Planned Parenthood probably shouldn’t declare complete victory yet: it will be interesting to see how well new grant applications are fulfilled (and you can rest assured we will have an answer, as they will be watched closely). In another sense, though, Planned Parenthood had this major organization affirm its legitimacy; got people talking again about the vast panoply of services it provides for women’s health; and raised $650,000 (!!) in the 24 hours following Komen’s first announcement. And good on Hadassah for joining the chorus of Komen supporters expressing their concern and outrage—outrage that, given what a P.R. fiasco this has been for the breast cancer group, probably won’t immediately subside.

UPDATE: Hadassah just sent out a statement. It reads, in part:

Hadassah is proud to continue our longstanding role as an advocate for a woman’s right to choose and a strong supporter in the advancement of women’s health. There is no time to waste. Komen should never again allow this type of controversy to erode the integrity of its well-known and much-admired name in fundraising for breast cancer treatment research and awareness.

Hadassah applauds the millions of women who have united in a shared message to ensure that together, women will continue to receive much needed services and that our focus on women’s health will be continuously strengthened, never derailed again.

Earlier: How Will Pro-Choice Hadassah React to Komen?
Komen Pulls Planned Parenthood Funding

Hadassah has long been a social and political advocate for a woman’s right to choose and a strong supporter in the advancement of women’s health, particularly regarding those issues involving breast health and the treatment of and search for a cure for breast cancer.

As a two-time winner in the battle against breast cancer myself, as a supporter of both Komen and Planned Parenthood, and as an advocate for reproductive freedom, I am disappointed that the controversy surrounding Komen’s decision to discontinue its modest funding of Planned Parenthood has become such a distraction that it could endanger our collective dedication to the important issues surrounding women’s health. There is no time to waste in our commitment to the fundamental issues of women’s health, breast cancer and a woman’s right to choose.

A spokesperson referred me to this as Hadassah’s statement on the matter. Left unsaid: Whom does Natan blame for “the controversy”—Komen, for pulling its funding, or Planned Parenthood, for providing abortions? One would assume the former, given Hadassah’s strong support for a “woman’s right to choose.” Which begs the follow-up: Will Hadassah, as a major ally and funder, request that Komen restore its Planned Parenthood funding, on threat of losing some of Hadassah’s? That would seem like the logical next step.

Earlier: Komen Pulls Planned Parenthood Funding
Hadassah: Start Annual Breast Exams at 40

As Jill Lepore reported recently, Planned Parenthood actually began much the same way Komen did. Though its founder, Margaret Sanger, was not Jewish, its original receptionist was fluent in Yiddish and it opened on the Lower East Side to serve poor Italian and Jewish women. Its first handbills were translated into Italian and Yiddish; its first landlord was named Rabinowitz, and he gave them a discount because he liked what they did. Later, in the 1960s, Planned Parenthood grew thanks to the efforts of Jewish president Alan F. Guttmacher.

But here’s the difference: those who most need Komen are represented by the people who run Komen; those who most need Planned Parenthood—poor women, including the African-Americans whom Guttmacher was reaching out to—are not. Despite depending on the donations of the wealthy (and government funding), Planned Parenthood altruistically goes beyond its natural constituency. Komen, with this decision, appears not to be, and in fact seems increasingly concerned with rich women, who might be able to afford their own care. “Meet Women Whose Lives Have Been Saved By Early Breast Cancer Screenings,” reads Planned Parenthood’s homepage. There may be fewer to meet in the future because of this decision.

AP Exclusive: Amid Abortion Debate, Komen Cancer Charity Halting Grants to Planned Parenthood [AP/WP]
Related: Birthright [The New Yorker]
Earlier: Pink Is Jewish

“Democratization,” because breast cancer itself is not democratic. Though of course not even close to an exclusively Jewish issue, it is a disproportionately Jewish one. One in 40 women of Ashkenazic descent has a genetic mutation that greatly increases her chance of getting breast cancer, as a result of which Ashkenazic women are subject to stricter screening standards and are disproportionately afflicted with the illness. Susan G. Komen, Brinker’s sister, certainly did not die of breast cancer because she was Jewish, and nor did Brinker get it, too (her sister inspired the foundation but, according to Wikipedia, she herself is a survivor, a fact you don’t find in her official biographies). However, it isn’t pure chance that by far the nation’s leading breast cancer foundation was inspired and founded by two sisters in Illinois born to the name Goodman. (Interestingly, one of the foundation’s most controversial stances is its emphasis on screenings, which many say are unnecessary for much of the population but are more frequently recommended, again, for women of Ashkenazic descent.)

