JANE FLEISHMAN ORAL HISTORY

JANE FLEISHMAN: I was born in Dutchess Hospital in New York City. My mother went all the way in from Long Island to have me at what was reputed to be the best hospital for labor and delivery. She found out later that her doctor had a golf game that afternoon, so he induced her to get me here a little bit more quickly and to hasten the birth. She was a little bit upset that his golf game was more important than her baby. But I was her third. Two boys and then me, so she was very excited about having a girl. And I always reaped the benefits of that, being the third and being the youngest and getting to be the only girl. So, I got a little spoiled, which I always liked when I was a kid. And I grew up in Long Beach, which is a city by the sea, built in the '20s as a beautiful 1:00paradise, actually. They brought elephants in to bring the big rocks in for the jetties because it was right on the ocean and -- on the bay, so it was a little island right off of the island of Long Island. But it was great. It's about seven miles long, boardwalk, great beaches. And my whole extended family lived there. So, that was pretty wonderful. So, we grew up with an intact family of three kids and two parents, four grandparents, and a great-grandmother. So, that was pretty amazing. And all of our cousins lived in town. My dad had a family business with his dad and his brother. So, he walked to work from our house, which is pretty unheard of. Most of my friends' fathers would be the ones who worked. And they'd go on the train to New York every morning. My dad would come home for lunch and I thought that was pretty unusual. And my mom's parents lived 2:00there and her brother lived there and his kids lived there. So, we had all of our cousins and spent lots of Saturdays with our grandparents, staying over, missing Sunday school on Sundays whenever possible and just having a great -- it was a great place to grow up. It's the only part of Long Island that I really feel a kinship to and -- loved it. Had a great -- I think real positive experience. All of my family came here before the Holocaust, so we didn't really have a sense of tragedy, of trauma. We saw life as all good. And it really became, in some ways, the way that I live today and the way that I'm raising my kids.

JESSICA ANTOLINE: So, there was a big influence there, it seems.

JF:Huge. Huge, yeah. And when I go back -- the ocean draws me. It's --

JA:The ocean draws you.

JF:When you had a problem in our family, Jessica, you would say, "Let's go to 3:00the beach." And you take a walk with that person and you'd have a long talk and walk along the sand and work out whatever the issues were. Or if you had some angst -- and I had lots of teenage angst when I was growing up in the '60s -- I'd go for a walk. And so, it was a way that the ocean really became that healing and that sort of more magical place for me.

JA:And so, when you took those walks, what languages did you speak? Did you speak English? Did you speak, for example, Yiddish or another Jewish language?

JF:We never spoke any Yiddish. Only our grandparents spoke another language. So, my father's parents spoke Russian, that's -- I guess a little bit of Yiddish, sometimes. And my mothers' parents spoke some Yiddish and a little bit of German. But that was in order for the children not to understand. And so, there was a way in which my sense of the Old Country and Judaism was really almost 4:00absent because of our assimilated experience of growing up there. And so, the language I spoke was purely English. And I don't think I even knew what Jews were until I went to camp and experienced anti-Semitism for the first time from some young girls who looked at me and said, You're a Jew, aren't you? And I said, "Yeah," not knowing that there was any point of anti-Semitism in the world. And she said, "Do people have blue in your blood? Do you have horns?" And I realized at that moment that there was something going on, that there was this great secret that I never knew about.

JA:And how old were you?

JF:Good question. I guess I was about twelve or thirteen.

JA:So --

JF:And the only time we really ever learned about the Holocaust -- because our 5:00parents were distanced enough from it. Their parents had been here -- my mother's parents were both -- my mother's mother was born here. The way that we learned was really in Hebrew school, which -- I think we've really done a better job with nowadays. When we were in Hebrew school, the stories and the newsreels were really pretty dramatic and pretty gruesome. And for a kid, eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, I -- it didn't work for us and I -- it was too far away. I didn't really understand what was going on. My whole sense of Judaism, actually, at that point was really much more of a -- sort of a cultural understanding. And later on in life, I really understood and became proud to be a Jew. But back 6:00then, my growing up years, it was something you had to do for the High Holidays. In fact, the High Holidays was sort of a great moment in our town because school was closed for the first couple days of -- first two days of Rosh Hashanah and then for Yom Kippur because there was -- no teachers, the kids were all gone, there was no substitutes. And it was a -- ninety percent of the town was Jewish. And so, we thought that was a good thing. We really didn't connect very much. We had seders and we had the old Maxwell House Haggadah, which were just terrible and long and boring and a lot of Hebrew in my grandparents' house. It was just really tiresome. And so, we didn't feel a real, visceral connection for a long time, and really until -- I guess it was in my twenties. When I came out, actually, was when things really began to -- I think of myself as sort of a person who lives on the intersection. And that was when I began to see the 7:00intersections of various parts of my life. But early on, Judaism was just the food. It was the great food that my grandpa bought on Sunday mornings from the deli. It was that amazing sable and sturgeon and those incredible bagels. I mean, that's what Judaism was for me. It wasn't really a place of -- that it is now, where I feel an honor and a pride in who I am, so --

JA:And so, can you tell me about kind of that period in your twenties when you were coming out, when things changed, there?

