This is not a fashion show (except when it is)

There is a short period during the year where my choice of dress code does not distinguish me from others. It’s usually that intersection between seasons, for instance, where many women are wearing skirts, long-sleeved shirts and maybe some (combat) boots. But as a friend recently noted on Facebook, it is not this season. My friend, who is in the process of converting herself, observed casually that when it gets warm, the clothes tend to come off and she’s surprised how little people will wear.

Growing up my mother tried to force me into miniskirts and other girlie clothing in all manner of tightness and shortness. By 13, I had rebelled by becoming a tomboy. By 15, during a boy crazy phase, I had accepted that my clothing gave me a certain power and allure over men. But by 25, I was tired of the misconceptions people made about me because of my clothing (stupid lot!) and when I decided to cover up and adopt the Orthodox Jewish dress code (mostly, some people argue I could go further), I was grateful that all eyes were no longer on me.

But they still were! Some ultra-Orthodox Jews looked at me with scorn because they thought my clothing was still too tight, too short, too modern. I remember being shocked by this and the idea that in my “modern” Orthodox garb, I could still lure, captivate and drive men to sin. Then I walked around Manhattan in my modern Orthodox garb and I got hit on by men and women alike. Sure, for the most part I was ignored on the streets of Washington Heights but I was still stared and gawked at everywhere else. As blogger Elana Sztokman notes in a different argument altogether, the laws of modesty did not protect me from the “imposed sexualized gaze upon [women's] bodies”. Because as someone else put it, sometimes, men (and some women) are just dogs.

This is not my problem. Sorry, but nope, I am not ready to cover myself head to toe like some Muslim women do. In fact, I believe it is my right and yours to dress however you like. If you don’t like how I dress then don’t look! In a “What Not to Wear” Should Never Be More Than a TV Show,” Ilana Teitelbaum talks about what it’s like when your dress code is not your own choice but society’s choice. It made me feel really lucky that I’ve been able to explore my options. But it reminded me that it took twenty-five years of one type of oppression to convert and leave it for what sometimes feels like another one.

What do I mean? I’m talking about people who think it’s their G-d given right to go around policing everyone else's dress code. There seem to be a great many of them in Orthodox Jewish circles. No, I’m not talking about infringing on your ability to instill your values and your judgments into your kids. Brainwash them, however, you like. However, I’m talking about annoying other self-respecting adults with them. I think it's particularly disgusting when people make negative remarks about my head coverings and my clothing (and other people’s thinking I'll agree) as if they somehow have ownership over a body that is, get it, all mine and not theirs. How is this any better than kindergarten name-calling? Ah, because they’re so sure they have G-d on their side? I wouldn't bet my life on it.

I do hope people are making thoughtful decisions about what they wear because it’s their right and their body. If you choose to go against the grain, more power to you but I’m sorry if somehow, I have given people the impression that I haven’t made thoughtful decisions about what I choose to wear on my body. I think people should keep those thoughts to themselves. Now, if my skirt is tucked into my underpants, please try to help me from myself but it might be polite to ask me if that wasn't the look I was going for first. Teehee, teehee. Anyway and otherwise, we’re all adults here (on Planet Earth), aren't we? So why don't we start acting like them?

Going, Going...er, Ghetto...Gone?

I’m not very good at guarding my tongue which is probably why that part of the Shemoneh Esrei, the prayer Jews say three times a day, that focuses on this common human defect is my favorite. But I’m working on it. I’m particularly watching the vocabulary I use and how that might be offensive to others. This week, I decided to forgo using the term “white trash” in pleasant company even when the people in the room weren’t white trash themselves. I know, huh? Anyway!

But I was shocked when one of my Twitter followers, RuthieAA (aka Ruth Abrams who blogs at Interfaithfamily.com) was upset I used the word “ghetto” in a Tweet. (By the way, that’s what those of us on Twitter call our 140-character posts.) My Tweet? “Someone asked my sister if she was ghetto. She's not, we decided, unless you mean ghetto enough to punch your teeth in.” My sister was obviously offended by being called ghetto. Though half her childhood was spent in a “ghetto” (Washington Heights), she was decidedly NOT ghetto.

Growing up “ghetto” was reserved for those kids who hung out at all hours of the night doing G-d knows what on street corners, unable or refusing to speak proper English. We called them tigueritos. Thugs. But when RuthieAA asked me what I meant by “ghetto,” I decided that in the case of my infamous Tweet, it had meant “violent, inappropriate, hot (sometimes hot-tempered, sometimes too cool for school), and (just a little) crazy.” Was I speaking some foreign language? Had I misused slang? Was I, my mother would roll over in her grave if she knew this and many other things, even using slang?

During some serious Twittering (communicating with others on Twitter), we played around with rough definitions of “ghetto.” A food and a person could be “so ghetto” and even “ghetto fabulous” but was it being used pejoratively and was it okay when it wasn’t? RuthieAA seemed to think the word “ghetto” wasn’t racist but she wasn’t altogether sure using the word was kosher. RuthieAA said it seemed like a shibboleth to her. A what? According to Wikipedia, shibboleth usually refers to features of language, and particularly to a word whose pronunciation identifies its speaker as being a member or not a member of a particular group. So, the word “ghetto” was divisive….


