With her take-no-prisoners approach in “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” author Amy Chua has drawn the ire of mothers across America who take exception to the draconian measures she recommends to ensure successful, prodigious offspring.

So it’s little surprise that prominent among her critics are another group famous—infamous, some might say—for what they have to say about how best to be a parent: Jewish mothers.

Chua’s book and a synopsis she wrote in The Wall Street Journal on Jan. 8, “Why Chinese Moms are Superior,” lay out her parental rules—no sleepovers, no play dates, no television—and admiringly relate a story of how she once reduced her daughter to tears when she couldn’t play a piano piece.

“If a Chinese child gets a B—which would never happen—there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion,” Chua writes. “The devastated Chinese mother would then get dozens, maybe hundreds of practice tests and work through them with her child for as long as it takes to get the grade up to an A.”

Chua’s article summarizing her book elicited a firestorm of criticism and became the most responded-to article in the Journal’s history. It also reportedly elicited death threats for Chua, a professor at the Yale University Law School.

A stream of offended Jewish mothers have waded into the debate, among them Ayelet Waldman, who drew some motherly opprobrium when she made a scandalous admission of her own some years ago—confessing in the pages of The New York Times to loving her husband, novelist Michael Chabon, more than she loved her children.

“The difference between Ms. Chua and me, I suppose—between proud Chinese mothers and ambivalent Western ones—is that I felt guilty about having berated my daughter for failing to deliver the report card I expected,” Waldman wrote in the Journal. “I was ashamed at my reaction.”

Ironically, Chua, who is married to fellow Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, is raising her children as Jews. Rubenfeld has yet to weigh in on the brouhaha over his wife’s article—Rubenfeld did not respond to a JTA request for an interview—but Chua does acknowledge they don’t always see eye to eye.

“It’s more my story,” she told the Times. “I was the one that in a very overconfident immigrant way thought I knew exactly how to raise my kids. My husband was much more typical. He had a lot of anxiety, he didn’t think he knew all the right choices.”

Writing in the Huffington Post, Wendy Sachs, editor of the parenting Website Care.com, claimed that Jewish and Chinese mothers aren’t in fact so different. The difference is one of style more than substance.

“Chua says that Chinese moms don’t mince words when it comes to their children’s appearance either,” Sachs writes. “They can say, ‘Hey fatty—lose some weight.’ The Jewish mom would more likely kvell over her daughter than insult her, no matter how fat she had become.”

Echoing a similar theme, Allison Kaplan Sommer, writing in the Forward’s Sisterhood blog, claimed that Jewish and Chinese mothers are both uncompromising when it comes to their kids—they just don’t measure achievement the same way.

“It is their broader definition of ‘success’—one that treats social status as important to climbing the American Dream ladder as academic success—that leads to their different ground rules,” Sommer writes. “Chua’s ‘Tiger Mother’ model dismisses activities that are crucial to gain social skills important for climbing the ladder in modern America. If one doesn’t master the politics of play dates and sleepovers, how are they going to handle dorm life and office politics?”

That was the line as well taken by the most prominent Jewish father to weigh in on Chua: New York Times columnist David Brooks. In a piece titled “Amy Chua is a Wimp,” Brooks writes that Chua is actually channeling her children’s attention into less mentally challenging tasks by depriving them of vital social outlets.

“Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls,” writes Brooks, the author of a recently released book on how brain chemistry impacts human achievement.

“Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group—these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale. Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement.”

Reality shows seem to be becoming less and less real every season. Exhibit A: The very intriguing but highly unlikely pairing of a Shomer Shabbos Jewish family from Brookline, Mass. (near Boston), and a coon-huntin’ family from Olympia, Ky. (on a map that would be nowhere near a kosher grocery store), in the Oct. 20 two-hour season premiere of FOX’s “Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy.”

For the past two years, the show has been trading moms between families of vastly different demographics (i.e., pro-choice and pro-life, gays and conservative Christians). And this one is no exception.

In spite of the obvious cultural differences between the Southern Martins (mom, Sharon; dad, Dale; daughter, Ashton, 20; and son, Aaron, 17) and the East Coast Shatzes (mom, Lisa, who wears pants; dad, Michael; son, Aryeh, 20; and daughters, Esther, 17; Adina, 15; and third-grader Kayla) both families are very insulated in their respective worlds.

Lisa, an MIT-educated associate professor of electrical engineering, asks Dale, a corrections officer, what bluegrass is when told that is what the state is known for. (It’s a grass.)

Sharon, a registered nurse, goes shopping at the kosher market with Michael, a physicist, and remarks that she couldn’t understand any of the “Arabic, Hebrew, whatever” on the labels, adding, “I could give a flying flip about the kosher.”
The families, who each receive $50,000 (with a twist) for participating, have very parallel, yet opposite, living situations.

According to Lisa, Aaron spends too much time playing on the computer and hanging out and not enough time studying. She wants to call a tutor, much to the horror of Aaron, who is adamant that he’s not stupid and doesn’t need a tutor. Lisa also makes the faux pas judgment that raccoon hunting, a Martin family pastime, is “intolerable and should be outlawed” after they take her on a late-night jaunt in search of the critters.

