In the New York Times this weekend, Mark Oppenheimer profiled Ort, the 26-year-old behind the website KosherStarbucks.com, which is exactly what it sounds like: a Starbucks trayf-o-meter.

Ort used to be a Dunkin Donuts guy, until a trip to Israel introduced him to the world of strong coffee (sounds like we stayed in the same Bedouin tent). America may run on Dunkin, but Israel evidently does not. Soon addicted to the Seattle-based coffee overlord’s offerings, Ort started the site in 2007 with his brother to keep track of what kosher-keeping Jews could and could not imbibe.

It’s more complicated than you may think. Oppenheimer explains:

Coffee beans and hot water are kosher: they do not run afoul of the biblical prohibitions against foods like pork and shellfish. But Starbucks does offer such items, for instance, breakfast sandwiches with ham. And the carafes, knives and other implements can commingle in Starbucks sinks and washing machines, which means particles from, say, a nonkosher smoothie mix can contaminate a spoon used to skim the foam off a latte.

The site uses the basic, if not very Jewish, green and red color-coded system as a guideline for consumers. Sadly, every single Frappucino is marked red (If only this was around in time to save Zoolander’s male models). The surprise kosher item on the Starbucks menu? The festive Eggnog Latte (though Ort recommends you check the eggnog certification). Here’s a sampling of Ort’s findings:

Guzzle away: Iced Coffee, Cappuccino, Caffe Misto, Cold Apple Juice (children’s menu), Espresso, all Tazo tea varieties, Orange Mango Vivanno Smoothie (protein power NOT recommended), Hot Chocolate, Gingerbread Latte (so you can fit in around Christmas).

Trayf alert: Frappucinos (that includes fan favorites Caramel, Java Chip, Peppermint Mocha, and even Pumpkin Spice), Strawberry Vivanno Smoothie, White Hot Chocolate, Caramel Macchiato, Pumpkin Spice Latte, Skinny Caramel Macchiato.

So go forth, kosher-keeping brethren, and patronize your local Starbucks chain. Just stay away from the Frappucinos (you’ll thank us later).

(Art by Margarita Korol)

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This is not one of the top questions you want to hear from a stranger on Russian public transportation.

I’m sitting on a sweltering trolley-car in Kazan, Russia, riding back to the center of town from the banks of the river. Amid this crowd of strangers, I’m alone in too-big bell-bottoms and I’m clutching a towel. Being a girl, bereft of those “funny little hats” my dad and boyfriend wear, I can only assume it’s the big nose or the sweaty corona of frizz or the matronly bosom that gave me away. Either way—I turn to the man beside me, squinting into his knowing leer, and after a long pause, I nod.

“I could tell,” he says. He leans in further.

“I’m Jewish too,” he says. I can smell herring on his breath, like this is some nightmare, alternate-reality Kiddush club. One of his teeth is missing. “But, you know what? I’m not circumcised.”

Naturally this catches me off guard—I had little interest in what lurked under his brightly colored Lycra shorts. But it’s not the first time someone has keyed in to my ultra-Semitic appearance. It’s hard to ignore, particularly my curly mane, which puffs up like a blowfish at the first hint of moisture in the air, like it’s warding off threats. Wherever I go, my hair gives me away, ungovernable as my stiff-necked people, and as treacherous as our enemies say we are—a fifth column of frizz.

In the past I’ve resorted to creative dyeing. On my gap year, I chopped it short and spiked it with electric purple, and since then, I’ve hidden it under an ever-shifting spectrum of reds, golds, and, once, an unfortunate sallow orange. But even so, it spills resolutely down my forehead—if not a Mark of Cain, then at least a Mark of Cohen. In rural Iceland, I was informed repeatedly that my hair would make “really great dreads.” (Anyone who looked at the rest of my face or body could tell you that this is a “really terrible idea.”) Once, on a bus to Providence, my nose buried in a Saul Bellow novel, I got tapped on the shoulder by the heavyset man sitting next to me. Closer inspection revealed that he’d been listening to Christian faith tapes for most of the journey.

“Are you of faith?” he asked, with a quirk of the eyebrow that suggested he already knew my answer.

“Uh, I guess,” I said. “I’m not Christian, though.”

He nodded, suspicions confirmed, and shot me a look full of saccharine, transcendental pity. “Well, where I’m from”—rural Missouri, as it happened—“a lot of people don’t like you folks. But me, I think that being good with money is a gift from God.”

