There will be happiness, though muted
So a lawyer (male) writes to a judge (female) about possibly needing a brief recess in an upcoming trial because his “beautiful daughter, married and with a doctorate no less” was about to produce a baby.
Should the child be a girl, not much will happen in the way of public celebration. Some may even be disappointed, but will do their best to conceal this by saying, “as long as it’s a healthy baby.” My wife will run to Philly immediately, but I will probably be able to wait until the next weekend. There will be happiness, though muted, and this application will be mooted as well.
However, should the baby be a boy, then hoo hah! Hordes of friends and family will arrive from around the globe and descend on Philadelphia for the joyous celebration.
Is this just normal? Am I too sheltered? Is it just normal for a guy to announce (to a woman judge, no less) that when a baby turns out to be a female, happiness is muted? Is it normal for a guy to announce implicitly that his daughter, his wife, and the woman he’s addressing are all inherently disappointing and worth less? Is it normal to be so cheerful about the (putative) fact that people will zoom in from around the world for a boy but not for a girl?
His tone is facetious, but he really is asking for a provisional recess, depending on whether or not it’s a boy. Mind you, the reason for zooming to Philly is to watch the boy baby get whacked in the penis, but that’s not much compensation.
Yes, sexism is alive and thriving. I don’t see much of it myself, as I work in academia which is one of the more enlightened parts of the world. Looking beyond academia, it does seem that the amount of sexism is reduced from what it once was. But there is still a lot of it around.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: There will be happiness, though muted http://dlvr.it/8tvKx […]
Frankly it’s just fucking depressing. Here’s the guy talking about his own daughter, and he’s saying the birth of a girl is a disappointment.
It has been a considered view of mine for quite a while that the legal requirements for both registration and practice as a lawyer should include a compulsory period of six months per year working in a blue-collar occupation such as plumber’s assistant, road-mender or sewerage farm troubleshooter, and at the rates of pay going for those occupations. The intention of this is to make sure that the legal individuals do not lose contact with the real world, and so that for the other six months of the year their decisions and general performance reflect this. A stint working in contact with the general public as a supermarket checker-out, shelf-stacker or even better, public lavatory attendant would probably also help anchor their minds in reality.
As well, all lawyers should be disqualified for life from becoming members of any parliament, legislative assembly or local council.
Catch-22: who in the present legislatures, which are stacked out with lawyers, would support this?
Anyone heard any good lawyer jokes lately?
I don’t call this normal. It’s horribly demoralizing. And where I come from, lawyers are supposed to be utterly and unfailingly respectful when they address the court even in writing, even about babies, and even teaching the lexicon of Yiddish. Sheesh If this guy is as he appears, working as a plumber etc would not change his inner sexist doody head. It just fucking breaks my heart to think of his daughter, wife, future grandchild. Kimba Wood should have ripped one of his lungs out. She was too kind to require a celebration w/poetry in court if the baby is a girl. The baby girl will deserve a big mink coat and a strand of luminescent pearls.
I cannot believe this is serious. Where do they expect children come from, hmm? Certainly not from a man’s womb!
Is this guy an Orthodox Jew? Such attitudes are the norm in that crowd.
Even if he’s not Orthodox, I have a hard time dismissing the idea that it’s his religion that’s driving the sexism here. I really can’t imagine someone not steeped in that kind of culture saying such things.
Or maybe I just don’t want to.
I doubt that his attitude has much to do with the fact that he’s a lawyer. I think it may have a lot to do with the fact that he’s a religionist.
Fortunately, Ophelia, you’re not that sheltered – this is an extraordinary thing to hear or read (especially in the upper echelons of the professional world). It’s shocking, and I’d guess most people would see it that way, not just a few. The level of idiocy it takes to state such a thing to a female judge to whose indulgence you are appealing is staggering.
Good for Judge Kimba Wood’s response!
I don’t know how normal this is now, but it was true nearly 60 years ago when I was born. Boys were special & my parents only had girls. Growing up, I was repeatedly told how disappointing this was. I consider my family a typical American midwest “family values” type. I can only hope that attitudes are changing for the better, but…
And what a damned fool, too, in the Internet age. Should the child be a girl (or should he ever father a girl), it is a certainty that she will see this, and probably have her nose rubbed in it by elementary school. This is the sort of offense that deserves a sharp slap across the face from an aggrieved woman, preferably publicly.
