Lauren: Mom?

Joyce: For my last blog, I’d like your help.

Lauren: OK… discuss.

Joyce: I’d like to do a little survey about the Jewish mother.

Lauren: A survey to determine if people think the Jewish mother is funny?

Joyce: If you had to choose one funny thing about your mother, what would it be?

Lauren: Well, I think that the funniest thing about my mother is that she doesn’t realize how funny she is – as a comedian, that’s comedy gold, so every time you do something that I think is funny, and then I make fun of you and you get angry, it just makes it funnier.

Joyce: I’m glad I’m an inspiration, but what’s Jewish about this?

Lauren: Like when I asked you what to say when I was speaking somewhere – and you said, totally seriously, “Why don’t you talk about how the microphone is a phallus?”

Joyce: I said that?

Lauren: I guess what’s Jewish about it all is the self-deprecating quality to all the humor – even when you get mad at me for making fun of you, you do always laugh at yourself! And when I tell my story about the Jewish mother, I’m really poking fun at myself, not you!

Joyce: I don’t get mad at you!

Lauren: Then what do you call that frowny face, when you say, “Lauren, enough!”

Joyce: Never happened!

Lauren: See – point proven – funny! :)

For further confirmation, see below for a sample of replies I got from the staff of the Jewish Women’s Archive, friends and students, when I asked them to complete the following lines:

My mother is really funny because:

*My mother decided to knit me a hat. She really, really wanted to knit. She asked what color hat I’d like. I said, “whatever you like.” She asked what style I’d like. I said, “whatever you like.” So, she went to the store and bought me a hat. She said, “If none of this mattered to you, I figured why am I knocking myself out?”  Best recovery from Jewish motherhood I can recall, and a much-loved hat.

*She keeps several years of dark brown bananas in the freezer,  just in case someone might wake up one morning and want to bake banana bread with bananas from 1987.

*One year, on Pesach, she made matzah balls that came out exceptionally dense, so she insisted that we put on our pajamas and  play baseball with them in the kitchen (so as not to let them go to waste.)

*She insists she’s not a feminist (she totally is a feminist)!

*You have just induced a nervous breakdown. My mother isn’t funny.

The funniest thing my mother ever said to me is:

*When I was younger, I asked my Mom about how I could become a princess.  She said it would never happen, because despite there being a few cute princes out there, like William and Harry, they weren’t Jewish, so it was out of the question.

*The funniest thing my mother ever said to me is in explaining the board game Blokus: “the rules of the game are: you can touch someone else anywhere you want to but you can only touch yourself (meaning your own pieces) in the corners.”

*Take a snack for the car — how ’bout a lemon or a sweet potato?

*”Please remove your listening device from the entrance of the house. You know, the thing that plays

music – the pod. Is Carol King on your pod?”

*          *          *          *

Thanks to all of who shared their anecdotes. (Note to my daughters: Ok, I surrender! Jewish mothers – like all mothers – are funny!

But as we laugh, let’s remember, especially during this week of extraordinary historic significance, what a profound difference mothers can make, and of course, grandmothers as well (there should be many more books about them!) As President-elect Obama has made clear, his landmark victory was also theirs.

Joyce Antler, author of You Never Call! You Never Write! spent the past week guest-blogging on Jewcy.  This is her parting post.  Want more?  Buy her book!

The post What Makes a Jewish Mother Funny appeared first on Jewcy.

Her college alumni magazine ran a special feature about the special group of six female friends, my daughter among them, who had remained as close during the post-graduate decade as they had during their college years. Now they numbered two teachers, a poet, photographer, a literature scholar, and a comedian.

And when the group reunites this upcoming May, it will be to celebrate another milestone, my daughter’s wedding. It’s been a wonderful fall, with me cheering on my daughter and her fiancé as they joyfully create their wedding plans. It was very different for my generation, both in terms of the timing of our marriages and the commandments we received from our parents on how to conduct our nuptials.