JF:Yeah.

JA:What sparked that change?

JF:Well, this is so in-- I mean, to me, this is the most fascinating thing. And if you were still doing a dissertation, you could actually do something on this, but wouldn't really be a museum piece. But I remember -- I came out -- my early 8:00twenties or toward the end of college. And when I first came out as a lesbian, it was a real separatist movement. It was a big push -- and I was here in the valley and I was living in Northampton. There was a real push for lesbians to separate themselves from the patriarchy. And I didn't feel quite comfortable with that and I never quite understood why. I had good friends who were men, I had former boyfriends, I had my brothers, you know, people in my family I loved. So, never felt comfortable with that, and really sort of found my way into more of a -- what I think of as a more left-wing feminist -- or what we used to call the socialist feminist side of the movement. And I had always been a feminist. But separatism didn't really make sense. And when I first came out, I didn't really understand, it -- was too many different questions out there. But when I 9:00began to find myself and locate myself -- I had always been involved in political movements and I'd always been interested in justice ever since I was in my teens. I remember going down the street collecting money for the farmworkers. I don't even think I even understood what the migrant workers' issues were, but I had heard about Cesar Chavez and I was interested in that. But I remember in my twenties I got involved in organizing clerical workers. And I had just graduated from college here -- right here, demonstrated at Hampshire College. And I got a job at UMass in order to help organize a union. And we were part of a real nascent and exciting clerical workers' -- organizing. And we were hot. We were psyched and we were on the vanguard, and life was really exciting. And I was also coming out. And so, there was this moment where I was seeing this political work and then this personal work that I was doing kind of walking down 10:00the road together. And I met some other Jewish women who were also recently coming out, or they were young women and my age and they were lesbians. And I thought, They're Jewish, and one woman came up to me and she said, "Thank God there's some more Jews in the room." And it was the first time anyone had ever said anything like that to me. And she said, "I always look for the Jews." And I said, "What do you mean? Tell me, what's going on? And that was the beginning of understanding that there was another part of my culture that was about a rich history of activism, of justice, of seeking justice, of working for justice, that I really had always been distanced from and had been really in some ways hidden from me because I had not experienced that in my early childhood. And the connection for me between coming out as a lesbian, coming out, in some ways, in 11:00my Judaism, together, was really, in some ways, mind-boggling because I had not put those two together before, so -- does that make sense?

JA:It makes sense and it's quite an interesting story. And in line with that, you talked about your political activism and how this kind of played a role in understanding your Judaism and also being a lesbian woman. But can you tell me some of these national events -- right, you grew up in the '60s, right, at this kind of point in American history and Jewish history that we talk about today with kind of this awe. But so, what were some of these world and national events that really touched you and helped you understand yourself?

JF:Great question. Remember, when I was in high school, we were absolutely anti-war. I mean, the world was coming to an end, we thought, and we would bring 12:00the Vietnam War to an end. And we would see a new -- we would herald a new beginning and we would see a huge cataclysm of goodness that would prevail. We were involved in so many different movements at that time. So, there was this -- beginnings of an environmental awareness and beginnings of women's awareness. I remember there were even two gay rights activists who came to our high school. And I was wondering about it, but I was too afraid at that point to come out. It took me another five or six years to really find myself in that movement. But it was beginning, and there was so much going on on the world stage. And so, for me, it was a beginning of really what I think of as my great life's work. I recently retired, by the way, which is a wonderful, wonderful experience and I really recommend it. And I wish people your age could retire, because it's so 13:00much fun. So, I'm beginning my next career because I'm much too young. I don't want to start playing shuffleboard and although I'd love to sit around and eat bonbons, I realize it's really not my speed, but -- I'd gain way too much weight, too. But the thing that I love is that all through my career and all through my life -- I worked for thirty years in the public sector, by the way, mostly in mental health and education, but always on the side -- always, always, always, I kept up a real strong and kind of solid yearning to continue to do good in the world and to do for others. So, what does that mean? I've always been involved in various types of political work. And when I retired, I thought, I don't have any hobbies. What am I going to do? I don't knit, I don't really sew. I like to cook, but you can't do that all the time. And I realized that my 14:00hobby, if you will, is to make the world a better place. It's not really a hobby. It's really who I am. And so, my next career is really going to continue in that vein. But I have to say it's really -- it's born out of those years in the '60s and then coming of age in the '70s when I began to understand that I did grow up in a very different time. When I grew up, the world was opening. It was the Great Society, right? I mean, Kennedy hadn't been shot yet. We were excited. There was a place where we were thinking this world really could change. And then, when I was in high school, after the deaths of first John Kennedy, then Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King -- we saw so much death, it was the beginning of an experience for me to understand we had to really do something as our generation was the one to be relied upon. And then, in the 15:00'80s, when so many of my friends in the gay men's community began to die because of the HIV and AIDS virus, what I saw was that I also had a place because I wanted to become a mother. And so, I wanted to bring kids into this world and bring them into this world in a way that would be better for them and in a way of feeling all the pride and all the honor and all the optimism that I felt. So, I remember at my son's naming ceremony, we had been through many -- probably five really terrible memorial services. And terrible in the sense of so sad, but beautiful services for -- there were five of our friends who had recently died of AIDS. And we had a big, big welcoming ceremony for my son. It was after the bris. The bris was very small, in the apartment, but then we had this wonderful 16:00ceremony with singing and a parade and puppetry and -- it was fabulous. And then, one of the men came over to me and he said, "Thank God we have a birth because now we can all rejoice." And it was so nice for people to come together about a birth instead of all the death. So, I feel that that's been really informing, I think, a lot of the ways in which I've both lived my life and raised my kids. And they're getting old now, so they're almost on their own, so --

