Check out this blog: The Angry Black Woman

In "The Low Cost of Being Racist", the writers at The Angry Black Woman blog, use the latest article of obvious racism: a white boss telling Hispanic workers to change their names (apparently, Jose and Martin are too hard to pronounce?) to show how quickly and easily Americans will defend their racists.

Young Jews

Don't let the title of this CNN article fool you, it's not about conversion. In fact, very little in "'New Jews' stake claim to faith, culture" applies to converts.

The article is a "too-cool-for-school" look at young Jews and how they're taking back their Judaism. But while reading it, mostly, I thought...Y-A-W-N. Every couple of months, I see an article like this and I think the same thing: B-O-R-I-N-G with an added eye roll.

Look, I love some of the innovations mentioned in this piece: the G-dcast cartoons---which I love and always put up on my blog--and Limmud (I've attended their conferences for three years straight) but I just don't know how these type of articles apply to converts. Mostly, they don't. I think that's the point.

These type of articles are packaged for (and usually, about, with few acceptions) born Jews who were bored with Judaism and from a convert's perspective, didn't know how good they had it.

Heeb Magazine (most notable for dressing up Rosanne Barr as Hitler recently) and comedian Sarah Silverman, both mentioned in this article, are really gross. Why this article mentions them in the same breath as G-dcast and Limmud is truly beyond me. Heeb is about serving up some kind of ethnic Judaism life while Sarah Silverman is about defying the "nice Jewish girl" mystique by working her potty mouth. G-dcast and Limmud...are actually trying to get people to learn something about JUDAISM!

I think there is something really sad, watching from the wings as a convert, about the fact that "without anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, Israel (um, did Israel disappear?), liberating Soviet Jewry)," that young Jews feel they don't have something to gather around. Um, it's called Judaism, people. It's been around for over 2,000 years and it doesn't need a "cause," is about a personal relationship with G-d, hello?!

While young Christians in America are making a comeback (wearing their chastity rings on Disney, asking "What Would Jesus Do?" and becoming a united voting block), young Jews are...watching Sarah Silverman and reading Heeb. Is anyone else worried?

Happy Hallo-what?

If my father saw this (and he's an American citizen), he would say, "Jackasses."

No, I don't celebrate Halloween anymore. (Here's an interesting perspective I heard last year on keeping kosher and being shomer Halloween.) But ever since hearing that there is an "illegal alien" costume being sold at Target (it was since taken down) and Amazon.com, I'm having flashbacks to my last Halloween. (By the way, re: the illegal alien costume, um, illegal aliens DON'T have green cards, hence, being illegal. Duh.)

In college, I went trick-or-treating with my friend Lisa and a group of little neighborhood kids in and around Bensonhurst Brooklyn (a Russian-Chinese-Italian-everything-else neighborhood). I dressed up as Harry Potter (yeah, not your standard sexed-up Halloween character). I can't remember what anyone else was dressed as. But I do remember that all of us had to run down a block to avoid getting egged by a group of white teenagers that yelled "Chink! Chink!" when they saw Lisa, who is Chinese, and the little kids we were with, also Chinese. I remember all of us crying.

Apparently, a lot of people like dressing up as "ethnic" characters on Halloween. (The radio show, Addicted to Race, talks about this in their latest podcast.) Is that racist? Well, I can tell you that when I visited a white Jewish couple's house and I heard they were dressing up as a "Chinese family" (their words) for Purim, I was pretty offended.

Check out: The Jewish Halloween (MyJewishLearning.com)

Conversion (and Racism) in the news

"Barbara Walters: Ivanka Trump’s wedding was 'absolutely gorgeous'" (The Examiner.com)

Read and learn why The View host Joy Behar can be really annoying….

"Ivanka Trump Says "I Do!" (Us Magazine)

Bet Ivanka never thought she'd become the poster child for Orthodox conversion.

"What defines your religion?" (BBC News)

As Britain tries to redefine Judaism for Jews, Jews everywhere wonder...can this be good? “Is being a Jew a matter of bloodline or religious practice? The UK's new Supreme Court is debating the subject this week, in a case that could have a wider impact on faith schools, says Tim Whewell.” (Very interest comments from Brits…who seem to be in agreement about Judaism being “racist.”)

"From Kaifeng to Kibbutzim" (Jerusalem Post)

Jews from Kaifeng, China arrive in Israel to embrace their Jewish roots. Now if only we could stop racist Jews from commenting on the article.

"Jewish Actress Sophie Okonedo Explores Biracial Identity" (Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles)

"I’m a North London, working-class, black, Jewish girl," actress Sophie Okonedo said. “I love my upbringing because it had so many different colors; it’s given me the equipment to play lots of diverse roles.”

"'Circumcise Me’: The Mohel the Merrier?" (Jewish Exponent)

Hilarious article about Irish-Italian convert Yisrael Campbell and his three (yes, three) circumcisions. Here’s a soundbite: “And his father? Not the most observant of Catholics, observes his son the Jew. "When I explained to him that I couldn't turn lights on on Shabbat," and that even the refrigerator light that would go on when the fridge opened was restricted, his father eyed him and opined, "Do you really think God cares that a light goes on when you open the refrigerator door?"”

"Chinese descendants of ancient Jewish community make aliyah" (Ynetnews.com)

More!

"Tzohar Rabbis: Privatize marriage registration" (Jerusalem Post)

“The National Conversion Authority is run under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate, and Chief Sephardi Rabbi Shlomo Amar has the final say on conversion policy. But many haredi city rabbis refuse to recognize its conversions because they claim that Druckman's religious Zionist agenda casts doubt on his rabbinic authority. As a result, dozens of converts who have attempted to register in cities such as Ashdod, Petah Tikva, Rehovot, Ma'aleh Adumim and Beersheba have been turned away by the local rabbis because they are not considered Jewish.”

"JFS to plead case at Supreme Court" (The Jewish Chronicle of London)

“The legal battle over entry to JFS (a Jewish day school) will reach a climax next week when a three-day hearing begins at the new Supreme Court in London on Tuesday.”

"'They’ll say I’m a racist'" (Haaretz.com)

“[Ori]Konforti, who until last year was the Jewish Agency's representative in Ethiopia, says that American-Jewish groups wish to keep the immigration of the Falashmura going in order to generate more contributions from supporters who want to be involved in tikkun olam ("repairing the world" activities), enhance the bringing together of Jews from around the world and improve their own relations with the black community in the United States. Israel, he says, became entangled in commitments to the Falashmura, a group with an almost infinite potential for immigration, due to pressure by nongovernmental organizations and politicians, especially from the Shas party.”

"The Open Door: 25 Years After Patrilineal Descent" (The Jewish Week-New York)

“The resolution also paved the way for a whole new class of what Rabbi Gordon calls “green card” mothers to emerge — gentile women who enthusiastically schlep their children to Hebrew school, volunteer on synagogue committees and host Shabbat dinners, even if they choose not to undergo a conversion. In recent years, many of those women have received support from the proliferation of the Jewish Outreach Institute’s Mothers Circle groups around the country.”

"Druckman Supports Easing IDF Soldiers' Conversions" (IsraeNationalNews.com)


"New Signs that Ethiopian Aliyah Will Resume" (Baltimore Jewish Times)

"The Law of Return" (MyJewishLearning.com)

“The question of whether non-Orthodox converts should be included in the Law of Return has also been debated for decades. Since the 1970 amendment, the ultra-Orthodox parties in Knesset have advocated limiting the Law of Return to Orthodox converts.”

Portugal's secret Jews come out of hiding" (Haaretz.com)

“They trace their Jewish roots to the 15th and 16th centuries, to the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions in which thousands of Jews were murdered and countless others were forced into exile or to convert. Many became crypto-Jews, practicing secretly. They were classified in Jewish law as Anusim, Jews who are forced to abandon their religion against their will, but continue to practice insofar as possible. Their modern-day descendants call themselves Bnei Anusim - sons or children of the Anusim. They are also known by the derogatory Spanish term "Marranos" ("swine")."

"Life Stages And Our Jewish Involvement" (Baltimore Jewish Times)

Article follows born Jews, and one convert, through their life stages and how their involvement in the Jewish community has evolved.

"Boosting the Israeli nation" (Ynetnews.com)

“And if we do go for expedited conversion, why don't we start with the roughly 700000 “non-Jewish Russians” and work immigrants that live amidst us?”

"The fixer" (Haaretz.com)

"The survival of Israel needs 200 million Jews around the world, which means it's a question of conversion. This question is not really addressed. We should have a much broader definition of who is a Jew, and active conversion. We should accept anybody who has one Jewish parent or was raised in a Jewish family or wants to live as a Jew. And if you apply the Law of Return to people who are distantly Jewish, that will change the picture significantly."

