September 5^th 2008 Dear Friends Shabbat Shalom This has been a week of clairvoyant (!) media prophets and confused readers as they try to predict what will be in Israeli negotiations with both the PA and the Syrians and in the wider world what will be in the USA elections. The truth is that none of us knows what will be. The Syrians say that it is our fault that the "peace" talks have faltered yet declared undying alliance with Hezb-Allah and the French predict that all will be well! Russia is trying to predict – and ensure the accuracy of that prediction in their dealings in the Middle East, using their claim that Georgia caused the war with Russia because...

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Lonely, Miserable, Pregnant: and totally hilariousAndrea Askowitz has the best life in the world.  She's pregnant and healthy.  She has friends and family who love her.  She has money and meaningful work.  And all she can do is obsess about the one thing she doesn't have: Kate, her ex-girlfriend.  My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy is a funny, whiny, all-too-real account of one girl's true adventure in maternity.  

In week 8, her sense of smell becomes so strong that she can tell what deodorant people are wearing.  In week 28, she plans a pity party, complete with black-only dress code and a violin player: "It isn't an attempt to make fun of myself, because that would be too joyous."

Andrea's life reads like an antidote to sugar-sweet pregnancy guides and memoirs.  Irreverent and whip-smart, My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy is potent therapy for ill-timed break-ups, leg cramps, constipation, and every other downside to a dream come true.

Over the past week, Andrea has bravely served as Jewcy's resident lonely, miserable lesbian (she's not pregnant anymore, but her partner is).  She's wondered about the possibility of having a hybrid baptism/bris, taught us that anyone can perform a baptism, searched for a baby name that will satisfy both her and her Latin lover, and suggested that circumcision falls somewhere between ear piercing and foot binding.  Check out her posts, join in the conversation, and stay tuned for her last piece on Monday.

I just finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See.  Someone in my book club last night said it was the only book in the past year that our entire book club enjoyed.  I nodded with the rest of ‘em.  I don’t know if anyone else remembered that MY book, My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy was the book we read last month.  It had been a whole month.  And so I didn’t say, “Wait, didn’t you all enjoy My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy?”

I just sat there, mute as a Chinese woman.  I didn’t question.  

I’ve been thinking about cultural teachings and practices since reading Snow Flower.  Chinese women were taught to be quiet.  Jews are taught to question.  

At age six, Chinese girls’ feet were broken, their toes tucked under, and then tightly wrapped for months.  Each time their feet were rewrapped, the wraps were pulled tighter.  Walking after the bones reset and healed was pretty much impossible, so Chinese women spent their whole lives in one room, the women’s chamber.  Foot binding—-a practice most people today would agree was savage and cruel—-wasn’t completely banned until only about 50 years ago.  

These Boots Were Made For: sittingThis is an 86 year-old woman.  Look at her tiny shoe.

Why did they bind?  

For social advancement.  The smaller the foot, the sexier the woman and the more marriagable she would become.  This was the cultural belief.  Chinese people lived by these beliefs for centuries and no one questioned.  

Eight-day-old Jewish boys get their penises circumcised.  I WANT TO MAKE CLEAR THAT I DON’T THINK CIRCUMCISION HURTS BOYS THE WAY FOOT BINDING HURT CHINESE GIRLS.  I don’t know how circumcision hurts a boy, if at all.  Some circumcised men claim that circumcision feels better.  I have no idea and don’t claim to know.  My guess is that the snip hurts, probably like it hurts to get your ears pierced.  Lobes rarely get infection; usually the skin heals within a few days.

The similarities I see are cultural.   Americans and especially Jewish Americans are caught up in a cultural practice. Why do we circumcise?

Because Abraham was asked by God to sacrifice his son; because circumcision has been a 4,000 year tradition; because circumcision marks a Jewish boy;  because maybe it’s easier to keep a circumcised penis clean; because a circumcised penis looks better; because a boy should look like his father; because a boy shouldn’t feel strange in the locker room at the JCC.

In Venezuela, where my partner is from, circumcision, like foot binding, is practiced to raise a child’s social position.

Victoria said, “I don’t want our boy parading around in front of my family with a poor boy’s penis.”

I don’t either.  And I want our boy to be identified as a Jew.  But I want to make sure we don’t permanently alter our boy’s body without seriously questioning.

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

My WASPy Etiquette Consultant Recommended ThisLook what I discovered in my quest to find cool Rosh HaShanah cards.  The "New Year Girl" collection from tastemaking stationary designer Bonnie Marcus (formerly a wedding planner and special events coordinator at the 92nd Street Y, thank you very much) is stylish and appropriate, and includes both modern and traditional elements. 

The funny thing is, I discovered Miss Marcus through a rather unlikely source--namely, an etiquette blog written by one "Annabel Manners," a "displaced debutante" WASP in Los Angeles.  This southern belle from South Carolina (I think?) claims to be "learning all kinds of interesting things" in her current city of Los Angeles.  For example, Jews have their own New Year, which happens in Autumn. 

She explains that when she first saw the card, it really "threw her for a loop."  Despite a bit of confusion about the autumn leaves, apples, and honey, she thought the design might be a great choice for "clients who need non-denominational holiday cards."  Luckily, she made the Rosh HaShanah discovery before embarrassing herself. 

Good luck with the multicultural studies, Miss Manners, and might I add: You'd fit right in at my temple!

I had a dream last night. Not a nightmare - there was no threat of imminent danger, but nonetheless I woke up feeling a kind of dread. I've had dreams like this before - dreams about which I may only remember a particular image - a set of broken ceremonial swords lying on a snow bank, a 'boom box' perched precariously on a high shelf, seeming to defy gravity; a motor-scooter, a luminous green, parked on the wrong side of the street. None of these images suggest danger or are even menacing, yet I wake up from them feeling they might mean something terrible and important that I very much want - or is it that I don't want? - to know.

Our sages tell us that a dream is one-sixtieth part prophesy; after all, G-d speaks to his prophets through dreams. 'Whoever sleeps without dreaming for seven days is wicked' - another suggestion that dreaming shows a connection to the divine.  The other parts of dreams, the sages say, come from 'the...

