Six for 36
This is ahead of my birthday
We’re back!
Housekeeping notes: This week, paid subscribers got this month’s ET Speak Home.
In the second week of May, I’ll send out the next ET Read Home, a monthly book club of sorts, which will be on The Master and Margarita. If you’ve never read it, now is a great time!
With that! Onto news, Jews, and views.
NEWS
For the Forward, I wrote about Hasan Piker, American Jewish concern, and aligning (or not) behavior with goals.
From the New York Times: “After Security Scare, Trump Demands Approval for His White House Ballroom.” (I am including this to let you know that I read this and said, “sorry, what?” out loud.)
From the Hindu: “Record turnout in West Bengal poll fuels rival claims, data tempers conclusions”
For something completely different: I loved this Slate piece on Lena Dunham, written by a woman admitting she was wrong.
These Barnard alumni are absolutely right to be up in arms about the college’s decision to put Slavic Studies on pause and speaking as a Columbia Slavic Department alumna: this was a great department! That great things are being decimated is a choice!
To the seven of you who are subscribing from the Czech Republic (děkuju): I bought a Czech World Cup jersey despite not being Czech. Is that weird? Yes, right? But not weirder than taking an online Czech class? Anyway. They’re back in for the first time in 20 years! Exciting stuff.
MY VIEWS ON…
…turning 36!
I know that last week I promised that this week’s would be a newsletter of greater interest to more of you, but, like Yehuda Amichai, Machiavelli, and the Polish constitution, my birthday is this coming Sunday, so here are some reflections from this year: the six things I’m trying to take from the last year into 36. In no particular order:
You don’t know what kind of mother you’re going to be until you become one, at which point it’s very slowly revealed to you.
I’ve written about this before, but the part of the Rudyard Kipling poem “If” that goes, “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same” is about parenthood and the part that goes “If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone, And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’” is about everything else.
Right after I had our baby, my family was here and my mother offered to help in ways I might have previously considered judgmental but I needed the help and so accepted it. It turns out it was very helpful. I think this is true in many cases of assuming judgment and accepting help more generally, too.
That you’re not a student in the formal sense doesn’t mean that you can’t write to other people who are experts on or excited about the things you want to learn more about and ask them to send you what they’ve written. You don’t have to stop learning or caring about things or building expertise.
The world can be divided many ways, but one way is between people who know that health is all that really matters and people who are lucky enough to not have had a reason to think about it yet.
I have spent a lot of time in my life worrying that things I’ve written or said or done would make people mad at me. And I still worry about that, but I am getting better at realizing that people are entitled to their feelings but not to my behavior.
Last year, I ended this newsletter’s birthday essay with, “I always thought that I’d freak out about turning 35, and I guess I kind of am, but more than that I’m nervous and scared and excited to see how this year—growing older and (keynehore) becoming a mom—will change and reveal who I am. And in the meantime I get to take stock of my life and see that I have gotten basically everything I’ve ever really wanted, and gotten to do almost everything that I’ve wanted to do, and that, before anything else, I’ve been lucky. It feels like a jinx to write that and to publish it, but I don’t mean it as a boast. I mean that I can’t believe it. That this is how I’ve gotten to spend 35 years.”
I both don’t and do relate to the woman who wrote that. This year was beautiful in ways I’ve never seen before and also challenging in ways I never thought I’d have to experience. I have more complicated feelings about getting older than I did last year. But despite that, or maybe because of it, I still feel, and know, that I am the luckiest.
AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS
From Times of Israel: “Police detain Modiin man for wearing kippa with Israeli, Palestinian flags, cut out the Palestinian one.” (I found this Haaretz video with the man in question to be worth watching, too.)
I thought this Forward piece, by Arno Rosenfeld on Julian Casablancas and “American Zionists,” threaded a difficult needle very well
From the Guardian: “US universities are seeing an influx of ‘antisemitism centers.’ Some Jewish scholars are worried”
-ET