What I love about it is that I know exactly what she’s talking about. What isn’t said—or, maybe, what the Times doesn’t need to explicitly state—is that the preoccupation with noses and the very presence of the nose job in the teenage consciousness is far more often a reality for Jewish girls. “At 13,” Brodesser-Akner writes, “I started dreaming about a nose job, but my parents wouldn’t hear of it.” Ah, yes, that gloriously awkward age of 13, when everyone starts noticing each other at bar and bat mitzvahs and teenagers become acutely aware of their own appearances.

“The nose job I didn’t get in 11th grade would have been straight and long with a tip like a polka dot,” Brodesser-Akner recalls. I know the one! “On the first day back from summer vacation, six students returned to our all-girls high school with black eyes and tiny bandages across their noses, badges of their parents’ understanding of what it was like to go through life with that nose.” The Semitic Sweet Sixteen rite of passage even got the Glee treatment last season, when Rachel Berry got kicked in the face during dance practice and the Jewish plastic surgeon told her it was standard operating procedure (literally!) for her female co-religionists to have their noses fixed around that time anyway. Will she? Won’t she? Fellow on-screen Jew Noah Puckerman tries to convince her not to, urging her to be proud of the Jewish heritage her nose symbolizes.

“But really,” Brodesser-Akner explains, “I’ve avoided rhinoplasty because though it might make me prettier (and I do believe my nose is what stands in the way of my being conventionally pretty), I’m not sure what it will say about me.” While (spoiler alert) I’ve never had a nose job, I definitely relate to this idea that there is something imbued in the act of cosmetically altering one’s nose–particularly in a community where so many young people do just that. Which means that, at some point, I bought into the nose crazy too.

Love the One You’re (Born) With [NYT]
Related: A Bridge Too Far [Tablet Magazine]

Look, I am not one of those parents who sniff and say, “Oh, we don’t have a television.” We love our television. Our television is the size of a barn. My girls watch Project Runway and Top Chef with us. We TiVo the cartoons Phineas & Ferb and WordGirl. They watch Pee-wee’s Playhouse on DVD and Beakman’s World as streaming content on Netflix. Josie and I watch Glee together, though I am ambivalent about the show. I’ll frequently hit pause to explain sexual references, explicate what I find offensive, and excavate the show’s hidden judgments and values I may or may not agree with.

Yes, I have issues with Glee, but I’m OK with my kid watching it. I applaud the normative portrayal of gay kids, the musical numbers, and the hilariousness of Jane Lynch. For me, those things outweigh the inconsistent characterization, incoherent plots, and sexual shenanigans. Plenty of parents disagree with me about Glee, which is why I have no intention of being the Hat Police about television. (The Hat Police being those people who criticize strangers’ parenting by barking things like “That baby needs a hat!”)

That said, I’ll tell you why live-action tween TV shows are banned in my house, and not just during the Omer. What these shows have in common is a snotty attitude. Kids address each other and adults with a sassy, casually hurtful tone peppered by laugh-track laughs. Many of these shows posit celebrity as the ultimate value. The protagonists are pop stars (Hannah Montana), TV comedy stars (Sonny With a Chance), dancers (Shake It Up), hottie boy bands (Big Time Rush), or students at a top Hollywood performing arts school (Victorious). The message: The greatest thing you can be is famous. Shows that aren’t about becoming a music or TV star are about the perks of wealth and power: The Suite Life of Zack & Cody is about kids living on a luxury cruise ship, and True Jackson, VP is about a teen whose stylishness nabs her a senior-level job at a multimillion-dollar fashion company.

A huge number of the shows’ plots focus on being attractive to the opposite sex. Kids who are bookish, have unusual passions like ventriloquism (Victorious), have asthma (Good Luck Charlie), are chubby (Suite Life), or wear glasses (Victorious) are subject to ridicule by the heroes. (It can’t be bullying if the heroes are doing it!) Parents, if they exist, are generally portrayed as dimwitted. When kids mock them to their faces, the parents react with helpless frustration or goofy, rueful acceptance.

