As Seen by Eve – -Where I Go To Answer My Own Questions-

Stolen Valor

The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)

As a Canadian, I know the American military as fictional character. The military is the journey down the Nung River to assassinate Colonel Kurtz; it’s the destruction of a bridge built by British POW’s on the River Kwai; it’s the Kathryn Bigelow film that won Best Picture in 2010 that I never saw but I’m sure was great; it’s Jessica Chastain leading a team to assassinate Osama bin Laden with a plot that was way too confusing for my 12 year-old self; it’s Vincent D’Onofrio doing the Kubrick stare in a communal bathroom while reciting the Riflemen’s Creed.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

I have no personal connection to the military, much less the infamous American forces. In Canada, we remember the First World War that happened a century ago for about a week each year. But in America, it’s everywhere, everyday.

I’m fascinated by the universal admiration and unconditional respect granted towards veterans. When I was in Texas recently, I saw dozens of cars, mostly trucks, with stickers indicating that the driver was a veteran, it was something they wanted the world to know. Everywhere we went advertised discounts for veterans. One of the universities we visited, Texas A&M at College Station, is one of six United States Senior Military Colleges. We saw men my age (you could practically call them boys) walking around in the blazing heat in full uniform, equipped with knee high leather boots. When my family went to New York for the first time when I was 12, we took a train from JFK to Manhattan upon arrival. The first person we spoke to was a young man who was on his way to school at West Point. My dad was impressed, I was oblivious.

Military status is so valued in America that there are people who walk around impersonating military office

Apocalypse Now (1979)

rs, and in response, those who look out for this impersonation and call them out. They look for flaws in their uniforms, they ask them detailed questions to catch them in a lie. They film their encounter, and once they’re sure of the accused’s guilt, they yell “Stolen Valor!”, and publicly shame them. Anthony Anderson runs a Stolen Valor website called guardianofvalor.com with its very own ‘Hall of Shame’, a database with pictures, names, and write-ups of men and women who have impersonated military officers. This issue has even been taken to the federal level. In 2005, George W. Bush singed a law declaring it a federal misdemeanour to falsely represent oneself as having any US military decoration. In 2013, that law was adapted to protect freedom of speech, now making it illegal to benefit financially from an impersonation, such as receiving discounts or obtaining money or property.

Anderson has noted in an interview with the podcast ‘Reply All’ that publicly shaming a military impersonator has viral potential.

The Hurt Locker (2009)

“I use this word and – an- and I tell people I hate using it, is–there’s entertainment value behind the video. … it actually caused … representatives, lawmakers to get involved with the Stolen Valor movement. And that one video has, so far, caused five new Stolen Valor laws to be passed in five different states.”

Both Anderson and Nate Bathea, who was stationed in Afghanistan in 2009, have noted the dangers of people going too far in their search for authenticity. Unfortunately, the movement has cause some to go after those who are military, but simply don’t want to be confronted, therefore making themselves look guilty. People with mental disabilities who wear

Full Metal Jacket (1987)

uniforms as a form of admiration have been harassed and humiliated. Anderson firmly claims that this is not the true intention of the Stolen Valor movement, and he takes action for copycat websites that post these videos to be removed.

Bethea says he wishes the Stolen Valor movement didn’t have to exist. To him, the reason for it is the major disconnect between civilians and servicemen.

“The people who wear uniforms are still people. Because it’s weird when people are treating you like a symbol and you’re trying to say, ‘Hey man, talk to me, I’m a person.’ Like, talk to me as a human being not – not as th- the symbolic representation of what you think the uniform I’m wearing means.”

I’ll never be able to fully understand what it means to work in the military. And I don’t think anyone truly knows until they experience it themselves. The fact of the matter is that I never want to.

Vogt, P.J. (Host). Pinnamaneni, S. (Producer). (2016, July 14). Stolen Valor. Reply All. Podcast retrieved from https://gimletmedia.com/episode/70-stolen-valor/

A Homeland in Grey

The other day in my sociology class we were given a statistic that upset me, but after I thought about it, didn’t surprise me: In 1950, fewer than five percent of Republicans or Democrats reported they would be upset if their child married someone from the other party. Today, that number is 50 percent.

