It goes without saying that my children are geniuses. What kind of Jewish mother would I be if I didn’t brag about the musical instruments (violin, guitar, pots and pans in perfect rhythm,) the far above-average reading levels (the boy has finished all the Harry Potters with a little help from his daddy, the girl can write her name) and the random artistic creations (the boy has written comic books, the girl builds bizarre multimedia installations using Disney princesses, confetti and pine cones.)

But when it comes to encouraging a child’s natural curiosity, I think we may have to bring the reins in:

Boy: Dad, can I use the computer?

El Yenta Man: Why?

Boy: Is the printer hooked up?

El Yenta Man: Why, Abraham?

Boy: Because I want to download the German language.

El Yenta Man: Um, how many pages do you think the German language is?

Boy: Two or three?

El Yenta Man: I think it might be more than that.

Boy: Oh, I just need the common stuff. Y’know, to chat with people.

Look, I’m all about the child learning another language and he’s already driving his Hebrew school teacher meshuggah with vocabulary requests. But why does it have to be German?

We tried to make him understand that many Jews of a certain age still cringe at the sound of a German accent, and wouldn’t he like to study something like Spanish, or perhaps Mandarin? Or least something that doesn’t sound like bones being crushed in the garbage disposal, like Italian?

To her credit, his bubbie didn’t plotz over it. She just shrugged and said “It’s probably a past life thing. Let him be.”

But I think I heard my own bubbie shake up the dust in her urn when I dropped him off for school this morning he gave me a big wave and yelled “auf Wiedersehen!”

I can’t believe this. Judy Gold – yes, THE funny, famous Judy Gold who actually made me pee one time when I was listening to her stand-up CD – read my blog post about her book 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother, and she thinks I’m hilarious.

Just had to shep a lil’ nachas for myself and share. Check this email I got yesterday:

Hey Yenta –
We are cracking up at your answers to our questions. Good luck with EVERYTHING. You are hilarious.
Best,
Judy (aka Jewdy) Gold

How cool is this woman? She couldn’t possibly respond to every silly blogger who writes about Jewish mothers…could she?

No, this post is not about what I wore to work today with black boots. Too tacky and my veriscose veins would show. Although maybe with tights out to a club later.

It’s that time of the month in my world where I have more tasks to complete than I have brain cells, so here are a few morsels to keep you busy this morning:

Daniel Radcliffe, the Boy Known As Harry Potter (or, for you arty types, The Man Who Got Nekkid Onstage This Summer) has donated his first pair of glasses to the Respectacles Project, part of the Holocaust Memorial Commemorations in Great Britain. This is wonderful news since last year the Brits wanted to cancel the Holocaust.

Yes Virginia, there is such thing as Black Jews. Even George Bush knows that.

If you haven’t gotten the memo, rock music is the future of Judaism. And Craig Taubman is our king.

Since Judy Gold forgot to interview me for her explosively successful Broadway-and-all-over-da-place one woman show and book, I thought I’d answer her 25 Questions for A Jewish Mother anyway, just ’cause.

You can tag any other Jewish mother with this meme, too! But make sure they link back here so I can see what an aberrance I am!

1. What makes a Jewish mother different from a non-Jewish mother?
I can only speak for myself, but after eating out several times recently it appears that what makes me different than non-Jewish mothers is the insistence that my children use table manners.

2. Who is your favorite famous Jewish woman?
Amy Winehouse. Just kidding! No, I’ve always adored Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand because they wear their Jewishness so proudly and glamorously; it gave me nachas as a little girl to know I could be loud, proud and successful.

3. Do you approve of your children’s choices?
Since they’re only 4 and almost 8, they rarely make choices that I can’t correct with the threat of no dessert for a week. But as far as life choices, I don’t care what they do as long as they support themselves.

4. Would your life have taken a different turn if your hadn’t had kids?
Well, isn’t this a silly question? I would be a famous novelist with a fat Manhattan apartment and closet full of expensive shoes – der.

5. What’s your biggest regret?
There’s still time to accumulate bigger ones, but mostly that we cannot seem to get a sukkah up in the backyard year after year.

6. What’s the best piece of advice your mother ever gave you?
Never go into business with friends.

7. Who is your favorite woman in the Bible?
Miriam. She could smell water and she could shake her timbrel like nobody’s business.

8. Who did you name your children after and why?
Abraham Lightning was supposedly named after my husband’s grandfather whose name was Herman so I’m still unclear on the connection, but there’s no question this child needed this name. His middle name came from a similarly strange situation going on in my beloved’s brain: It was supposed to be “Barack”, which is Hebrew for “lightning,” but El Yenta Man decided to write the English down on the birth certificate and it stuck.