According to Sharon, the Shatz kids are socially awkward and need to have fun. She suggests throwing a party, much to the horror of Michael, who is adamant that there be no party and no dancing (“in the Jewish religion, we don’t give our kids permission to indulge in risky behavior,” he tells her). Sharon also makes the misstep of bringing up two very taboo topics at the dinner table: dating and Jesus.

So will there be fireworks in the second hour when Grandma confronts Lisa (“Do y’all still have sacrifices?”); Sharon tries to throw the Shatz kids a party (“They’ll dance! You wait and see!”) and the two moms meet face-to-face? It doesn’t take an MIT degree to figure that answer out.

“Trading Spouses” kicks off the new season Friday, Oct. 20 from 8-10 p.m. on

Melinda Lopez’s “Sonia Flew,” which opens at the Laguna Playhouse on Sept. 16, depicts the parallel struggles of a Cuban girl in 1961 and a half-Jewish, half-Cuban American boy just after Sept. 11.

Of Cubans and Jews, Lopez says, “These are two cultures that have experienced Diaspora, two cultures that are disconnected from their homeland, two cultures that stress education, family, food, laughter. When you go to Thanksgiving in a Jewish household or a Cuban household, you’ll talk about politics, tell jokes.”

Speaking from Boston, where she lives with her Jewish husband, Lopez, who was born in this country to Cuban parents, says with a chuckle: “Two Cubans in a household is just trouble.”

The first act of her new play takes place during Chanukah/Christmas vacation in 2001. To emphasize the seeming harmony of this “blended family,” Lopez indicates in stage directions that the Christmas tree is decorated with Stars of David.

Yet we sense that something may be wrong when Sonia, the protagonist, and her daughter forget to make the traditional 7-Up Jell-O salad, a symbolic failure that suggests a rift in the family, similar to what occurs in Barry Levinson’s “Avalon” when a guest, arriving late for Thanksgiving, complains, “You cut the turkey?”

In Levinson’s movie, the discord is over the relative climb up the financial ladder of the differing family members, while in Lopez’s play Sonia is distressed over her son’s decision to leave college and join the Marines.

In making a parallel between the aftermath of Castro’s revolution and Sept. 11, Lopez seems to posit that history doesn’t repeat itself but it can overwhelm families and tear them apart. Like Stephen Dedalus, who famously says in “Ulysses,” “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Sonia feels she has been doomed twice by history, once in 1961 when her parents forced her to flee to the United States, the second time in 2001 when her son, Zak, heads off to fight in Afghanistan. Like Daedalus, the namesake for Joyce’s character, who flies from the island of Crete to safety but loses his son, Sonia escapes from Castro’s oppression but never gets to see her parents again, and 40 years later she fears losing her son, too.

One of the ironies of “Sonia Flew” is that flight, which should signify freedom, comes to mean betrayal to Sonia — abandonment and a manipulation of patriotism.

With the subtext of the two hijacked airplanes flying into the Twin Towers, Lopez broaches the forgotten history of the Pedro Pan children, whose parents sent them away from Cuba on falsified student visas in the early 1960s; the play ponders why the parents never left the windows open so the children could return to their homeland.

Unlike Peter Pan and the lost boys, the Pedro Pan children don’t live in Never Neverland; they live very much in the real world, in a new country, the United States, where they have to start all over, learn a new language, make new families. In that regard, Sonia shares a bond with Sam, her father-in-law, a World War II veteran who emigrated from Europe to the United States at the time of the Holocaust.

While there is no suspense in the first half of the play about Zak’s joining the Marines, the act ends with Zak involved in an explosion in Afghanistan, followed by a blackout. Lopez leaves us uncertain for nearly the entire second act as to whether Zak lives or dies. For a scene or two, she also effectively withholds from us the key point that Sonia’s parents hated the revolution under Castro.
Occasionally, Sonia tips us off with Shakespearean-style soliloquies. Lopez began her theatrical career as an actress for Shakespeare & Company, a troupe in Western Massachusetts, and she says that when she first started acting, “I imagined myself exclusively performing Shakespeare’s plays.”

For years, she was primarily an actor. However, she enjoyed “contributing to someone else’s artistic vision” to such an extent that she decided to write her own plays. She obtained a masters in playwriting from Boston University, where she studied with Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, and wrote her first play about 10 years ago, a one-woman show, “Midnight Sandwich,” which was staged in Boston and in which she played all the parts of her bicultural family.

Since then, she has written several other short works, as well as a number of full-length plays. In addition to Shakespeare, whose Ariel is a precursor to Sonia in that she can fly, yet lacks freedom until the end of “The Tempest,” Lopez cites August Wilson as an influence. Lopez doesn’t write the way Wilson does with his flowing jazz-like riffs and authentic dialect. At times, Lopez’s dialogue veers toward cliché, such as when young Sonia, in a line uttered countless times since the dawn of movies, tells her mother, “I’m not going to end up like you, I know that much. I’m going to do something with my life.”

