Freedom of speech?

For personal reasons I can't elaborate, but I was very recently exposed to the issue of Holocaust deniers.

I think there are few people more reprehensible than those that would disregard the deaths of six million Jews--and millions of others. Not only is it reprehensible, it's scary.

It made me think about a conversation I had with Jeff a few weeks ago. We were talking about freedom of speech, the whole, I don't agree with you but I'll defend your right to say it. Who said that anyway?

We were talking about the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis. Do they have the right to assemble? To make Web pages and hold rallies? Jeff said yes and I said no.

I know, First Amendment right. But come on, how much does that still exist anyway? Censorship is everywhere, sometimes for the better, sometimes not. But if it were removed altogether, there would be anarchy. Still, you could make a pretty good case for freedom of speech in just about any instance.

Jeff's main argument was there's no sensible place to draw the line for future generations. There's no way to set a precedent. If you banned the KKK from holding a public rally, how would you word that for the future? No radical group has the right to public assembly? How do you define radical? He says seemingly necessary control often provides the roots of fascism. What's to stop someone 100 years down the line from defining Jews as a radical hate group? Nothing stopped Hitler.

I said precedents aren't everything. There's always an exception, and nothing can account for one hundred percent of the time, especially something written hundreds of years ago that hasn't been adapted to modern life. Sometimes you just have to leave things in the best judgment of people you trust right here and right now.

In the end, Jeff was probably right. We live in a world where you always have to account for the future, and where it's hard to determine who you can trust. But the whole issue brings up another question--when radical, hateful groups like the KKK and Holocaust deniers make noise, is the general public smart enough to disregard their messages?

Right now, for the most part, in the United States, they are. But that line can change. It's always changing. Forty years ago Jews weren't defending the rights of Palestinians to Israeli land. Today's Pro-Palestinian liberals could be our great grand-children's Holocaust deniers.

Today's most hated war criminal was once Germany's knight in shining armor.

Photo: Schindler's List found at Sydney Library

On the slopes

At my Bat Mitzvah, my dad made a speech about skiing. He probably doesn't know how vividly I remember it, and I don't think I ever told him how much it meant to me. I was never good with that mushy stuff.

He compared my ambition, my courage and my willingness to challenge myself on the mountain with the same attributes in life.

I don't know if I'm as brave as I was at 13. Is anybody? I'm not sure if I was as much courageous as I was just plain stupid. But again, that's typical.

Yet on the mountain, I'm just as dumb. My family has gone skiing out West just about every year since we were toddlers. I got back from our 2010 excursion yesterday.

I'm a good enough skier to make it down just about anything on the mountain, but I'm by no means an Olympian. The more difficult the run, the more ridiculous I look going down it. If I make it to the bottom with no broken bones and minimal pain, I consider it a success.

For some reason, nothing about skiing scares me. I know there are risks involved, but my heart rate never jumps at the top of a hill, or in some cases, a cliff. I wish my dad were right. I wish I were as brave as I am on the top of the mountain as I am in real life. I don't know where I'm going to be in five years, and that terrifies me.

But I think my dad's analysis of my skiing persona applies to the rest of my family. My little sister is like me on the mountain, but she's 12. By far the most outgoing and social person in our family, her ambition outshines her abilities (which are a measure of her age, not her talent), and the only thing stopping her from skiing off the cliffs with my dad and me is him forbidding it--and then running off before she has a chance to catch up.

We call my brother the enigma. He's a beyond brilliant theater nerd turned classical singer. He hates physical activity, likes nice things, luxuries and staying indoors, but he loves to ski. And he's good at it. It makes no sense. In life outside of the ski hills, the rest of us spend a lot of time trying to figure out how he thinks with little success. He's too smart, no one can do it.

My dad is the best skier in the family. He skis with his feet locked together and a grace none of us can match. Off the mountain, it constantly amazes me how he deals with daily stresses with a tranquility the rest of us can only envy. My mom, brother, sister and I are pretty emotional. I don't know how we would've survived our childhoods without his ability to think fast and rationally under pressure.

