The Key to Rebecca

Traffic

2006-06-29T13:43:00.000-04:00

You know you're screwed when either a) the carpool lane stops moving or b) you see a police (ie. not highway patrol) car on the freeway or c) most obviously, when you see anything with flashing lights passing you on the shoulder. I am spending WAY to much time in the car.

The Da Vinci Code:Books::Wedding Crashers:Movies

2006-01-31T20:06:00.000-05:00

I came up with this stirling example of an analogy while in the video store the other day with my roommate. She thought I was making some sort of connection between The Da Vinci Code coming out as a movie and Wedding Crashers perhaps originating in some other form. What form, I'm not quite sure, but that was definitely not my point.

My point was that The Da Vinci Code occupies the same place in literature as Wedding Crashers does in film. Both were, rather unexpectedly, huge successes and both are, to greater or lesser extent, entertaining, but not, at least in my opinion, the amazing book or film that many people say they are. Wedding Crashers, I think, is actually a better movie than The Da Vinci Code is a book, and I have absolutely no desire to see its movie. In any case, it's interesting to see what makes bestseller/blockbuster status and what doesn't. The pseudo-historical novel seems to be on a roll recently (Da Vinci Code, The Historian, The Rule of Four), despite the fact that all of them are ridiculous books, with The Historian perhaps being the worst. Oh well.

Thank You McGill Reporter

2006-01-25T18:18:00.000-05:00

I always knew there was a reason why I read the McGill Reporter, despite the fact that it is the organ of McGill University. I guess it's because it's nice to realize every once in a while that McGill is actually a reputable academic institution and not just a big ball of red tape that you are continually unwinding. While reading this past week's edition (maybe it only comes out bi-weekly though, I'm not real sure--I just pick it up when I see a new picture on the cover), I came upon a sidebar stating that the History News Network had named Professor Brian Cowan (he's the prof I wrote the paper on Micrographia) for one of the profession's up and coming professors. This prompted me to do further research, and I found the link to the post here. Congratulations, Professor Cowan!

The Holocaust and History, Part II

2006-01-23T01:02:00.000-05:00

To briefly respond to Jesse's post I think you miss my point about the example of Whiggish history, perhaps because we have different definitions. You say:

However, to look for the causes of the Holocaust in the societies in which it occurred isn't necessarily Whiggish. It is simply what historians do.

However, what I was (and am) bemoaning is not the search for causes of the Holocaust in the history of antebellum Eastern European Jewry. It is the way in which many historians treated the period as necessarily ending in the Holocaust, just like Queen Elizabeth's Protestant triumphalism positively had to eventually lead to a Pax Britannica. It is one thing to search for causes, it is another to write the history of an era seeing every aspect of it as a cause or contributing factor to what did happen, when any number of other things might have occurred instead. Just because something happened does not make everything that happened before a "cause" of that event. I definitely did not mean to be arguing that the "Fiddler on the Roof" image meant that the Jews of Eastern Europe led themselves into or created the Holocaust. I think the above clarification clears that up.

As to your assertion that the Holocaust corrected some of the more Whiggish aspects of early German-Jewish historiography, I bow to your better knowledge of the field (your argument makes sense to me). I would just like to point out that I am, in fact, focusing on the history of Eastern European Jews. I am not, in the end (or even in the beginning) a historian of Jews, which is part of the reason I'm having so much trouble with this thesis.

For the big about the Gezairot, I again defer to your wider expertise, but any un-distancing done by referring to it as the Churban is nullified by referring to it as the War, which can only be seen as distancing oneself from the reality of one of the greatest tragedies in Jewish history. All my grandparents also experienced "The War," none were affected like my instructor's family was.

The Holocaust and History

2006-01-22T15:38:00.000-05:00

Some night last week, I was having a conversation with a friend online and he asked me what my Jewish studies thesis was about. In a very brief nutshell, it's hopefully going to be an examination of the appearance and depiction of the shtetl, or lack thereof, in works of Jewish history. As I got to the next part of my explanation, my friend began making the online equivalent of clucking noises. The part he began clucking at was the when I started telling him how I am especially interested in the Holocaust and the way in which it gave rise to a slew of bad histories of Jews in Eastern Europe and the perpetuation of what eventually crystallized as the "Fiddler on the Roof" image of Eastern European Jewish life--an image about as historically accurate as that King Arthur movie that came out with Keira Knightley and the guy who played Horatio Hornblower last year. The clucking noises, it turned out, were his reluctance to shoot holes in my plan for my thesis. He didn't particularly want to rain on my parade, but felt that he should warn me about the potential pitfalls of saying that the Holocaust is more of a side note than the main event in the subjects being studied.

While my thesis is not exactly studying the un-importance of the Holocaust, as it deals more with the effects of it on the writing of history instead of flat-out saying it has not business being discussed in that context, his basic statement is one I agree with. Much Jewish history of Jews in Europe that was done after the Holocaust is of the basic plan connotated by the phrase "Whig History" if instead the inevitable end result being the glorious Pax Britannica, you substitute the devastating and complete destruction of most of Europe's Jewry and all of European Jewish life.

The conversation then took a different turn when he made the comment that I am allowed to write these things, and he is not, because I am Jewish, whereas his espousal of these views has earned him a variety of colorful names. As soon as he opens his mouth to say that the Holocaust occupies too big a place in Jewish, or even European, history, accusations of anti-Semitism and a failure to understand fly. I, on the other hand, because of the fact that I am Jewish, can, to a much larger extent, get away with saying some of these things. Why am I, merely because I am of the same faith as those who perished, allowed to say things that he cannot? None of my close relatives died in the Holocaust. In fact, looking at my grandparents (my grandfather came over from Germany in the late 30s, my grandmother was born, bred and has lived her entire life in Southern California), while it would obviously be naive to say that growing up in Germany had no effect on my grandfather, or that WWII had no effect on my grandmother, the events that seemed to have shaped their lives the most are the Depression and WWII (but not, necessarily, the Holocaust).

This discussion with my friend was then followed the next day with a related discussion in my Yiddish class. In Yiddish, the Holocaust is referred to as "Di Churban" (the destruction) or "Di Milkhome" (the war). No distinction is really made between WWII and the Holocaust. My Yiddish instructor, who was born in post-war Europe, mentioned how even today, many of her contemporaries, and especially people of the generation before hers, do not, and to a certain extent cannot, refer to the Holocaust as the Holocaust. Instead, they must distance themselves from the past by referring to it as the War or the Churban.

I think it is unfortunate that people like my friend get the responses that they get because there are still too many sacrosanct issues in Jewish history today. Historical research, in general, in the past 50 or so years, has seen an unprecedented willingness and freedom to critically look at and revise previously orthodox versions of history. Not all of it has resulted in good historiography, but it has nonetheless broadened the field and made for more interesting discourse. Jewish history, unfortunately, got its start by tearing down the sacrosanct (religion) but in the process some how made everything else sacrosanct instead. It is only relatively recently that the prevalent views on many important events and movements in Jewish history (ie Zionism, the Holocaust, Hasidism, the Haskalah) have become fair game for critique.

To end with, here is a tangentially related post from the blog Acephalous, involving an exchange which I found quite entertaining, even if I don't quite get the blogger's point.

Snow Days

2006-01-18T17:47:00.000-05:00

Because I grew up in Southern California, and Montreal does not believe in Snow Days, the closest I have come to experiencing one is when I was in New York last month and the girls' whose apartment I was crashing in did not have to go to work on the Friday i was there because it had snowed about an inch overnight, an inch that was already melting by the time I left the house at 9. I realize that snow days have a purpose, in that they give cities like New York City an reason to avoid buying these things called snow plows. However, snow is not an essentially threatening weather pattern. You can do pretty much anything but drive in snow, and the worst that is going to happen is you'll get wet.

Snow Days, then, are all nice and good, but why aren't there Ice Days? Ice is dangerous for both drivers and pedestrians, and can inflict permanent, even fatal, damage fairly easily. Today, for example, should have been an Ice Day. Oh well. It should be even worse tomorrow.

Hair

2006-01-17T21:03:00.000-05:00

Many, if not most, Jewish girls have wavy-curly hair in the world of natural-hair. They frequently complain about it and how much work it is to straighten it, how nobody knows how to cut it so that it all comes out even when straightened, etc. My hair, however, falls just sort of wavy. In fact, if I don't do anything to it and let it dry straight (which is 6/7ths of the time) it comes out with a wave. Yup, just one wave. Not enough to mousse and call "wavy" and not exactly the normal definition of "straight" either. Unfortunately, maybe just because I have straight hair, I've always had a semi-secret liking for wavy hair. And as much as those girls complain about having to straighten their hair, straightening your hair is a very straight-forward process. Blow dry, and then iron. It might take a while, but it's doable. There's no comparable way of making straight hair curly. It's just not possible short of a perm or curlers. Curlers are kind of complicated. So yeah, it might suck to have curly hair, but at least you have the option of wearing it either way.

Haven't Done This in a While

2006-01-08T22:51:00.000-05:00

Sorry to everyone who has kept coming here despite the fact that I haven't blogged in a month. I was running all the over the continent, wrapping up my second-to-last semester of undergraduate work and killing my keyboard with my water bottle. Luckily, the keyboard was miraculously fixed shortly after I arrived back in Montreal at the same time as ALL of my luggage. United really came through this time (it's always nice to be pleasantly surprised).

In the 7 days I've been back in Montreal I've skipped class, had a million meetings, applied to grad school and been traipsing around at 3 in the morning trying to locate Bloc Quebecois posters that are not defaced and also in reach of a person not standing on anything for a friend who has his heart set on a Gilles deceive poster for his apartment. So pretty much it's straight back to normal (well, except for the Gilles Duceppe poster-hunting). Hopefully I will be writing something a bit more substantive in the near future.

Yay!

2005-12-11T14:42:00.000-05:00

I got back from a great trip to New York this morning in which I did a number of things, including seeing the new Broadway musical Woman in White, which was quite an interesting experience, but is not supposed to be the subject of this post, so I'll leave it for later. Having been internetless for the greater part of week, I sat down this afternoon to catch up on all the goings-on in the online world, which included checking my referrers. The excitement created upon learning that Cliopatria, unbeknownst to me, has added a link to my site on their Appedices page directly resulted in this post. It's crazy (but good) that they saw fit to add me to their blogroll, as they are one of the best history blogs out there.

Save Me a Trip to the Rare Books Room

2005-11-28T18:09:00.000-05:00

Imagine my surprise when, opening up the latest New York Times Book Review my mom had sent me (What can I say, it's tough living in Canada. There's no real newspaper and no decent ranch dressing.), I found this ad smack in the middle of page 7:

I like reading the Bauman's ads, because you can get a sense of the importance of a book by how much it sells for in relation to its age and popularity. A full description of the book for sale can be found here. Anybody want to save me some time and buy me a really cool present? Micrographia is a really cool book, and this copy is almost 341 years old (it was published in January 1665). And it's only $70,000, although this copy seems to be in much better shape binding-wise than either of the ones I've been working with. I think, however, that Sir William Olser bought his copy for less than 10 pounds sometime around 1912. From 10 pounds to 70,000 dollars in less a hundred years isn't such a bad investment (not that I would every be able to sell something like this, but yeah).

