Bat Mitzvah Research Articles

The Witch of Woodland by Laurel Snyder

Reviewed by: The Witch of Woodland by Laurel Snyder April Spisak Snyder, Laurel The Witch of Woodland. Walden Pond/HarperCollins [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780062836656 $19.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780062836670 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4-6 Zippy prefers a predictable life, so she's thrown for quite the loop when her best friend is suddenly more interested in the popular kids instead of their cozy dyad, [End Page 305] and her parents insist that she begin studying for her bat mitzvah, which means she has to start meeting a rabbi she doesn't know and other students she doesn't trust. She has always used magic to make sense of her life, casting small spells or chanting ritualistically in attempts to enact change or retake control—though whether it is an emotional placebo or genuine witchy abilities is a bit ambiguous. What is absolutely obvious and indisputable, however, is that the girl she conjures up, Miriam, is entirely dependent on Zippy for nourishment and guidance. At first, Miriam is the perfect best friend replacement, but it soon becomes clear that she is not a living girl at all, and Miriam has a hunger that may take more from Zippy than she has to give. Zippy is skeptical of religion, questioning herself, her parents, and the (thankfully quite patient and open-minded) rabbi in her quest to find real answers to, she soon learns, unanswerable questions. Zippy's stressed out first-person narration and harried juggling of too many new things makes her compelling from the first page, even as she is vulnerable and baffled at how other people seem to actually enjoy spontaneity and change. There's much to ponder here in friendship, family dynamics, and religion, and Zippy's growth is hard-earned and deserved. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Queering Ethnic Rites of Passage: Transparent and One Day at a Time

Abstract I take account of queered ethnic rites of passage in the popular television series Transparent (2014-19) and One Day at a Time (2017-20), shows through which directors Joey Soloway and Gloria Calderón Kellett explore the intersections between queer youth and Jewish and Latinx identities, respectively. Transparent uses flashbacks to character Ari’s decision to forego their bat mitzvah in such a way that is inexorable from both their vexed relationship to their family’s immigrant history and their burgeoning queer (and later nonbinary) identification as a twenty-something in the series’ present. Likewise, One Day at a Time presents character Elena’s process of coming to terms with whether or not to celebrate her quinceañera, which she perceives as a misogynist, patriarchal tradition, as she duly grapples with coming out. Both series include gendered rites of passages, the Latinx quinceañera and the Jewish bat mitzvah, in a way that shows sexuality and ethnicity to sit uncomfortably with one another for queer adolescents whose grandparents immigrated to the United States. The two storylines share a family as a site of compulsory heterosexuality, adolescent characters who negotiate their sexual identities as they grapple with a rite of passage, and the use of humor as a tactic to question, resist, and at times reify patriarchal norms.

From Bat Mitzvah to the Bar: Religious Habitus, Self-Concept, and Women’s Educational Outcomes

This study considers the role of religious habitus and self-concept in educational stratification. We follow 3,238 adolescents for 13 years by linking the National Study of Youth and Religion to the National Student Clearinghouse. Survey data reveal that girls with a Jewish upbringing have two distinct postsecondary patterns compared to girls with a non-Jewish upbringing, even after controlling for social origins: (1) they are 23 percentage points more likely to graduate college, and (2) they graduate from much more selective colleges. We then analyze 107 interviews with 33 girls from comparable social origins interviewed repeatedly between adolescence and emerging adulthood. Girls raised by Jewish parents articulate a self-concept marked by ambitious career goals and an eagerness to have new experiences. For these girls, elite higher education and graduate school are central to attaining self-concept congruence. In contrast, girls raised by non-Jewish parents tend to prioritize motherhood and have humbler employment aims. For them, graduating from college, regardless of its prestige, is sufficient for self-concept congruence. We conclude that religious subculture is a key factor in educational stratification, and divergent paths to self-concept congruence can help explain why educational outcomes vary by religion in gendered ways.

