Speaker 1: Hey, hello everyone. My name is Frieda Vizel. Welcome or
Speaker 1: welcome back to all of you for another live stream
Speaker 1: on my channel. We are recording on April twenty nine at.
Speaker 2: Three pm Eastern time. What is it noon for you
Speaker 2: in California? I know me?
Speaker 1: That is right, Okay, great, it's noon. Perfect time to
Speaker 1: do a little bit of a chat. Thank you all
Speaker 1: who are here for the live The idea is to
Speaker 1: be able to take your questions, especially for some of
Speaker 1: the people who have been on my channel, some of
Speaker 1: my beloved guests who've been on my channel several times,
Speaker 1: so we can have a conversation that's more interactive. So
Speaker 1: please in the chat leave your comments or questions and
Speaker 1: we'll try to field some of them. If you're here
Speaker 1: when we're not live anymore, you're rewatching it another time.
Speaker 1: I'm happy you're here as well. Leave a comment in
Speaker 1: the video description.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 1: My guest today is the wonderful Noomi Sideman, who I
Speaker 1: have had on my channel several times. I think the
Speaker 1: last time we did something together was in Poland, correct,
Speaker 1: I think that's right. Yeah, we went to Poland together
Speaker 1: and that was amazing. Today we are going to be
Speaker 1: discussing Nomi's book.
Speaker 2: Nomi is a.
Speaker 1: Scholar at University of Toronto and the author of several books.
Speaker 1: Today we're going to be discussing the marriage plot, and
Speaker 1: hopefully we'll talk about Judaism, marriages, arranged marriages, not arranged marriages,
Speaker 1: and marrying in the faith or outside of the faith.
Speaker 1: What do you think of that, Nomi?
Speaker 3: That is great. I would love to talk about that.
Speaker 4: Awesome.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for agreeing to do it. How
Speaker 2: are you doing. How's everything great?
Speaker 3: Yay? Short semesters?
Speaker 2: Yeah, how come you're in California and you're house.
Speaker 5: Our semesters are very short in Toronto. My last day
Speaker 5: of I mean I didn't actually teach this semester, but
Speaker 5: if I would have, my last day of teaching would
Speaker 5: have been April third, fourth. It's something like that. So
Speaker 5: I was back here for my birthday in April sixth.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it's I mean, it's great being a professor.
Speaker 5: And you know, the two best things about about being
Speaker 5: a professor what.
Speaker 4: No, I don't know li in August, but I see.
Speaker 3: May and June are great too.
Speaker 5: In the case, I keep going, just finishing up like
Speaker 5: various little things for this semester and then going to France.
Speaker 2: You go to France.
Speaker 3: How come you know?
Speaker 5: We my partner and I like almost never take vacations
Speaker 5: like academics.
Speaker 3: We go.
Speaker 5: I have an academic friend who says, I'm very polite.
Speaker 5: I only go places I'm invited. We tend to organize
Speaker 5: our vacations quote unquote around conferences or he has a
Speaker 5: gig somewhere, We'll go along, and I'll go along and take.
Speaker 3: An extra day.
Speaker 5: And so that way we don't like actually have to
Speaker 5: do what you know ordinary people do, which is actually
Speaker 5: buy a plane ticket and go somewhere, make a hotel reservation.
Speaker 5: And I was just thinking, you know, we're never gonna
Speaker 5: get invited to the South of France, so I'm never
Speaker 5: gonna go because they're never gonna have a Jewish studies conference.
Speaker 5: And I thought I could just buy a plane ticket.
Speaker 5: Actually it was all on miles. I have a lot
Speaker 5: of miles, which is what happens when you have a
Speaker 5: life like mine.
Speaker 3: So we're paid the.
Speaker 5: Hope for the whole thing on miles and made a
Speaker 5: reservation and we're going to the South of France, which
Speaker 5: neither of us has ever been there. So we're going
Speaker 5: on what other people call a vacation, no talks, no jazz,
Speaker 5: at least no jazz that John plays, and we're gonna
Speaker 5: do what people do.
Speaker 2: Wow, how long are you going?
Speaker 6: Ten days, ten days Sundays.
Speaker 5: I know, I know, I'm just really really hoping to
Speaker 5: take care of everything so I don't have to have
Speaker 5: meetings on Zoom, but I do.
Speaker 3: I'm actually going to teach one class pretty much in
Speaker 3: the middle.
Speaker 5: Of the night from France, so yeah, I know I
Speaker 5: couldn't totally clear my schedule.
Speaker 2: Wow, look at you going to the south of France.
Speaker 1: Also, since we're talking about marriage and all of that,
Speaker 1: I'm surprised to hear you talk about John as your partner,
Speaker 1: which is now the trendy way of people talking about
Speaker 1: their husbands.
Speaker 5: And why I'm confusing to people because like your business partner,
Speaker 5: your lesbian partner, you know, like what is it? And
Speaker 5: I don't wear a wedding ring.
Speaker 3: So no, we actually are legally married. We got legally
Speaker 3: married three days before my our son was due.
Speaker 5: We went really courthouse, and we were so kind of
Speaker 5: embarrassed to be doing something so square that we.
Speaker 3: Didn't tell anybody.
Speaker 5: And not only that, we don't like observe our wedding anniversary.
Speaker 3: And the word husband gives me the hebgb's, so I
Speaker 3: just can't say it.
Speaker 5: I mean, you don't have all these gender issues, so
Speaker 5: I don't like the word husband. Partner is weird. I
Speaker 5: guess I could call him my boyfriend. I think that's
Speaker 5: kind of sexy.
Speaker 1: I might start to really, but he's if you can't
Speaker 1: call him your boyfriend if he's your husband.
Speaker 3: Is there a law?
Speaker 2: There is a law?
Speaker 5: Oh well, well guess I'll just have to go to
Speaker 5: relationship jail.
Speaker 2: I will, I will bail you out.
Speaker 4: I feel like, thank you, thank you?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Oh interesting, See this is the first time I hear
Speaker 1: I hear about how you got married. Is it okay
Speaker 1: if I ask you some more personal questions about your marriage?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: John, Yeah?
Speaker 2: Did you never have a fancy, proper wedding?
Speaker 3: We never got the cash and prizes.
Speaker 2: But did you ever wear a white dress?
Speaker 5: And I mean I wore the maternity my fanciest maternity shirt.
Speaker 3: It was nine months pregnant, nine and half or whatever
Speaker 3: it was. No, we did not have a fancy wedding.
Speaker 5: We didn't have a neither of us like we have
Speaker 5: this kind of aversion to I don't know, bourgeois conventional like,
Speaker 5: for instance, we live here with housemates, which is I
Speaker 5: think unusual for a married couple.
Speaker 3: And we also said we have a little we have
Speaker 3: one housemate.
Speaker 4: Now we and that housemate has a pet.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I didn't.
Speaker 5: I don't think I told you that Vanessa died. But
Speaker 5: I know we're not talking about pets this time. Oh no,
Speaker 5: I know, you know what. That's another reason we're going
Speaker 5: to friends. Because so Vanessa had kidney disease and we
Speaker 5: had our living room looked like a hospital room because
Speaker 5: we had this ivy thing. We gave her iv every
Speaker 5: night and we weren't going to go anywhere with her
Speaker 5: that's sick. And I told you I came back home,
Speaker 5: I guess for Paysach on my birthday and she was
Speaker 5: doing fine.
Speaker 3: She did. You couldn't even tell she was sick.
Speaker 5: And then the day I got back, she just she
Speaker 5: couldn't jump up on the couch. She was suddenly very weak.
Speaker 5: We took her to the emergency room and she died
Speaker 5: that night. They called us a two in the morning
Speaker 5: and said, if you want to see her, come quick.
Speaker 5: And you were in Toronto, No, it was my first
Speaker 5: day back in California, and when.
Speaker 3: It was three or four weeks ago, Oh.
Speaker 2: My goodness, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 7: It was.
Speaker 3: It was devastating.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've heard people describe the difference between a
Speaker 5: pet dying and a close human being dying, and for
Speaker 5: some reason, it's like the pet thing gets way deep
Speaker 5: in there. And also they're not ambivalent relationships. They're pure relationships.
Speaker 5: He are not like well I sometimes like them, I
Speaker 5: sometimes don't the way we all have these complicated human relationships.