"Equality watchdog in JFS fight" (Jewish Chronicle of London)

“The Supreme Court this week granted the Equalities and Human Rights Commission the right to be an intervener in the forthcoming appeal case, which will enable it to make submissions to the court. JFS, the country’s largest Jewish school, is trying to reverse a decision by the Court of Appeal in June that it is unlawful to offer places on the basis of whether a child’s parent is Jewish.”

"Taekwondo / Getting a leg up" (Haaretz.com)

Ukrainian taekwondo champion says she’s converting because "she wants to feel fully Jewish."

"Jewish case may hit other schools" (BBC News)

The case of a Jewish school accused of breaching race relations laws over admissions could have ramifications for other faith schools, ministers say. (I still can't get over the fact that Britain has decided Judaism is a "race.")

"I Just Married A Jew, But My Sister’s The One Converting" (The Frisky)

"Is Ivanka Trump Good for the Jews" (Forward)

An interesting perspective on how times have changed and why it's good for converts and Jews of all backgrounds.

"Riverdale gets an introduction to Ugandan Jews" (Riverdale Press)
Quite the title.

"From The Ghetto To The Shtetl: An Interview With Hip-Hop Artist Y-Love" (Five Towns Jewish Times)

"Ivanka Trump & Jared Kushner Seal the Deal at Reception No. 2" (People Magazine)

People magazine, not used to covering Sheva Brachot, fumbles the explanation over the ritual 7-day after wedding celebrations calling this one a so-called "Reception No.2" held by the Kusher family, Ivanka's in-laws.

"Will Ivanka Trump’s Wedding Dress Inspire Sleeve Lust?" (New York Magazine)

So Ivanka Trump has sleeves on her wedding dress to conform to Orthodox standards of modesty (some people are upset she didn't cover the elbows, too) and now, it's going to turn into a fashion trend for everyone? Wow.

Moment Magazine Profiles Converts

In the latest issue of Moment Magazine, "The New Jewish Convert" looks at the experiences of converts from diverse backgrounds: "A Muslim, a Mormon, a Baptist, a Protestant, a Chinese American, an African American, a Mexican American and the great-granddaughter of a Nazi officer tell their stories."

Going to the mikvah with your "nappy" hair...

Okay, so it's totally immodest to talk about going to the mikvah. Like, ever. I know. But I'm doing it anyway. So get over it.

Too Many Black Children?

The Jewish Week (New York) just did a nice little feature on the new Hebrew language charter school in Brooklyn: "For Now, Hebrew Charter School Is ‘Sababa'".

Don't blink or else you'll miss (yeah, right) this line:

"The level of racial integration is unusual in a school district that has several overwhelmingly black public schools and others that are largely white. Olevsky reports that another Jewish family she knows pulled their child out because they “felt there were too many black children in the classroom.”

Now, the school is 60% white. So just how many black kids is "too many"? I'm dying to know.

And by the way, this quote was interesting, too:

“All we know for sure is that the school is 60 percent white,” says Dan Gerstein, an HLA spokesman. “You can reasonably assume some are not Jewish, but there’s no way to tell how large that percentage is.”

So, um, none of the kids who aren't white could be Jewish? Jews do come in all colors...even in Brooklyn.

Barbies that look like ME!

I wrote earlier this week briefly on the new black Barbies and the backlash that has taken place in response to the hair types and bling-bling (truly larger-than-life gold jewelry in this case) the Barbies were wearing.

Well, check out this post on Jezebel.com: "Dear Mattel, this is how you make Barbie more diverse". I was floored. Just floored. One of these Barbies looks just like my little sister. I never thought I'd live to see the day when Barbies actually reflected what my family looks like (check out the one above)!

Along with the above pictured doll with the curly afro, there is a doll with dreadlocks, a doll with long curly locks and more!

MaNishtana Responds to Criticism

Check out the "JOC-slapping" video above and then read blogger MaNishtana's response to criticism regarding the video: "A History of Implicit Violence"

Challah Con Platanos

Here's a very short play I wrote for a "Multicultural Jewish" writing contest. I didn't win. The ending's kind of abrupt. It was in my earlier days when I wasn't writing so much. I was trying to give the readers a good indication of what my Shabbat meals were like.

The curtains open to a dining room in the home of the Katz family, Riverdale, New York, in the spring of the year 2007.

There is a large wooden dining table in the middle of the room. The table is covered in a blue table cloth. There are eight chairs. Four of the chairs are folding chairs while the four other chairs are made of wood that matches the table. In the corner of the room, there is a smaller table, no bigger than a stool, covered by a silver tray with two candleholders positioned atop it. The two white candles in the candleholders stand unlit. There is a box of matches on the tray.

As the curtain rises, Moriah Katz, a young woman wearing a hat, a bright pink dress shirt, a long brown linen skirt and matching brown Saucony sneakers, walks into the room towards the candles. Moriah lights the candles, covers her eyes and murmurs the blessing so softly, it is not heard. After she finishes, she fusses with the utensils on the table.

MORIAH, looking up from the table, to the audience: I didn’t realize I was Dominican until I decided to become Jewish. Before that, I was just a boring old, first-generation American with a penchant for arroz con habichuelas with a side of platanos. You know, basically, I was just like everyone else in New York or so I thought. I didn’t realize what I was getting into until I realized that every Shabbat, I was the strangest person at the table.

A young man, Moriah’s husband, Moishe Katz, wearing a colorful kippah and a black suit with a bright blue shirt, enters the room. He walks behind Moriah who seems so lost in thought that she does not seem to see or hear him walk into the room. He hugs Moriah from behind.

MOISHE: Honey, I think the Weissberger-Bergers are hungry. Is the table all set?

Moishe leads a young couple about the same age of the Katz couple to the table from the living room (off stage). The young woman, Bracha Weissberger-Berger, is wearing an elaborate large black hat, a stylish white blouse, calf-length black and pink silk skirt and black four-inch open-toed heels. Her wedding ring and engagement ring are prominently displayed on her left hand. The young man, her husband, Yaakov Berger, is wearing a black suit with a white shirt, black shiny shoes and a black knit kippah.

MORIAH: Thank you so much for coming over for Shabbat dinner! We finally got everything unpacked and it’s so nice to have everyone over.

MOISHE: Yes, well, we’ve washed and said hamotzi so let’s get this show on the road. Wait until you see what we have for dinner!

YAAKOV: Those are some great sketches in your living room, by the way. That drawing of the man, though….

BRACHA: …the naked man!

MORIAH, smiling: Well, he’s not completely naked, is he? He is wearing a leaf!

Yaakov and Moishe laugh.

BRACHA: Oh, Moriah, it all smells so great. What is it?

YAAKOV: Yeah, Moishe, what’s that funny thing I saw next to the washing cup?

MOISHE: Oh, that? That’s yucca! If it looks like a big brown root thing, that’s because it is. By the way, we’re having yucca with some garlic and onions tonight.

Moishe leaves the room to bring in a dish.

BRACHA and YAAKOV exchange a glance.

BRACHA: Wait, so what’s Yoooou-kaah?

MORIAH: Don’t worry, you don’t eat the outside raw or anything because it’s laced with cyanide. The inside’s okay though once you boil it. It’s just something my mom used to make me all the time growing up in Washington Heights.

Bracha and Yaakov are quiet for a moment before anyone speaks.

YAAKOV: Well, I didn’t know that you grew up in Washington Heights. Do you know Rabbi Levy at Breuer’s?

MORIAH: Uh, I grew up on the other side of the Heights.

BRACHA: Oh, then you must know Rabbi Lamm who teaches at Yeshiva University?

MORIAH: Well, no, you see, I grew up on the other, other side, you know, like those streets between Audubon and Broadway.

Bracha and Yaakov both widen their eyes and shake their heads.

Moishe walks in holding a white tray filled with food.

MOISHE: Well, here’s the first course.

YAAKOV: What is it?

MORIAH: Well, it’s gefilte fish, Yaakov.

YAAKOV, pointing at his dish: No, I mean, that thing on the side, it looks like a banana.

MORIAH, looking up into the air and shaking her head in exasperation: IT IS NOT A BANANA!

MOISHE: Excuse my wife, she gets upset when people call platanos, bananas.

MORIAH: Because they’re not!

BRACHA: Plata-what?

MOISHE: Platanos. You know, plantains? They’re like green or yellow starchy, um, almost bananas. MORIAH can fry them, bake them, boil them. It’s amazing! They’re even Kosher for Pesach.

