It was not the first wedding dress I purchased. That inaugural monstrosity of dupioni silk and crystal appliques came from Priscilla of Boston, the now defunct high-end bridal boutique on Boylston Street where my mother insisted we shop because Priscilla Kidder designed the bridesmaids’ gowns for Grace Kelly.  I’d been living in LA for nine years at that point, but my fiance and I were both from the east coast, and our engagement fete that mid-November weekend—tea and bellinis, a party invite title my father, a Russian-Jewish Masshole raised on kishka and borscht, is still attempting to parse—made for the perfect opportunity to buy everybody’s outfits for the impending nuptials that following June. 

Not that we were even remotely in the same financial bracket as Monaco’s House of Grimaldi—my dad was a public school teacher who worked in advertising sales on the side. But I was his only daughter and my then 93-year-old grandmother never got to throw a wedding for my dad’s sister because she was killed in a car crash over Pesach in 1965, just days after she turned 19, and my dad was going crazy with credit cards buying things for this wedding that nobody could really afford. It was a spending spree out of the DSM-V, from the Doo-wop/R&B band whose setlist included Marvin Gaye and Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand duets (the lead singer later become a Trumpie and my dad defriended him on Facebook); to the Klezmer quartet playing an instrumental rendition of Erev Shel Shoshanim as I walked down the aisle; to the moshgiach who took 15 minutes to verify the Four Season’s kitchen was kosher and sent a bill for an amount more than a semester of books at U. Mass. 

The Priscilla salesgirl pushed a rack of satin and crepe and pearl-beaded ball gowns into the dressing room area, presenting each one with an outstretched arm as if they were newborn infants about to be measured on the APGAR scale. It was a dizzying flurry of blinding white and I had a hard time distinguishing between any of them. This was already worse than my bat mitzvah, where my ruffled pink dress made me look like a cupcake and my dad clapped halfway through my haftarah portion, signaling that I was chanting too fast, and I lost my spot and nervously laughed and nicked my tongue on my braces, tasting blood as I stood on the bima, looking up just as an eccentric great aunt was entering the sanctuary in a giant red hat too wide to fit through the doorway. 

Eventually, the Priscilla salesgirl held up a dress with a heart-shaped neckline and enough mirrored  crystals on the bodice to ignite a fire if left in the sun. It was a dress befitting the social secretary of a sorority, or at the very least someone blonde. It was all so hideously wrong for a girl who walked around in flip-flops and sweats with CORNELL lettering embossed across the ass. “It’s stunning!” said my mom, now on the verge of tears. “We’ll take it!” 

It was all turning into a circus, and I wanted to say no, but I also wanted to get out of there as soon as humanly possible. So I focused not on the absurdity of the dress, but the myriad reasons neurotic 31 year-olds have a big Jewish wedding to begin with, namely to compensate for what we have collectively lost along the way: my fiancé’s dead father (a world-renowned radiologist who’d died of cancer months prior), my maternal dead grandparents and paternal dead grandfather, my father’s dead sister, the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the babies never born. God, the Torah, my ovaries. 

There were so many people, places and things for whom one needed to get married. This dress carried the weight of the entire history of the Jewish people. 

Months later, I walked into Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire and saw a different sort of dress: layers of tulle draped over a plain white sheath and a ribbon of pale blue running along the underside of the hem. Simple, clean, subtle. It was a pretty dress, and it didn’t resemble a disco ball. Carolina Herrera had dressed a steady parade of socialite brides, from Caroline Kennedy to Portuguese noblewoman Diana de Cadaval. Renee Zelwegger was wearing a lot of Carolina Herrera in those days—she married Kenny Chesney in one of the eponymous label’s fit-and-flare silhouettes—and not that I was Renee Zelwegger, but I also wasn’t a debutante. So we returned the first dress and put this second one on a credit card and added a custom-made shrug for tznius purposes. Who cared how much it all cost? 

A marriage was forever. 

In the days following our wedding, while my new husband and I were smoking Benson and Hedges and drinking pineapple vodkas on a Third World Caribbean island nation, my mother had the dress French-pressed, sealed airtight in a soft, dun grey garment bag—along with my husband’s three-piece suit and the tuxedo and velvet bow-tie ensemble my dog (a bichon-poodle mix rescued from the streets of Tijuana) had worn to the after party, right before he took a giant shit in the hallway of the Four Seasons. 