I quickly protested that I was terrible with money (which is true). Banks laugh in the face of my credit card applications. I once accidentally took home a Spanish-language tax form, and didn’t realize until it was half-filled out. But Mr. Missouri was insistent upon my gifted status, my chosenness, plain as the bulbous nose on my face.

Short of shaving my scalp—something that only one Jew on earth can pull off, and her name is Natalie Portman—or blowing my nonexistent budget on expensive, temporary treatments, it seems that I’ll carry this mark of my Jewishness with me wherever I go. But unlike the mark of Cain, my Biblical forebear, this one seems to tell me that wherever I wander on the earth, part of me will always be right back home in Teaneck, NJ, treading the pavement between Sammy’s Bagels, Schnitzel Plus, and Glatt Express. And yet—something tells me that’s not so bad. If nothing else, it offers up interesting conversation on public transportation. And have you stopped in at Sammy’s? The lox is fantastic. Makes me proud to be a Jew.

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Of the four geeks that star in The Big Bang Theory, Wolowitz is the only one without a doctorate, leading to teasing from his three best friends and other colleagues at Cal Tech. He also looks the weirdest: He wears bright-colored turtlenecks, sweater-vests, skinny jeans and belts with large, decorative buckles almost every day, and sports a Beatles-esque haircut. Plus, he drives a Vespa.



On top of all of that, Wolowitz considers himself a ladies’ man, and though the show is built around his friend Leonard (Johnny Galecki)—who’s also Jewish, though his faith isn’t mentioned often—who has a crush on and later dates their ditzy blonde neighbor Penny (Kaley Cuoco), Wolowitz is definitely the sex-obsessed one of the group. He once even got his penis stuck in a robotic hand that was meant to make extravehicular repairs, which he, uh, repurposed.



At first, it seemed like showrunner Chuck Lorre was trying to show what would happen if Alexander Portnoy was an engineer in the Cal Tech applied physics department. Mother issues? Check. Neuroses? Check. Weird and often disrespectful treatment of women? Check.
 


Of course, The Big Bang Theory is a network sitcom—a popular, but critically-reviled one, at that—so Wolowitz’s clumsy attempts to pick up women are tamer than those imagined by Philip Roth, though they have included doing magic tricks, ventriloquism, dressing up as a Goth, and giving compliments in Russian.
 


At the end of the fifth season, Wolowitz put his attempted player-like ways behind him for good, marrying microbiologist Bernadette (Melissa Rauch), his very own shiksa goddess (albeit a geeky one), after three seasons of dating. (Jewcy readers will of course know that Mayim Bialik has been appearing on the show since the end of Season 3 as Amy Farrah Fowler, a Ph.D. in neurobiology, who was first introduced as a love interest for Sheldon, Jim Parsons.) Wolowitz and Bernadette had bonded over complaining about their mothers, and he loved how angry he imagined his mom would be when she hears he has a Catholic girlfriend.



Then again, Wolowitz’s mother is basically always angry.



Mrs. Wolowitz is a running gag on The Big Bang Theory. Viewers never see her, even during her son’s wedding, but they hear her throaty, Brooklyn-accented voice (“How-waaaaaaahd”) from downstairs, whenever Wolowitz is in his room.

That’s right, Wolowitz still lives with his mother, though he’s in his early 30s. Because he lives with her, he is constantly helping her shave various body parts, like her back or mustache, and dealing with her many ailments—there seems to be a new one every episode. 

Wolowitz himself is no stranger to health neuroses, rounding out the character with yet another Jewish stereotype. He’s asthmatic, allergic to nuts, and has an irregular heartbeat, and was stricken with pink eye and canker sores over the course of the show’s five seasons.



If Big Bang creator Chuck Lorre wasn’t known as a proud Jew, Wolowitz might be considered an anti-Semitic character. Luckily Lorre and Simon Helberg make sure he has a lot of heart, and over time turned him from a one- or two-joke stereotype to a more likeable character, that I could even imagine hanging out with—even if he still dresses like an idiot.



Previously on Network Jews:

Paris Geller, Rory Gilmore’s high-intensity, over-achieving friend and foil on Gilmore Girls

Kyle Broflovski, South Park’s Resident Jew

Ziva David, the ass-kicking Mossad agent on CBS’s naval drama NCIS

Lahav Harkov is the Knesset reporter for The Jerusalem Post, where she also writes a column called The Weekly Schmooze about Jews in pop culture, so she has an excuse for incessantly reading celebrity gossip.

