These days I carry EpiPens. I bypass fancy pastries, since they often contain vile marzipan. I don’t eat in Indian restaurants anymore, as bits of cashew and almond often seem to find their way into even ostensibly nut-free dishes. Once, on a cross-country flight, I accidentally bit into a nut in my airline meal and panicked. The flight attendant took me up to the first-class bathroom and taught me how to make myself vomit: She got a saltshaker, filled a teaspoon and said, “Swallow this, fast.” I did as she said. It worked. When I reported back to her, eyes watering, she told me, “All flight attendants over 35 know that trick; airlines used to have mandatory weigh-ins.” How odd that the sexism and sizeism of a bygone era saved my life.

Passover is probably the biggest holiday challenge for folks like me. Many Passover desserts rely on tree nuts for texture and heft. Swanky seder salads invariably have walnuts hidden in them like bombs in The Hurt Locker. And of course there’s charoset, known to the nut-allergic as the Mortar of Doom. So, when I began hosting the seder, I started experimenting with nut-free charoset recipes.

In 2006, I tried a Yemenite variant with figs, dates, wine, fresh ginger, coriander, cayenne pepper, and sesame seeds. (Sephardic Jews and some Ashkenazim—including me—eat seeds and legumes on Passover.) But the charoset it yielded was simultaneously not nuanced enough and too coriander-y. In 2007 I tried an Israeli version with apples, bananas, dates, lemon and orange zest, cinnamon, wine, and honey. But that charoset, as those without nuts frequently become, was an icky-textured glop, and banana-scented baby-food glop is not enticing to anyone. We left it for Elijah, but he didn’t seem interested either. In 2008, to avoid the glop issue, I used big chunks of granny smith apples to provide the crunch other charosets get from nuts. I tossed them with cardamom, Slivovitz, dates, raisins, and cinnamon. Finally, triumph!

But because I am the Lindsey Vonn of nut-free charoset, I was not content to rest on my laurels. So, I continued experimenting. In 2009 I tried mixing Yemenite and Ashkenazi traditions in a version with apples, raisins, dates, wine, pine nuts, cardamom, and cayenne. The pine nuts were too oily and added a greasy mouth-feel to the dish.

This year I’ll be trying two new recipes. One is adapted from the Jews of Curacao; it will have peanuts (I can eat those, because they’re legumes, not tree nuts), brown sugar, dates, raisins, figs, wine, honey, cinnamon, orange, lime, and watermelon and tamarind juices. Yes, it could be completely disgusting. So, to be safe, I’ll also revisit the Great Charoset of 2008, a combo of apples and cardamom.

You might think I’d be advocating for all charoset to be nut-free. Or that I’d attend a seder at other people’s homes only if they promised not to serve the vile indehiscent items. You would be wrong.

Of course I believe infants and toddlers with hardcore food allergies should be kept away from foods that could make them sick. But the rest of us, including school-age children, need to be responsible for our own eating. My parents didn’t make a big deal out of my allergy; they taught me to always find out what I was eating.

Today’s parents, I’m afraid, try to control everything in a child’s environment as if casting a spell at Hogwarts. They succeed in panicking their kid, convincing him that danger is everywhere, and making matters worse for these very few kids who really are that allergic. What’s up with the parents who claim their child is allergic but haven’t had him tested? Or the parents who haven’t done blood tests as well as scratch tests and food challenges? Or who dismiss doctors who tell them their child may have a sensitivity but not a true allergy?

Are there children who are so desperately allergic they can’t be in a room with nuts? Absolutely. Are they common? Doubtful. I say this as someone who is allergic enough to have stopped breathing, lost consciousness, and required intubation. Once, after I made out with my college boyfriend after he’d eaten a walnut brownie in the cafeteria, my lips swelled up so much I looked like Amanda Lepore. Yet I tested only at level 4 (on a scale of 0 to 6) on the blood test that determines just how allergic you are. My doctor said that in over 30 years of practice, he’s never seen a 6. Here’s my proposition: If you can produce test results saying your kid is a 4, you get a nut-free table in the classroom. If your kid is a 5, you get a nut-free school. And if your kid is a 6, you get whatever you want, because that blows. (As an aside: All parents of allergic kids should teach them to be judicious about swapping spit and eating while drunk—it sounds like a joke, but adolescence was when I had to learn new lessons about living with a serious allergy.)

As most parents of young kids know, food allergies have been on the rise for the last two decades. Some immunologists think the “hygiene hypothesis” is responsible, that we’re all so clean and purified and antibioticked and antibacterial-soaped that our immune systems have lost the ability to do their jobs right. Others think a lack of exposure to nut products in early childhood may be the culprit. I’d love to hear from Israelis who were raised on Bamba, the peanut-based Cheetos manqué that’s a childhood staple. Were you shocked when you learned that most American parents would no sooner give a 2-year-old a peanut snack than they would a bag of broken glass drizzled with botulism toxin?

In any case, Passover is a good time to think about how we respond to nut allergies, and not just because of those farkakte flourless hazelnut tortes on every seder table. It’s because this is a holiday about freedom. Our sages ponder the part of the Exodus story in which God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. Was Pharaoh responsible for his own actions? What role does free will have in the story? Can children become actualized, differentiated adults if we don’t give them the tools and chances to control their own lives? The Israelites moved from slavery to freedom; we don’t want children to be slaves to their fears. And we don’t want them not to feel responsible for their own health because everyone else in the community has been handed that responsibility. Ultimately, we all own what we put in our own bodies. If we encourage kids to live in fear or rely entirely on others for protection, aren’t we condemning them to slavery?

I know what it’s like to be scared. For weeks after I nearly died as a young adult, I’d sit quietly outside my superintendent’s apartment after I’d eaten dinner. My heart was pounding. I could feel my throat closing up. I was flushed and having trouble breathing, because I couldn’t be 100 percent sure that I hadn’t accidentally eaten a nut. And a panic attack can look and feel an awful lot like anaphylaxis. And I know what it feels like to worry about your child. My kids, thank God, didn’t inherit my allergy (I had them tested), but Josie has spent several nights in the emergency room with severe asthma, and as a 4-year-old, Maxine wandered out of my in-laws’ backyard and got lost in a neighborhood with a deep ravine. Parenthood is terrifying. I understand wanting to do anything, everything, to protect your child.

But Passover is a celebration of becoming your own master. Don’t we want to offer that gift to our children?

That’s where the fairy tale ends, of course. Ulrich was a Jew in Germany in 1938. After Hitler took power, the idyll gave way to dispassionate ledger-keeping and list-making that categorized that time in history. According to a 1938 inventory of the contents of Ulrich’s apartment, this family had two Persian rugs, 20 neckties, seven purses, two oil paintings, 19 small silver ritual objects, one accordion, one set of skis, 48 linen napkins, 18 hand towels, 42 handkerchiefs, even an ice-cream maker. All markers of middle-class privilege. All markers of a family’s life.

What must Ulrich and Edith—the grandparents of my husband, Jonathan—have thought as Heidelberg changed around them? Starting in 1933, Germany’s Jews lost their government-service and editorial positions. Then they were expelled from the army, saw their citizenship revoked, were prohibited from marrying non-Jews, were banned from public school teaching. Yet relatively few Jews left Germany between 1933 and 1938. They were German. This was their home. The bad times would pass.

One day in 1938, Ulrich’s landlady whispered to him that he had to leave, fast. She’d seen a list on her son’s desk; Ulrich’s name was on it. The landlady’s son was in the SS. Her words convinced Ulrich that it was time to leave the country his family had called home for generations. He procured an invitation to lead High Holiday services at Temple Beth Sholom, a new synagogue in Fredericksburg, Virginia. If he could deliver a sermon in good-enough English, the congregation would hire him as its full-time rabbi. Ulrich’s English was iffy; he studied frantically as Edith packed. They left their home in early September 1938. As a farewell, the shul’s organist played Handel’s “Largo,” as it had at their wedding two years earlier:

Never has there been a shade

of a plant

more dear and lovely,

or more gentle.

Germany confiscated the 42 handkerchiefs, the baby’s chair and potty, the ice cabinet, the fruit plate, the five pans, the four platters, the six metal trays. The inventory notes that the family “acquired for emigration” a fur coat and a gramophone. Those they took with them. Such things, they thought, were needed in America.

A few weeks later, November 9, 1938, was the night of broken glass, Kristallnacht. The city’s synagogues burned. The members of Ulrich’s congregation were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.

But not Ulrich and Edith. They lived in Virginia for many years. Ulrich’s English was good enough. It got better. But he didn’t use it to tell his grandchildren any stories of life back in Heidelberg. Ulrich and Edith were always full of secrets, always full of their own kind of brokenness.

Like so many American Jews, they retired to Florida. Jonathan remembers visiting them in their hushed apartment complex when he was a small boy. He self-importantly pushed the elevator button and ran his fingers through their plush carpeting, leaving tracks.

Ulrich and Edith both died in 1973. The baby with whom they left Germany, Jonathan’s uncle, died in 2000. And now Jonathan is reclaiming a sliver of their past: He has decided to become a German citizen. He is working with The German Citizenship Project, which specializes in helping Jewish victims of Nazism and their descendants become re-naturalized in Germany.

It can be tricky to prove that you’re the spawn of a German citizen, what with the unfortunate combination of Germany’s longtime passion for paperwork and the Nazis’ penchant for burning everything in the waning days of the war. And since Germany follows the principle of jus sanguinis, blood law, not every Jew born in Germany actually was a German citizen. The German Citizenship Project is helping Jonathan move the process along—the organization helped around 150 Jews get German citizenship since 2006. (Other Jews, from Israel, the former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, and the United States have completed the process independently.)

But Jonathan’s not applying alone; he’s applying for our daughters, too. And to my surprise, I am distressed. Not in that old-school, I-would-never-buy-a-Mercedes way: I think today’s Germans have done their fair share of self-examination and breast-beating, and they themselves weren’t the ones wearing the shiny scary boots. My feelings are more ambivalent and sorrowful.

Jonathan wanted our kids to be able to study and work in Europe as European Union passport-holders. I’m happy about that part. No, really. But still, I’m troubled. Maybe the thing that bothers me most is the notion of being the family member left behind. I’m the one apart, the one who’s not in the dominant group. Maybe the thought of them having this identity I won’t have is painful for its symbolism: Children grow up and inevitably go away. It’s hard to imagine when the younger one is still in kindergarten, but I know it’s inevitable.

Another part of my pain has to do not so much with them being German, but with me being an American. This was supposed to be the new Promised Land; American Jews have typically felt about America the way German Jews once felt about Germany. But nowadays, I’m growing increasingly concerned with the state of things. I’m not saying I see barbed wire and stone soap in our own futures; I’m not that kind of hyperbolic drama queen. But I haven’t felt this kind of despair about our country’s direction before. The joy I felt at Barack Obama’s election makes the anxiety I feel now that much more bitter. We have a government seemingly unable to reform health care (I can’t even talk to my friend in England about her adoptive country’s amazing prenatal, midwifery, and newborn care); we have Tea Partiers offering terrifying invective and Republican officials proposing laws that could have chilling effects on civil liberties. We deny science and our role in global warming. It’s not the president I’m freaked out about; it’s everyone else.

Despite the anxiety in the air, at least we can still take pleasure in the small things. Like reality TV: recently, my seven-year-old, Josie, became obsessed with Project Runway, busily sketching dresses and mimicking Heidi Klum’s double-cheek-kiss-punctuated Teutonic sign-off to the evicted designers: “Auf wiedersehen.”

At least if Josie has to leave her country, she’ll be prepared.

A thousand thanks to Michael Fadus for his generous German translation services.

You know, the little questions.

These imponderables may stump rabbis and philosophers, but children have their own ideas.

And going back a bit further, there was the Super Bowl, with its raft of ads depicting women as castrating bitches. What a joy for our sons and daughters to view! There was Bridgestone, informing men that their tires were more valuable than their wives. There was GoDaddy, offering incoherent softcore porn with semi-clad blondes and Danica Patrick. FloTV, a device whose very name sounds like a menstrual product, ordered legions of spine-challenged, pussy-whipped men to “change out of that skirt.” And then there was the breathtakingly offensive “Man’s Last Stand” from Dodge, in which dead-eyed men stared into the camera, listing the daily oppressions they suffer, primarily at the well-manicured hands of domineering women. (At least someone created a superb and pointed parody).

Kate Bednarski, a specialist in brand strategy who’s held executive positions at Walmart, Nike, and Reebok and co-founded her own brand agency, agreed that this year’s crop was unusually noxious. “This year’s Super Bowl was full of ads with the theme ‘women are horrible to be around,’” she told me. “In all my years in this business I’d never seen anything that blatant.”

So thank goodness for the commercials airing during this year’s Winter Olympics. Compare the hate-filled Super Bowl Dodge ad to the Olympics’ Chevy ad. The former shows a man hell-bent on escape; the latter depicts dads proudly driving kids to games and practices. “We carry them,” the voice-over concludes as a father carries his sleeping child out of a game, “while they, of course, carry us.” Another Chevy ad shows a father taking his little girl out of a scrum of boisterous older siblings to sit quietly in the minivan for one-on-one bonding time. Meanwhile, the only little girl I can recall in a Super Bowl ad is the eTrade baby with a bow on her head, browbeating another baby for failing to call her, ranting about “that milkoholic Lindsay” in a nasal, princess-y voice.

Little girls in Olympics ads speedskate, ski, and luge. They’re aggressive and competitive; they hate to lose. Sometimes they do anyway: the Chevy ad features a dad comforting a scowling little ice hockey player with blonde braids. It’s notable that while there are little figure skaters represented in these ads, they’re shown as just one facet of a wide-ranging, diverse picture of what little girls can be and do. My kids will never be figure skaters, particularly after they develop the Jewish poulkes that are their birthright, so I’m thrilled to introduce them to sports they’ll be able to play, not just watch.

In contrast to the Super Bowl’s “woman as succubus” theme, the Olympics ads depict marriage as a partnership. Parents share driving and child-rearing duties. One ad for GE touts the company’s medical technology: “I’ve seen beautiful things,” intones a middle-aged guy. “But the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen is the image on a screen that helped our doctor see that my wife’s cancer was treatable.” If that dude were in a FloTV or Dodge ad, he’d want his wife to die. Then he’d replace her with a more youthful latex version.

The women in Olympics ads have agency. They’re not acted upon like the Bridgestone bimbo; they act. An AT&T ad shows Gretchen Bleiler, 2006 Olympic silver medalist in snowboarding, defying gravity and sailing into outer space as Lou Reed sings “Perfect Day.” The tagline says, “Here’s to possibilities.” For Visa, Morgan Freeman narrates the story of alpine skier Julia Mancuso, who drew a poster of herself as a gold medalist as a child, then achieved her dream. The tagline is “Go, World.” And then there’s the Visa ad, recapping the story of speed skater Dan Jansen, whose sister died of cancer hours before his race in the 1988 Olympics, and he promised her he’d win the gold, and he didn’t, and then he did six years later, and he skated a victory lap while holding his baby daughter Jane, and oh my God I’m crying again as I’ve cried every single time I’ve seen this farshtunkiner ad. Damn you, Visa.

Motherhood in Olympics ads is noble, not noodgy. Proctor & Gamble shows a montage of Olympic athletes as children, doing press, signing autographs, shaving, preparing to launch themselves out of ski gates as emotional music swells and a title card concludes, “To their moms, they’ll always be kids.” The tagline: “P&G: Proud sponsor of moms.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you may say. The Super Bowl is watched by men; the Olympics are watched by women. Hence the ad differential. But guess what? The Super Bowl’s audience is 55 percent male, which means that 48.5 million women also happened to watch the game—4.3 million more than last year. In fact, the percentage of the Super Bowl’s women viewers has been climbing for a decade, shooting up 17 percent in the last five years alone. The Olympics’ viewership, meanwhile, is 51 percent female and 49 percent male. Not a huge difference.

Perhaps you feel that the ladies aren’t really watching; they’re just preparing the chili while the menfolk are glued to the screen. Wrong again. An NFL representative told Forbes magazine that NFL focus group research has found that women do watch. They view football as a Sunday afternoon family activity and cherish the hangout time.

Or perhaps you think that the Super Bowl’s viewership skews more downmarket than the Olympics’, and that tacky ads appeal to the unwashed masses. Not true either: The Nielsen Company found that 74 percent of all households earning $500,000 or more per year tuned into this year’s game, compared to 45 percent of all households. The demographics are similar for the Olympics. And here’s the kicker, as it were: Woman-bashing ads don’t work. In a roundup of all the data crunched by different media-measurement analysts, Jezebel pointed out that viewers either loathed or didn’t recall the most misogynistic ads: FloTV, Dockers (with its tagline “WEAR THE PANTS”), Bridgestone, GoDaddy, and Dodge.

So why create such ineffectual, hateful spots? I’m not sure. Perhaps advertisers unconsciously viewed football through the lens of their own misery. Maybe the idea of primal, thuggish manliness appeals to advertising guys who feel powerless because their business is withering. Thanks to time-shifting, an increasingly fragmented media marketplace, and ineffective measurement systems, they can’t even get reliable data on who sees their ads. Maybe rather than a male howl in the estrogen-filled wilderness, Super Bowl advertising was an industry’s wail of impotent frustration.

And maybe the Olympics offer more inclusive, embracing, multi-cultural ads because advertisers see those values as girly. Just as movies and television shows with a female lead are seen as being “for girls” even if guys like them as well, sporting events with just a few more female than male viewers get lady-focused ads. Is that idiotic? Yes. But we’ll take it, since it offers a pretty excellent view of the world, some damn fine advertising, and maybe even some behavioral modeling for a culture that could use a lot more girl power.

And then there’s Noah Cyrus. Blogs were abuzz last week with news that Miley’s 9-year-old sister was designing a lingerie line for little girls. This didn’t seem shocking, since Noah was photographed on Halloween at a children’s AIDS fundraiser in a slinky black dominatrix outfit, sexy makeup, and knee-high, high-heeled, black, shiny PVC boots, then seen in the boots again the next day, along with a super-short ruffly polka-dot mini, black sheer stockings, and a black spaghetti-strapped top. A few weeks later she was filmed performing Akon’s “Smack That” (“Smack that/give me some more/Smack that/Till you get sore”) while smacking her own teeny butt. And then there was that time she played around on the stripper pole.

That she was not, in fact, designing a children’s lingerie line (the story was misreported by icky gossip cretin Perez Hilton, then picked up by the mainstream media) was not the point. The point was that it seemed completely credible, because hey, look at her. As Chris Rock once said of becoming the father to a baby girl, “My only job in life is to keep her off the pole!” Billy Ray Cyrus has already failed on that front. But look at us. We’re the ones who watched Noah squeal, “Smack that, all on the floor” 943,869 times on YouTube.

When I was Noah’s age, I attended a Jewish Day School run by Orthodox rabbis. The girls were drilled in tznius, or modesty. We prayed behind a mehizta, a divider. We were urged to be quiet and demure. And we were expected to cover up. The high school girls taught us little girls a song, to the tune of the march from The Bridge Over the River Kwai:

Tznius, it is our battle cry!