JA:And so, your story so far really leads me up to this other question: you let us know, also, previously that you're now involved in movements for understanding kind of the -- what's happening in the Middle East.

JF:Yes.

JA:Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because that's --

JF:Sure.

JA:-- that's certainly something that is an issue today and we should recognize, especially participation in understanding that issue --

JF:Yeah.

JA:-- so --

JF:It's an issue that I shied away from for many years. As a Jew, I was constantly facing people in the progressive movement who were upset about what Jews in Israel, particularly the leadership and the generals in the military were doing in Israel. And I was constantly aware that I was shying away from this topic: A, because I didn't feel that I knew enough about it. But that wasn't the real issue because you can always learn, right? I'm a curious person, I'm relatively up on what's going on. I can always learn. But the more important thing was, emotionally, it was too draining. I felt that because of our place as Jews in Israel and what we were doing vis-à-vis other people, including Palestinians and other people who are oppressed in the Middle East that we were not any longer honoring the tradition of Judaism. And so, about five years ago, 18:00I -- maybe more, I started to pay a little bit more attention and realized that there was, in fact, a huge and growing peace movement among people in Israel and people all over the world who were seeking peace in the Middle East and who were searching for both a two-state solution and a way in which Israel could continue. And although I've been very ambivalent in many parts of my life and there are times when I've said I don't think Israel ought to continue because of the dreadful consequences that have occurred, I do believe that there's a way in which we are creative enough and we're intelligent enough and we are heartfelt enough as Jews that we can find a way to create a two-state solution. And so, a few years ago, a number of us in our synagogue decided that we wanted to create 19:00some new social justice parts of our community. And by the way, becoming a member of a synagogue was a huge deal for me. We didn't even talk about that but you can -- and we can talk about that later, maybe. But I'm a member of the synagogue in Northampton, Congregation B'nai Israel, and pretty active member. Kids go to religious school. Both our kids had their b'nai mitzvot there. Made some wonderful friends through creating kiddushes for a number of kids and each of our kids' b'nai mitzvot classes, part of the Sisterhood, but really interested in politics. And so, when this idea came up about creating some more possibilities or avenues for social justice, I said, "Yeah, I'm on." And I wanted to push the envelope because that's who I am. I like to be a bad girl sometimes. And I said, "Why don't we talk about Israel? Why don't we talk about the Middle East?" People said, No, you can't do it. There's no way we can do -- 20:00we wouldn't -- we would never be allowed to say anything critical, 'cause they knew where I was going. So, I said, "Why not? Let's figure this out." And there are a bunch of people who were already working on this issue who had brought in a facilitator who was interested in facilitating dialogue around contentious issues. And we brought in a wonderful woman, Norma Akamatsu, who is a real ally and friend to our synagogue, who has worked on issues of torture and other really difficult issues around race and racism, and she said she'd be happy to sit down with us. And we created a dialogue wherein people from any political part of the spectrum -- so, whether they were absolutely pro-Zion and Zionist and believed that Israel ought to fight off any enemy to people all the way to the left who believed that Zionism was really not the appropriate avenue for us 21:00to take and consider themselves more socialist and more on the side of really ending the conflict. And we brought them all together and we began to have a rich and very interesting conversation. The first time we tried this, we attracted too many people on the left. Not enough on the right. I think the people on the right weren't interested in coming to talk about this. I don't know what happened. So, being that I never like to stop when I'm trying to do something that's a little bit different, we tried it again. And this time, we got a much more varied and interesting group together. And we met for five or six weeks and we had a structure where people had to really learn how to listen. Deeply listen, not just from our head, but right here, from your heart. And the experience was great. And what it gave us was an opportunity to open the door 22:00for more conversation, more dialogue, more listening, and hopefully less fear. I remember one woman saying, "I can't criticize Israel within the halls of my synagogue. That's heretical. I could never do that." So, we did it. So, we're allowed to do that. And it felt painful at first and really powerful. My partner and I were both involved in doing this and that was wonderful, to kind of have a chance for us as a family to go through this. And I hope that we can continue for the future.

