May 11, 2007

Looking for a few good men — or at least one

Oy vey! You should read what they’re writing about them — in books yet

Leave a Comment / Books, California, Family, United States / Sandee Brawarsky

I have the kind of Jewish mother who could both make gefilte fish from scratch and play 18 holes of golf in one day. Every day throughout my high school years, my mother would hand me lunch in a paper bag as I rushed out the door and left most of the breakfast she had prepared on the kitchen table.

Now, when she visits, my eighty-something mother will clean our toaster inside out if we don’t stop her. She’s still the best person around to shop with for just about anything.

But while I’ve always been a daughter –an adoring one, in fact — this is the first time that I’ve written a column about books for Mother’s Day while being interrupted to go over 5th-grade spelling words and help illustrate a 7th-grade poster. As I write late into the night, tomorrow night’s dinner is cooking and three young children are sleeping upstairs in the new home I share with them and their father, a widower.

We got married just a few months ago, and we are all finding our way toward forging a family. Yes, I see my mother in my household routines, and I am ever aware of her example and increasingly awestruck by her talents.

So I read this season’s selection of books with perhaps a different eye and an increased curiosity. There are serious books about Jewish mothers, lighthearted books, how-to volumes and memoirs and some manage to cross categories. Some offer knowing advice, others observations and jokes. The best are those that are open, honest and wise, not preachy or sentimental.

The title of Joyce Antler’s new book not only grabs attention but conveys the tone of the book. “You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother” is scholarly and lively, full of rich anecdotes drawn from popular culture, sociological and historical studies and life experience.

Antler, a professor of American Jewish history and culture at Brandeis University and author of several books, including “The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America,” examines the origins of negative stereotypes associated with the Jewish mother. She shows how images like being domineering, manipulative and overprotective have endured, and how they’ve been depicted in books, film and particularly on television, even as Jewish mothers have represented so much more than that.

“I wanted to understand the misunderstood Jewish mother, ” Antler said in an interview, noting her goal of coming up with a portrait that’s more diverse and pluralistic, recognizing the great strengths of Jewish women over these last decades in America, who’ve helped their families get acculturated and achieve great success. She said that the images get re-invented every generation or so.

Hers is the most serious and engaging of new books, as she shifts her analytical eye from early television and radio’s Molly Goldberg and the jokes of George Jessel (“Isn’t it nice to have your own phone?” he asks his mother. “What? Nobody calls you? Even before you had the phone, nobody called you either?”) to Tovah Feldshuh in “Kissing Jessica Stein” and the humor of Sarah Silverman.

Antler also interviews Jewish mothers and includes their voices, speaking directly of their lives. One 97-year-old Sephardic mother of five who was born in Turkey spoke of having “a paradise in my home.”

Antler, who has been teaching at Brandeis for 28 years, is the proud Jewish mother of two daughters, and she’s admittedly quite involved in their lives.

“I’ve come to embrace the label, more so than I ever did before,” she said. One daughter is a stand-up comic who enjoys making fun in her monologue of having a feminist Jewish mother — a mother who encourages her not to wait for a man to shovel the snow for her but to put on a warm coat and get out there.

When you show up empty-handed on the first day of your young child’s softball practice, and the rest of the mothers all seem to be bearing bags of doughnuts for the coach, you realize that they know something that you don’t. “What the Other Mothers Know,” by Michelle Gendelman, Ilene Graff and Donna Rosenstein (Harper), is a smart, practical, funny and hip guide.

The Los Angeles-based authors, who describe themselves as not professionals like Dr. Spock or Dr. Phil but “three Dr. Moms, hands-on working parents” who have to budget their time and money, share advice that’s generous in spirit, especially geared to first-time moms.

There’s nothing of the competitive attitude that marks the so-called “mommy wars,” as they offer their version of a maternal E-Z Pass, culled from those with older kids and good memories. First-timers will learn about what other mothers seem to already know about preschool enrollment, finding good baby sitters and getting around the rules of school uniforms.

When I saw Judy Gold’s show, “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother,” off-Broadway, I laughed and cried and called my sister as soon as I left the theater and told her that she had to get tickets. Gold’s new book, “25 Questions for a Jewish Mother” (Voice), written with playwright Kate Moira Ryan, is based on the show and organized into 25 chapters of questions, ranging from “What makes a Jewish mother different from a non-Jewish mother?” to “What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do as a mother?”

Gold’s monologue — here presented as narrative — is based on her own adventures growing up in suburban New Jersey and now as the mother of two sons, along with the voices of 50 Jewish mothers she and Ryan interviewed around the country over a five-year period.