Speaker 5: They're super uncomplicated and they're super pure, and their death
Speaker 5: is just devastating as I think, you know. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 5: so that just happened, and yes, it was devastating, and
Speaker 5: it was also freeing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry for putting it that way. We loved you, but.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, don't worry. She gets it. She gets it.
Speaker 1: She's listening, but she she's die.
Speaker 5: The only thing she got, I mean, what she got
Speaker 5: is she knew she was sick. She would let us
Speaker 5: take care of her. She would be trembling so hard
Speaker 5: when we gave her these ivs and we were not
Speaker 5: good at it, so we would her her and she
Speaker 5: would yelp, and she would still let us do it.
Speaker 5: And then at the very end, the only way I
Speaker 5: can describe it is she was trying to tell us something.
Speaker 5: She was making these noises I've never heard before, like
Speaker 5: these intense, eye contacted these noises and basically saying help me,
Speaker 5: is how I can interpret it.
Speaker 3: And we helped her by letting the letting them do
Speaker 3: what they do.
Speaker 5: They're in those veterinarian emergency rooms. Okay, but let's talk
Speaker 5: about let's talk about my research if you don't mind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay, well, because.
Speaker 5: You know, I'm when does an academic ever get to
Speaker 5: have this kind of exposure?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you have done research on dogs, though, but
Speaker 1: we're not talking about that today.
Speaker 3: I'm talking about dogs jobs.
Speaker 5: I like Freud. I became a deep, deep, deep dog lover.
Speaker 5: In my case, it wasn't dogs in general. Like, we
Speaker 5: actually have two dogs. One is my housemates, and I
Speaker 5: have no feelings for one of them. I'm kind of
Speaker 5: like confessing deep in humanity and coldness in relation to
Speaker 5: one of my dogs. But I used to say, I
Speaker 5: look at Mooch, one of our dogs is Muchkala.
Speaker 3: I look at much and I see a dog, cute dog.
Speaker 5: I looked at Vanessa and I saw Vanessa.
Speaker 2: Do you remember Vanessa's been on my videos?
Speaker 3: Vanessa?
Speaker 5: I yes, eternalized, immortalized, I hope, yeah.
Speaker 4: Sweet.
Speaker 1: Okay, then let's let you talk about let's talk about marriage.
Speaker 1: Let's let's go back to you for a.
Speaker 2: Minute, and then we're going to talk about your research.
Speaker 2: Is that okay?
Speaker 4: So something that I.
Speaker 1: Think about quite a bit is the clash of values
Speaker 1: that present themselves with two people merging together, which obviously
Speaker 1: is so difficult in so many scenarios. I was at
Speaker 1: the gym and this absolutely wonderful woman told me she's
Speaker 1: getting married to a sort of from Ish guy, and
Speaker 1: that guy's family is from and they're navigating the wedding.
Speaker 1: Just the wedding alone is so complicated because you have
Speaker 1: all of these families coming together from different values. Who's
Speaker 1: going to be in the men's side, who's going to
Speaker 1: be in the women's side? Is there going to be
Speaker 1: a men's side of women's side? People are going to
Speaker 1: be offended if you do that, but other people will
Speaker 1: be offended if you don't. There's so much happening with
Speaker 1: my own son. I didn't make a bar mitzvah for
Speaker 1: this reason, and so many people were so offended that
Speaker 1: I didn't, but I just couldn't figure out how to
Speaker 1: do it.
Speaker 2: So anyway, I find it.
Speaker 1: Interesting that you didn't actually have a wedding to John.
Speaker 2: Was it intentional in that sense?
Speaker 3: I know, I know the point. Actually, Can I tell
Speaker 3: you a little bit about Essa's bar menzvah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: So we did have.
Speaker 5: A bar mensa for our son, and at first we were,
Speaker 5: you know, I had this idea that you know, I'm
Speaker 5: in secular, atheist whatever, that it was gonna be a
Speaker 5: kind of like unusual bar mitzvah. We tried to like
Speaker 5: get like a family history and a vision quest and
Speaker 5: spend the day alone and nature.
Speaker 3: I had all these grand ideas, and the end it
Speaker 3: was really.
Speaker 5: Hard to pull it off, and we just hired someone
Speaker 5: to teach my son how to read from the Torah.
Speaker 5: And then at the very last minute, my mother decided
Speaker 5: to come and.
Speaker 3: Which is very, very moving, but we really weren't quite prepared.
Speaker 5: And it was because so this won't be surprising to you,
Speaker 5: because you know about these huge families, but I have
Speaker 5: a brother who's I don't know.
Speaker 3: Third son was born on the very same day as
Speaker 3: my son, and.
Speaker 5: My cousin, who's like very open minded but kind of classidic,
Speaker 5: asked my mother which bar mitzvah you're gonna go through?
Speaker 5: And my mother said, I don't know. She's like, well,
Speaker 5: how do you choose between? So suddenly she kind of
Speaker 5: got my mother to think about going. And we had
Speaker 5: it on a Monday because we just couldn't manage the
Speaker 5: Shavist thing, and it happened to be Memorial Day, so
Speaker 5: people were off of work, but we had arrange to
Speaker 5: have it in where I was teaching, which was a
Speaker 5: Christian divinity school. So like we just pulled down so
Speaker 5: many crosses from the wall and we went to the
Speaker 5: Orthodox Synagogue and borrowed a maritza and we put the
Speaker 5: maritza just in the first three rows, and my mother's
Speaker 5: sitting there with my claucidic cousin who basically got her
Speaker 5: to go, and my sister because she was pretty old
Speaker 5: to be traveling alone, and we were like, who's going
Speaker 5: to be on the men's side. And I had a
Speaker 5: trans student who had just become a trans man, and
Speaker 5: I think he was so happy to be on the
Speaker 5: men's side. He was there with like fill in and
Speaker 5: he was shuckling. He had also converted into Judaism. And
Speaker 5: my mother, my mother was looking at him like that, like, well,
Speaker 5: you have such froom friends students.
Speaker 3: My student, she's like beautiful, you know, she.
Speaker 5: Was my trans student, very happy to be on the
Speaker 5: men's side of the militza.
Speaker 1: And then three there was just two people, Ezra, your
Speaker 1: husband and.
Speaker 5: My my father in law and my student, and everybody
Speaker 5: else wanted to sit in the mixed section, so we
Speaker 5: just had the back was mixed.
Speaker 3: So it was like everybody every somebody said during the.
Speaker 5: You know, during the party, it was just a little
Speaker 5: party with we had kosher food. But of course it
Speaker 5: wasn't going to be cod. My mother was you know,
Speaker 5: it wasn't going to trust it. But you know, we
Speaker 5: tried to make it. At least my mother wasn't watching
Speaker 5: people eat trade. It was like my mother bent bent
Speaker 5: toward us, and we bent toward her. And it was
Speaker 5: really the beginning of a kind of beautiful rep Prochemont.
Speaker 3: My mother brought I think you could see them. Where
Speaker 3: are they?
Speaker 5: My mother brought like the only family heirlooms that she
Speaker 5: has from Europe, like and They were like a very
Speaker 5: plain kiddish cup not from before the Holocaust but after
Speaker 5: the Holocaust, but Europe and candles shot us candles, and
Speaker 5: she gave them to my son, and I was like, why,
Speaker 5: my son. My mother had you know, many many grandchildren
Speaker 5: and great grandchildren, and she said, I don't know what
Speaker 5: your siblings.
Speaker 3: Are gonna give you when I'm gone, so I want
Speaker 3: you to have this.
Speaker 5: So my mother, really, my mother wrote a five hundred
Speaker 5: dollars check, which was you know, my mother had very
Speaker 5: little money, so I never cashed it, which I think
Speaker 5: may have offended her. But it was just a really
Speaker 5: beautiful way, and it came together at the last minute,
Speaker 5: and it happened. A wedding I think would have been
Speaker 5: much more difficult through all these My husband's father is
Speaker 5: Jewish but not his mother, and which as you know,
Speaker 5: means to my religious family, and he's not Jewish, and
Speaker 5: he would have had to convert Orthodox, which was he
Speaker 5: would have had to say he was gonna It just was.
Speaker 3: Too complicated to pull off.
Speaker 5: And also we were both like we had tons of
Speaker 5: we're both bisexual, we had tons of gay friends, and
Speaker 5: we were kind of embarrassed and we had this like
Speaker 5: heteronormative privilege.
Speaker 3: You know, we live in the Bay Area.
Speaker 5: We just it's funny we have to be embarrassed in
Speaker 5: marriage became legal.
