Of all the arguments that have ever been made about why the Iranian regime is uniquely uninterested in its own survival, the one my colleague Lee Smith offered up last week is one of the more preposterous. “It’s pretty easy to make a strong case that the Iranian regime really is suicidal,” he wrote, presenting three pieces of evidence. First, he mentioned Iranian support for Hezbollah. Then he discussed Iran’s willingness to sacrifice young men in the war with Iraq. (A war, incidentally, that Iraq started.) “Perhaps most tellingly,” Smith concluded, “the plummeting Iranian birthrate—from 6.5 children per woman a generation ago to 1.7 today— suggests that it is not just the regime, but an entire nation, that no longer wishes to live.”

One doesn’t have to be sanguine about the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran to understand what a thin argument this is. For years now, conservatives have decried plummeting birthrates in Europe as evidence of the corrosive nature of secularism. “Europe is facing a demographic disaster,” Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2008. “That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality.” That argument is wrong, but at least recognizes the connection between increased autonomy for women and decreased fertility.

I wrote a book about the politics of rising and falling fertility, The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World. While researching it, I read a lot of right-wing articles about how decreasing birthrates in Europe would clear the way for a Muslim invasion. But no one besides Smith, to my knowledge, has ever described fertility decline as a symptom of jihadism.

After all, unstable societies shot through with violent religious fundamentalism tend to have extremely high fertility: Afghanistan’s birthrate is 5.39, Gaza’s is 4.74. Pakistan’s is 3.17. (All these numbers come from the CIA World Factbook, which lists Iran’s fertility as 1.88.) Developed, modernized countries, by contrast, have much lower fertility: 1.67 children per woman in Sweden, 1.47 children per woman in Spain, 1.41 children per woman in Germany. The fertility rate among American Jews is around 1.9, a number that would be much lower without the particularly fecund Hasidim.

As education and opportunities increase for women, fertility rates go down. That’s as true of Iran—where women now outnumber men by two to one in universities—as it is anywhere.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is not happy about this development. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini adopted strongly pronatalist policies, but when rapid population growth started straining the economy, the regime reversed itself and began encouraging family planning. Ahmadinejad believes this has gone too far, and in 2006, as The Guardian reported, he “called for a baby boom to almost double the country’s population to 120 million and enable it to threaten the west.” Iranian women didn’t listen to him. It’s hard to see this as evidence of their willingness to sacrifice themselves in a mad religious war.

There is one oblique connection between religiosity and declining birthrates. Fertility tends to go down when economic opportunities for women increase. But in societies that don’t support women’s ambition to combine work and family, it can fall to levels that threaten a nation’s economic future. If having children forces women out of the workplace, some will forgo motherhood, or have fewer children than they might have wished. Thus, developed countries with strongly patriarchal attitudes are shrinking fast: The birthrate in Japan is 1.21, while Italy’s is 1.39.

In a 2003 report on population growth and pensions, Tory MP David Willetts wrote, “The evidence from Italy, and indeed Spain, is that a traditional family structure now leads to very low birth rates.” Countries like France and Sweden, by contrast, are shrinking much more slowly, because the generous benefits accorded to working women allow them to have more kids. “Feminism is the new natalism,” Willetts concluded. In this sense, Iranian women might have more babies if their society was more liberal. But the fact that Iran now has the same fertility rate as Chile and Iceland is still evidence of fitful modernization, not a national death wish.

Lee Smith responds:

Last week I wrote a column about the debate over the rationality of the Iranian regime. On one side of this policy debate are those who believe the regime is rational and therefore will pose little strategic threat to the United States and Israel should it acquire a nuclear weapon. On the other side are those who believe that the regime is irrational, and thus cannot be allowed to have the bomb since it cannot be deterred from using it. My conclusion was that the entire debate should be irrelevant to U.S. policy toward Iran, a country whose conduct—rational or not—already threatens our strategic interests and would surely become more threatening if bolstered by the bomb.

In order to illustrate both sides of the debate, I showed how one could argue—and some have argued—that the Iranian regime really is suicidal and even that the Iranian people as a whole had largely lost confidence and interest in the future that they are being offered by the mullahs. To that end, I suggested that rapidly declining birthrates in Iran could be taken as evidence that the Iranian people as a whole were choosing not to reproduce themselves, which in turn might suggest that, as a people, they preferred not to live.

Continue reading: ‘The small family is divine’

Savaged by the Cain campaign and the right-wing press, Cain’s accuser, Sharon Bialek, had just begun her return to obscurity when, yesterday, another woman surfaced claiming she’d had a 13-year affair with the Republican presidential candidate. That’s likely to keep Allred in the headlines for a while longer. And when this scandal fades, there will doubtless soon be another, because whenever there’s a salacious news story, from the Scott Peterson murder case to Tiger Woods’ serial affairs, Allred manages to become part of it. Though the most famous feminist attorney in the United States, she has become something of a national joke, a media hound who has undermined her reputation by pushing victim-feminism well past the point of caricature.

It’s tempting to see the low esteem in which Allred is held as a product of sexism. After all, she is a tremendously accomplished lawyer. According to her autobiography, Fight Back and Win, her firm, Allred, Maroko & Goldberg, has represented more sexual-harassment victims than any other in the country. In 1984, she sued the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles on behalf of Rita Milla, who Allred says was the first woman to go public with charges of sexual abuse against multiple priests. She’s also represented Mel Mermelstein, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald who successfully sued the Holocaust deniers at the Institute for Historical Review.

In Los Angeles, Allred helped eradicate the barbaric practice of forcing female prisoners to give birth in chains. She’s battled anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers posing as health clinics, and she’s represented a prostitute whose rape accusations were dismissed because of her profession. Last year, Allred helped destroy Meg Whitman’s gubernatorial hopes by bringing a suit on behalf of Whitman’s undocumented housekeeper Nicky Diaz Santillan. “There is a real serious core to her,” legal writer Jeffrey Toobin, who has often encountered Allred as a fellow CNN commentator, told me. “She is a real lawyer, who generally does very good work for her clients.”

But the fact that Allred isn’t taken seriously is partly her fault. It’s true that powerful women in the public eye are often castigated as gluttons for attention. In most instances, that’s a sexist slur. In Allred’s case, it’s an undeniable truth.

Her hunger for media attention, even when it doesn’t seem to help her clients, appears almost pathological. Beyond that, Allred’s cases, especially those involving jilted lovers of famous men, increasingly represent the depressing terminus of a vision of feminism based solely on victimization, one in which every wronged woman deserves a legal remedy. Thus, even when she represents a woman bringing grave charges—a woman, say, like Bialek, who claims that in 1997 Cain groped her and tried to extract sex in exchange for employment help—the whole thing ends up looking like a bit of a farce.

Perhaps the nadir of Allred’s career came last year, when she represented two of Tiger Woods’ ex-girlfriends: nightclub promoter Rachel Uchitel and porn star Joslyn James. Allred demanded, on James’ behalf, that Woods issue a public apology for cheating on her with other women. (At the time, of course, he was cheating on his wife with James.) “She’s a victim because he broke her heart,” Allred told the Atlantic. It wasn’t the first time Allred went after a famous man for caddishness. In 1997, she filed a lawsuit on behalf of model Kelly Fisher for breach of contract against her onetime fiancé, international playboy Dodi Fayed, for betraying her with Princess Diana. “Mr. Fayed needs to take responsibility for the woman that he ‘left at the altar’ and treated with such total disrespect,” said Allred at one of her famous press conferences.

In such cases, Allred pushes the feminist notion of the personal as political to the point of ridiculousness. Skeptics of the idea of sexual harassment sometimes claim that feminists want to be the dating police. Allred often seems like she’s out to prove them right.

Laurie Levenson, a former Los Angeles prosecutor who now teaches law at Loyola, Allred’s alma mater, points out that Allred, 70, came of age at a time when women’s futures hinged on their relationships. “I think it’s deeply ingrained in her that women need a voice, and one of the times women need a voice the most is when they’ve suffered personally,” she told me. This is understandable, but it threatens to reduce feminism to the revenge of scorned women.