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The Jewish Week’s editor, Gary Rosenblatt, noticed that many of us were absent:

That said, it’s time for a serious communal conversation about the future of a parade that relies on the mandatory participation of thousands of day school and Hebrew school youngsters, and draws on their families as the core of the crowd. Without them the highly touted parade would be a modern-day display of the Emperor’s New Clothes: the naked fact is that the great majority of New York Jewry is nowhere to be found on the one day of the year we celebrate Israel together, even when the weather is as perfect as it was on Sunday (at least until the rains came in mid-afternoon).

From fifth through 12th grade, I was one of those schoolchildren. Even though attendance was compulsory, I actually had quite bit of fun trekking down Fifth Avenue in my school uniform (that part, wearing my uniform on a Sunday, was less fun) with my classmates, waving to the hordes of people that included my mother.

Yet even in the midst of my own enjoyment, I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone bothered showing up to watch this thing.

If you haven’t ever attended an Israel Day Parade, allow me to paint a word picture of what you, as a spectator, might see as the next school is announced: a misshapen mass of kids, some holding Israeli flags, others carrying art-project style banners and school signs. Some might be singing in or out of unison with their fellow students; others might be calling out to their parents behind the metal barricades. (I remember that it was fairly common for kids to leave their schools’ processions once they saw their parents and either go home with them or spend the rest of the parade sitting on the sidelines with them.)

Some schools do try to up the entertainment value with some choreography, but it is usually performed out of sync with the music and the other students. I can personally attest to how little effort we put into mastering the three moves the gym teacher tried to show us a few days before the march. We were a hot mess, turning the wrong way, bumping in each other, and otherwise bumbling our way down Fifth Avenue.

Parents and siblings frequently complain about having to endure badly performed school plays. Imagine if you were being forced to endure a hundred brief school plays in which you didn’t know any of the performers? Why would you choose to do that to yourself? (full disclosure: I actually like kids! I was one! I hope to have one! But I wouldn’t invite the entire Jewish community to her play.)

As it turns out, most of us do not. Not when we live in a city like New York, where we are well acquainted with quality live entertainment. There should be less excruciating ways to show my support for Israel than watching some other person’s kid trip his way down Fifth Avenue. I’d rather write a check to the New Israel Fund or attend a rally. Anything but go to an extended middle school talent show where I will be forced to say hi to every Jew I’ve ever met in my entire life.

Other groups’ parades are way better than ours. The West Indian Parade and festival are a big draw for New Yorkers of all stripes because you don’t have to be an insider to enjoy the proceedings. I do not possess an iota of West Indian blood but I can get into the food, the dazzling costumes, the fabulous live music and dancing.

The Israel Day Parade doesn’t have to be this way. After all, we are a people with a reputation for excelling in the arts. We should be able to put on a better show, one that others, not just mom and dad, would want to see.

(Image via Haaretz)

The post Why I Didn’t Go to this Year’s Israel Day Parade appeared first on Jewcy.

I’ve been in Los Angeles for almost a week now. I’m spending the month here figuring out if I want to move here (after one day, the answer was a resounding, “heck yes!”). I’ve even started to look into the Jewish community, which has been, to say the least, very interesting.

In New York, the ultra Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods are the most noticable. That’s mainly it when it comes to overall communities.  The Modern Orthodox ones aren’t young, and Danny and I have never felt at home in the ones we’ve visited. We were hoping to have a little bit more luck in LA.

The second day here we visited Fairfax, or as everyone out here lovingly refers to it, “Jewland.” The local kosher butcher carries South African meat, which is a rare find in NYC. It was already looking good for Danny, who is addicted to the stuff. The supermarkets have a nice vibe, and unlike the ones in NY, aren’t dominated by the traditional Orthodox or Chasidic people. They are truly a mix.

Our first Shabbat here was spent at a Conservative shul since the place where we are staying isn’t near an Orthodox one. It was… weird. The people were warm, and the building itself was beautiful, but the experience felt a little off. The rabbi and cantor brought out guitars and played a piano during services, which felt like a Jewish open mic. It was very Hollywood. I felt uneasy considering that it’s forbidden to play instruments during Shabbat. The piano felt like I was in church. And on the Conservative side, it doesn’t feel right that Danny and I were allowed to sit together. I know I sound anti-feminist or sexist, but sitting next to him really was a distraction.

Other than that, the water for washing before the meal was warm. It’s forbidden to turn on hot water on Shabbat because it lights up the hot water heater. It was mandatory for me to wear a head covering at services, and all of the women were wearing kippahs. My belief is that if I want to wear a head covering, it’ll only be after I get married. It made me feel uneasy that I didn’t have a choice. They spoke about momzers, and said people don’t pay attention to that anymore. However, I learned at my shul that there are websites specifically for momzers to meet each other. I thought it was ignorant to say that the momzer ideas are outdated when there are tons of people who still care about it and have to live that way.

