Have at it!
Standard FYI clause: I generally wait about 2 hours after Ta-Nehisi would typically open a thread (roughly noon, EST, back when such a thing was typical…!), and if none is forthcoming, I put one up here.
All posts for the month December, 2012
Wednesday open thread.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 26, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/26/wednesday-open-thread-3/
Christmas Eve/Christmas open thread.
I thought that folks might not mind a place to stop by and say hi over the next couple of days, and so here ye be!
Below you’ll find my now-annual holiday post, an essay I wrote for the Chicago Tribune back in the day — it’s one of my personal favorites, and I love having a space in which I can give it a little breathing room.
As I say there, if you’re celebrating, I hope you have a wonderful and very merry Christmas — and if not, I hope you have a really terrific Monday/Tuesday! : )
Posted by emilylhauser on December 24, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/christmas-evechristmas-open-thread/
Blessings of the season.
My now-annual holiday post, an essay I wrote for the Chicago Tribune a few years back. If you’re celebrating, have a wonderful and very merry Christmas — and if not, I hope you have a really terrific Tuesday!
Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem; Christmas c. 1930s
It’s about bringing light into dark places, isn’t it?
As I understand the winter holidays, our Holy Days, this is what they mean: Hope, life, tomorrow. Light, where there was none.
That’s what we mean at my house when we light our menorah, and that’s what we talk about with the kids. For eight nights, after saying the blessings, we sing a sweet, rousing song in Hebrew that announces to the darkness that it shall have no quarter: “Each of us is a small candle,” we sing. “Together, we are a great light.”
And though I am not a Christian, it seems to me that that is what Jesus’s birth means, too. Light in dark places, a small baby who brought hope to millions. “The weary world rejoices,” goes Oh Holy Night, one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, “for yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.”
And Kwanza? I’m white, but it seems to me that lighting candles to remember the struggles of the Black people, to reflect on unity, and to anticipate the future triumph over oppression is a statement of hope most deep.
There is so much darkness in the world, there always has been. But God – or Nature, or our own collective Best Self – has given us the tools to drive it back. The Jewish tradition speaks of tikkun olam, repairing the world in conjunction with the Almighty. This is our job, our highest calling. To quote another song, “We’re one, but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other.”
And indeed, we are not the same. Our holidays are not the same, and even within our communities, our understanding of those holidays is not always the same. But in our own ways, we all seek a brighter tomorrow, a world without war, without hunger, without despair. And these holidays, even the ones that are not in my own heritage, can serve to remind me of that – as well as reminding me that there are many ways of battling evil and wrong, and that we need all of them.
We were created in a mighty multitude, and I believe God knew what He was doing when He made us different. Different brings creativity, it brings unknown joys, it brings solutions. I don’t need you to light candles at my house to believe that you are doing what you can to make the world a better place.
Every year at about this time, we hear over and over again, as we rush about our business, that we don’t focus enough on “what really matters.” We hear from Jews who are sick of being wished a Merry Christmas, Christians who believe that one could, actually, take the Christ out of Christmas, and worshippers of the Simple who decry the cultural trappings of the whole thing. Our national anxiety about being made a victim comes to the top, and it isn’t pretty.
We need to stop. Take a nap, maybe have a cookie, and then look at each other. We’re trying our best, almost all of us, I’m certain. Sure we need to focus on “what really matters,” but bottom line, that’s what we’re trying to do.
We’re human, so sometimes we don’t do it very well. But I am certain that when my Christian neighbors tell me “Merry Christmas,” they’re just wishing me well. And when parents buy a lot of plastic for their kids, they’re just hoping for that up-from-the-gut smile that only a kid can give. Neither of these things are bad; neither of them can reduce in any way the power of the Divine to guide and comfort us.
And after all of this is behind us, it will be a new year. Let’s agree to fill it with hope, and with as much light as we can muster, for the victims of Katrina who are still without homes; for the people living with AIDS in African shanty-towns; for Israeli and Palestinian children who are growing up afraid; for the women of Darfur who cannot get water for their families for fear they will be raped. The world is a dark place; we are the ones who can bring the light in.