I hung the dress in my closet in Los Angeles, and there it stayed, for a decade. Over the course of those ten years, there were so many things that went missing: my husband’s wedding band, which slipped off while he was swimming in the ocean; our ketubah (lost in a move between apartments), a tiny gold necklace with our children’s names engraved in Hebrew. Our relationship was disintegrating, one ritualistic talisman at a time. There were marriage counselors (one fired us, ordering us to write him a check and never come back) and appointments with psychiatrists poring over our son’s autism spectrum diagnosis and screaming matches over the price of Glatt kosher chicken breasts at Cambridge Farms. In July 2013, my brother-in-law died in a cliff-jumping accident on Lake Champlain; it took three days for divers to recover his cold, broken body, twisted amongst the lake grass. Like a galactic implosion, our marriage dissolved into dust. 

But there’s never one reason a marriage ends—or maybe even starts—and I am no angel with whom to cohabit. I cook a total of three items, I leave dirty towels on the floor, I burst into rages of anxiety-induced panic. During yichud, in those moments when a bride and groom are supposed to merge into one, my husband was silent and pensive, and I was cajoling him over flutes of fizzy Yarden and knishes to say something—anything. Even then we were like water and air. 

Our daughter was about six, an age at which the desire to play dress-up and make-believe is rooted firmly inside a child, and I wondered what that wedding dress looked like, all these years in. I drew it out of its plastic encasement, and there it was, a tea-colored stain roughly the size of my daughter’s head. I had no idea how it got there; it was not there when my mother had it French-pressed. But we played with it anyway, snapping photos of my daughter posing with the accompanying veil, photos of the veil on my dog (now dead), photos of me in the dress, unable to zip it up all the way, two pregnancies and emergency C-sections later. 

On the day that our marriage was dissolved—the court-stamped documents arriving in the mail on Yom Kippur 2019—I still wondered what to do with that dress. We can remove the stain, said a dry cleaner. Save it for your daughter, friends said. She can dye it flamingo pink and wear it to prom, like Molly Ringwald. But this to me made no sense. My daughter is now 12. She wears cropped tops from Brandy Melville and ripped sweatshirts that say Nantucket. Why would I want my daughter to wear a divorce dress, a dress worn during a marriage that did not last? A dress that is  stained, dirty, cursed. 

But to be honest, I don’t feel like selling it, or even knowing that somebody else is wearing it. This Carolina Herrera wedding dress is one of the most beautiful things that I have ever owned. Sometimes I think about framing it, like at a fashion exhibit at the MET. Sometimes I think about putting it on again, just to see what it looks like, a relic of promise that hung in the air from before life ruined it all. Truth is, I’m not in the mood to lose everything. If you want to, I figured out, there are some things from a marriage you get to keep. Some things you can’t get rid of. Some things never go away.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

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Former NSYNC star Lance Bass married his partner, artist Michael Turchin, in Los Angeles on Saturday night. The couple met four years ago and became engaged in September 2013 after about a year-and-a-half of dating, but Bass told The New York Times that they were “best friends before anything got romantic.”

The grooms were given away by their mothers and “wed under a canopy in honor of Mr. Turchin’s Jewish heritage,” reports the Times. Sounds lovely, right? Right. But then, this is perplexing: “They decided to abandon the tradition of being surrounded by a wedding party and chose instead to ask four models, clad in ivory dresses, to mimic flower girls.” What does this even mean? Were the models children? Adult women pretending to be children? Why would you have complete strangers mimicking flower girls at your chuppah? I would love to know more. (Send tips/pics to elissa@jewcy.com).

Anyway, mazal tov Bass-Turchins! Long life and happiness to you both.

(Image: Michael Turchin and Lance Bass, après-engagement, December 2013. Credit: Robin Marchant/Getty)

The post Lance Bass and Michael Turchin Wed Underneath a Chuppah appeared first on Jewcy.

The first time my partner asked me to come home with him to meet the parents, I couldn’t have been happier. A relationship milestone so soon after we’d started dating held such promise. Plus, I had it on good authority that his previous girlfriend, whom he’d dated on and on-and-off for nearly two years, had never had the pleasure. So, when we packed our bags for that first Thanksgiving in Florida, I felt far more excited than nervous. Parents tend to like me. Except this time, it occurred to me, I already had one strike against me: I wasn’t Jewish.

