My take on the recent victory over Miri Gold in Israel

Chassidot and Chutzpah

Anat Hoffman, head of the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC),  addressed Congregation Beth Am in February of this year.  Hearing her talk gave me a good perspective on a recent  statement written by Chaya, an anonymous  Chabad woman, in  the XOJane  blog on May 22.

Chaya declares, in short, that women in her Chassidic  community are happy, empowered, sexually active, in love with their husbands, and in touch with their bodies. And they are also in possession of good kugel recipes and can speak a bit of Spanish. She concludes:“The next time you see a Jewish lady in a wig pushing a baby carriage through Brooklyn, I hope you won't see an imprisoned waif who is just waiting to be liberated. Cuz we're not like that. We're strong. We're invincible. And we make delicious kugel. L'chaim, chicas!”

And they also work. In America, Remember Kiryas Yoel, the little ultra-orthodox hamlet in Rockland County with the poorest people in the country? That is a natural outgrowth of the Yeshiva system. Since the Yeshivot of Europe were founded, the women did business, while the men studied. In Israel, men get paid to study.  And they get paid more to be rabbis.

“There are 4000 rabbis in Israel, and they are all men.” Hoffman said. “The chutzpah!  I’ve visited many schools that are no more than post office boxes.” We in America forget that rabbis in Israel are paid for by Israeli tax money.  Synagogues are part of the infrastructure, like roads and streetlights and national defense and the court system and public schools. Most Israelis don’t use synagogues more than once a year, if that.  So they can easily ignore the fact that synagogues are an Orthodox boondoggle.

So when Miri Gold, the Reform rabbi of Kibbutz Gezer, was recently recognized as a community leader for that rural area, liberals around the world rejoiced, because now a non-Orthodox rabbi is on the government payroll. This court case began in 2005, and it is a big victory, but only one step on the road to equality. While Gold is now on the government payroll she still not recognized as a rabbi, only a “non-Orthodox community leader,” like someone who organizes daycare or sports teams.

Hoffman’s work is fighting illegal and misogynistic policies enforced by local rabbis and government employees.  Her organization has fought everyone from bus drivers who let women be moved to the back of the bus, to clerks who tear up completed paperwork for women they do not think are dressed properly enough to obtain Israeli citizenship as Jews.

“There are many shades of black,” she said.  “Women walk into my office and say, ‘thank God for you Reformim.’”  While IRAC initiates a lot of lawsuits, so do a few Orthodox women ( most notably Naomi Ragen, the outspoken American author who is frank on the subject of misogyny in the Orthodox community, yet militantly observant).  “Orthodox women,” Hoffman stated, “are some of the bravest feminists I know.”

Hoffman goes to court about sixty times a year to uphold civil rights in Israel that are written into the law of the land but undermined by ultra-Orthodox rabbis and members of the bureaucratic  establishment

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Onecakebaker--Come for the Recipes, Stay for the Irony: Richard Dawkins is Very English

Onecakebaker--Come for the Recipes, Stay for the Irony: Richard Dawkins is Very English: When I told Richard Dawkins that his term, ‘meme’ which he coined in 1976, had been appropriated by the digerati, and that they had f...

More about the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop

I learned some great things. About tweeting and DMing, rights, and writing, comedy and sadness, and Marianist Catholics.

And “Our Love is here to Stay,” is stuck in my head forever.

The Erma Bombeck Writer’s Workshop is a biannual (every 2 years) conference that occurs at the University of Dayton. U of D Catholic school run by an order of clergy and lay people called Marianists.  Matt Ewald, a professor in the communications department who is the head of the workshop, told me Marianists are like Jesuits, but not as flashy. The Communications Department puts together a weekend of communal meals, keynotes, and workshops, all of which address the different challenges of humorous and human-interest writing. There were sessions on the craft of humor, finding your voice, building your platform, selling your work, and even self-publishing.  I collected over 100 business cards, mostly from women who blog, and  got signed up to the Blog her twitter feed. As of this writing, I’ve now tweeted 158 times, and have 125 followers, including a real live comedy writer from SNL who’s coming to Palo Alto June 24 to flog the book he wrote with Dave Barry.