Emily L. Hauser is a freelance writer living in Oak Park.
(C) Chicago Tribune, 2005
Posted by emilylhauser on December 24, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/24/blessings-of-the-season-2/
Shas warns against assimilation – in Israel.
If one lives in the Jewish State, carries a state-issued ID that identifies one as “Jewish,” and keeps the customs of the Jewish people, one might be forgiven for thinking that assimilation is not much of a threat. If, however, one is to believe the election campaign of Shas, Israel’s Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party, one would be mistaken.
In a series of ads intended to send the message that voting for Shas is the only way to temper all that’s wrong with the party widely expected to win the upcoming elections—Netanyahu and Lieberman’s Likud Beitenu—Shas sets itself up as both coalition partner and savior: “Only a strong Shas will take care of the weak,” reads one ad, alongside a picture of Netanyahu. Alongside a picture of Lieberman wearing, rather startlingly, given his antipathy towards the religious parties, a black kippa, we read: “Only a strong Shas will prevent assimilation.”
“Assimilation.” Not even—I don’t know—“a watering down of the faith,” but: “Assimilation.” If you are not Jewish like Shas is Jewish, you are in danger of assimilating—even if you live in the Jewish State, carry a Jewish ID, and keep Jewish customs.
Because you see, there is only one right way to be Jewish. And ultra-Orthodox kingmakers have been given free reign on Israel’s domestic scene for 64 years to determine what that is. (Which is why, among other things, the only way for a Jew to get married or buried in the Jewish State is with an ultra-Orthodox rabbi, following ultra-Orthodox custom, your own beliefs be damned.)
This sad truth was given full expression last week when Emily Wolfson and Rhiannon Humphreys, young Jewish women from Great Britain, had the temerity to try to daven at the Western Wall in the custom in which they have been raised: Wrapped in a tallit.
Last Friday, the women—both 18 and participants in RSY-Netzer’s Shnat gap year program—were detained for several hours by Israel Police after wrapping themselves in tallitot, or prayer shawls, at the Western Wall. The women were taking part in a monthly service organized by the group Women of the Wall.
… Wolfson said she wore the tallit that her grandfather presented to her at her bat mitzvah.
You can see why wearing a tallit presented to one by one’s grandfather might signal assimilation. But don’t worry! The ultra-Orthodox in Israel’s political system are doing all they can to protect us from that scourge: “Under a new decree by religious authorities, women cannot enter the Western Wall plaza with Jewish ritual objects.”
Shas wants to make sure Israeli voters know: they are here to protect Israel from that sort of calamity. Otherwise, Israeli Jews might assimilate—into something that looks very much like American Jews.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 23, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/23/shas-warns-against-assimilation-in-israel/
Friday open thread + CALL CONGRESS.
After that repulsive NRA press conference in which the press were not allowed to ask questions, you might want to take a look at my post on why the Americans among you must call Congress about gun control, including video from the President who apparently agrees with me!
Or you can just call them: 202-224-3121
And also… it’s yours!
Standard FYI clause: I generally wait about 2 hours after Ta-Nehisi would typically open a thread (roughly noon, EST, back when such a thing was typical…!), and if none is forthcoming, I put one up here.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 21, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/friday-open-thread-call-congress/
Obama on gun control: “I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”
Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association put on a dog and pony show today in which he blamed everything on Earth for gun violence, other than actual guns (including, but not limited to, a shortage of guns). While he was doing this — literally, as Wayne LaPierre was talking — three people were killed and three wounded by a lone shooter in Pennsylvania; the injured were all armed state troopers; the assailant is also dead.
Earlier today, President Obama responded to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have signed We the People petitions calling for sensible gun control (video below). He said:
I can’t do it alone. I need your help. If we’re going to succeed, it’s going to take a sustained effort from mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, law enforcement and responsible gun owners, organizing, speaking up, calling their members of Congress as many times as it takes, standing up and saying: Enough, on behalf of all our kids. That’s how change happens. Because of committed Americans who work to make it happen. Because of you.
