Even as a schoolkid, I was never a big fan of Christopher Columbus.

When my third grade teacher presented cartoon pictures of this helmeted saint conquering the New World while little brown natives rejoiced on the shore, I thought to myself “But how could he have ‘discovered’ a place where people were already living?”

Whether it’s just guilt or Jewish genetic social consciousness, I’ve always had this inherent preference for the underdog, especially indigenous peoples whose land is invaded by syphilis-riddled sailors. Though I did not yet have the vocabulary to tell Mrs. Tipton why I colored Columbus’ face green on the ditto she passed out while the other kids chanted about the Nina, the Pinta and that Santa Maria, I saw right through the propaganda: Rich, white dude who’s the pet favorite of the queen gets to sail around the world like a trustafarian Trump and be entitled to whatever he finds. (In junior high I tried to ramp up enthusiasm for a formal protest to repeal Columbus Day as a national holiday, but trying to convince 7th-graders that a day off school wasn’t a good thing proved to be difficult, and also branded me as a social idiot.)

So, yeah, I’ve always thought CC was a bit of a douche. And this was way before I learned that he set sail on August 3, 1492, the very day after Queen Bitch Isabella and her bloodthirsty dick of a king, Ferdinand, ordered that all the Jews be expelled from Spain. The Catholic Church conducted its horrific Inquisition during this time, torturing and stealing from anyone suspected of lighting candles on Friday nights. (My mother wrote an incredibly interesting book of fiction, The Blind Eye, based on this time, which you can order here — it’s fascinating!)

In the five-and-half years I’ve been blogging about Jewishy thangs, much has been written about the reclamation of Judaic roots by many Latinos who descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews who hid their religion by pretending to accept Catholicism (known as “conversos”). Once in a while I’ll come across a theory that Columbus himself was actually Jewish — that he was in fact a converso who finagled a very expensive expedition as an escape. I haven’t found anything truly definitive, but it seems that although he was clearly a loud and proud Christian, his family tree had some Hebraic branches. In any case, his interpreter and two of his financiers (who happened to be along for the ride) were conversos, and he made use of Jewish historian Abraham Zacuto’s astronomical tables and charts on the voyage.

But even if some archaeologist finds Columbus’ bar mitzvah certificate this afternoon, does it matter? It doesn’t change the imperialist invasion of indigenous cultures that set the stage for our own country’s decimation of its native peoples, it doesn’t assauge the anti-Semitism in the world. Would history be rewritten to reflect it other than as an anecdotal footnote? Doubtful.

Look at all the hullabaloo out last week claiming that Iranian democratically-elected president Israeli sponge expert Mamoud Ahmadinejad has Jewish leaves on his family tree: Even if it were proven the stamps in his passport reveal that his grandparents were tzitzi makers, the Arab world would never accept it.

Like Ahmadinejad’s, Columbus’ Jewish roots are irrelevant — they’re both douchebags with a penchant for genocide. The fact that one has an official holiday in the United States is asinine — and hell yeah, I’d stand up in front of Mrs. Tipton’s class and say it if I could.

I am feeling just supremely ill that we’re just finding out today that our government is bombing the moon tomorrow.

I posted the following tirade as a response to a friend’s Facebook comment, and though I understand his point that this might help solve our planet’s energy issues, I’m still shocked that someone gets to decide to do this without consulting the rest of us.

I’d love to know if y’all think it’s no big deal or if this is hurting your soul:

Really? The rotating body that orbits our planet in a perfect 28-day rhythm that affects our tides, oceans and bodies (we’re at 55% water; our kids are 78%) is a CASH CROP?

I’ve never heard of anything so revolting or short-sighted.

What happened to using less, making pollution and toxins illegal, creating a sustainable future? Instead of a beautiful, serene moonrise, we’re going to see a constant assembly line of moon mining ships in the night sky? What are we going to do after we break the moon? Attack Mars? It’s as pathetic as it is predatory.

