Deborah Feldman’s Unorthodox Satmar Polemic by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Author Deborah Feldman

At first impression Deborah Feldman’s new memoir,”Unorthodox,” reviewed feels like déjà vu all over again: Girl breaks away from her insular Hasidic sect after a youth of illicitly reading library books and sneaking into movie theaters. With subtitle like “The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” it’s tempting to consider the book as a sexier, 21st-century version of Pearl Abraham’s novel “The Romance Reader.”

But that would be a disservice to Feldman, 25, who has succeeded in writing a heart-rending sexual polemic.

“I’ve never felt more Jewish than I do now,” Feldman told me, as nibbled on a scone at a whimsical Manhattan café called Alice’s Teacup.“I love mainstream Judaism. I’m still acclimating, but I love the diversity in a Modern Orthodox society.”

Her early life among the Satmar Hasidim was still exceptionally difficult. Her mentally unstable father was eventually matched with a hapless young British woman who had apparently been lured with gifts and promises of financial security. The marriage self-destructed soon after Feldman was born.

Feldman’s mother left Hasidism and her father retreated further into mental illness. Her paternal grandparents — stern, sturdy and idiosyncratically loving to her — raised Feldman. But her questionable family history made her an outsider in a community where social status affects a girl’s chances for a suitable marriage partner.

Temporarily breaking out of her private chrysalis, Feldman would haunt public libraries on long bus rides away from Williamsburg, checking out novels by Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott. At home, she read in secret and stashed her bounty under her mattress.

She married at 17 to a boy she had only met twice. After her marriage she was baffled by her body’s rejection of sex itself. Between her husband’s sexual dysfunction and her own anxieties about her genitalia, it took the couple over a year to consummate their marriage. “In all that time I had no idea what my vagina looked like,” she said.

Cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, Feldman began a blog called Hasidic Feminist. She posted essays about her challenging sexual experiences, her troubled marriage, and the hardships of teenage motherhood. Within weeks the blog went viral and was inundated with comments by Hasidic women who were in similar straits. The blog also attracted the attention of an agent who helped Feldman write a book proposal.

She began taking literature classes at Sarah Lawrence College, but told her husband she was taking business classes. “Sarah Lawrence was where I eventually came out of my cocoon,” she told me, recalling how she’d take off her wig and long skirt, and change into jeans before classes.

“I took a theater class where we did a writing exercise in which we had to elaborate on the sentence: My vagina is beautiful. In effect, I wrote an extended Vagina Monologue.”

Shortly thereafter, Feldman left Hasidism for good with her young son, Yitzi, who was almost three at the time. “One of the first things I did when I left the community was to teach my [Yiddish-speaking] son to speak English.”

A kindergartner at a Modern Orthodox Jewish Day School in Manhattan, Yitzi spends most Shabbats with his father, who has also broken away from the Satmar community.

“Unorthodox” is distinctive for the way Feldman’s narrative emphasizes discovering her body, cultivating her own Jewish identity and initiating relationships with men on her own terms.

Still mastering the social learning curve, on our way out of Alice’s Teacup Feldman invited the handsome host at Alice’s Teachup to her book party. “I’m still figuring out the difference between flirting and being social,” she said.

This interview was originally pubished on the Sisterhood Blog of the Forward

The College Admissions Boondoggle- Part 2 by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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When I first heard that an admissions officer at Claremont McKenna College in California inflated SAT scores for a better ranking, I thought: How did college admissions get to be such a boondoggle? Claremont McKenna is a fine school, ranked No. 9 on the list of liberal arts colleges in the U.S. News & World Report ratings. A top-10 spot on the magazine’s college lists is an admissions office’s equivalent of the Holy Grail. But as C-M’s president explained, a rogue admissions officer had been inflating SAT scores by 10 to 20 points since 2005 to upgrade the college’s percentile score.

The C-M story broke on the heels of the Vassar College admissions debacle. I wrote about the Vassar fiasco for The New York Times Motherlode Blog. My piece detailed the story of the 122 students who logged onto Vassar’s admission site (college admissions these days is pretty much paperless) and learned they were accepted. An hour later, citing a computer error, the college rescinded 76 of those acceptances – and the fireworks started.

The Vassar story makes a parent like me – who just finished the college admissions process with her oldest child – cringe. I can only imagine the crushing blow to those kids and their parents. When Vassar initially realized the mistake, the school was extremely insensitive. For starters, no one from the school was available until Monday to sort things out for those unfortunate applicants.

