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Nov. 20, 2009
Rabbi David Aaron: How to make every second of your life come first
Caroline B. Glick: Whither American Jewry
Nov. 19, 2009
Binyamin L. Jolkovsky: Please Listen to this Godcast (5 minutes)
Jonathan Tobin: ADL Crosses the Line with Report Bashing Obama Critics
Nov. 18, 2009
Rabbi Yonason Goldson: What Judaism has to say about the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile
JWisdom.com: The (Jewish) Dating Game with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (8 minutes)
Nov. 17, 2009
Steven Emerson: How Does the 4th Amendment Impact Terror Finance Investigations?
JWisdom.com: If Frank Sinatra married Edith Piaf with Rabbi Y.Y. Rubinstein (2 minutes) Life lessons from what would be regarded as the most inappropriate lyrics ever sung
Nov. 16, 2009
The Jewish Ethicist by Rabbi Dr. Asher Meir : When borrowing is stealing
JWisdom.com: Deconstructing faith with Rabbi Warren Goldstein (9 minutes)
Nov. 13, 2009
JWisdom.com Sarah's subjective reality with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 6 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick: Obama's failure, Netanyahu's opportunity
Nov. 12, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet By Marialisa Calta : A sweet sweet potato treat
JWisdom.com Does God get tired? with Rabbi Harvey Belovski ( 5 minutes)
Nov. 11, 2009
Rabbi Avi Shafran: Jews and money: When anti-Semitism isn't
JWisdom.com Marriages are not made in Heaven with Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff (VERY fast 15 minutes)
Nov. 10, 2009
Michael Doyle: Author of book exposing CAIR ordered to remove supporting documents from Web
JWisdom.com If the creation so loudly shouts the existence of the Creator, why aren't more people believers? with Rabbi Naftali Brawer (9 minutes)
Nov. 9, 2009
Mark Steyn: Shooter exposes hole in U.S. terror strategy
JWisdom.com It's never too late to have a happy childhood with Sarah Chana Radcliffe (5 minutes)
Nov. 6, 2009
Rabbi Berel Wein: Choosing to hear
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick The mullahs' big week
Suzanne Fields A Fallen Wall for Fallen Man
Nov. 5, 2009
The Kosher Gourmet: Three scrumptious -- but simple -- butternut squash dishes
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger: Should prayers be covered?
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
Martin Peretz: Beware, Barack. Beware, Rahm. Beware, Axelrod
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater? With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The Holocaust is now on Facebook
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 29, 2003
Mortimer B. Zuckerman: Graffiti On History's Walls (MUST-READ!)

Jewish World Review June 15, 2009 / 24 Sivan 5769

Mom-and- paparazzi

By Betsy Hart


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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | My sister was the first of us five kids to graduate from college. It was the 1970s, and I was in attendance. While my father was shooting pictures he was doing so — it was later discovered — without film. The only pictures salvaged from that day were a few photos I snapped on my crummy camera. (The kind with the replaceable flash cube that sat on the top; remember those?)


Flash forward, so to speak, and I watched the young children pouring out of our elementary school on their last day of classes recently and a horde of photographers, in the form of parents, were climbing over each other in an effort to get the perfect shot — or 50 — of their little darlings exiting the school.


My brother aptly refers to such mob scenes of camera-toting parents as "the mom-and-paparazzi." They are everywhere. I still marvel when I see them at neighborhood block parties snapping their cameras as their 4-year-old child comes down the slide or jumps in a bouncy house. Are they really going to keep and look at all these photos anyway?


Personally, I forgot my camera for my son's 8th grade graduation last week. OK, my bad. I stand in awe of the multi-generational parties commonly held by parents for their child's high school graduation this time of year, replete with piles of gifts. True my friends and I had lots of parties when we graduated from high school, it's just that our parents had no part of them and we would have thought it was really weird if they had.


OK, I also admit I like having photos of my four kids that tell the story of our lives. Yes, I frame some and put them around my house. I even have a few photos of my children getting onto a school bus or out of school on their last day. Though typically these are sent to me by a member of the mom-and-paparazzi who happen to snap my child in the process of getting to theirs, knowing my child's "achievement" would not otherwise be chronicled.


Really full disclosure is that I keep a pretty cool series of scrapbooks. But while rarely a page might feature just one child, my goal in these books is to tell the general story of our life as a family, not just to chronicle every move, from mundane to supposedly magnificent, of the individuals within it.


Anyway I know snapping a few too many photos of our kids walking out of elementary school isn't a terrible parental infraction, and taking pictures is just so much easier than it used to be. OK, maybe I'm just grumpy because it never would have occurred to my mother to be waiting for me on the last day of school — with a camera.


So still, I have to think that maybe the mom-and-paparazzi regularly treating their kids like little celebrities is one more symptom of a much larger "all about me" problem in our culture.

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