I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that Russell T Davies has a problem with fathers. The work he's involved with seems to lack positive father figures and have rather a few negative one's. I'm not sure whether this is just the flip side of Davies really loving strong, positive, working class mothers and not wanting to complicate these mother child relationships with another involved parent. In Queer as Folk I don't remember any of the main characters having good relationships with their fathers. Vince's father is absent. Stuart doesn't get on well with either of his parents. Nathan's mother is far more sympathetic than is father. Stuart is feckless whilst the nice lesbians look after the baby. In Doctor Who all of the assistants come from single mother families and when we do go back in time and learn about Rose's father he's a bit of a sleaze. There are two doctor who episodes, 'The Idiot's Lantern' and 'Fear Her' with very negative fathers and the only really positive sympathetic father figure I can think of was in "The Next Doctor". To be fair to Davies, he didn't write 'The Idiot's Lantern' or 'Fear Her'. Then in series three of Torchwood he rewrote Ianto's back story to imply that his relationship with his father was difficult, possibly even abusive. It just felt like Davies couldn't cope with a queer male character having a good relationship with his father, because there was no point to it.

What do you think?

There's a cliché about heterosexual and bisexual men being turned on by lesbians. I've found that this is generally true when it comes to the theoretical fantasy level but not so much when it comes to real live knitting and cat owning lesbians. Some women find it objectionable because they feel that it fetishises and male centres a sexual expression which isn't about men. I have a lot of sympathy for people finding the idea of two people of a type they are attracted to having sex with each other arousing.

There also seems to be a reverse thing going on. Heterosexual and bisexual women, particularly teenagers, having a thing for gay boys. The internet is full of slash and the BBC is feeling their fury over the latest development of the Torchwood Jack/Ianto love story.

There are differences in the way these play out. It generally seems acceptable for men of all ages to be into lesbians and there's plenty of mainstream porn and erotica to cater for that. I don't think that can be said for women's attraction to gay men. I haven't checked recently, but I don't think that Cosmo or More magazine are running photo shoots of skantily clad men getting it on with each other in the way FHM does with women. Playboy relatively often does photo shoots in which female twins pose together, whereas I think that magazines which featured brothers in homoerotic poses would be less publicly acceptable. The female appreciation of gay men seems to be happening mostly on the internet through user created erotic literature and gay bits in non-porn film and TV. The homoerotic content consumed by women seems to be more romantic. Part of the point of slash is that it's not just about anonymous bodies, but about characters with a lot of back story and established relationships to add more of an emotional element to the story.

I'm trying to puzzle out what all this means about gender and sexuality. Do men and women find different things erotic? Does the eroticism of homosexuality by heterosexuals sign acceptance of gay people or of exclusion? Are teenage girls getting more fascinated with gay men, and is this a reflection of greater flexibility in their permitted sexual expressions or just a product of YouTube allowing them to watch Jack from Dawson's Creek on repeat?

So LiveJournal, what do you think?

1. Referring to marriages between Jews from birth and Jews by choice as 'intermarriage'.
I'm not talking about people who don't recognise the conversion of one of the partners, I'm talking about people who flat out boldly describe 'intramarriage' as only between two 'born Jews'. This one seems to be most common among US Reform rabbis. My pet theory is that it's because most of their congregations only recognisable Jewish practice is two years at Hebrew school to justify the Bar Mitzvah party and calling their childhood Christmas trees Chanukah bushes. I'm also wondering whether any of these rabbis have ever been involved in a conversion which wasn't for a chuppah.

2. Complete inability to separate correlation and causality.
The conversation goes something like this:
"Intermarriage is bad."
"Why?"
"Surveys have shown that only 38% of intermarried couples raise their children to have a Jewish identity."
"Oh, OK. My husband and I are planning to raise our children Jewish. Does that make my intermarriage OK?"
"No, because there's only a 38% chance of you raising them Jewish."
"No, we've agreed on this."
"But only 38% of the children of intermarried couples are raised Jewish. Maybe if you have three kids one of them will be raised Jewish."
"You don't understand statistics do you."

It reminds me of the Lucas critique, which was roughly that if you base policy on historical statistical correlations, those correlations may well break down as soon try to manipulate them. If you think just ensuring that disinterested Jews marry each other will ensure the continuation of a vibrant Judaism you should meet some of my friends.

