Lerner, now 34 and married with a child of her own, is a descendant of Yom Tov Lipmann Heller (1579-1654), better known as the Tosfot Yom Tov (the title of his tract on the Mishnah), who was the chief rabbi of Prague and went on to head the rabbinical court of Krakow. According to Lerner family lore, he declared that turkeys were verboten and that none of his descendants should eat the animal. Lerner’s extended family continues to observe his edict, though they wholeheartedly embrace turkey kitsch when the fourth Thursday of November rolls around.

The debate over whether turkeys were kosher didn’t emerge until the birds, indigenous to the Americas, were introduced in Europe in the 16th century. Fish and animals must meet certain specifications in order to be deemed kosher (fins and scales; hoofed feet, chews its cud). For birds, by contrast, the Torah simply lists those that Jews are not allowed to eat, and these are mainly birds of prey. Turkeys were not on that list—they weren’t known at the time. But according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, the bird was ultimately accepted as kosher: a really big bird.

Yet the Tosfot Yom Tov refused to budge. Lerner admits she doesn’t actually think turkey is trayf. Rather, her refusal to eat comes out of respect and pride. “It’s a family thing far more than a Jewish thing,” she clarifies. And, she admits, it helps that her husband is a vegetarian.

But what if we’ve understood violence all wrong? What if we’re much more likely to use violence not against those we perceive as others, strange and foreign, but against those who are most similar to us, our friends and neighbors and kin?

That’s the thrilling idea that Russell Jacoby, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, entertains in his new book, Bloodlust. “Despite an ocean of words about violence—its origins, course, and prevention,” he writes, “something has gone virtually unrecognized: its primal form is fratricide.” And it begins, of course, with Cain and Abel, history’s first recorded murder. Jacoby spoke to Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz. [Running time: 27:02]

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Leaning back in an armchair, Aharon’s father begins in Hebrew, and Aharon quickly follows in English.

“Before I was born, my mother got pregnant and decided to have an abortion,” she says, rewording the story as though she were the one telling it. “They were young and didn’t have any money.” One afternoon, on their way to an abortion clinic, the couple sat waiting at a bus stop, full of apprehension. An old Moroccan woman sat down next to Aharon’s mother and knew instinctively that something was wrong. “You are not God,” the woman told Aharon’s mother after she found out what was troubling the couple. “Go, go home, for your own good.” As Aharon’s father tells the anecdote, he mimes the old woman, waving his arm as if shooing away a dog.

“They took it as an omen,” Aharon says. The couple never got on the bus.

Years later, when Aharon became pregnant in 2005, she stood at the same way station as her parents, figuratively speaking, paralyzed by fear. But she had no husband and no wise old woman to make her decision for her. She was broke, alone, and didn’t know what to do. A friend told her about an organization called Efrat, a nonprofit organization in Jerusalem that seeks to prevent Jewish women from having abortions. Started by Holocaust survivors shortly after World War II, Efrat is founded on the belief that no Jewish woman should have to abort a child because of money troubles. The organization will help a needy mother like Aharon financially for the first year of her child’s life. To many Israelis, Efrat’s mission sounds suspiciously pro-life, but Efrat likes to see itself as “pro-choice,” more an instrument of education than coercion.

But the Efrat approach is a hard sell, not unlike the efforts of anti-abortion groups in the United States. Images of developing fetuses line the inside of pamphlets that Efrat distributes to women who are seeking help. One cover pictures a stork dangling a blanketed baby from its beak. A question in big, black letters stands out above the bird: Mommy, why won’t you let me live?

“We show [the woman] information, show her she has a human being,” says Eli Schussheim, who took over the organization in 1978, when abortion first became legal in Israel. “The fourth week, the baby has a heart, the sixth a brain, the eighth, it has all of its organs. It awakes a natural feeling in a mother.”

While abortion in Israel is usually not the hot-button issue it is in America, it has lately become a focus of political controversy. At the start of March, a liberal member of the Knesset put forth a bill to abolish Israel’s abortion committees, made up of doctors and social workers who review individual cases and approve legal abortions. The bill did not pass. Efforts to change the status quo have also come from the right. At the end of 2009, Israel’s chief rabbis sent letters to every rabbi in the country, asking them to forbid their congregants from aborting a child.

Schussheim of Efrat goes even further. He sees abortion in Israel as a kind of Holocaust of Jews’ own making—a plague, he says, that causes more loss of life than wars or natural disasters. In his view Efrat is a vital effort to preserve and multiply a diminished population and to ensure that Israel remains fundamentally Jewish. “After we lost millions of people, I think we should do more to encourage the birthrate,” he says. “We should do more to save the lives we have already started.”

While Schussheim argues that what Efrat offers is education, Irit Rosenblum, the head of an Israeli family-rights organization called New Family, thinks the group’s agenda is a lot more insidious. One of Efrat’s most virulent critics, Rosenblum advocates for civil marriage and women’s rights in Israel. According to her, Efrat is invading women’s privacy and cajoling them into a decision. In 2004, a member of the Knesset attempted to outlaw Efrat’s existence, calling its work equal to harassment. “They are trying to tempt [the woman], to pay her,” Rosenblum says. “The temptation around it is very ugly, I think.”

Efrat’s cramped office is tucked away on a tree-lined street in residential Jerusalem. The floor is covered in industrial gray carpet, and the wooden desks are worn and shabby. But against this colorless background, hundreds of photographs showcased on the walls leap out vibrantly. Photographs of the children that Efrat has “saved,” as it says, are pinned to every inch of every wall, and laminated letters of thanks accompany many of them.

“They showed me more than I wanted to know,” says Aharon. When she came to Efrat, she was 25 and living very hand-to-mouth. She had just moved to Arizona to work in customer relations for an Israeli company, because she had always wanted to live in the United States. She hadn’t had her period in nine weeks, but the women at work said that was normal when transitioning to such a hot, dry place. Eventually, she went to a doctor. Her fears were confirmed.

“I can’t be pregnant,” she recalls telling a friend.

“I’m sorry, Mali, but you are,” the friend said. Aharon was not in a steady relationship, but she knew who the father was: her on-again, off-again flame of seven years—the tumultuous love of her life. They had slept together the night before she left Israel for the United States, but he was living the life of a bachelor. What was she going to do?

Aharon returned to Israel and moved in with her mother. She knew she couldn’t have an abortion—she’d already had one before, when she 22. Three months into that pregnancy, her doctors could not detect a heartbeat, and she’d made the decision to abort. “When he was gone, I was glad he was gone,” says Aharon. “I kind of thought, ‘Good, he doesn’t have a heartbeat. Fine.’ ” But the abortion ultimately caused more emotional fallout than she expected. “A year and a half later, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” she says. “I felt so sorry.” She wonders now that if maybe she had waited, something might have changed. Maybe the baby would have been healthy.

According to a recent report from Israel’s health ministry, some 20,000 legal abortions occur yearly in Israel. A New Family poll conducted this year estimated that another estimated 25,000 are done illegally. “We have the possibility, every year, to save 45,000 children,” says Schussheim. “And I must tell you—we have not one case of regret.”

Efrat gave her reassurance that everything would be OK, she says. And when she delivered her healthy daughter, Yuval, the organization gave her everything she was promised—a crib, a stroller, a year’s supply of diapers and baby food, and $300 a month. “I needed that money,” Aharon says. “I had nothing left here.”

Tied into Schussheim’s demographic concerns are religious concerns. Schussheim believes Israel’s Chief Rabbinate should be involved in the abortion committees along with doctors and social workers, for the sanctity of life is a fundamentally religious concern. Unless the mother’s life is in danger, abortion is forbidden. “The rabbinate must be involved, like the pope,” says Schussheim. “This is something very serious, and this issue is very important in this religion.”

“According to Judaism, this is an order—to give birth to children,” says Rosenblum. She feels that religion plays too prominent a role in the discussion of abortion in Israel. “Religion is religion and it shouldn’t be involved in the state,” she says. “But unfortunately, in Israel, there is no separation.”

Although Aharon says her decision to keep Yuval wasn’t directly religious—“I just know killing is wrong,” Aharon says—she does say her traditionalist Jewish family raised her to believe that abortion is immoral. The members of the family are religious to varying degrees: Her mother covers her hair, her nephew wears a tall, black hat, and her younger sister wears long skirts. And the sheer size of Aharon’s family exemplifies a value that has long been handed down in Jewish tradition.

As plates are cleared from the table in Aharon’s sister’s home, the children’s energy does not seem to flag. Yuval and her cousins run around the living room in circles. But Aharon brings out dessert, and that does the trick. Yuval stops at her mother’s side, eyeing the chocolate cake. Aharon reaches for her and sits her down at the table. She has big brown eyes, coffee-colored skin, and frizzy hair. She looks more Brazilian than Israeli, Aharon jokes.

After the meal, Aharon sits on the roof deck of her sister’s home, the salty ocean breeze whipping through her hair. “About two weeks ago, on a crazy morning, I thought: I wish I was single—no kids, no husband,” she says with a smile. “I could just pick myself up, pack a bag, and go.” She pauses for a moment and then shakes her head.

“But there is no way I’d live without her,” she says. “It’s just not worth it.”

Simone Gorrindo, an alumna of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, is a freelance journalist and editorial assistant at Amazon’s Kindle Singles.

In fact, on paper (that description) aside, the movie sounded appealing. The plot (the four Meyerowitz siblings prepare for their father’s 70th birthday dinner in the wake of the just-published-by-youngest-son-family-tell-all) seemed new and different enough to sustain a funny, lively narrative. And the cast! Rainn Wilson (of Dwight Schrute fame), Dexter star Michael C. Hall, and sharp-tongued comedian Sarah Silverman play variously troubled siblings dealing with the aftermath of youngest brother Nathan (charming-even-though-his-character-is-a-total-jerk Ben Schwartz)’s bestselling book, Peep World. Sadly, the characters fall flat in four individual, divergent story lines that aren’t fleshed out enough. On the bright side, at least the problem isn’t the Jewish thing!

Sarah Silverman’s character, Cheri Meyerowitz, is the most stereotyped, and “Jewish,” of the ensemble, and she goes all out—as perhaps only she can—to embody middle-child Cheri in all her bratty, obnoxious whininess. It is truly irritating, as I imagine Silverman thoroughly intended, to watch her failed-actress character shriek at her mother and demand back-up her in her libel lawsuit against Nathan. In Cheri’s defense, the film adaptation of Peep World (the film based on the novel within the movie, all with the same name—got that?) is filming outside her window, and the actress playing the film version of Cheri is her father’s new girlfriend. Tough times.

But aside from the stereotyped Cheri (and her inexplicable Jews for Jesus pal, played by Steven Tobolowsky), there is little reference to Judaism throughout the film, and I don’t think any mention at all that the family is Jewish, save for their surname. Cue sigh of relief.

Also worth mentioning is the stellar supporting cast, who play characters more realistic and dimensional than the Meyerowitz siblings. Judy Greer, whose sidekick presence alone makes any film worth seeing, is one of the highlights. Plus, her character is married to Michael C. Hall’s: Awesome couple alert. Taraji P. Henson and Kate Mara shine as Wilson and Schwartz’s unlikely dinner companions.

While I took solace in the fact that not every character in the film (directed by Barry W. Blaustein, who directed The Ringer and wrote Coming to America) was a Jewish stereotype, I wish Peep World had stepped up its narrative game and developed the main characters more fully.

Peep World Trailer

My wife is a Jew. My son is a Jew. I am not. Nearly all of my closest friends live in various states of mixed marriages, and if you know any Jews—any urban-dwelling non-Orthodox Jews, that is—it’s nearly impossible that you don’t know at least a few mixed couples. My mother-in-law can recall going to classes in her small-town Ontario synagogue in the 1950s where “Intermarriage is the Second Holocaust” was written on the chalkboard. The attempt to prevent Jewish intermarriage may be the most epically failed social-engineering experiment of all time. The most recent National Jewish Population Survey set the mixed-marriage rate for Jewish newlyweds in North America at 47 percent, but that was 2002, and the rate was accelerating. It is likely that more than half of Jewish newlyweds in North America today are marrying non-Jews. The response from institutional Judaism varies from outright horror to sighing acceptance, but the sighs and the horror don’t matter. Fearing intermarriage is like fearing weather, equally pointless and silly. It is much better to prepare. We are seeing the emergence of a category of gentile that is historically unique: millions of non-Jews who are attached to Jews but not affiliated with Jews. The emergence of a large group of these attached goys (goyim, to be precise) is a highly significant social development, an unprecedented development even, and it raises obvious questions: Who are the goys? What do we mean? And, of course, are we good for the Jews?

I am not going to pretend that I can give a precise definition of a goy. In biblical Hebrew, the word means “nation,” and in Yiddish it is simply “gentile.” Even if the term does have a faint pejorative sense, we don’t have to go very far to reclaim “goy.” It’s a word that Jews use to describe non-Jews, and that’s the sense I mean: non-Jews in a Jewish context. Converts don’t count, obviously. I have resisted conversion because I cannot say that I believe in God, but several atheistic friends have converted without this quibble of mine, spurred by the robust atheism of many Jews who dutifully attend synagogue. A rabbi I once knew told me that Catholics make the best converts to Judaism: They are already used to lighting candles for reasons they only dimly understand. But the converts have put their money where their mouths are, and who am I to doubt their full inclusion among the Chosen People?

