OPINION

The Amherst Student • April 13, 2022

Seeing Double: How to Make Challah

Cole Graber-Mitchell ’22

Columnist

One of my favorite holidays is Passover. For as long as I can remember, I’ve flown from Minneapolis to Connecticut every year to celebrate Passover with my dad’s family. We spend a day cooking great food and moving tables so we can entertain dozens of people in my grandparent’s small living room. During our Seder, some of my family members read along in Hebrew, while others — that is, my entire immediate family — join in afterward with our Haggadah’s English translations.

Those memories have shaped me and my conception of myself. I feel Jewish because every year I observe a tradition that my dad, and his mom, and her parents, and so on and on, have observed.

At the same time, my Jewish identity has always been a little unsteady. I didn’t grow up the way that most of the Jews I know grew up. I didn’t go to Hebrew school or synagogue; I didn’t have a bar mitzvah. My immediate family didn’t celebrate any Jewish holidays beyond Passover and sometimes Hanukkah, and neither did most of my extended family. Any time Judaism came up in middle and high school, someone would remark that Jewish law said inheritance of Judaism was matrilineal. I would be left wondering what that made me, a kid with a Jewish-Scottish dad and a German-Italian-French mom.

I thought that college would be the perfect place to learn more about Judaism and embrace my heritage. Maybe I could start going to a synagogue, or celebrate holidays with other Jews on campus. I hoped to find a Jewish community at Amherst where I could finally shed my uncertainty about who I was.

The summer before my freshman year, I browsed through Amherst’s religious life website and the websites of local Jewish organizations to see what I could take advantage of when I got here.

But I never followed through. Not because of some lack of resources at the college or in town; this article isn’t one of my many critiques of Amherst. I didn’t seek out Jewish community because I was scared. How could I fit in at a High Holidays service when I didn’t know the prayers? I was so certain that I would be the odd one out at any Jewish event: the only person in the room with none of the shared experiences that link Jews together regardless of their home states or backgrounds. I would be the goyish Jew — or even worse, they might not think I was Jewish at all because of my patrilineal descent.

I’ve worked up the courage to reach for Jewish community at Amherst a couple of times, but I’ve never succeeded. In my first months here, I attended a Rosh Hashanah service in Chapin, but I felt out of place enough that I couldn’t go back. In my junior year, I tried joining one of the Zoom services held by the Jewish Community of Amherst. I quickly realized that I was the only person there who wasn’t a member of that tight-knit community, and I left.

Part of my worries stemmed from my opinions on the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In high school, a Jewish teacher had become incensed when I indicated my disapproval of the Israeli government’s actions. Another student — not a Jew — said I was an antisemite. I knew that Jews hold a variety of opinions on Palestine because of opinion polling, my Jewish friends in high school, and common sense, but I was scared that I would be cast out of any Jewish community at Amherst because of my criticisms. (And in fact, ever since I spoke out in favor of Palestinian rights last spring and argued in support of the AAS’ email on Palestine, I’ve gotten dirty looks from a couple Jews on campus whom I’ve never even met.)

It wasn’t until this year that I found a Jewish community where I really felt comfortable. It’s an impromptu community, sprung up around semi-regular, highly informal Shabbat celebrations led by a Jewish friend of mine here. She usually invites a handful of people, but anyone who happens to pass by is encouraged to join. We light some candles, drink some wine, eat some challah, and sing some prayers.

I don’t know those prayers beyond their first phrases (which thankfully are the same as the Hanukkah prayers I know), and every time that we sing them I feel a twinge of anxiety when I drop out halfway through. It’s still hard for me to not run away from a situation that highlights a core tension in my sense of myself. But nonetheless I feel supported there, surrounded by friends who know how I’m Jewish and who, in many cases, had similar Jewish childhoods themselves.

A few weeks ago, I helped make the challah for one of these celebrations. I had never learned how to make challah as a kid, and this was my second time ever trying. (The first time was a disaster.) We mixed the flour, egg, yeast, and water with our hands before letting the dough rise and braiding it into two loaves. Later, we tore the challah apart with our hands, said “Shabbat shalom” to each other, and ate. I felt more connected to my Jewish heritage in those moments than I ever had before.