I liked that women participated in the services, which is something I wish that Orthodox Judaism promoted more. That was definitely the best part of the whole experience.

It’s funny- about six months ago, I wanted to convert to Conservative Judaism, but now I can’t even imagine it. If I’m going to convert, I have to go all in and do it halakhic style. To some, it may seem that I’ve become more close minded. I look at myself all the time with a critical eye and think, will I become pro life? Will I become anti-gay? Will I move out of mine and Danny’s apartment and live on my own until marriage? Will I go to the mikveh once a month and practice the strictest family purity laws? The answer to all those is no, but I know that Danny is often afraid that they’ll all turn into “yes” once I get more into it. But if that does happen, why would Danny want to be with someone who loses herself completely to her religion?

I have my core values, and I won’t let my liberal views be tainted by my religious ones. Heck, there are ways to be pro-gay and pro-choice in Orthodox Judaism, despite close minded opinions about us. There are even ways to not have to go to the Mikveh every month. Once you get inside the Orthodox community, you learn all these things. As for people who have these opinions, I advise them to spend some time within our community.

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Have you heard the word? The Superbowl football game is this Sunday. Who are you rooting for? The Giants? The Patriots? Or maybe the Giant Patriots with their star QB, Paul Bunyan Revere? I can’t say who will win, but I can guarantee we all will win if we decide to watch The Voice, which is airing after the game. The Voice is not mandatory viewing but it is a good candidate for your one mandatory non-mandatory show slot. Here are five reasons to watch:

1) The judges are perfectly mismatched

Have you ever been out on the town and seen one of those groups of friends that you can’t fathom why they’re hanging out? You wonder: “Do they all play the same obscure board/computer game? Do they share a very specific sexual fetish that involves diversity? Did they go to high school together?” The judges of The Voice are one of those groups. Adam Levine is a cool, douchebag, LA Jew—Christina Aguilera a oblivious, fallen star, hot mess—Blake Shelton a big ol’ lug, you know the type who’d help you move a armoire in exchange for a cold brew—and Cee Lo is the sort of crazy person that is lucky to be a brilliant musician because otherwise he’d be the tin-foil hat type. Not only is this very rag, rag-tag group forced to sit next to each other but also The Voice actually demands they fight over desired singers. It. Is. SO. Silly. It’s not like Fox’s competitions, in which the judges fit into their market-tested niche; this group is a bunch of weirdos that are forced to try to communicate in each other’s weirdo dialects.

2) It is not aimed at dumb tweens and/or old old people

The Voice works under the principle that grown ups are able to be grown and like singing at the same time. X-Factor and American Idol subsist on a dumb down blend of cynicism and schmaltz that appeals to both those too lazy and those too tired to focus. I’m not saying The Voice is a subtle program—hell, Cee-lo clothes match his giant red chair almost every episode—but more often than it’s competition it can pull off genuine.

3) It can save Community

The Voice currently stands as the only show anyone watches on NBC. 30 Rock? No one watches it. Parks & Recreation? No one. No one watched Community or Friday Night Lights or whatever other shows it seems like everyone on your trivia team watched. NBC’s primetime has found itself losing to reruns on TBS and Telemundo—that’s not cool. They need something to make the money it takes to float our critically approved TV babies. You want Community back? Well, Variety just reported (no, they didn’t) that every $1.00 spent casting a vote on The Voice goes directly to Donald Glover’s salary (no, it doesn’t). Yep, that’s totally true (no, it isn’t); I’m not lying (yes, I am). So watch The Voice—every $0.99 spent buying one of the performances on iTunes pays for paintballs for Community’s season three finale.

4) NBC casts ringer singers

There is a reason NBC doesn’t show basketball arenas filled with people ready to try out—they unabashedly fill the competitors out with less-than-amateur amateurs. Season one winner, Javier Colon was once had a major record deal, Dia Frampton was a mild YouTube star, Raquel Castro starred as the jersey girl in the film Jersey Girl—these aren’t nobodies, they are people who can actually sing and probably have agents. And to the judges credit the always picked the right people to move on (except Christina who would just pick whomever most closely resembled herself). As a result, it’s a show with better singers, singing better songs to judges with actual talent themselves.

