• You should check out the complete offerings in Haaretz’s annual “Writers Edition” but first and foremost this essay on Israel and the Arab Spring by contributing editor Leon Wieseltier. [Haaretz]

• They’re still working on that whole peace process thing. [WSJ]

• An HBO pilot about “a group of con men and magicians who use their skills of deception to help defeat Hitler and the Germans,” written by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, will be directed by Darren Aronofsky. There’s probably a way to make this Jewier, and they just haven’t thought of it yet. [Variety]

• Midnight in Paris will go to more than 1,000 screens, giving it the widest theatrical play of any Woody film. [ArtsBeat]

• Rep. Gary Ackerman, Democrat of New York (Queens and Long Island), has personally appealed to Egyptian authorities in the case of Ilan Grapel. The imprisoned Israeli-American law student is a former Ackerman intern. [JTA]

Looks like New York will get same-sex marriage after all (maybe). Quoth the deciding voter, Republican state Sen. Roy MacDonald: “You might be very cynical about that. Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing.” Word.

• Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman’s tentative HBO show, Hobgoblin, will depict “a motley group of conmen and magicians who use their skills at deception to battle Hitler and his forces during WWII.” [Vulture]

• Tomorrow, the Palestinian soccer team will host Thailand for an Olympics qualifying match—the first such global athletic event in the West Bank since 1948. [NYT]

• An amazing trove of books about Wissenschaft—the pre-World War Two German-Jewish “Science of Judaism” discipline that formed the basis for contemporary Jewish studies—has been discovered in New York. [NYT]

• A New York rabbi has received a salary—$100,000 last year—since 1995 to serve as the state police’s liason to the Hasidic community. It is not clear whether this salary is merited, nor how for-real this rabbi is. [Albany Times-Union]

• At a recent debate on Israel featuring Rep. Anthony Weiner and New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, Gal Beckerman found “sanctimony” from the left and “gross lack of knowledge” from the right. Ladies and gentlemen, the Mideast debate! [Forward]

I won’t even attempt a tenuous Jewish connection, but this 1994 performance of “Change” by Blind Melon is notable for a. Its awesomeness; b. Lead singer/band genius Shannon Hoon’s farewell to Kurt Cobain afterward; and c. Hoon’s ad lib “I don’t wanna die,” coupled with the knowledge that he would be dead no more than two years later.

Fortunately, I did not look to the Torah for advice on raising siblings. Sibling relationships in our tradition are a mess, starting with Cain and Abel (result: dead Abel.) It goes on and on: Isaac and Ishmael, Esau and Jacob, Leah and Rachel, Joseph and his brothers. Good times all around.

But who can blame our ancestors for being such crappy siblings? For generations, no one in their family modeled healthy familial relationships. Science, not just story, backs up the fact that sibling favoritism can have nasty consequences. A 2009 study of moms of adult children, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, found that perceived favoritism hurts both the “favored” and “unfavored.” It’s obvious why the latter would be irked by “Mom always liked you best!” but the former also showed depressive symptoms, even years later as middle-aged adults. Favorites felt guilt as well as the need to cope with negative, distant, resentful siblings.

Parents do acknowledge that they’re closer to some kids than others. (But is that really favoritism? You tell me.) In the 2009 study, 70 percent of the moms surveyed named one kid they felt closest to, and 73 percent named a kid with whom she had the most arguments and disagreements. Another study, this one from Current Directions in Psychological Science, found that a third to two thirds of American families evidence parental favoritism. Sometimes this is natural—parents inherently give newborns and kids with illness or disabilities more attention. Sometimes it’s surprising: Parents often feel closer to their same-gender children; first-born children get the most privileges and last-born children get the most affection. Jan Brady was right. It’s tough to be stuck in the middle.

However—and this is key—kids seem to feel there’s more parental favoritism than there actually is. In that same study, only 15 percent of children said their moms showed no favoritism at all, but 30 percent of moms said they didn’t have favorites.

Do I love one child best? When my own spawn demand an answer to this question, I reply with the excellent words of writer/therapist Amy Bloom: “Love is not a pie.” Love is not a finite thing to be sectioned up and doled out; it’s infinite. My kids are never satisfied by this answer.

