Streaming Israel’s Election Returns

The Israeli news anchors play with big touch screens and fancy holographic graphics just like -- well, almost like -- their counterparts on CNN.  They drag Knesset seats this way and that, forming hypothetical coalitions.  They also speak too fast for me. I get about 50% of what they say the day after, streaming the number-one news program, Mabat, onto my laptop while it’s still Israeli Election Day in my east coast time zone.  The candidates, by contrast, speak a nice slow Hebrew; I get every word of their predictable victory speeches, whether they've really won or are just pretending. 

But I’m happy.  I’m happy like the Mabat news anchor women seem happy, in the same way that American newscasters could hardly conceal their liberal media delight when Obama got elected and re-elected.   Israel has not veered sharply rightward, as so many had feared.  The specter of a triumphant “Jews are different” Naftali Bennett sweeping to second place with his HaBayit HaYehudi party, described in David Remnick’s New Yorker portrait this week, has not come to pass.  The Israeli center has come out of hiding or hibernation to reassert a desire for normality and democracy that I am very relieved to see.

Naftali Bennett was the pick of my kippah sruga (knitted kippa, Modern Orthodox) relatives (at least the 20-somethings, I see via Facebook) and the nightmare of my friend and fellow high-school alumna Judy, who moved to Israel 35 years ago or so, when immigration from the U.S. was (by definition) Zionist but secular left-leaning, not like it’s been the past 25 years.  Everyone fits their demographic; my relatives are hard-working, middle-class, third- and fourth-generation Israelis who have no faith or interest in a two-state solution and whose second generation delivered the Bat Yam vote to Bibi.  Judy is triply slotted into the left via academe (TAU PhD candidate), home address (Tel Aviv) and artsy profession (theatrical lighting designer).

Less predictable might be my other friend and fellow alumna who left Brooklyn in that same era and wound up in the north.  Ann might have given Bennett her vote but for his anti-woman religious bedfellows, she says.  That’s an association Bennett tries to dispel, coming on as very hip and approachable to the American press, and giving a secular woman, Ayelet Shaked, the fifth spot on his ticket. Ann said she’d vote for Bibi instead.

Ann’s gone through two tours of military service with two sons, ducked Kassams and spent time in shelters.  It’s easy to see how that might move one rightward.  Certainly, it’s a test I’ve never undergone. At the same time, it’s also easy to see what makes Israel-minded American Jews queasy when Israelis deprioritize democracy.  How can American Jews agree,  when democracy and equal rights for minorities are precisely what's allowed us to do so well here?  

On the third hand, I shouldn’t pretend to care so much about the spread of democracy; a lot of the world seems totally unready for it.  I just don’t want Israel ruling over a hostile population whose disenfranchised will come to outnumber its citizens. It will coarsen their souls and cost them serious business. Neither do I want Israel to count only the US, evangelicals and Micronesia among its friends. 

On the fourth hand, we Jews have been a non-threatening, good little minority here, well-behaved and productive for the most part, and happy to be American. The great thing about America is that in the peoplehood sense, it belongs to everyone and to no one.  Ever since we killed off the Indians, as my Netanyahu-supporting relative once pointed out.  

Yiddish Class: a Forshpeis

I taught my “one-shot Introduction to Yiddish” Sunday, billed as a “forshpeis” -- an appetizer.  13 people showed up, mostly friends from book club or the women’s Rosh Chodesh group or the Hebrew reading course I taught a couple times.  But there were also two new faces, including one of two whole men, allowing us to demonstrate that Yiddish, like other respectable European languages, has gendered verbs and nouns.

My Sholem Aleichem
Bobble Head Doll

Me teaching Yiddish is something of a chutzpeh; I took all of one year of Yiddish in college, all of thirty-something years ago. I’ve tried to keep it fresh since then with the occasional Sholem Aleichem story, song, conversation, class, or the occasional Folksbeine show on the upper west side.  But in my shul, this makes me resident mayven; me with my tattered/tserisseneh Uriel Weinreich College Yiddish text book and dictionary.  Maybe -- efsher -- there’s someone in the congregation who’s more fluent. But they don’t have my compulsion to do stand-up. Or they literally can’t stand up that long. In any case, it’s an easy, friendly audience and on Sunday we laughed and learned a lot.   

No classroom rows for my students and no textbook; they sat in a circle with their names written at their feet, so they could spend the two hours talking to each other, cultivating their seedling vocabularies.  I prepared sheets with a couple of verbs and phrases, pronouns, who-what-when and some nouns, using my old Hebrew word processor. DavkaWriter, circa Windows 95, conveniently includes a keyboard with the subtle Yiddish variations on the Alephbet:  the paired yuds that say “ay” (no line beneath) and “ei” (little flat line vowel beneath); the paired vovs that read as “v.”  Reclaim your Ashkenazic “aw” vowel -- the one modern Israeli Hebrew turned to “ah” -- change ayin from dumb silent letter to “e” as in egg, and you’re mostly good to go. 

