Not only does the air in Savannah feel like a Turkish bathhouse today, it smells like one.
Of course, if it were a bathhouse, no one would have to bother with t-shirts, but you could use this to sit on instead of putting your naked tuchus on the marble. Buy it here.
So listen, I’m serious, I could get into a lot trouble if this gets out, so keep it entre nous, ‘kay?
Here it is: Because of circumstances I never dreamed would come to pass, let’s just say I had the opportunity to make good on a threat this morning.
Got a little writing experience? Dig the Jewish Federation? Like chicken, children and old people? Then the Savannah JEA wants you!
From Jewishjobs.com:
The Savannah Jewish Federation and Jewish Educational Alliance (JCC) are seeking to hire an individual to assist with all aspects of our programming including fundraising, community programs and the Savannah Jewish News and Centerpiece. The ideal candidate will possess excellent communication and organizational skills to help plan and provide logistical support for all community programs, will be flexible enough to change roles depending on current initiatives, will have the creativity to initiate change and will demonstrate understanding of the missions of the JEA and SJF.
Basically, there’s a full-time job in sunny Savannah (just named one of the Top Ten cities in the U.S.!) for a person (Jewish or Judeophilic) who can help with the editorial duties of a monthly newspaper, shoulder some of the load from the hard-working directors and hit folks up for a little tzedakeh. I don’t know what the salary is, but I’ve been told it’s competitive enough to draw from the entire country.
I’d be going for it myself if I didn’t already have a fabulous job. Though I think at this point with both kids at camp using their outside voices indoors, me and the mother-in-law yukking things up at the Thursday Senior Lunch Bunch and El Yenta Man taking over the gym with his bubbemintzen, they’ve had enough of the Family Yenta over there…
My dear former colleagues at the j. in San Francisco saw fit to publish my op-ed this week on – what else? – the being Jewish in the South. Some days I sure do miss taking the ferry across the Bay and walking to work through the Financial District…
Friday July 11, 2008
Y’all wouldn’t believe the good life of a Southern Jew
by jessica leigh lebos
We Jews are an adaptive bunch. Put us beyond the Pale, in the dusty Negev or on the streets of San Francisco, and we’ll set up shop and shul and do just fine. Yet a couple years ago when I informed my Bay Area friends that my family and I were moving from the foothills of Mount Tamalpais to Savannah, Ga., I got some pretty freaked reactions.
Some folks were mystified: “They allow Jews in the Deep South?”
Some had watched “Deliverance” too many times: “If you find some people burning a cross on your lawn, don’t panic. Just start speaking in tongues, and they’ll think you’re one of them.”
Some were just clueless: “Georgia? Like, Russia? Dude, the housing prices are gonna be so cheap.”
My husband grew up Jewish in Savannah, so I knew better than to think our neighbors would expect us to have horns. Still, I had reservations about leaving. Where else but the Bay Area can the entire family dress in drag for Purim? Would taschlich ever feel as meaningful as it did under the redwoods? Would I be able to find a corned beef sandwich as good as the one at Saul’s?
Read the rest at jweekly.com!
Good Shabbos from the Family Yenta!
There’s a fab article in the current NY Jewish Week by Carolyn Slutsky on Jewish Savannah’s 275th anniversary, calling the city “an island of stability in a boom-or-bust South.”
Maybe I’m a little sensitive, but that sounds like a veiled blow to the sloooow pace of the Hostess City. I hear all kinds of comments about how nothing ever changes in Savannah, and I’m sure that’s how it seems to a fast-paced New Yorker. But I have to say, plenty of things have changed – for the better – since I moved here two years ago (to the month!)
First off, mid-week Hebrew for grade school students has been efficiently reduced from two afternoons to one (more time for Yenta Boy to practice piano.) And the city’s green movement is flying – the new organic farmer’s market headed by Jewish hipster agrarian Farmer D Joffe at Trustee’s Garden was packed last week. Plus, the meshuggeneh-making intersection of Derenne and Abercorn (one could spend a half an hour trying to get home from Publix before the ice cream melts) is buzzing with bulldozers to make a right turn lane as I write! How can anyone accuse this place of resisting progress?
No, for real, it’s super exciting to be a part of the 275th festivities at Mickve Israel this weekend. Yenta Boy is reading a section at tomorrow’s Shabbat service (we’ve been practicing how to pronounce “iniquity”) and I’m particularly proud of how gorgeous the glossy commemorative journal turned out. I volunteered to edit all the articles on the congregation’s history and first families, and now I feel like I’ve been bestowed insider status – which don’t come easy ’round these parts. My father-in-law likes to joke he’s still a newcomer to Savannah because he’s only been here 40 years. I feel pretty blessed to have been welcomed into this community so quickly.
Well, it might be that I pushed my way in. But no matter, I’m here to stay!
Read the NY Jewish Week article here.
