm thinking of what my classmates wore while studying in Paris--more scarves and artfully messy hair than they'd have gone with at home, although it could also have had something to do with unseasonably cold weather and lukewarm dorm showers with minimal water pressure. I'm also picturing Edina and Patsy's Maghreban adventure. So I guess what a Westerner dons in Morocco would be something vaguely 'Oriental' but not so much so as to appear to be trying to blend in.

Some Westerners, however, blend in with the locals so much that they serve their kids scorpions instead of raisin bran! On the one hand, as a slightly picky eater, I'm jealous of Matthew Forney's kids, growing up in China without the option of plain pasta for every meal. On the other, I was put off by the fact that the article was basically the author congratulating himself on his benefiting from having the best of both worlds, being well-off in a place where others are starving, and thus having kids who are not fussy like those whose parents commit the child abuse that is raising children in the suburbs.

I don't think of myself as especially touchy about things that contradict PC, and I am most definitely not Chinese, so this is not personal, but the confident declaration that China is a country "where people eat anything" threw me for a loop. Really, in all of China? Anything, or just things that aren't sold at Zabars? It might be on balance a good thing that we as a society have gotten enough past political correctness that I feel almost ashamed to have found the J.Crew catalog and the piece on Chinese omnivores at all disconcerting. That said, there's something to be said for admitting that at least part of the PC era's influence is worth keeping around. Like a bowl of scorpions, Edward Said is best not swallowed whole.

Park Slopers Against Social Justice

I was a bit surprised that neither the discussion of Linda Hirshman's article about the feminist movement nor the original piece bring up what might well be the main problem with "intersectionality," that is, with a "feminism" that has morphed into a universalist struggle against oppression, namely that some fights for the underdog contradict the more basic principles of feminism. When discussing, say, radical Islam (or radical anything else, but Islam is the one that comes up the most), while a feminist would condemn certain practices or traditions, a "feminist" who is simply a leftist or a humanist will point to the oppression Muslim men face in this or that country; will insist that Muslim women are more oppressed as Muslims than as women; and in extreme cases, will denounce as sell-outs those Muslim women who subscribe to a 'Western' feminism. One must then mention that France is/was racist (a generalization, but, as with any other country, not entirely untrue) if one wants to write a post, on a feminist blog, about women forced to undergo hymen restoration surgery. Feminism must be anti-racism, whereas anti-racism need not concern itself with feminism.

Maybe this is just because I'm both female and Jewish, but maybe not. Either way, to me, "intersectional" feminism brings to mind a mentality common among politically-aware Jews on the left, namely that fighting anti-Semitism is inherently parochial. A Jew who commits himself to fighting anti-Semitism has failed to triage the world's problems. Anti-anti-Semitism must at the very least incorporate anti-racism (says my man of straw, but I assure you he's not alone), but should put the cause of anti-racism first. What this means is that even if 'anti-racism' is irrelevant to anti-anti-Semitism, even if the anti-racist party line on a given issue will offer indirect support to anti-Semitism, one simply must prioritize. To put fighting anti-Semitism above all else is, goes this line of thought, a waste of energy, one could even say, it's like a "feminism" centered around the plight of women who, relatively speaking, are not that oppressed. Do Jews in America, in France, in Israel, have it worse than the rest of humanity, now, in the year 2008? If not, isn't it almost... bigotry to put the struggles of Jews as Jews above the struggle of female, gay, poor, or non-white-looking Jews, or, better yet, oppressions affecting those outside the community?

It seems clear enough that both women and Jews (and, I've heard, Jewish women) fall into the category of "human" and thus, as Maureen Tkacik points out regarding women, "care about people" in general, not merely our "partners in demography." This is well and good. But just because women and Jews can, do, and should support causes beyond womanity and Jewry, respectively, does not mean that feminism and anti-anti-Semitism must declare their work as 'isms' over, and blend in seamlessly with the 'isms' of the day. Neither of these fights is over; achievements in both are always on the verge of reversal.

Though it would be convenient if there were, there is no general movement that could rightly call itself favoring 'social justice.' Often enough, each oppressed group's demands conflict with those of other oppressed groups, leaving the only people fair-minded enough to fight 'oppression' generally those who are not in any way oppressed. One can favor social justice as a principle upon which to make decisions, but there is not and could never be an officially socially-just word on all manner of conflicts. What I'm trying to say, hidden perhaps underneath much rambling, is that I agree with Hirshman, but would take what she says a bit further, and apply it to at least one other case as well.

