When it comes to their children’s Hebrew language education, there’s a group of parents who are not playing around. Then again, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Since last fall, 145 families in the Boston-Providence area have established Hebrew playgroups for their babies and toddlers, sponsored by a website called Hebrew Play. From day one, these moms and dads are referring to themselves as ima and aba, changing a lot of chitulim (diapers), and hoping that their babies will stop crying if they give them a motzetz (pacifier) to suck on.

Click here to read more.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Kiku Shaw with lulav and etrog in Yosemite (photo by Kim Shain)

The lulav and the etrog joined the flora and the fauna at Yosemite last week, as more than 800 members of the Brandeis Hillel Day School community made a pilgrimage to the national park to celebrate Sukkot.

Students and their families built a communal sukkah on the valley floor, eating some meals not only underneath a thatched roof but also in the shadow of Half Dome and El Capitan.

The event began in 2001 and occurs once every three years — so the visit from Sept. 23 through Sept. 25 was the school’s fourth. Tabbed “Sukkat Shalom: A Canopy of Peace,” it was attended by more than half of the 520 families that send their kids to Brandeis Hillel Day School, which has campuses in San Francisco and Marin.

“Coming here to Yosemite just feels like Sukkot for us,” said Jan Reicher, the immediate past president of BHDS. She joined the festivities in Yosemite with her husband, Yossie Alouf, and their daughters, Adi and Alex. “What could be more Sukkot-like than feeling grateful in nature? And there’s also nothing better for building community.”

Adi Alouf attended the event even though she is no longer a BHDS student; she’s now a sophomore at Jewish Community High School of the Bay.

“It’s so fun. I have so many wonderful memories of Sukkot in Yosemite,” said Adi, who helped lead one of three Shabbat prayer services on Friday night. “Every time, I explore something new and make connections with new people.”

Organizing an event for more than 800 people — students, parents and 25 staff members — almost 200 miles away from San Francisco is no simple matter. A planning committee of 17 volunteers worked for an entire year to ensure that things ran smoothly. According to planning committee member Todd Strauss, the biggest challenge was ensuring the success of such a highly decentralized program.

Over half of the school's 520 families celebrated Sukkot in Yosemite. (photo by Sam Lauter)

Some participants stayed for the whole event, and others attended a portion of it. With so many people altogether, it was impossible for everyone to be in the same place at the same time.

Families were given a wide variety of options in terms of both accommodation and activities. Some families stayed at one of the hotels or lodges in the park, while others camped in cabins, tents or RVs. Vanessa Friedman, who made the trek in an RV with her husband, Marty, and daughters, Sofia and Sara, reported that some families even built their own sukkahs at their camping spots.

Communal prayer services for Sukkot, Shabbat and Havdallah were led by students, parents and faculty. Hikes, art classes, Torah study and bicycle rides were also offered. Some hikes were lead by naturalists and professional photographers, but others were led by volunteers from the school community and focused on Jewish content.

Fourth-grader Chloe Tickten, who attends BHDS in San Francisco, enjoyed the hike on which faculty members dressed as ushpizin (guests) showed up along the route. “We had to guess who they were,” she recalled excitedly. “There was Moses, Abraham, Jacob and some other ones.”

There were grade-level dinners and campfires — some planned ahead of time and others put together spontaneously.

Friedman, whose daughters attend BHDS in Marin, said she really enjoyed the opportunity to get to know families from the San Francisco campus. “Being in such a beautiful setting with our community is so spectacular, so spiritual,” she added.

Stephen Tickten, whose three children attend the San Francisco campus, said that his family is now friendly with other families they met at the same event three years ago.

Head of School Chaim Heller (left) and other faculty unfurl a Torah scroll during prayer services. (photo by Kim Shain)

Chaim Heller, the BHDS head of school, was pleased to see the event get off to such a rousing start, as some 200 people gathered the morning of Sept. 23 for Shacharit services.

“This program is a real passion of mine,” said Heller. “We even have students’ grandparents flying in from around the country to be with us.”

The kids had a wide range of favorite experiences — from seeing animals (two male bucks, a baby bear and a coyote) on a bike ride to going on a hike with dad next to a waterfall to doing art projects in the middle of a meadow.

It was “part summer camp, part Israel — and all at the base of the Yosemite Valley floor,” said one dad, Marc Dollinger.

Sam Lauter, a dad with two children on the San Francisco campus, hopes that even more families do the trip in 2013. “It’s too beautiful a place and too great a community to miss it,” he said.

Strauss echoed the sentiment.

“Torah in the morning, a bike ride in the afternoon, and then seeing the moonlight reflected off El Capitan and Half Dome at night,” he said. “What Sukkot experience could be better?”

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Gertrude Berg when she started out in radio.

Gertrude Berg left this world at the age of 68 on September 14, 1966, two months to the day before I entered it. I’d like to think that maybe our souls met one another in a possible netherworld between life and death. I imagine that the departed Berg whispered something in my fetal ear — planted a seed — that would come to fruition exactly 43 years later, when I sat down last September at my laptop and wrote my first blog post as a first step on the path to a new career in journalism.

Actually, I thought it was Berg’s dramatic alter ego Molly Goldberg, and not Berg herself, who was my muse. After all, it was Molly’s photo that I put on my blog’s header. It was in homage to Molly, the quintessential Jewish mother, that I assumed the persona of “The Gen X Yiddishe Mamme.”

However, since recently reading Berg’s 1961 memoir, “Molly and Me” (co-authored by her son Cherney Berg), and viewing Aviva Kempner’s documentary film, “Yoo Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!” — the DVD was released this week, and is reviewed here — I realized that I have even more to learn from and be inspired by Berg than I do the Jewish uber-balebuste character she inhabited for nearly 30 years that “The Goldbergs” ran on radio and TV. (The radio version was called “The Rise of the Goldbergs.”)

It was Berg who was ultimately far more of an interesting character. Unlike Molly —an impossibly great cook, attentive parent, loving wife and loyal friend and neighbor — Berg was a real person with real faults. It’s not as though Berg didn’t possess some or all of Molly’s positive qualities, it’s just that she didn’t lead an existence in which all loose ends were tied up and problems solved at the end of every episode.

But don’t think that Berg didn’t try to make us think that her life played itself out like Molly’s. Not only did she make public appearances as Molly (à la Stephen Colbert) but she also recounted the story of her life as though it were a sitcom. Her autobiography is not so much of a memoir as it is a collection of beautifully crafted short stories and sketches about the real-life characters who served as inspiration for the fictional characters that populated the thousands of shows she wrote. Other than the occasional short-lived bout of garden-variety anxiety or self-doubt, Berg presented her life as consistently rosy and invariably amusing.

Not once did she make mention of an older brother who died in childhood of diptheria, and all references to her mother ended after the chapters recounting Berg’s teenage years spent at her parent’s hotel in the Catskills. A product of her era and without the benefit of hindsight, Berg did not understand how much more she would have been appreciated by Jewish women of future generations had she revealed the hardships she endured, including her mother’s downward spiral into mental illness and eventual institutionalization.

It is Berg, far more than Molly, who would capture the attention and gain the admiration of mothers today. Molly was the exemplary — yet typical — immigrant who struggled to rise to the middle class and raise first-generation American children, and it was because of this that so many listeners and viewers identified with her. But it was Berg who uniquely managed to build a remarkable creative and business career at a time when very few women were doing so. She paved the way for women, and also Jews, in American society.

When I look at my blog’s header, I now see both Molly Goldberg and Gertrude Berg. Molly Goldberg was a woman of her times. Gertrude Berg was a woman before her time. I am a woman of my time who is grateful to them both.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

As serious as this 13-year old appears to be about his bar mitzvah, he is still no adult.

We learned from the cover story of the past Sunday’s New York Times Magazine that there is a debate raging in developmental psychology and neuropsychology circles as to whether there is a new stage in human development called “emergent adulthood.” Some might call it “prolonged adolescence,” but apparently, a lot of people are asking a variation of the question “What Is it About 20-Somethings?”

The jury is still out as to whether the fact that so many young people in their 20s are not yet financially independent, settled on a career, or in long-term, committed romantic relationships is a definitive indication that humans are not cut out to assume the responsibilities of adulthood until they reach the age of 30.

Whether or not you completely buy the new theory, this re-thinking of the timing of the true onset of adulthood has not only biological, social and economic implications, but also religious ones. If brain imaging research has found that the human brain does not finish its major growth and hardwiring until approximately age 25, then what are we Jews doing declaring young people adults at the age of 12 or 13?

The concept of adolescence has been around for more than a century, with just about everyone in the developed world recognizing that young children do not turn into adults overnight. We haven’t thought of 13-year-olds as true adults for a very long time.

So why have we not re-thought a tradition that dates to ancient times, when we well know that what made sense to life then does not apply to our contemporary existence? OK, so we gave in to inertia, we just let things go with the traditional flow for the past century. But now that we have the evidence, it’s high time that we reconsider whether it is right and fair for us to confer Jewish adulthood on our 7th and 8th graders merely to ensure a steady stream of minyan makers.

Rather than lament the drop off of congregational and educational participation of teenagers post-b’nai mitzvah, maybe we should remind ourselves that they are just that: teenagers, and not adults. Teenagers get a kick out of doing davka (basically doing the opposite of what we want them to), so why not psych them out by not expecting them to act like adults, which we all know they aren’t.