Goyishness may at first seem like a variety of philo-Semitism, but it isn’t really. You occasionally meet goys who fall in love with everything Jewish, particularly early in their relationships with Jews. I myself definitely fell into this category, reading Rashi and Pirkei Avot, going to klezmer concerts, and so on. But it soon passed. A certain brand of clichéd philo-Semitism is well-established in North America, of course: Woody Allen and matzo-ball soup and mother-in-law jokes and the rest of it. Pop culture revels in these stereotypes. Political and religious leaders indulge them. Among literary types, they’re commonplace. The clichés are mostly harmless, if sometimes strikingly inaccurate. (Anyone with a Jamaican, Chinese, WASP, or Italian mother can attest that Jewish mothers have no monopoly on the deployment of guilt, for example.) But philo-Semitism can be dangerous, too, particularly in Europeans. Philo-Semites tend to believe that Jews, because of their unique history, are better or should be better than other people, which is a hideous idea; it explains why Israel is held to a completely different standard of conduct than any other country in the world. (Even as a write this, I realize how much it reveals the peculiar position I am in as a goy: I consider myself so intertwined with the Jews, though I am not in any way Jewish, that I distrust Jew-lovers.)

Goyishness is a kind of belonging, with separation—actually a rather pleasant position to be in. Goys are a hyphenated identity in a world of hyphenated identities, pioneers of epiphyte culture. In my son’s kindergarten at a good public school in a nice area of Toronto, almost every kid is half-something; if his class is anything to go by, the world is filling up with black girls with green eyes and blonde hair and rambunctious half-Korean, half-Italian boys. Jews are at the forefront of this hyphenation. There’s a tendency, in the wider discussion of intermarriage, to assume that the phenomenon is something that has happened or is happening to Judaism, an outside force requiring evasive maneuvers. The truth is that the rise of goys in Jewish life over the past 50 years has emerged out of realities within Judaism and not outside them. Partly, the Jewish tendency to exogamy has emerged naturally from the cosmopolitanism of people who have made their homes in the biggest, and most mixed, cities of the late 20th and early 21st century. The institutional incoherency of Judaism has also done its bit. Goys fall between the cracks, and Judaism is full of cracks (“that’s how the light gets in,” according to Leonard Cohen). In Rome, in the year 1555, Pope Paul IV decreed that the Jews of the city could have only one synagogue. Instead of banding together under the impetus of the political nightmare and coming to a theological compromise, the Jews of Rome set up six different spaces for worship within the same synagogue. That magnificent fractiousness means that the disapproval of any given rabbi is more or less irrelevant; if you want a rabbi who approves, just walk a little farther down the counter. When my mother-in-law heard “Intermarriage is the Second Holocaust,” the message failed to sink in, at least in part, because the rabbi who wrote it down was not an authority the way, say, a Catholic priest is a conduit to God.

My experience of rabbis has been like my experience of priests of all types and kinds: I find their presumption of spiritual and moral authority hilarious and somewhat grotesque. Most rabbis—not all—have tended to look at me, when we’re introduced, rather the way a vegetarian looks at a fat man eating a bacon double-cheeseburger—with a mixture of beleaguered tolerance and suppressed abjection. There have been several who have spoken to my wife and not to me. But who cares? Where intermarriage is concerned, they don’t matter anyway. If they mattered, would the majority of Jews be marrying non-Jews? No. For day-to-day affairs, Jewish society is run by the bubbes. And while the rabbis disapprove of intermarriage, for the most part the bubbes have made peace with it. And they are who matter.

The lack of institutional structure—the cracks in the system that have allowed intermarriage to blossom—have another consequence for the lives of goys; our households necessarily work idiosyncratically. This may seem like a minor point, but its consequences are vast. In general the idiosyncrasy of the contemporary marriage is one of the least understood and most powerful forces shaping the future. The fact that your family doesn’t have to be like other people’s families, that in a sense you can’t be like other people, is transforming private life, and for everybody, not just those of us in mixed marriages. The plethora of magazine and newspaper articles about trends in family life doesn’t establish any pattern other than the constant shifting of the patterns—family life has become an always-turning kaleidoscope. The mixed Jewish family is at the center of that transformation: We are among the clearest examples of how identity has become a choice, rather than an irreducible substance.

When my son’s Sunday school classes are finished, we go out and eat bacon for lunch—my son and I but not my wife. When my wife and son go out for Yom Kippur services, I stay home to bake the lasagnas for the break fast. (This is a side benefit to having a goy around.) We have decided, for reasons that are more or less unrelated to Judaism, to have a digital Shabbat in our house—no screens of any kind for one day a week. And when we decided to take this step we chose to block off Friday night to Saturday night for the holiday, without giving it much thought. We even do 25 hours, not 24, following the principle of building a fence around the law. We build a fence around the law, which we violate simply by the existence of our family.

I know that some will find these choices distasteful—shallow playacting, reducing religious matters to mere lifestyle questions. Perhaps so. My point is that when I look around the mixed households that I know, I am amazed not by the evidence of the dissolution of Judaism but by the way Jewish practices continue to exert themselves in the lives of people whom they should properly exclude. Goys necessarily have a fluid relationship to ethnic identity. Like Barack Obama, they are going to choose who they are, whom they belong to, and who belongs to them. One consequence of the destabilization of ethnic identity is that some Jews will decide to have nothing to do with Judaism. Another consequence is that some non-Jews will decide to act like Jews. The bris for my son was the most moving event of my life. Because the man who holds the baby for the ceremony has to be a Jew, my dad couldn’t do it, so we got my wife’s grandfather’s friend, a Holocaust survivor. The ceremony combined the nonsensical with the eminently reasonable: The circumcision itself a relic from Middle Eastern shepherds dead for 5,000 years contained within a small party eight days after the birth to recognize and to celebrate the existence of a new human being. I was just happy my son was alive and that there were people around who cared.

The traditional way of viewing mixed marriage is as a threat to Jewish life, akin to the explosion of ultra-Orthodox births or the continued existential crisis of Israel. I’m not sure this view is altogether healthy. Some of us are good friends to have. Chelsea Clinton’s a goy. Mark Kelly’s one. In my experience, and I admit my evidence is entirely anecdotal, goys are much more hawkish than their partners on the question of Israel. I remember returning home from a summer job working at a children’s camp one year, and an ancient relative asked me, entirely unselfconsciously, “So, I heard last summer you were working for Jews.” Every time Israel comes on the news I hear again that tone of casual anti-Semitism she assumed we shared. Even in multicultural, boring, agreeable Toronto, the Hebrew school has security guards and computerized entry passes. Somebody wants to blow the children up. Goys know that this is not normal.

Goys, it seems obvious to me, are potentially an immense strength. They are exactly the kind of people you want for friends. God agrees with me, or at least the Torah does. It’s always Ruth who gets the attention in the wedding ceremonies between Jews and non-Jews; “Your God will be my God, your people my people” is the Corinthians 1:13 of mixed marriages. Moses’ wife, Zipporah, a goy, never gets her due. She saves his life when, in a confusing twist, God briefly decides to kill him on his way home to Egypt out of Midian; she saves him by circumcising their sons Gershom and Eliezer and placing the foreskins at his feet. Later when Aaron and Miriam complain that Moses has married a non-Jew, God punishes them by giving Miriam leprosy. Why shouldn’t contemporary goys, as invested as Zipporah, not be just as useful?

Recently, my wife and I were toying with the idea of having another baby, contemplating different kids’ names. For a boy, I suggested Simcha, which I absolutely love; it means “joy.” “A kid deserves a name his father can pronounce,” my wife countered. After Sunday school the other day, my son described the rules of building a sukkah to me. “You have to be able to see three stars through the roof,” he said. I had that feeling I so often have when new facts about Judaism are communicated to me: That is crazy and beautiful.

When my son started attending Sunday school, at first I didn’t want to go to the parent meetings and school holiday celebrations. I didn’t want that goy-meets-a-rabbi feeling. But one day, around Hanukkah, I went to pick him up and saw my folly. I realized instantly, looking over the classroom, that there’s not much difference between his Jewish class and his regular kindergarten class. My son’s best friend there is a kid whose dad is a 6-foot-6 Indonesian engineer. Another dad is a professional DJ with shoulder-length dreads. My son’s experience of learning about Judaism will not be homogenous. This is the future: a kid with ice-blue eyes and blonde hair makes friends with a couple of black sisters, and they’re all Jews.

I had another reaction, too, looking over that room of the mixed and the mixed-up. These are my people, I thought. It’s like what Bernard Malamud said at the end of “Angel Levine:” “There are Jews everywhere.” There are goys everywhere, too.

Stephen Marche is a novelist and a columnist for Esquire. His latest book, How Shakespeare Changed Everything, will be published this spring. Follow him on Twitter @StephenMarche.

Reality, however, didn’t turn out exactly as I’d expected. When my husband and I had started dating, I’d had a gut feeling that I could handle the challenges of joint-custody step-mothering. But I wasn’t ready for the challenges to be, well, so challenging. From the pile of hummus-smeared plates sitting in the sink and the school gym T-shirt that needed to be clean for the next day to the realization that mushroom risotto wasn’t an acceptable dinner option, I just wasn’t accustomed to being pulled in so many directions. Add to that the stresses of disagreements with my stepdaughters’ mother over issues big and small; the tensions regarding the girls’ split religious lives, from our Sabbath-observant household to their mother’s stridently secular home; my older stepdaughter’s teenage strife, and my younger stepdaughter’s pre-tween tantrums—life was simply intense.

We needed an escape. We needed to go somewhere, away from the edgy existence of life in two households, a place that was a blank slate for us all, preferably out of the village-like atmosphere of Israel and our southern Jerusalem neighborhood.

We took our first trip together in 2008. It was over Hanukkah vacation, and we flew to Marmaris in southwest Turkey, a cheap charter-flight destination for Israelis. I worried that the location wouldn’t be exciting enough to sustain us for four days, that there wouldn’t be enough to eat or that the wrong topics would come up in conversation.

But just the concept of a journey seemed to suffice. From the car ride to the airport and throughout our long weekend away, we succeeded in vacationing. It didn’t matter that the cool weather prevented us from swimming in the hotel’s massive outdoor pools, that the food was mostly unappetizing as well as predominantly non-kosher, or that there weren’t many sightseeing opportunities.

What we all reminisce about was an afternoon spent in the hotel hamam, the Turkish bath, where we hopped in our bathing suits between the array of pelting showerheads, steam rooms, saunas, and the bathtub-like pool. We loved heading to the hotel lobby each day to snack on the complimentary chocolate doughnuts that seemed to have been planned for the visiting Israelis who traditionally eat sufganiyot on Hanukkah. My younger stepdaughter, then 10, was thrilled to zip down the hotel’s imposing marble corridors in her new Heely sneakers, while my older stepdaughter, 16 at the time, was mortified and maybe more than a little flattered by the waiters who flirted with her in Turkish.

We lit our Hanukkah candles each night in the hotel room, giving the girls the simple gifts we’d brought with us. The girls were intrigued to create a Shabbat atmosphere in a place that felt so far from home, and the ability to experience it together, without the tensions of splitting weekends between a secular mother and observant father, made it that much more peaceful.

It was that first initial trip that set the pattern for us, taking family vacations whenever possible, whether over Sukkot, Hanukkah, and Pesach breaks or for longer stretches during the summer. We would scrimp and save, taking on extra work to make the trips possible, such as my educator husband’s two-week gig as an amateur chazzan at a synagogue over the high holidays, an annual event for which he leaves all of us in Israel while he travels to Toronto to boost his salary.

Sure, the memories faded between vacations. The same old tensions rose and erupted, whether between me and the girls or me and my husband about the girls. Yet I had determined that time away from our regular routine worked a certain kind of magic on us all, reminding one another that although we’d been thrown together in life, we actually even like and perhaps even love each other a good chunk of the time. We have our disagreements and usual annoyances during our time away, and I hold out hope that one of these breaks will allow us to talk about the things that really matter, like the way life has been disrupted by divorce. But that hasn’t happened yet.

Some major changes have disrupted our fragile but steady arrangement. The first was the birth of our twin sons two years ago, a welcome yet significant alteration in our blended family fabric. The girls fell in love with their brothers, but then a year after they were born, both girls ended the long-standing joint custody living arrangement. My older stepdaughter was spending her gap year before the army at a mechina, a pre-army program, and so was pretty much out of both houses. My younger stepdaughter, however, decided to live full-time with her mother, a decision that caused much grief and pain for all of us.

At the time, we had been planning a special Hanukkah vacation, 10 days in South Africa, where we would be visiting good friends from the United States who were living there for six months. We had been thinking of it as a bat mitzvah present for my stepdaughter, who, due to her complicated feelings about religion, given her parents’ very different beliefs on the subject, had eschewed any kind of celebration. Now we were stymied and angry. But after much hand-wringing and discussion, we decided to go ahead with the plan.

We didn’t even know if she was going to be coming with us. Her older sister couldn’t, as she wasn’t allowed to leave the country during her mechina year. In retrospect, I now realize that my younger stepdaughter wouldn’t have considered missing the trip, as it gave her the opportunity to be with her little brothers for 10 days straight, miss some school, and allow herself to be just with us, without the complications of having to constantly consider the needs and issues of both her mother and father.

