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I

f your parents were anything like mine they probably told you at some point not to “make a federal case” out of something. But back when I was ten making a federal case was exactly what I did.

As a ten-year-old gung ho athlete I wanted to play baseball. Not just backyard sandlot pickup games — real baseball games. To do that I decided to join Little League. But in those years of busing and civil rights and desegregation Little League was strictly all male. Girls were welcome at games of course but as family and fans only. Undaunted two friends and I showed up early one Saturday morning money and registration forms in hand. We were told that not only could we not play we couldn’t even register as we were (obviously) girls.

I arrived home fuming. “Sue them!”

My parents did just that.

In a case that landed me on the front page of the Boston Globe for weeks (and more embarrassingly on the bulletin board of my fifth-grade classroom) and made me and several other like-minded girls around the nation the talk of the radio talk shows we took Little League to federal court.

And lost.

After Judge W. Arthur Garrity (of Boston desegregation and busing fame) handed down the verdict I was interviewed outside the courtroom.

“Why do you think you lost?” one reporter asked.

“Because the judge was on the boys’ side” I answered in my black-and-white understanding of the world’s rights and wrongs. What other reason could there possibly be?

So I played in a girls’ softball league a hastily assembled consolation prize with the non-PC name of GALS (Girls American League for Softball). I played softball in junior high and high school. I played in pickup games. And 12 years after I made a federal case about it I showed up at Neve Yerushalayim almost on a dare.

Although I’d been keeping the basics of Shabbos and kashrus for two years I had yet to crack open a sefer of any kind. But emotional fuel only keeps you running for so long; it was time to hit the books and get myself a Jewish education.

I loved most everything about Neve but I did not love the dress code which required students to wear skirts anathema to a girl who’d had to buy a dress for her high school graduation because she didn’t own one. My blue jeans were blacklisted. I wore them anyway.