By the way, does anybody know how to put in the British pound sign?

I Could Never Quite Formulate It

2005-11-27T22:56:00.000-05:00

The other day (November 17, to be exact--my "notes" are dated) I was sitting in class paying about as much attention as I usually do, although class has become exponentially more interesting since we started having discussions on topics tangentially related to the material being taught (I'm not quite sure enough of us actually know enough about the Italian Renaissance to actually have a discussion based purely on it, per se, and certainly not enough about politics in the Italian Renaissance) and trying to formulate my fascination with Jewish historiography and the lack thereof into some manner that would be intelligibly coherent to another human being. The next week, I decided I actually needed to begin working on my thesis, and took out a slew of books on memory studies in general, as well as those done on Jewish history specifically. The classic work on Jewish historiography is Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, by Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi. And lo and behold, he hits the nail on the head in his preface.

"At the very heart of this book lies an attempt to understand what seemed a paradox to me at one time--that although Judaism throughout the ages was absorbed with the meaning of history, historiography itself played at best an ancillary role among the Jews, and often no role at all; and, concomitantly, that while memory of the past was always a central component of Jewish experience, the historian was not its primary custodian."

The two fields in which I am anything vaguely resembling well-versed historically, in case you haven't already picked up on them, are early modern Europe (really, mostly just early modern Britain) and well, I suppose, modern Jewish history. Lately I've been thinking a lot about how the two fields are vastly different and the different issues involved with the historiography of them. British history has its historiographical debates, but they go back centuries, usually to about the same time as the event itself. Serious Jewish historiography, on the other hand, is not much more than 200 years old, if that. (I got completely reamed the other day by Professor Orenstein on just this topic, so I am, at the moment, being quite liberal with my estimation of dates.) I'm not quite sure how to formulate the rest of my thoughts, or even what exactly I think about the comparison between the two fields of study, but my guess is I will come back to the themes of this post at some point.

I'll end with the comment that although a couple of my friends have already found the books they were going to write, I have yet to find mine. It might possibly be in the field of memory studies though, as I find it fascinating. I just finished an essay titled "The Knowledge of Good and Evil" by Northrop Frye, found in the book The Morality of Scholarship, edited by Max Black. It gave me a lot to think about, and again, some of those thoughts may show up here soon. Anyways, back to the paper mill for me.

LibraryThing

2005-11-27T22:53:00.000-05:00

I meant to write a whole post about this site, and perhaps I will when I get back from New York, but suffice to say it's really cool. And apparently used by people with primarily similar reading tastes (Look at the Zeitgeist tab.).

Mazel Tov

2005-11-26T23:32:00.000-05:00

I would like to extend a heartfelt mazel tov to one of the first and few avid readers of this blog, Zachary Homa on his engagement to Emunah Liberman. While they got engaged a couple of weeks ago, their l'chaim was tonight, and it was very nice. Zach, I can always count on you for two things. One is for you to consistently take delight in throwing things at me, and the other is to always be willing to have a shot of whisky with me. You should go from simcha to simcha, and always have an opportunity to break out the good scotch. Mazel tov, nakh a mol.

A New Game

2005-11-23T14:23:00.000-05:00

Having spent a lot of time trekking around the west side of campus, I've devised a new game. It's called the "Which McGill building would you want to have lived in?", as many of the buildings on the west side of campus are old houses/mansions. My current favorite is the Lady Meredith House. Here are some pictures:

Any other nominations?

A Quote

2005-11-21T21:56:00.000-05:00

The last of Adrian John's The Nature of the Book has this quote on it:

The World's a Booke, writ by th'eternall Art
Of the great Maker, printed in Mans heart;
Tis falsely printed, though divinely pend,
And all th'Errata will appeare at th'end.

It's from Francis Quarles' Divine Fancies (London, 1641). I like it, although I can't exactly pinpoint why.

A Long Way from High School

2005-11-08T18:48:00.000-05:00

The past couple of days have been a sort of flashback to high school, which reached its culmination today. Today I woke up, ate breakfast and went and wrote (although in high school I would have taken) my GREs. I wore the same clothes I wore for most standardized tests throughout high school (a lightweight sweatshirt and long jean skirt--there's no point in being uncomfortable). As I am applying to grad school this year, I realized sometime back in September that I actually did have to write my GREs sometime before December 1. As the month of October didn't exist, it had to be sometime in November. So I picked November 8, with the intention of perhaps reviewing some of the material in the 5 or so weeks I had between registering and the exam. Of course, events conspired so that the first time I really sat down to learn anything at all about the GRE was Sunday night. At which point I realized I no longer knew anything about math. So I crammed. And it turned out okay in the end. But after going through this, I really don't get how I spent more or less all of high school writing standardized tests.

Obviously, there were a lot of differences between the circumstances of the exam itself which made this one infinitely less enjoyable than those I wrote in high school. In high school everybody wrote these exams all together--you got chat with your friends during the breaks, your math teacher was the proctor and you all went out for lunch afterwards. This was perhaps the most sterile environment I have ever taken an exam in. You sit down in front of a computer, and heaven help you if you get bored, because there is nothing besides the computer screen for you to look at. Needless to say, I get bored. You also don't get a calculator. This is supremely unfair. On the SAT you get a calculator, so why not the GRE? They are pretty much exactly the same questions. After taking a computer based test, I highly prefer the paper-based kind. You can't go back and change your answer, or skip ahead and come back to a later problem. All in all, it was quite a different testing experience than those I remembered from high school.

The funniest part is that I never thought these tests were hard in high school, nor did I think it a particularly big hardship to have to write them. Writing the GRE, however, was a royal pain in the ass and I thought I had failed before I saw my score. I guess the whole experience just made me realize how far I've come from high school, and made me realize in a way I never had how completely the junior and senior years of high school revolve around standardized tests.

You Know You've Made It When...

2005-11-03T02:17:00.000-05:00

You know you've made it when looking through your referrers at 2:15 in the morning, while you're supposed to be writing an agenda for your meeting later that day, you find a link from somebody's MySpace page. Upon cursory inspection, you realize it's a guy you went to high school (as well as elementary and middle school) with, but haven't seen or spoken to in over a year. Upon further inspection, because, of course, you want to see where/how your blog is linked on his page, you see in his links section two links. One is titled "Kosher Blog" and the other is titled "Frum Blog." You see "Frum Blog" and think, "Oh, I wonder whose blog this is? Could it be somebody I know from the blog world, or somebody I just straight up know?" After all, at one point we travelled in the same social circles and to a certain extent we do again. Then you click on the link, and find it's your blog.

You know you've made it when people title your blog "Frum Blog." What exactly it is...I'm not quite sure. It was just a little bit weird though, because, you know, a picture of a bed covered in books has what to do with frumkeit?

Paper Time

2005-11-02T21:26:00.000-05:00

After a about 6 month hiatus from paper-writing (we have quite a long summer), I had forgotten how the process slowly takes over my life, until my bed looks like this...

And don't knock the Minnie Mouse comforter--we go waaaaaaay back.

Chag Sameach

2005-10-19T23:42:00.000-04:00

Chag Sameach everybody! Here's a picture of our sukkah (yeah, it's ghetto, but it's also functional). Now if it would just stop raining...

Limericks

2005-10-16T12:00:00.000-04:00

Sometime last semester, I was taught a very addicting way of amusing oneself--writing limericks. It's a great ability to have, because you can do it pretty much anywhere, as most of the work is done in your head. Or, if you're in class, and you want to write them down, you kind of look like you're taking notes, even if you're paying absolutely no attention. In anycase, the last time I had class on Thursday (I suppose it was two weeks ago now, although my sense of time is completely screwed up because of the whole chagim thing.) I wrote a number of limericks, mainly about some well-known historical events, although also about other random things like the street St. Dominique. Here is a selection:

There once was a street St. Dominique
On it cheap housing people did seek
The back of St. Laurent it did face
It was really dodgy, in any case
A streak of sketch in a sea of chic.

There once was a window in Prague
Out of which a man was thrown like a log
Starting a war
Which lasted 30 years more
The last time Europe was rescued by a Frog

There once was a wedding on St. Bartholomew's Day
To which the Huguenot nobility came in vast array
Catherine d'Medici saw her chance
Killed them all without a backward glance
Too bad she let the groom stay

There once was a queen named Marie Antoinette
Over her toilette she really did fret
She may have said "Let them eat cake"
In any case, furious the mob did she make
Her coifed head ended up in a basket

Kippa vs. Skirt

2005-09-28T23:25:00.000-04:00

I started writing this post in December of last year, and in my typical pack rat manner just left it lying as a draft on Blogger. However, it's something I often think about and I decided to make it a bit more coherent, expand and publish it.

In the observant ("frum") Jewish world, a skirt and a kippa are often seen as equal indications of religious observance (which isn't exactly a fair equation, but that will be discussed further on). The thing that I find interesting is that to the rest of the world, a guy wearing a kippa is clearly and instantly a Jew (unless he's one of those weird guys who aren't Jewish but still wear skullcaps all the time. I've seen guys like that around campus. They might possibly be Muslim?). To those same people, a girl wearing a skirt is just that--a girl wearing a skirt. Most people will only even begin to think about the fact a girl is wearing a skirt after seeing said girl multiple times, and only ever wearing a skirt. Even then, it's not clear that she's Jewish. It's much more common for people to ask me "Why do you wear skirts all the time?" than "Are you Jewish?" Observant girls enjoy a level of anonymity observant guys just can't obtain, unless they wear a baseball cap, which is obviously not appropriate to all situations. Neither is a skirt, but your average person still won't necessarily equate a glaringly out of place skirt (say, at the gym) with an Orthodox Jew and a skirt is more appropriate to more situations than a baseball cap is. An example to illustrate my point:

For a couple of years, I would go for a walk on Shabbos with my rebbetzin and usually at least one of her sons. When her sons were with us, we'd usually get at least one "Good Shabbos" or "Shabbat Shalom". On the walks that were just her and I, however, we'd frequently elicit no response from passersby, even though we were both wearing long sleeves, skirts and she'd be wearing a kerchief. To the practiced eye, yes, we're obviously Jewish, but to most of the world we're just dressed a bit abnormally for whatever unspecified reason a person might think up, if he thinks about it at all.

As to the equation of the kippa to the skirt as the indication of a certain degree of religious observance, I have found that the level of religious observance of guys wearing kippas seems to vary much more than that of girls who only wear skirts. That being said, it must be much harder to wear a kippa than to wear a skirt, and it must make a guy aware of his Jewishness and of the fact that other people know he's Jewish in a way far beyond that of a skirt on a girl. True, I have met some girls who say they wear skirts as an outward symbol of their Judaism, but their goal would be much more easily and effectively realized by wearing a Mogen David around their neck. Even that, however, is a much more private symbol than a kippa, which can be spotted from yards away.

Napoleon Was a Bit Awkward, Wasn't He?