Going on that vacation turned out to be the right decision for all of us. The sense of leaving behind all the strife of the recent events was calming, even with the singular silences of things that sometimes go unsaid. And now that my stepdaughter was no longer living with us, it felt important just to live together for 10 days, remembering what it was to just be us, without the complications of her parents who live life so differently.

In many ways, that is the best part of these family vacations: the ability to be together without wondering whether the girls will be joining us for dinner, worrying about whether it’s time for them to leave, or if they’re calling their mother from the bathroom while in our phone-free Shabbat home. We can almost feel like a normal family, or our version of that unit.

The hard times aren’t over. In fact, we entered into a new and difficult phase with my older stepdaughter shortly after that Cape Town vacation. It took months to renegotiate the relationship, and it wasn’t until a four-day stint in Eilat this past Hanukkah that I felt she and I had returned to our previous camaraderie, as she took a sip of my pre-dinner beer without asking. There are certain comfort zones that can’t be overstated.

As my stepdaughters have begun to make their own choices, which, seemingly inevitably, are more aligned with their mother’s life than their father’s, we’re struggling to keep the girls attuned and involved in our life. Vacations are one good way of doing that, gently forcing us into one common place, at the same time.

Jessica Steinberg is a freelance writer living in Jerusalem with her family.

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.

In Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment, a documentary film-in-progress, Toby Perl Freilich looks at the evolution of the kibbutz from its inception to the present, drawing on the memories and reflections of members from five kibbutzim. Perl Freilich spoke to Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry about the kibbutz movement’s ability to cultivate leaders even as it alienated women, non-Ashkenazim, and, ultimately, its own offspring.

Throughout August, to commemorate the kibbutz movement, Tablet Magazine will post a weekly clip from Perl Freilich’s film, beginning today.

TO WATCH THE FIRST INSTALLMENT, CLICK HERE.

—–Original Message—–
From: [Recipient]
To: Naomi Ragen
CC: [Another distribution list]
Subject: RE: The Unforgiven: Jimmy Carter
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 2010 06:17:36 -0500

Naomi, Thanks for sending this email. This is an important read. I wonder how the 80% Hebrews who refused to follow Moshe Rabbeinu into the exodus from Egypt, the nearly same number who voted for Obama, are reacting to Mr Graulich’s thoughts.

—–Original Message—–
From: Naomi Ragen
Sent: Tuesday, January 05, 2010 1:53 AM
To: [Distribution list]
Subject: The Unforgiven: Jimmy Carter

Dear Friends,

Are we impressed by Jimmy Carter’s belated apology? Me thinks not. His change of heart, which has conveniently come about just as his grandson is about to start a political career in which he needs Jewish votes, doesn’t pull at my heartstrings. Irwin N. Graulich, whose “Drop Dead Jimmy Carter” is making the internet rounds, I guess is of the same opinion.

Be warned: Not for the faint or forgiving of heart.

Naomi

Drop Dead Jimmy Carter

Sorry Mr. President–I just don’t forgive you. How dare you think you can demonize one of the most moral nations in history–and get away with your crimes. How dare you blame Jews for your pathetic world view, which gave credibility to the most evil characters on the face of the planet. Your apology is worthless.

President Jimmy Carter will undoubtedly be known as the worst president in American history. He allowed the Shah of Iran to fall and the evil Khomeni to gain power, giving Muslim extremism the fuel to spread like cancer throughout the world–ultimately leading to 9/11. His presidency was a true calamity from interest rates skyrocketing to 21.5% to the disastrous rescue attempt of the US embassy hostages, to the Carter “malaise” he created throughout America. A total catastrophe and tragedy would sum up the Carter administration at its best. I mean, a born and bred true Polish anti-western antisemite in the tradition of those who aided the Nazis, actually became his National Security Advisor—Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Carter’s cute little “al chayt” prayer of forgiveness is as impressive as Jeffrrey Dahmer’s apology cries. The ex-President finally realizes what a total putz he is–so what? “We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel,” Carter wrote recently. Please Jimmy, save those platitudes for your wife.

You cannot write books filled with outright lies about Israel and Jews, going on lecture tours and media interviews–fraudulently accusing Israel of apartheid, occupation, war crimes, terrorism, obstacles to peace, targeting innocents and other despicable labels. And then you beg for forgiveness? I mean is that a joke Jimmy boy?

Ex-President Carter recently met with Hamas–the modern day version of the Nazis. Chamberlain redux? No, Carter is much, much worse. What Jimmy Carter has done is join the list of well known historical antisemites to create a new type of Jewish Blood Libel. With tremendous passion and foolishness, Carter pretty much alone gave credibility to the “Israel Blood Libel,” which propagated throughout mainstream Western democracies, especially in Europe, to falsely accuse Israel and Jews of using Arab/Muslim blood to expand Israel’s territory.

In a similar vein to his fellow antisemites throughout history, Carter focused on the blood of children in Gaza and the West Bank, as if Israel purposely targeted non Jewish children to explain their horrific deaths. The fact that terrorists stationed their weapons and missiles in schools was totally irrelevant to the Jimmy Carter immoral psyche.

These Jewish Libel accusations by someone who was an ex-president of the United States gave instant credibility to the lies coming out of the Arab and Muslim world. The original Jewish Blood Libel gave rise to attacks on Jews from the first century through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, right up until the Nazi era. It was pretty much Jimmy Carter who created the modern day scenario which spurred attacks on Jews in France, England, Spain, Belgium, Mumbai, and many other countries.

It was obvious to Jews throughout history that the Jewish Blood Libel was all based on lies because the Jewish Bible, the Torah contains many specific laws against using blood in any way–even animal blood. This same Bible is filled with laws pertaining to the sin of harming innocents. Therefore, this concept of being extremely sensitive to hurting innocent people has become dominant in the Jewish psyche and behavior.

[...]

However, due to Carter’s Christian faith, he actually believes that all Jews should and will actually forgive him, showing a major difference between Judaism and Christianity about sin and forgiveness. Since Jesus’ death atones for the sins of those who have faith in Him, Carter mistakenly thinks that all Jews will ultimately forgive him and move on.

However, only non-Jewish Jews like Abe Foxman of the ADL, who have almost no knowledge of Judaism, will forgive Carter for his massive evil. According to Judaism, God Himself cannot forgive anyone for sins against another person. The only way that Carter can actually be forgiven, would be to go to every Jew worldwide and ask for forgiveness–not make his blanket empty announcement, because his grandson is running for office in a Jewish district in Georgia.

What is ironic about Carter is that he has committed the same “libel accusations” on America, creating the American Blood Libel. Carter’s comments over the last decade have included the rhetoric that “America is a torturer at Abu Ghraib, has performed criminal acts by water boarding in Guatanamo, we’re occupiers in Iraq and colonialists, we attack Arab countries for Halliburton or for oil,” etc. etc. Some day we can all expect an empty Carter apology to America.

So for the damage that Jimmy Carter has caused to both Israel and America, I do not forgive him and neither do many millions of other Jews or Americans. The best I can do for one of the most horrific American men of the past 3 decades is say, “Drop Dead Jimmy Carter,” and then you can ask your maker for forgiveness.

A tall narrow bookshelf to the left of the reception desk doesn’t garner much attention. Its shelves are divided into sections like child-rearing (two copies of the No Cry Sleep Solution as well as several baby sign-language books) and art (Crafts and La Vie En Rose). It’s only the titles in the adult literature section that seem incongruous: Bringing Heaven to Earth, Opening the Tanya, and My Spiritual Journey.

Manhattan Preschool of the Arts, which opened in 2000, is run under the auspices of Chabad Lubavitch, the ultra-Orthodox movement, and is part of a fast-growing network of Chabad schools nationwide catering to the young children of Jewish families across the denominational spectrum. The schools might differ in educational focus—some, like Preschool of the Arts, consider themselves inspired by Reggio Emilia, the Italian approach that emphasizes physical environment and community, while others place greater weight on Montessori ideals—but they all share the same, overarching philosophy: imbue their charges with a love for the Jewish religion. “We’re trying to spread the warmth of Judaism,” says Shternie Raskin, the director of Kiddie Korner, a Brooklyn Heights preschool that opened in 1991. “Not the laws, though that’s happening too, but the warmth, the fun part of Judaism. And so much of it is fun!”

There’s another goal too, which Chabad is quite up-front about, although you won’t see it printed on admission brochures: reaching out to the parents of the children. “It’s all about the relationships, the personal relationships,” says Devora Krasnianski, coordinator for the Chabad Early Childhood Education network. “It’s not just the child who comes to the school. It’s really connecting with the whole family.” Rabbi Nochem Kaplan, national director of Chabad’s education arm, puts it more directly. “Chabad preschools are created to serve not only as institutions of early childhood learning,” he wrote several years ago, “but as vehicles to reach out to the families of the children who attend.”

There are 157 preschools now affiliated with Chabad nationwide, up from 109 in 2005. These numbers don’t tell the whole story, though. Manhattan Preschool of the Arts was flooded with applications last year—160, of which they accepted 95. In ever-gentrifying Brooklyn, where strollers clog the sidewalks, the Park Slope-based Chai Tots, founded in 1987, has recently opened two new outposts—a Prospect Heights location in 2007 and another one in Windsor Terrace last fall—only to find that demand still exceeds space. Kiddie Korner in Brooklyn Heights just completed renovations on a new space and now offers, in addition to preschool, daycare for up to 50 kids.

And while more than 25 percent of the Chabad preschools can be found in New York State (home, of course, to 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad’s world headquarters in Brooklyn), the press to educate the young and Jewish stretches to the far reaches of the country. Over the past decade, Chabad-run early childhood education centers have opened in Alabama, Arkansas, New Mexico, and Hawaii. California has 26 preschools. Even Reno, Nevada, not exactly a hotspot for young Jewish families, saw the inauguration this past May of a new 13,500-square-foot Chabad center to house a preschool and a day school, which had previously resided in a converted carport.

“Listen, a child goes with his mom to the mall on December 15 and what does he see? Santa Claus and Christmas all over the place. Where’s Hanukkah?” Kaplan, the Chabad education chief, asks me. “Early childhood Jewish education leaves an indelible impression on the child. We need that. It’s essential for an assimilating community.”

For the better half of the past decade, Kaplan has been an agitator for Chabad preschool expansion. In 2004, he canvassed 23 Chabad communities, from Burlington, Vermont, to Bakersfield, California, to determine their level of interest in starting such schools. “Chabad touches the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews every day of every year,” Kaplan wrote in his resulting report. “Chabad is uniquely positioned to make a serious impact on the future of Jewish preschool education.”

Uniquely positioned how? In a word: outreach. The Chabad Lubavitch movement is virtually synonymous with its outreach efforts, a campaign that was kicked off in the wake of World War II’s devastation. (In 1950, the first Lubavitcher couple was sent abroad, to Morocco from Brooklyn, to spread the teachings of the rebbe.) Today, these efforts are as ubiquitous as they are varied: Mitzvah tanks roaming city streets blaring music; dark-suited young men and women in long skirts who approach strangers, asking, “You Jewish?”; Shabbat services at Burning Man; raucous, alcohol-soaked Purim celebrations on college campuses. Chabad is unusual, to say the least: a strictly religious group that directs its activities to the non-religious.

“People say, ‘oh, I’m Reform, I’m Conservative.’ I don’t care about that,” says Shternie Raskin of Kiddie Korner. “I say, ‘You’re a Jew? You’re Jewish!’”

Their non-judgmental, enthusiastic, religiously fervent approach can inspire skittishness and even ire in some secular Jews. But it’s these same qualities, their unabashed love for and pride in the Torah and its teachings, that makes their preschools some of the more successful and cutting-edge educational centers around.

***

Emerging in mid-18th century Poland, Chabad Lubavitch grew out of the general Hasidic movement. Its adherents embrace the concept of ahavat Yisrael, “love of all Jews,” regardless of a person’s level of observance. “When a Jew sins, the entire Jewish body is affected,” writes Sue Fishkoff in her comprehensive account of Chabad, The Rebbe’s Army. “When a Jew does a mitzvah, obeying even one of God’s commandments, the merit is enjoyed by all.”

This spiritual belief fuels all of Chabad’s outreach efforts, marking them with a palpable, physical urgency. “A hasid is he who puts his personal affairs aside and goes around lighting up the souls of Jews with the light of Torah and mitzvoth,” said the rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who led Chabad from 1951 until his death in 1994 (and who some Lubavitchers hold is the messiah). “There must be someone who disregards personal comforts and conveniences and goes out to put a light to these lamps.”

Those charged with the task of lamp-lighting professionally are emissaries, or shlichim, young married couples who move to places with little or no Orthodox presence—far-flung locales, like Thailand and Mumbai, or the more familiar Pasadena or Park Slope of 20 years ago—to set up independently run and funded Chabad Houses, of which there are now more than 3,000 worldwide. The intention is that they stay on the job for life. “The shaliach’s success depends on his own entrepreneurial talents,” says Jonathan Sarna, the American Jewish historian. “It’s a 24-7 job.” Their goal is to offer the myriad services that one needs to have a “full Jewish community,” as one Chabadnik puts it, and that includes, of course, Jewish schools.