Liberty Ruth was named after my great-grandmother Lillian as well as our wish to reclaim the term “liberty” from the schmucks who have tainted it with their neo-con nonsense. Since her brother has a biblical-hippie moniker, we wanted to balance her hippie name with a Torah reference, and since there are grandmothers on both sides named Ruth, her middle name was easy.

9. How important is it for your children and/or grandchildren to be raised Jewish?
Very, very important, though the level of observance isn’t as important as them learn to value family, education, humor, art and a personal relationship with the Divine. The hardest part of this is that I feel deeply responsible for helping my children and my future grandchildren develop a strong, positive Jewish identity. I always tell the kids in my Sunday School class: Being Jewish makes you special, but not any more special than anyone else.

I may be taking the reinforcing a tad too much: Some random person at the mall told my little girl last week that she was pretty and she said, “Yes, I am pretty. Pretty AND Jewish.”

10. Are you kosher?
It depends on who’s asking, but I don’t think I’d make a good stew, even if I was slaughtered halachically. Heh.
I don’t eat pork but El Yenta Man will gleefully eat anything outside the home. And every Savannah Jew knows the Torah has a misprint when it comes to shrimp.

11. What do you think about men and women being separated at shul?
Even though I’ve never experienced it, I kind of like the idea since El Yenta Man is forever trying to feel me up during Rabbi Belzer’s sermons.

12. Do you find Judaism limiting or empowering?
My own personal, DIY Judaism allows me all the power I like – my relationship with God doesn’t need a synagogue or even the Torah – but I recognize the limits of my Jewish education. However, shaving my head and not shaking hands with any other men ain’t ever gonna be my bag. I don’t judge anyone’s choices, but from the outside, orthodoxy seems suffocating by its very definition.

13. Did you raise your sons differently from your daughters?
I have one of each, and the boy likes to wear his bubbe’s clip-on earrings occasionally and the girl can deliver a karate chop that could fell a professional wrestler. Of course I have to raise them differently – because they’re different people, not because they’re different genders.

14. What do you think of Bat Mitzvahs?
More tradition, less trashy party.

15. What do you think of women rabbis?
They f’kn rock, yo!

16. Why do you think Jewish mothers are the butt of so many jokes?
Because men are so intimidated by our strength and tenacity, they can only deflect their inferiority into stand-up comedy.

17. Would you sit shiva if your child married a non-Jew?
I would sit on the couch eating fried chicken and feeling sorry for myself for the ass-kicking I would be getting from my own mother, but shiva? Life’s too short. If my children love someone enough to marry them, I’ll come around eventually. And show up every Sabbath with challah.

18. What is Jewish mother guilt?
There are two kinds: The kind she gives and the kind she holds. I try not to give too much because I don’t find it an effective manipulative tool; threats work much better. The guilt we hold could be an extra chromosome that allows us to tap into the collective unconscious belief that the world is a really awful place and that somehow it’s our fault.

19. Do you have any stories from your mother or grandmother that you would like to share with us?
Well, there’s this one from my bubbe (may she rest in peace.) She used to make fabulous blintzes when I was very small, but I could never get the recipe out of her. She was born in Poland and spoke fluent Yiddish, but she never, ever went to shul and considered art her religion.

My mother is my dearest friend and someone I admire very much. She does more in one day than many people do in a lifetime – writes books, makes money, manages by father, shops for my kids. And she became a bat mitzvah at 60!

20. What is God to you?
I shall refer y’all to this poem I wrote on that very subject.

21. Were you or any of your relatives affected by the Holocaust?
My mother’s grandparents came to New York in the late 30’s, but the rest of my greatgrandmother’s wealthy Warsaw family was killed at Auschwitz. With all the older Jewish folks I hang around these days, I am surprised that there aren’t more Holocaust survivors among them. Sometimes I experience great sadness that mine will be the last generation to speak to survivors firsthand and I am grateful for all the work people have done to preserve their stories.

22. Are you a Zionist and what do you think about the situation in Israel?
I don’t know if I can call myself a Zionist and I’m always embarrassed that I don’t know more about “the situation” in Israel. I was more informed when I worked at a Jewish newspaper; now that I work at a women’s magazine, it’s mostly fashion info and Hillary Clinton that leak into my cranial periphery.

I visited for a summer in 1992 and have not been back, and I find many Israelis so “foreign” in their brashness and the way they take Judaism for granted. But anyone who says a critical word about Israel around me better be prepared to feel the wrath.

I don’t “think” so much about Israel as I feel protective of it.

23. Have you ever experienced anti-Semitism?
Not so much out-and-out hatred, but mostly in the form of ignorance. Last week I ran into some dipshit mother of one of Abe’s classmates who was talking about something and then stopped and said “Oh that’s right, you people don’t believe in God.”