Not to mention what the moon represents to humans symbolically and spiritually: According to the ancient myths and Earth-based religions, it is the very seat of the Divine Feminine, a force that’s been hidden away from our collective conscience but nevertheless still exists. Every single woman’s menstrual cycle — and by definition, conception and birth itself — follows this same monthly rhythm. What does it say about our society that we are allowing the clean, white glow of the moon be pierced with a MISSILE? It’s f*cking RAPE. We will never be able to repair this damage to our shared psyche and our environment.

Obviously, I’m really, really sick and sad about this, but to keep things positive, let’s all look at how beautiful the moon is: You can click here, but wouldn’t you rather go outside and see for yourself?

Yo, Yenta and Herb Boy at the SEWHC

It’s been an adventurous week for the Yenta, so please excuse the slow posting!

Though my Sukkot skillz may be lacking, my son and I managed to sleep under the stars and shake some foliage this weekend at the Southeast Women’s Herbal Conference near Asheville, NC. Organically organized by the amazing women of Red Moon Herbs, the conference is three days of workshops and classes about the uses of the plants that grow all around us — bridging the practical with the spiritual, the medicinal with the ethereal. We learned that dandelion leaves aid digestion and taste delish in a salad, chewed up plaintain leaf to make a spit poultice for bug bites and bathed in marigold rose tea prepared under the full moon (does that count as a mikveh?)

This is our third year at the conference; everyone not only tolerates my boy as the token male, but adores him. He soaks up the Goddess worship just like he does his Hebrew lessons; rather than conflict with our family’s spirituality, the references to the Divine Feminine appears to fit right in with his cosmic belief system. (Yes, he’s quite advanced for 9.) I appreciate this incredible opportunity to teach him about the forgotten wisdom of the earth — knowledge about how to relate to our environment that’s been not only suppressed, but actively deleted from the human experience, including from our Jewish traditions. This is the information women were burned at the stake for as witches, and it’s the information that’s going to save us from the poisonous disaster our greedy brethren have made of the planet.

The weekend stoked the fire within me that says this is the only real work there is in these unstable times. As a parent, I think this kind of tactile study is fundamental to our Jewish faith. And because I enjoy seeing how far the boundaries of tradition can stretch before they break, I’m going to go the extra sacreligious mile and suggest that it’s even more important than studying the Torah if we’re going to raise conscious, responsible adults out of our children. We can talk all we want about appreciating the infinite manifestations God’s tremendous creation, but no kid is going to learn about the difference between black and white sage within the walls of Hebrew school. What’s a child going to remember more: Writing alephs in a Hebrew workbook a hundred times or rubbing the furry part of a mullein leaf against his cheek?

I’m not saying we should abandon the books, but I think Jewish education needs to bring us back to the plants and flowers. The more time we spend outside, the more closer we are to our Creator — which seems to me the entire point of Sukkot. But what if we actually celebrated it within the context of the Divine Feminine, called the shekinah in Hebrew? I wonder how much of Jewish tradition can be interpreted to incorporate this lost, invisible piece of our souls?

Food for thought. And speaking of food, I’m off to gather some dandelions for dinner.

So listen, Sukkot starts Friday already. I know I said THIS was the year we were going to build a sukkah in the backyard, but it turns out I’ve already started my 5771 atonement list.

It just seems like an awful lot of WORK, y’all. I just got finished with dealing with dinner for ten before Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah before that and then there’s Shalom School lessons to prepare and JUST WHY IN THE HOOTENANNY DID GOD HAVE TO PUT SO MANY DURN HOLIDAYS SO CLOSE TOGETHER? Fortunately, we do a community Sukkot celebration down at the temple so I can go hang out there (and of course, we’ll be making graham cracker versions with the kidlets, as usual.)

If I were a religious Jew instead of, well, whatever kind I am, I don’t suppose I’d balk so much at all the shopping and preparing and cleaning that each ritual requires. It’s always seemed to me that when it comes to observant Jewish practices, it’s up to the women to make sure it all gets done while the dudes just get to show up and pray and eat. And then I gotta BUILD something? That just doesn’t seem fair to this lazy, cranky lady right now.