Don’t get me wrong — I am not advocating that young Jews should never have the privilege of taking on the responsibility for the mitzvot. I’m not calling for the abolition of the bar or bat mitzvah ceremony. What I am suggesting, however, is that if the teenage and 20s years are all about exploring one’s identity, trying new paths, gaining experience and finding personal meaning and direction, then what is our hurry? Why not extend the Jewish educational journey for youth, and gain the benefit of not losing the momentum from making a major stop during middle school? Maybe then, when they finally do emerge as actual adults, they will really be ready to commit to living a Jewish life.

Why not re-envision this Jewish coming of age so that when a young Jew stands up at his bar mitzvah or her bat mitzvah and says, “Today, I am an adult,” he or she can really mean it and the rest of us in the congregation can really believe it?

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Ginna Green with her son Isaac and daughter Tzipporah in Oakland, CA.

When she sees how excited her 7-year-old son, Isaac, is to go with her to pick up his younger sister, Tzipporah, at his old preschool, Ginna Green is convinced that she and her husband made the right decision to send their children to Gan Mah Tov, in Oakland, Calif.

Green is confident that the Jewish foundation Isaac received at Gan Mah Tov helped him to succeed at his elementary school and to develop a love of being Jewish. It has also served as a gateway to ongoing Jewish life and learning for the whole family. But as a parent, she admits, “We are shouldering the financial burden at the expense of having more children,” and as an active lay leader at Congregation Beth Jacob, the host institution for Gan Mah Tov, she knows that for North America’s Jewish early childhood education (ECE) system, the challenges extend beyond high tuitions, with the current economic climate not making things any easier.

Teacher Quality vs. Pay Rate

Sticker shock has trickled down to Jewish ECE, or preschool, programs from Jewish day schools; however, while parents are paying anywhere from $10,000 to $20,000 per child per year for Jewish preschool, according to Janet Harris, director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco’s ECE Initiative, few ECE teachers are making a living wage. Harris says that the average national Jewish ECE teacher’s wage is $17.50 per hour. Most preschool teachers put in 30 hours per week or less. “And having a higher degree doesn’t really make much of an impact,” she added. “It might go up to $20 or $21.” By comparison, the average day school teacher makes roughly $50,000 to $70,000 annually, according to a study done by Sacha Litman, whose firm, Measuring Success, provides data-driven consultation to non-profits.

Low compensation for ECE educators is a national problem, not just a Jewish one. Caren Gans, director of the Leslie Family Early Childhood Education Center in Palo Alto, Calif., said, “We have many wonderful teachers who have been with us for years, but with our expansion on our new campus, we need to be able to attract and retain more teachers.… We’re finding it more and more difficult to attract new, high-quality teachers.”

The problem is especially acute in regions like hers, where the cost of living is high. But Gans can’t offer her teachers more, because she budgets for the low student-teacher ratios necessary for optimum learning and the benefits packages she feels her staff deserves.

Welcoming Shabbat at the T'enna Preschool at the OFJCC in Palo Alto, CA

Possible Solutions

Gans’s preschool participates in the JCC Association’s An Ethical Start program, a curriculum for children, parents and teachers based on the ancient Jewish text Pirkei Avot. The school also participates in the Jewish Early Childhood Education Initiative, a national program that melds Jewish ideas and values with the Reggio Emilia education philosophy, which is based on the belief that the early years of development are paramount to children forming who they are as people, and stresses a self-guided curriculum.

Experts in the study of Jewish ECE believe that the solution to the financial challenges facing preschools lies with the goals that initiatives like these are designed to achieve: improvement in the quality of education, expansion of opportunities for parents to learn with their children and become more involved in the Jewish community, and strengthening of ties between ECE centers and their host institutions (mainly Jewish community centers and synagogues). These things, it is hoped, will influence donors to view Jewish ECE as an important long-term investment and to infuse schools with money.

“The affordability and compensation issues can only be addressed if we shift the paradigm,” asserted Eli Schaap, program officer for education and research at the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life. This shift involves host institutions starting to look at their preschools through an assets-and-liabilities lens rather than through one that focuses on profits and losses. “It can no longer be about preschools breaking even, or, as in many cases, subsidizing the JCCs or synagogues. You can’t look at Jewish ECE in a one-year snapshot. [It] is a capital investment. Its long-term payoff — if it is done right — is enormous for not only the host institution, but also the greater Jewish community,” he said.

Lucy Polsky making challah at her preschool at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, MD

It’s Not All About the Money

Research has shown that salary is not the only thing driving ECE educators; staff satisfaction is high, and turnover is low, in schools with good leadership and a clear vision of excellence. Similarly, although hard-to-meet requests for scholarships are up, families have not left in droves, especially where a sense of community within the school is strong. “Even when the cost became a real challenge for us with two kids there at the same time, we were determined to make it work,” said Meredith Polsky, a parent at Temple Beth Ami in Rockville, Md.

But Ilene Vogelstein, who directs a professional network called the Alliance for Jewish Early Childhood Education, cautions that most parents are unlike Green and Polsky. She cites a 2002 study by Pearl Beck, published by the Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life. The survey indicates that for the most part, cost and convenience are stronger motivators than Jewish content when choosing a preschool. Therefore, Vogelstein is closely watching how the push for mandatory publicly funded universal pre-kindergarten will affect the future of the currently greater than 100,000 student-strong Jewish ECE system.

Major Jewish foundations may be watching, too, but they are not waiting. They are using their dollars, very small in comparison with some $1 billion flowing through Jewish ECE centers, to leverage the system. The San Francisco-based Jim Joseph Foundation has invested $6.9 million in Jewish ECE , including the ECE Initiative and the Jewish ECE Initiative. In response to the serious challenges posed by a dearth of professionally trained preschool directors and by young people choosing to pursue careers in ECE, the foundation recently announced as part of its larger grants that the Jewish Theological Seminary will be developing a first-ever master’s degree in Jewish ECE program, and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion will be developing a new certificate in Jewish ECE program for teachers already in the field.

“Jewish ECE is aligned with our vision” of increasing the number of young Jews engaged in ongoing Jewish learning, said Sandra Edwards, JJF’s associate director. “In pursuing that vision, we believe that a portion of JJF funding will be well spent on enhancing the quality of the Jewish early childhood experience, particularly by upgrading the preparation of pre-school educators.”

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Somehow, I am not surprised that just as I find myself at what has for me been the hardest stage of parenting (working mom with three boys, ages 9, 14 and 16), studies are showing that fewer women are choosing to be mothers.

A recently released Pew Research Center study shows that a quarter of American women in my age and demographic group (40-44 , with an advanced academic degree) are childless. While that percentage is down from 31% in 1994, there is evidence that choice, and not just infertility, is involved.

The recent report cited a 2007 poll, showing that 41% of respondents felt that children were essential to a successful marriage, down from 65% in 1990. A recent, much-talked-about article in New York magazine titled, “All Joy and No Fun,” covered the supposed revelation that parenting is hard and captured the zeitgeist of today’s young parents hating to be parents.

While I view this change in numbers — and more importantly attitudes — as a shift for women, I also see it as one for Jews. Half a generation after I married and began having children, more young women think that the economic expense and drag on personal fulfillment that come with having kids are legitimate reasons for having fewer, if any, babies. While I don’t think that this is a primary consideration for most young Jewish women, I do think that they are unburdened by a religious and national procreative responsibility that my cohort shouldered.

Growing up in Jewish day schools and spending time in Israel learning about the Holocaust, and even being taught by Holocaust survivors, we perceived a clear directive on doing our part to carry the Jewish people forward. Pru u’rvu (Be fruitful and multiply), Am yisrael chai (The People of Israel Lives), and “Never Again!” combined with one another to create a potent message.

Then, not too many years later, I arrived as a newlywed at the Jewish Theological Seminary for graduate studies in the immediate wake of the release of the National Jewish Population Survey in 1990. That was the study that sounded major alarms in the Jewish community and seared the notion of “Jewish continuity” and all its attendant desperation into our consciousnesses.

This double-whammy, together with my innate desire to be a parent, resulted in my husband’s and my welcoming our first child just one week after my 28th birthday. From recent conversations I have had with several of my former students from my days of teaching in New York day schools, it sounds like things are different for them. They are not taking any calculations other than the personal kind into consideration.

“[Having children] is important because I love children and want a family, and having children is a big part of life,” said one of these young women — now the same age I was when I was rushing home from her 5th grade classroom to be with my newborn.

“I don’t really think my Jewish identity factors into this,” she continued, noting that community and raising children in the Jewish faith are important to her, but being Jewish is not the reason why she would like two or three children.

“While my mother has always said that all Jewish women should have three children in order to deal with Jewish continuity and numbers, I think the numbers have more to do with simple family math and affordability,” explained another of my former students.

Caught in the middle, between the generation of these young women and that of their mothers, I identify with both. I admire my former students for being more level-headed than I was about the costs of parenting. But at the same time, I cannot but be concerned about what this will mean for future generations of the Jewish people.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

I started thinking about this while watching the following video produced and disseminated by Unf—ck The Gulf, an advocacy and philanthropic campaign to clean up the damage caused by the BP oil spill and oppose offshore drilling. It’s the brainchild of Luke Montgomery and Nate Guidas, social entrepreneurs who appear from their photos on the project’s website to be in their 20’s or 30’s.

These guys are clever, and they know how to appeal to young people – and also not-so-young people who aren’t offended by profanity. I found their F-bomb approach quite brilliant, rather entertaining, and most critically, effective – and I was ready to show the video to my kids. But then I caught myself, and asked whether that was an appropriate thing to do.

Fox News, of course, immediately ran a segment questioning the moral judgment of including young children using the F-word in the video. I did stop to consider this issue, but didn’t dwell on it too long. The child actors’ parents reportedly gave their consent and were present during filming. Hey, it’s a free country, and nothing here amounts to child abuse.