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http://itwasallameme.blogspot.com/2008/08/israel-where-elite-meet-to-ske...

What: i don't look like a priest to you?I said, “Hey, why don’t we get Tuffi to do our baptism?”

“She’s not Catholic,” Victoria said.

I said, “I know, but I think of her as totally priestly.”  

Tuffi, formerly known as Stephanie, but renamed Tuffi by Tashi when Tashi was just learning to speak, is one of Tashi’s God-moms.  Tuffi presided over Tashi’s baby-naming and seemed like a total priest to me.  

Victoria said, “Someone Jewish can’t do a baptism.”

I said, “Why not?  It’s not like we can get a priest to do it.”

Victoria said, “Why not?”  

And because she is pregnant and probably experiencing a little “mommy-brain,” I gave her the benefit of the doubt.  I trusted that she was probably listening the other eight times we talked about the baptism but just forgot, so I told her again about how I met with Father Steven, in the Castro. 

About a month ago, I got this other priestly idea, which was to get the whole family baptized.  I see it like this:  I don’t want half my family to be part of something and the other half not a part of that something, even if it’s total voodoo and I don’t believe in it anyway.  I mean, just in case there’s any power there, I might as well get some of it.  Doesn’t matter to me whose God is providing it.  There’s only one God anyway, we all know that.  And since Tashi and I have not been baptized, I made an appointment with a priest to ask some questions.  I was in San Francisco and thought if there is ever going to be a like-minded priest, a priest in the gayest neighborhood in America is MY priest. 

First thing he said to me, “So you want to become Catholic.” 

I was like, “No, no, no.  I just want to be baptized.” 

Father Steven said that no priest would perform a baptism on somebody if that somebody wasn’t going to take on the teachings of Catholicism. 

The priest did say, and I told this to Victoria, that unlike marriage or first communion, anyone can perform a baptism.   (For the full transcript of my conversation with Father Steven see previous post, Let’s Have a Baptism)

Since then Victoria and I have had several conversations about making baptism our own thing.  We’re creating our own religion here:  A Judeo-Christian-Latina-Lesbiana religion of our own making.  A religion of peace and harmony and who cares what other people think.  That’s why I suggested that Tuffi be our priest.

Victoria said, like this was all new to her, “Well, we at least have to get someone Catholic.”

Ten years ago I read Anne Lamott’s book, Operating Instructions, but I still remember this line where Anne’s friend first learned that Adolf Hitler had a tormented childhood and the friend said, “I’ve had it with Hitler.”

I’ve had it with religion.

Previously: Let's Have a Baptism/Bris

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

Baptism or Bris: which is freakier?We know for sure we’re having a boy.  Got the amnio results.  All is good news, even the news that it’s a boy. 

I mean right?  We already have a girl, and a boy and a girl is every mom’s dream.  And boys love their mommies.  There is that special bond that only happens between boys and their moms.  And what is more important in the world than raising a sensitive, feminist, gun-hating man?  A man who loves women.  A man who can be a modern-day Jesus, as this Jew understands Jesus.  A man who can befriend the sick and destitute and end world hunger and create peace between warring nations.  And there’s really no difference between a boy and a girl in the gender neutral world this boy will create. 

That’s why this is such good news.   

But what about the penis?

Now we have serious decisions to make. 

Since Victoria is totally FOR circumcision, and since she wants to baptize, I came up with the best idea.  I said, “Let’s have a baptism/bris.”  As soon as I mentioned it the idea seemed even better than ever.  Here would be a way to honor both of our religions at the same time.  ”We’ll invite our friends and family and someone will sprinkle a little water and then someone’ll do the snip.” 

Victoria said, “What’s a bris?”

I explained that a bris is a circumcision done buy a special rabbi called a Mohel.  The Mohel comes over with his special snipper and the family gathers around and I think it’s customary that the father hold the baby, so naturally, I would hold the baby and we’d give him a little wine, the baby, that is, to help numb the pain and then the Mohel does the snip.

Victoria said, “AT HOME?  That’s freaky.”

I said, “Baby, there’s nothing freakier to a Jew than a Baptism, except for maybe those statues of the man nailed to the cross that hang over everyone’s beds.  Why do they put those in the bedroom?  Is that a sex thing?”

She ignored my last question.  She said, “I don’t want to cut my baby’s penis in front of other people.  That’s freaky.”

I see her point. Religion is freaky.

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

(Crossposted to Open-Minded Mikveh and its attendant Facebook group)

Anyone in the holy city of Jerusalem? Check out this book signing (from Janglo). The book is not available in the U.S., AFAIK, but you can order it from the Schechter Institute.

What I'd like to know is what mikveh she recommends in Jerusalem.

You are invited to hear Rabbi Miriam Berkowitz speak on her latest book,
Taking the Plunge: A Spiritual and Practical Guide to the Mikveh
Tuesday September 2 at 7:30 pm
at Pomeranz Bookstore, 5 Beeri, JerusalemContinue reading...

EIGHTEEN REASONS JEWS THINK THEY SHOULD NOT BE VEGETARIANS (AND WHY THEY ARE WRONG)

Richard H. Schwartz

1) The Torah teaches that humans are granted dominion over animals (Genesis 1:26), giving us a warrant to treat animals in any way we wish.
Response: Jewish tradition interprets "dominion" as guardianship, or stewardship: we are called upon to be co-workers with God in improving the world. Dominion does not mean that people have the right to wantonly exploit animals, and it certainly does not permit us to breed animals and treat them as machines designed solely to meet human needs. In "A Vision of Vegetarianism and Peace," Rav Kook states: "There can be no doubt in the mind of any intelligent person that [the Divine empowerment of humanity to derive benefit from nature] does not mean the domination of a harsh ruler, who afflicts his people and servants merely to satisfy his whim and desire, according to the crookedness of his heart. It is unthinkable...

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A Dialogue Between a Jewish Vegetarian Activist and a Rabbi

For a long time, I have been trying to start a respectful dialogue in the Jewish community. Because I have had very little success, I am presenting the fictional dialogue below. I hope that many readers will use it as the basis of similar dialogues with local rabbis, educators, and community leaders.

Jewish Vegetarian Activist: Shalom rabbi.