3. It's just what Hitler wanted.
Yes. Making intermarriage illegal was just his attempt at reverse psychology.

4. Assuming that the non-Jewish spouses in intermarriages just can't be bothered to convert.
Again, I have to say I've seen this one mainly among US Reform rabbis. It never occurs to them that someone might have too much integrity to commit to a religion they didn't believe in or plan to practice, or that they might have a strong commitment to a different faith. I wonder what this says about their congregations.

5. Stupid ethnocentric concerns dressed up as religion.
I read an article by one rabbi warning that the Jewish children of Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers wouldn't have 'Jewish' surnames (particularly bizarre coming from a woman with that well known Jewish surname 'Smith'.) The fact that the father of your grandchildren doesn't like Palwin or gefilte fish doesn't mean the sky is going to fall, it just means he has good taste.

6. Marrying another Jew isn't just the most important mitzvah. It's the only mitvzah I'm ever likely to perform.
Generally the same people who feel superior because it's an Orthodox synagogue they don't go to. Put the bacon cheeseburger down and come back when you've got to a level of observance, knowledge and involvement approaching the level my Christian husband ends up at just by being around me.

7. Ill thought out demographic arguments.
Competitive breeding is unseemly and can turn nasty, but if you're going to do it at least get your facts straight. Even if every American Jew identified as a Jew and married another Jew, the US non-Orthodox Jewish population would still shrink. Non-Orthodox US Jews marry late and reproduce below replacement rate. When you exclude the Orthodox (who tend to marry young and Jewish, and have babies) intermarried Jews have more children on average than intramarried Jews. If 50% of those children were raised Jewish intermarriage would be a force for increasing the Jewish population.

8. The belief that if Jewish children were exposed to any other religions they'd clearly abandon Judaism.
Firstly, the reality today is that unless you're Charedi or Israeli, you're going to be exposed to non-Jewish religion, Christmas lights in the streets, finding out that school holiday isn't really for Pesach, most of the history of Western art. More importantly, how low is your estimation of Judaism that you think the slightest whiff of December pine trees will send your children running to learn catechism?

9. Even though I'm intermarried, I expect better from my rabbi.
That contribution was from a particularly bizarre article by a non-observant liberal Jew, who'd become more involved in Judaism at the encouragement of her Catholic husband but said that one of the reasons she opposed the ordination of intermarried rabbis was because if they couldn't enthuse their spouses about Judaism enough to make them convert, how were they going to enthuse her. Judging by the effect of all of the intramarried rabbis she'd met, logically the lesson of her story is that we should start ordaining Catholics.

10. Thinking you're being so generous and tolerant by offering (for a hefty fee) to do an interfaith wedding as long as you can do things to remind people that it's not a proper wedding because the bride's a shiksa at 30 second intervals.
Do interfaith marriages or don't do interfaith marriages; don't do interfaith sort-of-but-not-as-good-as-proper-Jewish-marriage. I'm not so much talking about the halacha here, because I can see that doing a traditional Jewish marriage between a Jew and a non-Jew would hit halachic issues, I'm talking about the petty non-halachic reasons. Things like not letting the couple have a chuppah or break a glass, which are traditions rather than legal parts of the ceremony. If you can't at least do a very good impression of thinking that the couple is beshert, then you shouldn't be performing their wedding. Let their wedding be presided by one of their friends who won't have to pretend to be overjoyed at the union.

I'm kinda amused that not having sex before marriage seems to be widely viewed as some kind of unbelievable extreme lifestyle choice.

I'm chanting haftarah for the first time on 1st August. I'm going through the text learning the chant but I've come across a problem. Isaiah 40:5 begins with tipchah munach katon, but the book I'm learning from doesn't say that you can get tipchahs in katon clauses so I don't know how to sing it.

Any ideas?

I might surprise some people by revealing that I am very saddened and angered by the verdict of the Appeals court in the JFS school admissions case.

Some background. JFS is an oversubscribes Orthodox Jewish state school in London. In the UK, state funded faith schools are allowed to give priority to children from their faith communities in their admissions policies. As JFS is very oversubscribed, you can only get in if you're Jewish, and as JFS is an Orthodox school they use an Orthodox definition of who is Jewish. In 2006 a boy applied for the school, whose father was Jewish by Orthodox standards and whose mother had undergone a Conservative conversion. His father enquired about whether it would be possible for the boy to have an Orthodox conversion so that he could go to the school. The London Beth Din replied that conversion would take longer than a year and the boy would not get priority for admissions by virtue of being in the process of conversion. The school was oversubscribed, the boy didn't get into the school. The father appealed but did not win his appeal. He then took the school to court on the grounds of racial discrimination. The school one the case in the High Court, so he appealed and recently won in the Appeals Court. The school, with the backing of the Board of Deputies and the Chief Rabbi, will be appealing the verdict in the House of Lords.