@Janice Cornforth
Well, my mother was born in the late 1960’s and she was told by her parents that woman should do all that a man tells her. That she should cook and clean, that she should have sex with him when he demands, that she should be “seen and not heard”. I think culture, and religion play a part but my Mother was born in North-West England and her family were not particularly religious (they are now). I can’t believe this silly behaviour still continues. My Mum still continues to clean, cook and generally be treated like a slave by my father. This form of sexism has not stopped. Woman are still treated like second-class – worthless citizens.
Look, perhaps I’m a cynic, but are you absolutely sure this is Kosher (if we’re going to be using Yiddish)? I’m looking at a fax sent by a lawyer to a judge that comes with foot-notes explaining the Yiddish in the fax itself. Then her answer is scrawled underneath, and there are further footnotes to explain the Yiddish she uses. Is it normal to put foot notes on a fax explaining what parts of the fax mean, just in case the recipient doesn’t understand Yiddish?
It looks to me that we have here a fair amount of cut-and-paste and although there are all sorts of impressive looking stamps that it has been officially received and electronically filed, I am just a little dubious. After all, I can imagine the lawyer being on cloud 9 but would he use such elementary Yiddish to a judge, somebody who can make him or break him. Or is this typical American informality? I certainly can’t imagine such informality taking place in a UK court.
Is there someone who could find out what the case was about? I mean, if the accused was in court for a serious crime, how would he feel about being represented by somebody who has the chutzpah to feel that the birth of a grandson is more important than whether he (or she) will spend many years in jail.
It is in my part of the world. And that’s only if the female child is *allowed* to be born. I suppose the problem is also cultural (the male child is expected to stay with the parents and support them whereas the female is married off )
That’s a very classy response by Judge Wood.
Does everybody remember what office Judge Wood was proposed for and by whom, and what happened to her nomination?
I had to look it up. I was just thinking, we could use somebody with that kind of finesse in the Supreme Court, but that’s not what she was nominated for. Here from wikipedia:
In the Nannygate matter of 1993, Wood was Bill Clinton‘s second unsuccessful choice for United States Attorney General.[7] Like Clinton’s previous nominee, Zoë Baird, Wood had hired an illegal alien as a nanny; although, unlike Baird, she had paid the required taxes on the employee and had broken no laws. Wood employed the undocumented immigrant at a time when it was legal to do so, before enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 made hiring of illegal aliens unlawful.[8] The threat of a repetition of the same controversy quickly led to a withdrawal of Wood from consideration. Janet Reno was later nominated and confirmed for the post.
I practiced law for 8.5 years in New York City before coming back to the Midwest, and I saw this sort of attitude on display with depressing frequency . . . more often in state court practice (Judge Wood is a federal judge), and more often among lawyers with addresses in lower Manhattan (like Mr. Epstein) or near or on Court Street in Brooklyn. And although I saw this sort of retrograde sexism pretty frequently among Orthodox or Conservative Jewish male lawyers, for all I know there was similar sexism displayed by devout Roman Catholic lawyers, with whom I had less professional contact.
The requesting of continuances by means of letters (characterized by a rather personal, chatty tone and liberal sprinklings of ethnic argot) was also common in New York practice when I was there.
The case that Mr. Epstein had before Judge Wood was a federal criminal case of some sort, and if one wanted to waste the time, it would be pretty easy to go to the web site of the District Court for the Southern District of New York, look up the on-line docket, and determine what the case was about.
Judge Wood is the Chief Judge of the District Court for the S.D.N.Y. Some may remember her as the woman who was almost nominated for U.S. Attorney General back in 1992 or so, until she revealed that she had once hired an illegal immigrant as a nanny or babysitter.
I have not seen this sort of sexism in communications between lawyers and judges in the Midwest (Here, the sexism is largely confined to the communications between lawyers and lawyers, lawyers and clients, . . . . .) In my experience, it’s a New York thing. Bravo for what Judge Wood wrote in her “ruling” on the motion.
