Ask and Ye Shall Receive

I'm in the process of writing a report at work, and in order to do the literature review, I needed 8 books from the library. I had asked this morning if any undergraduate research assistants were available to get them for me, but as of 2:00 this afternoon, no undergraduates had materialized. Then, just as I was whining to my office-mates that I was too pregnant to schlepp 8 books by myself, an undergraduate walked in the door and said, "Hi! I heard you wanted someone to go to the library for you."

It was awesome.

Feminist Woes

In my office, everyone is on a first-name basis. So it wasn't until last Friday, when I was inserting a brief bio into a proposal for a new project, that I was hit with the title conundrum. While the other two bios in the proposal used "Dr. This" and "Professor That," I don't have a PhD. The default for me would be "Ms. Shain," as per the current position of the Emily Post Institute on the form of address to women in the business world:

Ms. is the default form of address, unless you know positively that a woman wishes to be addressed as Mrs.

Incidentally, this is a far cry from Chapter X ("Cards and Visits") of Emily Post's 1922 book Etiquette, in which she laments the necessity of any derivation from the Mrs. His Name format:

She is Mrs. John Hunter Titherington Smith, or, to compromise, Mrs. J. H. Titherington Smith, but she is never Mrs. Sarah Smith; at least not anywhere in good society. In business and in legal matters a woman is necessarily addressed by her own Christian name, because she uses it in her signature. But no one should ever address an envelope, except from a bank or a lawyer’s office, “Mrs. Sarah Smith.”

But I digress.

I very much prefer Mrs. Shain, because the use of Ms. as the default form of address for a woman was, if not invented, certainly pushed into the mainstream by the feminist movement. And I reject the label "feminist," because -- and I say this with all due respect to the very real accomplishments of the first- and second-wave feminist movements -- the (third-wave) feminists of my generation spend most of their time promoting a post-structuralist interpretation of gender and sexuality, which I utterly reject, and advocating for issues more and more marginal to modern women's lives.

So, as part of my rejection of this trend and affirmation of gender, marriage and other tools of the Patriarchy*, when the time came to refer to myself in the third person in this proposal, I...boldly typed in Mrs. Shain, you ask? Nope. I avoided the issue and used my first name, which was eventually replaced with pronouns in the final draft.

Oh, well. At least it didn't read "Ms. Shain."

*This is a joke.

Workin' for a Living

It's been almost four weeks since I started my new job at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at my alma mater, Brandeis University.

One of the books that I read with my Jerusalem book club shortly before I left was this book by a Harvard professor (an Israeli, actually) called Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment. One of the main points in the book was that, in order to be happy, we should find work that is both enjoyable and meaningful to us. The Cohen Center makes a meaningful contribution to world Jewry, and the day-by-day, hour-by-hour work is fun and challenging for me. So I guess I'm on my way to daily joy and lasting fulfillment, right?

Check me out on the Cohen Center website!

Employment!

It's official -- I have a job lined up for the fall! Starting the day after Labor Day, I will be a full-time research associate at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University. For those who aren't familiar with the Cohen Center, they conduct cutting-edge scholarly research on the American Jewish community, and they're quickly becoming the center of Jewish social research in the United States. It's a perfect match with my interests and skill set, and I'm really excited.

I'll be doing mostly quantitative research on Birthright Israel, the free 10-day trip to Israel for young Jewish adults ages 18-26. (Yes, it's really free -- paid for by private donors like Edgar Bronfman and Sheldon Adelson, as well as various North American Jewish federations and the Israeli government.) What is the impact of the Birthright Israel trip? Does it strengthen the Jewish identity of trip participants, as it was meant to do? How can the trip be leveraged into long-term communal involvement? These are the big questions on the research agenda.