JA:And were your children there with you, as well?

JF:No, it's just for the adults.

JA:Just for the adults?

JF:Yeah.

JA:And so, this was something for the adults, but how do you view education for your children? So, you also told us previously that you're involved in 23:00education, too, as much as you are in political activism. So, how do you view education today, considering you also said to us previously that you were a Hebrew school dropout, but --

JF:I was!

JA:-- but you also, for example, went to college and encourage your children to obviously have a Jewish education as well as a public school education. So, how do you view education today?

JF:Well, first off, I believe that we've really got to persevere and preserve public education, that public education in this country is really failing and part of the reason it's failing is because of the scarcity of resources. And yet, we have such an enormous amount of resources in this country but they're not going toward education. And most of our tax dollars, really, get sent overseas to fund various wars that we're involved in. And my political work these days is often around, (clears throat) excuse me, around fighting for more 24:00dollars to be spent on public education. Having said that, we also wanted our kids to get a religious education. And because we're really ardent supporters of the public schools, we didn't believe in going to a Solomon Schechter kind of school with our kids. So, our kids went to religious school after their public school day was over, which nobody ever likes. So, you always have to bribe them with good snacks on the way there, good snacks on the way home. My partner was often known in the carpool as the person with the best snacks. And at the end of the year, it -- finishing a year of Hebrew school, she always invited the kids over to our kitchen for big ice cream sundaes. And we always tried to make it more fun because we didn't want it to be seen as a burden. And you're right, the only school I ever dropped out of in my life was Hebrew school and I did it for two reasons. One was in those days, the girls didn't have to go. So, in our 25:00family, the boys had to go and I didn't have to go. So, that was one thing. And the other reason was it really didn't speak to me in any way. There was nothing about my Jewish education that made any sense on a visceral level, in my gut, that compelled me or motivated me to learn more. The girls in my synagogue growing up had a very small service. They were only allowed to be on the bimah on Friday nights. They could just be on for a very short time. I mean, it was really a very different situation. In our synagogue, the religious director who, unfortunately, passed away a few years ago, Felicia Spall was -- amazing woman. Made the religious school vibrant and alive and exciting. And, in fact, one of our favorite family traditions now of our chocolate seder that we do often on the second night of Passover -- really came from Felicia and her genius about 26:00really inviting kids in a fun way. We also believe that chocolate is one of the main food groups in our family, so it really works well for us. But seriously, our kids had to go to Hebrew school. When Joan and I had discussions about this with their dad, Irwin -- and he's also Jewish and he, with his partner, John, we all decided that our kids were going to be raised with a Jewish education. In fact, when Irwin and I began talking about having kids a long time ago, was almost twenty years ago now, we said we wanted to raise our kids as Jews and that meant that they'd have a bar or bat mitzvah and we would continue that until they were through that phase and then they could choose after that. And that's what we said to them, that they can choose that. But I'm a real strong supporter of that and I really feel like it was a great experience for my kids. I kind of wish I had done it. They got up there on the bimah and I saw them 27:00change. Just a year ago, in June, our daughter, Rosie, had hers. And I watched her -- I saw her transform herself while she was on the bimah. Her dvar [(Torah) portion] was really powerful and brought down the house. A lot of tears. It was really beautiful. In fact, afterwards, her father said, when we were all giving our blessings to her after she was done, her father said, "When I was young and I was coming out, I wish there was somebody like you there who could speak out for me." And I thought, Wow. And he cried. We all cried. It was an amazing moment. And when my son, Ezra, was on a bimah four years earlier, the same thing happened. I saw him grow up while he was up there. I mean, in that four hours of that service, I saw him change. And for them to be able to look someone in the 28:00eye and look an adult in the eye and have the rabbi give a blessing right to them that was handed down from thousands of years -- I mean, there's something really powerful about that. And sure, the parties were great and sure the presents were great. But once the service was over, I felt like, Whew, they did it. I'm done. I'm so happy. (laughs) So, it was a huge, huge experience.

