kvetchy, camp-mourning jewish child

I amuse myself. If Josie doesn’t stop talking about Ga-ga (not the Lady, the Israeli dodgeball game) I am going to pound myself into unconsciousness with a volleyball. Thus my venting in Tablet magazine this week.

This week in Tablet magazine, I ponder shatnez, the rule in the Torah that prohibits wearing clothes containing both wool and linen. In the past, I only thought about shatnez when thinking up retorts to intolerant religious people yelling about Adam and Steve. (To wit: Dude, if you’re so into Leviticus and the Bible as the literal word of God, are you checking the content of every single item in your wardrobe? Are you sure you have NO sweaters with linen thread, say, stitched in the label or in a seam? Because the sacred texts take that just as seriously as homosexuality, and I don’t see you people getting furious about people wearing linsey-woolsey.)

But now I think about shatnez a lot, because I have a child whose rules for clothing are far stricter than those in the Torah. Maxie’s sensory issues mean I make choices about clothing all the time, and my daughter ascribes moral value to clothing. Anyway, I think it’s kind of an oddball interesting piece, one I could only do for Tablet. Check it out.

Bonus info:

1. Above is the art that was NOT used for the story. (Images from iStockphoto, collage by Abigail Miller at Tablet.) I think I like it better than the one the editors chose?

2. My original title for this was “Hit Me With Your Best Shatnez.” It was too long for the magazine’s title template. I could not think of another play on the word “shot,” or a Shatner joke.

3. At the Tablet office I caressed the National Magazine Award in the EIC’s office. I have held an Ellie (the copper-colored, heavy stabile designed by Alexander Calder) before, but this was the first time I was really comfortable fondling it to my heart’s desire, and I have just succeeded in grossing myself out, sorry. But I mostly write for women’s magazines, which tend not to win many Ellies, so it was thrilling to be part of a enterprise that won the most prestigious award in the industry. And in its first year out of the gate! Sassy was nominated for an Ellie for general excellence, but didn’t win, and other ladymags I’ve written for have been nominated or have won for “personal service journalism,” but not for pieces I wrote, so I haven’t felt much connection. I write for Tablet magazine every week, and I think it’s an incredibly good publication, and Alana offered to let me take the Ellie home to babysit it for a while, and I put a picture of the Ellie and me on my Facebook page. So I felt really good about having my way with that Ellie and it felt like a sacred union and I’m totally gonna buy it breakfast.

If I were to buy a $78 Halloween costume that my children would find creepy and refuse to wear, it’s this one! Because it is awesome!

I got a bunch of email after this picture of Crystal hit the wires:

Honestly, I hadn’t seen Crystal in four months and I picked up the phone and left her a message: DO YOU REALLY LOOK LIKE THIS? I DON’T THINK YOU LOOK LIKE THIS. BUT IF YOU LOOK LIKE THIS YOU ARE COMING OVER HERE AND I AM FEEDING YOU.

She called back right away, laughing, saying she was totally fine. Then she called again, not laughing. She’d just seen the pictures I was talking about. (She’d initially thought I was referring to a different, older picture.) She was so upset she could barely form sentences. Not only was she worried about young girls with eating disorders who might think she’d lost a gazillion pounds, but she was also worried about hurting the charity she was posing for. (See, I keep telling you, she is a lovely human being.) I said I wouldn’t say a word until she and her agent decided how to respond.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law emailed me. She’d seen the pictures. Oh my God, was Crystal anorexic again?

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be Crystal, living under this kind of scrutiny. And as I’ve said, I don’t think the obsession with Crystal’s thighs has any impact on the day-to-day lives of actual fat people. Crystal doing the Jean Paul Gaultier campaign is awesome but will not make airplane seats wider or increase tolerance of XXL people. But it must suck to have to strategize about issuing a statement: Hi, I happen to be exercising regularly for the first time in seven years, doing yoga and hiking, not being an exercise-bulimic lunatic the way I was as a teenager, and hi, here are some stills from my actual unretouched bod on that actual shoot. Which is what she told Glamour today. And here are the stills.

So to my mother-in-law, and everyone else who emailed: Crystal’s great! And look, thighs!

My current Tablet magazine column is on cyberbullying. My editor Liel and I strove for a Jewy take on the subject, but for better or worse, the piece is pretty universal. Right now one of the bullies we mentioned is tangling in the always-lively comments section. It is, um, not so civil!

Meanwhile, New York City’s Department of Education just proposed a change to the city schools’ Discipline Code: now cyberbullying (defined as “intimidating and bullying behavior through electronic communication”) will be subject to a disciplinary beat-down. According to our indispensable local resource Inside Schools, the new version of the code will also put more emphasis on “guidance measures (counseling, peer mediation, and parent outreach) when addressing student misconduct” — in other words, schools won’t rely as much on suspensions. Which I think sounds good — does anyone learn anything from a suspension, beyond “don’t get caught”? I can see counseling and perhaps parent outreach (though sadly not in the Beverly Hills case I wrote about, since the dad is as big a bully as his kid) having more impact than mediation — current research on bullying is that mediation is exactly the wrong way to go. Mediation assumes that both parties have a valid point of view, and bullying is closer to child abuse: it’s just WRONG. But Zero Tolerance policies aren’t a good approach either; if the punishment for bullying is always huge (longtime suspension or expulsion) kids may hesitate to report bullying for fear of retaliation, and kids who bully won’t learn strategies to change their behavior — they’ll just get booted.

Anyway, no kind of Discipline Code language would have had any impact in the Beverly Hills case, since the judge ruled that the YouTube video didn’t cause “substantial disruption” in school.

