On Lag B’Omer, the last Wednesday of the semester, I snuck past a challah baking event to say goodbye to the Stony Brook University Chabad Rabbi, Adam Stein. Rabbi Adam and I danced with his children to the music from a livestream of Meron in his backyard. At a pause, I tapped my kippa and tzitzit and said, “I wanted to rub it in. You were wrong; I did stay religious these four years.”

Rabbi Adam responded with a chuckle, “You cheated. You went home every Shabbos.”

Since graduating, I’ve told this story to friends and rabbis with responses ranging from, “I agree: That’s cheating,” to “I never had any doubts you’d stay Orthodox” to “I thought I’d have to cut you out of my life after a year in secular college.”

As a Five Towns-grown, Modern Orthodox boy, the fear of assimilating, especially in secular college, has been seeded and cultivated within me from almost the beginning of my education. When I decided to attend Stony Brook University for undergrad, almost everyone (not my parents) freaked out.

One high school principal still reminds me that I was the first student from DRS, my yeshiva, to attend SBU for undergrad (I don’t think I was). My Rabbi expressed concern but left it at that. One friend tried to convince some other friends to agree not to give up on me even though I would attend a school with little Orthodox Jewish representation. Rabbi Adam told me it would be virtually impossible to maintain my religious observance.

For this reason, or because I’m all about preparation, I established a religious foundation for myself six months before attending Stony Brook. I emailed two JLIC rabbis. I learned with my rabbi in Israel while talking about challenges and solutions with others. By the time I started my freshman year, I had scheduled learning time with five rabbis in Israel, two friends, my Rabbi, and my dad each week. I made an effort to attend every Hillel and Chabad event on campus and immediately joined the Hillel student board. This, in addition to my own academic schedule.

The number I remember hearing regarding modern and centrist Orthodox Jews going off the derech secular college is one in four. I’m deeply confused about what that means. Is “off the derech” total denial of God? A shift to Conservative or Reform Judaism? Intermarriage? Does “secular college” include Yeshiva University or Touro College?

Based on what friends and rabbis taught, I expected to show up to an 8:00 a.m. college class that opened with a powerpoint entitled, “Philosophical reasons why Judaism is completely wrong and you should be a Marxist.” I expected to be invited to party after party while secular Jewish and non-Jewish classmates goaded me into drinking my weight in vodka and exploring sexuality towards orgiastic nirvana.

In real life, girls who had no problem divulging their sex lives took my being shomer negia (not touching those of the opposite sex) more seriously than I did. Students asked me about the thing on my head and the strings hanging out of my shirt. I had hours long conversation about feminism and Judaism, about circumcision and consent, about religious growth and challenges.

Of course there were difficulties, too. It’s easy to skip shacharit (morning services) when there is no minyan and you have 8:00 a.m. classes. I couldn’t keep up that freshman semester learning schedule and so had to cut it down. But small lapses in observance happen to us all no matter where we are in life. It’s up to us to work up and bounce back.

I think it’s a major misconception that people lose their religion when they get to college. In my experience, many of these people really lost their religion years prior. College is their first opportunity to explore alternative lifestyles without having their communities breathing down their necks. Someone with an unwavering dedication to Shabbat, for example, won’t cut corners once they’re in university. But someone who only kept Shabbat because their family and friends at home did probably won’t keep it through four years of college.

Reasons for leaving the fold of Orthodox Judaism can range from intellectual disagreements to the general trend towards secularization to not feeling comfortable within the system. To deride secular college is to lower the fever rather than heal the infection.

In college, I’ve found, people are generally accepting to those who can defend their practices. This is no reason to get complacent, but I feel no more obliged to fear collegiate pressure to give up my religious beliefs than the girl I meet at Starbucks who tells me she’s a practicing Wiccan. We’ve both clearly thought about and can defend our respective religious practices.

Throughout my four years, I was more likely to get, “Hey, I’m sorry to bother you—and please tell me if I’m being offensive—but what exactly are you celebrating this holiday?” than any philosophical attack.

To expect all young Orthodox Jews to only engage within Orthodox spaces is idealistic at best. Rather than express undue concern and try to pressure students to stay in Israel a second (or first) year or switch to a more “Orthodox-friendly” campus, rabbis, friends, and community leaders can offer support for young Jews’ journeys. I had enough chutzpah to bother people to learn with me but sometimes this seeming lack of support can dishearten young Jews further.

