Return, O Israel! (But Don't Forget to Watch Your Backs)

Honestly, I had about ten other, more compelling things to write about today instead of the latest lies from the enemies of Israel. There were lofty yamim noraim (Days of Awe) musings, for instance, and thoughts about repentance, renunciation and what this period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur is all about.

Instead of writing about yet another group hiding their hatred of Jews behind the noble principles of peace and within the socially-acceptable framework of political discourse, I would have preferred to devote my post to something diverting such as that wonderful/horrible experience shared by observant Jews, known informally as the triple whammy.

And since you asked, a triple whammy occurs when Shabbat precedes or follows a two-day festival. It is a three-day tower of time wherein you eschew travel, communication, commerce, work and other trappings of the real world.

While it's great to have all this downtime to chill with the family and friends and read the New York Times in hard copy and catch up on your New Yorkers and even finish a novel or two and take long walks and have lots of festive meals with the aforementioned family and friends, there is also a weird time-out-of-time aspect to these three days, a forced separation from the world of commerce and communication that we depend on, the growing, panicky awareness that stuff is piling up while you close the door to this world....and that when the door is opened, you will be buried beneath the avalanche.

(Not to mention the fear that clients or co-workers or bosses might perceive of your observance as a religious form of slacking off.)

So, before I saw the press release about a particular forthcoming conference in Boston dedicated to "exploring" the ways in which Israel was just like South Africa (hint: apartheid!) and featuring South Africa's own Desmond Tutu plus the usual assemblage of anti-Zionists, some of them psychotic Jews, I aspired to write about embarking upon the arduous task of introspection that the period between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur demands.

Like the conference planners of this group called Sabeel, I wanted to explore the process of taking a candid look at myself in order to identify what I need to change in order to become a better person. This inward gaze is the first step of teshuva, returning to the path of righteousness.

If Sabeel was a person, I might recommend the following steps along the path to personal teshuva: stop scapegoating Israel, start caring about the Palestinians instead of using them as pawns, drop your mission to slander the Jewish State out of existence and try dedicating yourselves to the stated goal on all of your press material -- peace.

In fact for all the people currently affiliated with Sabeel, I heartily recommend an ecumenical exercise since they do indeed have the word "ecumenical" in their title, as in Ecumenical Liberation Theological Center (pssshhh!). The exercise is easy and doesn't even involve loss of work time because Yom Kippur falls on a Saturday this year.

It begins like this: go to shul. Find a local synagogue. Stand among the Jews you regularly slander, reading through the pages of personal confessions in the Yom Kippur liturgy. Search your soul and ponder the depths of your stated beliefs. Ask yourself if the things you say, write and promote about Jews and Israel are true. Seek the truth on your personal motivations for the work that you do or the cause you support. Ask yourself if it is really God's work or a perversion of religious principles.

Spend a long time thinking about the real way to bring peace to the Middle East. And then, just before the Gates of Heaven close at the end of the ne'ela service, with the blowing of the shofar, repent. Let the clarion call of the ancient ram's horn compel you to turn back from your sinful ways.

Not to imply that introspection cannot take place at other times of the year. I've noted in the past that for people who are plagued by the constant need to self-examine and self-flagellate (f'rinstance, me), Yom Kippur can often feel just a tad redundant. Yet even if it doesn't, one might ponder whether it is really effective to examine one's soul whilst battling low-blood sugar and the bad breath of people who are fasting within an enclosed area.

Going to shul on Yom Kippur is the ultimate paradox. On the day we are called upon to do the most personal act of worship -- confession of our sins coupled with the resolve to repent -- we leave our private abodes and come together in our places of prayer.

Engaged in our private tete-a-tete with the Almighty, we nevertheless remain opaque to the Jew in the pew beside us.

Yet we come together because there is power to being in proximity to all of this God-wrestling. And for those who are having trouble getting started, a perusal of the plaster or wooden reproduction of the Ten Commandments -- usually hanging helpfully over the bima -- can produce the desired effect.

Our frenemies at Sabeel might do well to ponder the commandment -- Do Not Bear False Witness. And if that fails, there is always the unambiguous Do Not Kill.

As for the rest of humanity, four out of five rabbis surveyed recommended directing one's attention towards the inescapable tablets as a way of jumpstarting the act of introspection: Taking the Lord's name in vain? Guilty as charged. Stealing? Check. Remembering the Sabbath Day and keeping it holy? Hey...that trip to Woodbury Commons was an emergency! Honoring thy father and thy mother? Yikes...I never did return mom's call from, like, five months ago. Adultery?....uhh...

While teshuva can happen anytime, Yom Kippur helps us by making it a must-do item one day of the year. And, as a special, limited-time bonus, the Gates of Heaven are open for the entire 25 hour period.

Which leads me to contemplate those folks who are headed straight in the other direction...not that Jews really believe in hell, y'all.

I am referring, of course, to Sabeel and Co., the loose confederation of anti-Zionists, Israel-bashers, Israel-dissenters, Israel-deniers, Israel-slanderers, scapegoaters of Jews, phony-baloney crunchy granola peaceniks, promoters of lies about Jewish control, whisperers about Jewish cabals, printers of canards, pseudo-political theorists, revisionists, rewriters of fake narratives, Israel-hating academics, intellectual terrorists, lying racists and various and sundry others whom I shall simply refer to as Anti-Semitic Scum, or ASSes.

The problem with ASSes is that they are numerous and widespread and gaining popularity and not raising the alarm level high enough within the majority of the organized Jewish community.

The danger posed by ASSes is that they are devious and dishonest and there is an alarming public appetite for the terrible things they say about Israel and the Jewish People...witness the sales figures for Walt and Mearsheimer's new book, The Protocols of the Elders of the Israel Lobby.... I mean The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy.

The ASSes are enraged by the notion of Jewish power and self-determination. The only good Jew for them is a Shoah-victim Jew, although increasingly, some of the ASS literature is pointing towards the Holocaust as being God's will. In the case of Sabeel, there is a bizarre casting of the Palestinians in the role of Jesus, suffering at the hands of the...you guessed it...Jews.

Quite stunningly, the masterminds at Sabeel, committed to peace, blah, blah, blah, don't find it problematic to revive the ole notion of deicide.

And though it is preposterous to allege that Israel is South Africa, ASSes like Sabeel cannot stop gnawing at this bogus bone, insisting on trumping up charges of Israel abuse against the Palestinians, never letting the facts get in the way. At the same time, they accept terrorism against Israelis as an acceptable act of resistance by an oppressed and desperate people.

ASSes have a relative sense of morality. Killing people is bad, of course, except if they are Jewish. Then, they probably deserve it because they are occupiers and oppressors. Even when they are four years old and eating pizza in Tel Aviv.

And ASSes always have compassion for Palestinian refugees but are strangely deaf to the news that there are over a million Jewish refugees of Arab lands, driven out by a concerted campaign of racism within countries where Jews have few, if any, rights to this day.

The ASS cause is aided and given some kind of inoculation against the charge of being anti-Semitic owing to the Jews they attract to their camp, pathological yiddin like Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein or most disappointingly, Tony Judt, who cannot stand the sight of their own Jewish faces.

Almost hilariously, ASSes focus their ire on Israel while ignoring places like the Sudan, like North Korea, like Arab countries where girls are killed by their fathers and brothers, often on imaginary suspicions of minor sexual offenses. Their so-called critique of Israel is actually a demonization, with no admission of wrongdoing on the part of Palestinians or their leaders.

And most unforgivably, ASSes often posit themselves as promoters of peace.

They couldn't care less about peace or even the Palestinians.

The name of their game is pulling the plug on Israel.

And now Sabeel has roped Desmond Tutu into their ranks so I guess that the good Archbishop is an ASS as well. Even former US president Jimmy Carter shied away from making in the Israel-South Africa direct analogy despite the unfortunate presence of the word "apartheid" in the title of his recent and deluded book. He is therefore only a half-ASS.

"Yeah," confirmed Hillel Stavis from the David Project during our phone conversation this morning. "Sabeel will be the most overtly anti-Semitic conference in the Northeast."

Just to share the bulls$%&, here is a portion of Sabeel's release for the October rally in Boston:

"Participants will discuss the moral issues of confronting and dismantling apartheid-like policies Israel administers in the occupied Palestinian lands and the emerging role of social movements and the U.S. government in addressing injustice. The conference will culminate in a peace rally in Copley Square organized by the Boston chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. Sabeel is a Palestinian Christian international grassroots peace movement based in Jerusalem which promotes nonviolence, human rights, international law, democratic principles, and Gospel teachings on justice and peace-building."

Blah, blah, blah.