What I found to be more challenging was figuring out whether I would want to show this video to my students or my own children as a model for effective social activism. I concluded that I probably would, but not without some misgivings.

It’s not as though kids today have never heard the F-word before (though maybe not repeated so many times in the course of a couple of minutes). But at the same time, do caring and responsible adults want to encourage a lack of civility? Shock and awe seems to be the genre du jour, but how much graphic language (let alone graphic images, as can be seen in some other public service announcements) is too much?

When it comes to making a difference – to repairing the world – does the end necessarily justify the means?

Take a look for yourself. What do you think?

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Writer Dave Eggers meets with some students.

With the cost of Jewish early childhood programs, Jewish day school, congregational school and Jewish camps increasing practically by the minute, people have been trying to come up with ways of keeping Jewish kids in Jewish education and their parents from going broke. Some think establishing scholarship endowments (school by school or community by community) is the answer. Others advocate that we all just move to Israel, where Jewish education comes free or next to free. It’s hard to know what the right and effective answer is.

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone soon comes up with another approach to solving the problem that looks a lot like the new ScholarMatch website founded by writer Dave Eggers. ScholarMatch.org is like micro-philanthropy sites such Kickstarter.com, but instead of donors giving online to support artistic projects, they fund students’ college tuitions. The young people from the San Francisco Bay Area (the project is being Beta tested here) you see featured on the website have done their best to cover their college expenses through their own savings, help from their families and different types of financial aid. ScholarMatch is a way for them to ask complete strangers to make up the difference between the tuition sticker price and what they can pay. A stranger’s making up the difference can mean the difference between the young person’s going to college and having to defer college – or not going to college at all.

Most of the students on ScholarMatch are from low and low-middle income backgrounds. I would imagine that if such a project were set up to help fund individual children seeking help with tuition for Jewish school or camp, many of them would be from upper-middle class families. Tuitions reaching $20,000 per year for preschool and $30,000 for day school have put Jewish education out of reach for all but the wealthiest in the community.

I am sure that there is an enthusiastic, tech-savvy, young Jewish social entrepreneur out there ready to jump on this idea (I would just warn him or her that the “J-Match.com” name is already taken – just in case they were thinking of that). But the question remains whether there would actually be enough takers – and I don’t mean on the funding side. The students on ScholarMatch are hungry enough for higher education to put their profiles up online and ask for help. Would Jewish kids (and their parents) be willing to do the same for the sake of their own – individual – formal Jewish learning?

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

I was amazed, however, that this topic of intermarriage even managed to enter my 8-year old son’s consciousness in this critical pre-nuptial period. As far as I know, he hasn’t read anything in the news about THE WEDDING, and he doesn’t yet have a Facebook account, Twitter feed and the like – so I have no idea where he got wind of it. I guess it’s just in the air these days.

Here’s the conversation he started with me out of the blue a bit earlier today:

Son #3: Imma, what do you think the chances are that I will marry someone Jewish?

Yiddishe Mamme: Well, what do you think the chances are?

Son #3: Not good.

YM: Why do you think they’re not good?

Son #3: Because all the Jews are taken already.

YM: They are? I’m not so sure about that.  There are actually still a lot of Jews out there. Do you want to marry someone Jewish?

Son #3: How should I know? That part of my life hasn’t happened yet.

Clinton and Mezvinsky’s wedding (but hopefully not marriage) will be over very soon, but I have the feeling that this conversation with my son will continue for quite a few years to come. Because, after all, that part of his life hasn’t happened yet.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

I so often write about young Jews who, after having grown up completely assimilated or having had a negative experience with Jewish education, are trying to find a connection to Judaism now that they are adults. So much Jewish social and educational programming today is designed as a means of reaching out to unaffiliated or disaffected Jews in their 20′s and 30′s. It’s all about meeting young Jews where they are at and hopefully bringing them closer to their cultural and religious roots. These are the liberal Jews spoken of by thinkers such as Peter Beinart, the ones he says identify strongly with values of democracy, humanism and universalism and are distancing themselves from both Zionism and Jewish particularism.

On the other hand are young Jewish adults who have emerged from upbringings and youthful experiences steeped in Jewish learning, community and tradition. They are the other half of the contemporary American Jewish equation of which the sociologist Steven M. Cohen wrote in his A Tale of Two Jewries study. It had been argued by some that these young people will be the group that becomes further strengthened and that will constitute the core that will survive and carry our people forward.

A new documentary, unscripted reality style TV show, In Over Our Heads, that debuted earlier this year on Jewish Life Television, chronicles the lives of four such young Jews (no need to worry if you, like me, do not have a TV – you can watch already-aired episodes on YouTube). The series has all the drama of Srugim, the hit Israeli cable TV program about a group of young Modern Orthodox professionals in Jerusalem, only with more raw and grittier production values. Unlike the protagonists of Srugim and the average liberal young American Jewish professional, who are all either single or newly married but childless in their late 20′s or early 30′s, the four friends who star in In Over Our Heads (and who also double as its production team) are all married and parents of young children.

Cast and production team members Yitzi Cusner, Malkah Winter, Valerie Frank and Simcha Weinberg

At first glance, it would appear that Malkah Winter, Simcha Weinberg, Valerie Frank and Yitzi Cusner have completely internalized the values and expectations of their heavily Jewish community of Sharon, Massachusetts. But have they really? This is the question that weaves its way through the first three episodes (and likely will continue to do so in future ones). The viewer discovers that things are not so straight forward and that these individuals do not fit simply into labeled boxes. In the first episode, which explores the concepts of niddah and mikveh (a woman’s ritual impurity during menstruation and immersion in a ritual bath), the focus is not on one of the women who grew up Orthodox but rather on one who considers herself Reform. In the second, we meet a married mother of two from Monsey, NY (a highly religious enclave) who regularly goes on all-night clubbing escapades in Manhattan in search of a spiritual outlet. In the third, we learn how these young people struggle with the choices they have made and with the expectations they feel their families, community and society at large put on them.

Stereotypes these people are not. Their lives are complex and their personalities nuanced. What makes this show so compelling is not only its candor and humor, but also the depth of religious and spiritual questions, considerations and yearnings that its real-life characters bring to it. They are often seen on camera referring to and discussing religious texts and commentaries, and each episode is framed by relevant quotations from Jewish and secular sources. God is present and real in these people’s conversations and in their lives – even for those who lean more toward doubt. It is this every-present layer of meaning-making cast over the production that makes it so startling (in a good way).

As much as my age cohort may enjoy and learn from this creative outlet for these four suburbanites, the show is even more important for their contemporaries (both affiliated and not) to watch…and reflect upon…and discuss.

Watch these segments from the first three episodes and see why I am hooked, and why you may be, too. I invite you to join me in spreading the word about the show. I plan on telling people that In Over Our Heads is “seriously funny,” which it absolutely is – just not in the way they will probably initially understand the phrase.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

In my day, you made a good impression if you put together a decent-looking poster board to show your teacher and class. Nowadays, creative, resourceful kids can use nifty tools like Apple’s Final Cut Pro (don’t forget, we’re in Silicon Valley here) to make AMAZING music videos to teach others about thrilling science topics like momentum.

The boys (all graduating from 8th grade and middle school this week) did the research, wrote the lyrics, scouted the locations, arranged the choreography and staging/direction, and chose the costumes and props. As you will see, they put their all into singing and performing. One boy – the one with access to the professional editing program – took charge of post-production duties.

So what does this have to do with my usual beat (ie. the Jewish world)? Nothing, other than the fact than I’m a Jewish mother who is proud of her son (a nice Jewish boy, of course) and his friends. Dayeinu.

Here is the “Sweetest Momentum” video plus -as an added bonus – the behind-the -scenes “The Making of Sweetest Momentum” (seems as though you can’t have the first without the second these days…). Oh, and in case you are wondering as you are watching, my son is the one with the long, curly auburn hair (affectionately referred to by him and his friends as his signature “Jewfro” look).

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

This is the pre-1948 travel poster used to illustrate Ingall's article in Tablet, titled "Never Never Land: I can't talk to my kids about Israel"

Sometimes I have to wonder whether people actually bother to read an article through to the end before launching into a tirade against its author. I really feel for Tablet Magazine’s parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall, who got feedback like, “Thank you for helping me understand why most of my family burned in ovens while American Jews like yourself stoodby doing nothing,” in response to a piece she wrote on her ambivalence about talking to her two young daughters about modern Israel. Those who attacked her for being an ignorant, self-hating Jew and knee-jerk liberal may have gotten their jollies projecting their hate and frustrations on to her, but they clearly missed her point by a mile (at least).

While I don’t completely agree with Ingall’s stance on Israel and how one , as an American Jew and a Jewish parent, should relate to it, I can sympathize with her reticence in talking to one’s children about something that is fraught with moral complexity. Anyone who says that talking about Israel is not a morally complicated undertaking is not in touch with reality, in my opinion. But then again, an awful lot in life is morally complex, and we as parents should not disengage from or ignore any of it. If we don’t engage and expose our children to the grey hues that span between the poles of black and white, then how on earth will they ever know how to do it for themselves when they are older – or how to model this delicate juggling act for their own children further down the line?