Allred’s own life was definitively shaped by men’s misdeeds, criminal and otherwise. The only daughter of a working-class Jewish family in Philadelphia, she married a blue-blood boy during college and was pregnant at 19. Soon, she writes in her autobiography, her husband’s mental health deteriorated and he became emotionally abusive, forcing Allred to leave him. (He later committed suicide.) As a single mother, Allred became a teacher, working in inner-city schools. In 1966, on vacation in Acapulco, she was raped at gunpoint, became pregnant, and had an illegal abortion that almost killed her. By the time she enrolled in law school in 1968, Allred was a 30-year-old woman deeply versed in the ways the world brutalizes her sex. Her work as a defender of women, built on her own experiences of powerlessness, has resulted in some heroic victories.

But every time a man hurts a woman, it’s not necessarily a matter of public concern. “One of the things that happens is that people start discounting her cases, saying she’s doing it just for the publicity,” Levenson said. “That probably is not an accurate or fair characterization, but it is one of the risks of what she does.”

Thus, when Allred introduced Bialek to the public this month, the event had a sideshow quality, despite the gravity of Bialek’s accusations. Allred had staged the press conference in a way that made it seem a reprise of one she’d held in June with Ginger Lee, a porn star who had an online flirtation with then-Congressman Anthony Weiner.

Both took place at the Friars Club, a private hangout for comedians and entertainers, famous for its bawdy celebrity roasts. The Friars Club has special meaning for Allred. In 1987, she became the first female member of the club’s Beverly Hills branch but found her access to its health club restricted by men who wanted to use the steam room naked. In protest, she barged into the steam room with a tape measure, reporters in tow. Referring to the penises on display, she sang Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” (The men were quickly convinced to cover up.) She also filed a sex-discrimination charge against the New York branch of the club, a conflict that at one point led Henny Youngman to physically block her entrance to the on-site restaurant. Allred’s ability to hold a press conference in one of the Friar’s Clubs stately, dark wood-paneled rooms is a symbol of personal triumph. Nevertheless, a club dedicated to comedy was an odd place to introduce a harassment victim hoping to be taken seriously.

At both press conferences, Howard Stern producer Benjy Bronk hijacked the microphone before Allred and her client took the stage, adding to the absurdity. (At the Bialek event, Bronk used his time to plug his crush, the former keytarist for Cobra Starship.) The first press conference, at which Ginger Lee called on Weiner to resign, left journalists a bit baffled. At one point, a reporter shouted out, “Why are we here?” to which Allred replied, “That’s a question you have to ask yourselves.”

The reason for the Bialek press conference, by contrast, was obvious. What was baffling was Allred’s decision to echo the atmospherics of the earlier media scrum, thus creating a symbolic link between the two, much to Bialek’s detriment. The hoary joke Allred made in her opening statement didn’t add to the occasion’s dignity. Describing how Bialek had sought job assistance from Cain, Allred quipped: “Instead of receiving the help that she had hoped for, Mr. Cain … decided to provide her with his idea of a stimulus package.” The whole event, with its weird mix of high principle and tawdry spectacle, embodied the tragic tension at the heart of Allred’s work. Few have done more to advocate on behalf of sexual-harassment victims. And few have done more to make harassment seem laughable.

Steinem’s life has been full of glamour and intrigue and controversy and historical weight. Here, though, she’s reduced to a generic person of interest, someone whose life has yielded anecdotes featuring other notable figures, including Richard Nixon, George Burns, and Helen Gurley Brown, bits of quotable wisdom, and lots of photographic evidence of her presence at important events while wearing era-appropriate outfits. The film covers Steinem’s famous undercover Playboy Bunny piece, her ambivalent relationship with her mother, her feminist “click” when she realized that the abortion she had at 22 was more than just a personal experience, her fierce independence, her breast cancer, and her tap-dancing skills.

Despite this encyclopedic approach, Gloria never alludes to the fairly well-known fact that Steinem—like many other prominent second-wave feminists, including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin—is Jewish. The concentration of Jewish women in the movement has been variously attributed to Jewish women’s tendency to embrace progressive causes, our inherent love of arguing, and our relative comfort with being seen as outsiders. As Steinem herself told the Jewish Standard last year, “I think the emphasis on social justice … has probably created a situation where Jewish women may be disproportionately represented in the women’s movement.”

Liberal Judaism and feminism have always seemed obviously wedded to me: Both emphasize asking questions and taking responsibility for the state of the world. In different ways, they both involve having faith. And if you want to be reductive about it, sure, Jews and feminists are stereotypically loud and opinionated. In my experience, they’re identities that complement more than complicate each other. I’d call them inextricable, except that while I can’t imagine being Jewish without being a feminist—or being compelled by a form of Judaism that wasn’t feminist-flavored—it’s less of a stretch to think of things the other way around.

Maybe this is because feminism is the broader of these two worldviews. It’s more flexible, with fewer rules. It’s also an identity that people choose rather than inherit (though there’s undoubtedly a hereditary element—my copy of Steinem’s book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions was handed down from my bubbe, who along with her sister was involved in a Jewish feminist study group they irreverently called the “Minyan of Crones”).

Though Gloria is not particularly nuanced—nor concerned at all with Judaism—there’s a moment in the documentary that suggests a more subtle parallel between Judaism and feminism is possible. It comes not from Steinem but in her quoting of a non-Jewish icon of an even earlier feminist wave, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony, Steinem paraphrases, “said our job is not to make young women grateful; it’s to make them ungrateful, so they keep going.” It’s a line that distills something essential about feminism and Judaism: their shared commitment to remembering their history, as well as a dedication to moving beyond it.

Anthony was calling for young women to continue the work of their mothers, to push on to accomplish what the older women couldn’t. But the line also points to the fact that feminists’ goal all along has been for their daughters’ lives to look different—less burdened—than they’d had to fight to achieve. Speaking “in her own words,” Steinem is happy to talk about the past, but she looks determinedly to the future. She insists on the importance of trusting younger generations, of passing down knowledge and experience but not resenting your children for not making your experiences the center of their own.

Jews and feminists alike care about remembering because they know there is danger in forgetting. If we don’t take careful stock of why things are different today and how we got here, we risk returning to a past that we worked so hard to get beyond. And yet to never forget, to be constantly remembering and re-remembering, can be a kind of paralysis.

This is not at all the point of Gloria, even though it’s probably one of feminism’s prevailing themes, and it’s admittedly something of a stretch to zero in on it amid what is otherwise a general, well-meaning overview of Steinem’s life and legacy. But without some extrapolating, the film risks putting you to sleep. This is partly due to the filmmaker’s apparent uncertainty about who he thinks will be watching: On one hand, Kunhardt seems to presume a certain familiarity with the basic facts of feminist history, because they are glossed over. At the same time, the film never really moves beyond those basics, failing to capture the urgency of second-wave feminism and the spirit of the women, including Steinem, who helped lead it. It’s a soothing, feel-good portrait that is likely to be celebrated by the same people who celebrate Steinem off screen—who know she’s got more dimensions than she’s allowed to show in this film but will be gratified to see her getting her due.

Given the complexity of all that Steinem represents, that means Gloria is a missed opportunity. But there’s also something honest about it. Steinem is 77 years old, and her legacy is coalescing. Though she’s still vocal and visible and shows no sign of slowing down, the history in which she played such an important role is receding, and this documentary is part of an understandable—and worthwhile—attempt to solidify her significance.

But significance and boilerplate are easily confused. Steinem continues to be relevant despite efforts to pin her down and praise her, to write her eulogy and feminism’s along with it. In recent years, she’s shown a determination to be part of feminist debate without defining it, to let her ideas evolve, and to acknowledge the relevance of feminism beyond her own generation in ways that many of her peers have been unwilling to. In 2004, she cheered the overwhelming turnout by young women at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, and, to its credit, the film does include a clip of this. During the 2008 presidential election, she weighed in on the blazing debate over whether a white woman or a black man was more “electable.” She contributed an essay to an anthology of women’s writings about getting their first period. Just last week, she called for a boycott of the upcoming NBC drama The Playboy Club—frustrated by the way it romanticizes a job she knows firsthand was anything but glamorous—and published an op-ed about the militarization of Jeju Island, South Korea.