“I am not the typical Jewish mother I make fun of in my act,” she writes. “I’ve always wanted to be the ‘young and fun’ kind of mom and not some secondary character in a Philip Roth novel. For most of my adult life, I have struggled with the conflicts of being Jewish as well as being gay and being a comedian as well as a mother. Honestly, what Jewish mother do you know who spends her evening in smoky clubs full of drunk people, shouting obscenities over the sound of a blender, and the next day drops off her kids at Hebrew school?”

Oy vey! You should read what they’re writing about them — in books yet Read More »

Give Her a Rest

Leave a Comment / Torah / Rabbi Karen Deitsch

Fact: 54 percent of Americans worry about their daily stress levels.

Stress instigates anxiety disorders. Medically categorized as “neuroses,” these nonpsychotic mental illnesses trigger feelings of uncomfortable inner emotional apprehension that dominate perception and impair thinking, judgment and functioning, even though there is no identifiable threat. The stress response to ambiguous danger activates what physiologist Walter Cannon termed “fight or flight.” Hard-wired into the brain, this mechanism releases chemicals from nerve cell sequences for anticipated combat or escape.

Although there is no identifiable threat, more than half our population experiences daily life as if there were. To quote Leviticus 26:18, stress disorders cause us to “flee when no one pursues.”

Deluded to believe our survival is being threatened, we exist in fight-or-flight mode: pulses quicken, blood diverts from the digestive and reproductive systems into hands and legs, and short-term thinking over-rides rationality. “Terror … consume[s] the eyes” (Leviticus 26:16) as pupils dilate in narrowed perception of a reality where anyone may perpetrate. The autonomic nervous system creates “consumption and fever” as flushing, sweating and reduced immunity, and “sorrow to the heart” (Leviticus 26:16) as chest pains or angina.

God’s warnings of consequence for disrespecting His orders in Behar-Bechukotai read like a psychiatric diagnosis manual’s symptom list for neurotic stress disorders. The Israelites are beseeched to provide a “Sabbath of solemn rest for the land, a Sabbath for the Lord” (Leviticus 25:4) every seventh year by not working Her. She is the Mother Earth: the Divine consort of Source. If disrespected; if misogynistic, ego-based desires for ownership or affluence give precedence to any “thing” over everything; “the sound of a shaken leaf will chase them and they will flee, as fleeing from a sword” (Leviticus 26:37).

We are paying the penalty for despising the Divine’s statutes. God warned that our “strength will be spent in vain”: while the human body is capable of withstanding considerable levels and durations of stress, eventually, sustained depleted energy reserves cause chronic fatigue, stamina and muscle loss, and brain cell toxicity.

He presaged we would: “sow [our] seed in vain” (Leviticus 26:16) — average sperm count decreased 42 percent since 1940; and that our “skies [would be] like iron and our earth like copper” (Leviticus 26:18-20). In 1990, scientists discovered copper contamination in 7,000-year-old layers of ice in Greenland glacial caps and widespread copper smelting in the Bronze Age released enough copper into the atmosphere to contaminate ice thousands of miles away, causing iron-colored pollution and a poisoned ecosystem.

We have abhorred our Father and, more pertinently, exploited our Mother.

Persistence will ultimately render our heartbroken earth “forsaken by [us]” as She finally takes her Sabbaths “while she lies desolate without [us]” (Leviticus 26:43), mourning the children that deserted her in selfish greed.

Either way, Mother Earth must rest. She cannot bear the weight of our collectively disowned femininity much longer; Her burnout from such repression is inevitable, Her sabbatical inexorable. She implores us to attend to her … before we disintegrate.

Physical systems must rest, in testament that no “thing” really matters. No thing restores wholeness. No amount of force compensates for an equal measure of submission.

Quick-fix prescriptions that inhibit symptoms and disregard underlying causes only exaggerate the very dependencies, weaknesses and insecurities we resist acknowledging.

We must sanctify Shechinah: Source’s indestructible other half. She is the intuitive, the deep, the changeable; She is the sensual, the vulnerable, the dependent, the receivable. She is the passionate, nurturing, indistinguishable dream of darkness from which the light is borne. She is earth beyond reclaim. She must rest.

Cardiologist Herbert Benson discovered an antidote for neurotic stress disorders: the “relaxation response” hard-wired in the brain, releases neurochemicals almost precisely counteractive of “fight or flight.” Induced by practices of consciousness, presence or surrender, it stabilizes brain waves and lowers blood pressure and pulse rates.

Nothing is what God commanded we do with earth every seventh year. Nothing is the reverence of Everything; it is Shabbat: the Jewish relaxation response that celebrates the completion, satisfaction and wholeness defined by the word shevah (seven in Hebrew). Sheva is the perfection of the manifest universe reflected upon.

Revering Goddess is something we literally cannot stress about. We need only let Her be — within and without. And through our retreat, Her beloved, protective mate will shower His grateful providence into our relinquishment that we too may return to the peace we have co-created.