The current policy of JFS means that I would not be able to send my children there, but I am still appalled by the verdict. Lots of people I know are pleased by the verdict because there don't like JFS, for being the epitome of everything which is awful about non-observant 'Orthodox' Anglo-Jewry, the London Beth Din, due to their arsey power politics particularly in the area of conversion, and faith based admission policies. However, the verdict of the Court of Appeal was not about the virtue of the London Beth Din and in my opinion it is worse. What the verdict boils down to, is that the Jewish definition of who is Jewish, is racist. When I say 'Jewish' I mean the definition of Jewishness held by all mainstream Jewish movements. If this verdict is upheld in the Lords it will effect JCOSS's admissions policy just as much as it will effect JFS's. Orthodox, Masorti and Reform Judaism all essentially have the same definition of who is a Jew, they just don't all recognise each other's conversions, but they all agree that you're Jewish if your mother is Jewish or you convert. The Court of Appeal have declared that this definition of who is Jewish is racist, and Jewish schools must instead use a Christian based definition of who is Jewish based upon religious practice. I'm not sure how exactly they propose to measure this. Presumably, as we're already applying Christian standards of religiosity let's go the whole hog, they're going to use synagogue attendance. Never mind that Judaism is a home based anarchic religion in which one can live an observant lifestyle without darkening the doors of your local shul too often, Anglican religiosity is often gauged by church attendance, why shouldn't Jews fall into line. Even if school places genuinely did depend upon observance, do we really want children's school places to depend upon whether anyone saw you drive on shabbat or grab a bite to eat from a non-kosher restaurant?

Another thing which annoys me about the case is that the judges are claiming the JFS admissions depend upon whether the child's mother is Jewish. This is blatantly not true. The majority of JFS pupils (possibly all) will have Jewish mothers, but they are there because they are Jewish. I don't know how the London Beth Din does about child conversions, but there are circumstances in which a child might be Jewish independent of his or her mother. If an Orthodox couple adopted a non-Jewish baby, it is usual for an Orthodox Beth Din to be willing to covert the infant, as long as they are satisfied that it will receive an observant upbringing. It is quite common for children to convert at the same time as their parents, it's possible that a widower or divorcee might convert his children with him. I wonder whether there may not be many children there in these circumstances because JFS isn't frum enough to attract Orthodox converts and their children. I rarely agree with the London Beth Din, but I have to say that if I were contacted by someone who'd suddenly decided he wanted his son to convert so that he could get into a particular school, my reply would be similar to theirs. Conversion to Judaism is a serious undertaking. I would hope that most rabbis of any denomination, faced by someone seeking a quicky conversion so blatantly not 'for the sake of Heaven', would, in the nicest outreachy way possible, tell them that they were being completely unreasonable.

Anyway, what's this world where children's admission to policies depend upon the faith of the child rather than that if his or her parents. Children apply to secondary school at the age of 10 or 11. Of all of my friends who've managed to confound their parents by adopting a different religion, I've never met someone who managed it before the age of 10. I think some of the same people who are applauding the JFS case would be appalled if a religious group converted a child that young without their parents' permission. So all faith schools, even the nice C of E ones, are basing their admissions on the religion of the parents rather than the children.

I just don't think that it's racist for a religious minority to stick to their over 2000 year old definition of who is a member of their religion, rather than have to adopt the definition of used by the majority religion. It's not racist that I couldn't have an aliyah until I converted. It's not racist that Alec can't toivel our dishes whereas our bacon loving friend Rob could. Legally imposing the categories of the majority religion upon a religious minority for no good reason, on the other hand, is oppressive.

Things got a bit biblical here yesterday when we experienced a plague of lice. Well, actually, Alec mainly experienced the plague as I was a shul during the worst of it and he managed to get rid of the worst of it before I returned home.