2005-09-27T22:57:00.000-04:00

In my Politics and Political Thought in the Italian Renaissance seminar the other day, we were discussing (or rather, my professor was lecturing) about the government of Venice and why it didn't develop fraction like that of Florence. One girl who had done the readings asked if the Venetian government lasted for something like 400 years, what finally did it in? Professor Clarke's priceless answer was "Napoleon. You see, Napoleon had this awkward habit of going and toppling governments." I love it when professor say things that you would never find in any work of scholarly merit, but that are still historically accurate (see also Stupid Aristocrats). It seems to make the whole discipline a bit more personal and lively.

Stupid Aristocrats

2005-09-14T20:53:00.000-04:00

In our discussion of the different aspects of the book industry in early modern Europe in my History of the Book class, we touched on the role of the binder. Up until the 19th century, and even then, it was common for people to buy books and have them bound at a binder. This was common practice among the aristocracy, because they often just felt they needed to own the books as a status of their class, but part of books being status symbols had to do with being able to afford a library bound in all the same style. This practice was prevalent, Professor Cowan said, "Especially [among] the aristocrats who had more money than mental ability."

Back to School

2005-09-11T23:30:00.000-04:00

So today somebody added a comment to this blog, causing me to check the stats to see if anybody was still actually reading it. Apparently an average of 9 people a day are visiting this blog, a fact that I actually find quite surprising. In any case, there is nothing like homework to get me to blog, and since somebody seems to be reading, I may as well write. School started a week and a half ago, but I've been back in Montreal for over three weeks. I still don't have a topic for my Jewish Studies thesis, but hopefully by the end of my meeting with Professor Orenstein tomorrow I will.

The class I'm most excited for is History of the Book in Britain. Basically, it's a class all about books in early modern Britain and it includes a field trip to the Rare Books Room in McClennan, among other places. What could be better? The only bad part about the class is that I have to miss 3 and a half classes for the chagim (out of a mere 13). I pretty much have to take the rest of my classes, which vary in their level of boringness. The prize for most boring is a tie between my year-long Italian Renaissance seminar (I just don't care much about politics, even in the Italian Renaissance, and I have to go) and Biblical Period (I don't care much about biblical criticism either, but at least I don't have to go). Then there's Yiddish, which I like, and The Shtetl from 1500-1897, which I've already written a paper using the reading list from. However, Professor Orenstein is a very good speaker, even if a bit scattered at time. It could be quite an interesting class.

Other than school, I've been busy with Ghetto Shul planning events like this:

Anyways, I didn't really know what else to write about at the moment, but I didn't feel like doing my Yiddish homework. I guess I'll try to post more regularly.

Harry Potter Reference

2005-08-16T01:37:00.000-04:00

So with all the Harry Potter madness that was the beginning of July, it was no surprise when I found this random book in my house titled Wild Pitch (by Mike Lupica)and read as the opening line:

"The kid was eleven or twelve, somewhere in there, big round glasses taking up about half his face, bangs all the way down to the glasses. Charlie though the little bastard looked like Harry Potter from hell."

Maybe it was just because of all the Harry Potter craziness in my life at the time, but that line had me hooked, and it was actually a pretty entertaining book. It's quite amazing, actually, just how far Harry Potter has entered popular culture.

Thesis

2005-08-08T15:39:00.000-04:00

Amazingly, the summer is almost over. Over the course of the summer, I pretty much decided I'm going to at least try to graduate in May. That means I have to write my Jewish Studies thesis starting this coming semester, and I still don't have a topic. So, does anybody have a suggestion? It's an undergraduate thesis, and should involve some aspect of Eastern European Jewish History. The languages I know well enough to do research in are English, Spanish and Yiddish, none of which are terribly helpful for doing academic research. Well, except for English. I don't mind using sources in translation, but I'm worried about the availablity of such sources. So far the front runner is a comparison of some sort of Lubavitch and the Jesuits, I'm still looking for some other ideas. Anybody have one? Thanks!

Barnes and Noble

2005-07-19T15:30:00.000-04:00

Barnes and Noble is not a library, it's a bookstore.

We will not turn down our music so you can concentrate, we do not have a copy machine and if we wanted to the books wrapped in plastic unwrapped, we would have stocked them unwrapped in the first place.

For some reason, people seem to have problems grasping these simple facts. One of my managers says that of all the places she's worked (and she seems to have worked in quite a few) Barnes and Noble attracts the greatest concentration of weird people. I haven't ever worked retail anywhere else, but I can't imagine the weirdo people ratio is nearly as high in say, for example, Mikasa. In fact, come to think of it, I rarely see anybody in the Mikasa store next door to my store.

Barnes and Noble is an interesting place to work. The employees are an eclectic bunch, what with the music nerds working in music, the book nerds working on the book floor and the hodge-podge of people who end up working in cafe. The great thing about the book floor crew is that all of us are drawn to a different part of the book floor. Some of us are comic book nerds, some are into Sci-Fi (although there is a bit of a cross-over between those two groups) and some are heavily into True Crime or Romance or the weekly magazines (ie InTouch, Star, US, etc.). Last summer, one of my managers once spent a good half hour explaining to me the differences between various Romance authors. For some reason though, we all like books enough to work for a pittance. Why else sell books when you can start at a wage $1.25 higher than what you start at Barnes and Noble at the Mikasa store mentioned above? Come to think of it, I like kitchenwares...

Eruvim

2005-06-27T15:12:00.000-04:00

I was in Long Beach for Shabbos this past Shabbos, and I learned that they now have an eruv. I had heard before that there was eventually going to be one, but it's one of those things that you never think is actually going to happen. Well, it finally did.

A couple of times this past year, the subject of eruvim came up. These discussions usually went along the lines of other people thinking that eruvim are absolutely necessary and the lack of one is a huge hardship for women, as they are then stuck in at home if they have babies who cannot walk to shul or a neighbor's house for a meal. I was always skeptical as to the amount of hardship posed by the lack of an eruv, as most of the women I know in Long Beach who have small babies are usually able to pay social visits to their friends or attend events like Shabbos Kallahs if they so desire. The men go to shul, they eat as a family, and then the husbands usually take over taking care of the kids, at least until mincha. I always felt that if a woman's husband wasn't willing to do that for her, then an eruv probably isn't going to fix her problems.

The eruv in Long Beach is interesting, because half the community holds by it, and the other half doesn't. So you have people pushing other people's babies places and all sorts of other interesting things going on. There was a Shabbos Kallah this Shabbos though, and I walked to it with a rather large group of women. Part of the discussion on the way there was about the impact of the eruv. One of the women was bringing her baby, while another with a baby just a bit older had left it at home. And contrary to the beliefs of those who maintain that eruvim are liberating for women, the woman who had brought her baby was lamenting that now that there was an eruv, she had no excuse for leaving her baby at home with her husband, and couldn't use the baby as an exuse to get out of social engagements she did not feel like attending. I've always thought of eruvim as a luxury and not a necessity, and it was interesting to see how the eruv in Long Beach affected people's Shabbos activities.

United Airlines

2005-06-16T00:37:00.000-04:00

United Airlines officially sucks, because they seem to be completely and utterly incapable of delivering my bags and I to the same city at the same time. Of the past 8 bags I've checked with them, they've lost 5. Everybody I spoke today said they were only flying United because they had miles and free is free. But if everybody flying on the airline is only doing so to use up their miles, how much longer can they last?

Blog Anniversary

2005-06-10T16:02:00.000-04:00

Although this blog officially turned one year old on Tuesday, I've only really been blogging for about 8 months. I'm going home for the summer on Wednesday, ending my second year in Montreal. This past month and half has shown me that Montreal can have nice weather, as well as be hot and ridiculously sticky. I never knew that tulips apparently grow everywhere and very well here. I never knew that McGill could actually look like it does in the recruiting pictures. The Gran Prix is this weekend, and I never knew that so many tourists ever came to Montreal all at once. However, despite all the season-long influx of people, color and greenery, Montreal's color is still grey and frozen concrete will forever be my mind's representation of the city.

Famous McGill Alumni

2005-05-23T19:38:00.000-04:00

I was talking to a friend about alumni, because he was going to his alma mater's (BU) graduation this past weekend, and telling me about all the famous people who have graduated from the school. Seeing as the only people I could think of were William Shatner and "the guy who founded Le Chateau, and the guy who founded Aldo," I decided to do a bit of research.

From Wikipedia I learned that the presidents of 6 other Canadian universities are McGill alums, including the ones at UBC, Western and Waterloo. The inventor of North American ice hockey rules, James George Alwyn Creighton, and the inventor of basketball, James Naismith both went to McGill as well. As did the current presidents of Egypt and Latvia and 4 Canadian Supreme Court Justices, and of course, Sir Wilfred Laurier, a Prime Minister of Canada.

The Wikipedia entry also provided a wealth of interesting facts about McGill University and some of it's affiliates. The McGill Daily, piece of fine journalism that it is, is the longest-running student newspaper in the British Commonwealth. The first game of North American football was played between McGill and Harvard in 1874. So really, McGill doesn't have any really famous alumni, except for perhaps Laurier, and nobody outside of Canada has heard of him. This is interesting, because McGill has a pretty solid, at least from what I can tell, international reputation. Anybody else know of any alums I'm overlooking/aren't on that list?

Really Cool

2005-05-22T23:49:00.000-04:00

This is really cool.

Shortness

2005-05-21T22:04:00.000-04:00

You know you're short when you move into a new apartment and you can only see the part of your hair in the mirror over the bathroom sink.

Profile

2005-05-16T00:56:00.000-04:00

Does anybody know how to get my Blogger profile to update itself so that it shows I've written more than one post?

Thanks!

Stats

2005-05-11T15:32:00.000-04:00

I was checking out my stats, and amazingly, this site is the number 9 result on Yahoo for the term "Crazy Canadians" and the number 2 result for the term "Key to Rebecca" (behind Amazon.com, but in front of the author's own website). Not too shabby, I guess.

Age

2005-05-03T21:55:00.000-04:00

I seem to have survived the brutal combination of Pesach (and pre-Pesach cleaning) and exams. Thank G-d. Now we're on to worrying about missing 7 days of school for Tishrei, smack in the middle of mid-terms. Hopefully I'll be lucky, as I'm taking a lot of Jewish Studies courses next semester.

Age is an interesting phenomenon, and one that I've been thinking about a lot lately. I started thinking about it when I was home in California about a month ago. I was at a conference (the Jewlicious one) and meeting new people. A number of people I met when my age, for whatever reason, came up, were surprised I was only 19. That's not really so remarkable. Casual acquaintances in Montreal, as well as those who don't really pay attention, also frequently think I'm older. What got me thinking, though, was the way the conference attendees seemed to distance themselves from me upon learning how young I was. I found this amusing, because in Montreal, the people I spend my time with are all (with only a few exceptions) at least a year older than I am, and the eldest is 5.