Speaker 3: He said to me, Oh, let's get married.
Speaker 4: No, it's so funny.
Speaker 1: It's a culture of its own where marriage between a
Speaker 1: heteronormative couple is or not even embarrassing.
Speaker 4: He's embarrassing.
Speaker 3: I can say.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So let's talk about your research. What was your about? Yeah,
Speaker 2: what was the book about?
Speaker 3: So my book?
Speaker 5: Maybe I'll start by saying, so, there's a really influential book.
Speaker 5: It goes back to the nineteen fifties when people still read.
Speaker 5: It's called The Rise of the Novel, and it basically
Speaker 5: describes like how the novel came to be, and it
Speaker 5: traces a kind of history of like worship of the
Speaker 5: virgin Mary, to the chivalric romance where the chival where
Speaker 5: you have the lady that is kind of virginal, she's married,
Speaker 5: but she's not the night can't have her, and to
Speaker 5: the novel which plays at this whole worship of women
Speaker 5: and fascination with women's beauty, and this kind of translation
Speaker 5: of religious ideas into erotic ideas. Right, this kind of spirituality,
Speaker 5: the sublime romantic love, and he described that's how in
Speaker 5: eighteenth century England where he sees the novel kind of
Speaker 5: beginning it suddenly you suddenly had all kinds of conditions
Speaker 5: that made it.
Speaker 3: Women had more free time.
Speaker 5: They were kind of because these were industrial societies, they
Speaker 5: were now depending on male labor, which meant that they
Speaker 5: were actually quite dependent on men. So these novels basically
Speaker 5: flattered them by centering, you know, adored women and then
Speaker 5: kind of covered over the fact that women needed men
Speaker 5: to survive economically by having the men want the women.
Speaker 3: So it's it's this very influential history of the novel.
Speaker 5: And basically I set out to write the kind of
Speaker 5: rise of the Jewish novel, like how did this all
Speaker 5: play itself out in Jewish circles and the difference between
Speaker 5: it in some ways, it played itself out in many,
Speaker 5: many different societies. So with the distinct the difference that
Speaker 5: these societies didn't inherit these Christian ideas. So the novel,
Speaker 5: according to Ian Watt, inherited all kinds of Christian ideas,
Speaker 5: including the fascination with female virginity not a thing in Judaism,
Speaker 5: the kind of the praise of celibacy, again not a
Speaker 5: thing in Judaism.
Speaker 3: Knights.
Speaker 5: Jews were familiar with knights from as one put, as
Speaker 5: one scholar puts it, from the other end of their
Speaker 5: spare like there is they experienced.
Speaker 3: Nights, not as like the knight in shining armor.
Speaker 5: But like oh my god, run, yeah, what happens when
Speaker 5: when this developed, this this novel which became a.
Speaker 3: Thing all over the world and all kinds.
Speaker 5: Of societies, how did it manifest itself differently in a
Speaker 5: society like Jewish society, which didn't have the prehistory that
Speaker 5: Ian Watt said the monarch European novel had. It didn't
Speaker 5: have all kinds of things it had, you know, it
Speaker 5: didn't have.
Speaker 3: The you know, the first even.
Speaker 5: The idea that women's beauty is more interesting than men's beauty.
Speaker 5: The tallement has all this stuff about men's beauty. Right,
Speaker 5: Reba Yochanan is supposed to be very beautiful. Rache laquis
Speaker 5: like makes the passi him. So it had all kinds
Speaker 5: of other things behind it, other kinds of traditions. And
Speaker 5: even though in the nineteenth century, Jewish writers adopted the
Speaker 5: novel and created a revolution which is called modern Jewish literature,
Speaker 5: they did it differently, and that's what my book is about.
Speaker 5: It's like, what does it mean to be what does
Speaker 5: it mean to be participating in novel writing? And I'll
Speaker 5: just point out that the word novel in many different languages,
Speaker 5: including Hebrew and Yiddish, but also French et cetera, is
Speaker 5: Roman or romance. So Roman, what does it mean to
Speaker 5: be writing romance? And this is a question that some
Speaker 5: of the Jewish writers asked, is how do we write
Speaker 5: a romance?
Speaker 3: We don't know anything about romance.
Speaker 5: We were married off at the age of fourteen to
Speaker 5: a twelve year old, like we never one of them
Speaker 5: says in this mental milch As Farm. I don't know
Speaker 5: if you've heard of him, the great, the grandfather of
Speaker 5: modern Hebrew Yiddish literature. He's like, I can't write a
Speaker 5: novel slash romance. I never went to a bull, I
Speaker 5: never fought a duel, I never flirted with a woman,
Speaker 5: a young woman our eyes meaning across, how do I
Speaker 5: do it?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 5: I just have no life experience. The only experience I
Speaker 5: have is reading novels. So one of the things I
Speaker 5: say is that you know, to become modern was to
Speaker 5: start reading novels, and it was to fall in love
Speaker 5: with the literary idea of romance, which was foreign to
Speaker 5: Jewish traditional culture, not entirely foreign, but in the same
Speaker 5: way that it's foreign to many other traditional cultures where
Speaker 5: arranged marriage is the norm.
Speaker 1: Wow, it's so interesting saying, because I often talk in
Speaker 1: my own work and my own tours about the fact
Speaker 1: that you can go into asiach bookstore and you won't
Speaker 1: find a single romance novel, and I think for the
Speaker 1: average person it leaves this huge gaping sense of then
Speaker 1: what are these books? How could there be all of
Speaker 1: these books without the love story? And it's sometimes hard
Speaker 1: for me to articulate. It's almost like I have to
Speaker 1: go through and show what they're all about in order
Speaker 1: to show yes, you can actually have stories, and they're
Speaker 1: not there's no romance in them at all.
Speaker 5: So one of the things that one of the writers
Speaker 5: said in the nineteenth century, Marshal Lais Lillian Bloom, who
Speaker 5: wrote a memoir about growing up you know, religious. One
Speaker 5: of the things he says is that the Jewish conception
Speaker 5: of the Christian conception of love, where you can say
Speaker 5: the Christian that then becomes the European conception of love
Speaker 5: highlights this one particular kind of love and is kind
Speaker 5: of obsessed with it. So the young, you know, the
Speaker 5: people at their bioerotic peak, sixteen seventeen year olds, hormones flowing.
Speaker 5: That kind of love is the staple, which you know
Speaker 5: for most people lasts a couple of years.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: That's if you looked at Hollywood movies and novels, you
Speaker 5: think that was like most of life. But he said
Speaker 5: Jewish love. Jews understand love to be so much more,
Speaker 5: he says, including the love of parents and children, the
Speaker 5: love of even the loves in which that marriages from
Speaker 5: which marriages are built. For instance, in Shifkreh Best and
Speaker 5: Praise with the Bolsheintov, which is a kind of novel
Speaker 5: about the founding of the Hasidic movement, it says very
Speaker 5: clearly that I think his name is Rabbi Abraham falls
Speaker 5: in love with the young Balshamtov, and his heart is
Speaker 5: drawn to him, and he decides, this will be.
Speaker 3: My son in law.
Speaker 5: Wow, you will find that in the books in your
Speaker 5: Hassidics bookstores. Other kinds of love. People don't live without love.
Speaker 5: It's also the Bible, so that One of the interesting
Speaker 5: things is the first best selling novel, the first big
Speaker 5: runaway novel that was read gobbled up by all these
Speaker 5: Aeshiva boys gone bad, right hidden in the pages of
Speaker 5: their tumut. They're reading this novel and it's called Avatsion,
Speaker 5: the Love of Zion, and it takes place in the time,
Speaker 5: in Biblical times, presumably because the author felt well in
Speaker 5: the Bible they still knew about love. Right, there's the
Speaker 5: song of songs. Those are Jews, you know, the Rachel
Speaker 5: fell in love. I mean Jacob fell in love with
Speaker 5: Rachel and worked for her for seven years. And I
Speaker 5: mean one of the things that I talk about is
Speaker 5: that the Bible actually has both kinds of ideas about love.
Speaker 1: It.
Speaker 5: So one idea is there is one true person for you,
Speaker 5: and no her sister isn't an allowable substitute. One true love, right,
Speaker 5: one and one only. And the other idea is in
Speaker 5: the dark old cats are alike. I see your cat.
Speaker 4: She's scratching at me.
Speaker 2: She's like got her claws on my side.
Speaker 3: I'm not alike. I'm the one true cat.
