Today I’m heading up to Boston/Cambridge for the WAM conference (Women, Action, and the Media) at MIT. I’m looking forward to honing my blogging skills, learning about using media as a tool for social change, and meeting other feminist media folks. Hopefully I’ll manage to blog a bit at the conference.
Bloggers and others: are you going to be there? If you’re not going, you should be jealous, the lineup looks pretty excellent. More soon.
(saltyfemme says: welcome to guest blogger oneluckyfellow, poet and community organizer extraordinaire)
As a community organizer in Jewish communities, I often ask people to draw connections between their social justice activism and their Jewish experience. For some this is obvious, for others not at all clear, for most there are stories of Passover – the holiday when families talk about slavery and liberation, when college kids spend time on alternative Haggadahs* for meaningful seders.
My given family rips through a 20 minute seder – we stick our pinkies into Manishewitz and drip small circles on to our plates to remember plagues brought against a repressive regime; we open the door for Elijah to symbolically open our home to anyone who needs a place to rest. My first Passover away from home, I found myself at a seder in Maine where they did everything differently and yet I could still understand, because it was the same story and the same rituals, in the same order. Right then, I realized that my individual experience was connected to a collective narrative, and that that held power.
It is up to me to claim my heritages (not just Jewish), learn from and challenge texts and traditions and make them live today. Years after that seder in Maine, a friend and I had our own two-person Seder consisting of (Jewish and non-Jewish) stories of oppression, resistance, and vision. I know we weren’t alone.
With that, I would like to share a few Passover resources with you.
* Members of JFREJ’s Shalom Bayit: Justice for Domestic Workers campaign put together a set of readings on issues relating to domestic workers’ justice for Passover. It’s a great addition to any seder.
* A last night seder event hosted by Jews Against the Occupation (JATO) on April 10th in NYC.
* A poem by me:
Passover
If she wants to she eats bread today
If she wants to she doesn’t eat bread
today. But today the name she
was named to love Israel
in cannot love the taste
of clean cupboards nor
the land that lives by the clock
of Jewish words. The one
that shuts down on Friday
night and rests until Saturday
It tells her when to make
borscht and never runs out of
farfel at the supermarket
The buses shut down and
only men can initiate
divorce because that’s what
the men decided. Her
name is Rose
She cannot
love the wall that lets this
clock run. That lets
a Settler shoot into trees,
watch someone fall
to the ground. And leave
without repercussions. She can’t
love the clock
that takes a Palestinian’s time
to wait on thirty different lines
to maybe send this person who
shot his uncle to jail maybe
She bought olive oil stronger
than all others
in old soda bottles
label ripped off
but cannot love the walk
she took
home to make dinner
to celebrate freedom
when she looks in young male eyes
who cannot love anymore
checking IDs, yelling in the face of
her friend Palestinian
blue Palestinian green
American Secular Israeli Queer
and together,
she resists
the clock
wound by black coated prayer,
with pieces made by red, white,
and blue suited prayer
by no prayer she knows
The clock that hides
women beaten by their husbands or
cleaning houses far away from home
The clock that closes
restaurants and roads, so
she can’t eat where and when she wants to
on the one brief day
Israeli workers get to rest
and she can’t march with Pride
while children wait detained
next to tanks that bear the star
she wears with six points
She can’t ever go home
without their smiles
at the soldiers, their return
to half walls of cement
posters pasted up
If she wants to she cannot
love the way she wants to
though she can move back
to a land whose clock
does not remember
her. Does not always
save a box of farfel
for her breakfast
or rest enough for her
to rest too
Back to rapid time and people blind
fixed on sermons at the temple
where she feels at home
Silent at the Seder
she misses land
she cannot love,
curses her mother’s tradition,
defies her father’s hate,
won’t eat bread today cannot
love today
the way she wants to
*Haggadah-the story of the exodus from Egypt, and our guide for the seder.
tags: guest posts
(this bag could be yours for a mere $99) I’m really loving Jewess. Rebecca Honig Friedman explains, with photo, the commercialization of the JAP. Juicy Couture is capitalizing on everyone’s favorite stereotype with a lovely new line called “Juicy American Princess.”
Did you know that today marks the 96th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire? I didn’t. Thanks, jspot.
Women of Color blog links to an old song/video from Palestinian hip-hop artist Tamer Nafar called Kan Noladeti (born here) that I had never seen with subtitles (it’s in Hebrew and Arabic). Interestingly enough, this song and video were produced by Israeli nonprofit Shatil’s Mixed Cities project.
