Apples And Honey For Rosh Hashanah

This post first appeared as “Apples, Honey – and Israel – in My California Backyard” on The Sisterhood blog of the Forward. Click here to read it there.

Libi bamizrach va’ani b’sof ma’arav. “My heart is in the East, but I am in the farthest West.” Those were the sentiments of Yehuda Halevi, the Jewish-Spanish physician and poet who lived in the 11th and 12th centuries.

They are also mine.

The apples growing in our backyard

However, while for Halevi, “East” represented the Land of Israel, for me it symbolizes both that and my other cultural home — New York City. When you live on the western edge of the North American continent, as I do, both seem very far away.

When I moved to Palo Alto, Calif. from Manhattan five years ago, I lamented not only the fact that I was leaving my beloved Jerusalem-on-Hudson, but also that I was moving further away from Israel. I had spent every summer as a teenager and young adult in Israel, and once I was married and had children, we managed to get back there at least once every couple of years. Of course, it was no picnic shlepping diaper bags, snack bags, carseats and strollers, but at least all we had to do was get on a single flight and grin and bear it for 10 to 12 hours.

Since moving to California, I have only been back to Israel once owing to the multiplied shlep and cost factor. This makes me sad. One mitigating factor: The topography, climate and flora of Silicon Valley is reminiscent of that of regions of the Holy Land. It’s no wonder that 40,000 Israelis feel right at home here.

The minute I stepped off the plane upon my arrival at San Jose International Airport, my olfactory memory kicked itself into high gear. I took a whiff of the air and said to myself, “Hey, it smells just like Israel.” It’s at this time of year, as we pick apples from our backyard tree and help friends harvest honey from their backyard beehives, that I feel especially connected to Israel. As hard as I try, I can’t recall having done either of these activities in the concrete jungle.

With the growing cycle here being almost identical to that in Israel, it is possible to really connect with the agricultural aspects of Jewish holidays. When the almond tree is blossoming for Tu B’shvat in Israel, it is also blossoming here. We grow several of the seven species of Eretz Yisrael, such as pomegranates and olives, right outside our door. We need only go over to neighbors’ homes to find others, such as figs and grapes.

The oranges from our very own orange tree may not taste quite as good as the ones that come from Jaffa Orange groves, but when I bite into them, they transport me half-way around the world and back in time.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Yes Ma’am…No Ma’am

This post first appeared as “On ‘Ma’am’ – and Israel’s Sage Approach to Honorifics” on The Sisterhood blog of the Forward. Click here to read it there.

Valerie Harper seems happy to be called Ma'am.

Natalie Angier doesn’t like to be called, “Ma’am.”

The honorific was the subject of this recent article that Angier — a Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and the author of several books including “Woman: an Intimate Geography” — published last weekend in The New York Times.

The article’s subtitle reads, “Defenders of the honorific say it is meant to confer respect. So why are some women rebelling against the term?” The answer, according to Angier’s piece, is because the moniker makes them feel flattened, generic, de-sexualized, or just plain old and fat. Some women feel that this ostensible sign of respect really indicates that its user wants to create distance, to not really engage with you as an individual.

But I am a bit tired of all this ado about nothing.

A lot of time is wasted on debating the merits of Mrs. and Miss vs. Ms., and now Ma’am vs. Madam. Women agonize over whether to keep their maiden name or take their husband’s.

I’ll admit that I did think all this was more important when I was younger and newly married. I opted for hyphenating my last name in order to please everyone, and just ended up creating a bureaucratic mess for myself (for those of you considering hyphenation for your future, be forewarned that many computer systems aren’t supportive of the decision).

By the time my kids came along and life became more hectic than I could have ever imagined, I didn’t give a hoot that the nurse at the pediatrician’s office called me Mrs. Zand. I was happy to let her call me whatever she wanted, so long as she would book an appointment for my sick kids for the same day that I called.