And I mostly don’t believe I have a favorite child. Mostly. But then I think back to a brutally truthful 2006 essay by Ayelet Waldman in the late, lamented Child magazine. Waldman, with her typical coruscating honesty, wrote that she let her youngest child get away with murder because she couldn’t resist her adorability. Her older kids noticed. “What’s killing them is that they are absolutely sure she’s my favorite. And they’re right—she is. Right now.”

Waldman goes on to explain that different kids hold the privileged position of favorite at different times. “You must never favor one child over the other, the rule goes,” she writes. “But the secret, hidden truth is that we often do. Parenting is a passionate enterprise. It’s about love: untempered, unbound love. And anyone who has ever been in love knows that it’s not a judicious, balanced endeavor.”

My truth is that I love my kids differently. I am gobsmacked by Josie’s insights. I love talking about books and social justice with her. As a dork and a nerd, I watch with endless admiration the way she navigates the world socially. But I feel fierce protectiveness toward Maxine. She’s the one who squeezes my heart until it hurts. Her cheerfulness and funniness and resilience just slay me. Does that mean I love Maxie more?

In the recently released book Freud’s Blind Spot, Elisa Albert, a contributor to Tablet Magazine, collects essays about the pleasures and terrors of siblinghood. The book’s title refers to the fact that Freud gave short shrift to sibs. “Some scholars have lately called for a reassessment of [this] vertical model,” Albert writes. “What about the horizontal model, they ask? What about lateral influence?” (The italics are hers.) Indeed, she finds, “Our siblings are central actors in the drama of our lives: they are our earliest and deepest connections, our poles, our friends, our contemporaries, our cohorts, our first loves and resented rivals … we tend to define ourselves in alliance with and/or in opposition to them.” Of the familiar Erev Shabbat blessing, “May you be like Ephraim and Menashe,” Albert writes: “Recently I learned it’s because Ephraim and Menashe are the only two siblings in the Bible who get along.” Oh.

The book is filled with stories of siblings who fight furiously. Sometimes they come to love and understand each other. Sometimes they don’t. Steve Almond writes about how when he was 5, his older brother, Dave, told him their pregnant cat Macacheese (Macacheese!) has just birthed a litter of stillborn kittens because Steve had accidentally dropped her the week before. (Later, knowing that Steve sucks his thumb, Dave secretly rubbed his digits with a raw hot pepper.) Another contributor, Margo Rabb, doesn’t grow close to her sister until after her parents are dead. “We share genes, a history, and the only bits of our parents we have left,” she writes. “And she’s the only person who understands how we can sit beside our parents’ graves on a sunny afternoon, and then go out for sushi and stuff ourselves and still laugh, even now, until we nearly burst.”

Apparently stabbing one’s sibling with a pencil is a thing. T. Cooper spikes one into his brother’s thigh. Alyssa, a 6th-grade character in Caldecott-winning poet Joyce Sidman’s incredible This Is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness, writes to her sister Cassie:

The Black Spot

That black spot on your palm.
It never goes away.
So long ago
I stabbed you with a pencil.
Part of the lead, there,
still inside you.
And inside me, too,
something small and black.
Hidden away.
I don’t know what to call it,
the nugget of darkness,
that made me stab you.
It never goes away.
Both marks, still there.
Small black
reminders.

In a response poem, Cassie says only:

Roses are red
violets are blue,
I’m still really
pissed off at you.

So sisterhood is powerful, in both good and bad ways. I’m not sure what I can do not to play favorites. I try to spend solo time with each of them. I try not to play them off against each other. I keep chanting, “Love is not a pie.”

I can see that the relationship my daughters have is a million times more intense than the one my brother and I had. My brother and I didn’t have much in common. Growing up, we didn’t have much to say to each other. Josie and Maxie, on the other hand, love and hate each other with fierce devotion. They play Legos together for hours. Josie reads to Maxie. Maxie comes home from school with dozens of drawings of Josie. They bring each other goodie bags from parties. And they fight like rabid animals. And they insist I love the other one more.

I can take heart from a recent study showing that people with sisters grow up to be better at coping with setbacks, more highly motivated, more optimistic, and more social than people with only brothers. Researchers theorize that sisters talk a lot (God knows this is true in my house), and open emotional expression is good for one’s mental health. Boys, on the other hand, discourage such verbal sharing.

