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Jewish Journal

Connect. Inform. Inspire.

June 26, 1997

Daring To Be Different

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Kids & Teens, Old Stories /

As any parent will tell you, shepherding girls over the treacherous bridge of adolescence is no easy task. Making sure that there is a Jewish dimension to the journey adds other challenges. There are no easy answers. But a conversation with Tamar Frankiel seems a good place to begin.

As a writer, Frankiel is co-author of the recently published “Minding the Temple of the Soul,” as well as “The Voice of Sarah,” an elegantly written response to the notion that traditional Judaism is the sound of only men talking. As a Jewish educator, she has taught the history of religion, at schools such as Stanford and Princeton. Currently, she teaches at UC Riverside and the Claremont School of Theology, along with an informal parasha class she leads in Studio City. As a Jewish wife and mother, Frankiel, 51, has come on a rather long journey herself. Raised in a non-Jewish home in the comfortably conservative environs of Columbus Ohio, she later converted to Conservative Judaism, then to Orthodoxy, all prior to her marriage. Today, she and her husband have five children, ranging in age from 7 to 17, including three daughters.

Below are some of her comments during a recent interview with The Jewish Journal:

Judaism and Sex Education

“Traditionally, Judaism has regarded sexuality as a very private area. The marriage track is the framework within which this is discussed. The problem is that on a private basis, when a girl starts to mature — which is really from pre-puberty to the time she gets married — it’s not clear who is mentoring her. Is it the schools? It used to be that it was the mother, or an aunt, perhaps, who was very close to her. But who is it now? Are we just going to leave it to sex education in the schools? I do think that this is a central issue in the Jewish community: Who is addressing the experience of girls in an ongoing way? Do we sit back and wait until a problem comes up?”

Girls Know

“Even in a traditional setting, girls know what’s going on. They have crushes on boys and tease each other and that sort of thing. But in an Orthodox context, not much is done about those feelings. The message is still, ‘Stay away.’ In more liberal settings, there is experimentation, and a sense of testing parental limits…. I am most concerned about girls between 12 and 16, who are incapable of handling the kinds of sexual experiences that kids seem to be engaging in younger and younger.”

Daring To Be Different

“Pressing upon our children the issue of Jewish identity — sending the message that we don’t have to act the way everyone else does, that we have values that are different from the rest of society, and we always did — this is very, very important. Now, exploring Jewish values, for example, like why family is important and why we don’t approve of certain things going on in the pop culture, means that parents have to be prepared to do all that…. But, for the child, I think the message that we don’t have to do things the way everyone else does is actually very empowering.”

Daring To Be Different Read More »

Part Memoir, Part

Leave a Comment / Books, Old Stories /

For the next few weeks, you will be hearing about girls and sex. “Oprah,” “Leeza,” “Charlie Rose,” The New York Times, even The Jewish Journal — media great and small will focus airwaves and inches on a topic that, while hardly new, rarely gets serious, sustained attention.

You’ll be hearing about it because Naomi Wolf wrote about it. The best-selling author of 1992’s “The Beauty Myth” has just released her third book, “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood” (Random House, $24). Part memoir, part polemic, part socio-anthro-historiography, the book talks about how American girls experience sexual awakening, and how society can do a better job of helping them.

There have been dozens of other books that have covered the same or similar ground (Wolf credits most of them in her bibliography), but Wolf has a knack for shaping the various voices into a mostly coherent, highly readable set of arguments.

With heart. The heart comes from Wolf’s memoirs of her own sexual development. Growing up near the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco at the tail end of the Sexual Revolution, the author, now 35, recounts her and her friends’ own gropings — pun intended — toward womanhood in a culture that offered few definitions of being a woman beyond losing one’s virginity.

“Men were deciding for us if we were women,” she writes. “Heck, teenage boys were deciding for us if we were women.” (Much of Wolf’s decision making took place during summers abroad in Israel; “Promiscuities” gives new meaning to the phrase “Israel Experience.”) In all, these personal recollections form the book’s most moving passages.

They are joined by Wolf-the-cultural-critic’s discussion of how society has come to devalue women’s sexuality. As she points out, there is a great, debilitating power in terms such as “promiscuous” and “slut,” which punish women for exploring what Wolf posits is, in fact, a much more powerful feminine libido.