I remember, before my bar mitzvah, our rabbi telling my Hebrew School class that we should not only consider donating a portion of the gifts we would receive to charities, but that we should especially emphasize Jewish charities—because, he said, nobody other than Jews is going to give to them. Brinker, it seems, has happened upon the corollary to this: where a cause affects Jews more than other groups, you can “democratize” the cause and leverage a much larger constituency to help your comparatively small group. It’s a useful lesson, I imagine, for other ethnic groups, and an interesting paradigm through which to view the ways Jews have made other issues of special importance to them—like the Jewish state—relevant to other communities.

Welcome, Fans, to the Pinking of America [NYT]

My life, after my mother died, was one long chain of doubts. Every day I thought of more things I should have done or said to her to demonstrate my love. It’s not as if I didn’t have the opportunity. Her death came almost exactly a year after her breast-cancer diagnosis, and I spent her last six months caring for her. I brought the garbage can when she was throwing up, helped her bathe and use the toilet. I told her I loved her a lot. I held her hand when she died, and I spoke at her funeral. Still, it’s impossible to look back and not have regrets. I think of the times I became irritated after a long day of doctor’s appointments; I wonder if I should have lobbied for hospice care earlier, to save her from having to endure more painful treatments, or if I should have pushed her doctors harder to try different drugs or protocols to buy us more time. And there is no end to the number of times I have wanted to reach back in time and slap my smug 16-year-old self for the hundreds of ways, great and small, that I was cruel and ungrateful. I was a teenager and it was expected, but still—it’s horrifying to look back on.

So, on Mother’s Day I’m filled with regret, but I’m also inevitably filled with rage. I know they’re straw men, but I can’t help feeling angry at the marketers and advertisers who assume we all have lively, lovely mothers who like flowers and French toast. Some of us never knew our mothers, or had mothers who walked out on us, or disowned us, or abused drugs, or abused us. Mother’s Day seems like a thumb in the eye of everyone whose mother is not typical or not alive.

This year, Mother’s Day happens to fall on the same day as the eve of Yom Hazikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, when the nation pauses to mark the loss of Israel’s soldiers and victims of terror. With the time difference, it means that as mothers in New York are sitting down to pancakes and receiving tulips, families in Israel will be lighting yahrzeit candles. On Yom Hazikaron radio stations play songs about losing comrades in battle and friends in explosions, and TV programs eulogize the dead. In the evening and again in the morning, a siren wails for a full minute across the country. Cars stop on the streets and highways, and their drivers get out. Conversations halt. People stand at attention silently; some weeping.

By the time most Israelis are teenagers, they are already experienced in dealing with trauma and loss. The mandatory draft means that nearly everyone has a friend or relative in the armed forces at any given time. The intensity and elegance with which Israel performs grief still moves me.

Mother’s Day couldn’t seem farther from Yom Hazikaron, but it turns out that it didn’t start that way. The 19th-century poet and feminist Julia Ward Howe, best known for penning the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” began crusading for a Mother’s Day for Peace in the wake of the horrific devastation of the Civil and Franco-Prussian Wars. Around the same time, Anna Reeves Jarvis was advocating for a Mother’s Work Day with a similar purpose. When Jarvis died, her daughter, also named Anna Jarvis, took up the mantle. But the second Jarvis was more concerned with honoring mothers and less concerned with promoting peace. (There’s a rumor that Anna was motivated in part by guilt; she and her mother apparently had an epic fight and didn’t have the chance to reconcile before the elder Jarvis died.) She successfully lobbied Congress for her cause (no one wants to be on the record against mothers), and in 1914 Woodrow Wilson signed a joint resolution that made the second Sunday in May officially a day to recognize mothers. Anna Jarvis soon became disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday she had helped create, noting that “I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit.”

How strange to think that Mother’s Day, this day of greeting cards, wanted to be the thing that help end wars and the need for Memorial Days.

It’s a cruel coincidence that Mother’s Day and Yom Hazikaron overlap this year. They are very different holidays, of course, but I am struck by how sharp the contrast is as they both grapple with our desire to show love. In Israel, Yom Hazikaron functions as a placeholder for a country that lives constantly with grief. It’s a day when a parent whose child was on the wrong bus 10 years ago can shed tears over the loss in public, unconcerned that someone will tell her to move on or get over it. In America our love for our mothers is primarily demonstrated with gifts that acknowledge that our mothers are in dire need for pampering (massages, perfume, flowers, and the like). Mother’s Day tends to be about stuff; Yom Hazikaron is about recognizing pain.

Slate recently ran a survey on loss and noted in the summary of results that “one of the hardest aspects of mourning is feeling that one’s own grief is somehow not valid, not ‘normal,’ or has gone unrecognized.” On Mother’s Day, when the entire country seems to be reveling in maternal joy, it can feel like those of us with dead mothers are simply invisible. Yom Hazikaron wouldn’t be a holiday for me even if I did live in Israel—my mother wasn’t a soldier, or a terror victim—but it’s comforting all the same to know that Israel has a national way to recognize grief, to validate the pain of an entire country.