Practical question...

...for female and/or fashion-savvy readers: what does one wear to teach a class when it is ten zillion degrees outside, and twenty zillion on the subway platform? I don't need to dress office-formal, but informal summer clothing has a way of making the wearer look either skanky, ten years old, or, worse yet, some combination. I've tried variations of the t-shirt dress (longer on me than on the 6' model), but these strike me--and more importantly the skeevy men of the subway--as a bit... revealing. Is the answer discomfort? Accepting that summer teaching has a different dress code than winter teaching? Bringing a change of clothes for once I get to the air-conditioned building? Abandoning my current look for a combination of linen and hemp-derived fabrics that send the message that I am in my mid-sixties and will not let my friends vote Republican? I am seriously leaning towards this last option, which is clarifying, all of a sudden, how it came to be that teachers dress in that distinctly teacher-y way.

The Zohan

What "Brokeback Mountain" is to "Yossi and Jagger," the hilarious "You Don't Mess With the Zohan"--not "Munich"-- is to "Walk on Water." They are the same movie, except that "Zohan" is American while "Walk on Water" is Israeli. In both films, a Mossad agent undergoes a slow transition from Zionist meanie to pacifist hero, falling in love, along the way, with an 'enemy' woman--the German granddaughter of a big Nazi in "Walk on Water," and the Palestinian sister of a big terrorist in "Zohan." Make love not war, star-crossed lovers, and all that.

I point this out not to show a greater trend of American movies ripping off (inspired by?) Israeli films--there is, to my knowledge, no such trend--but to ask what is going on, such that any movie about Israel, to be a more general success, has to involve a happy ending in which the male lead not only abandons violence but gives up on Israel altogether. I would say it's just something about the movies, but I don't really know. Living in New York, I am constantly meeting Israeli expats, not ex-Mossad hairdressers, but plenty of ex-IDF grad students, actors, waiters... Some will return, many are delighted to stay in NYC for ever and ever. From mounds of anecdotal evidence, I'd started to assume nearly all Israelis wish they could live in New York, a happy thought for a chauvinistic New Yorker but a sad one for a Zionist. And yes, sometimes people hold contradictory viewpoints.

Needless to say, Israelis who live in New York cannot possibly be representative of all Israelis. Some must live in Israel, lo? I did meet some on Birthright, the soldiers who accompanied our group. They seemed thrilled to serve their country, and not the least bit tempted to move to America, no doubt because of the ugly-American-tourist behavior they got to witness by riding along on our bus. That said, these Israelis were picked to represent Israel on a Zionist youth-trip, and so are also not so representative.

So what lies between the two extremes, between the expats and the rah-rah patriots? Since I have not yet had a chance to live in Israel, I'm going to go with what I've learned from Israeli cinema. In plenty of Israeli movies, it is simply a given that the characters are Jewish (though often enough, secular) Israelis, and that they will continue living in Israel after the credits roll. These films are neither pro- nor anti-Israel, except inasmuch as any movie about Israel that does not end with the protagonist's triumphant emigration and/or intermarriage is, by default, on the "pro" side. Really, any film that sends any message other than, Israel is by definition bad news, is pro-Israel. The message can be pro-peace, pro-Palestinian, pro-gay, pro-anything, critical of the government or apolitical, and the movie will still be pro-Israel. It is only when a 'happy ending' is defined as abandoning the country that a movie about the place fails to be pro-Israel.

That said, "Zohan" was amazing. Highly recommended.

Anti-Flemitism

Jo and I witnessed some highly anti-Flemitic language at, of all places, a certain well-known fabulous lox-and-more establishment on the Lower East Side. Several workers were discussing how you say various expressions in Dutch, and one explained that "Goodbye" in Dutch is "chchchchchchch." It turned out one of the people behind the counter, the one doing most of the mocking was Israeli, and really in no place to make fun of "ch" sounds. Another, who seemed to be American, pointed out that the Dutch speak better English than Americans and, if not Israelis generally, than certainly this Israeli in particular. Much like anti-Semitism, anti-Flemitism is often expressed openly in front of its targets, because Flemings, like Jews, blend in well enough with the crowd. But just because you aren't aware that you are in the presence of Flemings does not make it OK to express your anti-Flemitism freely.

