The Intercultural Communications Approach Good morning! On today’s episode of “The Pretend Jew,” our heroine waivers on hosting the Hanukkah open house in her home because her Christmas tree is still up. And who doesn’t love her confused expression every time she’s in synagogue (she doesn’t speak Hebrew!) and has no idea when to sit down! And here’s your hostess…
My dad has stories, and he wants to tell them, but wants to know the listener is interested. I hear it in my dad’s voice, particularly when he is talking to my son. “What do you want to know,” he asks. “Ask me anything.” And then there’s silence, or “I don’t know.” There is that “you…
Expectations for customer service around the globe are different. I can remember walking unacknowledged into a busy restaurant in Greece only to leave because we didn’t get how it worked (and told later by someone from Greece we should have just barged in and found ourselves a table). Not only do practices vary by culture, but even…
My 14 year old son announced a 5” (yes, that’s a five inch) restraining order against me the week before his first year in high school. From this point forward, I am no longer allowed to touch my little punkin’, the one whom I squeezed and held and diapered and comforted for all of these…
I find when I start to write about something else, it often comes home to me being the hero of the story. For example, this is really a piece about how nice it would be for everyone to adapt the “Family First” sentiment that is part of Hispanic culture to the United States. But, as…
I learned a few weeks ago that there were going to be 800 students from Brazil in Chicago this summer, studying at the Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois Chicago and University of Chicago. I immediately sent a proposal to IIT to offer a workshop on Communicating and Socializing with USAmericans. They need to…
The lady was standing in front of the cash register with a tray full of baskets of fresh cooked battered and fried somethings, as they entered the road side stop somewhere in the middle of Illinois. “What are those?” asked her teenage son. “Fried chicken gizzards,” said the ‘gas station chef’ as she placed the…
As we prepared for our son’s Bar Mitzvah last month, we began to get questions such as “What should I wear?” “What do I need to do?” Half of our family is not Jewish, and the half that is Jewish came from a Reformed tradition, but by geography and a Rabbi we liked, we ended…
The first paragraph I will hopefully delete before publishing: I most often get writer’s block by triviality–Interculturalism has to do with anti-racism, and there is awful cr#@ happening in the world because of intolerance, and I can’t help but belie my position of privilege by writing about making Panettone Bread Pudding in the middle of…
I could not be more proud that my son can watch Aladdin and immediately realize that the underlying stereotype when only the villain speaks with a Middle Eastern accent. Or questioning the underlying bias of the positioning of modern African folk art as items of tribal ritual in an art museum. After all, we’ve been…