Pritzus, halakhah’s do or die

Tznius, cover your knee-us

Your collar, your elbow, your toe!

In my school, Noah Cyrus’s semi-clothed dance moves would have caused mass seizures. Today, I view these little girls through the distant lens of momdom, and I’m horrified. But as a liberal Jew who chafed at the confines of my rabbis’ definitions of women’s roles, I’m hesitant to issue fatwas about how other people should dress and behave. As Nessa Rapoport pointed out in the Fall 2009 issue of JOFA Journal, the magazine of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, the social exhortations of tznius have always been disproportionately aimed at young women. “Rather than help young Jewish women view their bodies as exemplifications of the Creator’s work,” she wrote, “the edicts further objectify them, reifying their bodies solely into potential temptation for young Jewish men.” Exactly.

In that same issue of JOFA Journal, Naomi Marmon Grumet, who received her doctorate in sociology from Bar-Ilan University, wrote about her doctoral fieldwork; she interviewed American and Israeli Modern Orthodox women about their experiences of tznius. For many, the repercussions included “feeling ill at ease with one’s own body, being embarrassed that others should see it, feeling afraid to engage in bodily pleasures, and being unable to enjoy doing so.” For many years, in many cultures, girls’ bodies have been constrained and controlled under the guise of “this is ennobling; this helps you achieve the full flower of your womanhood. It’s not oppressive; it’s freeing!” I don’t buy it.

Yet I wonder if liberal Jews could have their own guidelines for tznius, a kind of modesty for our immodest age that isn’t, in practice, all about rules for women and girls.

Before we can begin to think about this new agenda for modesty—let’s call it tznius 2.0—we have to know what it is that we don’t want. We don’t want the kind of modesty conservative thinkers like Wendy Shalit have in mind: long sleeves, long skirts, covered hair for all the married ladies. Those are the same tired, shaming rules. We need to help girls feel at home in their bodies, but in a way that celebrates them instead of hectoring them. Because the damages caused by reducing them to how they look are serious.

According to a recent report by the American Psychological Association on the increasing sexualization of girls, the objectification of young women is linked to three of the most common mental health problems for girls and women: eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression. Sexualization, says the APA, views a girl as “a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.” No one wants girls to internalize that message.

The problem, however, isn’t limited to women. In our secular culture, men and boys are increasing sexualized, too. They’re under more pressure than ever to be hip, thin, fashionably dressed. And it starts early. I once saw a onesie for baby boys that read, “Hung like a five-year-old.” Tznius for today should encourage boys not to view girls as objects, but not to buy into their own objectification either.

Maybe we can all agree that one kind of modesty worth embracing is one that preserves childhood—when children are unashamed of their bodies and think “hot” only refers to the temperature of the bath water—as long as possible. Tznius 2.0 would involve keeping newborns away from spike heels (Heelarious high heels for babies, I’m talking to you!) and toddlers away from Bratz dolls. It wouldn’t stuff little boys into outmoded gender roles by discouraging play with “girly” toys. And nobody would wear a Huggies Thong.

Still, you can be completely covered—or a boy—and be wearing an outfit that flaunts values that are plenty non-tzniusdik. A key element of tznius 2.0 would involve discouraging cynicism and snideness, in clothing and in life. “If you don’t like my attitude, quit talking to me,” says one little-kid t-shirt I saw recently. “Caution: Zero to Brat in 2.5 seconds,” says another. “Isn’t it cute that you think I’m listening,” says a third. When you’re a parent, smirking at your kid’s disrespectful or dismissive behavior isn’t cute or cool. And it should be considered immodest, not something to boast about in bubble letters on cotton.

My version of tznius would also encompass materialism. Designer labels aren’t modest. And princesses aren’t great role models. Sure, there are wonderful books about empowered, self-rescuing princesses out there, but we all know that to a 3-year-old, the Arbah Imahot, the four biblical matriarchs, are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and Belle from Beauty and the Beast. And

only Belle has a real spine or any sense of agency. I’m not humorlessly saying we have to deprive little girls of their dress-up gowns—my 3-year-old niece would hate me forever—but I am saying we should turn our tznius energies toward making sure our kids don’t think being pretty, having a castle, and being well-swathed in taffeta are the most important things in the universe. This means we do not get to take them to the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, the beauty salon in Walt Disney World, where a preschooler can choose from three hairstyles—Fairytale Princess, Disney Diva, or Pop Princess—and where for $189.95 your kid gets a hairstyle plus “shimmering makeup,” a manicure, five photos in a princess-themed holder, The costume of the child’s choice, and a dwarf retinue. OK, I lied about the dwarves.

Ultimately, I think, the pinnacle of this new modesty would involve teaching our kids to value themselves for who they are rather than what they wear, whether that’s a floor-length denim skirt or a micro-mini. Of course, we want our kids to know they’re more than their looks. I’m just not sure how we achieve that. It’s easy to be horrified at the little Noahs and Suris. But more nuanced struggles with self-expression aren’t easy for anybody.

“Plus-size women are the fastest-growing segment of the fashion market,” Malkin points out. “But Fashion Week has basically nothing to do with us.” That’s part of why she started her store, selling items ranging from $5 tank tops to $400 evening gowns from the 1940s.

Since it opened last year, Re/Dress NYC has become a community hub. It hosts parties, self-esteem and wellness workshops, readings from fat-positive books, indie-designer trunk shows, yoga classes for plus-size women who aren’t comfortable in traditional classes, and a size-18-and-up model search.

In the Jewish tradition of tikkun olam, Malkin, who also founded the Fat Girl Flea Market, an annual event that has raised more than $30,000 for the fat-bias-fighting non-profit NOLOSE, donates regularly to Coalition for the Homeless and the NYC Clothing Bank. She’s hired quirky salesfolk with backgrounds in activism, performance art, and writing: Burlesque artist Bevin, for example, looks like a super-curvy, super-femme ‘40s pinup girl, while Glenn, winner of the Mr. Coney Island 2009 contest, has a style The New York Times described as “drag-hippie-trucker-on-the-road-to-Burning-Man.”

The daughter of a super-skinny Long Island fashionista, Malkin has embraced a different path. “I love my amazing, fierce, fat community,” she says. “They’re not to be ignored.”

SLIDESHOW PRODUCED BY JULIE SUBRIN AND LEN SMALL.

The previous week, I’d explained to Maxie and Josie, her 8-year-old sister, that there was an earthquake far away and that Daddy and I were sending tzedakah money to help the people. Did they want to do the same? They did. We’d emptied their tzedakah box and brought its contents to a fundraising drive for Partners in Health at school. But, you know, I’d never mentioned death. Now Maxie is ruminating a lot: Can we go to Haiti? What happens if our house falls down? Why don’t we have earthquakes in New York? Do we know anyone who died in an earthquake? Zayde is dead, but he didn’t die in an earthquake.

And suddenly I realized that while I’d had a sit-down conversation about death and grieving with Josie when she was just shy of 3, I’d never done so with Maxie. When Josie was in preschool, my dad died. Josie saw me crying, saw Bubbe crying. We explained that Zayde had died, which meant we couldn’t see him anymore. Like the flowers in our garden that wither and fade and get absorbed back into the earth, Zayde would be buried and we’d remember how he looked and what he did even after he was gone. Josie didn’t really get it. For weeks she said, “That’s Zayde!” whenever the phone rang. She went through a period of drawing Zayde’s corpse—with Xs for eyes!—and giving the pictures to my mom.

Maxie knows that Zayde was her grandfather, and that he died when Josie was little. She seems to grasp that “dead” means “ceased to be,” like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch. But does she actually understand?

Probably not. Experts say that until age 5 or so, kids can’t really comprehend the permanence of death. They still think they can outwit it. Maxie loves a book called Just a Minute by Yuyi Morales, about a grandmother tricking Senor Calavera—Death, in the form of a Day of the Dead skeleton—into not taking her quite yet. To me the story is sweetly, deliciously creepy and just a little sad, but to Max it’s all-out hilarious and satisfying. That makes sense, developmentally—kids her age tend to personify death: a skeleton, Voldemort, the Malach HaMavet. It’s not until age 9 or 10 that kids really grasp that death is concrete, permanent and inevitable for all living things.

So how do I address Maxie’s anxiety about death, disaster, and loss? Psychologist Sarah Chana Radcliffe, a parenting therapist in Toronto, says it’s not too late to reassure her. “Generally when small children ask about death, they’re really asking about separation—they don’t want to think that no one is going to look after them,” she says. “So you could say, ‘I probably won’t die for a very long time, but if something happened there would always be someone to take very good care of you.’” Radcliffe, who is religiously observant, continues, “If you use this language, you can add, ‘and eventually you will join me in Olam Haba.’”

I pressed Radcliffe to elaborate on how Orthodox Jews might explain death to kids. And as she spoke of a soul suddenly expanding, and of the joy of being reunited with Hashem, I felt jealous. I longed for that kind of confidence and serenity. Sure, I believe in God, but in the most nebulous God-is-some-kind-of-force-uh-I-don’t-know let’s-talk-about-social-action kind of way.

Delving too deeply into questions about suffering makes me twitchy. The notion of the Haitian earthquake having some heavenly purpose we can’t understand doesn’t work for me. The vastness of human suffering is too confounding to wave away with soothing words about God’s unknowable will. But neither am I comfortable throwing the Big Guy out with the bathwater.

But it is possible to talk about death and grief without bringing God into the conversation, says Rabbi Peter Schweitzer of The City Congregation for Humanistic Judaism. When I asked him how to address Maxie’s shpilkes, he handed the question to his 8-year-old son, who replied: “When people die they don’t go to an afterlife and nobody ever sees them again. Their skin and bones decompose into the soil.” Schweitzer told his son that this answer might not be comforting to a child, and his son replied, “But they’ll always be alive in your heart.” For humanistic Jews, that answer has to suffice, because that’s all there is. To Schweitzer, telling a child ”I don’t know what happens after we die” is often a cop-out. “As parents, we have a responsibility to lay out a picture of the world as we see it and help shape a worldview for our kids,” he argues. “Waffling is not a good thing if it really just avoidance of a tough topic.”

Ultimately, he said, it’s a parent’s responsibility to figure out what a child is really asking. Did Maxie want to know about what would happen to the children of Haiti, whether it would be possible to go see the devastation, whether we could go there to try to help out? “The first rule is find out what they already know about a subject,” Schweitzer suggests. “Be Jewish. Ask a question back. Remember the story of the child who asked a parent, ‘Where did I come from?’ and the parent thought this was an invitation for a lesson on sex, when the answer the kid really wanted was, ‘You came from Cleveland’?”

Funny. And good advice. But just as the full-on no-ambivalence omnipotent-and-good God version of Judaism isn’t my scene, the no-God version isn’t either. How to navigate these shoals is the subject for another column (or a dissertation, or an entire cosmology), but whatever your Jewish or theistic perspective, here are a few ground rules when talking about death with kids: don’t say things like “Grandma went to sleep and didn’t wake up,” unless you want your child never to put her head on a pillow again. Don’t say “Savta died because she was very old” because when a young person your child knows dies—as one inevitably will—it will rock that child’s world. (“Old and sick” is probably okay, if it’s true, as long as you clarify that most people who are sick do get better.) Don’t dismiss a child’s feelings of anger, be shocked by a child’s expressiveness—say, when she draws your father as a corpse every day for two weeks—or think a kid is being selfish if he makes death “all about him.” Anger is a legitimate emotion, kids process in their own ways, and the young are supposed to be self-absorbed. It’s in the rulebook. When your child feels helpless—as kids so often do, since they can’t even tie their own shoes—helping others is a good antidote. Encouraging kids to give tzedakah, make pictures for rescue teams or kids in hospitals, or donate toys to shelters can make them feel more in control. And when a relative or friend dies, sharing memories can keep them alive in our memories, as Rabbi Schweitzer’s son so wisely said.

Radcliffe offered a wonderful suggestion I intend to use with my kids in the future. She mentioned that we can tell older kids that research into near-death experiences shows that death is a peaceful, joyful experience. I can personally testify that this is true. In my 20s I had an anaphylactic allergic reaction and almost died. I passed out, stopped breathing, and was intubated by paramedics only in the nick of time. And I distinctly remember that as I lost consciousness, my feelings of terror evaporated. I felt warm, comfortable, elated. Suddenly I felt that I had enough air, though I didn’t. I saw a beautiful kaleidoscope and felt joy. Literature on such experiences is rife with stories like mine. I remember my dad, a doctor, explaining the medical reasons for most of what I felt. But hey, even if the common vision of a tunnel is caused by lack of oxygen in the brain causing compression of the optic nerve, isn’t it miraculous that the moment of death is happy and optimistic? Maybe this is evidence of God’s work and kindness, maybe it’s just a marvy trick of evolution, but it’s soothing either way.

Finally, consider that kids’ experiences of loss really aren’t that different from ours. A recent piece in The New Yorker about grief mentioned the work of 1970s psychiatrist and bereavement expert Colin Murray Parkes, who compared the physical sensations of mourning to what a child feels during separation anxiety. Death makes us feel alarmed because—like little children yearning for a parent who’s left the room—we’re unmoored from what we once relied on. And we keep searching for the missing person until we’ve finally created a new world without that person. It is what it is.

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Jewish school. Non-Jewish school that reflects the makeup of the world we live in. Both are worth yearning for. Both teach values that are completely legitimate. And “both” is exactly what I can’t have. They’re mutually contradictory. (My mom once insisted that Jewish schools can be diverse and got annoyed when I said that “diversity” doesn’t mean a couple of gay parents and a Chinese girl named Shoshana, but I stand by that statement.)

I feel genuine grief for the fact that my girls can’t speak Hebrew as well as I did at their age. I quake at the idea that it’s my responsibility to teach them the prayers and songs I loved as a kid. If I’d sent them to Senesh, they wouldn’t even have to deal with the stuff I loathed in my own day-school education: a lack of historicity, disrespect for alternate points of view, anti-feminism. They’d be in smaller classes, with all the pedagogical yumminess that entails. I waffle endlessly and luxuriantly in the possibility that I’ve made the wrong choice.

And then a day like Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday rolls around, and all my ambivalence falls away.

Let’s look at how Maxie’s class, a combined pre-K and kindergarten, celebrates the holiday. They build a bus out of chairs, and each kid is assigned a shape: rectangle or circle. First the rectangles all have to sit at the back of the bus, and when they protest that this is not fair, or complain to a circle at the front of the bus, they are told that, nyah nyah, these are the rules. Then a little rectangle playing Rosa Parks refuses to move. And the rectangle police come. You know the story. Then everyone switches roles: the circles have to sit at the back, and the rectangles sit in front.

The next day, Maxie’s teacher Laurie tells them the actual story of the Montgomery bus boycott. “It’s important that we do the role-playing first, before we talk about the historical event,” she told me, “because I don’t want kids to feel ‘If I’m white, I’m the permanent bad guy, and if I’m black, I’m the permanent underdog.’” Laurie stresses that people from all over supported the Freedom Fighters. She talks about how the bus strike was really hard. It was rainy. It was cold. But eventually the mayor said that it was costing the city too much money, and he changed the law.

Laurie tells the story through the lens of saying no to unfairness, an idea that resonates with very young kids. “Most of them feel pretty powerless in the world,” she pointed out. “They can’t make their own breakfast. They can’t get dressed and go out by themselves.”

The message that people of all races can work together—a message that is reinforced by the actual fact of kids of all races learning together—is one I cling to. Maxie’s class really is a gorgeous mosaic (Inside Schools says that the school’s study body is 31 percent white, 22 percent black, 29 percent Latino, and 16 percent Asian), and the point is that they’re not just talking about unity and racial harmony; they’re embodying it. The notion that we can move beyond the pain of our respective pasts and create a just and united world is right there in the classroom.

Sometimes white parents (almost never black ones, educators say) insist that kids can’t see skin color. They tell teachers they don’t want their kids to learn about painful historical events or even talk about difference, because “everyone’s equal” and “under the skin, we’re all the same.” But research shows that no kids are colorblind. And a 2007 study of 17,000 families with kindergartners, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that nonwhite parents are about three times more likely to discuss race than white parents; 75 percent of the latter never, or almost never, talk about race. When we don’t talk about race, we give kids the message that it’s a shameful subject.

Oh, and then there’s the fact that all too often Jewish parents act like we have the monopoly on suffering. Who has room for another group’s inequities when we had the Holocaust? Game, set, match.

It doesn’t have to be this way. It’s not a suffering competition. We Jewish moms and dads might choose to reinforce the message that people of different backgrounds can work together by reading As Good as Anybody: Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom with our kids. Richard Michelson and Raul Colon’s book talks about the similarities between these two great men and how they marched together in 1965, before Mommy or Daddy were even born. But the book doesn’t minimize difference. That’s important.

And to me, Maxie’s school truly embodies Heschel’s values. As Heschel says in the book, “God did not make a world with just one color flower. We are all made in God’s image.”

Indeed. But a book is one thing; an entire school is another. I see the lessons my kid is learning not just from the curriculum but from the hidden curriculum, a term I’ve learned since starting this column. At moments like these, I feel OK with all the stuff she’s not getting.

So, nu, I’ll do more of the heavy lifting to ensure that she gets her Jew on at home. I’ll supplement what she learns in Hebrew school. I’ll send her to Jewish camps, where she will make lanyards and swap spit with other Jews and sing Halleluyah until her ears bleed. On days like today, the tradeoff feels worth it.

This morning, Maxie told me, “Today I want to play Rosa Parks.” Go for it, kid.

Do you remember the Jewish books of your childhood? Many seemed to provide as much terror as pleasure. I was an easily traumatized child, so everything scared me. When Henny borrowed Ella’s fancy dress in All-of-a-Kind Family and got a stain on it, I felt sick with fear. (Sure, Henny dyed it with tea and everything was fine, but, my God, what if it hadn’t worked?)

For many of us, though, the Holocaust was the real emotional goldmine, providing thrills, misery, and catharsis. For those of us who came of age in the ’70s and ’80s, Holocaust books had particular resonance, perhaps because we were distant enough from the factual horrors to be able to experience them as art, but close enough that they still had immediacy. And though many adults seemed to want us to experience only joyless terror from Holocaust literature, we loved every page of our fear. We asked our friends and fans on Facebook to share with us their favorite, sweet traumas; behold, then, their reminiscences.

* * *

Andrea Monfried, art-book editor: I’m thinking of a scene in

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. It was when they put that professor in a cage and made him bark until he lost his mind. I never got over that, and yet I loved that book. I read it and reread it. It reminds me of a friend’s kid who got obsessed with a picture of the devil on a movie poster; if he saw it in the subway he had to close his eyes and they had to carry him out of there screaming. I believe they also had to do some kind of stomp-three-times ceremony to banish the devil. That was what Pink Rabbit was like for me, that one scene.

Robin Aronson, writer: I lived in the Holocaust section of the Providence Hebrew Day School library—was there any other section?—during recess. I Never Saw Another Butterfly? Puh-lease, that was an aperitif; I read them all. The trauma must have sunk in deep, because even though I remember very little from those books, I rarely carry one of my sleeping children across the apartment without thinking “What if I had to do this while running from the Gestapo?”