Please call your US Representative and your Senators – here’s that number again: 202-224-3121 – and tell them that you support sensible gun control legislation. I just called my Republican Senator a second time (my Democratic Senator and Democratic Congressman are among the legislature’s most progressive members, so I’ve only called them once) and the very friendly and helpful staffer asked me what I meant by “sensible gun control.” Here’s what I mentioned:
- An automatic weapons ban
- A limit on magazine capacity
- Background checks
- A national gun registry
These things strike me as straight-up common sense, which is what I said on the phone. It just makes sense to say to someone “I’m going to do a background check on you before I sell you this deadly weapon.” I made a point of saying that I have no issue with responsible gun owners, hunters and so on, people who use and store their weapons in a responsible manner, and when I was done, the staffer said “Thank you very much. The Senator will get this message this afternoon.”
As the President said: This is how change happens.
Please, please, please – CALL THEM: 202-224-3121
*************
A couple of useful resources:
1) from Mother Jones: Do Armed Civilians Stop Mass Shooters? Actually, No.
2) from the Washington Post: Ten-country comparison suggests there’s little or no link between video games & gun murders.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 21, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/obama-on-gun-control-i-cant-do-it-alone-i-need-your-help/
The season. The seasons. The many, many seasons.
I think this is meant to represent a tree as it moves through the rather more famous Four Seasons. But it kind of looks to me like the tree is moving through hell at a certain point.
As I drove past a Chicago Park District sign today, I was reminded that America has much more than “a” holiday season. It has much more than four seasons. It is, in my experience, positively awash in seasons.
The sign I saw on Lake Shore Drive declared that I could “Get Fit for Free For a Week!”, and I was reminded: Oh, that’s right! I-made-a-New-Year’s-resolution-fitness Season is nearly upon us!
IMANYRF Season is coterminous, of course, with I-need-to-organize-my-stuff Season.
Which is followed by Super Bowl/Valentines Day Season, which is then immediately followed by March Madness/St. Patrick’s Day Season.
Then, depending a little bit on when Easter falls in the Gregorian calendar of any given year, it’s Easter Season (or, as I like to think of it: Robin Eggs Season). Then, wowie, before you can even catch your breath from the unhealthy number of robin eggs you’ve consumed (ahem) – BAM! It’s End-of-the-school-year/Grads and Dads Season!
Followed by Fourth of July Season.
Back-to-School Season.
Pre-Super Bowl Season.
Halloween Season.
Thanksgiving Season starts on the same day as NaNoWriMo Season (though this may be only among a certain cohort of mine), but then NaNoWriMo runs over onto Christmas/The Holidays Season and it’s a wonder all hell hasn’t broken loose yet. I can only presume that this is because the NaNoWriMo folks are armed only with pens.
And then…. That’s right, we’re right back at I-made-a-New-Year’s-resolution-fitness Season!
I note all this for two reasons: One – I hate March Madness and really wish people would shut up about it. For a year? Maybe? I mean, yeah, yeah, Mighty, Mighty Gonzaga, whatevs. I DON’T CARE.
But reason #two is this: It’s so sweet how all of these seasons (many of which hinge largely on the fact that advertisers need something to pin product on) actually have traditions that attend to them. We human beings really do like order, and we like ritual, and we like to know from one year to the next that we can guess where we’ll be come March 12.
So while I’m not sure that I-made-a-New-Year’s-resolution-fitness Season/I-need-to-organize-my-stuff Season is the most magical time of year? I kind of get a kick out of it. Because I know it’s coming, and then? There it is.
And there’s your deep thought for today.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 20, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/the-season-the-seasons-the-many-many-seasons/
Conservative “feminism” for Flournoy.