Rabbi: Shalom. Good to see you.

JVA: Rabbi, I have been meaning to speak to you for some time about an issue, but I have hesitated because I know how busy you are, but I think this issue is very important.

Rabbi: Well, that sounds interesting. I am never too busy to consider important issues. What do you have in mind?

JVA: I have been reading a lot recently about the impacts of our diets on our health and the environment and about Jewish teachings related to our diets. I wonder if I can discuss the issues with...

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Identity is Out!

In the past twenty-four hours, I've been told several times: 'no more identity!' Yesterday I was sent a review of the book I co-edited on the eighteenth century British proto-feminist, Mary Astell. The reviewer in the English Historical Review laments that my co-editor and I treated Astell as--get ready for this--a woman. Go figure! But to our reviewer, Astell is just a writer, and to call her a woman writer is to make 'invidious distinctions' showing our failure to move into a 'post-modern framework for discussing gender.' For postmodernists, apparently, androgyny is in. Gender is out!

It also turns out that my Continue reading...

1. ROSH HASHANAH AND VEGETARIANISM

by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D.
rschw12345@aol.com
jewishveg.com/schwartz

Rosh Hashanah is the time when Jews take stock of their lives and consider new beginnings. Perhaps the most significant and meaningful change that Jews should consider this year is a shift away from diets that have been having devastating effects on human health and the health of our increasingly imperiled planet. While many Jews seem to
feel that the holiday's celebration can be enhanced by the
consumption of chopped liver, gefilte fish, chicken soup, and roast chicken, there are many inconsistencies between the values of Rosh Hashanah and the realities of animal-centered diets:

1. While Jews ask God on Rosh Hashanah for a healthy year, non- vegetarian diets have been linked...

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Joel Teitelbaum, the Rebbe of Satmar and the most coercive of all modern day ultra-Orthodox leaders, passed away 29 years ago this month.  A vociferous anti-Zionist, Teitelbaum is known for having exhorted his followers to stay in Europe.  Later, as the Nazis approached, he was one of many Hungarian ultra-Orthodox rabbis who told their flocks to remain calm.  There is nothing to worry about, these rabbis announced, God will protect us because of our anti-Zionism.

Unfortunately for Teitelbaum’s followers, God didn’t go along with his promises. While most of his followers perished in Auschwitz, Teitelbaum went into hiding and later escaped to freedom. He did not do this through his own ingenuity or through some divine intervention – Joel Teitelbaum, uber-anti-Zionist, was saved from certain death by a Zionist leader.

That Zionist, Rudolph Kasztner, organized the largest Holocaust rescue of Jews by another Jew.  He did it with smoke and mirrors, with bravado and slight of hand. Kasztner saved thousands of his people by negotiating with Adolph Eichmann – short of Hitler, the most feared Nazi in the world. Oskar Schindler of Schindler’s List fame said Kasztner was the bravest man he knew.

After the War, Teitelbaum lived for a brief time in Palestine, where he became a leader of the rabidly anti-Zionist, rabidly anti-modern, Edah HaCharedit. When you read about Jerusalem video stores being torched or Internet cafés trashed, chances are the thugs who did it are proudly affiliated with Edah HaCharedit.

Teitelbaum couldn’t stand what he saw as the ‘destruction’ of the Holy Land by the irreligious and imperfectly religious – in practice, pretty much everyone who wasn’t a Teitelbaum follower or acolyte. So, in 1946, Teitelbaum moved to Brooklyn and set up what was then his small hasidic court.  Teitelbaum found America’s Orthodox welcoming, and America’s Jewish welfare agencies helped to resettle many of his followers in Brooklyn.

You’ve probably heard the stories about these American Jews – the same ones who were so hospitable and supportive of Teitelbaum when he first arrived: Pious Jews fled pogroms in Eastern Europe.  The need to make a living in America forced them to give up strict Shabbat observance and other Orthodox practices. Their children, lacking the example of fully Orthodox parents, became even less observant. If those pious Jews had just kept Shabbat, the story goes, their descendants would still be Orthodox today.

The flip side to this story is another story you’ve also probably heard: Seemingly pious Eastern European Jews board a ship bound for America. As the ship leaves the harbor and gets beyond sight of the shore, they cut off their beards and pitch their tefillin into the sea.

Both stories probably happened, although the first was probably far more common than the second. But even though these are iconic stories, neither really tells the tale of Eastern European immigration to the United States. That is because both are based on a lie – the idea that these immigration ships were filled with characters out of Broadway’s Fiddler On The Roof: long-bearded shtetl-dwellers with untrimmed earlocks, whose only brush with secular culture had taken place moments before.

By the 1920s, the masses of Eastern European Jews were secular or only nominally religious. Emancipation, which spread throughout Europe during the 19th century,  made belonging to a religious community – and following that community’s laws – optional. Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, itself a reactionary movement to the Enlightenment that preceded Emancipation, lost its state-sponsored coercive powers as did all forms of Orthodoxy. And Jews, no longer forced to be Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox, left Orthodoxy by the tens of thousands as a result.

Most Jews who came to America during the great wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were neither ultra-Orthodox or rabidly secular – they were somewhere in between. They were Jews with a respect for Jewish law and tradition, but they were also Jews who appreciated and enjoyed secular culture and the freedoms it gave them.

The Orthodoxy they found in America was more suited to this hybrid outlook than the Orthodoxy of Eastern Europe. Never subject to state enforcement of religious law, American Jews – even American Orthodox Jews – took any type of religious coercion badly.

These new immigrants developed their own versions of Orthodoxy, too, founding shuls grouped around country or city of origin. In part, they did this to preserve the unique customs they grew up with. But they also did it for coarser, more practical reasons. These new shuls also served as affinity associations, and the social networking they provided helped immigrants land jobs and acclimate to American life. These shuls were rarely coercive – you paid your dues and you helped out with a minyan when you were able, and you were in.