So...where does this leave me -- and the world at large -- three days after a triple whammy and with another three days to go until Yom Kippur?

I admit that it is hard to look inward when you feel like you need to watch your back. The problem with anti-Semitism (in our country! in our time!) is that it is time-consuming to monitor. Being an anti-Anti-Semite necessitates research and networking and conversations and mobilization and action.

It cannot be left unaddressed because stuff like this doesn't just go away.

While I turn to the liturgy of Yom Kippur as I seek to repair my relationship with God, myself and my fellow humans, I also invoke the words from the Passover Hagaddah (liberally translated), which were composed for times just like these:

O God, pour out your wrath against the Anti-Semitic Scum who seek to harm us....for we have seen their brand of hatred before and it has devoured the Children of Jacob and laid waste their dwelling places throughout the Diaspora, wherever Jews have fled to escape persecution.

Pour out your indignation upon them and let your wrathful anger take hold of them and their lies. Destroy them in anger from under your heavens.

NIPPLES AND HONEY

Mmmmm.....

Honey.

The sticky, sweet, golden, dripping delight associated with both Rosh Hashana (apples and honey) and Israel (the land of milk and honey).

And current events as well. Wasn't there a major archaeological discovery this week about bee-keeping in the Holy Land?

Last night, as I joined the Upper West Side Jewish cocktail party that was Fairway, I chose two jars of honey for my Rosh Hashana table: a overpriced number from Spain via San Francisco and an overpriced number from New Zealand, whipped to a buttery consistency and color.

Mmmmm.

Everyone knows that Jews dip apples and challah into honey on Rosh Hashana so we will have a sweet year.

Shana Tova, Shana Metuka, we wish one another in the days leading up to the festival.

A good year. A sweet year.

We Jews believe that you are what you eat.

You eat kosher, you lead a kosher life.

We stay away from eating animals that are predators, for instance, for we do not wish to become predatory ourselves.

Naturally, not all kosher-eaters lead kosher lives.

And not everyone who dips their apples in honey has a sweet year. Jews have known many bitter years, bitter decades, bitter centuries.

The taste of Rosh Hashana honey is tempered always by Passover's salt water in our yearly rituals.

Still, we give sweetness a chance. Especially at the start of the year, ten days before the gates of heaven open on Yom Kippur and we get a chance to petition God on high.

So, if there is any mystical power to honey, I say -- bring it on!

Increase the dosage.

Make honey a habit.

Welcome honey into your life.

Let honey drip from the walls of your home, from your door-posts, between your eyes and down the length of your body.

Honey belongs not only on your dining room table, but in your bedroom as well. Shana Tova u' Metuka!

September Eleven Again

It is pouring rain in New York City.

Outside the Urban Bungalow, Columbia students race across the campus in an effort to keep themselves and their books as dry as possible.

The weather is one of those eerily appropriate details of today - the sixth anniversary of September 11.

During the memorial program held at Ground Zero (which I viewed on local television) the tears of relatives and friends merged with raindrops, watering the mass graveyard that is now lower Manhattan.

The reading of the names is always moving but today's performance of Bridge Over Troubled Water by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sent me over the edge. With wind whipping their hair and rain streaking their faces and soaking their clothes, the low-key rendition by these NYC teens left me wailing on my couch.

Hard to believe, but one week ago, we vacated the Love Shack and returned to The City. The sun was shining -- even glaring -- and the smell of our country cabin was still in our clothes as we drove towards Manhattan.

The move itself was more harmonious than any I can recall. Probs because part of the work was already done the night before but probs also because we didn't do the ultra-wrenching act of actually closing down the cabin -- emptying and unplugging the fridge, filling the empty drawers with mothballs, putting Clorox in the toilet, wiping down counter-tops, flipping the mattresses on their sides to prop up against the walls.

I know it's a mental trick, but we left the cabin sorely in need of our return.

If I'm lucky, we might even have to go back twice before we close it up for good.

Perhaps if I spend some time in the Love Shack, the sad/horrible news of the world will seem slightly less so.

Last week, I recall being grateful that we didn't have the equivalent of a Hurricane Katrina or a war in Israel to watch in horror over this past summer. The summer of '06 was overshadowed by the terrible drama of the Second Lebanon War and the previous summer was colored by the fiasco of FEMA and our Federal government's non-response to the disaster in the Gulf Coast.

In the absence of these dramatic events -- and in the face of mostly-glorious weather -- I got lulled into a false sense of security, leading me to ignore such serious developments as the stunning rise of global anti-Semitism and the proliferation of anti-Zionism in academic circles, which might kinda be the same thing, after all.

Yeah, I knew that the Protocols of the Elders of the Israel Lobby was about to be published, in fact, I've blogged about the canards of Walt and Mearsheimer, et al in the past. And I've been reading the same Haaretz, Jpost and JTA dispatches as everyone else. I've even had the pleasure of getting up-close and personal anti-Zionist rants from JOURNALISTS to whom I have sent press releases regarding a current project that critiques Walt/Mearsheimer's point of view.

Still...being back in Manhattan, just across the street from the Columbia campus, which is just across the street from the Barnard campus where professor Nadia Abu El Haj's tenure might get derailed because of a book she wrote that has been accused of being an anti-Zionist polemic, cloaked in (pseudo) scholarship...some things seem more glaringly horrible.

These things are both Jewish in nature and universal, such as the beating death of theatre impresario Mark Vail in Tashkent this past weekend and the stabbing of a rabbi in Frankfurt last week and the recent acknowledgment that there is a HUGE problem with anti-Jewish attitudes in England and the revelation that Madeleine McCann's parents are suspects in her murder and the rising incidence of elder-beatings and stunning acts of child abuse and the heightened security at Jewish schools and synagogues this holiday season.

Locally, I am shocked to return to the public menace posed by NYC's pint-sized gangstas riding the rails. I am depressed by the cowardice of grown men who can, in my opinion, open their mouths and tell the kids on the subway car where to go. I hate the fear in the eyes of senior citizens and young mothers and little kids. I am afraid I might lose it one day and get all Bernie Goetz on the high school hooligans.

I am angry at these kids and want to know why they have decided at such a young age to give up. I want to know why they are choosing this route while the Brooklyn Youth Chorus kids are choosing another.

And it might sound trivial, but I am also disheartened by Sarah Silverman's shockingly nasty attack on Britney Spears and her kids following Britney's uber-embarrassing "comeback" performance at MTV's VMA's this past Sunday night, which I'm not afraid to admit to having watched in real-time while HOBB looked on in horror.

The meanness of Silverman's banter quite took my breath away. While I usually applaud her nerviness, this was something else. It was not funny and it was not clever. It was a public whipping of someone who has already fallen and cannot raise herself up.

In the course of her frankly stupid riff, Silverman alluded to her own Jewishness, as she often does, mixing up references to heroin-addict/singer Amy Winehouse's yiddishkeit and the obviously Jewish punim that both women share.

In this week before Rosh Hashana, known as a time of introspection, I doubt that many members of the tribe are proud to count Sarah Silverman as one of their own.

But I digress.

It is now the afternoon of 9/11...six years after our collective mental landscape changed. The rain has turned into drizzle and I haven't changed out of the Old Navy baby doll nightie I slept in because I haven't left my computer desk and phone since 7:35 am when Little Babe left for school.

Yes, I feel somewhat dysfunctional in my nightie but that seems perfectly fitting for the dysfunctional reality of the world beyond the Love Shack.

Bye, Bye Bungalow Summer

My heart is going to break.

It is 12:03 am and I am sitting on the screened porch of The Love Shack, listening to the crickets chirp in time with the steady breathing of 12-year-old Little Babe and HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe), suitcases standing like a mini Stonehenge on the floor of my bungalow.

While visiting news sites and answering e-mail, Labor Day quietly passed away.

That exquisite creature -- Summer 2007 -- has officially departed.

It is Back-to-School, nearly Rosh Hashanah, The Party's Over.

And in six hours, HOBB and I have vowed to return to our packing marathon, planning to be on the road by 10 am so that we can salvage the majority of the work day in Manhattan and help Big Babe as he prepares to leave, on Wednesday, for a half-year in Berlin, get Little Babe ready for life as a seventh grader, which commences on Thursday.

The sane thing, of course, would have been to leave yesterday or today (like most of the inhabitants of our summer community) but neither of us had the ability to wrench ourselves away, craving a day filled-to-bursting with our country adventures, craving one more night in the too-small bed of The Love Shack, craving one more morning in this little kuchalein by the edge of the woods, decorated now with the kitsch and memorabilia of innumerable summers.