My sister Emma in Jerusalem

This got me thinking about a discussion we’ve had in ASTU about the concept of “us vs them”. After 9/11, America went on the defensive, blazing its red, white & blue, while condemning any opposition. That has yet to change. One of the major things I’ve realized in my life is that people are unable to see anything as beyond black and white. There is always a right answer and a wrong answer. Anything you say is dumb, because my opinion is correct. Because of this, people fight exclusively by shouting, protesting, and blocking their ears to anything they don’t like.

Subsequently I’ve realized that in fact, black and white is almost never the case. So many debated topics could be solved if people were willing to have open-minded discussions and actually listen to one another. Despite my realizations, I can’t help but be divided on a current global topic that affects me in a very small way, but because of my background I have been forced to confront: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I’m Jewish, (emphasis on the -ish). I’m not religious, I’ve only been to a synagogue a handful of times, and that was for my many cousins’ bar/bat mitzvah’s and various community activities. Despite this, I still identify with being Jewish. My family recognizes the major holidays, and my sisters and I have participated

My sister Eireann in Jerusalem

in Jewish community events and gatherings. Even though I’ve never been to Hebrew school and Judaism is not a frequent topic of discussion in my house, I’ve always been interested in Jewish customs, history, and religious practices. Along with this research I’ve done what searching I can on the situation in Israel, but I remain torn.

Both my parent are pro-Israel. Even my dad who’s not Jewish, he’s Catholic. My mom has some extended family there, and as a young woman she lived there for eight months on a kibbutz called S’dot Yam, just south of Haifa. My sisters don’t really talk about the subject, but they’ve been to Israel on a trip called Birthright (Taglit in Hebrew). Birthright is a tour program that allows young Jewish people to travel to Israel for free. The experience is paid for by philanthropists, and the organization’s goal is to get as many young people as possible to go to Israel and connect them to their Jewish Identity. My sisters loved their experience and talk about it all the time. I can’t help but be fascinated with a country with such interesting culture and fascinating history. But then I am reminded if the conflict, and the fact that I have the very real opportunity to travel across the world for free instead becomes a burden.

My dilemma basically comes down to my sympathy for both sides of the conflict. I am fortunate enough to not have any relatives who were victims of the holocaust. My mom’s parents were born and raised in South Africa, faraway from any danger. I still understand that Jews have been victims of discrimination for millennium, and that giving them a land to be safe from harm and to help them prosper was an essential part of protecting them. But my vision doesn’t stop there. I see the innocent Palestinians who were forced to leaves their homes, and those who are killed unjustifiably by Israeli military. I disagree with the recent decision by Israel to create more settlements in the West Bank, but opinions like these lead to feelings that I’m distancing myself from the place I’m supposed to call my homeland.

When I see someone who has suffered, their religion, ethnicity, and nationality becomes irrelevant to me. Whether someone is killed by a suicide bomb or a senseless soldier, I grieve. I can never rejoice at someone’s death, regardless of what “side” I’m on. Ultimately, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I believe that no one is “right” and no one is “wrong”. I believe the answer is negotiated peace, and it could be so easy, but no one is willing to take that chance.

Can We Be Funny?

Our ASTU Class’s has just read Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novella told in the style of a dramatic monologue that can be described as a “coming-of-age romantic historical-fiction thriller”. In a very small nutshell, the story focuses around a young Pakistani man who lives in New York City during the September 11 attacks. The whole book, including its ending, is ambiguous and does not aid the reader in putting together any clues. Such confusion is reflective of people’s actual attitudes after the event in question.

Satirical newspaper The Onion’s first issue after the attacks

I’ll never know what 9/11 felt like, I was too young to remember. I can watch movies, read books, ask my parents, but I’ll never know how it felt for something so drastic to occur on such a normal day, and I’ll never know what it felt like to live before it happened.

It’s sad to think about, but it appears that events like 9/11 are becoming more and more . . . normal. Of course an event with so many casualties in so little time hasn’t happened since, but events like the Paris Attacks, the Belgian Airport Bombings, the shooting in the Turkish nightclub, they happen, and they shake us, but we can “move on” in a week or so, blaming the whole thing on how much the world sucks nowadays. I’ll never know what it was like to be so blissfully unaware that such a thing could happen, and then be confronted with an event so catastrophic it changed the world in such massive, unpredictable ways.

