When San Francisco filmmaker Marcia Jarmel became pregnant, it suddenly occurred to her that she was “about to become a Jewish mother.”
“I said to myself, ‘Oh, no, not that.'”
Jarmel, who nursed her newborn son in the editing room for much of the first year of his life, hardly fits what she saw as the stereotypical image — that of “overly protective, possessive, strangling women.”
Her story is one of many that make up a lively, multifaceted tableau of Jewish motherhood, recorded in a new book by Paula Ethel Wolfson and photographer Lloyd Wolf.
The book easily shows that Jewish mothers defy stereotypes.
Wolfson, a Washington, D.C., social worker, interviewed a myriad of moms for “Jewish Mothers: Strength, Wisdom, Compassion.” That includes her own, Napa activist Rhoda Wolfson. The text accompanies sumptuous photos by Wolf, her live-in companion. (His mom, Lee Wolf, is in there, too.)
There are married moms, widows, those single by choice and lesbian moms. There is a switchboard operator, a graphic artist, a mother-daughter doctor team. One became a bat mitzvah at age 101.
There is a Nobel Prize-winning biomedical researcher, a mystery writer, a Girl Scout troop leader.
Three of the women have died since the book’s publication — all heartbreakingly young.
The stereotypes fall away swiftly.
“I never made chopped liver in my life,” reveals Ava Brand, president of the San Francisco Mikveh Society and director of the Bay Area Council of AMIT Women, which sponsors educational and social welfare programs in Israel.
Although Orthodox, she wears neither long dresses nor a wig: “Clothes don’t make you Jewish. Your outside appearance doesn’t make you anything.”
Pushy? Overbearing? This is a mother who encouraged her kids to take a year off after high school “to get their head together.”
Wolf remembers the night he and Wolfson came up with the idea for “Jewish Mothers,” for which Anne Roiphe wrote the for word. They were socked in by snow in their Virginia home, bandying about ideas for a project they could
work on together.
“The minute the words were out of her mouth we hopped on it,” he said in a phone interview. “There have been some wonderful books written on Jewish women but not on Jewish mothers. And the stereotype is obnoxious. It certainly doesn’t describe my mother or the other women I know.”
As the project progressed, reactions underscored the need for such a book, said Wolf, who describes himself as “a fairly observant Conservative, although I have been floating toward Jewish Renewal.
“When I would mention we were doing a book on Jewish mothers, a lot of people — especially non-Jewish men — would give me a little smirk. I didn’t even want to know what that smirk meant. After a while I would say we were doing a book called ‘Honor They Mother.’ I would wait a minute for that to sink in, then add, ‘It’s about Jewish mothers.’ The smirk disappeared.”
Wolfson hopes the book will cross over to non-Jewish readers, “although part of me feels like the non-Jewish world doesn’t want to give up the joke.”
Yet she also suggests Jewish men have played a role in perpetuating the unflattering image.
“From ‘Portnoy’s Complaint'” to TV sitcoms, the overwrought, neurotic, smothering Jewish mother became a stock caricature in American popular culture: a guilt-tripping, self-denying nag who would rather sit in the dark than change the lightbulb,” she wrote in the introduction.
“It is paradoxical that those perhaps most responsible for the success of the American Jewish community became the butt of a national joke.”
Many of the women we meet in the book are too consumed by the biases that harm members of other ethnic groups to address the Jewish-mother caricature. Self-effacing one and all, most responded to Wolfson’s request for an interview with, “Why me?”
We meet comic Lotus Weinstock (“At camp I used to perform and impersonate my friends and movie stars”), who was betrothed to comedian Lenny Bruce when he died.
Weinstock was only 50 when Wolfson came to her North Hollywood home: “Lotus answered the door and said, ‘I was just diagnosed with a brain tumor and I have some memory loss, so my daughter is going to join us and fill in some of the blanks.’ I felt like I had been run over by a Mack truck.”