I was fascinated by the comments that were posted on my blog entry. A retired admissions director said that had this happened on her watch, her office would have stayed open the entire weekend to field the distress calls. Finally, a voice of reason and empathy.

A number of other readers suggested that Vassar make good on the original acceptances and let in the 76 kids it ultimately rejected. One comment even detailed how these kids should be tracked for all four years to determine if they were Vassar material after all. But an equally vocal group thought these kids should learn earlier rather than later that life is sometimes unfair. In the end, the school contacted the affected kids and offered to refund the application fee as well as help them with their college search. Too little, too late, in my view. I’m almost tempted to advocate for letting the kids in, for goodness sake.

The Vassar incident reinforced my feeling that the college admissions process is like a lottery. It also saps a kid’s strength and makes a pretty big dent in his self-esteem. How many times does a student hear that thousands of excellent candidates have very similar profiles? Color me naïve, but I believe that everyone is as unique as his or her DNA.

I got raked over the coals for a couple of points I made in the piece. The first was that this whole affair was traumatic for the students and their families. More than a few commenters stated that I was badly in need of some perspective. I appreciate that many worse things can happen to a person than to be mistakenly admitted and then declined by her dream college. A couple of presumptuous readers said that what happened to the 76 Vassar applicants was an upper middle-class problem.

I don’t see this as a class issue, but as a meritocratic one. I know it sounds Pollyannaish to believe that if you work hard enough, you’ll attain your goals. I also know there’s some random luck involved. For Woody Allen it’s even simpler: 90 percent of life is just about showing up.

But what really got me into trouble with the Times readers was disclosing that I had my daughter’s acceptance letter framed. The day after the formal congratulations arrived the old fashioned way, stamped and postmarked, I headed to the frame store. A couple of readers thought I was ridiculous. In fact, the framer asked me if I would have been so particular about the right mat if the letter had been from a state school. I’d like to think that I would have been.

A couple of people generously pointed out that I was simply rewarding my kid’s hard work by not stuffing the letter in a drawer. Others acknowledged that in the end, a college acceptance touches the parents, too. After all, we didn’t have the budget to hire a college coach, so Ken and I were the ones nagging our girl to finish her applications. Reminding a teenager to do anything isn’t pretty. There were a bunch of Sundays when it was all too much, and Ken and I avoided Anna for most of the day. There were also moments of clarity when we realized how ridiculous we were behaving.

As for the bit of the perspective some readers thought I lacked, here’s some from my dear, late father. He used to say you can get a great education anywhere.

Out of the Pink — The Color of Breast Cancer by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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It’s time to give pink back to little girls and boys. The truth is that breast cancer—any cancer—is a hot angry bloody red, undiluted by white.

Last year my younger sister was treated for breast cancer. The cancer’s progression was caught early, but because of her relatively young age the protocol was horrific. I hope and pray for the day when the medical community will look back on these bald, brutal days—days when a mane of hair is gone and eyelashes fall away—as completely unnecessary. Every day of my sister’s treatment, she’d tell me through sharp, stinging tears how much she wanted to live. And through my own tears, I would tell her that I was certain she would.

Breast cancer is a muddied swirl of dark fear mixed in with light hope. When did pink intrude as the emblematic color of fighting for survival?

Pink is the color of the shag carpeting in the bedroom I once shared with my sister. It was a small room with just enough space for two twin beds and matching dressers. We’d frequently engage in sibling rivalry by running masking tape down the middle of the room.

When my sister had the chicken pox, I thought, at 11-years old, that my sticky border would establish a boundary that kept me safe from the disease. It didn’t. I was blotchy and itchy two weeks later. That was the beginning of the end of magical thinking for me. Now in this gritty, very unpink world of ours, I’m impatient. Hurry up, I shout to someone, anyone with a hospital research lab, and find the definitive cure for all cancers.

Pink is the color of the flowers that mysteriously bloomed alongside our driveway. Every spring my sister and I, in matching outfits, were posed in front of those floppy flowers whose name I still don’t know. Back then it was unimaginable to us that someday we’d be older than our parents when the picture was snapped. As for breast cancer, it only happened in the distance of long generations, to our grandmothers.

