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Category Archives: politics

News and Notes from Judy

Dear Readers,

It’s not exactly news that I have been sending out far fewer columns of late. I’ve struggled with this decision because I love staying in close contact with my readers, and appreciate so much the emails I receive afterward. I miss that. But I also needed to stay tightly focused on finishing my next book, The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith, which will be published in a mere four weeks! I am very excited about this major milestone in my writing career, and hope you will like it, review it online, You can download an excerpt from it from the link above.

Many of you have already pre-ordered the book, and I thank you for that! For those who have not, please consider ordering from a “real” bookstore, the kind you have to drive or walk to. Yes, online sales and Amazon rankings are important, but lets support bricks-and-mortar bookstores so that we do not lose them altogether. Also, indie bookstores are extremely supportive of the authors of She Writes Press, my publisher, and it’s only right to support them in return. Not sure where the closest indie-owned bookstore is near you? Find one through IndieBound.org. Yes, my book will be distributed in Canada as well, and an e-version will be available in a few weeks.

 

L.A. Book Launch Party — September 10!

If you are in the Los Angeles area, I’d love to see you at my book launch party at The Community Shul on September 10, 8 p.m. You can buy books there, and I’ll be talking about the book as well as reading a few excerpts. Book signing and refreshments to follow!

If you hop over to my website, you will see some other changes as well, including a link to where I’ve had other recent articles, such as in The Chicago Tribune and Aish.com. I’ve also begun ghostwriting and book editing and enjoying working with my clients very much. If you have a writing project that requires guidance and an expert editorial eye and sharp writing, please contact me.

 

Catch up on my book reviews on Goodreads

Just a reminder that I am adding new book reviews on my Goodreads page frequently. Recent favorite reads have been “A Man Called Ove,” “Britt-Marie Was Here,” and “The Color of Water.”  And I hope you are a member of Goodreads, because I will be offering a second giveaway for my book that will begin August 23 and run through September 2.

Yes, a new column is here, too

Last week I couldn’t resist weighing in on the micro-tenure of Anthony Scarmucci as Communications Director in the Trump administration, and what it might say about our society’s potty-mouth tendencies.

This column appeared in the Jewish Journal. I hope you’ll add your own comments on the paper’s website and share it on your social media networks.

Anthony Scaramucci’s Profanities – and Ours

The ouster of trash-talking Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci from the Trump White House reinforces one of my strongest beliefs, which is that foul language is still foul.

Scaramucci’s 11-day tenure may have set a welcome record for the fastest in, fastest out of a supremely unqualified White House staffer. His tirade against chief of staff Reince Priebus and chief strategist Steve Bannon, during an interview with Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, contained enough expletives to blow up a Trump Tower, and was published last Thursday on the magazine’s website with no tidying up of the expletives.

I imagine that aside from his NC-17 language, Scaramucci would still have been kicked out after the interview broke. He revealed himself as a man of incredibly poor judgment and an almost maniacal meanness. This guy was going to be a Communications Director? Wow, just wow.

Still, let’s face it: expletives in everyday talk have become epidemic. The definition of vulgarity has been defined increasingly down. I hope that the egregiousness of the Scaramucci episode might be a wake-up call that language still matters.

Admittedly, I’ve always been sensitive to harsh language, even though I grew up in a home where the worst expletive ever uttered – and that only in extremis, such as when the UCLA Bruins had just fumbled the ball at the ten-yard-line in the fourth quarter – now barely rates an ellipsis after the first letter in print. I already miss those fast-disappearing ellipses, which now appear as almost quaint.

When I first wrote about the topic of profanity about a dozen years ago, offering tip sheets to parents and teachers to help prevent or discourage swearing among kids, the studies I found about the impact on profanity almost uniformly agreed: the more people swore, the more they became desensitized to the inherent anger in those words, and the angrier they became as people. People who swore without restraint were usually seen by others as less intelligent, disciplined, and unhappier than their cleaner-talking friends and neighbors. Revisiting this topic just last week, I discovered that newer studies dismiss profanity’s desensitizing impact. Instead, researchers pat profanity-users on the head. Swearing is just cathartic, they say. It feels good, and is therefore good for you.