Erma’s whole family attends, her husband and their 3 children.  Some grandchildren attend, and I think they brought some cousins, too.  It’s a celebration and a reunion for them, and makes up a bit for the fact that Erma died quite young—she had kidney disease and died in her late 60’s. I spoke to Erma’s husband, Bill, after one of the sessions—he was right there in the back of the classroom, listening—and thanked him for creating the conference. His contribution, he told me, was insisting on holding the conference every other year, “to give the women writers enough time to recover and integrate what they’ve learned.”  Yearly conferences, he said  “just wouldn’t be enough time for the lessons to sink in and have a life, too.” 

The Bombeck family is as nice as can be. They loved that their mother wrote about them; at least they seem to love it now. Before every meal, they took turns reading their favorite column. I didn’t know Erma’s father had died when she was very young—“The Daddy Doll Under the Bed’ was the first column that got read aloud, before the opening dinner, and I was welling up.  But that was nothing.  After dinner, Alan Zweibel read some of his work to us.  I was primed for tears, with all that estrogen around, but when he told us about ‘a tree called Steve,’ I was bawling.

I bonded with a few women over that, via Tweeting, of all things.

Two young moms who were staying at my hotel showed me how to actually USE my Twitter account, and I showed them that we had passed by perfectly lovely diner 3 doors down from our hotel because this diner was not on Yelp.

Maybe 5% of the attendees were men.  Some had been at the conference more than once.  One was a TV host.  The people at this conference believed the social media and concept of platform with a religious fervor. Most of the women were active or wannabe bloggers, and they had been to other social media conferences.  There was unanimous agreement that this was the warmest and most supportive atmosphere of any gathering of writers and bloggers they had been to before.

*The workshop is limited to 350 attendees, and will sell a tickets to anyone who is or wants to be a humor writer.  I didn’t have to submit an essay or be vetted at all. I heard about the conference on “She Writes,” which is one of many Web portals that compete for the eyeballs and keystrokes of aspiring writers, and by the time I heard about the workshop, all the tickets were all sold.   Hoping against hope, and not really expecting much since my father in law was very sick, I joined the Facebook group, and sent an email to someone I had never seen (where IS Ohio, anyway?)  And put myself on the waiting list in case there were cancellations.  When I got the notice on my iPhone that someone wanted to sell me her ticket, I was on the East Coast, sitting on the bus back from parent’s graves in Beth David Cemetery in Elmont, Long Island.  It was too noisy to talk, and I saw there was Wi-Fi and decided to check my email to keep from crying again, and there was the notice, that I could buy someone’s ticket.

This illustrates something that the keynoters kept saying: “Laughter and tears are always very close to one another.”

And we did plenty of both.  Alan Zweibel was hilarious, as was Adriana Trigiani, Connie Shultz, and the lady who became an author at the age of 70 when she hand drew and wrote a book called  “love, loss, and what I wore,” made 7 copies at Kinko’s to give to her children and friends, and then had a publisher call her a year later with a contract offer.

Here are my most important take-aways:

1. Carry a notebook (done)

2. If you Tweet something, it’s copyrighted, so Tweet every clever line you think of.

3. Give your loved ones veto power and first reading if you are going to write something about them.  Remind them if they veto too much, their part of your next book is going to be the shortest.

4. Have ‘the goods’ ready.  Have a finished piece ready to go when you write a query letter.

5. Don’t hit ‘send’ or post too soon.  Craft everything in Word first.

6. Read everything out loud, to someone.  Dogs are very good for this. I’ll have to make do with my cat, Cleo.

There were some great roundups of the conference written by mom bloggers who were faster to the keyboard than I am, and you can find them on the Erma Bombeck Workshop site:

http://humorwriters.org/

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Richard Dawkins is Very English

When I told Richard Dawkins that his term, ‘meme’ which he coined in 1976, had been appropriated by the digerati, and that they had forgotten its origins in biology in general and with him in particular, he jumped up and said ‘Bloody Hell!” Then he smiled.

The father of the meme is very much alive and kicking. This week, he is on a luxurious riverboat on the Rhine, and I got to sit next to him at dinner last night.

SQUIRREL!

 

On Tuesday, I was in my garden with my gardener, showing him my new beehive, when I noticed what I thought was a dead grey squirrel curled up near the compost pile.