Breast cancer was once the odd flesh color of a grandmother’s prosthetic breast. The rubber breast was built into her bra and my grandmother was forever adjusting herself. Grandma was diagnosed and treated for her breast cancer in the 1950s. My grandmother never said a word to me about her bout with breast cancer. My aunt told me about the mastectomy when I was a teenager.

When the buzz cut was over my sister was startled that our late father looked back at her in the mirror. Genetics can be shocking. And there wasn’t a note of pink when her steel gray wisps grew back like young shoots.

Breast cancer can lurk in the intense blank white margins where I’ve scribbled my mad notes about the disease. But cancer margins need to be wide and clear. After the lumpectomy my sister had a second surgery to broaden that protective border of symbolic white space. No masking tape this time.

When my sister told me that her lymph nodes were clean, I was struck by how filthy cancer is.

Pink is a color. Breast cancer is a disease. It’s time to stop confusing the two and return the color pink to little girls and boys.

Solving for X: A New Educational Paradigm–Khan Academy by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Geometry gives me bad flashbacks. Abstract theorems and impossible proofs are still the stuff of nightmares. And yes, my teacher was a nun who rapped your knuckles with a ruler when you were on the edge of making a mistake. When it was Anna’s turn to have a go at the dreaded subject a couple of years ago, she and my husband bickered their way to solving a proof.

Why then did I commit soon after to sitting through at least one on-line tutorial on basic geometry? Field work or, to be more exact, virtual field work to check out the latest sensation in on-line education—Khan Academy. Could Khan Academy live up to its intense hype? You tell me. Four tutorials later I was answering SAT-level questions on angles. Correctly.

There are thousands of success stories like mine. A middle school student pegged as mediocre in math moved into an honors class a couple of months after working from early prototypes of Khan Academy’s videos. A grateful mother reported that her autistic son stumbled on one of the Academy’s videos and finally understood decimals and fractions. On-line, there are any number of exclamation-filled comments gleefully announcing, “I finally get this!!”

Khan Academy itself is a growing collection of 2200 videos—ten-minute lessons ranging from basic arithmetic to vector calculus. Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, is the founder of the virtual academy. Khan began his excellent adventure in education 7 years ago when he remotely tutored a young cousin in algebra. Logistics soon made it difficult to schedule their lessons in real time. A natural problem solver, Khan posted his lessons on YouTube so his cousin could watch at her convenience.  He soon realized that his cousin preferred to see him on YouTube rather than interact with him in person. On YouTube she could pause the video or watch it multiple times until she understood the lesson. After a couple of postings the videos went viral and Khan Academy was launched.

Much of Khan’s success lies in the fact that each of his videos tightly focuses on one concept. He coolly narrates every step of a problem with simple illustrations he sketches on a simulated blackboard. By 2009 Khan quit his job to build an educational video library that further encompassed subjects such as United States history, finance and biology. Since its inception, the virtual Khan Academy has attracted over 50 million views and its videos have been translated into 7 languages.

What makes Sal Khan at just 35 qualified to teach so many diverse subjects? With a dual degree in mathematics and electrical engineering from MIT as well as an MBA from Harvard, he’s obviously a smart guy. Perhaps most importantly, Khan is a gifted educator willing to immerse himself in various disciplines. He’s the sole voice of all the Academy’s videos and his affability stems from his endless patience and clear teaching style. He’s also strategically self-deprecating, humanizing him as both a person and a teacher.

But Khan is also data driven and tracks how engaged viewers are during a lesson. For example, if he notices that a number of users fall off at the same point in a video, he’ll go back and tweak the content. He also captures information on students’ progress, demonstrating the success of self-paced instruction for a struggling pupil.

A couple of years ago Khan Academy debuted in the classroom in California.  Part of the experiment was to flip homework assignments and in-class time by assigning students to watch Khan Academy videos for homework. The actual nuts and bolts of problem solving took place the next day in the classroom. When Khan’s self-paced lessons replaced the “one-size-fits-all” educational model a couple of things happened: supportive peer groups evolved in the classroom and students who were “behind” caught up more quickly.

Khan doesn’t follow a particular curriculum. His only goal is to impart “a deep understanding” of a given subject. Deep understanding goes hand in hand with mastery. And mastery happens when a student has the opportunity to delve into a subject. Khan’s latest software can generate hundreds of exercises until a student solidly understands a concept. For me, it was figuring out the value of interior angles in a given shape. My basic understanding began with knowing that a circle is 360°–a fact that Khan repeated until it felt natural and intuitive.