And so, we orchestrated a memorable farewell to summer. We paid homage to the goddess of consumerism and spent a frenetic hour at Woodbury Commons buying underwear and school clothes while waiting for Big Babe's bus to arrive from New York. Dropping Little Babe and HOBB back at the bungalow, Big Babe and I headed down to Sterling Forest to relive a sacred rite from his childhood -- the annual visit to the NY State Renaissance Festival.

I am especially pleased to report that after a hiatus of many a year, the fair seemed to me -- and Big Babe -- virtually unchanged. In a good way. We came craving a connection with the sweet memories of our shared past and were not disappointed. Nearly everything was as we remembered it: the shoppe with the wooden swords and shields; the alley of tarot readers and soothsayers; the spontaneous folk-singing duos; the abridged Shakespearean performances; the face-painting and hair-braiding; the sparkly magic wands and crystals; the jousting contests; the bawdy cammaraderie of the workers; the archery game; the hordes of fair-goers dressed as wizards and ladies and lords and dragons and fairies and ninjas and vampires and other inexplicable characters.

We waited on a too-long line for underwhelming Middle Eastern salads and drank water and hard cider and searched for bathrooms and rolled our eyes at the abundant display of pushed up bosoms and peculiar garb. Crossing over the kissing bridge, Big Babe spontaneously gave me a peck on the cheek and I felt a tug backward, recalling the tiny, wide-eyed child with blond curls clutching his wooden sword and shield with proprietary joy, now seeing the graceful young man with a straight dark locks wielding a professional camera, snapping images of the day, capturing scenes straight out of his youth.

It was so perfect that I could barely speak. I felt nearly selfish for engineering this day's journey to provide me with tangible memories to hold close while my eldest child is gone in Europe.

Later in the afternoon, after we returned to Rosmarin, I stood on the shores of Walton Lake with HOBB, watching the sun glint off the water, slipping lower and lower over the trees. "It's so beautiful," I whispered, afraid of the floodgate of feelings about to overwhelm me. A million memories from the thirteen years that we have come to this summer paradise danced around me. I tried to recall the glorious return to the lake this past May, the joyous reunion with summer friends, the walks with my children on the shore, our Scrabble games, conversations on blankets, songs in the water, kayak rides, snacks and meals on picnic tables, the amusement of watching Alfie the Pomeranian race madly through the grass, owning the moment, owning the world.

"The summer's over," moaned our New York neighbor Brian one month ago, as we bumped into each other dog-walking outside our building. It was early August and the words shattered like a broken window pane around my ears.

"No!" I protested, loudly, hauling Alfie into the apartment. I had just come back from a week-long trip to St. Louis for a client's convention and felt gypped of The Love Shack, bereft of NYC. I was back and I still had a solid month left of summer. No way was it over. There were still reams of days to dance through.

Each day this summer was its own world. Each morning had its own flavor. Each evening its own magic. We were here at the Love Shack, but also elsewhere-- there were trips to St. Louis and Hartford and Maryland and the Hamptons and upstate and, of course, the Urban Bungalow back in Manhattan.

There were movies and day trips and parties and conversations and books and magazines and weekend guests and visits from my sister from Israel and my nephew and a Shabbat with my parents and hot-button issues and fights and day camp for Little Babe and returning from Israel and then leaving for college for Middle Babe, our only daughter.

With Middle Babe now completing her second week at college in Maryland, I hold dear the memories of her visits to the Love Shack, wish to wear my recollections like a locket against my heart.

Artifacts from my past wink to me from the combination kitchen/living room of my tiny bungalow. My Grandma Dorothy's challah plate, now hanging on our wall. An oil painting by my mother. Caricatures of my three children, drawn by an artist at my Israeli nephew's Jerusalem bar mitzvah, two years ago. Camp pictures stuck in drawers. The Happy 4th of July streamer from two years ago. The 2007 schedule from Rosmarin's Day Camp, still affixed to the side of our fridge by magnet.

For lo, the beautiful summer is past.

Sadness mingles with gratitude, for it was as full and memorable as I could wish.

My cup and my heart runneth over.

LIAR, LIAR, PANTS ON FIRE

My good buddy, Jonathan Mark at the New York Jewish Week spilled the beans on the Noah Feldman affair in this past week's paper, revealing that the infamous reunion picture from Maimonides High School was not deliberately cropped to exclude Noah and his obviously goyesque then-fiance.

Rather, Noah and his now-wife as well as people on the other side of the too-wide photograph were cropped for space -- and not ethnic -- considerations.

Moreover, the photographer states that Noah misrepresented the regret he voiced as "sorry for bumping you and your shikse from the picture" when instead he was merely apologizing for cutting him out of the published photo, nothing personal intended.

With the revelation of that inconvenient truth, the entire premise of NoFel's rant -- look how exclusionist the Modern Orthodox are!!! -- is entirely lost.

Scarily, however, both Noah AND his editors at the New York Times Magazine knew this before the article appeared.

So, in addition to the Hah-vahd law professor having a Jewish problem, he also has a credibility problem.

Noah Feldman gives Jews a bad name.

NOAH FELDMAN PLAYS A DANGEROUS GAME OF CONNECT THE DOTS

Here he is, Noah Feldman, in all his adorable elegance.

Noah Feldman, another feather in the cap of American Jewry, the product of an Orthodox Jewish upbringing, the globally-acclaimed intellectual wunderkind, the author, the political pundit, the Harvard Law Professor -- formerly of NYU -- who barely looks old enough to shave, let alone get married.

To an Asian, non-Jewish woman, as he details in the pages of this past Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

Well, who cares, really?

Noah cares. He cares that the yeshiva he attended for 12 years -- The Maimonides School in Brookline, Mass -- has airbrushed him out of any of their newsletters, thereby erasing any evidence that he ever attended their institution.

And he cares enough to write an essay that lays out a dangerous game of connect-the-dots, hopscotching from his personal tale of being hurt by exclusion to finding a basis in Judaism itself for the terrorist actions of Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir.

By the end of the magazine piece, any sympathy I might have had for him had evaporated and in its place was sheer disgust. Reading postings on the blogosphere, I know that I am hardly alone.

Oh, Noah, you meander through childhood memories that are hardly unique to anyone who attended Orthodox Jewish day school. So the Maimonides School had to cloak their obligatory sex ed in the prohibitions of negiah, hauling out the philosophy of Feinstein in a multi-volume set to suppress your teenage hard-on. Big freaking deal. So you got reprimanded for holding hands with a girl? Been there, done that. So, your rebbes said stupid, parochial things about...goyim? Wow. I never heard of that happening.

There is a Talmudic debate about saving the life of a non-Jew on Shabbat? How fascinating that this took place so many centuries ago! Of course it is as dated as most of the discussions in the Talmud about women. Isn't the proof of the pudding in the fact that Jewish doctors are a worldwide institution, saving the lives of Jews and non-Jews without discrimination on Shabbat, on Yom Kippur, on every day of the week????

Do you hope to reveal some ugly, hidden face of Judaism to your shocked readers who previously had such a positive view of Jews? A pile of gentile corpses outside of Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, all the unlucky goyim in Upper Manhattan who had the misfortune to get sick on Shabbos?

Which readership are you writing for, anyway? The subscribers to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

You delve into the stories and teachings of our tradition, trying to out an ugly underbelly.

By connecting the dots, the reader might assume that Judaism is a hateful religion, promoting genocide, leading to acts of terrorism.

Gee, speaking of religions associated with promoting acts of contemporary terrorism...isn't something missing from your essay?

Here's the thing: I personally think that Maimonides' decision to airbrush you out of their newsletter was pretty stupid. But you shouldn't have been surprised. To be surprised is kind of disingenuous, isn't it, Noah? You know the consequences of marrying a non-Jew within the Orthodox community.

Some readers of your essay familiar with the goings-on inside Orthodox Jewish community might conclude that you must have been dozing in day school during that lesson on sure-fire ways to obliterate the Jewish future. Numero uno: marry out and raise non-Jewish kids. Have the line end with you. Finish the job Hitler left undone.

Other readers might conclude that you want it both ways: to spit in the face of the community and receive applause for marrying the woman you love...who happens not to be Jewish.

But this reader thinks that in your pain and hurt at the rejection of you and your wife by the Orthodox community of your youth, you have marshalled all your forces, all your intellectual aptitude and built a dangerous missile, pointed straight at the Jewish community at large, packed with enough ammo to inflict real damage.

ON THESE, I WEEP

How does the city sit desolate
That was full of people?
How has she become as a widow

She who was great among the nations?

The lights were low at Eitz Chaim, the congregants seated on the carpeted floor, individual copies of the Book of Lamentation illuminated by flickering candlelight.

