Alef: The NEXT Conversation
8 Days of Action
By Sarah Kornhauser and Leilani Love
Hanukkah is about a light that was supposed to last only one day, that lasted one more day, and then one day more, and so on for eight days. Miracle or not, there was definitely a collective effort for conservation. Out of that effort, we as a Jewish people were able to keep moving forward. This Hanukkah, do your part to conserve and keep our world moving forward. Follow these simple steps for each day of Hanukkah…
Day 1: Replace an outdoor light fixture with a motion detector.
Day 2: Commit to public transportation today! Make a plan to reduce car use all year long.
Day 3: Make your own Hanukkah gifts. Knit a scarf. Build a picture frame. Make a headband.
Day 4: Take a day off meat. Buy local, organic produce and go veggie for the day.
Day 5: Get your furnace serviced to keep it running at high efficiency.
Day 6: Create Hanukkah cards online and save a tree.
Day 7: Do a full load of laundry in cold water instead of a partial. Each load of laundry uses between 32-60 gallons of water. Using warm water requires lots of energy to heat the water.
Day 8: Buy your self a present: a reusable water bottle! Commit to giving up plastic water bottles.
Interested in doing more? This year, Repair the World presents 8 Nights of Service. Follow along on their blog for a new service idea for each night of Hanukkah.
Photo by chidorian, licensed under Creative Commons.Huggies for Hanukkah
by Shawn Shafner
“I think I’m going to start wearing diapers.”
For two weeks last December, this phrase was my favorite conversation starter.
I really thought it was a great Hanukkah gift for myself, one with profound psychological and sociological ramifications. Plus I could write off the Pampers as a business expense. Because when you run The POOP Project you can do that.
Think about it for just a moment: adults are wearing diapers. Right now. 2 million men and 11 million women across the USA, according to one study featured by the National Association for Continence (even bladder control has its advocates). Granted, a good chunk of that number are in nursing homes, where the diaper is standard uniform for over half the residents. Still others are joining you at the office for water cooler conversation. Do they carry a spare pair in their briefcases and purses? Are they peeing freely at meetings while you’re scribbling frantically? Where does the soiled nappy go when it’s old and done?
Of course, it’s no laughing matter for those dealing with this issue. The diaper carries with it great stigma. Even the toddler knows that she who wets her pants is “a baby.” To be potty trained—to gain the physical ability to withhold poop and pee and also consciously release it in a socially ordained place and time—is the primary threshold to civilized adulthood. Those who wish to follow the rules but are physically incapable must adapt means of hiding their deficiency. Those who choose to excrete outside of these bounds just don’t get invited to parties. Or anything else, for that matter. It’s a fundamentally subversive act.
So what would it mean to pee in public? Could I even perform such a feat? Could I actually sit on the subway—or stand for that matter—and will my body to release urine, even into an absorbent adult undergarment?
I soon found myself standing in the aisle at Duane Reade staring up at products called “Poise” and “Inspire,” lofty ideas undermined by adjectives like, “adjustable,” “ultra thin,” and “super plus absorption.” I was waiting to see the in-house doctor because I’d started having pee problems.
In an ironic twist, I had suddenly joined the 1 in 5 Americans over 40 with overactive bladder, except I was only 27. And I really had to pee. Always. On my ride home to Brooklyn, I was stopping off at Atlantic to go in the Subway Sandwich Shoppe and not on the Subway train.
The doctor asked me questions, poked and prodded Sr. Pepe, and took a sample of my urine. There were traces of blood. I left the doctor with an eight-day course of antibiotics and a six-pack of Depends for Men in designer fashions. Because if you’re going to wet yourself, why not do it in style?
An hour later I was celebrating the first night of Hanukkah with 7th and 8th graders in Hebrew school. They begrudgingly sang blessings to consecrate the juice, the challah, the latkes, the candles and the occasion, droning melodies deeply ingrained into their teen brains. But not a student knew about the bracha I was there to teach, the Asher Yatzar, or why it meant so much to me that night.
Asher Yatzar is primarily known as the blessing one says after using the toilet, but it’s also incorporated into the morning liturgy and thought of as a healing prayer alongside the m’sheberach. The basic translation is something like this:
“Dear God, thank you for making an intuitive body with many holes and openings. We all know that, if the closed holes should ever open or the open holes ever close, we would really be in trouble. So thanks for that, and all the other healing miracles in the universe.”