YAAKOV: Really?

MOISHE: Oh, yeah, Moriah eats tons of yucca and plantains over Pesach. You know, she has a really hard time giving up rice and beans.

MORIAH: I just don’t understand eating that much potato in one week. Moriah sighs dramatically. We need to move to Israel so I can eat rice and "legumes" over Passover.

Moishe glances at Moriah sympathetically.

MOISHE: It’ll be okay, honey. So, Bracha, Yaakov, tells me that you’re a teacher? Moriah’s a teacher, too.

BRACHA: Yes, I teach Judaic Studies at the SAR Academy in Riverdale.

MORIAH: Oh, really, I hear they’re great. Very child-centered.

YAAKOV: Where do you teach, Moriah?

MORIAH: 11th Grade English at Martin Luther King, Jr. High School. Bracha and Yaakov look at Moriah blankly. You know that giant building behind Lincoln Center? It’s a public high school but it resembles a prison actually, what with the metal detectors and all….

BRACHA: Oh, so you teach in…(Bracha gulps dramatically.) a public school?!

MORIAH: Oh, yeah, it’s great. I mean, the kids are amazing. Some of the gang members are a little scary but some of them are actually very nice. We invited a whole bunch of my kids to the wedding. You ever seen Rabbi Avi Weiss break-dance?

MOISHE: Yeah, one of her students, Reggie, was break-dancing with Rabbi Weiss at the wedding. It was so great. Reggie’s long dreads would fling up and down, all over the place, as he was dancing.

YAAKOV, incredulously: Er, well, um, wow! That must have been some wedding.

MOISHE, wistfully: It was, it was.

BRACHA, in a worried tone: But the school’s safe, right? I mean, most of the kids you work with are from the Lincoln Center area near the school?

MORIAH: Oh, yeah, well, the metal detectors keep most of the weapons out but most of the kids are from Harlem and Washington Heights. I mean, I’ve only been attacked once and the girl was really just a deranged Honors student. There is one kid who lives right behind the school...in the projects.

YAAKOV: Wow, the projects! That’s scary.

MORIAH: Oh, the projects are okay. I lived with my grandmother in the projects for two years. It was a great two-bedroom apartment right off Chelsea Piers, downtown. The only problem is people, or maybe their dogs, peeing in the elevator. That can get really nasty. Plus this one time, this kid was kidnapped.

Yaakov and Bracha exchange a glance. Moishe shakes his head and rolls his eyes.

MOISHE: Well, anyway! My four-year-old sister did the cutest thing yesterday. She sent me these cookies in the mail the other day that she had baked with my mother.

YAAKOV: Wow, a four-year-old sister. There are four of you, right? You must be twenty years older than your sister!

MOISHE: Yeah, I am. There's little Necia, the four-year-old and then there's Batya and Joseph, who are a little closer to my age.

BRACHA: What’s that like? Having a little sister so young?

MORIAH: Well, in Spanish, Necia means “brat.”

YAAKOV: Doesn’t it mean miracle of G-d in Hebrew?

MORIAH: Trust me, we accept the Spanish translation in Necia’s case.

MOISHE, nodding: Necia likes to scream.

MORIAH: Yeah, honestly, in my family, you were lucky if they allowed you to talk. If you screamed like that, you didn’t make it to your fourth birthday. Actually, my nickname was Necia. I didn’t scream. I was just trying to talk here and there.

MOISHE: Moriah has a hard time with Jewish kids.

MORIAH: I'm just that I’m having a hard time processing. So, if the kid dances around at shul and screams at the top of its lungs to get its point across, you call the kid “creative”? That stuff doesn't fly at a Catholic church. If you whisper at church, you'll probably be labeled a future prison inmate or be reminded that there is a fiery hell awaiting you in the future.

BRACHA: Oh, um, so, how many siblings do you have, Moriah?

MORIAH: Oh. Moriah pauses dramatically. I have, I guess, about ten siblings. I’m the oldest of eleven or is it ten? I can’t remember.

BRACHA: Wow, so am I, isn’t it great living in such a big family?

MORIAH: Well, I wouldn't know, I haven’t met them all.

Yaakov and Bracha share a confused look.

YAAKOV: Oh, why not?

MORIAH: Well, I only have three sisters on my mother’s side. Everyone else is on my father’s side. I told him I was going to give him condoms for his birthday.

Bracha, who was taking a sip of water, chokes on her water.

YAAKOV, loudly: You did not!

MORIAH: Oh yes, I called him in the Dominican Republic and I said, “Papi, you need to stop having kids. You’re not even sure how many you have anymore. You lost count. This needs to stop.”

Moishe sighs with a smile as he gets up from the table. He starts taking some bowls away to the kitchen.

MOISHE: Anyway! I think I’ll bring out the rice and beans. Moriah’s arroz con habichuelas are amazing. She makes this green goo for the beans that is really delicious.

MORIAH, laughing. It is not GREEN GOO! It’s called recaito but Goya sells it without a hecksher so I make it fresh.

YAAKOV: Oh, really? What goes into it?

MORIAH: Oh, a little bit of everything! Onions, garlic, green peppers, cilantro, basil, um, parsley…. I can’t remember what else but we put onions and garlic on pretty much everything.

BRACHA: Wow, that’s a lot of stuff. Sounds kinda spicy.

MORIAH: I don’t know if it’s spicy, but I store it in the fridge for when we make beans.

BRACHA: Do you eat rice and beans often?

MORIAH: Oh, yeah, it’s amazing. When I was growing up, if my mom didn’t make rice and beans, I didn’t even consider it food. I said mom, soup is not food, salad is not food, and spaghetti is not food. I never understood Americans eating salad as a meal. Actually, I never understood eating salad BEFORE the meal, either. We eat salad on the side.

Moishe returns.

BRACHA: Wow, so a lot of things must be really new for you.

MOISHE, laughing. Oh, you have no idea. She just had squash for the first time last week. Now, she’s addicted!

MORIAH: It’s definitely a culture shock. We had to go to premarital counseling because Moishe and I weren’t communicating. I would ask him constantly, “Are you sure you’re angry?” You know, because when Dominican people are angry, we yell, we throw things, we jump up and down, you know? You can’t miss it. I would say, “Moishe, you don’t even look angry.” I mean, he really didn’t. He would just say, really calmly, "I’m upset." I mean, who announces that they're upset?

Moishe laughs and Yaakov joins him.

BRACHA, shaking her head: Oh, that’s terrible.

MORIAH: Oh, yeah, it was pretty bad but we got through it. We meet each other halfway.

YAAKOV: How did you do that?

MOISHE: Well, you know, instead of saying, “Honey, is there anything for dinner?” I will say, “Honey, did you make dinner?” If I asked, “Is there anything for dinner?” She’d say, “I don’t know, look in the fridge.”

MORIAH: I don’t understand all those indirect questions. I mean, why not just get it all out? I can’t even talk to his Bubbe. Everything’s an indirect question. Moriah mimics an accented voice, impersonating Bubbe. “So, what do you think about children?” Just ask me if I’m pregnant and have out with it!

YAAKOV: Well, isn’t that a little blunt?

MOISHE: I used to think it was blunt, apparently, it’s just being direct.

The doorbell rings.

BRACHA: Who would be ringing your doorbell on Shabbos?

MOISHE: Oh, it’s probably Moriah’s sister and Moriah’s friends from college.

Moishe disappears to answer the door off stage.

BRACHA: But it’s so late. Why didn’t we wait to make Kiddush?

YAAKOV: Are they staying over? Isn’t this a one bedroom?

MOISHE: Don’t worry, BRACHA. They’re not Jewish. Moriah’s little sister just loves challah. The friends…I think it’s the grape juice.

MORIAH: Yeah. It may seem pretty strange but actually, my friends that are coming over are Christians. My sister, well, she's Wiccan.

BRACHA: What’s a Wiccan?

MORIAH: Well, I guess it means she’s a witch.

YAAKOV, drops his silverware with a large clang: OH.

MOISHE: Yeah, I was telling my rabbi about how we were having all these people over. He was so surprised and he asked, “But where are you going to put them all?!” I told him, Rebbe, they’re not even Jewish. They just take the subway up and back down. Inviting non-Jews over for Shabbat dinners is great because you don’t have to worry about how they’ll get home or where to put them.

YAAKOV, in a surprised tone: Do you have non-Jews for Shabbat dinners often?

MOISHE: Of course, her students and friends come over all the time.

BRACHA, breathlessly: You mean, the gang members?!

