International Women's Day (NMM vs. YSB)

How International Women's Day in the Knesset became One Big Joke.

How's this for a succinct answer? Yulia Shamalov-Berkovich (Kadima).

Ok, you say. Shamalov-Berkovich (Kadima) is not very succinct as Israeli names go. You're right. But ignore that for now. Let me explain.

On International Women's Day, this already less-than-stellar uber-freshman MK was not joking when her office issued a press release with the following headline:

"In honor of International Women's Day – Female MKs are battling the cold in the Knesset"

The rest of the announcement went on to explain that YSB has taken up the struggle to get the Knesset to turn down the air conditioning. She wrote a letter on the subject to Knesset Director-General Dan Landau, a copy of which reached NMM's hands:

"Since I have arrived in the Knesset, I find myself frequently sick and chilled due to temperatures that
reach as low as 16 degrees (Celsius). I have requested, I have restrained myself, I have suffered, and

enough is enough. I do not understand how one can advance anything in the Knesset when the entire place [gives examples to show that she knows that Knesset includes features such as dining rooms, committee rooms, and the plenum] is "dog cold".

"Although well dressed men here are found in suits, which maintain their body heat and their status, the accepted dress code expected of us, women, includes an elegant appearance that frequently involves skirts, dresses, high heels, and so forth."

"I was surprised to discover that some committee chairman demand that the ushers not raise the thermostat in committee rooms and I was not aware that their authority included veto power regarding temperature in hearing rooms."

"According to the Electric Company, the recommended temperature for the public in buildings in order to maintain reasonable electric use is between 22-24 degrees, winter and summer. Maintaining this temperature range in the Knesset will not merely help ensure the health of those who visit, but will also save a fortune in public funds."

According to an independent poll that I carried out in the Knesset, it seems that this phenomenon is not unique to me. Many members of Knesset, male as well as female, share my feelings and are forced to dress in a warmer, heavier and bulkier manner."

"From one issue to another on the same subject: The plenum hall suffers from a lack of ventilation and unpleasant compacting (?) of air. The feeling is one of sitting in a sealed and unventilated room. It seems that in an attempt to rectify the lack of ventilation, those in charge choose to freeze the air in the plenum. The result: both strangling and freezing.

"Thus I would thank you if the temperature in the Knesset could be maintained at no lower than 22-24 degrees and I would appreciate if you could find an alternative solution to the freezing of the plenum in a way that will allow for appropriate cross-ventilation and will cast aside the inappropriate and inhumane solution of freezing the plenum.

I am certain that the creative and innovative spirit that flows through your veins will ensure finding suitable solutions to the problems that I have addressed.

From woman to woman, a day after IWD, Yulia, I really must thank you. Thank you for reducing the role of the woman to the stereotypical "ooh, its cold in here". Thank you for implying that to be appropriately elegant, I come outfitted in skirts and high heels. Thank you for belittling the true importance of a day meant to raise awareness of the difficulties facing women in the modern world, and of choosing to highlight such an important issue as opposed to truly less-significant topics such as pay gaps, glass ceilings, and "family honor killings".

And thank you, as always, your invaluable effort in reinforcing negative stereotypes regarding the abilities, considerations and concerns of female parliamentarians.

Neo-Malthusian Structuralism and Flying with a Toddler

I have no time, really none, to write this post. But if I don’t get back on the proverbial horse, then…..well, I won’t be on the horse.

I was just inspired by reading a truly good Blog about travelling with a very small child. Or a very big baby. Or just a pint-sized ball of terror/energy/kisses.

So here it is, folks. I am overworked up the wazzoo, which is why I haven’t written anything in two months. I have a book review due on Sunday that still scares the bejeezus out of me, mostly because I think that the author’s school of thought is neo-Malthusian structuralism. Try to Wiki that… Not to mention the fact that in order to write a five-page paper, my most logical course of action is to summarize (précis) the book. All 600 pages of it, including odd calculus-based curves that track GNPs translated into wheat-purchase-power, alongside population growth and, uh, land use?

And in spite of the fact that I should be reading more about the failure of the tax structure in 18th century France, I am blogging to get one thing off of my chest:

I am terrified of flying with my son.

There, I said it. He is wonderful, smart and charming. But he also has very impressive lung power, is reluctant to sleep, and really likes climbing things. And all of that, including the physical discomfort of having him on my lap for a dozen or so hours, is minor compared with my discomfort when facing that utter disdain with which I know I will be greeted by my fellow passengers.

