Because I am a jew...

Because I am a jew, I signed the petition for the divestment from the occupation of palestine.
Because I am a jew, I learned to respect my father, my mother and my history.
Because I am a jew, I feel the ghettoization of people who are "dangerous to us" sounds a little too familiar for me to support.
Because I am a jew, I learned jewish values that told me to respect the stranger.
Because I am a jew, I learned to value all life.
Because I am a jew, I learned to spill my wine in respect to the pain of others.
Because I am a jew, I learned to pray that one day ALL people will be free.

Just because I am a jew does not mean I am a zionist, and just because I am a jew does not mean that I support the actions of the Israeli government and the occupation of the NATION of Palestine. Hampshire College, the institution at which I currently attend school, recently made the decision (after months of petitioning from student groups, primarily Students for Justice in Palestine) to divest from companies who are benefiting from the occupation in Palestine.
I have been thinking a lot about my identity as a jew and the way that it is torn up. I was raised in between reconstructionist libralism, conservative movements, and liberal, activist, socialist zionism. I grew up learning that arabs were bad, wanted to blow us up and destroy my family. I grew up thinking that the arabs and muslims that I knew were simply the exception to the rule... And then I realized that they were not, and one day I saw a movie that reminded me that Palestinians were people too. Perhaps it should not have taken me till I was so old to realize this, however, the propaganda within the jewish community is deep. I grew up and my heros were the zionists that founded the state of israel... I grew up hoping that one day I would go to Israel. And I went to Israel, and they told us look- there is an arab village, and there is a jewish village. And they told us that rubber bullets can't hurt. But rubber bullets do hurt, and they neglected to mention that while Jews in Jerusalem are living a 1st world life, arabs in Gaza are living in the third world. They showed us a rocket fired into an israeli village, but neglected to mention the Palestinian children dead because the hospitals are inadequate, the water of poor quality and the living conditions terrible.
I live in a world of mixed feelings over my jewish identity, I balance a desire to re-learn my hebrew and reconnect with my people, and a deep hatred and resentment for my people who I feel have turned the other cheek while the Israeli government puts Palestinians into ghettos...
WE CAME FROM GHETTOS, from spain to germany to poland to russia, we came from ghettos, our people have been locked up and pushed out, disenfranchised for 2000 years, and yet, as soon as we get the upper hand we turn around and lock innocent people up behind big thick walls designed not to protect or help them, but to "save" us from them. We have turned our backs on members of the human race, and the words that come out of our mouths echo the sentiments of the third reich.
When we learned about the Holocaust in hebrew school we read about the Sneetches, the sneetches is a classic Dr Suess book about the division between the plain belly sneetches and the star belly sneetches. In the end, after capitalist driven exploitation they learn that it doesn't matter if you have a plain belly or a start belly, that all sneetches are the "best on the beaches". So I learned that money talks and all people are equal, and divestment (no matter the statement an administration makes) talks, and divestment matters. And because I am a jew, and because I grew up with "jewish" values, I signed the petition for Hampshire College to divest from the occupation in Israel. And because I am a jew, I am extremely proud of my institution for divesting.

Jealousy

for the 13 year old boy:

I am so jealous of you
you turned 13 and all of the sudden you were taller than me
your muscles grew, nice and toned and big
your voice dropped.

I am so jealous of you,
because I will never be tall like you
and I have to work a million times harder to make my muscles grow like that
and my voice may never stop sounding like this...

you live to easily in your world
and I wonder if it is something I want to pass into
but at the same time, I am still jealous
........

Straight Hair

By the time I was in the 7th grade I had started to straighten my hair. I went to a Jewish Day school and despite the fact that most of us had naturally curly hair everyone showed up to school everyday with perfectly straightened hair. It started out slowly at first, only straightening it for special events (bar/bat mitzvahs) and using my curling iron to do so (I bought the curling iron to make ringlets which never worked either) and then soon I bought my first flat iron. Currently I still keep my 4th and 5th flat irons, but I have not turned them on in months. Up until last spring I straightened my hair as often as necessary to make sure that it was always straight (except for the period of time it was too short to straighten, about 6 months senior year). And then one day, just as spring was starting to come in I went to my room to straighten my hair, and I turned on my iron and I started to do it and I was sweating, and hot and didn’t think it was worth all the effort and so I grabbed my clippers and chopped off the remainder of my hair. I liked my hair when it was so short that it looked straight. It made me feel like I could be one of those boys on the side of an American Eagle bag, the ones who are topless on a beach somewhere and all black and white and muscle. He was the perfect little blonde straight white boy, the boy that all the girls swooned after growing up. I wanted to be him. And for a little while I was proud of myself for looking like him, I could put on a wife beater and if I stood the right way with my boobs out of sight I almost looked like that. But in the end… my hair grew, and it didn’t grow straight, it grew back into its curls. And I reached the point with my hair where I would straighten it, so that I would be hot, like the girls or boys from the magazines, but my straigteners sit out in a basket in my bathroom untouched. And my hair grows curly and poofs up from my head and I like it. It is comfortable, it looks like me… No more pulling at my hair every night with every straightening product available at CVS. I guess at some point we all have to embrace the people we are, learn to walk down the street without make up, with out a front and just be ourselves. That is something that I still struggle to do (not the make up, but walking without a front) but I think that my hair has always been a big symbol for me. I started to dye it because people assumed things when they looked at my blonde hair, and then I stripped it back to the blonde, so that I could be hot, and I repeated the process twice in 2 years. I chopped off my hair so that people would stop looking at me and assume things because I have long hair, things about my gender or sexuality. And I guess in some ways these things are still a front, they still hide who I really am because it is still all about the way I am perceived by others. But some would say that it is the other who constructs our sense of self. What ever it is all I know is that for right now, I’m giving the straigtener a rest and dealing with my natural hair, after all, I think it looks pretty cute…