Speaker 5: So the principle behind arranged marriage you more or less
Speaker 5: throw you know, an eighteen year old girl and an
Speaker 5: eighteen year old boy into a room together, and you
Speaker 5: know what age this is that differs, And you know
Speaker 5: a year later there's a baby.
Speaker 3: Doesn't really matter who they are.
Speaker 5: And those like those two ideas codist in the Bible too,
Speaker 5: because Jacob actually sleeps with Rachel's sister Leah, and he.
Speaker 3: Doesn't know, he thinks it's Rachel.
Speaker 5: So the question of whether there is want you love
Speaker 5: and what it means right that Tatoma says, forty days
Speaker 5: before you were born, God decrees who you're gonna marry.
Speaker 5: Does that mean that you shouldn't try and meet anyone
Speaker 5: at a party or does that mean that the true
Speaker 5: love is fated to be right?
Speaker 3: So even that belief is hard to square with.
Speaker 5: Like what exactly dos believe about love and true love?
Speaker 5: My argument is that they adopt the European model because
Speaker 5: the European model is so delicious thing. It's the big
Speaker 5: lollipop of modernity, why we want to be moderns. They
Speaker 5: adopt it, but they can never take it one hundred
Speaker 5: percent seriously, which is why the great what I call
Speaker 5: the counter narratives of this story of true love. A
Speaker 5: lot of these counter narratives come from Jewish writers, including
Speaker 5: you could say Filler on the Roof.
Speaker 1: Which is the counter narrative because Fiddler Tavia and his
Speaker 1: wife they love each other from time together, not from magical.
Speaker 3: And way is that love comes.
Speaker 5: So one form of counter narrative is you live with
Speaker 5: someone and then you learn to love them. Another counter
Speaker 5: narrative speaking from the realm of literature, sorry, garbage truck reality.
Speaker 5: So another counter narrative is that the only important people
Speaker 5: in the love story are the young couple.
Speaker 3: The only purpose of the parents, having.
Speaker 5: Raised them to the point where they can fall in
Speaker 5: love with each other, is to be obstacles and delay
Speaker 5: the sexual satisfaction to make it better, because we all
Speaker 5: know that sexual satisfaction delayed is a form of erotic incentive.
Speaker 5: So that's how it works. The parents are in the novel.
Speaker 5: The parents are basically there or Romeo and Julia. They're
Speaker 5: basically there to hate each other so that the love
Speaker 5: affair becomes tortured and it all just becomes hotter and
Speaker 5: hotter and hotter.
Speaker 3: That's the purpose of parents.
Speaker 5: The Fiddler on the Roof, Ted the Teviot stories that
Speaker 5: they're based on the great heresy that is accomplished by
Speaker 5: Fiddler on the Roof and the Tavot stories is that
Speaker 5: that same story of young love is told.
Speaker 3: From the parent's perspective. No one ever cared about the parents.
Speaker 5: Before, AND's like, let's see what it's like to be tevia.
Speaker 5: Let's see what it's like when your daughter marries a
Speaker 5: communist or when your daughter marries a nonjo.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's and people think.
Speaker 5: This is this The story is really the story about
Speaker 5: how modern romance has to naturally develop out of the
Speaker 5: backward traditional marriage.
Speaker 3: And my argument is that.
Speaker 5: What the reason why it's so popular and such a
Speaker 5: great hit is because it's one of the very very
Speaker 5: few stories that tells about the move from traditional marriage
Speaker 5: to modern romance in terms of the price that's paid
Speaker 5: for it. Yeah, no one else talks about the price
Speaker 5: that's paid. And the price that's paid is no mahatanin
Speaker 5: parents kicked out of the scene the you know. And
Speaker 5: it's exciting for the young couple until they realiz they
Speaker 5: have no community and no family around them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and Heavy himself has no in laws.
Speaker 5: In laws is actually a bad translation of mat It's
Speaker 5: another thing I talk about in the.
Speaker 2: Book Why Why is it a bad translation?
Speaker 3: In law?
Speaker 7: My family, so the the you know, when I say
Speaker 7: my mats or my marutten, I'm talking about a kinship
Speaker 7: relation that doesn't exist in the English.
Speaker 5: I'm talking about the my child's partner's parent. So in
Speaker 5: other words, I have a father and a mother in law.
Speaker 5: John has a father and a mother in law, had
Speaker 5: a father and mother in law, but my father in
Speaker 5: law and is not has not I say, I'm describing
Speaker 5: his relationship with my parents.
Speaker 4: I see, I see, I see.
Speaker 5: They work out who's gonna pay for thee and that's it.
Speaker 5: They're not real relatives. And in Jewish in Jewish marriage,
Speaker 5: marriages construct kinship not only between the young couple and
Speaker 5: their children, they also construct kinship backward. And when you're
Speaker 5: a minority diasporic community, you need as much kin as possible.
Speaker 5: In case the progrum cons which is what happens to Tavia,
Speaker 5: and he has no mahatanum. Who's his marutin right, his
Speaker 5: children married communists or non Jews or whatever. There's no makatanum,
Speaker 5: he has no safety network, which is what mahatanum often were,
Speaker 5: and there's no extended family for the young couple. Obviously
Speaker 5: in the heat of the passion, they don't care. But
Speaker 5: you have a kid and suddenly you do care. We
Speaker 5: all know how useful your parents suddenly become when you
Speaker 5: have a kid, right.
Speaker 1: And yeah, interesting? Okay, So first of all, I have
Speaker 1: to say to all of you who are here for
Speaker 1: the live stream.
Speaker 2: Thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: You're here for my conversation with the scholar Gnomi Siteman
Speaker 1: from University of Toronto. We're talking about marriages and romance
Speaker 1: and how they play out in Jewish history. Would love
Speaker 1: to hear your questions for know MEI I'll take them
Speaker 1: in a minute.
Speaker 2: I'll read some questions.
Speaker 1: This is something that's really interesting because I think we
Speaker 1: live in a culture where life is considered incomplete if
Speaker 1: you haven't if you haven't experienced that kind of romance,
Speaker 1: that feeling of being in love, and it's very interesting
Speaker 1: to me to observe. Sometimes I'll see people from the
Speaker 1: Sich community who are married at eighteen and arranged marriage
Speaker 1: to someone that they have a practical relationship, with a
Speaker 1: functional relationship, with a successful family, and yet they go
Speaker 1: into the world in their twenties and thirties and learn
Speaker 1: about romance and they feel deprived of a very very
Speaker 1: special experience that seems like one of the most important experiences.
Speaker 2: To have in life.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you can speak to that, Like, what
Speaker 1: would be your comment to someone who would say, I
Speaker 1: feel terrible that I've lived life without that kind of
Speaker 1: romantic love.
Speaker 5: Look, there's no doubt about it that that's a primary experience.
Speaker 7: I mean.
Speaker 5: Ian Watt's argument is that so secularization, romance comes out
Speaker 5: of secularization the and Ian what and other people say,
Speaker 5: religion doesn't just disappear.
Speaker 3: It gets channeled into other drives.
Speaker 5: And one of the places that religion gets channeled into
Speaker 5: is this kind of quasi religion idea of this the
Speaker 5: highest experience. He calls it the sex religion or the
Speaker 5: romance religion, this religion that we're all indoctrinated into in
Speaker 5: the West, which isn't to say it isn't true. But
Speaker 5: I want to say two things about it in the
Speaker 5: first and they're vying for what I'm gonna say first.
Speaker 3: So first I'll say is that.
Speaker 5: It isn't that traditional societies, particularly let's call them Jewish societies,
Speaker 5: don't have erotic connections. One of the ways in which
Speaker 5: I describe the erotic distribution of energy. Let's say in
Speaker 5: traditional religious highly religious communities, Orthodox, acidic, but probably more
Speaker 5: than just that, is that they divide erotic energies into
Speaker 5: two different spheres.
Speaker 3: One of the spheres is.
Speaker 5: An erotic size homosocial sphere, by which I mean a
Speaker 5: sphere that is this is particularly true for men. So
Speaker 5: let's take men as the example. That men live a
Speaker 5: big share of their lives, a big part of their
Speaker 5: lives in all male groupings, events, dances, a tish, all
Speaker 5: these that are partly eroticized. Right, you look at these spheres,
Speaker 5: They're shoulder to shoulder with other men, they're swaying, they're
Speaker 5: in love with the tzadik. Right, these are highly eroticized.