Khan has thus far passed on taking venture capital money. His funding currently comes from the Gates Foundation and Google. “When I’m 80,” says Khan, “I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world.” To that end Khan Academy’s videos are free to anyone who can get an Internet connection.

This year Adam is taking geometry and Anna is tackling calculus. When they get testy over math homework, I send them to Khan Academy. Or better yet, I offer them more than moral support after viewing the relevant video myself.

Your Brain on Adolescence by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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When Anna was a little girl, she once asked me if she had to hate me when she became a teenager. “Of course not,” I told her. I wanted her to love me unconditionally. I wanted her to love me forever.

But unconditional love for a parent is not that helpful for transitioning into adulthood. The better answer is, “Yes, you’re supposed to hate me once in a while. It’s part of a healthy teen’s developmental separation from her parents.” But bear in mind parent teen relationships are not black and white. There are many shades of gray between love and hate.

A recent study out of the University of Virginia found that allowing a child to argue with a parent calmly is important preparation for her to cope with peer pressure down the line. Specifically, the study found that 13- and 14-year olds who backed down from an argument with a parent were more prone to succumb to bad influences when it came to alcohol and drug us at 15 or 16.

Helping teens to argue fairly and effectively is often a two-step forward, one-step back process. I know for the sake of my children I must have the last word on a sensitive topic such as drinking at parties or teaching them about sexually transmitted diseases. This is tough stuff so a dialogue – albeit one that is managed by a parent – is essential for allowing kids to talk through these difficult subjects.

When I’ve stepped back and listened, I often like what I hear from my kids. They’ll tell me that they have sound judgment and hang out with a group of like-minded friends. They’re right, but I’ll necessarily counter that there are strict under-age drinking laws in this state. Or that one careless physical encounter can saddle them with a chronic, or even fatal, illness.

Then there are the complicated mechanisms of the teenage brain. Over the past decade, researchers have found that a teenager’s wild mood swings and penchant for risky behavior are not just about raging hormones. The adolescent brain – particularly the prefrontal cortex that is responsible for rational thinking – is developing at lightning speed during the teenage years, causing dramatic changes in behavior. Complementary research on the adolescent brain has also found that teenagers don’t necessarily underestimate risk. Rather, they overestimate the reward that comes with dangerous activities.

Throw into the mix that many of us have prolonged our kid’s childhoods by giving them a free pass on making adult decisions. National Public Radio recently reported that a number of parents negotiate job salaries and apartment leases for their recent college graduates. This kind of interference short-circuits the evolutionary hardware that allows young adults to accumulate the hands-on experience to make thoughtful decisions. On the other end of the spectrum, a recent article in The Wall Street Journal pointed out that with puberty starting earlier and adulthood starting later for our children, emotional and physical maturity might not be in harmony until the late 20s.

“If you think of the teenage brain as a car,” wrote Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley, “today’s adolescents acquire an accelerator a long time before they can steer and brake.”

This temporary brain disconnect brings about a couple of 21st century parenting conundrums. How do you deal with a 10-year old going through puberty when adulthood is so far off? How do you cope with a child approaching 30 who has postponed life in favor of shelter and dependence?

With the first stirrings of puberty, it’s important to avoid what Laura Kastner, a clinical psychologist and author of “Getting to Calm: Cool-Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens + Teens,” calls “co-flooding” –adding to the high emotions with which your teen has already “flooded” a conversation. Simply put, don’t spar with your child. Have a full-fledged conversation and listen to each other. Even when parents offer praise with constructive criticism, a teen just hears that as blah, blah, blah. Sometimes it’s simply better to set the rules. When you tell your child that he can’t attend a party where trouble is likely to brew, make sure that he knows that it doesn’t reflect your level of trust in him. Your daughter should know that even though not every piece of clothing is going to flatter her, in no way does that detract from her beauty.

And then there’s a parent’s default argument – the one with a snappy catch-phrase that stops a discussion from veering further off course. Mine is: “Save it for the Supreme Court.” Even if my kids make more sense than I do, I’m still in charge. And I’m in charge because their brains are still developing and syncing, making them the most misunderstood of all people: teenagers.