And now, to top it off, I’m scared that the flight attendants will remove me for “security concerns” if Little N loses it for a minute, or if I do something really objectionable like ask for a bottle of water when we’re stuck on the tarmac or take him for a walk up and down the aisles in the hopes that he will fall asleep while in motion. Because, if various news sources are to be believed, its happened before.

Last year: If only it was always this easy

There are no words of comfort, I think, that will reduce my trepidation in the coming weeks before we are set to go on vacation. Even neo- Malthusian structuralism and French tax history seem appealing in comparison to the Flights.

Instead, I will include a brief travelers’ prayer. To be read responsively by both parents prior to flight.

Oh Divine Divinity
Make the plane fly fast.
Give me roomy bulkhead seats
Don’t make me get off last.

Oh Divine Divinity
Let us all fall asleep
From London through to Washington
Without nary a peep.

Oh Divine Divinity
Let OJ flow like wine
Let there be an extra meal
So L’il N don’t eat mine

Oh Divine Divinity
Let others cast not stares
Nor grimaces nor hateful gripes
Whispered asides and glares

Because, Divine Divinity
They too were once young kids
You want to claim you never cried?
I’ll bet on it you did.

I swear, Divine Divinity
I’d rather take a train
But you went and made the oceans
And so I’m stuck on this plane.

In short, mighty Divinity
Pretty please, answer this prayer
Divert the yells, the cries and poop
Until we’ve landed there.

More sufganiyot and a word on democracy

First of all, in response to Yonit's complaint that my sufganiya list has been too brand-limited, I've added another three:

1. Chocolate "porcupine" – filled with chocolate and topped with "quills" of non-dairy semisweet chocolate ganache
2. "Rocher" – filled with chocolate and nougat cream and topped with chocolate ganache and rice crispies
3. Plain donut, complete with a hole in the middle, topped with classic chocolate topping

I feel like I should write something serious at this point, and so I will:

My democratic moment of the week:

Yesterday, a group of students enrolled in a pre-college program to complete their matriculation exams came to my office. They had discovered that matriculation courses had been privatized under their noses, so to speak, and that the organizations that provided funding for newly-discharged soldiers, ultra-orthodox, Ethiopians and so on had decided to stop working with the privatized body. The result? Somewhere around 12,000 students trying to qualify for higher education will discover on January 1 that their funding has been pulled out from under them.

The four students, all from Sappir College in Sderot, had come to the Knesset in the hopes of meeting with MKs and getting the privatization cancelled or at least to find a way to save this school year, which they have already started.

I spent around two hours with them and finished the day feeling really, really, absurdly good, despite the fact that they have very little chance of saving their education in the next two weeks before the privatization goes into effect. So why?

Because it is sometimes easy here to become very jaded and cynical. And sometimes it takes four students pounding the halls here, and camping out in the dining rooms to remind myself that not all Israelis think that the Knesset is simply an elaborate dance with a predetermined outcome. Sometimes, people come here because they believe that they can make a change, if only someone will listen to them.

And today – a relatively unknown MK caught me in the hallway, and smiled at me, telling me that he had already started work on the students' case. Sometimes, that means, the effort can pay off.

Happy December, everyone. Its one of my absolute favorite months. There is something very optimistic and rejuvenating about crisp, chilly air.

If I could give the world one assignment today, it would be finding a representative, and telling them what you think about something you care about. Because sometimes they listen.

Odds and Ends: Sufganiyot, sexism and more

Last week I had to explain why I wrote a terrible article on the previous Thursday. Here is what my answer wasn’t:

“Big N had just gotten back from reserves. I was pounding away at my keyboard as if I were Vladimir Ashkenazi. Big N was with Little N. Then came the curses, and then the call from Big N: ‘I need you to come here NOW. This one is exceptional!’ It was ugly. A bath was necessary. In short, my boss, the reason that I couldn’t focus on the article is that I was rushing to meet deadline while dealing with…poop. Lots of it.”

In my original dream-answer-sequence, I went into juicy detail as to the nature of said poop. But since I don’t have so many readers yet, and I would like to some day, I will quash that desire.

Instead, I simply apologized.

Second announcement: as I am married in to a family that seems to have a genetic terror of blood, I may have volunteered myself to be a birthing partner to a relative-in-law. Since blood doesn’t bother me. Or birthing. I hope.

Third announcement: I wanted to write something about a promo that I saw on television involving female MKs modeling clothing, but then could not find the actual context anywhere in the Internet. If anyone has found it, and would like to point me in the right direction, thank you. If you haven’t found it, and, like me, would like to speculatively trash whoever thought of such an idea, go ahead.