Girls on these shows, whatever their ethnicity, have long, straight, glossy hair. Frizzy hair, on both boys and girls, is a sign of stupidity or grossness. Boys’ hair is frequently swept forward and to the side, Bieberishly. The leads are almost all white, but even the nonwhite kids have no signifiers of ethnic or cultural identity, except, perhaps, for a fondness for hip-hop, which white kids happen to like, too. Clothing has a certain mall-safe sameness. Dressing “Goth” means you’re a bad girl; not dressing fashionably means you’re a joke.

And these shows are dumb. The writing isn’t witty. The plots are predictable. The characters are pancake-flat. Why put up with stupid TV writing when good TV writing is out there? A single musical number on Phineas & Ferb, for example, recently featured the words infernal, invective, abhor, ambivalence, subjective, atrocious, and apathy. Do not tell me all cartoons rot children’s brains.

Parents often say to me, “Well, iCarly isn’t that bad.” iCarly is almost always held out as the embodiment of not-bad. Well, I disagree. iCarly is that bad.

I used to think iCarly wasn’t that bad. I’d seen a couple of episodes and thought it was unfunny but innocuous. Then we watched “iMake Sam Girly” while unpacking in a hotel room. In this episode, Carly’s best friend Sam, a tomboy, decides she has to be “girlier” to attract the boy she has a crush on. Carly is thrilled and gives her a makeover, amping up her makeup and putting her in a pink blouse and miniskirt instead of her customary jeans. (Carly also orders her to wear panties instead of boxers.) Sam is ill at ease, but the boy notices her, so she puts up with her discomfort. She desperately wants a burger, but that wouldn’t be feminine, so she orders salad. A bully shows up—a very tall, muscular black girl, the only person of color in the episode—and shoves French fries down Sam’s blouse. Carly urges Sam not to retaliate because that would be unfeminine. When the bully throws Sam’s schoolbooks on the ground, Sam struggles for a moment, then responds, “I like your shoes!” The bully then pushes a little kid and a nerdy man. Sam wants to intervene, but Carly gives her warning looks. When the bully shoves Carly, though, Carly barks to Sam, “Rip her head off!” (Big laugh from the laugh track.) Only then does Sam dispense with the bully. Oh no! Her crush has been watching the entire time! She’s sure she’s lost him, but he tells her he likes her just the way she is. The studio audience says, “Awww.” No one mentions that the boy didn’t notice her at all until she changed the way she looked.

This is the show that’s not so bad.

Look, if your kids watch these shows, I am in no position to judge you. And believe me, I understand taking the path of least resistance, especially during school vacations. Nevertheless, I encourage you to watch TV with your kid and talk about the unspoken messages the tween shows convey.

And seriously, look into Phineas & Ferb. After the Omer.

• What the Assad regime is up against. [Slate]

• There were also somewhat-violent clashes in Amman. [AP/WP]

• The U.S. labor secretary was in New York City today to mark the 100th anniversary of the Triangle fire. [Forward]

• For the first time, Israel deployed its “Iron Dome” missile-defense apparatus to combat the rocket threat from Gaza. [AP/WP]

• This Anthony Weiner/Rachel from Glee “Separated at Birth” is pretty great. [Buzzfeed]

• Austin Ratner, subject of a Tablet Magazine joint profile (by me), won the $100,000 Rohr Prize from the Jewish Book Council. [WSJ]

• AIPAC apologized for trying to raise money off of the Jerusalem bomb. [JTA]

• Who says Israel can’t compete on the international stage? A women’s club basketball team defeated a French one to win a European trophy. [Haaretz]

• The New York Times alters its house style to reflect that Nazi concentration camps in Poland were not, y’know, Polish camps. [The Kosciuszko Foundation]

• Meet the newest members of the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. Special D.C. shout-out to the late, great Abe Pollin. [Kaplan’s Korner]

• A beloved, Palestinian-owned bookstore in Jerusalem is imperiled. Great story. [Book Bench]

• For the first time, the U.N. Human Rights Council appointed an Israeli (a British-Israeli, technically) to one of its working groups. [JPost]

• New book forthcoming from Maurice Sendak! [WSJ]

• We definitely needed yet another article about Miral. [NYT]

There’s a galley of John Lennon and the Jews on my desk.