There’s a time and a place for profanity. I like the old-fashioned times and places: the battlefield, the moment when you accidentally drop a heavy book on your foot, and “Ouch!” just won’t cut it. Those days are gone, but everyone knows that language counts, it’s just that we’ve become oddly selective about what words and phrases cause outrage. On college campuses, you can hardly say the word “white” or “American” or “rape” without mass fainting spells and demands for punishment for the speaker. Racial epithets, which are terrible and dehumanizing, are still somehow okay if used by someone of the same race. But we are also euphemism-happy, calling a used car “pre-owned” and referring to a job firing as a “department realignment.” That politician didn’t lie, she “misspoke.” And on and on.

The free-flying and promiscuous use of foul language – as verbs, nouns, adjectives, as anything and therefore as nothing – is only making our uncivil society less civil than ever. And our kids are listening, copying our actions and our words. Do we really want to live in a society where everyone is swearing all the time? If we do, what words will we have left to express true outrage, anger, fear or frustration? They’ve all been used up, empty and yet coarse at the same time.

How ironic that we are increasingly careful about what we put into our mouths, fearful of GMOs, pesticides, additives, and food dyes, but heedless of the words we are spraying like verbal toxins into the atmosphere? If we are what we eat, aren’t we also what we speak?

Judaism recognizes this truth. The laws of lashon hara, literally “bad speech,” are vast and intricate. They cover everything from implied insults to name-calling and certainly any outright profane language. The laws are so sweeping because it’s our speech that makes us human, and our words can hurt, or our words can heal.

Isn’t it time to rethink our promiscuous use of profanity?

We’ll Miss You, Mary Tyler Moore

Mary Tyler Moore
Mary Tyler Moore

One of the highlights of the week for me growing up was watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show with my mom. That show first aired in 1970 — the year my only brother, Allan, had died. Laughter was in very short supply in our home. Everything about the show was terrific, including the upbeat show’s music and lyrics (“Who can turn the world on with her smile?/Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”) When Moore famously hurled her beret skyward, it was if she were saying, “Let’s give this a whirl! I’m game to see what happens!”

My mom and I would watch and laugh, and I learned that laughter was not just an escape, but also a lifesaver. Even at 10 years old, when the show began, I had set my sights on a writing life. Women’s roles were changing fast, and they had to work hard, usually harder than men, to earn their places in professions where previously only men had been hired. Watching the character of Mary Richards as a young news producer thrilled and inspired me. I wanted to be like Mary: warmhearted and smart; determined yet graceful; finding my way as a modern woman and deciding where and how to break the mold set by my mother’s and grandmothers’ generations.

I felt a pang of sadness when I heard that Moore had passed away. It’s striking that so many performers who were so gifted at comedy lived through so much sadness. Moore’s parents (just like those of comedienne Carol Burnett’s) were alcoholics, and Moore was raised by another relative. She lost her only son in a tragic gun accident, and she outlived both her siblings. She battled alcoholism and was divorced twice. Not an easy life.

The headline in the online version of the obituary in the New York Times stated that Mary Tyler Moore “incarnated the modern woman.” That’s a big claim, but in looking back, it seems largely true: Television was breaking all kinds of ground in the 1970s, and the MTM show was the first to showcase a single career woman not obsessed with getting married, who had an unapologetically active love life (at least sometimes — as her character said to her TV boss Lou Grant, “I’ve been around the block. Well, maybe not around the block, but nearby”). She wasn’t afraid to stand up for herself even in the face of belligerent and buffoonish men who often, in modern parlance, liked to indulge in “mansplaining.”