Also re: Israel/Palestine, Reuters (and therefore all your mainstream news sites that pick up Reuters) carried an article last week about Machsom Watch, an organization that sends groups of women to checkpoints in the West Bank to observe and document soldier interactions with Palestinians, then publishes the notes from each shift on their website (full disclosure: I volunteered with them for awhile when I was there).
Piny at Feministe explains her absence by describing her painful decision to go off testosterone and to not masculinize her body. Pretty impressive that she’s being so open about something so personal and complicated. And well written, to boot.
Holy crap, I am a speechless feminist. Last week’s challenge on American’s Next Top Model was called Crime Scene Victims (the pictures are awful, consider yourself forewarned) – the would-be models struck those high fashion poses we’ve all come to know and love (death by poison, drowning, electrocution are some of my personal favorites). Also, the quotes of the judges that go along with the photos are just lovely too. “What’s great about this is that you can also look beautiful in death.” Commentary here. Via Feministing and Feministe.
Oh, Canada. Sigh. In HPV news, the Canadian government has allocated $258 million for the HPV vaccine. Via Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy.
In food blog news, Heidi at 101 Cookbooks explains how to make pesto like an Italian grandmother and shares beautiful photos of the green gold.
Remember Beyond Same-Sex Marriage? And my little obsession with it? So last week I went to Bluestockings to hear a reading of a new anthology by Mattilda (editor of the fabulous That’s Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation and the new Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity). Mattilda is a blogger, who knew, and on Friday wrote a critique of the BSSM statement. I don’t agree with her completely, but it’s definitely worth a read. I may revisit her words at a later date in a little more depth. For now, I am grateful for the very engaging essay, which brought up a whole series of new questions.
Livejournalers! Add saltyfemme to your friends list so you can be reminded when there’s a new post. Thanks muchly to one of my very lovely Shabbat dinner guests for setting this up.
Coming up this week: Passover-related posts, a new guest poster, and more. Stay tuned. My apologies for being such a delinquent blogger.
tags: salty sunday
Salty, why are you so defensive about your femininity? Why must you always be talking identity politics? Just shut up about this femme stuff, alright, and get on with the HPV vaccine and the Jewish feminism and the social justice!
So here’s the deal. I was/am a youngest child, also the only girl. Feeling small, unsure of myself, and defensive feel as natural to me as my own skin. On the flip side, I’ve learned to hone my arguments, to know what I’m talking about. I can’t afford a weak stance.
That’s why I’m defensive. Now if we want to talk about femininity specifically, it’s because I am such a feminist that I follow blogs that, if I didn’t know blogs were a phenomenon of the recent few years, I would have thought came straight out of the 1970’s. IBTP has a great many active readers in comparison to many other feminist blogs. (edited 3/26) Also, essentialize much? Now, if I stopped being so controlling about feminism, I would retract my hand from the mainstream feminist cookie jar and tell myself that those stale cookies are NOT the kind that I bake here in my third-wave queer femme kitchen. I always hope for more. Always, always hoping. And then my hopeful feminist wants to die a sad death. I knew as soon as I saw “I’m asking you to answer the question, “What is femininity?” that I would be disappointed if I read the responses. And posts like that, friends, explain why the salty is so defensive.
Here’s my secret: feminism is where it’s at for me. I really believe that. I also believe that feminism exists at the intersection of about 8 million other “isms” that we also need to pay attention to, without which a discussion of feminism would make absolutely no sense at all. I cannot discuss men, high heels, patriarchy (i.e. the BOOGIEMAN), footbinding, or lesbian identity without a) specificity and b) context. Open-ended questions can only get you someplace bad, and in feminist blogland, to me that means a place where you define yourself in written words, yet you have not used those words to their full potential: to actually describe what you’re really talking about.
If second-wavers are all “Damn the Man!” why and how do they express this by pitting women against one another and simultaneously assuming that somewhere deep down, all women just get each other? I don’t mind women talking about their own horrible and painful experiences with femininity – I think they should, in fact. I’ve had some of those myself. It’s the nonspecific ones that get me. “Femininity is learned helplessness.” “Femininity is pain.” “Femininity is a pack of lies that the world tells about women.” So here’s what I take from all this universalizing.