I wish that this standard-issue film about the life of one of our great heroines had been better, juicier, truer to the spirit of the movement she helped lead—and to which she continues to be a model of ingenuity, grace, and perhaps most important, a much-needed provider of perspective. I wish it could have been a rallying cry, something more than a validating if disappointing hour of programming for people who already know how important she is. Luckily, Gloria will not be the last word on Gloria Steinem.

Freudians see pistols as phallic symbols. Marines chant, “This is my rifle, this is my gun; this is for fighting, this is for fun.” But the Hebrew language takes the connection between sex and violence to the next level, joining the two in unholy linguistic matrimony.

The noun ziyun, meaning “arming” or “provision of weapons,” is also a coarse word for sex. Other words that share the root have a similar duality: “Zayin” is a slang word for “penis” but also means weapons; “lehizdayen” literally means “to be armed,” but if you wanted to tell someone to go do something anatomically impossible, you would say, “Lech tizdayen.”

This fecundity of meanings spawned some technology humor in 2006, just before the Microsoft Zune, a personal media player, came to Israel. At the time, some were asking whether the name really translates all that well into Hebrew. “We have yet to find an answer to the question of how to pronounce this word—Zoon, Zona [meaning “prostitute”], or perhaps Ziyun?” a technology reviewer wrote on Ynet. “Before they accuse us of ruining the youth, maybe it’s better if we stay on the safe side and call it Zion.”

But perhaps the form of the word ziyun that best lays bare the variety of interpretations is “mezuyan.” Talk about a “ma’avak [struggle] mezuyan”—as in Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statement that while failed talks with Israel may spark a third Intifada, he opposes any “armed struggle”—and no one will doubt that you’re referring to weapons. But mention “dor [generation] mezuyan” and the picture gets more complicated: You could be referring to the Hebrew title of Generation Kill, HBO’s seven-part miniseries about U.S. Marines in the first 40 days of the Iraq war; or you might be uttering the equivalent of a certain four-letter word, as in the best-known line of Israeli pop star Aviv Geffen’s chart-topping 1993 song “Ahshav Me’unan” (It’s Cloudy Now): “Anahnu dor mezuyan”—“We’re a fucked-up generation.”

As American feminists and others highlight the violent attitude toward women they say is evident in pornography, hip-hop, and the movies, Israel remains one step ahead in making the link explicit. Perhaps, as Freud might have speculated, it is the ubiquity of phallic symbol-toting soldiers that allows for the linguistic limbs of sex and violence to lie intertwined, and undisturbed, in the Hebrew language.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: Settle Down
Breaking Free
After Shabbat
Haredization
‘Filipinit’
On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

The award-winning and widely exhibited feminist artist Elisabeth Subrin is Jewish, as is Shulamith Firestone, the focus of Subrin’s 1997 film Shulie, on view at the Jewish Museum through the end of this month. (Full disclosure: Subrin is also the sister of Tablet Magazine’s Julie Subrin.) And though Firestone’s specific Jewish credentials are nothing to sniff at, it turns out that in this most Jewish of museum settings, Jewish identity is not the most Jewish thing about the film.

Subrin’s Shulie is a shot-by-shot, identically titled remake of a little-seen documentary made in 1967. That year, a group of four male film students shot a 37-minute, 16mm film about Firestone, one of a few they produced about the lives of the so-called “Now Generation.” At the time, Firestone was a 22-year-old art student in Chicago, not yet the influential feminist activist and thinker she would soon become. After moving to New York not long after the film was shot, she co-founded more than one radical organization and wrote the second-wave classic The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published when she was only 25.

Shot on grainy film stock, Subrin’s Shulie is defiantly true to the original. It feels like a period film, but our expectations of what that means are occasionally disrupted by a sly and subtly jarring marker of more contemporary times (a Starbucks cup, a Jansport logo, a flier warning against sexual harassment). A bewigged actress (Kim Soss) embodies Firestone with an uncanny sense of timelessness. We watch as this Shulie waits for a train, sorts mail in the Post Office where she works, paints a young man’s portrait, undergoes a grueling critique of her artwork—and confronts the camera directly, musing over an unseen interviewer’s questions about her daily life, her ambitions, and her impressions of the world.

The original Shulie was less interested in plumbing the depths of Firestone’s burgeoning politics—the word feminism is never mentioned—than in creating a portrait of her as someone symbolic of her generation. We can see the thoughts and tendencies that informed the ideas she would shortly champion: “I just generally identify with minority groups,” she says, claiming to relate to them more than “the homogenous masses.” She worries about what it would mean to live out what she calls a “meaningless life.” As she tells her interviewer, “I care about the now. … It’s just that it’s not enough for me to live in the now. I hate every day that I haven’t made some kind of landmark because it just goes by so fast. … I hate the shapelessness of it.” When the interviewer urges her to connect this to her generation, Firestone explains that the larger point is, “To live in the now. Don’t worry about today. Don’t worry about yesterday.”

Firestone’s words echo differently when spoken by the real person in 1967, and by the actress playing her 30 years later. As depicted in the original film, Firestone was of course unaware of the changes heading her way (as well as her own role in them), and she articulates her ideal of “living in the now” with an innocence that feels sweet and a little sad from our vantage point. However precisely Kim Soss mimics Firestone, her interpretation is naturally informed by her understanding of a history that Firestone couldn’t have known, because it was still ahead of her. Today, after this repetition has had another dozen or so years to marinate, Firestone’s sentiments have gained another few layers of complexity.

Subrin’s film asks us to reflect on why we preserve the things we do, why we’re inclined toward some slices of history and dismissive of others. The differences between the memories we personally have, what we’re obliged to remember, and the actual time we live in are easily confused, and it’s not always clear what actually counts as “the past.” For Jews, the past is a constant argument, frustratingly elusive even as we feel a sense of responsibility to know it well and remember it right. In a tradition that has made remembering something of an art, playing with memory has a more than a little gravity. That’s the trick of literally, physically putting a work like Shulie in a Jewish context: It helps tease out resonances that might otherwise stay latent, even as there’s the danger of encouraging viewers to make more of them than actually adds up.

Much of Subrin’s work has focused on repetition and recreation (her recent retrospective at the Sue Scott Gallery was titled, fittingly, “Her Compulsion to Repeat”). Shulie was an irresistible subject for her—a sort of time capsule that depicted a notable figure before she became notable, in a moment on a historical precipice. Subrin was just 2 years old when the original film was shot, and upon discovering it years later (she recalls in a 2006 essay on the work called “Trashing Shulie”), “I yearned to inhabit her reality, to feel this moment of pre-1968, before the haunting political and social revelations of her era, to say nothing of my own.” She’s far from the only artist to root her work in this kind of reproduction. But in the Jewish Museum, it’s an artistic strategy that resonates—conveniently, though not artificially—as intensely Jewish, as well as indelibly feminist.

“The year 1967 can only exist as myth to me,” Subrin writes in “Trashing Shulie.” Her version of Shulie shows how difficult it can be to distinguish that myth from the real thing, and how easy it is to confuse or conflate them. As both 1967 and 1997 recede further, the difference between those years—and the almost visually indistinguishable if conceptually distinct films made in them—will only get trickier to tease out. Both films will become synonymous with the blurry “past,” and their specific differences will start to matter less than the simple fact that they’re behind us.

The film itself is dedicated “To Shulamith Firestone, who has endured.” It’s true that her radical feminist philosophy has remained prescient even as it’s inevitably gotten somewhat dated. Firestone’s political activism more or less ended with the publication of The Dialectic of Sex, after which she withdrew into painting and later, mental illness (the latter is recounted in her 1998 memoir Airless Spaces; today she lives in New York and was mostly uncooperative with the 2003 reissue of her first book). She endures through her own work as well as through the ways others have built on it, likely not always in ways she agrees with. And so endurance seems less like a matter of heroism than a fact of life, of what happens as the years march on and we persist in trying to make sense of memories and experiences that are both our own and not. Over 37 minutes at the Jewish Museum, that starts to feel a lot like a Jewish virtue.

“Shulie: Films and Stills by Elisabeth Subrin” is on view at the Jewish Museum through January 30th.