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Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff (review)

Reviewed by: Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff Jody Myers Zev Eleff. Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 311 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000404 Zev Eleff has devised a fruitful and interesting way of describing developments within American Orthodox communities and the tensions between the Modern Orthodox and the Orthodox Right. He focuses on the quest for authenticity, a concern that has been central in the United States since the early nineteenth century. Authenticity in religion is a subjective judgement rendered by adherents who believe there is a correct form of beliefs and practices unsullied by financial, [End Page 498] political, and external cultural influences. One might think that for Orthodox Jews conformity to Halakhah determines authenticity. Eleff repeatedly shows, however, that among the Orthodox the charge of inauthenticity is leveled against an innovation when religious authorities deem it problematic but cannot fault the innovation on halakhic grounds; they therefore delegitimize it by declaring it new and contrary to Torah values. The Modern Orthodox, who have sought explicitly to incorporate elements of American liberal culture into their lives, have been most often accused of initiating inauthentic practices even though all Orthodox Jewish communities have developed new rituals, pedagogies, and rules. Furthermore, Eleff argues that scholars have underestimated the extent of American religious culture's influence on Orthodox Judaism, a corrective he demonstrates. Authentically Orthodox is not a historical narrative. It consists of nine case studies, each constituting a separate chapter focusing on a separate post–World War II innovation. Eleff arranges these in three sections. Part 1, "Halakhah and Change," examines kitniyot prohibitions on Passover, the Bat Mitzvah, and the yarmulke. Part 2 deals with the changed image of Orthodoxy in response to a Yeshiva University student team's victory in a College Bowl program on national TV, the creation of toys and games for Haredi children, and the life span of a Modern Orthodox Baltimore yeshiva. Part 3 focuses on "protected male space" through Yeshiva University regulation of co-ed social events, women's engagement in Torah study, and separate women's prayer groups. Each chapter can stand alone. Strictly speaking, none of the innovations were in violation of or required by Halakhah. For example, the case study on the yarmulke shows that in the 1960s American Orthodox Jews began to consider it imperative for men to wear a yarmulke during their waking hours no matter their activity, a position at variance with halakhic codes; they also began to describe the practice as a proud display of Jewish identity—certainly an American interpretation. In the 1980s, when the obligation to wear a yarmulke conflicted with a high school basketball league's rules prohibiting head coverings during playoffs, a yeshiva high school's leaders and supporters mounted a legal challenge. (The importance they attached to the sport is also an obvious sign of Americanization.) In Menora v. Illinois High School Association, the plaintiffs claimed that the prohibition violated the students' First Amendment Free Exercise right, and they won the two-year battle. At about the same time, some Orthodox rabbis and organizations began to oppose the long-standing Jewish community stance that the Constitution's Establishment Clause required strict separation of church and state and precluded state aid to religious schools. For this and related issues, the Orthodox were aligning themselves with Christian conservatives and asserting their distinctive American Orthodox identity. Similarly, in "Mitzvah Merchants and the Creation of an Orthodox Children's Culture," Eleff describes the school contests, trading cards, and toys developed by Orthodox educators that parallel those made by evangelical Christian educators. Both groups share the conviction that children's games should be "practice" for authentically religious adults. Their alternatives to American youth culture nevertheless promote the "American" values of competition, individual achievement, and acquisitiveness. [End Page 499] Eleff's frequent references to American religious history and historiography make his treatment of American Orthodox Judaism especially insightful. For example, in his chapter on Orthodox Bat Mitzvah ceremonies, Eleff builds upon the observation by historian Frederick Jackson Turner (and Shari Rabin's application of it to nineteenth-century American Jews) that there has...