MORIAH: Oh, they’re not ALL gang members but let me tell you about the time, I ran into two of them with little bandanas on with five of their friends. They were in the big elevator with me and a whole bunch of people at 181st Street. I was really annoyed because they were calling each other gay.

BRACHA: Uh…

MORIAH: Yeah, I told them to stop and that as far as I was all concerned if they were talking so much about being “gay,” they were probably all “gay.” I also asked them politely to stop embarrassing all Dominicans by acting so stupid in public.

YAAKOV: Weren’t you scared?

MORIAH: Of what? They all laughed. I keep telling them to stop calling each other gay. Don't even get me started on the “N” word. They do it on the subway in front of other people and I know what people are thinking.

BRACHA: What are they thinking?

MORIAH: “Oh, look at those black and Hispanic kids, they can’t control themselves!” People think it says something about the whole “race,” not just these specific teenagers. I think people would respond the same way if they saw someone with a kippah doing something inappropriate, “Oh, look at those Jews” but I don’t know if people see that often.

BRACHA: Well! This has been quite a Shabbat meal.

MOISHE: Oh, but we’ve only just gotten started! We still have to bring the yucca out!

Moishe hurries out to the kitchen.

From the kitchen off stage, running water is heard. Moriah’s sister, Mar, is washing her hands.

MAR, loudly: Did you guys sing Shalom Alechem yet? There better be some challah. You guys better not have eaten all the challah!

The End

A Response to "Latino in America"

Did you watch "Latino in America" on CNN? I didn't. I don't have cable. And according to a post on "Bilingual in the Boonies," it's a good thing I didn't.

Do check out Mike Robles ranting (and reaming out Soledad O'Brien and "white people") in "Average and Boring Latina in America". How many times can a person use pendeja (moron) in a sentence?

Also check out: "Commentary: Latinos are assimilating in the USA". Well, duh. That's why my Spanish is so bad and I'm addicted to hamburgers, isn't it? I have to eat plantain chips while reading "People in Español" to assuage my Latina guilt.

Of course, while I'm wallowing in my guilt, I have to trip over American Jews who keep reminding me that speaking Spanish isn't so important, in fact, it's almost un-American. (After all, Americans can't speak two languages like Europeans speak five. I mean, we're just not that clever.) Don't worry, they feel the same way about Yiddish (and probably, Hebrew) so they're not trying to be totally racist. Viva la assimilation, no?

Are you Jewish...

or are you just wearing that kippah as a fashion statement?



How going to a little Jewish party with blogger MaNishtana (check out his "black Jew is the new black" t-shirts) led to an educational moment for one white Jewish woman.

So, what do you do for a living?

Blogger/Vlogger/Freelance writer Jew in the City, aka Allison Josephs, posed an interesting inquestion on her Facebook fan page: "What should I call myself? I have this problem where people will ask if I work and I say yes, and then they ask what I do and I say, I don't know what to call it. What should I call it??"

People volunteered many ideas for Allison, including Professional blogger, Torah journalist and Professional Vlogger.

Eventually someone asked, "Do you get paid for this?" Allison said no. "So can you really call it a job?" And that's when I used the mom card. Being a stay-at-mom is a full-time job you don't really get paid for. In fact, a recent Time magazine article said that if we started paying our moms what they deserved, they'd be making upwards of $100K a year.

Well, when are we going to take our Moms...and our internet educators and bloggers seriously?

Watch my video response:

Check out:

"One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success"by Marcie Alboher

"Letters to Myself: The Life of a Freelance Writer"

"What does your wife do?" An earlier post about what my husband tells people I do.

"What do I do?" A mother of four and blogger weighs in.

A Precious Movie

Precious is 16, in junior high school, can't read or write and she's pregnant with her second child. Her father is the father of her children. Her mother likes to hit her with a frying pan. She dreams of being in a fashion magazine and having a light-skinned boyfriend with "good hair."

http://www.weareallprecious.com/

Fab movie poster!

My First Video Blog

Sorry for the fuzzy picture, that's actually my fuzzy hair.

That's exactly what I was thinking!

Did you hear the one about the new black Barbies? When I heard of them, I remember thinking...in a different world, some Barbies, maybe all Barbies, would have afros. Yes, afros. And instead of brushes, they would all come with comb picks. The bigger you could pick your Barbie's afro, the cooler and more loved it would be. And what would these have Barbies taught little girls like me?

Check out: The line the new black Barbies won't cross and "Not all girls embrace latest black Barbie doll, say Mattel toys went too far with rap-detail.

It's raining cats and dogs...

Or as I told my sister about today's rainy day, "It's like Noah's Ark out there!"

Parshat Noah from G-dcast.com

More Torah cartoons at www.g-dcast.com

An Episode on Jewish Relationships

The latest episode of Glee, Mash-Up, is one of my favorites. It’s what I’ll be calling “the Jewish episode” for a long time. In the episode, Jewish character Noah Puckerman’s mom tells him (on Simchat Torah while they’re eating sweet and sour pork and watching Schindler's List on TV) that he needs to go find a nice Jewish girl.

Later that night, Puckerman has an epiphany, basically a wet dream he believes is a message from G-d, about glee club’s nice “hot” Jewish girl Rachel (who in the dream is wearing a big Star of David around her neck). For most of the episode, they're an item.

Ah, if only nice Jewish people getting together were so simple. While Puckerman is serenading Rachel in a beautiful scene, Quinn, the Catholic cheerleader he secretly knocked up, is making eyes at Puckerman while her boyfriend Finn (also not Jewish), who thinks he’s the baby’s father, is making eyes at Rachel.

(In a joke that’s only funny if you’re in “the know” after reading Interfaithfamily.com, Rachel is played by Lea Michele, whose father is Jewish but whose mother is not. She was told she looked to “ethnic” for television. Meanwhile, Quinn is played by Jewish actress, Dianna Agron, who has expressed some…something…over playing a character with a big fat cross around her neck. On the show, Agron is a playing your typical blond Barbie cheerleader stereotype. )

The episode captures something that a lot of conversations about Jews dating non-Jews seem to leave out. These teens, and a lot of Jews dating and marrying non-Jews, aren’t thinking about saving Judaism (save for Puckerman during his epiphany and later when he notes “damn I feel like such a bad Jew” and puts on a kippah) or bringing about the destruction of Judaism or the extinction of Jewish people. They’re simply…in love. And usually people in love are only thinking about the person they’re making googly eyes at.

As the cheeky character Sue Sylvester (played by actress Jane Lynch who is a lesbian) later points out in an episode (when making a comment about being allowed to marry your pets, what the heck?!--obviously a dig at Prop 8), “Love knows no bounds.”

The Russian Jewish boy I dated in college, who broke up with me partly because I wasn’t a Russian Jew (and probably also because he was expressed racist tendencies towards Hispanics, including me and my “nappy” hair and “fat” legs), eventually married a nice Russian non-Jewish girl. The Russian Jewish friend who had introduced us became religious, inadvertently dragged me with him. and eventually, married a nice frum girl.)

And I, after fetishizing Russian Jewish men for a long time, finally converted to Judaism and quickly (thank G-d) found the Russian Jewish future rabbi of my dreams. (The only guy who, even after dating other Hispanic men, ever told me my hair was beautiful. It's been a learning experience. Like when I had to get him to watch "Baby Got Back" to help him understand what all the fuss about big butts is about in other cultures. "Now even white boys gotta shout.")

Obviously, we can only guess what G-d was thinking.

Also check out:

"Can I convert to Judaism even though my husband isn't interested in following suit?" (MyJewishLearning.com)

"In Reckless Waters: Falling in Love with a Non-Jew" (Chabad.org)

"Straight-Talk About Assimilation: An Exchange" (The Forward)

Moses in The New Yorker

Create a caption for this cartoon ASAP.

Over at Frum Satire...

Over at Frum Satire, my guest post, "When I told my family I wanted to be Jewish" has sparked an interesting conversation.

Real World: Noah's Ark

In another chapter of "real talk parsha, because obviously Gd has a sense of humor. just look at your face," blogger MaNistana talks about this week's portion/parsha Noach [gen 6:9-11:32].