Kohenet is part of a growing, grassroots Jewish movement to reclaim the divine feminine—female aspects of God represented in Jewish texts—and reintroduce earth-based traditions to Jewish spiritual seekers. In recent years, for example, some women have elevated Rosh Chodesh, the marking of the new moon that was celebrated as a festival in biblical times, into an important feminist holiday. And Birkat Hachama, the blessing over the sun that the Talmud instructs Jews to recite every 28 years, saw record levels of observance in April 2009, the last time it was invoked. While some earth-based ideas have seeped into the mainstream, Kohenet sees itself as part of a fringe of Judaism that “includes shamans, kabbalists, wilderness Jews, environmentalist Jews, priestesses of Shekhinah, Jewitches, [and] practitioners of Israeli nature spirituality,” according to its website.

Other groups are also reinventing traditions that they say once had a place in Judaism, from the shamanistic Walking Stick Foundation in southern California and the New Mexico-based Center for Devotional Energy and Ecstatic Practice, to the Oakland-based organization Wilderness Torah. “We teach ancient rites such as how we used to bow in prayer to the four winds,” explains Rabbi Gershon Winkler, the former ultra-Orthodox rabbi behind Walking Stick, who argues that Judaism was originally closer to Native American Shamanism than to Christianity. Rabbi Shefa Gold, who leads chanting workshops at the Center for Devotional Energy, speaks of preparing a “healing the earth ritual” for a session at a retreat center for Jewish Renewal, the new-Hasidic movement, in Boulder, Colorado. “Through the earth and fire, air and water we access the power of purification,” she says.

Kohenet too, relies on the elements for many of its rituals. Though critics assume that Kohenet is an extension of Jewish Renewal, it is also rooted in the feminine, earth-based Reclaiming tradition founded in the 1970s by Miriam Simos—a Jewish-born anarchist and self-described witch who goes by Starhawk. Her website describes the Reclaiming tradition as “an activist branch of modern Pagan religion.”

Back when Jewish Renewal and Starhawk were struggling to get off the ground, the notion of Jewish paganism was unimaginable because it defied the monotheistic core of Judaism. In recent years, though, Kohenet and other earth-based Jewish groups are challenging that monotheistic essence; in their view, Judaism and paganism can coexist. As Hammer and Shere write in an unpublished manuscript about Hebrew priestesses, Kohenet holds “a soft position with regard to monotheism.” While their work “conceives of God/dess as a unity,” they “welcome women who experience the divine as a multiplicity.” But unlike Starhawk and other Jews who became pagans, today’s earth-based Jews ground their theology explicitly in Jewish traditions and texts. “What’s new here isn’t that Jews are doing paganism,” says Jay Michaelson, a columnist for The Forward and an expert on Jewish spirituality who confesses that he has become more “pagany” over the last few years. “It’s that they’re staying Jews.”

“I don’t see how Kohenet, to judge from its website, is compatible with Jewish belief and practice,” says Rabbi Daniel Nevins, dean of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s rabbinical school, where Hammer received her ordination. From its inception, he notes, Judaism has sought to move people “away from paganism, magic, and the worship of nature.” Earth-based or pagan Jews, adds Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a dean of the seminary at Yeshiva University, are “perverts” and should be ignored. “Pagan worship by those of Jewish birth destroyed our temples and sent us into galut,” or exile, he explains.

Hammer rejects these criticisms. “Early kabbalists like the Baal Shem Tov also saw ways of finding God in the forest and fields, and they too used the language of Shekhinah,” she says. “Fear of paganism, which supposedly deifies the body and the earth in ‘bad’ ways, is fear of the body. And often, it’s fear of the female body.” She responds to questions about whether worshiping the earth is idolatry by pointing out that the word “idolaters” has been used by Jews, Christians, and Muslims throughout history to delegitimize people they don’t know much about. “Many of the customs the Bible calls ‘foreign idolatry’ are ancient Israelite customs that were abandoned by later generations,” she says.

Most women involved with Kohenet do not self-identify as pagan, according to Stephanie Melmed, a therapist based in Washington, D.C., who expects to be ordained as a kohenet next summer. Instead, they prefer neutral terms such as “earth-based.” To Melmed, who prays to El Shaddai and Eilat, names that call to mind powerful female goddesses, in addition to Shekhinah, Kohenet offers, “an earth-based, feminist reinterpretation or renarrativing of Judaism.”

More than paganism, though, Kohenet’s philosophy is best captured by the term panentheism—the belief, as Hammer and Shere put it, “in a deity that comprises all things yet is more than the sum of its parts.” It’s a theological outlook supported by Rabbi Arthur Green, rector at the Hebrew College rabbinical school outside of Boston, who writes in his new book Radical Judaism that “the time has arrived for Jewish panentheism to step out of the closet.” Green also sees Kohenet as an important step for Jewish feminism. “Jewish women’s religious creativity was so deeply squashed for so many centuries that it now bursts forth with tremendous vigor,” he wrote in an email. “Should we expect that every form of this outburst would be to my androcentric, neo-traditionalist taste? Hardly! But the release of that creative energy is such a blessing that I’m more than willing to put up with a lot that I can’t immediately embrace.”

The idea of becoming a priestess first came to Hammer in 2001, just before she was ordained. As a rabbinical student, her “fascination with the wild side of feminine deity stayed underground,” she wrote in the essay collection New Jewish Feminism. But she was enthralled by “kabbalists in their secret circles whispering the name of Immah Ilaah, the Divine Mother” and loved engaging in new moon rituals, when she would pray to Shekhinah. She was about to become a rabbi, she says, but she felt like a priestess.

Then, in late 2005, Jay Michaelson introduced Hammer to Holly Shere, who had studied priestesses in Brazil as a graduate student and was also interested in training Jewish women “to priestess.” Disillusioned by what she calls “the patriarchy, hierarchy, and the disembodiment” of mainstream Jewish practice, Shere, like Hammer, wanted to build a new kind of Judaism. “It was a thunderbolt when we met,” says Hammer. “Within an hour of speaking on the phone we decided to create this program and to call it Kohenet.” Kohenet held its first session in 2006.

Through Kohenet, Hammer and Shere want to bestow women with roles of spiritual leadership. “Women were important spiritual practitioners in the ancient world, but their roles were marginalized as Judaism became more monolithic,” she says. She cites Miriam, described in Exodus dancing with a timbrel—a popular ritualistic instrument among near eastern priestesses—as perhaps the Biblical character who most resembles a priestess.

Hammer is not sure what role, if any, kohanot will play in Jewish communities, and she prefers to leave it her students to find their place as Jewish clergy. “We’re not as learned as rabbis are in Torah and Talmud—what I call the writings of men,” says Yocheved Landsman, of Boulder, Colorado, who was ordained in Kohenet’s first graduating class last year. On the other hand, she explains, kohanot, like rabbis, lead life cycle rituals; Landsman has officiated at four weddings in Colorado—all of them interfaith—and has also helped out with funerals and baby-namings. Similarly, Ketzirah Lesser, a kohenet in Washington, D.C., offers services ranging from home cleansings to vigils for the dying. In spite of the good works, she and her peers have a way to go to gain a foothold in Jewish communities. When she told congregants at a mainstream synagogue that she was a priestess, one of them responded: “a princess?”

Whether earth-based Judaism will ever become mainstream remains to be seen, but there’s no doubt that “pagany” elements are gradually seeping in, says The Forward’s Jay Michaelson. “I’ve been to mainstream synagogues that are enthusiastically doing that ritual where you beat the willows on the ground on Sukkot,” he says. “If that’s not paganism I don’t know what is. Any pagan would be quite happy doing that.”

Jeremy Gillick is a doctoral student in history at the University of California, Davis. His writing has appeared in The Forward, Moment Magazine, and London’s Jewish Chronicle.

While feminists who find cheerleading chauvinistic have allied themselves with the ultra-Orthodox community, which objects to immodestly dressed women performing in public, they may unwittingly be taking a stand against a field that allows female athletes to shine. “They do lots of acrobatics and create energy, not through feminine movements, but more through strength,” said the cheerleading coach of Hapoel Jerusalem. While she made this remark in an attempt to distinguish her squad of relatively fully clad women from others, we find this distinction between femininity and strength troubling. We’re also bummed out by the conclusion to AFP’s report: “And so it seems Jerusalem’s cheerleaders, unloved, unwanted and definitely not sexy, are here to stay.” These women are not exactly nuns. Watch the video and judge their appeal for yourself.