When it comes to raising our progeny, we parents are bound to screw up sometimes. It’s a given. And it’s scant consolation that we’re bound to do better than our biblical forebears. We just have to make sure our kids understand that after we’re gone, they’ll have each other.

Today, Maxie’s crib is gone. We have bunkbeds. When they arrived, Maxie cried bitterly because Josie got the top bunk. But Josie has never spent a single night in it. After storytime, she climbs down into Maxie’s bed. I often find them intertwined, like puppies, in their sleep.

The essay struck some readers (this one included) as cold and just plain shocking. (And the common defense that Chua’s book is much more nuanced than the Journal excerpt isn’t really exculpatory, since Chua presumably crafted and at the very least approved of the excerpt; those are her words, too.)

However, here are two notes that may be of interest to Tablet Magazine readers. First, the most eloquent response to the excerpt—and it is a rebuttal, but it cedes some interesting ground—was penned by Nextbook.org contributor Ayelet Waldman, and explicitly establishes the “Jewish mother” as the opposite of, or at least the prime alternative to, of the “Chinese mother.” And second, not only is Chua’s husband, Jed Rubenfeld, Jewish, but, reportedly, their two daughters—the objects of Chua’s parenting and the subjects of her book—are being raised Jewish. So maybe Chua is a “Chinese-Jewish mother”? I have a feeling that Jews who grew up in earlier generations might see plenty of their own mothers in her.

Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior [WSJ]
In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom [WSJ]

If it can be considered a Jewish tradition to crack wise at the moment of bleakest tragedy, then the obscure comic book character Funnyman fits right in; so argue Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon in Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero (Feral House, July). Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster conceived of this improbable character, a jokily clownish pseudo-hero, at an inauspicious time, only a couple of years after the end of WWII brought images of Nazi brutality to American movie theaters. Siegel and Shuster were themselves waging a bitter, and finally losing, battle over the rights to their earlier creation, Superman; Siegel was also busy busting up his marriage, while Shuster, who nominally drew their strips, was slowly losing his eyesight. As Gordon says, these were “the most miserable guys possible and the most unlucky,” and yet they turned to slapstick comedy. The result was no masterpiece—Funnyman lasted only for six issues, and then for a brief run as a newspaper serial—but Andrae and Gordon use it as the basis for a wide ranging exploration of Jewish humor, while reprinting a few examples of the dismal series.

***

If for nothing else, Funnyman remains admirable for its attempt to demonstrate that superheroes need not come equipped with a square jaw or a barrel chest. Real-life freedom fighters rarely do. Saul Alinsky, for example: A “bespectacled, conservatively dressed community organizer” who dressed “like an accountant,” as Playboy described him, he managed to alter the course of American politics with Rules for Radicals (1971). Lately he’s been credited, especially by right-wingers who vilify him while adopting his tactics, with influencing the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. Already the subject of a major biography (1992’s Let Them Call Me Rebel), the Chicagoan—raised in an Orthodox home and inspired, as he once remarked, by Hillel’s call, in Pirkei Avot, to be a man in a place where there are no men—has his legacy further burnished by the anecdotes and recollections contained in Nicholas von Hoffman’s “homage,” Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky (Nation, July).

Like Alinsky, the African-American author Richard Wright transformed Chicago anti-establishment fury into publishing gold. After he accepted the bowdlerizing edits of the Book-of-the-Month Club, his Native Son (1940) became a massive bestseller that reflects Wright’s encounters with Jews; recall that the novel concludes with the failure of a Jewish lawyer, Boris Max, to offer much salvation or consolation to his African-American client, Bigger Thomas. Jennifer Jensen Wallach’s Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen (Ivan R. Dee, July) surveys Wright’s works and life, including his successive marriages to two Jewish women, his engagements with Communism, and his exile to Paris, more concisely than previous biographies, as a commemoration of his death exactly half a century ago.