People in the entertainment industry, especially in comedy, didn’t know how to respond. It was as if people were afraid to be funny, as if the ice they were walking on could break if they took the wrong breath. The TV show Friends had to edit an episode that aired on October 11, 2001; it contained a scene where Monica and Chandler get detained at an airport because Chandler makes a joke about bombs on planes. A 1997 episode of The Simpsons called The City of New York vs. Homer Simpson, in which Homer declares his distain for the city, and features the World Trade Centre prominently, was removed from syndication. Dozens of other films and TV shows decided to remove scenes containing the towers or to digitally remove them, as if they were never there. Out of sight out of mind.

Lorne Michaels and Rudy Giuliani on SNL’s first episode back

Late night shows decided to acknowledge the event. David Letterman gave an eight minute monologue with humour that didn’t go past self-deprecation and bald jokes, with light laughter from the audience. Letterman praised then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and New York’s firefighters, which was met with sentimental applause. On Saturday Night Live, folk-rock singer Paul Simon sang “The Boxer”, while Giuliani and show creator Lorne Michaels stood onstage with members of the NYPD and FDNY.

“Can we be funny?”, asks Michaels.

“Why start now?”, responds Giuliani, with thunderous applause and laughter from the audience.

The 53rd Emmy Awards were held on November 4th, six weeks late. American treasure Ellen Degeneres was the host. She began with some humour that was easy to handle, and addressed the elephant in the room with a joke that finally made it okay for everyone in the theatre to actually laugh again: “Think about it. What would bug the Taliban more than seeing a gay woman in a suit surrounded by Jews?”. The audience screams with laughter, people turn to their neighbours and smile. On with the show.

Regardless of our ability to live our lives without thinking of the event at every moment, it remains something that is impossible to joke about. There are a lot of devastating historical events that people feel safe making fun of, but 9/11 is not one of them. In all fairness, it is a fairly recent event, and there’s no real reason why people should make fun of it. But comics like Marc Maron walked this tightrope. In 2011 Brooke Gladstone interviewed Maron for the podcast On The Media, asking about the possibility of a “ten years later” joke. Here, Maron is referring to an instance where a women laughed at his introduction to a joke in which he almost killed two people.

“And somehow, like I built on it, to the point where I got the Holocaust involved. I said, ‘is that funny to you?’. And then people were still laughing cause I was sort of attacking this woman. And then when I said ‘9/11’ it was like ‘whoa whoa’. So I think it does still represent a tremendous pain in this country’s cultural fabric,”.

I highly recommend this podcast episode, found here: http://www.wnyc.org/story/after-911-nothing-was-funny/

Garfield, B. and Gladstone, B. “After 9/11, Nothing Was Funny.” Audio Blog Post. On The Media. WNYC. Sept. 14, 2016. Web. Jan. 26, 2017.

#hatchimalmademydaughtercry

Recently our Arts Studies class has been studying Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco, a journalistic comic book depicting conversations between Sacco and Bosniaks during the Bosnian War. One of the questions asked by a Bosniak character in the book is “Do they know about Gorazde in America?”. Sacco responds, “Yes, [I lied]”. (Sacco. 53). This book has reminded me in many ways of the war in Syria, and Americans (and westerners in general) attitudes towards it. Do Americans really know about Syria, specifically the people of Aleppo?

One night, shortly after Christmas, my parents and I sat down to watch NBC Nightly News. As experienced viewers, we knew the general layout of the broadcast’s stories: Global news, national news, medical revelation, wildcard, and heartwarming story about a young child and their brave golden retriever. On this night, the “wildcard” story was one that affected hundreds of families around the United States, bringing tragedy to those who just wanted to have a memorable Christmas. This tragedy was not the result of a severe weather catastrophe and not the result of disease. No, on this night, the National Broadcasting Company ran a four minute story about how Hatchimals, the hottest toy of 2016, were not working properly.

For context, Hatchimals are brightly coloured, cuter versions of Furby’s, with the technological advancement of being able to ‘hatch’ itself out of an egg. That’s the crucial part. There are thousands of fluorescent, noise making toys out there, but when a child takes a Hatchimal out of its box, it’s inside an egg, which the bird will break itself out of with its plastic beak when shaken. I admit, that’s a pretty cool toy, especially in the eyes of an eight year old. But they aren’t cheap. They cost around $50.00 – $90.00 in stores, while desperate parents could pay $250.00 for one on eBay. I can’t exactly remember, but I’m just hoping that I never forced my parents to but me a toy that expensive when I was that age through temper tantrums and the silent treatment.