Used only for reference -
but it's good.

Under my prodding, my students asked and told each other their names, what they did for a living, what they and others were or were not (mothers, fathers, aunts, daughters, sons, Jews, students, teachers, nurses, doctors). 

Also nudniks, goniffs, bubbes and zaydes.  That’s the fun thing about teaching Yiddish to over-fifties;  when they tickle the right neurons, even those who can’t read Hebrew letters -- even those who might not have grown up Jewish but merely lived near New York -- realize they have vestigial vocabulary to draw on; enough to recognize words and phrases I throw out without introduction or warning.  Those who haven’t been pretty little girls for 40 years remember “Shayne maydl.”  They remember being told to eat, my child; to go to sleep, to come here, to come home, by doting grandparents using little bits of Yiddish for extra sweetness or intimacy.

Then we have two students -- bright professional women, in their eighties and nineties -- who can actually take off in whole if imperfect, grammar-free sentences.  My Yiddish was artificially induced at Rutgers; theirs was born at home in Brooklyn. These two enjoy the class as much as anyone, hearing the language of their long-gone parents.  And we love to have them with us, reminding us how authentic the language can sound.  They thank me profusely and encourage us to continue with a course.  And most participants say they agree.  We’ll see…

Making it Under Deadline

The most important thing is to get started, right? Because I have resolved to start this blog by New year’s Day, 2013, and thrown every conceivable procrastination device in the path of this goal, acting no better than Congress over this Christmas vacation week.

I’ve tried first to learn a CMS (content management system). Someone told me to learn Joomla, and I’m up to Chapter Ten in an actual book I bought at an actual, brick-and-mortar Barnes & Noble. I might eventually move my blog and my website into Joomla … but that may take another week. Better to start writing.

Border print from Tanzania

I’ve sewn several skirts and a dress first, because daughter #2 was over for part of the week, and who can argue with time spent sewing clothes for and with one’s daughter? She had this wonderful dark green border print that her friend the adventurer had brought her from her six months volunteer teaching in Tanzania -- a trip that included scaling Mt. Kilimanjaro; something the girl had to accomplish before starting law school at Tulane. The same night my kid returned home to DC, she finished the skirt on her new machine. She texted me a picture around midnight. Ta da! Beautiful orange birds hiding among beautiful dark green pleats.

I have another skirt in the works for my sister, with wool so fine the nearest I can find to it at Joanne’s (not nearly as nice) was going for over $29 a yard. My sister picked up acres of this in grey and tan at a garage sale for $5. Her skirt is 80% done -- but I won’t see her for a while. Better to start writing.

I have to finish preparing for a “Are You Smarter than a Fifth-Grader”-style game show I’m organizing for the Hebrew School kids and parents of my congregation, but that’s not for two weeks. Better to start writing.

Then there’s the news. I have to know about the fiscal cliff and Hillary’s blood clot and “Gangnam Style” promotion in South Korea and Indian women protesting outrageous treatment and Russian Jews in Israel and stories much more arcane than these because they’re all there tempting me in the margins of Google News or in print on the kitchen table.

Could I cop the writer plea? Procrastination is what writers do. And in other media and for other purposes, writing is what I get paid for.

McCalls 6570

But as with most who write for money, it’s the non-paid, extracurricular prose that’s where the heart lies and the ego feeds. And if I don’t get that started, I’ll be remembered as the one who sewed. Not what I intended. I’ll remember myself (less eternally) as the one who fled from the keyboard to the sewing machine for the less iffy and much more tangible proposition of DIY wardrobe. Considering Lord & Taylor can’t lure me out of the house with screaming good sales, I’d call that avoidance. Fair statement?

I’ve also delayed blogging because it’s embarrassingly narcissistic: I strongly suspect that more people write blogs than read them. If I want to attract any readers, I’ve got to put some value in here.

M6579 pattern envelope pic

Notwithstanding my use of sewing as a procrastination device, I hope to attract some fellow sewers. Making clothes is a whole new ball game, now that sewing’s gone social like everything else. People review patterns and pin up pictures of their projects. You can see, before you cut, how things look on bodies like your own around the Latin-lettered sewing world, not models or drawings. You can find 25 Youtube demonstrations of the narrow hemming foot -- and those are just the ones in English. I can’t believe the number of sewing blogs out there, some miserably spelled, some wonderfully written. I’ll gladly contribute to this conversation.

I also hope to attract some readers with the other broad, recurring themes of my life, some introduced or hinted at here. Taken all together, I share them with a good chunk of the reading world.

There. I’ve started, just a tad past deadline.  Just like Congress...