I expect my quest to understand my relationship with Judaism to be lifelong. Last year, my final project for a course on the Jewish and Asian American experiences (“Model Minorities,” with Professors Bergoffen and Odo) was an oral history of my Jewish family. After interviewing my grandmother, my dad, and my sister, I realized that we had all struggled with Jewish identity and that the struggle never ended.

I still want to learn more

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

Challah is a yeast-leavened egg bread that is braided and eaten on ceremonial occasions.

The Amherst Student • April 13, 2022

Opinion 10 From Sore and Sticky Hands to Beautiful Bread

Continued from page 9

about being Jewish: more of the customs and stories, more of the ritual prayers, more of the recipes. A part of me still wants some sort of Jewish fairy godmother to provide me with an ad-hoc, postsecondary Hebrew school education. “This is the prayer said over challah,” such a person would say. “And the holiday coming up celebrates this particular time the Jews almost died. Do you know that story?” I’ve had friends and mentors who have filled similar, if less comprehensive, roles, such as my Shabbat-hosting friend.

However, I’ve come around to the fact that I’m the only one who can make this journey for me. There’s no doubt that it will be full of ups and downs, but I’m trying to remind myself to have courage. A beautiful loaf of challah begins not with perfectly formed braids but with hands sticky with dough and sore from kneading.

Photo courtesy of Julia Hartbeck

Challah is braided in a varity of ways, from this simple three-strand to more complicated six-stranded loaves.

Rants and Raves: Imagine You’re a Sea Turtle

Alex Brandfonbrener ’23

Managing Arts and Lving Editor

Imagine you’re a sea turtle.

Sea turtles lay their eggs in beaches during the night, and then leave. After 50 days (or so), the eggs are ready to hatch. 50 days after, the mother is long gone.

Most often, sea turtle eggs will hatch at night. But “Kemp's ridley” sea turtles hatch during the day. This species is sometimes known as the “heartbreak turtle.”

So imagine you’re a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle, hatching during the day. There’s no Mother Turtle waiting above in the sand, only the expanse of the beach. And it’s daytime: there are birds everywhere, looking for small fish. Crabs also patrol the sand, looking for something small to eat.

The baby sea turtle emerges from the sand like a mummy. It is entering the world for the first time, blinking at the sun. As a comparison, I imagine a baby deer, born onto wobbly legs like Bambi. These turtles must make it to the ocean by dragging themselves along the sand with their flippers. It’s not even the way sea turtles normally move; they are built for swimming.

The turtles have to make it to the ocean, far and unknown. With each push of a flipper, they move one centimeter at a time. Those grains of sand are so much bigger to them, like pebbles on their scale. Slowly, slowly — slowly — the turtles approach the sea.

The thing I would be afraid of most is the crabs. A giant (on the turtle’s scale), scuttling, armored, clawed shellfish and the newborn Kemp’s ridleys: can you imagine it? I honestly can’t; it would be impossibly hard, easily traumatic.

Though on second thought, the birds would be scary too. A big gull could snatch a turtle in one go. And then the turtle would be left soaring through the air, jailed by a hungry mouth.

Sea turtles are often at risk of predation, which is why the Kemp’s ridley is one of the most endangered species of sea turtle. What it takes for the population to survive is as simple as making it to the sea. With each push of a flipper, they save themselves. And soon, only minutes after being born, each turtle hits the foamy spray of the waves. They are cradled by the tide, pushed underwater to the future, like flowers opening to the sky.

I wrote this after watching a nature documentary clip on Facebook. It’s a distant, colonialist sort of pleasure that I wish I hadn’t enjoyed. And I find that it makes up a lot of the media the American people consume and propagate across the globe: some horrible fear that’s too distant to imagine, that we force ourselves to endure regardless. So I turn off my phone in these moments. It’s okay for the world to pass without being witnessed —

And the turtles grow and thrive, swimming for the first time, making circles and loops, finding rest at night, taking off towards unknown corners of the ocean. Most sea turtles never return to their birth shores. But sometimes, they make the trip back to that starting place, to a safe place where they then lay their own eggs.

Photo courtesy of krembo1 Photo courtesy of WWF

Coping With Campus: Rodeway Hospital-ity

Dustin Copeland ’25

Managing Opinion Editor

Architecture is communicative at its core: a building, by its ornamentation (or lack thereof), its arrangement, and each facet of its design, broadcasts to those who see it exactly its purpose. This is often simpler than it sounds: as a precept, communication through design means that houses usually end up looking like houses, factories like factories, and tombs like tombs. Our campus looks quintessentially New England and undeniably academic: the rectilinear brickwork, shingled roofs, and picturesque quads advertise to us the prestigious and enlightened purpose which these buildings have imbued.