Speaker 5: I'm not saying they're having sex with each other, but
Speaker 5: some kind of erotic bond that's taking place in a
Speaker 5: purely male sphere. And then at the same time, normatively
Speaker 5: they're all married.
Speaker 3: Right, You're not supposed to not be married.
Speaker 5: And that's a sphere that's partially de euroticized. It's the
Speaker 5: de euroticized because it's arranged by parents. Often it's not
Speaker 5: expected to be the full sum total of your erotic
Speaker 5: investment and then just to add things to So there
Speaker 5: are these two spheres, and they work together to create
Speaker 5: a community, a religious community, and they're connected to each other.
Speaker 5: The heterosexual heteronormative let's call them partially de euroticized bonds.
Speaker 5: These marriages that aren't expected to be the be all
Speaker 5: and end all of everything, they're connected to the homosexial spheres.
Speaker 3: The marriages are.
Speaker 5: Arranged by two men who are friends with each other,
Speaker 5: or two families that are friends with each other.
Speaker 3: Are two So these two spheres work together to create
Speaker 3: a community that's thoroughly.
Speaker 5: Let's call it, has these erotic connections. It's not just
Speaker 5: the married couple having sex. That eroticism is distributed. It
Speaker 5: much more widely, and you can almost say throughout the
Speaker 5: community as a whole. The price is that you're missing
Speaker 5: this great experience. Now, first of all, this great experience,
Speaker 5: the Western world acts like it's guaranteed.
Speaker 3: Right, you're a human being, you're going to have it.
Speaker 3: First of all, not everybody does for whatever.
Speaker 5: Reason, you don't find the person, or you're not for
Speaker 5: you know, whatever reason.
Speaker 3: Where we take a chance.
Speaker 5: And then the other thing is that these are not
Speaker 5: the heteronormative bond, if you want to call it that,
Speaker 5: which is the lollipop that modernity hands the traditional societies.
Speaker 5: It basically results in a nuclear family, not in a
Speaker 5: you know, if you're doing things right, which is also
Speaker 5: supposed to be the be all and end all, and
Speaker 5: it basically serves does not serve the purpose of creating communities. So,
Speaker 5: in other words, what is a com unity. If you're
Speaker 5: a heterosexual couple, you double date with another heterosexual couple,
Speaker 5: your kids have play dates. Right there, you've basically given
Speaker 5: up on that kind of erotic distribution which creates placidic community,
Speaker 5: and in exchange for that, you've had what a couple
Speaker 5: of years is really intense passion. If you're lucky, maybe
Speaker 5: you do it three or four times, and you live
Speaker 5: in the Bay Area, you do it every night.
Speaker 3: I mean, in other words, these are the trade offs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I hear you.
Speaker 1: It's so interesting because it's something I think about often myself.
Speaker 1: The invention in my own life of the term romance
Speaker 1: versus platonic or romantic versus platonic, which I experienced a
Speaker 1: shift of going from friend close friend, best best friend,
Speaker 1: best best friend as a scale system of described being
Speaker 1: relationships to a modern Western scale system, which is romantic
Speaker 1: or platonic. And in the Western world, you're either in
Speaker 1: a romantic relationship or platonic relationship. And even if just
Speaker 1: two men are standing too close together are being too friendly,
Speaker 1: they'll say that's so gay, which is such a derisive
Speaker 1: way of taking away any intimacy from relationships that should
Speaker 1: have space for intimacy. And I often think about, like
Speaker 1: when I go to Hasidic weddings, I find myself stepping
Speaker 1: away from people who are standing very close to me
Speaker 1: and creating a lot more body space than they do,
Speaker 1: Like you're standing so close to me, it's almost gonna
Speaker 1: kiss me, and it's like you're in my I can
Speaker 1: smell you. And I was once so used to this,
Speaker 1: it was normal, and it's it's an intimacy. It's a
Speaker 1: beautiful blotonic I think mostly intimacy, but.
Speaker 5: The idea that this is this kind of physical intimacy
Speaker 5: is something. There is a very interesting character. I don't
Speaker 5: know if you ever heard of him, Jerry Langer. He
Speaker 5: was a friend of Kafka, and he was gay, and
Speaker 5: he basically we're talking about the early twentieth century, and
Speaker 5: he became a husted. He moved to bells, and he
Speaker 5: talked about that intimate This is exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 5: He said, I'm in the study hole and I'm talking
Speaker 5: to a man and he starts pounding me on the
Speaker 5: chest because he disagrees with me. And then he puts
Speaker 5: his finger in my face and then he's like and
Speaker 5: I and we're all of this is just totally normal
Speaker 5: in this study hole. And this was so appealing to him.
Speaker 5: In other words, he preferred to be I call this
Speaker 5: is what I call when I call homosocial. I'm trying
Speaker 5: to describe something that's in between a sexual relationship and
Speaker 5: a platonic relationship, which is these intense and they're almost
Speaker 5: always same sex. But you don't do this across the
Speaker 5: sexual boundary. I mean in the Bay Area you do,
Speaker 5: but in religious societies. And I have to say I
Speaker 5: was very freaked out at heterosexual hugging when I first
Speaker 5: became secular.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you had that same feeling or
Speaker 3: all hugging. I wasn't like.
Speaker 5: There were just things that I just couldn't get used to,
Speaker 5: but the physical intimacy with members of your own sex,
Speaker 5: which you could see. I mean, look at you know,
Speaker 5: just google Hasida then you'll see it.
Speaker 3: It's right there, It's right obvious.
Speaker 5: And that kind of bodily proximity which is also spiritual. Right,
Speaker 5: These are like intensively effective spaces. You love the ta,
Speaker 5: you love the rebel, you love the rebba with someone
Speaker 5: you know how, like doing something thing with someone that
Speaker 5: you with a friend. Even this this is like what
Speaker 5: we have a project together. There's something about looking at
Speaker 5: the world as a team that's so much more satisfying
Speaker 5: that looking into each other's eyes. Like being on a date,
Speaker 5: this idea that being on a date is the ideal thing,
Speaker 5: when actually being on a date is a little bit
Speaker 5: of a drag.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think. I mean, I haven't got the dates
Speaker 3: in my life.
Speaker 5: I don't know what a date is because I'm so
Speaker 5: I'm so not wanted to be part of the sexual
Speaker 5: culture of modernity.
Speaker 3: I mean back to me and my own personal investment
Speaker 3: in this.
Speaker 5: But the you know, the and why it is that
Speaker 5: these this kind of intimacy is so much easier to
Speaker 5: produce in same sex sexually segregated societies, and people think
Speaker 5: of sexually segregated societies means there's no sex. It just
Speaker 5: arranges sex differently. And sometimes there are sets as we know,
Speaker 5: you know, and those are same. They're like prisons and
Speaker 5: you know, the army and you know, that kind of intense,
Speaker 5: intensely lived communal life, and they're not so much about
Speaker 5: the couple. It's always about the couple and everyone around them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I you know, I love this conversation. It's making
Speaker 1: me a little bit sad that I am so for
Speaker 1: lack of a better word, indoctrinated into the culture of romance,
Speaker 1: because I feel like it's in my subconscious that romance
Speaker 1: is so so primary and important. And I sometimes talk
Speaker 1: about this on my tours. I talk about the absence
Speaker 1: of romance and the absence of Barbie and Ken in
Speaker 1: this world, and I think about how powerful these messages
Speaker 1: are that once you've been exposed to them, they're there
Speaker 1: in the back of your mind and they become like
Speaker 1: the defining worldview, because it's like the lollipop of all
Speaker 1: a culture can offers to offer this this romantic fantasy,
Speaker 1: even though it's not practical, and like you said, a
Speaker 1: lot of people end up deeply frustrated going from day
Speaker 1: to date not finding it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I mean you talked about Barbie and Ken.
Speaker 5: It's all based on a kind of weird set of
Speaker 5: gender norms. Who makes the first move and what constitutes
Speaker 5: like erotic attraction and who's supposed to be more into who,
Speaker 5: And that's another price that we pay for joining this
Speaker 5: great sex religion that Ian what talks about. And also
Speaker 5: just didn't do that stuff that well, like we weren't
Speaker 5: such great Kens, and we weren't such great Barbeys.
Speaker 3: It's Barbie and Ken.
Speaker 5: Were invented by a Jewish woman. But the the gender
Speaker 5: roles that go along with this romantic idea are also
Speaker 5: a drag. And I mean, one of the ways that
Speaker 5: I understand Yental is that she wants to be with
Speaker 5: a man. She just doesn't want to be a woman
Speaker 5: with the man, which is something I can totally relate to, Like,
Speaker 5: I just don't want to be that thing that that
Speaker 5: that a female beloved.