As I have stated, I don’t exactly see eye to eye with Ingall. Statements of hers like the following get my dander up (my responses in parentheses):

• “…the word ‘Zionist’ makes me skittish.” (“Zionist” is not a dirty word. But if you don’t feel comfortable with it, substitute something like “supporter of Israel” for it. Don’t get bogged down in semantics, especially when they main focus is on getting your kids to connect to Israel.)
• ” I feel no stirring in my heart when I see the Israeli flag. I would no sooner attend an Israel Day parade than a Justin Bieber concert.” (As a Jew – even of a centrist/moderate/leaning to liberal stripe, I find this a bit disturbing. Not really sure how to respond to this, other than to say that Justin Bieber is likely to be a flash-in-the pan in our kids’ lives – not to mention in the larger scheme of things – but Israel won’t.)
• “I found myself trying to convince her [Ingall's eight-year-old daughter] that Israel did have that right [a legitimate historical claim to the Land of Israel]. But that’s not what I believe. But I’m not sure what I believe. I want my children to love Israel, but I don’t want them to identify with bullies.” (Israel has a legitimate historical claim to the Land of Israel – at least some of it – and a legitimate right to exist in a state of peace and security. Period.)
• “Until now, I’ve taught my children about Jewish identity through ancient history, through food, through songs and prayers, through the story of American immigration. I’ve left any Israel talk to their teachers.” (This can be a big mistake. Parents should not assume that teachers know what they are doing Israel education-wise. Research has shown that Israel education is weak and undefined in many non-Orthodox schools and other educational settings – hence the recent focus of educators and funders on developing good Israel education programs and initiatives.)
• “So, exactly how should liberal parents who want to foster Jewish identity, but who see Zionism as the conversational equivalent of an Alar-coated apple, teach their children about Israel?” (Maybe I don’t get the metaphor here -but is Ingall saying that Israel is supposed to be good for you, but that it is actually poisonous?!?!)

Marjorie Ingall and her daughters

It is only toward the end of her piece that Ingall brings in the expertise of Alex Sinclair, an Israel education expert, who encourages teachers and parents to expose children to a plurality of voices on Israel and to let them try on different stances to see how they fit. She quotes him as saying, “Educational thinkers since Socrates have known that one of the soundest ways in which to get people to feel committed to and invested in a given issue is to ask them to take a stand on it: to debate. In good schools, from the earliest grades, children are asked to collate evidence, analyze data and evaluate positions. Indeed, ‘evaluation’ is the highest order of thinking,…Yet, in Israel education, we seem to want to prevent Jewish children (to say nothing of adults) from aspiring to that level.”

Indeed, why is that Jews – who by nature like to disagree with one another – think that it isn’t okay to argue about Israel? Israelis argue among themselves – LOUDLY –  all the time about their government’s policies and where their country is going. They do it from the position of already having some skin in the game, of being engaged with something that matters deeply to them. That’s what American Jews can learn from Israelis, and what American Jewish parents can model for and transmit to their children.

Ingall begins to wonder, “Maybe instead we should encourage kids to be able to engaged in informed debate and be able to appreciate Israel’s history while also feeling empowered to urge its government—and ours—to take positions we think are right.”

She concludes: “When you’re an American Jewish parent, ambivalence and sorrow about the state of Israel aren’t necessarily bad. Disengagement is. What I need to fight in myself is the tendency to tune out when I’m confused and upset. When I tune out, I can’t learn, and I can’t teach my own kids. Disagreement with Israel doesn’t mean not loving Israel, just as being upset with your own children doesn’t mean you don’t love them. But I need to engage with what frightens me, and my failure to do so is why it’s taken eight years to write this column.”

I’m sorry Ingall did not express these sentiments earlier in her column. It could have saved her some grief. The upside is that it has brought her and Tablet more attention and furthers an important discussion (ergo this blog post). But I do still wonder about people who can’t stick with an article until its conclusion. That doesn’t bode well for civil discourse, which is something sorely needed when it comes to the topic of Israel.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Update: Ingall has written a follow-up column addressing much of the commentary that followed her initial article. Click here to her read her excellent reflection and response a week later.

Ma'aleh Film School logo

As lovely as the sentiments conveyed by all those flower arrangements delivered on Mother’s Day this past Sunday were, we all know that motherhood is not always a bed of roses. Hence, all those mommy blogs out there in cyberspace allowing mothers to rant, rave, share their frustrations and self-doubts, and in some entrepreneurial cases, make a nice chunk of change.

However, in religious Jewish circles, in which women are expected to be mothers first and foremost, and in which the bearing of children is mitzvah #1 (literally, as the commandment of pru urvu - to be fruitful and multiply – is the first to appear in the Torah), there isn’t as much room for maternal kvetching. Young, exhausted mothers who give birth to many children in rapid succession, although they live in ostensibly tight-knit communities, do not always have the necessary emotional support network.

Miryam Adler, a director from the Ma’aleh Film School in Jerusalem, has made a film called Shira exploring precisely this issue. The eponymous main character is a young woman in her twenties who has given birth to five daughters and does not want to have any more children. The fact that she has not yet borne a son complicates the situation further, as the Rabbinical tradition holds that one has not fulfilled the commandment to procreate until one has had offspring of both genders. The film deals with Shira’s attempts to be understood by her loving, yet uncomprehending, husband and with her excruciating inner turmoil.

The director knows of that which she speaks (or to be more accurate here – that of which she films). Adler, herself, is from an Orthodox background and gave birth to her six daughters one after another while in her early twenties. In a bold move, she began her film studies at Ma’aleh when her youngest child was less than a year and a half old (and her oldest must have been in only the youngest of elementary school grades). Watch Adler direct Shira and explain how her own life experiences have influenced her work in filmmaking, and in shooting this narrative, in particular:

Shira is yet another example of the impressive cinematic storytelling coming out of Ma’aleh. I have already written about how the creative team behind the hit Israeli television show Srugim are graduates of this unique film school. I invite you to view the following short film about Ma’aleh to learn about some of its other excellent productions, and about its singular place in the world of Israeli – and Jewish – filmmaking.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Photo credit: Corbis

As someone who personally knows gay Israeli couples who have had children by gestational surrogacy, I was surprised to find out very recently that Dan Goldberg is being denied the right to prove his paternity of his newborn twins, Itai and Liron.

I first learned that quite a number of Israeli gay men are fathering children through surrogacy in India when I read an article on the subject in The New York Times a couple of years ago. The article, written in the spring of 2008, stated that Israel legalized the adoption of children by same-sex couples earlier that year, but that such couples were barred from hiring surrogates in Israel. Thus, many Israeli gay men looked to India for women to serve as surrogates. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” said one of the prospective Israeli fathers interviewed for the article. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.” Indeed, these women use the money they earn in this way to buy a home, get a better education for their children or start a small business.

Normally, the local family court in the Israeli city or region in which the same-sex couple resides issues an order for a DNA test to be performed in India (or wherever the baby was born by surrogacy – which is usually in either India or North America) to prove paternity by one of the male parents. Once the biological link is confirmed, the child is eligible for naturalization as an Israeli citizen and for adoption by the non-biological parent.

In Dan Goldberg’s case, he has been stuck in a Mumbai hotel room with his twins for two months, his savings depleted, because the Jerusalem Family Court judge is refusing to issue the order for the paternity test. He claims he lacks the jurdiction to issue the order in Goldberg’s case, and in the cases of two other gay couples from Jerusalem expecting babies by gestational surrogacy. This seems incomprehensible given that other family court judges have issued these orders as a matter of routine.

But then again, nothing in increasingly religious Jerusalem surprises me anymore. As Dan Goldberg himself puts it, “This is a state of contradictions. I’m an Israeli citizen, I served in a combat unit during two intifadas and I still serve in the reserves. I’ve also volunteered with the police for years. But when I want to realize my right to be a parent, the state kicks me to the curb.” I have to admire his restraint – I’d be using some serious expletives if I were in his place.

For more information on the case, you can read about it directly in the Israeli press. Click here to read Ha’aretz’s coverage of the story. The case is also making the rounds of social media sites and word about it is getting out beyond Israel quickly. Below is a video called “Liron and Itai Want To Come Home” that was posted by Goldberg on YouTube yesterday as he appeals to the court of public opinion, while awaiting the outcome of his legal appeal.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Ruth Messinger with a Darfuri newborn

As thankless as motherhood can be sometimes, it is still an exalted undertaking – at least at this time of the year. Some have even elevated the task of mothering to the sublime – if not the divine –  with a Jewish proverb telling us that because God could not be everywhere, He created mothers, and G. K. Chesterton calling motherhood “the mystery of the making of men.”

Still, as much as we learn from our mothers, we can’t possibly learn from them everything we need to know in life. And what one person learns from her mother is not the same as what someone else learns from hers. This point came to mind a couple of weeks ago as I sat listening to Ruth Messinger speak to a group of students at the Hillel at Stanford University.

This was not the first time I had heard Messinger, President of the American Jewish World Service and one of the country’s leading Jewish voices on the national stage fighting for justice and human rights, speak. Before she assumed the leadership of AJWS, I and my then-fellow New Yorkers knew her as the Manhattan Borough President. I also knew her as one of the other regular guests at my politically active (of the Democratic persuasion) friend Ricki Lieberman’s annual Hanukkah latke dinners.

So, I primarily thought of Messinger as a politician and NGO director. But when she mentioned her granddaughter while speaking at Stanford, it struck me that, along with all the other roles she has played, she has also been a mother. It also occurred to me that many, though probably not all, of the conversations she has had with her children have been different from the ones my own mother and grandmothers have had with me. Not everyone has a a mother as astute, tough, driven, and accomplished as Messinger. Nor do we have one who has run against Rudy Giuliani in a mayoral race.

Messinger was speaking to the Stanford students as the AJWS president, but one could discern a maternal tone in her words as she gave them her advice for their future and for how to effect change in the world. She, like other yiddishe mammes, can give young people guidance on how to be a mensch, but unlike others, she is able to couch it in political, and not merely personal, terms. Messinger operates on a larger stage; for her, the heimisch is the global.