At 32, my daughter has seen a few of her friends precede her to the altar, but not many, and in this I think she is typical of her generation. Marriage or a committed relationship (with a man or woman) or serial entanglements or none at all—each individual precedes at her own pace and with little of the frenzy that affected the women of my generation. Most of my friends were engaged or married in the year after graduation and some before, and if not, they were seriously looking and hoping. Most of us had our children in our twenties. When I gave birth to my first child at 34, the words “elderly primapara” appeared on my chart. The obstetrician treated me like the anomaly which he (and I) both thought I was. What a difference a generation makes!

Mine was the generation that had no female professors, that graduated into a world where “Help Wanted” ads appeared in male- and female-segregated columns, where on my first CV I listed my typing speed and my height and weight (I still am astonished at that, let alone how thin I was), right after my Phi Beta Kappa award. This was the early 1960s and a lot was about to happen.

For the most part, the changes have been astonishingly positive, both in terms of identifying the social problems that confronted women and finding remedies. Yet so many mind-boggling problems remain; in many arenas, the freedoms that women have won seem fragile and partial at best.

Even when they are settling down to lives that seem full of promise, young women tell me about the pressures they feel. Whether it be demands to have the “perfect” wedding (let’s skip that, daughter # 1, okay?) or to become “perfect” mothers with “perfect” careers, somehow the prescriptive rules of the era I thought we had left behind seem to be resurfacing with a vengeance. With ever rising standards of achievement and without proper social supports (like decent employment options and adequate maternity leave), young mothers today are learning that “having it all” may be a vain delusion.

But though such a goal may seem both out of reach and as old-fashioned as those sex-segregated "Help Wanted” columns or throwing wedding bouquets to gaggles of hopeful women, my message to my daughter is to keep fighting for it. Having it all–whatever “it” is–will be worth the trouble, if you can get it on your own terms. At the end of the day, each woman can shape or hold her own proverbial bouquet in ways as unique as she is.

Joyce Antler author of You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother, will be guest blogging on Jewcy this week. Stay Tuned.

The post On Weddings, Help-Wanted Ads, and “Having it All” appeared first on Jewcy.

Yesterday I sat next to a cousin of Silverman at a luncheon of the Gotham Chapter of the Brandeis National Committee. This lovely lady told me that Sarah’s father, nicknamed “the Schlepper” by another family member, proudly sat his youngest daughter down when she was only three and taught her all the swear words. And Silverman, innocent as a fox with her sly humor, has been spouting them ever since. Silverman’s edgy routines, like Jon Stewart’s arch humor, are current examples of Jewish political comedy. And "the Silverman Hypothesis"–that her video, seen by millions on You-Tube–influenced the vote of Florida Jews–is being taken seriously by social scientists. We should never underestimate the influence of comedy on everyday politics. Silverman is not the first female Jewish satirist with a distinctly political bent.

But while Jewish male humor has long been recognized as virtually synonymous with the American comedy tradition in the US, the Jewish female comedic tradition has long been overlooked. This was brought home to me some years ago, when I dedicated my book on Jewish women’s history, The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America, to my two daughters, calling them "badkhntes of the next generation." Yiddish language experts discouraged my use of the word, telling me that there was no feminine form for badkhen, the Yiddish word meaning jester or clown. The badkhen, who had amused Jews in Europe for hundreds of years with his witty rhymes, composed on the spot at weddings, was a formative influence on the creators of Yiddish theater and may be seen as the forerunner of today’s standup comedian. However, this important Jewish icon, as well as the long tradition he started, has been considered wholly male. To ignore the funny Jewish women who helped shape American humor is to miss some of the most distinctive expressions of American comedy–not only Sarah Silverman, but other contemporary Jewish women comics–like Judy Gold, Jackie Hoffman, Cory Kahaney and Jessica Kirshon –four women who serve as the guides to a wonderful film journey through the Jewish female comedy tradition.