I’ve never been a fan of Madame Tussaud’s, or wax museums in general.
When I was eight, my father thought it would be fun to to screen House of Wax on our brand-new VCR (obviously, the original with creepy Vincent Price; as if the Paris Hilton version could ever hold a candle!) right before a family vacation to the wax museum at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. The Shaun Cassidy exhibit was cool, but I got so hysterical in the chamber of horrors that we were asked to leave – which we did, but not before I grabbed a fistful of hair of the partially decapitated figure under the guillotine, just to make sure it was fake. I still can’t eat clam chowder without seeing blood.
Do you think this guy‘s dad had the same slightly sadistic streak?
Less than three minutes after the doors of Berlin’s new Madame Tussauds Waxworks opened to the public on Saturday, the figure of Hitler had been decapitated by a former policeman. The assailant, a 41-year-old self-professed leftwing activist identified only as Frank L, who was second in line for the museum, was being hailed as a national hero after witnesses described how he ran past guards and leapt on to the figure, ripping off its head while repeatedly shouting: “No more war!”
Many Germans had already expressed disgust that Madame Tussauds would have the poor taste to put up a display in the first place and lauded Frank. L for his “artistic activism”:
“Seventy-five years after he seized power, and 63 years after the end of the Third Reich, finally someone has succeeded in assassinating Adolf Hitler,” wrote the essayist Henryk M. Broder in Der Spiegel. “It’s good news – the bad news is it happened rather too late.”
In spite of the accusations, the museum is already reattaching the wax Adolph’s head to its body and plans to reopen the display as soon as possible. Frank L. faces charges of vandalism and assault.
Should you ever decide to take the kids to Berlin, maybe you’ll fire up some Vincent Price and set ’em loose at Tussauds…?
I mean firecrackers, man. We’re clean here. Except for the occasional Benadryl.
As for the sex part, well, I’ll you what I told Yenta Boy when he busted in our bedroom last Shabbos morning and told us we were being “inappropriate” (for real, his word): “First off, the door was CLOSED. Second, your father and I are MARRIED and that means NOTHING consensual can ever be inappropriate. Now give me back the handcuffs.”
This is also homage to dear Yenta friend Leon Bristow who sits in with the fabulous New Orleans Klezmer Allstars… missin’ ya, Elwood!
*From Ohiso.com.
God bless them, my parents have taken the “tire” out of “retirement” and thrown it off a bridge somewhere. I’ve kvelled continously over my mother’s literary accomplishments and generosity over the years (The Most Energetic Woman Alive just passed through town to smooch the grandkids and buy us new livingroom drapes on her way to realize a long-lived dream of hanging out in Paris for a month) but now it’s Dad’s turn:
After decades mired in the medical world as a surgeon, he closed his practice. For awhile, he played a lot of golf and cooked chicken parmagiana from scratch and drove my mother nuts.
He also began honing his photography hobby into something serious.
A few years ago, missing the adrenaline of cutting people open, he began volunteering his surgical services in fun, sun-filled places like Pakistan and parts of Africa so poor no one’s even heard of them. Last summer Dr. Skip (his favorite sobriquet these days – it’s chummy, easy to pronounce and ambiguously non-ethnic, which is convenient for Jews visiting countries where radical Muslims like to hole up) went to a small village in Tanzania, where he removed goiters and repaired appedixes and generally saved people’s lives with nothing more than a butter knife under a single light bulb. (Ok, I’m exaggerating about the butter knife. But the lighting part is true.)
His sporadic emails were full of appalling details about how little the villagers have (and heartening stories of how sweet and lovely they are) and as soon as he returned he started collecting medical equipment and materials to take back, filling two huge suitcases.
He’s there now, and this time he’s got a blog!
It’s great to get the daily updates, but it doesn’t seem like things at the tiny hospital have improved in the past year:
This one case points up so much of what’s wrong here. The equipment problem has gotten worse. Things like NG tubes , suction equipment and funtioning, reliable lights should be available. They don’t cost that much but nobody cares enough to see that they are on hand. It’s easy to blame the administrative personnel but I accuse the doctors. There is one cardiogram machine in the hospital and it is in the office of the physician/administrator who never sees a patient. The excuse you hear over and over is ‘Well, this is Africa. Things will get better poli-poli (little by little.)’ Well, people, poli-poli isn’t cutting it. I’ve been away from here over a year and from what I see things have gotten worse.They’ve gone from an occasional power outage to four or five a day with no improvement or even deterioration of back-up capacity. The conditions in the wards are dreadful. Most even lack a place to wash your hands … They have allocated a fortune to build a new surgical unit which will be beautiful but how can they use it when they lack the ability to supply the unit they already have? When built it will be a showplace to display to visitng dignitaries who have no idea that it is an empty shell providing the same crappy care as the old one.