My mom never liked skiing very much, and decided that she doesn't want to ski anymore. She came with us on the trip, but she stayed back during the day, taking care of bills and taxes, and arranging scavenger hunts for her grown children on Valentines Day. She's always sacrificed so much for us. I wish I'd appreciated that more when I was younger.

Jeff came skiing with us for the first time this year. I'd never skied with him before. I'd never even brought a friend on a ski trip before. He kept up alright. He and my sister were at about the same level, although he was much more cautious than her. His fear was the only thing keeping him from getting better, just like her lack of it was probably her biggest mountain fault.

However, he challenged himself more than he probably thought he would over the long weekend. I didn't challenge myself as much as I usually do on the mountain. I went slower so I could help out Jeff and my sister, and I tried not to push the harder runs on them before they were ready.

But that was probably a bigger skiing challenge than I'd ever taken on--to match my pace to someone else's. Off the slopes and back in Madison, one of us is not faster than the other; we've just always followed our own paths at our own paces. Now we're learning to plan our next steps together, with more than ourselves in mind. It's probably my biggest challenge yet, but it feels amazing that we're doing it so well.

I did get a few hours one morning to go off with my dad alone, throw caution to the wind and ski off a cliff. Jeff doesn't mind that I have to do my own thing my own way once in awhile, as long as I come back to him when I'm done.

Photo: Jeff and me at the top of the gondola

J-Date: couple looking for a relationship

There are tons of advantages to meeting your sigificant other young. I met Jeff when I was 20, and we were only sophomores in college. For some people, this may be too young to commit yourself to one person, but we were ready.

There’s only one aspect of young adult Jewish dating I feel I might have missed out on: J-Date.

I’ve known about J-Date since high school, when my friends and I would giggle while we checked the listings to see the profiles of the Jewish single adults we knew.

Then we grew up and I had a boyfriend and my friends gained entry into the world of online dating that I’ll never know.

But it’s not the hundreds of eligible bachelors at your fingertips, the chatting or the excitement of someone new making contact that has me intrigued—it’s the long-term friendships that seem to come out of it more often than the romances.

After we graduated last spring, I watched friends of mine move to new cities and join J-Date looking for either the loves of their lives or just a fling to ease the transition.

What happened was my friends started going out. They met different kinds of people and were escorted to different kinds of places. Sometimes there were flings, sometimes there was nothing, and sometimes they vowed to just stay friends. And they did. They met friends of friends and soon their social lives were booming in a new city.

Back in Madison, Jeff and my friends are slowly dispersing. It’s cold, and there’s not much motivation to go out and meet people when the alternative is cozying up in the apartment together, not alone.

But we don’t want to look back and realize we turned 80 half a century prematurely. We’re under 25. We should be out and having fun with our friends, but how do we find friends in a world where dating post college seems to be a prerequisite for friendship?

Someone needs to make a J-Date for young couples looking to meet other couples. But in the mean time, I’ll get the tea, Jeff’ll set up the board games and the guinea pigs will squeal in delight at the prospect of another Saturday night with their parents.

Jewish women at the Super Bowl

I could care less about football, but I look forward to the Super Bowl every year. Super Bowl means super fatty chips, dip and pizza. It's one of those not-so-rare days on the American calendar where it would be socially unacceptable not to stuff your face.

Then there's Animal Planet's annual Puppy Bowl, which I'm watching as I write this. Consisting of about a dozen of the cutest puppies equipped with squeaky toys, a water bowl cam and lethargic bunny cheerleaders, the Puppy Bowl is the exact dose of cuteness necessary to sit through three hours of football.

Finally, there are the commercials. It's the one time of the year when I get up for seconds during the show, and settle into my seat during the ads. I like to say it's because I was a journalism and communications major, and I have a professional interest in the most expensive ad space of the year. But really, I just love the Budweiser Clydesdale commercials.