Back to the night in question. Reports are coming in that these toys are malfunctioning, they aren’t breaking out of their shell, essentially ruining the whole point. Parents flocked to Twitter to share their stories, telling the manufacturer that their child’s Christmas was ruined because of it. One person tweeted: “Hatimal didnt hatch after 14 Hours and now all lights have gone off. How do i exchange a dud ? My 4 year old is gutted” and “# hatchimal ruined my 6 yr olds Christmas. All the effort and it done nothing Christmas day #hatchimalmademydaughtercry” (all typo’s were present in the original tweets).

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen parents blame a toy company for their child’s dependency on material objects, but for some reason, this story struck a nerve with me. While this was happening, an actually devastating event was taking place across the globe. At this time, thousands of Syrian children probably forgot it was Christmas, because they were so concerned with keeping themselves and their families alive, wondering when the next bomb would go off, and how they would get out of the hell they were living in. So many families were broken through loss, and a whole city destroyed by madness and chaos.

I’m never one to tell a person they can’t be upset because “someone else has it worse”. I understand that hardship isn’t a contest. A person living in the safest city in the world with the most loving family and perfect health can be suffering immensely inside, and that pain is valid. But this was different. I myself have been wondering what I, a teenager in Vancouver, can do to help the innocent people of Syria and other countries torn apart by war. The best answer I can come up with is to keep these people and their stories alive. Share them on social media, talk about them with your family and friends, learn the facts. By going on Twitter and telling the world how hard your child has it because their $80.00 pink robotic bird isn’t working, you are displaying your ignorance and disregard for other people’s suffering, and it saddens me how people can waste their time with such trivial things.

I think my passion towards this particular event is a build up of my frustration towards the countless tragedies that have taken place around the world in recent months. Not just the war in Syria, but also the shooting in the Turkish nightclub, the suicide bombings in Baghdad during Ramadan, the mass shootings that now seem to happen everyday in the United States. People have accused westerners of not caring and being ignorant. Of course I thought this wasn’t true, and that people did care but they just didn’t have the ability to help. But that story on NBC, those tweets, made me think that people really don’t care, and I can’t imagine what other tragic events will be pushed aside and ignored tomorrow.

Information about Hatchimals thanks to NBC: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/consumer/hatchimals-barbie-disappoint-parents-kids-christmas-n700601

Artificium

Willem van Heythuysen (2005) Kehinde Wiley. Seattle Art Museum.

I am a frequent visitor of museums. Anytime I travel with my family we always do two things in whatever city we visit: stop by the most prominent university, and go to an art gallery. Recently I went with my parents to Seattle specifically to see the art of Kehinde Wiley, a New York based painter who paints people of colour in positions like those depicted in the neoclassical style of the 18th and 19th century. My family has traveled to Los Angeles and New York on several occasions, so I have been lucky enough to see many of ‘the greats’, like Monet’s Water Lilies, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, Picasso’s Les Demoiselle’s d’Avignon, and Matisse’s La Danse.

These works of art that I’ve seen are priceless; international treasures that are instantly recognizable. That is not what I found in UBC’s Rare Books and Special Collections.

La Danse (1909) Henri Matisse. Museum of Modern Art.

Our ASTU 100 class examined and studied various documents relating to the novel Obasan by Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. The things we looked at would not be recognizable, you wold not see one recreated on a t-shirt. They were letters of rejection, newspaper articles, and fan letters. But what I was given was no less important than a Rothko.

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) Pablo Picasso. Museum of Modern Art.

My partner and I were given a folder holding the contents of Kogawa’s brain. Early editions of the fictional Naomi Nakane’s family tree, an outline of Obasan’s plot, and alternate titles for the novel. On these pieces of paper, it is almost impossible to see where Joy ends and Naomi starts. We found a list of memories from “the house in Vancouver”. We couldn’t be sure whose memories these were. ‘My young mother, christmas presents, hot bath, playing dirty with kids, Old Man Howard’. These could be anyone’s memories.

Dad with his favourite painter. No. 10 (1950) Mark Rothko. Museum of Modern Art.