In fact, the running joke among my friends is that I'm 12. Of course, those same friends have are constantly reminding me that I'm ridiculously short. Neither of those things, however, are barriers to those friendships. Obviously, I'm in a different place in my life than my friend who's 24, but that doesn't mean we can't be friends. At the conference, however, it seemed to preclude even the most basic of acquaintance. It wasn't until I encountered this that I realized how that my friendships with these people might be considered strange by normal standards.

Chag Kosher V'Sameach

2005-04-29T18:31:00.000-04:00

Only two more days of Pesach! Yay!! My roommate found this on Epicurious last night:

At every Passover seder, Jews hold up a piece of matzo and say, "This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat!" Bread of affliction: The name itself is a dead giveaway, a big red flag. Few foods have affliction in their name.

Chag Sameach! I'm done with school...until Monday that is, but everybody tells me May is way more chill than the regular year. Art History from 1400-1700 in 30 days or less should be interesting, right?

Intelligence

2005-04-19T12:12:00.000-04:00

Once again, it's finals time. That means I get to spend a lot of gorgeous spring days inside sitting either in front of my computer or books, alternated by cleaning for Pesach. I'll be done soon enough, I guess. In any case, I'm always amused to read over my notes. I often find random things written in them-- whether it be notes to the person I was sitting next to or random quotes from who knows where. Sitting down to study for my History of the Middle East from 1918-1950 exam, I found this quote written in the top margin of a page:

The test of intelligence [is] not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don't know what to do.
--John Holt

Now, who John Holt is, or where that quote came from, I have no idea. Nonetheless, there it is. Basically, then, intelligence is based on your ability to fool other people into believing you know what you're doing? I never thought intelligence was know-how. That's more appropriately called knowledge, and you can be pretty dumb and still know a lot. I know some people who got/get very good grades through sheer hard work and not much else. Sometimes I envy them their discipline.

Strikebreaking, Part III

2005-04-18T13:10:00.000-04:00

A rebuttal to my post Strikebreaking, Part II can be found here.

Vacation

2005-04-12T21:29:00.000-04:00

I thought running a shul was hard. That was while living underneath it. Then I came home and got to run it from 2500 miles away. That was pretty close to impossible.

Strikebreaking, Part II

2005-03-23T02:11:00.000-05:00

Interestingly enough, McGill students, in a online plebiscite, voted not to strike for a second day on this coming Thursday, even though it would have given us a five day weekend. The plebiscite was defeated 2,390 votes for striking to 3,131 votes against. Maybe there's still some hope for Canada, although my guess is that most of the people voting against were out-of-province or international students. It would have given strikers a five day weekend, because this is Quebec, the most not-Catholic place in all of North America, and Good Friday and Easter Monday are already province-wide holidays. Apparently, even though nobody here actually goes to church anymore, they are understandably loathe to give up the two days they get off of work for a holiday, that, by definition, must be on a Sunday. In any case, it works out conviently this year because we don't have school on Purim because it's also Good Friday.

Rebecca Gets to be a Strikebreaker!

2005-03-17T15:16:00.000-05:00

Just when I thought Canadians, and more specifially, Canadian students, would be hard put to do anything more ridiculous than the usually Bush bashing and merely saying preposterous things about things which are supposedly "rights," they go and strike against a $103 million dollar cut to the funding for bursaries and scholarships in Quebec. I was reading the McGill Daily on Monday, before the assembly where McGill students decided to do a "solidarity strike" for one day to show that McGill students stand with those at other schools who have been striking for about a month now. The editorials were all about why we absolutely must strike. One of them was addressing the arguments against striking point by point. One of the main points that comes up in the argument against striking is that education is not a right. The editor's reponse to that was something along the lines of "I'm not even going to dignify that with a response." Why not? It never occurred to me that post-secondary education could even be considered a right.

This all made more preposterous by the fact that the whole strike is predicated on the fact that these cuts will raise average student debt upon graduation from $13,000 to $21,000. $21,000 doesn't seem like such a high number (to be fair, I'm not going to be having any student debt upon graduation, but even that number is much smaller than most of Canada, and not even comparable to that of students in the States.). The whole point of education is so that you can get a job requiring that education upon graduation, in which case it shouldn't take you so long to pay back all that money. Also, I'm wondering what all these students are doing that they have so much debt upon graduation. Even if you have to move the city, you can live really, really cheaply here, and get a job. Tuition is only $1600/semester for people from Quebec.

I was talking to a guy in one of my classes this morning, who agreed with me, rather surprisingly because not only is from Canada, but he's from Vancouver. He put it nicely. "Why," he said, "Should the government pay for these people to study anthropology? Plus, do they realize they are the ones going to be paying for reduced cuts, if they're successful, with higher taxes?"

In any case, the whole strike thing is kind of inconvient, because McGill students appparently voted to strike tomorrow. I was planning on skipping one of my classes before the whole strike thing, as my policy is to go to the class only 2 times a week, and I already went twice this week. If I don't go though, it's like I'm striking, which is ridiculous, because really, the class is just boring and I pretty much never need to be there. So now I have to pick between making a statement or doing what's more convient. I'm not such a fan of making statements. I hope there are exams tomorrow that people skip because they are striking, and their profs give them a 0 anyways. That would make me happy. In any case, I'm for sure going to my first class of the day. I guess that makes me a strikebreaker. Haha. That's kind of amusing.

Life

2005-03-07T22:51:00.000-05:00

This past weekend was very long. And this week looks like it's going to be even longer. For those who were concerned that I never ate out while in New York, I ate out twice after I wrote that post.

Some people are so incredibley unsuited for their jobs it baffles me that they don't realize it themselves. It's really unfortunate, actually. That was the lesson of this weekend's little drama. I'm sure I'll post more about once the shock wears off, but really, it isn't so surprising.

On a more positive note, if I'm still alive come Friday, we're having lunch again this Shabbos. Yay for feeding the world! I also seem to have found a partner for cards, which is great, because I love trump games but am not so keen on relying on other people. Anyways, Tangier calls. I just have to make through next Wednesday, and then I'm done until exams.

The Good Old Days

2005-02-28T19:33:00.000-05:00

I was at a friend's house for Shabbos, and Friday night before dinner her mom's friend came over. They discussed many things, but at some point the conversation turned to Kashrut. They began reminicising about how when they were little, they could eat anything as long as "pig" wasn't listed as one of the ingredients. There were no hecshers or other such confining statements of rabbinical approval. That was just how people ate, even observant ones. Man, why couldn't I have been around then? Stupid shift to the right. What were people thinking?!? I've heard rumours that in Europe you can buy things without a hecsher. Apparently there's a magic list or something. I'm not quite sure exactly how or why that works though.

Anyways, the rarely-awarded Quote of the Day Award goes, once again, to Professor Ian Henderson.

Anglicans are people who try to sit on the fence between Protestants and Catholics--but occasionally, it gets painful, and we fall off.

History and Historiography, Part II

2005-02-24T19:54:00.000-05:00

You might want to read this post first.

Anyways, in The Stuart Age, Coward repeatedly makes an interesting point. This point is partly what moderates his position from being purely Revisionist to Post-Revisionist. The point that he pointedly makes is that course of historical events depended not on what was actually happening but rather by what people thought was happening, in which case the Whig version of history actually holds some validity.

An example of how this is the case can be seen in the "Popish Plot." In 1678, a man named Titus Oates came to the king with details of a "Popish Plot" in which Catholics were supposedly plotting to assassinate the king and take over England. The plot simply didn't exist except for in Oates', but over 30 court Catholics were executed for participating in it anyways and it led to the passage of more anti-Catholic legislation. The fear of Catholicism and the papacy in general was so strong in Restoration England that people would believe a plot like this was possible. From this point of view, Whig history is somewhat valid, because it was largely written based on what people believed, whereas Revisionists tend to write based purely on what occurred, discounting popular belief (i.e. the inevitable greatness of the combination of England and Protestantism). "History" lies somewhere in between the two different interpretations.

In general, this isn't a point that pertains just to history. People act on what they believe to be true. Whether that belief is true or not is often, in the greater scheme of things, irrelevant, because by the time the truth is realized (and that doesn't even always happen, for various reasons), actions based on the first set of beliefs have already been taken.

History and Historiography, Part I

2005-02-23T21:21:00.000-05:00

For the Stuart Britain and Ireland class I am taking this semester, I had to read most of Barry Coward's aptly titled The Stuart Age: England, 1603-1714. It's one survey history books that crams a specific time period into 400 pages. It strove for a level of detail that seemed beyond the number of pages the author had to deal with the many things that happened in those hundred years and assumed a level of knowledge above that of the average survey book. One of the things it did differently from most books in its class was that it treats the historiography of the period.

For those of you have no clue what that really long word means, historiography is the study of history and how historians reached their conclusions. I find British historiography particularly interesting, probably because most of it's in English and it's the field I know the best. There have been three waves of British Historiography in the past century.

The first was the so-called "Whig" version of history. This was the version that drew a straight line from the Tudors to Rule Britannia! because that is what did happen, giving no consideration to the fact that events did not inevitably have to turn out the way they did. This school holds that by breaking with the Papacy in 1532, Henry VIII set off a chain of events that could not possibly lead anywhere but Pax Britannica.

The second was, predictably, a reaction to this. This is the "Revisionist" version of history. Its basic premise is that the "Whig" historians were wrong, blinded by Britain's greatness and that nothing was inevitable. Instead, a number of different people made independent decisions that led to events as they occurred.

Coward belongs to the third group of historians, simply named "Post-revisionist." This group feels takes a more balanced position, feeling that while the Whig historians were wrong, Revisionists go a little too far in their censure of the conclusions reached by them. Nonetheless, the Post-revisionists still lean more towards the Revisionists than the Whigs.

Anyways, I have more to say, but I'll say it later.

New York

2005-02-20T12:23:00.000-05:00

So in the end, I am in New York, and I'm glad I came. The funniest thing is that I have not eaten out once yet, and I'm leaving tonight. Oh well. It's been a good trip. I'm sure I'll have what to post about once I get back to Montreal.

So Here's the Picture of the Cake, Finally

2005-02-15T18:18:00.000-05:00

Yum!

House Motto

2005-02-15T17:52:00.000-05:00

Over the past couple of weeks, my housemates and I have come to realize that our house motto should be "And then...I have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life." It's a very adaptable phrase that can be used at the end of almost any sentence uttered in our house, because it can refer to what you're doing any amount of time from now. It can mean, I don't know what I'm doing for Shabbos (oh wait, I don't) or it can mean I don't know what I'm doing for the summer or it can mean I don't know what I'm doing after I graduate. As a matter of fact, none of us really have any idea what we're going to do after we graduate. The person who knows the most is the person who's graduating this year. She's going to make aliyah (and that's pretty much all she knows). After that, it's all down hill from there. The rest of us pretty much have no idea. I mean, I don't even know yet if I'm actually going to New York this weekend or not. And it's already Tuesday night.

Then, last night, I actually figured out what I want to do with my life. It was great, for about two seconds, and then I realized that the chances of it actually happening were slim to none (really, they are quite closer to none than slim). Then it was kind of depressing. But now I'm back to "and then, I have to figure out what the hell I'm going to do with my life."