Designed space is therefore rich with cues as to purpose, suggesting how the space should be used. A building is therefore at its most fulfilled when its stated purpose aligns exactly with what it is actually used for. A house, for instance, should be divided into living spaces, kitchens, bedrooms and bathrooms; and adorned with couches and tables and bits of familial miscellanea — chargers, mail piles, soap — that are the result of living in that space. There is a unity to such a structure, where the architectural cues of the environment match perfectly its use.

This sort of unity is the basis of comfortable space, where knowledge about how the space is used is clearly broadcast to anyone who steps into it, whether they have ever been there before or not. “House” is a concept that many people are familiar (and comfortable) with, and having seen a house before makes assigning a comfortable and familiar narrative to an otherwise-unfamiliar space easy. This ease of learning-by-association about the particulars of a space is also a factor in design — hostility and inscrutability are often synonymous when it comes to building space for people.

When unity between purpose and use, stated ideal and lived experience, is disrupted, spatial cues become more and more confused. What looks like a house, when it is obviously not being used as a house, is suddenly rendered less legible by how (or whether) the space is inhabited. Since lack of legibility is a barrier to familiarity, that discord between what I think should be familiar (a house) and how I read the space (not a house) creates a sense of strangeness, a vague wrongness about my lack of familiarity with a space built to be familiar.

I think this process works because of a general human impulse to narrativize the spaces we exist in. There is a story to a house: it was built one day, and thereafter it was lived in by people who used it and continue to use it as a house. There is a story to an office space, a factory, or a coffee shop that is equally easy to interpret, again building comfort by ease of understanding.

Interpretation is perceived knowledge (the best kind one can hope to have), and knowledge is key to familiarity and comfort because knowledge brings safety and assuredness in the social norms of a given space. Safety is therefore intimately connected to knowledge, so all that’s needed to create an unsafe space (in feeling at least) is to remove knowledge.

Abandoned spaces are therefore a perfect case study of architectural uncanniness. What was once an easily-interpretable and therefore safe space now has a viscerally-perceived temporality which begs for a narrative to be imposed upon it. The problem: there is no way to figure out exactly what that narrative is. The abandonment of a space is the shifting of a space from an inhabited space that is used for something known to an uninhabited one that is used for something horribly unknown. Something must have happened to create the conditions for de-inhabiting, but what? And the more unexplainable the ge-

Photo courtesy of Emma Spencer '23E

The Inn's exterior is almost inviting, but something about it still seems closed.

ometries, the more strangeness in appearance, the more pressing the questions become. Entering an abandoned space saddles me instantly with questions of when, of how, of why, that often simply cannot be answered by interacting with the space itself. Narratives break down in abandoned spaces because familiarity is denied. Even if one were to figure out (from patterns of rust or knowledge about the growth of moss or years stamped in building materials) the age of the building and the time of its de-inhabiting, it would be impossible to determine who left, or why.

Abandoned spaces are for that reason uncanny. Entering one fills me with a tension, a stress that doesn’t exist in a coffee shop, an office building, or a house. Abandoned spaces are without unity, and therefore are less safe.

But abandoned spaces are not

The Amherst Student • April 13, 2022

Opinion 12 Purpose and Use Fail to Harmonize in Isolation

Continued from page 11

alone in disrupting interpretation. Even spaces that are not only designed to be familiar but are by definition inhabited can become uncanny and uncomfortable because of factors that go beyond design.

Take, for example, the Rodeway Inn. Visibly, the Rodeway is a hotel, with some of the markers of an abandoned space: the exterior doors aren’t really functional, the parking lot is largely deserted, there are no hotel staff behind the check-in counter, which is piled with testing supplies and devoid of characteristic computer monitors and tall-ish chairs. However, it is also obviously inhabited, as on-call staff both monitor and supply the variably-sized collection of sick students which occupies some of the hotel’s rooms. The experience of getting Covid is thereby an exercise in unfamiliarity in this way, as one is forced to get used to living in a space which is inescapably removed from its original purpose.

