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celebrin
Probably my interactions with less- (or non-)observant Jews.
Take my husband's family, for instance. Back when I was a gentile, my presence (e.g. at Pesach) didn't challenge them in any way. I'd ask questions, they'd happily go into "teacher" mode, and all was well with the world. Now, though, I'm much more observant than they are and, in some areas at least, I'm more educated than they are, with the result that there's some amount of unstated unease during visits. They worry about whether I'll be able to eat the food (so do I, frankly, but I don't say it); I worry about how to balance my need to keep Shabbat/Yom Tov with their desire to go out to the theatre; etc. I end up making compromises I don't want to make (left to myself I just wouldn't eat in any restaurant during the week of Pesach, period); they are of course also making compromises. I'm not judging them at all, but I guess I worry that they'll see it that way when I'm really just trying to take care of my own needs without affecting them more than necessary. There is lots of good will -- I get along very well with almost all of them -- but things can still be awkward. People in general have trouble understanding the difference between "this is wrong for me" and "this is wrong"; they're the sort who take personal offense when I ask if there's butter in the cake.
2. My mouth waters when you post what you serve on Shabbat...until I get
to read that there's stuff I'm allergic to. Do you have a recipe for a
meal that contains no nuts, tomatoes or seafood of any kind? (by meal,
I'd say fleshig, main course, two sides one dessert.)
Sure, I think we can work with that. (And thanks for the compliment!) I'm going to assume you mean a Shabbat meal, so prepared in advance and kept warm until after the start of Shabbat.
Roasted chicken: take olive oil and mix with crushed garlic, oregano
(or other herbs of your choice), and black pepper. Rub this all
over the chicken, seal in foil, cook at high temperature (say 425)
until the juices just run clear (how long this is depends on how
big the chunks of chicken are and whether there's bone). Remove
the foil and cook for about 10 more minutes to brown a little. You
can now seal this in foil and hold at a lower temperature. (Note:
don't use a casserole with lid; that doesn't make a tight-enough
seal and the chicken will dry out.) Aside: some of my readers know
a lot more about roasting than I do (paging magid in
particular), and I hope they'll speak up.
Roasted veggies: As long as you're roasting stuff anyway, carrots, parsnips, onions, and potatoes can also be rubbed with that oil and roasted alongside the chicken. Add some whole cloves of garlic for good measure. You don't need to cover them until it's time to hold them; there's no risk of carrots drying out. :-) Bell peppers also roast well. I have not had much luck with "soft" vegetables like broccoli; they disintegrate or turn brown.
Salad made with fresh spinach, red onion (sliced thin), radishes, broccoli, mandarin orange segments, sliced apples (dunk in lemon juice before adding), and dressed with vinegar and oil (or just lime juice works well too).
Optional: chicken soup with beef dumplings; I usually buy the soup from the kosher market, and the dumplings come from the frozen-food section. Optionally, you can add cooked rice or noodles to the soup, though I find that the dough around the dumplings provides starch enough.
Dessert: apple-spice cake (made with applesauce); if you need a recipe let me know. (I have a couple cookbooks with parve versions that I've used, though it seems to be a common-enough cake that anything you find via Google is probably fine too.) In season, fresh fruit also makes a tasty dessert.
How's that?
3. What are ten books that you have read that made an impact on you?
Hmm, let's see... I'm not claiming these are the top ten; that would be an impossible task. But here are ten:
The Little Prince. I was pretty young when I first read it (maybe second or third grade?), and it was utterly different from anything else I'd read. Both the prince and the pilot saw the world differently than I did at the time, so reading it was pretty neat.
Conversations with Rabbi Small. It's fiction, and so-so fiction at that. But it was my first informal condensed summary of some of the key ideas of Judaism, so it was formative.
Fish: The Basics. Really. I understand much more about cooking fish now, and I eat a lot of fish.
The Mythical Man-Month (first edition). This taught me a lot about software projects in the real world, where things are not neat and tidy and packaged in semester-long chunks ideally tuned for the number of people available.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. This is actually the only Heinlein novel I have read (well, finished). The political ideas really resonate, and I was in the midst of a small-scale rebellion in a club at the time.
The Phantom Tollbooth. I have nothing grand to say about it other than that it's a book I think everyone should read. Yes, everyone. (Well, everyone who speaks English, anyway.) Nominally a children's book, but not exclusively.
Lapsing into a Comma. A very well-written style guide for modern English. This speaks to my inner pedant.
Two Jews Can Still Be a Mixed Marriage. Coping strategies.
A Shabbat Reader (Elkins). A collection of essays from a variety of viewpoints, many of which really speak to me.
Fifteenth-Century Dance and Music. Ok, it's specialized, but it did provide the essential source material that enabled me and my co-author to write Joy and Jealousy.
4. What about 5 good movies?
This is both easier and harder. I don't watch a lot of movies, so the choices are more limited, but on the other hand, I know I've missed a lot of good stuff. So, five movies that really appealed to me for various reasons:
Prince of Egypt. They did a very good job with the exodus story (aside from some gratuitious midrashic fluff they added), and I also liked the music quite a bit.
