District 10 Congressional Forum

On June 5, at the same time as the primaries in New Jersey, a new Congressperson will be elected for District 10, due to the passing of Rep. Donald Payne. The Community Relations Committee of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest is holding a candidates’ forum tomorrow, May 23, at 8:30 a.m. at the Cooperman JCC in West Orange.

RSVP TODAY as seats are limited. Sorry the side of the flyer is cut off, but if you click on it you’ll see the whole thing.

Also, please don’t tell my daughter we live in District 10. She’s rereading the Hunger Games trilogy for the third or fourth time!

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How did you choose your child’s name?

The Social Security Administration just released their list of the 1000 most popular baby names of 2011. Topping the list are Jacob and Sophia.

Jacob has held the top spot for something like 13 years running! People, it’s a nice name, but there are others out there! When I was in the fifth grade, there were three Jeff Browns in my class. If your last name is Brown, I think you can afford to be a little more creative with a first name than Jeff. Sophia is taking the reigns for the first time, knocking off Isabella after that name was number one for two years. (Which confirms my theory that parents are more willing to be creative with a girl’s name than a boy’s.)

When it came to naming our own kids, DB and I had vastly different approaches: he saw these lists of most popular names as lists to choose from, while I saw them as lists of names to avoid. Luckily for me, he came around to my way of thinking. I always liked being Alia, having a nearly unique name. Although it’s not so much anymore: The name Alia cracked the top 1000 in 1995, and ranked 732 last year, behind Aliya, number 657, and Aliyah, at 133! Which makes sense, because it is just in the last ten years that I have started hearing my name called in a crowd or at a mall and it’s not for me, it’s for a cute little girl, usually African-American. I certainly can’t claim any influence on that front, I think it was the popularity (starting out on Star Search at age 10 in 1989) and death (in 2001) of the R&B singer Aaliyah.

For our children, I had two rules for names: I wanted a name that was the same in English and Hebrew, and it should be spell-able and pronounce-able for Americans. I loved the name Michal, but didn’t think the hard ch sound would fly. I imagined a daughter being constantly called Mikel or Mitchell. Of course, I wasn’t counting on New Jerseyans penchant for a hard “a” sound. Big Girl’s name has an “ah” sound, but even her NJ-born and raised grandmas had to learn to say it. For her first month they kept saying it the way the “a” is pronounced in Sally, rather than the softer “a” of tallit, but they learned.

The funny thing is her name, although unusual and compliment-getting in the grocery store, is not so unusual in the actively-Jewish world. It ranked number 393 in her birth year (and 431 last year). When she got to kindergarten in Jewish day school, there were two other girls with her name in the grade. Of course she became, and remains, really great friends with both of them. My boys, however, have Hebrew/Israeli names that didn’t crack the top 1000 at all in their birth years or last year. So we bucked my anecdotal trend of being more conservative with boys’ names without even trying.

I’m saying all this without even getting into the “naming after” question. My daughter’s name has the same first letter as my late father’s, but the boys each have their own first name, independent of a dead guy. Each of my kids’ middle names, however, are English and directly the same as a deceased loved one, in Ashkenazi tradition.

I want your input: how did you choose? It’s an important thing you give your child, his or her name. How did you pick among the literally million options?

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Award winning Jews

Last night was Spring Fling, the annual UJC of MetroWest event honoring the Julius and Bessie Cohn Young Leadership Award winners, which for 2011 were Michael Elchoness and Robin Sysler.

I have been honored to know both of these award winning Jews, and it was (almost) even better to be a past award winner than have the stress of giving the main speech (I was nervous enough giving the campaign pitch). They both had fabulous things to say. They were both very conscious of keeping their grandmothers’ memories and legacies alive in the volunteer work that they do, and do so well.

Coincidentally, I too was honoring my grandma last night, in my own little way. I was wearing my lion pin on my grandma’s necklace. It’s a long chain of golden cheap metal with fake pearls every so often, but I love it. And I love that it was her’s, and that I remember her wearing it. I also have other things of hers, which I’ve writtten about before.

If you have a message to leave for Michael and/or Robin,  please leave it here in the comments. I’m sure they’d love to hear your reaction to the evening or maybe how they have touched your life!