It sounds so frusturating, but he keeps doing what he came to do, seeing patients, performing surgery, one stitch at a time. I’m so proud of him.
Maimonides categorized how we give of ourselves into Eight Degrees of Tzedakah – I wonder where Rambam would place continuing to give of one’s time, energy and skills even when the lights keep going out and there’s no antibacterial soap.
Leonard Nimoy – an enterprising spirit if there ever was one – has embarked on a new direction in his photography that’s endeared him forever to this fat-bottomed girl.
The Full Body Project is a collection of black-and-white portraits of proud, happy, large women based on famous paintings that’s meant to challenge our notions of beauty. The exhibit debuted last year at R. Michaelson Galleries and is available in book form.
In the book’s intro, 77 year-old Nimoy rallies against the malevolence of Madison Avenue:
The average American woman weighs 25 percent more than the models wearing the clothes marketed to her. There is a huge industry built up around selling women ways to get their bodies closer to a fantasy ideal. The women in these pages are proudly wearing their own skins. They accept and respect themselves and I hope that my images convey that feeling to others.
For some big laughs, check out Leonard’s interview with Stephen Colbert – hilarious.
Personally, I’m not shocked that the man formerly known as Spock is pushing the boundaries of the feminine. He’s always represented the female form in his art in a provocative way, and really freaked out a lot of religious Jews a few years back with the Shekhina Project, an exploration of sacred sexuality that had scantily-clad women posing with male-only religious objects like tallit and tefillin. By taking his lens to big tushies and saggy boobies, he’s shaking up everyone, bless that pointy-eared Vulcan.
Hat tip to Jewtastic.com; cross-posted to savannah.skirt.com.
I went to my first Catholic wedding last weekend. El Yenta Man has a doll of a client who finally tied the knot with her beau of eight years, and we were honored to receive an invitation. I love weddings no matter what the denomination – the joining of two souls under the Creator and all that. Plus, you know me – I am all about free food.
But first, we had to go to church. This used to make me nervous until I realized that setting foot inside a Christian house of worship would not actually erase my Jewishness and make all my ancestors roll over in their Polish graves, an idea I picked up from my bubbe, who also told me crying would give me wrinkles.
Now I enjoy visiting churches when given the chance, especially in foreign countries where there’s lots of pretty statues to look at and little old ladies light rows and rows of candles (although the Jewish mother in me considers this extremely dangerous. What, can’t God hear without setting the drapes on fire?) But I haven’t sat through an actual service since my best friend and I drank a bottle of Boone’s Farm on Christmas Eve our senior year and snickered through midnight mass (I know, horrible. Please know that my disrespect for religion at that point in my life extended to ALL of them, including my own.)
Of course, El Yenta Man was operating on JST (Jewish Standard Time) so we arrived 15 minutes late and bickering. Forget blending in – we might as well have been waving a giant flag with “Two Loud Late Jews.” We ducked into a pew and I checked it all out – high knotty pine ceilings, giant candlesticks, well-dressed people – it all looked familiar enough.
Until I swung my head forward and saw the 15-foot Jesus. I wasn’t really shocked to him hanging there; I mean, what did I expect, a giant golden calf? But wow, he was big. I couldn’t really take my eyes off him. We Jews aren’t used to having much to look at during services – usually I’m trying to keep my aleph-bet skills fresh by sounding out the Hebrew with my hand covering the alliterations (yes, I still have to peek) and when that gets boring, I study the stained glass windows. Sometimes I eavesdrop, because someone is always carrying on some kind of conversation in synagogue.
But in this church, no one was whispering. I can see why; how can you discuss Mrs. So-and-So’s whacked hat with the feathers or what’s for kiddush lunch when there’s a giant Jesus eyeballing you? At least he wasn’t bloody. My deepest apologies to my Christian readers, but that kind of gives me the willies.
So all was quiet as the bride and groom knelt at the altar. Except for El Yenta Man, who anyone will confirm is an abnormally chatty guy but on this day was affected by a verbal diarrhea so acute he couldn’t help running a commentary on how much he liked the pretty green color of the bridesmaid’s dresses and how gorgeous the bride looked and ooh, there’s Mister Whatsit and he’s just the nicest person…
I tried to explain to him that were weren’t at Mickve Israel and that if he looked around he would realize that no one else was talking, but the woman in front of us turned around and gave us the Stinkeye. So I resorted to the “church pinch,” which seemed appropriate.
“Ow! Why’d you do that? Anyway, did you see that dad from school? I saw him the other day at …”
Finally, I poked him and mouthed “Would you shut up? Jesus is watching!”
El Yenta Man cocked his head and studied the ginormous crucifix for awhile. There was a call and answer portion of the service not unlike a Reform Shabbat, except when everyone knelt down on the small boards attached to the backs of the pews that I guiltily realized were not footrests.
Really, you can’t take us anywhere.
Mazel tov to the happy couple.