I was surprised by how much freedom my class was given with these documents. Like the paintings I had seen at the MoMA, these were priceless, one of a kind, not to be recreated. The class was nervous at first, not wanting to rip any pages or smudge any words. It reminded me of a time in Palm Springs, when my family discovered an inconspicuous art gallery, with a name I can’t even remember. In the courtyard of the gallery was a sculpture by Henry Moore. My father, a lover of modern art, was so overcome with awe that he touched the statue without even realizing it. It could have cost millions. Some of the things were the product of a brain storm, Kogagwa’s stream of consciousness onto a page: “If we refuse to be eaten and eat do we die, or live. Surely the challenge is to discover that we can be eaten and not be destroyed – that love and resurrection attends our death – isn’t that where hope lies?” These words will not be endlessly studied by scholars. They will only be seen by so few people, and I am one of them. No one has analyzed them and decided what they mean. They can mean anything.

A family tree and character outlines. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections.

Joy Kogawa’s brainstorm. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections.

Alternate titles for Obasan. UBC Rare Books and Special Collections.

Is There a Magic Pill for Writing an Essay?

I’ll admit that I struggled to come up with a topic for this week’s blog. The past couple weeks in our ASTU 100 class focused mainly around academic writing, as opposed to an actual work of literature. To get some outside perspective, I called my dad on the phone and we brainstormed. He casually mentioned that during his time at university, this writer’s block would not have been as much of a problem, as I could have simply purchased an already written paper, or had someone write a brand new one for me. This got my attention. I decided to write about this practice and received insight from two of my family members: my dad, and my older sister.

My dad went to a prominent west-coast university in the late 1970’s. Before the internet, accessing vast amounts of information with the push of a button was not possible. Research was much more tedious, and some people may not have had time for this lengthy process. So, students would pay others, that is other students or graduates who are out of work, to write their paper for them. Eventually, actual businesses providing such a service were established, and these businesses still exist as online services. This way, you could go for the custom written model, or browse through a recycled, pre-written section.

It’s not as if everyone did this, but according to my dad, it wasn’t unusual. He never did this himself, but he knows of at least two close friends who obtained essays in this way, and knew that many of his peers were guilty as well. He estimated that an already written paper went for around ten dollars a page, and a newly written paper could be about twenty five dollars a page. This being in 1977 money, that would be $37.66 per page and $94.15 per page in todays money, respectively. That could make anyone with a full-time student’s budget shudder. But it was so common-practice that flyers, much like ones we see today for tutoring and piano lessons, advertising such services all around campus. This sounds impossible today, but technically, its not illegal.

Plagiarism is probably the biggest crime a scholar can commit, and this was the case when my dad was a student, but proving these crimes was significantly more challenging. Just as it was a laborious task to find information for your essay in the first place, it was even more difficult to determine whether or not a student had plagiarized simply by looking for the pre-existing work. By his account, students were caught for two reasons: they may have been a below-average student who turned in a doctorate level assignment, or another student who actually put in time and effort ratted them out.

These services still exist on the internet. When I was doing my research about the topic, I entered the words “essay writing services”, and I was shown eight different websites that do exactly that on the first Google results page. Most of them are very quick to mention that they are not an illegal service, and they imply that writing a paper by yourself would be impossible, so they are your best option. I dug a little deeper, and found one website that provides you with a price quota, which I obviously played around with. On this website, a five page essay at an undergraduate level that is due in three days costs $90.00. A ten page essay at the same level that’s due in six days costs $160.00.

My older sister Eireann is currently a teaching assistant at Simon Fraser University, so I asked her if she had any experiences with plagiarism. She said that while in her undergraduate years, no one she knew ever paid another person to write their essay for them. When I told about the stories my dad had told me, she was obviously very unfamiliar with the practice, as it is either not nearly as common, or just a well-kept secret. She never even knew anyone who simply stole another persons work without citing it, but she was told the same horror stories by her professors about the consequences. As a teaching assistant, she sees the same fear in her classes that I experience, people are afraid that they’ll plagiarize accidentally, either because they don’t know how to cite sources, or because of their familiarity with the all too common copy-paste method. Apparently, when a situation like this did occur, the professor decided to treat the accident like a lesson, rather than a punishment.

