Welcome, Judith!
Judith! You're here! I'm so excited! Now things are really going to get interesting. Judith is one of my oldest and dearest friends. I'm so pleased that Ricochet has persuaded her to join us.
Here's an article I wrote a while ago about our friendship, Judith's talent, Israel, babies and bombers:
I MET JUDITH WRUBEL in 1991 at Oxford University, where we were both graduate students in international relations. We became friends walking back to Balliol College each week, along the leafy Banbury Road, from a seminar at St. Antony’s College on the international relations of the Middle East. Both secular American Jews — the only ones in the class — we found in one another a measure of intellectual and ethnic solidarity against our classmates, who tended to view the region through the prism fashionable in academia: The violence and misery of the Middle East devolve from Israeli territorial expansionism and its abuse of the Palestinians. Once when a suicide bombing in Israel claimed the lives of a number of children under the age of 10 — it is often forgotten how common an occurrence these were even during the Rabin years — a fellow student, upon hearing the news, proclaimed with satisfaction, "Good. They deserve it."
After graduating, I moved to Thailand to take a job as a journalist. Judith returned to New York to work for an investment bank. We lost touch. Years later, she found my name on the Internet and wrote to me. I was delighted to hear from her, and we soon established a prolific correspondence. I had returned to the United States and was living in Washington, D.C.; she had married an Israeli mathematician and moved with him to Rehovot, an Israeli city well within the Green Line. She was now Judith Levy. She was expecting her first child, a boy. But her romantic and maternal fulfillment came at a cost: She now reckoned each day, as she wrote to me, with the possibility of her own murder.
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Comments :
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Thanks, honey! Happy to be here!
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Hey, by the way--I'm curious to know how you weigh in on the burqa ban debate.
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Consider me weighed.
May '10
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Welcome aboard!
It's great to have a perspective from Israel. Now, Claire won't have to cover Ricochet's midnight operations by herself. I only wish she would have picked a more uplifting article with which to introduce you.
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Well, Judith and I could tell the story about her tenure as dormitory warden of the Balliol College graduate annex and the time she had to adjudicate a four a.m. catfight involving a Scottish lesbian, a South African lesbian, and an interloping French lesbian--it has just a hilarious punch-line, trust me--but unfortunately every word of it would violate Ricochet's code of conduct.
May '10
Re: Welcome, Judith!
What a terrifying image. I do, however, wish that we could persuade all three of them that they would be imprisoned or executed under a burqa-friendly regime, and thus they should join the army in Afghanistan to fight for their rights.
May '10
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Of course, at our house, we don't talk about Oxford, "the other school".
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Judith, I'm slowly catching up on the Burqa Ban Business, but in the meantime, welcome to Ricochet! We're awfully glad to have you....
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Welcome, Judith. Good to have someone on the ground in Israel. Curious. Are you still a "secular" Jew as Claire describes you? It's always interesting to see in what direction age and family sends one.
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Rob and Denise, thank you for the welcome! Denise, to answer your question: yes, I'm still secular. We do not observe Shabbat, although we do say the blessings on the wine and bread on Friday night (and occasionally light a havdalah candle on Saturday night). I do not keep a kosher kitchen. (Not by a long shot -- there's usually shrimp in my freezer. My husband draws the line at bacon, though.) We shlep the kids to a giant family seder every Passover and observe all the holidays in a very Reform Jew kind of way (dress up on Purim, light candles and sing songs on Chanukah, and so on) but we do not go to synagogue, except for Yom Kippur. Religious observance, especially en masse, makes me as itchy as it ever did, although I respect those who believe in it. I'm both secular and spiritual, which I suspect many religious people take to be a contradiction in terms but which makes perfect sense to me.
Re: Welcome, Judith!
Denise, how are you defining secular? I used the word too carelessly. I meant, I suppose, "not particularly observant in a formal or traditional way."
May '10
Re: Welcome, Judith!
B-b-b-b-but..... bacon is one of the core essences of life (H/T Glenn Reynolds)! Embrace your secular and buy Oscar Meyer!