And of course, there’s the Kike Cake.

24. How many times a day do you call your children/mother?
My kids call me at work or on my cell a few times a day and I talk to my mom every day in spite of a three-hour time difference, y’know, just to kibbitz. I LOVE UNLIMITED LONG DISTANCE.

25. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do as a mother?
The bris wasn’t exactly a good time, and I breastfed them both until they were way past 2. And lately handling their dirty socks requires a gas mask. Mostly I’ve been blessed with situations that I can handle (except when there’s even a drop of blood involved; then I faint and El Yenta Man takes over.)

My children aren’t teenagers yet; ask me again when Abe learns to drive.

Feeling a bit unleavened lately? Maybe you just need to buy yourself your very own matzo manufacturing plant.

If you don’t, someone else is going to turn it into million-dollar condos.

Happy New Year to y’all! Here’s a photo of the mishpocheh at the Tybee Island Polar Plunge, where we performed our ersatz mikveh with the rest of the megshuggenehs. Such fun!

Thanks to all who posted comments about the Kike Cake (innocently carried away by the mailman last week; he even left us a thank you note.) El Yenta Man has been convinced that his silence was in no way appropriate and has promised to make the little old lady do 20 push-ups for every rascist comment from now on.

I have sitting on our kitchen counter a wonderful smelling cake. It came wrapped in tinfoil, a sure sign it was homemade, which in fact it was: El Yenta Man brought it home yesterday from one the regulars in his Senior Power Hour class, a collection of five or so 80 year-olds who show up twice a week to have him take them through arm circles and leg lifts and whatever other exercises their bodies are still able to handle. He always speaks of these clients with much affection, particularly the little old lady who gave him the aforementioned cake, who probably spent two days mixing and baking and wrapping the two dozen loaves she gave out to her mailman, neighbors and other favorite people for the holidays, including her wise-ass personal trainer.

So why the hesitation, you ask? Why don’t I just slice off a nice hunk and slap a nice shmear of cream cheese on it and snarf it down for breakfast? Why not serve it up with a pot of tea and nosh on it all day? Because, dear readers, the cake has been tainted.

Not literally poisoned, but the gift loaf has been rendered toxic with words:

Yesterday, during the transaction that involved giving the cake and all its “Merry Christmas” niceities, El Yenta Man tactfully worked into the conversation that we actually celebrate Chanukah, but our family would be so very grateful for the Little Old Lady’s cake because Jews love snacks and we can feel so left out around these holidays (absolute bullhockey – we looove Christmas, watching everyone else spaz out over relatives and fancy dinners while we eat fish sticks and watch Miyazaki movies – but El Yenta Man is polite and considerate of others’ feelings and wanted the Little Old Lady to know how much he appreciated her baking in spite of how it must have taxed her bum hip.)

And then the LOL followed up EYM’s bumbling gratitude with this: “You know, I like you a lot, you’re all right…you’re not like all those other kikes.”

Yes, you read that right. El Yenta Man was still in shock about it when he recounted the story in our kitchen that night, the cake still wrapped in its crumpled tinfoil, smelling like heaven but radiating a certain evil.

Now, I haven’t even heard that word in so long it had fallen off my Jewish epithet radar. According to Wikipedia, Yiddishkeit guru Leo Rosten says it started off as a term of affection between greenhorn Jews from the Old Country:

“The word kike was born on Ellis Island, when Jewish immigrants who were illiterate (or could not use Roman-English letters), when asked to sign the entry-forms with the customary ‘X,’ refused—and instead made a circle. The Yiddish word for ‘circle’ is kikel (pronounced KY – kel), and for ‘little circle,’ kikeleh. Before long the immigration inspectors were calling anyone who signed with an ‘O’ instead of an ‘X’ a kikel or kikeleh or kikee or, finally and succinctly, kike.”

It seems to our ancestors, an “X” resembled the cross worshipped by the Christian persecutors they’d been trying to leave behind, and Jewish Americans continued to use an “O” as a signature for decades after the large European emmigrations. The term stuck, though it was mostly “used by Jews to describe other Jews” and only developed into an ethnic slur later on. (An eerie linguistic parallel to the N-word, nu?)

So I grilled El Yenta Man: What did you say? Did you tell her that word it totally, completely inappropriate? Why didn’t you give her the cake back and tell her us kikes don’t eat doorstops? Since she has an Irish last name, did you tell you forgive her ignorance because she’d obviously been drinking?