Also, has anybody else ever thought it amusing that the Blogger spellcheck doesn't include words like "blog" or "blogging"?

2005-02-14T10:26:00.000-05:00

I figured out how it worked, afterall. Actually, I didn't, but I really have to go do my homework. So I guess it will just have to wait.

Crockpots and the Trouble with Jewish Girls Living by Themselves

2005-02-14T00:46:00.000-05:00

The picture, for some reason, stopped working. I'm going to try to figure out what happened, but first I have to study for my exams.

This past Shabbos we (we being my roommate Raichel and I) had 20 people over for lunch. It was the inaugural use of the crockpot my mom bought us when she was here right before (American) Thanksgiving. While in Montreal, my mom took me on a kitchen stuff shopping spree, generously purchasing a number of essential items for our kitchen, including the awesome three-tier cookie cooling rack and the casserole dishes that enabled me to make the yummy pineapple upside-down cake pictured above. Why Rebecca's hand is there or why she decided to take a picture of my cake, I have no idea. But it is kind of a cool picture. She also frequently says that there is no place for single women over the age of 21 in Judaism. I guess I have two years before I get the boot.

Why, you may ask, if we have had the crockpot since November, are we using for the first time in February? The answer is quite simple. Until a good friend of ours happened to have access to a car, we quite simply had no way to toivel all those great dishes my mom bought us. The problem is that the nearest mikvahs to where we live, and the only ones easily accessible by bus, are all chassidish (Belz and Satmar, to be exact). The only keilim mikvah is in the Satmar compound, where women aren't welcome. And as unmarried girls, we are not allowed to go to anything but a keilim mikvah. So it took 2 months and some bribing of friends with eternal gratitude and made-to-order baked goods for our dishes to be toivelled.

While the whole saga ended a while ago, I'm just getting around to blogging about it now. The episode also highlights a fact that I hadn't really realized until having my own house this year. Judaism is not a religion designed to be practiced by Jewish women living on their own. While I and the girls I live with are perfectly capable of doing things like lighting our own menorah candles and making kiddush if we just can't wait for dinner on those long Friday nights when Shabbos comes in ridiculously early, there are some things we just can't do. One of them is find a easy way to toivel dishes. Another is make havdalah when all the guys who don't want to deal with the singing havdalah upstairs come down to make havdalah with us. Instead, an argument ensues between the guys over who is going to make based on what they are making it over and who made it last week. It's kind of annoying to have to pick who gets to do what.

Another, although slightly different example, is men who make kiddush for a woman (i.e. me) to whom they are not related. When I go away for Shabbos, I'm always interested to see if the man of the house makes kiddush correctly. For those of you who don't know, he's supposed to pour the wine for me out of the becher before he drinks from it, because otherwise it's like we drank from the same cup (or at least that's what I think the reason is). However, the number of guys I've seen make kiddush that way has definitely been in the minority.

Anyways, this was just something I've been musing about for sometime. And it gave me an opportunity to show off my cake (and Rebecca's hand). If you're confused (like ck was when I started this blog), my name is Rebecca, but I also live with another Rebecca. And a Raichel. And yesterday, I even called Rebecca Raichel. Whoops!

Kind of a Bit Macabre

2005-02-08T23:40:00.000-05:00

I was talking to my brother online tonight. He is pretty much the yenta of Los Al happenings (to be fair, it's more of the who signed with who and who got fired for what variety than nasty gossip variety. An example can be found in his comment here). I mean, somebody has to keep me up-to-date on Los Al happenings. During our conversation, he told me that a kid died at the middle school I went to today. He was jumping across benches (something I did many times), fell, smashed his trachea and ending up dying from asphyxiation (something, thank G-d, I never did). This was after last week, when a guy I went to high school with died after being hit by a car while running in the morning.

This recent spate of deaths made me think about the number of people I have gone to school with who have died. I think that every year since I started high school has seen a couple of my peers pass away. I may not have known any of them well, or even at all, but it still seems like a high number. And not all of them have been heroin overdoses or drunk drivers (and yes, there have been those as well). There was the girl who died of a brain aneurysm in the shower and the fatal car accident that did not involve any alcohol. I think there have been two brain tumors, as well. In fact, thinking back farther than my high school years, death seems to come to the Rossmoor/Los Alamitos/Seal Beach community not as infrequently as one would think, especially if one extends the circle to the parents of my peers.

I can't imagine, however, that the community I grew up in is unique or out of the ordinary in this respect. My guess is that the high school is just big enough (at about 2800 students) to have enough people so that people die, but still small enough so they were actually people you recognized in some vague way, even if you didn't actually know them. I have also realized The larger community is actually a much smaller community than I ever thought while living in it. Because everybody goes to the same two middle schools and the same high school, by the time you're packed off to college, you know or know of the vast majority of your peer group. I'm not saying I knew all 650 people in my class, but my guess is I could go through my yearbook and think of something to say about many of them. So this didn't really have a point, except that at graduation, when they talk about how you'll go on to great things, nobody says that 5 or 6 of you will be in your graves before the rest of you finish getting the degree necessary to go on to great things.

Student Discount

2005-02-08T00:05:00.000-05:00

Apparently, student discounts now apply not only to the delivery of your groceries, but also to the groceries themselves. For all you Montrealers, Provigo now gives students 10% off groceries purchased on Mondays, if the total of the purchase is over $35. Needless to say, beer, alcohol and cigarettes are all excluded from the discount. Of course, despite the fact that there is absolutely NO food in my house (we don't even have any bread at the moment, not to mention other staples such as milk, eggs and anything vaguely resembling a fruit, vegetable or protein), I did not go grocery shopping today. At least something besides aggravation came out of reading the Daily this week, as I got all this information from Provigo's ad in the abovementioned example of student journalism at its finest.

Only at McGill

2005-02-03T19:44:00.000-05:00

Only at McGill University is a class let out a half hour early because the classroom is being heated to a roasting tempurature that must have been around 85 degrees, causing many students to nod off and enough discomfort that the professor would rather leave than stay and teach. And this is in the same classroom that two weeks ago people were wearing their coats during class because there appeared to be a distinct lack of heating.

Hope this makes you happy Michael! Three posts in less than 24 hours!

Lubavitch without the Rebbe

2005-02-03T13:20:00.000-05:00

While home, I spend a lot of time around Lubavitchers. While at school I spend much less, mainly because the Chabad House here is probably among the least successful, especially in relation to the number of Jews on campus. He has to charge for his meals and can't get a minyan on Shabbos. It's sad, yes, but the rabbi just needs to be replaced. Anyways, I digress.

In my usually procrastinatory manner, I was checking Jesse's blog and I found a link to this blog. While browsing through it, I came across a post that had something to do with Lubavitchers remaining Lubavitch without a/the Rebbe. The question brought back to me the many discussions I have heard in the past year that have dealt with that exact topic. It's been ten years since the Rebbe died (and almost all the people participating in these discussions would agree that he actually died), and for years before that he was not nearly as active as he was before his heart attack in 1977. After his stroke in 1992 his activity was even more limited. As a result, the people between the ages of 20-30 had a much more impersonal relationship with the Rebbe than that of people even five years older then them.

Many young couples now find themselves faced with the questions of how can you raise your kids Lubavitch, when there's no Lubavitch rebbe? What's to keep these kids Lubavitch, and even makes them Lubavitch to begin with? If following the whatever rebbe makes you a whatever-er, how can/do you follow a Rebbe who is dead? Of course, they point to the Breslovers, who haven't had a Rebbe in centuries and are still around, but Lubavitch is very, very different than Breslov. Already, it seems as if a smaller proportion of Lubavitchers are going on Shlichus after they get married (most do at least a year before they get married), partially because there are more Lubavitchers now than there were 20 years ago, and partially because there are less nice places to go to (California's pretty much full, except for the really horrid places I used to play soccer in, like Lancaster, but then I don't think there's more than 10 Jews living in Lancaster) but also because the personal connection the Rebbe felt by many people's parents just doesn't apply to the generation getting married even now, and it was that relationship that motivated people to buy those one-way tickets to the Former Soviet Union.

Religious Studies

2005-02-02T20:59:00.000-05:00

One of my first posts was about Jewish Studies, and how religiously observant Jews deal with biblical criticism and academia not related to the Life or Physical Sciences in general. This semester, I am taking a Religous Studies class entitled Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is taught by three professors for one month each. We have already finished the Judaism portion of the class, which was taught by one Jason Kalman (aka the Jewish Studies bitch because he teaches 3 or 4 classes each semester). On Monday we started the Christianity section, which has been taught so far by Professor Ian Henderson from the faculty of Religious Studies. He is taking a strikingly different approach to teaching Christianity than Kalman used to teach Judaism. This isn't really so surprising, though, because they are radically different religions being taught by two very different people. Kalman explained Judaism in fairly logical and coherent manner, while Professor Henderson appears to be following a logic known to himself, but not so apparent to the rest of the class (needless to say, I think he's great).

However, I realized (and yes, I realize that this is pretty stupid to not have realized before) that the problems I raised about observant Jews are perhaps even more striking in the Christian world, at least from a theological point of view. From a social point of view, I feel they are probably less, for the simple reason is that there are simply a lot more Christians, and that the actually level of observance necessary to an "observant Christian" is not nearly as much of a commitment as the one necessary to be an "observant Jew."

From a theological point of view though, because Christianity developed later, much more is known about Jesus and the people who actually created the religion than is known about the creation of Judaism, allowing for more criticism based on firmer grounds. Nonetheless, Henderson, whose specialty is New Testament Studies, is still a devout Christian with a firm belief in Jesus. I wonder how he reconciles the two lives, and if he has any of the same problems observant Jewish Studies professors have. It also made me think about Islam, because the orgins of that religion are better recorded than either Christianity or Judaism, and how Islamic Religious Studiers of Islam deal with the theological and observance-related issues those records raises.

In any case, he gets the quote of the day. While talking about the Sermon on the Mount, he said:

If G-d ever tells you to meet Him on top of a mountain, make sure you take a tape recorder or something, because it's sure to be pretty good.

Pictures

2005-01-27T23:12:00.000-05:00

And apparently I can.

2005-01-27T23:03:00.000-05:00

This is an experiment to see if I actually can post pictures.

Yiddish

2005-01-24T19:41:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I had to go on a Yiddish field trip to Montreal's Jewish Public library, where they were screening the Yiddish film "Tevya," based loosely on two Sholom Alecheim's short stores. These Yiddish field trips are, after a year and a half of Yiddish, a fairly regular occurence in my life, with some being remarkably more enjoyable than others. This particular one was interesting, especially because I understood a lot more than I did the last time I saw a Yiddish film, which was probably about 10 months ago. I also realized that the English subtitles, inserted to broaden the film's appeal, leave a lot to be desired.

