Women’s social issues have been treated in programs geared towards teens for ages. Remember when DJ Tanner went on a crash diet so she could look good in a bathing suit, and then passed out on a stairclimber?

On Saved by the Bell, Elizabeth Berkley gained pre-Showgirls notoriety, for the famous Jessie Spano Caffeine Pill Breakdown (I’m so excited! I’m so scared!). Of course, Full House and SBTB were heart-warming sitcoms, where everyone learns their lesson in the end, and move away from their self-destructive behavior, never to mention anorexia, bullimia, or drug abuse ever again.

The breakout Canadian teen sensation, Degrassi, which airs in the US on The N network, covers a variety of teen issues, without the cavity-inducing sugary sweetness of the stuff we grew up on. Among the kids who dabble in drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, and bi-polar disorder, Degrassi introduced the world to Ellie Nash, who is a cutter.

I’m too old for Degrassi, but I don’t care. I’m pretty much obsessed with it. The best part about the show is that it doesn’t sweep the issues under the rug at the end of each 22-minute episode. And because the writers have the balls to “Go There.” I mean, come on: we all know the caffeine-pill incident was a stand-in for a harder drug, like speed or something, but hard drugs don’t exist at Bayside High.

I remember when the cutting craze swept my middle school. I have no idea who started it, or why it caught on, but at my school, cutting was the iPhone of the late 90′s. Read More »

Passover. Great holiday. Eternal source of existential agony.

I’m Jewish, yes? Well, ethnically, for sure. My family is made up of Jews from Belarus and Romania/Transylvania (suck your blood, blah, blah, vampire joke) who take the culture seriously but the religion…well, not so much.

Supposedly, all sets of my parents’ grandparents were Orthodox, and then their parents (my grandparents) were all Conservative, but my parents, as first and second generation Americans, kind of let that all go. They sent me to Secular Hebrew School for five years, where I learned all about the culture but not the actual religious rites, and that was that.

However, my situation growing up was very different from theirs, and that, of course, made my relationship to Judaism a little more complicated.

My parents were both raised in Jewish neighborhoods in the Bronx. Growing up, they were in the ethnic majority (at least until high school). Being Jewish was just a fact of life.

I grew up in a very Italian- and Irish-American town on Long Island where I was one of about six Jews in my grade. Even though my parents and I barely practiced (every third year or so we’d go to temple for Yom Kippur), Jewishness became a very important part of my identity. As it happened, we lived directly next door to the Catholic church that was attended by about 85% of my classmates. This was a constant source of amusement. Jewish jokes? I was there…and maybe the one making them. Being Jewish made me stand out. So I made it work in my favor. Read More »