Wolf-the-activist weighs in at the end with suggestions on how women can take control of their sexual destinies. Among them: Go on retreats with other women to pass on wisdom; develop rituals to mark and respect sexual growth; and join girls with older women/mentors to whom they can turn to ask questions about anything, including it.

There is, in fact, a lot going on in “Promiscuities.” Sometimes, the effect can be jarring. Just when Wolf’s memoirs pick up steam, for example, she veers off to discuss a turn-of-the-century Danish sex manual or Emma Goldman’s sexual liberation. At other times, the polemicist plows forward, leaving the larger picture in the dust. Doesn’t society’s ineptitude at sexual initiation afflict boys and young men as well? Isn’t a larger discussion in order here?

But here’s where Wolf succeeds mightily: in touching nerves. You will find quite a bit in this book to side with, react to, debate, reject, admit. While Wolf’s greatest successes as a writer may lie in the future with more personal essays, it’s hard to deny her current power as the instigator of a crucial national conversation. — R.E.

Part Memoir, Part Read More »

Navigating Sexual Turmoil

Leave a Comment / Old Stories, Rob Eshman /

Naomi Wolf, author of “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood”
Sex will always be with us, but thoughtful, non-hysterical conversations about sexual issues are few and far between. With the publication of her newest book, “Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood” (Random House, $24), social critic Naomi Wolf has helped bring the subject of girls’ sexuality to the national spotlight in a serious way — for at least as long as it takes to conduct a book tour.

Though Wolf’s book is uneven (see review), the importance of the issues she raises is undeniable: What marks the passage from girlhood to womanhood in our society? If sex is integral to a definition of womanhood, how do parents and educators help girls deal with the challenges it raises? What is the role of social institutions — the media, churches and synagogues, schools — in shaping sexual self-image and even desire?

In conversation with The Jewish Journal while on tour in Los Angeles, Wolf turns these issues over for the umpteenth time, examining them in a slightly different light — a Jewish one. That’s not such a stretch.

“Oh, I’m a real Jew girl,” she says.

“Promiscuities” reveals only the surface of a deep Jewish background. Raised in a Conservative family, Wolf grew up attending San Francisco Temple Beth Shalom. She had the bat mitzvah, went to Hebrew school and made numerous visits to Israel. Wolf, her husband, writer David Shipley, and their 2-year old daughter, Rosa, attend synagogue near their home in Washington. The Jewishness, she believes, made her career choice something more than a coincidence.

“Being a Jew is great training for being a cultural critic,” she says, “because you’re always an outsider. You’re never allowed to be fully integrated into whatever the prevailing culture is.”

Wolf herself has become a fairly well-known figure in that culture. Her first book, “The Beauty Myth,” published when she was 29, was an international best seller, and launched Wolf as spokesperson and whipping girl. Depending on which feminist you speak with, “Promiscuities” is either a thoughtful continuation of Wolf’s polemic or a halfhearted exploitation of a hot-button issue.

In any case, it raises the issues that The Journal hopes to address in these pages.

The Jewish Journal: Where does sex education for girls really take place?

Naomi Wolf: Even the most conservative family can’t avoid the bath of images that their daughters and sons grow up in. Even the most observant and practicing families, especially in an urban environment like this one, can’t protect or screen their girls from VH-1 and MTV and friends.

JJ: So does having a house that upholds Jewish values even help?

NW: I know it certainly helped me to have religious practice in our household in terms of having a vantage point from which to look at the Sexual Revolution as it was sweeping over us, and to consider whether this was the only way to understand sex.

JJ: You felt Jewishness had a different take?

NW: Definitely. One of the big diseases we have in the West is the virgin-whore split, and one of the blessings we have of being Jewish is you can always, as a woman, have some credible distance from the virgin-whore thing because it wasn’t our virgin or our whore. There’s also this beautiful tradition in the Zohar that eroticizes married love. Judaism’s better than Christianity at eroticizing married love. In marriage, women’s sexuality is definitely honored. I think we’re way ahead in that respect.

And I don’t know any Jewish families that, in practice, stigmatize masturbation, that teach it’s wrong to touch yourself — maybe just in public or during the seder.