In today’s world, we tend to focus on what’s coming in and ignore what’s going out. We are fixated on incomes, identified as “consumers,” and obsessed with food. We seek out exotic delicacies to satisfy our organic-local-macro-paleo palates, and teach our children how to sanctify meals through invoking a higher power. The final byproduct of our relentless quest is taken for granted, shuttled underneath the floors and city streets, pushed to the subconscious fabric of our social lives, and relegated to the shameful outskirts of infant and elder. And then suddenly there’s blood in your urine and it all comes bubbling to the top.
Eight candles, eight days of pills and eight itchy diapers later, the open hole somewhere in my body finally took to closing. It was indeed a Hanukkah miracle.
Yet during the whole ordeal, I never once actually took advantage of the absorbent underpants. I always raced to the safety of the toilet instead. What if it overflowed? What if it smelled? What if I had to walk around in it for hours? So I didn’t unearth any profound psychological or social revelations. I don’t even know what it all means.
But I do know that there are two clean pairs of designer Depends for Men waiting in my dresser drawer. Any takers?
Shawn Shafner is The Puru and creator of The People’s Own Organic Power Project. His one-man show, “Eat $h*t: How Our Waste Can Save the World” premieres Oct. 19 at Dixon Place in NYC. Learn more at www.thePOOPproject.org.
Photo by simplyla, licensed under Creative Commons.
Chanukah in June
By Jay Michaelson
Alef editor’s note: An earlier version of this article appeared in The Forward on December 10, 2008.
Chanukah in June makes about as much sense as Christmas in July. But the Festival of Lights does have something in common with Pride Month: coming out. Yes, Chanukah is a “coming out” holiday, in both its origins and its contemporary forms.
First, the Chanukah story is, in large part, a story of coming out — not in terms of sexuality, of course, but more generally, it’s about being open and honest about oneself and one’s values, and demanding that difference be accommodated. The circumstances that led to the Maccabean revolt were not so much single acts of oppression as they were a slow, insidious process of erasure. Some of that process was imposed by the Syrian-Greek occupiers of Palestine, but some, let’s remember, was embraced by Hellenizing Jews. As a means of assimilation, Jews semi-voluntarily took on Greek names and Greek customs, and began regarding Jewish worship as one option among many.
The Maccabees – in a part of the Chanukah story they don’t teach you in Sunday school – rebelled against this assimilation, even forcibly circumcising baby boys against the wishes of the children’s parents. Hardly a model of religious tolerance, but definitely a form of coming out. They didn’t demand equal treatment of Hellenizers and non-Hellenizers; they demanded that Jews be acknowledged as different.
Today, Chanukah plays an oddly similar role. Every December, we are inundated with images of Christmas: endless sleighs and trees and Santas and the rest. Everyone’s meant to get into the spirit of the “holidays.” Which is why, as Kyle Broslovsky of Comedy Central’s animated series “South Park” put it, it’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas. This is why celebrating Chanukah is like coming out: it’s about admitting difference, recognizing that one is not the same as everyone else and, hopefully, celebrating the unique gifts that being different offers.
Sometimes people ask why we need Gay Pride Month, and Pride parades. Well, the answer is simple: because coming out is not easy. Here, my own story may be instructive. I sort of knew I was gay at 18, definitely knew at 23, but didn’t come out until, at age 30, a wonderful woman I had been dating finally dumped me (good for her!) and I realized I couldn’t “make it work” as a bisexual. What took me so long? I’m an intelligent, reasonably sensitive, and courageous guy. Why did I spend 10 years hating myself, repressing my deepest desires, and failing to embrace the gifts of emotional and sexual fulfillment?
Because “coming out,” which sounds so simple, is really very hard. I’m not saying I had the courage of the Maccabees, or the drag-queen heroes at Stonewall whose rebellion Pride Month commemorates. But when I look back on my own coming out process, I’m amazed I did it at all. In the hope that my story can inspire you to come out in whatever way can help you lead your life – sexually, religiously, emotionally, whatever – I want to share a few of the specific reasons coming out was so hard, and yet so worthwhile in retrospect.
First, I didn’t know what I was missing. I had no idea how dead I was inside, how emotionally cut off I was from other people or what love was really about. My friends will tell you: I was a different person entirely — more sarcastic, more insular, less open, less honest. Try it yourself: Lie to everybody you know about what’s most important to you, and see what happens. And if you’ve been doing it yourself, please take the leap of faith. It’s way, way better on this side of the chasm. Trust me.
