I, too, love Seinfeld, but is there not a problem when the show is cited as a referent for one’s Jewish identity? For many of us, being Jewish has become, above all things, funny. All that’s left in the void of fluency and profundity is laughter…Despite having been raised in an intellectual and self-consciously Jewish home, I knew almost nothing about what was supposedly my own belief system. And worse, I felt satisfied with how little I knew. Sometimes I thought of my stance as… an achievement, but there’s no achievement in passive forfeiture.

It is now well known that people are generally accurate and (sometimes embarrassingly) honest about their personalities when profiling themselves on social networking sites…In fact, the mechanized medium of the Internet causes not concealment but disinhibition, giving us both confessional behavior and ugly brusqueness. When the medium is impersonal, people are prepared to be personal…Arguably, the Catholic church has long recognized this, which is why the confessor is separated from the priest by a grill or curtain. To get people to open up about themselves, psychoanalysts used to ask their patients to lie on a couch looking away from the doctor. Most of us have experienced this phenomenon whereby we talk more freely about something intimate when walking or driving with a friend, facing forward parallel.

When I talk to women who were working mothers in the ’60s and when I talk to the working mothers today in 2011, they sound the same. They use exactly the same words. They say, ‘I’m torn, I’m not really a good mother, I’m not being a really good wife, and I’m not being a really good professional.’ Women who have kids are just as torn as we were back then.