on catcalling and compliments

Two pieces of information regarding my latest piece on HuffPost Women. 

1 - I have been shocked to see the online reaction over a video of a woman being repeatedly catcalled. Catcalls are not flattering. They are an attempt to assert power.

2 - The news about a Rabbi videotaping women is horrifying and disgusting. The news that it has become standard Orthodox practice for male rabbis to be in the room while women dunk in the mikvah for conversion is a perversion of Judaism, full stop.

So, following, a history of my relationship to the unwanted gaze.

To the men who made me hide my womanly body

I remember the dress. I felt so grown up wearing it. It was a gift from my great aunt and uncle who owned a clothing store in Nashville. I stood in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at myself. Adjusted the sleeves so that they were ever so slightly off the shoulder. Marveled at the buds of breasts that were beginning to appear. Then I would quickly pull the shoulders back up, alarmed at how old I seemed reflected in the harsh bathroom light. I would slowly spin around, examine how I looked from every angle.

It was still a girl's dress. But the girl inside was just a tiny bit woman.

I wore it that day, walking in Jerusalem, where we spent many summers, through the Arab market. The air smelled of spices, leather and olive wood. Though I could feel the presence of my parents and sister behind me, I walked ahead, tasting, for a moment, a grownup freedom. My focus stayed on the tiny shops, hawkers trying to entice tourists into their entryways. It was midday, but dark in the market, the sun blocked by the ancient stone walls of the old city.

A hand slipped gently into mine. I'm not sure what I was thinking. That one of my parents had reached out, not wanting to lose me, most likely. But the hand felt unfamiliar. And I felt myself being pulled to move faster. When I finally looked up, I saw that a strange man had hold of me. His grip was firm. I was too surprised to know what to do.

I'm certain it was less than a minute until my parents noticed and grabbed me away. The man ran. His back disappeared into a dark alleyway. I didn't really understand what had just happened. That a man had tried to steal me away. For the first time, it seemed I had come up against how the rest of the world viewed my changing body, and it was not exactly what I had expected. In that moment I became aware of the gazes of men as I passed by. I was nine years old.

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my racist summer vacation

So, I know I've been away for a while, holidays, new school year, four kids times three pair of shoes each = I've made friends with the woman at Zappos. Also, I've begun work on a book, fiction for a change. I'm hoping to have it done before my youngest graduates college. In 2028.

This blog post in the Forward is edited down, but I'll put the longer version here and link to the edited one. After the war this summer, I am worried what the Jewish community around the world is becoming. I'm not interested in minimizing the anti-Semites that have come out of the woodwork, nor the genuine evil within Hamas. But I don't want those things to change who I am and what I believe in.

See, I'm so worried, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. 

For some reason, when parents are speaking with their young children, they often employ the royal “we.” “We always say thank you when given a gift,” “we wash our hands after feeding the goat,” “we don't bite our sister.” This formulation is most commonly used in the aspirational, as in, “despite the fact that you've just bitten your sister for the third time this week, we, the powers that be, do not condone such behavior, and expect you to do better in the future.” 

This way of speaking always grated on me. It seemed by some verbal alchemy to remove responsibility from both the child and the parent. With my own children I favor the “responsibility all around” approach. My response to chomping on one's sister - “the next time you bite her, you will have no TV for a week” - puts the onus on both of us. The child will suffer consequences, and I will suffer as I follow through on my threat for a whole entire week, even when said child begs with the most pathetic eyes ever.

In July, I heard this “we” over and over as Jews around the world (appropriately) condemned the horrific murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. “we Jews don't do this,” they claimed, even as empirical evidence to the contrary mounted. Some Jews do do this. But they are clearly the exception. Jews know what it's like to be persecuted. That means we don't hate Arabs because of who they are, but we hate how some Arabs behave. We are most certainly not racists. Ok. If you say so.

Until recently I felt vaguely proud of the manner in which my whole community handled questions regarding race. Then last month, I found myself becoming one. A racist, that is. 

This summer, as sirens blared, we experienced the physical stress that comes with even the few runs to the bomb shelter that we had in Jerusalem. The flip in your stomach, rush of adrenaline, heart racing, that washes over you every time you hear a siren. Any siren. Last week, driving on the bucolic 2-lane Cape Cod highway, an ambulance approached. As my breath quickened, I glanced in the rearview mirror. My daughter smiled back at me and whispered, “tzeva adom.” Red alert.

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wherein I avoid talking about politics

I don't generally write about politics. Not that I don't have strong political views. I do. But I don't feel as though I need to be yet another voice in the cacophony of voices drowning each other out on TV and in the press and at your family dinners....

So the following is my musings from Jerusalem, the war raging on the ground and on the airwaves. It's published in The Worldpost, which is the best place I could think to publish it on their vast platform. Maybe it should have been in Huffpost Parents?

I was out to dinner in Jerusalem last week with a group of friends, some American, some Israeli. It was a mostly upbeat evening, with good food and wine, a bit too much of both. Thoughts of the war wandered into the meal like a hungry cat nudging at our shins under the table, but there was plenty of levity as well. Most of the Americans at the meal would have been considered fluent in Hebrew by nearly any standard. The conversation arrived at the one piece of language acquisition that can trip up even those of us who dream in a second language: the figure of speech.