The beauty of consciousness-raising groups in the 1970’s was that (mostly white, mostly middle class) women who experienced their lives in isolation began to learn that others shared their experiences, and that power came from finding commonalities. I think there’s a lot to learn from that, I think we form our human relationships and communities based on this same notion. The danger, though, is in talking in categories like “women” and “Americans” – depending on the context, I can be talking “queer femmes this” or “progressive Jewish Brooklynites in our mid-20’s that” and then continue with my sentence. After all, if you’re sitting in CR group, chances are that the women around you are from your community and likely live in your neighborhood, putting you in the same social class and probably race as you – also in the same age bracket. Suddenly you have more in common than just being women. So let’s back off the universalizing for just a little bit. And forget about defining yourself according to this mystery man called “patriarchy.” I hear he has bad taste.
(this post, BTW, was inspired by Ren’s personal words on femininity. So thanks.).
Well, on with the Sunday roundup.
In New York City news, the city has awarded $600,000 to Columbia University-Harlem Health Center for reproductive health services. The NYC fundies (yes, they’re here too) have their conservative panties in a twist with shouts of the looming end of the world caused by our valueless society. Via Kaiser Daily Women’s Health Policy.
Speaking of women’s health, I had an amazing website discovery this week. In my quick research for this post, I found the website of the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks HPV vaccine-related legislation (among others), state by state – and it seems that it’s updated pretty often.
Jerusalem homos gear up for Jerusalem Pride 2007. Via JVoices.
Naomi Chazan writes a thorough and nuanced piece on the status of women/feminism in Israel in the JPost. Snip: “it is not that discrimination has been erased; it is that it now appears in more subtle and nuanced presentations so different from the virulent strains of yesteryear.” Via my mom.
In Passover preparations: the Jew and the Carrot on bitter alternatives to horseradish, including a delicious-looking recipe for a bitter greens salad with pears.
ColorLines magazine on racism in the blogosphere – not too detailed but a good primer for newbies in the blogging world. Via DMF.
Exploitation of domestic workers in the SF bay area (and beyond) in the New Standard. Also via DMF.
Definitely check out this short piece in Queer Sighted about queer homeless youth and what “gay shame” really means.
New to the salty blogroll: Jewess (a new Jewish women’s group blog, only about a month old and already fantastic), Women of Color blog, The Jew and the Carrot, and Queer Sighted.
Last week I wrote this piece over at jspot, basically arguing that mandating the HPV vaccine will be totally meaningless if there’s no money to pay for it. Only one state (my home state of NJ, I am proud to say) has included a discussion of funding alongside their proposed mandate.
So I was less than shocked to read that republican senator Phil Gingrey has proposed a bill that would prohibit the use of federal funds for the HPV vaccine (as reported by the Washington Times). Wonderful. The bill, if passed, would not prevent states from mandating the vaccine, it would just prevent Medicaid or regular school vaccination coverage of the vaccine. Props to Kaiser Daily Health updates for linking to the actual text of the bill, which says the following:
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons states that there is no public health purpose for mandating HPV vaccine for schoolchildren. HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. (emphasis mine)
You get HPV from sex, ergo, it is not a public health issue? I can’t even get into how twisted that is. This is not about 12-year olds having sex, it’s about the fact that the vaccine is most effective when given at this early age! I don’t really want to rehash what I said at jspot, but basically anyone who can afford to pay for this vaccine out-of-pocket is probably someone who gets regular pap smears, which would detect any abnormal HPV/cervical cancer cells early enough to treat it. Those who would really need the vaccine, therefore (women who do not have health insurance and therefore do not have regular checkups at the gynecologist) are the very women whom Gingrey is trying to prevent from accessing this vaccine! Truly disgusting.
According to the Times, the bill won’t pass as a stand-alone but Gingrey can and likely will try getting this issue into the 2008 appropriations bill for the Health and Human Services Department. Gingrey, by the way, is an ob-gyn and is anti-choice (surprise!).
I must do a quick shoutout (and link) to the Women of Color blog – today they posted excerpts from one of the most amazing Audre Lorde essays/speeches, the Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. Upon rereading, I had one of those moments of remembering one of the roots of my politics.
As women, we have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression. But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor that pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.
…
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.
Isn’t it weird, it was written in 1979 and still rings true 30 years later?
If you haven’t read Sister Outsider, do it NOW. Seriously. Thank you, thank you, BFP.
Were any of my current readers around when I used to post recipes? Well I’m bringing it back. The connection between recipes and the rest of my blog may not seem obvious but domesticity is a huge part of my femme identity. So with that…
I have been making a pot of soup every weekend, pretty much since winter started. My limitations: vegetarian soups that are sufficiently filling, containing no legumes. This has actually not been so difficult. Below is a recipe for a soup I made on Friday. I had a butternut squash sitting on my counter for weeks, looking sad and abandoned. This recipe is especially wonderful because it requires just one pot. Also, it’s a creamy soup with no milk of any kind.