JA:So, what other aspects of Jewish culture do you identify with today? So, which are some of your --

JF:What do you mean?

JA:-- connections? So, for example, you talked about the importance of your children, right, attending Hebrew school and things like this.

JF:Oh! Oh, I see.

JA:But what other aspects of Judaism do you connect with as an individual and as a family?

JF:This weekend, we're going to a lesbian wedding. So, they're kind of commonplace now. I mean, it's been the -- since 2004. It's been six years since 29:00the same-sex marriage decision came down in Massachusetts. Joan and I actually had gotten married in a Jewish way in 2001. And Felicia, who I spoke about earlier, presided over it. And it was a beautiful ceremony. And it was really important for us to have a wedding, partly because Joan's dad was -- had just been diagnosed with lung cancer and we didn't know how much longer he would live. We knew he would really love to walk his daughter down the aisle. So, that was important. We knew from my parents that it would just be -- they would be kvelling beyond words. And I remember when I first came out to my parents, my dad had said, "Does this mean we don't get any grandchildren?" I said, "Oh, no, no, don't worry." But I think he was really excited that he got to be at his daughter's wedding. It was an amazing experience for him and my mom. But for us, it was really important that we sort of bring together these parts of our lives. 30:00Here we are, two middle-aged women who love each other, lived our lives as proud and out gay people for over twenty years, had been -- we'd been together for almost ten years at that point. And then, bringing together that part and our Judaism -- parts of our lives. So important for us. And that our kids could benefit, as well. And I remember, when we had the ketubah signing, everybody signed. So, my parents, Joan's parents, Irwin and John, dads, Ezra and Rosie, our kids, and Felicia. And Rosie couldn't really write her name yet. She was just about four years old and she wrote R-O-S-I-E and the S was backwards. It's really sweet. And when we got legally married a few years later, I always thought it was an interesting contradiction around this supposed division between church and state because the marriage license was actually signed by our 31:00rabbi, Rabbi Justin David. Now, I think that's sort of an interesting comment. But we now have a license and that ceremony was nice. But really, the real ceremony for us was the Jewish wedding. And I feel very close to Judaism now. For a long time before I moved up to Northampton, before I had kids, I belonged to a chavurah [Jewish group that meets regularly for discussion or prayer] in Hartford. It was a kehillat chaverim, a community of friends. And what drew us all together was that none of us felt comfortable in a regular synagogue, and it took a lot for me to become a member of a regular synagogue. But the wonderful storyline to tell you was how I met Joan. And we met at the Jewish community of Amherst in 1991. Is that right? I think 1991. Somewhere around there. It was 32:00before I got pregnant, so it was around 1991. And we were both there because there was a social. And when Joan was growing up, her parents always wanted her to go to the temple social so she could meet a nice boy, a nice Jewish boy. And so, when she met me, we had been at a lesbian and gay social at the synagogue in Amherst. And she called her parents and she said, "Guess what? I went to the social finally and I met someone. But she's a girl!" And so, they were -- (laughter) -- it was a great -- it was great. And they were very excited. And they were really welcoming and really loving to me right off the bat and -- but it was great that we met in a synagogue. It made us both really kind of cheer. That was pretty exciting.

JA:So, tell me what a typical day in your life is like now, now that you've told us about your family and your wife and how --

JF:Well, we don't call her my -- yeah.

JA:And what do you call her?

JF:We want -- we both would like a wife but neither of us would like to be a wife.

JA:Neither of you would like to be a wife. So how do you --

JF:It's different --

JA:-- refer to each other?

JF:Well, my primary sex object. My partner, although partner sounds very kind of clinical, like we're in a law firm or a dental practice together. My lover. I still call her my lover and I love her so much. And although that term has often been used in some really different ways, my girlfriend. I still call her my girlfriend. I mean, I'm fifty-six years old. It's enough already with the girlfriend. But I think I still think of her that way. But never wife. Yeah, that's just -- rankles me.