Now that’s a fact.

Rabbi Karen Deitsch works as a freelance officiant and lecturer in Los Angeles. She can be reached at karendeitsch@yahoo.com.

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Will Sarkozy’s Jewish roots impact France’s policies?

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Raanan Eliaz

In an interview French President-elect Nicolas Sarkozy gave in 2004, he expressed an extraordinary understanding of the plight of the Jewish people for a home: “Should I remind you the visceral attachment of every Jew to Israel, as a second mother homeland? There is nothing outrageous about it. Every Jew carries within him a fear passed down through generations, and he knows that if one day he will not feel safe in his country, there will always be a place that would welcome him. And this is Israel.”

Sarkozy’s sympathy and understanding is most probably a product of his upbringing. It is well known that Sarkozy’s mother was born to the Mallah family, one of the oldest Jewish families of Salonika, Greece. Yet it remains to be seen whether his personal history will affect his foreign policy and France’s role in the Middle East conflict.

In the 15th century, the Mallah family (Hebrew for messenger or angel) escaped the Spanish Inquisition to Provence, France, and moved about 100 years later to Salonika. In Greece, several family members became prominent Zionist leaders, active in the local and national political, economic, social and cultural life.

In 1917, a great fire destroyed parts of Salonika and damaged the Mallah family estate. Many Jewish-owned properties, including the Mallah’s, were expropriated by the Greek government. The Jewish population emigrated from Greece and much of the Mallah family left Salonika for France, America and Israel.

Sarkozy’s grandfather, Aron Mallah, nicknamed Benkio, immigrated to France, where he converted to Catholicism and changed his name to Benedict in order to marry a French Christian girl named Adele Bouvier.

Although Benedict integrated fully into French society, he remained close to his Jewish family and culture. Knowing he was still considered Jewish by blood, he hid his family in the village of Marcillac la Croisille in western France during World War II.

During the Holocaust, many of the Mallahs who stayed in Salonika or moved to France were deported to concentration and extermination camps. In total, 57 family members were murdered by the Nazis. Testimonies reveal that several revolted against the Nazis.

In 1950, Benedict’s daughter, Andree Mallah, married Pal Nagy Bosca y Sarkozy, a descendant of an aristocratic Hungarian family. The couple had three sons, Guillaume, Nicolas and François. After the couple divorced in 1960, Andrée Sarkozy raised her three boys close to their grandfather, Benedict. Nicolas was especially close to Benedict, who was like a father to him.

Sarkozy says he admired his grandfather, and through hours spent listening to his stories of the Nazi occupation, the Maquis (French Resistance), De Gaulle and D-Day, Benedict bequeathed to Nicolas his political convictions.

Sarkozy’s family lived in Paris until Benedict’s death in 1972, at which point they moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine to be closer to the boys’ father, Pal (who changed his name to Paul) Sarkozy.

Various memoirs depict Paul Sarkozy as a father who did not spend much time with his children or help the family monetarily. Nicolas had to sell flowers and ice cream in order to pay for his studies. However, his fascination with politics led him to become the city’s youngest mayor and to rise to the top of French and world politics. The rest is history.

It may be a far leap to consider that Sarkozy’s Jewish ancestry may have any bearing on his policies vis-?-vis Israel. However, many expect Sarkozy’s presidency to bring a dramatic change not only in France’s domestic affairs but also in the country’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

Nevertheless, there are several reasons that any expectations for a drastic change in the country’s Middle East policy, or foreign policy in general, should be downplayed.
First, France’s new president will spend the lion’s share of his time dealing with domestic issues, such as the country’s stagnating economy, its social cohesiveness and the rising integration-related crime rate.

When he finds time to deal with foreign affairs, Sarkozy will have to devote most of his energy to protecting France’s standing in an ever-involved European Union. In his dealings with the United States, Sarkozy will most likely prefer to engage on less-explosive agenda items than the Middle East.

Second, France’s foreign policy stems from the nation’s interests rooted in reality and influenced by a range of historic, political, strategic and economic considerations. Since Sarkozy’s landing at the Elysée on May 16 will not change those, France’s foreign policy ship will not tilt so quickly under a new captain.

Third, France’s Foreign Affairs Ministry exerts significant weight over the country’s policies and agenda. There, nonelected bureaucrats tend to retain an image of Israel as a destabilizing element in the Middle East, rather then the first line of defense of democracy. Few civil servants would consider risking France’s interests or increasing chances for “a clash of civilizations” in order to help troubled Israel or Palestine reach peace.

It is fair to predict that France will stay consistent with its support in establishing a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, existing side by side with a peaceful Israel. How to get there, if at all, will not be set by Sarkozy’s flagship, but rather he will follow the leadership of the United States and the European Union.