I’ve always liked the Israeli approach to honorifics, which is to say that they barely know that they exist. I grew up attending an Israeli-style Jewish day school in Toronto, where we always called our teachers by their first names (or by “Morah” [teacher], which I mistook for a given name when I was very young). I participated in Israeli army summer programs where we called our commanding officers by their first names. My first teaching job was in a school in which my students called me, “Renee,” and not “Ms. Ghert-Zand” (good thing, since that’s quite a mouthful – though not as much of one as say, “Goldberg-Zankowsky”).

Any time someone tells me that my students — or anyone — won’t respect me if I let them call me by my first name, I tell them that honor is not earned through honorifics.

And as for being called “Ma’am,” I don’t love it, but I also don’t hate it. Perhaps if I were a Senator or police chief, like some of the women cited by Angier, I would take more offense to the term. But I am not. I am a journalist and educator, who is more interested in listening to what people tell me than worrying about what they call me.

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.

Her Guiding Star

This article was first published as “Author’s journey to Judaism helped fuel book on interfaith relationships and hidden identities” in The Jewish Tribune. Click here to read it there.

Palo Alto, CA – Many people think back fondly about their college advisors, but Andi L. Rosenthal credits Dr. Sara Horowitz, director of the centre for Jewish studies at York University, for setting her on the path that would eventually lead her to write her debut novel, The Bookseller’s Sonnets (O Books, 2010).

Rosenthal is also certain that if it were not for the undergraduate class on Holocaust literature she took with Horowitz in 1988 at the University of Delaware, she would never have begun her journey towards becoming a Jew.

Rosenthal’s study with Horowitz, who remains a mentor to her, sparked an interest in exploring her interfaith family’s complicated religious past and in discovering and nurturing her innate Jewish identity that had gone unexamined during an upbringing in Catholic churches and schools in New York. She converted to Judaism in 2002.

This personal journey, together with a professional one at the Museum of Jewish Heritage: A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in lower Manhattan (the novel’s setting) from 1999 to 2004, has resulted in a powerful fictional story of interfaith relationships and hidden identities spanning five centuries.

The Bookseller’s Sonnets chronicles the story of a mysterious package from an anonymous artifact donor that arrives at the desk of Jill Levin, senior curator at the museum. The artifact appears to be a diary written by Margaret More, the eldest daughter of Saint Thomas More, legal advisor to Henry VIII. As Levin works with colleagues to authenticate the diary (using clues from letters arriving to her from the Holocaust survivor who donated it), representatives from the Archdiocese of New York move in to lay claim to it in an attempt to prevent its explosive contents from becoming public.

Author Andi L. Rosenthal (photo: Julie L. Cohen)

Layered over this interweaving of curatorial sleuthing and historical fiction is Levin’s contemporary struggles with Jewish self-definition and Second Generation family dynamics (the character’s own grandparents are Holocaust survivors). Rosenthal skillfully makes these challenges, as well as the museum’s milieu and day-to-day operations in the years immediately following 9/11 very detailed, textured and realistic.

Rosenthal originally wrote the book in 2005, but it went unpublished until members of the outreach committee at her synagogue, Larchmont Temple in Larchmont, NY, took an interest in it last year and offered to shop it around to connections they had in the publishing industry.

Buoyed by the fact that pre-orders for The Bookseller’s Sonnets, which will be released Sept. 16, are strong as a result of social media and word of mouth marketing, Rosenthal is looking forward to a special launch event scheduled for Oct. 24 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage and a book tour in early 2011 organized by the National Jewish Book Council.

“It’s really a case of dayenu,” said Rosenthal. “It’s been one blessing after another, and I am so grateful for each one.”

She is thankful to many people who have helped her along the way to realizing her literary dreams, but especially to Horowitz, who ignited the pintele yid in her. “She was my guiding star then and she still is today.”

© 2010 Renee Ghert-Zand. All rights reserved.