Betsy Schwartz, systems administrator: I read Elie Wiesel’s Night when I was 13. Too young. What scared me about it, besides everything? In addition to the catalog of horrors, the fact that near the beginning of the book, the village is warned about the death camps and they don’t believe because it’s the middle of the 20th century. That made the story frighteningly present-day for me. Plus, you know, the catalog of horrors.

Abigail Miller, Tablet’s assistant art director: The Devil’s Arithmetic, by Jane Yolen. It takes the latent necrophilia of your usual YA Holocaust novel to its logical extreme. Bratty contemporary young girl protagonist Hannah is opening the door for Elijah at her family’s seder when the door magically opens into the shtetl and Hannah becomes Chaya, a Polish girl in the 1940s. But this is not a Magic Tree House book: Chaya not only ends up in the camps, but dies there. Through the doors of the gas chamber, Hannah returns to the door of her grandparents’ apartment and the Chaya within her recognizes her old relatives, Wizard of Oz style. The young reader is, like Hannah, supposed to come away with a renewed respect for crotchety old survivors, but as a child, I was just wrapped up in the terrifying ghost story of it.

Amanda Clayman, financial advisor: Though I enjoyed Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, which is set in Miami in 1947, I was very disturbed by Sally’s fantasy that her neighbor was Hitler. Then there was the fact that the family was living apart (Dad was in New Jersey, the rest of the family was in Florida), and the family sitting shiva for a daughter who marries a goy. It was distressing.

Jessica Seigel, writer: Hands down the creepiest kids book of all time has to be Der Struwwelpeter. It was the Mother Hubbard of Germanic culture (I was born in Basel, Switzerland). It was given to me at age 3, which is how I know the horror. My mother confiscated it from the babysitter when she caught sight of it, but the damage was done in my child brain. I will never forget it. I lost the copy, but when you see the pictures of kids burning up from playing with matches, their thumbs cut off from thumbsucking and other horrors visited on bad children, you will understand Auschwitz better.

* * *

But the ur-text of Jewish childhood literary terror, is, of course, the Torah. Army-killing oceans (Exodus 14). People getting sucked into the earth, just like in Tremors (Numbers 16). Murderous foreskin collection (Samuel 18). Perhaps fittingly, in her academic work at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Professor Amy Kalmanofsky applies horror theory to biblical texts, looking at how the Torah is designed to terrify its audience. The author of Terror All Around: The Rhetoric of Horror in the Book of Jeremiah (and surely the only monster-movie-obsessed feminist Jewish scholar with a Facebook fan page), Kalmanofsky is interested in how Jewish stories scare us and why.

“There’s a natural nexus between horror and religion,” she says. “Religion is, at its core, about coming to terms with mortality, with our helpless, vulnerable, decaying selves. I actually think that in some ways horror movies and books function for us now the way religion used to function. They help us wrestle with death.”

“Mom! Josie won’t let me play fairies with her!”

And so it goes. I’d like to tell you that time off from school means time spent baking gluten-free organic muffins and jamming joyfully with our family bluegrass band. But not so much. Intensive togetherness in our house means whining.

In Émile, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described the “original perfect nature” of the child. To him, spending time with children necessitated respecting their inherent harmony and wholeness; the very first line in the book is “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.” During the “age of nature,” Rousseau claimed, or ages 2 to 12, a child should receive no moral instruction at all. “The mind should be left undisturbed till its faculties have developed,” Rousseau wrote, believing that it’s not until adolescence that children are actually able to reason.

Of course, Rousseau dumped his own five illegitimate children in orphanages, so what did he know? And the way mine are behaving right now, I’m tempted to follow his example.

But what if we look at what Rousseau said rather than what he did? Are our children indeed perfect little noble savages, blank slates for us to screw up? Does that make it impossible for them to understand the mixed messages we send—for example, when it comes to tattling vs. telling? After all, from the time they were tiny, we’ve been instructing them to come to us when they have a problem. Don’t use your fists, we say, tell me what’s bothering you. But by the time they’re in kindergarten, our message has changed: Work it out yourself. Don’t be a tattletale. Surely this is an example of Rousseau-ian messing with our children’s perfect nature.

Judaism, of course, has its own take: tattling is a facet of lashon hara, “evil language.” Lashon hara, the Talmud says, is sinful to engage in even if it’s true. (And make no mistake: tattling usually is true. Researchers have found that children who tattle are telling the truth 90 percent of the time, says Ashley Merryman, co-author of Nurtureshock: New Thinking About Children. According to the Talmud, lashon hara harms three people: the speaker, the listener, and the person being spoken about. That’s certainly true of tattling. Look at famed Torah tattler Joseph, of Technicolor Dreamcoat repute. In Genesis 37, we learn how Joseph was tending the sheep with his brothers, and brought his father a “bad report” about them. (Was it true? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter.) Along with his annoying tendency to share dreams in which he looked awesome and his brothers didn’t, Joseph’s run-to-daddy tendencies led to him being sold into slavery. Coatless. His family wound up starving and his father thought he was dead. Tattling did indeed harm the speaker, the listener, and the one tattled-upon.

But look at it from Joseph’s perspective. “According to observational studies of siblings,” says Merryman, “for every time a kid tattled to a parent, he had 14 other disagreements with his sibling or transgressions that he didn’t complain about.” I bet that was true of Joseph. His 10 older brothers, aware of who their dad’s favorite was, were probably picking on him constantly out in the sheep-tending fields. Jacob may not have blamed Joseph for tattling, but we’re not Jacob. In our real-life modern-day world, according to one researcher, we’re 10 times more likely to chastise a child for tattling as to chide a child for lying.

“Parents think ‘no tattling’ means ‘try to work it out on your own, but if you can’t, or if you have a real problem, then come to me,’” says Merryman. But kids often think they have tried to work it out on their own, and still we dismiss them. Thus, “kids turn ‘don’t be a tattletale’ into ‘don’t tell me the truth when you have a problem.’”

We have to help kids navigate these shoals, because the social consequences of being perceived as a tattler can be dire. “A child who repeatedly goes to the teacher after, say, second grade or so, will be socially ostracized by other children, considered more immature, considered unable to hang with the peer group,” says Erika Rich, a child psychologist in Los Angeles, points out. “Tattling becomes a social deficit.”

And a culture with a full-on “tattlers suck” ethos can have dangerous implications. One study found that among fourth and fifth graders, tattling is considered as serious a transgression as theft or property damage, says Merryman. And this worldview leads to the “Stop Snitching” movement, which encourages citizens not to cooperate with police. (Though to be fair, many police informants do seem to be motivated by self-interest. According to a study by Northwestern University Law School’s Center on Wrongful Convictions, informants are responsible for 46 percent of wrongful capital convictions from false testimony. They may be motivated by cash or by a plea bargain.) Rick Frei, a professor of psychology at Community College of Philadelphia, has created The Snitching Project, a study of community attitudes toward police cooperation. He has found that people were more afraid of damage to their reputation than of physical retribution if they talked to police. (They were also more likely to cooperate when a victim was elderly or a child and less likely when a victim was a drug dealer.)
But back in my house, with its non-criminal (but very annoying) tattling and whining, I need help surviving this vacation and beyond. The key is to be explicit about my expectations, say the experts.

“Up until first grade, you want kids to utilize adults as problem-solvers, because they’re still learning how to problem-solve,” says Rich. “We provide modeling. We have to teach them the correct strategies. Then by first or second grade, it’s important to help them make the shift into problem-solving themselves. It’s time to have a conversation: This is a new expectation I have for you. You need to come tell me if there’s danger, to you or to others, but if there isn’t, try to work through this on your own.”

When my kids run to me with a glass-shattering wail, I might say, “Wow, how have you tried to handle it?” or “What’s your motivation in coming to me?” or “Is this an emergency?” (As my friend Paula used to say, “Is there blood? Is it arterial?”). Mary Beth Hewitt, an educator who specializes in children with challenging behaviors, recommends that we recognize kids’ attempts to use words to solve problems and reinforce the positive facets of their attempts. Then we can help them refine their attempts (“Another way to say that might be…”). We can empathize with their feelings (“That makes you really mad, huh?”), ask what they’ve tried and what else they could try, and offer alternatives.

“Your job is to raise capable children,” says Bill Corbett, a parenting educator and author of Love, Limits & Lessons. “To do that, they need to take accountability for the problem. Ninety-nine percent of the problem is emotionally based—they feel left out or angry—and a parent can help them develop the emotional intelligence to deal with it by directing him to talk about the feelings. Generally, with repeat tattling, you just say ‘Really? Wow!’ Most parents have gone overboard in solving problems for their kids—we’ve raised a generation of kids who say, ‘I can’t do it myself; you do it for me.’”

To help a kid distinguish between tattling and telling, snitching and being a responsible member of a democracy, Corbett says, “Acknowledge that the child has brought you the problem. In doing so, you teach a kid ‘I did the right thing by going to Dad.’ Concentrate on the relationship: You have the right to tell me anything, but I have the right to take action or not.” (Shari Storm, author of Motherhood is the New MBA: Using Your Parenting Skills to be a Better Boss, offers a shorthand: “Are you telling me this to get someone in to trouble or to get someone out of trouble?”)

All the experts agree: the very word “tattling” is bad news. “We shouldn’t have it in our parental vocabulary,” says Corbett. Merryman concurs. “Since I learned about this research, I never call a kid a tattle-tale,” she says. “I would much rather have kids come to me when they feel they need to than set a pattern where they expect I will criticize them for asking for help.”

But back to our pal Rousseau: I’m not sure my kids’ savagery is so noble. But I also don’t see them as empty vessels, ready to be filled (even after their bat mitzvahs, bien sur) with my civilizing parental wisdom. Alas, with child-rearing, as with discerning the difference between tattling and helping, nuance is where it’s at. Shades of gray can be irksome when you’re trying to keep to a word count, but that’s life. And parenthood.

Sources:

1. American Resarch Group

2. Penn Current

3. Ynet

4. Slate

5. Interfaith Family Magazine

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle (Macmillan). It’s 1939. Daniel, age 13, is a German-Jewish refugee. His grandfather was killed on Kristallnacht; his parents, poor musicians, wiped out their savings to shove him onto a ship they thought was going to New York. But Daniel instead winds up in Cuba, where he befriends Paloma, 12, whose corrupt father is making a lot of money off Cuba’s suddenly huge refugee population. The book is written entirely in verse, in short poems spoken by its different characters. The language is ravishing—you feel the heat, smell the flowers, see the turquoise and yellow casitas, taste the ice cream. Images of broken glass and musical notes abound. And I learned stuff—I had no idea the Cuban government locked up non-Jews of German descent, fearing they were Nazi spies. There’s even suspense—will Paloma’s evil father catch and punish our heroes as they try to hide an intermarried couple? So much happens in so few words. Yet I fear this book will be hurt by its lousy title and subtitle (“Tropical Secrets” sounds like a Cinemax porno, and “Holocaust Refugees in Cuba” sounds like a boring history paper). And the cover is pretty but bland, exactly the opposite of what’s inside. This book is vibrant, exciting and moving—definitely my favorite of the year. I pray young readers will open it. (Grades 4-10)

Strawberry Hill by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin (Little, Brown). I am crotchety: I hated the title of the last book; I hate the art in this one. Josie wouldn’t pick it up because the book looked both dated and babyish, with its garish cover and super-perky protagonist with long braids. But inside is old-fashioned storytelling of the best sort. Set during the Great Depression, the story is about 10-year-old Allie, coping with her family’s move to a new house in a new town on a street called Strawberry Hill. Once I forced Josie to pick it up, by denying her food and water for several days, she adored it. Hoberman, our nation’s Children’s Poet Laureate, is a terrific storyteller, and she gets girl-friendship dynamics just right. Allie wants to be best friends with her new neighbor Martha, who is pretty and self-possessed; she does not want to be socially tainted by her new neighbor Mimi, who is chubby and over-eager and unpopular (but secretly pretty fun). When Martha’s best friend Cynthia (deliciously hateful) calls Allie a “dirty Jew,” Allie has to figure out what her own values really are. The book offers important but not leaden lessons about tolerance, and any girl who has navigated the treacherous waters of friendship (that is: any girl) will appreciate the satisfying resolution. (Grades 2–5)

The Brooklyn Nine: A Novel in Nine Innings by Alan Gratz (Dial Books for Young Readers). Nine generations of the Schneider family have loved baseball, and each generation gets an inning—I mean, a chapter—in The Brooklyn Nine. In 1845, 10-year-old Felix Schneider arrives from Germany and falls in with the New York Knickerbockers, a volunteer fire brigade that plays a familiar game when they’re not battling blazes. In 1864, Louis’s son Arnold meets his hero, one of baseball’s first stars, now a drunk and dissolute vaudevillian. In 1908, Arnold’s son Walter, batboy for the Brooklyn Superbas, tries to sneak the first African-American player into the majors by telling everyone he’s Native American. In 1926, Walter’s daughter Frankie, a Brooklyn Dodgers-worshipping math whiz, runs numbers for a local mobster and befriends a louche New York Times sportswriter. And so on. There’s more than 150 years of history here, and it all goes down easy, as delicious as peanuts and Crackerjack. You learn about the Civil War, the All-American Girls Baseball League, Sputnik and, um, eBay. There’s loads of humor and familial warmth, and Gratz does a great job with characterization, especially given how short the chapters are. (Frankie’s my fave.) Endnotes clarify what’s history and what’s poetic license; that New York Times sportswriter actually existed! I’m not a huge baseball fan but I adored this book—I can only imagine how an actual baseball fan would plotz. (Grades 4-9)

The Doll Shop Downstairs by Yona Zeldis McDonough, illustrated by Heather Maione (Viking Juvenile). This tale feels as if it could have been written a lifetime ago. Loosely based on the true story of how Madame Alexander dolls were created, The Doll Shop Downstairs looks at a Russian-Jewish family on the Lower East Side at the dawn of World War I. The family owns a doll-repair shop, but when war breaks out, doll parts can no longer be sent from Germany. The financial situation looks grim until Anna, the family’s middle daughter, has an idea that saves the day. McDonough (The Doll with the Yellow Star) does beautifully with the sibling rivalry among the family’s three daughters, and Josie loved the way the book depicts imaginative play with broken dolls awaiting service in the shop. The book isn’t as rich and detailed as the All-of-a-Kind Family series, but it has loads of flavor. (Minor quibble: why did no one catch that the name of legendary toy store F.A.O. Schwarz is misspelled throughout?) (Grades 1-4)

Brenda Berman, Wedding Expert by Jane Breskin Zalben, illustrated by Victoria Chess (Clarion). “Brenda had this whole wedding planned, and it wasn’t really important whose wedding it was.” Drama queen Brenda has always wanted to be a flower girl in a gold lamé dress with sparkly shoes and a diamond tiara, walking down an aisle alone. But her beloved uncle and soon-to-be aunt are ruining her vision with ideas of their own. They want her in lavender? They want her to walk with some other girl, her new aunt’s niece? Feh. But in the end, Brenda stops being such a pill and discovers that weddings are really about welcoming new family into our lives. And about having cake and punch, recipes for which are included in the back. This book, from the creators of Baby Babka, the Gorgeous Genius, offers a heroine who’s high-spirited but not as annoying as that farshtunkiner Eloise or Pinkalicious. I like the friendly, small, square size and the lumpy, big-nosed jolie-laide (that’s putting it politely) drawings—Brenda looks like the mutant offspring of Tomi DePaola (Strega Nona) and Harriet Pincus (Tell me a Mitzi). (Grades K-3)

Lost by Jacqueline Davies (Marshall Cavendish). Essie is a 16-year-old seamstress on the Lower East Side who adores and spoils her beloved little sister Zelda. Harriet is a secretive, snazzily dressed new worker at the garment factory where Essie works. Their stories are suffused with secrets. They’re both, well, lost. And the sense of foreboding is almost unbearable. I had a hard time getting through the first 50 pages. But I am an adult who knows the history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where the girls work, and I am the mother of a little girl who is a lot like Zelda. Tween and teen readers won’t have this baggage. And I suspect they’ll love this book. Yes, there’s an awful lot of coincidence to keep the wheels of the plot turning, but the atmosphere and details are beautifully drawn. And when the fire finally arrives—whoa. (An afternote offers still more historical perspective.) It’s hard to believe the same writer wrote The Lemonade War, a middle-grade novel about contemporary suburban kids competing to sell tasty beverages. Now that’s range. (Grades 7-12).

The Importance of Wings by Robin Friedman (Charlesbridge). This story is set in the 1980s; the main character is almost exactly my age. The title, of course, refers to the perfect flip of feathered hair, created with a round brush and a blowdryer. Josie was baffled and fascinated as I explained how vital good wings really were to my preteen identity back then. But Roxanne, 13, has even more problems than I did: she’s Israeli and desperate to assimilate, her dad’s away all day driving a cab, her mom’s off visiting family in Israel, she lives in Staten Island next to a house all the neighborhood kids think is cursed, she’s afraid of gym class, and she’s not popular. So she escapes into reruns: Little House on the Prairie, Superfriends, The Brady Bunch, Wonder Woman—all illustrations of the elusive, ideal American life she craves. Then another Israeli girl, Liat, moves in next door, and Roxanne gradually learns to reframe what’s important. This was Josie’s favorite book on the list, and it’s very readable. I like that it depicts completely secular Israelis, a portrayal that may surprise many American kids. (Grades 3-7)

Albert Einstein by Kathleen Krull, illustrated by Boris Kulikov (Viking Juvenile). A biography of the genius, written and illustrated by the same team that created the brilliant 2008 picture book Fartiste, about Edwardian-era Moulin Rouge gas-passing performance artist Joseph Pujol, “the man who made his pants dance.” (Talk about range! Jacqueline Davies, you just got schooled.) This book grabs you from its very first, unpretentious sentence: “Albert Einstein had major bedhead.” Krull uses terrific anecdotes and quotations from the great man (he said of himself, “I am no Einstein”) and discusses how he coped with anti-Semitism and the terrifying consequences of his discovery of relativity. (He became an anti-war and social-justice activist.) The book doesn’t shy away from Einstein’s darkness—it talks about his arrogance, crappy people skills, crappier parenting, and even crappier husbanding. (“I treat my wife as an employee whom I cannot fire,” he said.) I still don’t understand much of the science in the book, despite a noble effort by Krull; she works around the physics by explaining that fiber optics, TV, cell phones, smoke alarms, and GPS systems wouldn’t exist today without Einstein’s work in quantum theory. That works for me. (Grades 4-7)

There you go. Happy Hanukkah! Buy a book!