The culprits were thrips, an annoying, seemingly pointless tiny insect which sucks the goodness out of food crops, and swarms. With the heat Alec and I have been sleeping with the bedroom window wide open. Happily I didn't bother to look out of the bedroom window as I was getting ready for shul so I left blissfully unaware that the entire area behind the blind was covered in the blighters. Alec, on the other hand, got up after I'd left, went into the living room and opened up the french windows, before looking out the bedroom window and seeing the swarm there. He quickly grabbed the hoover and sucked them up, unaware that even more of them were coming in through the open french windows until he walked into the living room to find thousands of them on the ceiling. So Alec had to close all of the window in the flat to keep them out whilst he proceeded to hoover the ceiling. This morning I tentatively opened one window a bit and we don't appear to have been engulfed in another plague.

Thrips are very annoying, however they have some advantages. They aren't attracted to food, so the shabbat lunch waiting on the kitchen side was fine, although I had a short panic when I thought the pepper in the salad dressing might be thrips. They are attracted to white things and light, so after Alec hoovered most of them up, a lot of the rest could be disposed of by leaving a light on and wiping them all off the lamp with damp cloth. The down side of their fondness for white light things is that MacBooks are a bit of a Mecca to them. So now there are a few thrips which will be staying with us, as they are inside my computer. Two of them are very clearly inside my computer because they got inside the screen and promptly died. Alec helpfully looked at the internet and found that the only way to deal with this would be to send the MacBook back the manufacturer to be disassembled to see if they could get them out. I don't want to bother doing that so for now I have two very dead pixels in my screen.

One of my supervisees just sent me an email telling me that he got a first overall and a first in my paper and thanking me for my teaching and for telling him to get more sleep.

Yay!

Or rather, upon closer inspection of her wikipedia page, she's a militant secularist attempting to restrict other women's freedom of expression whilst styling herself as a "human rights' advocate.

She was on Womens' Hour today actually advocating the criminalisation of wearing a burqa in England. I am actually almost shaking with anger at such brutish intolerance to attempt to turn the potentially violent force of an institutionally racist and sexist police and criminal justice system upon women who refuse to show enough flesh for the majority's liking. Let's explore some of the arguments used to justify such a move.

1) Immigrants should conform to our ways.
This argument always fits a weird paradox in Western Europe. Among the many vague values which get mentioned when you ask people what they like about the values of their country are often tolerance, freedom and (particularly in England) room for eccentrics. What could be more British than letting someone wander around wearing a tent with eye holes if they want? What could be less British than banning certain items of clothing? We're a nation who developed a police turban. I don't want us to lose that. I also have a sympathy for the women who must exist who want to wear a burqa and aren't immigrants. Should we drive our daughters into exile if they want to dress in ways we don't approve of?

2) People shouldn't have to see religious clothing.
I really don't understand the delicate little flowers who are likely to faint at the sight of a burqa. It's not that scary. Every day I walk past lots of churches. I occasionally see the odd monk or nun. I frequently see clergy wearing dog collars. Despite this constant onslaught I manage to both survive and remain non-Christian. If seeing a burqa is all it takes to magically achieve your reversion to Islam, maybe you should be a Muslim.

3) It's a security risk.
I think these sorts of issues should be dealt with empirically. When we worried about Sihks carrying their kirpans in public we looked into it and found that kirpans had almost never been used to commit crimes. How many crimes have been perpetrated by women wearing a niqab or burqa in the UK? I hesitate to say that because it will incentivise members of the BNP and the National Secularist Society to wear burqas to commit crimes just to prove a point. If one needs to identify a woman a female attendant can ask to to step to a secluded place to see her face. Airports should have female attendants anyway to frisk and search female passengers. Face recognition technology is currently piss poor at identifying people.

4) Now we've gotten past that lets get to the one people who think that they're liberal like to trot out. Women aren't wearing burqas voluntarily, they're being forced by their fathers and husbands who are also abusing them and restricting their freedom.
We could get into a very long conversation and coercion, consent and embedded decision making, but unless we're also going to put on the table wearing make up, heterosexual sex and full time working hours let's pretend that these concepts are as simple as most people pretend they are. Some women freely choose to wear a burqa or niqab. I know this to be true. I do not know what proportion of British women who wear burqas do so because they want to. Let's assume, for the sake of argument that the majority are being forced, what would criminalising burqa wearing achieve? At best you now have abused, controlled an threatened women, but now you can see their faces. You still can't tell whether they're being abused and you're still not doing much to stop them being abused, but you've made them look like everyone else so you don't have to think about it.* Men aren't going to magically stop abusing their wives and daughters. Their faces being seen in public doesn't stop non-Muslim men abusing their wives. At worst what you've got is abused and controlled women who are allowed out of the house less. You've got abused controlled women who are at risk of prosecution. You've got abused controlled women who have much less ability to escape their situation and access services to help and protect them. Not an improvement.