More "studies"

The time has come to defend my honor against the National Review's Phi Beta Cons blog. First I learn that I am a "French Studies major" (an odd way to refer to someone in a doctoral program, but a good way to belittle the author of an article you dislike). Then I discover that in "studies" programs "you generally get grad students not intelligent enough to enter mainstream fields taking on an intellectual project that is, theoretically, more demanding." I appreciate the thought, but lest the Phi Beta Cons be concerned, I am in two different departments, one of which is French Studies, the other of which is French, which I believe counts as a mainstream field. Both are plenty rigorous, further evidence that the denunciation of "studies" programs comes from those with little knowledge of what's being discussed. So, before going any further, let it be known that I am not an undergrad, nor am I incapable of getting admitted to a 'mainstream' program. In other words, to borrow from the esteemed scholar Eric Cartman, respect mah authoritah!

As for the substance of the Phi Beta Cons counter-offense: I confess that I have not read every single conservative critique of academia ever written. This does not disqualify me from commenting on the subject. I've read plenty on the topic, far more than the works I cite specifically in my article. Had I listed the lot, it would have been a list, not an article, but my blog archives contain plenty more examples, for the curious. To make "sweeping claims" on the basis of "a few examples" is pretty much inevitable in the format of an article this length. For what it's worth, while I have seen the occasional decent critique of academia from the right, such as the discussion of academics' tendency to "problematize" rather than answer a question, these are rare, so rare that this is the only one that immediately comes to mind.

I'm still left unsure as to what a conservative critique of academia would even be. The "excellent" article Robert VerBruggen points me to--Charles Murray's piece on "educational romanticism," is, according to Murray's own introduction, "the story of educational romanticism in elementary and secondary schools," and thus not an article about higher ed. Next, Travis Kavulla writes, "My impression of what conservatives are demanding is, in a word, rigor." Liberal academics, too, demand rigor, and would disagree if one claimed that they did not. What do conservatives mean by "rigor" that differentiates their rigor from that of liberals? As I pointed out in my article, academic silliness--the Dartmouth prof being the obvious example--appears silly to those across the political spectrum. Each conservative attempt at "exposing the silliness that currently has a home in academia" further removes the possibility that serious academics (on the left or right) will care what conservative critics have to say, since plucking the most absurd examples of behavior in any field and examining them out of context fails to tell you anything substantive about what's going on.

The reason this concerns me is in part that I am arguably on the right for academia, or at least for the humanities, if only because, the way the world works these days, to defend Israel as a Jewish state is to be on the right. But it's also that, looking at things from the perspective of someone who is neither on the left nor on the right enough to count fully as either (but not in the sense described in this book), looking at things as objectively as possible, I do not think the conservative critique as it currently exists benefits either conservatives or academia. Right-wing denunciations do not push academia to the right; they certainly do not make the seminar room a friendlier place for conservative students or faculty. And, from the perspective of academia, a whole range of the political spectrum represents itself as hostile but ignorant, which in turn does not help in terms of checking the more extreme cases of politically-correct blather that do turn up from time to time and require well-reasoned take-downs. If anything, the conservative critique as it currently exists pushes academia further to the left.

The Overshare and the First World Problem

The first-world problem is an idea I first heard about when a college friend started a facebook group about them, perhaps the term was his invention. Prime examples: Starbucks put lowfat and not skim milk in my latte; I'm too tired from my i-banking job to make time for yoga; my Greenwich Village apartment is too small to comfortably fit my 18 boxes worth of clothing. Not all first-world problems are explicitly materialistic. Sometimes they're just dilemmas that require conditions of comfort to arise, such as, 'Does he like me? Let's discuss it over drinks.' What ties together all first-world problems is that while a friend might, just might, be sympathetic, if you allow the NYT Styles section to interview you, mentioning these sorts of problems will cause an avalanche of comments suggesting you volunteer in a soup kitchen--or better yet, in Iraq--to put things in perspective. It's quite clear that the share becomes the overshare definitively only once the fluffier sections of the New York Times take up your story. A commenter telling Emily Gould to stop being narcissitic (implication: stop being narcisisstic on the cover of a major magazine) might have a point, but until your friend reaches Carrie levels of self-pity, to be a good friend you let the other person vent, even if the complaint in question is objectively of little consequence.