The film, MAKING TROUBLE, produced by the Jewish Women’s Archive, introduces us to six legendary comics: Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Gilda Radner, and Wendy Wasserstein. All of these women were troublemakers who used their comedy to make people look at the world in a new way, challenging their assumptions and pushing them to new understandings. Sarah Silverman is the latest in a long line of Jewish comedians to use her platform in this way, except that she is doing it through the Internet and TV. Comedy and politics are porous; they live and breath together. Sarah Silverman, like Tina Fey, whose spot-on impersonation of Governor Palin was a highlight of this season’s campaign coverage, forcefully demonstrate that while men might be from Mars and women from Venus, political humor traverses the gender divide.

The Great Schlep http://thegreatschlep.com/site/index.html

The Jewish Women’s Archive

http://www.jwa.org

Making Trouble

http://www.makingtrouble.com/

Joyce Antler author of You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother, will be guest blogging on Jewcy this week. Stay Tuned.

The post The Battle of the Sarahs appeared first on Jewcy.

ANSWER: WHO CARES? WE’RE CHANGING THE WORLD!

In a week when the presidential election matters more than in almost two generations, as Jews we need to remember and act on our legacies as social reformers.

From the striking garment workers in the early twentieth century whose militancy helped establish the modern labor movement, to the transformative civil rights and women’s liberation movements of modern times, Jews have been in the vanguard of social change.

And Jewish women, even the much maligned "pushy" Jewish mother, have been right up there in the front lines, advocating, lobbying, marching, protesting.

While we are amused by the comic caricature of guilt-inducing, nagging, “Jewish mothers” –ones who, like Philip Roth’s fictional Sophie Portnoy, intruded inappropriately into every crevice of their children’s lives– we would do well to remember that down through the generations, Jewish women have been vital to the politics of everyday life and to the nation as a whole.

In my own family there was my grandmother, tiny but militant, who went out on strike with the garment workers in 1909, and was then arrested for striking a policeman. The judge released her when she promised not to hit any more coppers! Later in life, after she married and had four children, one of whom died from a burst appendix when she could not find a doctor to treat him, she became a fierce protector of the family’s well-being, especially after her husband, my grandfather, laid off from his milliner’s job during the Depression, could no longer find work. She scrimped and saved every penny, and was back on the picket lines protesting the high price of kosher meat and bread, whenever price increases seemed to be price gauging.

In both actions, my grandmother represented thousands of other housewives who as consumers both supported workers and acted on behalf of their families and communities to mobilize against unfair pricing. During the famous New York City kosher butcher boycott of 1902, this “dangerous” class of women made life miserable for unscrupulous merchants as well as the policemen who came to arrest them (my grandmother was not yet among them). One policeman even had an “unpleasant moist piece of liver” thrust in his face. It would not to do have such an “infuriated” mob of mothers on the loose, wrote The New York Times. But the mothers won their boycott, the first of many that followed.

These mothers acted in their own best interests but they also wanted a socially responsible workplace and cared that employers not exploit their workers. Today, following upon the scandals at kosher processing plants in Iowa, when there is a growing interest in eating foods that are produced in a way that meets Jewish ethical standards, e.g., respectful of the environment, avoiding cruelty to animals, and with responsible work practices—we think back to these foremothers who organized—and even threw around livers and chickens!—to demonstrate their convictions about justice and fairness.

In more modern times, as women have increasingly achieved power directly in the political sphere, Jewish women have served on boards of supervisors, city councils, mayor’s offices, state legislatures and in governor’s mansions, as well as in the hallowed halls of the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, as well as far-flung diplomatic posts. As a group they have been bold and innovative, fighting for the so-called women’s issues of education and child care, health and reproductive rights, and women’s rights more broadly, but also championing economic and security issues that they consider to be significant “women’s issues” as well.

The granddaughters and great-granddaughters of the immigrant women who fought sweatshop bosses and protested against unfair pricing have arrived front and center on the stage of American political life. They take with them the inheritance of generations of Jewish women whose passion for political life and deep-seated commitment to social and moral values has been exercised in a variety of effective ways, both inside and outside of conventional political channels.

* * *

Do you have any “dangerous” women in your family background? How much do you know about them and what legacies do they offer you?