I cover my hair for religious reasons. No one forced me. My husband is neutral about it. My family finds it odd but tolerates it. My religious community see it as an eccentricity. I was born in England. I can beat almost anyone in a "whose ancestors have been here longest" contest. However, because I refuse to let men other than my husband see my hair:
I am excluded from serving as a judge in Denmark.
I would not be allowed to work for a French state school or hospital and would not be allowed to attend a French state school.
I would not be allowed to be a teacher in 8 out of 16 German states (even though nuns are allowed to teach wearing habits).
These are abuses of women's human rights.

If that's all made you too angry and depressed, here's a great treatment of the issue which might inject some sense into the people who think legislating over what women wear is a great way to liberate them.


*And before people chime in that you'll be able to see the bruises if they're not wearing a burqa, I know a woman who dresses conventionally and was beaten by her husband and no one had an inkling of what was going on. I saw her the day after she was thrown down the stairs and I never suspected. There are lots of ways to hurt and control which don't leave marks.

10:30 My appointment with the doctor to get the results of my many tests to attempt to explain my six month cougth. None of them show anything interesting so it's probably just a cough. All the same, she's going to send me to the chest clinic to make sure she hasn't missed anything and a mention of a family history of persistent cougths led to a blood test for a hereditary enzyme deficiency which can cause cougths. My veins were their usual uncooperative selves so she asked me to see the nurse for the blood sample. So...

1:15 Blood test with the nurse who took my previous samples. Very quick and efficient. She was amused by my comment that I'd make a terrible smack addict.

3:00 Alec's doctors appointment. I had been nagging him to see the doctor for a while and laid down an ultimatum that I'd make an appointment for him if he didn't make one himself by today. I took his dairy with me this morning. When I described his symptoms in my appointment, the doctor said that I had to use my wifely three line whip to make him go to the doctor.

5:00 My MacBook is going to the Mac shop to see if they can bring it back to life. I downloaded the software updates and ever since it's refused to start. Hopefully it's one of those things which can be fixed in two clicks by someone who knows what they're doing.

I am eating gooseberries.

Alec bought a pallet from a market stall yesterday. I hadn't had a gooseberry in years. Sadly I forgot to say the shechiyanu when I stole one from his bowl last night. Gooseberries always remind me of my childhood and the house I grew up in. They're a slightly unusual sight in the supermarket but our garden had gooseberry bushes. At this time of year we would be sent down to the end of the garden with plastic bowls to harvest the berries, attempting to avoid the thorns. Eating them, I can picture being a young girl in that garden again. I'm no good at dates; the closest I could get to remembering birthdays was to know the general time of year. I always remembered my eldest brothers birthday as being during gooseberry season, and what do you know, Facebook informs me that it is his birthday today. Years later, with him on the other side of the world, gooseberries draw me back into our childhood.

Blessed are You, HaShem our G@d, King of the universe, Who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us to this season.

Alec and I have told our landlord that we're moving this summer. We'd like to move to a house in Cambridge with 2-3 bedrooms so that we can have a bit more room and hopefully a garden. We're in that terrifying stage of the process wherein we've said that we're leaving but there are no properties being advertised yet which are available from the date we want to move in. I've been looking on the university accommodation service website and various letting agents' websites. I'd like to contact a few letting agents and ask them to keep me updated with suitable properties so that I can get in quick.

So here comes the question, which Cambridge letting agents do you think I should contact?

I really should have learnt this but I'm still not quite sure. What do you do when you want to change the case of the letter which begins a quotation in a paper, either because the quotation originally started a sentence but you want to insert it into the middle of a sentence or vice versa? As I see it my options are:
a) leave the quotation as is even though it makes my sentence grammatically incorrect.
b) just change the case so that my sentence is grammatically correct.
c) change the case but do something involving brackets to indicate that I've done this.

If it helps, I'm trying to write this paper in Harvard System of citations.