But at a certain point, even friends lose interest in one's nonsense, or at least this is how it ought to work, (fictitious) Ms. Bradshaw's (fictitious)experiences to the contrary. Inner turmoil about problems that would sound idiotic if voiced have one rightful home, and that is in fiction. If a character in a novel is sufficiently developed, it is possible to identify with that character enough that its problems become your own, and that it starts to make sense why something that was not objectively tragic could cause immense misery. One expects novels to speak of the whole range of human situations, not just the Important ones, so it will be the rare reader of Proust who gets to the part where Swann realizes he's over Odette and thinks, 'With all the poverty and misery in nineteenth-century Europe, he worries about this?'

Reality entertainment of all kinds removes the barrier that allows us to truly care about first-world problems not our own. Once the problems are of another, real-life person, they elicit calls for real-world perspective. Obviously a fictional character fussing about her 18 boxes of clothes comes off as a fool--as Carrie does in the "Sex and the City" movie--but the standard for narcissism is that much lower when real people are involved.

Fiction works as an outlet to allow us to acknowledge that even ridiculous-sounding problems matter, without taking away from our real-life acknowledgement that on another level, they do not. It permits us to look at narcissism with compassion. What it also allows is for us to cover the full range of human experience without humiliating actual, existing people.

Elsewhere

I wrote an 'overshare' article about my personal life in which I discuss my secret blog--and which is accompanied by shots of my many arm-tattoos. You can find this article by clicking here.

Just kidding, as you will see if you click on the link. What I wrote was an explanation of why conservative critiques of academia are usually so lame. No tattoos, arm or otherwise.

'In my day...'

Rita justifiably takes issue with one of the sillier and more error-filled denunciations of Young People Today. All I can contribute to the discussion is an anecdote that will dispel all notions of kids these days being the downfall of our civilization. Recently my mother was at the store buying moth balls. An elderly man came up to her and told her, "Moths don't have balls." This man was, by virtue of his age, a product of a better time, a member of the Joseph Epstein generation of superior beings. This is just one example of why claims of generational failure can be entertaining, can make you think, but are, by and large, more "grouchy" than productive.

Where I part ways with Rita on this topic is that I do "think criticisms of youth culture are empty bluster." At least most of the time. For too many conservative writers, it is as though crude behavior were an invention of each new generation. Until these dreadful times, every adolescent was an intellectual, but in a good way, not uppity, but choosing the Great Books over the "Girls Gone Wild" cameras, to throw in some anachronism. All of this stems from a simple misunderstanding: the art and literature of the past seems better than that of the present because we're only exposed to the good stuff. An imperfect but useful analogy is how in America we think of French food as fancy because in the U.S. we only get upscale French restaurants--even French cafés are a bit classier than average--and not the crepe stands or hypermarchés. Which is to say, unless critiques account for this tendency, we will keep being confronted with false comparisons--Saul Bellow versus the winner of "Farmer Wants a Wife."

Sexy time

Clementine and I just saw "Sex and the City, The Movie." Why not to see it:

1) The most unrealistic thing about the movie is not the $500 shoes or the willingness of young, good-looking men to have sex with older, average-looking women. It is that a woman like Carrie would have any friends at all, let alone friends who dote on her 24/7. Seriously, when she gets ditched by her dull but allegedly jumbo fiancé, her friends wait on her as though she were Mother Teresa on her deathbed. Samantha actually spoon-feeds Carrie yogurt during the latter's recuperation. But why? It is a friend's job to tell a dumped pal to gain some perspective, not to act as though the person has just learned her hut and entire family were wiped out in a storm. So you were stood up by a trazillionaire, big deal! He seemed boring anyway, and was incapable of sending unplagarized email, he's just that good of a writer. Where there's one dim-witted banker, there are others, what was so special about this one?

2) I'm now in favor of arranged marriage. Really. This movie is the best argument ever for women not halfway embracing watered-down feminism, only to discover at 45 that they are not as attractive to men as they were at 15. In all the time these women were overanalyzing their relationships, they could have been long married and busy worrying about something else, say, their work, or even fashion, their alleged interest.

3) Fashion? No, there wasn't much of that, unless the movie was actually filmed in 1992. The movie's constant stream of racism (to be discussed more later) felt not-so-2008, so in a way the clothes helped, in terms of internal consistency.