It would be better to instill a foundational understanding of our values and a support system for when we, inevitably, find ourselves somewhere Orthodoxy does not reign. For all the concerns about my leaving the “Orthodox bubble,” I’ve emerged with greater commitment than some who have remained within these four years. And I’ve been exposed to a wider and more nuanced world.

College is a time to explore and find yourself. We shouldn’t be told to erect walls and go four years without evolution of thought.

Educate young Jews to love and understand the foundations of Judaism, support them, and let them be.

Image via Pixabay

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The think piece economy is booming, and we’re all scrambling for a cut. But what pieces are left unthought? How can I differentiate my voice from the thousands of others, especially when I don’t have an original perspective or care about anything?

So I decided to go for quantity, not quality, and churn out a bunch of ideas in one place. It’s great because neither you nor I need to commit to any one concept long-term. What’s cooler than think pieces? Listicles. And what’s better than listicles? Combining think pieces and listicles into one stunning-awful monster that’s sure to be the Next Big Thing.

1. Where Are The Jews in Disney? How Should We All Feel About That?

There are no Jewish Disney princesses and there are a disproportionate amount of blondes (but that’s a think piece for another day). Then again, there are a lot of groups missing from the Disney princess demographic, so maybe the lack of Jews is OK for now? But on the other hand it doesn’t feel right. But on the third hand I don’t think it matters all that much. Or does it? There. I just wrote a think piece, and you just read one, and we are all the smarter for it.

2. Spongebob Squarepants Didn’t Use Anti-Semitic Tropes And That’s Cool

With the musical now on Broadway, it’s a good time to remember that they could have easily made the stingy Mr. Krabs an anti-Semitic caricature but they didn’t! Good for them, especially since crabs are not kosher, so that would have been Problematic on two levels. Think-piece’d! Boom! Knocking them out.

3.  Reflections of a New York Jew Who Has Never Seen a Woody Allen Movie

I’m serious! I have never seen one Woody Allen movie, not even Antz. I grew up in a household with most of Woody Allen’s movies on VHS. I just never got around to watching them. Can you believe it? And now it’s, like, too late and I wouldn’t feel good watching them. Now is the part where I embellish the cultural push and moral pull I feel about this and end with a poignant conclusion about how ultimately it’s a personal choice about which lines we draw to separating creators from their work— or not. Also, I just don’t watch a lot of movies.

4.  Enough With The Sympathetic Nazi Puff Pieces

Like all Jewish families, my parents sat me down at a very young age and played White Supremacist Flashcards with me. I remember learning the difference between Halloween ghosts and Klansmen, and looking for that tell-tale red armband that all Nazis were required to wear. But times have changed and now Nazis are no longer legally required to identify themselves. They can be anyone! I know progressives trip over themselves to show how empathetic and open-minded they are, but come on. It would be one thing if the tones of the articles were like “This Nazi Broke Into Your Sick Grandma’s Cottage, Ate Her, Stole Her Clothes, And Is Using Her Reddit Account to Post Racist and Anti-Semitic Memes, So Be Careful!” but instead they’re like “This Handsome Lad Advocates Ethnic Cleansing And On Weekends He Sells Organic Apple Pipes in Williamsburg. Here’s Where You Can Buy Them.”

5. Rachel Bloom’s “Chanukah Honey”: A Funny Video Or A Dangerous Perpetuation of Anti-Semitic Tropes?

The first choice. It’s amazing. Watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U0k_vHxc2k

6. What Mara Wilson and Jason Robert Brown’s Twitter Tiff Can Teach Us About Gender Dynamics in Cultural Judaism

Mara Wilson recently shared her opinions about Jason Robert Brown on Twitter and it was AMAZING and Jason Robert Brown found out either because someone snitched or because he searches twitter for his own name! I could write a feminist take on this but I simply don’t have the time! I just wanted to share this because TMZ did not report it.

7. Why Poe Dameron Is The Hottest Jewish Pilot In The Star Wars Universe

Poe Dameron isn’t Jewish but imagine how good it would feel if he were. Imagine.

8.  No, Seriously, I Don’t Need to Tour a Neo-Nazi’s Portland Loft/Pickens Trailer/Everything In Between

We get that Nazis aren’t eight-limbed sewer creatures that can only survive on earth’s surface in the dead of night! But that doesn’t mean we need an 8,000-word profile about a dapper young Nazi who’s polite to waiters and volunteers for Church fundraisers!

