• Israel cracks down on illegal immigration. [NYT]

• Several politicians whose blocs together secured the majority of the Egyptian vote in recent elections want to promote “sin-free tourism.” Good luck with that, guys. [AP/The Republic]

• This cycle could see the election of several new Jewish Republican congresspersons. [Roll Call]

• The last Jews of … Gibraltar! [JTA]

• Lea Michele explains why she doesn’t go by her given name, Lea Sarfati. A million Ashkenazic girls would kill for that name! [6 Degrees No Bacon]

Gov. Rick Perry’s despicable anti-gay ad (below) has background music inspired by the well known (Jewish) homosexual Aaron Copland. (I also love that his objection is to gays serving “openly” in the military. If they want to risk their lives for their country while in the closet, then no big deal!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]

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.