It’s impossible not to think about Mary Tyler Moore’s funny, understated strength, her humor and grace under pressure and feel the loss of this kind of role model for younger women today. Younger comediennes and actresses demonstrate their idea of women’s strength not with grace and cleverness but with foul language, the language of anger. Being angry and “nasty” has become something to boast of. How bizarre. Women are outpacing men educationally and have continued to prosper in nearly every field of endeavor. Why so much anger? They demean themselves and the very idea that women are “whole people” by their obsession with their reproductive organs. Many performers make what was meant to be privately powerful into the stuff of their comedy routines. At the recent women’s march in Washington DC to protest the election of the country’s new president, many found “inspiration” from this area of anatomy and fashioned the most disturbing and bizarre fashion accessory ever dreamed up in a gender studies department. Did nobody tell these women that this was a fashion faux pas of the highest order?

I hope that younger women — all women! — will now go back and enjoy old episodes of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Laugh at the witty repartee between Mary and her friends and coworkers, and marvel that it wasn’t that long ago when a woman could prove her worth in our society without losing her grace, the force of her optimism and wisdom — in short, her very feminine strength.

RIP, Mary Tyler Moore.

Judy Gruen’s memoir, The Skeptic and the Rabbi, will be published in September by She Writes Press.

My Beef with the Food Pyramid Scheme

Shhh! Don't tell! Beef is really good for us!

Shhh! Don’t tell! Beef is really good for us!

 

I am a red meat fan. and come from a long line of hardened carnivores. In the early 1960s, when I was a little kid, the nutritional industrial complex convicted red meat of crimes against cholesterol and heart health. Red meat, for eons considered a staple of a healthy diet, was suddenly knocked off its nutritional pedestal. Overnight, if it once mooed, it was booed. My mother ramped up the chicken at the dinner table and tapered down the meat. My dad cried fowl.

I actually went vegetarian for about a dozen years, as part of my idealistic youth. One day, a friend offered me a delicate little chicken drumstick at her apartment. I had an epiphany: I had been a vegetarian fool. I sat down and ate the chicken and nearly chewed through the bone, never to return to the land of exclusively lacto-ovo vegetarianism. Still, I assumed that red meat was like a hunk of Devil’s food chocolate cake: delicious to be sure, but hostile to my health and to be parceled out in small portions on special occasions.

So imagine my joy when I read that red meat has been falsely accused for decades. That it was actually good for me! And for you! The article was from the Wall Street Journal and written by Nina Teicholz, based on her 2014 book, “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.” I had saved the article and came across it again this week, just when I was getting hungry for lunch and thinking, “Where’s the beef?”

Reading the story will probably make you ready to run out for a burger, if not the fries. Teicholz wrote that there was never (You hear that? Never!) solid evidence that animal fats cause the heart disease for which they were cruelly maligned. “We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias,” she wrote. Imagine that.

True, America suddenly faced a heart disease epidemic in the mid-1950’s. The government and scientists looked for a villain. Teichholz blames, in part, Ancel Benjamin Keys, a scientist at the University of Minnesota, who “relentlessly champion[ed] the idea that saturated fats raise cholesterol and, as a result, cause heart attacks.”

But Dr. Keys had an agenda to put red meat on the grill until it was charred to a crisp. And Keys’ study of nearly 13,000 men in the U.S., Japan and Europe was biased: He didn’t study men in countries where people still ate a lot of fat but had no widespread heart disease, such as France, Switzerland, Sweden and West Germany. He did study peasants from Crete, “islanders who tilled their fields well into old age and who appeared to eat very little meat or cheese.”

Other scientists followed like sheep, designing studies poised to malign animal fats. But the studies didn’t always control for smoking and other factors, which made their results “unreliable at best.”

Now the fix was in, and the mighty and powerful in the worlds of science and politics convinced Americans that red meat and butter were the enemy. This led to the famous government-sponsored food pyramid where carbohydrates were king. As a young mother in the early 1990’s, I served and ate pasta dinners most nights believing it was “healthier” than meat. I then wondered why, despite chasing after four kids and going to the gym, I was still twenty pounds overweight.