***

Wright moved to Paris in the hopes of escaping American racism; not all Americans travel to Europe for such good reasons. Tablet contributing editor Rachel Shukert, for example, describes, in Everything Is Going To Be Great: An Underfunded, Overexposed European Grand Tour (Harper Perennial, July), a European sojourn motivated less by any specific problems she faced in America—though, to be fair, Shukert did grow up Jewish in Omaha, Nebraska, which is nobody’s idea of a rollicking good time—than by a general spirit of post-college adventurousness, and, more concretely, by a “non-paying, non-speaking” role in a traveling theater production.

Lily Safra does Europe a little differently: when she’s on the French Riviera, for example, she stays at her house, Villa Leopolda, which, valued at a whopping $503 million, ranks second on the list of most expensive homes in the world. And when Safra celebrates birthdays with Elton John and his friends, they hop from London to Venice, mid-party, via chartered jet. Not bad for the Brazilian daughter of a Uruguayan Jewish mother and a fortune-seeking British father. Safra’s secret to success? Marry rich and often: Her husbands have included entrepreneurs Mario Cohen, Freddy Monteverde (né Greenberg), and Samuel Bendahan, as well as Edmond Safra, a Jewish-Lebanese-Brazilian banking whiz who supported Sephardic charities around the world, and whose death in 1999 left his wife sitting on a fortune estimated at a billion dollars. Isabel Vincent offers all the gory and glamorous details in Gilded Lily: Lily Safra, the Making of One of the World’s Wealthiest Widows (Harper, July).

***

Kiev doesn’t attract many of the North or South Americans, like Shukert and Safra, who head to Europe in pursuit of luxury, culture, and romance, but the city was once considered among the most interesting places in Eastern Europe for a Jew to live and work—until some pogroms and the Mendel Beilis affair spoiled the mood. As Natan Meir points out in his study Kiev, Jewish Metropolis: A History, 1859–1914, Sholem Aleichem himself lived in the city for a while and had good reason to set the first half of The Bloody Hoax (his version of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper) there. And, as Meir goes on to say, “though Jews were but tolerated strangers in Kiev, they influenced—indeed shaped—the city to a remarkable extent.”

***

Why travel at all, though, when you can have all of European culture, or at least European cuisine, in a single building in New York City? Jane Ziegelman’s 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (Smithsonian, June) focuses on a still-standing domicile to reflect the diversity of traditions imported to Manhattan’s teeming Lower East Side by immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Russia, and Italy. Two of the families whose experiences Ziegelman recovers, the Gumpertz and Rogarshevsky clans, were Jews who, it turns out, ate more than just gefilte fish and knishes. In fact, as Ziegelman emphasizes, the former family would have benefited from local tenement-based goose farms and eaten plenty of what we now refer to as foie gras. As Ziegelman and her co-authors noted in a 1999 paean to goose liver, Foie Gras: A Passion, “The only culinary tradition to rival the French in its genius for cooking with foie gras belongs to the Ashkenazi Jews.”

***

Vacationing close to home has its perils: In Ayelet Waldman’s novel Red Hook Road (Doubleday, July), the daughter of a family of Jewish New Yorkers who summer in Maine decides to marry a townie, the son of a cleaning woman. This is not fated to be a happy intermarriage: a car accident kills off the newlyweds almost immediately after they tie the knot, leaving the members of their very different families—violinists, Fulbright scholars, amateur shipbuilders, and so on—to figure out how to relate to one another. Waldman notes that she got her inspiration from a newspaper article; and, indeed, it does not seem that she could write about such a marital culture clash from personal experience, given that her husband is a brilliant Jewish novelist, just like her.

The very word “mommyblog” makes me cringe. When my children’s doctors called me “mommy” (as in “Mommy, give her this liquid Augmentin twice a day,” invariably without adding “don’t be surprised if she projectile-vomits all over the kitchen,” the schmucks), I corrected them: “I have a name.” My children are welcome to call me mommy; when adults use it, the word sounds infantilizing.

And calling all writing about parenting mommyblogs is like calling all books with female protagonists chicklit. Chicklit is a dismissive catchall term for any book dealing with young women’s lives; it implies shallowness, consumerism, pink covers with shoes on them. But of course the word is used as a slam on all stories told by women about relationships. If Jane Austen were writing today, her book covers would be fuchsia and shoe-strewn. Why must we lump together all storytelling about love and women’s lives? How will we recognize the next Jane Austen (my vote: Jennifer Weiner) if all books about women’s perspectives are treated exactly the same way (i.e., trivializingly)?