New Year at the Pier: A Rosh Hashanah Story by April Halprin Wayland, illustrated by Stéphane Jorich (Dial Books for Young Readers). This is my pick for the best Jewish picture book of the year. It’s about Tashlich. It’s funny; it’s moving; it’s lyrical; there’s good dialogue. Best of all, it shows how hard apologizing can be, and how cathartic. The protagonist, Izzy, is a credible little kid—he apologizes to his sister for drawing on her forehead while she’s asleep. I like the fun , vaguely French watercolor illustrations, with lots of yummy detail in the kids’ clothes—Stéphane Jorisch has a way, in particular, with shoes. (And I like that Cantor Livia and her guitar-playing accompanist, with their flowy Berkeley-vibed clothing, look like a specific and familiar breed of middle-aged bobo Jewess.) This book is superb. (Grades K-3)

When I First Held You: A Lullaby from Israel by Mirik Snir, illustrated by Eleyor Snir (Kar-Ben). “Rain tapped a song/ Rocks rolled along/ The sea waved with glee/ When I held you close to me.” The words are simple but sweet; for me, the folk art-y, naïve paintings are what really make the book. (Mirik Snir should be shepping serious nachas from her artist daughter.) Brightly colored, curvy images of lots of animal parents and babies cuddling make a soothing yet unboring (blessedly pastel-free) read for little ones. There’s a quote in Hebrew and English at the end, from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav: “The day you were born is the day God decided that the world could not exist without you.” And there’s a place at the back to place your child’s photo and birthdate. What kid wouldn’t feel safe and special when this book was read to him? (Infant to Grade 1)

The Yankee at the Seder by Elka Weber, illustrated by Adam Gustavson (Tricycle). This book is based on the true story of a Civil War-era Southern Jewish family that invited a passing Northern Jewish soldier to Passover dinner, only a day after General Robert E. Lee’s surrender. Uh-oh. The family’s 10-year-old son, Jacob, is horrified to have a “Yankee Jew” in attendance. He’s grieving the end of the war and the loss of his dreams: “I was never going to be a Rebel general. I’d never capture a whole unit of Yankees single-handed.” The tensions at the seder table are both uncomfortable and exciting. Jacob’s father pointedly tells the soldier that the message of the haggadah is that “no man needs to submit to the tyranny of an evil government;” the soldier, Myer Levy, says that the Passover story is about “how no man wants to be a slave and about how wonderful it is to be free.” Differences are put aside for the meal, but no one hugs it out at the end. “Well, that was something, wasn’t it?” is all the mom can come up with afterward. The book is illustrated with luscious, dark-toned oil paintings. There’s a historical note and photos at the end, but the book doesn’t feel at all like boring school stuff. (Grades 2-4)

The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak by Tomek Bogacki (FSG/Foster). This is another book that sounds like a noble, virtuous, narcolepsy-inducing history lesson—the spinach of Jewish juvenilia. Yet of all the books on this list, this one is by far my daughter Josie’s favorite. (She’s eight.) Korczak grows up in Warsaw, encounters anti-Semitism, pledges to fight for children’s rights, goes to medical school, starts an orphanage for Jewish children in which the kids help govern themselves and create a just society. Josie loved that last part. The book is beautifully illustrated, with acrylic paintings that have a slightly skewed, just-barely-cartoonish perspective. Some paintings stand alone while others are tiny spot illustrations integrated into the text. There’s so much to look at. And at the end, when Korczak’s children are marched from the Warsaw ghetto to the train that will take them to their deaths in Treblinka, there’s so much to mourn. I still think Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars is a better introduction to the idea of the Holocaust, but this is a gorgeous, gently-told book that every Jewish kid should eventually read. (Grades 2-4, and for adults, too)

Faith by Maya Ajmera, Magda Nakasis, and Cynthia Pon (Charlesbridge). This photography book illustrates how different cultures around the world pray, read sacred books, eat, visit holy places, celebrate festivals, and mark lifecycle events. Some kids love to look at photos of other kids, and this book will hypnotize them. There’s very little text. The images celebrate diversity without bludgeoning anyone over the head with it. We see a Jewish girl making challah with her zayde, a young Buddhist novice meditating, Nigerian children praying together, a bar-mitzvah boy chanting the Torah, a Muslim family breaking the daily fast during Ramadan, a Guatemalan kid with missing front teeth grinning broadly in an Easter mask. Charming. (Pre-K to Grade 4)

You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?! By Jonah Winter, illustrated by André Carrilho. (Schwartz & Wade, $17.99) Many years ago, as a tiny Jew, I got sick of hearing about Sandy Koufax. Whenever a kid would say there aren’t any great Jewish athletes, some grownup would trot out the story of a guy a million years ago who sat out a World Series game because it fell on Yom Kippur. To which we tiny Jews said (in our tiny heads): big whoop. Our unasked question: how much did that guy’s teammates and all the fans want to kill him? It sure didn’t sound Good for the Jews, refusing to play in the World Series. Will today’s tiny Jews also be resistant to hearing about how Sandy Koufax was awesomely Jewish and noble (there’s that word again)? Not if this book can help it. It’s enticing even without the nobility angle. There’s a crazy moving 3-D holographic cover image of Koufax mid-pitch. The illustrations are cool and distorted and freaky—and there’s a lot of brilliant gold leaf in them. Koufax is all arcing-curving-curve-ball-throwing giant arms, plus a set of bushy eyebrows. He’s pure power. He’s an enigma. The unnamed teammate who narrates this book (in a folksy voice that could possibly be deemed annoying) doesn’t really understand him, and we don’t either. But the fact that the main character feels elusive is OK. We respect his hard work, the way he faces anti-Semitism, the way no one can figure out what motivates him when he suddenly quits baseball at his peak. We end up just admiring the guy’s individuality; that’s better and truer than hagiography. Sometimes questions are richer than answers.(Grades 1-4)

When I Wore My Sailor Suit by Uri Shulevitz (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). This book, for very young kids, is a little snippet of one of Shulevitz’s childhood memories. Little Uri visits the Mintzes’ apartment and plays with a model ship on a dresser, imagining himself on a daring voyage where he meets a pirate and finds a treasure map. But he’s pulled out of his fantasy by a painting in the room: a portrait with creepy eyes that seem to follow him. At first Uri is too freaked out to continue his imaginary play, but eventually he finds a way to defeat the picture’s scariness and go back to his world-sailing fantasy. Shulevitz is a heavy hitter in children’s books—he won a Caldecott Medal in 1969, for The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, and has illustrated nearly 40 books (including Isaac Bashevis Singer’s astounding—and shockingly out of print—1982 retelling of The Golem). Last year’s How I Learned Geography is a more Serious, Important autobiographical book—that one, for slightly older children, addressed more directly Shulevitz’s childhood in World War II-era Warsaw (where his apartment was hit by a bomb in 1939, while he was home) and his family’s flight to Paris, Turkmenistan, and then Israel. Mid-journey, the father can’t afford food at a desert market, and instead comes home with a map, which turns out to offer its own kind of nourishment in terrible times. Both books are about the power of storytelling and imagination. The illustrations in When I Wore My Sailor Suit are warmer and more inviting than the ornate, sweeping vistas Shulevitz paints in How I Learned Geography. They’re cozy. And the story deals with addressing fear in an authentic, manageable way. Maxine, age five, adores it. (Pre-K to Grade 2)

Next week: the year’s best chapter books.

Plush Mohel Scissors

The perfect gift for a new baby, a jealous older sibling, or a little feminist who is really, really annoyed about the Stupak-Pitts amendment.

Available at Oytoys.com, $6.95 plus shipping.

Ten Plagues Finger Puppets

Why does hail look like Conan O’Brien? Why does darkness look like a throwback to a minstrel show? Why would you encourage your child to put a slain first-born on his wedding-ring finger? Is it some kind of subliminal “marry a Jew or you’re dead to me” messaging? You know what, just put the other nine puppets away and have your kid walk around with the dead first-born on his ring finger, croaking “Redrum! Redrum!” It will freak out your college student cousin who got high in the car before coming in for latkes.

Available at Judaica Enterprises, $18 plus shipping.

Star of David 3D Glasses

Your child is asking uncomfortable questions. Why does everyone have a Christmas tree except us? Why doesn’t Santa visit my house? Why do all these twinkling lights make me feel so lonely? Before you cave and get a Hanukkah bush, slap a pair of Star of David 3D glasses on the kid’s face and watch his eyes light up! Every bulb, streetlamp, and Christmas light he sees will be transformed into spinning holographic images of Jewish stars. Crisis averted!

Available at Gemini Specs, $1.95 plus shipping.

Samson Action Figure

Wait, his hair is plastic. I guess we could melt it. I totally know where Mom hides the matches. Or we could try to carve it with the electric knife you stole from the drawer. God, could his face look any less badass? He looks like Hannah Montana’s dad.

Available at Amazon.com, $29.95, eligible for free shipping with Amazon Prime.

Harvey Nagila Dancing Doll

True story. My dad got us this toy when Josie was tiny. Josie took one look at its impassive, sunglassed face and clung to my leg. When Harvey began shimmying to Hava Nagila, she screamed and crawled behind the couch so fast she left skid marks. Harvey sat, unloved, on a shelf for three years until Maxine was born. We took it down again. Because we are stupid. When Harvey began to clap, Maxine let out an inhuman wail, covered her face, and started shaking. She became haunted by it, her own personal dybbuk, and, in a ritualistic fervor that would make Freud proud, insisted on watching it dance over and over, quaking as it scared the bejeezus out of her. Buy Harvey Nagila and you too will know this fun.

Available at Traditions Jewish Gifts, $17.95 plus shipping.

Techno Draydel with Lights and Sound Effects

Do you miss the rave scene of the carefree early 90s? Give little Ezekiel a bottle of water, a glowstick, some massage oil, and this toy. Crank up the Goa trance and let him spin around the living room. He already has the pacifier.

Available at Jewish Book House, $4.79 plus shipping.

Jewish Major Leaguers Baseball Cards, Collectors Edition

“OMG, Dad, you spent $918 for this?! Why? Why do you expect me to live your dreams? I hate baseball! I just want to dance!”

Available at Amazon.com, $918 plus shipping.

Kosherland

From the product description: “Travel through KosherTown—pass by Bubby, the Kiddush Ocean, and Matzah Man—but don’t listen to the Latke Men Marching Band or you might get stuck in the honey! Be the first to make it to the kosher home, and you win!” But what if I pass the pig-trotter tortelloni with mustard broth and daikon at Momofuku?

Available at Amazon.com, $9.47 plus shipping.

Hanukkah Harry

Are you secretly jealous of the O’Shaughnessys’ Christmas decorations? The cure for what ails you is a seven-and-a-half foot, menorah-totin’ Jewish snowman perched on a dreidel! What child won’t be thrilled to find this giant creature looming in his front yard? What yearning-to-assimilate teen won’t be mortified to have friends drive past her home this holiday season? Nothing contributes to in-group identification like humiliation!

Available at Hanukkah Harry, $139.95 with free shipping.

Talking Queen Esther Doll

Um, are you sure you won a beauty pageant? Were the other contestants. . .biological women?

Available at Amazon.com, $19.99 plus shipping.

Back in the day, of course, we just wanted our kids to survive childhood. I once wrote a piece for the Forward theorizing about why Judaism historically didn’t address stillbirth or miscarriage. Why weren’t babies who lived less than 30 days given funerals? Why weren’t they attended with the rituals associated with mourning? I’m guessing it’s because attitudes were different in a time when an infant’s death was a regular occurrence. It was better to move on, push past grief, plan for the next kid. Today we have the luxury of neurosis. We get to dwell. We have fewer kids, and we not only expect them to survive to adulthood, we expect them to go to Yale and become gastroenterologists and program our TiVos. We get worked up about vaccines and breastfeeding because we can. But it’s more than that. I’ve been pondering why vaccine advocates can cite reputable studies until the cows come home, insisting with ever-increasing vehemence that Legitimate Science does not show that vaccines cause autism and let us explain the concept of herd immunity and you put all our children at risk if you don’t vaccinate yours and do you know that People Used to Die of Measles—and the anti-vaccine folks come back just as forcefully with anecdotal evidence and studies that the Friends of Science see as substandard.

Meanwhile, I wave around studies showing that once researchers correct for maternal age, income, smoking, intelligence, and education levels, the evidence is inconclusive about whether breastfeeding is better than bottle-feeding with modern formula—but lactivists continue to hurl insults at bottle-feeders and insist they’re harming their children and society. Why do we talk such different languages, at such cross-purposes?

I thought about this while sitting in a school meeting that turned into a heated referendum on the H1N1 vaccine. Like all New York City public schools, my kids’ school is making the vaccine available, but the Department of Education has been surprised by how few parents want it. Current estimates say that 25-35 percent of families want it for their kids, far below the original 50 percent estimate. Why? “There are still a lot of parents who want the vaccine for their kids, but many really don’t,” said Neal, my brother-in-law and a pediatrician who runs school health programs in the Bronx. “No one is lukewarm about it.” In my kids’ school, one person ranted about how a holistic doctor told her sister’s friend that the vaccine can eat the lining of the heart and kill you as two other mothers campaigned furiously to get the vaccine sooner rather than later and to be called to hold their child’s hand in the nurse’s office while it was administered.

So why the passion? I think it’s because we’re terrified of an unknowable future. Parenting is about making choices—how to feed a newborn, whether to work or stay home (if you’re an upper-middle class Jewess who is fortunate enough to have that choice), whether to vaccinate. We hope that what we do provides a magic bullet that keeps our kids safe and healthy in a terrifying, uncertain world. And yet, we’re supposed to let our kids disappear into a mysterious school nurse’s office, to be jabbed or made to snort something, some substance provided by a government we haven’t trusted since Watergate? Can’t I just let my kid wear a hamsa and feed her organic bananas?

“I think the anxiety about vaccines and breastfeeding is about seeking a false sense of control,” said Kiki Schaffer, director of the Parenting & Family Center at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan. “You can’t be anxious about everything, because it’s too much, so you pick a few manageable things to get really, really upset about. A few years ago it was asbestos, then alar in apples. But picking one or two things feels safer than having anxiety about the whole world.” And I think part of making your choice about what to get worked up about involves slamming the choices of others. Because what if they’re right? What if you’re the one who’s screwed up when it comes to your kid? Nothing could be more horrible to contemplate. Better to close your eyes and go on the attack. At this point, the notion of kids dying of old-school diseases seems far more remote than the notion of your specific kid getting autism or an immune disorder. We don’t know any kids with rubella. We know lots of kids with autism.

Next year, I’m going to have to decide whether to allow Josie to have the vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus. The idea of 9-to-11-year-old girls getting vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease is a certainly discombobulating. Jojo’s a baby! She’s not going to have sex until she’s at least, I don’t know, 35.

Indeed, many parents are opting out. Some worry that the vaccine will encourage promiscuity; others have concerns about the contents of the vaccine itself. Yet the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention believe that the vaccine is safe. (So do my kids’ pediatrician, my own G.P., and my brother-in-law.) The fact that 11,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year and 3,700 die is a compelling argument for the vaccine. The fact that 70 percent of American girls have had sex by age 18, while the vaccine is most effective among people who have not yet have sex and thus haven’t been exposed to any strain of this very common virus, is a compelling argument for giving a kid the vaccine while she’s young. (Should boys get the vaccine? Good question.)

Neal thinks that the HPV vaccine offers an important opportunity for pediatricians. “From a clinical perspective, I like the idea of using a discussion about the vaccine as an opportunity to talk to parents about how they’re going to keep communication channels open as their kids get older,” Neal says. “We need to acknowledge parents’ emotions and anxieties. Just offering and re-offering the vaccine is not the only intervention we should be doing.”

Would reframing the public health concerns around pediatric immunizations increase the numbers of kids getting vaccinated? Do we have to wait for more massive outbreaks, along the lines of the ones in ultra-Orthodox communities, perhaps involving even scarier diseases? Perhaps if we stopped treating opt-out parents as if they were stupid and instead treated them as though they were frightened for their own children’s welfare, it would color our approach and let us communicate more effectively. Or maybe we should make it harder to opt out. Or both.

All I know is that judgmental eye-rolling doesn’t help anyone. Not kids, and not parents.

Josie most loves reading Dad’s entries about her. Dad was utterly enchanted by my daughter, whom he believed to be a musical and linguistic prodigy. It’s one thing for me to tell Josie how much her zayde loved her; it’s another thing entirely for her actually to read my dad’s breathless descriptions of her adorability and brilliance. (When she was two-and-a-half, he wrote about her skill with a jigsaw puzzle. Josie recently read it aloud, her finger on the screen: “She is much better at it than either Carol or I. She is patient and persistent. She is a fucking genius.” Then Josie clamped her hand over her own mouth, eyes huge, and gasped, “Zayde used the F-word!” Yes, honey, he did. Often.)

Does Josie really remember him? She assures me she recalls sharing an Eskimo Pie with him in the car and flying kites with him in Newport. I’m not sure she really does. But in the here and now, she reads his narratives, coos over the pictures of him holding her, gets to know him through his own colorful writing. I’m so grateful to my geek husband for hosting the site and keeping it alive.

When Jo and I read Dad’s words together—she sits on my lap at my desk, clicking and giggling—she’s completely in the moment. But I’m not. I can’t help noting the date of every post. Five months before his death. Three months. I note every passing reference to dialysis and the ICU, the increasing number of times he mentions feeling sick and weak. In every pixel I feel his hunger for more time with Josie, more life, more Russ & Daughters lox. He called himself Farklempt (as in “I’m a little farklempt!”), and that was him all over—emotional, hilarious, and outrageous. The very last post on the site has no words. It’s a picture of Maxine, in utero; he’d scanned the ultrasound printout. He couldn’t wait to hold her, to embarrass me by describing her poops on the internet. He died two months after posting it, without ever meeting her.

Dad died while waiting for a heart and kidney transplant, one of 8,000 Americans who die waiting every year. According to United States government statistics, there were more than 103,000 people on the national organ transplant wait list in September 2009. Every 11 minutes, another name is added to the list. While 90 percent of Americans say they support donation, only 30 percent have organ donor cards.

And, unfortunately, Jews have the lowest rate of donation of any religious group. In Israel, only four percent of citizens sign up to be organ donors. In that tiny country, there are 1,000 people on the wait list and 100 die every year. Many Jews, in both Israel and America, believe that our religion prohibits organ donation. But according to almost all Jewish authorities, that’s untrue. Jewish law does prohibit cutting a dead body, part of the principle of kavod ha’met, showing respect for the dead. But that commandment, like all commandments, is overridden by the mitzvah of saving a life: pikuach nefesh.

In the 1960s, Judaism’s Reform and Conservative movements declared that brain death, the cessation of all electrical activity, meets the halachic definition of death. (No one has ever recovered from brain death, which is not to be confused with coma. And for organs to be transplanted, they need to be taken from a body that’s kept breathing artificially.) In 1989, Israel’s chief rabbinate agreed with this definition, and in 1991, the Rabbinical Council of America (which speaks for the Modern Orthodox movement), followed. Agudath Israel of America, an ultra-Orthodox group, differs from the other organizations, stating that each person should talk to his or her own rabbi about whether donation is permissible. Most rabbis, however, say that it’s not just permissible but a mitzvah.

