A WEEKLY LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF |
A WEEKLY LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF |
LISTEN: Ben Smith talks about the state of digital media, populism and our people on this week’s edition of That Jewish News Show with Benyamin Cohen & Laura E. Adkins. |
Some 30 years ago, when I was a (very) young reporter at the Los Angeles Times, I cut out a little squib from the paper headlined “Wanted: Girl Heroes.” It was by a 9-year-old girl named Alexandra Early.
“I used to just watch the television shows without thinking much about them,” the five-paragraph piece began. “But now I get angry. That’s because I’m a girl and there aren’t enough girl superheroes on TV.” I kept that little bit of brilliance posted on my refrigerator for more than a decade — refrigerators, plural, I should say, as Early’s words moved with me to Washington, D.C., the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Chicago and Brooklyn. The husband read the whole thing aloud at the baby-naming celebration for our twins in 2007. Somewhere along the way, my dad saw it was yellowing and stained and got it laminated. When Jill Abramson became the first female executive editor of The New York Times in 2011, I gave her a copy of the column with a note saying I hoped that wherever little Alexandra had ended up, she’d heard about Jill’s new job. Where Early ended up, it turns out, is the Bay Area, after years in civil war-torn El Salvador and gritty immigrant centers in Massachusetts. She’s 38 now, with an 18-month-old son and a job helping empower poor and immigrant women — something of a superhero herself, according to her mom, and I agree. “You can be an action hero and take your gun or karate chops to bad guys, but I think she’s much more of a superhero because her action is working to protect health-care workers in nursing homes, or with domestic workers who have no rights,” is how said mom, Suzanne Gordon, put it. “It’s much less glamorous, but I think much more difficult than these kind of Batman or Batgirl kinds of situations.” |
Alex Early, 38, via Zoom, and the Los Angles Times column she wrote at age 9. (Collage by Matthew Litman) |
Early, who goes by Alex, grew up in Arlington, Massachusetts, not far from where I grew up, in Newton (alas, a bit earlier). She wanted to be a child actress, was into sports, and in her yearbook at Arlington High School, Class of 2003, she was named Teacher’s Pet. Her parents were both activist journalists — Gordon is the author of numerous books about health care; dad, Steve Early, is a lawyer and union organizer who writes about labor. “Throughout my whole life,” Alex told me, “whenever I was upset about something,” they would suggest: “You should write an article about that.” That’s how she — and her parents — recall the backstory of “Wanted: Girl Heroes.” Little Alex was upset by the princesses always needing to be saved on King Arthur and the Knights of Justice and the fact that even the strong female characters in X-Men were always dressed in sexy clothes. Her parents told her to write it up and sent it to someone they knew at the LA Times. “The men on these shows do basically everything,” says the column now posted above my desk. “They do the shooting, and they save the girls. If anybody’s in trouble, the girls go and get the good-guy men. If the girls are part of the bad-guy team, they go and get the bad-guy men. “And then the good-guy men and the bad-guy men fight it out,” it continues. “The women just watch and hope that the person who’s on their team wins. The women never get to save anybody. This makes me feel terrible.” Alex got active in politics as a teenager, opposing the Iraq War, and majored in Latin American studies at Wesleyan. After graduation she got an internship in El Salvador, working for a nominally Christian organization, though she identifies as “culturally Jewish.” She ended up staying for years, partly because she met the man who would become her husband. So that’s where she was in 2011, when The New Yorker published the Jill Abramson profile that mentioned my having given her Alex’s “Girl Heroes” column. A month later, the magazine published a letter to the editor from one Alexandra Early in San Salvador. “The Salvadoran organization I work with empowers women to find their voices in their communities and in political decision-making — tasks that first require them to persuade their husbands to abandon macho ideas about women’s role in society,” she wrote then. “I am very pleased to hear about Abramson’s appointment at the Times — indeed, the women’s movement in the United States has made many advancements since I was a little girl — but my experience as a woman working in El Salvador indicates that we still have a long way to go in much of the world.”