The Children Who Brave The Homefront: Military Families by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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There is one standing order that I’ve given my children with which they have never argued. When we see a woman or man in uniform, we go up to them and thank them for their service to our country. No exceptions. A few years ago Adam and I had a stark and unforgettable encounter with a veteran. We were out for lunch when we saw a young man in a wheelchair pull up to the table across from us. There was something about his demeanor that made me think this young man wasn’t in a wheelchair because he was reckless. And then I saw the Semper Fi sticker on the back of his chair.

“This man is a Marine,” I said to Adam.

My son didn’t have to be told what came next. He knew I’d learned it from my own father, a World War II veteran. Adam accompanied me to the man’s table. “I used to be a Marine,” the man said softly. We told him once a Marine, always a Marine. Adam shook the man’s hand and said, “Thank you for your service.”

“Any time, buddy,” said the Marine. “Any time.” His mother had tears in her eyes.

My children and I don’t know anyone personally whose sibling or parent is serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. All the more urgent for my kids to acknowledge a soldier. All the more urgent for them to seek out information in articles and books that will help them understand what families in our country sacrifice when a loved one in the Armed Forces is in harm’s way.

Novelist and playwright Laura Harrington published a novel in the past year that should be mandatory reading for parents and teens alike. It’s easy to remember the title, Alice Bliss. And it’s impossible to forget the eponymous protagonist. Alice is 15 and the older of two daughters. You see the deep father-daughter bond Matt and Alice share – a bond that’s already there when she’s a younger girl helping her father shingle a roof, trusting him as he coaches her through a bout of vertigo.

Matt, a National Guard reservist, signs on to fight in Iraq because he believes it’s the right thing to do. His patriotism is unquestionable, but there’s also a bit of the adventurer in his decision to ship out. Alice knows this about her dad in the same way that she knows that he can fix anything in the world.

When you read this quiet, contemplative novel, be prepared to be both enlightened and moved to tears. The book further piqued my curiosity about children with a parent deployed in a war zone. During the decade-long fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has spent millions of dollars to train hundreds of American school counselors and psychologists to help children cope with the fear, confusion and the unthinkable. What if a parent returns with a physical injury? What if he or she needs psychological help? Or what happens if a parent doesn’t return at all?

As I surfed the Internet for information about kids with deployed parents, I imagined Alice Bliss doing the same thing in the bedroom she shared with her little sister. Skipping from link to link, I thought of my father refusing to answer a factual question. “Look it up,” he’d always reply. If I had been around when he served in World War II, how would I have borne his absence?

I eventually landed on a recent article in The New York Times that reported on the accommodations public schools near bases make for military families. If only fictional, Alice had been so lucky. Harrington is so good at capturing Alice’s isolation in her upstate New York community. She inhabits her character’s adolescent soul. When Alice is running off her fear and anxiety in a cross-country meet, we’re also short of breath and bumping up against hopelessness. Reading “Alice Bliss” is a visceral experience.

According to the Times, the public schools near Camp Lejeune, a military base in North Carolina, coordinate support services through the Marines with programs like the While You Wait Club. It’s a crowded club. Some 15,000 children in the area, including those of reservists, meet to talk, to journal, to draw – to do just about anything to make the waiting bearable. With a little luck and vigilance, counselors and teachers may catch a spiraling depression or notice mounting anxiety. According to a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, pediatric behavioral disorders steadily increase while a parent is deployed.

Maybe the study states the obvious, but the courageous Alice Bliss and her creator demonstrate that the obvious quickly becomes complex. Alice is a great character – an all-American girl that a military teen needs in her corner. She’s everyone’s daughter. And the Marine Adam and I greeted at lunch is everyone’s son

I Try for Good: Governor Jeb Bush’s Latino Outreach for the GOP by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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I’m in a south Florida state of mind today. I’m craving some of that sunny warm weather up here in chilly New England, but more importantly, today is a Republican primary day down there. Although I’m as curious as the next person to see who will come out on top, there’s something deeper going on that intrigues me, and it has to do with my sister and brother Latinos. True, they comprise an influential voting bloc, but I think the Latinos in this country have done something even more profound—they’ve pierced the American consciousness like no other ethnic group that’s come to this country. Latinos have brought a bilingualism that doesn’t melt into the muddying swirl of the proverbial melting pot, but bubbles to the top. It’s a bilingualism that is uniquely American.