By now, I've come to recognize the people who come to these events, as most of the time it's the same core group of people (often really old--last year there was a couple celebrating their 64th wedding anniversary). However, I realized yesterday that the number of people under the age of 50, has gone up since last year. The professor of my class, who I also had last year for Beginner's Yiddish, makes both of her classes go to these events. Last year, however, I think there were only 2 people in her Intermediate Yiddish class. This year, there are 5, and her Beginner's class has about the same number of people as last year, I believe. Obviously, the increase in young people at the event was due to the increase in the number of people taking Yiddish. But I'm curious to see if next year, the same number of people go on to Intermediate Yiddish, and she again has a full Beginners class. Is it possible more people are becoming interested in learning Yiddish?

Quote of the Day

2005-01-18T17:48:00.003-05:00

So the quote of the day goes to Sebastian.

"I think Quebec should change its tourist slogan to 'Why wait for Hell to freeze over? Just come to Quebec!'"

The quote of yesterday goes to England's Maritime Empire, by David Loades, and its discussion of the Glorious revolution. If you haven't noticed by now, I'm a bit of a history nerd, and I found the middle sentence highly amusing. The rest is just there to give it some context.

"...the admiral decided to wait on events. The decisive events of the next few days took place largely inside James' head, and the full truth is never likely to be known. Convinced he was surrounded by treachery..."

Higher Education

2005-01-18T01:17:00.000-05:00

So Michael's post made me laugh, because I also can't stand any of those things, and I almost went to Tulane for almost free as well. The more he posts about that place, the more glad I am I chose to freeze my butt off in the arctic tundra known as Montreal instead.

I tried to take a class called "Topics in Italian History: Women, Family and Sexuality in the Italian Renaissance" this semester. I really, really did. I sat through two classes before dropping it. And the prof wasn't even super post-modern like Michael's apparently is. In fact, the most amusing part of the class was when somebody (invariably a girl, because there were only about 4 guys in a class of 55) would get going on a feminist rant. The prof would let her talk until she ran out of steam, and then would kindly say, "No, I really don't think you can draw that conclusion based on the resources we have." At which point I realized that I could not take a class merely to wait for the prof to shoot people with feminist agendas down, if I wasn't going to pay attention the rest of the time for lack of interest in the subject material. It's not that these things shouldn't be studied, especially in the way Professor Clarke seems to do it (with a fairly open mind), it's just that I have absolutely no interest in doing that studying. I just keep hearing more interesting things like the development of naval warfare (pirates!) and British historiography calling.

The key to avoiding unfortunate wastes of time like Michael's Intro to Brit Lit class is to take classes with old professors who don't put up with BS like the "can't use the word masterpiece" shtick. I'm taking a history class called Stuart Britain and Ireland. The prof is old (he's a Professor Emeritus) and great. The first class he (Professor Maxwell is his name) told us how one of his pet peeves is the journal Herstory. What bothers him is not the concept of women's history, but the ignorant way in which feminists go about pursuing it, as epitomized by Herstory. Herstory is supposed to be the equivalent to spelling woman as "womyn," because by spelling things in absurd ways, you somehow undo the thousands of years in which womyn were exploited at the hands of men.

However, as Professor Maxwell pointed out in the first class "history" is so called not because it tells the story of man (as in "his story"), but rather because the word is derived from the Greek verb historein, which means "to inquire." Basically, some womyn read waaaay too much into things.

Today, Professor Maxwell was giving two of my classmates and I a tour of the library, pointing out many valuable primary sources I never would have found on my own. The whole idea of microfilm kind of scares me, but that's another issue. While looking for the Proceedings of the House of Lords or some such other document, we passed the reels for Herstory. One of the guys I was with pointed them out to the professor. He looked at them and said something along the lines of "Ahhh, ignorance passing as academia at its finest."

But then again, maybe I'm just a stupid woman.

This is Where I Live

2005-01-16T23:16:00.000-05:00

So this is apparently the truth about where I live. I guess by now I should have ceased to be amazed by the way I find myself defending things (i.e Orange County and George Bush) I don't particularly care for after the McGill Daily does its bit on them. Quite frankly, Genevieve Jenkins should never move to Southern California, or the States in general. I don't think she'd like it very much. Yes, maybe they should have called the show "The NB" instead of "The OC," but they didn't. It's just a TV show. Get over it. I wonder if she thinks that movies depict real places too. While Orange County, California may not be a perfect place, at least they don't charge 15% tax on everything or have ridiculous language laws. If people shouldn't live in suburbia, where should they live? In the "urban centers, where poverty is high and education awful"? Umm....I'll stick with my gas-guzzling and aptly named Suburban, thank you very much.

Singing in the Shower

2005-01-14T10:39:00.000-05:00

I can't exactly put my finger on why, but for some reason, I found the handyman singing the refrain to the ABBA song "SOS" badly and with a thick Quebecois accent quite amusing this morning while I was baking for Shabbos. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they have been here for four days, and are always here by 7:30 in the morning. At least they seem to be about finished, and then we'll have a real shower! And no more rotten floor! Yay!

Slipping and Sliding

2005-01-12T23:28:00.000-05:00

Going to school in Montreal forces a person to learn a lot of lifeskills unique to Montreal. Among these are being able to look the grocer mumbling at you in French in the eye and say "Thank you" at the end of the transaction; learning how to stay indoors until as close as physically possible to where you are going, even if it means allowing an extra 15 minutes and multiple flights of stairs; and how to laugh at yourself when you inevitably slip and fall. Because the city of Montreal does not really know the meaning of the words "snow removal," you are just going to fall at least once a winter. There's pretty much no question about it. And you may as well laugh, because everybody else probably will be too. Not that they aren't concerned or anything, but it's just funny. Yesterday I was walking home from campus with two friends, and one of them said "I really don't want to say this, but I haven't slipped yet this year." Today she walked into class, held up her hands and said "Guess what I just did?"...And another one bites the dust (or ice, in this case).

Pet Peeve

2005-01-02T01:49:00.000-05:00

A pet peeve of mine is anachronisms, especially from places claiming to be historically definitive. My family and I were in Denver, visiting my mom's sister and her family. For some reason, we ended up going here. It's the house of the woman on whom the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown was based. Needless to say, her name was Margaret Brown. You can only go through the house on a guided tour. While I'm not in a place to judge what the accuracy of what the guide was saying about the life of Margaret Brown, and my guess is she knew her stuff, there were some major flaws in her overall narrative that bothered me.

For instance, she kept saying that the house had been restored to how it appeared in "Victorian times, based on pictures from 1910." The problem is, Victoria died in 1901, and by 1910, the times were thoroughly Edwardian. There were also other problems with her grasp of the larger picture. She said there was a silver panic in 1893, when the Sherman Silver Act was repealed and the US went back to the gold standard...which was fine, until she decided to add on "which the US is still on today" at the end of the sentence. She also said that Turkey was in the Middle East. It's actually in the Near East (because if it's not, what is?) and was especially considered so during "Victorian" times. (Ok, so that's really splitting hairs, but it bugged me. A lot.) The real kicker came at the end, and really wasn't so much an anachronism as just plain wrong. She pointed to the steam pipes leading to the radiator and said "It was a sign of status to have an indoor bathroom with running water, so they intentionally did not put the plumbing inside the walls, like we would today." So then I decided maybe she was just stupid.

There is a second part to this story. I have a friend who analyzes every movie he sees. In depth. Now, that's not me at all. In fact, the way he does that happens to be one of my pet peeves (he knows all this already). The last day I was in Denver, all the boys decided to watch the King Arthur that came out over the summer. Now, my father and I, being the nerds we are, had been interested in the movie, but then it got bad reviews when it finally came out. We were curious to see why though. It's not hard to see what the critics were getting at (I never actually read the reviews, just saw that they were bad). I could see what the director was trying to do, but he still failed miserably because of...anachronisms. The movie supposedly took place in 452 (according to the opening scene). In 452 there were NO stirrups and therefore no knights, and and crossbows didn't really exist like that. And Sarmatia no longer existed, even a little bit, according to this. Ok. Now I'm done venting.

A Little Bit Behind Scehdule

2004-12-31T17:34:00.000-05:00

So this post come about a week later than most posts on this subject, but I was really busy last week. Christmas, to me, always seems so anti-climatic. You have six weeks of intense hype and Christmas-everywhere-you-turn for a Christmas dinner and one glorified morning of present opening? What kind of holiday is that? This is something I think about every year around this time, because I just don't get it. Maybe it's because the only Jewish holidays that are only one day long (at least in the Diaspora) are fast days, and I know I pretty much always want those over as quickly as possible. Christmas isn't even a whole day long (at least the way it seems to be celebrated now). It seems to consist of a dinner on Christmas Eve, an early morning of opening presents, and a dinner on the 25th. The whole 12 days of Christmas is only observed by the Orthodox Christians, as far as I can tell, and is much more of a Jewish style, drag the holiday out as long as possible type of deal. Anyways, it's just something that I can't quite figure out.

Airport Stories

2004-12-17T13:01:00.000-05:00

So I'm now home. Home is California. The trip home was largely uneventful, but did have some interesting moments. To be one of the people who hand searches all the checked baggage (like they were doing to EVERY bag at Dorval on Wednesday) you either have to have no sense of embarrassment or lose it very quickly. I bet I can't even imagine some of the stuff they see. The lady going through mine was very pleasant, but made some interesting comments. Upon seeing the heels I wear every Shabbos she said "Ooooh, these are nice!" Upon seeing the nice wooden dreidel my grandparents had given me for Chanukah the comment was "This is strange. Strange, but ok." Another interesting thing I noticed was that the airport employee directing people through United States Customs (the American part of the international terminal has United States Customs, so the flights originating out of Dorval to the States are technically domestic) was directing people with French numbers. It's United States Customs. We're on AMERICAN soil. Speak English! The only thing I noticed in O'Hare that was interesting was that they are spending over 5.2 million dollars on "Escalator Renovation in Terminals 1, 2, and 3." That's a lot of new escalators. Of course, O'Hare is also just really big.

So today was my first day home. It began with my sister waking me up at 7:45 by yelling "Chanie's on the phone for you." Chanie runs the local (Lubavitch) Hebrew Academy Preschool. She needed a sub and knew I was home because I saw her husband (the rabbi of my shul) when I went with my dad to pick my sister up from Hebrew School last night. So I dragged my body out of bed and spent 6 hours being Teacher Rebecca. It reminded me again of how much I miss little kids while I'm in Montreal. There really aren't so many of them on a college campus, and none that I actually know. They're so funny and so cute, but also so exhausting. So exhausting. I had forgotten that part. It's funny to be home again. All the light switches are lower here than in my apartment. It's weird how you get used to things like that without ever realizing it.

Every time I come home, some new piece of what used to be my space has been taken over. Last winter when I came home my sister (who I share a room with) had stolen my BED. I made my mom switch them back. When I came home for the summer, she had taken over my dresser. This time she's taken over one of my bulletin boards. Oh well. I still have the one that takes up the whole wall. I guess because I don't really have my own separate space the space gets taken over much more quickly than if I had my own room. In any case, my family has clearly demonstrated it's not the type to keep my space pristine, like I might walk in any minute.

Exams

2004-12-07T23:42:00.000-05:00

Enough said. I'll resurface sometime next week, if I survive. Good luck!