“it’s the end of the world as we know it, but i’m not feeling particularly fine.”

yep, in this parsha, Gd flips out doug ramsey style and orders the world to “shut it down“! of course, “shutting it down” in this case means “engulf the world in copious volumes of scalding water“. noah, his fam, and a choice few animals escape into the ark and survive the death and destruction going on outside to eventually build a new world. crazy, right?

i mean, the flood lasted for a whole year. a whole year in an ark with just your family?? not to mention your wife [who, unless you're cham, you're not getting any from] and a gajillion animals you’ve gotta feed. the midrash tells us that this one time? noah showed up late to give the lion his food? and the lion just wilds out and slaps and/or bites him.

well. no kidding!

i imagine that about six months in, things in the ark started turning sour a la “the real world”:

this is the true story…of 1.5 million species of animals…picked to live in an ark…survive the apocalypse together and have their lives hang in the balance…to find out what happens…when people stop being polite…and start getting real…

noah: hey lion.

lion: sup, man.

noah: things were crazy with the ostriches, but i got your…what?…what’s that look for?

lion: you know how long i’ve been sitting here waiting, man? six hours.

noah: look, man, i’m sorry but-

lion: sorry? oh you’re sorry. you got me sitting up here next to these zebras all day, with no food, but you’re sorry. cuz that’s really what i need to see when i’m dizzy from hunger–a bunch of black and white lines running back and forth all day long.

noah: well i already told you i can’t do anything about the arrangement i–

lion: well you better do something, homey. cuz if i hear one more thing from that damn deer over there talking about how i ate his daddy, imma–

deer: but you did eat my pops, you–

lion: SHUT THE [BLEEP] UP! IF I HEAR YOU [BLEEP] ABOUT THAT [BLEEP] ONE MORE [BLEEP] TIME, I SWEAR TO YHVH I’M GONNA BITE YOUR [BLEEP] HEAD OFF THE MOTHER[BLEEP] SECOND WE’RE OFF THIS BOAT–

deer: mother[bleep], WHAT?

lion: what? WHAT, bambi?

Do the deer and the lion throwndown? Does Noah survive with his body parts intact? Does the lion fall in love with the lamb--er, deer? Read the rest of "Real Parsha" over at MaNishtana.

Redux: The Ten Commandments According to My Mother

The Ten Commandments According to My Mother
Aliza Hausman

My mother doesn’t know where I live. And no, I’m not a member of the Witness protection program, though, if you knew my mother personally, you’d wonder why I wasn’t. I have successfully withheld this little tidbit, a collection of digits and street names, from my mother for ten years.

St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital sends me address labels whether or not I give them a donation. An animal shelter in Long Island floods my mailbox with the same. And somewhere, my mother doesn’t know where her child lives or that even so, I have not been able to completely escape her.

I became an honor student in kindergarten and at thirteen years later, I was ranked number twenty-one out of the three hundred and sixty students in my high school’s graduating class. At seventeen, I also became a teen runaway.

On the last day of my senior year of high school, I woke up my two sisters for school as I did every weekday. I pried my baby sister off my bed as I did every day when the alarm in my room interrupted her slumber next door in my mother’s room and she toddled her way into my bed with me.

Early sunlight poured over the dark mahogany day bed that was our unofficial living room couch thanks to the tube television on my dresser. As I stood in the doorway of my room, I took one last look at the pastel flowers on the wallpaper which seemed to strain towards the two windows in my room. I had spent most of my teens in this room. “It was the best of times and the worst of times.” Finally, my younger sister, B., fourteen at the time, pulled me away.

“It’s time to go,” she said stoically grabbing one of the garbage bags full of my books, clothes, mementos from friends and photographs of my sisters. Later I would find that I had forgotten to pack any socks.

Behind B., my ten-year-old sister, A. sobbed. My mother never woke up. She didn’t realize I was gone until I failed to make my 4pm curfew. I think that most runaways leave a note. But I didn’t. I wanted to be untraceable.

*
My favorite movie growing up, next to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, was The Ten Commandments. Before I began Sunday school, what I knew of religion stemmed mostly from The Ten Commandments according to Charlton Heston. Around Christmas, movies about Jesus Christ abounded on the English and the Spanish-language network television channels but it was Easter that I looked forward to because it was then that my family watched The Ten Commandments religiously.

I could never put two and two together to understand what, if anything, The Commandments had to do with Easter. I was too busy perplexed about honoring my parents when I didn’t really like them all that much to know about Passover. If my mother had known then that she was giving me a taste of Judaism that would lead to a conversion to Judaism later, she wouldn’t have just shut off the TV, she would have thrown it out the window.

I was the quintessential good little girl. My imaginary friend with whom I shared my joys and sorrows was G-d. I spoke to G-d when I needed something. Nintendo! My father! I spoke to G-d late at night from under the dining room table where I hid. I would lie down under the table when my mother was so enraged I was afraid I’d die. I prayed when I had lost the will to live. Please, please G-d, take me away from this, and take me away from here. I called to G-d who had put me on the Earth, the Lord who had given me the mixed blessing of little ever precocious sisters and sometimes, the merciless asshole up there in heaven toying with a cute kid like me.

My nickname, according to my cousins, when it wasn’t “Miss Goody-Two-Shoes” was Mother Teresa. My sisters and cousins alike would confess their sins to me. They would apologize if a stray curse word was spoken in my presence. I winced as my mother built altars with offerings for the various saints she hoped would grant her luck. I ignored the talk of casting wicked spells against my deadbeat dad. This all didn’t seem as bad as the sin of the golden calf but I was pretty sure that Santeria, a form of Spanish voodoo my mother practiced, wasn’t completely kosher.

All I wanted to do was be good for goodness’ sake. I didn’t need to be good for a mother or a father that treated me as if I was bad anyway. Deep down, I hoped that perhaps, if I was good, I would be spared what seemed like an endlessly painful earthly existence even as early as age seven.

But even if I wouldn’t be spared, I wanted to be good and needed to be good because I believed that G-d had a bigger plan in store for me, larger than my tiny pre-adolescent mind could fathom. When that failed, I told myself that if I committed suicide, my sisters would follow and their suicides would be on my soul.

Though I prayed every day, my sisters and I continued to live under my mother’s fascist regime throughout our childhood years. We were all enemies of the state. My mother dubbed me the good girl but didn’t spare me. B., beautiful and so aptly named, was the bad one and the victim of my mother’s mania most often. A. did not exist except when another victim was not available. And K., sparkling with kinetic energy, was the baby we cared for as her pseudo-parents.

There were rules, my mother’s Ten Commandments, and even strict could result in swift and unjust punishments.

1. I am the Lord your mother, who brought you out of my uterus and into slavery. Obey.

I was seven years old. My mother was late in picking me up from Sunday school classes at St. Elizabeth School. I was painfully shy and as the crowd of moms and dads picking up their sons and daughters had petered out, instead of asking for help, I had curled into myself by the front entrance and cried. In my bones, I was experiencing the greatest fear a child could have; I was worried that my mother had abandoned me, leaving me like my father had done.

If there had been anyone around to see! Making sounds not too dissimilar from that of a caterwauling kitten, I wandered aimlessly back and forth until hours seemed to pass and I was finally rooted to one spot from shock. Anyone who peered my way would have seen a little girl with voluminous, puffy black pigtails who looked much, much younger than seven. They would have known right away that I was crying for my mother.

By the time my mother arrived, I was hysterical. I clawed at her trying to wrap my arms around her. My tears were tears of the most exquisite kind of euphoria. For it was then, more than at any other time in my life that I was sure that my mother loved me because she had not forsaken me.

“Stop crying! Stop it. Stop it,” she thundered down at me.

I stopped pawing her, looking up into her eyes as she threw her head back to laugh. I told her how scared I had been and she laughed. As I retold my story of woe, I began to whimper myself into delirium again.

“You are pathetic.”

It was then that she shoved me away before finally slapping me across the face.

2. You shall not have any other gods before Me.

At 14, my bed was littered with books of all sizes, all borrowed from the Religion section of our local library.

My mother, who had forced us to yet another Sunday mass at church, had finally given up on our souls.
“You can do whatever you want. Just do your confirmation and then do whatever you want. Be whatever you want.”

I skimmed Buddhist books and read about my aunt’s religion. Steeling myself, I read about Protestant Christianity before discarding the book. I was already Catholic. Hours and hours poured over the books until I finally knew what I wanted to do with my life.

“Mom, look, I’ve been reading all these books and I’ve decided what I want to be,” I uttered with unusual confidence.

My mother pursed her lips in amusement.

“¿Si? What?”

“I want to be Jewish.”

Her face twisted in disgust. She reeled her arm back like a baseball pitcher and then struck me in the face.

When my younger sisters later decided to practice Wiccan my mother sequestered them to a Pentecostal church for an exorcism. I suppose, one could say, I had gotten the better deal.