As it turns out, the actual building is actually the man’s job. Elana Sztokman’s blog in today’s Forward, “Sukkot Customs I’d Like To Change” points out that’s pretty whack, too:

As a woman, though, I find Sukkot to be one of the most difficult holidays we’ve got. It is laden with messages about gender differences and where women truly belong, and these messages seem to intensify each year…I used to think it was just the children’s books – you know, pictures of men and boys banging the hammer and nails juxtaposed against pictures of women and girls in aprons or serving soup – which conveyed these messages.

I don’t know if Sztokman calls herself a feminist or not, but I always appreciate how observant Jewish women reconcile feminist principles:

The message of Sukkot should be an equalizing one. We are all stuck in the huts, all equally exposed to the elements. Living in the desert, no one family had a bigger house, job, or paycheck and everyone relied on God’s generosity and compassion.

I agree. But somehow, even as a loud, proud liberal feminist, I don’t feel a smidge of guilt that El Yenta Man is the one down at the synagogue hammering together a sukkah and I’m lounging in the empty expanse of grass in the backyard! Like I said, it’s only been two days and my sin list is already growing…

It’s Thursday, which means I’ve got my regular lunch date at the JEA for some kosher eats.

I’ve been escorting my mother-in-law almost every week for over three years to the Senior Lunch Bunch, and it’s a constant source of entertainment and education for me. I absolutely adore the other regulars — like Holocaust survivor and yiddishe joker Chaim, Savannah native and trucker-mouthed Micky, the elegant and eagle-eyed Dorothy, the hilarious and sprightly Beezy, and hostesses with mostesses Thelma and Miriam (who’s 88!) Since I no longer have any grandparents with whom to steep myself in generational Jewishness, I value their interest in me and my family. (Of course, it could be that El Yenta Man loves to flirt with everyone, too.) They’re mostly in their 80s and even 90s, yet they remember our children’s names and their schools and exactly how many weeks now I’ve been unemployed.

I wish I could say the same for my mother-in-law. Her dementia has advanced considerably in the last year, and though the Yenta Lunchers always welcome us with waves and air kisses, she’s long past recalling names or recognizing faces. In fact, beyond immediate family and her dedicated and wonderful caregiver, I’m guessing all faces look the same to her. I try to be patient with folks with whom she once co-chaired a Sisterhood committee or docented at the temple who come up and say “Don’t you remember me?”, as if they’re going to be the ones who shake her out of her out of the neural tomb into which she has receded. It pains me so much to see her face draw up in confusion, because she knows she’s supposed to know this person. My mother-in-law, always such a dear, such a lovely lamb, never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings, so she just shakes her head and gives a small, barky laugh and stutters her one rehearsed line, the longest full sentence she says anymore: “I’m sorry, but my memory situation is a mess.”

We’ve had to have some family discussions on whether we should take her to synagogue for Yom Kippur this year. My father-in-law is afraid that she’ll be disruptive, sighing and asking “What? What?!” anytime there’s a lull in the service. Which is probably true — last year she threw a fit when he tried to take her to the bathroom because she couldn’t communicate that she’d left her purse in the pew. But most everyone knows what’s what since this family has been part of the Jewish community for almost 40 years, and if anyone’s going to judge or get crabby because this poor confused woman makes a bit of noise has some more repenting to do, am I right?

I’ve taken the stand that she needs to go. Just for the closing service, mind you — her dear caregiver will sit with her Monday morning while the rest of us suffer — but I sense that this will be our last opportunity to share a synagogue service with her. She grew up Orthodox as a child, and as lost as she is inside her mind, I believe the memories of Jewish liturgy remain like stone pillars in the slippery liquid of unfinished thoughts and disconnected identity. I’ve seen her lips moving when we say our Shabbat dinners on Friday nights, and I know she remembers. And even if she starts eating the little pledge envelope stuck inside the prayer book, I know that when she hears the Sh’ma and the closing shofar blast, it will pierce her consciousness someway, somehow.