I finally asked my friend from back in I.S. 143, the junior high school that skirts Yeshiva University in Washington Heights, what she thought the word ghetto meant. She thought using the dictionary definition of ghetto (which we haven’t yet notably) was “wack” (stupid, no good). She said “I define "ghetto" as a state of mind that transcends race/ethnicity/culture even class. the ghetto state of mind is one of defeat. from Washington Heights to a trailer park in Iowa, a "ghetto person" is one who thinks they're owed something because of whatever life circumstances they've had. they're someone who is resigned to being where they are with no ability to look ahead.” Then she had to run because her boss was looming over her shoulder. In my friend’s definition, calling anything ghetto definitely was a pejorative.


Even after RuthieAA said that she had heard ghetto used as a compliment: “cleverly making due with too little,” I couldn’t quite look at the word the same way again. Sure, my suburban friends laugh hysterically when I use it but would my junior high school friends if they were in the room? Would Holocaust survivors think it was funny? Some of them had after all been forcibly put in ghettos and some people now argue institutional racism has forced many minorities back into American versions of it.

"What does ghetto mean?" people asked on Yahoo and the Best Answer was that ghetto is now used “to describe someone or something that displays characteristics of a city. Specifically the rap music subculture typically referred to as 'gangsta.' Ghetto clothing is often baggy and worn by ethnic minorities within cities, or by mainstream American teenagers from suburbia that want to rebel against their parents or authority. In America, you can be “ghetto” even if you’re white and weren’t born into one. This all pretty much sums up what Urban Dictionary has to say about the word.

So in the end, I discovered “ghetto” is not a nice word. And maybe I’ll still use it. Maybe I won’t. But the world won’t roll so easily off my tongue. It won’t feel comfortable. My junior high friend says “being a street thug is a symptom of being ghetto. the street thug doesn't realize that if s/he punches someone in the face they can go to jail, they can't see past their anger to the repercussions. this 'ghetto' thing is a sensitive topic for me. I feel like it's used negatively to describe certain living conditions, however people have risen out of such situations (you and I included).” I suppose that RuthiaAA is right, “it’s hard to be welcoming when activating hidden tripwires.”

The Conversion Process

According to CNN, Americans aren't losing their religions, they're changing them often. Wow, for some reason, I've never felt more like a statistic. I am one of those Americans who has changed religions but I don't plan on changing it again...ever. First of all, it's too hard and second of all, I'm too happy (even on bad days) with the one I've now got.

Right now, I'm working on writing about my first Rosh Hashana (using my old blogs as a cheatsheet) and that kind of time travel has reinvigorated me. It has taken me back to the first moments I took on my new skin, just after deciding to change my life and my religion forever. It feels like simultaneously I've just made that decision for the first time and at the same time, I can now look back and laugh at my old naivete. Remember when I thought Jews didn't think they were better than other co-religionists? Remember when I stopped eating bread because bentching (the praying after eating bread) took me forever?

But there is something refreshing about that old naivete. Something awesome about recollecting a time when everything I knew about Judaism fit on an index card (maybe now it fits on a 8' by 11' ?). Someone once joked that the first year I decided to convert to Judaism, I learned about the religion. The next year, I learned about the people. Perhaps, in years after that, I have learned a little a both (I hope) and even some about Jewish culture. It is an endless learning process, an endless journey, a never ending conversion process but I haven't always been able to hang onto that shiny, new penny feeling I felt after finishing "Path of the Just" and sending my first email to a rabbi.

So you should know that I'm holding out on you a bit. I realize that since beginning to write the book, I've been holding back. I keep thinking, should I write about this? Should I put it in the book? If I write about this on my blog, will people even buy the book? But I realize that a lot of the blogs that came after I decided to write my book are very different than the early blogs. I'm in such a different place, I have such a different perspective that sometimes, it's hard to see how all these different people inside of me connect and become one person. I guess that's a life's journey itself.

What you're reading now is Aliza, the writer and she's a bit different than Aliza who just decided to convert. It's funny because I recognized a little of Aliza who just decided to convert in fellow blogger Chaviva who recently decided to convert to Orthodox Judaism after an initial conversion through Reform Judaism. Now, that's funny because Chaviva has been doing this much longer than me, blogging, I think, and deciding to live Jewish, too. But there is something that ties all converts together (an obsessive connection with another people that calls you to become one of them for one) but our stories can be so wildly different and inspiring and if you're grasping for examples, see Yoseph Robinson go from Jamaican hip-hopper to Jamaican Orthodox Jew or check out the new book I'm reading by Reform convert Sally Srok Friedes, "The New Jew: An Unexpected Conversion."

Inspiring? Even though I ran away from home, kidnapped my sister, converted to Judaism and ended up marrying a would-be rabbi, I don't think I've ever sat down and thought "Well, I'm inspiring." I mean, I was just living and sometimes, often, barely surviving. But since deciding to blog my innermost thoughts, I've gotten letters from fans who have said, "Yeah, you're inspiring, now can you give me some advice?" And all that this has done is, well, inspire ME. To keep on going. To keep taking hit after hit. And small miracle after small miracle. Even the annoying Anonymous commentators who have pissed me off on a constant basis haven't kept me from wanting to share my story and hoping that every now and again you'll share a bit of yours.