When my partner and I began dating, I was only vaguely aware of his Jewish background. Unless the name ended in “Stein” or “Berg,” I didn’t have a clue. I’d grown up in a suburb of Buffalo, NY and I simply didn’t have a lot of exposure to Jewish people. Of course, it didn’t help that I’d attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

My friends and family were a bit taken aback when I announced that I was dating a Jewish guy from Long Island, given that my past serious relationships had been with men of African descent. Steve was short, funny (funnier than anyone I’d ever met) and extremely ambitious, and sometimes, when he grew animated, he’d adopt a Brooklyn accent, learned from his father and perhaps leftover from his first few years as a boy in that borough. I remember early on in our courtship a friend remarking that Jewish guys were great “because they really know how to treat a woman well.” I learned that they were also stereotypically regarded as ‘mama’s boys.’

I became fascinated by the all of the ways in which Jewish culture is characterized and defined—especially since some secular Jews offhandedly dismiss the religious component. My partner is not a serious practitioner of his faith, which I am grateful for, I suppose, not that I would’ve minding his going to temple regularly or seriously honoring the Jewish holidays or even fasting—though keeping a kosher kitchen would’ve been a big adjustment for me. Since I’m not a practicing Catholic, the two of us on the religious fence somehow seems more manageable than one or both of us strongly devout.

Eventually, as the relationship progressed—that first meeting of the parents behind us—we began speaking in earnest about our future. It had been clear early on that the relationship had legs, and as we both wanted to get married eventually, I started pressing him about what that would mean for us, a Jewish boy and a Catholic girl: What kind of ceremony would we have? Where would we do it? Would he want me to consider converting for him? I assumed I knew the answer to the last question—no—since my partner’s belief in a higher power is more muddled than my own fluid thoughts on the subject, but when we got to discussing how a non-denominational ceremony would affect our parents, he nonchalantly told me that on the day his sister had married her husband, who was raised Catholic like me, his mother had said, “Well, he’ll never be one of us.”

His mother, tiny and chatty and sweet, but not effusively so, could also, apparently, be quite cutting. I had spent little time with my partner’s family, but I hadn’t sensed anything odd or off about his brother-in-law’s interactions with the Jewish family he’d married into.

Anyway, what did that even mean? ‘Not one of us’? I reasoned that converting to Judaism was a moot point for me—for us—unless we decided to have kids, and neither of us wants children. In my few visits to Florida, I’d never received the cold shoulder from his mother, but neither had I gotten a sense that she was interested in me all that much either. Was she just waiting for him to settle down with a nice Jewish girl? Perhaps she saw me as temporary.

As it was obvious to both of us that I wasn’t going anywhere, I boldly broached the topic with my partner.

“So, were you supposed to marry a Jewish girl, or what? Did you parents ingrain that in you when you were growing up and started dating?”

Accustomed to my out-of-the-blue questions, he simply looked up from his laptop and said that although it wasn’t an issue that had been discussed directly, it was implied. “I don’t remember anybody saying this outright,” he admitted, “but it was definitely the model I grew up with.”

Uh huh. Seeing the confused (and, I don’t know, hurt?) expression on my face, he pulled me onto his lap and promised me that he didn’t care, that he wouldn’t be disowned or anything like that.

“You’re my little shiksa,” he said affectionately, and though I understood the root of the word to be derogatory, I heard it as a term of endearment.

I began to wonder if his mother had simply given up on his marrying one of his own, or if perhaps I was just fooling myself. While I was happy to celebrate Hanukkah with his family last year (when the first night of it happened to fall on Thanksgiving), I don’t really get it, nor, if I’m being honest, do I care to. And yet, maybe that was the exact problem. The not caring would certainly peg me as an outsider. If he were any more invested in his faith though and wanted me to take the same interest in it as his other passions—baseball, Marvel comic book movies, barbecue—I certainly would.

On Christmas Eve at my house, when my large, boisterous family partakes in a meatless Polish meal as is tradition on this holiday, and my meat-loving man says he thinks the pierogis should be stuffed with pork or beef and not just potato, cabbage, or cheese, I patiently try to explain that that’s our way. There’ll be a roast on Christmas day, I assure him. There, he’s the outsider, but it’s in such a small way and on a such a small, insignificant level (to us, at least) that I hardly think it matters or even really affects him.

My family has embraced him as far as I can see. There was a time when my parents would have been adamant about my marrying a Catholic man (or at least a Christian), but as time’s gone by, and my faith has lapsed, it’s been years since my father has threatened not to pay for a wedding if it’s not in the church. My sister, who married a Presbyterian three years ago, chose to have a traditional Catholic ceremony because she says, “Mom would’ve been crushed if I hadn’t.” It was just easier that way.