The parents of young children are often at a crossroads (a harried, sleep-deprived crossroads, but a crossroads nevertheless), facing a time in their lives when they realize that the decisions they make—from the quotidian to the spiritual—are not simply for two adults but for an entire family. “The family is generally trying to figure out their religious ideals,” says Krasnianski, Chabad’s early-childhood coordinator. “They could have been whatever they wanted to be as singles, or young adults, or even couples. But now is a key time.”

Chabad, with the establishment of their preschools, is trying to capitalize on this particular moment, but the families who send their children to the schools have their own goals in mind. “I kind of dismissed the school at first,” says Alexa de los Reyes, about her decision to send her son to Brooklyn’s Chai Tots. “Very religious Jews make me uncomfortable. And, you know, it’s Chabad; they’re proselytizers. I’ve had the experience of being approached by Chabad people on the street, which is definitely off-putting, but this isn’t like that at all. It’s very welcoming and inclusive, no pressure.” Plus, in the competitive New York preschool market, there’s another important factor, admits de los Reyes: “The fact that there was space was the prime thing.”

***

I had many preconceptions as to what a Chabad-run school would be like, but an emphasis on paint colors wasn’t one of them. Yet when I arrived at Manhattan Preschool of the Arts, Sarah Rotenstreich, the smooth-talking, 34-year-old director of the school brings up the neutral base color for the walls immediately, pointing out that it’s a very soothing shade. “Environment is like a third teacher here,” she says as she walks me through the school’s invitingly open space, which boasts cobblestone flooring, cedar-planked walls, and an internal courtyard, or piazza, in Reggio-speak. It looks closer to something out of a Norman Rockwell scene or Little House on the Prairie than any preschool I’ve seen before.

In her glass-enclosed, piazza-facing office, Rotenstreich speaks about Reggio philosophy and “reaching the whole child,” how the curriculum is integrated with Judaism (“science and math can be Jewish”) and about the slew of family activities the school offers—from large holiday parties to parenting workshops and challah-baking at her home. The school even operates a small, upscale kosher cafe next door, called Books and Bagels, open to the public, to encourage mingling. “Community is crucial to what we do,” says Rotenstreich, who grew up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, the daughter of shlichim.

While not every school boasts as polished a space (Park Slope’s Chai Tots is housed in a basement, Kiddie Korner in a well-worn Brooklyn Heights brownstone), Chabad-affiliated preschools are, by most accounts, effectively run, successful centers of education. They are licensed by the state as well as accredited by Chabad. The three New York City preschools I visited all seemed lovely—the teachers warm and attentive, the children happily engaged at the water table, in the dress-up area, running around the playground. They looked, on the surface, a lot like my own daughter’s secular preschool, albeit with more Hebrew.

Mark Rosen, a Brandeis sociologist who has studied outreach to young Jewish families, says when Chabad “takes on early childhood, they take it very seriously. They’re extremely savvy about the religious piece. Religion is not the major focus of what they do—the focus is on the education.”

“I think there’s a real push for professionalism” at Chabad schools, says Pearl Beck, a social psychologist who conducted an oft-cited study of non-Orthodox Jewish preschools in 2002. “They might have been winging it years ago, but not anymore.”

Whatever their trepidation about the religious component, parents are well-aware of the professionalism. “At first, I was in shock,” says a recent Israeli transplant to Brooklyn who sends her son to Chai Tots. “I came home and said to my husband, ‘We can’t do this. We can’t do the tzitzit and kiss the Torah and the talk of Hashem. It’s so strange for us.” But her son remained. Why? “The teachers are good, they’re friendly,” she says. “They listen. They want to know the kids, the whole family. My son went to three different schools in Israel and this is the best.”

The schools receive professional support, such as curriculum assistance, from Chabad’s national offices, but they’re on their own financially, and 770 doesn’t dictate an individual school’s approach. “Every school makes its own decisions,” says Krasnianski, the early-childhood coordinator. “We don’t have a mandate from up top.”

There are certain commonalities, however. “All learning is sensory-based, and stems from a Judaic experience,” says Kaplan, the national education official. “So, if we’re talking about vegetation and green life, we’ll start with a Jewish bible story.” Most schools ask their young students to bring in daily a “mitzvah note,” detailing a good deed. And most also require students to offer a penny for charity. “We’re teaching your child to be a mensch, a good person,” Kiddie Korner’s Shternie Raskin says. “Everything should be a joy,” says Sarah Hecht, the director of Chai Tots. “Nothing should be ‘you have to do it.’” She makes a face. “That’s so old-school.”

The handful of preschool directors I spoke with said they don’t require children to wear tzitzit or yarmulkes, but keep them on hand if the child requests. (Judging from the number of parents who brought it up, many children do request. And a parent handbook from Toronto’s Chabad preschool, part of the larger packet Kaplan sends to new schools, says, “boys are required to wear kippot to school every day.”)

The open-mindedness that characterizes Chabad’s activities in general is certainly evident at the schools. The directors I spoke with said they’ll admit any child whose family is interested in a Jewish education. “Look, I don’t like labeling. We have everyone; we have families with two mommies, we have everybody,” says Chai Tots’ Hecht. “We have families that, halachically, are they Jewish? No—the father is Jewish but the mom is not—but they want it, they want the Jewish school.”

Most draw the line at non-Jews. Shternie Raskin is a notable exception. She says there are about four or five non-Jews in each of her fifteen-member classes. In the early years of Kiddie Korner, which opened in 1991, she took non-Jews simply to fill up the school, but now, she says, it’s a different story. “So many non-Jews are interested. The truth is, kids are kids. I don’t turn them away.”

(Not every school is accepting. I spoke with one mother who told me that her son had been verbally accepted to the Chabad preschool on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in 2006, only to find that acceptance rescinded when the school learned she had been converted to Judaism by Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun magazine and a rabbi of Renewal Judaism. “They told me I would have to reconvert in order for my son to be accepted,” Lili Schab says. “It was horrible.” The school did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another selling point seems to be cost. A number of people I spoke with said that Chabad is generally able to underprice. Brandeis’s Sarna points out that the position of director at most Chabad preschools is usually filled by the rabbi’s wife, who is generally not drawing a salary. “That money is going to a general fund of the Chabad House,” he says. In the handful of Chabad preschools that I canvassed the pricing structure was comparable to other preschools, secular and religious, with one notable exception: Chai Tots is significantly cheaper. (It charges $5,500 for three half days a week, for example, while a nearby preschool affiliated with a Conservative synagogue charges $7,600 for the same time.) A flexible range of hours offered and ages of children served—many Chabad preschools have a daycare component for babies—also makes these programs especially appealing to working parents.

But finances and availability only tell part of the story. “The shaliach is working 24-7,” Sarna says. “They love it; they’re doing the rebbe’s will. If you thought your work might bring on the messiah, you might work that much harder too.”

***

“I think parents don’t realize that this is a total community,” says Kiddie Korner’s ebullient Raskin. “They don’t understand, I teach your kid, they become my kid. We invite people over for Shabbos. They come to my house, they see it all. It changes things.” It certainly changed things for Jessica Kaye, whose daughter, Sage, was in preschool at Kiddie Korner. “I look at my daughter; she’s learning so much stuff, and I think, ‘Maybe I should do this at home,’” she says. “Or, ‘my Hebrew should be as good as hers.’” Kaye says she has helped out with school holiday celebrations. “Shternie and the rabbi so welcoming. It’s so cool to participate, even if I don’t know all of the blessings.” She explains that she grew up in central Pennsylvania, where “the KKK marched through my town. I heard Jewish slurs. It’s nice to see Sage be really free with knowing who she is.”

Anne Estes, who grew up Quaker and describes her husband as a “lapsed Episcopalian” is also a big Kiddie Korner supporter. Her son went to the school for four years; her young daughter attends it now. “It’s been wonderful, spiritual, and supportive,” she says of the school, and not just of her children. When she lost her job last year, “Shternie and the rabbi were there for me, as a friend,” Estes says. “They’ve been there for us during some very painful times.”

I ask if her son ever felt odd, as a non-Jew at a Jewish school. No, she says. “We were worried that he would feel like he didn’t belong. But he never felt that way.” Then she stops. “Except for the time he asked about—what’s it called, what you do on Friday night?” Shabbat? “Yes,” she says. She goes on to explain that her son got upset because his friends celebrated Shabbat, and he didn’t. “So I went to Mrs. Plotkin”—Shternie’s mother, who works in the school office—“and I said, ‘Would it be okay if I did something?’ I didn’t want to be disrespectful. She said, ‘It’s a family ritual, you can make it a family ritual.’ So I made an ecumenical Friday night celebration; we sliced the bread, I said a prayer over the candles. We still do it sometimes.”

But for other families, even those who are happy with the school, the religious component can remain a thorny issue, leading to a disconnect between what a child learns in the classroom and what she practices at home. Alexa de los Reyes, whose son attended Chai Tots and who is married to a non-Jew, says, “my husband says, ‘Let’s say the blessings; let’s have the Shabbat.’ For him, it’s much easier to adopt it as a family tradition. It’s much more complicated for me.”

Isaac Josephson, who also says that his family’s Chai Tots experience hasn’t changed their level of observance, is mirthful about the disconnect. “Hashem has entered his daily lexicon,” he says about his son. Josephson has dubbed these conversations “The Hashem Wars.” “When a toy breaks, he’ll ask Hashem to fix his toy. And I’ll say, ‘Well, if we believed in Hashem….’” Josephson, who has nothing but good things to say about Chai Tots and Chabad in general (“I think they’re astoundingly good at what they do,” he says, “consummate marketers”) doesn’t hesitate when I ask where his son will be attending kindergarten. “Public school, baby,” he says with a laugh.

When I ask the Israeli mother (who requested that her name not be used for fear of offending Chai Tots) if her son’s attendance at the school had changed the way they did things at home, she says, “absolutely not. Not at all. I like the challah they make on Fridays, but that’s it.” She, too, laughs, noting that she wants her son to attend kindergarten at the local public school. “I don’t want problems with the Hashem stuff.”

The issues are not limited to Hashem, of course. It’s a worldview, one in which the female teachers (and they are all women, as they are at the vast majority of preschools) are regularly married by the time they are 22, where having 10 children isn’t all that unusual, and black, as the song the children sing about colors attests, “is the color of Daddy’s hat.”

Consider this, from the teacher’s manual of Chabad’s Upper West Side preschool: “topics relating to the age of the earth and man, various geological stages … and any other ideas which may be dichotomous with Jewish theology are not to be discussed in the classroom without the express permission and guidance from the Director.”

Pearl Beck, the social psychologist, says: “These modern, educated, secular Jews who send their kids to Chabad preschools, and eat at Chabad houses—I’m not sure they know that it has a specific ideology, with ideas about Zionism, for example. The parents might like the product, but they don’t regard it as an ideology.”

Others are more damning about Chabad. David Berger, a Jewish historian who wrote a highly critical book about Lubavitch messianism, says, “I’m not particularly worried about these preschools—I assume the vast majority of their teachers are not teaching about the moshiach—but I see Chabad Lubavitch as espousing ideas that have the potential to undermine Judaism. So anything that might contribute to the success of the movement troubles me.”

One Brooklyn mother I spoke with who didn’t want to be identified considers herself an observant Jew and a staunch supporter of Jewish education. Last year, while shopping around for preschools, she looked at Chai Tots, despite the fact that she’s not a fan of Chabad. “What really bothers me is the non-egalitarianism,” she says. “It drives me nuts. A friend of mine whose kids are there told me about a Friday night event they went to where all the kids made kippot for the dads and bracelets for the moms. I found that horrifying.”

Still, she says, it didn’t stop her from applying. “In principle, the fact that it’s a Chabad school is a problem, but when you go into the school, the religious issue ceases to be the issue and becomes just one consideration.”

***

The focus on family and community, so intrinsic to Chabad, isn’t necessarily as emphasized at other Jewish preschools. Mark Rosen, the sociologist who studies outreach, explains that the early childhood centers run by synagogues or JCCs adhere to an entirely different model, one often driven by financial considerations. “In synagogues in particular, preschools are seen as cash cows,” Rosen says. “If they weren’t profit centers, they wouldn’t exist. It’s not that they’re not interested in outreach, it’s just that the business consideration must come first. I would suspect that if a Chabad preschool wasn’t profitable, they’d run it anyway. They’re not there to make money; they’re there to bring souls closer to Hashem.”

In 2002, Pearl Beck, the social psychologist, conducted a study that offers evidence of Rosen’s point. She surveyed 90 families in three different cities—Denver, Chicago, and Baltimore—who had a child enrolled in a Jewish preschool affiliated with a Conservative or Reform synagogue, or a JCC. The resulting study, “Jewish Preschools as Gateways to Jewish Life,” found that for all the Jewish organizational world’s talk about reaching unaffiliated Jews, little attention was being paid to a population already in the system, “namely families whose children are enrolled in over a thousand Jewish preschools throughout the country,” she wrote.

Beck found that most of these schools “didn’t have highly articulated Jewish educational goals,” and that the Jewish curriculum was often “ad-hoc and limited.” Interactions between children and the rabbi or cantor at these schools “were the exception rather than the rule.” Despite these findings, “parents expressed overwhelmingly positive sentiments about their child’s Jewish preschool experience. Parents for whom the ‘Jewish factor’ was not a major reason for enrollment expressed surprise at how much they liked Jewish component.” Beck also found that nearly 70 percent of the families said they were doing something different in terms of their Jewish observance as a result of their child’s education.