I guess, I could write a whole other book about the journey AFTER conversion. (Incidentally, Nan Fink managed to sneak this into the same book about her journey to and through her conversion. Which just proves she has bigger cojones than me.) It would be a very different book than the first. It would be about all the things that came after the mikvah and all the things yet to come. I guess what you're reading IS that book so maybe, I'm not holding out on you after all. Maybe, you're just my first critics, a big, great giant writing workshop of readers who will hopefully buy this book if I ever decide to make it legit and publish it. But don't forget to buy the first book (the one about the running away, yada, yada) first, of course.

So as always, thank you for reading. I hope you've learned a little about Dominican Jewish women with big afros and fibromyalgia. They say a little knowledge goes a long way. Who knows where other people's stories will take us?

Pro-Choice...

According to several news outlets, the government of the Dominican Republic has voted to approve a constitutional amendment that would effectively end legalized abortion around the country. Dominican doctors say that women will die. The amendment was passed after a massive campaign by the Catholic Church.

OH. MY. G-D.

'Nuff said.

Mexican Flu

Mr. P--? P-- Diddy?

"Is it safe to go outside?" you must be wondering upon hearing the news that the swine flu has made its way to our coast. And the answer? I'm not sure. I've logged onto the CDC website every day since I first heard of the outbreak but the answer hasn't gotten any clearer. Even daycares, one news outlet warned, are not immune.

But Israel has other worries since an Israeli man returned from Mexico showing symptoms of swine flu. Israel and its non-pork eating constituents are now playing word games, specifically with the phrase "swine flu." Haredi politicos are now calling the "swine flu" by any other name (right now it's called the Mexican flu) to avoid using the word of that non-kosher animal.

Does anyone else think this is a bit much? I thought we just weren't supposed to eat them, are we now not even allowed to name that animal in conversation? Any ideas for what we should rename the pink animals whose claim to fame it was to star as Wilbur, Babe and even dear old Muppet Miss P-ggy?

Meanwhile, does anyone think that this name change will cause more people to hate Mexicans?

17 Again?

I have a confession: I have watched almost every Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie ever created. And no, I'm not going to apologize for it. Most of the films ranged from bad to awful, especially since I was in my early 20s when I was watching them and I wasn't exactly the right audience for the films. But the thing is, I had fun watching them. Through them, I lived vicariously, reliving a picture-perfect childhood so far removed from anything I could ever have imagined living on welfare with my mentally ill mother in Washington Heights. At least, that's why I think the Olsen films became a guilty pleasure and my sister and I watched them religiously while we were fighting to take custody of my sister away from my mother in court for three years.

So when my sister told me 17 Again was worth seeing, I believed her. We have similar tastes and a disturbingly similar sense of humor. She promised that people had been laughing in the aisles and to be sure, there were people chuckling to themselves and out loud when my friend J. and I watched the film at the AMC Loews theater on 68th Street--you know, the one next to the best Barnes & Noble EVER. Still, the film isn't much better than most Mary-Kate and Ashley films. The jokes are mostly eye roll inducing and a number of the audience had notably, much like myself, come over to Zac Ephron who looks so much prettier on the big screen than I thought any man could.

It's easy to see the appeal of Zac Ephron (who is Jewish by the way). He is sexy without being too sexed up. He is still a PG, Disney channel squeaky clean, tween-beguiling hearthrob with acting, dancing and singing chops that will only serve to broaden his mass appeal. He carries the film effortlessly despite the clunky writing and even clunkier jokes and the supporting characters don't overshadow him too much. Michelle Trachtenberg was better as Buffy's little sister on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and even better as a wicked teen on Gossip Girl. Matthew Perry is dull and easily overlooked but his love interest, Leslie Mann is fantastic. The real scene stealers are Melora Hardin ("The Office") and Thomas Lennon ("Reno 911!) who fall in love in kinky, nerdy Elvish spurts.

The film, in case you're wondering, is about a 30-something-year-old guy who thinks his life basically went down the tubes after the glory days of high school. Some crazy movie mumbo jumbo transforms him into his 17-year-old self and sends him back to high school to salvage his relationships with his teenage daughter and son. There's also some romancing because the guy is in the middle of a divorce from the high school sweetheart who told him she was pregnant at the big 1989 high school basketball game that should have propelled him into college ball, not fatherhood. The film is awkwardly funny and not as slick as it could have been. Still, while I might not roll out a poster of Zac Ephron on my wall (I'm a little too old for that), I will look forward to seeing his next film and it's not just because he's a pretty face.

Now, perhaps it's just me but does anyone want to be 17 again? 17 was the age when I ran away from home. And though I was popular in high school, I felt chronically misunderstood. Would any of you do 17 all over again and why?

Drug Addicts or Lifestyle Enchancement Coordinators

So I just subscribed to The New Yorker and finally received my first copy in the mail. This is part of my program to take writing more seriously and such but of course, the first thing I did was skim all the pages to look at the great cartoons. I felt highly educated for being able to understand what they all meant.

But what I did not understand was a mighty lengthy article called the "Brain Gain: The underground world of "neuroenchancing drugs." Funny enough though the article talks about college students and workaholics taking things like Adderall and Provigil to stay up late nights and work themselves to death, it only mentions drug abuse once...when referring to the title of someone being quoted.