LINKS:

Jewish women history-makers

http://jwa.org/exhibits/wov/

Kosher Wars http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12kosher-t.html

Joyce Antler author of You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother, will be guest blogging on Jewcy this week. Stay Tuned.

The post Election Day appeared first on Jewcy.

Every time I vote I think of the potential of the process to express and protect the interests of minorities, and I remember how long it took both African-Americans and women in the U.S. to achieve that privilege. For women, it was 72 years, to be exact, counting from the first women’s right convention at Seneca Falls in 1848 to the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920. Jews can be proud of the role they played in the fight for woman suffrage. One of the earliest activists on behalf of equal opportunity for women was Ernestine Rose, a rabbi’s daughter born in a Polish shtetl, who defied her father, and his expectations that she would marry there, young and conventionally. Rose emigrated to England and then to the U.S., where she became an early leader in the effort to give women the vote. Suffrage notable Susan B. Anthony named Rose as one of the most important women’s rights leaders in history.

In the next generation, there was Maud Nathan, an Orthodox Jewish woman who had been a leader in the consumer’s movement and who became known as “the society woman” in politics. One of the movement’s most original tacticians, she invented open-air automobile campaigns, "24-hour" speeches given from cars, and throwing out suffrage literature wrapped around coins. Because suffragists were associated with "masculine" women, Nathan dressed in her finest gowns when she spoke at mass meetings. “When I hear a woman speak so well in the public interest,” Woodrow Wilson remarked after hearing her, “it almost makes me believe in woman suffrage." When the president belatedly became a suffrage supporter–a shift important to its final victory– Maud happily took the credit.

But it was not only elite Jewish women who fought for the right of women to vote. The passage of a suffrage amendment in New York State, which served as a major catalyst to the 1920 federal amendment, was largely attributed to the Jewish vote—78 of the 100 pro-suffrage election districts were immigrant Jewish neighborhoods.

For Jewish mothers who had been active in the suffrage fight, it was fitting that the final victory happened because a widowed mother, far away in Tennessee, spoke out. By mid-August, 1920, 35 of the necessary 36 states had ratified the suffrage amendment. If Tennessee failed to pass the amendment, the long battle would be lost.

With a virtual tie predicted, the climactic moment fell to Harry Burn, the youngest member of the Tennessee legislature, who had previously voted with the anti-suffrage forces. But in the end, the 24-year-old listened to his mother, who sent a telegram pleading with her son to be a “good boy” and stand up for women’s rights. With Burn’s vote, Tennessee became the deciding state to ratify. Eight days later, on August 26, 1920, the amendment became law.

We thank Mrs. Burn for intervening in her son’s life, as we do all those women who worked to ensure the victory of this legislative milestone. Mothers have often gotten a bum rap for just such “nagging,” but without them, our political lives would be that much poorer.

* * * * * *

Can you think of a time when your mother’s “nagging” likewise did some particular good– for you, and others?

LINKS:

Ernestine Rose

http://jwa.org/this_week/10/19/Ernestine_Rose/

http://www.brandeis.edu/centers/wsrc/ernestinerose/index.html

Seneca Falls

http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/docs/seneca.html

Jokes from the Borscht Belt:

Q. What did the Jewish mother bank teller say to her customer?

A. You never write, you never call, you only come to see me when you need money.

Q. How many Jewish mothers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A. Never mind, I’ll just sit here in the dark.

Q. What did the waiter ask the group of dining Jewish mothers?

A. "Is anything all right?"

A woman takes her son to the doctor. At the end of the appointments the doctor calls the mother into his office and says, "Mrs. Goldstein, I’m afraid that your son Barry has an Oedipus complex." To which Mrs. Goldstein replies, "Oedipus, Shmedipus, just as long as he loves his mother."

Reprinted from You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother by Joyce Antler published by Oxford University Press, Inc. © Joyce Antler, 2007

Joyce Antler author of You Never Call! You Never Write!: A History of the Jewish Mother, will be guest blogging on Jewcy this week. Stay Tuned.

The post Thoughts on Election Eve: Oedipus, Shmpedipus, As Long As He Loves His Mother appeared first on Jewcy.