Beck might not have considered any Chabad-affiliated preschools, but Chabad was considering her work. Rabbi Kaplan, the head of Chabad’s education arm, read Beck’s 2002 study, and several years later, used the findings to support his own argument that Chabad was well-positioned to fill the gap. “A comprehensive study by Pearl Beck … concluded that Jewish preschools present significant, yet underutilized opportunities for strengthening families’ Jewish affiliation and enhancing their Jewish identities,” he wrote.

Beck, who was surprised to learn that Chabad had cited her study, said that there had been a “surge of programmatic” changes at Jewish early childhood centers since she had released her study. “I talked about the lack of Jewish curriculum, and that’s not true anymore,” she says. Still, she sees the specific appeal of Chabad. She views their schools as “very cutting edge, a barometer of things to come. Jewish ideology and its underpinnings are seamlessly integrated into the school experience.”

One potential marker of a Jewish preschool’s success could be the rate of its graduates’ enrollment in Jewish day schools. Milwaukee’s well-regarded Jewish Beginnings is one of the oldest Chabad-run preschools in the country. (It opened in 1973.) Its website proclaims: “90% of our students come from non-Orthodox homes. 87% of Jewish Beginnings graduates go on to Jewish Day school education.”

None of the New York City Chabad preschool directors I met with were interested in claiming day school enrollment as their mission. (Talk about scaring secular prospective families.) “My goal is not for them to go on to Jewish day school,” says Sarah Rotenstreich, of Preschool of the Arts. “That’s a wonderful, positive outcome, but that’s not my goal.” And yet when I ask her about the number of children going on to a Jewish day school this year, she looks it up and realizes it’s 50 percent, eight out of 16. “That’s so exciting. It’s our highest percentage yet,” she says. “It’s usually around 20 or 30 percent, if I’m lucky.”

Chai Tots’ Sarah Hecht,who gave birth to her 13th child this spring, told me that of the 12 kids from last year’s graduating class, five were going on to day school. (“It could be better,” she says of the percentage with a laugh, “but it’s not bad.”) She too says her goal is not day school, but for kids to leave loving and having pride in their Jewish heritage. “Every Friday, every child here makes a homemade challah,” she says. “Now it doesn’t make a difference to me if they go home and make a little Friday night Shabbat celebration with the challah, or, if they say, ‘You know, this bread makes the best French toast!’ It doesn’t matter. They’ve had the experience.”

It’s an appealing statement, consummately Chabad in its verve and open-mindednesss, but one which could seem slightly disingenuous. (Does it truly not matter if no one ever says a blessing?) On the other hand, Chabad does hold that experience is everything. For each student who attends Chai Tots for a year, baking challah and saying the prayers, that’s one more Jewish soul adding to the number of mitzvot in the world.

Ilene Vogelstein is the director for the Alliance for Jewish Early Childhood Education, and she points out that the early years of childhood are critical ones in terms of brain development. In the first five years of life, “the neural pathways are being formed, and the brain is designed to absorb the experiences that children are exposed to,” she says. “So, if you’ve been exposed to Shabbat, you’re hard-wired for that experience, even if you don’t come back to it for a long time. It’s sort of like a bungee cord if you’re exposed to it—you have a frame of reference. You bounce back up.”

Others suggest that this reading of brain development, the strength of that bungee cord, might be optimistic. “I believe that such early childhood experiences need to be reinforced as the child grows older,” says Beck, who has worked with Vogelstein in the past. “If the experiences are not reinforced, I doubt they would make a significant dent in the child’s Jewish identity in the long term.”

Chabad, however, seems to be throwing its considerable muscle and resources behind assessments like Vogelstein’s. Or perhaps a better way to think of their efforts is as a guard against needing the bungee cord altogether, to mangle a metaphor. Why would these children need something to snap them back to Judaism if they never leave?

Beck says that when she thinks of Chabad, authenticity is the first word that comes to mind. “They’re very welcoming and operate from the heart. It emanates from the belief that every Jew is created in the image of God. It’s what they truly believe. Any person, secular or observant, can detect it.” Such authenticity can be very compelling and enticing, no matter where you lie on the denominational spectrum.

Chabad’s ability to market this authenticity so well, to wrap a strict form of Judaism in layers of welcoming warmth, is no small feat. “They make Judaism seem accessible and doable,” Beck says. “They have a formula and it doesn’t seem formulaic.”

The Brooklyn mother who was rankled by the gender inequality is quite aware of Chabad’s formula. And she is direct about the fact that the Lubavitch life is not one she wants for her offspring. “Listen, I think it’s weird, it’s like a cult with the proselytizing,” she says. “Do I want my daughters to have 12 kids? No.” And yet her objections to a Chabad-run school faded when she visited Chai Tots. “I went there, and it was really lovely,” she says. “The director was wonderful; I liked the teachers better than at the other schools, and it was five blocks from my house.” Her children, however, did not end up at Chai Tots. But chalk it up to the hyper-competitive nature of New York City preschools and not to any religious considerations. “I would have sent my kids there,” she says. “But they didn’t get in.”

Ellen Umansky is a Tablet Magazine contributing editor.

Freud said that “hysterics suffer from reminiscences,” although he didn’t have memoir-writing in mind. As I write my way back ceaselessly into the past, I wonder about all the things I only half-know and half-remember, random hysterical tics. Wasn’t I absorbing, all the time, the habits and styles of an invalid’s life? For a long time after my father’s death, I lost my interest in empirical science, so I don’t know if neurologists have figured out the mechanisms of Proust’s “involuntary memory.” I can see the headline anyway: “Researcher Locates Secret Ingredient in Proust’s Madeleine.” They’re tracking the section of our brain that lights up when we eat a favorite food of childhood, encounter a perfume our mothers wore. But what will the light tell us? We still can’t will memory into existence without changing it somehow. The conditions of the experiment affect its outcome, which is why, like most great discoveries, Proust’s recovery of his Combray childhood happens with a sudden loss of control, by accident. The true restored memory returns to us unbidden. Its sign is surprise. Or maybe the feeling of surprise is mistaken for the truth? Either way, in fits and starts, in idle hours or with strained purpose, over the last ten years I’ve tried repeatedly to write about the day I finally learned my father was dying from AIDS.

Such an event, oh yes, shouldn’t it be indelibly etched in my memory? Still, the scene keeps shifting: in one leadenly symbolic version, I’m interrupted while reading a letter from the girl I’d kissed a few weeks before. In another, I’m losing myself in a Yankees game, Mattingly batting in the third. I’d learned to play baseball mainly by watching him, the deep crouch at the plate, weight on the back knee, shifting quickly forward as the hips turned to bring the bat through to meet the pitch, the quick snap of the wrists used to fight off pitches and scoop errant throws to first. My father watches with me for two minutes, a look of pain and disgust on his face. He asks me to switch it off. I refuse until I notice that somehow, unlike his usual unprovoked attacks on my sports habit, this one is really serious. A third draft tries a tableau of a more unified family life—my father at his place at the kitchen table, opposite my mother, who I can see is trying not to cry. The biology textbook he used when teaching medical students, placed to his right, is open to the section on immunobiology. I’ve pulled around one of our high-backed cane dining chairs to see better, hunching uncomfortably over the edge of the table. As I press down into the wickerwork, a latticed tattoo is growing on the back of my thighs. It will look like the diagrams of molecules on the page. My father, sitting straighter, stretches a finger over the book, pointing out a section or chart of the various kinds of cells that make up our immune system. You could imagine it as a series of engravings, “My Father Explains the Mechanism of the Disease That’s Killing Him.”

In another version, he tells it as a bedtime story, as if I were a small child, but in his teaching voice, and with too many details:

Once upon a time, when you were about five or six years old. I was working on an idea I’d had for a new malaria drug. I was also supervising the sickle cell clinic at Mt. Sinai hospital, and most of the blood we used for experiments was taken as samples from our sickle patients. We were trying to mimic the benevolent, antimalarial effects of sickle trait without the crippling pain of the disease. One day, as I finished drawing blood from one of the regulars, I did something very stupid. I wasn’t wearing latex gloves, which you’re supposed to do whenever you’re handling blood, and as I was about to get the needle out of this guy’s arm, he jerked. The needle came out suddenly and poked me in the wrist, just below the vein. It was in for no more than a second or two. Now this guy had a lot of problems, not just sickle cell disease, but, like a lot of the patients, he’d got hooked on heroin to get rid of the pain. That’s when I came down with hepatitis; you were too little for me to tell you about it then. At the time we were beginning to hear about this new disease, one that a lot of heroin users contracted from contaminated needles.

It didn’t really happen in any of these ways, although each of them approaches some kind of composite representation of the event. Something happened, unmistakably, because before I went away for the summer I knew nothing, and when I started high school I knew my father had AIDS—had, according to him, anywhere from one to five years to live—and that I mustn’t tell anyone about it.

Given what I knew, his decision to keep his disease a secret from all but his two most trusted colleagues and his immediate family seemed strange. It was 1988, a time when the growing AIDS-awareness movement needed “innocent victims,” that false category, to show that the disease was more than “God’s punishment on drug addicts and homosexuals”—in the infamous phrase my father attributed to televangelist Pat Robertson. My father had not been quiet about humanitarian politics or his belief that biology was beyond good and evil. Only a few years earlier, he’d joined a group of doctors and musicians protesting the use of torture by U.S.-supported regimes worldwide in their “dirty wars” against the Left. He’d visited torture victims in Danish hospitals and signed petitions. But now, facing a near-certain slow death, he suddenly developed a terror of softer forms of persecution: being forced to abandon his laboratory research, being hounded by rumors that would destroy his peace of mind; he feared, too, for how I would be treated at school and what my mother would have to hear from supposedly well-meaning friends. While still alive, he would donate his body to science, participating in a host of clinical trials for the antiretroviral drugs that, eventually, with reduced side effects, would make AIDS a treatable, albeit chronic, disease among those who could afford them. He would not, however, become a spectacle or a spokesperson. Privacy mattered more to him than the cause of “enlightenment” he’d spent much of his intellectual and public life defending.

So great was the power of this secret that I still feel a twinge of betrayal whenever I mention my father’s illness in conversation. Also a great relief, followed quickly by something worse. For many years I’d only told a handful of people, mainly psychiatrists. It was my talisman, the sign of trust, as though by telling someone I gave them a special power over me, to wound or heal. I never knew how they would react. My nervousness would grow as the moment of truth approached, especially around women I’ve loved. Would I become, in that moment of revelation, a figure to be pitied rather than admired, an object for compassion instead of passion? Waifs, strays, and orphans are Dickensian tastes that mostly went out with my grandmother’s generation. My father was right in a way to want me to stay dumb. What chances did I have in my girls-just-want-to-have-fun generation if I didn’t keep things to myself? And what adolescent enjoys compacts of mutual pity? My first girlfriend sent me off to college health services for an AIDS test. Maybe she’d have asked anyone the same—testing your “partner” was practically part of the liberal arts curriculum in the early ’90s—but I took it personally. “I haven’t slept with my father,” I told her, “or anyone else.” “Do it for me,” she said, and I did.

What I actually remember most vividly about my initiation into my father’s secret life as a dying man was the sensation of air-conditioning. It was August, maybe around my father’s birthday, his 49th. My father loved air-conditioning, as he loved veal scaloppine, breaded or in a marsala sauce, red wines, old historical films on TV (anything with Errol Flynn or about World War II), a good stereo system, and a firm mattress. These were the few physical pleasures of his dying years.

It wasn’t only about coolness, his love of air conditioning; it was also the white noise. Only two things can really quiet New York City: snowfall in winter and the persistent hum of an air conditioner’s motor in summer. The drum circles and bandshell concerts in Central Park faded, the blaring horns, sirens, and car alarms were turned into muted background accompaniments. Later, I’d realize that he loved the machines for the same reasons he became a scientist and placed his faith in modern medicine. The air conditioner brought comfort and showed us our capacity for benevolent domination of the earth. He took pride in it, the same way he’d tell me stories of how malaria had been eradicated in America and most of Italy by draining the swamps and killing off the mosquitoes with insecticides. These were concrete signs of progress, of hope for the world, like the Zionist project to make the desert bloom—or, at least, to install air-conditioning in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

By the time I brought home the news that these helpful little machines released CFCs into the atmosphere and contributed to the depletion of the ozone layer—before we’d even heard of global warming—he was too committed to change. My triumphal announcement of a scientific discovery unknown to my father was not even met with skepticism, just indifference. By my last year of high school, we ended with a house divided: I sweated in my room with fans and open windows while my father would shut the door, shut out the noise, block out the sun, and read his way by lamplight through blazing afternoons. If I wanted to talk, he’d ask me if I wasn’t just visiting him to cool off.