JA:So, how -- what's a day like in your life, given all of that, given --

JF:Well, I don't go to work anymore. So, that's the greatest gift. Thank God. It's the best. I help get the kids off to school. We always joke that our 34:00children would be truants without us because they would sleep in as much as possible. And I worked in juvenile justice for a number of years, so I'm really glad that we never allow our kids to be truants. (laughs) Always do some exercise in the morning. Joan and I either go out for a walk or run or we do yoga, something like that. And then, my day begins. And because I don't have an office anymore and because I've begun taking courses in grad school, I need a place to go. I don't like to work at home. And so, I go to the Forbes Library, which is a lovely public library. We should really fight to keep all the institutions and public libraries intact and keep their funding, because it's really one of the great socialist institutions that we still have. It -- all 35:00walks of life go in and out of that place and it's absolutely free. And I bring my netbook and my cell phone and my work for the day. And I spend a good part of almost every day there. And then, I go to the classes. I do some consulting work. I do some education. And my new career is really about sex, sexual identity, sexuality, and love. And weaving all those together, I'm trying to conjure up what my next career will be. And it's really in the gestational phase. So, you'd have to ask me in about nine months from now what it really will look like. But I still do a lot of education and now most of my education is around sex and sexuality. And lots of fun. Really great work. I made a promise to myself when I retired that my next career would really be fun. And so far, so good. It's going great. And then, get home, schlepping, always -- my 36:00kids always have some afterschool things. My son plays ultimate frisbee. My daughter is involved in theater and chorus and improv and lots of great stuff. So, getting them to and from wherever they are, and then, dinner hour is always raucous in our house. We have dinner together, the four of us, often with a family friend or neighbor or somebody else drops by who likes to come by for a good dinner. We always have lots of fun and sit at the table for as long as we possibly can. And then, it's just homework, maybe watching a movie, and a little bit of Scrabble online. (laughs)

JA:And how about Fridays? Do you celebrate Friday?

JF:Yes. Every Friday morning, I bake my challah. I don't bake it in the morning; I get my challah ready. And I love the smell. I don't know if you bake bread, 37:00but the smell of the challah all day long really permeates the whole house. And as the yeast is working its magic, it's kind of permeating through me, as well. And we light the candles on Friday night. We have the homemade challah and we have our kiddush and we have a really nice old kiddush cup that we use. The candlesticks are from when Rosie was born. The kiddush cup is old. The challah is really a tradition that I started when Ezra was born, 'cause I -- my life was so topsy-turvy with a baby. It was so much chaos, I could barely take a shower. But I wanted one thing that I could hang onto. And so, I began baking challah. And my kids are so used to it now, Jessica, that they don't even care about it. We always try to give it away after Friday. We only like it when it's hot out of 38:00the oven. And the other very important thing about challahs in our house is on Labor Day Weekend, the weekend before school begins, right before the holidays, we have junk food Shabbat, where we replace the raisins with M&Ms in the challah and we put Coke in the kiddush cup. But other than that, we're a very traditional family. (laughs)

JA:And so, want to switch gears for a second --

JF:Sure.

JA:-- because we've had a great picture of your life thus far. And so, who are some of the people who've influenced you? Because you mentioned, for example, your family having the chance to be together with this kind of extended family growing up. But who are your role models?

JF:Some of the people in my family that I wish were still around. First of all, 39:00having grown up with four grandparents was pretty amazing. Actually, we had my great-grandmother until I was in high school. So, that was amazing, too. I remember my grandmother's hands and I remember my great-grandmother rolling out the dough for the noodles for the chicken soup. And I always worried that she would cut her hand 'cause she cut it so fine. And she made her own noodles and I was so worried that she was going to cut right into her -- my grandmother on my dad's side, when she made her charoses for Passover, I remember she would grate the apples by hand. And we always were concerned about that. And my grandmother's rolling pin, I still use. And I think of her hands and I think of her handiwork and crocheting and knitting and sewing and baking. And I think of 40:00that when I roll out the dough for fun -- if I'm making a pizza for the kids and I'm using that rolling pin, I think about her hands. On Fridays, when I make my challah dough, I make it on a bread board that my grandpa made for my mom. And she didn't need it anymore and she gave it to me, which is really great. And it makes cleanup a lot better. It's a lot easier. But more importantly, he made that. It's his hands. So, I miss their hands, I miss that tactile sense of them. I miss my grandpa on my dad's side. He was a wild, wild guy. Real rambunctious. And he was a magician and he was a politician and he loved a great story and loved to hold forth -- hold court at the head of his table. And sometimes when we're having a big dinner, we have a real, gigantic table in our dining room, 'cause we love to have lots of people over. Sometimes, I'll be sitting there and 41:00I'll be telling a story and I'll think, Wow, that's Morris Fleishman. He's in there. So, there's a way in which my family still live inside me so much. I had a -- you said you are interested in museum work, and I had a cousin, Amy Stein, who died when she was twenty-five. And she was an incredible artist and was so caring about color and texture and hues. And when I'm involved in color, like if we're trying to figure out the paint for something or the color for something, I hear Amy's voice inside of me. She lives on as well. So, there's a way in which the people who I -- shared my early years really continue.

JA:So, what do you know about your parents or your grandparents' -- their education?