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Shalom TV’s Tribefest wrapup

I was among more than 1,500 young Jewish adults to attend Tribefest in Las Vegas last month. Since I’ve been to many Federation regional and national Young Leadership conferences, there comes a time when you think you can’t learn anything new, but of course you can, and I did.

Above all, I loved spending time with my friends Dana Lichtenberg and Doni Zasloff Thomas – we kept joking that we had to leave NJ just to hang out together. Doni – aka Mama Doni – was the Shalom TV Tribefest correspondent for the weekend and I got a thrill being her guest producer for a day, suggesting locations and questions and grabbing people I knew from the crowd who I was sure would give good quotes. I was right, they did.

Here’s the result of Doni’s hard work: It’s a half-hour special on Shalom TV. You can see it On Demand on most cable systems. To watch it on your big screen, go under On Demand, then TV Networks, then Shalom TV. I didn’t see it up this morning, maybe it’s going up today or Sunday. I was so excited to watch it last night: I swear I’ve been stalking Shalom TV’s listing every week for a month!

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Why is Time trying to milk their cover for the Mommy Wars?

Seriously, I don’t mind if you breastfeed your kid till grade school.

What I mind is the implication, on Time‘s cover this week, that if I choose to end my nursing relationship earlier than when the kid gets his driver’s permit, I am somehow not, in their words, “Mom Enough.”

 

Oh, I am Mom Enough. Mom Enough to have nursed three babies. Mom Enough to know not to be bitten by a baby. Mom Enough to know I’m in charge of my body, not my child. Mom Enough to have pumped milk by hand, yessiree.

And I am Mom Enough, and woman enough, and friend enough, not to judge my friends who did it differently, which was most of them. To feel for my friend who wanted so much to nurse and couldn’t and had to give up after eight agonizing weeks of physical and psychological pain. To feel for another who went through child-led weaning long past when she was ready herself. To empathize with the friend who never nursed because she wanted her boobs to be her own.

I have no issue with attachment parenting. If it works for you, gei gezuhnta heit (go in good health). What I have an issue with is a magazine fanning the flames of a Mommy War. We fellow moms should stick together, not Mommy War about which method of nutrition delivery makes us a better mother.

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Bar mitzvah planning

Last week we met with the caterer for Skater’s bar mitzvah next spring. Yes, indeedy, we are only a year out from Big Girl’s big event, and we have to start in on the next one. 

Skater’s kiddush and party will be smaller in scale than our first one, because he wants to go to Israel for his bar mitzvah (which, because of timing, will be his “second” bar mitzvah, to take place in June after school lets out). At first I wanted to keep the Stateside celebration to just family and maybe take a few of his friends to a baseball game or something else fun, but it was DB who didn’t want him to feel shortchanged. So a nice kiddush and a kids’ party on Sunday it is.

In a way, it’s easier of course to plan a “smaller” gathering. But it’s harder, on the other hand, to make a guest list for a smaller gathering. My heart still wants to include everyone we did the first time, but logic will have to reign me in at some point.

How would you/did you handle it?

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A true champion

Israeli rower Moran Samuel won gold in a disabled rowing competition in Italy. But the wrong anthem started to play. A true champion, she asked for the microphone and began to sing it herself.

Moran, you make every Jewish mother proud!

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‘Still Jewish’ and quite funny

Last night my sister- and brother-in-law took us out to see a little show in Montclair called Avi Hoffman’s Still Jewish After All These Years. It is presented at the Grove Street Theater in Montclair, logically located on Grove Street. You can get tickets through Apricot Sky Productions.

The show is a one-man overview of  singer/actor Avi Hoffman’s life and career, from his days in the New York Yiddish theater as a child, to acting on TV and in movies in Israel as a teen, to an adult career playing a wide variety of Jewish characters back in the States. Hoffman does all this with pathos, humor, and more than a little shmaltz. And he does all this with one piano accompanist, two hats, and two jackets. His voice – both singing and his artistic one – is both familiar and true.

When I first walked into the theater, which is hosted inside the Deron School, I thought how lovely the original wooden seats were. After sitting (and shifting) on them for the hour-and-a-half show, I could feel the need for updated seating. I got a special surprise when the Apricot Sky executive director came out to greet the audience: I knew him from Ohio State, went on two dates with him our junior year!

