Onecakebaker

If Manishewitz had had these in 1969, I would have gotten one, and been less embarassed in sixth grade…

I was totally floored at making a candy house.  It seemed so goyish.  Jews don’t make candy houses, or they didn’t. But now they do…

Really, a cookie house for Chanukah!

http://www.ohnuts.com/buy.cfm/hanukkah-gifts/for-kids/manischewitz-chanukah-house-decorating-kit

A gingerbread shtetl for Hanukkah?

This is how I recall the incident:
I wanted to make a house that was modern, like Frank Lloyd Wright or the “habitat” development by Moshe Safdie I had seen at Expo 67. I broke the hooks off some candy canes and used the loops and straight pieces to define the borders and beds of an imaginary flower garden in a big yard. For the finishing touch, I completely covered the house in light blue royal icing my mother had whipped up with her hand mixer.
“That’s your candy house?” asked Mrs. Listi, not sounding as overjoyed as I’d expected. “It’s quite unusual. I mean, there’s no candy on it.”
I looked around and saw that everyone else’s was brown with a peaked roof, like gingerbread. They were adorned with rows of candy, like in Hansel and Gretel. Not like a real house.
I had never played the board game Candyland. Gingerbread houses were not in the World Book Encyclopedia, volume A.

My teacher called the guidance couselor in to interview me the next month.

Here’s a link to a posting I wrote for the Jewish Women’s Archive: In a nutshell, I don’t trust Talmud, Maggie Anton loves it, and whatever I think of it, Talmud is a very important piece of Jewish knowledge, which will endure.

Wisdom, or Oppression? Two views of Talmud

There are many nice comments, including some from the author.

This article was published in JUDAISM, A Journal of Jewish Life and Thought, Issue No. 211/212/ Volume 53 / Numbers 3-4 / Summer-Fall 2004 / Pages 260-266.

Bus Ride of the Living Or What I Did on My Summer Vacation

And if you have Safari,  you can’t see it. Try another browser, like Chrome or Firefox. I may figure this out later, but not today.

Stuffed Cabbage,

Before Jewishness hit the Internet, I had no idea that stuffed cabbage was a traditional dish for Simchat Torah (aka the day after Sukkot). I served stuffed cabbage at my open sukkah, because, while it is time-consuming to prepare, it is a really good dish to entertain a crowd with. It practically serves itself, benefits from long stays in the oven, and freezes well.  You just have to plan ahead, like days ahead.

Xenia Hammer praised my dish so effusively, that I cooked up another batch and froze some just so I could take pictures for my recipe.  I also froze some for her.

Here is my recipe liberally illustrated with photographs.

The ingredients are:

2 lbs Ground Beef (I used Teva brand 85% lean ground beef)

Cooked Rice (I used Trader Joe’s pre-cooked  brown rice, for convenience)

A medium sized head of green cabbage (more on that later)

2 16-oz  cans Tomato Sauce

Brown Sugar and Mustard Powder, if desired.

See the picture

Equipment I used:

A large pot to boil the cabbage,

A good pair of soft-tipped tongs to peel the leaves off the cabbage,

A place to park the softened leaves before stuffing,

Two baking pans to bake the cabbage in.

Fill the large pot half full of water and bring to a boil.

Cut the core out of the bottom of the cabbage.

Put the cabbage, in the boiling water for 5 minutes, core side up.  Press the cabbage down

under the water so a few air bubbles come up.

Using your good tongs, peel the soft outside leaves off the cabbage.  If the leaves are not coming off, let the head of cabbage boil some more.

Set the leaves aside to drain and cool.  You are going to repeat this step five or six times, till there are no leaves left to peel off.

While the first set of leaves is being softened, you make your stuffing: mix your meat and rice, adding ½  cup of water.  You also open a can of sauce add your sugar and mustard powder to the sauce.

While the second set of leaves is boiling, coat the pan with a thin layer of sauce, and now you can stuff the first set of leaves by taking a dollop of stuffing, by which I mean perhaps two to four tablespoons of meat mixture,  deposit it on one end of the leaf, fold over the sides, and roll up.  Place the roll in the sauce seam side down.

Repeat until pan is full. Pour other half of can of sauce over the rolls.

Cover tightly with foil. Bake in 350 oven for at least 90 minutes, but you can leave pan in the oven for 5 or 6 hours, if covered tightly. It just gets better flavor that way.

It was in the Palo Alto Daily News, then the Bay Daily news, and I reported on things that parents in Palo Alto needed to know to help them raise their kids, feel informed, get connected, or get mad.