Converting to Judaism, however, would not be so cut and dry. The little I’ve read on the subject is enough to tell me that it would require a great amount of discipline and education, not to mention a renunciation of the religion I’ve been immersed in since I had water pored over my head in a baptismal ceremony 33 years ago.

When the time comes for us to take that next step, we’ll have to take a united front. Our wedding will probably be in Brooklyn—not in my hometown or in his family’s current place of residence, but in our home. The slight sting of not being “one of them” according to his mother may always be felt, but as long as my partner’s on my side, it won’t matter.

Stacey Gawronski is an editor at Refinery29. Her work has appeared in The Huffington Post, New York Family, Yahoo Shine!, The Billfold, xojane, and more. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their dog, Odie.

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year

(Image: The OC‘s Seth and Summer, one of the most famous interfaith couples of all time.)

The post Interfaith Dating: I’m Catholic, He’s Jewish—And We’re Just Fine With That appeared first on Jewcy.

You know it’s Monday night when The Bachelorette is trending along with Gaza on Twitter. Keep being you, world.

Chris Harrison introduces the final episode of an overall tepid tenth season in front of a live studio audience. Wait, did he just say it’s a three-hour show? Good lord. I get some dark chocolate peanut butter cups and settle in for a long night.

“This is the first week [where] I don’t know what could happen,” chirps Andi. Oh, well, it’s not a major week or anything, so that’s good. I’m glad uncertainty has only reared its head during the most important episode of the season, and possibly the most important moment of her life.

It’s time to meet the Fockers—dad Hy, mom Patti, and sister Rachel and her husband—only Andi’s family isn’t so Focker-ish. Their Jewish heritage has barely gotten a peep all season (more on this later). Nick’s up first, and he exchanges the most awkward hug of the season with Patti. Everyone remarks on Nick’s obvious nerves. “He seems a little reserved,” says Patti to the camera, moonlighting as Captain Obvious for the episode. He stumbles over recounting his feelings of true love, but goshdarnit, he does seem genuine and Patti agrees. “For someone to say that about my daughter is very special,” she says, tearing up. Get your tissues, Patti, because someone else is about to say the same exact thing to you tomorrow.

But first, it’s time for a sisterly heart-to-heart. “He makes me feel like a woman,” Andi tells Rachel, and I half-expect Aretha Franklin to break out in song here, but no dice. Nick and Hy speak next. “My whole job is Rachel, Andi, and Patty,” says Hy firmly. “I got one daughter taken care of. My job now is Andi.” If this is supposed to sound sweetly paternal, it doesn’t. It makes Andi sound like a helpless floundering female waiting for her father to secure her a husband—not a self-sufficient woman with a kick-ass career. “It would mean a lot to me to have your approval,” Nick tells Hy nervously. Hy falls silent for a moment. “I feel exactly about Andi the way you do,” he begins (I hope not exactly the same way, considering last week’s fantasy suite shenanigans), and then reluctantly gives Nick his seal of approval should Andi choose him.

I must interject here to make mention of the worst installment of the weekly Suave shampoo commercials featuring the Bachelorettes of Christmases past. This week’s ad features Andi talking stiltedly with Catherine and Desiree, who literally squeal when they wave around their ring fingers, appropriately adorned with baubles, so that Andi can see what her future might hold. Betty Friedan, I’m glad you’re not around for this.

Next up is Josh, and Andi’s family just loves him. Josh, who has thus far shown himself to be loud, dim and hot, is appropriately charming as only former athletes can be, and he lays it on thick for his one-on-one with Hy. “She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” enthuses Josh. (Really? She’s cute, but in the way that my cashier at Pathmark is cute.) Hy tells him that marriage is sometimes hard work, and wonders if Josh is prepared for that. “It already hasn’t been all roses,” Josh assures him quickly. From a sharper man, this would be a quippy one-liner referring to the show’s recurring motif, but I’m afraid any wit is wholly incidental here.

On their final date, Andi and Josh muse aloud about their confidence in each other. “I have no questions,” Josh coos. “What, you have no thoughts?” exclaims Andi. Yes, that’s it, Andi: no thoughts whatsoever! Absolutely inane conversation ensues for five minutes and is concluded when Josh reads her a letter and hands her a baseball card with her ‘stats’ on the back. “Drafted: first pick,” Andi reads, giggling. It sounds cheesy but it’s actually kind of cute.