All that was still to come. It’s entirely possible that my distrust of the sacred A.C. began the same night, just before the start of high school, when I heard about my father’s disease. After all, I’d just spent six weeks without it in the middle of Tennessee, where the heat and humidity exceeded even New York’s. They were happy weeks and seem happier now for being the last of my childhood, or the first of a more promising adolescence. I loved wildly, promiscuously: I fell for the twenty-year-old violinist from Buenos Aires who sat next to me at breakfast the first day. She immediately adopted me as a page—letting me tie back her long black hair before rehearsals, teaching me how to pronounce Spanish, Argentine-style: the double l (“¿como te llamas?”), the soft “sh” sound. Even now, when I hear it, most often in the mouths of soccer players or bearded intellectuals, some part of my brain, with deep pleasure, remembers her saying it. There was my neighbor in the boys’ dorm, a Korean flutist who introduced me to The Cure and also, one night in his room, to the girl whose letter I was reading sometime on or about the moment I learned my father was going to die. She probably didn’t fall for me so much as the stories I told her about the wonders of New York—the nightclubs I’d never been to and the museums and concerts I had. She was a girl of the Blue Mountains, the first punk I’d met, already dreaming of escaping her town. (“You must come visit,” I told her, as I walked her to her room after our last orchestra concert, and she reached out her hand, her dark purple-painted nails, to rest on mine.)

So I was already chafing, so to speak, on my return. I felt imprisoned; dreamed of the rosebush down the slope from the girls’ dorm. My sweet Rochelle (a whole other world in that name) and I kissed in its shadow. Now, clearly, I could never speak to her again. Her impression of me was utterly false. I’d become another person. What sort of person, I wasn’t yet sure about. I grew cold in my air-conditioned room and tried to make sense of death. All men are mortal, my father is a man, my father is mortal. He was going to die sometime in my life. It would be sooner than we thought. To keep the secret, the important thing was to behave as though nothing were wrong. This was what he said he wanted. Everything would go on as before. I would still do my homework as I had the previous winter while my father was hospitalized with “an allergic reaction to dust from the painters redoing our dining room.” That, at least, was my mother’s explanation as she packed me off to my aunt’s house for a few days. He actually had pneumocystis carinii, then one of the leading killers of AIDS patients. I’d known nothing about it. He could have died while I wrote an essay about To Kill a Mockingbird.

It was odd how little my parents asked of me. They were even sending me to France for the last two weeks of summer before high school. The refrain they used was that they wanted me to be “my own person,” independent, uninfluenced, unafraid, possibly unconcerned. I’d spend a great deal of my life picking at the paradoxes of such impossible imperatives as, “Be free,” “Enjoy yourself.” Did they just want me to go away? Or were they strange hypocrites, paying homage to 1970s virtues of “free to be you and me,” hoping all the while that who I was would prove to be what I ought to have been for them? Or maybe, through desperation or delusion, they really meant it, they really thought I could grow up strong, happy, and, yes, oddly unburdened and free—in spite of everything.

I went off to France with the family of the same friend my father once barred from our apartment. The trip has been erased from my memory except for one scene in which my friend and I were sitting on a rocky outcropping above the Avignon bridge, that great stone fragment that breaks off a third of the way across the Rhone. We were talking about high school, the year ahead. He had his yearbook committee, his soccer practice; his older sister’s friends gave him advice on how to pick up girls, how not to be a geek. I’d follow him a little while longer, my Hans Hansen, as though he had the secret of an easeful and successful life, but it was probably then that I knew we wouldn’t stay close. I watched the river beat against the ruined bridge, the bathers happily splashing their tawny bodies further down the bank, the absorbed fishermen as they looked over their lines. According to his parents, I was a terrible guest, moping and complaining as they drove us up and down Provence, visiting chateaux, vineyards, and Cézanne’s enormous white mountains. But I didn’t tell them a thing.

Ill. High Court OKs ‘Jews Only’ Inheritance [AP]

You describe your father as “the ultimate cheapskate.” Can you give an example?

My father is quite eccentric—he really couldn’t care less what other people think. We had a car named Minnie, and when she was 13 years old he gave her a bat mitzvah. It was more like a baptism—he threw a few pails of water over her. There’s very little written about the psychology of cheapness, but people who are frugal tend to be independent thinkers and not susceptible to pressure.

You also talk about how you used to be ashamed of the cheapness, but that now you see it as somehow virtuous, take pride in it, and even practice it yourself.

Once I started supporting myself I realized how hard it is to get by. Being cheap has allowed me so much freedom in my life, especially when I look around and see people who have become slaves to their jobs. Why is there some shame in being frugal? If my friends want to go to dinner, but I can’t afford it, why should I feel bad about that?

In today’s economic climate, do you see the idea of cheapness being redeemed?

People talk about the “new frugality,” and on some level that’s really gratifying. Many people are being forced to cut back. There are a lot of people who are in serious trouble, but for a lot of other people it just means canceling the cable subscription, the gym membership. But I don’t buy it when people say this is a sea change. We cycle through this sort of thing over and over.

Where does philanthropy fit into the stereotypes about Jews being cheap?

It’s a very flexible stereotype, but it all stems from a link between Jews and money. In some ways, Jews refer to it as the redemptive part of the stereotype: see, it’s not all bad, look how much good were doing in the world! It’s something I’m proud of. But even that is double-edged. Some people might look at it as ostentatious. Michael Bloomberg named a residence hall at Princeton after his daughter. I think if I were her I’d be a little embarrassed about it.

There’s something paradoxical about the connection between Jews and money. There are stereotypes about Jews being tightfisted, but also about Jews being gaudy.

The stereotype combines both admiration and resentment, and that’s a particularly American combination. On the one hand Jews were called miserly, on the other hand they were called ostentatious. Jews would be closed out of certain resorts because they were vulgar. In the book, I talk about this stereotype of the Jew living in a hovel that was secretly opulent inside. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

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 had, typically, a strong proclivity toward both the observational thrills of reporting and the introspective opportunities afforded in covering the Jewish world, as well as obsessions with religion and cheesy pop culture (with which the Jewish world abounds), not to mention writing. I had until that point been relishing the looming opportunity to muck around in even more puddles of Jewish culture, with Tablet still in its pre-nascent stages. But all the news about the economy tanking and the impending death of Journalism had put a pressure on me I had yet to experience in my adult life—now, I was supposed to feel lucky just to have a job. Talk about a kein ayin hora. Suddenly, it seemed that my work was tightening around me, posing a threat to a large part of my identity: the unique role I played as a rebel and incorrigible seeker of exotic experiences as the child of an eighth-generation rabbi father and Jewish communal worker mother.

I decided to look for a therapist, guided by little more than my insurance company’s website and the vague idea that I wanted to see someone Jewish and female. I still can’t quite say whether this preference stemmed from a desire for someone who would mirror myself and provide comfort in a similar manner to my mother, some vestigial “insider” impulse, or was simply the least restrictive qualification I could apply, given the demographics of the New York City therapeutic community. As it turned out, my tenure as the patient of a woman I’ll call Sharon Stein helped enormously, but not for the reasons I, or anyone else, could have predicted.

****

Sharon is in her mid-60s and exudes the graceful toughness that I associate with a certain kind of Jewish woman. Her large features and skeptically-set mouth reminded me of an Ashkenazic version of my beloved late grandmother. As soon as I met her, I felt a familiar, if constricting, kinship. I immediately began to question my decision. Did I really need another mother, or aunt? Would she be able to understand my complicated relationship to my Jewishness?

But I found that what felt “Jewish” about her, at least initially, also felt good. Her specific brand of dark humor and matter-of-fact assessments seemed neutral and comforting, and I liked that she acknowledged ideas that had become taboo among women my age: that romantic longing sometimes drives us, that we want babies, and that we get irrationally angry when we feel like other people have what we, too, are due. Her folksy way of commiserating with my endless frustrations—“most people are schmucks,” “you’ve gotta have the chutzpah to decide who the people you want in your life are,” “there’s no point trying to relate to people who haven’t suffered”—just about balanced some of her more cringe-inducing self-help platitudes. She didn’t judge me for my obsession with omens, or my superstitious attachment to certain jewelry, but did take strong issue with my laziness and self-pity. I settled into a pattern of talking around the subject of my work. I slowly began to trust her, and to appreciate the symmetry in talking to someone who relied on Jewishness as a code, and obviously shared some of my familial neuroses, but seemed somehow immune to their crippling effects. A functional nut! Maybe I could be one too.

One day at work, though, four or five sessions into my time with Sharon, my issues with Jewish organizational life reached a fever pitch. I had a pathological desire to turn and run from the Jewish world, from the realm of neurotic writers, and from New York City, into the Wild West of the mind: California, working with kids, driving through mountains, freedom from Yiddish puns, arguments about Israel—even bagels had become sinister. Even in the heat of this anxiety, I knew I was conflating my job and my family and my personality and my fate, and perceiving an inappropriately grandiose narrative where there was just a quiet indie drama—but still, I was losing my grip.

Once in Sharon’s office, I took a deep breath and began describing my mounting desire to flee, heightened by the sense that, career-wise, I had gotten something I wanted but paid too dearly for it. I weepingly confessed that I was finding the focus on my people—our people—too parochial, and that I sometimes looked down on family members who had narrowed their professional worlds in this way. Without thinking, I offered frantic caveats—that many of my best friends were Jewish, that I love the holidays, that all else being equal, I would prefer to marry a Jew—none of which changed the fact that, at the moment, I would have given anything to be able to turn my back on the whole thing.

As I talked, Sharon’s face, peering out from that day’s scarf-brooch combo, went from expressing patient curiosity to amused condescension. When I paused for air, she jumped in. She explained that she too had struggled with her Judaism when she was younger, had dabbled in Buddhism and eventually came back to all the “wonderful” things about our faith. I sputtered that it wasn’t an issue of my personal Judaism, but of my work and my role in my family and my feeling that I was a fraud among the East Coast Jewish intelligentsia. She countered by telling me about how she had once attended a lecture about Judaism and the law and how it had gotten her more interested in the religion—maybe I should try something like that? Maybe I could write about klezmer music’s effect on other musical forms? Had I considered the idea of taking pride in being Jewish because “so many of us are so bright”?

At this point, I gave up trying to respond, but the coup de grace was still to come. Unbidden, Sharon launched into a story about how she had reluctantly joined a Torah study group at her Reform synagogue. At first, she explained, she was concerned that it wouldn’t be intellectual enough, but—through pluck and determination—she was able to bring her own perspective to the group, which then took everyone in an unexpected and “fascinating” direction. As she reached the triumphant climax of this tale of personal discovery, I glanced at the clock and realized we—she—had gone almost 10 minutes over our allotted time. I gathered my things, stood up and thanked her. Same time next week?

A few days later, I called Sharon’s receptionist and cancelled my next appointment. I never went back.

Over the next few months, I parsed the experience on my own. I had gone to Sharon looking for, at best, a way into understanding and, at least, an escape. Instead, what I got was a brochure. Just like my mother, just like my aunts—like me, even, in some ways—Sharon was incapable of impartiality when it came to the question of a young Jew questioning her place in the tribe. Instead, as I was drowning under the pressure to put a lens of pride on all things Jewish, she presented me with a surreal example of precisely what was making me feel suffocated in the first place.

But, like my grandmother used to say, God writes with a crooked hand. Sharon’s performance turned out to be a comically apt manifestation of the elusive thing I had been bothered by—the “pride blinders” that otherwise thoughtful people develop when conversations turn to Jewishness. And in hindsight, she provided me with a ripe Jewish story of my own—tricking me, in a way, back into engagement with this topic that had become so fraught. As my generalized anxiety waned, I woke up to my natural state of curiosity. Just as Judd Apatow could probably make a hilarious movie exploring the lives of professional golfers, and J.D. Salinger could likely write an intriguing novel from the perspective of a poor octogenarian (well, maybe he has), even the less talented among us have any number of paths we can go, but often function best within a certain realm. Maybe Jewishness won’t be mine forever, but Sharon helped me remember where my interest in the topic lay: myself.

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.

“Overall, it was a pretty normal trip home.” >>

Anyone who’s been to a Jewish wedding has witnessed the ritual of the groom stepping on a glass. And most of us have seen hamsahs, the hand-shaped amulets often displayed in people’s homes or worn as jewelry. But how many of us have had a chicken killed on our behalf to ward off bad luck?

Nextbook editor Hadara Graubart’s ancestors came from Spain, via Turkey, and like many Jews who have traversed the globe, they picked up a few traditions along the way. In her family, it’s a short leap from hanging a mezuzah on a doorway to flushing handfuls of salt down the toilet. For this podcast, Hadara spoke with her mother, Jean, about her family’s preoccupation with protective rituals.

Problem was, she had no idea how. For her, as a kid in Manhattan (and the Bronx), Jewishness was to my mother as water is to whitefish. It was just there, all around. You breathed it. It was what you did, how—and where—you lived. But it was not about observance of ritual or halacha; that, for her father and his free-thinking intellectual friends, belonged back in the Old World. Instead, for my mother and her sister, being Jewish meant rallies, fist-pounding politics, landsmanschaft meetings, Yiddish theater, Zionist songs, noodle kugel, chopped liver. When she became aware that some of her friends were having bat mitzvahs, she asked her father why they didn’t belong to a synagogue. His answer: “Synagogues belonged in Europe, where Jews had nothing else. In America, Jews don’t need synagogues. They have everything else.”

While Lexington, Massachusetts is certainly America—it’s the birthplace of American liberty, after all—it bears little resemblance to New York in the 1940s. It didn’t (and doesn’t) offer the kind of “everything else” my grandfather was talking about. There were Jews there, sure. Lefty politics? Some of that too. But it was unlikely that my mother, no matter how good her kugel, would have been able to find or create for me a Jewish atmosphere there like that of her childhood. (Let’s just say that there isn’t actually a store in Lexington called Minuteman Bagel, but there might as well be.) She was going to have to turn instead to religious ritual and education—and not just for me.