9. What Twilight Taught Me About Judaism

When I turned to the first page of Twilight, eyes rolling with smug elitism, I did not expect to undergo a spiritual journey. Not many people know that Stephanie Meyer’s father was a rabbi and each book corresponds to a significant event in Jewish history, beginning with Bella Shaina Swan’s Exodus from the dry desert of Arizona to Forks, Washington. I’m sorry! I made all this up! Stephanie Meyer’s Mormon! Bella’s middle name is Marie! Think pieces are hard, actually!

10. Being a Vegan on Chanukah (and a Bonus Awesome Vegan Latke Recipe!)

I am not actually vegan, but I think traditional latkes inherently are, so just use a basic latke recipe but do not add animal products to it. I is don’t actually know what I’m talking about, but vegan pieces are hip, right? (Mr. Buzzfeed, if you’re reading this, I’m cool with the trends and up on youth lingo, even though I’m not vegan!)

11. 15 Times Bernie Sanders Was The Wokest Bae

I can’t do this.

Image by Gabriela Geselowitz, from KnowYourMeme and Public Domain Pictures

The post The Most Important Jewish Think Piece (Ideas) appeared first on Jewcy.

When my friend Max called me up to suggest we host a dinner for a dozen or so close friends, it sounded like a great idea. I’d been wanting to gather everyone together for a while, at least since Donald Trump was elected and our faith in democracy was upended. Because, even in the darkest moments of history, you don’t postpone joy.

And since Max and I are both Jewish, and I had the next Friday night free, I thought: Why not a Shabbat dinner?

It’s almost a commandment, I said.

It’s the fourth commandment, Max said.

“What should we have, Max?” I said and grabbed a scrap of paper— which turned out to be the envelope of my last electric bill from the Department of Water and Power.

Max spouted off a list of vegetables but he didn’t get past pan-roasted Jerusalem artichoke with fava bean before I realized, I don’t have “a pan.” I didn’t even have a disposable baking sheet.

I was a predictably ill-equipped millennial.  I’d only bought what was absolutely necessary for my apartment, which meant I’d spent most of my discretionary income on a big rustic looking lounge chair and an accompanying throw. No more than 1.5 people could really sit there comfortably.

As it seemed, hosting a dinner revealed a major failing of my twenties: I have very few domestic skills. I never cultivated them because I always thought homemaking was a burden of the past. After all, there are a lot of women who refused to shave their armpits so that I could enjoy a life outside of the kitchen. Say, in the living room. With take-out from King Thai.

My mother had a Betty Crocker cookbook, which I used to thumb through as if it were a historic document, marveling at the scientific wonder of a Baked Alaska. “You know,” my mom would say, “Women used to spend all day preparing dinner for their husbands.”

“In the 60’s,” I’d say, shaking my head with sympathy for women who had to figure out how to keep ice cream frozen inside a baked meringue shell.

It would have been easy to toss aside our plans like it was brunch at the new vegan place with an out-of-town friend. But something about Shabbat felt like it shouldn’t be blown off at the last minute. It’s a tradition thousands of years old, it signifies a recognition of the holiness that exists on earth, and it involves at least 5 hours of prep time.

What’s more, it is kind of my birthright. When I was 13, I stood in front of God and all my parents’ friends at Congregation Beth El and promised that I’d strive to live my life in the tradition of great Jewish women like Sarah, Rebecca, and Natalie Portman.

In the intervening years, I’d largely lost sight of this responsibility to my foremothers.  I’d taken my confessional identity for granted. It hadn’t seemed to matter very much whether I had my bat mitzvah at the synagogue or in the downstairs ballroom at the Park Hyatt, whether they had served kishka or shrimp cocktail.

But America was starting to feel less like the home for the wandering Jew than it once was.  I felt a new urgency to proclaim my heritage, as if by asserting my own Ellis Island immigrant roots, it might make America seem more welcoming and familiar, less ruled by a bigoted despot and more by love.

****

Much to my mother’s chagrin, I’m not a planner.  But I make a mental checklist of what we need to do before our Shabbat. We’ve asked everyone to come at 8 because traffic on Friday is terrible and I think we’ll photograph better in twilight.

I put Max’s brother, Luke, in charge of food. Which is a good choice because in addition to being related to Max, Luke is a fabulous chef. He once spent two days on whole duck cassoulet for a birthday party, and the birthday boy didn’t even thank him or as it turns out, eat duck.

The Thursday before our dinner, Luke and I make a challah. I don’t have an electric mixer so Luke literally churns butter by hand. I’m worried I got carpal tunnel at work so I work on a playlist instead and periodically interject with observations culled from my Instagram feed.

