\”I was in all of one spelling bee in my life,\” confides Myla Goldberg, the author of \”Bee Season,\” who\’ll read from her stunning debut novel at the Jewish Book Festival this week. The overachiever was in the fourth grade, and she smugly expected to win – until she was asked to spell \”tomorrow,\” her Achilles-heel word. She spelled it \”tomarrow.\”
With the Days of Awe just behind us, it might do us all good to consider the content of the prayers we collectively uttered.
I flew to New York on the morning of Rosh Hashanah, 5760. Tuesday there was a day in court, a dreaded ugly ending to a seemingly unending divorce.
I\’ve been going to Jewish camps since 1985 and can lay bare my heart with the best of them. But I\’ve never attended a camp as intense as BCI, and my expectations for an epiphany are high, perhaps ridiculously so.
This past year, Toys R Us was excoriated for proposing and, in some instances, constructing separate \”Boys World\” and \”Girls World\” sections. But public outrage quickly forced the 707-store retailer to abandon this gender-based marketing concept, which it euphemistically referred to as \”logical adjacencies.\”Twenty years ago, I would have vehemently condemned Toys R Us\’ discriminatory actions, perhaps even joining the ranks of the politically correct protesters. Girls, I would have argued, have as much right to play with a Tonka truck as boys with a Little Tikes vacuum cleaner. And not only a right, a need.Twenty years ago, I was single, childless and clueless.
My first and only experience at summer camp was magical, or so it seemed to me. I entered a world I had never known before, and by summer\’s end had gained some recognition into who I was and who I was not. No mean feat at 13.
There is a grimy Arabic sign high on the wall of the imposing new building rising on a rocky, ragged hillside in the West Bank village of Abu Dis.
I have been reading a fascinating book, \”The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel\’s Soul,\”\”that has set me to thinking about Jewish identity — both in Israel and in the United States.
My mother died July 9,1999. I remember coming home that Friday afternoon from picking up Shabbat flowers.
After eight years, I\’m leaving The Jewish Journal.
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