I think I might try to lose some weight. I don't know how much I weigh but I'm pretty sure that it's more than I weighed a year ago. I don't want to be stick thin, I love my little round belly, but lately I've noticed that it's getting less little and more round. I preferred it when it was a soft little curve rather than a greater expanse of flesh. I've definitely put on weight because I tried to put two things on this morning which I haven't worn in over six months and they didn't fit any more. Loosing a few pounds will probably be cheaper than replacing all of my clothes.

I've identified two main causes of the weight increase. Both are related to married life. I love baking and an oven of my own and a husband who likes cake have been great spurs to regular cake production. The problem with this is that this means that there is usually an inviting cake dome of cakes or biscuits about the place, which really needs eating up. So if I've made something I like I'll get the urge to snack on it throughout the day. I think I actually like making cake more than I like eating it, so I must try hard to get friends to come and eat my produce so I don't eat it all myself. I might make some batches of cakes today and take them down to the friends of Magen David Adom garden party.

The other issue is portion sizes. Alec and I tend to be scrupulously fair when portioning food between us. However, the nutritional needs of a 6"2 man and a 5"9 woman are not the same. If we were to eat exactly the same amount logically either I'd put on weight or he'd lose weight. On top of that, we both do the thing where you show affection by making lots of food and encouraging the other to eat. Before we got married I didn't usually have dessert, but Alec feels a bit guilty having dessert if I don't so he encourages me to and then even if I'm full I have some or I'll wait half an hour for a bit of space in my stomach and have some.

I'm aware that the best plan is to really stop the habits of eating when I'm not hungry, because it's a terrible habit to get into if your metabolism works properly. I think I'll also investigate getting a calories counter book. I don't think I'd aim for a particular number of calories a day, but I'm not sure exactly how different foods compare (obviously ice cream is more fattening than lettuce but I'm not sure how, for example, veggie chilli compares to veggie shepherds pie and broccli). I'm quite easy going about food, so if I'm trying to reduce my not-so-little-any-more round belly, I may as well pick lower calories meals.

Anyway, that's the plan.

There was something about the envelope which let me know at a glance that there was something special about it. It's contents were given away by the bride and groom rubber stamping on the outside. Wedding invite! It was from two college friends who have been engaged nearly as long as Alec and I have been together, but have kept failing to actually organise their wedding. This disorganisation had led to another boon, non-Saturday wedding. I'd already heard that they were getting married on a Monday because it was the only day they could book all of the rooms they wanted to use for the wedding and reception.

Forward to this morning, I was thinking about the wedding and had a little niggling feeling. A Monday... in September... I just checked my calender and (the Jews reading might have guessed what's coming) it's on Yom Kippur. It's not too bad. The weddings at 3 and in Cambridge so I think I'll go to shul in the morning, go to the wedding, head back to shul for the last couple of services and hopefully get back to the wedding in time for the speeches and cake cutting. I'm trying to work out how to compose an RSVP with a menu request of "meat for Alec and nothing for me, I'll be fasting".

On the radio there's an argument that paying Indians to act as surrogates for British couples should be illegal because the women may be so poor and the amount they can earn through surrogacy is so much, that they may not really be said to be freely consenting to be surrogates. I can't help but think, when did they freely consent to be that poor?

According to Facebook, Twitter is bringing down the Iranian government.

There was a program on Radio 4 yesterday which really bothered me in a WTF kind of way. I found it hard to articulate exactly what made me so bothered by the broadcast but Alec seemed to agree that the broadcast was problematic so I don't think I was over reacting.

The broadcast which pissed me off so much was Sunday Worship, which was a service marking the 80th anniversary of the birth of Anne Frank held in Blackburn Cathedral. I must confess that when I heard them say what the broadcast was going to be I turned it off (I don't usually listen to Sunday worship anyway). I later listened to it on iplayer because I should at least liste to it if I'm going to criticise it.

Here are some of my issues.

I don't think that there was anything else on the BBC that day to mark the anniversary. If you're only going to have one thing on the radio to mark the life of someone who was murdered because she was Jewish, is an Anglican service really the appropriate thing to have.

I really think that European Christians should commemorate the Shoah. It's such a huge and traumatic part of our collective past that we all need to find to mark and reflect upon it, just as we need ways to mark and reflect upon the world wars. However, there's always going to be a tension in Christian worship about the Shoah. Although the Holocaust was based upon a 19th and 20th century mythology of race, the Jewish victims of the Shoah were killed in part because their ancestors had managed to resist centuries of Christian persecution to abandon their Judaism. It's hard for Jews to really claim victims of the Shoah as martyrs because Christians and atheists with one Jewish grandparent were killed along with the most pious Jew. However, if you take the prayers and hopes of people clinging to their Judaism when G@d is allowing them to be killed for being Jews, and slot them into a Christian service without even trying to flag the tension involved, that's fucked up.