The next morning we go to Whole Foods with intentions to buy food that not only tastes good, but also tastes moral.  Unfortunately, we forget our bags, which nearly undoes the Mitzvah of shopping at Whole Foods.

With the shopping done, it’s time to sanctify our dinner table.  I decide we should walk to the Chabad house in the neighborhood because they are always giving out free candlesticks and prayer books and I’ve spent all of my money on organic pears that Luke promises are a good substitute for the organic plums that the New York Times Chicken Marbella recipe calls for.

The rabbi at Chabad is so overcome with joy to welcome in three intrepid young neighborhood Jews, that he’s almost blind to the fact that I’m wearing a celebrity-brand yoga outfit and my companions are two gay brothers who love Christmas. He gives us the candlesticks we sought and wraps tefillin with Max and Luke. He tells us that if we don’t light the candlesticks before 4:45 (sundown) he’ll know. He’s teasing. It’s not like he has a direct line to God, he says, and looks at me as if to say: I have a direct line to God.

As Luke puts the finishes on the farm fresh vegetable mélange and the artisanal apple pie and Max sets the table, I put on the wrap dress I got from Off Saks and add Leonard Cohen to our playlist.

We play Fiddler on the Roof loudly as the house starts to smell like I imagine a house greeting the Sabbath should smell. Max sings “If I Were a Rich Man” accessing the same bravado with which he carried the tune as a 4th grader, and as a 7th grader, and in his high school repertory theater performance, for which he won a regional award.

Our friends start to arrive, and it doesn’t seem to matter that some people are on chairs, and others on stools, and still others will probably just have to squat.

I just see my friends, vibrant and weird and at least for tonight— joyous. I see them gather around the table, laughing, ogling the meal that Luke’s prepared, and I feel like I want the whole neighborhood to come break challah with us.

On the stereo, a villager asks the Rabbi for a blessing for the tsar. The tsar, he says? And pauses. A blessing for the tsar. May God bless and keep the tsar… far away from us.

Tonight, it feels like he is.

Image via Shutterstock

The post May God Bless And Keep the Tsar… appeared first on Jewcy.

Night:

2007, The Peak of My Religious Piety: It’s 11pm on Yom Kippur eve, but I’m not that tired. I reach for a book about rabbis from the Talmud. There’s one about a rabbi who confronts a Roman empress:

Roman empress scoffs: “What does your God do all day?”

Rabbi answers even-temperedly: “God makes matches between man and woman.”

I believe, with a kind of simple faith that’s synonymous with virgins from Laura Ingalls Wilder-esque novels, that God has made my match. I’ll meet him when I’m approximately 20.

But no later than 22. I silently cry. There’s little room at the High Holiday hearth for a female singleton.

I chase any vestige of fear by reciting the whole entire shema prayer and by learning two pages of the Chofetz Chaim’s “Guard Your Tongue.” I gently wrap a blanket over my chin and breathe happily: There. I’m amassing good deeds so that I can soon be a young Jewish bride.

I don’t know yet that I’ll spend the next 8 years as an untouched, un-romanced woman.

2017, The Peak of Newfound Secular Living: It’s 11pm on Rosh Hashanah eve and I’m alone in my apartment. I watched Stephen King’s It a couple of weeks ago. I’ve slept with a light on since because—yes—the thought of a fictional demonic clown is still too terrible to bear in the dark. My roommates will murder me after reading September’s electricity bill. I’m scared of them too.

And are you not scared of God’s wrath? My brain suddenly shrills. His vengeful wrath as he smites you for being so apathetic on His New Year? He’ll punish you and deprive you of love, luck, and—I try to shut it up.

After watching Netflix’s Jerry Before Seinfeld, it finally dials down to a background murmur. Irreverent Jews will always find comfort in one another. Thanks, Jer.

I manage to sleep.

Morning:

2007: Walking to shul on Yom Kippur morning, I cross paths with a dark-eyed, charmingly scruffed yeshiva boy. When you’re a hetero 17 girl surrounded by only women every day, almost all XY chromosomes emanate sexy musk from their pores. I grow excited.

He’s wearing a black hat and his eyes are pinned to the ground. He can’t bear to look at my hands or face—the only parts of my body that are naked. Everything else (from collarbone to toes) is safely tucked away under a long sheath, patiently awaiting God’s blessing.

I avert my eyes from him too. We’re both conscious of this aversion and it’s so beautifully awkward.