These old and new American Orthodox Jews founded yeshivas like Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn and what would later become Yeshiva University in Manhattan. They also founded or helped to found many of the leading national Jewish organizations of their day, including what we now know as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and other welfare organizations meant to help suffering Jews in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Despite this, and despite the fact that these same American Orthodox Jews would be instrumental in rescuing and resettling Eastern European Jews during and after the Holocaust, Teitelbaum rejected American Orthodoxy as impure and watered down by compromise and modernity.  He sought to impose Edah HaCharedit standards on it, demanding stricter forms of kashrut and the rejection of all secular values, including basic secular education. He created a community virtually walled off from the rest of society. And, when that was not enough, he created another in Upstate New York that now carries his name.To this day, when Satmar hasidim choose to leave Brooklyn or Kiryas Joel and the hasidic life, they often leave it illiterate in English. An entire organization, Footsteps, exists primarily to help these former hasids adapt to American life.

Yet the pull of a closed life and the allure of rebuilding a fantasy version of pre-Holocaust Satmar Jewish life was strong. Teitelbaum’s group grew to be largest hasidic court in America, although that growth has far more to do with the fertility and fruitfulness of its members (not to mention the difficulties those members face when defecting) than it does with the attractiveness of its lifestyle to outsiders.

Like the Edah HaCharedit, Teitelbaum and the movement he founded are ultra-Orthodoxy unvarnished, presented without PR agencies or concern for anyone else’s opinion.

Although he had opportunities to do so, Joel Teitelbaum never thanked the man who saved his life. Teitelbaum even refused to acknowledge that a Zionist had saved him. His pat answer when pressed was that he was saved by God, not by man, and would discuss the issue no further. Perhaps most shockingly, despite the failure of his theology and the success of Israel, Teitelbaum continued his anti-Zionist agitation, becoming the leading anti-Zionist in the world.

He showed little if any respect for the American Orthodox community that initially welcomed him, and he eventually shunned its leaders just as he shunned their schools, shuls, and organizations.

Many of the men and women who immigrated to pre-Holocaust America did so to flee men like Teitelbaum and the extremism that so often surrounds them.  That did not mean they threw their Judaism into the sea.  It meant they wanted to live a life free from religious enforcers and from antisemitism – a life where they could rise or fall based on their merits, not on their religious observance. In short, they wanted an American life, not an ultra-Orthodox one.

In a fit of rabid theodicy unmatched in modern times, Teitelbaum ultimately blamed Zionism for the Holocaust itself.

Hello Semites and anti-Semites! (Is that like matter and antimatter? Kind of, except instead of totally and mutually annihilating each other they seem to have maintained an antagonistic, yet symbiotic relationship for centuries, deathless and regenerating, occupying the others mind and heart, like Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort. I talk about Harry Potter a lot, don’t I? I think it’s because it makes me sound younger.)

Sorry! Wandered off there for a second. You see, I’m in Amsterdam.

Yes, that Amsterdam, where last weekend I had the singular experience of watching You Don’t Mess With the Zohan in a theater full of Dutch people—Dutch, except for the dozen or so Germans parked behind us, loudly expressing their befuddlement at every cry of “Disco Disco,” and at Lainie Kazan, naked and resplendent, throwing her arms around Adam Sandler and cooing, “Oh honey! You are good at everything that you do,” before she dunks her hunk of pound cake in his coffee and shoves it in her mouth. Were they really allowed to laugh at this?

The New Jew Revolution--this reflexive self-mockery, the transformation of our own stereotypes and internalized self-loathing into something like pride--hasn’t quite gotten here yet. This can make for some intriguing exchanges. When one Dutch woman, somewhat haughtily, asked me why I hadn’t changed my last name upon marriage to Mr. Abramowitz, “subsuming my identity like most American women,” I replied:

“Well, I guess I could feed you a bunch of lines about having already established my professional identity and not wanting to go through all the paperwork, but honestly? I just wasn’t prepared for my name to sound that Jewish.”

She looked at me with undisguised shock. I know it’s difficult to detect irony when you’re not speaking in your first language, and standing just blocks away from the train station that processed the transports to Westerbork, I really should have known better. But before I could tell her I was kidding, she jumped in.

“But your last name is Shukert. That is a already a Jewish name.”

“Kind of,” I said. “In America it’s sort of neutral. In Nebraska, where I grew up, it’s just kind of German.”

“Well,” she said. “In Holland, it’s very, very Jewish.”

Ah! The ghosts of the past!

The Amsterdam Joden: in all of their gloryIn regards to Jewish identity, Amsterdam is special. It has a special name, Mokum, bestowed upon it years ago by its Jewish inhabitants, and has many Jewish leaders, including the popular current mayor, Job Cohen. The old Jewish Quarter boasts kosher restaurants and a pristine Jewish Museum. There are several synagogues and Jewish cemeteries still in use, and the Anne Frank House, with an appropriately solemn façade of glass and steel, attracts thousands of visitors each year. And then there are the Amsterdam Joden.

The Amsterdam football (or soccer, for those of you hopelessly unversed in the ways of the Continent) team, Ajax, is one of the three main Dutch football clubs, and like many such teams, inspires almost cult-like devotion in it’s supporters who call themselves… wait for it… the Jews. At games, they drape themselves in makeshift, sometimes homemade, Star of David flags and wear hats and jerseys with Hebrew writing. Some die-hard fans (most of whom, like the players, are not Jewish) set “Hava Nagilah” as their ringtones, or even go the extra mile and have the word Jood (if you went on a field trip with your Hebrew school class to that traveling Anne Frank exhibit in the late 1980’s, your remember as the Dutch word for Jew), often accompanied by a Star of David, tattooed on their bodies. When the team makes a successful play deserving of praise, or a serious bungle requiring encouragement (or reproach) their supported shout "Joden! Joden!" (Jews! Jews!) down at the field.

I thought it might be funny to take up a similar chant whenever Adam Sandler or Robert Smigel appeared on the screen, but managed, thankfully to restrain myself.

In the years since World War II, we’ve gone from martyrs to mascots.