Also, spiritually, it made me much more scrupulous about contraception than my friends. Judaism has a stronger tradition than Christianity that sex is a sacrament, and it certainly has a stronger tradition than the secular Sexual Revolution that sex is a sacrament and that life is precious. And though I’m pro-choice, I knew I’d never want to face choosing an abortion. Somewhere, I’d absorbed from my religious background that you shouldn’t cause harm with your sexuality. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong with having premarital sex at all in terms of my Judaism. There was no problem there, and I still don’t think there’s a problem there. But I definitely had the sense that I shouldn’t hurt anyone, that I shouldn’t cause unnecessary damage.

JJ: Did your friends come from similar Jewish backgrounds?

NW: No, it set me apart. The striking thing about the families of most of the girls I was friends with was the total agnosticism and secular mood. We were weird.

But that gave me grounding to navigate the sexual turmoil.

It didn’t spare me, but any kind of spiritual grounding, whether you’re comfortable with it or you’re uncomfortable with it, at least gives you higher or deeper or more lasting things than “Have the best orgasm of your life” or “Make the most money” or “Be the thinnest” as your prevailing value.

JJ: Like what kind of lasting things?

NW: Probably the most direct effect it had on us as kids was through our parents. I think it helped my parents keep their balance. Just having our synagogue as the ground of our community was probably a buffer for my parents to help them withstand the messages around us saying, “Find yourself; family isn’t that important.”

JJ: Is there a larger role Judaism can play in guiding girls through sexuality?

NW: Yes. I remember on our visits to the Planned Parenthood clinic, there was no moral grounding, no spiritual content, no ethical instruction. We were being processed like animals. And if there’s one thing Judaism does tell you over and over in every way, whether it’s through lighting the candles or blessing the meal, is that we’re more than animals.

Kids are being taught sex education in schools in a way that’s purely physiological and not about the relationship of their sexuality to their spirit. Boys are not learning about girls’ sexuality in relation to girls as complete human beings. Both boys and girls are encouraged to think of sex as completely divorced from their spiritual life, their spiritual evolution and maturation, and I really think this harms teen-agers. I would love to see sex education in schools in the context of asking deep questions about right and wrong, asking deep questions about love and responsibility.

JJ: It sounds like that would be a perfect course for a synagogue to give rather than a school.

NW: You’re absolutely right. As a mother, I would love to have my synagogue be a resource for my daughter’s generation to talk about these things. That would be great.

JJ: In the book, you call for older women to mentor younger women about sex. But when you were a young woman on a kibbutz, involved with an Irish-Catholic worker, you refused to listen to the rabbi’s wife, who warned you to stay away from him.

NW: It’s easy to misread that moment. What offended me was not that she was giving me guidance like, “Don’t go too far too fast.” That would have been fine. What offended me was I thought she was being racist about it. I knew it would have been perfectly OK with her for me to have made out with a nice boy from Great Neck (N.Y.).

JJ: That whole episode reads like a case study in the slippery slope to intermarriage. Is the attraction to the Other an inevitable or even necessary part of our development as sexual beings?

NW: The whole thing Philip Roth described is just as true for women. I think it’s almost hard-wired. But it’s also true that our culture does not eroticize marriage or intimacy. It eroticizes distance. I do think that if we did a better job eroticizing marriage and closeness, we would not be so drawn to always trying to find excitement and stimulus with the Other, further and further away from home.

JJ: What culture comes closer to the ideal in developing girls’ sexuality?

NW: You know, Israeli women are pretty confident. They don’t have a lot of the shame issues that people in other cultures have. That’s a sweeping, gross generalization, but that has been my experience.

I remember when I was on kibbutz when I was in my 20s, there were big barrels of contraceptives outside the infirmary, and you didn’t have to see a medical worker to get them. It just felt safer to be a woman there because of that.

JJ: How would you raise a son?

NW: The best thing I could do for him I already did, which is I married a man I think will be the right kind of model for him. Also, I guess I would talk to him about how girls feel, and let him know he’s entitled to think about how he feels. Really, the best thing we can do for our kids is to teach them how to stay conscious. We can’t save them, we can’t insulate them, but we can give them self-acceptance, and we can give them critical intelligence.

