That Takes Ovaries! (26 page)

For a second after we burst through the double doors, the crowd in the lobby stood frozen, blinking in shock. Then the women, Republican ladies in pumps and large bulletproof hair-dos,
scattered, most of them making a break for the exits. Suddenly, the men were all rushing forward, demanding in loud voices that we leave immediately.

I addressed one: “Hello,” I said pleasantly. “We’re from the Washington, D.C., Lesbian Avengers.”

“You have to leave,” he informed me.

“Okay,” I said. “But see, we have this Valentine for Mr. Donovan.” At the time, Donovan was FRC’s executive vice president; their previous director, Gary Bauer, had recently left FRC because he decided to run for U.S. president in 2000. “Is Mr. Donovan here?” I asked.

“If you don’t leave right now I’m calling the police,”
he screamed.

“Right,” I said. “But see, I made this Valentine …”

While I was chatting with the man, some of the Avengers attempted to make friends with the other people in the lobby. Kim, a member of our group, walked up to one of the remaining women and tried to hand her some flowers. The woman refused with a nervous smile and a shake of her head. Kim persisted. “Look,” she said, “they’re just flowers. For you. Take them.”

The woman may have thought this was a trick. Perhaps she believed we had found a way to infect tulips with some insidious virus liable to leave her with bizarre urges to let her leg hair grow or vote Democrat. Maybe she just thought she was being asked out on a date, but for whatever reason she staunchly refused her present.

“Here. I’ll just put them here.” Kim bent down to leave the flowers on the floor, a foot in front of the frozen woman, then backed away very slowly.

The FRC menfolk, security and staff members, were not willing to call the police and wait the extra ten minutes for the authorities to remove us. We were a cancer that had to be excised immediately. The men grabbed us and started pushing us toward the front doors. We took that as our cue to leave. We turned to one another and had a quick kiss-in in the lobby before being shoved out onto the sidewalk. One of the staff members followed us outside to engage in dialogue: He pronounced
us “sick,” took our big red valentine heart and broke it over his knee, three or four times. When the pieces became too small to crack apart with his hands, he threw them down on the ground and started stomping on them, grinding the foamboard pieces into the concrete with his shoes.

Some people you just can’t reach, I guess. Still, we felt better having made the effort. We continued our kiss-in on the sidewalk for a while, and then went home.

In my high school there is a patio area where everyone hangs out in between classes and during lunch. The school is small, so you can see everyone from the benches at the end of the patio. That is where the most popular boys in the school used to sit. Every day, as each girl passed, these boys stared at her and rated her different body parts from one to ten. The girls dreaded walking out of the lunchroom. This practice had been going on for years and I’m pretty sure that’s why our school had one of the highest eating-disorder rates in the state.

I was friendly with these boys. I knew them all, and actually I was always glad about that because even though they still rated me, at least they never publicly humiliated me by yelling out the numbers. Until one day.

“Six.”

“What? No way. That’s Rachel. Eight.”

“Ha! Seven for the bottom, five and a half for the top.”

I felt so degraded and worthless I spent the rest of the lunch period hiding in the bathroom.

But something else happened that day, too. The girls at my school, girls who were usually so competitive with and cruel to one another, started talking. It began in the bathroom, when I rallied us together by suggesting we take action against these boys.

The next day at lunch a bunch of us girls got to the “boys’ bench” before they did. We sat and waited until they approached, and when they did we called out
their
ratings as they walked by. We had it all planned out: When they came up to us to talk, we lifted their shirts and grabbed at them just the way they did to us every day. Then we handed each a letter I’d written and gotten 158 girls to sign. It said they needed to stop their behavior right away and that we were not going to stand for it any more.

It sounds amazing, but from then on it all stopped. Instead of taking their intimidating places on the bench, the boys mingled in the lunchroom. If any of the guys made any angry or sexual comments toward us about what we had done, they were immediately silenced by their friends.

It feels great knowing I did something good for girls, especially something that will help those who have yet to enter the frightening halls of high school.

Loolwa’s note: When most of us think of “Jews,” we think of
Ashkenazim—
Jews from northern Europe. Jews, in fact, are an international people, with numerous ethnic groups. One such group is
Mizrahim—
Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. As a result of European racism and its internalization, Mizrahim have lost much of their heritage over the past fifty years. Even in Israel, a Middle Eastern country that until recently had a majority population of Mizrahim, Ashkenazi racism has nearly destroyed Mizrahi identity.

I was fourteen when I led the revolt. For each of the previous nine years, my family had made pilgrimage from San Francisco to Los Angeles for the Jewish High Holy Days to attend the only Iraqi synagogue this side of New York. This was the third year the new, young, Moroccan rabbi was there, leading services alongside our beloved Iraqi cantor and scholar. I walked into the synagogue with apprehension.