Every show on children’s television seemed to feature chirpy efforts to rescue Santa or induce some animated sourpuss to feel the spirit of Christmas. Before long Maxine was pouting, “Where is Hanukkah? Why is there no Hanukkah on these shows?”

“Because we live in a country that is mostly Christian,” I told her. “Hanukkah isn’t a major holiday for us, anyway—Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot—those are a way bigger deal.” I started to explain that Hanukkah has turned into a whole megillah in the United States because of its proximity to Christmas, but Maxie just wanted to watch Miss Spider’s Sunny Patch Friends.

Just as well. It’s not as if my answer was very satisfying.

That night, Maxie had some chicken soup, then she and her older sister Josie and I watched Glee. (I told you not to judge.) Maxie gazed wide-eyed as Britney the dumb cheerleader sat on Santa’s lap and told him that for Christmas, she wanted her wheelchair-using boyfriend Artie to walk. She yelled at the screen, “You can do it, Santa!” Josie and I gulped and looked at each other.

We sat Maxie down and explained that Santa was not real. But the kid insisted. “If you just believe in him,” she said, “he can help you.” I told her that Santa was an idea, a jolly symbol of kindness and harmony for our friends who are Christians, but not a real or powerful figure. She seemed unconvinced, and I went on thinking about the very different ways Jewish parents can address life during Christmastime:

Attitude No.1: The Blackout

Dora and Miss Spider are not invited into the home. Shalom Sesame is on an endless loop. There is no need for Hanukkah to compete with Christmas, because Christmas is not a factor. This attitude is hard to sustain halfway; it generally works better to commit year-round. Kids know when you’re uncomfortable, so suddenly insisting on pop-culture withdrawal the day after Thanksgiving is likely to bring up some thorny questions. In many ways it’s easier to pull the full Borough Park—keep the goyish world at a general remove year-round rather than trying to disengage from secular culture only in December.

Attitude No. 2: The Buy-In

Let’s get a Christmas tree! Christmas is really more about peace on earth and goodwill toward men than about religion! And the Christmas tree is really just a Hanukkah bush! And the kids look so cute on Santa’s lap! And even though he converted/even though she’s an atheist, Christmas is a lovely cultural tradition from my spouse’s childhood, and I don’t really feel right taking it away! It’s not like you can lock the real world out, you know?

Attitude No. 3: The Competitive Condescension

It’s way better to be Jewish because you get eight days of presents instead of one! Your friends are secretly really jealous! Jesus was a Jew! Don’t tell your classmates that Santa isn’t real because it will upset them, but you and I know he’s just a silly myth! (The same, of course, isn’t true of the tooth fairy. She’s legit.)

Attitude No. 4: The Dance of Ambivalence

Sure, we love to go look at the lights in the Dyker Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and gape at Clopper the Donkey in the enormous Christmas display at the La Salette Shrine in Attleboro, Massachusetts. We’ll even help our friends trim their tree. But over and over we stress that it’s not our holiday. It’s normal to feel a little left out at Christmastime, but pretending it’s a secular holiday or puffing Hanukkah up to Christmas dimensions isn’t a solution. In fact, this is a good opportunity to talk about the commercialization of our culture. You know, Christmas isn’t a celebration of candy canes and thermonuclear reindeer and velvet bows and nebulous warm feelings. It’s the commemoration of the birth of a god. That’s a pretty big deal, and something that too many people forget. Some Christians are upset that Christmas has become this celebration of buying stuff and having parties rather than a serious opportunity to think about their faith, and—hey, wake up; I’m not done moralizing.

Becoming a parent is the impetus for a lot of us to examine some tangled and heretofore left-alone feelings about being a minority (albeit a minority that often doesn’t feel like a minority and often isn’t considered a minority) in a majority culture. Whether we marry Jews or non-Jews, many of us really don’t think through exactly how we’re going to do Judaism and secularism in the great big world. But when you have a kid, you have to make the call. Not deciding isn’t a decision.