No Sexiness, We’re Holy City Cheerleaders [AFP]

Remember you promised to come on the holiday
One hour after dark.
For my part, I won’t keep count of wraths
Or wrongs till you come.
And you: Don’t believe a word I say
Even when it’s wondrous or perverse.

I lie down to sleep like ordinary mortals
And I don’t practice magic.
I forgo the honors in advance,
I bear no resemblance to the daughter of the gods.
And you: Remember when and where.

The common comparison of Ravikovitch with American poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton is not really apt: Ravikovitch writes about herself more ironically than those confessional poets, and is more hardheadedly engaged with the world around her. Still, it is easy to see why the comparison gets made. Ravikovitch’s poem “Clockwork Doll,” from her first collection, published when she was 23, caused a sensation with its cold, ironic, feminist anger:

I was a clockwork doll, but then
That night I turned round and round
And fell on my face, cracked on the ground,
And they tried to piece me together again.

Then once more I was a proper doll
And all my manner was nice and polite.
But I became damaged goods that night,
A fractured twig poised for a fall.

If you compare this poem with, say, Plath’s brilliant “The Applicant” (“A living doll, everywhere you look./It can sew, it can cook,/It can talk, talk, talk./It works, there is nothing wrong with it”), it is hard to feel that Ravikovitch’s poem has the same kind of power. Much of Ravikovitch’s early work, in fact, comes across in Bloch and Kronfeld’s translation as swaddled in literariness—it is too “poetic,” in the bad sense. This is not because the translation is inadequate, though I cannot know for sure; but I suspect it is because the translation faithfully attempts to preserve a quality that made Ravikovitch so exciting to Hebrew speakers—her continuous engagement with the vocabulary and conventions of the Bible and the modern Hebrew classics.

In “Clockwork Doll,” for instance, the translators note that Ravikovitch’s metaphor of the fractured twig, which is rather banal in English, would be clear to the Israeli reader as an allusion to Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “A Twig Fell.” In that poem, Bialik compares himself to a tree that cannot bear fruit, an image of disconnection and despair that Ravikovitch cleverly recast for her own purposes. This kind of allusion is, to continue the metaphor, the root system of any poetry, and the element that most resists transplantation into a new language. Nor does it necessarily help matters when Bloch and Kronfeld introduce what sound like allusions to well-known English-language poems into their translation. “Even for a Thousand Years” begins “I cannot bring a world quite round/and there’s no sense in trying”; but was Ravikovitch actually alluding quite so explicitly to Wallace Stevens’s “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (“I cannot bring a world quite round,/Although I patch it as I can”)?

But the allusion most important to Ravikovitch’s early work is Biblical, and here Bloch and Kronfeld offer indispensable guidance. Words that sound ordinary, or at best slightly formal, in English are often shown to be meaningfully peculiar in Hebrew. Ravikovitch makes excellent use of hapax legomena, words that appear only once in the Bible, and thus carry a very particular charge for the Hebrew reader. The first poem in her first book, “The Love of an Orange,” perhaps her most famous poem, is passionately carnal, in a way that would become Ravikovitch’s hallmark:

An orange did love
The man who ate it,
To its flayer it brought
Flesh for the teeth.

But the carnality takes on a whole new meaning when we learn, from the translators’ note, that the word here rendered as “flesh” is not the standard Hebrew basar, but barot. This word appears only once in the Bible, in Lamentations 4:10, a description of the siege of Jerusalem: “With their own hands, tenderhearted women have cooked their own children; such became their fare (barot), in the disaster of my poor people.” It is an open question how many of Ravikovitch’s original readers would have known their Bible well enough to understand this shocking allusion, but the translators make the poet’s intention clear, in this and many similar cases.

The allusiveness and the formality of Ravikovitch’s early poetry are largely cast off starting with her third collection, titled with meaningful plainness The Third Book. This appeared in 1969, at a time when poets across the world were in search of a more relaxed and plainspoken style. There is a new tone, sardonic and self-aware, in poems such as “Portrait”:

She sits in the house for days on end.
She reads the paper.
(Come on, don’t you?)
She doesn’t do what she’d like to do,
she’s got inhibitions….
In winter she’s cold, really cold,
colder than other people.
She bundles up but she’s still cold.

This informality does not mean, however, that Ravikovitch has given up her large subjects. When she writes about love in her own voice—rather than as “Tirzah” or “Shunra,” personae from her earlier poems—she is bitterly impressive:

I ask
with a quizzical look:
What else can happen to me
that hasn’t happened to me yet?
I dangle from a cloud
without wings, without a beak
but I don’t fall.
Once when I was in love
I could no longer feel
the cold or the heat.

As she gets older, we come to know Ravikovitch differently, and better. We see her loneliness and sadness, her worries about money and reputation, and—in a series of deeply moving poems—her troubled love for her son, Ido:

A tiny lizard on the wall of your house, Ido,
that’s what I want to be….
With no purpose,
enclosed in a space
where you inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale
oxygen.
We’re not talking about love, Ido.

Starting with the Lebanon War of 1982, Ravikovitch became an outspoken critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestianians. Though not all her protest poems transcend the subjects that provoked them, the provocations themselves—the burning alive of an Arab worker by Jewish arsonists, the killing of a pregnant woman’s fetus “under circumstances relating to state security”—are sufficiently terrible to make the verses powerful. And yet the Ravikovitch who lives on in the memory is less often the public conscience than the private sufferer, the poet who speaks in “The Window”:

So what did I manage to do?
Me—for years I did nothing.
Just looked out the window.
Raindrops soaked into the lawn,
year in, year out….
Winter and summer revolved among blades of grass.
I slept as much as possible.
That window was as big as it needed to be.
Whatever was needed
I saw in that window.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series. This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

We all wanted to be Esther, of course, the heroic, beautiful, self-sacrificing beloved of the King. The ingénue savior of the Jews, and so thin from all her fasting! She was going to get to wear a dirndl and sing a re-lyricized “My Favorite Things.” Second choice would have been to play a member of Esther’s harem, biblical pole-dancers with veils, MC Hammer pants, exposed midriffs, sequins. Ahasuerus, surrounded by his minions and ogling a parade of bachelorettes, was given to breaking the fourth wall, winking at the audience, and exclaiming, a la Mel Brooks, “It’s good to be the king!”

I was cast as Vashti and was, at best, ambivalent about it. She was the shrew. The cast-off first wife, a mere footnote to the story of Esther’s bravery and the salvation of the Jewish people. My costume was a modest polyester gown and my big number was “I’m Gonna Wash That King Right Out of My Hair.” I was last seen on stage protesting the beauty pageant, pacing back and forth downstage, alone, with a large sign that read WOMEN UNITE!

Sure, it wasn’t the most nuanced portrayal of feminist values, but lo and behold, the audience ate it up. They positively roared. On the VHS I scavenged from a musty box in my mother’s basement, you can see a relieved and astounded smile creeping over my face, replacing Vashti’s enraged, playacted protest and alienation. And something crucial sparked in my pre-pubescent brain: sometimes the pretty, virtuous little princess is a snooze. The girl who played Esther had a somewhat underdeveloped stage presence, and proved quite unmemorable. But everyone found Vashti—in her tiara, shouting down biblical gender paradigms—hilarious. At age 10, I already had a reputation for being tough and loud and something of a handful, and now it seemed I’d found an acceptable outlet.

How fun and exciting (and attention-getting) to be protesting and shouting and refusing. Why was it okay in any case for the King to demand sexual favors from Vashti and then unceremoniously dump her if she didn’t feel like putting out? I was too young to fully get the situation, or appreciate the fact that in ancient Persia gender paradigms necessarily operated rather differently than at Temple Emanuel in 1989— though I had, by then, discovered and memorized my older brothers’ stash of disturbingly extensive hardcore porn—but the injustice of the situation, and the righteousness of Vashti’s refusal, seemed clear, and I ran with it.