Oh, and by the way, “Hate the sin, love the sinner” doesn’t work. Sexual identity, like religious identity, isn’t some part-time hobby. If you hate the sin, you’re going to end up hating yourself.
Second, and relatedly, I thought that coming out would destroy everything I valued. I thought it would end my Jewish religious life, end my chances at normalcy, and alienate me from family and friends. I was wrong on all counts. My spiritual and religious life blossomed once I stopped hating God for making me gay. I was able to start thinking about having a real life, a family, and a career only after I stopped having fake ones. And my being honest about myself has enabled me to forge friendships that are deeper than I had ever imagined back in the closet. (“Closet” is probably too cozy a word; “tomb” is better.)
I have also watched my family members evolve in their own views and come not only to accept my sexuality but also to embrace it — a tall order, to be sure, especially as they themselves still encounter homophobia from their friends. But what mother doesn’t want her son to be happy? Eventually, we learn that love, happiness, justice, and holiness are all that matter — and if homosexuality, heterosexuality, or bisexuality leads to those things, baruch hashem.
Finally, I think it took me so long to come out because I lacked the kind of community and values that would have given me the courage I needed to do so. All my friends and family members were straight, and the gay world I saw on TV looked superficial, hypersexual, and weird. It was only once I came out that I realized sexuality is about more than having sex, and that being queer, like being Jewish, is a blessing. In an ideal world, we all grow up with religious and personal role models. But because few GLBT people grow up in gay families, coming out can be lonely, terrifying, and embarrassing.
Yet it is also the Jewish thing to do. It may be hard to be a Jew on Christmas, but it’s by daring to do so that we’ve survived the past 3,000 years and created a culture and religion worth preserving. Well before the Maccabees, the very first Jew, Abraham, was told by God to come out: to get out of his father’s house, follow his own spiritual path and cross over to the other side of the river. From this act, our nation and language get the name Ivri — “Hebrew” — the one who crosses over. And from Abraham’s repeated answers to God’s queries we get the consummate statement of self-exposure: Hineni, Here I am.
The lessons of coming out are Jewish lessons. Just like repressed gay people, repressed Jews don’t know how damaging it is to closet our religious and cultural selves; how invigorating it is to be open, honest, and celebratory about who we are; or how empowering it is to be part of a community of boundary-crossers. So, my advice for celebrating Chanukah in June? Stop repressing and stop equivocating. Whatever closet you’re hiding in, whether it’s sexual, religious, professional, cultural, or just plain dull and repressive — come out, please, wherever you are.
Jay Michaelson is executive director of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality.
Photo by Brymo, licensed under Creative Commons.
Jewish Identity Through Burlesque
An Interview with Burlesque Performer Minnie Tonka
Interview by Sarah Pumroy
It’s the second night of Hanukkah, and I’m sitting at the bar, eating greasy potato latkes and staring at naked Jewish women.  I knew there was an active burlesque scene in New York City, but never checked it out until I was invited to  ”Menorah Horah” in December.
There were the typical elements of a burlesque show – the slow, seductive shedding of long gloves, skirts, and undergarments piece-by-piece to vaudeville music. But there was also (nearly) naked dancing with menorahs, women wearing pasties in the shape of Hanukkah candle flames, and jokes about Manishewitz wine and other Jewish cultural references.
Why does Manishewitz, pasties, and nudity feel like so much fun? It should have felt dirty, even blasphemous. I was intrigued, and wanted to interview one of the performers from that night, Alyssa Abrahamson, aka Minnie Tonka, who has been performing for audiences in New York and across North America since 2003. Minnie Tonka spoke to me about her Jewish identity and what it means to be a Jewish burlesque performer.
Although the term “burlesque” has become synonymous with female striptease acts, the word also can be used a verb meaning “to mock” or to caricature something. But while Minnie Tonka’s Hanukkah show was certainly outlandish and humorous, it was clear that it wasn’t rooted in mockery of Jewish traditions. As she explained to me during the interview, burlesque is actually an art, one where she can showcase her pride for her Jewish identity. Be sure to check out Minnie Tonka at her upcoming show, The Burning Bush vs. The Second Coming on Saturday, April 3rd, 2010.
Alef: You’re involved in something known as “Jewish Burlesque,” can you tell us exactly what that is?
Minnie Tonka: For me, Jewish burlesque is about creating and performing a burlesque act with intentional Jewish content. For example, I have an act to Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You” that is about a Jewish gal feeling guilty about loving bacon. Or, the Schlep Sisters (my duet with Darlinda Just Darlinda) has an act that we call, “Schlepping through the Desert” where we tell the story of the Exodus through burlesque.
