She was my Hebrew school bully — and I finally learned what happened to her

The author and the invitation to her bat mitzvah at Congregation Beth Too-Far-Away. Courtesy of Joan Afton

It was the ’70s and my parents thought the synagogue closest to us was “too country club.” It was on the WASP-y side of Evanston, in the suburbs of Chicago. It was too expensive, too concerned with appearances, and most important, too blandly reform. Meanwhile, the one housed in a renovated storefront a few miles down the road in deepest Skokie was clearly “too frum.”

My folks, both children of immigrants, had come to the realization that, in spite of being atheists themselves, they wanted their children to have some kind of sense of Jewishness after all. Which is how my brother and I wound up 45 minutes away at a synagogue I’ll call “Beth Too-Far-Away,” the first and, at the time, maybe the only secular humanist synagogue in the Midwest.

My dad had been brought up Orthodox, stopped believing quite young and stopped any kind of observance as soon as he’d left my grandma’s home. My mom on the other hand had been brought up by socialist non-believers, so she didn’t have far to travel to meet up with my father’s atheism. They met and married in the ’60s, had two kids, and when their apartment in the city went condo and kicked all the renters out, they moved to a particularly Jewish suburb (“For the schools!” What could be more Jewish than that?).

And so we lived in Skokie, cheaper and more accessible than Evanston but close enough to go to their schools. We had a menorah, one phonetic prayer that we used for all the days of Hanukkah, and a spare cabinet shelf for all the dishes and glassware we needed when Grandma came for meals. And that was that until I was about six, my brother Tom was 10, and it was time to start thinking about planning for his Bar Mitzvah.

“Oh, Grandma, I’ll have a Bat Mitzvah!” I remember piping up once, when Tom was expressing some reluctance.

She put me on her lap, stroked my hair. “Darling, Bat Mitzvahs do not count,” she said.

Right.

In those years, my father was a traveling salesman, selling industrial gravel throughout his region of the Upper Midwest, including Detroit. So we had a series of monster American-made cars, GMs of various kinds, and once he had driven his Pontiac or whatever it was into the ground, he would hand it down to my mother, who was working behind the scenes at the nearby Skokie Library and hated driving. She’d use it for short errands, to get to and from work, and to drive us to that little tiny secular humanist Sunday School.

The little tiny synagogue had a little tiny school building, where the teachers were mostly other parents. There was not enough space to hold all the classes at once, so we would go in shifts, and my brother and I were just far enough apart in age that our shifts never overlapped. So Mom volunteered to work at the little tiny temple library/gift shop, since we were going to be there all day on Sundays anyway. One child would hang out with her there before or after their class, waiting for the other one, and afterwards, we’d all go home together.

Because we lived so far away, we did not have any friends at Beth Too-Far-Away. But Tom had, I think, an OK time there. As for me, this was my first and worst experience of being bullied.

Who knows, looking back, why these things happen? What was the weakness that they smelled on me? It wasn’t just that I was from the outside — there were two other girls who also were the only ones from their schools (who were, not coincidentally the only ones who were kind of nice to me).

Was it because I was early to puberty? Because I was unfashionable, wearing Tom’s hand-me-downs and whatever, thrown on in our rush to leave the house at the crack of dawn for the long-ass commute? Because I lurked in the gift shop, reading for hours? Certainly the elderly rusted-out Pontiac parked next to the fancy Mercedes Benzes in the staff area also did not help.

Whatever the reason, it was basically Lord of the Flies.

We learned about Sandy Koufax and Marc Spitz (“See?! Jews can be good at sports!”). We read My Name is Asher Lev and Isaac Bashevis Singer folktales, and sang “Morning is Broken” and “Tum Balalaika” in the Sunday school chorus.  And there was never a moment I was not subjected to some kind of merciless abuse.

The ringleader was a girl who, even all these years later, I will give a nom-de-bully. Let’s call her Tiffanie Moskowitz. She was by far not the prettiest girl, but she set the tone for fashions as well as everything else. She was the first to start wearing high-heeled clogs, makeup and dangly earrings — ON SUNDAY MORNINGS. If she wore the barrettes with the little ribbons woven in them, by the next week the rest of the girls did, too.

Tiffanie would prompt her minions to tease or try to provoke me, to come up with rumors about me as a sort of hazing ritual of them: Were they willing to do her bidding? How far would they go?

The boys started off oblivious, doing their own things, but a few years in, when we hit middle school age, they seemingly reluctantly joined in too — to impress the girls, to stay on Tiffanie’s good side. We went on a weekend retreat thing, and on the way home the boys figured out which suitcase was mine and emptied the contents all over the back of the bus.