The Halachic Organ Donor Society exists to encourage more Jews, religious and not, to donate. (Its acronym, HOD, is the Hebrew word for glory.) It was founded with financial support from the parents of Alisa Flatow, a 20-year-old Orthodox girl who was killed in a 1995 suicide bombing in Israel. Her organs transformed the lives of six Israelis. Now, in addition to providing education on organ donation, the HOD Society offers two versions of a Jewish Organ Donor card. One uses brain death as the standard (which would allow transplantation of all organs). The other uses the cessation of heartbeat as the standard (which would allow transplantation of corneas, and would satisfy almost all ultra-Orthodox rabbis).

In 1997, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services launched its own initiative, called National Organ Donor Sabbath. It always takes place two weeks before Thanksgiving; that’s November 14-15 this year. Rabbis, priests, imams, and ministers are all encouraged to discuss organ and blood donation with their congregations. Tell your rabbi!

My dad always loved the fact that I give blood regularly. But to me, it’s a no-brainer. It doesn’t hurt much, it helps other people, you get to skip out of work without anyone raising an eyebrow, and you get free cookies. My dad couldn’t donate because of his health; my brother can’t donate because he’s gay; my husband can’t donate because he used to live in England. That’s why the rest of us have to step up. According to the Red Cross, 60 percent of Americans are eligible to give but only five percent do. (To find out where to donate near you, go to the Red Cross’s Give Life site or the American Association of Blood Bank’s donation center locator.)

I always take the kids. They like free cookies even more than I do. And it’s a good way to model my values, plus it de-scarifies needles. (Or so I tell myself. It hasn’t made their vaccination appointments any less scream-filled.) As I bleed into a baggie, I always think about Dad and wish he could see the girls now. Josie is an entirely different human. Maxine—his kind, funny, and very, very weird namesake—would have delighted him.

Years ago, when Dad was in the ICU for the first time (getting resuscitated after his first heart attack at 39), he yelled for a pen. And he wrote an ethical will, his rules for living, should my brother and I grow up without him. “Rule #1,” he wrote: “Never, never take anything too seriously. Especially yourself. Rule #2: Belch loudly at the dinner table. It is a compliment to the chef, and a long-established Ingall tradition. Teach your children this, above all.” I’ve tried to live by Rule #1, but I’ve failed miserably on Rule #2. I cannot burp on cue. Josie can’t either. Maxine, however, has the gift of burping the entire alphabet so loudly our across-the-hall neighbor can hear her.

My father would have been so proud.

And if more people were organ donors, maybe he’d be applauding her magnificent talents right now.

]]> http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/19604/the-annotated-child-halloween-hangover/feed/ 0 http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/19118/no-so-wild-about-it/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=no-so-wild-about-it http://www.tabletmag.com/life-and-religion/19118/no-so-wild-about-it/#comments Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:00:05 +0000 Marjorie Ingall http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=19118 As a child, I was obsessed with Where the Wild Things Are. My favorite scene wasn’t the famous six-page wordless rumpus. It was the three pages in which Max’s room turns into a forest. I’d flip back and forth (the pages aren’t consecutive spreads, as the rumpus pages are—they’re separated by pages of white space, each with just a line or two of text), noting how the room devolved a little more with each page. First the bedposts turned into tree trunks and the cross-hatching in the rug got mysteriously grassier. Then more trees appeared, lusher ones, and the bed faded a bit more into the background; the rug changed from light brown to green. And finally the bed was gone. Max stood in a green forest glen. Only the moon, shining through Max’s window, remained constant.

Now Maxine, age 5, loves the book. When she looks at the wild rumpus, she likes me to chant RUMPUSRUMPUSRUMPUSRUMPUS in a deep voice. She always whispers the last line along with me: “And it was still hot.”

In a recent New York Times Book Review essay, Bruce Handy posited that Wild Things (originally published in 1963) is one of those books loved more by critics than by actual kids. I beg to differ. As a toddler, Josie (who has been known to have Max-like anger-management issues) wanted to hear it over and over. She loved the depiction of wildness. Maxine, who is far more even-keeled than her sister, merely laughs at the rumpus (Josie would stare at it, wide-eyed), and says her favorite part is the sailing home and the warm supper.

I wasn’t sure what to think about the movie. I knew Spike Jonze, vaguely, long ago. (I worked for Sassy magazine; he worked for our “brother magazine,” Dirt.) Even way back then, he was infinitely cooler than I was. (The only other person in the Sassy office who intimidated me as much was a fashion intern named Chloe Sevigny.) Anyway, years later, I liked the guy’s movies fine. I knew Sendak had given his Wild Things project (with its screenplay by Dave Eggers, another achingly hipsterish tastemaker dude) his blessing. And my kids wanted to see it.

So we went. And you know, it was fine. Most reviewers seemed to love it or hate it, but we found it … fine. When (SPOILER ALERT!) Max bit his mother, Maxine grabbed my hand and whispered, “I know what it feels like to be that angry.” We all loved the beginning, in which Max builds a snow fort and crazy fun turns instantly to destruction and unfairness. Been there, done that—the intensity was a perfect encapsulation of the whiplash emotions of being a kid. Jonathan and I liked the music, the way Eggers captured the rambling, hallucinatory way children tell stories, the gorgeous Burning-Man-like structures built by the wild things, the sweeping beauty shots of desert and shore.

But we were all a little bored by the wild things themselves. The RUMPUSRUMPUSRUMPUSRUMPUS seemed to go on forever. The heavy-handed idea of the wild things as warring elements of Max’s emotions, his id, his contradictory impulses, whatever … it all seemed very overly therapized California to me, and interminable to the kids. Ach, these monsters, with all their processing and sharing and blaming. And all the questioning about whether Max is really a king? Geez, it was one big furry psychoanalytic institute.

It’s funny, Sendak is a super-Jewy children’s book writer, what with his shtetl-born parents, Brooklyn childhood, analytic and psychological deftness about how children think and feel. The Sign on Rosie’s Door! Pierre! Brundibar (with Tony Kushner)! But the movie, written by a non-Jew, feels far more stereotypically neurotic than any of Sendak’s own work. The minimalism of Where the Wild Things Are—228 words! 38 pages!—makes it feel richer, more allusive, and far more timeless than the movie.

I think it’s telling that in 1961, Sendak wrote a letter to his editor at Harper’s children’s books, Ursula Nordstrom, pouring out his heart about not achieving as much as he wanted as a writer. He was unimpressed by his own quiet simplicity. He wanted to be … more. Nordstrom wrote back drily, “Yes, Tolstoy is wonderful (his publisher asked me for a quote) but you can express as much emotion and ‘cohesion and purpose’ in some of your drawings as there is in War and Peace. I mean that.” She concluded, ““Yes, Moby Dick is great, but honestly don’t you see great gobs of it that could come out?”

There were great gobs of the movie that could come out.

And the one gob I really wanted, I didn’t get. In the film, Max’s room doesn’t become a forest. Instead, he runs away, racing through neighborhoods and woods before taking a boat to the land of the wild things. (Jonze has said he didn’t want to use CGI animation, only live action. So it would have been impossible to deliver mysterious growing trees and a fading bed anyway.) To me, it’s important that the visit to the land of the wild things happens in Max’s room, where he’s exiled, furious, and powerless. He can’t escape, bolting through the suburbs. I like the notion that anger is where you live. It’s more childlike and more resonant to adults. Most of us don’t get to run away, except in our furious, fevered imaginings.

At bedtime, Josie said ruminatively, “I liked the book better than the movie because the book was also an amazing adventure but it didn’t take as long. And with a book, you can just make it a movie in your head.”

The little children understand.

We are Jewish women. We are high achievers. Many things have come easily to us. We can bring home the Faken; fry it up in a pan.

Which means that when we fail at something supposedly so easy any mammal can do it, we feel horrible.

Breastfeeding is supposed to be a cinch. We educated ladies of Hebraitude know it’s expected of us. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends exclusive breastfeeding for six months. Research indicates that breastfed babies have less diarrhea and fewer colds and ear infections than formula-fed babies. They’re less likely to die of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, less likely to have lymphoma. And of course we want our children to grow up strong and healthy enough to withstand our powerful Jewish Mother Guilt Rays.

To a great extent, we’ve gotten comfortable with our ability to tame our Jewish bodies. We can straighten our curly hair; diet or exercise or Spanx our butts into submission; depilate or wax or laser our swarthy body hair into oblivion. So when our bodies betray us, it’s a shock.

My sister-in-law, struggling to nurse twins, called the La Leche League, an international breastfeeding support group, for help. The woman on the phone told her, “Breast milk is like a blood transfusion for a baby. Formula is like a hot dog and fries.” A good friend of mine was told in disbelief by another mom, “Your kids seem healthy and smart, and they weren’t breastfed!” (My friend pointed out that actually, two of her four children had nursed a bit. The woman smiled and said, “Oh, but you cheated with formula, right?”) Another friend called a lactation consultant, sobbing, worried that her newborn daughter (who was born with a pinched nerve in her neck, leaving her unable to nurse) was starving on the meager amounts of breast milk she was able to pump and feed through a tube. The lactation consultant urged my friend not to give her hungry baby formula. “It’s like feeding her poison,” the consultant said in a hushed voice. “It will damage her kidneys and take three months to get out of her system.” My friend worked herself into a frenzy, pumping every two hours, waking the baby constantly to get her to eat, crying regularly.

Jewish mothers, according to our ancient cultural portrayal, are mega-nurturers, urging our babies to eat, eat, eat. If our 90-year-old Biblical matriarch could nurse a child, what the hell is wrong with us? A midrash from the Babylonian Talmud says that Sarah was so womanly, her breasts were two fountains that flowed with enough milk to feed all comers. When this old lady miraculously produced a baby, the story goes, people muttered that Isaac was actually adopted. (Need I add that this tale may resonate painfully with Jewish women who delayed childrearing for work or education, or who may have trouble conceiving and feel berated by the commandment to be fruitful and multiply?) To prove that Isaac was hers, Sarah breastfed all the children in the neighborhood. What kind of loser modern Jewess can’t make enough milk for even one measly baby? And hey, don’t think adoptive moms are exempt; you ladies could damn well nurse if you tried hard enough. That is, if you really cared about your babies and weren’t such selfish bitches. (Memo to the slow: save your email. We call this sarcasm.)

And then there is the One True Breast. One of the many names for God, Shaddai, may be a reference to breastfeeding. (The Hebrew word for breasts is shaddaim.) No one knows the origin of this divine name, but it may well be a reference to an earlier fertility goddess. Part of godliness is nurturing a people from your own body and soul—it’s the mother-child dyad writ large.

Despite some lactivists’ insistence to the contrary, there are women who simply can’t breastfeed, such as those taking certain medications or who’ve had breast surgery. And though making too little milk is generally called “mismanagement” (hey, no judgment there!) it’s a reality. According to Lisa Marasco, an expert on insufficient milk supply and a professional liaison for La Leche League of Southern California/Nevada, reasons for low milk supply can include polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), hypothyroidism and severe postpartum bleeding. Interestingly, Marasco points out that fertility treatments may also play a role. “In the past, some women might not have been able to get pregnant or give birth,” she writes. “[I]t may be that just because science can get you pregnant, it can’t make you able to nurse a child.” Postpartum depression or stress can certainly be factors too, and nagging doesn’t help. We’ve all had friends who tried to nurse exclusively, but wound up in a sobbing heap on the bedroom floor at 5 a.m., sending their partners out for formula. Finally, if a baby latches improperly, over the long term he or she may not get enough milk and nursing will hurt the mother like a mofo. Lactation consultants may be able to help. Or not.

In any case, it’s unfortunate that women are guilted for not nursing when a big chunk of blame should fall on our culture. Family-leave policies in the U.S. lag far behind the rest of the industrialized world. A survey of 16 European countries and Canada found that these countries provide an average of 68 weeks of maternity leave, with 33 of those weeks paid. Jewish women, like all women, may well have to return to the workforce sooner than we’d like. That’s particularly true in this economy. And then there’s the fact that not every workplace or life is conducive to pumping.

The upshot: don’t judge a woman until you’ve walked a mile in her post-partum granny panties.

We Jews are, I think, particularly susceptible to judgment and guilt. We are a competitive lot. Just as we pore over the work of Dr. Sears and Dr. Weissbluth as if it was the Talmud, act as if sleep training and toileting are matters of life and death, obsess about whether our little angel is hitting his developmental milestones faster than the nearest similarly-aged baby at Tot Shabbat, drey about getting our kid into the “right” school, we want to excel at nursing. Recent research showing that formula isn’t poison doesn’t really have an impact on maternal emotions this profound. And we turn our anxieties outward, guilt-tripping other women, because of our own insecurity. The breastfeeder rolling her eyes at the baby with a bottle or pacifier may have her own mishegas. Maybe it’s about feeling invisible, about not having a career, about not feeling able to voice her resentment over feeling distant from her husband because of the intensity of her intimacy with her child. Who knows? I do know that we channel our own ambivalence outward; we turn parenting into a vicious contest. As one doctor I interviewed laughed, “Guilt begins at conception!” We’re all looking for the magic bullet, the amulet, the hamsa, the mezuzah, the one thing we can do to insure safety in an unsafe world. And some of us fixate on nursing as that one thing.

“And what did you do?” I asked Josie.

“On the way back from lunch I told Girl Y, ‘Just ignore Girl X,’” Josie told me. “I said, ‘She’s so mean she’ll only get meaner and scarier if you react to her.”

Was that a good answer? Should Josie have intervened in the bullying, telling the Mean Girl to cut it out? Should she have asked the Mean Girl’s best friend what, exactly, was so funny? Should she have engaged a teacher or lunch monitor, thus gaining a reputation as a meddlesome tattling geek? How should teachers, administrators and parents deal with teasing and taunting that happens outside the classroom setting?

I have no clue.

There’s no question that kids can be breathtakingly cruel. According to “Hostile Hallways: Bullying, Teasing, and Sexual Harassment in School,” a 2001 American Association for University Women (AAUW) report based on a national survey of 2,064 public school students, eight in 10 students have experienced some form of harassment in their school lives. But hey, just listen to Josie, sharing a typical sneer from the elementary-school world:

So I wondered: Is there a way to foster bullying-prevention in a Jewish context? Apparently, yes. In 2006, through funding from the Jewish Women’s Foundation of New York, Professor Shira Epstein at the William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education at the Jewish Theological Seminary launched the “Addressing Evaded Issues in Jewish Education” program. (“Evaded curriculum,” a term coined by the AAUW in 1992, means topics students grapple with constantly in their daily lives – gender, body image, bullying and more – that aren’t usually addressed at all in the classroom.) Epstein has also written a curriculum for Jewish Women International (JWI) called “Strong Girls, Healthy Relationships: A Conversation on Dating, Friendship, and Self-Esteem.”

“Bullying is a reality,” says Epstein. “But we need to talk about the whys of bullying. We can’t just be reactionary, talking about punishment. We need to look at the larger culture that fosters bullying. The hard work comes in mindfully creating a culture in which we can be supportive of each other. How do we help girls think about what it means to build sisterhood?”

In Evaded Issues’ online resource guide, Epstein writes about the way one Jewish Day School, Hannah Senesh Community Day School in Brooklyn, addressed subtle forms of bullying – teasing, cliques and exclusionary practices – in school. The head of the school chose to use the Bullyproof curriculum, produced by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women.

“Although Bullyproof is a secular curriculum,” Epstein writes, “the work carries a Jewish theme, the relationship beyn adam l’havero, between two people.” The school worked to make the curriculum explicitly Jewish by culling Judaic texts for stories, quotes, and examples of bullying and what we can learn from them. The younger grades looked at illustrations from Torah and Pirke Avot (Sayings of our Fathers); older grades looked at the Nevi’im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) as well as Talmudic texts. Did the program make bullying disappear? No, but former head of school Susan Weintrob says that it did make teachers act more quickly when they saw bullying in action. “It is one thing to recognize bullying,” Weintrob remarked, “but it is another to know how to deal with it.”

In her work, Epstein uses the stories of Sarai and Haggar to talk about shifting power balances. “Sarai was mean to Hagar because she suddenly felt low in status and was trying to get her power back!” Epstein points out. “She needed someone else to feel low so she could feel high. We want girls to understand that status isn’t static. It moves quickly.” Epstein also uses the story of Vashti as a way to explore statuses, incorporating movement and visual drama so that kids can feel emotions and power shifts in their own bodies. “In one session we portrayed Vashti as a beggar on the ground and everyone was ignoring her. One girl said, ‘She was up here and now she’s down low’ – she used her body to show how it must have felt for Vashti.”  The story of Amnon and Tamar illustrates issues of “having your voice silenced, and how to be a supportive friend.” The girls can use all these stories to reflect on their own emotions and experiences. Epstein laughs ruefully, “Unfortunately, a lot of our texts show deviousness and power plays! But that means they can provide a learning experience: How do we shift to a language of partnership, equality, support, friendship?”

And we parents, sadly, can be hindrances rather than helpers. At Hannah Senesh, Weintrob noted, teachers were excited to incorporate the program, but parents weren’t. Unfortunately, that makes sense to me. Pondering my kid being bullied, being a bully, or (perhaps worst of all) being a follower – the girl who laughs when her Queen Bee friend teases the kid with the speech impediment – makes me shut down like a garage door. Ack! Let’s talk about what you learned in math class instead! “It’s hard for adults to think about what it was like to be young,” notes Epstein. “It touches on a lot of our own issues we haven’t completely worked through from our pasts and makes us uncomfortable.” Indeed, my mom reminds me of how I wept my way through junior high, where I was at the periphery of the popular circle and sometimes got snubbed. I don’t want to explore my unresolved childhood crap! But this ostrich-y tendency also lets us excuse our kids’ bad behavior, or rush to blame other kids and/or their over-reactive helicopter parents when our own kid is cruel.

A further complication: society sends wildly mixed messages about female anger. Girls are supposed to be sugar-and-spice, and the stereotype is that girls turn anger inward (they cut their own skin, they experience depression and eating disorders at greater rates than boys do). But is that true? Why do we so love hearing stories and seeing Lohan movies about Mean Girls if girls either a) aren’t as mean as boys or b) turn their anger on themselves rather than others? It’s all so confusing! The upshot: It’s not productive to blame girls for being cruel when they’re growing up in a culture that so frequently disempowers and devalues them.

So nu, what do we do? Lyn Mikel Brown, a professor of Education at Colby College and author of Raising Their Voices: The Politics of Girls’ Anger (Harvard University Press, 1998) and Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (New York University Press, 2003), offers parents and educators 10 ways to move beyond typical bullying-prevention efforts. Many dovetail with Epstein’s suggestions: Stop demonizing kids, consider the culture that bullying takes root in, let kids feel themselves to be potential leaders who can build their own coalitions, don’t issue top-down dictates.

Does it really matter whether boys or girls are meaner? I‘ll let Josie have the final word.

The sukkah my own kids are growing up with is a lot more prefab. It was ordered on the internet. It has taut fabric walls and a boring rolled bamboo roof. (We’re actually on Prefab Sukkah 2.0, because this summer, my husband and a welder friend turned the original sukkah’s metal frame into an electric cheese art car for Burning Man. Just don’t ask.)