Here’s one:

20110128January28,2011 copy

Here’s another:

20081010October 10,2008 copy

I went to Israel in July, ready to ride segregated busses in Jerusalem and report to the liberal Jewish feminist community on what I saw.  Just before I landed, this blog post went up on the Jewish Women’s Archive “Jewesses With Attitude” site.

 http://jwa.org/blog/modern-day-freedom-rider

But when I actually reported on what had happened, what I wrote was rejected as “too controversial.”  What do YOU think?

As a good progressive Jew and feminist, I regularly read the online newsletter of the Israel Religious Action Center, (IRAC), founded in 1987 with the goals of advancing pluralism in Israeli society and defending the freedoms of conscience, faith, and religion.  They stage demonstrations of women permission to praying at the Kotel with Torahs and Tallitot, and frequently get harassed. They also champion Reform and Conservative interests in congregations in court. They get me upset on a regular basis. Their mission includes fighting the ultra-Orthodox Jews on the far right, also called Haredim. These Haredim are so zealous in defending their brand of religion that they impinge on the rights of others—women in particular.

One such practice is the segregated bus, where women sit in the back and men sit in the front.  IRAC regularly organizes “Freedom Rides,” where women sit in the front, because these segregated busses seem ridiculous in a country where women serve in the Army. It seems foolish to herd them to the back of the bus.  Since I was going to Israel anyway, I tried to join a “Freedom Ride, ” IRAC never answered me except to say “you are just one person, come with a group and we’ll talk.”

Ruth Marcus, who writes for the Washington post, must have come with a group. She was in Israel and rode a segregated bus with representatives of IRAC. You can read about it here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ruth-marcus-a-religious-fight-in-israel/2012/08/07/b74cd4e4-e0ab-11e1-8fc5-a7dcf1fc161d_story.html

So had my cousin Sandy come with me to see what these Haredi busses were like. They are called “Mehadrin,” which is the same word applied to kosher food which is prepared according to ultra-strict standards. Egged, which is a government run company and by far the biggest bus company in Israel, runs them, and it is simple to see why. These busses typically run with full loads of passengers, which is the holy grail of any mass transportation company. They are also fairly rare, only running from certain neighborhoods to other neighborhoods, and you have to find them by word of mouth.

Just so you know, in America, we also have segregated busses that cater to the Ultra-Orthodox communities. These busses are run by private companies, and are divided by a curtain running down the middle of the bus (Yes! A mehitza!), so the resonance with the segregation of the Old South does not apply. These busses have been have been going to Manhattan for decades. Men can daven during their commute.

But back to Jerusalem.

“I don’t want any trouble,” Sandy said. “So we are going to have to dress you up.” I put on a light shirt that covered my elbows, and a wrap skirt that covered my knees, and I was ready.  Sandy didn’t think that head covering was needed—I could be a widow, after all. Or single.

Then we went to Mea Shearim and looked for segregated busses. Some women we spoke to told us that if we wanted to ride in the front, we had every legal right to. “There are signs on every bus near the driver”  We rode the #56 line, which runs from the center of Jerusalem to a section of town called Ramat Shlomo, three times, and on our last trip, we were part of a large crowd that sorted itself by gender. One woman repeatedly told us, in Hebrew, that women rode in the back, but we played dumb and got on at the front of the bus so the driver could punch our transfer tickets.  We stood with the driver, admiring the scenery of Jerusalem before us, and then looked back.  A phalanx of black coats and hats looked back at us. Every seat appeared to be full, and some men were standing in the aisle, blocking our access to the back.

The wall of black coats intimidated me, even with all those Shirley Temple ringlets bobbing around.  The men didn’t SAY anything, just stood there and stared at us, and blocked the aisle.

Sandy asked the driver  “Should we push our way to the back?”

“Better stay up here, with me,” the driver answered.

So we did, back to the center of Jerusalem, and relative sanity.

####

July 25, 2012by 

Full image
Photo by Fabcom via Flickr

Are women in Chassidic communities nothing more than oppressed victims? Is the Haredi threat to civil liberties in Israel, which is represented by segregated busses, real?

I am going to Israel, at the very least, to find out about the second question.

As a rabidly liberal Jewess (I am president of the unaffiliated Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto), I am interested in the Israel Religious Action Center’s (IRAC’s) assertion that Haredi Jews are marginalizing women with segregated bussing.