But if I’m being honest with myself, I’m doing the same thing when I flinch at being called a mommyblogger. Yes, to a degree I wince because most mommyblogs suck. They aren’t crafted. The writing is frequently a spew of gushy listen-to-the-hilarious-thing-my-child-said-today cooing and Andy-Rooney-style kvetching. And my life is short; I do not need to see little Hannah dancing to Beyoncé. But it is a truth universally acknowledged that a parent in possession of a Flip camcorder must be in want of a blog.

And yet. Why are mommyblogs more annoying to me than the countless poorly written political blogs devoted to doctrinaire spittle-flecked ranty blathering? Why do they irk me more than the gazillion dull fashion blogs, sports blogs, geek blogs, and gossip blogs out there? Why do I occasionally read daddyblogs like Cynical Dad, Daddy Types, MetroDad, and RebelDad, but so few blogs by mothers? Is it because I’m sexist? Am I as bad as the chicklit-disparagers?

I’m gonna go with no. (Shocker.) I look to daddyblogs to provide perspective very different from mine. When it comes to being a mother, I know the drill. I don’t know from being a father. Men’s challenges around recreating identity as parents are different from women’s; they have to cope with societal expectations of dad-dom, which are different from the familiar ones (to me, anyway) about motherhood. I’m interested in how fathers who choose to write about fatherhood—and they’re way outnumbered by the mommies—share their experience.

The few mommybloggers I read also provide a window into worlds different from mine. I like A Little Pregnant, a blog about childrearing after a long, brutal struggle with infertility, and Love That Max, about raising a child with serious disabilities. I read Homeshuling, by an intermarried Jewish mother sending her children to Jewish Day School.

What all these bloggers have in common is that they’re all great communicators. They can write. They’re aware of the need to provide something readers can’t get elsewhere. Kvelling about your spawn? Zzzz. News flash: All parents think their kids are fascinating and enchanting. It’s a trick of God and/or evolution designed to prevent us from hitting them with a mallet.

To be clear, I don’t think anyone should stop blogging. I have a personal blog where I rant about standardized testing, the General Slocum disaster in 1904, and the fact that Glee’s Lea Michele looks exactly like David Duchovny in drag on Twin Peaks. But I don’t expect you to read my ramblings there. So, don’t ask me to read yours.

One more thing: There’s a reason so many mommybloggers have babies and toddlers. Tiny people have no expectation of privacy. Their stories are our stories. Even the line between their bodies and ours is blurry (especially when we’re breastfeeding). Blogging about them is almost invariably blogging about us.

But when kids get older, we have to figure out how much of that conjoined story is really ours to share. I loved Anne Lamott’s book Operating Instructions, the mommyblog ur-text. It was the first book most of us ever read that spoke honestly about how hard early motherhood could be, how often we entertain the flickering, momentary fantasy of throwing the baby against the wall. But when Anne Lamott started to write about Sam as an older child and as a teenager, I started to feel uncomfortable. I could barely read the column in which she describes slapping him across the face when he sneered about washing the car. Ayelet Waldman frequently has the same “eek” effect on me. (She herself said of her mommyblogging, “A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.”) When she wrote about her son telling her he was afraid she’d kill herself I felt queasy.

But even as I’m personally squicked out, I can appreciate their work as writers. (Most bloggers, on the other hand, produce what Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s work: “That’s not writing; that’s typing.”) Lamott and Waldman have craft. They’re not self-consciously poetess-y, and they’re not boring. They’re being specific rather than general. (Cue the Tolstoy “Happy families are all alike” quote.) Above all, they’re honest.

Which brings me to the heart of what I loathe about most mommyblogs: the dishonesty of not telling the full story. “Half the truth is often a great lie,” as Ben Franklin said. Most mommybloggers tacitly follow the unwritten but codified rules: Create a persona that’s exasperated but loving, pretending to be annoyed by one’s child but in a way that makes it clear that said child is a genius, indicate that you don’t sweat the small stuff and mock parents who do. This is writing as incantation, a magic amulet—it pushes the real, messy, nuanced world away instead of bringing it closer in all its terrors.