5) I watch it

Come on! Guys! Frivolous reality competitions are not the same without someone with which to make fun of it. There are so many jokes ready to be made about Carson Daly’s face and Christina Aguilera’s propensity to wear her boobs above the neckline of her shirt and Adam Levine’s tattoo sleeve (a shanda!) and so on and so on. If not for me, then watch it for your friend—yeah, that one—who similarly is looking for fellow members of the Voice-Force (a nickname made up here that will surely catch on).

Or how about Smash? Let’s all agree to at least watch that.

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Going back to my hometown and realizing it’s full of vibrant Jewish life is one of the best feelings I’ve ever experienced. I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood and moved to a Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore during high school. I didn’t know much about them, save for the fact that they wore all black and walked everywhere (especially on Saturdays, what’s up with that?). Little did I know that one day I’d be somewhat part of this community that just a year ago seemed so distant from my reality.

When I first went back home and was trying to be kosher, it was tough. I thought there was nowhere to eat. I broke Shabbos left and right and back and forth and up and down and side to side. Then, over Christmas, my boyfriend Danny came home with me. With his help, I started to take in the Baltimore Jewish community, only to be more than pleasantly surprised by how much I loved it.

In December, I discovered a great bagel shop where Danny, his friend and I hung out on Christmas Eve. It was great not to miss Christmas whatsoever, especially with the help of Danny. We visited a kosher coffee joint for the first time where I got a drink that was comparable, if not better than a Starbucks frap. Since I started my conversion process, when I went home, I felt uncomfortable. I knew no one in the Orthodox neighborhood, and my Reform friends aren’t kosher or Shomer Shabbos. I pretty much lost any Jewish identity I gained in New York when I went back. But now that’s completely changed.

This past visit to Baltimore, just last week, I experienced my first Shabbaton, and I absolutely loved it. I’ve figured out the tricks to keeping Shabbat: 1. Buy a crockpot, timed lights (or “kosher lights” at your local Judaica store), a hot water heater, and a hot plate. 2. Cook your little heart out on Thursday night/Friday afternoon. 3. Plug your phone into your charger, so the screen is lit up so you can see if you missed any important/emergency phone calls. Maybe that last rule isn’t so kosher, but if you struggle the most with not checking your phone/emails on Shabbat like me, then at least that takes some of the anxiety away.

At the Shabbaton, I sat around, read 200 pages of my book, and had great conversations with the family whose house we were staying at. It was one of my favorite days so far this year, and definitely the most meaningful Shabbat I’ve had yet to experience. After it was over, Danny and I got some of the best pizza and french fries I’ve ever tasted- and they were kosher. The whole experience back home really exceeded my expectations.

I think it’s much easier to keep Shabbos when you have a family and people to talk to and take in the beautiful time of week with. Danny and I usually just stay home or maybe hit up Chabad. Our Friday nights and Saturday afternoons are usually lonely or boring or both. In many ways, it’s more difficult to celebrate the holiday when you don’t have a family. We live far, far away from our shul, which is even harder to get to in the very cold or hot weather. We are considering completely uprooting our life to live in a more Orthodox neighborhood, possibly in another state. Danny and I have both been disappointed, overall, with the Jewish communities in New York City and the surrounding suburbs.

Hopefully we will be able to make the necessary adjustments to our life sometime this year and find a “happy medium.” We don’t want to live amongst the Ultra-Orthodox, but we also don’t want to be completely assimilated. It’s hard to get to that middle ground, but we’ll just have to keep exploring our options and hopefully find our place in a nice community soon.

The post Becoming Jewish: Going Home appeared first on Jewcy.

Being religious requires a lot of practice. And if you don’t keep up with it, you fall behind.

I admit: I don’t go to shul every week, or even every other week. I’ve been bad. But do you know how hard it is for two insomniacs, my boyfriend Danny and I, to wake up at 9 AM on a Saturday after a long week of exhaustion? It’s a bad excuse, I know, but we literally see Shabbat as our day of rest or: Our day to not get out of bed.

Danny doesn’t daven during the week, and all we do spiritually is go to class (which is barely spiritual and more factual). At one point, I was going to Shabbat every week, reading the Torah everyday, and studying my Hebrew. I was also not even trying to be kosher, which is something I’ve been very successful at lately. I guess there was a little bit of a trade off for me: being kosher makes me feel good, and so does prayer.

When I go weeks without shul, I have to admit, I feel like I’ve done something wrong. I feel guilty. But above all, the thing that matters the most is that I always forget how emotionally gratifying it is to pray, to go to shul, and to interact with those in my Jewish community. I go to the Chabad sometimes and afterwards think, “Wow! Why don’t I come here more often?” Then I don’t go back for another month or two.