The service was quite universalised. It wasn't as bad as I had feared. They did mention quite frequently that Anne Frank was Jewish but the service was less an attempt to listen to the experience of Jews and other victims of the Shoah and more an attempt to shape an Anne Frank narrative which was convenient for promoting interfaith relations in Blackburn, to listen to a composer of Christian choral music's work and to pick bits of the testimony of some Jewish Shoah victims which fitted well into a Christian message of faith and hope. If you want to discuss genocide and persecution as universal (Christian) themes, why pick a particular Jew to build that message around?

This brings me onto another thing, I don't really like the cult of Anne Frank. I just don't find Anne Frank the best way to engage with the Shoah. Possibly it's partly because my whole attitude to the Shoah has been shaped since I was in my teens. I think it's also partly because I tried to read the Diary when I was young and give up before she went into hiding because I found her so irritating. A less personal problem I have with such emphasis on Anne Frank is my suspicions about why she's become the Holocaust "poster girl" to the gentiles. I understand that her diary was one of the first accounts to be published, but I can't help but wonder whether an awful lot of it has to do with the fact that she was young and pretty and female, and died whilst still young and pretty and "innocent" and our culture loves women who die before their looks fade. She was middle class and her family was highly assimilated. Obviously the diary stops before the horror of deportation and the camps, so the reader doesn't have to engage with the torture that happened there. The story focuses on the non-Jews who hid the Franks, rather than the people who perpetrated the Holocaust or the majority who did nothing and let it happen. It makes it a more comfortable read. I get the feeling that when Anne Frank is held up there's an implicit message that the murders of older, less than saintly, ugly, working class and non-assimilated Jews, and homosexuals and gypsies and everyone else not similar enough to middle class Western European Christians, weren't as much of a tragedy.

If such a service can reduce the likelihood of race riots in Burnley then maybe it's worth it, but such an act of appropriation wasn't appropriate for broadcast on national radio. Those are my thoughts anyway.

Lots of my friends are posting about rape and the rhetoric and activism surrounding it. Don't worry, this post is a bit lighter.

A problem which is often raised is the way that we live in a rape culture and the way that this leads to people thinking that it's acceptable to coerce people into sexual activity and not thinking of that as rape or sexual assault. So I thought I'd start a discussion about films buy into and go against that rape motif. I'm thinking of the films I've seen over the last couple of weeks. Three of them (Coraline, The Bishops Wife and Keeping up with the Steines) are kind of neutral, in that they don't involve any hooking up. Star Trek was a bit pro-rapey, in that the hero Kirk harassed Uhura a bit. I was trying to think of a film which was a good example of only having sex when consent is freely and enthusiastically given. Oddly enough the example which came up with was Austin Powers. OK, it's part of the joke that all Austin Powers has to do to get enthusiastic consent is to wiggle about with his shirt off, but there is a lovely moment when his partner who he's been wanting to have sex with and who he ends up having a romantic relationship with, gets drunk and starts flirting with him in the hotel room they're sharing and he makes clear that he's not interested in doing anything like that when she's drunk and might regret it in the morning.

So, what films do you think of which promote rape mentality or an anti-rape mentality?

I'm making a dress I'm a bit confused by the instructions on interfacing. I need to use interfacing to stiffen the neck of the dress (it's a boat neckline). The pattern included a pattern for the bit of interfacing I needed as the interfacing is a different shape to any of the pattern pieces. The instructions say "Apply fusible interfacing to wrong side of front neck lining" (except I'm using sew in interfacing so I'm going to sew it in) and "Pin interfacing wrong side of fabric. Cut across corners that will be enclosed with seams. Machine baste 1.3 cm from cut edge. Trim interfacing close to machine basting."

So, my confusions are:
Should I line up the interfacing so that the edge of the interfacing is level with the edge of the lining piece?
Should I sew all of the way around the interfacing or just around the edges which will be within seams on the finished garment?

From looking at the rubbish diagram on the pattern I think that I'm supposed to line up the interfacing against the edge of the fabric, baste them together 1.3 cm from the edge and then cut off the interfacing close to the stitching, cutting across the corners. Is that right?