Maybe part of my scorn is fear that I do the same. I too refrain from touching certain third-rail subjects that could help other families. I try to be thoughtful and tough-minded (and yes, when something touches a nerve, I see both the risks and the rewards of true openness), but I always ask my family what I can share. (Shalom Bayit, baby, in a big extended-family way.) And self-censoring is a Franklinian half-truth.

But telling the whole truth is hard. I have infinite respect for Katie Allison Granju, another professional parenting writer, who has been blogging about her 18-year-old son’s death, in the aftermath of a brutal beating after a long battle with drug addiction. She’d been blogging for years without talking about his addiction, but when he was hospitalized, a month before he died, she opened up completely. Her posts on her own blog and in her column on Babble are raw, completely honest, heartbreaking. They’re proof that you can be a great parent and terrible things can still happen. No matter how we spin our narratives.

Outdated, sure, but rarely dull.

Michael Chabon: The Pleasures and Regrets of ‘Manhood’ [NPR]

Matisyahu, hip-hop artist

All are related to consciousness and health:

1. I would like to only put healthy things in my body. This includes eating more consciously, cooking my own food, and buying locally grown veggies, organic products, etc.

2. Exercise. I would like to have one consistent exercise. Not go crazy or anything, just simple stuff: ride a bike, take a hike, etc.

3. I would like to visit the Hasidic rebbes’ gravesites in Europe and spend time at each one, learning the teachings of that rebbe.

4. I would like to continue working on being present in whatever I am doing. To do things with truth, whole-heartedly.

Daphne Merkin, writer

To try in my personal habits to be more like Benjamin Franklin and less like Courtney Love. Early to bed and early to rise, that sort of thing. (Right now I stay up late, watching Iron Chef and Lock Up, when I should be reading Chekhov at the very least; and I get up near noon, by which time Christopher Hitchens has already produced 1,500 words on the issue of the day.)

To try and enjoy the little things; to stop looking for a blaze of light followed by a loud bang, or the transformative phone call, or the email that arrives out of the blue and will change everything. To be happy with my share instead of envying everyone who has a larger apartment. To appreciate that I am alive even though I’m not as thin or young or productive or, well, anything, as I had hoped to be.

To love where I am loved instead of pining after the unreachable or ungettable person (meaning man) without whom my life is incomplete. To accept that most couples are compromised arrangements at best and “the lion’s share of happiness,” to quote my beloved, never-married Philip Larkin, doesn’t necessarily belong to them. To remember that a woman without a man is like a woman without a man—pathetic in a noble sort of way.

To find some route back to the Jewishness I have cast off—not lightly, I might add—and for which I harbor great nostalgia. Not enough to make me actually seek out a shul that might suit me or to return to keeping separate kitchens in my apartment, but enough to hanker after Friday night invitations. To find some way of inserting it in my life in a meaningful fashion—whether it be taking a class or learning how to make gefilte fish from scratch.

Michael Showalter, comedian, star of Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues

1. Improve backhand.

2. Learn to speak cat language.

3. Understand meaning of life.

4. No more ice cream every single night.

Naomi Alderman, author of Disobedience

I’m not generally big on New Year’s resolutions; I feel that being in therapy ought to cover my self-improvement needs for the year. Why improve yourself when you can outsource and have someone else do it for you?

However, as the festive season approaches I have been thinking that next year I really want to try to be more forgiving. It’s a very Christian-sounding resolution, I know. It’s not about “turning the other cheek,” though, but a more pragmatic approach: I’ve noticed that individuals who are unforgiving end up coming across as bitter and annoying. So for the sake of my soul or maybe just for the sake of appearances: more forgiveness this year.

Otherwise, there are just the constant ongoing resolutions of the battles one can never win. Answer email more promptly. Do not allow the washing up to sit around for several days. Go to the gym more often. Set a writing schedule and stick to it this time, goddammit—think of Trollope in his study, writing for three hours every morning from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m., and then going off to run the post office, be more like that. Get a post office, perhaps.

I once made a list of all the things I thought I should be doing on a daily basis and estimated how long each one would take. The total came to 28 hours a day, and didn’t include any time for sleep. Maybe I really need to learn to be more forgiving of myself.