After much soul-searching, and with much trepidation—specifically, the fear that someone would spot her and shout “Trayf!”—my mother decided to join Lexington’s Reform synagogue and enroll me in the religious school. A few weeks before the consecration ceremony for the new children, the rabbi met with the families to welcome us and describe what would happen in the service. We’d stand before the ark, he said, and we’d all recite the Shema.

Mom raced home to phone a Jewish friend. “Sally?” she asked, ‘What’s a Shema?”

I still have a very clear, comforting memory of sitting at the piano with my mother and learning to chant the three simple lines of the Shema, Judaism’s essential affirmation of faith. I had no idea she had just learned them herself.

And now I am a mother who wants to give her daughter memories like that one. (Not to mention a mother who wants to have an apartment big enough for a piano.) I know what a Shema is; if I didn’t, I have a husband who could pretty much break it down for me. That said, I don’t want to cede Bess’ Jewish upbringing to David just because he does Jewish upbringing for a living—though I’ll be happy to give him the floor the first time Bess asks, “Who’s God?” I don’t want him to be the default bearer of our household Jewish standard. I want to start new family traditions, help Bess find meaning in who we are already. But that’s also where I get intimidated. This past Passover, we enjoyed second seder with dear friends and their kids in Boston. When the mom rallied the troops to count the omer—which we never got around to in my house growing up—my first thought was, “What’s an omer?” (Counting the omer is a daily blessing for marking the days between Passover and Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah. For some reason I can never remember that.)

This is a long way of saying that I am going to have to do some reading. Just because I am a rabbi’s wife does not mean I’m a ringer. We know that when less observant liberal Jews like my mother marry or start a family, they often feel the urge to become more observant—to join a Jewish community, to create a Jewish home, and, often, to give their children more in the way of Judaism than they themselves had growing up. Basically, we’re all looking for ideas and answers—to our childrens’ questions and our own. As I am beginning to discover, there’s an ever-growing library that can help.

The books I’ve collected so far seem to fall into two rough categories: first, those on how to be a Jewish parent; and second, those on how to parent Jewishly—or, how Judaism can help you parent. (Arguably, there’s also a third category of books by sleep experts, but that’s only because the guru status of the biggest-deal expert is such that I hear him called “Reb Ferber.”) The current big-deal book in category number two is psychologist Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children—but we’ll get to that in a later column. Self-reliant only when in her ExerSaucer (referred to by fellow parents as “Overstimulation Station” or “Neglect-atron 2000,” depending), Bess is indeed old enough to sense routine, to respond to music, to be mesmerized by candlelight. So we’re on the Rituals 101-level books number one such as parenting columnist and web doyenne Meredith L. Jacobs’s new The Modern Jewish Mom’s Guide to Shabbat, which David and I just consulted because somehow we keep forgetting when in the rundown on Friday evenings you bless your children (right after lighting the candles). Its approach, like that of Anita The Red Tent Diamant‘s 2000 classic How to Be a Jewish Parent: A Practical Handbook for Family Life, is comprehensive and concrete: here are the blessings; here (traditionally) is when, how, and why you say them; here’s the deal with keeping kosher; here’s how to install a mezuzah on your doorframe; here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Carrot Ring. Both books invite and assert the flexibility that is key to liberal Jewish practice—it’s still Shabbat if you light candles after sundown, and even if you don’t make brisket—but without crossing the line from lenient to meaningless (“Here’s the recipe for Grandma Hilda’s Pork”).

More and more Jews, it seems, are looking for this kind of gentle, practical, substantive guidance. Traffic to Jacobs’s website, ModernJewishMom, has increased by 300% over the past two years. Diamant’s other venerable guide, Living a Jewish Life: Jewish Traditions, Customs, and Values for Today’s Families, is not only still in print after 15 years, but was just updated and revised. When I asked Jacobs what she thinks accounts for the success, new and renewed, of works like hers and Diamant’s, she said, “Whether it’s a response to September 11 and the kind of world we are now raising our children in, and/or a response to materialism, I think parents are turning to the traditions of our faith to give our children a sense of peace and a sense of self.”

True. But (gasp!) it’s not just about our children. Bequeathing them Jewish traditions can give us a sense of peace, too—as long as we’re able to be comfortable with our own Judaism. Just comfortable! Not experts. “Starting to make Jewish choices as an adult can feel very awkward, even for people who were born Jewish,” Diamant writes in Living a Jewish Life. “There is a sense that you ought to know Hebrew, and when Passover begins, and what the Talmud is. Being uncomfortable in a synagogue or at the prospect of lighting candles might seem to confirm the suspicion that you will never ‘get it,’ that you will never fit in.” True: everyone feels like they’re the one who doesn’t know as much as the person next to them—the one who doesn’t know the melody, who doesn’t know why everyone covers their eyes during that prayer. Thing is, the person singing along perfectly is also wondering how that guy over there knew just when to bow. I’m just learning, we think—they’re the real Jews. Like me: at my husband’s or home shul, I’ve totally got my Jewish game on. But when we have Shabbat lunch with a bunch of rabbis and their even frummier friends, I go into a very “What’s a Shema?” place. How do they keep track of where we are in the post-meal blessing? Do they actually feel joyful because it’s Shabbat, not just because they have the day off? I am always sure that every else’s experience is deeper than my own. Which, if I’m just sitting there feeling inadequate, it definitely is.

Which itself is why it’s a mistake to confuse being less prepared with being less adequate, less experienced with being less Jewish. As my mother ultimately learned, it’s just as Jewish to inquire as it is to know. (Their temple, by the way, has become the center of my parents’ social and spiritual lives. Good call, Mom.) The trick is to get over ourselves—to read how-to books, ask questions, or just observe, and quit worrying about looking stupid. If we’re doing this for our kids, we should learn like them, too. Sitting on the piano bench before my consecration, I don’t remember being afraid that I’d forget the words to the Shema. I just remember that my mother taught them to me.

“Maybe he’ll be a restaurant critic,” my wife suggests, trying to dispel the heavy cloud hanging over us.

“A restaurant critic?” I say disdainfully. “Do you remember what he said after he took a sip of ink from the printer cartridge? ‘Yummy.’ The kid is no gourmet.”

Israel’s next president?

But my wife refuses to lose hope. “Maybe he can be a quality controller of mattresses for dwarves?” she asks excitedly. “After all, he really does love to sleep.”

“That is a very, very specific field,” I say, trying to cool her enthusiasm. “Without connections in bedroom-furniture-for-the-height-challenged circles—which I’m sorry to say neither of us actually has—it’ll be hard for him to break into the business.”

A depressing silence fills our dark living room, broken only by the phony “Bye-byes!” little Lev is calling out to the passersby on the street. My wife is on the verge of crying, and if my military past hadn’t toughened me, I would shed a tear too. What could a pair of brave parents hope for after discovering at such an early stage that their baby is a good-for-nothing?

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a ray of sun breaks through the clouds, bringing with it an epiphany. “President,” I shout happily to my wife, “our Lev will be president.” She hesitates for a moment, but I don’t let that deflate me. “It’s crystal clear,” I explain to her. “With all the investigations of Katsav and the coming impeachment, they’ll be starting to look for a new president in a few weeks, and our Lev has everything it takes to do the job: he looks like a statesman; he loves to wave to people; he doesn’t have a left-wing past that could raise right-wing opposition; and he barely knows how to talk, so there’s almost no chance he’ll make politically incorrect remarks. He’s the perfect candidate, just think about it: my parents are from Poland, your grandmother’s from Syria. If we play our cards right, the little guy’ll get wall-to-wall support.”

“But,” my wife notes skeptically, “he doesn’t know English. How will he make speeches or talk to other world leaders?”

“With waves and smiles,” I reply to calm her down, “just like Katsav.”

“But he still shits in his diapers,” my wife says, still doubtful.

“So what?” I ask, waving my hand dismissively. “No one’s perfect. Compared to his predecessors, his virtues—and there are many—definitely outweigh his vices. Our Lev is as straight as an arrow and he doesn’t have a criminal record or skeletons in the closet…”

“He touches his peenie,” my wife blurts out. “You leave him alone naked for a minute and he’s touching his peenie . . .”

“Better a president who touches himself and not others,” I say, quick to see the half-full glass.

“I’m still not convinced,” my wife persists.

“Shira,” I take her hand and look hard into her eyes, “Face it. Either president or quality controller of mattresses for dwarves. There is no third option. Now you tell me—where do you think Lev has a better chance?”

“President,” she says with a nod after a second’s hesitation. “‘Lev Keret’ definitely sounds like a president’s name.”

Since that conversation, my wife and I have been working constantly on Lev’s presidential campaign. We already have one good slogan: “The People Love Lev.” And “Small Countries Need Compact Presidents” might work pretty well as a bumper sticker. We’re not complacent; we’re well aware that a few other people in the country know how to say “Bye-bye” and wave to passersby from the window. So it’s going to be a tough battle, but in the end, when the smoke clears, the last man standing will be the shortest and the chubbiest. And if you, like us, want Israel to have a president with a clean past and a dirty behind, don’t hesitate to send in your endorsements. All moral support and offers to baby-sit the president-elect will be gratefully accepted.

Cynthia, Montclair, New Jersey, 2002 (© 2007 by Andrea Stern)

As a teenager, Andrea Stern hated being the subject of her shutterbug father’s photographs. As an adult, she turned the tables, picking up a camera of her own and taking pictures of her large, affluent family not just in moments of celebration—horas at weddings, bar mitzvah mornings, and holiday gatherings—but at meals, in quiet prayer, and at the beach.

Many of these images are now collected in a new book titled Inheritance, which reads almost like a diary, capturing the intimate moments and love exchanged among Stern’s close-knit relatives. Andrea Stern speaks with Nextbook about her inheritances, from the material privileges she enjoyed to the emotional legacy her family—and every family—bestows on its children.

Andy wants to do social engineering, upending familiar groupings and generational cliques. I say that people forced into new orbits tend to have collisions. But I’m engineering, too. My picture of the room, with its tables for 10 and tables for eight, is a weather map of self-esteem. Who will feel diminished if seated with whom? Who will feel augmented? Andy tends to think: These folks all have young kids; they can talk about that. I think: Will they feel insulted if they’ve clearly been dumped at the breeder table?

So we spin the wheels again and again; the cool young adults coalesce in one spot and then go flying to the four ends of the room. Look, the actress is now at a table of orthodontists! They will be thrilled—but will she? It’s enough to make me wish we had stuck with Andy’s original plan of not assigning tables at all, a plan that was scotched when the caterer sagely told us it wasn’t hostly. Guests are nervous if they have too many choices, she said. They want to know where to go.

I know how they feel; I’m nervous, too. Once the table assignments have been made—and, oops, someone’s just cancelled—I still have to print up the seating cards, cut out the little cedar tree designs with the cedar tree hole punch I found online, then fold the damn things with a grapefruit spoon. (The word erez means “cedar” in Hebrew and Arabic.) That chore is but one on a list several pages long of things that need to be done between now and Friday, when the festivities begin with a pre-synagogue Indian dinner for out-of-towners. Each item on the list is as mind-knotting as the table placements. We have to assign the various ritual honors, like saying prayers and carrying the Torah, carefully balancing sides of the family with linguistic and physical capabilities. We have to contact guests about subway disruptions we barely understand ourselves. We have to review the rental order (where are the 16 table-number holders?) and e-mail Erez’s teachers, begging them not to assign any book reports for the following Monday. Not to mention planning clothing and haircuts for four. I am happy to say I’ve taken care of my haircut several days early, though the result is less like the George Clooney I was going for than a penitential Britney Spears.

None of this has anything to do with the real meaning of the bar mitzvah, of course; any religious issues have disappeared almost irretrievably within a fog of party planning. Indeed, the item on my checklist that keeps being moved forward each day as the rest get crossed off is the only one that speaks directly to the import of the experience: writing my speech. Relevant thoughts flit through my brain at night, but they are quickly chased off by those hostly concerns. At this rate all I will be fit to say to my son as his community watches him accept the duties (or at least the cash) of adulthood is what the chafing dish cost.

And why are we making speeches in the first place? We have eliminated all other fake rituals from our plan for the party: the candle-lighting doggerel, the open-mike roast, the pushy videography and the child-on-chair dancing. During the service itself, Erez will deliver a dvar Torah—an exegesis and interpretation of his Torah portion, Ki Tisa—that compares the Israelites’ fear-based shenanigans at Mt. Sinai to fear-based American foreign policy after 9/11. (In this analogy, Aaron stands for Bush, which seems apt enough; Aaron was a terrible public speaker.) In accordance with the rabbi’s instructions, the talk concludes with the traditional nechemta, or consolation: a hopeful application of Jewish values to the situation under discussion. Erez’s nechemta imagines a new Moses, perhaps in the form of a new president, albeit one who won’t literally break the law when he or she shows up.

Isn’t that enough of a message for the day? But no, Andy and I and my father (and even Erez’s 11-year-old brother, Lucas) each have to say our piece. It’s not a ritual; it’s a reflex. At least Lucas’s will be entertaining. In the draft I typed for him, he interprets Ki Tisa in personal terms, suggesting that if the Israelites had only hidden their golden calf under the bed when Moses got home, they might have avoided all that trouble. (“Believe me,” he wrote, “I know from experience.”) My father will no doubt invoke his own father, who spoke interminably at my bar mitzvah service, and in so doing attempt to trace for Erez the line of Jewishness to which he not only belongs but to which he is now also responsible. Andy is handling the welcome speech and, like me, has no clue what he will say.

