Question

It doesn’t look like there’s a way to do this in jQuery, but I thought I’d ask you fine folks if there’s a clever work around that will let me avoid parent().parent().parent() .

I’m basically looking to accomplish something like this: $('#myId').parent('li')

Answer 1

Try the .closest() selector

$('#myId').closest('li');

This will traverse up its ancestors in the DOM tree..

Check FIDDLE