Governor Jeb Bush, who is spearheading the GOP’s Latino outreach, recently recognized that unique bilingualism in an op-ed in the Washington Post:

We must be able to assure new Americans the opportunity to succeed and contribute their talents. And when they come, as surely they will, we must welcome them, no matter whether they speak Spanish or Creole or Portuguese. When we hear foreign languages in the streets of America that is a validation of the Republican vision to create a place where people want to come and make their lives. Hispanics here speak or are learning English — not French, Chinese or Hindi. There is a lesson in that, and Republicans should be the ones to champion it.

Over a decade ago, when Anna was six-years old, we stayed in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale where the housekeeper left an envelope with a note thanking us in advance for a tip. Please for tip, I try for good, she wrote in a barely legible scrawl. I showed this to my young daughter who went wide-eyed as she deciphered the words. “A grown up wrote that?” she asked.

I showed her that note to her to develop empathy.  I showed her that note so that she’d never forget that America is a place where immigrants strive for a better life, and in doing so they grace our streets with their languages and their customs.

Governor Bush’s vision is not just a Republican one. And I’d like to think that he also believes in the housekeeper and her intentions of, I try for good.

In that spirit I offer a few caveats that I wrote to my children a couple of years ago when the war against immigrants, Latinos in particular, raged in Arizona.

Take note of this verse from the Torah: “You shall have one standard for stranger and citizen alike: for I, ADONAI, am your God” (Lev. 24:17-22). Your Cuban refugee relatives wouldn’t have passed muster in Arizona. They didn’t have papers when they came to this country 50 years ago. Your Israelite ancestors and your brothers and sisters in the Holocaust were paperless too.

 People are neither illegal nor alien. And while I’m on the subject, they’re not illegitimate either.  

 It’s not a crime to be poor. It’s a crime to marginalize the poor.

Learn Spanish. It’s part of your heritage and it’s practical. Given that there are 20 countries to our south where Spanish is the national language. Feel anew the old commandment to Love Your Neighbor as Yourself

Revel in deep, meaningful translation as a way to engage with others. If you don’t believe me then turn to God, who happily listens to the Sh’ma, Judaism’s central tenet, in 70 languages. God is an equal-opportunity linguist.

Pretty in Pink: Peggy Orenstein on the New Girlie-Girl Culture By Judy Bolton-Fasman

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For the past two decades Peggy Orenstein has had her finger on the pulse of contemporary girl culture. The author of three acclaimed books on girlhood as well as a poignant memoir about her arduous journey to motherhood, Orenstein takes on mass marketing and the Disney machine in—Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture—her latest book just published in paperback.

Orenstein sends her dispatches from places as varied as toy fairs and the toddler-tiara pageant circuit. She doesn’t claim to be covering uncharted territory in these venues, but to be exploring these landscapes anew with a pink lens. For pink is the predominant color in this mega-industry of anointing Disney princesses and the glittery hoopla that comes with the coronation.

I love Orenstein’s unique take on “there is nothing new under the sun” when she writes that 5 year-old beauty contestants are like “museum portraits I had seen of eighteenth-century European princesses—little girls in low-cut gowns, their hair piled high, their cheeks and lips rouged red—that were used to attract potential husbands, typically middle-aged men, who could strengthen the girls’ families’ political or financial positions.” How different is that mindset from a mother telling her 6 year-old daughter that, “one of the judges is a man so be sure you wink at him.”

I spoke with Orenstein when her book was published in hardcover and she noted that the “Disneyfication” of the princess phenomenon boosted the company’s sales to 4 billion dollars last year. Here’s another statistic that astounded me: ‘Tween girls spend 40 million dollars a month on beauty products. These girls are doing a lot more than using Bonne Belle’s Lip Smackers. Ten year-olds are buying fruit-scented Nair to get rid of unwanted body hair. Eight to 12 year-olds are convinced that they need the anti-wrinkle cream that Wal-Mart markets to them. Wrinkles at 12? ? These are examples of a trend descriptively referred to as ‘kids getting older younger’ or KGOY.”

How did this insanity begin? When did it escalate? Here’s the short answer. Parents and grandparents have bought the complete princess package. For starters, a Disney survey reported that parents equated the word princess with safe. Accordingly, Disney has created a world where an infant’s onesie announces her royal status. From there it goes on to elaborate costumes that emulate princesses from Cinderella to Tiana—the first African-American princess in the Disney lineup. Companies dip DVD players, cameras and the more standard purses and jewelry boxes in pink.