The Ish with Katy Perry

possible written article to come..... stay tuned, but for now i just needed to get this up there...

I Never Thought I Would Grow up to be a Woman

I grew up with the privilege of parents who didn’t care. Not didn’t care as in neglect, but didn’t care as in they never told me how to be, or how to dress or how to think about myself. At age 4 I wanted to be the Beast for Halloween, and so my mom made me the costume, and sewed up a beauty costume for my doll and I marched in my preschools Halloween parade as the beast with beauty on my arm. And in the subsequent years I refused to wear dresses, flowers, the color pink, and my mom never cared, we avoided sections of the store, she removed the flowers from hand-me down t-shirts and sewed jumpers and outfits for me to wear to family events so that I did no have to wear a dress. And when I came home crying one day because someone asked me if I was a boy or a girl she simply said boys don’t wear flowers, and she bought me a pair of flowery pants, and I tried it, but then I gave up, or I didn’t care, I forget which.
In the search for an education my parents moved me out of 3rd grade at public school and into 4th grade at a Jewish day school. At first I loved it, but as I grew I could see the atmosphere smothering the independence that had been fostered in me as a child. I wanted to fit in, and so I started wearing dresses, and skirts and I even stole make-up from the local drug store. And I tried, but the skills and desires that are inherent in other girls to put effort in, to be comfortable in a skirt and to want to look pretty never formed in my brain, and so I was awkward, and clumsy and messed up a lot and still I never fit in. And I remember the first time they told me that I was supposed to be a woman, I think that’s when everything changed, in 5th grade when gender mattered and boys and girls started dating, and the girls asked me to be on their basketball team because I was the best girl at basketball.
Every year in elementary school each grade did something appropriate within the scheme of Jewish Education and every year they would have a ceremony to show off a new skill or ability and then each member of the grade received a book. In the younger grades they were significant Jewish texts: prayer books, the 5 books of Moses, etc. But in 5th grade we received, “Women of Valor”, I still have that book, its nametag written out in Hebrew, with pictures of the other books I had received and would receive. It was then that it hit me, I don’t know if it was just 5th grade, or if it was my best friend who started hanging out more and more with the cool girls and less and less with me, or if it was the couples in our class, constantly rotating but never including me, but it was then that I realized that I was supposed to be a woman. I guess it changed my mindset in a way because I started to try; I pored over fashion magazines, bought books on makeup and beauty and how to be perfect. And I tried, I tried SO hard, I would stay up late at night trying to make my hair perfect and practice the art of being a woman. But it never worked.
As I grew I started to acknowledge to myself that I did not fit in as a woman and I chalked it up to immaturity and inability to accept responsibility. But then I continued to grow and I started out high school on a new foot, I would be a woman! I bought the skirts and had the hair and the makeup and I tried to make the friends. And I tried and I tried and the more I tried the more it built up until I bought my first pair of man pants. They are ripped now to the point where I cannot wear them, but I remember them. They were 10$ on sale at Kohl’s, they were dark denim with a hint of green, and I wore them with my men’s “Kiss Me I’m Irish” (I’m not really Irish) sweatshirt and something clicked. It would be a while until most of my wardrobe transformed, in fact it would be until I got out of high school that I would stop feeling the need to wear skirts or dresses when I needed to dress up. It would be until midway through my first year of college that I became comfortable enough to put my breasts away, to stop using them to get the attention that I always craved and until I was comfortable enough to try to shape them around who I wanted to be, and how I wanted to be seen.
Now I don’t bind that often, but I cannot remember the last time I did not wear a sports bra. Women complain that sports bras flatten their chest, and eliminate their cleavage. Now I don’t know what their talking about because even in a sports bra they do not disappear, and if I dare to wear a tank top you’ll see just how much cleavage I still have. But when I’m in a sports bra I can feel my self start to be in that in-between place I want to be. I never thought I would grow up to be a woman, the thought didn’t even cross my mind until 5th grade. But I also never thought I would grow up to be a man. I think of myself now as a 14-year-old boy, because 14-year-old boys are so often caught in that place between adulthood and childhood. And I haven’t met a 14-year-old boy yet who didn’t have some complex built around masculinity. I never deny growing up as a girl, a confused girl but a girl nonetheless. The question is where am I now, who am I now. I know that I am growing up, but I don’t know where it will take me. I know however, where it will not take me, I am not growing up to be a woman, and I am not growing up to be a man. Perhaps I will never know where I am going or when I get there, but hopefully I will be able to find some footing in the in between space that has evaded me so long.