Speaker 3: Is supposed to be one thing. I chased my partner
Speaker 3: for six months before we went out, like I you know,
Speaker 3: I just I don't and I got him.
Speaker 5: The great gender roles are also the gender roles don't
Speaker 5: fit like Jews had different gender roles and when they
Speaker 5: you know, and when mental Amoucher's farm said, I can't
Speaker 5: write a novel because I've never I've never fought a duel,
Speaker 5: and I've never been to a ball It's like he
Speaker 5: was a Yeshiva boy.
Speaker 3: That's what he knew how to do.
Speaker 5: And often it was the it was the girl singing
Speaker 5: love songs about the Yeshiva back room. It was the
Speaker 5: girls that were singing Yiddish love ballads, not the boys.
Speaker 5: And for them it was like what kind of boy
Speaker 5: do I want? And you know and singing it with
Speaker 5: other girls, so the you know who. It's one of
Speaker 5: the reasons that the great you know in the Yiddish
Speaker 5: in the Yiddish film industry, instead of having a beautiful
Speaker 5: woman as the great star, it was Molly.
Speaker 3: Pecan, who basically dressed like a boy.
Speaker 5: She was a cross dresser like me, and that was
Speaker 5: who they thought was like the greatest film actress, and
Speaker 5: she was constantly playing cross dressing roles. So it was like, yes,
Speaker 5: Jews wanted these romances, and they wanted to read romances,
Speaker 5: and they wanted to fall in love, and they wanted
Speaker 5: to have those peak erotic experiences. But they also were like,
Speaker 5: I gotta pretend I'm this kind of man. I gotta
Speaker 5: pretend I'm this kind of woman. I gotta pretend I
Speaker 5: don't care what my parents think. Like that's why they're
Speaker 5: producing these this literature that basically charts everything that's wrong
Speaker 5: with the romance novel. I mean, if we're still allowed
Speaker 5: to cite Woody Allen, like Love and Death, it was
Speaker 5: just he has this film that's, you know, kind of
Speaker 5: a takeoff on a Russian novel, but it's so over
Speaker 5: the top that you just have to laugh at the lovers, like, oh,
Speaker 5: I love your eyeballs, you know, like that kind of thing.
Speaker 5: Like they recognize these as artificial because they don't have
Speaker 5: that Christian prehistory, because they're just thrown into romance suddenly.
Speaker 3: Like we were.
Speaker 1: Very interesting, you know, if we're allowed to cite Woody Allen.
Speaker 1: Woody Allen was actually one of the first films I watched, really,
Speaker 1: which one Annie Hall oh.
Speaker 3: Anny Hall on a date with the Hussin.
Speaker 6: Oh right, you yeah, next to someone who had taken
Speaker 6: his hat off to when we walked into the movie theater.
Speaker 2: Wow, at the tack of a story. I wonder how
Speaker 2: he felt.
Speaker 3: If we just looked at each other like.
Speaker 2: Okay, let's let's take some questions.
Speaker 3: There are people there. I can't see anybody.
Speaker 2: Yes, there are people in the comments.
Speaker 1: I see them, my friend, I don't know how you know,
Speaker 1: you don't see it on riverside.
Speaker 3: You have to you. I trust you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I have multiple tabs open, but I'm looking
Speaker 1: only at you.
Speaker 2: I'm not so great at this.
Speaker 4: I just like the idea of you're amazing.
Speaker 1: I like the idea of doing it, like like of
Speaker 1: taking people's like questions. But I'm very one channel person,
Speaker 1: so I'm focusing on you. But my friend is saying,
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear more on the difference in intimacy
Speaker 1: are a male spaces versus female spaces. Female circles have
Speaker 1: the same allowances or outlets as male circles tend to have,
Speaker 1: especially so with physicality.
Speaker 3: What was the last part? I didn't quite get that.
Speaker 1: She says female circles have the same allowances or outlets
Speaker 1: as male circles tend to have, especially so with physicality.
Speaker 2: Is that truely?
Speaker 4: Is that Hobby Weisberger no different?
Speaker 5: Ka?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, like six covies too.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I know.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So thanks Kavy. So one of the things that
Speaker 5: I wrote in the book. Is that actually the I
Speaker 5: thought that until. I mean, there were certainly women's spaces,
Speaker 5: the women's section, the sewing circles, there's these women singing
Speaker 5: Yiddish love ballads together. I mean, there's intense, you know,
Speaker 5: definite form, and maybe women go to the mikvah cemetery rituals.
Speaker 3: There certainly are.
Speaker 5: But the kinds of communal spaces at like a hacidic
Speaker 5: court is where yeshiva are really were.
Speaker 3: Developed for women. I think in the inter war period.
Speaker 5: I think partly because the Orthodox world subconsciously understood that
Speaker 5: it was one of the ways to keep Orthodoxy alive
Speaker 5: for girls in particular, was to create more intense, sort
Speaker 5: of formal spaces for these kinds of communal eroticism, if
Speaker 5: you want to call it that. And you know, I'm
Speaker 5: thinking about Beisiyakov and these all night hikes where they
Speaker 5: build a fire and they dance around the fire for freedom.
Speaker 5: You translated that description.
Speaker 3: For me so many years. I don't remember that. So
Speaker 3: it was an attempt to mind that particular.
Speaker 5: You know, you're not going to give I mean, they'll
Speaker 5: find it at the places, for sure. You're not going
Speaker 5: to give girls in that particular lollipoppe. It's too dangerous
Speaker 5: to let them choose their own mates, you know, you
Speaker 5: let them choose from among the Yeshiva Baker population. Next thing,
Speaker 5: you know, they're reading novels and they fall in love
Speaker 5: with a soldier or something, a.
Speaker 3: Knight in shining armor.
Speaker 5: So I think they needed to create the They needed
Speaker 5: to create more spaces for women to keep them physically
Speaker 5: attached to each other. And there's no doubt that this physicality.
Speaker 5: When I was I read descriptions of how Basiyakov in
Speaker 5: the early years the girls slept to to a.
Speaker 3: Bed and.
Speaker 5: As opposed to like, oh, that's so sad they didn't
Speaker 5: have their own bed. I think that was part of
Speaker 5: the attraction of Basiyakov, you know, what made it a
Speaker 5: kind of charismatic, a way for the Orthodox world to
Speaker 5: find a substitute for, you know, the lures of the
Speaker 5: film industry, Hollywood.
Speaker 3: The modern novel.
Speaker 1: Very interesting, Nolan Frank says, can no me discuss the
Speaker 1: patrilineal versus matrilineal descent in Judaism.
Speaker 3: You know, I've always wanted to know more about that.
Speaker 5: I think it's very interesting because in the Bible it's
Speaker 5: very clearly patrilineal right, so the patriarchs in the Bible, Abraham,
Speaker 5: I mean they there's no worry about them marrying.
Speaker 3: Non Jewish women.
Speaker 5: And the idea that Judaism is carried on through the
Speaker 5: maternal line seems to be a product of the of
Speaker 5: the Ribbonic period. And you know, people usually say, well,
Speaker 5: you know who the mother is, and you may not
Speaker 5: know who the father is.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: I mean, I I that seems too weird and suspicious.
Speaker 5: This is a very long way of saying no, yeah,
Speaker 5: I'm sorry. As soon as we get off, I'm gonna
Speaker 5: ask chat GPT, don't use chat GVT.
Speaker 4: Don't use chat GPT.
Speaker 2: No, it's a it's a very I mean.
Speaker 3: What else in the chat knows better than I do?
Speaker 4: Yeah? No, I appreciate that answer.
Speaker 2: Let me move on.
Speaker 1: Lisa says, such a fascinating discussion. Older German Jewish writers
Speaker 1: such as See schach Knowitz and Marcus Lehmann did include
Speaker 1: romance in their novels. Modern Orthodox Jewish literature is more sanitized.
Speaker 5: Yes, so it's very interesting that this is somebody who
Speaker 5: knows a lot.
Speaker 3: I don't know who was.
Speaker 4: It that said asked that question Lisa.
Speaker 3: So Lisa right on for knowing.