But fortunately, as a result of a blog-cooling-off break that I took between part 1 and part 2 of this blog, I now have a direction to advance with this.

There are about two female reporters in my specific line of work. There are a dozen male ones. And I have noticed that my (female) colleague and I have a special status. Anyone (male) we are seen speaking with in the corridors of power is immediately considered by our (male) colleagues as a potential fling. Of ours.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, people! As a reporter, I tend to look for sources. So do my male counterparts. The pursuit of sources may be a type of romancing, in the most poetic sort of analogy, but honestly, give it a break. And, to be fair, the only reporter currently known to be enjoying such a relationship is – sorry to burst the bubble – male.

I am sure that this is some type of sexism, but I don’t know which stereotype it seeks to vindicate. That young women in the workplace are necessarily having work-related relationships? Or is it giving voice to the gossipers’ fantasies regarding the young women in their workplace?

Fourth and final subject: Happy Hannukah to those for whom it is relevant. I haven’t eaten any latkes yet, but here’s the list of sufganiya (its like a donut, folks) flavors I’ve consumed (but mostly shared) so far:

1. Plain, with powdered sugar
2. chocolate and pannecotta filling, glazed with milk chocolate and topped with chocolate “pearls”
3. whipped-cream filling with Belgian chocolate glaze
4. chocolate and pop-rocks filling (weird but fun) with chocolate glaze and colored jimmies
5. white chocolate and pistachio ganache filling with semi-sweet dark chocolate glaze and ground pistachio topping
6. chocolate, banana and coconut liqueur filling with dark chocolate glaze, topped with banana chips and toasted coconut
7. melon vodka and white chocolate ganache filling with white chocolate glaze and a dark chocolate drizzle
8. halva and white chocolate ganache filling with a white chocolate glaze, dark chocolate drizzle and crumbled candied pecans

Happy holidays, whichever ones you choose to ingest!

Kurdelicious

I am going to begin this post by noting that I am stuffed full of Kubbeh and Katachaweh and if you understand what I'm talking about, you can skip half of what I have to say.

Winter is Kurdish food season. Kurdish food comes in three forms:
1) Raw
2) Extremely well-cooked
3) Very extremely well-cooked

The raw aspect tends to focus on all kinds of good-smelling herbs, like fresh basil, bad-smelling herbs, like green onions, and root vegetables of a dubious nature. Also something that everybody agrees is called "taratiza", but nobody can translate into a language spoken by non-Persian Kurds.

And now to explain further. Kubbeh is to Kurdish cuisine as…gosh, I don't know, a nice hollandaise sauce is to WASP food. It is the pinnacle of Kurdish culinary skill. It can be fried or boiled in soup, and begins its life as a stuffed, round dumpling. The wrapper part is made of semolina (think Cream of Wheat, Americans), and the inside is ground meat, ground chicken, or some kind of vegetarian sludge. They can be the size of ping-pong balls and spherical, or can get as flat and big in diameter as a small plate. As far as I can tell, there are at least a dozen variants on the soup involved, ranging from beet broth (delish! I know – sounds terrible – cream of wheat stuffed with pulled beef in beet broth) to sour sorrel soup.

They are the joy of husband N's existence. As winter comes, he waxes nostalgic, and advocates at least once every ten days that we make the three-hour drive up to his parents in the hopes of having Kubbeh for Friday dinner.

Did I mention that it is the secret way to separate the Kurds from the rest of the world? That as a super-non-Kurd, my chances of ever getting the cream-of-wheat to form a glutinous ball that will support the filling are slightly worse than those of my winning the PowerBall lottery?

As if the nostalgia wasn't overwhelming enough, we unwittingly moved last year, right at the beginning of the Kubbeh season to one of the quiet Kubbeh capitals of Israel.

Our landlords live one floor above us. Mrs. Landlord, who could – and should – be the subject of a photo shoot by National Geographic on the Kurdish exile, makes everything they eat from scratch, from bread, to home-cured sunflower seeds, to Kubbeh. And oh, what kubbeh (we imagine) it is. As far as we can estimate, she's been in the kubbeh-rolling business since she was about ten. She seems to be, in a sort-of ageless way, pushing 80. She has some 11 children, all of whom have children (and one or two have grandchildren) and on Friday nights, they all come over and eat kubbeh.