Hooked on Feelings: The Story of My Jewish Pathologies

Hooked on FeelingsThe Story of My Jewish Pathologies Jodi Eichler-Levine (bio) Keywords Jewish, feelings, illness, crafts I grew up in a house filled with objects. Plants covered the passage from the kitchen to the wood-paneled den; spider ferns hung from dangling baskets. Above the fireplace, dusty old brass candlesticks and a mortar and pestle loomed over the room, encased in a patina of immigration stories. Enormous crochet afghans from the hooks of cousins and great-aunts covered the couch. My mother’s vibrant oil paintings were displayed on every wall that wasn’t already occupied by a bookshelf. But then, there were the quotidian objects: the clutter. It went beyond the average sort, except in my room, where I kept the desk clear and everything at right angles. Piles of newspapers and what seemed like every copy of National Geographic ever written. Hosting any guests required preparation and maneuvering. It was like a Tetris game meets Hoarders, an Indiana Jones-esque excavation of the dining room table. Perhaps this is one of the ways I learned to love history. This New York Times is from a year ago. Remember when we thought Dukakis could win the election? It is certainly where I learned nostalgia. Dig down deep enough, and I’d find a two-year old service leaflet from our synagogue—remember that weekend? It was Stacey’s Bat Mitzvah! My family did not possess objects. We were possessed by them. I thought about these ancestral piles often as I researched Painted Pomegranates and Needlepoint Rabbis, my book about Jews, crafting, and resilience in contemporary America.1 From 2015 to 2020 I read books, newsletters, and blogs about objects; I entered people’s homes to touch and see mountains of their objects; I wrote on the road and then in my office on campus, surrounded by piles of paper; and I went over the final page proofs in my crowded guest-room-turned home office, under [End Page 5] a stay-at-home order, during a pandemic spring. I learned about other people’s heirlooms, and a few of my own. As so often happens, the process of writing this book left me with more questions than answers, more stories than I could convey in one volume. I have learned that I am hooked on feelings, though I embrace the ones from my fingertips while resisting the more charged ones we also call “emotions.” In truth, of course, that’s a false binary. “The habits of the heart are also the haptics of the heart, the religious tactility of the body,” writes David Chidester.2 In my research and in my own history, rituals of mind are deeply enmeshed with rituals of the body. I fall into repetitive, even compulsive, habits of feeling in both senses of the word. Hands and hearts are both collections of muscles, clenching and releasing habitually along well-worn grooves of sensation and sentiment. In this story, the habits and the haptics are one and the same. “the whole world will go away if that happens” Inheritances come with a mandate. In April 2017, I flew to Los Angeles for a week of interviews with members of the Pomegranate Guild of Judaic Needlework, a North American organization of Jewish crafters with some chapters that have met for over four decades. Gertrude, an octogenarian who prefers to sew by hand, sat in her sunny yellow living room, feeding me Passover treats and showing me her creations as her dog hovered protectively over us. Towards the end of the interview, she got to the heart of the matter: “It’s like a continuous, continuous thread,” she told me. “It’s a different way of leaving behind for the future generations the works of your hand, your heart, and your mind. To me, that’s what it is, you know. Because, look, I’m going to be 88 in a few months. I have all this for people to talk about, because they’ll be using it, they are using it now, they’re talking about it now, the pieces that I made for them.” Like Gertrude’s words—and in part because of her...

Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff

Reviewed by: Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life by Zev Eleff Michal Raucher (bio) Authentically Orthodox: A Tradition-Bound Faith in American Life. By Zev Eleff. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2020. 311 pp. Boundary-policing has become a defining feature of Orthodox Judaism. Social science research reveals the elusiveness yet realness of these boundaries. Historians have largely presented a picture of Orthodoxy in America as a "slide to the right," wherein Orthodox Jews have moved to more stringent religious attitudes over the last century, thus pushing out many of those who might otherwise consider themselves Orthodox. However, amidst a sustained focus on how American Orthodoxy has changed despite an internal narrative of stasis and adherence to a singular tradition, we can now identify more clearly the many ways Orthodoxy has transformed, responded, and divided over the last century. [End Page 435] Authentically Orthodox demonstrates that throughout the twentieth century, Orthodoxy has not shifted its boundaries to the right but moved them in different directions depending on surrounding cultural and religious factors. Zev Eleff takes a broad view in developing a theoretical framework for thinking about how Orthodoxy has defined itself in twentieth-century America. Diving into nine case studies, Eleff argues that authenticity is what determines whether something—peanut oil, Binyan Blocks, or women's prayer groups, for instance—remains within the boundaries of Orthodoxy. Authenticity is subjective, contested, and a moving target. It is a feeling that is determined by "a web of experiences mediated by any number of cultural forces" (3). Those cultural forces come from a combination of what Eleff terms America's "indigenous religious culture" (by which he often means Christianity), European immigrants, and leading Israeli Orthodox rabbis (22). He argues that this quest for authenticity is what defines the boundaries of American Orthodoxy. Eleff illustrates how American Orthodox Jews have dealt with tensions over authenticity. The first case study concerns the permissibility of eating peanut oil on Passover and the influence of Hasidic emigres from Eastern Europe. The second chapter shows how bat mitzvah ceremonies became an accepted practice within Orthodoxy. The third chapter details the authentication of a religious norm for men—wearing a yarmulka in public. Chapter four focuses on how Modern Orthodoxy enlivened their youth with Mighty Mites, the Yeshiva University quiz squad. Next, Eleff looks at how the Orthodox right produced a faith-based youth culture through the Bracha Bee and rabbi trading cards. Chapter six tracks the rise and fall of Yeshivat Rambam, a Modern Orthodox day school in Baltimore that was ultimately rendered inauthentic because of the "religiously inhospitable soil" of Catholicism and the Orthodox right (143). The next three chapters focus on gendered spaces. Chapter seven explores the struggle over female college students at Yeshiva University. Chapter eight tracks the acceptance of women's Talmud study, as Eleff argues that this counterintuitive authenticity was due in large part to the decoupling of women's Talmud study from feminism. Chapter nine shows how this decoupling was not successful among women's prayer groups, which ultimately led to the elites not granting them authenticity. Eleff does important work in rooting Orthodoxy in its American framework. One powerful example of this can be seen in the chapter on peanut oil. Eleff shows how American consumerism of the early twentieth century "purchased more than a modicum of religious authenticity and helped peanut oil secure its foothold in Orthodox homes" (38). However, Hungarian Orthodox opposition to peanut oil ultimately influenced [End Page 436] American Orthodoxy only because of the conservative turn in American Protestantism. Hungarian Orthodoxy was deemed a more authentic expression of Orthodoxy in America because the American religious context had an anti-modernist, separatist, and conservative trend. The concept of authenticity is a productive theoretical approach to thinking about how boundaries are constructed. The case studies highlight the malleability of the concept. What ultimately authenticates a practice or innovation is not whether it is considered in line with Jewish law. Instead, the book reveals that at times the question was whether something was authentically Orthodox, like a bat mitzvah ritual, while at other times, the question was whether Orthodox Jews could be authentically American, like when they...

A tale of two cultures: an outline for a comparative cultural analysis of Israeli and North American Jewry

ABSTRACT The article develops a theoretical outline for a comparative analysis of the North American and Israeli Jewish cultures as two systems of meanings. Relying theoretically on the “strong program” of cultural sociology and on Ephraim Shmueli's Seven Jewish Cultures paradigm, it suggests that the American-Jewish and Israeli cultures be understood as two different meaning-systems: that of emancipation, whose main thrust is hyphenation with non-Jewish cultures; and the nationalist culture, whose main corollary is Jewish demographic and symbolic dominance of the public space. This cultural difference can determine political, sociological, and intellectual differences no less than the other way around. To exemplify the “Two Cultures” approach, the article offers a short comparative anthropological history of the bat mitzvah in the North American and Israeli Jewish mainstream (i.e. the non-Orthodox) from the end of the Second World War through the present, to serve as a methodological window onto the meanings that the two communities attribute to “Jewishness” – that is, the nature of membership in the Jewish people. By taking a step back from the tumult of politics and the media, the Two Cultures framework may be able to uncover unspoken cultural gaps between the two largest Jewish centres in the twenty-first century, as well as find potential points of understanding between them.