When we met via Zoom a few weeks ago, I read Alex her decades-old column. She said she feels like television and “media representation” generally has radically improved, with shows like Sex Education not only having strong female characters but “people with so many different ethnicities and genders and sexualities.” “I don’t watch a lot of superhero movies,” she said. “I’m more into watching how real people interact.” Her favorite show is Jane the Virgin, where America Ferrera stars as a young, working-class, Catholic, Latina single mom. A superhero of another sort. “My partner makes fun of me because I’m watching it for, I think, the third time,” Alex said with a laugh. “I think I love it because it's got a character who has a kid, and has this big family that's helping her out all the time, and she's also got these love interests. And she's got a job and she's a writer, and it’s so interesting to me to watch her juggle things.” But for all the improvement and diversity available on streaming services in the United States, Alex said, she cringes at the television her 15-year-old niece in El Salvador is subjected to. “I remember this really homophobic, sexist show that I was watching with her, and seeing her react to it, with her parents,” she said of a recent visit. “I was trying to talk to her about, like, ‘I have friends who are gay and they have these beautiful relationships and it’s OK, you can be whoever you want’ in my non-perfect Spanish.” |
“Why can’t the men be messenger boys and stand around hoping their team wins? I hope the people who make these shows know that girls like me are watching. We want fairness.” |
– Alexandra Early, at age 9 |
I’m not sure what made me decide to reach out to Alex now, versus anytime since I first cut that column out of the paper three decades ago. It might have been because of my dad’s death in February — I had misremembered that he found it in a Boston newspaper and sent it to me; in fact, he simply saved it, via lamination. Dad loved laminating things. Maybe it’s because, as I am saying kaddish every day, I’ve been thinking about how and whether different Jewish communities include our matriarchs in their prayers alongside the patriarchs. Or maybe the Passover Haggadah’s remarkable erasure of women from the Exodus story made me think about Alex’s plea for “girl heroes.”
In a happy accident, it turns out that today is National Superhero Day, a holiday I have definitely never before acknowledged or even known existed. It was created by — who else — Marvel employees back in 1995, not long after little Alex Early wrote her column in the Los Angeles Times, proposing a new show called X Women or Queen Guinevere. “Why can’t the men be messenger boys and stand around hoping their team wins?” she asked. “I hope the people who make these shows know that girls like me are watching. We want fairness.” I asked the grown-up Alex who her favorite superheroes are these days. She had not yet seen the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever, but she wasn’t thinking about screen heroes anyhow. She was thinking about a Brazilian woman named Fabiana who came to the worker center in Chelsea, Massachusetts, a number of years ago to report sexual harassment by the cooks at her restaurant. “She and her co-workers started this whole campaign against the restaurant,” Alex explained. “She was such a natural leader. I’ve seen so many examples of this, people who have so much charisma, the way they talk, the way they can energize other people. “But instead of the company being like, ‘Oh my goodness, this person is an amazing asset,’ instead they drove her out, for speaking up about the way these women were being treated in the kitchen,” she continued. “She was really inspirational for me.” So inspirational that Alex and her husband gave their son, Kayo, the middle name Fabian. Maybe he’ll grow up to write a TV show about girl superheroes. |
Thanks to Matthew Litman for contributing to this newsletter and Adam Langer for editing it. Shabbat Shalom! Questions/feedback: [email protected] |
YOUR TURN: GIRL HEROES LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK |
You could have predicted this one, right? I want to know who your female superheroes are! From the big screen, from Jewish history, from real life. I’m thinking about Ruth Bader Ginsburg but also Judy Blume ... Or maybe someone from our Forward 125? Use the button below to share a few words about your shero, and a photo if you’re so inclined. We may publish a selection. |
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| Israel’s 75th birthday according to the Hebrew calendar was on Wednesday. We’ve got special coverage through the English anniversary of the state’s founding on May 14. In this special edition of our print magazine: Essays by Michael Oren, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, Jodi Lox Mansbach and Yousef Bashir; memories of our readers’ first trips to Israel, through the decades; and reports from inside Israel’s flag factory and the party-with-a-dash-of-protest on the streets of Tel Aviv. Download the printable (PDF) ➤ |
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Jeremy Ben-Ami, the founder and head of J Street, came to my synagogue in New Jersey on Sunday for a conversation about this milestone anniversary at a time of intense political turmoil. He was questioned by a veritable “beit din” of our local rabbis — that’s Marc Katz at the mic, and Julie Roth and Elliott Tepperman on the left — and then by yours truly on behalf of the audience. |
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