Douglas Century, writer and author of Nextbook Press’s Barney Ross: The Life of a Jewish Fighter

I’d love to be able to explain basic biblical stories to my six-year-old daughter without having to look them up on Google. The other day, when I mentioned the story of Abraham (almost) sacrificing Isaac, she looked deeply troubled, and said, “I don’t understand—why would God tell Abraham to kill his own son?” I stammered something about how God was just testing Abraham, then found myself getting online and scrolling through website after website to read the various explanations for the Binding of Isaac. I realized I couldn’t remember the exact motives for Cain killing Abel, either. Or list more than a handful of Joseph’s brothers. Since my daughter is starting her religious education this year, it would be nice to relearn the stories that the 12-year-old me knew by heart.

I also use way too much profanity, especially driving. Since cursing under my breath at other aggressive drivers seems hardwired into my reptilian brain, and since I’m often driving with my daughter in her car seat behind me, I’m also constantly half-turning and apologizing for using bad language. “Daddy shouldn’t have said that, honey, you’re right.” It happens, too, when I’m on the phone. I’ve tried spelling out curse words, but Lena caught me at the first “S-H-I–.” So, I resolve to make every effort to clean up my act. Perhaps it’ll make me calmer and happier too.

Finally, I’m sure most people resolve to be more productive and focused each day. I need to go through a kind of social networking detox, or at least stop rationalizing hours wasted in the sinkholes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by telling myself it’s time spent doing “research.”

Ayelet Waldman, writer and author of Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace

1. Pay more attention to my husband.

2. Not worry as much about my children’s futures.

3. Turn off my damn appliances to save energy.

Mimi Sheraton, former New York Times food critic and Tablet Magazine food columnist

1. I resolve never again to serve my Italian husband matzo balls marinara or noodle kugel—which he abhors as “sweet pasta.”

2. I resolve not to tell guests that my chopped chicken livers contain gribenes. Let them enjoy!

3. I resolve never again to grate potatoes for latkes in my Cuisinart. From now on, it’s a hand-held, four-sided grater or nothing.

4. I resolve to lose the last 10 pounds. Doesn’t everyone?

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.

At least once a year, my mother sends a clunker to my children, usually as a Hanukkah or Passover gift: Shmulik and the Kvetching Tallis; Mrs. Gabinsky’s Talking Kneidlach. Needless to say, my kids don’t enjoy these books. They try, especially my oldest, Sophie, whose defensive Jewish posture rivals that of her grandmother, a woman who made Joseph Trumpeldor seem like a member of Peace Now. But these self-conscious tales of shtetl life or Bible history are never read more than once through in our house. My kids seem instinctively to grasp that there is something reproachful about them, a kind of sanctimonious finger-wagging: “You should be a nice, well-behaved Jewish child,” they drone. “Now finish your food.”

In my own house, the clutter of such tomes has expanded—and not merely because they are impossible to dispose of. (“Did you lose that book I gave you about the Japanese consul in Lithuania who saved Jews during the Holocaust? I’ll get you another copy.”) Madonna’s three books for children have been added to the pile. They have that familiar hectoring tone, although hers is cloaked in a kind of studied whimsy: her characters dance the “tickety boo” and are named Tittlebottom. My children do not react well to this kind of ham-fisted sermonizing. My kids demand a bit more magic in their stories, and the learning of lessons is not a big priority. Still, that’s what books like these are all about, so it only makes sense to evaluate them on those terms.

Madonna’s three books—Mr. Peabody’s Apples, The English Roses, and the latest, Yakov and the Seven Thieves—are based, she writes, on Baal Shem Tov stories told to her by her “Kabbalah” teacher.¹ I can vaguely recall the story behind the Mr. Peabody book, as I’m sure anybody who wasn’t entirely comatose in Hebrew school can. You remember: Once you’ve spread evil gossip about someone, retracting your words is as difficult as gathering all the feathers from a pillow burst into the wind. The Yakov story I sort of remember too, although Madonna’s stated moral is unsatisfying and somehow ill-constructed. It’s about the prayers of evil men unlocking the gates of heaven, but it feels half-baked.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out the point of The English Roses. I honestly think that the instruction this story gives is to be nice to pretty girls because their lives might be harder than ours. Did the Baal Shem Tov really say this? I know I’m altogether too influenced in this as in all things by the horror that was George Washington Junior High School in Ridgewood, New Jersey, but it never seemed to me that those flaxen-haired lovelies had any problems making friends. On the contrary; they very contentedly made the lives of the rest of us a living hell.²