The Right Stuff. I'm a sucker for space history to some extent, but this is really well-done.
Dances with Wolves. A lot of people have problems with Costner, and I'm not saying he's great, but this movie really touched me on several viewings.
The Hobbit. Yes yes, the recent LotR movies are stunning and beautiful, but the animated Hobbit was endearing. (It's been a long time since I've seen it, so I may revise that opinion later, but this is how I remember it.)
Jesus Christ Superstar. I saw the movie long before I saw a stage production; I like it in both forms. Upon watching the movie a few years ago I was struck by how much sense Judas was making, especially in the beginning -- didn't pick up on that when I was a kid!
5. As someone who isn't a parent, you get a special view at children.
What do you wish parents could/would do better?
Accept responsibility.
If you are a parent, then your life must to a large extent revolve around your child for many years. This will affect how you live your life. It will affect your free time, your finances, your ability to go out spontaneously, perhaps your career, and perhaps your time with family and friends. If you aren't prepared for that, don't do it. Society doesn't owe you the ability to pursue this venture with no external impact.
Nothing irks me more than parents who decide that their children aren't going to stop them from having fun no matter what, so they (say) bring them to an SCA event and then just dump them while they go off to do stuff with adults, relying on the good will of the community. Some even cite this as an advantage, claiming that it takes a village to raise a child. That may be true, but you don't have the right to co-opt unwilling villagers. Along similar lines, there are the parents who think that their kids have some special privilege to be disruptive because "kids will be kids", but don't accept that there is a time and place for it. If your kid is carrying on during the show, leave, at least until you can calm him down. If your kid wants to run around as if at a playground, it's not the right time for a meal in a nice restaurant. If you can't get a babysitter, maybe you need to pass on the (adult) meeting you wanted to go to rather than inflicting a kid you know will be bored and disruptive on the rest of the attendees. And, if your kid damages something, accept responsibility immediately.
Part of taking responsibility is also recognizing that you aren't entitled to special treatment. I've seen parents whine about how "anti-child" a community is, but what that really means in a lot of cases is that the community hasn't bent over backwards to make children the most important thing. I see this a lot in the SCA, but I also see it elsewhere. I'll link rather than repeat a past rant on entitlements, and also one on the cult of the child.
Most parents aren't this bad, of course. But there are enough who are to pose a problem for those who've chosen not to have kids and for other parents, and that's just plain rude.
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2. Answer #5, paragraph 2, eloquently laid out the main reasons that
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Who is Two Jews Can Still Be a Mixed Marriage by? Is it recent/easily available?
#2
What I tend to do when roasting chicken parts (I very rarely cook whole birds) is cover them with something thick enough to retain a bit of moisture. Since tomato-based things are out, I'd suggest a chutney, or mustard mixed with marmalade, something like that. The topping caramelizes, the chicken cooks, and it stays moist.
As for veggies, I'd also suggest cauliflower (it's totally different when roasted) or eggplant. Oh, or green beans (for a much shorter amount of time), or sweet potato. Whenever I roast veggies, I put on sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, sometimes an herb (rosemary is excellent), and olive oil. They can be kept warm reasonably indefinitely, and taste great.
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I don't know what it is about in-laws in particular; they seem to be a little more sensitive to the religous issues than my less-observant friends.
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#5: thanks. It's a lot of why we aren't having kids either.
Re: #2
Veggies: thanks; I had forgotten about eggplant, which I know you've mentioned several times. I didn't realize cauliflower would hold up; I'll have to try that.
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You mentioned your in-laws were Israeli, right? They must have forgotten life in Israel because my husband doesn't mix either (as you know from my constant ranting) and no one here sees it as a judgement.
Your comments towards kids - well, yes your life does change once you have kids, but that doesn't mean that it has to be over or you can't have fun anymore. In Israel they actually have a movie theatre in Tel Aviv for moms and kids. That way women can come with their babies or their kids and single non-parent adults don't have to be bothered. They also have a restaurant called Diada that is attached to a posh parent/child course studio (things like baby yoga and gymboree and such). The food is great and they have big mats on the floor with toys and stuff for kids.
Israel is generally set up for parents. The entire country is nuts over babies and no matter what you do you will have strangers coming up to you asking personal questions if you are a new mom. "Are you breast feeding? He needs a hat. It's too hot out for him to wear that. He should have ... blah blah blah. everyone here has an opinion and every new mom gets to hear it. I think that's a big difference between the US and Israel and part of the reason why I don't want to raise my kids in the US. Kids are ignored in the US, they are a bother or a nusance. In Israel they are a blessing, it's everyone else that's a nusance.
in-laws
In my case, G's sister got married to a nice non-Jewish guy from Spain about 8 months after our wedding. So, my in-laws had to deal with culture shock #1 with our wedding (generally Orthodox if not orthodox in style because so many of our friends are) and then #2 with G's sister's (non-Jewish but generally closer to their style because they set it up, except where his background was explicitly acknowledged, i.e. bilingual ceremony, his mom's traditional headdress, etc). I think they're struggling to go from "we have 3 children" to "we have 1 single child and 2 married children and in-laws".