Every year, a familiar gathering at this low-key Conservative synagogue in Monroe, led by Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, whom I first met when he was in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

More than a decade later, he still has the youthful aura of a recent graduate tempered with the gravitas of being a religious leader in increasingly perilous times.

To my left, Little Babe sat cross-legged, wrapped in polar fleece, black Crocs on his feet. He looked chilled and tired. It had rained all day in New York and by evening, we were water-logged and weary.

Another year, another Tisha B'Av.

I have written elsewhere of my great love for this day of observance, which commemorates the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem -- first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans. In my writing, I have often detailed the somber and magical observances at the legendary and now-defunct Camp Massad, which have stayed with me my entire life.

Possibly because of my camp experiences, the mourning for the devastation of the Temple in Jerusalem -- which signalled the beginning of the Jewish diaspora -- is immediate and accessible to me, winding through the centuries, becoming enmeshed with other tragic historical moments deserving of commemoration.

Tisha B'Av is about pure sadness, grief, regret, remembrance. It doesn't require fancy preparation or complicated observance, mostly abstinence from food, drink, washing, sex and other pleasurable activities, the shunning of leather shoes, reciting special prayers and the reading of the Book of Lamentations.

Tisha B'Av is a day when Jews, hard-wired for survival and overachievement, have a chance to cry about everything horrible that has been done to us as a people.

While the rabbis would have us believe that the Temple was destroyed for sinat hinam -- senseless hatred -- between Jew and Jew, I am pretty convinced that the senseless hatred was directed AGAINST the Jews for refusing to accede to Rome, for stubbornly insisting upon being Jewish.

Last night, the ground at the Love Shack was wet beneath our feet as Little Babe and I trudged to the minivan to drive to Eitz Chaim. We had just eaten our seudah mafseket, finishing meal, and were ready to greet the fast.

Prior to our meal, Little Babe had been at Tae Kwon Do. During his lesson, I met an Israeli woman I had never seen before and we spoke compulsively while watching our sons spar in padded uniforms, bonding avidly as Jews meeting one another in an unexpected outpost. She invited me to a reading of Eicha (the Book of Lamentations) at the local Chabad and I told her about our tradition of attending Eitz Chaim.

Now Little Babe and I were heading to the synagogue through the dark, raindrop-bejeweled night. Five minutes before we arrived, he surprised me with a question: Why do so many bad things happen to the Jews? Why do so many people hate us?

Reading Eicha is difficult, as it is filled with self-flaggelation. Jeremiah, widely considered to be its author, depicts a ravaged city and a hopeless people. The desolate Temple mount is overrun by foxes; women cook their own children. A verse tacked onto the end -- Return us O Lord to you, renew our days as of old -- provides only the slightest relief from the sheer and utter devastation.

This bleak scenario could not be farther from the world that Little Babe inhabits on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a world in which being a Jew, even an observant Jew, constitutes being a member of a social and cultural elite. Moreover, the Jerusalem of Eicha is utterly alien to Little Babe, who has visited and lived in a sparkling, overpopulated, Jewishly-dominated Jerusalem.

The Jerusalem of Jeremiah is not even close to the creepy experience of living in Oxford, England three years ago, where Little Babe was regularly called a variety of names that involved his Jewishness and Middle Babe was attacked verbally by her elite private school classmates for the alleged sins of the State of Israel... the chief one being its very existence.

Once a year, on Tisha B'Av, I cast off my comfort as a contemporary American Jew and dwell in the sadness of being part of a persecuted people, exiled, longing to be returned to my beloved Zion.

Once a year, on Tisha B'Av, Jewish parents -- especially those living on Manhattan's Upper West Side, spending their summers in a glorious paradise at the foothill of the Catskill Mountains -- begin the process of explaining to their children the difficult truth about being Jewish.

WHEN YOU'RE A JET

It took the better part of one entire year, but I finally prevailed.

After refusing to veer from his steady habit of anime and Cartoon Network, Little Babe grudgingly allowed me to cajole him into watching West Side Story.

The Sunday night screening was one of the most magical moments of my recent life.

Following a relentlessly social Shabbat at the Love Shack and a trip out to Long Island to visit MOBB and FOBB (mother of Bungalow Babe; father of Bungalow Babe) in Great Neck and friends in Long Beach, Little Babe and I returned to Monroe, New York just as the sun was setting on Sunday evening.

Driving west on Route 17, a mysterious fog settled around us like a great big benevolent quilt. What I really longed to do at that hour was to dive onto my bed to read Mary Gordon's stories but somehow, as if by magnetic force, I found myself drawn into the new Target in the pre-fab new shopping development known as Harriman Commons.

The impetus for this detour was to pick up a few packs of the popular undershirt known as a wife-beater for Big Babe who has developed a sudden dependency upon them. Those of you who frequent Target are probably well-acquainted with the syndrome of check-out shock, which is the phenomenon of being utterly astonished at the check-out counter by the sheer quantity of (non-essential) items you have just purchased.

However, tucked into the trademark red and white bag were three magnificent metziahs (steals) that made the excursion entirely worthwhile: the musicals Hair, Fame and West Side Story on DVD, each for $9.99.

Oh, snap!

Upon returning to the horrifically messy Love Shack -- abandoned hastily earlier that same day in a mad effort to get HOBB (husband of Bungalow Babe) to La Guardia on time for his flight to Boston -- Little Babe and I collapsed onto the master bed, eyes trained upon my computer screen, which was balanced on the makeshift table that forms my desk. Between us rested Alfie the Pomeranian, blissfully squashed between our sandy, beach-burnt bodies.

The DVD player whirred inside my computer. The window for the DVD player popped up. I pressed play. The computer screen went black. That famous West Side Story whistle sounded, hovering in the silent air, and then the thrilling overture began, a skycam panning New York City, causing Little Babe to cry out in recognition -- "Columbia University!" "The Empire State Building!" "The East River!!" -- until the lens honed in upon a playground on the West Side.

In the quiet of the country, Leonard Bernstein's energetic music sounded overly loud and I kept compulsively fiddling with the volume button, afraid of waking the entire bungalow colony. Lying on our stomachs, facing the computer, chins resting on fluffy pillows, a soft breeze wafting through our curtains and brushing our pajamas, I kept stealing glances at Little Babe, monitoring his reaction.

Some adults take their kids to Disney World to show them the time of their lives.

For me, Disney World is eclipsed many times over by the wondrous world that Bernstein, Robbins, Laurents and Wise created in this film: the urban battleground of the Sharks and the Jets, the Eden of Tony and Maria, the sisterhood of Anita and Maria, the safe haven of Doc's Candy Store, the frilly retreat of the bridal shop, the shadows in the schoolyards and playgrounds (haunted by Anybody's), the alleys and streets, nooks and crannies of New York's dirty, down-at-the-heels West Side in the very era I was born.

The epic relationships of West Side Story have been with me my entire life: Tony and Riff; Anita and Bernardo; Riff and Bernardo; Tony and Maria; Anita and Maria; Maria and Chino. And the characters are hard-wired into my memory: Officer Krupke; Doc; Ice; A-Rab; Baby John; Velma; Graziela; Consuela; Lieutenant Schrank; Action and mah gurl Anybody's, the ultimate celluloid tomboy.

After four decades of watching this film, the characters of West Side Story have become mishpocha. Their story, oft-told, is family lore, a primer for life, a template for every situation one is likely to encounter -- love, longing, hatred, disappointment, betrayal, exhiliration, adversity, loss.

And rumbles. Especially rumbles.

To see West Side Story is to take a crash course in life-preparedness.

The first time I saw West Side Story was in 1972, watching it from the high-rise bed next to my cousin Rena in the basement of her house in New Hyde Park. The film was on TV, a Sunday night special, perhaps Channel 9's Million Dollar Movie. From the very beginning of the film, I was breathless with the thrill of discovery; I felt like the Vasco da Gama of Queens. Here was entirely new territory! Never before had I seen a musical like this, filled with characters I instantly loved... and wanted to be.

Watching the film unfold, I recognized myself in Riff, in Action and in Anybody's. With each viewing -- sometimes even between each viewing -- I wrote myself into the script. Little did I know that ten years later, their West Side setting would become my own neighborhood.

As I got older, I even tried on the persona of Anita -- sexy, savvy, hot-blooded, Spanish like me, though it would be many years before I learned the truth about my own Sephardic origins.

How bold the film was, confronting the tribal animosities of urban life! Yes, we all knew it was a modern-day adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, but it wasn't until I actually saw Romeo and Juliet performed that I realized how faithful the adaptation was.