Mother’s Day assumes the best, even when so many of us have experienced the worst. Yom Hazikaron assumes the best, too, but acknowledges the exquisite ache of grief, the endless waves with which it hits you.

This year on Mother’s Day I’m leaving town. I won’t be at a restaurant watching other families have brunch, but I won’t be at a ceremony to mark Yom Hazikaron either. I’m heading to the forest, to hike and sit and hope I hear something like a siren.

Tamar Fox is an associate editor at MyJewishLearning.com.

In my sophomore year of college, my mother died. Her illness was long, breast cancer that played hide and seek. My grandmother, my co-parent since my parents divorced when I was 7, collapsed under the weight of her daughter’s death. With her went the ability to pay the mortgage on our house.

In the end, our house was foreclosed on. Weeks before, I was told to collect everything—furniture, papers, clothes—I wanted; everything else would be sold or thrown away. I took very little; I had no room for the rocking chair, the loveseat, the vases, the china. For the most part, I don’t regret the things left behind, but although I wasn’t there to see it, I’m haunted by the image of the contents of our home being thrown into a trash bin, leaving the green Victorian an empty coffin.

Walter Benjamin wrote, “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to things. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” I visited my grandmother often in the nursing home where she lived before her death in 2007 at the age of 96. Our conversations during that time orbited around two things—how much she wanted to leave the nursing home, and the location of her antiques.

My grandmother began working at the age of 9, at a now-defunct department store in Springfield. She collected her antiques slowly, strategically, filling first her small apartment and then our large house. There were ornate sofas and chairs, curio cabinets, lamps, tea sets, jewelry, picture frames, dolls. This was meant to be our inheritance, my mother’s and mine, in a world where the order of death would be different. When my friends visited the house, they seemed convinced that behind this museum existed a profound aesthetic and enormous wealth, but it simply wasn’t true. For my mother, my grandmother’s collecting was a nuisance, a sign of an old woman’s decline, the misplaced locus of her love and affection.

During the last years of her life, my grandmother became excruciatingly paranoid. She was convinced that my aunt and uncle were pilfering her antiques, hoarding them for their own children, when in reality, they both used the term “crap” liberally to refer to her collections.

The foreclosure freed us from it all, but my grandmother, beset by grief from losing my mother and confused and hurt by no longer being able to care for herself independently, obsessed about her possessions every day, with no idea what had really happened to them. My aunt, uncle, and I resolved to never tell her, and so I lied, athletically. I told her the antiques decorated my dorm rooms and apartments, I pretended to know the exact locations of things, the story of their journey from our old house to my new life.

My mother and grandmother meant to leave me objects when they died, objects that would provide me with money, with safety, with the knowledge that someone had wanted me to be taken care of, to know that I was loved. What remains instead are notions about money that are twisted, yet enduring.

One: Not having money is shameful. My mother worked hard to create the illusion that we had money and to deflect the reality, even if it meant hiding it from me. She became a single mother when she was 40, after she and my father divorced. Her shame was always palpable; not having money meant that she was a failure, asking for help meant that she couldn’t take care of me, that she wasn’t responsible, that she had made bad choices. I see her situation as complicated by these factors and her illness, but I’ve still managed to replicate her emotions about money. I’m surrounded by people with money, and so I avoid open discussion of my own financial state, although I’m quick to point out the overwhelming classism in the Jewish community. I’ve been willfully financially ignorant, broke beyond comprehension, debt free, well appointed, and terrified, all in the 12 years since my mother died. Ironically, I’ve also only worked for nonprofits, and I’ve chosen to live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, so maybe, ultimately, I don’t want to have money. It would mean breaking the cycle, becoming someone else.

Two: Home is fleeting, and money will never be able to buy it. I’ve avoided returning to the town where I grew up, and when that’s been impossible, I’ve been sure to avoid driving past our old house, convincing myself that it had been demolished. Last year, on a whim, I Google-mapped it, and there it was, painted a different color, obscured by overgrown grass in the front yard. I wonder who lives there, if there are any remains of my mother, my grandmother, or me.

The places I’ve lived since then have never felt real, or secure. Transience brings me a strange comfort, and I almost always live in small spaces that other people probably wouldn’t tolerate. I know home can disappear quickly, like everything else.

Three: Possessions are dangerous and meaningless. I think sometimes of my mother’s orange house sweater, which hung on the back of her chair at the kitchen table. As far as I know, it remained there until the house was cleaned of its contents. Out of everything left behind, it’s that sweater that I wish I had taken with me, even if years later, the smell of her would be gone. These days, I make it a point to not be trapped by things, to not be defined by the use or the accumulation of them.