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Barney’s Version

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment, Old Stories /

Author Mordechai Richler

“Barney’s Version”by Mordechai Richler, (Knopf, $25)

Like some of his Jewish contemporaries to the south, Canadian novelist Mordechai Richler has mined a literary career from thefertile terrain of assimilationist Jewish culture, most notably inbooks such as “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” and “Joshua Thenand Now.” He returns to that familiar ground for his latest novel,”Barney’s Version,” but this time around, the trip is a bust.

The anti-hero narrator of this tediously self-satisfied book isBarney Panofsky — a vulgar, thrice-married TV producer who findshimself approaching old age with all the grace and dignity of a nudemud wrestler on crystal methamphetamine. Barney recounts his lifestory, taking plenty of timeouts along the way to nurse ancientgrudges, crack predictable jokes and whine repetitively about hisfading memory.

Richler wants Barney to simultaneously shock and delight thereader, much like a salty, uncensored Jewish uncle who skewers hisfamily’s P.C. pretensions at the dinner table. But Barney is neitherterribly interesting nor original. He seems like a tired Jackie Masongag stretched to book length, not a full-bodied character. Hismeandering, colloquial tone is uninvolving and claustrophobic. Hismemory tales read more like contrived mini-pitches for TV than thewell-constructed layers of a fictionalized life: see Barney andfriends as bohemian wannabes in postwar Paris; listen as Barneygrumbles inevitably about his health-nut daughter-in-law or the fateof his favorite hockey team. All that’s missing here is a laughtrack, a storyboard and a rim shot.

The author has managed to pack an awesomely dense amount ofclichés, stale humor and annoyingly cute literary mannerismsonto each page, but the end product is curiously weightless. For areally masterful novel centered around one man’s modern Canadianlife, check out instead Carol Shields’ brilliant new book, “Larry’sParty.” If it’s the inner and outer life of a Jewish NorthAmerican male you’re after, go directly to Philip Roth’s latest, “American Pastoral.” Compared with these two “versions,” Barney’sdoesn’t even come close.

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Art as History’s Witness

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Old Stories /

Left: “Competitors for Potatoes” by Eli Leskley. “Many [paintings] … are like ghoulishly bright cartoons in which the subject matter is anything but funny.'”

Art as History’s Witness

Paintings from Terezin are on exhibit at the Jewish Federation Building

By Diane Arieff Zaga, Arts Editor

It was 1942 when 29-year-old Eli Leskley, a Czech-born Jew, was sent to Theresienstadt, a fortified ghetto 50 kilometers from Prague. As a visual artist, he was assigned to the sign workshop, where he had access to paper, paint, ink, pencils and other art supplies. With what must have been a combination of remarkable courage and an overpowering need to document what transpired there, Leskley secretly painted dozens of prison-life scenes, mostly with watercolors and ink on office-sized paper taken from the workshop.

In a world where possession of contraband cigarettes was a fatal offense, the risk of discovery for the artist was great. Leskley folded and hid his paintings — many of which were sharply satirical — in the nooks and crevices of the camp, sometimes first tearing off the incriminating text that accompanied them. Some, such as “The Three Kings of the Ghetto” and “Christian Jews are Arriving,” incorporated symbols and metaphor. Others, such as “Return After Disinfection” and “Trading Soup for Bread” were more journalistic in their approach to describing life in the “model” ghetto.

Nazi propagandists may have touted Terezin as a bucolic resort for cultural elites, even prettying it up with tablecloths, flowers and classical concerts for a Red Cross visit. Of course, Leskley and his fellow prisoners knew better. Immediately prior to and after that infamous visit — an elaborately staged sham depicted by the artist in several drawings — the SS shipped thousands of inmates to Auschwitz. Terezin was a closely guarded, disease-ridden place where death — whether from punishment, starvation or the dreaded transport east — was common.

As chance would have it, both Leskley and much of his work survived. After liberation, he and his wife, Elsa, recovered many of the hidden paintings, which they took with them when they emigrated from Europe to Israel.