2017: It’s Yom Kippur morning and I’ll walk towards a Dunkin Donuts. (Thank God I won’t allow the Day of Judgement to infringe on my iced latte cravings.) Men will trek back from shul. I’ll worry that they’ll smell my crushing pile of sin. They’ll know, through some inexplicable Jew-y antenna of theirs, that I used to be a servant of Hashem. I’ll pull up my yoga pants to expose less belly.

After I pick up that iced latte, the paranoia will fade. They’re too fixated on their growling stomachs to care about your sin, you self-absorbed little girl. Caffeine works wonders in tethering me to reality.

After a latte, I’ll meet my boyfriend and kiss him three times on his cushion-like lips. Make that ten times. No—20. Lawless lovers will always discover peace in one another.

Afternoon:

2007: Religious Jews are advised not to nap on Rosh Hashanah because it can foreshadow a spiritual lassitude or a physical fatigue that may hang upon them for the rest of the year. Sans nap, TV, or phone, my friends and I have stretches of time to fill before another holiday dinner. We decide to stroll on Brooklyn’s Ocean Parkway and schmooze like a couple of bubbies:

Me: “In shul today, almost all the women were wearing Valentino heels and Chanel dresses. Why does shul have to be a fashion show?”

Tali: “It’s loshon hora (gossip) to talk about people like that in your shul! Please stop! It’s Rosh Hashanah!”

Me: “Alright.”

But I hate this. I want my friends and I to be walking copies of an Ok! Magazine: equal parts disgusting and unbridled fun. There’s isn’t any laughter on these days. Always somber. Always serious. I scream internally.

Is this the scream bubble that germinates my inevitable dissent? Perhaps.

2017: This Rosh Hashanah, my boyfriend and I lazily lounge on the couch, our conversation quickly taking the pleasurable shape of gossip. But I soon cut the verbal whippings about neighbors, co-workers, and acquaintances short.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because it’s Rosh Hashanah and the pintele Yid, the ‘little Jew,’ does not die.”

My Bais Yaakov teachers warned me about the pintele Yid: “Even the most filthy, immoral Jew will always contain a spark of God,” they said. Now, I know.

Neilah, the Climax of the High Holidays:

2007: I stand united with my congregation. Yom Kippur is racing to the finish line. The heavenly gates are quickly locking, our fates quickly solidifying. Quivers of desperation ripple through the sick, the anxious, the poor, the lonely. For a moment, my burning tears speak when I cannot. For a moment, I see God eagerly collecting our collapsing bodies into his expansive chest. For a moment, we fit.

2017: It’s the last hour of Yom Kippur, the moment when spiritual listlessness crawls up my skin like a hot rash.

As a distraction, I turn to social media. There’s more news about Kylie Jenner’s pregnancy. And I think: How can I daven to a God that allows the Kardashians to infest the world’s collective newsfeed every minute? I grow increasingly fatalistic. And then nihilistic.

But cynicism crumples upon itself to expose a little girl mourning a faith that once felt like home. What do you do when you no longer believe, but miss believing?

I sigh and then slip on my headphones; I know, at the very least, that God is unblemished in music. This turns into passionate, fastidious prayer.

Rebecca Mordechai has an MA in English Literature and used to teach teens. But now she writes about her ever-evolving identity and lots of other Jewy things.

Image via Pixabay

The post Ten Years Later: The High Holidays for an Ex-Orthodox Jew appeared first on Jewcy.

During my weekly pre-Shabbat call with my father, I tend to count the seconds until he asks me about babies.

“I’ve got all white hairs and not a single grandchild,” he likes to say. After we exhaustively cover the very possible catastrophe of me, a Jewish woman, underutilizing my fertile window and missing my opportunity to ensure the demographic survival of my people, we move on to my academic progress.

“Remind me what you are planning to do when you finish your master’s?”

The year is 2016 and I have adopted the asymmetrical bob. Society tells me I am rocking it, that I am doing “woman” right. I have gracefully mastered the yearly transition from open-toe flats to ankle boots and the correct ratio of proteins and complex carbs. These, I am assured, are accomplishments. Part of society also congratulates me on that master’s degree, that new job, and the ability to be both an ambitious and likable woman at the same time. Ask me how I strike that balance, how I don’t scare you but still get shit done, I tease my dates. I don’t have a witty answer to give them. It’s just hard work and fake smiles. 

This year, I walked the Jerusalem streets believing a woman might finally make it to the White House – and not as a wife or a daughter, but as a leader. There was a certainty that our collective progress was soon to culminate in 270 electorates-worth of Americans affirming, finally, that a woman with a vision and a plan is a good thing. That that glass ceiling had already been broken in Israel by Golda Meir in 1969, and in many other countries around the world, did not detract from the significance of the election or the anticipation I felt leading up to it.