Speaker 5: That that's actually part of my Basiaco history, because you know,
Speaker 5: there was this crisis of girls leaving Orthodoxy, and there
Speaker 5: was this Rabbinic conference, and then there were other Beenic conferences,
Speaker 5: and at the first for Benic conference to talk about this,
Speaker 5: someone said, the problem is that Jewish girls are reading European,
Speaker 5: the Polish and German novels, and we Orthodox choose have
Speaker 5: to produce our own romances. And someone said, you know,
Speaker 5: the Germans are in Eastern Europe. This is an Eastern
Speaker 5: European Jewish conference. They say, you know in Germany they're
Speaker 5: doing that, right, Marcus Lehmann has written all these novels.
Speaker 5: What we have to do is translate these novels into
Speaker 5: Yiddish and try to feed them to our girls.
Speaker 3: Because yes they had romance.
Speaker 5: No they don't have intermarriage, and there's no you know, soldiers,
Speaker 5: so or you know, whatever it is that we want
Speaker 5: to guard against. So these novels were translated into Yiddish
Speaker 5: for Orthodox Jewish girls in Poland and it was a
Speaker 5: kind of stopgap measure. And now people just like keep
Speaker 5: their fingers crossed and hope for the best, and they
Speaker 5: don't try that particular trick, right think.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing that always interests me is that I do
Speaker 1: think that these erotic same sex relationships provide the same
Speaker 1: kind of intimacy, belonging, and satisfaction thrill in similar flavor
Speaker 1: as romantic relationships. But Judaism is so against same sex
Speaker 1: male relationships, so that sounds like a contradiction in terms
Speaker 1: that these same sex relationships should be more emphasized. I've
Speaker 1: spoken to Amish people where the Amish people of opposite
Speaker 1: sexes have a lot of interactions and are expected to
Speaker 1: meet and fall in love or whatever get into serious relationships,
Speaker 1: and a part of that setup is an anxiety about
Speaker 1: not channeling young hormones towards the same sex.
Speaker 5: So it's true that, you know, there's an absolute prohibition.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's true that it's I mean, there are.
Speaker 5: People arguing against that, that it's not an absolute doubt.
Speaker 5: Stephen Greenberg has a book Wrestling with God and Men
Speaker 5: or Orthodox Gay you know, rabbi, but who I think
Speaker 5: his husband is Steve Goldberg, which is kind of funny.
Speaker 5: But on the other hand, I mean, one of the
Speaker 5: things that I would say is that the notion that
Speaker 5: eroticism is is an on off button, like you're either
Speaker 5: having sex or you're not having sex. Like you said,
Speaker 5: it's a sexual as opposed to a spectrum of desires
Speaker 5: that can get satisfied in all kinds of ways, including
Speaker 5: with your clothes on.
Speaker 3: That those.
Speaker 5: The secular world does, the whoever wants to have sex
Speaker 5: with whoever, go right ahead, They do that better the
Speaker 5: Orthodox world does. Let us provide a kind of framework
Speaker 5: for intense and I would argue, kind of at least
Speaker 5: somewhat eroticized relationships, same sex relationships that the secondar world
Speaker 5: could only dream of. I mean that basically, a Hasidic
Speaker 5: court is a gay bar, you know, open every.
Speaker 3: Day all day.
Speaker 5: Okay, you're not supposed to actually have sex with all
Speaker 5: these people, but what you're doing with them can be
Speaker 5: so intensely satisfying. I understand that a gay man in Prague,
Speaker 5: by the way, he moved back to Prague, and he
Speaker 5: walked around Prague in full Hasidic regalia and wouldn't touch
Speaker 5: his parents' food. So I understand how he would something
Speaker 5: was satisfied for him living in the Passidic court, and
Speaker 5: he didn't say he had a.
Speaker 3: Lover there, but in some way he had lovers there.
Speaker 5: And there's something about that speceum that I think needs
Speaker 5: to be brought to the surface. The let's call it,
Speaker 5: an erotic spectrum that somehow the modern world, the European
Speaker 5: idea of romance, has has lost track of.
Speaker 1: We're about to wrap up, so I'm going to take
Speaker 1: last questions. I find what you're saying especially interesting as
Speaker 1: I think about the question I often get about the
Speaker 1: Sech community. In fact, people have asked it of Pearl
Speaker 1: very often. You know Pearl, who I've had on my
Speaker 1: channel multiple times, not your friend Pearl, the other Pearl.
Speaker 1: We know Pearls, we know David's, we know hobbies, we
Speaker 1: know we know a lot of Jewish people.
Speaker 2: But people ask of Pearl often.
Speaker 1: They'll leave a comments and say, what does Pearl say
Speaker 1: to gay people in her community?
Speaker 2: And I've asked Pearl and she said.
Speaker 1: Nah, that's like, that's not my thing to talk about.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering if you would have an answer.
Speaker 1: That might be interesting about what happens in this kind
Speaker 1: of world, in the Jewish world, and not necessarily today,
Speaker 1: but in the context of your research.
Speaker 5: Could be a prohibition against homosexuality without a certain kind
Speaker 5: of homophobia. In other words, it's a prohibition against eating selfish.
Speaker 5: You're not gonna talk to someone who ate some shelfish.
Speaker 5: I mean, you'd be kind of It's a sin, like,
Speaker 5: it's not something that turns you into a kind of
Speaker 5: person that encompasses everything that you are, right, like an identity.
Speaker 5: It's not an identity. It's a sin. If you did
Speaker 5: a sin, you shouldn't have done a sin.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean you are a certain kind of person.
Speaker 5: I mean, obviously we know this is a particular kind
Speaker 5: of sin that this closely tied to, you know, a
Speaker 5: deep part of who you are.
Speaker 3: And you know the Orthodox world n has seenum.
Speaker 5: But I mean it's kind of weird that it could
Speaker 5: be viewed as a sin without that sin also be
Speaker 5: treated through a kind of panic and homophobia, which is
Speaker 5: evident in the secular world. Right, people aren't freaking out
Speaker 5: about who's gay. You're not like suspected of being gay, Like, okay,
Speaker 5: you know you're.
Speaker 3: Gay, shouldn't have done that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And you can be gay and sort of gay
Speaker 5: sometimes in Yeshima, right, what do they call like lesbian
Speaker 5: until graduation?
Speaker 6: Really you know, gay until marriage, gay until marriage, it is.
Speaker 5: It's a whole different way of understanding what gayness is.
Speaker 5: And in some ways it's it's yes, it's a sin
Speaker 5: and that's awful, But in other ways it's a kind
Speaker 5: of like you're living in a world that isn't actually
Speaker 5: it never occurred to anyone that you're gay, Like, why
Speaker 5: wouldn't they think of that.
Speaker 3: It's not a big part of how they think about people.
Speaker 5: I mean, I've seen it in my own experience. I
Speaker 5: think I told you about. You know this guy who
Speaker 5: came to when I was sitting Shiva. He's sitting in
Speaker 5: the women's section and he has eye linerer on and
Speaker 5: I go to my sister, who's that And she says, Oh,
Speaker 5: that's whatever, some guy in the neighborhood. And then he's like,
Speaker 5: you're inter said him me single. I'm like, yeah, of
Speaker 5: course he's single. Like just no gaydar, very little gaydar,
Speaker 5: so fun heaes in the rest of the world, it's
Speaker 5: like she gay, yeah, And it's almost it's a relief
Speaker 5: not to live with that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know my story of my Birthright trip and the
Speaker 1: Gatar No did I tell you? When I went on Birthright,
Speaker 1: I was like fresh off the boat from the Sidshure world,
Speaker 1: and I was trying to integrate myself and to have
Speaker 1: a good time, but I was really still feeling very
Speaker 1: much like an outsider. I wasn't culturally adapted, and I
Speaker 1: was a young mother, and I was very in that
Speaker 1: frame of mind. And all the other Birthright Trip artists
Speaker 1: we're young people who hadn't even settled down yet. So
Speaker 1: we're somewhere out not central Israel. The first night and
Speaker 1: everyone is sitting around in this rickety motel in like
Speaker 1: a dining room that's cleaned away at night, and they're
Speaker 1: sitting on chairs and they're talking about a gaitar and
Speaker 1: someone says, I.
Speaker 2: Have a great gatar.
Speaker 1: Eric is gay, and I'm like, the yent in me
Speaker 1: is like super excited, like what's going on?
Speaker 2: Who's Eric?