But the strangeness of the Rodeway is deeper even than that, for not only is the Inn officially not in-business, it isn’t really an inn. The space’s primary goal is the isolation of its inhabitants, and its features, from meal bags to supervised outdoor-time, are trademark features of a hospital.

At the Inn, there are procedures and guidelines for every aspect of living — even well-being is codified in scheduled Zoom calls (with, in my case, the nicest person in the world) and requests for time outside. The Rodeway is a medical facility dressed up as a living space, and while it succeeds absolutely in that purpose (I even had a pretty good time for most of my stay), it’s not exactly harmonious.

I felt an uncanniness in the room as soon as the hotel-looking door closed behind me. The trim was worn and the pillows were few, but the mirrors and lamps were numerous, like it was an ex-hotel room dressed up to look like it was still in use. The window-screen was bent at the corner just enough to make it very easy to pop right out of its slot, turning the once-barred hole into a doorway. Outside the door, at around noon, the hallway would be lined with paper bags, set in front of each blankfaced door that was a portal into someone else’s entire life, contained in the room. We had no key cards, so I had to prop the door open with that hoop-looking lock common to hotel doors every time I left the room to pilfer a bag of chips from the snack room (an exercise room, converted with a folding table). The way I lived told me, for certain, that I was not a hotel guest. Why, then, did the place look so much like a hotel?

I got used to it, of course. Every decision made makes sense, and out of necessity, the Rodeway is probably the best solution to isolation housing that seems eternally useful. But it is eerie to live in. Its design is not directly opposed to what it’s used for, but the two chafe against each other just enough to produce a dissonant tone, to make the place seem just a bit uncanny. All that, on top of a foggy brain and an easy, constant exhaustion, means that getting Covid is super weird.

w Amusements

The Amherst Student Crossword | April 13, 2022

ACROSS

1 They may be checkered 6 Aperture setting 11 Audiophile's stack 14 White house? 15 Spanish white wine region, or a Cuban form of 13-Down 16 "Hold your horses!" 17 Reeves of "The Matrix' 18 Once more 19 Drag 20 Compulsory planning sessions, if you aren't graduating 23 Pot starter 24 Singer Kitt 25 27-Down is one of these 29 Get rid of 32 Professor 34 Add-ons to den, prom, and coy 38 Tile art 39 Timetable 42 "As you wish," to a spouse 45 Aviator Earhart 46 Chop-shop parts 47 Authorization 50 Off-menu offering, as in 53-Across 52 Bldg. units 53 Soup or salad 57 "Donkey Kong Country" platform 59 Kanye's second album, or trying to do 20A, 32A with 47A, and 53A with 39A on May 7, e.g. 66 Secondhand 67 Vitality 68 "I didn't do it!" 69 Surrealist Joan 70 ___ Gay 71 Most high schoolers 72 Penultimate Greek letter 73 Challenges 74 One of 7 percent of applicants to Amherst, informally

DOWN

1 Pokemon mascot's root word 2 Like fine wine 3 Ukrainian, for one 4 Author Morrison 5 "Semper Fidelis" composer 6 Overwrought 7 Hint at 8 The Mammoths or the Purple Cows, e.g. 9 Garfield's foil 10 Indian cottage cheese 11 Gregorian ___ 12 Bread, before baking 13 Saucy dance? 16 Vibratory sound 21 Bring about 22 A small something that goes in front of a pole, perhaps 25 East ___ (nation since 2002) 26 Japanese mushroom 27 Indian silk center 28 Judges' orders 30 The C in SOHCAHTOA 31 Prefix to 30-Down 33 Purge in Cambridge? 34 It's south of Kyiv 35 Dutch flower 36 "The Waste Land" poet 37 Penn and Connery 40 Cab caller 41 College event scheduler 43 King Kong, e.g. 44 Parks and ___ 48 Pastry-enclosed croquette 49 Phrases worth repeating 50 Ukr., once 51 Irked 53 Tuft of grass 54 "Wonderwall" group 55 Gestation stations 56 Start from scratch 58 He's not real 60 Actress Gershon 61 Tyler, the Creator's Grammy-winning 2019 album 62 ___ the line (obeyed) 63 Tabloid twosome 64 Prefix for present 65 Hatchling's home

Ryan Yu ’22

Editor-in-Chief Emeritus

Solutions: April 6