What do you say to your son, now or ever? My mother saw herself, adapting the words of the poet James Merrill, as being condemned to talk about real things. This was her professional mantra (she was a therapist) but also her modus vivendi. She was not the type to ignore elephants in the room, but would invite them to come sit by her and unburden. And though she delighted in the mundane and frivolous, such things also needed to be addressed realistically. She would see any speech I might give at Erez’s bar mitzvah as far less important than what I said to him as he went to bed each night.

Would see! Oh, the implacable sadness of that conditional tense! For it was my mother, dead five years now, who gave me the vocabulary to talk about the love between a parent and child—and she seems to have taken it with her.

I try to think what else she would have seen if she were still alive. What would she make of Erez at 13? (His actual birthday is today, as I write this.) She would notice immediately that he is as different from me as I seemed to be from my father. He is cheerful, even-tempered, sturdy, gregarious, fidgety, thick-skinned, if anything too resilient. He says hello to everyone on the street, and remembers their names years later. He tries out his nascent Spanish on people who speak it. With good cause, he loves the way he looks.

I have nothing to teach such a child; he has more to teach me, I should think. Oh, in our normal discourse there may be things I can tell him: how to prioritize his homework, how to fold his pajamas. I can even, within the limits of my ability to analogize, give him advice as he starts to express his feelings for girls, though he’s on his own with the dance moves. What I cannot do is improve him in any larger way; where he is naturally gifted he is already unimprovable, and likewise where he is not. I have often said that he, and Lucas, came to us fully who they were or would ever be, and that’s not merely the consequence of adoption; biological children are just as willfully the product of their genes. Perhaps that’s why this whole bar mitzvah process has seemed so quixotic, highlighting as it does all the surface ways we shape our children: their clothing, their phrasing, their faith. Stand these next to the radiance of who they are without (or despite) our shaping and the whole project of parenting is revealed as less consequential than we usually dare to think.

Yet there’s no denying that many children are disastrously raised. And that some of us feel our parents to be tremendously significant, if only for having joined us in our project of becoming ourselves. I look back on how my mother chose to bend her life to mine; how, even stranger, my father did so almost blindly. Why did they do that? I couldn’t have seemed like anyone’s sure thing. (A theater major? Even worse, an English major?) The trick is not just egolessness, it’s faith. And I don’t mean in God.

As my son turns 13 I wonder what will happen to him in the knotty years that come next. It isn’t so much a question of whether he will be able to follow me as whether I will be able to follow him as he stalks all confident and godlike into the future. Unlike my grandmother, walking to America, I am a fearful person, and may not have faith in where Erez will take me. I am a calf-worshiper. But I’ve learned something from Erez’s dvar Torah, even in draft form: we must not act from such fear because we cannot live without the gods of our future. So perhaps, on Saturday, it’s not for me to tell him something profound between the main course and the cake. Or only as profound as this: I will listen to you; I will try to have faith.

Since we began studying bar mitzvahs more closely in anticipation of our son Erez’s, next March, we have seen many variants on what I call the Family Flambé. In its classic incarnation, the rite is introduced when the emcee welcomes the adolescent honoree to the dais at the beginning of the luncheon or dinner. The cake, often shaped like a Torah, is then paraded from the kitchen for a preview, with much the same pomp that accompanies a real Torah when it’s brought from the ark. The cake, however, is studded with tapers—at least 13, and as many as two dozen. Each, we soon learn, is dedicated to a friend or family member, or sometimes an entire nuclear unit, whom the bar mitzvah eulogizes with a fitting (though metrically unorthodox) piece of doggerel. “You’re always there when I need to relax / Please come up, Uncle Milt, Aunt Elaine, cousins Becca and Max.” After Becca and Max fight over the propane match and light their candle, the cycle starts again with Nana Sylvia; by the time all the candles are lit, everyone in the room has been called to the buttercream Torah—and voila, when they return to their seats the salad has been placed.

But if these faux aliyot make a peculiar ritual, they pale in comparison to the supposedly real ones. The signal event of the bar mitzvah ceremony, religiously at least, is the 13-year-old’s first public reading from the Torah. In many congregations, in addition to his portion of this ancient text, the bar mitzvah also reads a haftarah portion—a related selection from a slightly less ancient text that is meant to bear a revealing connection to the biblical story under consideration. As part of his first assignment in preparation for his bar mitzvah, Erez was recently asked by our rabbi to read both his Torah and haftarah portions, in English, and see if he could find such a connection. He couldn’t, unless it was the frequent use of the word “the” in each. Ki Tisa, the Torah portion, concerned, among other things, Moses’s destruction of the Ten Commandments when he found the Israelites cavorting with the Golden Calf. In the haftarah, taken from the first book of Kings, the prophet Elijah instructs the followers of Baal to sacrifice a bull. Was livestock the connection? Possibly, though it was hard to tell because, in literary style, the stories were about as related as The Iliad and Valley of the Dolls.

If intertextual connections were not forthcoming, intergenerational ones certainly were. Watching Erez’s eyes glaze over just trying to understand the English, Andy and I flashed back to our own bar mitzvah ordeals, and realized how much work lay ahead. For Erez would not be reciting lines he more or less understood; this was not like his Drama class’s recent presentation of My Most Embarrassing Moment, in which the words made sense and admitted of paraphrase. No, his bar mitzvah readings are supposed to be perfect despite being in Hebrew, which is mostly gibberish to an American child not raised in a yeshiva. And yet the texts can barely be read, either, because as presented in an actual Torah scroll they are virtually in code. They contain neither vowels (in Hebrew, a semaphore of dots) nor punctuation nor diacritical marks that distinguish, say, the letter that sounds like an s from the one that sounds like a sh. Imagine being asked to sing a song presented to you, in thickly handwritten strokes, as MR HD LTL LM. Or as ML LTL DH RM—because Hebrew, of course, reads from right to left. Would you grasp that Mary had a little lamb? Or would you surmise, just as reasonably by Hebraic rules, that Morey hid a lethal loom?

And even if you got the words right, would you sing them properly? No modern notion of song prepares you for the difficulty of chanting Torah. Words are not set into long-line melodies consisting of regular-length phrases, as in a proper Rodgers and Hammerstein number; instead, every word, and often every syllable of a word, gets its own little tune of three to ten notes, which must be strung together just so. These melodic cells are commonly called trope, and there are about 27 of them, indicated by a mark the size of a sesame seed—also, sadistically, not printed in the scroll.

And so, except for the rare 13-year-old who is already a cryptographer, a gifted musician, and a scholar of ancient Hebrew, a great deal of rote memorization is involved. Putting aside the question of meaning, which I find a lot to put aside, the bar mitzvah Torah reading is a totally abstract and intimidating chore. Teaching a son how to do it, or more likely watching someone else teach him, is for many fathers an act of nostalgia and also revenge, as perhaps circumcision was some years earlier in the process. The Torah does not get any less arcane, or difficult to utter correctly, as each generation goes by.

Erez is fairly musical and a quick study at languages. But he’s no Alan Turing, and the enigma of Biblical cantillation seemed likely to dwarf such sixth grade challenges as Latin and viola. To ease the process, our rabbi suggested that parents of the coming year’s crop of b’nai mitzvah consider purchasing a computer program called Trope Trainer, which could be customized for each student’s Torah and haftarah portion, plus the relevant blessings and even our synagogue’s preferred pronunciations. The program, manufactured by a company called Kinnor, which means “harp” in Hebrew, would not only help our kids learn their material but also, because it might loosely be classified as a computer game, keep them interested in doing so. With its technical bells and whistles—its variable pace and pitch, its cheerful color-coding and robotic sound snippets—Trope Trainer might even make the dreaded process fun. Well, if not fun, then at least less onerous than it was when supervised by harried adults. A motto on Kinnor’s website seemed to allude to this tension: “The software with infinite patience.”

Lacking infinite patience, and sensing a bargain at just $59.95—not to mention a rabbinical discount of 20 percent—I immediately set out to buy the program. But there was one problem. It only runs on Windows.

When we met, Andy and I worried about the stresses of a mixed marriage. I had been using Windows since the beginning of personal computing; he was an early adopter of Mac. Andy was an early adopter in another sense, too: he’d adopted Erez and his younger brother, Lucas, nearly at birth. I adopted them later—a story I’ve told at length elsewhere.

As with all mixed marriages, the big question was: How would we raise the children? While they were toddlers the matter could be tabled. But as school came along, and with it, amazingly soon, assignments involving web searches and typed papers, we realized we had to face the disparity of our customs and beliefs. There were arguments to be made for both systems. Windows was more universally applicable, and had a pleasing Old Testament volatility. Its crashes came like thunderous punishments. Mac was all promises of love and peace. If there were crashes at all, there were pretty resurrections. But it was really because it made our electronic communications simpler that I converted. It was, in a family, simpler to be on the same platform.

This was, in some ways, a version of the religious conflict that had simmered beneath the surface of our relationship from the beginning. While Andy and I are both atheist Jews, we are different kinds of atheist Jews. (The subdivisions of faith within atheism far outnumber those among believers.) Andy, never having been very observant, is content to accept the contradiction implicit in his enjoyment of whatever observance fits into his schedule. I, having been raised more religiously, find that approach not just uncomfortable but untenable: a woolen shirt I can only wear for a few seconds before feeling the need to tear it off. Nevertheless, when we began to discuss how the boys would be raised—in effect, which nonfaith we would try to inculcate—I once again converted. Atheism certainly suited me; but how could I know what would suit them? We often said that a little religion now would be a good inoculation against too much later: a hair of the dogma that bit you.

But I did not think clearly enough about what a little religion leads to before it gets to faithlessness. It first leads to faith. And soon enough a bar mitzvah.

And so, as the Trope Trainer sat useless in its jewel box, here we were trying to figure out what Elijah and the bull had to do with Moses and the Golden Calf or, indeed, with anything. Then I read a line I had somehow missed the first time: “Elijah approached all the people and said, ‘How long will you keep hopping between two opinions? If the Lord is God, follow Him; and if Baal, follow him!’ ” Whereupon he sacrifices the bull in a blaze of fire to prove his God’s supremacy, thus bringing the idolaters back to their faith. (Though that’s not, unfortunately, the end of the story.) As Elijah might have put it were he a bar mitzvah today, “You’re always there to help me when I fall / please join me at the altar, ye followers of Baal.”

So that was the connection: Elijah, like Moses, wanted people to decide once and for all who they would be. Belief, it seemed, had always been a problem of platforms, the most difficult kind of knot to untangle because it is less about content than habit.

Our computing problem was more easily solved. Sid, a customer representative at Kinnor, suggested I purchase Virtual Windows—a $200 program that allows your Mac computer to pretend it runs in the dominant faith, much as the crypto-Jews of Inquisition-era Spain, in their outward lives, appeared to embrace Catholicism. Sid said that Trope Trainer would work well enough in this neither-fish-nor-fowl environment, though it might seem a bit poky and would use up a huge amount of our computer’s resources in making its constant internal translations and compromises.

I knew what he meant.

L. Bloom was born in Sung-Nam, Korea. Adopted as an infant, like her brother, she grew up in a town an hour west of Boston. She’s got relatives in Brookline and Jerusalem, and close friends who are Korean- and Chinese-American. L. is Jewish and Asian, and at 24, she’s still figuring out where she belongs.

Listen to interviews with families who adopted girls from China.

RESOURCES

Adoption Learning Partners

National Adoption Information Clearinghouse

Families with Children from China

Stars of David

Sino-Judaic Institute

More and more American families are adopting children from China. Last year, Americans adopted almost 8,000 children from China—up from 61 in 1991. China introduced its one-child policy in 1979 to limit population growth. Since boys are considered more desirable, the vast majority of these adoptees are girls.

In this multimedia documentary, three Jewish families discuss their experiences as adoptive parents:

Scott and Debbie Halperin have three children: one daughter each from a previous marriage and Laci Anhui Sondra Halperin, who they adopted in 2003. The Halperins live in Suffern, New York.

Roxanne and Eric Levine have one child, Tamar, who was adopted in 2002. Roxanne is an immigration attorney and Eric works for United Jewish Communities. They live in White Plains, New York.

Marcia Hochman and Joel Mitnick have two children: Emma and Annie Feng Ye Hochman Mitnick, who was adopted in 2003. The family lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

There’s nothing like a wedding to make simmering tensions come to a boil. Janice Erlbaum tells the story of her cousin Melissa’s wedding—one which is fraught not only because Melissa is marrying Frankie, a Catholic—but also because her mother wants to sing at the wedding, and Melissa’s not having it.

As many parents will tell you, there’s nothing quite like your own children to force you to reexamine your beliefs. Before having a son, “I never bumped up against my own thoughts about spirituality,” says Michael Kimmel. “I think many of us don’t, and I think we sort of drift.”

Kimmel, a sociologist, and his wife, writer Amy Aronson, were forced out of their drift about two years ago when their son, Zachary, took a sudden, rather pronounced interest in religion. Julie Subrin reports.

Has anything like this every happened in your family? Has a relative or friend ever forced you to rethink what it means to be Jewish? Tell us your story.