JF:Well, let's see. When I was in high school, my mom went back to school. My parents had both finished college. My dad went into the army but came back and finished college. And my mom went to college. So, they were both college grads, which was really important to them and really important to me. When I was in high school, she went back and got her teaching degree. So, she got her master's, and once I, as the youngest child in the family went off to college, she went off and started working outside the home and had a really wonderful career. She was a home economics teacher and we're always really proud of the work she did. She often would bring home really unusual things in those days 43:00like whole wheat bread, (laughs) peanut butter and banana sandwiches. I remember she was really -- she was one of the early health food people. And much to our consternation, she fed us other than white bread in those days. But she did great with that career. But other than that -- oh, my mom's dad went to law school. Never practiced but went to law school. And everyone else had up to either -- I guess all of them had high school educations, but nobody else went on. We had one doctor in the family and that was a big deal. But that was it.

JA:And how about informal education? So --

JF:Tons!

JA:-- tons of informal?

JF:Yeah, what are you thinking, in --

JA:So, you said, for example, you -- when you mentioned your grandmothers' hands and making the noodles, did you get to make noodles, for example? Was there this kind of formal education?

JF:No.

JA:Did you read lots of books, for example, like that?

JF:The kind of informal education that I really love is something called popular education that a man named Paulo Freire is known for. He's a Brazilian. And he works a lot with people -- kind of finding what's important to them and then helps them learn how to read from that or finds a word that they really are interested in, then helps them learn that word and then other words. And so, literacy campaigns built on this idea. And I've used that in my educational work as a teacher with adults. But I think the informal kind of work you're talking 45:00about is something that happened on a Saturday night, helping to make dinner or watching a movie or playing a board game. Those kinds of moments were really special and taught me some really valuable lessons. Sitting in my parents' living room listening to my grandparents talk -- they weren't talking to us, and it's not the same as what my parents do as grandparents to our kids. They're constantly engaged and they used to sit on the floor and have the kids ride horseback with them. I mean, there was just this very get down and play -- my grandparents would sit in the living room and we would kind of sit on the side and listen. But I think particularly around family tradition, around life cycle 46:00rituals, around birth, around bar mitzvah, around death, around High Holidays, there was always a sense of that was the tradition and that's what you learned. Very often, for the High Holidays, my grandparents would take us up to the Catskills and we'd go to one of the hotels: the Concord and the Grossinger's and the Brown's were the three that I remember. And I learned a lot there. I learned a lot there. I didn't learn things that my parents always wanted me to learn, but I learned a lot. And one of the things I learned was when all of these -- mostly Jews, right? It was all Jews who came together. There was a type of music, theater, and humor that I didn't really understand because, as I said, when I was growing up, I was so -- it was just part of our lives. We didn't 47:00really understand that we were different. That's when I really understood that there was really a different brand of humor and a different type of theater, the old Yiddish theater that people would speak of came alive in those places. And, of course, the food was so abundant, it was so over-the-top that there was also a sense later on when I grew up that I realized this really is different.

JA:That's great. So, what are some of your favorite memories?

JF:I have some great memories. We grew up on the water. I mean, we grew up on the beach. We grew up around life. You could see the eternity of life. And having not been a spiritual person, I think that spirit just came inside of me. So, I remember -- great memories of -- in the '60s, going down to the beach with 48:00my cousin, Steve, right after the hurricane when you weren't really supposed to go and the waves were really high and hitting those waves and body surfing and just feeling in my body and coming home and climbing a tree. And living in the middle of this great community of tons of families and tons of kids and playing on the street and walking on the boardwalk and playing the games and having the carousel and the rides. And Skee-Ball and Izzy's Knishes and Hebrew National Franks. I mean, I just -- there was so much life in Long Beach. It was phenomenal, really.

JA:That's -- this seems like -- that you have a lot of influence from your past as a child that's really flowed into you as an adult. Do you take your children back to where you grew up or do --