Click The Image: for more Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons!But it doesn’t just stop there! American sports fans may argue over the Yankees vs. Red Sox with conviction and fervor, but rarely does it come to bloodshed. Nor have we perfected the kind of taunting verbal warfare, forged in the crucible of centuries of painful and violent history, that European teams unleash on each other. When some teams play Rotterdam, they sing a song referencing the brutal bombing campaign inflicted on the city by the Germans in 1940: “When the spring comes, we will bomb Rotterdam.” Dutch fans scream at German teams: “Give us back our bikes!” (Interestingly, I don’t believe there are many cases of Israeli fans screaming at the same teams: “Give me back my grandmother!”) When The Hague plays Ajax, they often shout “Hamas! Hamas!” while they goosestep in place and salute straight-armed at the opposing stands. And most famously, and creatively, when the Ajax Joden take the field, you can hear a loud hissing sound come from the Rotterdam stands. This is not a hiss of derision. It is meant to sound like the hiss of the gas. Jews to the gas.

I know. I’d be offended if I didn’t sort of think it was a little bit hilarious.

That’s Holland for you. Jews making Jewish jokes (for example, moi) are goggled at and strangely reprimanded. Non-Jews, however, use the Holocaust as a football chant, and it’s basically fine. (I say basically, because now and then a politician or civic leader plays lip service to how terrible it all is, but it doesn’t make much difference.)

More interesting to me is the evolution. Jews have gone from a being a despised minority to being sainted martyrs, and finally, mascots. I think of a story my mother told me, when we toured the old Jewish quarter of Prague, and came upon a group of elderly women selling little figurines of Orthodox Jews outside the ancient and abandoned synagogue. As one of the women tried to press a ceramic Chasid into her hand, my mother asked her if she was Jewish.

“Oh no!” said the woman.

“What happened to all the Jews then?” my mother asked.

“Oh!” The woman fluttered her hand in the air breezily. “They all moved away.”

A vanished people from a long-past time, whose once reviled customs (and existence) seem quaint and picturesque, now that they’re all gone. How strange to be part of a group filed away into irrelevance by the prevailing culture, the rough, unpleasant edges sanded and swept away by the passing of time.

It put me in mind of another group of people similarly removed from lands that they had lived on for millennia, that we in America currently use as mascots and souvenirs.

The Native Americans.

Is there really so much difference between the “Tomahawk Chop” and the hissing of the gas? Do these cultural appropriations only sting when they appropriate our culture? The only answer, I think, is to just take them back. In the words of Amitai Sandy, the Israeli graphic artist and comic book publisher, in response to the anti-Semitic cartoon contest sponsored by an Iranian newspaper: “We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew-hating cartoons ever published! No Iranian is going to beat us on our home turf!”

Personally, I’d love to see a version of how the Dancing Mascot of the Amsterdam Joden might look. My guess is that it wouldn’t be like Zohan.

Undead Preemie: didn't surviveIn a story that will likely be featured in pro-life literature for years to come, a baby that had been pronounced dead began breathing and showing vital signs hours later in Nahariya, Israel. A baby breathing hours after being pronounced dead—it’s a pro-life activist’s wet dream.

The baby’s mother was five months pregnant when tests showed that there was intrauterine bleeding, and that her fetus had no pulse. Doctors then initiated what’s being called a “second trimester termination procedure” the baby was delivered and pronounced dead. The baby was then sent to a cryogenics lab where she was put in a refrigerator, and five hours later, when the baby’s father asked to see it, doctors found that the baby showed signs of spontaneously breathing. She was rushed to the neonatal intensive care unit, but unfortunately she wasn’t able to survive for even 24 hours. Presumably this time, when doctors pronounced the baby dead they checked a little more thoroughly.

Here in America, pro-lifers are being forced to make a tough decision in the upcoming Presidential election, and pparently neither candidate has convinced hardliners that he’s the best choice.

Did you know that the little kosher symbol on your food may have a geopolitical, rather than strictly religious, purpose – especially if you live in Israel? Some Orthodox rabbis in the Holy Land use that symbol to reduce the number of Palestinians working in Israel. Here’s how it works:

Jewish law requires that many foods be cooked by Jews. This means that even if the ingredients are fully kosher and the food was prepared in a kosher kitchen under the watchful eye of an Orthodox Jew, if a non-Jew did the cooking, Jews are not supposed to eat that food.

Of course, if you’ve eaten a kosher restaurant lately, you probably noticed non-Jews working there. You may also have noticed that many of those non-Jewish workers seem to be directly involved in food preparation. That’s because Jewish law has provisions in place to circumvent the ban. And herein lies the story.

Before the 16th century publication of the Shulkhan Arukh, the standard code still in use today, Jewish law was hodgepodge that varied much from place to place. While the biblical and Talmudic laws were constant, rabbinic laws, edicts, and interpretations were not. But the upheaval caused by the expulsion from Spain and the resulting Inquisition created a situation where Jews, all refugees from different towns and countries, now lived side by side as refugees. This meant Jews living in adjoining houses were each following, in effect, different laws.

Rabbi Yosef Karo, an exile from Spain who settled in Tzefat, now in northern Israel, sought to rectify this situation by standardizing and codifying Jewish law. It almost worked.

Karo relied on three major early legal works, the Rif, the Rosh, and Mishne Torah of Maimonides. The Rif was written in North Africa, and reflects the customs of prevalent there. The Rosh is representative of Ashkenazim, German Jewry, and its outgrowths. The Mishne Torah, although written in Egypt, reflects the traditions of Maimonides’ Spanish homeland. In effect, what Karo did is place the traditions of the three major Jewish communities extant at that time in front of him and decide the law based on the majority. So, for example, if Spain and Germany said "permitted," and North Africa said "prohibited," the majority won.

For the most part, Sefardi and North African Jewish communities accepted Karo’s code. Eastern European Jewry did not.

Rabbi Moshe Isserles, a leading Polish rabbi and contemporary of Karo known as the Rama, thought Karo had shorted Ashkenazi traditions. He wrote a commentary to Karo’s work, pointing out every case where current Ashkenazi practice differed from Karo’s decision. From the late 16th century onward, Karo’s Shulkhan Arukh has been printed with Isserles’ commentary interwoven in its text. Karo’s attempt at unity failed.

So, what does all of this have to do with our restaurant problem? Karo’s code calls for a Jew to start the fire used for cooking. Without this involvement, most foods cooked by non-Jews are forbidden for Jews to eat.

Isserles allows a Jew to do a minor symbolic action – adding kindling to an existing fire, for example. In his view, this permits the food.