Everyone in my family hated the new rabbi. He may have been Mizrahi, but like many who have internalized the dominant culture, he acted Ashkenazi. “What is he doing in an Iraqi synagogue anyhow?” my parents would mutter. “He’s no Iraqi.”

For the past two years, the young rabbi and two Israeli congregants—all with booming voices—had taken over the singing, drowning out classic Mizrahi songs and replacing them with Ashkenazi-Israeli songs. Both years, everyone had submitted to the takeover, in typical fashion of the passive Iraqi Jew, by either joining in with these traitors to our culture or simply not resisting. I ached inside, watching the sad faces on old Iraqi men as they quietly gave up singing, removed their prayer shawls, and headed home.

Both years, I felt helpless. Trapped in the back of the synagogue, I hung over the top of the four-foot wall separating the women from the men, and sang Mizrahi songs at the top of my lungs. But my young voice alone was no match for the traitors’ powerful pipes. I felt desperate and powerless.

My eyes always faced forward into the men’s section, where the action happened and the power lay.
I belong up there,
I thought to myself every time I attended synagogue.
They should have
me
up there leading.
I knew all the prayers, largely by heart. I sang in the traditional Iraqi way, with the distinct Iraqi pronunciation
of each word. In the United States, where I was raised, it was unusual for adults to preserve the Mizrahi traditions, and unheard of for youth to know them. But none of my knowledge or dedication mattered to the community, because I was “just” a girl.

In many ways, our religion did not take women seriously. And in many ways, women returned the favor. “The ladies” showed up only on the big holidays and at the tail end of Sabbath services (if at all), and they talked incessantly after arriving. I constantly had to strain my eyes and ears to focus on the services. When I sang, my voice seldom blended with the voices from behind, for the women’s section usually was devoid of prayer. As such, it just never seemed the place to turn for preserving our traditions.

This year, I sucked in my breath in anticipation. The congregation started off by singing a few Mizrahi songs, but within minutes we were bowled over by Ashkenazi-Israeli songs belted out once again by the new rabbi and his two cohorts.

I absolutely
had
to stop the insanity, and I knew from the last two years that I could not do it alone. For the first time in my life, I stopped facing forward and turned to look behind me.

I was stunned.
I suddenly realized the latent potential that had been there all along. I jumped out of my seat and began marching up and down the aisle of the crowded section, clapping and singing at the top of my lungs, rousing all the women into rowdy Mizrahi song:
“Simhoona, simhoona besimhath hatorah…”

I chose songs that were easy to follow, with repetitive phrases, and all the women jumped right in, expressions snapping from boredom into glee. As the women’s section began drowning out the Ashkenazi songs, the passive men woke up and joined in with us. Pretty soon, we had taken over the whole synagogue with Mizrahi songs.

The young rabbi started getting agitated. He wanted control. I marched up from the women’s section, crossed into the men’s, climbed the steps onto the
teba
—the rabbi’s platform—and
yelled at him, “There are at least
ten
Ashkenazi synagogues down this street alone. If you want to sing Ashkenazi songs, then go to one of those synagogues. But don’t you
dare
try to bring those songs in here. This is an
Iraqi
synagogue, and it’s the only one we have!” With that, I marched back down the steps and into the women’s section.

All hell broke loose. Everyone started yelling at one another. I had brought to the surface tensions that had been growing over the past few years: What direction would the synagogue go in? Would it “adapt” (assimilate) to the “modern” (Ashkenazi) ways, or would it stay pure? There was a definite split in the congregation.

In my experience, Iraqi Jews cannot stand unpleasantness, and they will bend over backward to avoid it. This situation was no exception. After arguments ensued, the young rabbi and his two cohorts began gathering people into the room off to the side of the sanctuary, and people just followed. The three traitors got everyone into the side room to dance around with the Torah, the Hebrew bible—which is strictly forbidden by Iraqi practice—while singing Ashkenazi-Israeli songs like “Hava Nagila.”

The resisters went home.

I remember seeing one of my favorite old men dancing around with the crowd, gathering people together, trying to make everyone forget they had just fought. I was shocked to see him actively participating in the erasure of our tradition.

Walking with my family through the hullabaloo, I had a sinking feeling. People were dancing, but it felt like death. As we neared the exit, I knew the resisters had lost and my family probably would not return. We pushed open the door and walked out as a boy younger than I shouted, “And don’t come back!”
Slam.
He shut the door. I started to cry.

Eight years later, I moved to Los Angeles. I avoided that synagogue, not looking forward to how congregants, especially the rabbi, would respond to me. When I finally visited, I realized I had given far too much credit to their consciousness. Unable to
fathom that a girl could be the source of such commotion, the few men who mentioned the situation seemed to think my
father
was the one who had raised the ruckus, not me.

Offended yet relieved, I did not bother correcting them.