I am a lifelong Zionist. My parents raised me that way. My father blessed me at the Wall in 1968–on the boys’ side. I went to Habonim Camps, and by the time I was 10, I had been to Israel twice. I spent a lovely summer there when I was 20, working on Kibbutz Gezer and visiting relatives.

Then life happened, and I did not visit again for over 30 years. When I visited Israel in 2009, I stayed with a lesbian friend who lives in Tel Aviv. She gave me an education. First, she made me take off an orange headband because orange is the colors of the settlements. She would not buy mushrooms grown in Tekoa, and when I said she was crazy for doing it, a couple of people in the farmer’s market spoke up in her defense, passing on the mushrooms also.

I have stayed away from Jerusalem because what I read in the news–Haredim rioting and throwing dirty diapers at soldiers, angry over a parking lot opening on Shabbat and spitting on an eight-year-old girl–scared me.

But…I come from Hasidic stock. I can trace my lineage to a famous rabbi. My dear cousins live a modern Orthodox life in Chicago. Another one lives in Beit Yatir, which is in an occupied territory. I have not visited there, standing on my old Zionist principles.

In the course of doing genealogy, I discovered that I have an army of second cousins in Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel who are Hassidim. I don’t have the energy to keep up with them much, but when I met a couple of them in Williamsburg, they were welcoming and friendly.

I heard Anat Hoffman, executive director of the IRAC, speak in my town. “There are many shades of black,” she said. “Women walk into my office and say, ‘thank God for you Reformim.’ Orthodox women are some of the bravest feminists I know.” You have to be brave, to agree to unfettered fertility AND the burden of earning a living.

You remember the “asifa,” the rally of yeshiva men against the Internet at Citi Field? Well, one of my cousins who travels for a living saw on a 747 plane flying from New York to Tel Aviv an Orthodox couple sitting near her in business class. The man in a black hat was talking about the rally, and his wife was sitting next to him, reading Fifty Shades of Grey.

And listen: I have written many emails to IRAC, trying to get on a “Freedom Ride,” and they have not answered me yet. I scoured the website, looking for some help, and found a reference to a travel agency. I called them, but this agency did not know what I was talking about.

I leave for Israel tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted.

 

Jerusalem with Etz Chayim

I am very excited about going to Jerusalem with Etz Chayim, especially about seeing the Kotel again.  The last time I was there was in 1968, and my father blessed me–on the boy’s side. He even had a professional photographer take pictures of it.  I found the pictures, and their large format black and white film negatives, some years ago. 

My father lived in Palestine, then Israel, from 1947 to 1956, and my mothers was a kibbutznik in 1950, when being a kibbutznik meant backbreaking labor and often, hunger.  By the time I was 10 they had taken me to Israel twice. I spent a lovely six weeks in Israel in 1978 volunteering on Kibbutz Gezer for a month, then touring around and visiting relatives. Then I did not visit Israel again for over 30 years.  I kept up with the country though. I got constant updates on the state of things  from my father’s brother Ludwig, who made Aliyah right from Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s, and from three American cousins—Sandy, Rebecca, and Ariel, who made aliyah in the 1980s.  

But I did not go. I could always go to Israel, I thought.  No rush.  Nothing was changing. But then I read  Sharon Lenox’s reports from the Etz trip in 2008,  and I realized something: the country she described really sounded different from the one I had seen in 1968.

So I got up and finally went, by myself, in 2009.  Israel WAS different.

The country was much more built up, but also clean, and the people were polite and helpful.  Naomi Burns’ parents, who were good friends with my mother on Kibbutz Sasa, helped me arrange a visit there.  Ari helped me arrange going to services at Kehillat Sulam Yaakov in Zichron Yaakov. I stayed with my uncle Ludwig’s two daughters in Haifa. I did research at the Palmach Museum and Yad Vashem.

I stayed in Tel Aviv for a few days with an old high school friend. She told me horror stories of Haredi men rioting and throwing dirty diapers in Jerusalem. These stories were corroborated in the links in the Israeli press I followed through Shomernet and Habonet.

 So I stayed out of Jerusalem (except for Yad Vashem) and had Purim in Tel Aviv in 2009, which, I admit, was a little cowardly of me.

I followed up my Israeli research on my father’s family with a trip to the Ukraine in 2010. When a cousin’s daughter got married in 2011, I brought her a booklet about the family I put together.

 And again, I stayed away from Jerusalem.

 Etz is going to Israel again this summer and this time I’m joining them.—after I visit six or seven cousins. Because with a country changing as fast as Israel, you should not stay away.

–Preeva