Apparently, when poor people use drugs, it's called drug abuse but when rich people do it to get smarter, it's called "neuroenchancement." It's called "steroids for your brain." The article was quite cavalier about a future will neurologists will become "quality-of-life consultants,” whose role will be “to provide information while abrogating final responsibility for these decisions to patients.” So forget getting your ADHD medications from your dorm drug dealer, your doctor will soon get in on this game, too?

One DRUG ADDICT quoted said that taking neuroenchancing drugs was much like people who took antidepressants for mood disorders or depression: "it was important to enhance their mood, so they took antidepressants; but for people like him it was more important 'to increase mental horsepower.'" Ah, the rationalizations. What a world!

Only the White Crayon for me, thanks....

In an article in Newsweek, “Beyond Just Black and White,” Raina Kelley writes about wishing her biracial son looked black. Sound familiar? I've posted about it before. In a more recent NY Times article, "A Child of Two Worlds", Nicole Sprinkle stresses in one lengthy rant that she would like her biracial child (half-Columbian/half-white) to identify as mostly white. It strikes me that while Kelley worries about being racist, Sprinkle beats stereotypes into her piece until the reader feels like a bloody pulp.

But you be the judge: is Sprinkle racist for wanting her child to identify as mostly white or is she being an over-protective mom in a dominate white society? And seriously, didn't either of these ladies think about these issues BEFORE having kids (you know, like I'm doing).

I think you can already tell which way I'm leaning. This reminds me a friend who has his dark-skinned daughter check off white-only because he doesn't want her playing that game. But who's playing and who's being played? My husband refused to even finish reading Sprinkle's piece.

Some people think I am damned

Thanks to Jewlicious (check out the latest on Jewish genes) for continuing to post some jewlicious content.

You can follow the singer/songwriter of "Protocols" at @RavShmuel on Twitter or check out his website: RavShmuel.com.

How do you get from ghetto to ghetto?

Just what was I expecting “From Ghetto to Ghetto"? As a writer and fellow convert myself to Judaism, I have read many, many books about the journeys others have traveled to conversion. I have loved none so much as Julius Lester’s “Lovesong: Becoming a Jew.” I devoured, gobbled it down, page by page. And yet, “From Ghetto to Ghetto” is not without its own merit. No other memoir, really almost an autobiography in this case, has illuminated so much about the African American experience and also, the African American Jewish experience in quite the same way.

At times, the author Ernest H. Adams can be quite shocking. He will skirt the edge of what some conservative audiences will be able to handles in some areas. Still, other times, the reader will wonder whether Adams he has gone too far and this is mostly because he is honest with us, painfully and incredibly honest, about what he has lived as a black man and what he has lived as a Jewish black man.

“Ghetto to Ghetto” devotes equal time to Adams’ life before Judaism in one ghetto (Harlem) and later to his life as a Jew. It is a very balanced portrayal. And yet, Adams does not have the deft writing skill that fellow African-American convert Julius Lester. The writing is at times inconsistent, flying from clinical to astoundingly, richly poetic. The story structure is at times enigmatic and unexpected but it never loses steam. The reader never stops feeling impressed by the weight of meaning behind Adams’ powerful experiences.

Adams goes to great lengths in order to openly discuss racism in the broader community as well as the Jewish community itself. This is where his writing will resonate and shock the reader most. Will his readers be able to accept how truly racist the world can be and has been to even a most eloquent and sincere African-American man? Adams, a psychologist by profession, makes himself truly vulnerable in this memoir and we are the awed beneficiaries of the risks he takes.

But not to worry, the book is not all vulnerability and risktaking. There is plenty of fodder about Israel that will evoke smiles and "Oh yeah, me too," sentimentality. There is also a story here about an athiest who turns to G-d. If anything, this remarkable memoir will definitely go far in changing that staid old Woody Allen stereotype about New York Jews because Adams is, truly, nothing if not a New York Jew. Like myself, he is a Jew of two diasporas.

In case you missed it, read The Jerusalem Post review by Samuel Freedman here:

Bagels and Locks...and Jewminicana pride!

If you're not a regular subscriber to Latina magazine then you're missing out!

You probably haven't seen my full page spread in the May 2009 issue for which Michelle Rodriguez graces the cover. You'll find my piece, "Bagels and Locks" (get it?) on page 76. It is the first piece in Latina's Love Your Body 2009 section. Need a copy? Pick up it at your local Barnes & Nobles if you can't find it on local newsstands.

See, even Latina magazine believes in my Jewminicanness.

A Rose by any other name...

Maybe it was easier when we gave the kids good Spanish Catholic names?

Shakespeare said a rose by another other name would smell as sweet. He hadn't met any Dominicans.

Dominicans are notorious for making up names that are fabulously unpronounceable to the American monolingual crowd. Before I was Aliza, I had a beautiful name that rolled off the tongue, a transmutation of my parents' names and initials. But it stopped sounding so graceful when I got to elementary school where it was butchered time and time again (and frequently got me marked absent) until I finally changed it to Aliza after converting to Judaism. (By the way it's Ahh-leee-zah, not Eliza Doolittle. See, sometimes, you can't win either way.)

My little sister followed suit by changing her name, too. My parents hadn't realized that the name they had given her, however cleverly misspelled, was the pupal stage for butterflies. Unfortunately, for my sister, her friends realized this during a class science experiment. She changed her name to something rather boring sounding but in keeping with Dominican tradition, spelled rather creatively.