The final date with Nick involves fewer giggles, and finally, at long last, there’s a mention of religion: “We’ll figure out whatever it is, where to live, religion…” he says obliquely. It’s the first time in the season, to my working knowledge, that Andi’s Jewishness is even referenced.

It seems bizarre that The Bachelorette never shows potential couples discussing the sorts of things marriage-minded people speak about, like religion or politics. Obviously, there’s a good chance such discussions would alienate large swaths of viewers, so the choice not to air these moments—if they happen at all—is undoubtedly calculated by ratings-minded producers. But for a show that purports to be all about helping the lovelorn find their true match, these are glaring omissions of substance, and it’s disingenuous to exclude mention of major issues that actually impact the longevity and ultimate success of any resulting relationships. However secular and non-practicing a Jew Andi might be, one would think it would behoove a woman on the cusp of marriage to someone who is not Jewish (Nick) or someone who is Jewish but was raised Catholic (Josh), to at least initiate conversation on where she stands in terms of her Judaism. No?

Nick gives Andi a necklace with a vial of sand from the beach where they had their first date, which is simultaneously creepy and thoughtful. And like sand through the hourglass, so is this day of my life: When is this freaking show going to end? Good god, there’s 45 minutes of self-doubt to go before we even get to After The Final Rose. I get more chocolate.

Back from commercial break. “It’s coming down to the final moments,” says Chris. Promise? Andi awakes on the day of reckoning. Josh meets with Jeweler-to-the-Stars-and-Trashy-Reality-Show-Contestants Neil Lane to pick out a ring. When Nick gets a knock on the door and we assume it’s his turn to meet with Neil, it’s not Neil at all but… Andi!? This can’t be good. And it isn’t: Andi proceeds to tell Nick that something didn’t feel right when she woke up that morning—and it wasn’t last night’s sushi. Nick looks stunned, and they bid each other farewell. It begins to rain as Nick looks pensively out on the patio, unless that’s actually a producer pouring down buckets of water from the roof. Either way, we get the point: Nick is a sad panda right now.

Back at the live studio audience, Chris elaborates on Nick’s shame by telling the world that he’s tried repeatedly to sit down with Andi “to chat” since filming ended, but she’s always refused—until now, because she is contractually mandated to. “But first, let’s see how the show ends,” he says, but duh, we already know how this ends. Josh approaches Andi and offers a fast-paced hodgepodge of tidbits pulled from romantic movies into one mawkish speech. Andi tells him she loves him, he proposes, and she happily accepts. And they’ll for sure live happily ever after, or at least until after she finishes filming a season of Dancing With the Stars. The end.

Note: There was an After the Final Rose special, but nothing of note happens except for the continued exploitation of a wounded man (Nick), who also tells Andi that it was wrong of her to make love with him if she wasn’t in love with him. Despite the fact that we all know they’re not crocheting in the fantasy suite, such a direct admission of its inner workings is actually (and literally!) “hitting below the belt,” as Andi tells Nick, looking positively green. The audience lets out a collective gasp and Twitter explodes. Okay, now it’s the end.

Catch up on all the previous Bachelorette re-caps here.

Image: ABC/The Bachelorette

The post The Bachelorette Finale: Wait, Josh is Jewish?! appeared first on Jewcy.

It wasn’t quite lunchtime or dinnertime when I met my friend at a cafe on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It had been five weeks since my broken engagement, and this was the first time I was seeing my would-have-been bridesmaid, who lives three blocks from my Washington Heights apartment.

Dressed in her black skirt and J Crew vest over her Kiki Riki, she arrived at promptly 4:30. She asked me about school, she asked me about my roommates, but not once did she ask me how I was doing. Not once did she bring up the ‘incident,’ my source of emotional turmoil.

Within half an hour, I was fed up. I needed to talk. Didn’t she see that my eyes were red and bloodshot? Didn’t she notice the fifteen pounds that had melted off me in the last month? Didn’t she see the bags under my eyes?

“So, want to know about my ‘hashtag’ broken engagement?” I asked, with a hint of desperation in my usual sardonic tone.

She stared at me. After a moment, she became over-animated. No, she didn’t need to hear about it, she said, but she did want to comfort me: “It’s, like, so good that people aren’t treating you like a stigma,” she said over our salads. When I look visibly confused, she added, “like, broken engagements are stigmatized, but it’s so good that everyone’s treating you normal and, like, not a stigma.”