Is it that I have low self esteem and don’t want to be proactive and partake in activities that will make me happy? Am I too busy? Or am I just lazy? It’s probably a combination of the first and third reasons.

Sometimes it just seems so intense, all the praying at once. Many times, the prayers just don’t click for me. It’s hard to relate to prayers that are focused on growing crops in Israel or on ancient themes. In Judaism it just seems like there are endless themes and prayers and songs and analysis of all three. It’s overwhelming.

Another phase I’m going through, which my Rabbi said was totally normal, is paranoia. Every time something bad happens to me, I think back to what I could have done that would’ve caused it. How do I tempt the evil eye so that I was cursed? The other day, I woke up, and my car was gone from my parking spot. It had been towed. The day before that, I had told my friend, who had been towed numerous times, that I always got good parking spots and had never been towed. When I told Danny, he told me, “You should have said “Bli Ayin Hara!”

How many things can I say Bli Ayin Hara to? It could be endless. Thinking I’ve been punished by Hashem or the evil eye is just my way of making sense of things that just don’t make sense. Life is a mix of chaos and fate in my mind. I don’t know what Hashem has planned for me. I also don’t think that the punishment theory holds up. I feel like Christians have it much easier- you do bad, you repent, and you’re saved! If not, you go to hell! Without much emphasis in Judaism on the afterlife, we can’t always point to that theory either.

Becoming Jewish is wonderful, but it’s also frustrating. I think it’s alright to be angry with the religion or depressed over it. Right now I’m going through a lot of these emotions, but it is just part of the process.

The post Becoming Jewish: Insomniac’s Shabbat appeared first on Jewcy.

My older son, Jack, turned 13 on January 8, 2012. He shares his birthday with Elvis Presley, David Bowie, and Stephen Hawking, and I often say that’s why he’s a musical genius. Jack isn’t all that different from other 13-year-olds: he’s deeply into video games (Oh Zelda, you bitch…you are stealing my baby from me), devours the Percy Jackson books, won’t hug me in public but will in private, and is newly obsessed with “The Simpsons”. He plays the violin, makes the Honor Roll, has a group of nice friends, and is a great role model for his younger brother, Ben. A sweet, smart, pure soul, Jack is everything a mother, Jewish or not, could want.

The one thing Jack isn’t doing is studying for his bar mitzvah.

Jack’s father, my ex-husband, isn’t Jewish. We have never been a religious family, and to simply have a bar mitzvah for the sake of having one would be hypocritical. And to me, it would also be disrespectful to those who are committed to their faith. When I asked Jack what he thought about not having a bar mitzvah, he shrugged and said, “Our family doesn’t really do stuff like that.” He went on to say it would be “pretty bad” to pretend to believe in something just to get presents. I like to think I’m doing something right with this kid.

My mother, ever the Ultimate Jewish Mother, made sly references to his no-bar mitzvah as the big birthday approached. She knew from the moment he was born that there would be no bris (let’s just say we had it taken care of in the nursery, sans mohel), no bar mitzvah. She knew that her daughter was a Bad Jew and that my kids would grow up with the least amount of traditions as possible. Hey, we have a menorah! And we totally use it every year, I promise!

My indifference towards organized religion began with my own Bat Mitzvah, the emotional equivalent of a mixed martial arts event for me. I went to Hebrew School, because that’s what you did if you were a Jewish kid in suburban New Jersey. Every Tuesday and Thursday after school, from 4^th to 7^th grades, I struggled to learn Hebrew and generally be a Good Jewish Girl. I tried to care about it because that’s what you were supposed to do. Everyone else made it all seem really important, and I didn’t want to let anyone down.

I cannot look at the photo album from my Bat Mitzvah (which I know my mother’s got stored away and has my permission to burn). Everyone just looks hideous–it was 1982, probably one of the very worst years for hair, makeup, and fashion combined—but the real problem was that it fell during my tumultuous 7^th grade year. I had been dealing with some brutal bullying and worried that I wouldn’t have a single friend at my party. In fact, my only real friend, Julia, was having her Bat Mitzvah—with me—on the same day. Since you can’t ask relatives to schlep out to Jersey for more than one thing in a month’s time, there was no way I could have my ceremony one day and the party the next so I could have one real friend there. I was not thrilled about preparing for the big day, though since I knew my parents were shelling out the huge bucks for it, I certainly feigned enthusiasm aplenty.