In part because our current sukkah is so bland and soulless, I want the kids to decorate it as quirkily and personally as possible. The popcorn chains of my childhood won’t play here in NYC, what with our vile pigeons and aggressive vermin. And given our family’s current underemployment situation, we wanted to decorate as cheaply as possible, this recession year in particular.

So I gave the kids $25 and let them loose in the dollar store. Since Sukkot coincides with Halloween, it turned out to be a good time to shop: the first thing the kids gravitated to was a giant glittery skull. Hey, why not? Call it a metaphor for the end of the growing season or the fragility of temporary shelter. We also picked up strips of purple sequined trim, loads of gold ribbon, and strands of gold and silver Mardi Gras beads. (If there were a drag-queen sukkah challenge on Project Runway, we would totally win.) Cheap! Festive! And because of the aforementioned Halloween tie-in, I agreed to bribe my young decorators with candy corn.

In the past I’ve simply had the girls draw pictures of booths and harvests and fruits and veggies, and we’ve painted gourds and hung them up, but this year I wanted to do some more involved work. I looked at the internet for some DIY ideas. And my naivete was crushed like a sheaf of wheat in a thresher. Have you looked at these crafty mommy blogger web sites? You need a Ph.D. in crafting to do these projects! I cannot sew. I do not own an X-acto knife. Who are these women?! Who are the tiny children who with the motor skills to do these terrifyingly ornate papier-mache sculptures? I imagine hyper-committed mothers grimly ironing the Hebrew alphabet in fusible beads while their children sneak into other people’s houses to watch television.

I am lazy. I picked the easiest projects I could find. We wrapped rolls of toilet paper in orange fabric and stuck a rolled up piece of brown construction paper in the hole: pumpkins! Le voila! We cut apples and pears in half and made fruit prints on paper. Josie made long chains of paper clips using colorful striped clips I got at Staples a decade ago. Maxine helped me roll up little balls of white tissue paper and glue them to a bare branch we liberated from a tree in our building’s garden (I considered this a tribute to my dad, olav hashalom) and presto—a minimalist Japanese-y pussy willow. At the dollar store, I’d gotten a roll of adding machine paper (99 cents!) on which the girls drew Sukkot messages in Magic Marker. (Maxine painstakingly wrote W-A-L-C-O-M-T-O-O-U-R-S-U-K, until she ran out of steam. She also wrote the entire thing backwards. Well, at least she didn’t write R-E-D-R-U-M.) We made tissue paper flowers and plunked them into an empty can of jumbo olives (my kids’ favorite snack food—they put an olive on each digit and chase each other around the house calling, “Ollie Fingers!” in creepy voices, then eat)—the label is awesome. I felt triumphant … until I looked for an image of the olive-can label for this column and saw that a way more accomplished crafty mommy blogger had gone that extra mile and steamed it off the can, applied glitter and turned it into a cigar-box purse. My own work suddenly looked very perky group-home day-program.

All us parents wind up remaking holidays in our own image. They won’t be exactly like the ones we grew up with—and we wind up missing our own childhood rituals and perhaps no-longer-with-us moms and dads—but we do the best we can with the tools we’ve got.

Banned Books Week falls on the last week in September every year. To mark it this year, we thought we’d offer a little tribute to Jewish children’s book authors whose works have been banned or challenged. And in homage to one Jewish writer whose books get attacked with great regularity, we decided to do it in verse, a la Shel Silverstein. Silverstein’s 1974 book Where The Sidewalk Ends was challenged at the West Allis-West Milwaukee School Libraries in 1986 because it “suggests drug use, the occult, suicide, death, violence, disrespect for truth, disrespect for legitimate authority, rebellion against parents,” and at the Central Columbia School District in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania., in 1993, because the poem “Dreadful,” which is about how “someone ate the baby,” encourages cannibalism. Silverstein’s 1981 book A Light in the Attic was challenged by an elementary school in Beloit, Wisconsin, in 1985 because the poem “How Not to Dry the Dishes” “encourages children to break dishes.”

In our poem, please refer to the notes below to learn the stories behind each author’s battle. And know that though we’ve only provided one example of censorship for each author in the poem, in real life there are many, many more.

[1] In 1972, a librarian in Caldwell Parish, Louisiana, used tempera paint to diaper the naked baby in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. In 1993, the book was challenged in Minnesota’s Elk River elementary schools because “reading the book could lay the foundation for future use of pornography.”

[2] In The Boy Who Lost His Face, by Newbery Medalist Louis Sachar, a boy gives the middle finger to an old woman during an episode of peer pressure and bullying. The book was challenged at an elementary school in San Ramon, California, in 1993. for obscene gestures, profanity, and “inappropriate subject matter.”

[3] In William Steig’s Caldecott-Medal-winning Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, police officers are drawn as pigs. The Illinois Police Association therefore wrote to librarians in 1977 asking them to remove the book from libraries. (Even though the pigs in the book are perfectly nice pigs.)

[4] Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume is No. 60 on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Banned or Challenged Books of the 1990s. (In the Night Kitchen is No. 10.) It’s been challenged for sexual and religious themes, as have many of Blume’s books, which may have something to do with her being so active in the National Coalition Against Censorship.

[5] Robie Harris’s four brilliant sex-education books, aimed at kids of different ages and illustrated in comic-book style by Michael Emberley, make censors crazy. Her book for teenagers, It’s Perfectly Normal, is celebrating its 15th anniversary this fall with updated sections on Internet safety, birth control, and the HPV vaccine. In 2008, a patron of the Lewiston, Maine, public library took out the book and refused to give it back because she deemed it disgusting. Other patrons then donated four copies of the book, which remain in circulation. Yay.

[6] According to the delightful website Bookslut, an elementary school in Decatur, Georgia, banned The Bad Beginning, the first volume in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket  because it was deemed to endorse incest. In the book, cartoonishly evil Uncle Olaf tries to steal the children’s inheritance by marrying his niece Violet. (She outwits him, of course.) “It’s difficult for me to imagine how I can construct a villain whose actions would be unobjectionable,” Snicket, aka Daniel Handler, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “That’s called a hero.”

All the books in this poem:

In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket

Gently kick the back of the pew in front of you. Kick rhythmically to the cantor’s chanting, until your mother suddenly clamps her hand on your knee.

Stare into the Eternal Light until your eyes begin to water. Imagine it is a gateway to another dimension.

Flip ahead in the mahzor and read the Martyrology, the description of how 10 rabbis were tortured by the Romans on Yom Kippur after the destruction of the Second Temple. Read it again. Ponder which would suck the worst: being beheaded like Shimon Ben Gamliel, having your face flayed like Rabbi Yishmael, or having your skin raked with iron combs like Rabbi Akiva? Marvel that you are allowed to read this but were not allowed to go see “Final Destination 4.”

Attempt to count the shul’s ceiling tiles. Attempt to count the number of light bulbs in the chandeliers. Attempt to count the number of triangles in all the Jewish stars in the sanctuary. Attempt to count the number of Fannys and Isadores on the memorial plaques on the sanctuary walls. Try to find the funniest name.

Whisper to your mom, “Are you hungry?” Wait two minutes. Whisper “What about now?” Wait two minutes. Whisper “You know what I’d like? A big plate of fettuccini Alfredo. Oh wait, that’s your favorite, not mine.”

Rub the velvet on the pew so all the nap goes one way. Then rub it so that the nap goes the other way. Then write DOODY in the nap with your finger and erase it.

Braid the fringes of your father’s prayer shawl. Unbraid them. Wrap the fringes as tightly as you can around the tip of your finger and watch as your finger turns purple.

Wonder if it is too late to apologize to the cat for coloring her nose with a purple marker.

As the rabbi tells the story of Jonah and the Whale, ponder. Did the big fish start to digest Jonah before it barfed him up? Did it look like that guy’s acid-melted face in “Seed of Chucky”?

Imagine blowing the shofar. Imagine making the longest tekiyah gedolah anyone has ever heard, ever. Imagine the entire congregation just dumbfounded that you are only a kid and such an amazing talent. Imagine all the popular kids nodding at you with newfound respect in school on Monday and going, “Hey.”

Debate slipping the comic book inside your sweater into the mahzor. Maybe your mom will be too hungry to kill you.

But whither the hot sheygets today? (His sister, the bubbly blonde shiksa, is doing fine.) Dirty Dancing was set in the summer of 1963, and it seems that the assimilationist ’50s and ’60s were the sheygets’s heyday. Does this character have a place in today’s hyphenated America? Or is the role Swayze played in Dirty Dancing—the tantalizing, non-Hebraic Other—now a thing of the past?

I believe it is. The plot of Dirty Dancing—driven by Swayze’s Johnny Castle, the noble, working-class goy who is more authentic than the med-school-bound, proto-Yuppie, entitled Jewish boys of the Catskills—is drenched in the fear of intermarriage and wariness of class difference; for better or worse, those aren’t major concerns of young Jewish filmgoers. (Indeed, I use the word sheygets in this piece only to illustrate that the character of Johnny Castle is as much a relic of a bygone time as the phonograph records the characters bump and grind to—the word, once in wide use among Jews, is now rightfully seen as a slur: it literally means bug, unclean thing. Once, most Jews knew this. Today, not so much.)

We live in a world in which Jews are far less marginalized than they were in the heyday of bungalow communities. What’s true in life is true in film: where’s the bright line between Jewish and non-Jewish male leads in American moviemaking today? Romantic comedies are now ruled by the Apatow crew: Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Adam Sandler, Jonah Hill, Steve Carell, Paul Rudd. Jewish men are leads, not nebbishy sidekicks—and not only in romantic comedies. These days they even come in the buff, chest-baring, ass-kicking flavors (Inglourious Basterds, Munich, Defiance) that were once the province of the Swayzes.

Furthermore, what’s changed is not just how we view ethnicity but also how we define masculinity. Today’s male leads—Jewish and not—are generally wispier, more diffident than Swayze ever was: Shia LeBoeuf, Michael Cera, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Hugh Dancy, Johnny Depp, John Krasinski, James Franco, Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal. Which ones are Jews? It doesn’t matter. They don’t read as Jewish or goyish. All convey sweetness and a little awkwardness; they don’t exude testosterone the way Johnny Castle did. A lead like Swayze, who could convincingly beat up a bad guy and do the mambo, is a rare thing. Who can do this now? (Two words. Hugh Jackman.)

The biggest difference between then and now: our current irony-saturated moment. Swayze—and Johnny Castle—exuded sincerity. Even in the most ridiculous roles—such as, say, a bank-robbing, Buddhist surfer—Swayze conveyed seriousness. (The guy clearly had a sense of humor—he mocked his own persona by playing a wannabe-Chippendales-dancer in a Saturday Night Live skit; a drag queen in To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar; and a mullet-wearing bouncer in the bloodily homoerotic Road House, but his acting was generally wink-free.) Today, Johnny Castle’s earnestness (conveyed in lines like “the reason people treat me like I’m nothin’ is because I’m nothin’!”) is cringe-inducing. Today’s actors are arch, edgy. Swayze was anything but.

The world has expanded enough that Harold and Kumar, a Korean and an Indian, can be male leads in a mainstream film. They’re not white, they’re not Jewish, and they’re not shgotsim. They’re slackers, everything Johnny Castle wasn’t. They’re on a perpetual quest to get baked; Johnny would no sooner pick up a joint than a volume of Mishnah. Johnny takes his job as a summer resort dance director seriously. But such irony-free gravity and yearning are only acceptable today if you’re an overly moussed vampire in a movie aimed at teenagers. Dirty Dancing was a movie for everyone.

Speaking of yearning: an utterly unscientific Facebook poll found that most of us Jewish girls who came of age in the ’80s and ’90s and loved Dirty Dancing didn’t have crushes on Patrick Swayze. (Many of our moms, however, did. Maybe because the world they grew up in was a lot more like the world portrayed in the movie.) My generation loved Dirty Dancing without mooning over Johnny; our love was grounded in our identification with Baby, the character played so brilliantly by Jennifer Grey. (“I carried a watermelon.”) We empathized with her awkwardness, her big Jewish nose (RIP), her idealism, her crush on a seemingly unattainable guy.

It’s clear to me that Baby and Johnny don’t end up together. She’s going to go to Mount Holyoke and then the Peace Corps; he’s going to keep dancing in the Catskills. After that one summer of passion, she’ll wind up marrying a Jew. But most people don’t see it that way. The climactic “I had the time of my life” scene —admittedly one of the most awesome dance sequences on celluloid—has become a widely copied wedding dance around the world. Among British people! Chilean people! Brazilian people! New Jersey people!

As we struggle with questions of Jewish continuity and how far we want acculturation to go, it’s worth reflecting on that final dance: Baby overcomes her fear and lets Johnny “do the lift”—and suddenly the room is filled with Jews and non-Jews, rich people and working class people, everyone boogying together. Is that what we want? The disappearance of a slur word for a non-Jew is a good thing. But is the disappearance of all difference good, too?

Marjorie Ingall is a contributing editor to Tablet and a co-author of the just-released Hungry: A Young Model’s Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves.

Wait, I sound like I’m making excuses for my kid acting like a weenus, right? I’m not. Her actions were inexcusable. I am mortified. And like many parents, I personalize what my kid does and sometimes get confused that she and I are not the same person. (And this confusion is what leads to idiocy such as boasting about your newborn’s Apgar scores—uh, dude, your kid is not a genius for breathing successfully—as well as more insidious parenting mishegas such as the dismissal of all entitled, bratty conduct as the fault of someone else: an unsympathetic teacher, a kid who deserved to get picked on, a situation that all but forced your child to misbehave.) Like many parents, I worry that my child’s conduct reflects poorly on me. And my reaction is to push the bad stuff under the rug rather than confronting it head-on.

But that won’t fly during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. In our tradition, now’s the time to take a hard look at ourselves, including our parenting. Is mine crappy? Am I raising a unrepentant, hair-trigger-temper-owning pill? (Don’t answer that.) How can I do better?

Unfortunately, research indicates that there’s no surefire way to raise a good apologizer. A couple of weeks ago, The New York Times wrote about research in which toddlers were encouraged to believe they’d broken a toy that was very special to the researcher. (Researchers: big meanies.) University of Iowa psychologists found that the kids who expressed the most guilt had the fewest behavioral problems over the next five years. This was true even for kids with poor impulse control.

But it’s important not to confuse guilt with shame. Guilt is when you feel terrible about something you’ve done; shame is when you feel you’re a terrible person. As parents, we can encourage our kids to feel guilty for their misdeeds (and indeed, as Jews, it’s our moral obligation to guilt our children as much as humanly possible) without shaming them by belittling them as human beings. There’s a big difference between “Smacking your friend was completely unacceptable—how do you think she felt? How could you have solved the problem without getting physical? How do you think you can pull yourself back from the brink next time?” and “What the hell is wrong with you?! You make me sick!” And though I wish I knew the magic words and skills to craft a morally well-developed child, there isn’t a single parenting style that correlates with raising kids who feel appropriate guilt without crippling shame.

So what’s a parent to do? Psychologist June Tangney at George Mason University recommends that when your kid misses the mark (which is, after all, the definition of the Hebrew word “chet,” frequently translated as “sin”), you should focus not just on the bad deed but on helping the kid make amends. (The High Holidays are not only about saying you’re sorry, but also about working not to repeat the same mistake again.) Josie tends to curl inward after an outburst, so embarrassed about her conduct that she has trouble talking about it. Which means she has trouble getting out the words, “I’m sorry.” (Maxine has no such trouble. At four, she blithely views “I’m sorry!” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. As long as she says it, she thinks she’s in the clear. Wrong-o, kid.) As for Josie: I made her apologize to Bubbe; I often talk about my own values; I apologize myself when I lose my temper. Basically, I do what the parenting experts say. And I still don’t know how everything’s going to turn out. Parenting often feels like you’re flying blind.

At this time of year we’re not only supposed to apologize; we’re supposed to accept the apologies of others. And for some kids, including Josie, neither is easy. (Hey, she’s descended from a long line of seethers.) But as Rabbi David Wolpe once wrote, “The grudge perches on the heart like a gargoyle on a parapet.” Echoing the same sentiment, Buddha supposedly said, “Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned.” Buddha and David Wolpe should totally have dinner.

But children love feeling persecuted. They love wailing “That’s not faaaaaaair!” Our job is to teach them that life isn’t fair, and though sometimes people wrong us, we have to forgive. “There’s a wealth of literature saying that harboring resentments and grudges takes a toll on your psychological and physical health,” Christopher Peterson, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies character strengths and happiness, told me in an interview. “Yes, you may be pissed off. But if you can let go, you are doing yourself a favor, not the other person. You don’t have to forget; you just have to choose to let the emotional burden go.” In Judaism, we’re supposed to accept all genuine apologies, which isn’t always easy for the young. Or, for that matter, the not-so-young.

So how to keep kids from ruminating about being wronged? How to encourage them to forgive? One strategy is to tell them about a time when we ourselves did wrong and were forgiven. Josie loves to hear the story about the time when I was in college and missed a flight to meet my parents at a family wedding. I called my dad expecting him to scream at me, but he could tell I felt terrible, and simply suggested ways to fix the problem.

It’s hard not to get worked up when we or our kids screw up. It’s tempting to lash out or look for blame. But doing that would really be missing the mark.

I know I cater too much to my kids’ noshing mishegas. I’ve tried the tricks: Keep offering tastes of new foods, demand they take one bite, cook with kids so they feel a sense of participation and ownership. I KNOW, PEOPLE. We’ve had some successes: they love edamame, they eat lots of fruit, and Maxine is a fiend for spicy tomatillo salsa, which she eats with a spoon. But we need to try harder.

And just to make things even more complicated, I want my kids not to have any neuroses about food and eating. At least I know I’m not alone in worrying about my kids’ diets. Former New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni (who outed himself as a childhood bulimic in his new memoir Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, recently wrote about the challenges of urging kids to eat healthily without making them into neurotic little freaks. The Wall Street Journal weighed in with a story revisiting a famous 1986 study that found that 80% of fourth grade girls were on diets. It pointing out that in the years since then, the incidence of bulimia has tripled and anorexia rates have also risen.

Our feelings about kids and food are as tangled as a pile of spaghetti marinara. We’re anxious when our wee ones don’t eat (which is why parents like me keep resorting to sure-fire kid-pleasers), but we freak out when they eat too much. We live in a culture that equates fat with laziness, dirtiness, grossness, and kids get that message loud and clear.

This week, I have a book coming out about a fashion model who nearly died of anorexia and suffered from exercise bulimia before remaking her career as a healthy plus-size model, and I’ve been vigilant about conveying to my kids that beauty and strength come in all sizes. But Josie, age 7, still said last week, “I know you say it’s OK for bodies to look all kinds of ways, but if I were in high school I would be happy to be thin because boys like girls who are thin.” I wanted to cry. But she’s right. One 2006 study by Harris Interactive for Girls Inc. found that 60% of third to twelfth grade girls felt they had to be thin to be popular, up from 48% in 2000.

We have such screwed-up feelings about our bodies, eating and health. My book’s not even out yet, but I’ve been fascinated by how divergent people’s responses to it are. If I show people a photo of the model in question, Crystal Renn, some sputter, “You call that plus-size?? She’s gorgeous!” (Indeed she is. And yes, according to the CDC, she’s overweight.) Other people say, “How can you write a book glorifying obesity? Don’t you know it kills?”