But apparently, Dominican names have gotten so bizarre lately that The LA Times had to write about it in a piece called "Dear Pineapple?' 'Dummy Ruiz?' Dominican Republic considers banning bizarre names". A judge is trying to hard to ban names that glorify car brands, drugs, cartoon characters and even body parts (someone named their child "Breast" in Spanish). Is this an infringement of civil liberties or just protection against child abuse? Ask Dear Pineapple and her friends, Mazda Altagracia, and, of course, Dummy Ruiz.

Sleep Deprived

I am many things but I am not sleep deprived. Ever since leaving behind the rat race (teaching at a New York City public school in my case), I have been catching up on much needed sleep. Now I get oodles of it, hours of it and when I'm lucky, a handful of it is good "restorative" sleep.

I never slept as a child. When I wasn't reading into the wee hours of the night, my mother was watching TV in my bed or depositing one of my baby sisters in my lap to watch at...3am. Bad habits die hard and by the time I was teaching full-time, I was sleeping about four hours a night. Really, it's no surprise that fibromyalgia caught up with me before sleep did.

What I've since learned about living with fibromyalgia is that the pain is much worst when I'm under slept. But of course, as many pain sufferers will tell you, sleeping through the pain is sometimes impossible. There are a lot of expletives, I would like to use about my experience this Passover but nothing pissed me off more than all the constant comments about my health and my sleeping habits. (Okay, the jokes about stealing my pain killers were amusing and I still think drug dealing is a serious offense).

But here's a little advice. Take it or leave it. If you're not a doctor (or actually suffering from what I've got), SHUT UP. Please don't bore me (or any of your poor suffering friends) with all the details of all the supplements, organic foods and crazy experiments you think will cure my fibromyalgia. It's not helpful. And if my twelve hours of sleep are pissing you off, maybe it's because you're jealous and cranky and could use some yourself.

Gee whiz, does anyone survive Passover without anger management problems?

The Holocaust Hits Home

“Johancy Torres had never heard of the Holocaust before last fall, but she will soon be tracing the footsteps of Jews at the Dachau concentration camp during a trip for fifth- and sixth-grade students at Public School 86 in the Bronx.


“I think I may cry when I see the ovens,” said Johancy, 11, adding that she planned to take “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young girl” when she leaves later this month.


The Holocaust lessons are part of an unusual effort by P.S. 86’s teachers to expose students to a world far from their Spanish-speaking neighborhoods near the No. 4 train in Kingsbridge Heights. About 95 percent of the school’s 1,700 students are Hispanic or black. More than three-quarters of them are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.”


And so begins a recent NY Times story on elementary school students learning about the Holocaust head-on, "From the Bronx to Germany and Dachau".


I was 13 when I first learned of the Holocaust. Like Johancy Torres, I had never heard of it before but one visit from Hannelore Marx, a Holocaust survivor, changed my life forever. I didn’t just connect with Hannelore’s story of survival, one that gave me hope that I would triumph against the adversity, against childhood poverty and chronic child abuse at home. Hannelore connected me with the Jewish people.

I decided I wanted to be Jewish at 13. The day after Hannelore spoke to my class, I wore my mother's Star of David to school. A classmate yelled "Heil Hitler" when she saw it. Obviously, we had taken away different things from learning about the Holocaust. And now, here I am, decades later, a Jewminicana married to a rabbinical student no less.

When a survivor asked my husband's grandmother how anyone could convert after the Holocaust, she told her that I had converted because of the Holocaust.

I doubt that a visit to the ovens will result in many conversions (so those of you who worry on that account can breathe easier) but it is a powerful thing to feel connected to people of other cultures through literature and friendship and the opportunities they give us to connect to people from seemingly foreign lands.

Holocaust Guilt says Ahmadinejad

Watch as members of the EU walk out of the UN Human Rights Council international anti-racism conference where keynote speaker, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad blasted Israel.

Listen to the English voiceover of Ahmadinejad's speech at the JTA.

According to Israel Today, Ahmadinejad insisted the European powers established Israel out of guilt over the Nazi Holocaust.

"Under the pretext of compensating for the evil done in the name of xenophobia, they in fact set up the most violent xenophobes, in Palestine," stated Ahmadinejad.

Read more about the clowns in The Jerusalem Post article, "Who Interrupted Ahmadinejad's Speech?"

The Sephardic Holocaust

My latest guilty pleasure is Jewish fiction. It used to be trashy romance novels. I am currently making my way through most of Naomi Ragen's books.

Right off the bat, I noticed that "The Ghost of Hannah Mendes" was different than her other books. It didn't focus on the religious community or on Israel. It focused, instead, on the Spain, the bonds of Sephardic families and the damage the Inquisition and (and later the Holocaust) did to Sephardic Jewry. It was a fictional account but I learned so much, enough to look up the nonfiction sources the author used to write her vivid novel.

I was floored by the little tidbits the author shared of the experience of Sephardic Jews during the Holocaust. Why hadn't I ever heard of the Sephardic experience during the Holocaust? Was it just my own ignorance or more?

So you imagine my surprise to hear the story of the Holocaust told from the Sephardic point-of-view in The Jerusalem Post. In 'It's time they knew our names' Stacey Menchel profiles Stella Levi, a Sephardic survivor. It is a powerful, moving portrayal of one woman's struggles as much as it is a portrayal of an ugly divisiveness that still rings true in the Jewish community today.

