Summer of rage, resistance, and ridiculousness
My illegal abortions. Sex strike. Republican antisemitism. Settler violence. Ben & Jerry's. Zelensky as Astaire. Music, dance, books, and cartoons, great cartoons.
Newsletter # 113 July 1, 2022
Given what we’ve lived through in the months since my last posting, I’m leading with levity today. (The Supremes haven’t repealed our right to laugh. . .yet.)
HUMOR
MUSIC VIDEOS
* Janis Ian’s song, “Resist,” backed by Carol Waechter’s amazing video, could be an audio-visual tutorial on the last 100 years of feminist activism.
* You better not f*** in Texas. Protest song by Jill Sobule (above) is even truer now.
* “You don't have to be a mother ... to have daughters.” Seriously: you’ve got to click this link and listen to “My Daughters,” a beautiful paean to the women our girls will become. Based on a poem by Jo-Ann Mort, the video is by Francesca Rizzo.
ABORTION
*Thanks to these 4 wily liars, who now hold lifetime seats on the highest court in the land, the arc of history is bending away from justice.
*Coat hangers redux. Photo above is from an early ‘70s demonstration. Yet“Never Again” is happening again right now.
* My article in Hadassah magazine — “Rather Than Live in Disgrace, I Decided to Kill Myself”— describes my illegal abortions in the 1950s and evokes life preRoe.
WHAT YOU CAN DO TO FIGHT BACK
— Give to the National Network of Abortion Funds and protect women’s access to reproductive care.
— Watch NNAF’s video, “Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion.”
— Advocate for an end to FDA restrictions on the abortion pill, mifepristone.
— Donate to The Brigid Alliance. They cover travel, lodging, meals, and child care expenses for anyone without the means to cross state lines for abortion care
— Know your faith’s pro-choice position because the next battleground may be religious freedom. For chapter & verse, read “Think Christianity is Anti-Abortion? Think Again. “ Catholics for Choice. “Judaism & Abortion.” Wise Muslim Women.
— Organize a “sex strike” modeled on the ancient play “Lysistrata,” in which women withhold sex from their husbands and lovers until the men agree to negotiate peace between their warring city-states. The strategy worked in Liberia in 2003, ending a civil war and winning a Nobel Peace Prize for the main organizer, Leymah Gbowee.
— Pressure the manufacturer of the morning after pill to increase its supply to meet increased demand from now on. The pill sold out this week.
* Pregnancy as punishment. Cruelty and cognitive dissonance personified
A 13-year-old girl can’t adopt a baby. Neither can a 15-year-old, or an 18-year-old, or a 20-year-old. There are 400,000+ children in foster case, why can’t she adopt at least one of them?
Because it’s illegal. You have to qualify to adopt a child: Rigorous background checks, home visits, proof of financial and mental stability, etc. However, if one of those girls, gets impregnated by an abusive ex-boyfriend who shoved her out of a moving car and left her for dead, she must carry to term.
“But she’s only 13…,” you say.
“She should have been more careful,” they say. “Made better choices.”
DANCE
*The energy of Riverdance could power a ConEd plant. Find a show near you here.
*The Gardiner brothers (above) blew me away. Irish dancing at its coolest.
Didja know? Before he was Ukraine’s president, Zelensky won his country’s “Dancing With the Stars” competition.
RAPE
*A protest in front of the Russian Embassy in Tallinn, Estonia, drew attention to the savage rapes of women and children committed by Russian soldiers in Ukraine. (See “blood” between the demonstrators’ legs.)
BOOKS
*Books I’ve read and loved in the last few months: The Empathy Diaries by Sherry Turkle; The Exiles by Christina Baker Kline; The Choice: A Novel of Love, Faith, and Talmud by Maggie Anton; Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb; From This Broken Hill I Sing to You: God, Sex, and Politics in the Work of Leonard Cohen by Marcia Pally; Who by Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai by Matti Friedman. The Book of All Books by Roberto Calasso.
*Department of shameless self-promotion
* Above is the jacket for my twelfth book, SHANDA: A Memoir of Shame and Secrecy, which Post Hill Press will publish on September 13 (distributed by Simon & Schuster). In the coming months, I’ll post the in-person venues, or Zoom dates, of my appearances. For now, you can read a short excerpt from the book that was published in Hadassah magazine.
ANTISEMITISM
* The past year yielded a bumper crop of Republicans who Can’t Stop Making Offensive Comments About Jewish People. Count' ‘em: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Warren Davidson, Madison Cawthorn, and more, not to mention the unmentionable former POTUS, master of antisemitic dogwhistles.
* Deja vu all over again. Jews are often accused of paranoia but, as Delmore Schwartz (maybe) once said, “Even paranoids have enemies.” And as happened in the 1930s, life can get scary fast. While watching neoNazis storm the capitol or parade in Orlando, Florida (above) and elsewhere, brandishing swastikas and shouting Jew-hating slurs, who can blame us paranoids for thinking, what’s next?
* In February, Whoopi Goldberg kept repeating on “The View” that the Holocaust “isn’t about race.” When informed that Hitler considered the Aryan race superior and Jews an “inferior race” worthy of extermination, she apologized. But how could a smart woman get it so wrong in the first place. Did her high school history curriculum skip the rise of Nazism? Did her textbooks downplay the slaughter of 6 million and more? Do you know how that era is taught in your children’s school? For how it should be taught, see Facing History and Ourselves
*The Bard Center for the Study of Hate has a free, nuts-and-bolts manual to help community groups organize against racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant hatred, homophobia, trans[phobia.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
* Ben & Jerry’s parent company, Unilever, found a way to sell ice cream in the West Bank, ending the boycott against the Occupation.
*In this Moment magazine column, I deplore Jewish settlers’ violence against Palestinian farmers and shepherds in the West Bank.
BLACKS, JEWS, AND BLACK JEWS
* Black Jews often experience two violations of dignity: racism in the white Jewish community and antisemitism in the Black Christian community. But these days, as I report in Moment magazine, many Jews of Color are not just challenging the bad behavior of their racial and religious affinity groups but leading the way to mutual understanding, solidarity, and action.
TODAY’S CODA — MORE LAUGHS
* Most Jewish stereotypes are offensive but when we mock ourselves, admit it, stock characters can be funny. These lines from an unknown author made me LOL.
YOU GREW UP JEWISH IF…
“Your mother’s best advice was: ‘Go! You might meet somebody!’
‘You think it’s normal for someone to shout "Are you okay?" through the bathroom door if you’re in there longer than 3 minutes.
“You never knew anyone whose name didn't end in berg, baum, man, stein, or witz.
“Your family dog responded to commands in Yiddish.
“You spent every Sunday afternoon visiting your relatives.
“You considered your Bar or Bat Mitzvah a "Get Out of Hebrew School Free" card.
“You were surprised to discover that wine doesn't always taste like grape juice.
“You didn’t know from pasta, you knew from egg noodles in kugel, and bowties with kasha.
“You were as tall as your grandma by the age of 7 You were as tall as your grandpa by seven and a half.”
DON’T AGONIZE, ORGANIZE. SHABBAT SHALOM. HAPPY WEEKEND
Amazing excerpt in Hadassah, hope you come to the MM JCC in NYC with your book! I also loved Bess Kalb's book. Hope you are well!