Really? People who fall into the “overweight” category on the BMI charts actually live longer than normal weight people and frequently do better after heart attacks. The health risks of yo-yo dieting are well-documented, and most people who lose a lot of weight tend to gain it back. (Hi, Kirstie Alley!) Yes, being very fat is correlated with ill health. But shaming people – especially children – is unlikely to make them healthier or make them lose weight. What is clear is that exercise and eating good food are vital. That’s true for people at every size. But still we glorify thinness at the expense of all else, and we shun the pudgy.

This is a battle I’m obviously going to have to keep fighting. We all need to realize that while it’s important to make good food choices, being zaftig is not the worst thing in the world. (Though the cruelty and cluelessness with which we treat fat people, though … that’s pretty sucky.) And it’s only one of the battles I’ll continue to engage in as my girls grow up. Another is selling the notion of eating lots of different kinds of foods, at a nice sit-down family dinner. Doing so has to be better for the kids—and for this poor beleaguered short-order cook!—than having to dish out bland and sauceless kiddie meals in addition to semi-schmancy grown-up food.

Later this month we hope to take a field trip upstate to see where food comes from. My hope is that seeing veggies in their natural habitat, and eating them right off the vine and out of the ground, will make the girls more predisposed to eat them at home. The farm in question is owned by a family who sell their produce at the Tompkins Square farmer’s market, and who recently helped start a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) group at my kids’ school. These same farmers appear in a new film called What’s On Your Plate? about how eating healthily, locally and sustainably can be tasty as well as good for the planet. The film’s two narrators are older schoolmates of Josie and Maxie—perhaps they can serve as role models. (The girls and I are going to a screening later this month at the Solar-Powered Film Festival on the East River, and can I just say this column makes me sound like so much of a hippie I cannot even recognize myself? I am throwing up in my own mouth a little, and not in a bulimic way.)

In the coming new year, I pledge to do better in having family dinners in which we all eat the same thing. (A friend recommends making just one meal, but offering kids the option of cereal or yogurt—and that’s it—if they don’t like what’s on the table. Maybe I’ll try that. Email or Facebook me if you have other ideas or family-friendly recipes.) I’ve got to expand my girls’ culinary horizons. And as Josie in particular gets closer to her tween years, I want her to see food as a source of pleasure, not terror.

Instead, Josie is in a wonderful, progressive public school that encourages collaboration, good citizenship, and cooperation. It’s not some crunchy-granola place where every child is told she’s a ray of sunshine, kumbaya. There is academic rigor and portfolio assessment. But there is no gifted program, and there are no letter grades. And, so far, Josie is thriving there. She talks about how everyone has challenges—academic, behavioral, social—and how everyone should strive to do his or her best work. Recently, when I idly referred to a character in the book The Tale of Despereaux as “stupid,” Josie stopped dead. “You said the ‘S word’!” she gasped. “But Mig is stupid,” I replied. “Well, she doesn’t go to school, her dad sold her as a slave, she keeps getting her ears clouted and she doesn’t have books or toys,” Josie answered. “She doesn’t have the opportunity to do her best work!” Point taken.

A few years ago, I wrote a column about why we were opting out of the gifted track. A reader who happened to run a gifted program, wrote to me in disbelief and fury: “You are sacrificing your child on the altar of your ideology!” Obviously I don’t feel that way.

But recently Josie read a book that triggered a serious conversation between us on giftedness and achievement. The Report Card is by Andrew Clements, a rock god among middle-grade readers. A former Chicago-area public school teacher, Clements often sets his books in schools and focuses on various ethical dilemmas students and teachers face: gender issues, the battle of an individual against a bureaucracy, intellectual freedom, racism. His books are lively and funny. His best-known (and best) work, Frindle, has sold 2.5 million copies and is about how language is invented and codified. A boy tangles with his uptight English teacher over whether he can succeed in getting a brand-new, invented word added to the lexicon. Josie, eyes shining, said it was one of the best books she’d ever read. I picked it up myself and couldn’t put it down—it’s entirely devoted to weighty intellectual and moral ideas, yet it’s written at a level most third graders will have no trouble with. And it’s funny. And moving. At the end, I was weeping.

The Report Card isn’t nearly as good, but it brings up issues worth discussing. Nora, age 11, is a genius, but she has hidden this fact—even from her parents and siblings—her entire life. (At 2, she recalls, she’d solved a complicated jigsaw puzzle her big sister was doing, and she didn’t like the googly-eyed, bug-under-a-microscope reaction her achievement earned her, so she she’d resolved to learn to blend in by copying the behavior of non-genius children.) Nora loves learning—she secretly teaches herself Spanish, exchanges email with a primatologist at the Jane Goodall Institute, and enrolls in a distance-learning astronomy course at MIT. But as far as anyone else knows, she’s an ordinary, average fifth-grade student. When she sees how her best friend is suffering with anxiety over the ramped-up pressure for good grades and test scores, she hatches a plan to prove to the entire school that these measures don’t reflect kids’ real intelligence or ability. She decides to bomb her tests.

Alas, Nora’s parents are cartoonish grade-obsessed villains; the token “gifted” kid in the story is a driven weenie; the school psychologist is a pretentious know-it-all. The only truly sympathetic adult in the book is the school librarian, who’s seen Nora’s online activity on the school computers and figured out she’s brilliant. Josie’s review of the book: “I loved it until the ending. The ending was bad.” I read the book myself—at the end (spoiler alert!) Nora has been unmasked as a genius and her big anti-grade-grubbing mission has failed, but she wins her own small battle, getting to stay with her “average” friends rather than be moved into the gifted program.

Josie was frustrated by this non-conclusion. “She didn’t really change anything,” Josie said. “It’s annoying not to know if anything is different in the school or in Nora’s life afterward, but the book just ends.” I was distressed that Nora never really does celebrate or share her enthusiasm for learning; it’s private, like a dirty secret. And too many bright-but-not-genius girls already think being smart is shameful.

I do respect that Clements doesn’t have an easy answer to the problems of grade-obsession. What does seem clear is that too much emphasis on gold stars doesn’t lead to good kids, though we parents fervently resist believing that. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have found that kids who are praised for their brilliance and achievements wind up caring far more about their grades than about learning. They worry that if they take risks, they might fail, and that will mean they’re not really smart after all. But when children are praised for their effort, rather than their braininess, they’re more likely to try harder. They’re less freaked out by having to struggle and less fearful of tackling new challenges. Dweck studied the differences between kids who think intelligence is a fixed trait (something you have or you don’t) and kids who think intelligence is malleable (something you can develop, like a muscle). The ones who view intelligence as fixed are more likely to shy away from challenges, with their attendant possibility of failure. I knew those kids at Harvard—entitled little weenies who only cared about getting the right answers and didn’t care how they got them or who they trampled on the way. They were all about the destination, not the journey. (God, I really do sound kumbaya.) Besides, when it comes to real-world success, numerous researchers have found that character and perseverance matter more than brilliance.

In Clements’s books, the heroes are iconoclasts, kids who are willing to face down injustice, create new paradigms, make mistakes, irk the establishment. They aren’t weaselly people-pleasers. And they’re whom I want Josie to emulate. Of course I want to nourish and encourage her talents, but I want even more to encourage her for working at them. I want her to know it’s OK to fail, as long as you try. And I want her to be a good person, with the courage of her convictions, rather than a follower, surrounded by other privileged kids whose parents trumped their giftedness constantly.

Footnotes:
1. Cal State-Northridge
2. Cal State-Northridge
3. National Literacy Trust (U.K.)
4. Cal State-Northridge
5. APA

Was Max an observant Jew like his writer cousin? “We do not have good information on ‘how Jewish’ Max was,” Lipner told me. “But his welcoming hundreds of thousands of people onto the farm strikes me as a rather extraordinary example of the Jewish value of hachnassat orchim—welcoming guests.” Max Said Yes! isn’t an explicitly Jewish book, and it doesn’t draw an overt parallel between Max’s behavior and that of our tent-opening forefather Abraham, but the authors believe the analogy’s there. Still, is it weird to have a book about Woodstock that doesn’t mention sex or drugs at all? Lipner and Yasgur told me they’d joked around with some couplets that were left on the cutting-room floor:

In land filled with alfalfa seed
They relished LSD and weed.
They lay down in the fields and went to bed
With people to whom they were not wed

Mm, not so much. Ultimately, the authors decided that parents could use the book as a jumping-off point to talk about sex and drugs with their kids—or not. So for those of us—Woodstock Generation, Gen X, and Millennials—who did inhale, the question remains: how do we talk about drugs with our kids?

Kiki Schaffer, a social worker and director of parenting, family and early childhood at the 14th Street Y in Manhattan, laughs: “This subject is to parents of teens what sleep is to parents of newborns.” In other words: it’s the biggie, the giant bong in the room. Schaffer’s strategy is to plant the seed (as it were) early. “I tell younger kids, ‘Think about what we put in our body,’” she says. “Would you put worms in there?’” Schaffer believes that early education about drugs and alcohol is about encouraging kids to think about choices and self-regulation, so that when they grow older, they’ll continue to question what they ingest. As they reach preteen and teen years, she says, “Parents can start saying, ‘There are a lot of things we once didn’t think were harmful but studies have since shown they were: cigarettes, medications women were given in pregnancy.” Like many experts, Schaffer is not a fan of “Just Say No” education. “I hate it,” she says. “It doesn’t engage the hearts and minds of children or empower them to make good decisions—real life is about learning to be a decision-maker.” Indeed, those of us who grew up with Reefer Madness-style education learned only to laugh at parental paranoia.

Julie Holland, an assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine and author of the forthcoming Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER (Bantam, October 2009), agrees that the “Just Say No” approach is misguided. For one thing, she says, recent studies indicate that marijuana isn’t a gateway drug—hysterically insisting to your kids that one toke is a fast track to Cobainville makes you look like an untrustworthy doofus. In 2008, 43 percent of 12th graders reported trying marijuana once or more—clearly they haven’t all become raving, heroin-shooting, paint-huffing street addicts. A better strategy, Holland says, is to stress the potential consequences of doing something illegal. “Many schools have random drug tests,” she says, “and if you test positive, you can’t do sports. If you’re a senior, you could lose your student loans.” Explaining how drugs affect developing brains is also vital, she continues. “Because the adolescent brain is still in a formulation stage—pathways are getting laid down, connections are being made—in a perfect world kids wouldn’t use any substances, including alcohol. But in the real world, statistics show that’s unlikely.”

Holland stresses that parents should be as concerned about legal drugs (cigarettes, alcohol, and prescription drugs) as about street drugs. Unlike the kids at Woodstock, kids today rarely experiment with acid. Today, the big drug of choice is “pharmies.”

“Excuse me?” I say, like the old fart I am.

“‘Pharmies’ are what kids today call prescription drugs,” Holland explains. “So keep track of what’s in your medicine cabinet—especially all you neurotic Jews taking benzodiazepines [Xanax, Valium] so you can sleep.” Other modern-kid faves include narcotic pain killers (Vicodin, Percocet, Oxycontin), ADHD drugs (some kids resell them as weight-loss aids), steroids, and the cough suppressant dextromethorphan (which the kids call “Robo”). Not to harsh your mellow or anything.

So, my fellow post-Woodstockians, what should we do? There are terrific online models of nuanced, non-scare-tactic-y speeches to give to teenagers. With my own kids (now seven and four), my inclination is to wait until they start asking questions. But I also don’t want to end up in the same situation as my mom, when she tried to give me the sex-ed talk long after that particular train had left the station. So in a couple of years, I think I’ll sit Josie down and say, “You may start having kids offering you drugs to feel good—pills, things to drink, things to sniff, and things to smoke. My hope is that you’ll talk to me about it. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s safe. You don’t know who got what where. And if you ever get in a situation where you feel unsafe or out of control, know that you can call me or text me and I will help you or get you, no questions asked and no punishment given.”

And what if Josie or Maxie ask about Mommy’s drug history? Well, I’ll tell the truth. (And no, I’m not telling you.) And we’ll continue to share a regular sip of Shabbat wine. One recent study found that kids who drank with their parents were less prone to binge drinking. Thus in the spirit of Woodstock, I offer my own conclusion:

Your kids’ addiction you will head off
If you think of Max, and share a quaff.
Treat your kids like sensate beings.
And they’ll grow into responsible teens.

Or so I hope.

“Combusty began to wail in fury. . .”  >>

Your father has gotten involved only recently with the Jewish community. What made him do that?

He was a labor activist and a lefty all his life—not interested in religion; my mom was the one who sent us to Hebrew school and was involved in her synagogue’s sisterhood. After she died, Judaism became community for my dad. He volunteers at his local Jewish Federation office stuffing envelopes and he goes to shul every week. But I don’t think it’s that he found God.

What should those of us who are lucky enough to have healthy, active parents in their 60s and 70s be doing now? In the book you point out that more than a third of Americans have given no thought to end-of-life care.

Some parents say, “I’m not leaving this house except feet first!” But today we tend to stick around in increasing disability, with chronic diseases. The death rate has gone way down for strokes and heart attacks, which used to be the quick way to go. Families need to talk and plan. “Feet first” is not a plan! Children can get together to suggest bringing in a helper for a few hours a week to assist with cleaning, cooking, errands. Kids far away could hire a geriatric care manager to check on the parent every couple of weeks. Begin to modify the parent’s home to prevent falls. Call an occupational therapist to do a walk-through to say, “Put a grab bar there. Widen this doorway. Think about a stair glide.”

How could we better serve elderly parents?

Some things would be easy to make better: more follow-up after hospitalization to keep people from going back in. Educate families about resources like adult day programs that give people a place to socialize. Have activities during the day, so they can live at home longer but not be sitting alone in a dark room all day. Create a public long-term care insurance option; Senator Kennedy is pushing the CLASS Act [Community Living Assistance Services and Support], which would set up a national trust for long-term care insurance. Right now, there is no public funding of long-term care unless you’re very poor or in a nursing home.

You use the term “caregiver gain,” not a phrase I’d heard before.

I don’t want to be a Pollyanna and tell someone who is consumed with worry about their parents and their finances, “Oh isn’t this meaningful! Don’t you feel a sense of purpose and mastery!” I’d have to forgive them for punching me. But almost all religions and traditions underscore the importance of helping others. And when it’s over, most people feel satisfaction that they did a good job and discharged a responsibility. They did the best they could for the people who did the best they could for them.

Women still do the bulk of the care-giving. And a lot of Jews delay childrearing, dooming us to be a sandwich generation coping simultaneously with little kids and frail parents.

Not necessarily. Only 9 percent of current primary caregivers for the elderly also have minor children. . Many people are now sailing along independently through their 70s. Your generation delayed childrearing, but the age at which parents need serious help has moved back too.

At 7, Josie has a more complex image of God. “I believe in God except for when I’m angry,” She recently told me. Then she reconsidered. “Well, actually I do believe in God when I’m angry, but I want to be all, ‘I’m ignoring you!’” She’s interested in the idea of the yetzer hatov and the yetzer harah, the good and evil impulses that duel within us. “I think God is a force that tries to persuade us to do something good and tells us not to do something bad, but sometimes we don’t listen,” she said.

I thought about my kids’ different views about God when I read about research into the correlation between spirituality and happiness in children. The study, conducted by Mark Holder and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia, looked at 320 children aged 8 to12 in both public and parochial schools. It used a standard measure called the Spiritual Well-Being Questionnaire to assess kids’ spirituality in four components: Personal (finding meaning and value in one’s life); communal (the quality of interpersonal relationships); environmental (the sense of awe in nature); and transcendental (the relationship one has with something beyond the human level).

The researchers found that children who felt that their lives had meaning and value and who had strong relationships with others (the personal and communal aspects of spirituality) were happier than children who did not feel that way or have those connections.

But religious practices—defined as attending services, praying and meditating—didn’t have a statistically significant impact on the happiness levels.

I’m not so sure you can tease apart spirituality and religion. To Jews, at least, religious practices aren’t limited to prayer and being droned at in shul. A lot of what we do is home-based, tied to food (challah back!), costumes (Purim, anyone?), even camping (building and hanging out in a sukkah). For us, and for people of other faiths, religion is social. Through day schools, synagogue schools, and camps, we build connections and support systems. Holder and his colleagues view such social networks as spirituality-building, not religion-enhancing, but that clean division doesn’t work for me. Judaism emphasizes tikkun olam, healing the world— wouldn’t that fall under the researchers’ definition of the personal and communal aspects of spirituality?

Furthermore, I’m not convinced that spirituality without religion is good for happiness. I used to live in San Francisco, surrounded by nebulous woo-woo performance-art spirituality, which frequently existed in the absence of real community (other than Burning Man) and without any social-justice aspect. Spirituality, for a lot of folks I used to know, consisted of trying to “manifest” what they personally wanted, a la The Secret, a book that makes me want to hurl. (Not that I’m judgy.) And when you’re manifesting doesn’t work, don’t you then feel powerless as well as unmoored to something bigger than yourself?

I’m no researcher, and I’m no rabbi. But one thing is clear to me: Maxine’s view of religion isn’t very nuanced. (Most things are not when you’re a preschooler.) If she were an adult, I could see how her version of God—the celestial big meanie— would have zero correlation with happiness. (And it could drive anyone to God-free no-pressure Bay Area hippie spirituality.) Indeed, in The How of Happiness, an overview of positive psychology and happiness research by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside, the downside of seeing God as a punitive, controlling force seems clear: several studies have found that people who believe that negative events are God’s punishment for their sins have more depression and poorer health than those without such beliefs.

I hope Maxie will grow into a sense of faith, spirituality, and religion that’s more like her big sister’s. Last year on the Fourth of July, Josie watched the fireworks over the East River while alternately screaming with joy and watching silently with her mouth hanging open. “Your mind is bigger than your head, because your mind can go anywhere,” she told me afterward. Transcendental. And Josie, like all self-righteous seven-year-olds, loves the notion of assisting the downtrodden and saving the planet. That’s communal, environmental, and personal. In short, she gets, and I hope Maxine is starting to get, the notion that helping other people and searching for meaning are both essential parts of our religious tradition.

There’s a project called The Happiness Study, funded by the Steinhardt foundation, that explores how Jewish institutions contribute to four “quality of life outcomes.” These are connectedness to others, having problem-solving skills, having social and emotional competence, and having a sense of meaning and purpose. The theory is that these qualities are malleable in childhood and can increase one’s happiness as an adult. The hope, of course, is that they will make Jews feel more connected to the Jewish community.

Jeffrey Kress, a member of the project team for The Happiness Study and a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, agrees that religion as well as spirituality can contribute to happiness. “When you have a sense of connection and feelings of belonging, and a sense of purpose and meaning in your life, you have both social support and perhaps the strength to persevere when there are bumps in the road of life,” he says.