By all accounts, the show was a triumph. Our director, an Israeli woman named Nili with a frosted perm and lots of blue eye shadow, was exacting and visionary, and I wonder now if her production, with its satirical nods to contemporary Broadway and experimental casting revealed larger theatrical aspirations. In a nice bit of gender-play, my friend Raquel was cast as Haman, and before being sent to the gallows in the show’s final act, delivered a truly heartrending performance of “Don’t Cry For Me, Shushan City”.

After the show, I found I’d become the target of a fair amount of teasing:” “Hey Elisa, women belong in the kitchen!” “Hey Elisa, are you going to get married and have lots of babies like you should?” A good many peers and even adults in my life seemed to find it cute to bait the grade-school feminist. I found myself embroiled in frequent spats about this burgeoning identity, forced to defend ideas I didn’t understand. Despite the fact that I was utterly without the tools to properly argue my as-yet-unarticulated case, it was clear that something was off: this “feminism” thing got me into creepy one-sided arguments with grownups. My elderly great uncle tersely advised me, ostensibly in response to my fifth grade feminist harlotry, to “keep my legs crossed.” Another relative liked to mock me with statements like “women shouldn’t be doctors,” just to laugh while I stuttered furiously in disagreement.

Some years passed before Grace Paley, Naomi Wolf, Vivian Gornick, Andrea Dworkin, and others kindled the spark of a complex adult feminism in me and taught me to articulate its terms, but I’m convinced that my embracing of their ideas and worldview hinged on already having identified—in that stubborn, childish, attention-hungry, way—with Vashti. With her refusal to degrade herself for the entertainment of her husband and his friends, with her dignity in the face of being dumped and cast aside, and with her sadly lacking place in the Old Testament.

The Megillah tells us nothing about what happened to Vashti, but it’s likely she was put to death at the King’s insistence. I’m not observant these days, but every Purim—a holiday on which it’s a mitzvah to get so drunk you can’t tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai—I toast her spirit, and my fellow players in that long-ago Shushan spectacular, for helping me begin to see what resistance is all about.

Elisa Albert is the author of The Book of Dahlia and How This Night is Different and the editor of the forthcoming anthology Freud’s Blind Spot: Writers on Siblings. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Holland. This essay is excerpted from Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists (Seal Press, April 2010).

Elsewhere in the holy city, police detained a woman who wore a tallit at the Western Wall. Nofrat Frenkel was taking part in a prayer service organized by Women of the Wall, a group that gathers at the start of each Hebrew month for communal prayers at the Kotel. Last week, group members faced the ire of the Sephardic spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, who called them “stupid.” Frenkel was detained for violating dress codes, according to the BBC, though we like to think those codes were put in place to stop bikini-clad ladies from sidling up to the wall’s crevices where they might stick in notes asking for the means to properly clothe themselves.

Intel to Employ Only Non-Jews at Jerusalem Plant on Shabbat [Haaretz]
Jewish Woman Arrested Over Shawl [BBC]
Earlier: Orthodox Rioters Take on Intel [Tablet]

I guess I just wondered why he did this project. >>

When I was growing up in the early 1970s, there was my nose—and then there was me hidden behind it. Similar to Wilhelm Fliess—Sigmund Freud’s one-time friend who specialized in “nosology,” the idea that one’s nose was intimately tied to one’s sexuality—I believed that my prominent nose reflected the unshapeliness of my soul. Even though I lived in a New York suburb, home to thousands of Jews, I felt lonely, shy, and troubled. I thought that if I’d fix my nose, I’d fix my self.

So, at 16, I had a nose job. Apparently, it helped; right after, I found friends as well as my first serious boyfriend. Yet in the three decades since my operation, my previous nose has haunted me like the ghost limb of an amputee. I miss my old nose and I regret my decision to alter it. My new nose might be perky and far less noticeable—yet to me, it still stands out. Before, I felt like a stereotypical Jewish girl with a Jewish nose. Now, I feel like a stereotypical Jewish woman with a Jewish nose . . . job.

The connection between Jews, our noses, and our identity is very much on my mind these days because my youngest daughter, Libby Yael, 16, is the same age I was when I had my nose fixed. And—Mother Nature’s revenge—she has my old nose.

I had expected her attitude about her nose to be more positive than mine had been. After all, we live in Israel, where nose jobs are relatively uncommon, while I grew up in Great Neck—aka Rhinoplasty Central. My mother often told me that I’d look much prettier with a smaller nose; I constantly tell my daughter that she is gorgeous just as she is. But Libby doesn’t believe me. And even though I’ve shared my regrets about fixing my own nose, she tells me she’d like to fix hers.

“A man is physically and psychologically what his nose is . . . and a race can be judged and recognized by its nose,” plastic surgeon Dr. Henry J. Schireson wrote in The Jewish Transcript, a Seattle newspaper, in 1924. Even here, in Israel, a place where both Jews and Arabs are genetically prone to hefty noses, the perfect profile is petite. Famous models such as Pnina Rosenblum and Galit Gutman have noses that appear trimmed and tapered, as does the popular television newscaster Miki Haimovich. I sometimes wonder if Ehud Barak and Benyamin Netanyahu traded in their noses for right-angle, camera-friendly profiles. Their noses, oddly enough, resemble mine. While we finally have a Jewish country, we still contend with the unwieldy Jewish proboscis. To my astonishment, the nose job remains a Jewish issue.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it seemed that nose jobs were, like sleep-away camp, just part of American Jewish adolescence. I favored unshaven legs and overalls, and might not have even thought twice about plastic surgery had it not been for my mother. After losing her father when she was five and growing up poor during the Depression, my mother saw beauty as her ticket to marrying well, a guarantee of economic security.

Unable to afford college, she worked as a dental assistant after high school, saving enough for her own rhinoplasty. She felt prettier instantly and landed a more lucrative job selling industrial aluminum to manufacturers like General Electric. (She boasts that in the early 1950s, she was the only aluminum saleswoman in the entire country.) Soon after, she married and promptly quit her job. Why wouldn’t her daughter want to follow a similar path?

Then, when I was in high school, the feminist movement exploded. Inspired by Betty Friedan, my mother went back to work—this time, selling antique jewelry. When it came to choosing a feminist look, however, she followed Gloria Steinem’s example. “We’re living in a world where beauty is very important,” my mother says now (and must have said then), “and if you can do something to make yourself more beautiful, then you should do it.”

My mother never wanted to pass herself off as a gentile. She scoffed at Jews who de-Judaized their names or converted to Christianity. Her wish for me to downsize my profile was, she claimed, purely aesthetic.

Yet rhinoplasty and Jews are linked on a deeper level. The founder of the modern nose job was a late 19th-century German Jewish plastic surgeon, Jacques Joseph. In his book, Making the Body Beautiful, Sander Gilman writes that Dr. Joseph (who was born as Jakob and wed a Christian) assumed that Jews would be better able to assimilate if their noses didn’t make them look “too Jewish.”

Since the medieval era, a big nose has always been the stereotypical feature that has symbolized Jews. A popular children’s book by Julius Streicher (publisher of Der Sturmer), published during the Nazi regime recounts how a boy named Little Karl recognizes Jews. “One can most easily tell a Jew by his nose,” the boy says. “The Jewish nose is bent at its point. It looks like the number six. We call it the Jewish six.” Later in the story, a girl looks at a Jewish man and exclaims that in the middle of his “devil’s face” is “a huge crooked nose.” Even today, caricatures of bloodthirsty Jews with immense noses appear in anti-Israel political cartoons.

Western scientific literature buttressed stereotypes and prejudices and classified the “Jewish nose” as a medical deformity, a pathological condition called “nostrility,” according to a 2001 article by Beth Preminger in the Journal of the American Medical Association entitled “The ‘Jewish Nose’ and Plastic Surgery.” Robert Knox, an anthropologist, stated in his 1850 book, The Races of Men, that the “Jewish nose” is “large, massive, club-shaped [and] hooked . . . three or four times larger than suits the face.” For this reason, he stated, a Jew can never be “perfectly beautiful.” Three decades later, plastic surgeon John Orlando Roe wrote in the journal The Medical Record, that, according to physiognomy, the Jewish nose symbolized the Jews’ “commercialism or desire of gain.”