3. You shall make no wrongful use of my name.

I committed a deadly sin at fifteen. I began to tell any friend who would listen that my mother was a monster. Each time I did so, I did it grudgingly for I really believed my mother could find out. She told us the spirits and her Tarot cards saw everything we did and told her about it.

“I don’t want you talking to that girl, Marisol,” my mother started. We were in the kitchen preparing dinner together, a rarity. My mother chopped away at vegetables on the counter while I worked on the table to find pebbles in the white rice.
Without thinking, I answered: “But why? Marisol’s really, really nice. She’s so quiet. She never does anything bad.”

Marisol was a Hispanic classmate blessed with a creamy ivory complexion, something my mother would have loved if she had ever met her. My mother hated that we had “colored” friends. When a black friend had called B. on the phone, my mother had asked what color the friend was. Without hesitation, B. responded, “purple.”

“Marisol is a wicked girl. She is bad. I don’t want you talking to her. Tell her not to call her again. And don’t think that I won’t know if you talked to her at school.”

“But Mom, what am I supposed to tell….” I was stopped short when my mother held up the knife in her hand to silence me. The last time my mother had actually thrown the knife at me.

I slipped upstairs to look through the letters that Marisol and I wrote to each other because we didn’t share any classes.

The only letter missing was Marisol’s last. The letter where she warned that if I didn’t, she would tell someone that my mother was abusing us.

4. Remember the Sabbath day? You don’t get one.

Everyone has a mother, I guess, whether they want her or not. My mother was difficult to love. People who have only ever known love for their mothers cannot imagine the unbridled loathing my mother had for her children. It was never too far from her lips.
“I wish I’d never had you! I could have done so much with my life if I hadn’t had you. I could have finished school, gotten my degree in psychology.”

“Then why did you have us!” we would yell from a safe distance.

“Psychology?” we would later scoff behind her back.

Whatever my mother learned in college, until dropping out junior year when she became pregnant out of wedlock with me and had to be rushed through a speedy wedding, she did rather well at mind manipulation.

When I was ten, my mother announced the reason, she swore, she had in fact birthed any us.
“I didn’t have three daughters so that I would have to cook, clean and do everything my damn self.” Spanish expletives flowed and I soon learned to cook rice and beans under armed guard.

5. Honor your father and your mother. Not in the order.

My father disappeared when I was four. Having two kids and an unstable wife interfered with his role as leading Latin lover in the neighborhood. Which is why my father divorced my mother and only then came back to impregnate her long after the divorce was finalized.
In the earliest memory I have of my father, the hero, I am being thrown into the air. Filled with elation, giggling, every time I fell back into the safety of his arms after being tossed closer and closer to the ceiling.

“Higher, Daddy, higher!”

Most of my mother’s memories of my father, the tales and lies she spun, are too colorful for consumption. She delighted in reminding me of incidents that I had wiped from memory long ago.
She told me that at three years old, she beat me with her bare hands.

She hadn’t discovered the chancleta, yet, the token slipper Latino parents the world over use to keep their children in check. She hadn’t needed to resort yet to the black belt that she later hung up on the wall for easy retrieval.

I had taken to the habit of pulling everything out of all the drawers in the house. And then I would wriggle in all things I’d found in each drawer. You know, I was oh-so-terrible, trying to assert my self as a three year old. My mother had battered me so thoroughly, that my father found me catatonic, bruised and wet from recent weeping.

At least, that’s the way my mother always told it. She repeated the story to me whenever she could, laughter overcoming her during the telling. My father told her that she was never to hit me again. So, she didn’t. When he was looking.

6. You shall obey or be murdered.

My mother was a star pupil of Machiavelli who believed it was more important to be feared than loved. Growing up, I thought my mother was the source of all evil but by the time I was an adult, I knew she really was. When my mom entered a room, the room trembled. My sisters and I would huddle, readying ourselves, for we knew her plan of attack was always: divide and conquer.

My mother was a weapons expert. She could wield knives, telephone cords, telephones, brooms, poles, belts, wet towels, heels, sneakers and chancletas with unfathomable dexterity. When nothing was available, she used her hands. When that wasn’t enough, she used words and pet names.

My pet name was “Hija de la gran puta,” translation: daughter of the grand slut. Most of the Spanish I heard growing up was equally as florid. When I told my mother that according to my pet name, she was a slut, a terrible look washed over her face. What happened afterwards, I’ll never know, I ran out of the room and didn’t stop running.

My sister, B., was pet named “Hija del Diablo” and my mother said the proof of this was that there were at least two sixes on the back of my sister’s skull, signs of the anti-Christ. When my sister A. and I later tried to look for them, we could never find them.

A., the last of the child my parents had together, was spared a nickname because my mother preferred to throw A. against the wall like a rag doll when A. made the mistake of getting in her way.

“¡Coño! ¡Hija de la gran puta! Coño, maldito seas,” flew from the inside of my mother’s room shaking the walls of our little two-family house.
A. and I, who were in the hallway that connected all our rooms, scurried into our separate bedrooms and locked the doors.

From my bedroom, which shared a wall with my mother’s, I could hear her door opening. And soft, unsuspecting footsteps padded up from the first floor.

“B.!” my mother hollered. “Is that you, B.? Are you wearing lipstick? YOU ARE! Where did that lipstick come from? And that is not your shirt. Showing your bellybutton showing….”

I could hear B.’s body being dragged through the hallway.

Against my better judgment, I chose then to open my door. And soon, I, too, was ordered into the bedroom A. and B. shared. I pressed my body against the entryway and I could see A. in the farthest corner of her bed attempting to hide under the bed covers.

“WHERE DID YOU GET THESE THINGS? WHERE?”

B. shook her head and tried to free herself from my mother’s grasp. Her mistake was turning her back on my mother.

With her other hand, my mother had grabbed at one of B.’s rollerblades. In horror, A. and I watched as my mother brought it down swiftly onto the back of B.’s head.

7. You shall not be unfaithful. Love no one but me. Loathe no one but me.

My mother had three answers for everything: Yes, no, maybe. Yes meant no. No meant no. And maybe, generally, meant no. This, of course, took us a while to deduce.

I was radiant and running home at sweet sixteen to get ready for my first dance. I had pleaded with my mother for over a month. I had even engineered the blessing of my aunt, a police detective, after agreeing to hear all about how boys could slip roofies in your drink and how.

My aunt lived in the basement and since by that age, we were close in size, she had also agreed to lend me one of her dresses. I was drunk with pleasure as I pulled on slinky dress after another over my head. When I finally found the perfect one, I ran upstairs to show my mother.

I think my mother knew then that I was in love. She just couldn’t figure out who was the culprit that was making me starry-eyed. I could sometimes hear her pick up the other line boys called me. But my secret was safe. It also helped that the love of my life, now a gay Science middle school teacher was then a squeaky-voiced boy with an effeminate lilt to his speech. He was also hiding our tryst from his mother. We were experts at talking in code.

“Why are you wearing that?” she threw at me, from her bed where she spent most of her days, as I stood at the door and preened.

“Remember? The Valentine’s Day dance? It’s tonight, Mom, remember, I told you. You said I could go,” I answered warily.

“Well you can’t. Take off that damn dress.”

And so with tears welled up in my eyes, without questions, I did.

8. You shall steal if I tell you to.

9. You shall bear false witness when I make you.

I took lying very seriously. And stealing only a little less. When I started shoplifting under the guidance of my best friend, Alex, at nine years old, I told my mother immediately. I wanted her to punish me, even beat me, for committing such a disgraceful act.

It had been a crime of passion, though I hid that from her, as the first thing I had stolen was a keychain with the name “Anthony” scrawled across the front. Anthony was an Elvis-lookalike, pouty lip and all, who worked as the stage manager on our production of “Hansel & Gretel.” Each time he helped me out of my gingerbread costume, as he did with all the gingerbread cast, I shivered.

My mother surprised me by not striking me. She responded like any normal mother, telling me that what I had done was wrong, explaining how stealing hurt the person who owned the business.
I heard bits and pieces through the tears that flowed, waiting for the slap. My mother glowed, instead, thrilled by my confession. Each and every time I stole and told her, she was sure of the immense power she had over me.

And so she came clean with me.

“When we go to the doctor, you need to make him believe that you’re sick.”

“How? Why” I asked cautiously looking down at my orthopedic shoes.

“Do you think your school supplies pay for themselves?”

“I don’t….”

“I take your prescriptions to the pharmacy and my friend takes them and gives me back your book-bags, your pens, all your stupid notebooks,” she laughed triumphantly.

I was horrified. She was stealing, too.