I can’t end this post with a brilliant solution to this occasional lack of academic integrity, I can only continue to be interested in it. But based on what I’ve learned, the consequences of plagiarising are much worse than doing poorly on an assignment. In three words: Not worth it.

Special thanks to Diarmuid and Eireann O’Dea

Inflation calculation thanks to Bank of Canada. Retrieved from: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/related/inflation-calculator/

Hymn to Hestia

For the past couple of weeks my ASTU 100 class have been discussing Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family, a book that seems to defy the concept of genre, but I personally describe as a somewhat fictionalized memoir. A theme of the book is the concept of identity, and how it can grow and change. I began thinking of my own identity, specifically nationality, ethnicity, and religion. I began to consider if where my grandparents are from really has anything to do with my identity at all.

My father’s mother, Maureen, as a young woman in Northern Ireland

I worked at the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park in North Vancouver from the summer of 2015 to the summer of 2016. As one of Vancouver’s most popular tourist attractions, our guests came from every corner of the globe. This made the job very interesting; I was able to hear stories from one hundred different people from one hundred different countries in one day, even if the interactions only lasted a minute.

What made the job even more compelling was the people that I worked with. We all got along very well, so I was always comfortable asking my colleagues about themselves, often starting with “where were you born?”. Of course some were from Vancouver, but not many. The majority of people that I worked with were not only not from Vancouver, but not from Canada. I worked with people from England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Germany, Ukraine, Poland, Philippines, India, Korea, Laos, Spain, Iran, and many others. Many of our co-workers were also of First Nations descent. Even amongst those who were born in Vancouver like myself, no two had identical ethnic backgrounds.

A recent photo of my mother’s parents, Leslye and Allan

This culturally diverse group is nothing new in Vancouver, which is one of the many reasons why this city is as great as it is. Vancouver’s vast multiculturalism is represented in the UBC student body. On the day I wrote this blog post I walked from a class to my dorm room with two fellow classmates, one from Thailand and one born in Uganda who lived in China for ten years.

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My mother in the early 1990’s, visiting Ireland

While celebrating diversity is definitely a positive for society, it can pose some internal questionss about ones own sense of identity. I will use myself as an example. I was born and raised in North Vancouver along with my two older sisters. My father was born in Toronto to Catholic Northern Irish immigrants. He lived in Toronto only briefly as a baby before his parents decided to move to Vancouver (probably because of the weather). My very religious grandmother would go on to have four more sons, totalling five boys. Neither she or my grandfather were well educated (both never finished high school), so my father and his brothers grew up very modestly. My grandad used to see it as a source of pride when there was meat on the dinner table.

Seven years after the birth of my father, my mother was born. In South Africa, my grandpa was a university educated dentist, while my nanny (what we call my grandmother) was working as a lab technician when they met. After my mother’s oldest sister was born, they moved to Lusaka, Zambia, where their second daughter was born, as well as my mother, the youngest. They lived there for a short length of time, after which they moved to various places, including New York where my grandpa attended Columbia University to become a periodontist. My mother spent most of her childhood growing up in Hamilton, Ontario.

My parents at their wedding in 1990

Both my parents received university educations before they met. My father holds a B.A in Communications from Simon Fraser University, and my mother holds a B.Sc from the University of Guelph. They would eventually meet while working in government jobs in Toronto. My dad exceeded expectations, being the only one of his brothers to go to university. While both my mothers older sisters attended university, making her education very likely. The only expectation my mother defied was when she brought her Catholic boyfriend home to her Jewish parents.

I won’t go far into details. Basically my fathers side of the family had no issues accepting my mother, while her side of the family was more apprehensive. My grandpa even had my father meet with a rabbi to discuss the possibility of conversion (to no avail). This ultimately resulted with them eloping in Vancouver in 1990, having my (twin) sisters in 1993, and me in 1998.

There are not many “Irish” Jews in the world, so my ethnic background is definitely interesting, and something I am proud of. But being a part of two virtually unrelated cultures can make it difficult to identify with either of them. One of my friends back at the Bridge had parents who were both born and raised in Iran. She was extremely proud of her heritage, very knowledgeable about its history, and fluent in Farsi. My father’s family has been in Ireland for centuries, so there is no doubt about the location of that side of my origins. But, because of Jewish law, I am not Catholic, unlike my uncles, aunts, and cousins on my fathers side.