Speaker 1: And so they explained to me that a gadar is
Speaker 1: when you can read who's gay. And Eric is on
Speaker 1: our trip and he is definitely gay. So my frame
Speaker 1: of reference is completely different from theirs. My frame of references,
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this person is gay. Must be They're
Speaker 1: not accepted who they are, must be. Their life is
Speaker 1: so hard. I feel so bad. I'm projecting all of
Speaker 1: my own senses of not being accepted did for being different,
Speaker 1: And I befriend Eric for the trip, and I am
Speaker 1: super machar of Eric. I sit next to Eric, and
Speaker 1: Eric is super socially awkward, so I'm like really trying
Speaker 1: to make.
Speaker 2: Sure Eric is not lonely.
Speaker 1: And then at some point I'm sitting with Eric on
Speaker 1: the bus and his hand creeps into mine and he's
Speaker 1: holding my hand, and I'm.
Speaker 2: Like, absolutely shot.
Speaker 6: Shot.
Speaker 1: I had zero attraction to Eric. I had no interest
Speaker 1: in Eric. I was told that Eric is gay, but
Speaker 1: Eric was clearly not gay. And I'm in the elevator
Speaker 1: going up to the room and the woman who had
Speaker 1: told me that Eric is gay says, so you and Eric, huh.
Speaker 5: Gay is kind of like a weird catchule, right, It's
Speaker 5: like yeah, it's like you know.
Speaker 3: Like, yeah, people think I'm gay. Yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 3: I'm queer or whatever.
Speaker 2: It's a box. I mean, you can't be gay, know me,
Speaker 2: if you're married to a man, I'm not gay.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Let's like we have a whole conversation
Speaker 3: about that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, okay, let's let's do Eric on the chat.
Speaker 2: Eric is not.
Speaker 1: Changed the name his name isn't actually Eric.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, don't worry.
Speaker 2: But anyway, nice person.
Speaker 1: But you know, there was a total cultural misunderstanding because
Speaker 1: this tendency to put people into boxes of gay, straight,
Speaker 1: et cetera. Is such a secular thing, and in the
Speaker 1: process of me trying to adapt to it, I then
Speaker 1: ended up being extremely warm towards someone who took it
Speaker 1: as sexual overtures or romantic interest, which it wasn't at
Speaker 1: all what I had meant to communicate. And it's again
Speaker 1: coming from a world where relationships are so differently categorized.
Speaker 5: Where everyone's kind of a little gay everyone.
Speaker 1: Everyone can be very intimate physically if it's the same sex.
Speaker 3: It turns out like straight people like that too. Yeah,
Speaker 3: poor people that we would call straight.
Speaker 1: Okay, let me let me take last questions and then
Speaker 1: we wrap up. I really enjoyed talking about this. We
Speaker 1: were going to talk about marrying Jews or non Jews,
Speaker 1: but we're leaving that. Okay, Barry says, I am a
Speaker 1: gay Orthodox Jew. It's been an internal conflict for years,
Speaker 1: which for me is best addressed by celibacy. Not my choice,
Speaker 1: but I don't know of any other way too. I
Speaker 1: can't see what one word told something like I can't
Speaker 1: think of any other way to do it.
Speaker 3: Poor Barry. Yeah, well, sorry, Barry.
Speaker 5: I wonder if I wonder this is a crazy idea,
Speaker 5: but maybe that maybe the solution is not leaving Orthodoxy
Speaker 5: but becoming more Orthodox, Like maybe you're modern Orthodox, which
Speaker 5: means that you've basically moved into a bourgeois form of Orthodoxy,
Speaker 5: which has all the problems of modernity in terms of
Speaker 5: reduction of community to the nuclear family. The lack of
Speaker 5: space is a physical intimacy for homosocial spaces of physical intimacy.
Speaker 3: I don't know.
Speaker 5: If you're now modern Orthodox, but then you're screwed. I'm sorry,
Speaker 5: that's the wrong word choice. But from both directions, right,
Speaker 5: it's like the Orthodox prohibition against homosexual sex plus the
Speaker 5: modern Orthodox lack of these intense homosocial spaces, so you
Speaker 5: don't even get the intimacy part of it. I don't
Speaker 5: know why, just the fact that your name is Barry.
Speaker 5: Maybe you know, like if it was Beryl.
Speaker 3: Then it's awful. It shouldn't It shouldn't be the case.
Speaker 5: I mean, the one thing is that I think the Orthodox,
Speaker 5: the modern Orthodox world is changing Stephen Greenberg, modern Orthodox
Speaker 5: rabbi married to a man.
Speaker 1: Also, I think, Knowmi, this is a particular challenge for me,
Speaker 1: and I'm supposing for you. It is very hard to
Speaker 1: hear people say that celibacy is a solution for them.
Speaker 1: I think about nuns all the time. I'm fascinated by
Speaker 1: nuns because a part of me is so sad about
Speaker 1: celibacy being a solution. But the truth is that if
Speaker 1: we respect that people know what they want and what
Speaker 1: is giving them meaning, then celibacy should be an option
Speaker 1: for people that we don't like.
Speaker 5: And you can sometimes mean eroticism. Sorry, I can't tell
Speaker 5: you a quick story. Yeah. So when I taught for
Speaker 5: many years at a divinity school and a lot of
Speaker 5: my colleagues are nuns. They actually don't call themselves nuns,
Speaker 5: their sisters religious. And I was once at a birthday
Speaker 5: party for a.
Speaker 3: Nun and I was the only person there that wasn't
Speaker 3: a nun.
Speaker 5: And they were talking about a friend of theirs who
Speaker 5: had joined a monastery, and they were talking about how
Speaker 5: fancy the monastery was, and then one of them said,
Speaker 5: you know, and that he had taken a vow of
Speaker 5: poverty and now suddenly he.
Speaker 3: Was rich because he lived in this incredibly fancy monastery.
Speaker 5: They are gossiping about some dude they knew, and one
Speaker 5: of them says, if that's poverty, give me chastity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I was.
Speaker 5: Like, wow, Wow, I'm glad to be on the inside
Speaker 5: of this conversation.
Speaker 3: But I'm not one hundred percent sure I know what
Speaker 3: I'm marrying.
Speaker 5: So they were joking about chastity and what to make
Speaker 5: of that? Who knows except that I would say that
Speaker 5: our understanding of testy, what does that mean?
Speaker 3: No masturbation, no physical intimacy at all with another human being.
Speaker 4: So different.
Speaker 5: And also there are just people who, you know, lack
Speaker 5: the desire a sexual or a romantic And we now
Speaker 5: understand that the spectrum of sexuality is huge, and maybe
Speaker 5: it encompasses something like a what could be called a
Speaker 5: satisfying celvacy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And also I think sexual desire unfulfilled can be quite
Speaker 1: an electrifying feeling. And in our society where sex is
Speaker 1: so casual, I think it has removed some of its intensity.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean sex has this odd form, which is
Speaker 5: that it's most exciting before it's fulfilled, exactly. And if
Speaker 5: you write and if you prolong that excitement, then the
Speaker 5: you know, this is I guess the principle behind tent
Speaker 5: to sex sex.
Speaker 3: But you're actually like moving against you know, the.
Speaker 5: Great sexual experience by getting too fast to the you
Speaker 5: know zero.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very interesting.
Speaker 1: And then people go and get married in city hall
Speaker 1: and they make it all so banal and and no,
Speaker 1: I'm just I'm really being tongue in cheek.
Speaker 3: I'm not get write about it. And that could be
Speaker 3: satisfying too.
Speaker 4: That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Nomi. Last question and then I
Speaker 1: let you go. Have you ever had a black and
Speaker 1: white cookie?
Speaker 5: I only like the white part of the black and
Speaker 5: white cook really, I.
Speaker 3: Know it's perfect because everybody else likes the the black.
Speaker 3: I mean not to be too you know, white nationalist.
Speaker 4: Or you know, do apologize.
Speaker 3: And usually the white part is a little bit smaller
Speaker 3: than the black part.
Speaker 2: Do you notice, No I have not?
Speaker 3: Well, I have because I'm the white part.
Speaker 4: That's very funny.
Speaker 1: All right, next we meet, I'll split a black and
Speaker 1: white cookie with you.
Speaker 3: I'll have the podcast. I'll look for one where the
Speaker 3: two sides or.
Speaker 1: Even okay for sure for you, Okay, I'm gonna link
Speaker 1: your book in the video description. Thank you so much
Speaker 1: for this extremely fun and satisfying conversation.
Speaker 3: It was the blast.
Speaker 4: Yeah you same, Thank you everyone. Also, who is