And far from being a benign change in our diets, moving to carbs and margarine instead of meat and butter, as we were told to do, was harmful, Teicholz says. Carbohydrates break down into glucose and help store fat. Frankly, I have never needed help with fat-storing, thanks anyway. Worse, carbohydrates in excess can lead to obesity and potentially to Type 2 diabetes. These both contribute to heart disease. All those bowls of Grape-Nuts cereal, that frankly tasted like pulverized pine cone, may have been worse for me than had I eaten nice buttery eggs for breakfast! Who knew? Many scientists did, but wouldn’t tell.

The American Heart Association in 1961 proclaimed that shunning butter and lard for vegetable oil-based margarine and vegetable oil led to healthier hearts, yet Teichholz notes that “In early clinical trials, people on diets high in vegetable oil were found to suffer higher rates not only of cancer but also of gallstones. And, strikingly, they were more likely to die from violent accidents and suicides.” Gosh, could people have been so desperate for a steak that they killed themselves?

It was no pleasure to learn that after having ingested a bargeful of margarine in my life for a “healthier heart” that I may have damaged my liver in the process because of all the trans fats, and even raised my level of “bad” LDL cholesterol. This is “not remotely what Americans bargained for when they gave up butter and lard,” Teichholz wrote.

And who remembers that famous Framingham study on heart disease risk factors from 1971? Well, that study, whose results have never been questioned, revealed that women over 50 with high total cholesterol levels live longer, yet women are the ones who have been assiduously upping their fruit, vegetable and grain consumption, wondering why their “good” HDL cholesterol was dropping. Finally, women have achieved equality with men, at least in matching their death rates from heart disease.

Of course, there are many studies that have proven the health benefits of a nice juicy burger or lean steak, but they don’t get much attention. One study, whose results were published in the January 2012 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, showed that a group with high cholesterol following a mostly fruit, vegetable and whole grain lowered their “bad” LDL cholesterol by about 10 percent after adding up to 5.5 ounces of lean beef a day. What’s more, “bad” fat content—called triglycerides—decreased.

Another study of women in Australia who ate 1 to 2 ounces of beef or lamb a day were half as likely to have major depression or anxiety disorder compared to those who ate less than 1 ounce daily. One researcher guessed this was because the typically grass-fed beef and lamb in Australia is higher is higher in omega-3 fatty acids, which can protect against anxiety and depression. I say the answer is simpler: Most people simply enjoy meat. And frankly, if anyone allowed me only one ounce of meat as a serving, I might get depressed too.

So if cows are not to blame for our heart health woes, what is? After more than $1 billion spent trying to prove that animal fats were to blame, we don’t know. Too many people have built careers and egos on what might be junk science. The real evidence that meat is bad for you remains as slippery as an omelet sliding off a buttery grill and onto a plate with a side of hash browns.

Here’s to a fat, fresh burger, grilled with onions on top, medium rare. I’ll only eat half the bun.

 

Laughter is also good for you, and has zero cholesterol. Check out my funny books: Till We Eat Again: A Second Helping, The Women’s Daily Irony Supplement, and Carpool Tunnel Syndrome — a modern-day classic! If you enjoyed this Mirth & Meaning, please forward to a friend!

Don’t Hate Me If I Voted for the Other Guy (or Gal)

One of the dumbest things I ever did was to satirize a friend’s political point of view on Facebook. Yeah, I really did that. I hadn’t identified her by name of course —I’m that that dumb—but she knew I was talking about her and let me know how upset she was. I felt lower than a slug. I was shaken and apologized. Thankfully she ultimately forgave me. You betcha I haven’t made the same blunder again.

Read on …

President Obama’s First Yom Kippur

President Obama isn’t much of a church-goer, having dropped that practice after moving from Chicago, but he does take time to publicly commemorate various religious holidays in the White House. Mr. Obama has koshered the White House kitchen for Hanukkah celebrations and hosts annual Passover seders, complete with gefilte fish and matzo ball soup. He hosts Iftar dinners in the State Room for Ramadan. Naturally, he and the First Lady light the White House Christmas tree and host the Easter Egg Roll.

Read on …

Judy’s Newest Book Release!

Now available for purchase on Amazon

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