But, this question really deserves a conversation. Just like the question “what is Jewish art?” there is no simple answer and it will depend on who you ask. Is art “Jewish” because the artist is Jewish even if there is no Jewish content? Or is art Jewish because it has specific Jewish content? I know some non-Jewish performers who have Jewish-themed burlesque acts, such as a dreidel act. Would that be considered Jewish burlesque? On the same note, would a Christmas-themed or Easter bunny act be considered Christian burlesque?
In my experience, people in the burlesque community do not use the term “Jewish burlesque” (except for me, Darlinda Just Darlinda or Susannah Perlman of Nice Jewish Girls Gone Bad). People in the Jewish community use this term because, I believe, it comes from a place of ownership, pride, and sometimes an attempt to appear innovative or edgy.
Alef: Why did you choose to incorporate Jewish identity into your performances?
Minnie Tonka: Since Jewish identity and creative expression was something I was very involved in and passionate about both professionally and personally when I first started performing burlesque six years ago, I made it a point to be very “out” about my Jewish identity through my performance. In 2004, I co-founded and continue to produce an all-Jewish burlesque revue – Kosher ChiXXX. It was important to me to showcase talented Jewish burlesque performers and give them the opportunity to think about their art in a new way – within the context of a relationship to Judaism. But, the acts don’t always necessarily have specific Jewish content. At that time, I’m not sure anyone in NYC was doing any specific Jewish-themed burlesque acts. For all the performers, including myself, it was a new, challenging, bonding, and empowering experience.
Alef: How did audiences reacted to this new type of burlesque?
Minnie Tonka: Over the years, I am proud that I helped create a name for “Jewish burlesque.” It has been rewarding and validating in many ways. For example, when I started performing and “Jewish burlesque” was very new, people would (and still do) come up to me after shows and thank me. They thank me for showing that Jewish pride and identity can be expressed and celebrated in many different ways.
I have a friend, Trixie Minx, who is the director of Fleur de Tease Burlesque Revue, based in New Orleans. I met Trixie at the New York Burlesque Festival in 2006. The Schlep Sisters performed our Hava Nagilah act and Trixie introduced herself, thanked us, and said she was surprised and inspired by our performance. She is Jewish and said she had never considered incorporating Judaism into her burlesque acts. Since then, Trixie has created and performed a few Jewish-themed burlesque acts that are fun and fabulous. She’s a very talented lady!
Alef: How did you get into burlesque and why did you go into Jewish burlesque specifically?
Minnie Tonka: My burlesque debut was in the winter of 2003/2004 with the Schlep Sisters. Darlinda was the person who inspired me to try out burlesque. We met and talked about all sorts of artsy things. She was really interested in burlesque and she sparked my curiosity. I love choreography, I love dressing up, and costuming. I have a background in dance and figure skating, so being in front of an audience was nothing new to me (although it had been years since I had last done it). I always surrounded myself with artists but, at the time, didn’t have a specific artistic outlet myself. I wanted to explore my creative side and this seemed like a great opportunity. At first, I was intimidated by and uncomfortable with the striptease aspect, but I took it on as a creative challenge. Six years later, I’m still hooked and going strong!
Alef: Have you ever been criticized for “sexualizing” Judaism?
Minnie Tonka: For me, burlesque isn’t about sex; it’s an art form and it is about creative and artistic expression. I have never been criticized for “sexualizing” Judaism. Over the years, I have only received compliments and praises for expressing my Jewish identity through burlesque. Many people are searching for ways to connect to Judaism and it demonstrates that there are many different ways of connecting to and celebrating our heritage and tradition. It can be validating and encouraging to many people.
Alef: What do you enjoy most about being in the Schlep Sisters?
Minnie Tonka: The Schlep Sisters are FUN! I love collaborating and choreographing acts together. Our differences really compliment each other and whatever we do it always a creative and inspiring learning experience. I am very excited to say that we are producing an upcoming springtime holiday show: The Burning Bush vs. The Second Coming: The Ultimate Burlesque Showdown, which is on Saturday, April 3rd at Le Poisson Rouge in downtown Manhattan. It’s going to be a fun and fabulous show that showcases both Passover and Easter acts with some of NYC’s most talented burlesque performers like Dirty Martini and Tigger!. This show is not to be missed!
Read more articles from Issue 08: “The Sex Issue.”
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