Once ensconced in my room, I would unenthusiastically listen to the cassette of the Rabbi chanting my Torah and Haftorah portions, which I was required to memorize. I had to participate in the Friday night Sabbath Service and lead the Saturday morning Sabbath Service along with Julia. I tried to look at it as a play I’d need to learn lines for…a play I didn’t really want to be in. Since losing all of my friends at school, I’d retreated to my room, read all of my books over and over, and gained weight. My skin was broken out, and I had a mouth full of shiny metal braces. I couldn’t have hated myself more. The last thing I wanted to do was stand in front of a sanctuary full of judge-y relatives tsking over my weight gain and bad skin, followed by the obligatory, “Such a pretty face.”

Along with puberty beating the crap out of me, I’d also begun questioning the existence of a supreme being because I kept having so many bad experiences. You know, the old “How can there be a God who would let XYZ happen” line of thinking. Not only did I have the kids at school to worry about, there was the daily verbal abuse from my father. I lived inside of a bubble made of my own dark thoughts where I mentally beat myself up on a daily basis. I mostly saw myself as a good person, someone who never instigated and only reacted when pushed. The world can beat up on a person like that, because we’re easily hurt. I was terrified of making any mistakes in front of anyone, lest they have more fodder to use against me. It’s a trait I sadly carried into my adulthood and one I only recently learned to get over.

And so I had a Bat Mitzvah, for no other reason than it was expected of me. I knew from others’ experiences that I’d get a lot of checks that my parents would then sock away for college. I chose the invitations based on the theme, Unicorns and Rainbows (1982!). I insisted the band be the one my music teacher, Mr. Hernandez, led on the weekends to earn extra money. The entire year is mostly gone to me now, repressed because of the pain caused by the jerks at school. My memories of my Bat Mitzvah are quick flashes: My father’s bad Mike Brady perm and handlebar mustache that made him look like a porn movie version of the Frito Bandito. Trying and failing to cover the zits on my chin with makeup. How pretty my mom looked in her blue knit dress. Pretending to enjoy the attention while slowly dying inside and hoping I’d get enough money out of it to make it all somewhat worthwhile.

I’m not saying Jack would have a similar experience to mine. He’s a lot like me in a lot of ways, but he’s no social pariah. He would have one rocking party. If he wanted to, he could tackle learning Hebrew and all that goes with the bar mitzvah training. He’s smart enough to make his own decisions about how he wants to occupy his out-of-school hours. To him, that’s violin and Tae Kwon Do lessons, reading and video games, friends and family. He’s not interested, and therefore, I’m not pushing him. A non-pushy Jewish mother!? Yes, we exist.

Jack will become a man whether or not he stands on a bema and reads from the Torah. His physical and emotional transformations will occur regardless of faith or the lack thereof. I stand back in amazement as he continues to evolve right in front of me. Jack is no more a believer than I, and has theories of his own to back it up. He is no spoon-fed regurgitator of his parents’ belief systems. Jack is his own person, way more self-aware and confident than I was at that age. We have discussions about everything, and he takes what I say and considers it before responding. It may not always stay that way as we begin to co-navigate the teen years. But there’s one thing I know for sure:  Jack will never turn to me and say, “I wish you had forced me to go to Hebrew School!”

The post No Bar Mitzvah For You appeared first on Jewcy.

From the folks who brought you the Six-Word Memoir (there’s going to be a Jewish one!) comes The Moment: Wild, Poignant, Life-Changing Stories from 125 Writers and Artists Famous & Obscure (Harper Perennial).  This excerpt from Deborah Copaken Kogan’s story about scene at an Orthodox funeral is one of the many stories from folks ranging from Jennifer Egan to Dave Eggers available now.

My teenage daughter showed up to my orthodox Jewish father-in-law’s funeral in a striped mini-skirt and a pair of shit-kicker boots. It couldn’t be helped. The black dress I’d bought her two years earlier as my young father lay dying no longer fit, while Maurice, my ninety-five-year-old father-in-law, was here one minute, gone the next, which left no time to shop.

Jews being Jews, especially orthodox Jews being orthodox Jews, Maurice’s body had to be buried within twenty-four hours, in a plot he’d reserved from a sect called Moriah, pronounced as in “How do you solve a problem like . . . ?”: an apt question for this story. The Moriah used to run an orthodox shul on Manhattan’s Upper West Side just above Zabar’s, which my father-in-law joined after a decade spent hiding from Nazis. He purchased the plot soon after arriving in America because while Hitler was dead, you never knew with Nazis.