JF:Yeah, sure, but it's so different. I mean, it's like -- our kids went to 49:00Coney Island recently, and it's really different. When we went to Coney Island, there was the steeple chase. And you'd always wait at the edge of the door because they had -- there was this -- sort of this card that they would punch. And on each ride, you would punch the card and by the end of it, if your parents made you go home before your whole card was punched, there were still three or four punches left. And so, we would wait at the door and we would grab other kids who were leaving. So, we'd get their cards so we could get more rides. And I remember going on the big roller coaster that -- today would be so scary to go on. It's so frightening, but it was, I guess, the Cyclone? Is that what it was called? Yeah, and the -- it was so, so big, and going on the helicopter ride. And so, those rides don't -- I mean, you wouldn't be allowed to have those kind of rides anymore. It's too much liability and fear of litigation issues now. But I take -- yeah, when we go back to Long Beach, we take the kids to the boardwalk 50:00and we take 'em to the ocean. But nothing -- it's not like that anymore. It's really changed. A lot of the old hotels have been torn down, and now they have these luxury condos where they used to be. So, where the rides -- and the bowling alley, all of that stuff is gone. So, we take our kids to New York City a lot and we show them the New York that we love. And we take them to different neighborhoods so that they get a sense of that. But they hear the stories. They know a lot of the stories. Our kids know all of those stories and they know the stories about my dad. Oh, by the way, my mom and my dad grew up in Long Beach, too, and they met in kindergarten. It's kind of unbelievable. And my dad was a real cutup when he was a teenager. In fact, her dad didn't want her to go out with him because he was a really naughty guy -- and loved the stories about him. And he would drive a car up on a boardwalk. Not allowed to do that. And do all 51:00sorts of fun -- so, then, our kids know all the stories about grandpa Norman when he was growing up. So, that's fun, too. So, they have the stories. There's an oral tradition in our family. So, they have the stories that way, even though over the last fifty years, so much has changed in the landscape in terms of the architecture and what the community looks like. But the ocean's still there, the beach is still there, and they still get it. And to this day, I don't know why I live in a part of the country that has no ocean except three or four hours away. But I do love this community, and so I guess that's why I live here.

JA:Is there anything else you'd like to tell us --

JF:I don't know, I --

JA:-- your exciting life? Is this --

JF:There's one more thing I wanted to say, which is there was a time in my -- I didn't have Ezra until I was thirty-eight and I had Rosie when I was forty-two. So, you can tell I waited a long time, so -- and I came out at an early age, 52:00around -- in my twenties. Twenty-one, twenty-two. So, there's a time in between there that I knew that I wanted to be a mother but I was concerned that bringing kids into the world would be a really tough thing for them. And I wasn't sure that I wanted to do that to people. I didn't want to give them such a tough road to walk on. And as I said before, I've always lived in the intersection between and connected to various parts of my life and movements and ways of being in the world. And politically, often people look at areas of oppression and the intersection of oppressions. And I was concerned that I was going to bring kids into the world not only as a Jew, but as a lesbian mom. And I wasn't sure I 53:00wanted to do that to them. And then, this idea came and this is how things always happen for me, this idea came, sort of bubbling up in conversation, from books that I've been reading, from work that I'm -- been involved in where I realized that I had something that I could give them. And what I could give them was my joy and pride and sense of place in the world, that I knew who I was and that I had come to a realization about who I was, and that having a parent who had that kind of clarity and pride and understanding could actually benefit them and far outweigh all of the other tragic difficulties that they might have to deal with, either around being bullied -- that's what I was really concerned about, being bullied on the playground and being hurt some way because of 54:00something that they never even had anything to do with, because of who their parents were. And our kids have four parents and a lot of grandparents and aunts and uncles and a lot of cousins. And our kids are benefiting from the fact that they have parents who understand ourselves and who have a sense, at least at this point in time, that we can make change in the world and by our very being in the world and standing for who we are that we can actually propel the world to change. And that our children can really benefit in that way. And so, when I think about it, when Ezra was two years old, I was invited to be part of a -- another oral history project that actually was called "Love Makes a Family." And 55:00sort of a very interesting project that I would really recommend you look into. And they made it down to the Holocaust Museum in Tampa. And the Holocaust Museum director at that point was a really smart person who said, "Hey, there's an intersection here between what we're doing and what these people are doing around gay/lesbian families." And so, the photographer came to Ezra's second birthday party and took a picture of almost all of his family. Not everybody, because Joan's family wasn't there. But we got another picture of all of us later on. And what I realized was that our participation in an event like that meant that everybody in my extended family is now part of Ezra's circle around him. And later, when Rosie was born, it was the same thing. And when Joan's dad's reunion -- he went to Harvard. Very proud Jewish boy, got into Harvard. 56:00His parents were so proud. When his fiftieth reunion at Harvard came around, he said he wanted a picture just like everybody else did. And he has two kids: John and Joan. And John is married to a woman and they have three kids, and Joan is married to a woman and we have two kids. And he wanted his whole family -- 'cause he wanted his whole mishpokhe [family] to be seen and he wanted to show his pride in both his son, who was a heterosexual, and his daughter, who's a lesbian. And so, that photo also stands very strongly in my mind as a real moment that our kids now have that heritage of parents and grandparents who are so proud of who they are. And so, I think that became, to me, the life lesson about really being able to give advice to younger people now, people like myself 57:00who are not sure -- do they want to bring kids into the world? And I say if you know who you are and you know your path, what a gift you're giving to your children.

JA:So, thank you for coming and interviewing with us.

JF:Thank you.

JA:It's been great speaking with you and we hope you come back (laughter) and maybe we'll actually even get to talk more.

JF:That would be great! Thank you, Jessica.

[END OF INTERVIEW]