@ Jeff D
OK you seem to know all about the background, and that chatty personal letters get written within the New York legal world using plenty of ethnic argot. It surprises me, but why not be heimish.
However, if they all knew (and used) the argot, why is it necessary to use footnotes as part of the fax, and moreover, why use them in a chatty letter. It is the footnotes which make it all seem to be a show case for MCP (actually, would orthodox Jews be particularly upset if I called them male chauvinist pigs?) practises, which may be typical. I still question if the letter itself is genuine, even although the attitudes (and response) may be typical
It’s ironic that Judge Kimba Wood herself should ironically use poetry as a means of celebrating in the court the arrival of a girl baby. As, moreover, in the middle ages, for over a period of a thousand years, not a single Jewish woman wrote a halakhic, literary, theoretical, mystical, or poetic work, with the exception of a handful of poems written by Jewish women in Spain”
Well done, judge, for sticking up for women and baby girls.
One wouldn’t want to be depending on the services of this particular lawyer if one were a woman. I wonder does he realise at all (even with all his education) that he is so blatantly misogynistic. Or is he so utterly conditioned by his orthodox Jewish religion that he doesn’t see the outdated wrongfulness of his thinking.
I still question if the letter itself is genuine…
The sub-heading says: (whatever that counts for?)
This is incredibly charming and progressive on Kimba Wood’s part (and real; we checked):
Ophelia,
Don’t be shocked, he’s a lawyer! But seriously, yes it’s the kind of comment that belongs in a medieval village and not the twenty-first century. I think perhaps that it may have been Jewish humour by reading the letter in the article. He did begin by writing about his beautiful daughter, and so I don’t think an educated articulate lawyer would really be so dumb.
Of course Jewish humour is funny, unlike any other form of religious humour, precisely because it mocks itself and when you’ve been persecuted for two-thousand years, comedy clearly becomes a healthy alternative to the seriousness of almost all other religions.
Oops, should have said ‘sexist’ as opposed to misogynist.
It’s so conflictual/confusing that he should say such wonderful positive things about his daughter from an ‘outward’ perspective; but not have the same to say about her ‘inward’ body.
(and real; we checked):
Yeah, I did too.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/43380668/Bris-Order
Jan Frank wondered,
I’ve seen motions and letters (and even some orders or decisions by judges, both in and outside New York) in which colloquialisms or non-English phrases (including Yiddish) were explained in footnotes. Perhaps Mr. Epstein was using the formalism of footnotes in his letter to throw into stark relief the rest of the content — including what even he might admit are sexist outlooks and practices rooted in Jewish religious and cultural traditions – so that Judge Wood would recognize that Mr. Epstein was making a sincere request for relief (a provisional continuance) but also displaying a sense of humor about it.
I don’t know whether Judge Wood is Jewish (Her first name is borrowed from a town in Australia and she attended the London School of Economics), or how much contact she has had with Yiddish expressions, or whether Mr. Epstein knew in advance how much of the Yiddish Judge Wood would understand. So perhaps he used the footnotes just to be sure.
In the New York State trial courts just a couple of blocks away from Judge Wood’s courtroom, I attended many, many sidebar conferences at the bench and in judges’ chambers where Yiddish phrases were tossed around with abandon and with no thought of annotation or explanation, because the judges and the attorneys knew each other very well from previous encounters and also knew that the Yiddish phrases needed no further explanation.
Whoa–how ridiculous! You’re not sheltered. People might sometimes think like this, but very few actually talk like it.
Look people,
I don’t doubt for a moment you’ve had a look at the document posted on the web, so have I. But working as a graphic designer, I can make up a letter looking just like it in about 1 hour, and so can, probably, most of you. If somebody says “I’ve checked it” I don’t simply accept it. Call me a cynic if you like, but Jews have had quite a few centuries to develop humour but also to develop a healthy scepticism.
What I am questioning is the intrinsic evidence. If most of the people involved (judge, lawyers) freely use Yiddish simply because they live and work in New York, why is it necessary to add foot notes. And if this is an example of an orthodox Jewish lawyer winding up a goy feminist judge, he is even more stupid than would be expected of someone who has gone through law school. That’s why I am sceptic – it all smells faintly of a put-up job, a sort of miniature and watered down Protocols.