In the midst of this marketing blitz, Orenstein acknowledged that as a Jewish woman she bristles at the word “princess.” “It was a slur for me growing up. It wasn’t something you aspired to. It brought up issues connected with materialism, which is why my traditional Jewish mother didn’t let me have a Barbie. She felt Barbie focused too much on clothes and looks.”

Orenstein, the mother of 8 year-old Daisy, is personally on the frontlines of girl culture. Daisy occasionally appears in Cinderella Ate My Daughter and it seems she’s a wonderful chip off the old block. When a girl layered in pink—pink helmet, pink bicycle—challenges Daisy’s preference for a green dragon helmet and neutral colored bike, Daisy tells her that her choices work for boys and girls.

Orenstein points out that Daisy is a little girl who’s as comfortable in overalls as she is in party dresses. Girls as well as boys are among her close friends. She’s also a little girl with a Japanese-American father who asks her mother why a Jewish person can be called a Jew, but a Japanese person cannot be called a JAP. Daisy will someday learn that the same racial epithet extends to Jewish women as well. Orenstein explains to her that, “meanings shift over generations.” The play on words leads Orenstein and me back to our conversation about the Jewish American Princess stereotype. “I think calling women JAPs ,” she says, “was a way for Jewish men to express self-hatred, discomfort with ethnicity and their own difference.”

Orenstein’s commitment to Jewish girls has also extended to serving as a curriculum consultant for Rosh Chodesh, It’s a Girl Thing. “It was important to me that a bat mitzvah not be seen as a bar mitzvah in drag, but as an aspect that belongs just to our daughters. I don’t want my Jewish womanhood to be generic or adapted from men.”

And how does Orenstein cope as a mother with this engulfing princess culture that attracts our girls like a moth to a flame? “I fight fun with fun. You can’t say no to everything, but you can give your girl broader choices to articulate her desires and her need to express herself as a girl.”

Aunt Glady’s Portrait — The Third Yartzheit by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Today is my Aunt Gladys’ third yartzheit—the anniversary of her death on the Jewish calendar. I miss her because she was funny. I miss her because she looked so much like my grandmother. But mostly I miss her because I love her. She would have been 97 this past October and one of the last things she said to me was, “I’m not sure who you are, but I know I love you.”

A few years back my aunt gave me a life-size portrait of herself. She was packing up her condominium to move into senior housing. She had been widowed for several years and one day the condo became just too big, too daunting for her to maintain it. There were too many stairs. And there was too much of everything in it. Furniture, paintings, dishes. So much memory-laden stuff strewn about can be exhausting.

Aunt Gladys decided enough was enough and she sent everything off to be auctioned. I asked her if the portrait was for sale too. It was. I made an offer. Instead she tried to buy me out with a pair of grape shears—silver inlaid with the fruit of the vine. These were the same shears she wrapped my knuckles with when I tore the grapes off their miniature branches with my hands forty years ago. Back then I was pegged as my mother’s daughter—a loud, fibbing, heart-on-her-sleeve wearing mini-me. My father’s family was proper, fancy. Aunt Gladys had a housekeeper, a grand piano and leather furniture in her den.

Aunt Gladys’ portrait hung for years in the living room of her stately home in New Haven, Connecticut. In its gilded frame, the painting looked like John Singer Sargent had had a formidable hand in its creation. A portrait light illuminated the picture.

A friend once told me that she thought painting or photographing someone was morbid. She refused to own a camera. I’d think about her comment when I visited Aunt Gladys and snapped her picture with my children. I worried that she thought I took the pictures because it was my last chance to have her huddle with my kids. Maybe that was my intention, but I can’t say for sure.

Another find from the condo move was the treasure trove of black and white photos. My aunt, so young and pretty. Young women in old photographs are always beautiful. My daughter, 11 at the time, stared at the pictures, trying to reconcile the Aunt Gladys before her with the Gladys Bolton in the pictures.

Aunt Gladys told me that the summer she sat for the portrait it was very hot and she was very cross. She was also newly married and the last thing she wanted to do was to sit still for a month. But her mother, my grandmother, insisted. And so the portrait was painted. I love that my daughter heard the story directly from my aunt.

Intergenerational relationships are essential to me. Aunt Gladys was also a direct link to my father who died several years before her. She told my kids that their grandfather was her goofy kid brother who had a genius for trivia and numbers. She also told them how much my father and I looked alike.