I took a sip of Merlot. So this was how my life was going to be now. Great.

***

We had finally finished cleaning up my fiancé’s parents’ Jerusalem apartment from the engagement party they threw us the night before, when his parents told him they needed to speak to him. Later that night, he went on a walk with his father. I stayed in their apartment watching TV—after all, how long could it possibly take? When they came back more than three hours later, he told me we needed to go for a walk. Protesting because of the bitter cold, I asked if we could just talk inside. “You’ll want to be outside for this one,” he told me.

I layered up, donning his thick pullover, black thermal leggings, a black knee-length skirt, striped knee socks covered by black winter boots, and my black coat. I guess my subconscious was already prepping me for the upcoming mourning period.

With that, we stepped onto the narrow, winding roads of Palmah Street together for the last time. We had many memories of these roads—my fiancé had moved to Israel over the summer to conscript to the army, and this was the third time we had been in Jerusalem together in the last six months.

The first time I went to shul in Washington Heights after “the incident,” I bumped into a group of girls I had known briefly in college. They wished me mazal tov, but when I gently explained “I’m not engaged anymore—but it’s OK! How are you?” they made up an excuse to walk away faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.

Has it affected my dating life? Well, some people ask uncomfortable questions about me, like, “Why didn’t her fiancé want her? She seems like a catch, but obviously there’s something more…,” but frankly, I don’t want to date those people. I have realized that anyone who views me as stigmatized isn’t someone I can build a life with—our ideologies and perspectives are too different.

Rachel Delia Benaim is a freelance religion reporter whose work has been featured in Tablet Magazine, The Diplomat Magazine, and The Gibraltar Chronicle, among others. She lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

(Image: Shutterstock)

The post Breaking Up is Hard to Do—Especially in the Orthodox World appeared first on Jewcy.

It was past midnight and we were driving home when I broached the subject. “Who can we set him up with?”

“I was already considering it,” my husband answered a bit too quickly. “Actually, it’s all I’ve been thinking about since we walked out of the theater.”

We had spent the evening at a big Broadway production. A friend from high school had a prominent role. I’d seen Andy rarely in the years since we’d graduated, at weddings mostly. Still, I was eager to cheer his success. It was exciting, but I was dreading the visit backstage after the show. I hate feeling like a hanger-on, waiting around awkwardly while I try not to look like a gawker.

This time was different, though. Andy was so sweet and generous, asking about our kids and excitedly introducing us to the actors. I felt not at all a gawker, more a visitor to a friend’s for an intimate dinner party. When my husband asked Andy if he was involved with anyone, Andy—looking almost longingly at the iPhone pic of our brood—answered, “No, I’m all alone.”

And so there we were, stuck in construction traffic at one o’clock in the morning, paging through our mental Rolodexes under “Jewish gay men, 30s, artsy.” After trying on a few matches for size, we both settled on someone we thought would be a great match: Jeremy. He was sweet, smart, good-looking, and a successful musician to boot. A little younger, maybe. There was only one problem.

We weren’t positive he was gay.

Well, it doesn’t always come up. I mean, we kind of assumed he was gay, but I couldn’t tell you precisely why. And when, exactly, is the right time to ask? Maybe it could be added to the requisite question list when you invite someone to dinner. “Any food restrictions? Allergies? Vegetarian? Gay or straight? Gluten-free?” Not exactly practical.

Because my husband is a rabbi and our family is religious, gay people are sometimes unsure whether they should reveal their orientation to us, concerned we might reject them—or try to turn them. But keeping the laws of Shabbat should not cause a person to be less compassionate or understanding. As far as I’m concerned, if a Jew reads the Torah and her takeaway is a list of people she’ll never accept into her “club,” then she’s missed the point.

Someday in the not-so-distant future, I choose to believe, the sight of Yeshiva kids walking into school with their two Abbas will be old hat. In the meantime, I identify with those Abbas in so many ways. As a religious Jew and a feminist, I have to gauge how “out” I can be in all kinds of situations.

Is this the kind of Orthodox shul where I can wear a tallit when I pray? Can I go into this bookstore and buy a Gemara and reveal that it’s for me? Or would it be safer to say it’s for my son? And lest someone think I’m being paranoid, I relate this story that happened two weeks ago. I started an online conversation about women wearing kippah and tzitzit in Jerusalem. The response I got from one woman was chilling. If you are interested in being safe, she said, you won’t ever do something like that. Someone could, God forbid, break your jaw. Or, God forbid, throw acid in your face. It was like a conversation out of “The Godfather.”