Michele Flournoy
Despite what you may have heard around the internet, I’m no fan of anti-Semitism, and I am (to top it off) an actual-factual Zionist—and I am furthermore a big ol’ feminist, so I’m also no fan of power structures that shut out women.
One might think, then, that I would like the idea of a Defense Secretary Michele Flournoy, particularly when her biggest competition appears to be in the form of former Senator Chuck Hagel, a man who has just been declared an anti-Semite by folks (like Bret Stephens and Jennifer Rubin) who like to declare such things. A not-anti-Semitic lady! What could be finer?
Well, prepare for a shock: I actually like Hagel.
Aside from anything else, I don’t buy the right’s anti-Semitism argument (so neatly eviscerated by my boss Peter Beinart yesterday), or its sudden-onset feminism. Indeed, I have very little time for either.
As I’ve said before, the false equivalency between opposition to right-wing Israel’s political agenda and anti-Semitism is a-historical, intellectually insulting, and frankly offensive. If American conservatives don’t know what 21st century anti-Semitism looks like, they could always check in with Hungary’s Jewish community. But hey—at least this is an argument I’ve met before.
But Conservative demands for more women in Obama’s next Cabinet? Am I the only one gobsmacked by the unmitigated gall?
I don’t know if you recall, but waaaaay back last week, there was every reason to believe that President Obama was considering a woman for a high-level Cabinet position—but Susan Rice wasn’t, apparently, the right woman. So she was hounded out of the running, with neocon darling John McCain at the head of the pack.
Moreover, the party for which American conservatives cast their votes is the same party which until very recently was trying to win control of the country so that it could do things like limit abortion rights, redefine rape, and repeal a health care law set to roll back an enormous amount of gender-based health care discrimination. So you will excuse me if I don’t take the call to grrl power all that seriously.
No, this sudden interest in Flournoy, Obama’s own former under-secretary is (if I may borrow a term) Lady-Washing, at its most crude.
Neocons don’t like Hagel on Iran. Full stop. (Well, they don’t like him on a lot of things, but they really don’t like him on Iran). And neocons want us to believe that being pro-Israel (and, ipso facto, not-anti-Semitic) is identical with supporting a strike against Iran.
But here’s the thing: It’s just possible to love Israel and the United States and believe that starting a war with Iran would actually be bad for both. It’s just possible to believe that the people who sold us the Iraq War shouldn’t be trusted on Iran. And it’s just possible to be a feminist who thinks a man happens to be best choice for a particular job (optics aside).
One caveat: I don’t actually know that Michele Flournoy would be a bad choice for Defense. I know that I don’t agree with her idea that the U.S. military is in danger of becoming overly cautious as a result of a new “Vietnam syndrome,” and as regards her assertion that “we have to be willing to fail,” well, I’d say our military establishment has done enough failing in the last decade—but as Abe Foxman himself has noted, “the Secretary of Defense is not an independent contractor.”
But I do know that I agree with Hagel’s instinct toward diplomacy, and I have long admired his willingness to speak frankly about Israel and the difference between being pro-Israel and being in thrall to a particular set of Israeli policy positions. Regardless of what Bret Stephens might think, there is actual courage involved in taking that position in American politics—as anyone who paid any attention to the last Presidential campaign can attest.
So please, conservative Americans, miss me with your appeals to my feminism, or to my Zionism, when you try to criticize this President. The bloom is off the rose for fact-free smear campaigns (as anyone who paid any attention to the election’s results can attest). You’re embarrassing yourselves.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 19, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/conservative-feminism-for-flournoy/
A crow, a cat, and a dog walk into a kitchen.
Here you will see a crow feeding a cat and a dog.
(Doesn’t the dog look all “Oh God, that awkward cousin is here again! Maybe if I go to my room, Mom won’t notice.”)
*
I discovered this video via an absolutely fascinating post at io9, Corvids: The Birds Who Think Like Humans, which in turn reminded me of this equally fascinating article from the New York Times a few years back, Friend or Foe? Crows Never Forget a Face, It Seems. Go! Read!