Tomorrow is Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Rememberance Day, and I will not forget Stella Levi.

Silence

I didn't have much Internet access in Los Angeles towards the end of my little Passover vacation there so alas, I didn't have time to schedule anything for my Sunday slot. Still, I was catching up on your comments on my phone, missing Twitter and Facebook desperately and suffering from the aftereffects of jetlag, sleep deprivation (6:30am flight back to NYC!) and New York humidity. Thank you for your patience.

Seder Soundbites

"The seder is supposed to be a safe place." Now, who are you kidding? But check out this comment from wrpn and why it deserves its own post:

Rabanit Hausman,

Sometimes you just have to pick your fights. We had guests over the first days of the chag (holiday) whose son, who had just returned from a year of study at a yeshiva in Medinat Yisrael, proceeded to quip, "my rebbe in yeshiva told me that the most depraved Jew is more righteous than the nicest goy (non-Jew)." I was infuriated but opted not to respond to a comment that, in the scheme of things, places Bernard Madoff on a higher spiritual level than say a Mother Theresa or the Dalai Lama.

My seder was ripe with jokes about Modern Orthodox rabbis (followed by jokes about Reform rabbis) along with a couple of jokes about Mexicans where someone explained to me that all Hispanics are Mexican. Can you say..."cruising for a bruising"?

What kind of trash talk did you hear at your seder? Go ahead, get it off your chest, I'm listening.

Goals for Next Pesach

Okay, so I think this year's Pesach was better than the last. Maybe I'm blocking out the more unpleasant stuff. I mean, I only cried once so that's a vast improvement. (No, wait, it was twice. Still....) Anyway, I hope yours was good and fairly uneventful (or eventful, depending on what you were hoping for). Here are my goals for next Pesach:

1. Do not throw turkey at relatives-in-law for making Mexican jokes.

2. Do not threaten relatives-in-law with bodily harm for using pejorative language about converts.

3. Do not threaten relatives-in-law with bodily harm for ragging on husband.

4. Do not threaten relatives-in-law.

5. Stay home in Riverdale where it is safe, albeit, not as sweetly sunny.

Cultural Confusion

Isn't it confusing? Won't it be confusing for your children? People constantly ask me these questions. They think being Dominican, American and Jewish sounds really complicated. Mostly, they're trying to put a damper on my multicultural mojo.

So here I am in Los Angeles for Pesach (Passover) stocking up on yucca and plantains so I can survive without rice and beans during the holiday. (We're Ashkenazi, not Sephardi, so we don't eat beans and rice on Passover.) I'm practicing my Spanish with the maid and my mother-in-law (who wants me to move in so I can translate for her on a daily basis). I'm already dreaming of next Passover when I hope to learn some songs in Ladino (the original Heb-Spanglish). Being Dominican, American and Jewish doesn't feel too complicated right now...it's just a juggling act that comes naturally.

It's easy for American Jews to forget that Jews in the diaspora are already pretty multicultural. We're not all eating gefilte fish and a good lot of us can roll our r's like nobody's business. Perhaps, you haven't heard about Ms. Jinich? Well, read "A Taste of Passover with a Mexican accent" and learn why Jewish multiculturalism is where it's at. At the very least, it's tastier.

Barack Obama's Rabbi

Hallelujah, shalom: Rabbi Funnye singing at Shabbat services. (Alec Soth/Magnum, for The New York Times)

Conservative rabbi (and convert) Rabbi Capers Funnye is putting the black back in Judaism. (Okay, so it was already there.) And the New York Times noticed. They profiled him in a piece called "Barack Obama's Rabbi". The piece also gives a great deal of background on the black Hebrews or Hebrew Israelites. My favorite line in the piece? "‘I ain’t never seen no white Jews before!"

Punched in the gut

I feel like these thing sneak up on me and punch me in the gut.

So there we were sitting all unassuming like, before Pesach (Passover), in the Fish Grill, my favorite place to eat in Los Angeles. My husband and I were wedged into a corner table when some guys plopped down in the table next to us. One of them looked like he had just gotten off a plane from Israel: snow white shirt, black pants, black kippah and tzitzit flapping in the wind. But the other three guys weren’t even wearing kippot (plural of kippah) and they looked more like the fat, smoking up types who scratch themselves in public and star in Jude Apatow films.

It was hard not to listen in on what the guys were saying. Our tables were squished together so close; it was like we were all sitting together. Except that thankfully, we weren’t. I can barely watch Jude Apatow films, much less sit with the cast of characters.

So one of Jude Apatow guys started whining about a girl he’s dating. He said it like he was trying to explain how far he’d gotten from being a religious Jew. It was like the frum guy at the table was his priest and he was taking confession at the Fish Grill.

“So, I’m dating a non-Jew.”

Everyone nodded.

“A shiksa?” one of them asked shaking his head.

“Yeah, no worse than a shiksa. She’s a schvartze.” And then the guy laughed. But no one else did.

I almost threw up over my grilled trout, rice and salad. I was cringing hard into the wooden seat. I opened my mouth but no words came out. When I was a high school teacher, I was in teacher mode all the time. I had to stop myself from “schooling” every teenager I saw in the street. One of my friends was scared I’d get jumped one day sticking my nose where it didn’t belong. But I was fearless. (I only got jumped once by a mentally ill honor student who flipped out when I locked her out of the classroom for being late—school policy.) But it’s been a couple of years since teacher mode.