N's mouth waters and his eyes grow as wide as the saucer-sized flat and yellow tumeric kubbeh when he smells them cooking. He chokes back his jealously as he hears the chairs scraping upstairs signaling the onset of the kubbeh meal, while he wends his way through another roast chicken dinner a la Ashkenazi-American Jewry. Mrs. Landlord, who is always happy to invite us in for a cup of tea and delicious home-made sweets, knows where her real assets lie, and will not give out her kubbeh for free. In fact, she assured my husband, she would be happy to sell us 50 frozen Kubbeh at the same budget rate that she offers to her offspring.

Where does Shorter N fit in to this? He's our leverage, of course.

Mr. and Mrs. Landlord think that Li'l N is a fabulous baby, meaning they talk to him in Kurdish baby-talk, and…like old people everywhere…wish to express their love by way of the palate. So while N and I can languish months with my roast-chicken-and-sweet-potato dinners, a visit with Shorter N to the Landlords can result in side benefits for Mom.

Last week, the Little Guy had a runny nose, and after a medical discussion in Kurdish, the Landlords prescribed a treatment of Shorbeh, a sort of rice-and-chicken stew. They poured Li'l N a bowl big enough to present a drowning risk, and grinned as he took a bite, grinned, and commercially announced a perfectly-scripted "mmmmmm". Guess who was given the honor of finishing the Shorbeh? Yup, me.

Big N had a sort of hang-dog tone, if a tone could be hang-dog, when I called him at work to report my success. "Did she give you Kubbeh, though?"

Here I had to admit defeat. "No. But the Shorbeh was gooooood. Much better than the can of tuna I planned on having for lunch."

But never you fear, faithful reader. Little N is growing and becoming cuter by the week. And after I strategically plant him in sort of a Tiny Tim way, plaintively staring at – or better yet, after I teach him to delicately announce in his little voice "kooo-beh, kooo-beh" – I'm reasonably certain that success can't be far off.

A Blog is Born

Why is this blog different from all others?
The first answer is that it isn't, but I realize that that's no way to sell a blog.

I would like, hypothetically, to write a blog that talks about real parenting issues, and real not-parenting issues. And not-real parenting issues, as the case may be.

So here we go.

This week, the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) passed a joke of a maternity-leave law in its preliminary reading by a truly overwhelming majority. I'll try not to go in to the law so much (if you really want to, here's the link:
Maternity Leave Bill Won't Change Much), but the point is that MKs think that its good political ground to extend maternity leave. Good enough political ground that they're willing to fool the public in order to get them to think that they extended it, even when they haven't.

For all of you Americans and Australians out there, who come from backward, third-world countries where maternity leave is pendant on your ability to save up leave days over the course of half-a-decade or so, I'm sorry if this posting makes you drool. Or makes you write hostile letters to your representatives, asking why women in such enlightened states as Afghanistan and Algeria have rights that you don't.

Here, however, the game is to pretend to extend it. And (political) death to the MK who dares oppose any such bill. In this case, it was MK Michael Ben-Ari (National Union) who said that extending maternity leave would make employers think twice about hiring women. He then met me in the basement, and spent a while explaining to me how his wife - after each of her seven children was born - went right back to work, no gripes or questions asked. To which I say, good for you. But then again MB-A doesn't really have to worry about his pro-working-woman credentials, coming as he does from a party that won't allow women to run on its list.

And here I should add a few points to make the Americans and Australians feel better. Yes, we do have paid maternity leave for 14 weeks. And I enjoyed every post-partum-depressed minute of it. Workaholic that I am, I never, not once, said "wow, I wish I was at work right now". And I was busy. I don't know with what, but I definitely was.

But, on the other hand, I'm not sure in America it would have been so easy for a (government) would-be employer to politely inform me that for "operational" reasons, I could not become pregnant for my first six years of employment. For instance. Or enjoy the Israeli anachronism in which it seems to be common to put on one's resume "married +1". Thank God they don't expect me to write the truth: "married+1 and hoping for another +3 if only you pay me enough to subsidize them all".

So I'm not sure where I'm going to go on this one. Given a choice between a country in which discrimination on the basis of motherhood (or potential motherhood) is completely routine, but where I can enjoy 14 weeks of paid motherhood that doesn't come at the expense of 5 years worth of vacation days, or a country where I'd spend six, very short weeks at home, and have no chance of squeezing into my pre-partum pants before my glorious return, but where at least I'd know that my +1, +2 or +7 status wouldn't be a consideration in being hired for the job that I'd still presumably be in no hurry to return to.

Any thoughts?
Next: Kissattacks, Kurdelicious, and more!