The books are gorgeous, more beautiful than the norm for Jewish storybooks. Your basic Purim tale comes in two versions: poorly-drawn bubble people in primary colors, and ornate paintings with a vaguely Mitteleuropean flavor, the colors so faded as to give the impression of having been dug up from the dirt beneath a ruined Latvian synagogue. Jeffrey Fulvimari, Loren Long, and Gennady Spirin have illustrated magnificently, far better than Madonna’s clunky prose deserves. It’s dispiriting that these talented artists don’t have their names on the covers of the books, as illustrators of children’s books usually do. I can only assume they were well-compensated for this small sacrifice.

Spirin’s paintings in particular are splendid.³ His illustrations for Yakov and the Seven Thieves are complex and multilayered; some pages look like illuminated manuscripts, others like Renaissance paintings, still others have a cartoonish appearance. What they aren’t is Jewish. Despite the fact that the story is supposed to take place in a “very small village” (a shtetl, I assume), the illustrations give us a beautifully rendered Tudor town. There isn’t a yarmulke or a set of payes to be seen, and the heroes are suspiciously blond. Don’t get me wrong, my two youngest kids are towheads, Jews come in all shapes and sizes, blah blah blah. But this particular literary genre—stultifying sanctimonious shtetl tale—usually requires at least a few grizzled beards and the odd hooked nose. And the women are not generally attired in hoop skirts.

I could be wrong in assuming that Yakov and the Seven Thieves is supposed to be Jewish, despite its Hasidic roots. Perhaps only some of us—those of us who have compelled entire classrooms of children to listen as we read them Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins yet again, injecting enough “diversity” to justify another year’s worth of Christmas carols and gingerbread houses—would even think the book is Jewish at all. Oddly, The English Roses is more Jewish. The poor little pretty girl is named Binah, and she spends her time chopping onions, peeling potatoes, and scaling fish. She also calls her father Papa and wears a shmatte on her head.

I doubt, however, that The English Roses will be added to the list of approved reading material kept by the world’s Jewish grandmothers. Neither will Mr. Peabody’s Apples, although arguably it has the simplest and clearest of Jewish morals, and that feather pillow is a nice metaphor. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if Yakov and the Seven Thieves becomes a staple of Hanukkah gift-giving. It’s a muddled and simplistic story (“when we turn away from our naughty behavior and embrace good deeds, as the thieves did with their prayers, we are turning the key and unlocking the gates of heaven”) but the illustrations are lovely and the title sounds like those of all the other boring Jewish storybooks. It might even be sold in synagogue bookstores and at Jewish book fairs every November. Bubbe will wrap it in navy blue paper stamped with silver stars of David, and little Hannah and Zachary will tear open their package with eager anticipation. They’ll read the book once, and toss it onto the shelf with all the others she’s given them over the years. In a little while, their mother will donate it to the library. At which point Bubbe will say, “Did you lose that Madonna book I gave you? Don’t worry, I bought you another copy. Happy Hanukkah.”

¹I won’t pretend to know much about Kabbalah, either the Los Angeles version or the one that only married, male scholars of Torah and Talmud over the age of 40 are permitted to study. I don’t know from Gershom Scholem or from Rabbi Philip Berg, so I’ve got some nerve, really, being judgmental enough to slap those quotation marks around the word. But when the Kabbalah Centre website is flogging anti-stress candles and online Zohar classes it’s hard not to feel like Margaret Cho might have had a point when she referred to it as “Scientology with yoga.”

²I imagine that the moral Madonna wanted to get across was that you should be kind and generous because you can never know the circumstances of another’s life. Why she thought the story of a girl ostracized because of her beauty might accomplish this probably has something to do with the bizarre circumstances of being fabulously successful and famous, yet nonetheless in very close touch with one’s capacity for pain. It’s hard to be rich. Trust her, she knows.

³Although what’s with the biographical note about having been born on Christmas Day?