I know it’s nice to read all about how the judge put down this impolite lawyer (I think, personally, I would have stomped a little harder) but I am not convinced. Or am I being too difficult?
I wouldn’t joke about a boy being better than a girl, since many do still think that way. And even giving him the benefit of the doubt, he is not joking about having a big celebration for the boy but (until the judge offered) nothing for the girl.
As for it being fake, the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog doesn’t think so: http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/11/19/if-its-a-girl-judge-kimba-wood-will-celebrate/
Note the lawyer’s quote (in the Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog for all to see no less):
And on the topic of having to ask a noted female judge for time off to celebrate the birth of a boy, but not a girl, Epstein minced no words:
“Look, the Jewish religion is sexist. It just is. But I didn’t make the rules!”
This reminds me of a comment I made a few days ago (comment 16 in How Ronald Numbers reports an incident) about how theological writings are indistinguishable to parodies of theological writings. This is often termed Poe’s Law (thanks to Andy Dufresne in comment 17 of the same post):
“Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.”
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poe's_Law
And this really is because the absurdity of religious views are becoming so absurd, especially when written by supposedly educated intelligent people, that I cannot help but look upon such writings as the writings of a clown, whether intentional or not.
I rather think this is nothing more than a heavy-handed attempt at an in joke that fell a little flat. It’s all over the internet now, to Mr Epstein’s undoubted embarrassment. I don’t see anything in his, poorly chosen, words to indicate that he believes that a son is more important than a daughter; rather he seems to be talking about the general family response, but who knows if it will really be so? In any case, in judaism, isn’t the birth of a daughter also supposed to be a welcome and celebrated event? I think there’s even a special ceremony for it.
Well, according to Mr Epstein, little girls are not much to rush off work for – in a hurry. It has nothing to do with him – he didn’t make the rules, he only follows them.
Boys are more important when it comes to name-giving. They get to have names of deceased relatives, so that said names are handed down, thus keeping with the legacy of the genealoogical line. Whereas with little girls, they have to resort to divine parental spiritual intervention. Thank Heavens for little girls. Thank relatives for little boys. The latter shall keep the blood line in tact.
Jan, Kimba Wood is a public figure – if this thing were fake, that would be known by now; it would have been known before I ever saw it.
Kimba Wood isn’t just a public figure–she’s a federal district court judge. Her court’s motions and requests for continuances and the like are matters of public record. Not easy to fake at all.
I’m having a hard time seeing what the fuss is about. The lawyer would prefer not to have a continuance, he only wants the continuance if it means personal hardship (being ostracized). He would not be ostracized if a girl was born and he waited until the weekend to fly up, he would be if it were a boy and he waited.
The lawyer almost certainly should have stopped there with the letter, the rest of it is going on about the sexism of the various relatives, which, while likely true (to the point of being a cliche), didn’t need to be revealed. The tone of it struck me as being somewhat snarky–that the relatives might feel that a girl is less an opportunity for celebration, but that he, of course, is above that.
It wasn’t clear to me from the judge’s reply whether the rest of the court–the DA, the jury, etc. would be involved in the public reading of poetry glorifying women should a girl be born. That strikes me as being fairly contemptuous of the jurors as well as a waste of state funds.
David, try harder.
It is a stylistic miscalculation perhaps, David, but style here reveals substance. Epstein could have said to Judge Wood that he would appreciate a continuance so he could participate in a religious obligation surrounding the birth of a grandchild. After all, his daughter might have been planning a Simcha Bat, the naming ceremony for Jewish girls, which is increasingly popular among Jewish families. There was no need to say more.
I have long been an admirer of Judge Wood. I felt she was shafted by the Clinton administration, in fact. Not only did she not violate the law, but she assisted the nanny in question in gaining documentation. The woman said at the time that Judge Wood had been a mentor to her and had helped her to advance in her life subsequently.
I’ve tried, but apparently I’m coming at this the wrong way. As I see it, there are two possible things to complain about–asking for a continuance if the baby should be a boy but not a girl, or writing that his relations value boys over girls.