As my (non-Jewish) friend Joe pointed out, this holiday is a fascinating opportunity to eat Chinese food and ponder a culture in which Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, and Barry Manilow can have top-selling Christmas albums and in which the biggest musical Christmas hits of all time were written by Jews. It’s the perfect chance to think about our strange middle ground as consummate insiders and consummate outsiders. Sure, government offices are closed on Christmas, but Hollywood’s biggest movies are all open, Hollywood being yet another thing our people run.

And you remember how that episode of Glee ended, right? Artie did walk, with the help of a robotic exoskeleton designed by Israeli scientists.

Her camp, like mine back in the day, offers t’filah (prayer), omanut (art), sports, chofesh (free time), swimming, weekly sending of Shabbat-o-grams and attendant social anxiety: How many will I get? If I send one to That Cute Boy, will he think I like him That Way? Do I want him to? What is the encoded meaning of this particular Shabbat-o-gram? Could I possibly parse it more if it were the Talmud?

For many of us, sleepaway camp is the first sizeable chunk of time away from parents. It’s a taste of adulthood. Nikayon, daily cleaning time, was the first time I really scrubbed a sink or swept an entire floor. Because camp means building a society in miniature, in which kids have more independence and power than they do back home, friendships there seem more vivid, more intense–a lifetime poured into a concentrated month or two.

But some things have changed. My parents sent in a two-page form and bam, I was a camper. I, on the other hand, filled out some 60 pages of documents about Josie, including a “social media policy” in which our entire family had to pledge not to defame the camp on Facebook or Twitter. Today’s camps ask so many questions about our children’s mental health, it’s as if our tweens are applying for jobs with the CIA. And as I wrote a few weeks ago, the world outside of camp is far more connected today. When kids head for the machaneh, they leave behind a million ways to chat, extensive online universes and multi-player games, gazillions of TV channels. Writing and receiving letters rather than email feels quaint now.

But I chose the camp I did because the kids and the camp’s values seemed like throwbacks in the best way. I want the feeling of a bungalow colony, not a country club. I want Jo to have the experience I did. Of course, every generation is a little different…

	Me: Walkman the size of a brick		Josie: iPod Nano
	Me: On the Walkman, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey		Josie: On the iPod, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by the cast of Glee
	Me: Flowers in the Attic (Goth-y vaguely Victorian trashy lit)		Josie: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Goth-y vaguely Victorian decent lit)
	Me: Asthma inhaler		Josie: Asthma inhaler
	Me: Bug repellent with enough chemicals to defoliate a small island		Josie: Hippie herbal insect repellent with organic catnip oil, organic rosemary, and organic lemongrass
	Me: Shabbat outfits consisting of flowered Gunne Sax dresses		Josie: Shabbat outfits consisting of flowered Hanna Andersson dresses
	Me: armfuls of rubber Madonna “Goomie” bracelets		Josie: armfuls of silicone Silly Bandz (modeled by Maxie because Josie is away at camp)

When Josie’s generation enters a sylvan, bunk-dotted landscape, they’re entering a more retro world than we did. But I think they need it even more.

If female nerds have had a tough time of it, what a double-whammy female Jewish nerds are faced with. Let’s face it, some of pop culture’s most affable male nerds have been Jews. And they’re real nerds. Think of Neal Schweiber from Freaks and Geeks and Paul Pfeiffer from The Wonder Years. On the other hand, Marcotte herself grants that “portrayals of female nerds are undercut by the smoking-hot-actress problem”; in the case of the Jewish nerdess, even the characters are considered attractive—as Jeremy Dauber pointed out in his essay on Glee for Tablet Magazine, Rachel is a “self-proclaimed hot Jew.” Where Marcotte asserts that “Rachel’s costuming has her stuck in elementary school, with knee socks and childish dresses,” we would argue that her wardrobe has her stuck in a decidedly more prurient place. And when it comes to identification with female characters, especially given the general body-image issues facing young women, hotness negates nerdiness. (Case in point: The absurd valorization of Natalie Portman, particularly in her role in the film Garden State, as the poster child of unabashed female Jewish nerdiness.) In fact, the only true example we can think of of a female Jewish nerd onscreen is the tragic Dawn Weiner in the bleak indie-cult classic Welcome to the Dollhouse. And something tells me she wouldn’t exactly feel empowered by the rise of the sexy, talented, torn-between-two-lovers Rachel Berry.