Thanks for the book info.
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Not quite. My husband is Israeli, but that's a result of his Canadian parents moving to Israel for several years, during which time he was born. They didn't stay, though, and now everyone's back in Canada. His mother has family in Israel and they maintain some level of contact, but my husband hasn't seen his cousins in many years.
My mother-in-law and my sister-in-law are actually very accommodating of my needs, especially food-related. They understand that it's important, and since they have lived in Israel I don't think they're as sensitive about it. My husband's parents are divorced and my father-in-law and his wife are not sensitive or accommodating. This may be the wife's doing more than the father's; since I never knew them separately, I can't judge. I'm not sure about this, but I think when his parents lived in Israel that was his mother's idea more than his father's, so maybe his father just never picked up on the cultural food bits. I'm just guessing, though.
My father-in-law's wife has a largish family that so far as I know has no direct ties to Israel (beyond Jewish identity). When we go to a family gathering the majority of the people will be her family, so the "how dare you question my cake" vibe can get pretty strong.
Kids: Life doesn't have to stop, of course, but it does change (mostly by becoming less predictable). I think most parents are reasonable and most non-parents are reasonable, so accommodation shouldn't be hard. For example, in my circle of friends, when one couple had children, we moved most group activities to their house to make it easier on them. (I worried that we were creating a burden on them becasue they had to be the hosts all the time, but they prefer it this way.) I don't want to make things hard for parents; I just feel that the person with the special needs -- whether that's having kids, having dietary restrictions, having a physical limitation, or whatever -- bears primary responsibility for dealing with it. It is not ok to show up somewhere and say "you must accommodate me while I do nothing to help out", as the unreasonable parents do.
The special theatre and restaurant setups you describe sound fantastic. They give parents and their kids a place to go without imposing on non-parents (who, presumably, know to keep away if they don't want to deal with kids). We have a chain of restaurants here that's similar in mindset (but not implementation); if you go there you know you're going to be among screaming kids, and that's your problem. The -- or a -- problem in the US is that some parents believe that every public place should be like that, and this is not fair to the people who aren't gaga over kids. We have a right to be able to eat in restaurants and go to the theatre in peace, after all. If I go to the matinee of the G-rated Disney show that's my problem, but if I go to a Shakespeare production I should be able to enjoy it absent noisy children. (I am not making this up: I once sat, at a live theatre production, next to someone holding a six-month-old child. The child didn't want to be there and was very noisy; the parent refused to take the child outside because "it's important for kids to learn culture early". I'm sorry, but a six-month-old is not going to appreciate the production. Eventually an usher intervened.) It's all about recognizing limits, and many in the US are so entitlement-driven that they've forgotten that.
Re: #2
One thing that sounds absolutely disgusting but comes out rather well is equal parts mayonnaise (not the low-fat kind...that gets icky) and duck sauce (which is basically apricot jam, but less sweet) with a bit of onion soup mix stirred in. Slather it all over the chicken pieces and roast. The nice thing about it is that the mayonnaise keeps it very moist, and it doesn't taste as disgusting as the recipe makes it sound! (Actually, it's quite good).
Admittedly, I tend more toward roasting whole chickens than chicken pieces.
Re: #2
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My personal belief is that this issue stems in part from the idea that one's primary job as a parent is to act as the child's buddy. I grew up like this, and I experienced it as a serious problem. It was confusing because I felt like there should be boundaries and there were none, really. I was a pretty self-disciplined child and didn't pose many behavior problems, but I did grow up without much knowledge of what it meant to respect people. It was very strange, when I got involved in the Jewish community, to meet so many people for whom I had instant respect.
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Yes. Some parents think they need to woo their kids so the kids will like them, and that saying "no" is counter to this. The result is often that you get little hellians. I routinely see kids doing things -- in full sight of their parents sometimes! -- that would have gotten me grounded or spanked when I was a kid. My parents weren't drill seargants or abusive in any way (spankings were rare and deserved), but I learned early on that there are rules and they matter. I turned out ok, and I get along fine with my parents.
Entitlement & the Cult of the Child
(Anonymous) 2005-01-05 12:12 am (UTC)(link)Rufina (LJ Lurker)
Re: Entitlement & the Cult of the Child
(I actually know more than one Rufina, but I'm assuming you're the one I see a few times a year and who lives relatively locally to me, not the one who lives in New Jersey. Well, welcome either way. :-) )
Re: Entitlement & the Cult of the Child
(Anonymous) 2005-01-06 02:24 am (UTC)(link)RC
Re: Entitlement & the Cult of the Child
Do I know you, or did you get here via random surfing or the like? (I don't mind; I'm just curious.)
Yes, You Do....
(Anonymous) 2005-01-06 05:06 am (UTC)(link)RC
P.S.
(Anonymous) 2005-01-06 05:08 am (UTC)(link)Re: Yes, You Do....
So how've you been?