Tweet

R. P. Schwartz

5 Dec, 10 tweets, 2 min read

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1467197523127422979

So here's why I find this picture so striking:

A long time ago, I was a wee ultra(-ish?) Orthodox high school girl who wanted to be a physicist.

We all understood that I was going to be living at home while going to college, so that meant Brooklyn College. But I dreamed of MIT.

https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1467197523127422979

Not "I dreamed of going there." That was impossible in the world I was from, in the life I was leading. Just, I dreamed about it. Even went to visit early in 12th grade.

I started getting mail from MIT after I put down my intended major as physics on my SATs. Like, lots of mail.

There aren't a lot of high school girls who want to be physics majors, and I guess MIT finds out about them.

Among my many pieces of mail was one that told the story of a then-MIT student, who built a robotic arm before he had learned trigonometry, and independently (re)created tables of trig functions to predict where the arm would end up based on the angle of the bend.

Undergrad's name was Tom Massie.

So when I first heard about the Kentucky congressman, I said, "funny," and thought no more about it, until a couple of weeks ago, when I saw a tweet asking how an MIT-educated Congressman could be a vaccine skeptic.

!!!

Was this my guy? Did I remember the story accurately? I dug around, but couldn't find MIT recruitment materials from 1992-1993 online, and gave up.

Until this photo started circulating, and I dug more.

Behold:

lemelson.mit.edu/resources/thom…

The Congressman from Kentucky whose family are all brandishing rifles in that photo is the student whose story was having me dreaming of sugarplums and brass rats in 1993.

I don't think this means anything. I'm not who I was in 1993--neither is he.

I just think it's a really, really weird confluence, is all.

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R. P. Schwartz

@Doc_RPS

12 Nov

Really curious about the Israeli school experience. Don't know much about it, but my understanding is much larger classes, much less individual attention and support. Is this true? And if so, how does it work for kids?

Do Israeli kids just have many fewer academic, social/emotional, religious needs? Do Israeli parents not expect the school to be the address for those needs?

Are there different expectations on what the schools will, can, should do? Is that because tuition-paying parents have different expectations?

Read 4 tweets

R. P. Schwartz

@Doc_RPS

12 Nov

I found last night's conversation distressing in ways that surprised me. Accusations of bad faith, dishonesty, status chasing, rich-people-pandering, and klal-money-wasting are pretty par-for-the-Twitter course, but they got to me, and I don't choose to go there again right now.

Instead, here's one more try at making the same point. Like you, I pay yeshiva day school tuition. One of my children graduated from SAR--the other four went to/go to other day schools, which have to be paid for. Total bill this year for three kids is ~$60,000.

Youngest two are in two different schools. 12-y.o. in Bais Yaakov that costs a little over $10,000/year. 10-y.o. in Centrist Orthodox school that costs two-and-a-half times that.

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R. P. Schwartz

@Doc_RPS

8 Nov

https://twitter.com/SorryIra/status/1457462328186781714

Mi va'mi haholchim?

https://twitter.com/SorryIra/status/1457462328186781714

(This isn't meant as a criticism of RSA, or of Ger specifically. We know that many religious gatherings across the Orthodox world would look exactly like this. I am just so struck that beneath the rhetoric of nashim b'mai zachyan, and the tears of the Yiddishe mama, and the rest,

is the reality that many of the members of the religious community of which I see myself a part live with the unquestioned and not-needing-to-be-questioned default state that women are completely absent in religious spaces.

Read 11 tweets

R. P. Schwartz

@Doc_RPS

27 Oct

@avitalrachel

I know a fair amount about New York State law for hiring and firing clergy. I know a fair amount about shul politics. This is not a thread about those. So about the rebbetzin-ate, and what it is to inhabit and lose that role, and my heart goes out to @avitalrachel, a thread:

(I get to decide what this thread is for, and what it is isn't. Will viciously block anyone who brings any ugly into this thread. Not interested; not having it. You don't like it, start your own.)

I've spoken--publicly, in my shul, in my then-role as a rebbetzin--about how strange the role is. A job you get with no training or preparation, by virtue of your ketubah. (2/n)

Read 16 tweets

R. P. Schwartz

@Doc_RPS

26 Sep

https://twitter.com/YisraelMotzen/status/1441927584611069953

I am utterly blown away by this appearing in Cross Currents. (You can read it and tell me all the ways it falls short, or you can read it and realize what an enormous sea change is reflected in this discussion, of these issues, this way, for this audience. I prefer the latter.)

https://twitter.com/YisraelMotzen/status/1441927584611069953

(For those not familiar, Cross Currents is a publication of and for the intellectual/open haredi world. If you go back and look at R' Shmuel Kaminetzky (with Arthur Goldberg!) in Hakira on "same-sex attraction" a decade ago and then this, it's light-years. Parsecs.)

@YisraelMotzen

I cannot give a big enough yasher koach to Rabbi @YisraelMotzen for stepping up and saying these things, in this community, about LGBTQ members of our community and their families. There is neck-sticking-out here, and there will be backlash. Thank you for braving it.

Read 6 tweets

R. P. Schwartz

@Doc_RPS

20 Sep

@DBashIdeas

Well, here's a conundrum. I declined to participate in this the first time I was asked. I changed my mind after a change on the masthead. And now find myself alongside a denunciation of "the subtle takeover of our generation's mind by progressive ideas...." (And @DBashIdeas. 😄)

I don't feel quite as compromised by who-else-is-commentating (which I didn't know until I saw it in print) as I would appearing in a publication whose editor had been inside the Capitol on January 6th. But perhaps that's post-hoc motivated reasoning.

@DBashIdeas

Another version, @DBashIdeas, of the complicated calculuses (calculi?) of which ideas we use and share, and which songs we sing, and whom we'll appear with. Interested in hearing thoughts. (And of course, he may be as dismayed to be alongside me and my @SHI_America affiliation.)

Read 5 tweets

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