Is it feminism to pose naked with a challah?

Reader(s)!  Please note that sometime over the next week I will be shifting the blog over to http://blog.vickiboykis.com to make room for a front page that doesn’t make me look like a crazed Nutella lover, a fact that people will find out only on the blog. Mwuahahaha.  Not too drastic of a change, but you’ll want to update your bookmarks. RSS shouldn’t be affected *crosses fingers* Danke schoen.

Thanks to a tip from Mr. B’s cousin, I am now writing looking at the trainwreck that is The Year of the Jewish Woman Calendar (MOST DEFINITELY NSWF,) produced by Jamie  Sneider (whose blog is also somewhat NSWF.) Here is the full set of pictures for the 2009 calendar.

Go ahead, take a glance at the half-naked woman with the brisket. Also with a challah.  What a nice Shabbat meal.  And the, uh, body heat keeps her warm, right?

Here’s what Sneider writes about her motivations for the calendar,

This calendar is dedicated to my Nana, Edith Sneider.

Edith managed a bakery in Miami, Florida called “Kosher Treats.” She loved kibitzing and schmoozing with the customers, and she especially loved the baked goods.

During our family trips to Florida, each day my Papa took my sister and I to visit my Nana at her bakery. When we walked in my Nana would yell, “THESE ARE MY GRANDCHILDREN EVERYONE!” And then I’d always order the Rainbow Sprinkle cookie and my sister would get the Chinese Cookie with a dollop of chocolate.

I have fond memories of my Nana’s refrigerator full of small white bakery boxes she brought home from the bakery. When everyone was sleeping, I would open the boxes and sample the delicious pastries. I especially loved the cold chocolate-dipped, jelly finger cookies on a warm Miami night!

The idea for this calendar began in April 2008, when I walked into a Jewish bakery in Los Angeles. The smell of rugelach, babka and hamantashens brought me back to my childhood, and the love I had for my grandparents.
This calendar is in honor of all of my grandparents: Edith and Benjamin Sneider, and Max and Bertha Shuman.

This calendar has become so much more than an ‘ode to food.’ It is a celebration of my identity as a Jewish woman. I wanted to express the strength, humor and sexuality that I love about a Jewish woman, and all women. It’s my ode to being alive.

That’s heartwarming.  I know now that the way I’ll be honoring both of my dead grandmothers (one Jewish and one not) is by wearing, alternately, hamentashen instead of real clothes, and suggestively posing naked with some spires of St. Basil’s Cathedral in strategic places.  Hey, I know feminism says you’re not supposed to judge women for how they express feminism.  And Judaism says you’re supposed to embrace whatever encourages Jewish culture amongst the youth.

But honestly.  I think this is an awful way of expressing both because it doesn’t offer sexy innuendo as much as it does shove sex down your throat and cheapens some of the best parts of Judaism.  I did like the Rosh HaShana picture, but, honestly, I think it would have been much more tasteful if it were at least a pregnant naked woman, who truly symbolizes rebirth, instead of an ode to vanity, which this calendar seems to be.

A shekel for your thoughts?