Although Sarkozy’s family roots will not bring France closer to Israel, the president’s personal Israeli friends may. As interior minister, Sarkozy shared much common policy ground with former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The two started to develop a close friendship not long ago, and it is easy to observe similarities not only in their ideology and politics but also in their public image. If Netanyahu returns to Israel’s chief position, it will be interesting to see whether their personal dynamic will lead to a fresh start for Israel and France and a more constructive European role in the region.

Article courtesy European Jewish Press in Brussels.

Raanan Eliaz is a former director at the Israeli National Security Council and the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and a consultant on European-Israeli affairs.

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Incumbency aids Olmert in surviving party ‘coup’

Leave a Comment / Israel, Worldwide / Leslie Susser

By all accounts, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert should have been history.

The Winograd Commission’s interim report issued April 30 on last summer’s second Lebanon War could not have been more scathing. The paragraph on the prime minister’s responsibility for the failures and shortcomings in top-level decision-making speaks for itself.

“The prime minister,” it says, “made up his mind [to go to war] hastily, despite the fact that no detailed military plan was submitted to him and without asking for one.”

Further, the report says, “His decision was made without close study of the complex features of the Lebanon front and of the military, political and diplomatic options available to Israel.” And he “made his decision without systematic consultation despite not having experience in foreign and military affairs.”

Ostensibly, the damning report should have been just the stick Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni needed to unseat Olmert. For months, Livni had been crafting a move to take over as Kadima Party boss and prime minister. Her assumption was that a critical assessment of Olmert’s conduct of the war, coupled with his close-to-zero popularity ratings, would force him to step down.

Kadima lawmakers, she thought, would not tolerate an increasingly unelectable leader who could cost them their parliamentary seats.

In the weeks leading up to the report, Livni’s close ally, party Knesset whip Avigdor Yitzhaki, openly approached potential Kadima rebels, trying to build a pro-Livni camp ready to move at the right time. The influential internal security minister, Avi Dichter, was supposed to join at a crucial juncture to create a critical mass against Olmert.

But there was one thing the would-be rebels had not counted on: the power of incumbency. As soon as the Winograd Report was published, Olmert and his aides used threats and promises to derail the planned “coup.”

Some potential rebels were offered important new posts that would open up with a planned government reshuffle; others were threatened with a premature end to their political careers. All were warned that a move against Olmert would spark new elections Kadima would lose.
Less than 48 hours after the report was published, Livni’s coup attempt had been stifled.

Still, Olmert remains vulnerable. There are three ways he could lose his hold on power: If he fails to keep control of Kadima, if he loses his Knesset majority or if mounting public pressure on him to resign becomes intolerable.

For now, his hold on Kadima seems secure, but there are rumblings in the party about replacing him with former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, rather than Livni. The idea is that Peres would be a caretaker prime minister until Kadima chooses a new leader. That would give some of Livni’s rivals for the top spot — Housing Minister Meir Sheetrit, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz and Dichter — time to organize leadership bids.

Olmert, however, is moving swiftly to head off the Peres push the same way he quashed Livni’s attempt.

To keep his Knesset majority, Olmert has been strengthening ties with junior coalition partners and wooing the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party (UTJ). He has developed good relations with Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman and Shas leader Eli Yishai. With them and the Pensioners Party, he has a base of 59 seats in the 120-member Knesset and together with Labor, a solid majority of 78.

The weak link is Labor, which is under mounting pressure to pull out over Winograd. Hence, Olmert’s effort to bring in the six-member UTJ faction, which would leave him with a majority of 65, even if Labor bolts.

To ease public disaffection, Olmert intends to come out with a new peace initiative, his confidants acknowledge. This would coincide with another major element of his survival strategy: the establishment of a second Olmert administration in June, after Labor elects a new leader. The aim would be to regain public confidence by appointing strong ministers to the key defense, finance and foreign affairs portfolios and pressing a peacemaking agenda.

Again, the problem with this plan is Labor. Party secretary Eitan Cabel and leadership candidates Ophir Pines-Paz, Ami Ayalon and Dani Yatom are calling for Labor’s peremptory withdrawal from the government if Olmert continues to head it.

Labor’s dilemma, however, is far from simple. Pulling out of the Olmert government could spark early elections that right-wing Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu would probably win. On the other hand, if Labor stays in the coalition, its new leader, probably Ayalon or former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, would likely become defense minister in Olmert’s “second administration,” a good base from which to build a future campaign for prime minister against a weak incumbent.

Netanyahu is biding his time, waiting for public pressure to force an election. He had toyed with the idea of generating a motion of “constructive no confidence,” in which 61 Knesset members would back him for prime minister, enabling him to form a government without having to go to the polls. But he dropped the plan when finding those 61 votes proved more difficult than he anticipated, and when close confidants pointed out that he stood to gain far more via the landslide election victory public opinion polls are predicting.