I’m in class when the results are announced. Holding my phone under my desk, I watch as news anchors frantically tap states on the electoral map red. The ticker says she’ll be calling to concede. As I swallow down my rising nausea, I internalize: a woman lost for not being likable enough. You can be the rational choice, but you’ll still lose to a clown.

Sometimes, while riding the bus to work, I think about how much I want to capture that feeling of nowhereness— that frustrating, in-between phase— and package it, send it to my father in Brooklyn. I imagine him sitting in his chair, slowly unwrapping the bundle as it seeps into his olive-toned hands, allowing him to understand how hard this wait for progress is, how much energy it takes to be constantly aware of where we are on the map. 

“I’m not asking you to have it all figured out by tomorrow,” my father would point out. “I just want to make sure you are moving forward.”

Forward. You can move forward in a book, or in line at the supermarket, but how do you do it in life? And what of all of the steps backward you have to take? So much of being a woman moving-forward today is learning how to handle disappointment gracefully, how to not dissolve when put in your place, to collect your heart back into your body every morning and get to work on time. You put in the hours to get that promotion but you lost your life partner in the process; you met your targets at work but a man on the bus home grabbed your thigh. You give concession speeches regularly, only they are private affairs, mantras you find yourself saying to friends and family every time you lose. Next time I’ll do better, you say, but for now you are so, so tired. 

Rewind a couple of months. I meet an Israeli man on a plane and we share a long layover/coffee date in Istanbul. He holds the promise of a traditional life – he’ll bring home the money, she’ll tend to the home. The idea of it repulses me, yet a week later I find myself again in his company. Tempted by this cop-out, I want to touch the illusion with my own hands, just allow myself to rest for a few hours. Like in the fairy tales, my struggle could end with surrender to a man, and although it’s not a path I could ever live with, who has the energy to fight for the rest of her life?

It’s an irrelevant question of course. Maybe I hoped for the quiet satisfaction of living within my means, but it has not come. There’s only the perpetual ache of my dreams growing too big for my body, my ambitions accelerating quicker than society can learn to tolerate. 

It’s midnight in Jerusalem when I call my father, catching him at the end of his workday.

“She was the only candidate in US history to apologize in a concession speech,” I tell him. I try to explain why it is outrageous that it seemed natural to hear a woman apologize after her country has failed her. But exhaustion takes me and I can’t string together the words. 

Her voice plays on repeat in my mind as I try to fall sleep, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

Born and raised in New York, Rachel Sarafraz has been living in Israel for the past eight years. She holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and literature. Rachel is currently pursuing master’s degrees in public health and in public policy, the latter within the framework of the Israeli Civil Service Cadets program. She has past experience working in project management at the Task Force on Human Trafficking and as a reproductive health educator at the Ministry of Health Public Clinic for asylum-seekers and at the sexual health organization “Lada’at.” Her passions include women’s health, sewing and trying to get her cat to like her.  

Image via YouTube.

The post Concessions: On Dreaming Big in 2016 appeared first on Jewcy.

Editor’s note: In protection of the author’s identity, her name, as well as the names of other people involved in this story and a few details have been changed.

From what my friends tell me, public school gossip moves a mile a minute. The news of a break-up is quickly overshadowed by rumors of another couple getting together. By the end of the day, several new stories have broken and everyone has forgotten about what was so scandalous at the beginning of the day. It isn’t like that in a Yeshiva high school.

I’m a normal high school girl who has not done anything out of the ordinary, certainly nothing so remarkable that it would even be a topic worth discussing if I wasn’t in the Jewish community. But you wouldn’t know this from the year I just had, with the level of backlash and name calling directed towards me.

Many people presume that the students who attend are model Jews being instilled with good midot (positive values). This simply is not the case. Take “Daniel,” who spread rumors about me when we were seeing each other, falsely claiming that I performed oral sex on him. The rumor spread quickly, across grades and schools, due to the interconnected nature of yeshivot (the downside of “Jewish geography”). Students at my school accosted the boy in question, asking him personally details about me and the time we spent together. Daniel told them his version of the story. When I ran into Daniel in person, he hid from me, but my friend overheard him saying that he wished to accost me and humiliate me. Daniel, as well as many of the boys in my class, keep kosher and shabbos but somehow has not grasped how hurtful lashon hara (gossip/evil speech) is.