So what did the students learn from this Jewish mother?

1. Feeling overwhelmed by the world’s problems is not an option. Being overwhelmed is a cop-out and not a luxury the world can afford. The imperative is to act. Do something – anything – but don’t stand idly by.
2. Service is not enough. Acts of hesed and tzeddakah are well and good, but real tzedek (social justice) will only come about through changes in policy. For instance – If you are handing out food at a soup kitchen, you should be asking why there are hungry people in the first place and figuring out a way to address the underlying issue of poverty.
3. Tzeddek is about achieving social justice for all people, not just Jews. It’s more than okay to work on behalf on the Jewish community, but that should not be the sole focus of your tzeddek efforts.

I, myself a woman with children, am the first to admit that sons and daughters don’t always listen to mothers. But in this particular case, I would strongly advise young Jews to do as they are told.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Elisabeth Bing

This piece was cross-posted on Jewesses With Attitude, the blog of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Click here to read it there.

New Yorkers know better than to bother an actor, celebrity or otherwise famous person when they see one on the street (or in a restaurant, store, or park – not to mention stepping out of a taxi).  As a New Yorker for fifteen years, I upheld this unwritten rule – even when it came to a famous neighbor. And now, realizing I missed my chance to get to know better a woman who changed an important aspect of life for thousands, if not millions, of people, I regret my reluctance to rebel against convention. I also now know that I allowed my own insecurity (unrelated in any way to Big Apple etiquette) to get in the way of my understanding history from someone who changed it.

For ten of my fifteen years in Manhattan, I lived literally next door to Elisabeth Bing, a pioneer in educating parents for pregnancy and childbirth and co-founder of the the American Society for Psychoprophylaxis in Obstetrics (now Lamaze International). Bing, an immigrant of German-Jewish descent who was educated in England upon fleeing from the Nazis, lived for decades in an apartment building on West 79th St., where she operated a center/studio on the ground floor of the building, at which generations of Manhattanite new parents prepared for the birth of their children under her tutelage.

It is only today, years after I gave birth to my sons who are now teenagers and after doing some research, that I have come to fully realize the mark my elderly neighbor has left on social and medical history. As a young, busy, working mother, I was satisfied to leave my relationship with Elisabeth (she asked that we call her that rather than Mrs. Bing) at the level of friendly banter in the hallway outside the elevator and to an occasional visit by my children to her apartment to play with her cat. I knew that this compact, energetic octogenarian who always wore her frizzy white hair tied back in a pony tail and moved at a clipped pace, taught childbirth lessons. What I failed to realize was how influential she was, and how tenacious she had been in pursuing her interests and developing her field.

As a young woman, Bing saw what she perceived as a wrong and set out to right it. While training as a physiotherapist in England prior to, during, and immediately following WWII, she worked with bedridden new mothers on gaining strength in their muscles. This exposure to the then practice of obstetrics whereby childbirth was treated as an unnatural condition, women were drugged and asleep during childbirth, and new mothers were strictly confined to bed for ten days following delivery compelled Bing to seek out and study alternative approaches.

Having known her as an older woman, I can imagine how in those early years she used her confident air and intelligent-sounding British-German accent to convince doctors at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital (coincidentally, where my sons were born) to take the risk of allowing her to work with their patients and set up Lamaze Method pregnancy and childbirth education programs.

Bing’s success in New York led her to gain notoriety throughout the country and even internationally. She lectured widely, wrote articles, contributed to several publications, and published her seminal book, Six Practical Lessons for an Easier Childbirth in 1967 (available for your Kindle over forty years later!).  Countless Lamaze instructors trained under her, and innumerable new parents learned from her. “Life just sort of took me into it. It wasn’t that I had decided once I was in this country that this was what I was going to do. Things just happened, and I was there at the right moment, and I stayed with it,” she once said modestly in an interview.

Elisabeth Bing leading a breathing techniques class.

I was one new parent who chose not to learn from her. Wary of natural childbirth and afraid of being made to feel uncomfortable because of it, I shied away from Elisabeth’s classes (despite the alluring convenience of their being held in a studio off my building’s lobby). Already having received dirty looks in the pediatrician’s waiting room for bottle-feeding my first son, I – by the time we moved into our apartment on 79th St. and I became pregnant with my second son – was sure that my lack of earthy-crunchy credentials would just result in tsk-tsking (if not outright scorn) from the other couples in the class and worse yet, from Bing herself.

It turns out that I had been wrong. Elisabeth came over to our apartment to check on me after I arrived home from the hospital. I sheepishly told her I had had an epidural and that my labor had been augmented with drugs. She saw me lying there in bed bottle-feeding my newborn.  The mother of Lamaze handed me a blow-up rubber donut to sit on, congratulated me and was nothing but reassuring and gracious. Elisabeth was interested in helping new mothers, not judging them.

I may not have taken Bing’s childbirth class, but I suppose that in the end I did actually learn from her. I learned that I could have gotten to know this fascinating woman better, and that going forward, I would never again let any self-consciousness stand in the way of my getting to know interesting people I might have the fortune to meet.

I have put Elisabeth Bing “On The Map” on the Jewish Women’s Archive website. I invite you to see her there, and to add your own landmarks relating to Jewish women’s history to JWA’s map.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

A vibrant and healthy Abbie Dorn prior to the botched delivery of her triplets.

When I look at Abbie Dorn, I see my late friend, Risa Hirt.

Abbie Dorn is the 34 year-old, severely incapacitated, Orthodox woman whose tragic story has been in the headlines recently, as her parents fight on her behalf against her ex-husband in the courts. They are fighting for Abbie’s right to have her children, triplets born in June 2006, visit her. Daniel Dorn, who divorced Abbie a year after she suffered apparently irreparable brain damage following her delivery of the children and is raising them in Los Angeles (Dorn is being cared for by her parents in their home in South Carolina), is arguing that the triplets’ seeing their mother in such a state would be distressing for them. He says he would be open to their seeing their mother when they are older, but only if she were able to communicate with them. The case is going to trial on May 13 and could become a legal landmark for the rights of mentally incapacitated parents.

I can’t help but view Dorn’s case, through the prism of my, as a teenager, watching my friend Risa rapidly waste away from an early-onset, rapidly progressing form of Multiple Sclerosis. The situations are not exactly the same, but for me, the lessons learned are.

Those lessons are that try as you might, as Dorn’s ex-husband is attempting with their 4 year-old triplets, you can’t shield children from the less-than-happy aspects of life. In fact, doing so can be detrimental to them, depriving them of the opportunities to develop into compassionate and moral human beings. Life can be confusing, hard and disturbing, but it is through these kinds of experiences – far more than through the easy ones – that we grow.

To be sure, some credit is due to our parents and teachers. But it was the time my schoolmates and I spent with Risa that taught us the most about what it means to be a good Jew and a good person. It is thirty years later, but I still vividly remember the boys carrying Risa in her heavy wheelchair up three flights of stairs to the classroom and the girls helping her in the bathroom. She quickly deteriorated from walking unsteadily to being non-ambulatory and constantly shaking, unable to control her muscles, but no one doubted her place alongside us.

Once Risa was no longer able to go to school, we visited her at home in the bedroom her family set up for her on the first floor of their house. Her hospital bed was next to a large window that looked out over the street, from which she could view neighborhood activity and see visitors as they came to the door.

We came over individually and in groups to keep Risa company, first communicating with her by trying to decipher her labored and garbled speech, then by helping steady her fingers as she spelled out words by pointing to letters on a board. Eventually, we spoke to her without any expectation of a response.

For a long time, I knew that the smart, talented and funny Risa was trapped inside her incapacitated body. But toward the end, even as I continued to spoon feed her ice cream and confide with her about the boys I liked and gossip about who was dating whom, I was no longer so sure that she was still there. However, it didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter because Risa was still a human being created b’tzelem elohim. There but for the grace of God went I, and who was I to decide that she did not deserve to be paid attention to, cared for and loved? I’m not sure we teenagers could have articulated this in this way, but we knew it. We knew that doing this chesed was not optional, and that by doing right by Risa, we were doing right by ourselves.

As we, Risa’s friends, grew up, the demands of young adulthood and higher education pulling us away, we were not able to spend as much time with her as before. She died in 1990, 14 years after her diagnosis, having changed my life and those of my friends for the better. That is her legacy. That is the powerful legacy of a young woman who could not talk, feed herself or move her own limbs.

And that is why it doesn’t really matter whether Abbie Dorn can actually see her children or not. She deserves to see them, and even more so, they deserve to see her.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

When I was growing up in Canada, I always looked up to Israeli teenagers. I was fortunate to spend my high school summers in Israel and participate in programs together with Israeli teens, which served to intensify my admiration for them. I thought they were strong, bold and courageous for both getting drafted to the army and living in a country without American jeans and sneakers and where movies came out only months after their American debut.

Although I am now over twice the age of a regular Israeli soldier, and Israel today is not lacking in the way of materialistic culture, I still admire Israeli teens. Far more than many North American youth, they seem to have the courage of their convictions. None so much as the gay and lesbian Israeli teens who visited San Francisco’s Jewish community last week as part of the Out in Israel LBGT Culture Festival sponsored by the Consulate General of Israel to the Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Jewish Community Federation together and other local organizations.