“Oh, Federico,” I said, “There’s a dead squirrel, can you get rid of it?”

The squirrel must have heard.  It unrolled itself, sat up and blinked.  It wasn’t running away though. It just sat there.

Federico and I discussed the squirrel, and it sat still while we talked about it. Federico noticed that ants were crawling over its spiky little feet. Yes, the sick squirrel was pathetic, but then I was overcome by rage at its kind.

I am constantly battling squirrels.  They eat my flower bulbs.  They wiped out my crop of snow peas by eating the plants.  They dug out my lettuce plants. Squirrels, I have heard and I believe, are rats with good PR.

Two years ago, I heard a funny noise under my skylights, hired a roofer, sent him up to look, and a squirrel had been CHEWING ON MY SKYLIGHTS. YES. I have photographic proof of this.

“Federico, just get rid of it.” I said.

“Yah, I’ll probably just move him” he said.  Federico is a gentle soul.

“Whatever you want, I can’t stand to see it,” I said, and I thought no more about it that day.

Very early the next morning, I had a dream about fleas and squirrels that woke me up and made my blood run cold.

 I was planning to go into my doctor’s office for a blood test for my annual physical. And fleas bite people. And squirrels. And people again.  Well, I sent an email to my doctor, you will see for yourself.

Hi, Kathy,

I am coming in for my fasting blood test today.

Also--and this is silly, but bear with me--is there bubonic plague or some other rodent vectored disease around? Yesterday, there was a dying squirrel in my garden, I didn't touch it, but I asked my gardener to get rid of it.

 This morning I remembered that the plague, and probably other diseases, are passed by flea bites from rodents, and a squirrel is just a rat with good PR. Leonard tells me that they find a couple of squirrels carrying plague in the Sierras every couple of years.

I am going to find a vector control website--they would know.

--Preeva

I know about vectors from AP Biology, organic gardening, and the movie ‘Contagion.”  I have heard the news stories about  mosquitos and  flocks of ‘sentinel chickens ’  the counties maintain. I looked up the Santa Clara County vector control website on Google:

http://www.sccgov.org/sites/vector/Pages/Vector-Control-District-Site-Home-Page.aspx

Splashed all over the page is WNV, the West Nile Virus, but there is a picture of a dead bird at the bottom right hand corner of the page that says, “ Report dead birds and squirrels here,” and the link was clickable.

I clicked, and there was a phone number and a list of diseases that are carried—vectored—by backyard critters, and yes, plague is there.

(oh, yikes! Plague. Buboes. the Black Death. Ever see a movie called Restoration with Robert Downey Jr, ?)

Palms sweating and visions of  “Bring Out Your Dead” from Monty Python dancing in my head. I called the number and left a message on their machine about how I had an ailing squirrel in my backyard.

After I hung up it hit me.

The squirrel was not dead when I saw it, only lethargic and I  had not asked my gardener to kill the squirrel, only to get rid of it, and he said he would probably move it.

The squirrel might have recovered.  It was on its own, not my problem. 

I stopped hyperventilating, and left the house to get blood drawn for my physical.

When I got back, my husband hollered down the stairs at me.

 “Did you call someone about a sick squirrel?”

I wanted to tell him about everything, fleas, plague, buboes, Monty Python.  I wanted to bury my face in his chest and have him soothe my fears of being the epicenter of a horrible pestilence.  But he was upstairs, and I am lazy.

“Yes,” I hollered back upstairs to him.

“They said if the squirrel isn't dead, and you don't have it, then they can't pick it up."

“OK,” I hollered up. Right, I thought. They can't test a rumor for West Nile Virus, they need a body. I made a quick tour of my garden, lookinng for the corpse, but didn't find anything. So the squirrel probably made at least a partial recovery.

If that squirrel ends up chewing on my skylights, I guess it serves me right.

Jewish Mothers of Technology

Here is a post I wrote for the Jewish Women's Archive last week. I have been watching the tech revolution from a cozy perch in the Tramiel family since 1983, and I have decided that the difference between a tech worker who becomes a hero and a tech worker who becomes a retired tech worker is just PR. So I'm out to give the women who have been innovators, mentors, facilitators, or otherwise important parts of the tech revolution some attention.

