Monday Lament: Wanting to be Jewish
It seemed like a good idea at the time
When I was a kid, I told people I wanted to grow up to be Jewish. I remember shocking a bunch of my mother's friends after church one Sunday when I was six years old, and one of them asked what I wanted to be. My mother never mentioned it afterward, and neither did I.
The image has stayed in my mind for seventy years, so the effect must have been memorable, for it was a German fundamentalist church, and everyone knew that Jewish people were evil.
I don't remember why I wanted that, but I may have gotten confused about who the good guys were between the Old Testament and the New Testament. I kind of liked Satan, too, but later discovered he didn't exist in the Old Testament—another good reason to like Jewish people.
There weren't many Jewish people in Indianapolis in the 1950s, at least, I couldn't identify any. My mother told me they owned all the department stores, but I could not confirm that.
Then, in high school, I discovered Shapiro's Delicatessen in the old south part of Indianapolis. The dill pickles were amazing, and the pastrami sandwiches beat the hell out of baloney. I don't eat pastrami anymore, but I miss the pickles.
I went to Butler University, which was part of the Midwest Ivy League. The Jewish kids from New York who couldn't make it into the older Ivy League often got into Butler, and I ended up with some close Jewish friends.
Jewishness was not a big issue. It was the same as my German family background, except different. We were primarily concerned with booze, cars, girls, and how many classes we could miss and still pass.
Much later, I went to work part-time for Time, Inc.'s cable TV company while doing graduate work in history and teaching History of World Civilizations. While my field was Asian history, I had to teach everything, and much of that was Jewish history just because of Western Civilization.
The cable business grew then, and I paid a lot more than teaching history part-time in college. I spent twenty years working with mostly Jewish people in media and entertainment in New York and Los Angeles. That included several Israeli engineering companies that supplied data networking equipment.
I still occasionally hear from some of those people, but they never mention Israeli things. In fact, over all those years, I don't remember ever talking about Israel or Palestine. One person worked with a guy who did graphic design, wore a yarmulka, and was serious about his Judaism, but that was not a topic.
Those people are like talking to fundamentalist Christians and, I've found, like talking to Zionists. It is not worth the time to deal with the willful ignorance.
I lament not wanting to be Jewish anymore. The Zionists have killed that with their genocide and insistence on their right to steal Palestinian land as if the Palestinians were not the original Israelis who stayed and evolved their culture, good and bad, for the last two thousand years.
No, I'm not going into the tangled history of the Eastern Mediterranean. None of it justifies genocide for greed.
And none of this has anything to do with Jewish culture and all the people I have known. I do not lament my years working with and teaching college students about the entangled and, often, idiot past that may yet kill us all if Trump has his way.
Poignant. I too was a wannabe Jew
Enjoyed the article .