Performing Gender and Political Recognition: Israeli Reform Jewish Life-cycle Rituals

Anthropologists see life-cycle rituals as a significant way to understand gender roles and identities in religious communities. While in the past, these compulsory rituals involved a significant change in a person’s social status, today many of their traditional features have been transformed. This ethnographic inquiry examines Bat Mitzvah ceremonies (coming of age rituals for girls) in Israeli Reform Jewish congregations. By including new blessings, appropriating masculine religious symbols, and creating new bodily gestures, the feminine life-cycle ritual challenges the traditional Jewish laws and contemporary socio-cultural constructions of the Israeli Jewish community. The exclusion of the Israeli Reform community from mainstream Jewish religion turns this ritual into a subversive act that battles local Jewish Orthodoxy authority. The ceremony is a political performance, which positions the Reform congregations as an activist religious agent for gender equality in the Israeli public space.

American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience by Fred A. Lazin

Reviewed by: American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience by Fred A. Lazin Marjorie N. Feld (bio) American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry: A Call to Conscience. By Fred A. Lazin. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. x + 251 pp. For many affiliated American Jews of my generation, the cause of Soviet Jewry left a significant mark on our youth. At my bat mitzvah, I was "twinned" with a girl in the Soviet Union who, I was told, could not practice her religion publicly. Three years later, in 1987, I joined 250,000 others at my first demonstration in Washington, DC: The March to Free Soviet Jewry. My own hazy memories of these events match the dominant historiographical outlines of the movement and its white, Ashkenazic Jewish leadership. In his new book American Christians and the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, Fred A. Lazin offers a competing or, perhaps, complementary, portrait: a history of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry (the "Task Force"), a group dedicated to Soviet Jewry and headed by Sister Ann Gillen of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. Lazin's study illuminates the politics of interreligious cooperation and activism while revising our understanding of the Soviet Jewry movement. Lazin sets the stage for the 1972 founding of the Task Force by beginning with the "constructive consequences" of Vatican II, in particular the 1965 Nostra Aetate document that drastically altered relationships between Catholics and Jews. In the years following, nuns began to address broader social problems outside of the Catholic Church, just as American Jewish leaders sought support from Christians for the cause of Soviet Jewry. First sponsored by the National Catholic Council for Interracial Justice (NCCIJ) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the Task Force gradually fell under AJC leadership with the goal "that it would serve as the national organization through which concerned Christians may act on behalf of the Soviet Jewish community" (38). Grounded in prodigious archival research, this book chronicles, in intricate detail, the multifaceted work undertaken by Sister Gillen across the United States and in the Soviet Union, at United Nations conferences, and at the World Conferences for Soviet Jewry. Under the careful and strict supervision of the AJC, and using the language of human and civil rights, Sister Gillen drew from her own Christian networks in assembling conferences, vigils, meetings, and demonstrations for Soviet Jewry. She contributed to a campaign that mobilized millions of people, Jewish and Christian, world leaders and laypeople alike, and offered a unifying cause for American Jews in the final years of the Cold War. Lazin writes that some Jewish communal leaders spoke of "spiritual genocide" and resisted efforts to broaden the campaign to work for other [End Page 641] (Christian) groups denied religious expression in the Soviet Union (70). He suggests that Israeli leaders led or reinforced this resistance because of their own nation's investment in Soviet Jewry's freedom to emigrate. Indeed, in the very first sentence of the book, Lazin notes that "Israeli leaders immediately faced an existential threat to the new Jewish State's existence—a population insufficient to ensure both the survival of the State and its Jewish majority" (1). The Task Force, he writes, knowingly or unknowingly served this purpose as it drew Christian allies to the cause of Soviet Jewry and of the free emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Even Sister Gillen, he tells us, "may or may not have been aware of the role of the [Israeli] Liaison Bureau"—a "clandestine operation focused on Soviet Jewry in the office of the Israeli prime minister"—in the work of the Task Force's campaigns (65, 64). Perhaps tied to the directives of Israeli leadership and to new geopolitical contexts, the tension over advocating for other religious groups in the Soviet Union intensified in the late 1970s. In response, Sister Gillen, joined by AJC leaders, set up a National Interreligious Task Force on Human Rights, which "shifted the focus of advocacy to one of universal human rights" (145). In these years, Sister Gillen allied with Catholics and evangelical Protestants to draw attention to...