Stupidity in the Classroom Part II

2004-12-01T00:43:00.000-05:00

Some people really are just amazing. I wonder if she'll show up in any of my classes next semester, and extend the streak to three in a row. We received a grand finale in class today, it was quite amazing. The prof eventually just stopped responding to her, and continued on teaching. Her last line was "So what you're saying is he (Hussein, the first Arab nationalist the British toyed with) wasn't used to lying Europeans yet." At which point the prof looked down and began lecturing again, without acknowledging the comment.

Also, why does the world hate Americans, and not the British? Many of the problems in the world today that people blame the Americans for (like Iraq and Israel) are really just leftovers from Britain's fairly hasty unloading of empire after WWII. Partition must have been one of the worst political inventions ever. Let's make Ireland into Northern Ireland and Ireland, so that Catholics and Protesants can continue to blow each other up. And how about splitting colonial India into India and Pakistan. They're not going to hate each other or anything. And how about that wonderful Green Line? Don't blame the Americans for it, because it was most definitely an invention of the British. Maybe they should have just left all these places as one big country, and let the people inside duke it out. My guess is all the civil wars would have been over by the mid 1960s. And whose idea do you think it was to put the Kurds, Shi'a and Sunni all into one state in Iraq? That's right....it was the British.

What People Said

2004-11-27T19:10:00.000-05:00

So this is the post responding to everybody's comments to my last post. I realized it would probably generate a number of them, and for my site, it did (5). Now to address what you guys all said, and to maybe clairfy what I was saying.

First, I feel like I should mention a couple of facts, for the sake of full disclosure, that seemed to get lost in the reactions.
1) I flipped.
2) I've been to Israel, but was not there for school.
3) I most definitely did not grow up in a Modern Orthodox home.

Now for the responses to what people said:

Josh--You pretty much completely missed the point. The post had nothing to do with people coming back religious and everything with people coming back having rejected/accepted things that they then realize they didn't really want to. I mean, I flipped to the right myself, so I probably don't see it as such a bad thing.

Michael--I have no idea what you'll come back wearing, but probably not a streimel. You're a broke college student (I would assume) and they are really expensive. Also, I have met many people who flipped and have none of the angst described in the last post. So basically, there's still hope for you.

Jesse--You may be right, and I was semi-trying to convey that, although maybe I wasn't as articulate as a I should have been. I'm not really in a position to comment on the Modern Orthodox education system, seeing as I didn't go through it. But from what I've seen, I can see where you're coming from.

Jacob--All I've got to say is...Sucks for you. Go on Wheels or something else instead. Or try to hit them up for the European Tour thingy. I mean, you can definitely hit them up for something.

Yael--First, what I was writing about was not really what my mom said, per se, as much as it was about the sequence of thoughts her saying it unleashed in my head. Second, my mom didn't really mean that nobody should go to Israel, and she for sure didn't mean that people should never leave home. We never even discussed me staying home for college. She did want me to go to UCLA instead of McGill, but only because I would then be only a 45 minute drive, and not a 6 hour long flight, away from home, and she would be able to see me more often than every 4 months. Lastly, for some people, the reasons you mentioned are the reasons they change, and that's fine. But for a lot of people, that isn't the case, and it's unfortunate that they have the issues they have now.

To Josh, Yael and Jesse, I hope you guys realize that the ways you responded to the post all are pretty much direct reflections on your personal experiences there.

And last but not least, in response to a spoken comment I got from a friend, thanks Zach, for the compliment. I'm glad you now realize I do, in fact, have opinions.

Something My Mom Said

2004-11-22T22:32:00.000-05:00

In a conversation with my mom the other day, she told me that a girl I went to high school with had flipped to the right. I was suprised by this, because in high school the girl, with whom I was vaguely acquaintances (in that Jewish sort of way) had been pretty much staunchly Reform in her religious outlook. I mentioned this to my mom, remembering from somewhere in the cobwebs of my mind that she had done her last semester of high school on a Reform program in Israel.

"Yes," my mom said, "but when she came back, she refused to go to Beth Israel (the Reform synagogue where I live). She would only go to Beth Shalom (Conservative). And then when her parents went for family weekend to UPenn (where she goes to school now), she wouldn't do any of the activities on Shabbat and wouldn't eat out. At the very least, she's far to the right on the Conservative spectrum now."

Needless to say, her parents are currently convinced she's not going to be like that when she comes home for winter vacation. They apparently believe she will have two different sets of rules, one for school and one for home. I think my mom finds this amusing.

Then my mom made a comment that many people will disagree with, and I am not to sure I myself agree with. When you think about it, however, she definitely has a point. My mom said:

I don't think parents should let their kids go to Israel.

To everybody who just read that and thought it completely ridiculous, hold on to your horses and let me explain.

In context, she meant that teenagers shouldn't be allowed to go to Israel, because it makes life hell for their parents, both while they are there and when they come back religious. Yes, the comment initially sounds absurd. While she was looking at it from a logisitical point of view (even though she really does like it when I come home), think of it from a psychological point of view. Really think about it. How many people do you know who have gone to Israel and come back either significantly more or less religious than they were when they stepped off the plane? In my immediate social circle, I can think of a handful of people who were highly affected by their periods, of various lengths, spent in Israel. Some of them are still wrestling with religious conflict years later.

While it is true that the majority of people come back without conflict and not bitter, the number who do come back completely shtark or disillusioned is not insignificant either, and I find it hard to believe that none come back, especially from a year there, completely unaffected. While many of these people were probably heading down one path or the other before they went, the country is still so polar that it forces people to extremes they would probably never have reached if they hadn't gone. I see the bitterness, confusion and all-around shittiness that living in Israel caused in some of my friends, and I wonder why parents, and a whole society, would do that to their children.

Yes, they may have wanted to go, but there is also much societal pressure to conform to what has become the norm in Modern Orthodoxy. In the Modern Orthodox world, if you find out that somebody did not go to Israel, you wonder what's wrong with them that they didn't.

In some ways, it's kind of like trial by fire. Push an 18-year-old alone into one of the most heated religious and political environments in the world, and see if he can survive with his sanity and religious identity intact. The people who flip usually lose one or the other. Or, in some extreme cases, both. If somebody suggested you do that to your kid, and never mentioned the word Israel, would you send them?

Stupidity in the Classroom

2004-11-16T19:10:00.000-05:00

It happens to all of us. In some classes there are just really stupid people, who ask really stupid questions and waste our time by doing so. Really, the adage that "there are no stupid questions" is something I think only teachers of elementary and junior high say. It's ridiculous, frankly. There are stupid questions. And in one of my classes, there is a girl who asks them on a regular basis. As soon as her voice is heard, the noise level in the class increases dramatically because nobody pays any attention to what she asks. The prof is really patient though, and usually tries to hide his annoyance. Today, however, she really outdid herself. The lecture was on Middle Eastern intellectuals in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries. One these guys, Muhammad Abduh, became the Grand Mufti of Egypt. After doing so, he issued a fatwa (like a heter, but they can be both permissive and restrictive) saying that Muslims can charge interest at reasonable (like 2% or something) rates. Muslim law prohibits Muslims from charging interest. The fatwa was a big deal because it then allowed Egypt to create a banking system and foster economic growth. At this point, the girl raises her hand. She is called on, and asks "Well couldn't they have a banking system without charging interest? Maybe I'm just stupid, but I think they could have, like they did in medieval Europe." Admittedly, it sucks for her, because at this point muffled laughter broke out across the classroom, to become blatant when the prof, while trying to keep a smile off his face, said "Umm...I think you need to take some Economics then." Indeed, there are stupid questions.

Names

2004-11-10T04:26:00.000-05:00

First, to Josh, ck and Jesse, I'm a really big fan of the comments. In ck's comment on my blog about the American Consulate, he brings up a point I've been meaning to blog about for a while. Ck's point that it is "St. Alexandre" and not "St. Alexander"--as I wrote it--brings up the topic of names. Names were never such an issue until I moved to Montreal. Only in Quebec is the political situation ridiculous enough that even the way a street is pronounced is a political statement. I was actually semi-surprised to learn that I had written "St. Alexander," because I generally spell streets the way they are written, even if I call most of them by their original English names. In speaking, Montagne is Mountain, Pins is Pine and St. Laurent is St. Lawrence (although the last one depends slightly on to whom I'm talking). Even streets that have no real English equivalent, like Jeanne-Mance, I pronounce as if they were English--mostly because my French is abominable, if at all extant, and I just embarrass myself more by trying. Four years of high school Spanish doesn't help much when it comes to speaking Quebecois.

In Montreal, more then in most other cities, I believe, names of streets (and neighborhoods) are much more a reflection of the political mood of the city then elsewhere. Here, you have a battle Anglophone and Francophone in Westmount vs. Outremont and of Anglo and Quebecois politicians in Dorchester vs. Rene-Levesque. In the elevator waiting area of the James Administration Building at McGill, the used to be (I don't know if it is still there or not) a map of "Olde McGill." That was the first time I realized the extent to which the Quebecois had gone to frankify the city. Rene-Levesque used to be Dorchester all the way across, and de Masionnueve was something equally Anglo, I believe, although I no longer remember what. I find all of this fascinating.

Peoples names also display some of the same politics. What somebody's given name is a huge reflection on their parents' beliefs. If somebody is named Faith, Harmony or Rainbow, it probably says more about their parents then it does about them (as long as we're on the topic of hippies), although it could possibly give you some clue as to the person upbringing. The same goes for the names Andrew Michael Smith III and Tzvi Hirsch. The vast majority of people had absolutely no control over what their given name would be, yet few people are unhappy enough with their names to actually change them. I am and have been called many different variations of my name, both in English and in Hebrew (from Rebs to Rifkush), but they are all, in the end, the essentially the same name as the one given to me by my parents. It would be very weird to be named something else, even though my parents could just have easily named me Leah.

Blog Changes

2004-11-09T21:46:00.000-05:00

I added links to the blog. Nothing like school work you don't want to do to make you learn HTML through trial and error. If I didn't link to you and you actually read this, tell me.

The End of the Game

2004-11-09T19:05:00.000-05:00

The game has officially ended. The answer was consistently below freezing.

Quotes II

2004-11-03T18:18:00.000-05:00

Perhaps every accidental cluster of people has a short period of grace, in between the initial shyness and prejudice on one hand and ventual repugnance and betrayal on the other.
Wicked, by Gregory Maguire

Circumstance dictates the formation of every group of friends, at least to some extent. There are millions of people in the world you will never, for various reasons, meet, but that's not to say you wouldn't be friends if your lives somehow ended up crossing paths. The only wild card in this quote is how long the "short period" will last. True, you may be friends forever with some members of the group, but the splintering of the cluster is inevitable. As life goes on, circumstances change.

Complete non-sequitor--
Thank G-d John Kerry decided to be a better man then Al Gore and lose gracefully. He pretty much just earned my respect.