Another romantic entanglement a few months later did not end much better. Although “Adam” most likely did not share the news that we were an item, his friends who met me most certainly did. I am a private person and I like to keep my romantic life separate from my academic life, but that was not possible in this scenario. With one text, a fairly good amount of people in my school knew, including one boy who told me that I was hurting my male friends who secretly wanted to date me and that he wanted to be invited to “watch the sex.” Not only was what he said to me disgusting, it also makes no sense. He condemned and encouraged the same behavior simultaneously.

The Torah says that to embarrass someone is to kill them. I’ve been thoroughly embarrassed by Adam’s friends. I worry about going into Kosher restaurants or playing hockey games against other schools. I’m constantly worried I’ll see someone who knows private information, real or false, about my relationships or who has called me “slut” or “whore” out of earshot, because I know so many students do. I saw a message on group chat where someone sent a picture of a girl with carpet burn on her knees (get it?), and one of the kids in the chat asked if it was a picture of me. Even though the relationship ended nearly a year ago, the gossip has yet to die down.

However, the rumors were not just spread amongst the students. A senior administrator at my school heard stories that I was involved with Adam and had attended a “dangerous” party he threw. “Principal Cohen,” as I’ll call her here, claimed that she had received this information from faculty at Adam’s school, even though Adam nor any of his friends had gotten into trouble. Principal Cohen then reported the unsubstantiated rumor about me partying to my mother.

When I asked my principal how she could call up my mother and spread falsehoods without asking me if anything was true, she said that it was acceptable because it was an out-of-school matter. If I had reported it to her, then she would not have been able to say anything to my mom. This statement is, of course, illogical. She expects me to tell her everything that happens in my life, on the off chance that maybe one day she’ll spare me from spreading rumors she’s heard. Principal Cohen is supposed to be an adult, yet she was also gossiping, wasn’t she? And although my mother and I are on good terms now, Principal Cohen’s actions temporarily damaged our relationship.

Principal Cohen also told me that anything that happens at any yeshiva will always be reported back to her and that I have “no privacy.” But it was not enough to her to just tell my mother. Principal Cohen would tell members of the faculty in my school about the rumor, destroying my reputation amongst beloved teachers who did not need to be privy to the details of my personal life.

It isn’t just me, though. The culture of slut shaming is pervasive in every Jewish school I have encountered. Girls who kiss more than one guy are immediately labeled sluts or worse. God forbid they have sex and like it. Because of the small Jewish community, gossip is not limited to just your school. I’ve heard stories about videos of romantic encounters jumping from school to school like lice, or compromising photographs that spread like wildfire. These rumors also never die. Jews in their twenties and thirties who have checkered pasts often find that it is nearly impossible for them to escape mistakes they made when they were young. This can have real repercussions, such as damaging potential marital matches.

I began thinking about the events of my annus horribilis (which I mostly try to forget) a few weeks ago when a friend who attended a yeshiva high school informed me that he had lost his virginity. He told me people were surprised, but most tended to have overwhelmingly positive reactions, commenting on how beautiful the girl he had sex with is and how proud they are of him. I had no reactions like that when I lost my virginity. I was asked if I was having a mental breakdown or informed my actions were slutty. And that was just what my supposed friends said to my face. Although there is a double-standard when it comes to sex for most people, not just religious Jews, it feels far more pronounced in the Orthodox world. A woman without her virginity has no chances of getting married, no future, and is damaged goods. A man without his virginity is the norm.

One story often told to young Jewish children is about feathers in the wind. A woman goes to her rabbi, looking to atone for the way her lashon hara has hurt people. The rabbi tells her teshuva is easy- all she needs to do is remove the feathers from a down pillow, wait a day and collect them. The woman does just that, and the next evening, returns to the rabbi puzzled. “Rabbi, I tried to do what you said, but I can’t collect all the feathers. They’ve spread too far and there are too many of them.” “Ah,” the rabbi replied. “It’s the same with lashon hara. Your words have more power than you could know. Once you let the feathers into the wind, there’s no telling where they’ll end up.”

As for the future, I’m not sure whether I will remain a member of the Orthodox community. Although I like many of the practices in religious Judaism, I hate the hypocrisy I have encountered. It’s not enough to prattle off Bible verses; you have to follow the basic tenets of Judaism: treating others as you would treat yourself, not humiliating people, and trying to limit hurtful speech.

Sophia Rosenberg likes baking and combating injustices in the world.