The Likud’s tactics will be to maintain the anti-Olmert pressure generated by the mass rally it helped organize in Tel Aviv on May 3. An estimated 150,000 people from the left and the right filled Rabin Square in a rare bipartisan demonstration demanding that Olmert go.

Olmert is facing other obstacles, too. In the coming weeks, the commission will release his testimony. If it transpires that he tried to shift blame to his predecessor — Kadima founder Ariel Sharon — he could find himself in serious trouble inside the party.

For now, the focus is on the commission’s specific criticisms of the prime minister: the hasty decision to go to war; the loose definition of war aims; the failure to adapt to emerging conditions. This pits the strong public desire for change against the power of incumbency in an as-yet-unresolved battle.

Incumbency aids Olmert in surviving party ‘coup’ Read More »

Israel experiencing revival of democratic life thanks to Winograd

How will GOP fare with Jewish voters in ’08?

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Raphael Sonenshein / Raphael J. Sonenshein

With California’s early primary bringing unusual recognition to the Golden State, the Republican candidates are heading out West. They met in debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley on May 3. Do these Republicans have a shot at winning Jewish voters over in 2008?

Under Bush, the Republicans essentially offered Jewish voters unbridled support of Israel. Jews were asked to return unbridled electoral support, despite almost total disagreement with Bush on virtually all other issues, from diplomacy to stem-cell research, to abortion, to gay rights. The plan worked at an elite level, bringing Bush close support from national Jewish organizations and giving Jewish Republicans something to talk about at community events.

But at the electoral level, the strategy failed miserably. More than three-quarters of Jews voted for Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) in 2004. Some exit polls found that in 2006, more than 85 percent of Jews supported Democratic congressional candidates.

So should Republicans pursue the same strategy and hope for a better result with Jewish voters? Republicans would probably be better off if they were to follow a three-word strategy: Listen to Arnold. Like former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan before him, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has now found the comfort zone that allows Jewish voters, most of whom are Democrats, to pull a different lever.

Having returned from his two-year, self-inflicted sojourn in the political wilderness, California’s governor is now dispensing advice to his party about reaching out to the center of the political spectrum. He is talking up the battle against global warming and promoting stem-cell research.

He attended the debate in Simi Valley and is being heavily courted by all the leading candidates. At least two candidates in the field, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Rudy Giuliani, should be naturally responsive to his call.

In his two election victories in partisan New York City, the socially liberal, tough-on-crime Giuliani showed great voting strength among the city’s overwhelmingly Democratic Jewish voters. He carried more than 60 percent of Jewish voters in both 1993 and 1997.

While McCain does not have the same record of winning Jewish votes, his close ties to Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and other centrist Democrats opened a lot of doors (much like the ones swinging open these days for California’s governor). A third major candidate, Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, was elected governor in one of the most Democratic states in America, although his sarcastic attacks on his own state have begun to outrage Democrats there.

Schwarzenegger may be unable to move a much more resistant force than individual candidates: the Republican Party itself. Public focus has been so intense on Bush for the last six years (love him or hate him?) that the deep changes in the Republican Party have been less visible.

Bush and the Republican Party have become totally intertwined and isolated from the broader nation on issue after issue, beginning but not ending with the war in Iraq. The only place where it is safe among Republicans to disagree with Bush is on immigration, where the party base is more conservative than the president. Even the more pragmatic leaders of the Christian right, who say they would tolerate a socially liberal nominee in order to hold onto power, may not easily hold the base in line.

Bush has governed with a one-party model, ignoring Democrats and independents. He has pursued a narrow ideological agenda on the environment, foreign policy, economics and social issues. Even more important, his team has gone past the outer limits of presidential power in a manner that is looking more and more like a frontal assault on the Constitution and the rule of law. The authoritarian overtones of arbitrary detention, torture and marginalization of dissent are likely to disturb Jews, who comprise the heart of the civil liberties community.

As a result, potentially centrist Republican candidates may get caught in the newly named “Chafee effect.” Too liberal for the party base and too stuck with the Republican label, Sen. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was a popular moderate Republican in a Democratic state, holding a 67 percent approval rating. But the stakes of party competition had been raised so high by the Bush approach that Democratic voters turned Chafee out of office in order to win a national party battle for Senate control.

Lieberman barely won re-election in Connecticut after losing the Democratic primary due to his affinity for Bush. If either McCain or Giuliani are the Republican nominees, will the same thing happen if Jewish Democrats, who might be inclined to support them, fear the continuation of the Republican machine under new management?

For a while, it seemed as if Giuliani would get a pass from the base on these issues, both because they think he can win a general election and because Republicans admire those they consider strong war leaders. But Giuliani is not taking any chances. He has now taken affirmative steps to abandon his pro-choice posture. He recently endorsed a controversial Supreme Court decision to allow the government to outlaw late-term abortions, regardless of the health of the mother.