Butternut squash soup with potato and leek
This is a variation of this recipe (meaning the recipe looked boring so I added many other things).
1 celery stalk, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 leeks, chopped
2 tbsp. olive oil
1/2 tsp. thyme
1medium butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 fist-sized potato (I used Yukon gold but anything will work), cut into 1/2-inch cubes
1 whole fresh peperoncino or 3/4 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes (I used 5 or 6 of these wonderful dried jalapenos they have at the co-op)
2 teaspoons coarse sea salt
3 1/2 cups vegetable broth (I used a combination of veggie broth and water)
1 bunch parsley, rinsed and then tied in a little cheesecloth pack so you can remove it easily (you can also put your peppers in there too)
2 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. curry powder (optional)
sunflower seeds
In your soup pot, heat olive oil on low heat, cook celery, onion, and leeks for 12 minutes, adding the thyme about 6 minutes in. Add squash, potato, salt, peppers, parsley, and water/broth. The ratio of solids to liquids will seem funny, but you can adjust that when you’re done cooking by adding more water. Cook for 30-40 minutes, remove parsley and peppers, and then blend the soup in your blender or food processor in batches, being careful of the hot hot hot. Return soup to pot. If it seems too thick, add more water. If the soup is not spicy to your liking, you can add some curry. (it will probably need more salt so you can add that too).
I always need something to break up the texture if a soup is totally smooth, so sprinkle each bowl with some sunflower seeds when serving. That’s all!
Next week I’m going to post a recipe for tahini dip that has been requested by many. I figure it’s easier to post here than to remember who to email it to.
I’m getting psyched up for spring - the bike has finally come out of hibernation and took me to Brighton Beach this morning. I feel like I can breathe again.
If you’re Jewish, you probably got this emailed to you from 5 different people. Journey from a Chinese Orphanage to a Jewish Rite of Passage tells the story of Cece Nealon-Shapiro, adopted at 3 months from southern China by a Jewish lesbian couple from New York.
Southern Baptist leader calls for prenatal testing for the gay gene and research in getting rid of it. Wait, what? Ha ha ha. It would be funnier if it were an Onion story. I can’t wait till this crap hits the mainstream fundies. Via Queer Sighted.
Carnivals: This month’s Carnival of Bent Attractions (the queer blog carnival) is full of great links, including a salty one. Also check out the 33rd Carnival of Feminists.
New-to-me magazine Make/Shift: feminisms in motion put out a call for submissions. They’re looking for many kinds of contributions. Via Our Bodies Our Blog.
Finally, a Feminism 101 blog. (that’s what it’s called). Via Feministe.
“Marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well educated and well paid are interested in.” (married is now the exception to the rule). Via Pandagon.
Last year’s Jewish Feminism in America conference at Barnard is now up on the CROW website in online format. Definitely check out the transcript from the ‘Changing Culture’ panel, it was really fantastic. I may be blogging about this more in detail at a later date.
Lastly, check out yours truly over at jspot on the topic of the HPV/cervical cancer vaccine and why the current propositions for state-mandated vaccinations might be missing something.
(this is a long one, so decide now if you want to read it. Topics: anti-religion progressive feminists aka women stuck in the 70’s, people who should STFU, the Haredi sex-segregated bus issues. The rant-y part is separated by that bold line about halfway down.)
Maybe it was the freezing cold weather last night, or the snow I woke up to this morning, or maybe it was the infuriating Jesus preacher woman who thought that 8:30 in the morning on a snowy, cold day would be just a perfect time to command all of her fellow commuting subway riders to accept Jesus as our personal savior.
Or, perhaps my morning got off to a bad start because of a bunch of “feminists” waxing self-righteous about Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in comments section of a Feministe post. A decent post reporting on an awful situation in Israel brought on comments from all kinds of brilliant folks. The situation: pockets of Haredi Jewish men in Jerusalem are attacking women on buses (city, not private) who refuse to conform to the sex-segregation imposed by the men. You can also read a personal account of a woman who experienced this last November (a different woman than the one mentioned in the NPR story linked above).
Just to get this out of the way: this is totally fucked, brings up a whole host of questions about the tenuous relationship between religion and democracy there; the increasing power of the Haredim (pl. for Haredi); the ways that religion can be completely bastardized by its supposed most devout (i.e. to protest the woman’s lack of “modesty,” they kicked her to the ground and pulled off her head covering); and the general violence that seems to permeate every corner of Israeli society; among many other questions. The last time I checked, this news piece does not involve:
-How Haredi Jews in Brooklyn are weird freaks who don’t understand pets or birdfeeders and who are in desperate need of your pity for their backward lifestyle.