Trip to American Consulate

2004-11-02T21:21:00.000-05:00

An hour and fifteen minutes at the American Consulate and I saw:

4 Hasidim and 1 chassidishe woman. The bekish of one of the Hasids did not fit him at all. It was probably about 2 sizes too small. His sister would not have been allowed to buy an article of clothing that tight. Ever. The woman's seams weren't even close to being straight.

1 man who looked like a taller, pre-white Michael Jackson wearing all black leather. Black leather pants, black leather trench coat, black boots and even a black leather blazer underneath the trench coat. Maybe it was a leather suit.

A stunning view. The consulate is on the 19th floor of a building on St. Alexander. It is all windows and you can see both the mountain and the river. Too bad it was raining and gray.

3 hysterical Texan businessmen. They were getting new passports because their's were stolen last night when their car was broken into while they were at dinner. Along with their laptops and clothes. They wanted to know what was up with the sketchy photo studio they were sent to upstairs on St. Cats. I told them everything upstairs on St. Cats is sketchy.

Granted, that was only on the American citizen side of the waiting area. And I was only there for the entirely reasonable period of 1 and 1/4 hours.

On a slightly different note, I was fairly offended by the cover of the McGill Daily that came out yesterday. A picture of it is here. The fact that the anti-American cover, as well as the alarmist editorial it contained bother me is interesting. In general, I'm not particularly pro or anti-American. And I'm certainly not militantly pro-Bush. I voted for Kerry. But this is really a bit disturbing. I can understand why many people in other parts of the world don't like the United States a whole lot, but what did we ever do to Canada? The editorial says Canada is terrified that Bush will be re-elected. Really? Because I haven't really noticed any horrifiedness among the people with whom I go to school. Sure, people think he's stupid and are not happy about the fact that it is very much a possibility he will be re-elected. However, I have not heard anybody wish for a terminal illness and a gun so they could go kill him. Whatever George W. Bush has done, or one has perceived him as doing, I'm pretty sure it doesn't deserve death. I guess I was just astonished something could be completely ridiculous that the fact that somebody actually believes that mierda so vehemently frankly scares me much more then the prospect of another four years with Bush as our president.

A Game We Like to Play

2004-10-19T01:43:00.000-04:00

My housemates and I are playing a game. It's called how cold does it have to get before we turn the heat on? Our logic is that if we suck it up now, when it gets really cold we can turn the heat on, instead of up. It's a fun game, and the reason I'm sitting here right now wearing a long corduroy skirt, flannel pajama pants, a t-shirt, a heavy sweatshirt, socks and slippers. Students will do almost anything to save a buck. People here always overheat their buildings anyways. Just because it's minus forty outside does not mean it needs to be 25 inside.

Quotes

2004-10-18T20:32:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, when I'm reading, there are quotes that just reach out and grab me. This can happen when I'm reading for school, although textbooks don't usually provide a trove of quotable material, except for exams. Those compilations of primary sources that some professors make you buy, even though you've been reading more or less the same selections from the same primary sources since high school, no matter who the actual publisher or editor is, often serve up quotes on platters. However, that is also the reason for the existence of those books. They seem to be selected expressly for the purpose of giving students good, easily remembered sound bites that can be quickly regurgitated on an exam. Even better than these types of quotes (examples of which follow) are the ones that teachers and professors say in class and that really are, more than anything else, mythological. These are of the "Give me liberty or give me death" (Patrick Henry) and "Paris is worth a mass" (Henry of Navarre/Henry VI of France) variety. The all time best quote that was never really said is Marie Antoinette's "Let them eat cake."

A quick glance through my readers provides quotes like "It is far safer to be feared than loved" (Machiavelli), "It is faith alone that consecrates" (Luther), "Man is born free; and everywhere he is chains" (Rousseau) and "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Marx and Engels). These are all important quotes in the history of Western civilization, but they are spoonfed to you in books like these, which edit and abridge the works until they include only the bare bones of the originals. It's so much more exciting to find good quotes in random literature, quotes that don't get beaten to death in conference--ones that are exclusively your own (or at least you can think so).

The following quotes are quotes that, when I read them, made me think enough so that I wrote them down. They stuck out. The first two are from novels; the last one is of an entirely different nature. Anyways, here are the quotes.

"His two bete noires were the clergy and the monarchy, and he believed ardently that the two most important contributions to the history of humanity had been the printing press and the guillotine."
--from The Fencing Master, by Arturo Perez Reverte

Whether you agree with the first part of the statement or not, I believe that the printing press was one of the most important inventions in the history of humanity. Maybe not quite as revolutionary as the wheel or the stirrup, but definitely up there on the "Most Important Invention" list. It's the way in which the statement is phrased that I like so much (I'm a big fan of parallel constructions). Also, Perez Reverte is just a really good writer, in general.

"But, reader, there is no comfort in the word "farewell," even if you say it in French. "Farewell" is a word that, in any language, is full of sorrow. It is a word that promises absolutely nothing."
--from The Tale of Desperaux, by Kate DiCamillo

What can I say...it just struck a cord.

"Everything that exists is from G-d, and even in evil and in wicked men his order prevails; but I must confess that I am perplexed by the contradiction between the fact that no one is without G-d and that G-d is nevertheless not with everyone."
--De Ordine II:20, by St. Augustine

This quote is from a book on the depiction of Jews in Christian religious art that I read and wrote a book review on last year. I no longer remember the author's reason for using the quote though. I have also read St. Augustine's Confessions in one of those wonderful sourcebooks mentioned above. I could barely get through the abridged version it--philosophy is not one of my interests, and certainly not one of my strongpoints. Nevertheless, it is blatantly obvious that St. Augustine was one conflicted and torn person when it came to faith. Sometimes I wonder how he became such a cornerstone in Christian philosophy. However, this quote stuck out because to me, at least, it seems like a pretty key question. It would be interesting to see how/if he answered himself, but I've never looked it up.

Now, off to study for my midterm tomorrow.

Crazy Canadians

2004-10-12T19:19:00.000-04:00

I go to university in Montreal. I am American. It's an interesting mix. I can forget for days that I live in foreign country. Part of it, I am sure, has to do with the fact that many, if not most of my friends are American as well and that I live with 3 other Americans. American politics are discussed (or not) just as often among my friends than if we lived in the States. The fact that subjects I study (early modern European history, chemistry, and Yiddish) are all fairly impervious to a "Canadian" spin means that I don't feel like I'm in Canada even while in class. Sure, the signs everywhere are in French or in French and English or in English (thank you, Cote St. Luc) and the STM workers give me nasty looks when I ask for my metro pass in English. But that is function of me being in Montreal, not of me being in Canada. At the provincial level, I realize I am not in California any more. Quebec is about as similar to California as an apple is to an orange. At the national level, however, it is such a non-issue I rarely think about it.

It is only when I have to do things like go to the American consulate to renew my passport or get annoyed that I cannot work on my student visa that I have to deal with the fact that I don't live in the States. There is, however, one issue that never fails to amaze me. That issue is the Canadian attitude towards university education. Most Canadians, at least from what I've seen, feel entitled to a university education. Not only do they feel entitled to that education, they also feel that it should be free, or at least ridiculously inexpensive. People from Quebec pay a whopping $2800 a year to attend McGill University. They complain. I pay $13,000. I think I've found a bargain. A friend of mine wrote a letter about the issue to the McGill Daily. I could not agree more.

Jews, Jewish Studies, and History

2004-10-11T01:10:00.000-04:00

I originally started this blog five months ago, thinking that I would be bored over the summer and it would be fun to have one. Then I never posted, after that first night. I didn't realize the power of procrastination. So, with a barely started paper due on Tuesday, here's for starting again.

There's a topic of conversation that seems to come up frequently among my friends, mainly because a few of them are interested in going into academics (specifically in Jewish Studies), however parts of the conversation pertain to my life as well. Basically, I have friends who are all "frum" Jews and who all wish to live their lives as "frum" Jews in a "frum" society. However, their chosen career path creates a problem. Jews, starting even in Modern Orthodox circles, are not supposed to study Tanach and Gemara academically. Biblical criticism and the evolution of Jewish theology is supposed to be a moot point. Everything was given to Moses at Mt. Sinai. Period. Hashem was the author and Moses took perfect dictation.

The interesting thing is that each of my friends stands in a very different place according to their religiosity, ranging from the merely observant to the devoutly religious, and as such, each is looking for the answers to the questions of What do you have to believe to not be an apikoros? and How do you balance the your findings on the evolution of your religion with the way you live your life, especially within the framework of a religiously orthodox community? If you believe that everything was given at Mt. Sinai, then you bind yourself to a certain set of religious laws, which includes a basic level of required belief, even if you find biblical criticism interesting enough to devote your life to. If you're quiet about what you do, can you fit into an Orthodox community? Is it even possible to be quiet enough?

This question is highlighted by the fact that I, and some of my friends, frequent areas of town that are even more religiously narrow-minded then the Modern Orthodox. Mainly, we go for the food, the chance to sleep and to get away from our small, some would say in-bred downtown student community. During the meals, this question inevitably comes up: "What are you taking?" History, Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies are all the wrong answers. You don't go to university to study something with no directly related livelihood. Studying to become a doctor, an accountant or even a lawyer mitigates the unacceptability of exposing oneself to university and the goyishe world. The next question after that, at least for me, is always, "What are you going to do with that, teach?" At which point I say "Yeah, probably" and the conversation is dropped. Jewish Studies has no out like that though, because in the minds of the people asking the questions, one cannot teach academic Judaism--it doesn't exist. Middle Eastern Studies is equally useless to them. Why should a Jew study Arabic?

I don't know what the answers to the questions are, but I'm interested to see how my friends reconcile their interests and their lives. I do, however, know this, which I feel touches on the subject. People easily confuse a high level of religious observance for devoutness or religiosity, making it easier for the observant, if they are smart, to live in the religious world without professing great belief. Just look at the word "frum." In English it means, at the bare minimum, a person who is Shomer Shabbos (Sabbath-observant) and Shomer Kashrus (observes the laws of Kashrut). Not a word there about religious belief. In its original Yiddish, the word has nothing to do with observance and everything to do with piety. "Frum" means religious, but not in the sense the word "religious" is most often used (which is incorrect). A frummer yid is a pious Jew, not an observant one. Like I said, I don't know the answers or even where to start looking for them. It's an interesting conversation, though, and seeing the frequency with which it has come in the past weeks, I'm sure it will come up again.

First Try

2004-06-07T03:43:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so this is my first try at this whole blogging thing. A lot of my friends are into it, and I happen to read a couple on a regular basis. I haven't decided if I want to keep this private or make it public yet, but we'll see. I mean, I think it would be fun to keep it all mysterious and "spoke to M today, and got in a fight with Y," but I don't think anybody really cares that much about my life, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about writing about my friends for the whole world to read, especially when about nobody is going to read what I write. If I tell my friends that I have a blog, it would guarantee me readers, at least initially, but then what's the fun in that? Also, then I would have to answer for what I write to people I actually know, whereas if it stays anonymous, I only have to answer to the few people who might actually read me. So basically, this probably an incredibly cliche (does anybody know how to put accents in here?) first blog, but nonetheless...here it is!