Giuliani had previously taken the opposite position on late-term abortion and had even endorsed public funding for abortions. There is no group in America that is more pro-choice than Jews, particularly Jewish women, whose support of that position is nearly unanimous. Suddenly, Giuliani does not look like the mayor they thought they knew.

McCain, meanwhile, has abandoned his maverick stance of working with Democrats and occasionally challenging Bush to become the most loyal Bush supporter around. After first challenging Bush on torture, he signed on to an agreement that gave the president virtually unfettered authority.

He has tied his fate to Bush’s unpopular Iraq War. This strategy reached the height of absurdity when he strode through a Baghdad market he had declared safe wearing a bulletproof vest, protected by our troops and guarded by helicopters.

How will GOP fare with Jewish voters in ’08? Read More »

Mere Humans

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Rob Eshman / Rob Eshman

In the space below, list all patents you have received in the past four years:

1.
2.
3.
4.

Nothing? Not even one lousy invention?

And you expect to get into college?

No kidding, my niece, Lesley, came upon this question on the 2007 entrance application to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She left it blank.

“Guys,” she told her parents, “I don’t think I’m going to MIT.”

That moment, Lesley said, was her low point in the long, drawn-out hell that is college admissions. You can get straight A’s, ace your SATs, captain the girls’ water polo team, write like Anne Morrow Lindbergh, but then some wiseacre admissions committee wants to know what have you done for humanity lately. Scratch that: What have you invented for humanity lately?

I don’t know if that question has haunted the MIT application for decades.

But I do know that this year was the single hardest year to get into the college of one’s choice. The Baby Boomers who mated nearly 18 years ago created a demographic bubble, a baby boomlet, that has flooded college admissions offices with piano prodigies, Westinghouse winners and Junior Olympians with 4.5 GPAs.

“I don’t want to be too discouraging,” Judith P. Mackenzie of Mackenzie College Consulting told the Seattle Times, “because many mere humans are admitted each year, but it’s tougher than it’s ever been.”

Lesley’s father attended MIT. “If it’s any comfort,” he told her, “I wouldn’t have gotten in either this year.”

I suspect those words are being repeated in many households around now.

This time of year in L.A., the usual chatter about real estate prices and movie grosses gives way temporarily to unending conversations about schools — and not just colleges.

The angst that marks the college entrance process echoes backward through the grades.

Milken Community High and New Jewish Community High School each faced extraordinarily large pools of qualified applicants for the ninth grade.

A friend of mine with a toddler asked me if I had any pull with a Chabad preschool on the Westside. “I didn’t know you were Jewish,” I said.

“We’re not,” she said, “but we need a backup in case we can’t get her into First Years.”
And so it begins.

I know some parents for whom this process is not such a big deal. They realized early on how the system works. They bought or rented a home based on the local school’s rating, or they carefully racked up magnet school points, all the while tithing their income into a sensible savings plan. I have a word for these parents: grownups.

But I know more parents who, when their infant suddenly walked upright, went into a school-provoked frenzy that doesn’t relent until the last installment on the last college loan is paid, sometime around 2027.

These are the parents I tend to hang out with. Our conversations shuttle from shock to outrage to high anxiety to resignation.

We suddenly awaken to the sorry state of too many of our public schools, far too late in the game to improve them for our kids.

Some of us point fingers at busing, the competitiveness of a global economy, immigrants, incompetent officials, uncaring parents — but still we have to choose now for our kids, knowing we can’t solve any of these problems tomorrow.

For those of us committed to a Jewish education, the choices are, to put it mildly, complex. Our external and internal debates probe the quality, the cost, the convenience. The lack of Jewish high schools on the Westside has led 11 families I know to enroll their soon-to-be ninth graders in New Jew, which is in the West Valley. The kids will get a great education, with a minor in commuting.

And that’s assuming — now that their children have cleared the entrance hurdle — the parents can keep paying for it. A rabbi in town told me his son once asked him when they will ever get a new car. “I get a new car every year,” the rabbi responded. “It’s called a Tuition.”

For parents of special-needs children, this whole process is a thousand times more agonizing, mixed with uncertainty, a public education system that usually has to be litigated into submission and limited and expensive private and Jewish options.

But … summer is almost here. The college admissions frenzy has climaxed, the first tuition installments have come due and parents and children are resigned or elated in their choices for the coming academic year.

As for my niece, she’ll be attending UC Berkeley this fall — patent that, MIT.

She’ll succeed, but I’m sure her future success will have less to do with what schools she did or did not attend and more to do with her ability to attend to herself.

“Go to your bosom,” wrote Shakespeare in “Measure for Measure,” “knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.”