Later, my mother tried to make the most of my constant sickliness. Now I was her trusted confidante. She trusted me to sniffle and sneeze my way into prescriptions for expensive allergy medications.
All I had to do was lie to our family doctor.

“Tell the doctor that you have a cold. Tell him that your throat has been hurting you. Tell him you can't stop coughing. When he comes back into the room, you better act like you're sick," was my mother’s refrain whenever we found ourselves in his office.
When the doctor walked back into their room, he asked me gently, “So, what are you here for today?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered wide-eyed suddenly jittery. When he looked back at me and then my mother, I trembled.

“Aren’t you sick?”

“No.”

“Then. Why... are you…here?” the doctor repeated, his voice halting with confusion as he peered down at me before returning to my mother’s furious gaze.

“I don’t know,” I whispered again more insistently.

He left the room moments later absentmindedly shuffling papers in the files in his hands. He had left me alone for the taking.

“Mom, I couldn’t lie. I just couldn’t.” A tremor of fear shook my body. Looking back at the door, I prayed the doctor would return soon.

My mother sneered at me in disgust. She walked over to the cheap, upholstered seat that enveloped my small frame. She slapped me over and over again until she could hear the doctor’s footsteps returning to the room.

10. You shall not covet anything you want or need.

More than new clothes to replace the tattered hand-me-downs we wore to school on the worst days, we wanted our freedom.

The day I ran away, A. tried to hang herself off her bunk bed. B. began to cut herself and carved HELP ME all over the inside of her closet. And K. began to collect my things for the shrine she built to the fuzzy memory of her eldest sister. She would point to people with glasses for years as she struggled to remember my face. In the midst of this frenzy, my mother ordered them to pack. She was going to throw them all out.

My senior year of college, I received a tear-stained letter arrived in my P.O. Box from eighteen-year-old B..

“Save me. Oh, my G-d, save me! She’s going to kill me. I know it. We went to the guidance counselor and they told her I was cutting school. She slapped me in front of my friends in the parking lot. She’s going to kill me. Please save me. Please.”

The letters I had received before never spoke of my mother. They knew that she rifled through their belongings while they slept, looking to uncover secrets we kept from her. She read their mail before it was sent out. B. had written this letter at school and dropped it into the mailbox on her way home.
In response to the letter, my sisters and I staged a walkout.

B. ran away first and then together, B. and I, with the help of friends, kidnapped A. a week later. It was easier for my mother to get over the loss of B.. B. was quickly becoming a rebel with a cause. But A., she depended on A. to care for K.. K., who wondered aloud, the last day I ever spoke to her again, “But why aren’t you taking me? She hits me, too.” It was A. who made sure K. was fed, clothed and at school every day. So when A. ran away, my mother came after her.

“She’s here,” I heard crackle across the telephone line. A.?

“What? What?” I shouted back into my cell phone.

There was silence and then sobbing.

“She’s here! She’s trying to get me to come home with her. You have to come here. I told them everything.”

“Every…thing?” My tears joined hers.

“Everything.”

And then her high school principal took the phone from her.

*

My twenties were a blur. At graduation, while others fantasized dream jobs, I was trying to figure out how to support A. on six hundred dollar a month. Our family tragedy had devolved into an epic court battle that would detail our history of violence to the public.

People told me that I had a choice. Don’t be a hero, they said, you don’t have to keep fighting. But if I refused to fight for custody of A., she would be returned to my mother. I waited for family members to rescue us. They never came. But then they hadn’t in all my twenty-one years.

For three years, we battled.

I never once stopped believing in G-d, who I only spoke to then with animosity, but I stopped believing in my mother. She would arrive at court in a garish blue dress, my grandmother, her accomplice, in tow. She would open a bible and then whisper under her breath as she stared at me unflinchingly in the waiting room we were forced to share.

And then finally, one day as the dark-haired, steely judge tried to bark her decision, my mother interrupted her to scream: “In the name of Jesus Christ, I swear I never hit my children. I never hit them!” My mother never looked at me again.

People they tell me they feel sorry for me. Perhaps, I would feel sorry, too, if I truly knew what I had missed. And others have dared to insist that “your mother is always your mother, no matter what” and that “someday, you and your mother will speak again.”

When I ask them about their mothers, they grin, they talk about having a best friend, a hero, a role model, not a woman who wet a belt before striking and telling her children that it was for own good. As the glazed look of happiness falls over their faces, I tell them about the Ten Commandments according to my mother.


I don’t know what you all feel like. How you love your mothers. How you wouldn’t be here today, who you are now, without her love and support. I am who I am because of my mother’s utter negligence, the manner of her torture and the mental illness that warped her mind and wreaked havoc on my childhood.

Because of all the lies my mother forced me to tell, she will never know. She will never know the little details that parents take for granted. Like knowing where their adult children live. She won’t know that I married a rabbi. That every other night, I make him a pot of rice and beans for dinner. She won’t even know my name because I changed that and didn’t tell her that either.

She won’t know that on the day we finally beat her in court, our Baskin Robbins celebratory ice cream cake at the after-party read: “MOM SUCKS.”

MaNishtana Goes You Tube

Do you deserved to get JOC-slapped? You know who you are.

Blogger MaNistana has decided to start using MaNistanaTV on You Tube to make an interesting batch of humorous/informative videos. To learn more about MaNishtana, watch the video below.



He's also joined Jewcy.com, writing two recent posts for them. And you can also follow him on Twitter: MaNishtana.

Also, he has a line at Cafe Press of really cool stuff including "Black Jew is the new Black". buttons.

What does your wife do?

When someone asked my husband recently, "What does your wife do?"

My husband was at a loss for words to explain what it is I do on a day-to-day basis, some of which (my book, my essays, my blog, Facebook fan page, Tweets) my husband knows very little about. He prefers reading the perfectly polished published pieces I sell to magazines and online publications.

But after some thought, he smiled up at the rabbi. Like it'd been downloaded into his brain from G-d, he knew exactly what to say.

"My wife is a conversion counselor. She also does internet kiruv (outreach)."

When he told me he'd said this to our rabbi, my jaw dropped and I said to him, "AH, WHAT?

After the time I spent in Los Angeles last summer, I realized I really enjoyed meeting converts, listening to their stories and figuring out how to help them get through the process, finding the right rabbi to work with them, picking the right synagogue, finding the right community, whether they have been interested in converting for years or just find the starting the process. I try to help the prospective convert build a support system by connecting them to others in the Jewish community.

I thought this was just a cool way to get out of the house and meet new people. A teacher by trade I've taken women to synagogues and gone through the entire services with them. I've met with men and women in coffee shops to discuss their interests (varied, complicated, vulnerable) in conversion. Some of the stories I hear are so touching but some are so heartwrenching, I feel. like, I need a degree in counseling. My hope is that I can use what I have learned to help them on their own paths.

So if you're thinking about conversion, in the conversion process, newly Jewish, shoot me an email at jewminicana1@gmail.com if you want to discuss it or ask the questions you're too scared to ask a rabbi. I usually meet people in Starbucks or some other coffee shop. I tell you my story if you don't already know it and then I sick back and hear yours while I take really good notes figuring out how I can be helpful to you.

Teen Latinas Considering Suicide

I can remember “wanting to die” when I was five years old. It was the only way I could think of escaping my situation. I was living with a mentally ill mother who was chronically abusive. Sure, we were also living in poverty, in a neighborhood too dangerous for me to play outside where I didn’t fit in because I was “too white,” too Americanized and better educated than my peers. I was isolated from my peers not just because of the abuse but because my mother was afraid I’d become tainted by the culture she saw around us.

These issues were secondary to the abuse but they weren’t so secondary to my life or the lives of those around me. At three years old, my youngest sister was sent away to the Dominican Republic because my mother couldn’t afford to take care of her. It would be years before my sister could come back. Many of my friends had siblings in similar situations or were passed between family members because of money trouble.

Like any kid, by the time I was old enough to recognize I was poor, I was taught to be ashamed of it in a status-oriented, materialistic society. In high school, my Mexican best friend said he couldn’t go to college because his parents wanted him to start working right away to help support the family.. I was luckier than most of my peers in that both of my parents had been raised in New York and been raised to value the importance of going to college.

As a preteen, I was called into the guidance counselor’s office for telling my friends I wanted to kill myself after showing up at school with black and blue bruises. At 13, I met the Holocaust survivor who would give me hope for surviving but it was my teachers who helped me sustain the hope that education would help me escape my surroundings. (My mother hoped I would go to college so she could steal my financial aid money to help the family.)

But what if you don’t find that hope to keep going?