The Conceptual and Anthropological History of Bat Mitzvah

This article aims to form a conversation between conceptual history and anthropological history, taking bat mitzvah, the coming-of-age ceremony for Jewish girls, as a test case. The term is shown to have two main conceptual meanings: first, the new religious status that a Jewish girl acquires—that of an adult obligated by the precepts of Jewish law—and second, the event or ritual marking this milestone. The close examination of the concept’s various meanings in different Jewish languages tracks its development from its hesitant beginnings in the nineteenth century to its emergence as a key concept that refers to a central ceremony in the Jewish world of the twentieth century. From that point, the article follows the two lexical paths that bat mitzvah has traveled, in the United States and in Israel, and highlights a basic anthropological difference in the ceremony’s social function.

The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel: From Initiation Rite to Birthday Party

This article is an anthropological history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s, when this ceremony radically grew in terms of the space, time, and economic resources devoted to it, as well as expanded to include girls. To explain that shift, I suggest distinguishing classic rites of initiation from the system of life-cycle ceremonies typical of modern consumer culture, which emphasizes the transition between temporal markers rather than social statuses and imposes no task on the birthday celebrant. The article reconstructs the process by which, during the 1940s and the 1950s, the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony came to function more as an elaborate birthday party than as a rite of initiation. The historical reconstruction demonstrates how, during the late Mandate period and early years of statehood, a new grassroots Israeli culture emerged, shaped by the accommodation of Western consumer culture to Jewish traditions rather than by Zionist ideology or established religion.

The Bar and Bat Mitzvah in the Yishuv and Early Israel: From Initiation Rite to Birthday Party

This article is an anthropological history of the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony in the Yishuv and Israel of the 1940s and the 1950s, when this ceremony radically grew in terms of the space, time, and economic resources devoted to it, as well as expanded to include girls. To explain that shift, I suggest distinguishing classic rites of initiation from the system of life-cycle ceremonies typical of modern consumer culture, which emphasizes the transition between temporal markers rather than social statuses and imposes no task on the birthday celebrant. The article reconstructs the process by which, during the 1940s and the 1950s, the bar/bat mitzvah ceremony came to function more as an elaborate birthday party than as a rite of initiation. The historical reconstruction demonstrates how, during the late Mandate period and early years of statehood, a new grassroots Israeli culture emerged, shaped by the accommodation of Western consumer culture to Jewish traditions rather than by Zionist ideology or established religion.

Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted, Patricia Keer Munro

Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted, Patricia Keer Munro

Community Repair through Truce and Contestation

On 15 February 2015, a gunman attacked a public event on art and freedom of expression in Copenhagen, leaving one person dead. Later, trying to force his way into a bat mitzvah celebration, the gunman killed a Jewish guard. These incidents produced public discourses at the intersection of security, social control, rights and tolerance and, with that, questions related to religious, secular and national communities and identities. At the political level, this was an attempt to repair a national community divided in relation to questions of security, integration and the curbing of immigration. Mainstream print journalism faced a similar challenge in its attempt to reassert its national relevance while remaining loyal to its audience communities within a market increasingly separated by taste and platforms. Politicians and news media thus shared an interest in both repairing and contesting a Danish community. This article analyses how discourses of community repair, cohesion and exclusivity permeated the appropriation of this disruptive event into the public realm. Progressing from an intersection of cultural approaches to journalism studies and political communication, the analysis will, in addition to other concepts, aim to combine insights from research on “disruptive media events” with studies of “belonging”.

New Psalms for a Paradigm Shift in Judaism

New Psalms for a Paradigm Shift in Judaism

Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted, by PATRICIA KEER MUNRO

Coming of Age in Jewish America: Bar and Bat Mitzvah Reinterpreted, by PATRICIA KEER MUNRO