In Israel today, Isserles’ view on this issue determines the law for restaurants and food producers that carry the Jerusalem Rabbinate’s basic kosher supervision. In practice, this means a rabbinic supervisor can visit most restaurants in the morning, light the oven’s pilot lights, and leave. The restaurants' non-Jewish cooks – generally Palestinians – cook without his direct supervision for most of the day, while the rabbinic supervisor spot checks the restaurants periodically.

Karo’s stricter view is followed by restaurants and food producers carrying the Jerusalem Rabbinate’s mehadrin, “choice,” supervision. These restaurants tend to have a rabbinic supervisor on premises at all times, as well.

But now a group of settler rabbis, overwhelmingly Ashkenazim of eastern European origin, are challenging the Jerusalem Rabbinate’s reliance on Isserles, the Ashkenazi codifier. Why? Because forcing the Jerusalem Rabbinate to follow the stricter Sefardi view would force many restaurants to hire more Jews and, more importantly for these settler rabbis, to fire Arabs.

Kosharot, supposedly meant to be a kosher industry watchdog, leaked a report smearing dozens of Jerusalem eateries. The charges range from lax supervision to allowing Arabs to place uncooked food on the fire. Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Rabbinate, itself under ultra-Orthodox control, blasted Kosharot’s report, pointing out significant errors of both fact and law.

Rabbi Benny Lau, a leader of moderate Orthodox rabbis, investigated Kosharot’s charges and refuted them. He wrote, "There is a real concern that Kosharot's interests are not restricted solely to Halacha and kashrut. Rather, for them it is no less important to reduce the number of non-Jews working in Israel.”

But this is far from the first time kosher food law has been misused for a non-food-related purpose. Perhaps the earliest account on record goes back to the dawn of Rabbinic Judaism itself, approximately forty years before the destruction of the Second Temple.

The schools of Hillel and Shammai, the two competing camps that made up Rabbinic Judaism in the 1st century, disagreed about many aspects of Jewish law. One of those aspects was Judaism’s treatment of non-Jews. Shammai’s school waned gentiles kept as far away from Jews as possible. It viewed gentiles as a corrupting influence, and contact with them, in Shammai’s view, posed an unacceptable risk of intermarriage.

Shammai’s school tried to pass legislation banning contact with gentiles and enhancing the spiritual “cleanliness” of Jews. Hillel’s school opposed this. Shammai’s followers did not have the votes to win – so they went dirty. The Jerusalem Talmud (Shabbat 1:4) describes what happened.

The sages were meeting at the home of a prominent supporter, on the roof deck of his house. Beit Shammai came armed, murdered several members of Hillel’s school, and blocked the exits from the roof. Hillel’s remaining followers were held at spear-point until they cast votes for Shammai’s anti-gentile legislation. The 18 gezerot (decrees) proposed by Shammai’s school were then passed into law. The Jerusalem Talmud calls this day the “blackest day” to befall the Jewish people since the destruction of the Temple.

Most of those 18 gezerot are in force to this day, including bans on gentile-baked bread and gentile-produced wine. The theory was, if you can’t eat a gentile’s bread or drink his wine, you can’t eat in his home. If you can’t eat in his home, you can’t socialize with him. And, if you can’t socialize with him, you probably won’t marry him.

The law forbidding food cooked by non-Jews is a derivative of those laws.

What Israel’s settler rabbis are doing isn’t that different from what Shammai’s followers did. What they could never gain legitimately they seek to gain through fraud and deceit.

A flip side to this is B’maaglei Tzedek, a moderate Orthodox justice organization that certifies restaurants treat their employees fairly. About one third of Jerusalem restaurants now carry this certification alongside kosher supervision from the Jerusalem Rabbinate.

While Rabbinic Judaism claims to be following the traditions of Hillel’s school, the truth is far more complex. Rabbinic Judaism is a blend of both Hillel and Shammai’s outlook. In most ritual matters, we follow Hillel. But, in matters relating to contact with gentiles, Shammai’s view – the more radical and restrictive – still prevails.
Fanatics see the world in black and white, and their law reflects that. Moderates understand that nuance exists and that there is room for compromise. The fanatic position is easier to sell – think right wing talk radio – because moderation requires living with complexity and the uncertainty that always shadows it. Although the Academy was dominated by Hillel’s moderates, the populace was solidly in Shammai’s corner and would remain so until the Second Temple was destroyed. Indeed, it is thought that many of the zealots who helped cause the destruction were children of Shammai’s followers.

Just like in ancient times, there are two polarizing forces in Rabbinic Judaism. One is ever more radical, restrictive and exclusionary; the other, moderate.

Have the lessons of the past been learned? Only time will tell.

One Tuesday night [a few years back], I sat at a local cafe with a cappuccino and my just-purchased copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel's The Sabbath; all of my reading for pleasure seemed to be about Judaism at this point. I had already begun to understand why, on the seventh day, Jews traditionally refrain from lighting fires or using telephones or cooking food or spending money or doing many other things understood to be either technically "work" or outside the spirit of rest that governs the day

It seemed clear that abstaining from this stuff would create long stretches of silence and a freedom from distraction that could help a person access the most silent, hidden parts of the self. Heschel, however, explained that there was even more to it than that. He wrote,

To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence from external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature-is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man's progress than the Sabbath?[i]

The irony is that human progress depends on saying no to technology and economic engagement, at least for a while. Heschel framed Shabbat as a way of returning to too-oft-neglected ways of being human-a way to help us remember what we have in common with the woman who got up at 4 a.m. to clean the office.

I sipped my drink and I chewed on Heschel. The idea of being free from commercial transactions on Shabbat was attractive. I thought through the implications: If I didn't spend money, I couldn't get the eggplant sandwich I loved from the deli up the street. I wouldn't be able to ride the bus, since I never had a monthly pass. I needed Friday-night money to tip bartenders, pay cover charges, pick up the tab on a date, get into a movie. The list seemed to be endless. No eggplant sandwich?

