| CommonQuest:
The Magazine of Black and Jewish Relations
Selected Excerpts from "Mixing
it up on Campus"
Jewish Women in Search of Themselves
For much of human history, identities
were felt rather than found or formulated.
But for many Jews, the timeless, even
silent ways of becoming Jewish no longer
compel. In a world of seductive secularism,
some have never even been exposed to
more than "bagels and lox"
ethnicity. As a result, identities can
no longer be taken for granted; they
must be hard won. To learn more about
that process of winning, CommonQuest
talked to three young women who embody
Jewish renewal in all its animated,
sometimes vexing, intensity. Complicating—and
inspiring—their quest has been
the desire to find a pleasing image
not just of being Jewish but of being
a Jewish woman.
Abigail bears the mark of a modern
Orthodox Jewish woman, but she didn’t
always wear those long skirts and long-sleeve
shirts. In the midst of her move toward
observancy, she couldn’t excise
her former life in one fell swoop. Yet
halfway measures carried a certain risk
in the Orthodox community at Brandeis.
"It was hard. People would call
you a ‘jean skirt girl,’ and
I didn’t want to be called that.
It meant you weren’t totally frum
[observant] and you’re lost to
the world and totally unsavable."
Negotiating that treacherous line was
only one way in which the life of a
baal t’shuva (returnee) was not
easy at Brandeis. The Orthodox world
could feel hard and unaccepting: "I
felt like I came in with a black mark
on me. I wasn’t frum from birth,
I had done things that were not kosher,
I had gone out on Friday nights. People
expected me to drop my entire previous
life, and to start wearing skirts immediately
and socialize only with very shomer
shabbos [sabbath-observing] people.
I couldn’t just jump into it headfirst,
and they had difficulty accepting me
as I was coming."
Keeping It Real: The Hip-Hop
Nation on Campus
by Mark Anthony Neal
The fluidity of the communities to
which we belong increases the freedom
to explore these identities, often playfully
at the expense of white onlookers, in
ways that our parents could never conceive.
I don’t know what I get off on
more, wearing expensive suits while
blasting Big Pun ("I’m not
a playa, I just crush a lot") out
of the car, or showing up at the local
Starbucks in the B-Boy stance (in my
neighborhood, all you got to do is be
black and wear a faded baseball cap),
asking for a pound of Sumatra and a
French Press.
As the first generation born after
desegregation, "Generation Hip
Hip" was endowed with a hope that
eluded blacks before them. But the generation
born after Bakke also has a sense of
possibility denied. Reagan’s roarin’
’80s saw a lot of black folks standing
on unemployment lines, while liberal
politicians and black elected officials
fronted as if white backlash was a necessary
evil in the drive toward equality. Crack
was an equal opportunity employer in
my neighborhood those days. You didn’t
need affirmative action legislation
to slang rock.
This atmosphere of racial tension takes
special form on college campuses. .
. .
MARK ANTHONY NEAL, Assistant Professor
of Africana Studies and English at the
State University of New York at Albany,
is the author of What the Music
Said: Black Popular Music and Black
Public Culture.
Identity as Destiny: The
World According to "South Park"
by Alyssa Katz
The secrets behind "South Park’s"
enormous popularity are easy to see
over the course of any of its raucous
episodes: There are none. The half-hour
cartoon, the most popular series ever
to run on cable television, takes every
sacred cow it can find and kicks it
squarely in the udder. Small children
blast smaller animals to shreds and
play a game called "kick the baby."
They religiously watch a TV show about
two characters who fart and laugh, then
fart and laugh some more. An entire
episode is devoted to the sexual union
of an elephant and pig. The all-American
mom turns out to be a hermaphrodite
who’s slept with every man and
woman in town and the entire 1989 Denver
Broncos; when her son is eight, she
decides it’s time to get an abortion
in her "fortieth trimester."
The strangest thing of all is that
almost nobody in this nuthouse seems
to think anything’s out of whack.
. . .
ALYSSA KATZ is the television critic
for The Nation.
DAT — AS IN ‘WIN’
by Larry Moffi
On the campus of Texas A&M, Kyle
Field is just about midway between the
Barbara Bush Parents Center on George
Bush Drive and the George Bush Library
on Barbara Bush Drive. But no matter
how you measure it, Kyle Field is one
long haul from Rockport, an even longer
one from Vietnam.
"If I were in Vietnam today I
would be playing soccer," Dat says.
"The only sport that’s understood
in Vietnam is soccer. They would think
it’s crazy: people tackling each
other to get that pigskin." But
today is Kyle Field and Texas Tech.
Nearly 63,000 people fill the triple-tiered
stadium. . . . Tammi and Ho Nguyen are
here today, too. They drove the four
hours from Rockport this morning over
roads that just a few days ago were
washed out by the severe fall rains....
LARRY MOFFI, managing editor of CommonQuest,
is the author of three collections of
poems and two works of nonfiction, This
Side of Cooperstown: An Oral History
of Major League Baseball in the 1950s
and, with Jonathan Kronstadt, Crossing
the Line: Black Major Leaguers, 1947–1959.
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