Meanwhile, according to the account given by Sander Gilman, in Berlin in 1898, a patient presented himself to Dr. Joseph, complaining that his nose was “the source of considerable annoyance. Wherever he went, everybody stared at him.” Although we don’t know if the man was Jewish, Gilman presumes he was: his sense of nose-related social isolation mirrors the Jews’ position in fin-de-siecle Germany. Harry Schireson, a student of Jacques Joseph’s before immigrating to the United States wrote, “Many a Jew, especially if he belongs to the class of social climbers, anxious not to be recognized as a Jew, deplores his racial nose.”

Dr. Joseph performed his first rhinoplasty that year, cutting through the skin of the patient’s nose to whittle down the bone. The operation left a scar, however, but by 1904 he had refined his technique. Using surgical tools similar to those still in use today, Dr. Joseph performed the first intranasal nose job. After this successful operation, Dr. Joseph went on to bestow “gentile contours” to hundreds of Jewish noses. Right before his death in 1934, he performed free nasal surgeries on Jews to help them try to bypass Nazi Germany’s ever-tightening racial laws. Aesthetic rhinoplasty, then, began as a medical procedure to remedy Jewish patients’ noses. Ironically, it parallels the way psychoanalysis—born roughly at the same time and place—first arose as a cure for Jewish patients’ souls.

When I brought torn pages from Vogue with photos of noses I liked to a plastic surgeon in Manhattan in 1973, I had no idea that rhinoplasty was designed to make Jews less conspicuous. All I knew was that I tried not to turn to the side in my high school classes so that boys would not whip out my nickname, “Big Nose Bletter.” At home, I spent hours in front of the mirror, lamenting this thing in the middle of my face.

The surgeon’s office was on Park Avenue. My mother chose him because, as she put it, he “did” the nose of a friend of a friend, a top Jewish model at the time, as well as the nose of her very favorite actor, Paul Newman. After examining me for a few minutes, the doctor asserted that my nose had a bump and a fat tip and that he could reduce them both to suit my face. I was petrified to consider that I would be putting my nose in his hands, yet he seemed so self-assured that I agreed to schedule my operation in a few months’ time.

Despite my mother’s prodding, I remained ambivalent. “My feelings about my nose go back and forth,” I noted in a June 1973 diary entry. “When I look in the mirror, I see how big my nose looks and I can’t imagine living with it all my life, but I can’t imagine such a drastic change.” Then, as I jotted in my diary a few weeks later, after reading an article in Seventeen, which advised emphatically, “If anyone is considering [rhinoplasty], I say, yes, yes, yes!” I was convinced.

I had my nose fixed right before my senior year of high school. Numbed from anesthesia, half-awake and still aware, I could hear the doctor break the bone. The pounding sounded like a pile driver banging steel piles into the earth. But it did not emanate from the outside world: it came from deep within me.

Afterwards, a mummy-like bandage covered most of my face; only my swollen, black-and-blue eyes peered out. When the nurse removed the dressing, I didn’t want to look in the mirror. Instead, I closed one eye and gazed at my profile, thrilled that the bumpy ridge had been leveled.

“For the first time in my life, I feel pretty! I feel free!” I wrote in my diary, transformed. Then I ran into an old friend who hadn’t fixed her nose which was just as large as mine had been. Looking at her, I felt like a coward—and a fake. Society’s buzz had conned me into believing my nose was too big to be beautiful, and my parents had bought me a more attractive look.

I graduated high school, went to college, and then worked in New York City. For a while, I moved to Paris, where I dated a medical student from Senegal. As people stared at us—interracial couples were unusual in those days—I became painfully aware that my boyfriend could never peel off his skin. Obviously, he’d always be black. And although I felt irrevocably Jewish inside, to the outside world, I was white. I had become an invisible Jew.

But I didn’t want to be invisible, especially not among the French who, time and again, revealed their true feelings. One woman told me that Jews caused anti-Semitism because we choose to be different. On another occasion, I mistakenly assumed a man I met a man at Goldenberg’s Restaurant in the Marais was a fellow Jew. When I outed myself to him, he replied, “Aren’t you ashamed?”

Suddenly, I didn’t want to pass any more—I wanted to be in your face. I began to feel that if I couldn’t look Jewish, then at least I could act it. I returned to New York and gradually became more observant, which is another story. Ten years later, I moved to Israel.

This spring, Libby was voted “Tenth Grader of the Year” and “Best Smile” in her high school. She surfs, plays piano and soccer, and is far happier than I ever was at her age. I’ve tried to do all the right things to boost her confidence—but she is still miserable. She tells me that she feels she’s ugly because she has—in her words—a “big, crooked” nose. When I counter that her nose is special, she says that she could be a lot prettier without it.

She was chosen to join a delegation of teenagers who visited Germany this summer—yet was unsure if she wanted to go. When I asked her why, she said she was afraid that Germans would make fun of her Jewish nose. After studying the Holocaust and hearing stories from relatives and friends, she feared that Germans, despite their good intentions, might have internalized anti-Semitism—and might react negatively to Jews. Wary of being conspicuous, she suffers the very same anxiety that preoccupied Jews in Germany 100 years ago.

Nose jobs are not a rite of passage in Israel as they are in certain places in America; however, plastic surgeries (including breast and lip enlargement) are on the rise. Halachic authorities deem a nose job kosher if it can improve a person’s mental health. Still, I’m trying to talk Libby out of it. One reason is financial: With six children to put through college, my husband and I don’t have an extra few thousand to throw at elective surgery.

I’ve shared my regrets; she says she appreciates the way I’m trying to save her from the same mistake. I’ve also recounted how, a few years ago, I made an appointment with another Park Avenue plastic surgeon to see if I could get my old nose back. Unfortunately, he said he wouldn’t be able to re-enlarge my tip or replant the bump. I’m stuck with my before-and-after schnoz, but I don’t want Libby to be. Dorothy Parker quipped, after Fanny Brice’s rhinoplasty, that she’d “cut off her nose to spite her race”; I’d like to convey to my daughter that her unique features trump standardized versions of McBeauty.

Yet I understand all too well how awkward adolescence is and how shaky Libby’s self-esteem might be. As I’ve grown up, though, I realize that beauty—as well as happiness—really is an inside job. And maybe in my rush to fix my self via my nose, I missed out on learning how to stand up for what I believe in, and how to love my whole self despite what others around me say. Those are vital lessons in life—not only of bearing a Jewish nose but, simply put, of being a Jew—and that’s what I’m hoping to teach her.

Illustration by Vanessa Davis.

In 1972, Alix Kates Shulman wrote her first novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. The book follows Sasha Davis, a Jewish girl from Cleveland saddled with excess intelligence, ambition, and sexual desire, as she confronts 1950s notions of femininity.

Even before the book was published, it caused a great stir among secretaries as the galleys made their way through various printing houses. It went on to sell more than a million copies, and has been in print almost continuously ever since; Kate Millet cites it as the first notable work of fiction to come out of the women’s liberation movement.

Shulman went on to play a prominent role in that movement, both as a writer and an activist. Now, as Memoirs hits bookstores yet again, this time as a special 35th anniversary edition, Shulman talks with Nextbook about how Sasha Davis came into being, and about how much—or how little—has changed since readers first encountered her.

In 1998, Lauren Sandler began work on a series on youth and religion for NPR. Her research took her to a small church in Seattle that attracted skateboarders, punks and hipsters decked out in vintage fashion – all of whom were exceptionally well-versed in the bible.

Nearly a decade later, Sandler is still tracking an Evangelical Christian youth movement that is fast-growing and nationwide. She talks to us about the people she’s met on her journey, and about the implications of their lifestyle and faith for a progressive, secular Jew like her. Her stories are collected in the book Righteous: Dispatches from the Evangelical Youth Movement.

These women—we’ll call them Shirley and Elena—did not come to New York for The Lion King. They’re here to have late-term abortions not available in their home states (in their cases, Pennsylvania and Connecticut); New York’s cutoff, more generous than most, is 24 weeks. This late in the game, it’s a two-day outpatient procedure requiring an overnight stay in-state. And who can afford a Manhattan hotel and a late-term abortion?