And it wasn't until I was older that I realized how daring the film was, allowing good-girl Maria a night of sex with Tony. The scene of Anita coming upon an obviously post-coital, half-clad Maria in the room with the rumpled bedsheets, Tony escaping through the alleys was an important milestone in my moral development.

Don't listen to your parents...people in love can and do have sex, it informed me... even if they are not married! Good girls like Maria and good boys like Tony. People like Judy and Bob, my birthparents, a college and a medical student, in love, unmarried, utterly unknown to me at that time in my life.

Thirty-five years ago, I watched, miffed, as the final, melodramatic scene unfolded and Maria cradled a dying Tony. Naturally, my girly-girl cousin wept and naturally, I laughed at the corniness of it all, tomboy that I was. I remember rolling my eyes at that excess of emotion while my cousin shouted at me through her tears that I was ruining the ending for her. But the ending had been ruined for me by the director.

Until that final scene, everything had been great and irreverent and suddenly, there were violins and ashen-faced gang members and everyone was acting serious and grown-up and like they didn't hate each other anymore. Eeeeuuuuwww!

Outraged though I was, I ultimately forgave the filmmakers, pragmatically deciding that they needed to turn the movie into a tearjerker...this was Hollywood, after all.

I have no idea how many times I've watched West Side Story, seeing it anew through the eyes of each of my children, finding it ever more brilliant with each viewing.

So, what novel observations did Sunday night's viewing bring?

Well, for one thing, the choreography nearly made me swoon. It is utterly sublime, sophisticated and greatly varied -- ballet to mambo to jazz to modern and back again. I saw Little Babe's mouth open during each dance number, suffused with wonder that "boys" could dance so well.

This Sunday's viewing also activated my gaydar. Maybe it is due to the dancing, but at this recent viewing, most of the Sharks and Jets struck me as gay. Especially the Sharks. Check out their tight little butts and high-waisted pants. (The lipsticked pouty mouths don't help matters.) Still, the gayest guy of West Side Story has got to be Tony. When he attempts to look love-besotted, he merely manages a constipated grimace. The way he holds Maria is distant and awkward. It is far more natural to imagine him, say, making out with Bernardo.

Gratuitous musings about the the actors' sexual orientation aside, what my latest encounter with West Side Story gave me was the sheer joy of sharing it with Little Babe --wondering how it looks to him now that he is the very age I was when it entered my life in a very different world, a world before the Intifada and 9/11 and videotaped decapitations and American students going on murderous rampages and flaming jeeps being driven into airports. I wonder how Little Babe's mind will preserve the memory of the first time he viewed the Jets and Sharks rumbling in urban playgrounds and alleyways, an Upper West Side child on the cusp of adolescence, camping out in the country in the summer before his Bar Mitzvah.

COFFEE AND TERRORISM. Part Deux.

God is taunting me. He/She obviously read my previous posting and thought to Him/Herself:

So, you like to racially profile perfect strangers? Two can play the game!!!

Evidently, the game has begun. This morning, when I popped into my local Dunkin Donuts, I nearly dropped my small cappuccino with an extra-shot when Verena, the Eastern European clerk from last summer, emerged from the back of the store wearing a Muslim headcovering and a long sleeve black leotard beneath her Dunkin Donuts shirt.

The veil was pinned beneath her chin and her face was utterly free of make-up. She kept her eyes downward, looking up only briefly to take orders. Last summer, she smiled at customers and wore her mousy-brown hair free and uncovered.

Now, of course, I am consumed with wondering whether Verena and the sleazeball from last week are related. Now, of course, my paranoia level has gone up to Level Red.

And it didn't help that five seconds later, I was trotting on the treadmill at Straub's Fitness three stores down, listening to Michael Chertoff talk about the hunch he has that a large-scale terrorist plot might be hatching for a city such as New York. Possibly this summer.

No specific information about a threat, just the hunch from the director of Homeland Security.

Of course, this could be a ploy from the Bushies to get everyone all paranoid and nervous and deflect from the fact that the troop surge in Iraq is a huge failure and the frikkin war in Iraq is a huge failure and the Iraq government is a huge failure and every frikkin thing that has happened over on Bush's watch has been a huge failure.

It's hard to figure out where to focus my paranoia.

COFFEE AND TERRORISM

Three Tuesdays ago, I gave up coffee. Not forever...that would only make me rebel against myself. For now. For a day, or a week or a month or however long it would take to get me away from the Give-me-coffee-or-give-me-death relationship I was having with my body.

I'll admit it. The prime reason I went off the stuff is so that my metabolism can kick in to maximum effect. I know that a number of the diet mavens have skirted the issue of caffeine, timidly suggesting that their adherents would be best served by keeping caffeine to a minumum because to boldly state that coffee is utterly off-limits to people already deprived of normal food would make them homicidal. But I know the truth and the truth is that when people stop guzzling coffee, they lose weight.

Anyway, I don't think it is coffee or tea per se, but simply the way Americans consume everything in excess. Several Venti-sized hits of java will absolutely mess up your body's chemistry. And by Americans I mean myself. If I could only be like a European in my coffee consumption, I'd be effortlessly thin.

So, three Tuesdays ago I gave up coffee and yes, have been drinking green tea like it has the secret of eternal youth, which it may well have. But I felt like a taste of coffee last Thursday. And I didn't want to get into an arm wrestle with my yetzer hara (evil inclination). So I drove to the Dunkin Donuts next to Master Sang's Tae Kwon Do place, where Little Babe takes classes.

First, however, I popped into Master Sang's to explain that Little Babe was absent this week because of the hairline fracture on his big toe, which he got from sprinting around the exercise room after class the previous week. Master Sang bowed in greeting and looked truly contrite to hear of Little Babe's injury. This brought out my most nurturing Bungalow Babe instincts. Of course, it didn't hurt that Master Sang is the hottest Asian man in the world. And that there is the word "Master" at the beginning of his name, which is kind of fun to say and even more fun to think about...

...but where was I???

Oh, yes, so after leaving Master Sang, I trotted into Dunkin Donuts and guiltily placed an order for a small cappuccino with an extra shot. If I was going to backslide, I was going to do it in style. Not extra-large, but extra strong.

Because they were cleaning the machine, it would be a bit of a wait, I was told. How long, I asked, suspiciously. Oh, about 3-4 minutes. I rolled my eyes discreetly and smiled my amenability.

The 3-4 minutes I waited at the side of the Dunkin Donuts counter gave me just enough time to hear the customer to my right giving a hard-sell to the clerk about some new enterprise that would net him "eighty thousand dollar" the first year, probably double or triple that the next. With his Walmart-issue clothes, close-cropped hair and unsavory complexion, the man was hardly the picture of financial success. Everything about him screamed sleazeball. His accent caught in my ear and perplexed me. It sounded at first Eastern European, then Hispanic, then Balkan...and finally I placed it as Arabic.

Which made me pay infinitely closer attention to the man...and conclude that he was Muslim.

There are loads of Satmar Hasidim and townies and mainstream goyish types and a proud showing of Conservative and Reform Jews but I had never seen an Arab/Muslim in Monroe before. Yes, he could have been Christian or Druze or escaped Bedouin, but in the script that was unfolding in my mind he was absolutely Muslim.

Whatever he was, the guy was a no-goodnik. This much was obvious. To his credit, the young Mexican dude at the counter yeah-yeahed him good-naturedly while his made his oily sales pitch. The coffee was brought. Change was given. And then he sauntered out of Dunkin Donuts, across the parking lot and towards a....JEEP CHEROKEE?????

My heart started hammering like mad. OMG!! Was this Jeep about to be plowed into the Dunkin Donuts??? Or driven north along 87 towards Stewart Airport? Or taken south along 87 to La Guardia??

I admit that I got close enough to the window to see the license plates of the Jeep and memorized them. I was too embarrassed to write them down. But I have them in my mind in case I can help a future police investigation.

Am I insane? Paranoid? Racist? Retarded?

And I'll admit something more. I intend to stalk the Dunkin Donuts next to Master Sang's, on the lookout for this guy...or others like him.

And keep my eyes peeled for Jeep Cherokees driving along Rt 17.

As for my resolve...let it be said that after three or four sips of the cappuccino, I tossed the entire thing away. However, I would be lying if I didn't admit that I drank a delicious Lavazza cappucinno at the rest stop along 87 while driving out to the Hamptons on Friday and had several gulps of Gevalia coffee at the 1880 house on Saturday morning and had a triple-shot cap at the Organic cafe on Sunday morning, right off of Main Street in Westhampton.

If we are under imminent terrorist threat, then it's kind of pointless to give up coffee, right?

FIRST DO NO HARM

What does it mean, the television anchor asked the expert, that the terrorist masterminds in the UK car bombing plot are doctors?