Stylistically, the women are worlds apart. Among the many qualities they share, however, is an incredible resilience. Many cried during their interviews with Wolfson. And not one bears any resemblance to the prevailing stereotype.
Implicit within the pages, too, are the mothers of these mothers. Their presence looms large.
Take Wolfson’s mom. A leftist activist who cut short her honeymoon to demonstrate at the U.N. building, Rhoda Wolfson recalls the brit of her first child: “I got a surprise when the man in black at the door turned out not to be the rabbi but an FBI agent! He was investigating my mother’s signature on a petition to ban the A-bomb.”
Wolfson is “very much my mother’s daughter,” more concerned with righting the wrongs of the society than attending temple services.
That many of the women she profiled work in low-paying human service fields, such as teaching and social work, also may help break down “this stereotype that Jews are successful and materialistic,” she said. Certainly, none of these women “are getting their nails painted on or their hair done.”
For Wolfson, the challenge was how to separate which details were “too intimate” — an unresolved family quarrel, for instance — and which revealed a woman’s most profound strengths. Sometimes, the line blurred. Ultimately, what worked for her was “listening with a social worker’s ear and not a journalist’s ear.”
The result: Details that are devastatingly revealing. “I had an older sister with gorgeous long hair,” Ethel Kleinman discloses. “When she got married, next day they cut it off to put on the shaitl. I was a little girl, crying, pulling on the women cutting her hair to leave my sister alone.”
That sister would perish in Auschwitz along with most of Kleinman’s family: “When they made the women undress, they shaved everything. My other sister Toby was next to me in line, but I didn’t even recognize her…For several years after the war many Orthodox women wore hats. I kept my hair.”
For Wolf, an award-winning photographer, the most formidable challenge was overcoming the women’s reluctance to appear in pictures.
“Why do you put my ugly punim everyplace?” said a rabbi’s wife who counsels and advocates on behalf of battered women. “I said, ‘Ma’am, you are beautiful.’ Her face had great warmth and intelligence. I didn’t want to take photographs that looked like the cover of Cosmopolitan. I wanted to show strength, character and decency.”
These mothers are as likely to be guided into growth by their children as their parents. Take Dr. Carolyn Goodman, whose son, Andy, was murdered with two other civil rights workers in Mississippi more than 35 years ago.
“For myself, I know now that Andy’s commitment, Andy’s dedication, and Andy’s death in his early adulthood would have no meaning if I retired to some place and was simply stricken, so stricken by it that I couldn’t move forward, move with today’s young people,” she says. “And I love them.”
They speak both with fear, passionate love and humor about their own children.
Weinstock told her daughter Lili: “If she wants to try any kind of drug or experiment with sex, she should try it at home. That way when the commercial comes on the TV that says, ‘Do you know where you kids are?’ I can say, ‘Yes. They are in the bedroom smoking and screwing their brains out.'”
These women are not only funny, they get the last laugh in a culture in which Jewish mothers are often not the subject of wit but ridicule.
“I never did a variation of the Jewish-mother jokes,” Weinstock says. “Personally I always felt that reducing an entire group of women to a one-liner is loathsome and profanes the entire Jewish tradition.”
Wolfson will be joining her mother for Mother’s Day but regrets it will be for festivities at the Skirball Institute in Loa Angeles instead of at the Million Mom March, where both women feel they should be.
“So we both feel guilty,” she said cheerfully.
And she is bringing her own mother along on her West Coast book tour. Wolfson’s brother, pioneering surfer Joe Wolfson, known as “Dr. 360” in the surfing world for a boogie board move he created, died in an auto accident just two months ago.
“So [Rhoda Wolfson] is facing the hardest challenge for a mother,” in moving beyond devastating grief, her daughter said. “This will be a bittersweet Mother’s Day for her. The sweet part is that she will introduce me at the Long Beach Jewish Community Center, where she worked for years.”