I met with four ambassadors of Israel Gay Youth, or IGY, who spoke at San Francisco’s Bureau of Jewish Education. They told their personal stories, discussed what it was like to come out in Israeli society, and shared how they were affected by the lethal shooting attack on the gay youth club in Tel Aviv last August. As a member of a generation in which almost no gay person came out until they were in college or beyond, I was amazed at the confidence and self-assurance with which these Israeli teens handle their sexual identity and negotiate any obstacles that stand in their way because of it. Here are their stories:

Elior, Ronni and Gil en route to San Francisco

• At nearly 18, Regev is a tall, slim young man with a short beard who hails from a moshav on the Golan Heights. Far from the cosmopolitan center of the country, it is a place where, as Regev put it, “LGBT people feel like they need to hide like mice in holes.” Regev decided to hide no longer a few years ago, after a close friend committed suicide because he was gay, afraid to come out, and convinced of the shame his sexual orientation would bring upon his family. Regev has suffered taunts and physical abuse from straight peers, so he is circumspect about his sexual orientation in his home community. He is, however, completely out in the rest of Israel and is a very active member of IGY. Soon to be eighteen, he has volunteered to the IDF, despite serious medical problems that would have exempted him from military service.

• Gil, 18, from Kfar Sava, suppressed his feelings through overeating as a child. It was only after losing weight in his mid-teens that he was able to face his sexual identity. His father took his coming out pretty much in stride. His mother sent him to a psychiatrist, but eventually accepted Gil’s sexual orientation. Like any idealistic and responsible teen, “I’m doing my best to reach my goals,” he said. Gil looks forward to his draft date this coming November and using his knowledge of Arabic in the intelligence corps.

• The only religious teen among the four, Elior, 15, from Netanya, came out to his elderly rabbi father with a heart problem one Pesach morning. “I just hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack,” he says, “so I said I thought I was bisexual in order to break the news more softly.” Elior’s father did not have a heart attack, but his mother did take the revelation very hard. She has sought support from an organization called Tehilah, the Israeli equivalent of PFLAG.Interestingly, not all of Elior’s many siblings know he is gay, but everyone at his religious school does. He said he is grateful to his school’s rabbi for having come into his class (without Elior there) to tell the students that they need to accept and respect Elior because of the courage he showed in coming out.

• Ronni, 16, from Ramat Gan was the only girl among the four IGY ambassadors. She speaks very confidently and matter of factly about her sexual orientation and love life. “I have had three girlfriends so far,” she said. She is completely out at school, where she openly fields questions about being gay. Like the others, she spends a great deal of time participating in IGY groups, calling the organization “a second home, a place where I always feel safe.” Although all four of the ambassadors took the shooting attack last August very hard, Ronni was most directly affected in that one of the two victims killed was a 27-year-old man named Nir, who had been the advisor to her school’s young entrepreneurs club. It was with Nir’s support that Ronni came out for the first time among her fellow club members. “Now is the time to speak our voices.Davka because someone tried to kill us, means we need to stand up and say we are not going anywhere,” she told the crowd.

I always liked how Israelis are unapologetic and talk dugri, telling it like it is. When I was a teen, I liked this characteristic of my Israeli peers because I thought it was cool. Now a mother of teenagers myself, and someone who cares deeply about the future of Israel and the quality of life there, I know that the ability of LGBT teens to freely come out, speak their minds and participate actively in Israeli civil society, is more than just cool. It is essential for maintaining Israel’s democratic identity.

The following is a public service announcement video produced by Euro Tel Aviv for IGY (which is referred to in Hebrew as “Organization for Proud Youth,” rather than ”Israeli Gay Youth,”). The ad campaign is called “osim seder ba’aron,” which translates roughly as “sorting out the closet.” Ivri Lider, a gay Israeli pop star, sings the song heard in the video, which includes the lines, “The time  of shame is over, the period of denial is finished…When I grow up I will be like everyone else, a great love will wait for me out there in the world.”

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Rabbi Hillel (debater par excellence) by Arthur Szyk

I’m amazed at how when it comes to high school, some things stay the same and some don’t. If my memory does not fail me, I recall that back in the day, the debate club was most definitely not where you would find the coolest, most popular students. Let’s not mince words – it was where the nerdy brainiacs hung out. Well, not so any more.

My 8th grader middle son, as popular a kid and as much a student leader as you will ever find, was recently recruited for the local public high school debate program. Palo Alto High School (Paly), a debate powerhouse, doesn’t wait until students arrive in the fall of their 9th grade year. They reach out to soon-to-be-graduating 8th graders and start training them as a sort of farm team.

So, I went to an orientation program with my son, and was amazed to see how juiced he was about debating. He and a couple of his close friends (also tapped as excellent critical thinkers) were mesmerized by the presentation by the debate program’s head coach and some of its champion debater students. My son was looking at and listening to these older kids like they were rockstars – which I guess they are in forensics circles. Jocks for the intellectual set – many of whom turn out to also be jocks in the classical sense, too.

I suppose it also doesn’t hurt that there was an inspirational movie out a few years ago called The Great Debaters about a team from a small African-American college in Texas that beat Harvard at debate in the 1930′s. You couldn’t sit in the theater and not root for the underdogs and cry into a few kleenexes. My son saw it more than once.

I, someone who heretofore knew absolutely nothing about debate, came away from the orientation learning as much about debate as my son did. For instance, I now know that Lincoln-Douglas Debate is not the same as Policy (or cross X) Debate. The former is for those who prefer to compete individually and like to argue issues concerning morality, values and philosophy in a more theoretical sense. The latter is for people who like working in teams and are more inclined toward arguing beyond the theoretical into the realm of practical application. I also learned that not all debate is done in the persuasive mode (come on, am I the only one who thought that all debate was by default “persuasive?”), but rather that some competitors specialize in something called “technical debate.” After hearing a description of technical debate and watching an example of it on YouTube (featuring an award winning Paly debater named Avi Arfin [in the dark shirt]), my son decided that this was just plain bizarre and not something he wanted to pursue. Let’s just say that there are fast talkers and then there are technical debaters:

Why am I excited about the possibility of my son pursuing debate in high school? It has nothing to do with winning trophies, being popular or making a college resumé look pretty. It has everything to do with the fact that debaters must learn to argue both sides of any resolution (often, they don’t even know which side they are going to argue in a debate until the very last minute). This is a lost art and interest in our society, and its disappearance is contributing to the extreme partisanship that is damaging the fabric of this country and causing legislative gridlock every step of the way toward a better future.

In Jewish tradition, the Rabbinic maxim, “shiv’im panim laTorah” (there are 70 faces to the Torah) tells us that there is a multiplicity of interpretations of any given piece of text. To be sure, the Rabbis set a “siyag” (fence) around the Torah to draw general limits, but they (über-debaters for sure) also taught that an attitude of “it’s my way of the highway” is not okay. Even more to the point is the passage in the Talmud in Eruvin 13b:

For three years there was a dispute between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai, the former asserting, “The law is in agreement with our views,” and the latter contending, “The law is in agreement with our views.” Then a bat kol, a voice from heaven, announced, Eilu v’eilu divrei Elohim Chayim, “These and those are the words of the living God, but the law is in agreement with the rulings of Beit Hillel.”

Since, however, “Eilu V’eilu, both are the words of the living God,” what was it that entitled Beit Hillel to have the law fixed according to their rulings? Because they were kindly and modest, they studied their own rulings and those of Beit Shammai, and were even so humble to mention the words of Beit Shammai before their own.

The conjunction in “eilu v’eilu” is “v’,” (and) – not “o’ ” (or) – meaning that two opinions can be held at the same time, without one being to the exclusion of the other. No doubt a difficult concept to grasp historically, and clearly one which we could all use some practice with today.

For those of you who know my middle son’s name, it is now probably neither hard to guess why we gave it to him, nor surprising that as fate would have it, he is interested in debate.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Update: You may want to listen to a related podcast on Tablet Magazine’s website. It’s an interview with Mark Oppenheimer about his new memoir about how competitive debate saved his youth, titled, Wisenheimer: A Childhood Subject to Debate.

This time I read the new translation by Wiesel's wife, Marion.

Last week, I participated in a program produced and led by my oldest son’s 10th grade English class at Palo Alto High School. It was about Eli Wiesel’s first and most famous book, Night, which the students had studied and the adult participants had been asked to read before coming to the event. Interestingly, there were things I learned that evening that were far scarier than Elie Wiesel’s experience in the Holocaust.

OK, maybe I am being a little over-dramatic (Wiesel’s experiences, like those of the other victims of the Holocaust were unimaginably horrific), but I came away from the program with the overwhelming feeling that there is something wrong with the educational system in this country. It’s not what the students in my son’s class said that scared me, but rather what they would not have said had they not been in the special course that they are in.

My son opted to take a Facing History And Ourselves track in English this year. FHAO is a national organization that has been around for quite a while, whose mission is to link the study of history to the making of moral choices today. This is the lens through which my son and his classmates are considering all the literature and associated history that they are encountering this year.

The Night of Night program last week was one of the major highlights of the year for the students, for which they prepared to lead a variety of group presentations and discussions with the attending adult guests (family, friends, teachers and community members) on topics such as Elie Wiesel’s life post-Night, confronting genocide (with a focus on Armenia and the Holocaust), art and the Holocaust, music from Terezin, honoring survivors, and confronting hate in the 21st century (with a focus on hate online).

Photo taken by American soldier upon the liberation of Buchenwald. Wiesel can be seen in the top row on the far right.

I, someone for whom the Holocaust cast a shadow over my education from the youngest ages and for whom it was very real and immediate (and who was exposed to both Night and Night and Fog probably far earlier than I should have been), was eager to hear what people of other backgrounds had to say about the book. I was surprised, though, to find that many of the adults had never read Night prior to this event. I guess I had been under the false impression that it was on the reading list of almost every high school and/or college class. And I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that not everyone follows Oprah Winfrey’s reading recommendations. Nonetheless, I found the discussion interesting (I participated in the group focusing on music from Terezin, because my son was leading that one), and I was impressed by the serious thought the students had put into their preparation. I was an active participant in the discussion and even managed, to my son’s relief, not to go too much into Jewish and Holocaust (I once worked at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York) educator mode.