What does it mean, she persisted, horror mixed with incredulity, that these are educated people?

The expert paused and collected his thoughts. And then offered an answer that sounded more like a kid bulls%^&ing his way through a test he failed to study for: that people with a propensity towards science are more easily swayed by extremist ideology.

As Scotland Yard chases down clues and suspects with stunning speed, this rapidly-unfolding international drama has all the ingredients of a major blockbuster film.

Including the plot twist of seemingly harmless doctors revealed to be murderers.

Like the Nazi doctors.

But this century's Nazi ideology is not contained to one continent...or one people. It is hopscotching around the world.

And the film would be thrilling were it not the unfolding of our new reality, minute by terrifying minute.

LONDONISTAN

At one minute to six this morning, I was jolted awake by an urgent feeling; there was something I needed to do.

Stumbling over the boxes of my office -- still unpacked after four days in the bungalow -- I staggered to the bathroom, passing Little Babe asleep on the living room/kitchen couch/high-riser.

More boxes of my office stuff stood like a mini Manhattan in the middle of the living room/kitchen. Outside the bungalow, the sky was an inviting pale blue and birds were singing prettily, Snow White-style.

Once I arrived in our crazy day-glo bathroom (the tiles are accidentally retro...installed in the seventies or eighties, before they were cool, which they most certainly are now) it dawned on me that there was nothing more urgent for me to do than get to the gym before my work day began.

Blame it on carbs, hormones, age or my exercise-lite regimen of this past year, but my Bungalow Bod isn't looking quite summer-ready. Though HOBB and the Babes protest to the contrary, I feel like a huge container of cottage cheese when I put on my Isaac Mizrahi bikinis (Target, of course) from bungalow summers past.

To counteract the lumpy look, I have undertaken four draconian measures until I see some improvement:

1. No coffee (I was seriously, impossibly addicted, downing several cups a day of Zabar's, Starbucks and/or Oren's Beowulf blend, with generous amounts of half and half)
2. Daily visits to the gym
3. No to Cheetos and potato chips and other carby foodstuffs
4. Yes to the Fat Flush Plan, or at least a liberal version of it (visit www.annlouise.com)

So, within half an hour of waking up -- and two massive cups of green tea later -- I arrived at Straub's Fitness Center in Monroe. Claiming my fave treadmill -- the one with a good view of four television sets -- I plugged in my headphones, pressed Quick Start and was on my way to svelteness.

The danglings television sets had all been set to news stations and I had before me ABC, FoxNews, CNN and CBS. The story about the defused car bomb in London's theatre district dominated each network. For the 45 minutes I trod, I heard the story over and over again, listened to snippets of press conferences from London, saw diagrams of the location of the parked and smoking car, heard from the man whose car was parked next to the failed car bomb, listened to pundits and anchors and reporters alike, viewed the area -- Haymarket -- from a multitude of London security cams, got various updates on the situation, heard about the heroism of the bomb squad that disabled the device, packed, incidentally, with nails, learned of the potential catastrophe that had been narrowly, perhaps even accidentally, averted.

And learned a roster of new names in the news: Gordon Brown, the newly appointed PM whose name I kept forgetting; Peter Clarke, the chief of anti-terrorism for the British police; Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former head of MI5.

And tried to squelch my frustration hearing CNN's Christiane Amanpour skirt the issue of Islamic fundamentalism, reminding viewers that most Muslims in Great Britain are peaceful, linking the radicalism to the war in Iraq and the fact that Muslims do not enjoy the same standard of living in the UK (and France) as they do in America.

Just one teensy-weensy step further and terrorism becomes a sociologically and morally justified act.

Kind of like when it happens in Israel.

Naturally, the pundits and talking heads on TV hearkened back to the attacks of July 7, 2005 or 7/7, as we are almost at that ignoble second year anniversary.

It is a day that I will never forget because of the irony of where I was when the attacks unfolded.

On July 7th, 2005 I was hiking with my family in the lush Galilee, enjoying the second part of my Israeli nephew Alon's bar mitzvah. We were staying at a beautiful kibbutz right outside of Kiryat Shmona and had gotten up early to hike through Ein Tina, a river trail. The day was spectacular: sunny and clear with a sweet breeze. Camp groups gathered in the shade, applying sunscreen and checking their water supplies.

About three minutes into our hike, Little Babe slipped on rocks in the riverbed and fell, cutting his leg open in a gaping wound. A female medic nearby took one look at our sobbing son and proclaimed, "tefarim" -- stitches. Five minutes later we were on our way to a Magen David clinic in Kiryat Shmona.

After the doctor had stitched up a brave Little Babe who was now buoyed by the impending celebrity he would enjoy among his cousins on account of his five stitches, HOBB and I, who were limp with post-traumatic stress and the late-morning heat, decided on a trip to the Kiryat Shmona mall for some ice cream.

The mall in Kiryat Shmona is a dismal, two-story affair with a handful of cheap stores, a pharmacy, a post-office and a food court with a pizza place, a falafel joint, two ice cream establishments and a burger place. Like our retro dayglo bungalow bathroom, this mall hailed from the seventies, but there was nothing remotely chic about it.

Instead, it reflected the depressed local economy.

Yet the gelato was fresh and delicious and we opted for large servings to counteract the heat of the day and the memory of the morning.

It was as we were sitting down to enjoy our treats that we saw the horror of seven-seven unfold in real time on the television set suspended from the ceiling of the food-court. With the two-hour time difference between England and Israel, we caught the news as it was happening.

Eating ice cream in the very town that witnessed a massacre of eighteen of its civilians in 1974 (including nine children), it was surreal to say the least to watch London reel under the impact of a calculated terrorist attack on its underground and bus system.

Being in the world's most popular terrorist target, it seemed illogical that elsewhere on the planet -- England, in this case -- innocent civilians were also being killed in ideologically-driven murder plots.

For the next hour, we sat glued to the television screen, broadcasting BBC Worldnews, stunned to find ourselves safe in Israel while others were maimed and killed by terrorists in that most cultivated of European cities -- London, where we had spent a large part of the previous year.

So, when today's news from London dominated the airwaves, I felt myself transported back two summers, trading my treadmill-top location in Monroe, NY for the mall of Kiryat Shmona, Israel, recalling the cold shock that washed over me on that day as I watched the news.

Though I learned the truth on 9/11, the events of 7/7 reinforced the lesson: Nowhere in the world is safe anymore.

Terrorism lives, fueled by the conviction of those who wish to annihilate us.

By "us," I mean anyone who is not "them."

And passively aiding and abetting the terrorists are the Christiane Amanpours of the world, who fail to ask the proper questions, such as why moderate Muslim leaders repeatedly fail to speak out in force against acts of terrorism; and infer that opposition to the war in Iraq or an inferior social status satisfactorily explains why people of a certain religious and ethnic group are driven to kill innocents.

If the recent, Nazi-like boycott of Israeli academics in England didn't alert the world to a basic failure in British society, perhaps today's barely-averted disaster might serve as a wake-up call.

There is a murderous hatred in the heart of England, flowing through the veins of its citizens, poisoning the body of the nation.

WELCOME TO THE LOVE SHACK!

The Love Shack is the fulfillment of my fondest fantasies.

Modest and unassuming, it resides on the edge of a lush forest, one half of Unit 10 of Rosmarin's Cottages and Camp in the town of Monroe, NY.

The Love Shack is Bungalow 10B. After years of skipping through other units -- all charming in their own way -- we settled on this one, outfitted with a generous front lawn, set far apart enough from the 99 other units so that we enjoy something that bungalow colonies often have in short supply -- privacy.

Because of our location, I often (happily) refer to our bungalow as the Anti-Social Shack.

The Love Shack has an enclosed porch where we have moved our round breakfast (and lunch and dinner) table; a combination kitchen/living room, a small bathroom and two bedrooms. Our front lawn has a combination of resin Adirondack chairs, a wooden picnic table and assorted end tables.

By 8 in the morning, sunlight filters onto our front lawn, drenching it in golden light for most of the day. By 4, the sun begins to recede over the top of the trees and the lawn becomes a sheltered oasis, protected from the glare of the sometimes relentless sun.

Early in the day, deer, bunnies and turkey vultures often cavort on our grass.

In my bedroom, the entire contents of my office surround me. It took eight hours, from 8 pm to 4 am, starting on Sunday evening, to pack up my work life, organize it, and prepare it for transport to the Love Shack. Since I started my business in 2002, this has been a yearly ritual -- transplanting my professional life into the Catskills.

Now, I am truly Bungalow Babe.

Where I fail to clean properly for Passover, I meticulously scour through files, notebooks and materials at the end of school in late June, organizing projects and clients, preparing them to make the trip with me from Manhattan to Monroe.