To raise a child to young adulthood who knows herself, who has a sense of what she loves, an ability to relate to others and a command of the things she needs to learn — that is a gift far beyond the right school and the best scores.

Because let’s not fool ourselves about the most important question our children will have to answer once they’ve finally graduated.

It’s not, “Where did you go to school?”

It’s, “What do you want to do next?”

Mere Humans Read More »

Pick your redemption

Leave a Comment / David Suissa / David Suissa

There’s something about being Jewish that makes you think big. Jews can easily schmooze about global stuff — the bigger the better. We’re here for all of humanity.

We want to save the planet, whether from global evil or global warming. When we talk about our own problems, we also lean to the dramatic; we’re constantly at a crossroads, fearing for our survival, talking about “the future of the Jewish people.”

Maybe it has to do with our big bang beginnings, when we all had front row seats to God’s revelations. We were born in drama, we grew up in drama and we shall forever live in drama.

So it was business as usual the other night when a historian from Aish Hatorah gave a lecture at my place called, “The Edge of History.” Talk about big. It seemed like every few minutes we heard the words prophecy, redemption or revelation. The speaker, Rabbi Ken Spiro, was using a slick PowerPoint presentation to impress on us that the era of global redemption was at hand, and there is no time to waste to return to God.

The rabbi was no fool. He was prepared for a skeptical audience, so he went through many of the biblical prophecies – the Jews will be small, they’ll be hated by the world, they’ll survive, an enemy will have a “weapon of mass destruction,” etc. — to make the point that if those prophecies came true, why can’t others?

He was especially interested in the prophecy that all Jews will return to God. According to the biblical and rabbinical sources Spiro quoted, this teshuva, or return, is critical if we want to survive as a people and fulfill our role as the redeemers of humanity.

In truth, it was a compelling presentation. When he was done, there was a sense that we had witnessed something incredibly important. It couldn’t get any bigger — the future of the world and the Jews’ vital role in shaping it. When your mind is consumed with whether you have a snack ready for the kids tomorrow, it feels oddly relaxing to talk about the end of the world.

But while we were highly impressed, even awed, I didn’t get a sense that anyone was personally moved. Some of us might have been swept away in the moment, but that seemed to blow over once the shmoozing started.

Of course, it didn’t help that something was still lingering in my mind — like a little barbecue party.

You see, by a strange quirk of timing, a few hours earlier, my teenage daughter and her friends from Yula High School hosted a little barbecue for a couple of Jewish girls visiting from Israel.

It was a casual affair. Everybody just hung out and had a good time. The visiting girls had just come back from a day of shopping. A day earlier, they were at Disneyland, and they were now looking forward to Universal Studios. One of the girls, Adi, asked for my mother’s hummus recipe. The other, Racheli, was saying how much she’d love to live in Los Angeles. They both asked about movie stars.

There was, however, one thing about the girls that was not typical. About six years ago, on a warm Saturday night in Jerusalem, Adi and Racheli went out for ice cream with friends and soon found themselves next to a terrorist blowing himself up.

Racheli had only minor injuries, because right before the bomb exploded, she’d left Adi to say goodbye to a friend several yards away. The bomber was a yard and a half from Adi. All 10 people around her were killed. About 100 nails coated with rat poison exploded into her legs, and a main artery was severed.

When Adi talks about it now, with her sweet voice matching her sweet, olive-skinned face, she is remarkably calm and factual. She talks about “maybe 30” operations on her legs and another one coming up. She tells me in detail about the night she was rushed to the hospital — how the enormous amount of blood pumped into her body was coming out of “the hundred holes in her leg”; how at one point they had to stop operating because her body couldn’t take the trauma, and how an experimental coagulant drug, Novo 7, saved her life.

She also remembers that in the beginning of her recovery, one of the few things she could eat was ice cream, her favorite.

She was especially happy when I met her, because she has finally begun to walk without the help of a walker or cane. Clearly, she was also happy to be in Los Angeles, a place she always dreamed of visiting. In fact, when I told her I might write about her story, she asked me to please mention the organization that helped arrange her L.A. visit — Kids for Kids, an organization that connects young terror victims with fellow Jews around the world.

In the spiritual realm, they tell you there are no coincidences — everything that happens to us holds a divine message. What could be the message in this unusual sequence of events: a little barbecue party for two young girls who were caught in a Jerusalem bombing, followed by a masterful presentation on the final days of global redemption?

If you ask me, maybe the message is that there’s more than one way to find God and bring about redemption. One way is to think big, go right to God and commit to obeying his commandments.

The other is to think small, and on your way to finding God to see if you can find any Jews who have trouble walking — and who might be in the mood for a little ice cream.

David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine and Meals4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.