But it seems that my husband, whose wit is normally sharper than Emeril’s fillet knife, was rendered speechless by the racist remarks of an 88-year-old Southern belle. He said nothing, just stuck the loaf of tinfoil under his arm and came home, where he made excuses for her: She’s old, she’s lived in Savannah her whole life, she would be totally crushed if he brought it up again because she doesn’t know better, she probably was drunk…

But I’m not having it. I don’t care how old someone is; that kind of speech and behavior is unacceptable. I think he should figure out how to respectfully let this LOL know that that word might have been a part of her vernacular for the first nine-or-so decades of her life, but she needs to excise it immediately if she would still like El Yenta Man spot her while she does armcurls with 1-lb. dumbbells.

What say you, dear reader? Am I overreacting (it would not be the first time)? Should we let LOL live out the rest of her life (seriously, how much longer can it be? Five years? Ten years? She does exercise – it could be 20) spreading her antiquated anti-Semitism? What if EYM does confront her and she gets defensive and angry, thereby activating a hatred for Jews that had been latent for half a century?

In the meantime, I’m not letting anyone in my family touch the F’kn Kike Cake. But because I don’t like to waste, I think I’ll re-gift it to my gentile neighbors before it gets stale.

This is 17 year-old Lauren Rose – Jewish, British and uncomfortably Spears-like (circa 2003. Please, God, steer little Lauren away from that path.)

Ha’aretz reports this pop-schlock rendition has a decent chance of hitting No. 1 for Christmas, which is some kind of victory for our tribe. But is it good for the Jews if the rest of the world now believes that “Hava Nagila” translates to “Baby Let’s Dance”?

Well, it depends.

If you’re cool, live within a 100-mile radius of Miami and can party with the big kids (i.e., you have an alcohol tolerance of more than one vodka tonic before you need to find a nice couch to take a nap on), you go to Jmerica’s annual The Eve Party.

If you’re a guilt-drunk Jewish mother in your 30’s, you spend the evening babysitting at the church whose members entertained your children during Yom Kippur services. Then you go to your goyish friend’s house and accept the fact that in spite of your best efforts to kill your children’s imaginative take on why Jewish children still deserve presents on Christmas, Santa will not die.

Or, if you don’t fit into either of those categories, maybe you’ll be:

*Stealing baby Jesusi from the neighborhood creches and replacing them with garden gnomes

*Marching up and down the street singing “Maoz Tzur” and banging pots and pans

*Waiting patiently by the fireplace with a plate of rugelach and a glass of Manischewitz

Hmm? Let me know.

Why yes, the eighth night of Chanukah did fill the spiritual void I was experiencing this past Festival of Lights: One of our favorite Jewish families, the Cohens of Groveland Circle, had us over for menorah-lighting, tilapia and from-scratch latkes. I am ashamed to admit I haven’t grated a potato since I discovered frozen hash browns; this year I even resorted to Streit’s mix on one chaotic night. Guess what? They tasted awesome – they were fried, for heaven’s sake. But Wendy and Jon’s were truly special, mixed with carrots and zucchini.

After I tried to open up a second bottle of Kedem white wine (tasty with fish!) with a corkscrew and it wasn’t until every person in the room tried to pull the cork that we noticed I’d punctured a hole in the screw-off cap, we whiled away the evening watching the candles burn down and cracking up over Wendy’s starring role in the Savannah Morning News’ Chanukah feature, which focused on her conversion to Judaism. Check this melodramatic opening paragraph:

Wendy Cohen has no childhood memories of Hanukkah to pass on to her three children.
No heirloom menorah to light together.
No family latke recipes to share.
However, she has plenty of memories of celebrating Christmas.

I guess the reason it’s so funny is that Wendy is one of the most authentic Jewish mothers I know (see latkes) and the Cohen home pulses with such warmth. They keep kosher and walk to the Conservative shul most Saturdays with their three (unbelievably well-behaved) children without making it seem difficult; their observance is joyful and inspiring rather than judgmental and limiting. Plus, Wendy isn’t shy about throwing around the f-word when the appropriate occasion arises (oil spattering on exposed flesh, the curtains next to the menorah table coming dangerously close to incineration) which makes her f’kn cool in my book.

Like good Jewish mothers, we shared menorah cleaning tips: I’ve always frozen them and chipped the wax off, the Cohens like to boil off the extra goo. So this year I’m trying both to get that brand-new shine back to our five chanukiahs – it’s working so fabulously so far, but I’ve only cleaned two. What’s the rush, nu?

As for today’s image, there’s nothin’ like a menorah-mimicking Mandelbrot set fractal (invented by a Jewish mathematician, of course) to get me in the mood for spiritual navelgazing (hey, am I the only one who thinks bellybuttons resemble a Fibonacci spiral?) Larger version here.