Wednesday, October 20, 2010

The Jews

I'm a Jew. You already know from my teeny profile on the side of the blog. It's nothing new.
I also grew up in a small town without very many of us (Jews, I mean). This means that the 9 Jewish children in my Hebrew school class was the most exposure I ever got to Jewish teens. Some of them went to a Jew summer camp. They would come back with tales about this boy or that girl or whatever happened behind the cabins. Seriously, Jew camp is way worse than band camp. I never went to camp. I always viewed it as matchmaking. The Jewish parents knew that their children would mess around with the opposite sex sometime and they preferred it be out of town with "nice Jewish kids" instead of in town and with the goyim.

My dad always joked about Jew camp. He would sing "Don't kiss a boy if he's a goy, but you can screw if he's a jew" to the tune of Lo Yisa Goy (A traditional prayer). At 12, I would squeal "Daaad! That's GROSS!"

As I got older and kissed many, many boys that were goys I realized that my dad (who, ironically, married shiksas... twice) actually had a point. It's not that non-jewish boys aren't great and it isn't that Jewish boys are... but I like Jewish boys better. Prepare yourself for a ton of stereotypes coming at you.

First of all, I consider myself an intellectual. I read poetry and visit art galleries for fun. I enjoy discussing "the BIG questions" and I like imagining a better world. For years, I considered myself an anarchist after voraciously reading everything Emma Goldman ever wrote. Granted, I wasn't so much of a fan of her when she drifted more towards communism during the Spanish Civil War but her early stuff was great. So, when I look at a guy as a potential boyfriend, I want him to be able to at least tolerate my idealism and pretentious interpretation of art.

What I'm saying is that Jewish culture places an emphasis on knowledge and understanding. Two out of the three Jewish boys I've kissed are incredibly intellectual and the boys I grew up with are as well. We're taught that our duty to the world, as Jews, is to question everything. Especially, authority. We're taught that knowledge is power and that things change. The Torah, Nevi'im and Kituvim are living documents. They are meant to be reinterpreted with every generation and that inquisitiveness is so vital to the tradition, that without it, I don't think Judaism and the Jews could have possibly survived the ages.

Secondly, it's just easier. I'm too lazy to explain my holidays to anyone else. I don't want to date someone that jokes he has bad "jewdar" or asks me " What is Yom Kippur?" or "really? You don't do Christmas?" Really. I don't do Christmas.

I want to be able to joke about how I got socks for Hannukah or that Purim when the Rabbi dressed up as a PE teacher from the 70's and ended up looking like a guy from a porno. I want to joke about the Yom Kippur service when acrobats went up to the Bimah and the woman I was with simply said "My father is rolling in his grave right now. Let's go." and we left. Horrified.

There's so much vocabulary I'd have to teach someone and so many cultural mores. When I told my grandmother that I wanted to study forestry, she said "But that's so difficult to explain to my bridge group. It's not like you're becoming a doctor or a lawyer or maybe even a rabbi!" To Jews, this is funny. It's expected. It's what Jewish grandmothers say. To boys that aren't Jewish, they stare at me strangely for a minute and then ask, "rabbi?"

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