But the whole kerfuffle in Tablet’s comment section (I know, mah nishtanah) made me think about Gary Schmidt’s recent, wonderful middle grade novel The Wednesday Wars. (Get it for your kids! It won a Newbery Honor!) A boy has to figure out for himself what his definition of morality is in a very turbulent time (in his case, the Vietnam war…but today’s electronic frontier is pretty turbulent too). The book is fun, with lots of baseball and friendship and humor, but there’s a seriousness to it: part of growing up, for the hero, means realizing that he isn’t going to learn about morality from his rigid, blustery, intolerant father or weak mother. Sadly, that’s a lesson a lot of bullies — including the ones we wrote about at Tablet — could benefit from.

Israel is considering denying citizenship to Jews whose conversions to Judaism were performed by Conservative or Reform rabbis. There’s a bill in the Knesset that would give the (ultra-Orthodox) chief rabbinate authority over all conversions; this would overturn an Israeli Supreme Court decision allowing citizenship to all Jews converted by rabbis from all branches of Judaism. The chief rabbinate already controls marriage and divorce. Whee.

When I talk to American Jews who are ambivalent about their Judaism (“it’s anti-feminist! it’s rigidly cerebral and text-obsessed! it’s a throwback!”) I try to say that Judaism is a pluralistic religion; there are many ways to practice and at least three distinct philosophical and theological paths. I say that Judaism does not have to be a completely patriarchal, wimmin-oppressing, chauvinistic, isolationist religion of fucktardedness. And then something like this happens.

I hope Israel (and hey, America) can come to terms with how much power it wants the ultra-Orthodox to have over its coreligionists. If I wrote about this for Tablet magazine the readers would disembowel me, but think about it: who is a bigger threat to democracy in Israel, the Arabs or the ultra-Orthodox?

Important summer safety interruption: Drowning doesn’t look like drowning. This piece by a maritime safety expert (a former New Orleans Coast Guide helicopter search-and-rescue swimmer) gives you a checklist of what drowning actually looks like. Hint: Not the way it does in the movies.

Once I got a hint of how quickly something horrible can happen at a backyard pool. A friend was sitting with her legs in the water, next to her two-year-old son. She was looking over her shoulder, talking to someone behind her, as her little boy leaned forward and (I think deliberately) fell in. It was like a toothpick piercing an olive. He went straight down, straight to the bottom — he was too young to even give the clues in Mario Vittone’s story. Another mom at the BBQ said, “Um, is that your son in the water?” She turned back, looked, screamed a curse, leaped in and yanked him up. He was under for maybe 20 seconds. He coughed and sputtered and then was absolutely fine. He didn’t even cry. But the fact that he just slipped quietly under, with no flailing or splashing, was haunting.

Maxie had a playdate with her pal Kiran. They made a “velvet rope” out of paper chains taped between the couch and the wall of the living room. Kiran sat at a desk in front of the rope and asked “Are you on the list?” He then crossed off our names and Maxie opened one end of the “rope” and let us in. We were not allowed to sit — we had to stand behind a chair. The “performance” consisted of Maxie wearing a tutu and a swath of gold fabric tied around her middle like a bandeau, with a boa tied around her forehead, hurling herself energetically off the couch and chairs like a pinball. It lasted maybe 30 seconds.

Thank God we were comped.

Artist Kelly Light is running a charity auction of affordable work by terrific illustrators, printmakers, painters and children’s book artists, all to raise money for wildlife affected by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Here’s how it works: The moment something you like goes on sale, you send an email saying you want it. If you’re the first emailer, you have one hour to donate $50. The money goes to the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies and the International Bird Rescue Research Center. Kelly has already raised over $7400. Brava!

I was too late to bid on this work by kidbook rock star Mo Willems. I hadn’t known he was from New Orleans. The sad pigeon makes me want to cry.

I love this linocut print by German artist Maria Bogade:

And this miniposter by Courtney Autumn Martin, made with a combo of digital painting and pencil drawing:

Wouldn’t that look cute in a kid’s room? The answer is yes. The fundraising project, called ripple (get it?) is definitely RSS- or bookmark-worthy. Go bid!

Really scary-looking 4-alarm fire in the East Village last night. One address, 150+ firefighters, dozens and dozens of fire engines. As usual, our neighborhood blogs were on top of the story fast. Check out these pictures from East Village Grieve (found on the twitpics of a guy named Josh Spear):

And this:

New York’s Bravest got that huge inferno under control in maybe half an hour. No one was killed or badly hurt; eight firefighters received minor injuries (burns and smoke inhalation). These guys are amazing.

Another local blog, Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York, had some spectacular aftermath pics:

My “ooh OMG look, hunky firemen!” days are long past. I’ve reached the age of “honey, look, the nice fireman waved at you!” It’s what happens. We get older; we produce daughters who smile at firemen. It is the way of all flesh.

But OOH OMG LOOK, HUNKY FIREMAN!

I checked out the scene an hour or so after the real action ended. Discovery Wines, one of the businesses at street level, looked OK. I saw one of the staff in the building with some firemen, then opening the sidewalk basement for them. Maybe I’ll swing by to see if they’re open now. (Hey, we like wine.) The deli on the corner is open. But word on the street is that the roof is toast and the top two floors of apartments are unsalvageable. And there are dark mutterings about illegal scaffolding around the building and shoddy roof work…we’ll see.

UPDATE, 7/15/10: FDNY says the fire was caused by the “unapproved use of electrical wiring.” Residents had stretched various extension cords up to the roof and run wires beneath roofing materials, according to the indispensible East Village Grieve blog.