Despite the occasional, overly familiar line, Lopez creates characters who are inhabited with the kind of dedication and idealism we expect of pioneers. Given the waves of Jewish immigration in this country, it may not be surprising that after Lopez staged her one-woman show, “Midnight Sandwich,” her mother-in-law said to her, “You’re Jewish, and your whole family is Jewish.” Her mother-in-law then began asking Lopez if her family lit candles on Friday nights, like Marrano Jews who conducted ancient Jewish rituals in the basements of their homes after the Spanish Inquisition.

“You came over with Columbus and stopped off at Cuba,” theorized her mother-in-law.

Lopez took her mother-in-law’s comment as a compliment, though she has no idea whether she actually descends from Jews. While her protagonist, Sonia, is very attracted to Castro, whose surname, according to tradition, is a Jewish surname, Lopez does not have fond words for the aging Cuban leader.

“I don’t think he’s going to die. He’s too stubborn to die,” she said. “Nothing will change. When he does die in another 50 years, things will get worse. Scarcity will be greater. I’m not very optimistic.”

When my father informed me he had scheduled a business trip to Los Angeles and was taking my mother with him about a month after I moved out here, his timing seemed less than coincidental. Both of my parents had been anxiously phoning me on a daily basis since I left New York. The real reason they were coming was to make sure I wasn’t living in a crack house, or at the very least had the decency to choose a Jewish crack house.

Truth be told, I needed them. After all the work that went into finding a suitable apartment and automobile in Los Angeles, I was growing increasingly listless about settling in much further. Even when the weather got colder and I struggled to sleep without a quilt, freezing each night felt preferable to braving the crowds at Bed Bath & Beyond.

Still, I had to be careful what I wished for. From the first minute my parents arrived at my new apartment, my mother began scrutinizing every square inch. As she wandered about steadying crooked picture frames, frowning at price tags and toeing carpet stains, I felt as if she and I were co-starring in the rejected pilot episode of "Jewish Mom for the Straight Guy."

But their visit was not entirely without generosity. When my father told me he was bringing a housewarming gift, my mind immediately raced with a few tantalizing possibilities: That waterbed I’ve been fruitlessly asking for since I was a kid? Not likely. A new car? In my dreams. A welcome mat emblazoned with the family name? Hope there’s a lot of willing Wallensteins on eBay.

So when he handed me a gift-wrapped package about the size of a cigar, I was completely confounded. Removing the wrapping, I unsheathed a mezuzah, the slender religious object Jews affix to their doorposts containing a scroll with excerpts from the Torah.

"It will watch over you," my father suggested.

The mezuzah was about more than providing a surrogate guardian, I realized. My decision to move out of New York City had only accelerated their long-compounding anxiety over my fading religious identity; despite Los Angeles’ heavy Jewish population, I imagine they pictured the city filled entirely with blonde heathens named Heather intent on eternally altering their bloodline. If my parents could fit Mount Sinai itself on a handtruck, they would have had it wheeled into my apartment. A mezuzah was a more practical choice to serve as a constant reminder of my Jewishness.

Had I wanted to distract my parents into forgetting about posting the mezuzah, I probably could have gotten away with it. But like every Jew, strands of guilt are coiled into my DNA’s double helix as tightly as a Chasid’s peyos.

On my parents’ last day in Los Angeles, they stood by as I fastened the mezuzah into place outside the front door of my apartment. Much as I would like to say the spirit of Moses himself swelled within my soul, the hammer, nails and wood actually brought to mind the crucifixion of Jesus.

"Can I ask what you’re doing?" a voice called out from down the hall. My parents and I wheeled around to glimpse the neighbor I had never met who lived three doors away. As if Central Casting had dispatched Hot, Young Los Angeles Neighbor to the never-ending sitcom that is my life, a striking blonde stuck her head out of the apartment, presumably prompted by the banging outside. My parents and I exchanged a helpless look. How were we going to explain a mezuzah?

She ventured out of her apartment for a closer look, which afforded me the opportunity to get a closer look at her blue eyes and tan legs. Fairly certain my parents would not spontaneously combust at that moment no matter how much I might will it, I instantaneously decided they would help me charm her. I turned to my father and asked him to explain the mezuzah, which he did with surprising gusto. I was then reminded of a fact I often forget: my father is also a man, and no man is immune to a friendly, attractive woman.

"Would you like us to install one for you next?" I asked. "Free of charge."

She laughed and even came into my apartment for a quick tour. My parents nervously milled about, watching their worst nightmare unfold in front of their eyes as I flirted with a neighbor who was way too blonde to be Jewish. When she scribbled her phone number on a Post-it before leaving, they simply ignored what transpired in sullen silence.

Not another word has been spoken about the mezuzah since that fateful day; I’d imagine in their mind I might as well have nailed mistletoe to the door. My mezuzah had indeed blessed me, but not in the way they had intended.