Thus within Bungalow 10B, I am able to run my business for the summer, working out of my bedroom, taking phone calls while stretched out on a blanket in the sun, invariably decked out in bikinis, running clothes, or not very much at all.

When we first came up here, in 1995, Little Babe was three weeks old and his brother and sister (Big and Middle Babe) were about to turn 11 and 7, respectively. For those first few summer, I had all the Babes with me up at the Love Shack. During the day, they attended the excellent day camp and when it was over, we met at the pool to swim for hours, or visited the nearby Ananda Ashram or went to play in "Airplane Park" in downtown Monroe, or hiked down to Walton Lake or caught a double feature at the Drive-In in Fair Oaks, Middletown or Warwick, or simply hung out inside the bungalow.

After my first summer, when I was on maternity leave, I worked during the day, commuting to Manhattan before I left my job to open my business, employing nannies to cover for me when I was not here. For a few summers, we even had young women live with us in the Love Shack. It was miraculous how our bungalow was able to accommodate so many people without seeming cramped.

Since Big and Middle Babe hit their teens, however, the prospect of a Bungalow Summer paled next to European travel or Israel trips and their visits have primarily been restricted to weekends or days off from their programs. With the allure of Summer in the City, it has been harder to lure them up to the Love Shack, though this summer I have been heartened to see their renewed appreciation and longing for our family tradition.

And speaking of tradition, HOBB (Husband of Bungalow Babe) stays mostly in The City, coming up with other husbands for the weekend in classic Catskills style.

Some of our most delicious memories are of being in the Love Shack together in the middle of the day, when no one else is around.

It is now 8:08 in the morning. The new folding table I picked up at Target last night is resting on the floor next to my bed. My printer is on the bed to my left, where I left it last night before I fell asleep reading this past Sunday's Times Magazine. Next to the printer, Alfie the Pomeranian is stretched out, snoozing blissfully. In our kitchen/living room, Little Babe is sleeping deeply. Though the entire back bedroom is his, filled with toys, books and momentos, he prefers to sleep in our common room, lulled by the hums of our fans and the refrigerator.

Shortly, I will have to wake Little Babe up and get him ready for camp. Shortly, I will have to begin my work day. Later, there is a Shortline bus I need to take to The City for a midday meeting. When I return, after Little Babe has had his fill of post-camp swimming and a snack at The Concession, I will drive him to Tae Kwon Do in Monroe, next to Straub's Fitness, where I work out. Later, I will host his friends for a summer dinner -- hamburgers and potato chips.

I am typing in my bungalow bedroom, wearing the tank top and shorts I slept in. My short black hair is standing up in spikes around my head. After one weekend in the country, my skin is already deeply tanned. I think with pleasure of the contrast between my brown thighs and the oatmeal linen walking shorts I will wear to my meeting today.

Bags from Target still litter my kitchen floor. My summer reading has still not been unpacked from the suitcase I hauled into Little Babe's bedroom but, as if with x-ray vision, I can see the books I plan to read: Don Quixote; The Stories of Mary Gordon; Londonistan; New Essays on Zionism; The Book of Disquiet.

And the Collected Works of Isaac Babel.

I have been shlepping Babel around since Passover, losing him once in SoHo, failing to finish his work but determined to keep trying.

The Love Shack is filled with the artifacts of my life -- my laptop, my work, camp photographs, knick-knacks from the local 99 cent stores, tag sales, roadside leftovers from garage sales.

There is just enough space inside Bungalow 10B to accommodate my summer life. The humble rooms harbor my memories and my dreams. Sweet sleep overtakes me at night; sweet summer air surrounds my slumber.

The view outside my enclosed porch is of a lush and deep woods.

It is this view that calms me when I have fears that I may cease to be.

This scenario is the epitome of my desires.

READ ALL ABOUT IT!! THE NEW YORK TIMES DECLARES ISRAEL TO BLAME FOR HAMASTAN!!!

It was only a matter of time, in fact, I’m a bit surprised the refrain did not sound sooner.

The real, underlying cause of the civil war in Gaza this past week is (drum roll, please)…Israel!!!

Oh, and America.

But really, Israel.

Like Arnold Horshack, the famously stupid yet overeager student from Welcome Back Kotter, the New York Times has the distinction of raising its hand first, Horschack-style -- “Oooh!! Oooh!! Mr. Kotter! Mr. Kotter!!! I know!! I know!!! -- to (reflexively) identify the root cause of the reason why Gaza has turned into Hamastan, in a matter of days, with over 70 Palestinians dead.

But the Times was queasy about naming names. The reason behind the recent nightmarish warfare in Gaza rests in the failed policies, it says, of “Washington” and “Jerusalem.”

But readers, abandon your shock and above all, do not despair. There is yet hope. Though Israel (...whooops, Jerusalem) screwed the whole thing up, now is the time that it -- together with America (...whooops, Washington) can set everything right by “exert[ing] constructive influence in this dangerous situation.”

(Okay, I’m listening, even if I am wondering why only Washington and Jerusalem are being addressed when there is an entire international community watching Gaza implode.)

Hmmm. So, which “constructive” means does the Times have in mind?

*Impose a “total freeze on settlement building and expansion"
*Promptly ease the “onerous, humiliating and economically-strangulating blockades on Palestinian movements within the West Bank and
*Swiftly release “all tax revenues rightfully belonging to the Palestinians” to Mr. Abbas’s office

In other words, if only Israel had done this earlier, Hamastan would not have happened. And dismal as the situation is, taking the advice of the optimistic Times editorial staff constitutes a “new and wiser approach to Palestinian politics.”

Before I even dive into the heart of the specific recommendations of the newspaper of record, let me deconstruct the above statement. While I am all for some deus ex machina solution to the tragic drama of Gaza, I am against the subversion of language. To call what has unfolded over the past few days “politics” is preposterous. Politics has nothing to do with this, unless politics simply means power-struggle.

Politics dignifies the primitive, bloodthirsty violence that has taken place as an ineffective, internally corrupt Fatah has been overtaken by the sword-swinging Hamas fundamentalists bent on creating an “Islamic State,” whatever that means, ridding their conquered land of “heretics” and utterly ignoring a social agenda so that it might devote itself to rid the entire world of these so-called heretics, and, as the icing on the cake, eradicate Israel in the process.

And now to shoot down the Times’s three points, quickly and painlessly:

*Israel’s “settlement building and expansion” has about as much to do with igniting the Crips and Bloods-like warfare in Gaza as my mother’s new kitchen renovation. If the Times wants to be utterly irrelevant, it might as well toss in the O word at this point (occupation).

*Regarding the “onerous, humiliating and economically-strangulating blockades on Palestinian movements within the West Bank,” the Times is confusing cause and effect. These checkpoints are utterly essential in order to prevent the murder of Israeli civilians at the hands of new and eager recruits, such as the two Palestinian moms caught en route to blowing up Netanya and Tel Aviv last month.

If only Israel didn't have to worry about building blockades.

*Hey, instead of releasing the “monies” to Mr. Abbas, I’ve got a better idea! Let’s just hand them directly to Hamas! This way, we can at least save a few members of Fatah from being gunned down in front of their wives and children or thrown off the top of a high-rise building or shot in the back of their knees!

I admit it. Reading the Times this morning utterly ruined my day. Its lead editorial is more akin to something I’d expect to read in a college newspaper of a campus famous for its left-wing politics, and ill-informed student leaders.

But the Times editorial is depressing for another reason. To state that the ball for stabilizing the situation in Gaza rests fundamentally in the courts of “Washington” and “Jerusalem,” is to admit (without admitting it, of course) that the Palestinians are such animals/ incompetents/lunatics that the world can have no expectations of them. That they are so morally-challenged that the concept of accountability does not apply in their case.

So many analogies come to mind reading today's lead editorial in the New York Times.

Reading today's Times is like watching an episode of Law and Order that was produced after Hamas militants stormed the set. After shooting the interim DA Nora Lewin in the head, kidnapping Jack McCoy and throwing producer Dick Wolf off the top of the NBC building, the newly-cast judge, played by Mel Gibson, would render a decision that found Israel culpable for the crime at the heart of this episode -- an infectious virus that spread to humans because an animal activist stormed a laboratory where infected monkeys were being experimented upon – as well as every crime on every episode of Law and Order, including Law and Order: SVU and Law and Order: CI and other spin-offs I'm not aware of.

Because Law and Order is no longer watchable, I cruise the channels, only to discover reruns of Welcome Back Kotter, but it seems like Hamas stormed the set of that show as well, turning Horschak into a newly-converted Wahabist Muslim who honor-kills Hotsy-Totzie because she was seen talking to Epstein and recruits Barbarino and Boom Boom Washington as suicide bombers.