-How religion, as a whole, is perverse and how the women who fall victim to it are helpless and in need of our (read: white-, middle-class, and American) feminist rescue.
-Questions of are there any religions out there in the world that love the wimmins, really and truly? (nothing like a completely nonspecific question to spark some real discussion).
-And a complete and detailed response to that question: I would find it hard to imagine a sect of Dianic Wiccans with fundamentalist extremists like that. And Haredi Judaism in Israel has what, exactly, to do with Dianic Wiccans?
-How Haredi Jews are just incredibly annoying (although their payos [sidelocks] are real cool!).
-Umm…I have no response for this one: Sometimes it seems, ironically given the history of the Jewish religion, that today’s pagans and Jews have so much in common 
-Factually incorrect statements like my friend’s sister’s mother’s great uncle married a Haredi, so I am therefore the expert: “they also refused to teach the kids how to read and write in English — only Hebrew.” (here’s a clue: if you can’t tell the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish, perhaps you should wonder what right you have to drop your opinion in this thread).
I could go on but I might seriously lose it. I feel like there are some basic rules that people seemed to just throw out the window here. First of all, if you do not know what you’re talking about, DO NOT SPEAK. Seriously. Ask specific questions. Second of all, stay on topic. The big underlying problem with second-wave feminism is that it lacked specificity (or should I speak in the present, lacks specificity, since sometimes I think we’re still in the 1970’s).
But I thought we were beyond that. Right? Because when you think about it, logically, a Haredi woman living in a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem doesn’t want your feminism, white American college-educated woman! Hello? Why is that so difficult?
“Stop taking your value system completely out of context” rant ends here. Below, for any interested parties, is my own take on this issue.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
The way I see it, we have here a situation that calls for a tremendous amount of tact and complicated thinking: two things that are, apparently, foreign to many. The problems here, as I see them, are twofold: one within the Haredi community and one with their relationship with the larger mainstream Israeli society (and a piggyback off the second question: how “religious” should Israel be as a democratic country?).
Haredi women seem to be fighting some part of this battle within their communities and their homes. It is not up to us (including me – and when I say us, I’m talking about women who live in the US, non-Jewish women, non-Orthodox women, even Israeli women who are not Haredi) to decide exactly how that battle should play out, what is at stake for these women in fighting against sex-segregation on buses. Our concern is not whether these women are oppressed in their marriages and their birthing of 12 babies or how in the world they wear those heavy black tights in 90+ degree sweltering desert heat in the summertime in Jerusalem or why they don’t just get on the train/bus to the secular part of town and see the (secular) light! If you’re all about autonomy, how about letting them speak for themselves, hmm? You may wonder about it, but it is completely irrelevant to this discussion. It starts to concern Israeli society at large if it comes to making high-court decisions regarding the permissibility of sex-segregated public buses – and indeed, it does. From the NPR story:
The bus company released a statement saying they let the ultra Orthodox enforce their own rules. The company says its own surveys show that the general public wants “to respect the Haredi-religious sector that uses public transportation and to let them behave in a way that is convenient to them.”
(one aside: Egged’s supposed “live and let live” attitude here is a total farce: Egged buses don’t run on Shabbat, for one – what about “live and let live” for all the secular Israelis who can’t travel on Shabbat?)
What I find really interesting is that Egged (the bus company) has some weird notion that the buses in question move between Haredi neighborhoods, never entering anyplace else, which is not true. The Haredim can’t live their lives isolated from the rest of Jerusalem 100% of the time, and we see the disastrous consequences of this fact when they react to gay pride parade in riots (and the riot police, who are quick to pull out rubber bullets in Bil’in, are strangely nowhere to be seen, but I digress). Egged, like many other bodies in the state of Israel, are completely scared of Haredim, and for good reason: they vote in blocs and they have tremendous political pull.
Religion is tricky – it pushes the public/private boundaries like nothing else that I know of, and in Israel this debate has a tremendous amount more weight. All Israeli Jews have complicated relationships with Judaism (not to mention Palestinians and Palestinian-Israelis, who have a differently complicated relationship with Judaism!); with negotiating their secular identities and the religious country that governs so many parts of their personal lives. I just beg that we keep the discussion in the context where it belongs: in Israel, on the topic not just of religion but of Judaism, and not on Judaism generally but its relationship with the (mostly secular) Israeli mainstream and the laws that govern the state of Israel. Just a little specificity is all I ask.
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