I kept this whole terrible time mostly to myself, until my new friend at Real School, back in Evanston, asked me why I, generally a rule-abiding geek, kept writing the same phrase over and over, in small block lettering on desks and tables in each classroom.

Just the other day, more than 40 years later, I was asked if that friend would still remember the phrase I was defacing school property with. I should have put money on it: I said I was sure she did.

“Oh yeah of course,” she said when I asked her, not missing a beat. “I HATE TIFFANIE MOSKOWITZ.’”

Because I did.

I hated Tiffanie Moskowitz.

On Sundays, I would hope the snow or rain would be too bad for mom to drive. I would get real and imagined fevers, headaches, stomachaches. But I was too young at first to stay home by myself, and dad, after all, was on the road a lot of the time.

So on we went.

Even now, it still sits oddly with me that my extremely anxious, watchful parents never did quite get to asking what was wrong, when so clearly something was. Part of me was hiding the truth from them, for fear of, what, making it worse somehow? And part of me was investing in a stubborn you-can’t-make-me-quit attitude that I still haven’t quite abandoned.

Where were the teachers?

They were the moms (and occasional dad) of the bullies in question, or friends of the other moms of their friends, so they were no help. At all.

Finally, finally, it was time to start Hebrew lessons, get that damn Bat Mitzvah, and get the hell out. These intensive lessons were held during the week at the Rabbi’s house in a not quite so far-flung suburb, taught by the Rabbi’s wife. And lo, it came to pass one sunny spring afternoon, that I was coming to this lesson right from some Event Day at school, and so was mildly dressed up, with even a teeny bit of makeup on.

I rang the bell, and the Rabbi’s wife let me in and the previous student out: It was Tiffanie’s right-hand hench-girl — let’s call her Jenny Greenberg. Quite pretty, rather dumb. I think of her now as the muscle in a mobster film: always hovering a step or two behind Tiffanie, never the one to come up with the ideas herself, but content to act as the enforcer, check on potential strays and see if they’d done the malicious thing they were tasked with: Had Ellen started calling me the horrible nickname of the week? Had Mike snapped my bra strap from the back? She laughed first and hardest — always, I see now, searching for instant approval.

On this day, though, Jenny was, unlike her Sunday morning feathered-hair-and-makeup-and-tall-clogs self, wearing sneakers, no makeup, a dorky t-shirt… and her orthodontic night brace.

In silence, we stared each other up and down. I was, for the first time, taller than she was.

Before this moment, it had literally never occurred to me that the girls were dressing up for Sunday School. That they were probably, judging by Jenny’s look on this random Wednesday, sneaking into those clothes and jewelry after they left their houses, maybe even changing in the girls’ bathroom at temple I tried to avoid at all costs, because it was just another place for them to gang up and be mean to me.

Aha!

Mrs. Rabbi, sensing something was up, but not knowing our Sunday Situation, shooed Jenny off, offered me a nice cold drink, and we picked up where we’d left off the week before.

From then on, the spell was broken.

No one at Beth Too-Far-Away, to be clear, was ever nice to me except those other two vaguely-outcast girls, but there was a détente of some kind. I didn’t dress up, per se, after this on Sundays, but I made a bit more of an effort. And one day one of the suitcase-emptying boys complimented me on something, and then, when I was the only one who had done the reading and helped him with an answer, he thanked me.

I remember shooting a look at Jenny across the room. She shrugged, but then looked down.

Not long after, I had my Bat Mitzvah, where I read my Torah portion and gave a speech about the feminist message missing from the story of the Garden of Eden. After which I had the obligatory luncheon at one of those banquet places with my family and my parents’ friends, and they took me and six of my friends to see the new Bob Fosse musical Dancin’ at night. And that was pretty much that.

Until last month.

Another old friend and I were talking about this and that, and the subject of the hated Tiffanie Moskowitz came up. He asked me if I knew whatever became of Tiffanie, and I, who had wanted to block this whole time from my memory, had never thought to look her up and see.

It took all of about two minutes on LinkedIn for us to find the answer that seems as unbelievable and far-fetched as it is appropriate and true.

Yes, Tiffanie Moskowitz, the bully of Congregation Beth Too-Far-Away, works for ICE.

One final note: Ever since my bat mitzvah, I’ve found myself trying to stand up against bullies in various ways. And so I’ve been wondering what I’d write on my sign for the next Day of Action, here in LA. I had been thinking of “ICE BULLIES ARE COWARDS,” but maybe right below, I’ll add a small but tasteful and stylish “I STILL HATE TIFFANIE MOSKOWITZ.”