Although this was not a Jewish educational program, I could not help but think about the symbolism of our reading (and in my case re-reading for the umpteenth time) and discussing right before Passover  this account of the deportation of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps. It was on Passover 1944 that the Nazis tore the Jews of Hungary from their homes. The date on which Jews commemorate the Holocaust, Yom Hashoah, is linked to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, which took place on seder night, 1943 (International Holocaust Remembrance Day is on January 23rd, in commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945).

I was also struck by the very coincidentally Jewish nature of the evening, which was framed by the course’s teacher, David Cohen, opening with the quote from early in the book when Wiesel recounts that Moshe the Beadle “explained to me, with great emphasis, that every question possessed a power that was lost in the answer.” Cohen stressed that the power of what his students were doing was in their asking hard questions. The evening closed with a student’s speech in which she said, “I am facing questions that I will never be able to answer.” Like the child who asks the Four Questions at the Passover seder, the students in the FHAO class, won’t get quick or easy to understand answers. But at least they are posing the questions and challenges and searching, with the help of supportive adults, for their explanations and solutions.

Elie Wiesel and President Obama recently visited the Buchenwald site together.

This, of course, makes me feel emotions like pride and joy. What evokes shock, fear and anger in me, however, is what the regional director of FHAO said toward the close of the program. In emphasizing how unique the FHAO experience is for students, he identified three core ideas as part of the mah nishtanah of his organization’s educational approach. First, rigorous content is conveyed in the course, with students gaining historical understanding and learning how to ask essential questions and make meaning of what they are studying. Second, they students have an emotional engagement with the material, examining deep questions of the human condition. Finally, they are involved in ethical reflection; they dare [his word] to connect things they learn to their own lives.

So why am I shocked, fearful and angry? Why does this scare me? Because this is what education is supposed to be for all students, not just ones electing to take the FHAO course. Why should a student have to “dare” to connect what she is learning to her own life and the world around her? If what happens in an FHAO course does not happen in others, if all that is really happening in the others is teaching to the test and rote learning devoid of ethical considerations, then how will young people be able to understand, internalize and act in the way that Wiesel says (in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech) we must act? -

“…And that is why I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – becomes the center of the universe.”

…That place – not the high school classroom, not the SAT and AP test, not the college resume or application. Not the self.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

So, now I know what my youngest son has been talking about for the past year or more when he has told me about his friends and him playing “cheese touch” at recess. Having never bothered to actually read through all four volumes of the DWK series, I was unaware of this popular – and gross – twist on what we old fogies know as the game of  ”cooties.” But “cheese touch” is only one aspect of the complex world of middle school, as it is depicted in all its hellishness in both the book and movie.

How thankful I am to author Jeff Kinney for writing these novel-comic book hybrids that have not only gotten my youngest son to like reading “chapter books,” but also for exposing him before middle school to what he can expect during what have got to be the most excruciating years for just about every kid on the planet. It’s good kids are wising up ahead of time these days, unlike me, who didn’t actually start reading about being an adolescent until I was one myself (thank you, Judy Blume). Kinney is like the parent in one of my favorite parts of the Haggadah, the passage about the Four Sons (the Four Children in PC parlance). When it comes to the child who “does not know how to ask” (about the meaning of Passover) the one that is still too young, it is up to the adults in the child’s life to start the conversation, to introduce him or her to the narrative – be it one that involves passing through a miraculously split Red Sea or merely one of navigating treacherous junior high hallways.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a great read for many kids, but just as different people prefer different Haggadot (the main text is the same, but the commentaries vary), so too are there books out there that are better for kids who don’t intuitively identify with DWK’s main character, Greg Heffley, who don’t “get it” when Greg does. A better guide to the social complexities of middle school for kids with greater-than-the-run-of-the-mill social challenges would be Jarvis Clutch – Social Spy, in which Dr. Mel Levine teams up with his fictional adolescent alter-ego (that would be the oddly named Jarvis Clutch) to teach about social cognition in a much more direct manner. This is the right book for highly intellectual middle schoolers (or soon to be ones) who need stuff like “code switching,” “body language,” and “social reading” spelled out for them.

“V’higad’ta l’vincha” (and you shall tell your child) is a mitzvah, a commandment. The responsibility of teaching children the story of the Exodus from Egypt rests with parents, teachers and other adults in their lives. But we grown ups are not left to our own devices, our tradition provides us with the text of the Haggadah and its many commentaries. Fortunately, when it comes to guiding our kids through the sometimes oppressive quagmire of puberty to the stage in which they feel the freedom and confidence to be whomever they are – or want to be, we have literature to help with that, too.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Zeldis McDonough, a self-professed “doll fanatic,” admitted in a recent interview with me that it is “embarrassing to still be one at my age.” Embarrassing or not, her decision to just go with where her interest pointed her has resulted in her enjoying both critical and commercial success with the book. Brooklyn-based McDonough’s visit to the Madame Alexander doll factory in Harlem years ago while on assignment for a doll magazine, and her learning about the company’s beginnings as a doll hospital, have evolved into a juvenile literature hit that has been chosen by The New York Public Library as one of Best Children’s Books 2009 -100 Titles for Reading and Sharing and as a KIRKUS REVIEWS Children’s Book of 2009.

Imports of German doll parts were suspended.

The Doll Shop Downstairs is the story of the fictional Breittlemanns, an immigrant Jewish family of Russian background, running a doll repair shop on Essex Street in the early years of the 20th century. It is told from the point of view of the 9 year-old middle daughter Anna, who is sandwiched between her very capable (and bossy) older sister Sophie and her babyish younger sister Trudie. The family lives above the store in a tenement building, the mother working hard to make their home clean and comfortable despite the crowded conditions. The girls help out in the  shop and become attached to some of the dolls that have been brought in for fixing, but go unclaimed for a long time. The outbreak of WWI is the turning point in the story, with the resultant trade embargo with Germany – the country where most of the world’s dolls were made at the time, and the only one producing spare parts – threatening the Breittlemanns’ livelihood.

Zeldis McDonough loves historical fiction as much as dolls.  As a girl, she favored books that were both set and written in the past. She has always found “the distance of the past fascinating,” making it unsurprising that she is an aficionada of old things and a collector of vintage clothing and antiques. “I am enormously moved by these things that comprised a life,” she explains. Having written other historical literature for children, the author chose to set this book during WWI,  a period she feels is often ignored.

Zeldis McDonough is purposeful to write narratives in which children are agents of change, part of the solution to the plot’s presenting problem. Young Anna Breitelman is the one who comes up with a way to resolve the predicament posed by trade being cut off with Germany, allowing her to feel important and to fulfill the wish that all children have to be powerful.

I found the language of the The Doll Shop Downstairs to be beautifully rendered, and I was equally enchanted by the author’s portrayal of childhood a century ago, with its combination of innocence with resourcefulness and self-reliance that is not as common today. Although the book clearly presents Jewish life, it differs from other depictions of it in that time and place. Rather than Anna and her sisters being surrounded solely by other Jews, they interact with obviously non-Jewish characters who come from all parts of the city to have their dolls repaired by Mr. Breittlemann. When asked about this, Zeldis McDonough said that she did not consciously create the story this way, but that she is not surprised that she did so, given her own background, outlook on life, and preference for inclusion over exclusion.

The Doll Shop Downstairs‘ focusing on dolls, being historical fiction and featuring a young heroine, are evidence that Zeldis McDonough is writing for elementary school age girls – the same set who are likely to own the only Jewish American Girl doll, the one called Rebecca Rubin (who coincidentally also “lives” on the Lower East Side at the turn of the last century). But just as she cops to being an abiding doll fanatic, she also admits that, “I am still writing for the girl in me.” True, but she is also writing for many girls today and those of generations to come who will read this book, which, according to Jewish Book World, is destined to become a classic.

Those of you who have already read the book (or more likely have read or given it to a child) and are wondering what happens next to Anna, her family and the dolls, can look forward to the sequel, The Cats in the Doll Shop, which is due out in fall 2011. All that is known about it so far is that in it, “the year is 1915, and the Breittlemann family’s new doll factory is doing well. But an unexpected visit from a Russian cousin and the appearance of a stray cat and her kitten create both new problems and new opportunities for Anna, her sisters, and their parents.”

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Unlike most public schools, many Jewish day schools have yet to establish GSA’s. Few,even ones that tout their inclusive, pluralistic natures or are located in areas with liberal constituencies, have not yet  figured out how to best address issues of sexual identity and orientation. I believe this avoidance is at its core due more to a reluctance than a mere lack of time. I am embarrassed to say that somehow, even as a Jewish educator who has worked in and with Jewish day school high schools in recent years, I never learned of Hineini, nor did I ever engage in any serious effort to discuss the topic with which it deals with my colleagues – let alone my students.

Ironically, now that I am not working directly with students and educators, I stumbled across this important film and resource. I know that it is easier to be on the outside looking in, to have stepped out of the trenches of the daily teaching grind. But it is this view from the balcony rather than from down on the dance floor (that’s a reference to the Ron Heifetz‘s theories of adaptive leadership) that enables me to see that the time in which all Jewish schools will have to confront what it means to have non-heterosexual students within their communities is, if not already here, then coming extremely soon.