This year, there was a trend among the commercials that tread a fine line between women bashing and "strong woman." There was the Dodge Charger "Man's Last Stand" commercial, where a man lists all of the tedious responsibilities his wife forces him into. He accepts his fate on the one condition that he can drive the car he wants, this compromise being "Man's Last Stand."

The Dove commercial, selling their men's soap line, follows a man from birth to marriage to all of his "manly duties," like checking out noises in the middle of the night and changing tires in the rain while she waits in the car, that his wife expects of him. It's a far cry from Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty."

Others include the FLO TV "Injury Report," where a woman surgically removes her boyfriend's spine and forces him to shop with her instead of watching the game, or Bud Light's "Book Club" , where a man and his friends tolerate a woman's book club meeting because they have Bud Light.

It's not that any of these commercials came as a surprise. The dominant woman has been navigating her way through multiple media for the last decade. At first, she was a humorous, respectable character, standing up against the repression of the American housewife of the 1950s. But now she's turned into somewhat of a cliche, stepping out of her boundaries and repressing her man's "natural right" to lead the household.

I wonder how much of these thriving images are based on the long-time evolving Jewish woman. I don't know where or when the Jewish woman as the confident head of the family emerged, but she's something I joke about. Like, when Jeff and I decide to get married, we'll ask our Jewish mothers to exchange phone numbers and send us an invitation. Or, excusing my fifth call to the vet with, I'm a Jewish woman, so it's normal that I'm calling again about the strange noise my guinea pig made this morning.

I have always respected the Jewish women in my life, knowing that I would one day be one. But these main stream, ball busting women are undermining my role models, overplaying their dominance and erasing their wisdom. They should've just left the Jewish woman where she belongs-- with the Jews.

And the nominees are

As the Jewish Journal points out, three of the 10 films up for best picture this year have Jewish themes or undertones. I haven't seen "A Serious Man," but I saw both "Inglourious Basterds" and "An Education" in theaters.

When I heard about "Inglourious Basterds" last summer, I was uneasy. It was historically inaccurate, sarcastic and funny. A lighthearted film about the Holocaust? I was willing to keep an open mind, but I waited for the controversy. A few months and several Google searches later, I was surprised to find virtually no backlash.

I ended up loving the movie, as did Jeff and my parents. My brother thought it was tasteless and that it put Jews on the same level as the Nazis. I can see his point, but the movie is so unrealistic that it hardly seems fair to compare the fictional "basterds" to the horrendous brutality of the very real Nazis.

With the exception of the opening scene, Tarantino avoids tragic scenes where Jews are senselessly murdered. There are almost no innocent victims. Nearly everyone who dies in the movie has killed someone in a previous scene.

There is no message conveyed in "Inglourious Basterds." I think it's just meant to be taken as a fun, "what if?" work of fiction.

I also enjoyed "An Education," which portrays the naive seduction of Jenny, a school-aged girl, by David, an older, perverted Jewish criminal in 1960s London. Peter Sarsgaard, one of my favorite actors, plays David.

There isn't much emphasis placed on David being Jewish. It is only utilized in a few brief moments to create tension between Jenny and her conservative parents. But if it wasn't that important, why make him Jewish in the first place?

Unlike, "Inglourious Basterds," there was some question of anti-Semitic undertones in "An Education." I personally don't think that was the intention. I think the choice to make David Jewish is more about creating a dynamic character than it is actually a commentary on the religion.

I thought the Jewish angle makes David more sympathetic, because he has few redeeming qualities. He's a criminal and a pedophile. Being Jewish in 1960s London doesn't excuse him, but the desperation and social scorn he must've faced makes his behavior easier to comprehend.

I don't think it's a coincidence that as the last generation of Holocaust survivors dies out, the media becomes bolder in their portrayal of Jews. You worry a lot less about offending someone in a fictional depiction of a moment in time when no one is around who was there. It's also a lot easier to make an argument for putting a segment of society in a bad light when that "segment" is portrayed in the news as thriving, and not as overcoming a tragedy.