Rise of the Female Nerds [The American Prospect]
Related: The Outsiders [Tablet]

Part of what makes Rachel and Puck such a special couple is their shared heritage. In fact, it is Puck’s desire to settle down with a nice Jewish girl that compels him to pursue her in the first place. Jeremy Dauber wrote about this intra-faith coupling last October in Tablet Magazine.

Exclusive: ‘Glee’ boss on Rachel/Puck, Kurt’s new BF, and Madonna! [Entertainment Weekly]

Related: The Outsiders [Tablet Magazine]

Golden Globe Nominations Announced! [Vulture]

Related: The Outsiders [Tablet]

If you’re already watching Glee, the most bizarre, delirious, delightful show currently airing on network television, well, then, good for you. You already know what I’m talking about. Feel free to skip the rest of the column and set your DVR for tonight’s episode. If you’re not, I swear to you that millions of Americans watched these events last week, rubbed their eyes, and continued rubbing throughout the episode as this rugged football player, Noah, paid court to Rachel by singing a Neil Diamond song. Later, after the brief relationship soured, Noah looked mournfully into space and then contemplatively perched a yarmulke on top of his mohawk. This all took place, it should be repeated, on network television—indeed, on Fox.

Glee is the brainchild of Ryan Murphy, who created Nip/Tuck. That previous show featured two non-Jewish plastic surgeons in Miami—an unlikely possibility, to say the least—so one might be forgiven for assuming that his new cult hit, which revolves around a cast of singing and dancing misfits in an Ohio high school that’s stocked with your usual John Hughes-ful of jocks and cheerleaders, would have very little to do with matters Jewish.

One might be forgiven, but one would be wrong. Some of this, I suppose, has to do with casting. The show’s charismatic female lead, Lea Michele (born Lea Michele Sarfati), who’s got a voice with enough power to supplant Middle East oil, has been playing Jewish roles for years: she was Tateh’s daughter in the original Broadway production of Ragtime and Shprintze, one of Tevye’s daughters, in the 2003 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Lea’s ethnic looks clash nicely with the blond midwesterness of the “Cheerios,” the cheerleaders who serve as her ostensible rivals on Glee.

But there’s more than that.

The show is about misfits, and the ragged chorus that makes up the McKinley High School glee club is—and suffers a bit from being too much of—the “one in every category” sort: there’s an African American, an Asian American, a gay student, and a nerd in glasses who, to up the ante, is also in a wheelchair. In fact, without providing any spoilers, it’s fair to say that one of the show’s themes is that anyone—even the jocks—can be a misfit, a target for an unerringly aimed Slushee to the face. So if all these other minority groups are included, a Breakfast Club-like lesson in how outsiders become a community—presumably with a different ending—how could you leave out the Jews? They’re part of the story of minority America muscling their way, in their difference, to center stage, to the heart of American entertainment.

But it’s probably more than that, too. The show’s bones are in Broadway; and—in a truth espoused by William Goldman in his backstage classic The Season 40 years ago and more recently and pungently in Eric Idle’s score for Spamalot—you won’t succeed on Broadway if you don’t have any Jews. Jews are as much a part of the DNA of American musical theater—and, as such, of Glee—as, well, gay men. The episode in which the show’s flamboyantly gay character, Kurt, leads the football team to success by getting the players to dance to Beyonce’s “All the Single Ladies” (and then successfully comes out to his gruff father) is a sly suggestion of the real forces that make Glee move (and shake, and pop their hips, and do jazz hands). Why can’t a frustrated love story between two self-proclaimed hot Jews be next? It’s what the people who pack those seats on the Great White Way come to see.

Whether this’ll be the case in a much broader medium, of course, remains to be seen. It’s also an open question whether these stories will be occasional moments, relegated to the chorus behind the tales of Finn and Quinn, the singing quarterback and cheerleader. I tend to think not, though. Thankfully, we’ll have the chance to find out: a month ago, Glee became the first new fall series to get picked up for the full season.

Jeremy Dauber is a professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University.