I walked away from the restaurant thinking I should have said something. What kind of person goes around trash talking non-Jewesses and black people with that kind of vocabulary?Maybe he didn’t know the words were hurtful, maybe he just thought shiksa means non-Jewish female and schvartze means black person. Maybe he didn’t know both words are slurs.

But what kind of person am I? Am I the kind of person who says something? Should I be? If I stop just one person from making these kinds of statements will the ripple effects change the world? I just don’t want to be the kind of person who sits there quietly and pretends things didn’t go down the way that they did.

To Hell in a Hand Basket

Greetings again from Los Angeles where my mother-in-law's Honduran maid is an Evangelical Christian. She is sweet. But she reminded me very politely that people who don't accept Jesus are going to hell. This is what I get for trying to practice my Spanish with her. In all fairness, I think some communication lines got crisscrossed and she thought I was trying to convert her.

Does this kind of stuff happen to other people?

Kashrut (Kosher) Supervisor

Because I was having a fibromyalgia flare-up, I didn't actually help make anything kosher for Passover. Instead, I supervised. I watched things get steamed, boiled and wiped down. Okay, so I wasn't actually paying attention and I probably missed a lot.

I did get to catch my husband and his brother fighting. Apparently, when they were little they used to wrestle each other to the ground. They have outgrown this. Instead, they now battle over halakha (Jewish law).

I can still remember fist fighting at Disney World with my younger sister. I can't remember what we were fighting about but we were certainly both over age 18. I still can't spend more than an hour with one of my siblings without screaming.

I think this means my in-laws are more civilized.

What does your family fight over on Passover?

Jewish Life in the Present (and Past) Tense

Confession: I'm not a big blog reader. I have a list of favorites that I'm always falling behind on. And yet, lately, I've found myself pretty faithful to one particular blog.

"The Jewish Writing Project wants your stories. The blog celebrates Jewish life by giving Jews of all shapes and sizes the opportunity to tell their unique stories. The writing is fierce thanks to Bruce Black, a former editor for a Jewish publishing company, and the amazing contributions from writers from all over the country.

In "A Rally for Harmony," Mimi Schwartz talks about peace and anti-Semitism in a way that captivates no matter how many times you've read up on the subject before. In "Ask Your Father and He'll Tell You" worries about the intergenerational gaps that cause family memories to get lost.

I promise these stories will keep you hungering for more.

Let Freedom Ring

I remember the taste of freedom. After running away from home, after kidnapping and winning custody of my sister, I was free. I felt so free and happy, I started on a journey that began in church and led to my eventual conversion to Judaism.

My first Pesach, I wanted to write my own Haggadah about my journey to Judaism. I never did. Bubbe’s kitchen looked like a spaceship and I was busy drowning in work from my day job as a NYC public school teacher. I had stacks of papers to grade and I could barely write my name anymore. It was becoming clear to me that I could no longer keep up the balancing act. Fibromyalgia, which I had recently been diagnosed with, and my full-time job didn’t mix. I was desperately unhappy and thinking of all the wrong ways to escape.

Depression became my best friend when I finally understood the cards I had been dealt. I had always been independent but because of fibromyalgia, I would forever be dependent on others, not only for financial help but for help with maintaining the day-to-day routine so many others take for granted.

The chronic pain and fatigue has gotten easier to cope with in years since but watching the future as I had imagined it crumble before my eyes has not. I have been grieving all this years. And sometimes, some days, it is unbearable. Writing has made it easier but even that has been terribly ironic. Writing causes the pain to flare up, both physically and mentally. Writing is something I had already dismissed as a career possibility. Why was it fibromyalgia that gave me all the time in the world to write?

This Pesach, I want to imagine that someday I will be free again. No, never from fibromyalgia, which is incurable, but perhaps I can someday be free from grieving for my loss. On last week’s episode of Smallville, Chloe Sullivan told Clark, “You can never be who you want to be if you’re always looking over your shoulder at what could have been.” I don’t know who I want to be but I’d like to stop looking over my shoulder at what could have been.

Militant Dominican

Okay, so I'm Dominican but I think my husband is a militant Dominican. What do I mean? I think he's about force fed everyone in the family some yucca and plantains this Pesach. And no, I didn't cook any of it. He cooked the stuff himself. It's all part of his make-sure-wife-doesn't-starve-without-rice-and-beans plan.

Now, if I can just get childproof caps for my painkillers so I don't have to worry about my six-year-old sister-in-law hiding chametz again in the midst of my pills next year, I think we'll be just fine.

Did you hear the one about...?

My sister is in New York missing out on the Passover festivities. When I told her we would be going away for Passover, she asked where she was supposed to go for her seders. And no, my sister's not Jewish.

She called me up to tell me she's watching Season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my absence. She heard a joke she thought I would appreciate more now that I'm Jewish.

Giles, the school librarian and watcher to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, says this of a new vampire in town: "His name is Spike? That's a little unorthodox."

Buffy, who is played by Jewess Sarah Michelle Gellar, responds: "Maybe he's Reform."

So that's where my money went...

Please note that posts are scheduled to go up on days when I will not be using my computer in observance of the Passover/Pesach holiday.