In the future, Kress says, he and his colleagues hope to offer insight into the very different takes on spirituality and meaning that people find within Judaism. Is spirituality something that’s really self-directed? Is it more externally related, like tikkun olam? Is it a peak experience—a sort of religious runner’s high we experience only rarely—or a habit, part of the daily fabric of our lives? To me, these are more interesting questions than wondering whether it’s spirituality or religion that makes children—and adults—happy.

I knew they’d enjoy their first march with their two-year-old cousin Shirley. It would be my mother’s first march too. My brother Andy, his husband Neal, my husband Jonathan, and I are all parade vets, but we’d never marched as a family. And our inaugural outing would be at the perfect time—the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. We’d be marching with Congregation Beth Simhat Torah (CBST), where Andy and Neal are members.

Then I got word from Camp Ramah, which Josie would be attending for the first time, that orientation for new families would take place the same day as New York’s gay pride parade. This would be our only chance to check out the camp grounds and staff before Josie attended the camp an hour from home the very next day

We chose camp over Pride.

As I ate my Popsicle and checked out the swimming pool, I felt a periodic pang thinking of the parade route not taken. More specifically, I wondered if Shirley was having fun. How did she do with the Moment of Silence, when marchers hold up ribbons with names written on them of loved one who’ve died? Did she enjoy waving at the onlookers? (She’s an expert waver.)

On the way back from camp, we had dinner with Andy, Neal, and Shirley in a Salvadoran dive in their Washington Heights neighborhood. Shirley was exhausted and kept exploding in toddler hysterics. Between bouts of whisking her outside to protect other diners from her deafening shrieks, Andy told me, “It was really nice to have Mom marching with us. I kept looking over at her and thinking ‘Hey! It’s Mom!’”

Shirley had indeed loved waving to spectators—she’s like a little Queen Elizabeth—and seeing everyone wave back. She adored the flags. Someone gave her a beach ball—bliss. She reveled in the cheering that always greets the religious organizations. My family marched behind the Episcopalians and in front of the Armenians, Andy told me. “Mom bonded with one of the Armenian moms. She said afterward, ‘We share a history of genocide and hairy eyebrows!’”

Between bites of pupusa con queso, Neal chimed in that Shirley was thrilled to march with her idol, CBST’s cantor. She carried a sign that read “Civil Rights for All Gods [sic] Children.” Over the course of the day, my mother became increasingly annoyed by that missing apostrophe. Finally she grabbed the sign from Shirley, pulled a black pen from her commodious purse, and corrected it. My mom: loves gays, hates bad punctuation.

Later that night at home, I looked online at Andy’s pictures from the day while chatting on the phone. “It all seemed so apple pie!” my mother said. She was moved by the marchers from Jewish Queer Youth (“a social/support group made up of frum/formerly frum gay, lesbian, bi and trans Jews age 17-30,” according to the group’s website) looking impossibly young, wearing tzitzit and classic Haredi garb—white shirts and black pants. They carried signs that said, ‘We’re in Every Yeshiva.”

CBST’s contingent had featured Mamacita Rita, an 80-something straight woman who is AIDS Walk New York’s single biggest fundraiser. She winters in Florida and sends Shirley postcards. Andy had a picture of her posing with Michael Lucas, a Russian-Jewish gay porn star. (He has never sent Shirley anything. That’s fine. Really.) Worlds collide at Pride.

There clearly isn’t just one LGBT community.

But families headed by LGBT adults are a formidable segment of society and growing, according to the group Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE). Even the 2000 census finally recognized this demographic, asking for the first time questions about gay couples having children. According to that census, 33% of female same-sex couple households and 22% of male same-sex couple households reported at least one child under the age of 18 living at home. Those numbers don’t account for single lesbians and gay men who have children or for LGBT parents who don’t have primary custody.

On a micro-level, you can see the demographic changes at CBST. Who knew, when it was founded in 1973, that the synagogue would wind up having wildly popular Tot Shabbat services? A Sunday School?

In a recent issue of New York magazine, Mark Harris wrote about the generation gap between older and younger gay men, comparing the perspectives of grizzled 50-something activists and 20-something party boys. Entirely absent were stories of gay men with children.

Children can be a uniting force—bridging generational and cultural gaps—as well as a divisive one. I’ve seen older men at CBST roll their eyes at the chaos children bring to the building. But I’ve also seen how children help forge connections among different communities. Andy and Neal’s social circle has broadened as they meet more families, gay and straight, with kids.

I predict that one day Andy and Neal will have to miss the parade because they’ll have to take Shirley to camp. By then, my own children will both be veteran campers. And that year, I hope, we will march in my brother’s family’s stead.

Mothers are reveling in their self-declared outlaw status, bragging about their kids being unwashed, un-toilet-trained, potty-mouthed, or prone to Barbie-hoarding. MacBook-tapping moms detail their own tendencies to plunk their kids in front of the TV (ooh!), have a cocktail (oy!) and give their kids non-organic, preservative-laden, character-branded junk food (veyizmir!)

Though it’s trendy to say you suck at motherhood, I doubt most of the women declaring this actually believe it. Their boasting is really about being cool. They may drive a Veggie-Booty-strewn mini-van, but their hearts are on Harleys. The problem is that by embracing “bad mommydom,” we opt out of redefining what it means to be a good mother. Most confessional writers aren’t taking up the gauntlet of redefining the norm. Instead, they identify as Other, which lets them off the hook; they lose out on the chance to say imperfect mothering is good—it’s normal, healthy, flexible.

Is it so “bad” to put yourself first once in a while, to admit that parenting can be maddening and boring, to acknowledge that our culture has elevated motherhood to an impossible ideal without actually providing social services that allow us to get anywhere near that ideal? Being a “good mom” does not mean being utterly self-negating while telling yourself it’s all for the children. It is just as narcissistic to talk about how awesomely bad you are as it is to boast about how perfect you are. (And yes, as a parenting columnist, I am aware that I am the bottle calling the sippy-cup BPA-free, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.)

All of us live and write in a culture of panicked hovering and competitiveness. (I don’t think fathers are immune, but mothers are still most often the ones blogging about the minutiae of babydom, playdates, and extracurricular activity pickups.) And now we’re witnessing backlash not just from the mommy bloggers but from the mainstream media. Parenting magazines, women’s rags, reality TV, and The Today Show have all picked up on the term “helicopter parent” and are suddenly mocking moms who can’t back off. The New York Times’s designated chronicler of the ovaried over-educated, Lisa Belkin (the writer who created a faux revolution with her disingenuous “Opt Out Revolution” article), recently wrote an entirely anecdotal piece saying that the age of alpha parenting may be coming to an end, and that micromanaging one’s offspring is falling out of favor.

Announcing that helicopter parenting is over is like saying that something is the new black. Guess what? Black ain’t going anywhere.

What is new is the notion of fake casualness. Now we’re supposed to be relaxed and real, but this unstudied-ness is, in fact, carefully studied. “Authenticity” is the operative buzzword. One trend in weddings is for low-key-seeming family-style fetes that actually cost as much as a more formal event. Clothing trends are bohemian and punk-influenced rather than overtly luxe, but they still come at price points that would make a real hippie have a seizure. Fashion mags talk about how much men love women who eat, and urge women to have dessert, but we’re still supposed to be a size two.

In other words, the standards women are held to are as high as ever. Now we’re not supposed to be self-negatingly child-centered, but our kids still have to come out brilliant, accomplished, and adorable. No wonder it’s easier to throw up your hands and call yourself “bad” than engage in debate about the impossibility of perfect goodness.

I’m not blaming the mommy bloggers for society’s unachievable standards. But blogging about how edgy you are for refusing to buy your daughter princess-themed merch (or the converse, blogging about how edgy you are for agreeing to buy your kid princess-themed merch) is small stakes. Ayelet Waldman often pushes my buttons, but she’s one of the few parenting writers who comes by her badness honestly. She’s written about loving one of her kids more than the others, about loving her husband more than any of her children, about hoping that her son would be gay but not that her daughter would be a lesbian, and about her battle with mental illness so severe that her seven-year-old told her, “I am afraid you’re going to kill yourself.” That’s far too much authenticity for some folks. It makes “OMG, I’m so bad, I haven’t washed Coco’s hair in three days” pale in comparison.

Certainly nobody’s perfect, and most of us aren’t truly bad. It might be nice to put some of the energy we pour into our personal performance art toward working to improve the lives of moms who truly are considered bad by the wider world—moms who can’t feed their kids, moms in abusive relationships or with substance abuse problems, moms who really are overwhelmed. Claiming to be a badass by typing while your kid watches Blues Clues doesn’t really help anybody.

My daughter Josie, seven, is hyper-competitive. She feels everything way too intensely. She’s a voracious reader. She struggles endlessly with moral questions. When she’s angry, she narrows her eyes into little slits and a vein throbs in her jaw. I understand her completely—and she has the power to drive me completely nuts—because she’s exactly like me.

My daughter Maxine, four, is completely Other to me. I adore her, but she’s a visitor from a foreign country. When Josie and I were her age, we sat in piles of books, flipping pages happily. Maxine, on the other hand, is all about the imaginative play. She often asks to play “the kitten game”—she’s a kitten I have to find on the street and take home. Today, I asked her what her kitten name was, and she mewed, “Rosie of the Lakes of Roses and Water Lilies.” Her favorite doll is named “Isabel Montina,” pronounced with a Spanish accent. When she’s feeling crabby, she scowls like a cartoon and says, “I’m feeling very pudnacious today.”

Maxine started talking later than her sister did, but once she started, she never stopped. Words flow from her in a gurgling rush. She can be challenging to understand—syllables crash and collide in her excitement to expel all the concepts whirling inside her. She jabbers at neighbors. She jabbers at homeless people on St. Marks Place. (“Oh my goodness, you sure lost a lot of teeth!” she told one crusty gentleman, happy for his surely-impending tooth fairy visit.) She jabbers at our cat, Yoyo. When she’s alone, she yammers to herself. Last year, during potty training, I listened outside the bathroom as she babbled, “When you are three you have to go to the potty and you have to wait for someone to wipe you. You can’t just pull up your pants and your panties and go! Mommy can wipe you, Daddy can wipe you, maybe Jojo can wipe you, but Yoyo can’t wipe you because Yoyo doesn’t have hands.”

As Maxie struggles to get her stories out, her face goes through animated, eyebrows-lifted, open-mouthed expressions. Sometimes she sings to herself instead of speaking. One of her earliest compositions:

I’M A TODDLER AND I’M NOT WEARING PAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS!
I‘M A TODDLER AND I’M NOT WEARING PAAAAAAAAAAAAAANTS!

Josie has always craved independence, while Maxine just wants to cuddle. When I see that the crossing guard is at the corner, I let Josie have her fondest desire—to run ahead and experience the heady joy of crossing the street without me. Last week, watching Josie take off at a dead run, Maxine slipped her hand into mine. “I will never not want to hold your hand,” she told me. “It is one of my joys.” Maxine’s storms blow over quickly; Josie holds a grudge. (So do I.) When my children’s lovely babysitter was teasing Max recently, Maxine blurted, “Shut up!” and immediately blanched. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but sometimes words pop into my brain and then they have to come out my mouth or I feel like I’m swallowing flies.”

My girls are very different from one another, but not as different as Biblical siblings, who always seem to exist in counterpoint to one another: Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Leah and Rachel. (All I ask is that one of my daughters not grow up to be dubbed “the homely weepy one.”) Real life doesn’t operate in antitheses. My girls are similar-looking, as opposed to the genetic opposites so many Torah sibs seem to be. I don’t think either of them is planning on killing the other with a rock. They seem to have an innate understanding of each other’s blessings and trials.

Both my girls had a wonderful pre-K teacher, Laurie. Last week, on Maxie’s last day of school, Laurie gave me a letter detailing Maxie’s love of numbers and patterns, her joy in words, her ability to create complex repeating designs that sometimes slip into narrative illustrations. Once Maxine created a pattern around the border of a picture, then drew her grandmother inside. “This is a pattern of my grandma dancing,” she explained.

But Maxine is easily exhausted. She has a much harder time socially than her sister. She finds it difficult to approach other kids. (Once she’s in, she’s mostly OK, and has a couple of close buddies she plays easily with.) She has trouble writing and using scissors. She prefers painting to using markers—the flow of a brush frees her to express herself more easily. Next year in school, she’ll get help from an occupational therapist for speech and motor issues.

I wasn’t surprised to learn this; Laurie had kept us posted throughout the school year of Maxine’s challenges, and Josie had warned us that Maxine was frequently isolated on the playground. What did surprise me was my own reaction to the information that Maxine would be getting extra assistance. Despite my stratospheric standards for myself, I didn’t feel any embarrassment or inadequacy for having a kid who isn’t an academic rock star on every level. I was thrilled that Maxie was in a school that doesn’t stigmatize learning differences. And I was confident that she’d be helped in a way that doesn’t shame her, and doesn’t diminish her general joy and exuberance in the way she approaches the world. Both my kids, with such different learning styles, are thriving at this school, and Laurie was a genius teacher for both of them. When I ponder how different they are, and how they face such different challenges—Josie’s competitiveness and temper; Maxine’s social and physical difficulties—I see the truth in the ditty we tell our kids about presents is true: “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.”

I can’t imagine either of them being anything other than who they are. This is a great lesson for a control freak to learn. I worry about Maxine’s frustration, but I don’t wish for a moment that she were different from who she is. Then she wouldn’t be Maxie, my huggy, hilarious little nutball, my poetic visitor from Elsewhere.

Some Hebrew names that are still uncommon in the larger culture are gaining traction in the Jewish community. For example, “Matan,” which means gift, has cropped up more and more. One mother of a Matan says, “My theory is that because more people are having children later, after struggles with infertility or as single parents or in same-sex relationships, having a child easily isn’t a given. So, a name which actually means ‘gift’ is going to have special resonance.” But most of us secular Jews tend to fall back on snooze-inducing, overly common names. Only the Orthodox community seems to regularly pop out a wide variety of Yiddish and obscure names derived from religious texts. Come on, other Jews! Start combing through Jewish texts and cultural history to come up with some snazzier stuff! Here’s a head start—as well as a list of some names we don’t want so much to promulgate.

Here’s an observation: most bubbes in children’s books seem to populate a folkloric or historic landscape—a misty, mythical Chagall-esque Old World, or the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, or Holocaust-era Europe. These women have faces etched with deep lines, wispy buns on their heads. They wear babushkas or long, faded, flowery dresses.

Bubbes in these books—titles like Bubbie and Zadie Come to My House by Daniel Halevi Bloom, illustrated by Alex Meilichson; Nine Spoons by Marci Stillerman, illustrated by Perren Gerber; My Grandmother’s Stories by Adele Geras, illustrated by Anita Lobel; and When Mindy Saved Hanukkah by Eric Kimmel, illustrated by Barbara McClintock—are worlds away, literally and figuratively, from the condo in Rhode Island where my kids spend a week with their Bubbe every summer.

A second observation: my mother is hip. She has a chic salt-and-pepper crop and wears chunky jewelry. She’s a tenured professor, working full-time. She’s no princess, but she wears nail polish and doesn’t dress as if she’s 107 years old and living in Chelm.

Why have my children never seen a bubbe like her in their picture books?

What they do see: bubbes perpetually stuck in the kitchen. In Matzah Ball Soup by Joan Rothenberg; Bubbe Isabella and the Sukkot Cake by Kelly Terwilliger, illustrated by Phyllis Horning; Matzo Ball Moon by Leslea Newman, illustrated by Elaine Greenstein; and Rebecca’s Passover by Adele Geras, illustrated by Sheila Moxley, it’s all dowdy grandmothers hoisting ladles and slinging spatulas.

All these grandmothers—historical, folkloric, and contemporary—embody a past as cloying as honeycake. Do their portrayals say something about where we are as Jews in America? Perhaps so many bubbe books are set in the past because our sense of identity today derives from nostalgia for a mythical Fiddler-like existence, or from Holocaust anxiety that’s become a central tenet of Jewish selfhood. (Even in young-adult fiction, geared toward more mature kids, “not only do the bubbes tend to be stereotypical, they also tend to be Holocaust survivors, and they die,” noted Eileen Polk, the librarian at Prentis Memorial Library at Temple Beth El in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.) Maybe the grandmothers in kids’ books look so old—often more like great-grandmothers than grandmothers—because they’re symbols.

“I am sure this phenomenon is related to the larger tendency in American Jewish culture to romanticize the American Jewish past,” explained Jonathan Krasner, assistant professor of the American Jewish experience at Hebrew Union College. “I also imagine that most children’s writers look to their own romanticized pasts for inspiration, rather than the contemporary scene. And rather than conjure up images of plastic covered furniture, dilapidated apartment houses in ethnically changing neighborhoods and inane family feuds—or whatever facts represented the reality of their childhood interactions with their grandparents—what they care to remember is the challah, the carp in the bathtub, the kneidelach.”

I wonder if some younger authors portray bubbes as looking more decrepit than they should because they’re yearning for an older model of grandparent. Their own parents, like my mother or perhaps yours, may be too busy working, going to city council meetings, living their own lives, to provide spur-of-the-moment babysitting. Is it any wonder that younger picture-book creators, consciously or not, tend to idealize their own grandparents? Craving an old-school model of selflessness and nurturing, they find themselves drawing passels of bubbes who are supposedly grandmothers to two-to-seven-year-olds but unaccountably look 90.

And then there’s the feminist problem. How do we culturally code the idea of the “Jewish grandmother?” “How do you identify a character as a female Jew? If you draw someone who looks like me, how do we know it’s a bubbe?” Shuly Schwartz, professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary, asked rhetorically. “How do you know a Jewish woman is doing Jewish things? If she’s making Jewish food!”

Authors and illustrators aren’t sure how to paint modern American Jewish life for children because we aren’t sure how to depict it to ourselves. Our identities as Jews and Americans are integrated. If a bubbe works full-time (she probably can’t afford to retire now anyway), buys frozen latkes, watches HBO, goes to the gym and belongs to a book club, how can a children’s picture book portray her? She’s too complex.

Picture books have to be reductive, since they’re aimed at four-year-olds. But is it necessary to revert to stereotypes that telegraph “old Jew lady”?

Some of the books I’ve named here are terrific. But they require counterpoints that show other faces of bubbetude. Children’s librarians point out that in young adult and middle-grade fiction, there are more nuanced portrayals of Jewish grandmothers. Publishers are trying to bring that sophistication to children’s books, too. “We’re always specifically looking for stories that reflect more diverse portrayals of Jewish families,” says Joni Sussman of Kar-Ben books. “We’ve put the word out, but that means now we’re getting too many stories about ‘Bubbe is hip! She rides a bicycle!’”

Kar-Ben has a current title called A Grandma Like Yours/A Grandpa Like Yours, by Andria Warmflash Rosenbaum, illustrated by Barb Bjornson, in which grandparents are portrayed as cute animals. As now-grown fans of Bread and Jam for Francis or Sylvester and the Magic Pebble may recall, it’s an effective device in kids’ lit which allows children to project themselves and their families onto the characters no matter what their families look like. The notion of embracing difference is commendable; if only it would extend to grandmothers of the homo sapien kind.

Marjorie Ingall is a columnist on parenting for Tablet Magazine.