It will no longer be enough to look the other way and say nothing. A policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” doesn’t work well in the military, and it certainly isn’t fit in a setting which is designed to nurture the next generation and help them grow into confident, proud and committed Jews. It would be wrong to minimize the challenge that LGBT inclusion presents to traditional Jewish schools and curriculums, but it would be even more so to minimize the risk to the continuity of the Jewish people if we were to act in a way which would potentially turn away a tenth of our members. The world is different now. The younger generation will either vote with their feet or dig in and demand change. My hope is for the latter, but I can’t say my money is on it.

No longer should a young Jew (or any Jew) recite the following religious texts and think that by virtue of their sexual orientation, they are neither the “other people,” the “any person,” nor the “creation” that deserves to be fully accepted by their religious and cultural community and live with dignity within it:

Rabbi Eliezer says: Let other people’s dignity be as precious to you as your own.(Pirkei Avot 2:15)

Ben Azzai taught: Do not disdain any person; do not underrate the importance of anything – for there is no person who does not have his hour and there is no thing without its place in the sun.(Pirkei Avot 4:3)

Blessed are You, Eternal God, who makes Your creations different. (Traditional liturgy)

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

This kind of brawn is not needed...in most cases.

I now know that my middle son’s recent bar mitzvah celebration, which I had thought was well planned and executed, was lacking in one way. Sometimes you just don’t know what you are missing until someone points it out for you. That is what happened when I spoke with a friend from New Jersey today.

My friend and I were comparing bar mitzvah notes, since her son became a Jewish adult just a few weeks before mine did. I mentioned that the only thing that caused our celebration to receive less than a 100%/A+ on the bar mitzvah grading scale was our teen guests’ two timing us. It turns out that another boy from my son’s school (one my son does not know), was having his bar mitzvah party at the next door hotel at exactly the same time. We had not been made aware of this ahead of time by the hotels’ event planner, and none of my son’s friends had alerted us that they had been invited to both parties. At a certain point during the evening, we noticed a couple of unusual things. First, many of our teenage guests seemed to be disappearing and then reappearing. And second, some of them reappeared wearing and bearing party favors (funny hats, oversized sunglasses, gaudy faux gold chains) that we were not giving out.

“Didn’t you hire bouncers?” inquired my friend. “What do you mean ‘bouncers?’ I’m talking about a bar mitzvah party, not an exclusive New York night club,” I replied, honestly having no idea what she was talking about.

Very "Keeping Up With The Steins." These are party motivators (different job and profile than bar mitzvah bouncers).

It turns out that my friend, like all the parents of bar mitzvah age children in her New Jersey community, include bouncers alongside DJ’s, food, party favors, invitations and centerpieces on their bar/bat mitzvah party essentials list. Apparently, parents think it is well worth the extra few hundred bucks to ensure their (the parents’, not the teenage guests’) enjoyment and peace of mind. By hiring bouncers, they (unlike me, who once I figured out what was going on, was torn as to whether it was my job to play the heavy with the kids who were running across the dark parking lot between parties, or whether it was their parents’ responsibility to teach them how to be gracious guests) are able to focus on family and friends and savor the simcha.

Thankfully, the image in my mind of hulking, scare-the-s–t-out-of-you tough guys was dispelled once I started doing a little internet research on the bar mitzvah bouncer phenomenon. It turns out that, at least in the case of the largest and most established such outfit (Bar-Mitzvah Bouncer, Inc.), the bouncers are all professional teachers who take on this weekend moonlighting to supplement their meager salaries. Although they do act as a security outfit, and some of them appear pretty beefy, they dress like the teams of clean-cut, young Mormons I see around Palo Alto – only the bouncers’ freshly pressed shirts are bar mitzvah blue, rather than missionary white.

A Bar-Mitzvah Bouncer, Inc. bouncer on the job.

While the only mischief I had to worry about was my son’s friends’s enjoying two parties for the price of one and joyriding in the hotel elevators, many New Jersey parents are motivated to hire bouncers by rumors of teenage hanky panky. According to a 2005 article in The Record, a local Bergen County publication:

The rumors have been a boon for Evan Wofsy, a middle-school teacher from Livingston, N.J., who doubles on weekends as the Bar Mitzvah Bouncer, a tamer of 13-year-olds at fancy affairs.

Anxious parents, including plenty from North Jersey, hire him to make sure kids don’t misbehave on the bus between the synagogue and the banquet hall, or in the bathrooms, alcoves and parking lots outside the party room. He gets enough calls to keep him and a few teacher friends chaperoning well over 200 parties a year.

“Do the kids try and make out? Oh, absolutely,” Wofsy says. “But more than that? It just doesn’t happen. I can’t say what goes on when I’m not there, but even when the kids tell me the stuff they’ve heard, they admit they’ve never actually seen any of it happen. I think things get fabricated: One thing happens and overnight, there are 14 versions of the story, none of them accurate. That’s how middle-school kids are.

“Not that these kids don’t keep me busy. They have food fights, throw things out of the bus window, wrestle, put toilet paper rolls in the toilet to clog it, pull fire alarms or break things or hurl party favors at each other. I’ve got to tell you, keeping these kids from being sexual is the last thing I have to worry about.”

Charming. Seems that the impact of the “Today I Am a Wo/Man” speech and fanfare about thirteen-year olds becoming Jewish adults fizzle out on the short ride between the synagogue and the party venue.

Maybe New Jersey parents swear by bar mitzvah bouncers, but I would have to agree with Y-Love, who recently tweeted on Twitter about these guys , saying, “It’s kind of sad that we need this, klal Yisrael.” Given the demographic of Y-Love’s fans and audience and the mode of his message’s delivery, I think it is being directed primarily at the teens. As it should be.

© 2009 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

I missed my chance to be on the cover of Bat Mitzvah Digest.

I never had a bat mitzvah. To be clear, I am technically a bat mitzvah, since I am a Jewish woman older than 12 and therefore priviledged and responsible to keep the Commandments (well, at least as many of the 613 that I manage to fulfill). The bat mitzvah that I am referring to is the ceremony – the celebration of a rite of passage and the marking of a milestone.

Unlike some girls, I did not choose to forgo a bat mitzvah. In fact, I did not know many who actually did, as we belonged to the first generation for whom a bat mitzvah was a natural given, especially for those of us who attended Jewish day schools. I very much wanted to have one, but my father would not allow it on traditional grounds.

Before you start picturing my dad wearing a black hat and sporting payes and tzitzis, I had better tell you that at the time, he was for the most part (as he still is) religiously unobservant. I am not even sure that my family belonged to a synagogue then, though unsurprisingly we had joined one by the time my youngest sibling – a boy – was ready to have his bar mitzvah. My father’s rationale boiled down to an unquestioning loyalty to the traditions of his youth mixed with a healthy measure of what I will politely call an underdeveloped feminist sensibility. It has always amazed me how some fathers (mine included) not only fully supported and encouraged, but expected, their daughters to pursue advanced degrees and professional careers while concurrently refusing to fully acknowledge them as adult Jews.

My dad threw me a fancy Sweet Sixteen party a few years later and figured it made up for my not having had a bat mitzvah. It didn’t. I may not have known this then, as I threw myself into hostess-with-the-mostest mode and basked in the attention of my guests, but I do now.

As I reached the age of marriage and motherhood, I vowed to mark my daughters’ passage into Jewish adulthood with a formal bat mitzvah ceremony.  I also planned to welcome them into the world and the Jewish People with a simchat bat ceremony as significant and ritualized as a brit milah (minus the circumcision part, of course).

As fate would have it, I am the mother only of boys.

Three Boys, 1937 by British artist B. Fleetwood-Walker.

For some, this might come as a relief.  After all, a bar mitzvah ceremony for a boy is a no-brainer. It’s all very established and straight forward. No need to dredge up old frustrations and hurt feelings, or to mold a daughter’s bat mitzvah into a feminist statement atoning for the sins of the fathers (or grandfather in this case).

But for me, it is not so simple. My sons’ becoming b’nei mitzvah has challenged me to decide what I, not only a woman in her early 40’s but also an accomplished Jewish educator, wanted to do to address the bat mitzvah void I have carried within me for thirty odd years. Several people suggested that I become officially bat mitzvah alongside one of my sons. Others suggested that I have one of those individual or group adult bat mitzvah ceremonies that are in vogue.

None of these options appealed to me; they were not the right fit…or fix. What I thought I lacked was both a moment in time when I was welcomed and accepted by the Jewish community as an adult of equal standing, and my acquiring proficiency in liturgical ritual. I took a good look at myself and I saw that I had actually already accomplished these two things, albeit not as a young teenager nor in a specific or limited time frame.

I'll never be a member, but I'm okay with it.

What had been missing was already found. That is because I recognized at some point that a hole needed to be filled, and I slowly filled it along the way. I filled it by continuing my Jewish and Hebrew education rather than turning away from it in disappointment. I filled it by accepting the offer of an aliyah to the Torah on the High Holidays as a freshman in college. I filled it by learning to daven and layn as part of my professional development as a Jewish educational leader, often turning to my young students to be my teachers. I filled it by teaching my sons to read Torah years before they really needed to know how, and by going with them to buy their tallit and tefillin (and demonstrating for them how to wrap tefillin before they were instructed by their bar mitzvah tutor). I have filled it by reading Torah and having aliyot at my sons’ b’nei mitzvah ceremonies.

And I have filled the hole by forgiving my father for having made a mistake. I still like to rib him about it sometimes, and I am not even sure he, a person not known for admitting his faults, would even acknowledge it as a mistake. A lot of water has passed under the bridge in the intermittent years, and I have chosen to let certain things be washed away with the current. When the tide ebbs, that which is important remains: my relationship with my father, my confidence as an adult member of the Jewish community, and my ability to be a role model for my sons.

© 2009 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.