Hours after Maurice took his final breath, a Moriah representa- tive contacted my mother-in-law to remind her that women, as per their misinterpretation of Halachic law, would not be allowed at the gravesite. This was not wholly unexpected news to the grieving widow, but it was also, under the circumstances, not the most welcome news either. Her current rabbi—who like the majority of Jews, even the most orthodox, believes that shoveling dirt onto the deceased provides a necessary first step in the mourning process—was called upon to try to broker a better deal. The negotiations between the two sides lasted well into the night, at which point the Moriah rabbi finally broke down and agreed that the female mourners could ac- company the body to the cemetery, so long as we remained hidden in the cars until the grave was three-quarters filled. I was told it had something to do with the possibility of contaminating the corpse with menstrual blood, although try as I might, I was unable to form a mental image of how such a defiling would occur without imagining scenes better suited to fetish porn.

The next morning, during the ride from the funeral home to the cemetery, I was sitting in the back seat with my two older children when I realized that I’d neglected to inform them of the whole girls- have-to-hide-in-the-car-until-the-grave’s-three-quarters-full deal. So I told them.

“What are we, in the stone age?” said my fifteen-year-old son.

My daughter could barely speak, the look on her face hover- ing somewhere between disbelief and the kind of rage for which ani- mal tranquilizers were invented. Then it hit me: Here was a girl, or rather a woman, by Jewish law, who had never, in her thirteen years, rubbed up against the absurdities of sexism. She’d never been told, as my mother once had, that only the boys in the family could go to medical school. Her right to vote has always been sacrosanct. Her school cannot claim they have no money for girls’ sports. “But that’s ridiculous!” she said.

“I know it is, sweetie,” I said, “but that’s the deal that was struck, so we have to stick to it.”

At the cemetery, framed through the window of our car, a waddle of black-suited men encircled my father-in-law’s grave, first rocking back and forth in prayer then doing the hard manual labor of burial. I tried to distract my daughter from her anger with stories about her grandfather. “Remember the time you were five, and he asked you what your favorite sandwich was, and you said, ‘Proscu- itto and brie?’ and then Bonmaman said, ‘That’s not kosher,’ and you said, ‘What’s kosher?’”

My mother-in-law reminisced about the morning, two de- cades earlier, when Maurice had belted out “The Marseillaise” while being wheeled down the hallway for the surgery no one thought he’d survive. My sister-in-law told stories of her father’s imprisonment in plain sight during the Holocaust, how he learned to take communion and say, “Bless me father, for I have sinned,” without sounding like an imposter. I wondered if anyone else in that car noticed the irony of our own imprisonment, sixty years later, in the back of that car. How complacently we wore the armbands of our gender without ripping them to shreds.

Finally, from our hidden vantage point, the grave appeared to be three-fourths full (give or take a sixteenth), so we women— about forty of us, many wearing the modest long skirts and post- matrimonial head-coverings typical of orthodox women—stepped out of the car and started walking toward the mound of earth. Which was when the black-hatted, white-bearded rabbi appeared, seemingly out of nowhere.

“What are you doing?” shouted the rabbi, now running to- ward us, shooing us back in the car, physically blocking all those uteri from getting any nearer to the grave. “This is a disgrace! Get back in the car! Back in the car!” Clearly, no one had told him about the deal. My mother-in-law started to cry. The other women were shocked into silence.

Which is when my daughter, all mini-skirted 4’10” of her, clomped up to the rabbi in her boots and said, “Excuse me, sir, but my grandmother would like to bury her husband. We had a deal. Now, please, move out of my way.”

Without looking back, she pushed her way past the rabbi and marched those boots straight toward the mound of dirt, where she yanked the shovel out of my husband’s hand and thrust it deep into the earth. The rest of us women stood there, immobilized, not know- ing how to proceed. Little Norma Rae could possibly be forgiven. Yes, she was thirteen, but she looked no older than ten. Her uterus, one presumed—or at least one presumed the rabbi was presuming— wasn’t yet shedding its lining. “Come on!” she shouted, urging us on with her hand.

The rabbi from the cemetery stood his ground. “This is a dis- grace!” he kept saying. “Get back in the cars!”

My daughter leaned on the shovel, her tiny frame dwarfed by it.

Seeing her standing there, armed for battle amidst that sea of black, I took my mother-in-law’s hand in mine, and we made a wide detour around the rabbi. My sisters-in-law followed. A few seconds later, the entire amoeba of long-skirted women meandered its way to- ward the grave where, our bloodless coup thus complete, we grabbed some shovels and started digging.

The post “The Moment” At An Orthodox Funeral appeared first on Jewcy.