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My parents with my older sisters, around 1994

Being Jewish is interesting, because you can identify with being Jewish without believing in the religion at all, as it is also an ethnicity. This more or less describes my mother’s side of the family, herself, my sisters, and myself. But even my secular cousins had Bar/Bat Mitzvahs, went to Hebrew School, have Hebrew names, and went to typically Jewish summer camps. There’s also the fact that they live in Toronto, which has a significantly larger and more active Jewish community compared to that of Vancouver. Added to the fact that I only have a rough idea of what countries my maternal ancestors occupied. South Africa was only home to my family for two or three generations. Before that was a mashup of countries such as Latvia, Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European nations where Ashkenazi Jews lived.

I pester my parents daily for answers about my background, but of course they have limits to their knowledge. Even my 92 year old grandma, with her Irish accent, does her best to tell me stories about her childhood in Belfast. I hope I will one day be able to answer more questions about where my family is from, but for now I’ll have to settle with what I have. In fact, the more I learn about my family history, the more I learn about the personalities and individual qualities of the people telling it too me. I have learned that nationality, ethnicity, and religion are not the only elements of a person’s identity, and certainly not the most important.

When Your Choice is Not Your Own

Hello Readers,

My first blog post is inspired by a plot point in Marjane Satrapi’s Graphic Narrative Persepolis. The veil, whether in the form of a hijab, chador, burqa, or niqab, is a controversial subject that seems to be regulated by all the wrong people with all the wrong intentions.

In 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi declared that all veils worn by Iranian women, including the chador, were to be banned, and encouraged the use of force to remove said veils from the heads of any woman who chose to wear one. There have been laws concerning female headscarves since Pre-Islamic times, allowing women of certain classes to wear the veil while prohibiting the practice by others. This time, however, the ban, which also included restrictions on traditional mens clothing, was based on an attempt at modernization and westernization. Of course some women had no desire to wear the veil, but many women who did were humiliated by having their coverings torn off by police, resulting in m 6a00d83451bfe269e200e54f44a4168834-640wi any women choosing not to leave their house, and some committing suicide. Many wearer’s of the chador compared the ban to feeling naked.

During the Iranian Revolution, wearing a headscarf or chador became a revolutionary symbol. Even secular non-religious women wore it out of solidarity. Once the Revolution had succeeded in removing the Shah from power, things completely changed. Wearing a veil became the law in 1980. As seen in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, young Marji, just ten years old after the Revolution, is required to wear a veil at her now girls-only religious school, while she and her classmates treat them like playthings.

I want to make my position clear, I am not against a woman deciding for herself to wear a headscarf or covering of any kind. The issue as I see it is that too often it is not the personal decision of the woman herself to determine what she does or does not wear. Any user of social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook is most likely familiar with the “Free The Nipple” campaign, a protest concerning the censorships of women’s bodies on social media and the unequal treatment of female nudity by law enforcement.

Across the Atlantic Ocean, a related issue is currently in the spotlight. Several French cities have banned the wearing of the burkini (a swimsuit which covers the whole body except for the face, hands, and feet, in accordance with Islamic law). The official reasoning for the ban is for public security, a concern brought about by the numerous terrorist attacks that have plagued France throughout the year, but many see the ban as outright Islamophobia. A recent photograph depicting a woman o 378d9c9700000578-3754395-image-a-4_1472114721288 n a beach being forced to remove her burkini by several French police officers has gone viral. The image serves as visual metaphor for the actual issue at hand. A defenceless woman, enjoying herself at the beach, is surrounded by several heavily armed men who force her to undress in public.

While almost all these laws that either enforce covering up or stripping down are claimed to be for the “protection” of women, they are never created or enforced by the women they are protecting.

Image #1: Illustrated by Marjane Satrapi for the book Persepolis, 2000, published by L’Association

Image #2: Courtesy of Vantagenews.com

F. Mirrazavi. (2013). The Removing of Hijab in Iran. Iran Review. Retrieved from: http://www.iranreview.org/content/Documents/The-Removing-of-Hijab-in-Iran.htm

L. Dearden. (2016). Burkini ban suspended: French court declares law forbidding swimwear worn by Muslim women ‘clearly illegal’. Independent. Retrieved from: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/burkini-ban-french-france-court-suspends-rule-law-forbidding-swimwear-worn-muslim-women-seriously-a7211396.html