Posted by emilylhauser on December 19, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/19/a-crow-a-cat-and-a-dog-walk-into-a-kitchen/
Twenty-five years ago, we didn’t know it was the first intifada.
Twenty-five years ago, we were two weeks into the first intifada, but we didn’t know it yet. We were calling it “disturbances,” or “riots,” or just sitting with our mouths agape, our hearts pounding out of our chests, as we watched the nightly news. Even when we started calling it the intifada, we didn’t realize it was the first.
Israel was a smaller place then. There was only one TV station, only one news broadcast, 9 o’clock every night, Haim Yavin at the helm, telling us what had happened across the border in what we then still sometimes called the administered territories, showing us footage of a kind of rage that stopped us in our tracks and caught our breath in our throats.
I was working toward my Bachelors degree at Tel Aviv University at the time, and that rage was all anyone could talk about. We would stand outside our classrooms and talk about it, sit on the bus and talk about it, go to parties and talk about it. And at 9 o’clock on the dot, someone always turned on the television.
My boyfriend at the time was a shiriyoner, a tank commander, in reserves, and from the intifada’s earliest stages, he and all the other young men who had so recently left Lebanon were thrown into a kind of endless roundabout of call-ups, returning to the uniform, sent into the maw of something for which they’d never been trained, told to do what the politicians couldn’t do: Make it stop.
He would come home from weeks away and our evenings would be consumed with the same conversations, this time with other young men who had also just come back from that same maw. His nights were sometimes consumed with nightmares. He was gone so much that he failed his classes, a year of university studies gone in a barrage of rocks.
I know now that those rocks were an odd, twisted kind of violent non-violence. The Palestinian factions had arms, plenty of arms—they chose not to use them. They chose to focus mostly on trying to establish methods of civil disobedience and mutual support networks, to cut the occupation off at its knees without resorting to all-out warfare.
But rocks can kill, and so can cinder blocks and Molotov cocktails, and all that rage—Tel Aviv was full of young women like me, just waiting.
It was then that so many of my generation discovered where we really stood. I had a gentle friend who I’d cherished for years, an air force navigator, who told me that if he were Palestinian and in one of those refugee camps, he would be grateful for everything Israel had given him. I had another friend, the son of a Holocaust survivor, tell me he felt like a Nazi. And the boyfriend—the boyfriend did everything within his power to keep the madness and the rage at bay, to be a human in an inhuman circumstance. At the time I remember being glad he was in Gaza, because the guys who actually wanted to be in Gaza were the guys who actually killed people.
It was during those endless conversations, those endless nights with Haim Yavin and my shell-shocked friends, that I came to realize that if Israel really wanted the intifada and all it stood for to truly end, there were two choices, even if Israel didn’t want to admit it: Kill and/or expel all the Palestinians, or negotiate a second state. Two states for two peoples, we called it then, and at the time the idea was borderline traitorous.
Today of course, the two state solution has taken on a utopian cast, because in twenty-five years, we have accomplished nothing. Nothing but countless more deaths, countless more nightmares, countless more moments of sheer inhumanity. Another intifada (and maybe a third on the way), suicide bombings, a few wars, and the ceaseless grinding noise of the settlement project, building on and on and on.
I’ve spent a quarter of a century fighting for a two state peace. I completed my BA, started working as a reporter, fell in and out of love, married a Jerusalemite. There was a time that I knew that I would raise children in Tel Aviv, children who would visit their Palestinian friends on school vacations, crossing the border to Palestine with ease and excitement, happy to be driving the hills that roll out from Israel to Ramallah or Jericho.
All those boys—they were mostly boys—on both sides of the intifada who were doing what society and circumstance called their duty are now as middle-aged as me. I remember their faces, I remember their dreams. I don’t really hope for much anymore.
Posted by emilylhauser on December 18, 2012
https://emilylhauserinmyhead.wordpress.com/2012/12/18/twenty-five-years-ago-we-didnt-know-it-was-the-first-intifada/
Emily L. Hauser - In My Head 