This, I realized later, connected to all that stuff about desire I found in countless books on spirituality. Carol Lee Flinders wrote, "as long as I believe in sex as a source of lasting happiness-or power or food or even long weekends in the mountain or anything finite-then no matter how much I want the mysterious something else that mystics speak of, I can't walk toward it because my consciousness is divided."[ii]

In Buddhism, desire--uncritical servitude to our finite cravings--is considered the root of all suffering. The Ten Commandments tell us not to covet, not to desire greedily. Attempting to rein in my impulses, however, sounded terrible. The mere prospect of not being able to do what I wanted, exactly how and when I wanted to do so, was causing me no small amount of my own suffering. There seemed to be no winning.

Up until now, dabbling in Judaism hadn't demanded very much of me. I had time in my schedule for both Friday night services and clubbing, I could spare an hour's sleep every week or two for morning prayer and Torah class. Avoiding nonkosher food wasn't so hard-I hadn't eaten meat in years, and I wasn't really a fan of seafood anyway. But as I contemplated Shabbat, and what it might entail to deepen my practice, I began to realize that this spiritual discipline stuff was . . .well, more work than shooting energy out of the palms of my hands. If I wanted to move past the "random cool experiences" phase and into something more like Divine DSL, I had to actually do things to make that happen. I just wasn't sure that I was ready.

I wasn't alone in my hesitation to take this next step. A lot of people hit their limit of spiritual experimentation, I think, when it comes to facing down desires. The happy glow, the rushing ecstasies, and the feelings of being understood are all amazing. A class here or a retreat there is sweet, inspiring. Doing more than that is harder for a lot of us.

It's not like we have a lot of help and encouragement from the culture in which we live, either. As Caroline Knapp notes, "some twelve billion display ads, three million radio commercials, and 200,000 TV commercials flood the nation on a daily basis-most of us see and hear about 3,000 of them a day, all of them lapping at appetite, promising satisfaction, pulling and tugging and yipping at desire like a terrier at a woman's hemline."[iii]

American culture today is the most consumer oriented in Western history, and the system depends upon our cravings. Buddhist environmentalist Stephanie Kaza suggests that "consumerism rests on the assumption that human desires are infinitely expandable; if there are an infinite number of ways to be dissatisfied, there are boundless opportunities to create products to meet those desires . . . How can [consumers] know what product will satisfy them when there are so many to try?"[iv]

With a little practice not running after our cravings, we begin to realize that they, and the feeling of urgency to satiate them, might not be as endless as we had thought. If, one day a week, all of our needs can be met with prayer, slow walks in the park, reading, Torah study, sitting in silence, and long communal meals that allow conversation to unfold, what might that tell us about the things that seemed so urgent on the other six? What might that tell us about our culture's stories regarding what we can and can't live without?

It's not that there isn't a place for work, music, travel, and, yes, spending money-the world needs us to be creators and doers just as it needs us to take breaks from all that relentless creating and doing. As Heschel framed it, "in regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one proper attitude-to have them and to be able to do without them."[v]

This was what Frederica Mathewes-Green meant when she said that we should enter one religious system fully and allow it to change us. Judaism was beginning to ask things of me, to intimate that it might be in my own best interests to take on practices that were neither convenient nor comfortable. Me? I wasn't so certain. It wasn't that I didn't want a deeper relationship to God and my religious practice, but that-like many of us who grapple with desire-I was terrified of the implications.

I had created a tenuous balance, one hand grasped tight around my Judaism, another around my social life. It felt like any sudden movements in one direction or the other would cause everything to fall. I was terrified to think I might become so religious that I'd lose much of what I had in common with the artists, activists, and slackers cum Unix administrators who made up my world. If I said no to what I wanted, would I get things that I needed, instead? That piece of me that was always itching for more-more God, more connection, deeper encounters that lasted longer-would it be satisfied? How much of my life, my friendships, would I lose by seeking this out? Would oh-so-holy Friday nights without spending money be boring? Lonely? Feel like some sort of a punishment? If everyone went out without me . . . then where would I be?

Saint Teresa of Avila writes of her own experience,

It is one of the most painful lives, I think, that one can imagine; for neither did I enjoy God nor did I find happiness in the world. When I was experiencing the enjoyments of the world, I felt sorrow when I recalled what I owed to God. When I was with God, my attachments to the world disturbed me. This is a war so troublesome that I don't know how I was able to suffer it even a month, much less for so many years.[vi]

I needed my friends. They had nourished and sustained me, helped bring me back to life after my mother's death, given me a sense of community the likes of which I had never experienced. I loved them-Jack and Lida and Michael and Ariel and Rebecca and

Cass and everybody else. If saying yes to God meant endangering these ties . . . well, I wasn't able to do that. And yet, it was clear that my relationship to God had become fundamental to the point of non-negotiability. Any attempts to run from it would just be denial doomed to failure. God was calling me, but I wasn't sure to where. God beckoned, but I couldn't face the price that I might have to pay to follow.

The Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote,

You have an idea of what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, although not truly at peace, in the old country. You know the ways of the old country, its joys and pains, its happy and sad moments. You have spent most of your days there. Even though you know that you have not found there what your heart most desires, you remain quite attached to it . . . you know that what helped you and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? . . . Trust is so hard, because you have nothing to fall back on.[vii]

The feeling that I was living a double life began to wear. I still wasn't ready to throw away the full, flourishing existence that I had painstakingly built from scratch in a brand-new city, but inside the so-called flourishing life, I was increasingly lonely. That I felt like I couldn't talk about my desire for the sacred to become the organizing principle of my life meant that I had less and less to say.

My social life, like my freelance career, seemed to be far too much about the quest for the fresh, the exciting, the new, the next big thing. I, on the other hand, was yearning for the well tested, the eternal, the timeless. I was getting too much candy and not enough protein. Even costuming-which had become one of my favorite activities-began to lose its sparkle.

Though it had been delightful to reinvent myself over and over again, now I wanted to figure out who I was underneath all the artifice, underneath the makeup and the glitter and the thousand shifting guises. I still cherished the creativity demanded by the enterprise of getting dressed, but it began to be harder and harder to feel like I was "on" all the time. I started going out a little bit less, refusing invitations here and there. More often, though, I'd go out and simply not enjoy it.