That leaves Kol Nidre, the opening ritual of Yom Kippur and usually a meaningful prayer for me to attend. I’ve decided to pass on it this year to spend it next to with Marcia on her old leather couch, listening to Jewish TV Network’s live broadcast at 6pm PST, 9pm EST, this Sunday night. I watched a bit of last year’s broadcast and it was somber, familiar, exactly as it always is and should be, even though it was taking place 3000 miles away. Though I’ll miss the experience of being at the temple to usher in this day of Atonement, I’m thinking watching it online with thousands of others who couldn’t go in person — for their own personal, perfectly valid reasons — could become a family tradition.

For me, for her, I have no doubt that the right way to pray Sunday night is in the living room.

I know, I know, I was railing about Jewish clichés yesterday, but for some reason this vid (courtesy of Bangitout.com) about clingy Jewish mothers got into my funny bone instead of under my skin. Double standard? Maybe, but the lady pointing her Blackberry at the TV cracked my sh*t up.

Oh, and you can now follow the Yenta on Twitter!

Tip o’ the yarmulke to 5th grade Shalom School prof Dan Skidmore-Hess!

As a parent, you come to expect that your kids are going to have cultural interests that you might not choose for them.

You may recall Yenta Boy’s interest in downloading the entire German language a couple of years ago, which made me realize just how patient my own parents were when I insisted on driving Volkswagens throughout my 20s. Fortunately, the boy’s fascination with German has been replaced with an obsession with Portuguese — though I can’t resist throwing in a little Spanish Inquisition history whenever he’ll listen.

So now it’s Little Yenta Girl’s turn. Ever since we moved to Savannah, a city of proud Irish heritage that has a St. Patrick’s Day parade four hours long filled with legions of girls clogging away with straight arms and curly, curly wigs, the child has been asking to be schooled in the art of Irish dance.

For years, she’s been putting on a skirt and kicking her little feet around and crying “Look, Mommy, I’m doing it!” I’d ask her how her ballet lesson were, and she’d say “Fine,” and then wistfully add, “But what I really want is to do Irish dancing.”

I’d managed to blow off her requests thus far; she was already in ballet, we didn’t know anyone else we could carpool with, blahblahblah. It wasn’t that I have anything against Irish dance, but personally, I just don’t see the point. I mean, no matter how you slice it, it’s tradition that doesn’t have a thing to do with us — why should I pay for lessons and costumes and shlep her to study a heritage that’s not ours? Better she should stick to ballet and tap; at least those are general enough that she can get her ya-yas out and not complicate things, for heep’s sake.

Then I started thinking about my own enthusiasm for African dance and how patently ridiculous it is to be a suburban Jewish girl who knows the choreography of the circumcision celebration of the Susu people of Guinea. Although I’m sure it mystified her, my own mother always encouraged me — though I started dancing long after I was of the age that someone else paid for my extracurricular activities — and proudly introduced me as her “Jewish African Cowgirl.”

(The “cowgirl” in there is the part of my that grew up in Arizona and identifies with outlaw desert culture – another element I decided to embrace that probably confounded my parents since we lived next to a golf course, thirty miles from the nearest horse stable.)

So when my daughter’s best friend’s mom told me she’d found a beginning Irish dance class for the girls, I relented. The first class was this past Monday, and I can’t tell you how much my little Jewish darling stuck out amongst all the Irish Catholic girls there to follow in the clickety footsteps of their ancestors — almost as much as I did, crowding around the two-way mirror in the tiny lobby with fifteen Irish Catholic mothers.

I had already made up my mind that this wasn’t going to work: The lessons are expensive and require new shoes and a sparkly new costume and yes, one of those crazy curly wigs. The women in the stuffy lobby were already on my nerves with their talk of competitions and so-and-so’s older sister who went to nationals. And did I mention how EXPENSIVE it is?

