Ruth Andrew Ellenson - The Modern Jewish Girls Guide to Guilt

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Table of Contents

A PLUME BOOK

THE MODERN JEWISH GIRLS GUIDE TO GUILT

Lively and intelligent.

The Seattle Times

Youll feel guilty if you dont read this hilarious and poignant collection. Move over, Woody Allen.

St. Petersburg Times

All of the stories... whether humorous, intense, or both, grapple with complex themes like how we live up to others expectations and how our cultural heritages shape who we are.

Jerusalem Post

An honest discussion about issues Jewish women face today.

The Dallas Morning News

In humorous and poignant essays, authors discuss healthy guilt, unhealthy guilt, motivating guilt, and paralyzing guilt.... The book uncovers a simple truth: A Jewish woman who wrestles with guilt is not alone.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer

This anthology features well-written contributions by significant, contemporary Jewish women writers... heartfelt accounts of their authors struggles, often ongoing, with the demands of Jewish tradition and the pressures of their Jewish subcommunities.

Forward

Thoughtful... cheeky... Among their topics are fresh takes on mothers and daughters, dating and JDating, worrying, divorce, observance, body image, and loyalty to Israel. Some recount their own spiritual journeys toward Judaism and others their (sometimes hesitant) paths away. They write with candor, insight, and boldness, sometimes with humor, making for enjoyable reading.

Jewish Week

A kid-in-the-candy-store experience for the angst-ridden Jew... Pore through this collection and theres bound to be an essay that will resonate.

Jewish Journal

Trust me: they are all funny and thoughtful and frequently moving. (The authors mothers should be very proud!)... The editor, Ruth Andrew Ellenson, has done a fine job of articulating the crises of identity that beset modern Jewish women.

Steve Almond, JBooks.com

Humorous and poignant... explores in a nuanced way the different kinds of guilt experienced by modern American Jewish women.

Star-Telegram (Fort Worth)

Brilliantly observed... The angst-filled situations are funny and poignant and have a fresh, frank, Sex and the City toneonly with Manischewitz and gefilte fish instead of cosmopolitans and sushi.

New Jersey Jewish News

Entertaining with emotional depth... Always lucid, often funny... [and] richly told.

New Jersey Home News Tribune

Wide ranging and thought provoking... funny and fresh.

Publishers Weekly

The writings so sharp, you can laugh, cry, and hate yourself for not calling your mother at the same time. A book its impossible not to love.

Jerry Stahl, author of Permanent Midnight

A touching and humorous collection.

Curve magazine

Funny, provocative, delightful, and wise, this original collection by so many outstanding writers is a wonderfuland completely guilt-freepleasure.

Aryeh Lev Stollman, author of The Far Euphrates

Splendid... witty and substantive... Turns on its head the hackneyed cultural stereotype of Jewish women as the sole disseminators of guilt.

Chicago Jewish News

For my wonderful grandmother, Lillian Douglas Andrew,
who is neither Jewish nor guilty, but was excited
to read this book anyway.

And in memory of my grandmother, Rosalind Stern Ellenson,
whose life was a shining example of tikkun olam.

Louis: Rabbi, Im afraid of the crimes I may commit. Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz: Please mister. Im a sick old rabbi facing a long drive home to the Bronx. You want to confess, better you should find a priest. Louis: But Im not a Catholic, Im a Jew. Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz: Worse luck for you, bubbalah. Catholics believe in forgiveness. Jews believe in Guilt.

Tony Kushner, Angels in America

Introduction

RUTH ANDREW ELLENSON

BETWEEN the ideal of who you should be, and the reality of who you are, lies guilt. And when youre Jewish, there seems to be no shortage of people who are willing to point out just how guilty you should feel. Families, rabbis, and communities happily, but perhaps not always so helpfully, are all too eager to bring it to your attention, or you can even agonize over it yourself. For me, it often takes the form of the following internal reprimand:

Jews have barely managed to survive for thousands of years, and you, you little pisher, are going to make one bad decision and screw it up for everybody.

As soon as I hear those words, the guilt works its way down into my chest and hooks my heart. It happens every time Im faced with a decision that questions my Jewish loyalties, or whenever Ive flat-out failed to live up to the prodigious expectations of my people. Whether it was enjoying pepperoni pizza on Passover, failing to move to Israel despite summers spent at Zionist youth camp, or dating boys who provoked the following reaction from my father, a rabbi: I know youre going to marry a non-Jew and I want you to know it breaks my heart, I have heard the sirens call of Jewish guilt throughout my life. I have tried rejecting the voice, laughing at it, and sometimes even accepting it with a heavy heartbut I always stop when I hear it speak.

The voice spoke up particularly loud and clear one day as I sat in the front pew of a church in Virginia, watching my grandmother sing in the choir about her Lord and Savior. She wasnt talking about Moses either.

While I am a rabbis daughter, Im also the child of a convert. My mother had converted to Judaism upon marrying, and when my parents divorced, I was raised in an observant home with my father and stepmother, who is also a rabbi, making me part of a rather small group of Daughters of the American Revolution who grew up going to shul on the Upper West Side. Still, I grew up knowing that a church dating back to the Civil War was just as much a part of my history as a shtetl in Russia.

There I sata rabbis daughter in the church of her forefathers, bathed in the ruby light of stained-glass windows depicting Jesus, and paralyzed by guilt. What in the name of Maimonides was I doing here? Not only was I violating some Talmudic edict about not being in a foreign house of worship (see, all that expensive Jewish education paid off after all), I was sure my Jewishness was obvious (okay, maybe not horns-on-my-head obvious, but stillobvious) to all the good Christians around me. I desperately wanted to leave. Then my grandmother caught my eye and smiled, clearly delighted by my presence. Was it worse to betray my Judaism by sitting in front of a giant cross, or to disrespect my beloved grandmother by bolting? Oy.

So, while the choir continued I closed my eyes and began to sing Hear O Israel under my breath and wondered: If my Jewish friends could see me now, what would they think? Would they understand that I was trying to bridge a gap for which I had no clear road map, or would it simply confirm for them that I was someone in need of lots of therapy, pronto?

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