Now, more than 50 years later, visitors to an exhibition at the Jewish Federation Building can get a look at these drawings, a bitter, detailed vision of camp life. Most of the pictures were done when Leskley was off duty and able to work unobserved in his third-floor bunk. Many of them are like ghoulishly bright cartoons in which the subject matter is anything but funny. The effect is powerful and immediate.

The exhibition is entitled “Terezin: Then and Now.” The “then” portion includes 70 of the works Leskley produced in Terezin, along with his later re-creations of the same. The latter are companion pieces — larger, more highly colored versions of the ghetto-produced originals, done by the artist during his first decade in Israel. The wall text that accompanies Leskley’s works provides an important context for them through its informative descriptions of the physical and sociological conditions that prevailed at Terezin.

A collection of miscellaneous camp artifacts is also on display. Included are postcards, permits for packages and, most heartbreaking, the “Nesharim flag,” a hand-embroidered pennant that was sewn to mark a soccer-tournament victory for the camp’s team of young boys.

The art in the “Now” portion of the show is the result of something altogether different. In 1993, 13 young painters who were members of a master class at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts spent five days at the former site of the Terezin camp. The art students — none of whom were Jewish — hailed from countries as far-flung as Germany and Singapore. Their trip was made under the auspices of Project Gedenkdienst, which translates as Commemorative Service. The 4-year-old program, run out of the offices of Austria’s Interior Ministry, allows young Austrians to substitute 14 months of work at Holocaust memorials for their obligatory eight months of military service. One such intern, Bernhard Schneider, created the Terezin art project, which centered around the class’s trip to the ghetto memorial.

Judging by the haunted quality in many of these paintings, all of the students seem to have been deeply affected by their visit. Their project is described at greater length in the exhibition catalog, which includes brief commentary from Simon Wiesenthal, Vaclav Havel and the group’s professor, Anton Lehmden.

As for Leskley, his art was forged in far different circumstances. As with any other “Holocaust art,” it is difficult, and perhaps pointless, to judge his work by the rules of art criticism. The strength and importance of this show are not necessarily in its sophistication or subtlety of technique but in its power as visual testimony. This is not only art for art’s sake but art for the sake of history. In this capacity, Leskley is a cleareyed and vivid witness.

“Terezin: Then and Now,” at the Jewish Federation Building, 6505 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. The exhibition is on display in the Pauline Hirsh Gallery, Museum Gallery, Boardroom and select corridors. For more information, call (213) 852-3242. The Federation will also host a performance of music and poetry from Terezin on June 29 at 4 p.m.

More About Terezin

Film

Several short films about the Theresienstadt Ghetto have been made over the years, ranging from four-minute shorts to hour-long productions. They include a film of interviews conducted with survivors at an Israeli kibbutz and the infamous Nazi propaganda film “The Führer Grants the Jews a City.” The Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles has gathered videotapes of all the Terezin-themed films known to date and is screening them for visitors in its Museum Gallery on Sundays, at 2 p.m., and Thursdays, at 3 p.m. Call (213) 852-3242 for a complete program and confirmed schedule.

Books

Here is a short list of recommended books about Terezin. While some are widely available elsewhere, all of them may be found in the Federation’s Martyrs’ Memorial Library and Jewish Community Library, or may be purchased from the museum book store. Call the number above for a more extensive bibliography.

* Bor, Josef, “The Terezin Requiem.” New York, Borzoi Books, Knopf, 1963. Translated from the Czech.

* De Silva, Cara, ed., “In Memory’s Kitchen.” New Jersey, Jason Aronson, 1996. Translated by Bianca Steiner Brown, forward by Michael Berenbaum.

* Karas, Joza, “Music in Terezin, 1941-1945.” Paperback edition, Stuyvesant, N.Y., Pendragon Press, 1990.

* Schwertfeger, Ruth, “Women of Theresienstadt: Voices from a Concentration Camp.” Oxford, England, Berg, 1989.

* Volavkova, Hana, ed., “I Never Saw Another Butterfly: Children’s Drawings and Poems from Terezin Concentration Camp, 1942-1944.” New York, Shocken Books and U.S. National Holocaust Museum, 1993. Expanded second edition with a forward by Chaim Potok and afterword by Vaclav Havel. — D.A.Z.

Art as History’s Witness Read More »