All too frequently, it felt like there was something important missing from the conversation, something beyond romantic escapades, making rent, and the vicissitudes of pop culture. There just seemed to be a dearth of people with whom I could talk about this "something else," about not only my burgeoning religious life but all of the things that it might mean. My close friends' own spiritual lives allowed for some translation, but not enough. I needed people who were going through the same thing that I was, people who had also thought about keeping Shabbat or who were also afraid of their desire to become religious, and who might have some new ways for me to think about my private dilemmas. I needed those people, but I didn't see them anywhere in the life that I was already living.

Alex and I would later refer to this sense of longing as the search for the "party next door," for community and a life that felt cohesive, in which all of the social and religious aspects integrated seamlessly. At this point, however, I didn't know that there was a party happening elsewhere, or what kind of fun that could possibly be.

I wouldn't give up one life or the other. I'd refuse to tip the balance. And, in fact, I didn't stop spending money on Shabbat at this point; I just couldn't bring myself to take that step and face its possible implications. I'd just live with the discord, I told myself, keep letting the feeling in my solar plexus get trampled by the loud music at the bar. I'd notice keenly every time the check came at a restaurant, feel guilty and far from God as I reached into my purse for my share of the bill. This wouldn't be a long-term solution, and I knew it. The problem was, I didn't know what else there might be.

Reprinted from Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion by Danya Ruttenberg.Copyright © 2008 by Danya Ruttenberg. By permission of Beacon Press, www.beacon.org.

[i]Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 28.

[ii] Carol Lee Flinders, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco,1998), 71.

[iii] Knapp, Appetites, 15.

[iv] Stephanie Kaza, "Overcoming the Grip of Consumerism," Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000): 23-42.

[v] Heschel, Sabbath, 28.

[vi] Flinders, Enduring Grace, 167.

[vii] Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love (New York: Bantam, 1999), 21.

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Rubashkins: not winning any prizes anytime soonSince the raid on the Agriprocessors plant on May 12th, bashing the kosher meat giant has become something of a sport. Everyone from the New York Times to failed messiah to yours truly has taken a few shots (some cheap, some well-deserved) at the Rubashkin family and the business they run out of Postville, Iowa.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Rubashkin family. In fact, I called for a boycott of their meat in January, months before Uri L’Tzedek was on the case. But I’m getting a little frustrated with the way the scandal is being dealt with by liberal-minded people like me.

First of all, the boycott was a joke. It was called off too early, but even if it was still going on it wouldn’t be having any effect on the company itself. Many, if not most, of the people involved in the boycott are not regular purchasers of kosher meat to begin with. Either they’re vegetarians, or they buy non-kosher meat. So while it’s admirable that they want to be on the record against the practices at the AgriProcessors plant, they’re not creating much of a business loss for the company. Case in point: A good friend of mine manages a kosher restaurant in Chicago, and said he received an irate phone call from a Reform rabbi who demanded that the restaurant stop buying Rubashkin meat. But the rabbi in question had never eaten at the restaurant before. My friend just hung up on him. AgriProcessors is having business trouble these days, but it has to do with a lack of workers, not a lack of demand. If their workers weren’t mostly incarcerated, they would likely be producing as much as ever.

Like many lefty issues, the decision to buy other brands of kosher meat, if they’re even available, and especially to push kosher organic meat, is only viable for the people who can afford the significant price tag that comes with most AgriProcessors alternatives. An ultra-Orthodox mother of 10 in Borough Park might care deeply about labor practices and animal treatment, but if she can’t afford organic kosher meat, she’ll end up with Rubashkins.

I’d love to say that vegetarianism is the answer to this crisis. As a milchigatarian I’ve observed the Rubashkin uproar with an admittedly smug smile. But while I think vegetarianism would be great for the Jewish community, I think the sell would be about as effective as the abstinence pitch for teenagers. It might work on a select few, but for most, the allure of a hamburger is just too great.

If we want to change the way AgriProcessors does business we have to recognize how important their product is to our community and be respectful and cognizant of what they need to stay a profitable business. We should also not forget ways in which the Rubashkins have been generous in the past. This includes donating kosher meat to various Jewish institutions, and exporting members of their small community to even smaller communities that otherwise wouldn’t have had a minyan for the High Holidays.

As far as I can tell, the most effective way of dealing with the Rubashkin family would be within a halachic framework. It is clear that they don’t feel any obligation to the American legal system, but they have to pay at least lip service to halacha, so an appropriate conversation with them would focus on the halachic violations in their plant (of which there were many) and how they could change their behavior to be compliant with halacha and maintain whatever profit margin they require. Obviously this conversation needs to be initiated by someone within the frum community, preferably someone within Chabad. A liberal activist, even one with smicha, is unlikely to be taken seriously by Rubashkin.

I have some pretty serious doubts as to whether AgriProcessors is likely to ever change its ways significantly enough that it would pass inspection by the liberal Jews I identify with. But if there’s any chance it will ever happen I think we need to be realistic about what would be the most effective way of negotiating with a company that doesn’t take us seriously.

(Cross-posted on The Jew and the Carrot)

Affirmative Action: or reverse discrimination?Home Center, an Israeli home wares chain, has been offering  a secret discount to Arabs. When customer Eli Chai discovered and reported this last week, a Home Center spokesperson explained, “Home Center offers a wide range of attractive discounts throughout the year. As part of a plan to target specific communities, the chain offers different discounts for different sectors from time to time.”

The situation does seem pretty odd, but not altogether uncalled for. I wouldn’t be surprised if Arabs do more than 70% of the construction in Israel, and thus end up spending the most money at those sorts of stores. Why wouldn’t Home Center capitalize on that customer base by offering a good deal?

Of course, that’s not how it’s being framed in Israel. Chai is quoted as saying, “I didn't expect to get a discount, but I was appalled when I realized that had I been Arab I would have received one. I tried to think what would happen if it was a discount only for Jews, or Sephardim, or Ashkenazim.”

There's plenty of discrimination against Arabs in Israel, and Chai isn’t bothered by that. But when Arabs are favored, it’s a grave in justice!  It may feel inappropriate to offer a discount based on ethnicity, but it’s hardly shocking in a society that’s so clearly divided along those lines.