I’m a mother of four with a masters degree, but part of me remains a 12-year-old girl, angry as her body begins to betray her and advertise her sex on the outside. When your sexuality and gender are the first things people notice about you, it’s exhausting. I get it. But still, I was determined to make the match.

After discreetly inquiring with an acquaintance of Jeremy’s (who couldn’t answer with any certainty), I realized my best option was to be direct. My husband agreed to take one for the team. He casually texted Jeremy to give him a call when he had a chance. Jeremy called back. While they talked, I did what I often do when faced with an awkward situation: I hid.

While I cowered idiotically in the next room, I thought about the conversation I had had with my kids the previous night when they overheard us discussing our predicament. Why, they wanted to know, had we been assuming Jeremy was gay? How could you tell just by looking at him, or having a conversation? “You’re just stereotyping!” they insisted. I knew they were wrong, but I was having trouble with the why.

The truth is, we’re constantly making assumptions about people based on superficial evidence—the car they drive, the shoes they wear, their accent, their haircut. Using these limited clues, we determine class, education, politics, religion. Sexuality is more complicated, though. As a child, I was a serious ballet dancer. Dance had a culture of its own, but even then I noticed that some teachers and choreographers deliberately and consciously carried their delicate movements with them outside the studio. It was complicated to be out in the eighties. Yet these men proudly announced, by the tiny choices they made about how to present themselves to the world, who they were.

As self-involved ten and eleven year olds, my fellow dancers and I didn’t dwell on the private lives of our teachers. As far as we were concerned, they vanished into thin air when we left the building. So when one of our favorites stopped teaching, and didn’t even attend our performances, we felt only a vague annoyance that we’d have to get used to a new set of expectations with our next instructor. A year or so later, when we heard that he had died, you could almost see the little light bulbs clicking on above our identical, perfectly groomed buns. Oh. Our hunch was correct. No judgment. Just sadness.

I suppose that’s what I want my kids to know: thinking someone is gay is only bad if you believe being gay is bad. It’s the negative judgment that’s harmful—not the supposition itself.

I got the transcript of the conversation as soon as my husband gave me the all-clear.

“Jeremy,” he’d started, “can I ask you a strange question?”

“Sure?”

“Are you interested in being set up?”

Pause. “Well… I’d be interested, but there’s a twist.”

And here, I’m pained to admit, is where my husband was a rock star, while I hid in other room with a pillow over my head, mortified by the awkwardness of the situation. “So,” he replied, “if the twist has anything to do with the fact that the person we had in mind for you is a man, you’re in luck.”

There’s a Jewish tradition, more a superstition, I suppose, that anyone who makes three matches—presumably ending in a wedding—is automatically granted entrance into the world to come. It’s holy work, to help people find partners and build homes together. I don’t want to go back to a time when people felt compelled to extinguish a piece of their essence in order to conform. But all the uncertainty is a little too stressful for me, I’m not sure I can handle the pressure. I’ll take my chances with charity and good deeds.

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Ah, Jemima Kirke and Michael Mosberg! Glam-Jewy-indie couple extraordinaire! You either want to be them, or you— wait, no, you pretty much just want to be them. That’s the only option.

First, we saw the inside of their Brooklyn home and read about their Shabbat dinners. Now, a new slideshow up at Refinery 29 provides an intimate glimpse into their 2009 wedding. Each photo is accompanied by commentary from Kirke, and first few slides—in which she describes falling in love with Mosberg—are pretty swoony:

I loved his gentility, but his kindness was what struck me. He had this patience and stoicism; I had never met anyone like him… He just felt so much more awesome than any guy I’d ever dated. Every guy I dated before had been abusive and made me feel like shit. I was like, “Wow, this just might be the person I deserve.”

The traditional, Orthodox Jewish ceremony took place at the bride’s mother’s beach house, under a “driftwood chuppah covered in flowers.” Kirke was untraditionally—but gloriously—pregnant. She wore a rad vintage Jill Stuart dress which she purchased a few days before the wedding for $200, and immediately after the ceremony, the bride and groom jumped into the water. The guests ate “bagels and lox and cereal,” it was over by noon, and everyone lived happily ever after. Sounds like a dream.