Oooh, I can sing in Ladino!

Oy. Now I have to practice my Spanish, learn Hebrew and Ladino. I'm going to need a good long life for this kind of venture. I'm actually doing much better in Ladino than Hebrew.



Can you guess which Pesach song this is?

Spanish People Revolt!

Jewlicious Responds to Newsweek's "Is Your Rabbi Hot or Not?" with signature snarkiness. Jewlicious asked me via Twitter to take a look. I didn't expect to get riled up but then I noticed the line, "What kind of name for a rabbi is 'Rolando'?" Jewlicious was poking fun at Rabbi J. Rolando Matalon who was born and bred in Buenos Aires. And that's when I went ghetto.

In my post on Jewlicious, I wrote back:

What kind of name is Rolando? What kind of name is Eric! Don’t go dissing us Spanish folks.

And then in Twitter, I wrote:

@jewlicious: I'm getting ghetto on your bootie, son. You did not just diss the name Rolando. Spanish people revolt!

So you heard me, get on that website and make sure to strike fear in the hearts of people who can't roll their r's.

Happy (early) Passover

I am on a plane to Los Angeles where I will be spending Pesach/Passover. Oh, the happy times we will have together trying to digest matzah. Prune juice: good. Matzah: bad.

Did you really just say that?

Read the article "8 Things NEVER to Say to a Mixed-Race Colleague" and then you'll understand my 8 responses.

1. Do people actually ask this directly? Jesus!

2. I look foreign as compared to what?

3. See? I don't make this stuff up. Apparently, mixed race people get told they'll make beautiful babies all the time.

4. Is this like when someone asked me if I'd choose Israel or the Dominican Republic or America in a war?

5. People like asking me how my husband and I met. Sometimes, unfortunately, they ask it like they can't believe we ever got together. Not very nice.

6. My sister argues she has the best of both worlds. She celebrates Jewish holidays and isn't actually Jewish. So matzah is a choice. She should be Jewish though mostly because she is the only person I know who can break down matzah.

7. I never get enough of this one. My husband's cousin says she wants to sound "teal."

8. And some of us are more mixed up than others.

So this is Zionism?

The Jerusalem Post story, "Spiritual odyssey turned nightmare" introduces us to Rachel, an Orthodox convert whose conversion in Rome was recognized by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel but not the Interior Ministry. Oh yeah and she's married to a kashrut supervisor, she's pregnant and living in Israel without any rights.

But Rachel's not as worried for herself as she is for the child in her womb. She says: "But what bothers me most is the uncertainty about my baby. Will my baby be considered a Jew? What is the status of a baby born to someone without any status? I don't know."

So just to be clear, converts are now illegal aliens in land of Israel? You know because I just want to know where I stand. Right now, I'm mostly disgusted in America...where at least I'm sure I'm Jewish.

I'm American and I'm up for adoption

Should I order Chinese? I don't mean food.

Why didn't Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt adopt me? Why didn't Madonna adopt me? These are questions I ask myself when I hear about their latest quests for international adoptions.

Roland Martin has a better question: "Why aren't celebrities adopting U.S. kids?" Martin claims that "according to various adoption and governmental agencies, more than 500,000 American children are under foster care, and many of them are waiting for adoption. From coast to coast, babies to toddlers to teens are desperately looking for a home where they can be loved, nurtured and provided for."

But when I worried aloud about the state of my biological clock, someone suggested I adopt from China if I faced any fertility problems in the future. She said, "Everyone's doing it."

Why everyone is adopting abroad is a question that Martin goes to great lengths to answer in his piece for CNN. And the problem does not lie in Madonna's recent international adoption. It's much closer to home. But it won't be fixed by my little blog.

Loving in Black, White and Jewish

With “Love in Black and White,” Matthew Hunter has written a passionate love letter to interracial relationships in The Michigan Daily. He cites a Time Magazine statistic that says interracial marriages have spiked by almost 1000% since the ban of anti-miscegenation laws. I believe him. Though recent statistics show the rate of Asians and Latinos marrying out of the race is actually down. I am apparently bucking the trend.

Hunter has helpful, sound suggestions for interracial couples. The suggestions apply mostly to relationships between black and whites but they can be tweaked for relationships between people of all races. They include “no one should ignore race” and “white men should be careful not to treat a black partner as their 'ethnic prize.'"

But how does the following statement apply to Jews? “Limitation to one race is not only sometimes impractical, but also often restrictive of one's own ability to share and learn from deep relationships with others.” Well, Jews are not a race (despite what recent ugly comments on my “Funny You Don’t Look Jewish” piece at Chabad.org may suggest). Thanks to adoption, intermarriage, conversion and well, just living in the diaspora, the Jewish people are a multiracial people.

Still, I hear from many Jews of color who are fretful that their white counterparts won’t date, much less marry, them. I hear from Jews of color who have been treated like "ethnic prizes" and fear that their white counterparts think that relationships with Jews of color, like the saying goes about shiksas, are also for practice.

Racism within the Jewish people doesn’t just apply to outsiders but even to members of the tribe. Hopefully, as Hunter suggests mixing of the races within the Jewish people will also be “inevitable” because as he also mentions “there is much to be gained from dating outside one's race.” And no, it’s not just because interracial people produce “hot” babies, something people keep telling me every time I mention having kids.