That’s where New York City’s Haven Coalition—of which David and I are proud to call ourselves members—steps in. Haven has no office, no budget, just a rotating team of coordinators who schedule its 50 members for on-call nights every month and phone us when we’re needed. When I get that call, part of me groans—what if she doesn’t want to watch American Idol? But part of me always remembers, even as I’m leaving work hanging and schlepping to the clinic: In all my years of activism and agitating, this is the most direct, intimate mitzvah I’ve ever had the privilege to perform. And it’s a reflection of how, over the years, my reproductive rights activism has, more and more, become an expression of my Judaism. And the same is true for my husband.

How so? Well, our “mission” does not come directly, or only, from what halacha has to say specifically about abortion. Strictly speaking, Jewish law permits abortion only when there is potential danger to the woman’s health. This generally puts Jews somewhere to the left of South Dakota, but “danger” and “health” have been interpreted in a wide range of ways—including mental health and overall well-being. Some interpretations apply the rodef (literally, “pursuer”) principle—a sort of preemptive self-defense, suggesting that the woman is permitted to abort a fetus who poses a threat. Also, the dominant (though by no means solitary) position is that the life of the fetus is not equal in value to the life of the mother—or even, in some opinions, to the life of existing children.

What moves us, what made us both instantly say yes when a friend emailed us about becoming Haven hosts, are the Jewish commandments to help and protect our neighbor, to shelter someone who is in—again, liberally interpreted—danger. And the notion of tzedakah, which is not an act of magnanimous charity—”Here, pitiable one, make yourself comfortable in my fabulous Brooklyn home!”—but one of justice: giving the poor their due.

Because for all our fretting about how changes on the Supreme Court and in South Dakota will affect Roe v. Wade, for far too many women and girls the right to abortion already exists only on paper. The legal and economic barriers that make it difficult, even impossible, for women to carry out their own reproductive choices trap the most vulnerable members of society: the poor and working class, the young, immigrants, and those without people around them to bail them out. Access to abortion—access, not just the in-principle right—is a fundamental matter of social and economic justice. The word “choice” doesn’t even begin to cover it. We, the Jews, are the people commanded to take care of the widow and the orphan. Shirley is 41, confident, single, and black; Elena is 19, shy, and Polish—she hasn’t seen her parents in Warsaw for two years. The only things they really have in common are that they are poor, they are pregnant, and they are in my house.

Recently, reading Eyal Press’ Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict that Divided America made me think how far we’ve come—and how quickly we’re going someplace even worse. Press’ book is an account of how his home city of Buffalo became a magnet for violent anti-abortion protests and how his own father, an ob/gyn who also performed abortions, became a target. “Protests” is actually far too gracious a term for what went on in Buffalo for years: trespassing, vandalism, stalking, harassment—even murder. Remember Dr. Barnett Slepian, just home from shul, shot dead through his kitchen window while heating up some pea soup? He was Dr. Press’ colleague and, according to his son, the only other local doctor who performed abortions. The rest were—and still are—flown in from neighboring areas. No matter how interesting the ethnic eateries, or tempting the hockey opportunities, new abortion providers aren’t exactly moving to Buffalo in droves. Even though organized clinic attacks and protests have dwindled, I imagine it’d be kind of like buying a house you know is haunted.

Dr. Shalom Press, by the way, is Israeli. His son believes that his born-and-bred stoicism—perhaps more, at least at first, than his sense of justice—was what kept him going to work in the face of death threats: “A bomb went off in a nearby market? You shopped there the next day as though nothing had happened. War loomed on the horizon? You went about your business just the same.” Then again, Press’ mother barely survived her girlhood in a Nazi work camp. (You can imagine how well calling abortion “America’s Holocaust” goes over with her.) As a result, Press’ family was torn between two Jewish impulses: on the one hand, to bear and forebear, to find normalcy in a danger zone, to do what must be done; on the other, to do whatever it takes—quit your job, move, go into hiding—to survive and protect your family. The younger Press urged his father to choose the latter, all the while knowing that the next morning, just like the last, his father would walk out the door to go to his office.

When David delivers a Haven guest to the clinic in the morning, there’s almost always a protester or two, often male, usually the quiet, murmuring, “If you’re pregnant we can help you” type. David always warns the patients ahead of time that they’ll probably be there, tries to get between them and the patient, and then calls me in a rage from his cell when he leaves. The strong patients sass back, the resolute ones stare straight ahead, the frightened ones burst into tears—and yet not one wavers in her determination to do what’s right for her. So thanks, harassing guy, that was useful for everyone.

Of course, what these people are doing is a far cry from the weekly, large-scale clinic sieges I witnessed in Buffalo and in my hometown of Boston during the early 1990′s. There, the goal was to violently shut down a legal facility and interfere, in the process, with people exercising a constitutional right. Press argues convincingly in his book that in that violent climate, murder was inevitable.

Today, getting through the clinic doors is somewhat easier—and safer—than it used to be. It’s getting to the clinic doors that’s become harder than ever. Why did Shirley and Elena “wait” so long before seeking their abortions? I’m not sure; I keep my questions to “Do you have pets?” and “Peanut butter: crunchy or smooth?” (They usually don’t ask much about us, either. One guest saw our ketubah and asked if we were “Hebrews,” but David’s job hardly ever comes up and when it has, “rabbi” hasn’t really been on folks’ radar.)

But I can tell you what some of the other people who’ve stayed with us have volunteered about what brought them to New York. The 20-year-old who slept here last month got pregnant while on the Pill—hey, someone’s got to be that 1%—but was later sent home from the E.R., without an ultrasound, having been told she’d miscarried. She was secretly relieved. After all, she was raising a 2-year-old and her sister’s kid, her boyfriend was on his way back to jail for violating probation, and she was working full-time at Staples to put herself through Katharine Gibbs. Only thing was, the doctors were wrong. The 14-year-old Mexican girl didn’t tell her parents she was pregnant (the condom broke) because her dad had started drinking again and she didn’t want to be a burden. Only when she realized she’d have to travel to New York did she confess. She, her mother, and her father all slept on our sofa bed, lined up like little dolls—and that sight both warmed and broke my heart.

I can tell you why other women “wait,” too. Eighty-seven percent of U.S. counties lack abortion providers, thanks in part to Buffalo-style harassment of doctors. This is why it makes me want to spit poison darts when people like State Sen. Bill Napoli of South Dakota claim that “most” abortions are a matter of “convenience.” Then you’ve got parental notification and consent laws, Most minors hosted by Haven come with at least one of their parents—and the ones that don’t have good reason not to, like the ones with a parent in jail, whose whereabouts are unknown, or who has threatened, convincingly, to kill them if they get “in trouble.”

These roadblocks mean—and this, people, is the evil plan—that women often find themselves in their second trimester before they know it. And then they’re really in a bind. The cost of an abortion goes up from about $350 at 10 weeks to more than $1000 after 20. Even the cost of a first-trimester abortion may be more than a family on public assistance receives in one month, according to the National Network of Abortion Funds. On the way to my house from the clinic, Shirley threw up her antibiotics. She’d been told to take them on an empty stomach, but she hadn’t eaten since the day before. I doubt this was because she wasn’t hungry.

David and I have both long cared about women’s reproductive rights. He saw the tricky decisions friends and families had made; I marched and rallied and wrote. But only when we joined Haven was the reality—and inequality—of access to abortion brought home to us. That’s what inspired David to present a High Holy Days sermon last year about the crisis, right now, of access to abortion—a decision that many called “ballsy,” and for which even more people thanked him. To him, the topic didn’t seem ballsy so much as obvious. He is, after all, in a position not just to help, but also to teach. He’s not interested in trying to change the mind of someone who believes abortion is morally wrong. But he is interested in helping broaden the perspective—the Jewish perspective—of those who haven’t happened to see, in their own homes, the true face of need.

It’s so viscerally clear to both of us that Haven, and working to protect reproductive freedom, is about taking care of society’s most vulnerable. Yet Haven’s philosophy is also very clear: We are not saviors, just people fortunate enough to have extra futons and a little flex time. We do tzedakah not because we are righteous, but because we are just. Like Dr. Press, in a way, we are simply doing our jobs. In David’s sermon about reproductive rights, he reminded the congregation of these words from Deuteronomy: “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and that Adonai your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.” May women like Shirley and Elena, and those who follow, find an easier path to redemption next time.