The four Ramers brought down the average age by at least 15 years, but I don’t see why this show wouldn’t appeal to younger adults. There are lessons to be learned in sticking to doing what you love, even when the parts aren’t plentiful and you feel pigeonholed by typecasting.

Hoffman’s best moments are speaking quietly of his dad, and his impressions: he does the Catskills comics with flair and great timing, including Jackie Mason and Jack Carter, whom I thought I never heard of but it turns out reading his bio that he’s currently playing the elderly, usually half-naked, dementia-addled bar owner on Shameless, which I shamelessly love.

The show is playing one more weekend, so get tickets quick. Apricot Sky Productions is also producing a new musical, Hanky Panky, so check that out, too.

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Petition to remember The Munich 11

Forty years ago, 11 Israeli athletes were taken hostage and killed at the Summer Olympics in Munich in 1972. One of the victims’ widows, Arkie Spitzer, has been appealing the International Olympic Committee ever since for a moment of memorial silence during the games. And for all these years, the IOC has been saying no.

Now the Rockland County JCC has made it their mission to support this cause with an online petition to be given to the IOC; the Jewish Federations of North America is supporting and promoting it. Please click onto the website and sign the petition. And share either this page or theirs directly with your friends. Talk about it with your kids. Explain why this is important. All competitors and sports fans should honor their memory.

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Disappointing ‘New’ haggadah

So just before Pesach I was lamenting the fact that we have several kinds of haggadot but not enough of any of them to have one per person at a 19-person seder. My lovely mom felt for us, and bought us a set of the much-lauded-in-the-Jewish-and-secular-press New American Haggadah, by Jonathan Safran Foer with translations by Nathan Englander.

I was really excited for the new haggadot; so much gushing praise had been given to the book. And at the cover price of $30 a pop (they are discounted on Amazon but my mom, as I, likes to support local Judaica stores) the set of eight was no small gift. When I picked one up, I noticed how thick it was. About as thick as three or four Maxwell House haggadot. Uh-oh. A haggadah is a manual for conducting the seder. And my general rule on these things (which I just now made up, thank you) is the thicker the manual, the harder it is to follow. Ever tried finding the simplest answer in your car’s manual? This thick manual was written by two novelists. Causation, or just correlation?

As I paged through, my nose wrinkled. The extra stuff goes in all directions. No, not figuratively: the text literally is typeset sideways both left and right. A timeline of Passover history (which is interesting) flows like Hebrew from right to left at the top of each page. Commentary starts its crawl across from the left. They stopped short of upside-down. I imagined all our guests getting cricks in their necks while following along.

And there’s so very much of it. Even the page numbers themselves acknowledge this: for every page number, there is a countdown page number to its right, printed in a light gray and backward. Even the book itself is asking “how many pages are left?” That can’t be a good sign. The translations are lovely and poetic, but again, when there’s so much to choose from the whole looks too daunting.

Some of the artwork is supposed to look like ink stains, or food stains, or somesuch. Yes, I like that there are wine glass and coffee cup rings in my haggadot. But I want that to happen over time, not buy it that way. I feel the same way about paying $200 for pre-ripped jeans. It’s cheating. I much rather appreciated the artwork included which riffed on the typography of Hebrew words and phrases.

The book is written only in Hebrew and English. Most American Jews don’t speak and barely read Hebrew, only what they’ve learned in Hebrew school.The lack of transliterations seems short-sighted to me. Even if only the Kiddush and the Motzi were transliterated (and maybe Dayenu and Chad Gad Yah etc.), it would help everyone at the table follow along.

I tried to get DB to sit down with some sticky notes and mark what pages we should use, but that was too much work. And if it’s too much work for Jewishly-educated Jews who want to have a meaningful seder, what will the experience be like for Jews who want a nice meal with their family and a bit of seder before it?

In the end, DB took the newish family-style haggadah that we like – but only have one of – to the copy place and violated some reproduction laws. I like that haggadah but it mentions Moses, which traditionally a bit haggadah no-no. We are not supposed to remember and thank Moshe, but rather remember that he was the instrument through which God worked, and remember and thank Her. Him. It. God.

So the hunt for the perfect haggadah will return next year. My rabbi sister and I have spoken over the years about writing one ourselves, so who knows; in the timeline, it is noted that 2003 brought the launch of the Open Source Haggadah, “an online software framework that makes it possible users to compose their own versions of the Haggadah online.” Hmmm….

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