Mr. Kotter is killed, of course, because he is Jewish, and replaced by a new teacher – Mr. A. Dolph -- played by Mel Gibson. Horschack changes his name to Hamid and renames the Sweathogs the Palestinian National Struggle Against Zionist Imperialism.

Hamastan has taken over the American media, seeping into our homes and our minds.

FRATRICIDE IN GAZA

When I was a little Babe I shared a room with SOBB, my little sister, two years younger.

My chief occupations as a young girl/boy were reading books that were at least a decade too old for me and often sexually frank, if not pornographic (ie -- The Godfather, Candy, Blue Movie, Tropic of Cancer, Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care) writing adventure stories and suicidal poetry, practicing my spying skills and fantasizing about running away from home.

My sister's chief occupations were playing school, playing mother, singing and talking to her dolls.

Aside from the basic fact that as my younger sister she barely deserved to live, SOBB -- who is my best friend today -- was absolutely the world's most annoying person. I, on the other hand, was a budding sophisticate. As a result, most of our discourse was nasty. Yelling, shouting, insulting and name-calling were our main modes of communication and there was plenty of hand-to-hand combat as well.

When things reached a certain pitch we approached our mother to mediate. Instead of offering cool diplomatic conflict resolution, her reaction invariably was something along the line of "Go ahead and kill each other for all I care!" delivered between bared and gritted teeth.

Which invariably shocked us into declaring an immediate ceasefire.

I am reminded of my mother's reaction as I read the headlines out of Gaza, which get more and more horrific by the minute. Instead of building an infrastructure for their oppressed people, the Palestinians have decided to turn on each other -- Fatah vs Hamas, brother against brother -- each vying for leadership of their fragile nation, executing each other in the street, tossing handcuffed prisoners off highrise buildings, killing UN workers, lobbying grenades, missiles and mortars at key installations in a nihilistic bid for supremacy.

Also, conducting a form of torture -- according to today's front page New York Times article -- known as "kneecapping," which I had to look up on-line. So, what is kneecapping? Shooting someone through the back of the knees.

Nice.

Watching from the West, I cannot help but recall the words of the great Abba Eban who famously quipped that the late, corrupt PLO chairman Yasser Arafar "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity."

After conducting a fairly successful decade-long public relations campaign where they managed to explain their lack of social infrastructure by portraying themselves as victims of Israeli aggression and occupation and even raise support for an obscene lie -- that the suicide bombers they were producing were but a symptom of an oppressed, desperate people, hence, morally defensible and ultimately Israel's own fault -- the Palestinians have fallen down on the job, severely wounding their own image as victim of imperialistic outsiders.

Turns out that they are their own worst enemy.

I just tuned into Haaretz.com to see the latest in this explosive situation, which has not yet been called a civil war by observers, but is surely that, if not the Palestinian version of Armageddon. What I learned, in addition to the escalation in fighting and the threat by Hamas to invade Abbas's compound, is that Israeli security forces revealed that in late May it caught two Palestinian women on a suicide bombing mission to Tel Aviv and Netanya.

Both are mothers. One is pregnant, with eight other children. The other fabricated a medical reason for her travel to Ramallah to be fitted with an explosives belt. Both hail from Gaza.

Nice.

Mazel Tov, btw, to Human Rights Watch, who woke up to brand the activities of Fatah and Hamas over the past few days as crimes against humanity and war crimes. It was the gun battles that were being waged near hospitals, the tossing of shackled people off of rooftops, the misappropriation of press markings on a vehicle to be used in an attack against the IDF, the habit of killing civilians and other such activities which led HRW to speak out.

The long-ago battles I used to wage with my little sister are the stuff of stories we both tell our our children, much to their amusement. The stories are funny now because it is obvious that we have grown out of that primal rivalry/hatred into soul-sisterhood. The stories are also funny because of our mother's un-PC reaction to our warring...and our own penchant for offering intervention services to our own children.

What is not funny in the least is what is happening in Gaza. Brother versus brother, a fight to the death. A twist in the Palestinian narrative that somehow reveals an uncomfortable truth that lies beneath the other narrative that has been neatly presented to the West, a narrative in which the chief offender has been Israel, a narrative in which it all might have turned out differently if only....

Within the bedroom of Gaza, Palestinian brothers have marked each other for destruction. Within the house of Gaza, young mothers leave their children to strap on belts of death and devastation This is not a story with a happy, heartwarming ending. No one is going to laugh when they look back at this scene.

Watching from the West, I hear the long-ago message of my mother, delivered through gritted, bared teeth telling the warring siblings to go ahead and kill each other for all she cares.

WOMAN PLANS; GOD LAUGHS

Any woman who has attempted the feat of derring-do known as working while raising children has likely developed a theory about the Almighty that allows for one of the following:

• God is a sadist


• God is a misogynist


• God has one hell of a sense of humor

Being fond of God (check earlier posts where I have declared that Hashem is my homeboy), I am going to go with the concept of God as a cosmic writer for the Colbert Report.

And the comic situation most beloved by God is the one in which the needs of one's children come into direct conflict with work deadlines and commitments, causing maximum stress and embarrassment to the mother who is struggling to appear as competent and professional as possible.

With Big Babe approaching his 23rd birthday and Little Babe just newly turned 12 (and Middle Babe about to celebrate her 19th B-Day...not to leave out my only daughter) I have over two decades-worth of that initimitable experience known as "feeling like crap" because I have fallen down on the job as a mom or as a professional...or both.

There is a log somewhere (in heaven most probably...just next to the Book of Life and a bit to the left of the Book of Deeds) that has recorded every birthday I was absent for, every school event I missed, every trip permission form I failed to fill out, every late payment to camp or school, every lame-ass gift I have bought and every unfair allegation I have lobbed against my blameless children.

Next to these entries is the work-related reason for the maternal slip-up. The conference in Washington on Little Babe's birthday, the interview that took me away from Middle Babe's kindergarten play, the deadline that kept me up late at night so I didn't wake up in time to sign the trip permission slip before the school bus left in the morning, the birthday shopping spree at the local 99 cent store because we were flat broke because a client was late in paying, the sharp words because a child exceeded a budget and we were flat broke because a client was late in paying...etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

And next to this particular book is a book written by my clients filled with testimony of missed deadlines, broken promises, failed campaigns, bad press releases, cancelled meetings, interrupted meetings, meetings I attended with unwashed hair and clothes, meetings in which I was barely awake and/or coherent that is, in turn, accompanied by the child-related reason for each transgression -- the child sick with flu/bronchitis/pneumonia/croup/stomach virus/mono/PMS/diarhea/chicken pox; the child inconsolable following the break-up of a relationship; the child with nightmares; the child who had to endure an anti-Semitic tirade at their school in England; the child marooned in a foreign city/airport/beach; the child bullied at school or camp; the child who is scared/sad/depressed/filled with existential angst; the child who is graduating; the child who has a test/homework/term paper/project; the child who has a prom; the child who has a birthday... etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

One day -- after one hundred and twenty years, God Willing!!! -- an accounting will be made of both logs to see if the screw-ups on both fronts cancel each other out.

With such grown-up children underfoot, one might conclude that my life has become easier, that I can pour myself into my work with a clarity of focus. In fact, just yesterday, as I trod on the treadmill during lunchtime, a friend who has four children younger than 5 waxed poetic about the magical, manageable lot that must be mine.

Well... yes and no.

Yes, when the Babes are out of the house and Hell No!!! when they are around.

In fact, with Big Babe home from college and Middle Babe returned from her gap year in Israel, the house is suddenly alive with the sound of children. Not to mention their music, their friends, their phone conversations, their complaints and their demands...er, requests that I spend quality time with them (i.e. -- talk to them) in the middle of the work day.

Making it really challenging to keep my home-based business afloat or to even finish one e-mail in peace.

Making me pull all-nighters that are still interrupted when Big Babe arrives home at 2 am and proceeds to blast the soundtrack from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover or launch into a spontaneous discussion of what to do for the rest of his life now that he's graduated from college.

Making me lose my concentration when -- in the middle of a conference call -- I hear the biggest scandal that happened on Middle Babe's Israel program and I know the parents of the child involved.

Making me unable to rewrite the lead on a simple Media Advisory because I realize I never filled out the school registration forms for Little Babe that were due two months ago.

Somewhere in Heaven, God and His/Her pals are having the laugh of their (eternal) lives tuning into the sitcom that is my life:

Bungalow Babe in the Big City Tries to Have a (Professional) Life

While Not Totally F$%^&ing Up as a Mom.