Selected Other Writing
The President Could Elevate Our Mental Health Discussions
July 9, 2020
I’m a Buffalonian who shops at Wegmans, visits Canalside and eats sponge candy. But I’m also a woman who was ordained by Hebrew Union College in 1975. I’m a synagogue cantor (retired now) who has learned to pay sharp attention to the offhand remarks that people make.
On New Year's Eve, a Fox News reporter asked President Trump to assess Sen. Elizabeth Warren's opinion of her chances of winning the presidency in the 2020 election. The president replied that he couldn't speculate about it. He then suggested posing the question to Warren's psychiatrist.
What did our president mean when he referred to Ms. Warren's theoretical psychiatrist?
Sexism is Routine for Female Clergy
August 19, 2019
A female cantor walks into a funeral chapel. The funeral director says, “Nice to meet you, Cantor. Turn around and let me see the rear view.”
Rabbis and cantors who are also women hear some version of this from time to time, but less frequently today than 40 years ago.
Although we’re aware that it’s impossible, many of us try to dress in a way that’s designed to prevent sexist comments. By keeping our necklines high and our hemlines low, by avoiding anything clingy, we work at a calculus that has variables clearly beyond our control. Our sought-after formula usually depends on some perfect calibration of the “female” aspect of the term female clergy and the “clergy” part. If nothing else can, the theory goes, looking HOLY should shut it all down.
New Jewish Feminism
Excerpt from Barbara’s chapter:
The cantor of my childhood synagogue, Martin Rosen, was one of my heroes. Cantor Rosen’s voice rumbled like thunder and he had a great, high-pitched laugh. I believed in himn, in that rumbling sound, in the fancy prayer words, in the lemon polish smell of the pews, and in the compact feel of the Union Prayer Book in my hands. Oh yes, I too would be a cantor one day.
When I was eleven years old, Cantor Rosen let me sing alto in the high holy day choir and made an example of me. He helped me to find a voice teacher and told me tales of student life at Hebrew Union College. I was secure in my resolve until the late winter of 1970, when I called Cantor Rosen to ask him about applying to cantorial school. At that tender moment, he laughed, saying, “They’ll never take you.”
New Jewish Feminism was a National Jewish Book Awards finalist.
When I first chanted Megilah at 19, I was harassed on the bima. I’m still not laughing, decades later.
January 9, 2018
It is almost the spring of my second year at Hebrew Union College, and I am studying cantillation.
I love it. I feel clever when I get it right and adore picking up the little nuances that only the cognoscenti appreciate.
The faculty chair asks if I will chant an excerpt from Esther on Purim during the school-wide service. I demur a bit, because I have mastered only haftarah chant so far and am just starting on Torah. Esther cantillation is part of next year’s curriculum. Still, I say yes, feeling sure that I can learn it, at least well enough to chant the assigned verses, which are Esther 7:5-10. Only a few verses, with lots of “Hamans,” so there will be lots of traditional noisemaking in the congregation to blot out his villainous name. I am excited.
I learn the system with its odd melismas and strange ironic bursts of sound. Then I practice chanting the text over and over until I can do it from the fancy scroll, which has no vowels or cantillation signs. I am not quite in the legally mandated zany Purim mood, though, as I am aking this task very seriously. I am new to the book of Esther, new to this system of chanting, newly honored with a public reading on a day when everyone, students and faculty, will be in the chapel, and only nineteen years old, with a teenager’s self-consciousness.
When it is time, I get up for the reading.
#MeToo: My Family’s Been Saying This for One Hundred Years
October 19, 2017
My grandmother was a pharmacist in Romania. Day after day in her floor length skirts she would climb a scaffold on a rolling ladder to fetch medicines. Day after day customers positioned themselves to look up her skirts. She told me this story over and over again, blushing every time.