Image via Sophia Nicholas on Pixabay

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“My mom is the only one who gets excited if I tell her I got my bangs trimmed or if I bought a new kind of frozen food at Trader Joe’s,” Rachel Ament jokes, via email. That’s the thing about moms: they love us when we’re grocery shopping or even when we’re editing an essay anthology about them.

Ament, 30, is the editor of the new essay anthology Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much By Our Moms, which features essays from Jewish women of all ages about their beloved mothers and grandmothers, including—but not limited to—actress Mayim Bialik of The Big Bang Theory; Jena Friedman, producer of The Daily Show; Iliza Shlesinger, winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and Anna Breslaw, Cosmopolitan‘s Sex and Relationships editor.

Ament—whose essay “Seth Cohen is the One For You,” about an evening at the infamous Matzoh Ball at her mother’s behest, appears in the anthology—began working on Jewish Daughter Diaries in 2012 in the hours away from her day job as a Social Media Writer for Capital One. “The hours varied. Maybe an hour or so a night. It just depended on what stage I was at in the process,” she said. “During the final editing process this [past] summer, I probably spent about three or more hours a day on it.”

But what makes someone decide to assemble a collection of essays about Jewish moms? Well, said Ament, the key was realizing how similar the experiences of Jewish daughters were: “Whenever my Jewish friends tell me stories about their moms, the stories are always so funny and endearing and relatable. I see my mom in their moms. I thought that there was this great universality about Jewish moms that Jewish women could embrace and bond over, instead of ignore.” My own feelings were the same when reading Jewish Daughter Diaries—whether I was on the subway or at the gym, I was cupping my hands over my eyes and laughing, thanking the universe, thinking, “It’s not just me!”

To wit: in the introduction Ament recounts an all-too-familiar phone call with her mother, who doesn’t identify the reason she’s calling, but instead twists winds her way through the conversation with a variety of cockamamie suggestions (“Did you tell Blossom you used to look just like her when you were a kid?”), yells to her father in the another room (“Mark, get on the phone!”) and asks absurd questions about the future (“How do you think you will respond to my death? A loud hysterical reaction or a quiet detachment?”), never getting to the actual point of the call.

I’ve had similar phone conversations with my own mother, who will inevitably call while I’m buried to my ears in work:

“Do you have time to talk?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m really busy. Can I please call you later?”

“So how are you, how is your day?”

“What can I do for you, ma?”

“Daddy wants to know if you heard from that editor. Oh! And I went to Bloomingdale’s with Aunt Addie today and we found this wild plum lipstick at Clinique we thought you would love so we got it for you. We had lunch at that stir fry place again. What’s it called? Stir Crazy? You know the food there isn’t what it used to be. Maybe they need new woks. You know, they had the best deal on woks at Ikea the other day. Do you want me to get you one? I’ll send it to you in the mail with that bread knife you left here…”

And so on.

But as the reader soon learns, the point is that a Jewish mom doesn’t need a reason to call. She’s your mother, and whether you like it or not, she’s allowed to call you as many times per day as she likes and say absolutely anything or, as it so happens, nothing at all. To her, that’s what love looks like.

Ament draws on this idea throughout the anthology to tie the essays together. In “You Should Be Playing Tennis,” Jena Friedman calls her mother for a chocolate chip cookie recipe—and receives a diatribe about the life mistakes she’s making, interspersed with baking instructions (“Off hand, I don’t know the exact proportions but I bet you can find it online… I’ve actually become quite an internet junkie now that I have so much alone time since neither you nor your sister ever come home to visit me.”) Gaby Dunn’s “Home for the Apocalypse,” recounts the numerous mom-safety emails she’s received over the years (“Did you know that dialing *677 tells you if the unmarked police car trying to pull you over is actually a murderer? You didn’t? That’s because none of these myths are true, but all of these tips have been heralded as life-saving advice by my mother.”) The message is that Jewish moms schmear on the guilt and forward the emails and make directionless phone calls because they miss you and they want you to be safe.

“No matter how much our cultural and political landscape shifts,” said Ament, “mothers still want the same thing for their kids. They will still want them to be happy and find love and success. The difference between Jewish and helicopter moms is in the associations. We think of a helicopter mom as someone who is constantly over our shoulder, buzzing around us, policing and controlling us. There is more warmth and love attached to our idea of a Jewish mom. A Jewish mom is softer. She just wants to feed us.”

The Yiddishe Mameh, the Jewish Daughter Diaries reveals, is not easily tamed, and her daughter is all the better for it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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