4) First Charlotte won't eat food in Mexico because eww, Mexico's dirty! This is presented as one of her charming quirks, not as her being kind of racist. Next there's Miranda, whose approach at looking for an apartment is to follow the only white guy she sees walking around. Then Carrie hires a curvy--sassy, even--black assistant who waits on her hand and foot, seemingly unnecessary given that her friends do this as well. This plot line only adds to what had already been the case: everyone in any way marginal dreams of fetching stuff for the not-so-fab four. Gay men just adore straight weddings, and exist pretty much to improve the aesthetic lives of women whose own lovers are bulky straight dudes who communicate in grunts. (I kept waiting for Big to say, "Feels like an Arby's night." To continue on the "Seinfeld" theme, I also wanted someone to tell Carrie, "Maybe the dingo ate your baby," that is, what Elaine says to an irritating woman at a house party who has just announced, "I have lost my fiancé, the poor baby!") And where to begin with Charlotte's Jewish husband, a constant reminder (more so in the show than in the movie) that Jews are quirky, crass, rich, and grotesque, but do they ever make good husbands! And none of this is even post-PC humor, ala Borat. It's just pre-PC ignorance. Why?

5) I might not really be a woman, or at least not an unmarried straight woman living in New York. Because I identified with exactly none of this movie, found none of the men or shoes attractive.

Why to see it:

1) Carrie's spiky belt is pretty cool, if a bit like one I had in high school. Maybe it's time to bring the belt back, that is, to remove it from one of the two microscopic closets it's probably on the floor of right now!

2) It's an excuse to watch over two hours of TV and feel like you're taking part in a cultural phenomenon, or at least watching a film.

3) There could be something empowering about a 50-year-old woman dumping a blond (if bland) model with a perfectly-chiseled torso, simply so she can go around having sex with other, similarly-chiseled contenders. That is, if it were remotely believable that her plan would work out in the end. But it's kind of conceivable that her fantasies will come true, and all told, Samantha comes across as the least objectionable of all the characters by such a long shot.

4) There's something very "Absolutely Fabulous" about the movie, perhaps more than the show.

5) Whoever you are, however superficial and materialistic, you will leave the movie feeling like a self-righteous hippie.

Francophilic oddities

As a Francophilic Zionist, I feel obliged to welcome the existence of Francophilic conservatives. Not that Zionism implies (or should imply) conservatism, but the principle's the same.

Peace in the thematically-Middle East

It can't be, but it is: the semester's papers are all in. I'm on summer pseudo-vacation, which means 'only' teaching, but after a semester of not not thinking about work for two seconds, the finite work of lesson-planning and teaching for three hours a day, every weekday, really does feel like a vacation. Today, Jo, my parents, and I checked out the the Israel parade, where we were not blown up or anything. There was just a touch of security for the event, just a little bit. Yesterday was also Middle Eastern-themed. Jo and I got lunch at the fabulous Zaytoons, then shopped at Sahadi's, which has amazing olives, spices, and so forth, but also (listen, fellow grad students) slightly cheaper pasta than most other establishments. And infinitely longer lines; could be that we were not the only grad-students to have noticed the 50-cent-per-box-less-than-Key-Food De Cecco. The scruffy, late-20s crowd ahead of us on line suggested we were not.

Hey there Upper East Siders

The blog of frequent Gawker target* Emily Brill is kind of amazing. It is the day-to-day life of a 'real Upper East Sider' precisely as one would imagine such a life after watching 'Gossip Girl' from one's home in Papua New Guinea. Which is to say, it seems this young woman has created herself in the image of what by all accounts she actually is, assuming she went to the schools she mentioned and so forth. The point of this post? I find it baffling. Why would someone actually of this world make a site dedicated to glorifying it? No one who actually grows up in Manhattan announces, 'Now I'm going to get my nails done on the posh and fabulous Madison Avenue,' just as no one living in the suburbs would say, 'Now I'm hitting the shops at the extremely important mall in the next town.' Which is to say, this world, like every other, seems normal to those living in it. It is strange for someone living on the Upper East Side not to go to restaurants and boutiques on the Upper East Side. If Brill were anything like the person she's claiming to be, her blog would not say, oh, look at my glamorous life, going to the Hamptons and all the hot clubs, but would from time to time express sympathy for the peons forced to, say, shop at Old Navy or attend public school. For the super-rich, they're the middle class (or, if pressed, upper-middle) and it's everyone else who's poor.

*A useless way to identify someone, I realize. By 2025 everyone, famous or not, who has so much as visited New York will have been thoroughly mocked by that site.