I have to say Sheryl Sandberg inspired me by crystallizing what I might have known all along--women don't promote themselves enough.  And these days, it is ALL about promotion.  The smartest thing Apple did was pour money into promotion. They still do.  But that's a post for another day.

Read and enjoy:
http://jwa.org/blog/esther-wojcicki-jewish-mother-of-tech-revolution
 wait, how does one cut and paste?
Here. But it looks better on JWA.

I sometimes direct tourists toward 'the HP garage,' which is marked with a plaque and gets photographed a lot. It is three blocks down the street from my house. HP bought that garage, and the house it is attached to, decades ago, and preserves it. HP holds receptions in that old house sometimes, and people cherish the honor of being close to two pioneers of the technology revolution.

I'm here to tell you this: Some pioneers of the technology revolution are Jewish women. You don't hear very much about them, because no one has put up a plaque for them yet. One of then is named Esther Wojcicki, aka "Woj." Woj serves as Vice Chair on the Creative Commons Board of Directors, and is a pioneer in education and technology.

I sat down with her, and when I listed a few of the women contributors to the technology revolution, she had never heard of them but was not surprised that she hadn’t heard of them. “Girls, women, are taught to be retiring, and quiet,” she said. “I tell my kids to be very careful about that when they go out into the world.” Woj, as she is called, is the mother of three daughters who went into high tech, and is the surrogate mother to thousands more students she has taught in her 27 years as head of the journalism department at Palo Alto high school. She acknowledges that there is a lot of discrimination, and thinks women should just go ahead anyway.

“My daughter, Anne, had it the worst,” she relates. “She was in investment banking, and men would ask her to get them coffee, would try to get her to sleep with them, and she just told them,” Woj paused, “she just told them where to get off.” Anne, the youngest of Woj’s daughters, ran a mutual fund specializing in biotech before starting 23and Me, a personal genomics company.

“I would say I’m a feminist, yes,” Wojcicki said thoughtfully, “but I’m not a flag-waving feminist. I don’t devote my life to feminism. But what I do is I basically walk through life as a feminist and try to make sure all the doors are as open to women as they are to men, and I treat women in my classes the same way I treat men.”

Woj is proud that, even though they don’t have to, everyone in the family works. She and her husband helped their children, but only to a point. Her oldest, like most children, got some help from Mom and Dad when buying a house, but needed to rent out part of that house to two young graduate students (named Larry Page and Sergei Brin) to pay her mortgage.

"It was a huge house, 5 bedrooms and 3 baths for two people," Woj said "We told 'em 'use your resources!' and it worked out."

Now that Wojcicki daughter is a vice president at Google, “in charge of all their revenue,”Woj said proudly. "It worked out really well."

Part of it is an unspoken ethic of tikkun olam, or as Woj calls it, making the world better. “You bring it into their childhood, the ethic that you can’t just sit around and do nothing, you have to change the world,” she said “And you have to realize that as a mother, you have almost zero control, once they get their own ideas.” Rebellion, she insists, is more than healthy—it’s essential.

Wojcicki has belonged to a synagogue all along, and sent her children to the public schools K-12. She is proud that her three daughters all belong to synagogues in the Bay Area, but a little puzzled that they send their children to private school.

“All my grandchildren are in Jewish Day schools.” Woj said, looking surprised. "I never thought that would happen."

Celebrating Women, Erma and Humility

I've just come back from the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop. It was a wonderful weekend. I came away empowered, excited, and with a new perspective.  Erma was the first mom blogger--I ran around in high school thinking that I would be the next Erma Bombeck.  That did not happen.  I was not a mother,  I was Jewish, I was a teenager, and I was a New Yorker, not a Midwesterner. 

Then my dad got cancer and took a year and a half to die. While I got into lots of schools. I went to Barnard for college, not because it was single sex, but because it was close to my mother, and cheaper than Brown or UPenn.

I could have stopped shaving my legs and become a raving feminist, but I didn't.  I used Nair, and  I stayed away from the "womenin" courses, you know Women in Film Women in Religion, Women in Literature.   I used the fact that I placed out of  Freshman English to take Shakespeare.  My first trip to the Columbia Bookstore I bought two huge books--an unabridged dictionary and a Complete Works of William Shakespeare.  I also took a JTS course on "Pirke Avot--Ethics of the Fathers," that semester.