But then I saw my girl in there, snapping her feet and skipping to the rhythm, her cheeks pink, eyes shining with joy. She obviously loved it, more so than some of the little girls who were brought there because this is the expected activity for them to join. She hung on every word the teacher spoke and mimicked the teenage assistant like she had the Emerald Isle running through her veins.

Just like I felt like I was channeling Senegal the first time I stumbled into an African dance class – it was like those rhythms were already in me, and I was simply waking up to them.

Heritage is a funny thing. If you feel an affinity for a culture and its traditions that you have no genetic right to feel, does it make those feelings any less valid? Depends on who you’re trying to dance with, I guess. Trying to keep up my African dance chops has been hard here in Savannah, where the “you ain’t African” vibe is much more tangible than it was in California. Maybe when my my daughter realizes that she doesn’t share the familial connection with the dance that the Irish-descended kids do, she’ll begin to feel that “otherness,” and she’ll be less inspired.

For now, though, I’m guess I’m gonna eat the hundreds of dollars it’s going to take to make little Jewish Celtic Sweetheart happy.

Just what 5770 needs: Rabbis with guns.

Here in Savannah we have more to fear from errant Jews for Jesus than terrorists due to the synagogue’s open door High Holidays policy, but I definitely think we could charge admission to see our rabbi rolling around the bima a la Starsky & Hutch.

For someone who’s trying to swallow the injustice, slings and arrows of real life, I have to say a late-night viewing of Inglourious Basterds was worth like, ten therapy sessions. (BTW, a warning: this post contains plot spoilers. But really, it won’t ruin the movie for you.)

It’s a violent, gory mess starring Brad Pitt as the head of an all-Jewish brigade on a mission to kill “Natz-ees” that imagines a very different end to WWII, and there’s something redeeming — empowering even — to see the tables turned on a history that’s already been written. We already know how WWII turned out; six million Jews and four million others were sent to gas chambers and shot in front of firing squads. And while the good guys eventually “won” the war, justice was never really served: The world never got the satisfaction of seeing Adolph Hitler strung up by his balls; he got off easy by committing suicide in the comfort of his bunker.

But to Quentin Tarantino, those are just details. He’s based a career on bloody vengeance (doesn’t the very word “vengeance” make you think of a Bible-booming Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction?) and because that’s his particular genius, he recognized that a film about badass Jews who go after Nazis with all the intelligence and calculation the Nazis hunted Jews would be brilliant: I can totally imagine Harvey Weinstein salivating all over his cigar when QT pitched it.

Sure, there have been movies that have delivered a little bit of Jewish avengement like The Boys from Brazil, and more recently Defiance, where Liev Shreiber and Daniel Craig demonstrate some major toughness chops by creating a safe haven out in the Polish forest, but there are plenty of disappointments, like Valkyrie — I mean, who gives a crap about how Tom Cruise almost assassinates Hitler?

But at last, Quentin Tarantino has delivered the ultimate Jewish revenge fantasy: Trapping the top Nazi brass in a theater, then burning it down, blowing it up and pumping the Fuhrer full of machine gun holes all at the same time.

Now, some reviewers have said that turning Jews into “sickening perpetrators” is a mistake – that this rewriting of history allows the facts of the matter to be lost. Instead we must stick to the facts, constantly and without straying, in order to rise above and heal from the atrocities:

“An alternative, and morally superior, form of “revenge” for Jews would be to do precisely what Jews have been doing since World War II ended: that is, to preserve and perpetuate the memory of the destruction that was visited upon them, precisely in order to help prevent the recurrence of such mass horrors in the future.”

Gosh, I don’t even disagree. Except that being morally superior never really protected anyone — and it certainly doesn’t deliver the visceral satisfaction of watching a fictional character hitting a really bad person with a baseball bat. Of course we must carry on as we have — educating our children and neighbors about the Holocaust, stand up where we see injustice, keep saying “Never Again.”

But we also have to cheer when someone makes a movie about Hitler finally getting the ass-kicking he always deserved.