What if your parents can’t relate to you because they’re from a foreign country? What if two different cultures are sending you very confusing, mixed messages and you second-guess all your actions? What if you’re too poor to consider struggling to survive for more than day to day? Where do you turn? Unfortunately, many young Latinas are turning to the same place I thought would help me escape as a young teen…suicide.

Suicide rates among Latina teens are apparently quite disturbing: “Latina high school students have higher attempted suicide rates than white non-Hispanic (7.7 percent) or black non-Hispanic (9.9 percent) girls their age, the CDC reports.”

In the CNN story, “Trapped between worlds, some Latina teens consider suicide,” I found too much I could relate to. Like teen Latina Francisca Abreu, I was depressed and cut off from the support system parents should provide. I was “the daughter of immigrant parents, [living] in a low-income setting…caught in an intense battle with her mother over Latino and American cultures.”

When I came home late from drama club (I begged to join explaining lack of extracurricular activities could affect my chances with colleges), my mother accused me of doing drugs…I wasn’t but many of my friends were. Like Francisca’s mother, my mother wanted me to “to stay home, learn how to cook and clean the house” and I also “wasn't allowed to hang out with friends.” I was rarely praised for my grades and more often criticized for burning the rice or mopping the floor improperly.

"Teenagers have certain freedoms; they don't need to consult with their parents to make certain decisions," Dr. Luis Zayas, a psychologist at Washington University, says in the article. "That's the culture that's here, and inserted in that is the Latino family that says the family is much more important than the individual." Among other things, this is one reason, I, like many of my Latino students when I taught high school, was pulled out of school frequently to stay home to help take care of my siblings when I should have been in school.

Though the article ends on a high note, we know the teen in the article has a tough road ahead of her learning to cope with depression and now, also struggling with being a teen mom. The odds aren’t in her favor but there’s hope.

Did you get a haircut?

My husband came home and accused me of getting a haircut without telling him. A haircut's not in our budget this month so it was like being accused of hiding a new little black dress in my closet. Okay, I've done it before but I promised I wouldn't do it again.

On a constant basis, I get asked, "Did you get a haircut?" SIGH. It's an innocuous question that gets annoying the more I get asked. The problem is that people don't know too much about hair like mine, they don't realize that my hair is "special." It's not like straight hair. It looks different depending on when I washed it, how long it's been since I washed it, whether or not I ran out of gel or didn't use any product at all. Based on these little details, it can look like I got body-snatched...or well, like I got a haircut.

Curls are not consistent. They have a mind of their own. So last night, I did something crazy. I washed my hair right before I went to bed. I usually don't do this because who wants to sleep with a mass of wet gel on their head. Hours later when I woke up, my hair was about five inches shorter and vaguely similar to a Greek statue's ringlets. Usually, sleeping on my (usually dry) hair makes it grow to massive proportions.

So 9 times out of 10, I haven't gotten a haircut. I know it's confusing. But honestly, because I keep my hair "natural," I only get hair cuts every three or four months. So really, not very often. The other innocuous phrase, by the way, is when my hair looks particularly big (haven't washed it for a while--remember, my hair is very DRY, it doesn't need to be washed more than once a week), I get "you need a haircut." Funny, I didn't ask you for your opinion.

This has been a public service announcement from Aliza's Afro.

All about Foreskin

(Photo: Hannah Whitaker/New York Magazine)

Just when I was thinking of canceling my New York magazine subscription, they decide to come out with an issue on circumcision: "For and Against Foreskin".

Look, I don't have a baby boy. I don't have baby boy parts either. So, this issue isn't personal for me. It's strictly religious. Mostly. Should I have a baby boy, he'll be circumcised. No questions asked.

But even if I wasn't Jewish, my sons would have been circumcised. At least if this article's right. According to one article in the mix, "The Case Against the Case Against Circumcision": "Circumcision, it turns out, could reduce the risk of HIV transmission by at least 60 percent, which, in Africa, adds up to 3 million lives saved over the next twenty years." Are you reading this?

Hopefully this isn't like the time people told me that giving up rice and milk would "cure" my fibromyalgia.

Great article.

A great article on convert Ivanka Trump in New York Magazine, "Why Won’t Ivanka Just Let Herself Be a Trump?", never mentions her much talked about conversion. Thank G-d.

It seems when people in the Orthodox community talk about Ivanka, all they can talk about is her conversion. And mostly, the stuff I hear is pretty awful.

Some converts fear that her conversion paints all converts in a bad light. These converts can't stop talking about what Ivanka is or isn't wearing, what Ivanka is or isn't doing.

Others are using Ivanka's conversion to question all of conversions of Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the rabbi who converted Ivanka and myself (among hundreds, I'm sure thousands, of others).

I know someone who recently confessed to me and my husband that they had called other prominent rabbis to find out if Ivanka Trump's conversion (and all of Rabbi Lookstein's conversions, including, duh, mine) were "kosher." I was disgusted. Unless Ivanka Trump is marrying your son, you have no business question her conversion. Period.

Here's what I know about Ivanka Trump's Orthodox conversion. Ivanka Trump's only crime is converting at a time when there is an incredible backlash against Orthodox converts, Modern Orthodox rabbis and others in the Orthodox community. Because of this backlash, her actions will be under a harsh spotlight no matter what she does. Because she is Ivanka Trump. Because she is Modern Orthodox. Because she is a convert.

What you're hearing about Ivanka Trump's conversion is what you would hear about any convert in backrooms. This recent backlash has only made certain people more comfortable puffing up their chests and questioning all converts, including Ivanka, out loud. For years to come, I fear, Orthodox converts will not be treated as fully fledged Jews as certain Jews in the community wage a "Who is a rabbi?" war and use converts as pawns. To win this war, certain Jews have sown seeds of doubt so deep that all converts will be subject to the microscope for years to come.

When I heard Ivanka Trump had completed her conversion, I wished her a "Mazel Tov" and I said a prayer. For her, for myself, for all converts. That we do not continually come under fire because of a growing schism in the Orthodox Jewish community. And that we are allowed to lead our Jewish lives in peace without the glaring eye of those who do not wish us, or any converts, well.

Radio Aliza!

I'll be speaking on the radio tomorrow (Oct. 20) at 12 noon EST on a show called Public Think Tank on Brooklyn College Radio. If you'd like to listen in, check out the Public Thinktank website for details on how to listen in.

What are YOU doing this winter?

I've never been to Jewish summer camp (but I hear it rocks!). And the most Jewish learning I've done at a Jewish school was one summer spent at Pardes and an ultra-Orthodox conversion school in Israel. If I could, I would have already run away for a year (or two, or three) to learn in Israel but in the meantime, I make due with the most awesome, exciting Jewish conference on the face of this Earth (you know, the New York region)...

Limmud NY!!!! (The 2010 conference will be held at The Hudson Valley Resort in Kerhonkson, NY over Martin Luther King Weekend 2010, Friday January 15 - Monday, January 18, 2010.)

I'm also a big fan of Limmud LA when I'm on the West Coast.

But if you're not in New York or Los Angeles and you wish you could spend a weekend doing some serious (and seriously fun) Jewish learning, don't worry, there's probably a Limmud out there for you so check out the Limmud Website for further details.

Welcoming Synagogues for Jews of Color

First of all, thanks to Jewlicious, Tolerant Nation and Interfaithfamily.com for already putting the word out about my mission to help the Jewish Multiracial Network grow their list of "Welcoming Synagogues."

If you’re a Jew of Color and are looking for a shul to call home, check out The Welcoming Synagogues List on the Jewish Multiracial Network, which offers a list of synagogues multiracial families and individual Jews of color have felt comfortable attending and are now recommending to others.

The list ranges from Humanist to Reform, Orthodox, Reconstructionist, Conservative and Non-denominational. But the list does not yet include synagogues outside the United States and in Israel. The project is actively looking for suggestions in both categories, as well as in the United States.

If you are a Jew of color or part of a multiracial family and you have found particular synagogues or minyanim welcoming, please email the following information to jewminicana1 (at) gmail (dot) com

1. Synagogue name
2. Link to synagogue website
3. Synagogue location: city/state or city/country

Spread the word! If you are not a Jew of color or part of a multiracial family but you know someone who might be interested in helping provide information for this list, please forward this post to them.

Yes, ideally, someday, all synagogues will be welcoming to every Jew of every color but until then, hopefully this list will connect more Jews of color with places they know they can pray in peace (without stares, without interrogations about their "Jewishness," without racism).

And if you haven't already, check out "Jews of color come together to explore identity", an awesome JTA article on how Jews of color are coming together to build community within the Jewish community.