The first seems proper to me–continuances disrupt trials, I would have thought that judges would rather avoid them if possible. I’m obviously wrong here, because the judge has said that she would schedule a continuance even if it weren’t necessary, so perhaps predictability is more important (actually, if I wanted to get offended, I might interpret her reply as saying the court would have a mandatory public ceremony should a girl be born, but have the day off if it were a boy, which seems a bit asymmetrical).
The second? Well, I’ve been taught not to air family dirty laundry in public, and it seems that it would have been a good idea if he followed suit as far as possible, and instead just said that his relatives would essentially disown him if he missed the bris.
So, which is causing the contention? The first, the second, or both?
Well I could understand this attitude if the guy in question already had four kids and all of ’em were girls. That doesn’t appear to be the case, however.
If it’s his first child, then he’s a bit of an idiot.
How does having four girls make a difference?
I’m not trying to be deliberately obtuse, I really don’t understand which of the points I’ve asked about is causing the hubbub, or if I’ve missed it altogether.
Julia, I would have thought that a continuance was an unusual event and a lawyer should ask for one only if a hardship were involved. In this case, if the grandchild were a boy and the lawyer skipped the bris there would be hard feelings and he would be shunned by the various relatives. That’s a hardship. If the grandchild were a girl then there would be no ceremony to skip and he wouldn’t be shunned. No hardship. Even if there were a naming ceremony for the girl, if he wouldn’t be shunned by not showing up (and very likely he wouldn’t–by your description it’s a relatively new ceremony and there is unlikely to have the social imperative to attend) there wouldn’t be enough of a hardship to warrant a continuance.
As I noted before, my thoughts about continuances requiring hardships is obviously wrong–the judge has decided to grant a continuance regardless. Perhaps the lawyer should have phrased his request differently–asking for a conditional continuance should his grandchild be a boy, or, if the judge felt generous, an unconditional continuance. To me that smacks a bit of telling the judge what to do. Swapping the order–asking for an unconditional continuance, or, if the judge feels that that isn’t warranted, at the least a conditional continuance–also seems awkward. Explaining the reasons for the conditional continuance, and letting the judge decide to grant it or to extend it to an unconditional continuance still seems to me to be the correct approach, and I still don’t see what I’m missing.
I don’t think the sexist part is particularly intentional (I suspect its mainly a lame attempt at irony on the authors part). On the other hand his letter basically says, “Hey Judge, can I have the day off to attend a genital mutilation ceremony?”
Distasteful letter. Sad. No dignity. Sounds like a “stage Jew.” (Woody Allen tends in that direction.) But I imagine every tribe or ethnic group has them — preeners who want everyone to know that they are of X religion or Y ethnicity. You’ve got the stage Scot, and the stage Irishman, the stage Swede et al.
To boot, maybe more importantly, pity the poor client who is now associated forever with such an embarrassing letter.
And the extra time — i.e legal fees — for which the client probably paid. May yet be paying.
It’s sexist to have a celebration for a boy baby but not for a girl, and to make a point of saying how everyone will fly in and it will be a huge deal if the baby is a precious boy, but not a girl.
I hope Epstein has a granddaughter and there’s some media attention surrounding the poetry readings. =)
I’m inclined to view the letter in part as a work of humor, hence the superfluous footnotes, the playful pairing of “muted” and “mooted”, and the note that the bris is “joyous to everyone except, apparently, the baby.” The author’s own sexism is only expressed in his hope that the baby will be a boy. A less artistic effort might not have merited attention, even with the judge’s wonderful ruling.
It’s astonishing that they don’t already know the child’s sex. Surely they must at least have had sonograms to check for gross abnormalities. What sort of person chooses to remain ignorant?
We didn’t choose to not know our baby’s sex, but the sonograms weren’t conclusive. I know people who don’t want to know; they seem like fairly decent people, if that answers your question.
In many parts of the world it is still fairly ‘traditional’ to not know the sex of the child right until it is born. This tends to dovetail with the sort of sonogram you get offered in Western European state health care – i.e. you usually only get one examination with ultrasound and that is at an earlier stage when it is not certain that the sex of the child will be obvious.
There was some concern a few years ago about sonograms damaging the hearing of the fetus. I’m not sure whatever came from that, but it seems like a reasonably good idea to not peek for more or longer than is medically useful.