Heavy Metal: An essay on Certainty

Heavy MetalAn essay on Certainty Robin Romm (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Maximilian Paradiz [End Page 104] Jeff and I are headed east of town to pawn our gold. I have silver, too—or silver-plated plates, boxed five years ago when my grandfather died. The plates rattle in the back of my hatchback. We take the freeway, Jeff squinting into my iPhone for directions. Jeff is in his forties, somewhat aloof, in work pants and a navy [End Page 105] jacket. I don't know him all that well; he was briefly in a writing group of mine that he suddenly abandoned for reasons he won't explain. He's quick-witted and arch, judgmental and deadpan, and I feel both liked and scorned by him, an experience I find familial. The refinery is set behind barbed-wire fencing. I parallel park between two old pickup trucks on a gravel road. I tried to research a reputable melting place, but the Yelp reviews in a city like Portland tend to focus on yoga studios and vegan cupcakes. During interviews for a journalism piece on pawnshops, I'd heard about this place and thought it sounded under the radar, efficient. A refinery. Refine, from the Latin "finire," to finish again. It almost had the sound of a fairy-tale business. Straw into gold. Or, in this case, gold into lots of cash. The rates for gold have never been higher. The sound of thick traffic mixes with the squawk of crows and a whirgrinding from one of the nearby warehouses. My car crackles from exertion and settles onto the dust. Jeff raises his eyebrows slightly, assessing the squat, black-windowed building surrounded by barbed wire. He opens the door wordlessly and stands, the fall light on his pale face revealing the lines in his face, the soft gaps in his thinning hair. I don't know what happened to Jeff's marriage. He's not a forthcoming person, which has the curious effect of making me divulge too much about my life. I have filled his restrained silences, not with chitchat about lunches in Portland or the weather but with how I couldn't move to Iowa with Don, my boyfriend of ten years, because I wasn't ready to move anywhere yet, to lose the fragile sense of home I'd just started to feel after a three-year career debacle. I wanted more stability, not more moving, not more questing. I wanted a house on a foundation, a man with a plan, a child. I wanted stillness. I didn't tell Jeff all of this, just that when I'd gone to move, I'd packed one cupboard in the bathroom and then couldn't make my hands do any more packing. I literally could not move them. Jeff raised his eyebrows. I shut up. Jeff fell in love and fell out of love. He had the whole thing: a purchased house on a foundation, the woman with a plan (she was a doctor), and two kids. But he still wound up on this Wednesday afternoon at the refinery, his wedding ring bound for the pot. The truth is, Jeff has been sending me highly crafted literary e-mails for several months. If I ask him to read a page of my novel, since he offered to be a reader, he writes me back in dense detail, letters filled [End Page 106] with observations, literary allusions, jokes. They must take him hours. I tell myself they are friendly, but no other friends do this for me. When I asked him to research refineries for his ring and my jewelry, he pretended to find the following businesses: Smelt Away the Memories; Heavy Metal, Light Heart. ________ My gold nestles in an old white box, a box I found in my mother's stuff out in Eugene in a closet that hadn't been gone through for years. In it: bat mitzvah earrings of mine, shaped like clams on steroids, so ugly that they have sat in a jewelry box for twenty-two years. Two hoop earrings of my mother's that I loved...

“He had a Ceremony—I had a Party”: Bar Mitzvah Ceremonies vs. Bat Mitzvah Parties in Israeli Culture

“He had a Ceremony—I had a Party”: Bar Mitzvah Ceremonies vs. Bat Mitzvah Parties in Israeli Culture

A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America

Book Review| July 01 2016 A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America. Edited by Hasia Diner, Shira Kohn, and Rachel Kranson. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 284 pp. 9 illustrations. $72 (cloth); $26.95 (paper). Lena McQuade-Salzfass Lena McQuade-Salzfass Sonoma State University Lena McQuade-Salzfass is Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at Sonoma State University. Her research interests include histories of women’s reproductive health in New Mexico and Jewish feminism. She has published historical work on midwives in New Mexico and on the bat mitzvah in Albuquerque. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of American Ethnic History (2016) 35 (4): 113–115. https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.35.4.113 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lena McQuade-Salzfass; A Jewish Feminine Mystique?: Jewish Women in Postwar America. Journal of American Ethnic History 1 January 2016; 35 (4): 113–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/jamerethnhist.35.4.113 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressJournal of American Ethnic History Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.