I’ve stored the portrait in my attic. Her children and grandchildren didn’t have space for the picture. My cousin said that I was the best person to keep it for now. Aunt Gladys said that she was glad I had the portrait. When she gave it to me she wished aloud that I would give it to one of my children someday. Maybe they won’t exactly remember who Aunt Gladys was, but they’ll sense that they loved her.

The Lark and The Owl: Getting a Good Night’s Sleep by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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There are two kinds of people in our house – the larks and the owls. Ken and Anna are the larks. They’re “morning people,” capable of carrying on a conversation without caffeine. And worst of all, they’re ridiculously cheerful at breakfast.

Adam and I are the owls. We love staying up late and sleeping in. We only speak when spoken to in the morning, and we’re strictly monosyllabic. It’s so unfair that most night owls have to follow the schedules of flittering morning larks.

Regardless of our natures, no one in our house sleeps as much as he or she should. I’d like to blame homework and deadlines for putting us in the red in the sleep column. But the truer culprit is our inefficiency. I can hear my kids’ objections now. “We start our homework right after dinner. We use free periods in school to stay on top of things.”

Save it kids. I know you’re on Facebook or you’re trolling the Internet for this, that and the other thing when you should be solving equations. You can’t fool the queen of procrastination. And you can’t fool your body. Dr. Lawrence J. Epstein is the regional medical director for the Harvard affiliated Sleep HealthCenters and was recently president of the American Academy of Sleep. He’s written a comprehensive book called The Harvard Medical School Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep. Pick up the book and there is no doubt that Dr. Epstein is the go-to man for everything about sleep.

When I recently heard Dr. Epstein speak at my son’s school, he put my family’s lack of sleep in sobering perspective. At best, each of us is running on a two-hour sleep deficit. In my family, that adds up to eight hours of desperately needed sleep wasted on Angry Birds, Twitter and The New York Times crossword puzzles. Yes, everyone needs down time, but now more than ever there’s so much out there to entertain us. I don’t like to go to sleep early because I think I’ll be missing something.

There’s no getting around the fact that sleep is a basic biological drive. We’re predisposed to circadian rhythms – waking and sleeping at certain times. Sleeping is how we conserve and restore energy. Sleeping strengthens the immune system; it sharpens learning and memory; and it’s key to growth development. Teenagers, in particular, are constantly disrupting their circadian rhythms. To compensate, my son would happily sleep until one in the afternoon on the weekends if I didn’t insist he get up by 11 to join the world.

Statistics show that sleeping away the weekend to stay ahead of a cumulative sleep debt doesn’t work. Seventy million Americans – 25 percent of the population – have sleeping disorders. Twenty-seven percent of college students are at risk for a sleeping disorder.

Dr. Epstein likes the idea of a later start time for high school students. But he’s a pragmatist and acknowledges that pushing up a school’s start time can wreak havoc with a parent’s schedule and may have some economic fallout for the family. But I know the few school days in the year that Adam starts just a half an hour later make him human in the morning. Of course, if a later start time became routine, he’d probably adjust accordingly by staying up later and still be miserable in the morning.

A Good Night’s Sleep covers the obvious and not so obvious obstacles to restorative sleep. If falling asleep is difficult, avoid the bedroom until it’s time to retire. It may seem simple to do, but my kids and I work in our rooms after dinner. I even have a lap desk so I can type in bed. Working in bed (and yes, I’m writing this column there) sabotages sleep. I know that for me, I almost trick myself into thinking that I’m getting some rest by hanging out in my bedroom. But the truth is, it’s harder to wind down when I use the same room for sleep and work.

Limit caffeine and alcohol. No more Coke Zero at night. Wine may initially cause drowsiness, but it’s one of the major causes of sleep fragmentation. We’ve all been there, waking up several times at night. Relaxation and visualization can also be useful to segue into sleep. I’ve coached Adam, the biggest sleep skeptic in our house, using techniques instructing him to relax each muscle in his body. I’ll ask him to visualize lying on a warm beach or looking at a star-studded sky. Visualization worked better when he was younger. These days he shoos me away to write a paper.

Of course the biggest disruption to sleep is kids. Note the best-selling success of a tongue in cheek book called Go the F*** to Sleep. But there was something profound that happened to me when I became a mother. I was no longer responsible just for myself, and I never slept the same way again. I used to listen for cries. Now I listen for the car in the driveway. And I’m almost certain to lose sleep this coming fall worrying and wondering when my lark flies off to college.