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Helicopter parents: Jewish mothers go airborne

Leave a Comment / California, United States / Ronda Fox

Consider this description from Wikipedia: “a person who pays extremely close attention” to her children and rushes “to prevent any harm from befalling them or letting them learn from their own mistakes, sometimes even contrary to the children’s wishes.”

Consider further this description from collegeboard.com: “They are always on the lookout for threats to their children’s success and happiness. If a problem does surface, these parents are ready to swoop in and save the day.”

Definitions of a Jewish Mother, yes? Sorry, bubeleh. They’re definitions of “helicopter parent,” the phenomenon of hovering, overprotective, overinvested, and overbearing mothers and fathers. Apparently Jewish mothering is contagious: jumping gender and religion on a national scale. Suddenly we are all, as Woody Allen titled his short film in New York Stories, “Oedipus Wrecks.” And no one is giving credit where credit is a Jew.

To see just how closely a Helicopter Parent resembles a Jewish mother, one need only glance at collegeboard.com’s quiz “How Do You Know If You’re a Helicopter Parent?” While the term is often used in the context of parenting college-age children, the similarities are undeniable. Still, the Helicopters can only bob amateurishly in the mighty wake of the Jewish mother jet fighters.

You are in constant contact with your child

Jewish smothering has wrung its hands into the 21st century, where you can run, but you can’t hide. The AT & T network was nicknamed “Ma Bell” for a reason, and with satellite technology your mother knows she can hear you now. (Nu, so why aren’t you calling?) She can even buy you a ringtone from YentaTones, including “Ya Mother’s Cawling,” “My Son the Doctor,” and “Have I Got a Boy for You.”

University of Georgia professor Richard Mullendore dubs cellphones the “world’s longest umbilical cord.” But Nokia-wielding Helicopters are mere Johnny-come-latelies to long-settled Jewish mother territory. Indeed, as Allen, Phillip Roth and the APA know, Jewish mothers achieved wireless communication decades ago with the guilt-powered internal monologue.

You are in constant contact with school administration

A recent Doonesbury panel depicted a cellphone-brandishing MIT freshman telling the dean if he didn’t let her into the class she wanted, he’d have to speak to her father. While Helicopters specifically target college administrators, Jewish mothers have targeted the entire world — teachers, doctors, roommates, boy/girlfriends, spouses, bosses — no one is off limits. In Allen’s short film, his mother and aunt pay him a surprise visit at work — a WASPy Manhattan law firm. When an imposing white-haired partner comes to retrieve Allen, who has left an important meeting to head his mother off, she turns to her hearing-impaired sister and says of the boss in a voce not nearly sotto enough, “He’s the one with the mistress!”

You make your child’s academic decisions

Yes, Helicopters choose their children’s school and their courses, after which they may even maneuver their way to do the schoolwork itself. Meanwhile, Jewish mothers have mandated legal, medical, and other professional careers for generations of sons and now daughters, many of whom probably represent Helicopters in their grudge suits against schools or treat them for anxiety and depression when Junior gets a B. Even beyond the academy, Jewish mothers are notorious for deciding everything for their children: from when to wear a sweater to why they shouldn’t marry that no-goodnick.

While both Helicopters and Jewish Mothers dictate and interfere, their decision-making methods differ. Helicopters take direct action: the old nothing-gets-done-right-unless-I-do-it-myself approach. Jewish mothers, on the other hand, nudge until they get their children to do it. My son the doctor, as the ringtone trills, wasn’t always a doctor, but the Jewish mother knows she can do only so much on her own to make him one. To become Dr. Katz, he’s going to have to take his own MCATS. All she can do is provide a little motivation, i.e., alternating doses of praise and guilt.

You feel bad about yourself if your child does not do well

Helicopters derive vicarious pleasure from their children’s accomplishments and suffer pain from their “failures.” Data released by the Society for Research in Child Development indicates that in seeking self-worth through their children’s achievements — which means getting top grades and into certain colleges — Helicopters endure more anxiety, depression, and insecurity, and enjoy less contentment, than those on the ground.

Jewish Mothers, too, are utterly invested in their children’s advancement. For them, however, it is not the Ivy League or bust. Jewish mothers are less interested in prestige than they are in tikkun olam that happens to come with a house in the suburbs. Steven Spielberg’s mother, undoubtedly bursting with nachas, might still feel a pang of regret that her son was not, for example, Jonas Salk. Helicopters want their children to do well; Jewish Mothers want their children to do good.

Popular culture may have assimilated the bagel hamwich, Red State Yiddish, and the “Daily Show,” but it can never appropriate the Jewish mother. At the end of the day, both the Helicopters and Jewish mothers are fueled by love gone amok, but only the Jewish Mother answers to an authority higher than Air Traffic Control.

Ronda Fox is the proud mother of two teenage mensches who do their best to keep her grounded.

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