One of the diners said she had just had the opportunity to use an expression for the first time, and she was amused that it was one that was itself already an anachronism. The phrase she used was "Nafal ha'asimon." Literally it means "The phone token dropped." It's the Hebrew equivalent of the English expression "A light bulb went off" or "It clicked," meaning "I got it" or "I finally understood." It refers to the old-style Israeli payphones, which required a dedicated phone token in order to make a call. Anyone who's ever used a payphone -- and we're getting to be an elderly bunch -- knows the feeling. You dial your number, then wait until the call connects, the money in the machine engages, and your stomach does that tiny flip of excitement when you know the call has gone through. It's Oprah's "'aha!' moment," I suppose.

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notes from a (sort of?) war zone

Last week I got a request from my local Connecticut Jewish paper for an account of my "summer of sirens." I didn't want to wade into the politics, mostly because if I had a solution, I'd be looking to share it on a slightly larger platform. 

So here, instead, is a collection of thoughts about what it's like living in this land of contradictions, if only for the summers. You can read the piece here, but as the site is confusing, and you have to scroll all the way down, here's the article in it's entirety. 

I'm driving home from dropping the kids off at day camp. The radio is on, playing an old pop tune I recognize but never loved. I consider turning off the radio, then think better of it. I tuned in to drown out my kids on the way there, who were gratingly singing the same two-line song over and over in the backseat. Now, on my way back to the house, the radio is my only company in the silent, empty car.

The music ends and the DJ is talking in that upbeat morning voice that I have never been successful in cultivating. He gives a quick traffic report just as I find myself in a mini-jam a couple of minutes from home, not big enough to make the news. I'm only half listening, watching the dance between the driver a few cars ahead and the man standing at the crosswalk. He stares down the car in a look I find all too familiar because I make it myself daily. It dares the driver not to let you cross even as two feet are planted firmly on the sidewalk, on the off chance the driver takes you up on it.

The DJ's tone changes slightly. “Listeners, if you hear a tzeva adom (red alert) and you're in your car, pull over to the side of the road. If there's a wall or a building you can get to in time – depending on where you live this is between 15 seconds and a minute and a half – run to it. If there's no time, lie on the ground behind your car, face down, arms over your head. Be safe, everyone.”

And the first thought that runs through my head is, how do I know what “behind the car” means? Doesn't that depend on which way the missile falls?

Then the traffic clears and I arrive on my street and my thoughts turn to what I need to buy for Shabbat.

I've spent most summers of my life in Jerusalem. My kids go to camp here, where they speak only Hebrew and develop a fleeting interest in the Mondial. They love the freedom they have in Israel, not like in the suburbs where we drive everywhere. There, when the kids try to walk to a friend's house, or to the store, strangers roll down their windows asking if they're okay. My younger daughter comes home from camp and asks if we need milk, because she loves going to the store by herself and doing the shopping for me. If we have enough milk, I tell her to get some seltzer. As a result, we have a pantry full of seltzer.

And while the kids are in camp, I walk around the city, planting myself in cafes where I can write for hours over a single cup of coffee, enjoying the breeze and the light bouncing off the Jerusalem stone. But this summer is different.

My two older kids are spending a month at sleepaway camp in the states, so my husband remains in the U.S., waiting for them to come home so they can jump on a plane and join me and their siblings. Oh, and the bombs.

I've been here in wartime before. I've had the police yell us back into our house so that they could explode a package someone left in front of our gate. I've been locked in the supermarket for an hour while they subdued a terrorist outside. And with so many other things connected with the security situation here, I know the drill.

But this is the first time that an air raid siren siren sent me (and my children) into our double duty laundry room/bomb shelter. I'm not sure what I was expecting. I was very calm and sure that the kids weren't at all frightened.

But I must have been more flustered than I realized, because when my good friend, who lives down the street, sweetly called me in the shelter to see if I was alright, I forgot to ask if her son, who a couple of minutes earlier had been babysitting at my house, had made it home in time. (He had not, and ran the second half of the way, sirens blaring.)

And the kids went to bed easily, but the next day, they had a battery of questions. “What if I'm in the shower when the siren sounds?” “How far away is the bomb shelter at camp?” “What are the chances we could get hit?” My daughter jumps every time she hears an ambulance, unable to entirely distinguish the sounds.

But then, they giggle at the top of their lungs in the pool, or I have a hard time pulling them away from their friends at the end of the camp day, campmates yelling at them in Hebrew as we walk towards the car. And they annoy me from the backseat. And it all feels so normal.

There's an episode of “The West Wing” where Josh Lyman can't stand to hear music because in his head the sounds turn to sirens, reminding him of when he was shot, during a foiled assassination attempt by white supremacists. I remember thinking what a clever literary device that was, if a bit unrealistic.

But last night, the kids in bed, the news on low, banners going across the screen every time a missile was fired, the house was eerily quiet. And then I heard a sound, like a wave, with an ebb and flow that I would have sworn was a distant air raid warning. I heard it again. And again. They weren't mentioning anything on the TV about a warning in Jerusalem, so I opened the door to the balcony to check.

There's a haredi yeshiva down the street. They exist in a bit of a bubble, barely interacting with the more liberal community that surrounds them. They were having a celebration of some sort, seemingly unaware of the war going on all around. They were singing the same tune over and over, and it washed over me like waves. I went to bed to the sound of those crashing waves, which any other night would have grated on me, as they sang loud and strong, way past midnight. But this week it seemed apropos, a contradiction within a contradiction. I'm sure there were mothers in Gaza at that same moment, silently wishing for a bit of my good fortune. Serenaded, I slept better than I have in weeks.