Ideas about money are really just ideas about who you are and where you have been. One of the worst things about the cycle of financial need is the inability to conceive of another reality, the perpetual feeling of being at a dead end, the bald, quivering fear. There must be an opportunity for interception, reversal, potential.

There’s a Jewish saying about deriving benefits from the illumination of the Hanukkah menorah; you should not even use the light to count your money. I imagine the three of us hovering around the flickering, inconsistent light of the candles that burn out quickly, struggling to see ourselves and our lives clearly.

Chanel Dubofsky is a writer living in New York City.

• Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad basically said yesterday that Palestinians would declare statehood in the West Bank in 2011, and the United Nations would approve it. [JPost]

• Protesting Israelis clashed with Israeli Arabs in the town of Umm el-Fahm, which is in Israel proper. [AP/NYT]

• The walls of the Old City of Jerusalem are lit in pink in honor of breat cancer awareness. [JTA]

• How Delaware candidate Christine O’Donnell is affecting the neighboring Pennsylvania’s Senate race, an important proxy war between different Israel organizations. [WP]

• President Obama appeared on the The Daily Show in advance of this Saturday’s rally on the Mall; host Jon Stewart pressed him on what he campaigned on versus what he had been able to accomplish. [NYT]

Hadassah Says Mammograms Should Start at 40 [JTA]

But now, as a regular visitor to Israel, I see a different country, especially in Tel Aviv, a city that has pioneered a free-flowing hedonistic lifestyle that promotes free expression in art and fashion. The campus of Tel Aviv University offers a parade of inked bodies. Which is partly why, though I’m not an Israeli, I decided to join Israel’s tattooed ranks during a visit this summer. But, unlike the bulk of Tel Aviv’s inked masses, I’d recently survived a harrowing ordeal, and a tattoo seemed as good a way as any to mark it.

The Jewish taboo against tattooing is culled from a verse in Leviticus: “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves: I am the Lord.” There is a great deal of additional rabbinical commentary supporting this prohibition, including the notion that the human body is created in the image of God and, thus, to tamper with it is a kind of blasphemy. In recent times, the taboo has become more rooted in contemporary history than in biblical injunction—linked as it is to memory of the Holocaust. The sight of survivors’ tattoos traumatized a nation and a people, as it should have. A friend of mine whose grandparents perished in Auschwitz nearly threw his oldest son out of the house on their kibbutz when the son came home with a tattoo.

After making an appointment at Kipod on King George and Allenby Streets, I had to choose a design. Until I entered the tattoo studio, I had little sense of the final marking. But I knew where I wanted it to be (my upper right shoulder), and I knew that I wanted something that had a somewhat generic elegance to it, since it and I would grow old together.

I came equipped with pictures of lotuses and roses, different shapes and colors, but it wasn’t until I sat down in the studio and looked through the picture books that I decided on a final design: a rose with a sense of movement that makes it look like it is budding right on my back. And I chose the color black; Tel Aviv women may not dress in black from head to toe, but me and my fellow New Yorkers are persistently robed in it, and so it seemed to make sense to me to have my tattoo match the rest of my wardrobe.

The operative word in the previous sentence, though, is “chose.” As it turns out, my new rose is the third tattoo on my body—but the only one I asked for. Sixteen years ago, I was diagnosed with treatable breast cancer, and I had to go through a six-month radiation treatment. Prior to this treatment, the doctors outlined the area to be radiated with two tiny tattoos. Some women get these removed after their treatment, though it’s advisable to keep them in case you have a recurrence so that a doctor will see these telltale signs when considering further treatment.

Sometimes, I stare in the mirror and try to smudge away the unsmudgeable—these navy blue dots that appear intermixed with my natural body markings. These tattoos were not by choice; they mark an attack on my body and on my life by a deadly disease. As fixtures on my chest, they are reminders of the disease and of my triumph over it; but either way, they are reminders of a time in my life when I was out of control.

My new tattoo is something I did for me. It has no political or religious significance for me, nor does it show disrespect for my body, as the Leviticus passage implies. Rather it is a sign of respect for my body—and for me—to create a unique design on my skin that is not harmful. It doesn’t connote something dark or destructive. It’s about my own personal choice, making a decision for which I was fully in control. It’s playful and distinctive, like the city where I had it done, born from the past but not wedded to it, influenced by its own people’s history but not fated to relive it.

Jo-Ann Mort writes frequently about Israel for a variety of publications.

Armed with this knowledge, Gessen was forced to make some nearly impossible decisions about her future: Should she take the radical step of having her breasts and ovaries removed to prevent illnesses that might never come? If so, when (given that she was still breastfeeding her daughter, and had considered having another child)?

In her book, Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, Gessen writes about these dilemmas, and about those that others have faced, as genetic testing shines a new—and not always welcome—light on our futures. She speaks with Nextbook about the scientific, philosophical, and emotional implications of this complex new way of understanding ourselves.