Related: ‘Girls’ Star Jemima Kirke and Husband Michael Mosberg Do Shabbat, Have Many Tattoos, Are Very Beautiful

Image: Not the actual wedding (via HBO.com)

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Oh, don’t mind us, we’re just crying happy tears into our afternoon coffee over this ridiculously charming New York Times video of three bubbes who were bridesmaids at their granddaughters’ weddings.

Yep, it’s the hot new old trend: grandma as the Maid of Honor. According to Ariel Meadow Stallings, the founder of Offbeat Bride, couples are increasingly seeking out non-traditional wedding roles for family members. “For a lot of couples and their families, there’s friction between the traditional role that families play in weddings and the couple’s concerns about where those traditions come from and the feeling that they don’t reflect their lives,” she explained.

Enter: the bubbe bridesmaid, the perfect role for grand dames not content with front-row seats at the chuppah.

Dorothy Shapiro, 95, says it was “one of the biggest honors that a grandmother could have. That she chose me! An old lady!” 88-year-old Lila Leblang, who runs an annuity sales firm and can do 40 push-ups (check out her reps at 00:12, solid), told the Times that granddaughter Jenny Illes Wood was sending ” a wonderful message… it’s O.K. to deal with people who are a little older than the typical bridesmaids.” And Sylvia Helfen, who was 89 at her granddaughter’s 2011 wedding, said with tears in her eyes, “It makes my heart feel good that she feels that close to me.”

Is there a word for grandchildren schepping nachas from their grandparents? Meta-nachas?

Image: Eric Stephenson Weddings (via New York Times YouTube)

The post When Bubbe is a Bridesmaid appeared first on Jewcy.

Well, here’s a story to warm the cockles of your heart.

Jewish actress Ginnifer Goodwin (who rose to fame on the cult HBO show Big Love) just tied the knot with her Once Upon a Time co-star Josh Dallas. But as Goodwin explained on Jimmy Kimmel Live last week, their wedding plans almost went awry the morning of the big day, when Goodwin’s wedding planner called her in tears, informing her that her car had been broken into and the couple’s ketubah (Jewish marriage contract) had been stolen. The star was all set to draw up a makeshift document, when fate—and two random Jews in Hollywood with really good Hebrew skillz—intervened. And they all lived happily ever after.

Get the full story here:

http://youtu.be/0s_xHJXDGuQ

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Remember the Princeton Mom? That lady who wrote an open letter to the young women of her alma mater telling them they really, really needed to find a husband in college or else all would be lost? Well, she’s back. And this time, she has a book. In Marry Smart, Susan Patton covers the timeless, pothole-ridden territory of Advising Young Women About Marriage. (I know, you’re blanching, but read on.) Her ideas, though decidedly retrograde, are oddly compelling—mostly because they reveal so much about her own life and disappointments. You know that thing where you try to give advice to someone else but make it all about you? Well, that’s what Marry Smart is.

Anyway, this interview with Patton in New York Magazine is a must-read, in a she-said-what sort of way: her apartment is stuffed with Princeton memorabilia, she’s obsessed with orange, she fantasizes about marrying for a second time in the Princeton chapel, and she has no qualms revealing her insecurities/disappointments/vanities to anyone. (First thing she says to the interviewer: “You’re so tall and thin! Usually I hate that body type.”)

Her parents were Holocaust survivors, and it seems their trauma shaped her attitude towards education, gender, and feminism in a profound way:

It would be easy to caricature Patton as an old-fashioned, paternalistic snob — but her snobbery is actually quite modern, and fueled by an unexpected streak of feminist gumption. Patton was raised in the Bronx by Eastern European immigrants. “They survived the Holocaust. My mother was in Auschwitz; my father was liberated from Bergen-Belsen. They came to America with very old-world ideas about women.” Though she was at the top of her class at her public high school, her parents opposed a college education. To apply to Princeton, Patton had to declare herself an emancipated minor. “I wanted a much broader life than just motherhood. My parents didn’t see the value in that, they couldn’t understand. They saw it for my brother, but not for me. And he would tell you this: He wasn’t much of a student. But I was, and I always wanted a bigger life, a more creative life, a more engaged life, out of the Bronx.

So I guess read the book if you want to! Or don’t! Beyond her advice that women in their 20s should be mindful about whether or not they want get married/have kids (yes, THANK YOU EVERYONE for reminding us about our ovaries), it’s all a bit ridiculous. Not everyone wants to get married and/or have kids, and not everyone wants to do it young. And obviously, marrying someone who went to an Ivy League school isn’t going to make you happy—unless you’re Susan Patton. In which case, by all means, Marry Smart.

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