First off, apologies for not delivering this news letter yesterday as I’m sure you were all waiting with baited breath for my newsletter to arrive in your inbox. I’ve been in the throws of recording a new album, losing a lot of sleep thanks to perimenopause, and then there was the fact that I abandoned this subject three times before finally finishing it this morning for y’all. Comedy comes in three’s so…third time was a charm I suppose.
And now I present to you: Jew-ish, The Jerome Greenblatt Effect
When I was growing up in a Southern Baptist household in the Bible Belt, I heard a lot of conflicting things about Jewish people: Jesus was the king of them, they were the chosen people (interpreted by my mother as God’s favorites but who weren’t going to heaven because they don’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah…even though Jesus was Jewish), they were rich but also tight with money, they were smart and were persecuted because of it, oh, and they didn’t like being in nature. That last one was a racist assumption made about all Jewish people by my uncle who went on a float trip with a Jewish guy who freaked out when he threw a garter snake at him.
My family’s interpretation and the Bible’s interpretation of the Jewish people were the only things I was taught about these “chosen” ones. Seeing as my high school was not in an affluent part of St. Louis, we had zero first-hand experience with getting to know Jews as peers and in college there weren’t any at the low-ranking state school that I attended. Not even professors. Can you imagine?
It wasn’t until I went to Boston University for my master’s degree and rented a room in a boarding house in the middle of Brookline, Massachusetts, that I had my first taste of what life was like living among American Jews. I mean, Brookline is the Williamsburg of Boston so how could I not?? My landlords were an old Jewish couple who fought like George Costanza’s parents from Seinfeld, there were chabads and synogogues on every block and bagels galore! I was the minority in my Jewish American neighborhood and I gotta say, I loved it. I loved unlearning all the things I was told about these people and then I literally fell in-love with a nice Jewish boy from Chicago.
…I was ready to get boo’d up and meet his family in Chicago when his bi-polarity hit a mountain high and then he told me that he was bi-sexual.
His name was Jerome Greenblatt. He was short, he was adorable, he was a playwright, and he had a wild abandon about him that I had never experienced in a guy before. One Friday he just said, “Let’s go to New York City and see some shows!” He was a man without a plan and it was delightful. We grabbed a Chinatown bus to NYC, we stepped into Times Square and he looked up and said, “Where should we stay?”. A giant “M” caught his eye and he exclaimed, “There!” So, we stayed at the Milford Plaza Hotel for two nights and went on a whirlwind of show-watching: Chicago with Bebe Neuwirth and Anne Reinking, Rent with Adam Pascal and Daphne Ruben-Vega and The Capeman (boy, that one was a stinker.) After an unpredictable, hot and heavy couple of months, I was ready to get boo’d up and meet his family in Chicago when his bi-polarity hit a mountain high and then he told me that he was bi-sexual. I just couldn’t process that like the kids these days and I had to say “adieu”. Call it unevolved or whatever else you want, but I couldn’t fathom the idea of competing with other women and men for the attention of someone I thought I was falling in love with. Nevertheless, Jerome Greenblatt never left my heart and ignited a newfound love for Jewish boys.
When I moved to NYC and met Jason, my future husband, he casually mentioned that his dad was Jewish but his mother wasn’t so…technically, he wasn’t. Buuuuuuut…I had high hopes of there being traces of that New York Jewishness that had become so beloved in all things great comedy. Funniness was a prerequisite to co-existing in my world and for me, no one, and I mean no one, did that better than Norman Lear, Mel Brooks and Larry David…with the exceptions of Richard Pryor and Dave Chapelle, but that’s IT! I was disappointed to learn that Jason’s father had passed away and that the whole family was atheist. Whatever. I could overlook a lot being a co-dependent mid-westerner. Did that last sentence sound insensitive, about the death of his father? Probably. Anyway, our kids ended-up having Jewish last names and we tried to celebrate Rosh Hashanah once, but mainly because Jason wanted an excuse to not go to work. That was the extent of me living my dream of becoming a full-fledged shiksa.
shiksa = non-Jewish woman dating or married to a Jewish man.
So, when I started dating someone with a real Jewish family, I felt right at home. Walking into my partner Tor’s family’s Hanukkah for the first time was a moment of celebration, pride, happiness and accomplishment. I did it. I became a part of a world I admired from afar and longed for for over a decade. This family was loving, kind, devout but not fanatical, knowledgeable, considerate, compassionate and a lot like my own Christian family back in St. Louis…minus the punch fights, verbal abuse and occasional incest.
They welcomed my boys with open arms and everyone else no matter their race, color or creed. By now, I had moved to the east in the way of my spiritual practice which included daily meditations, reading the Bhagavad Gita, listening to Ram Dass and Alan Watts on repeat, and practicing the 100-Syllable Mantra of Vajrasattva. I was basically a Jew-Bu-Christian with Arab blood running through my veins who was taking it all in, all the while raising two future men experiencing religions and values from different perspectives and hoping that one day, they would be able to make an informed decision about their own paths of fulfillment. What could be more American than that? Having the freedom to engage and practice in whatever the heart desires no matter your origin or beliefs, and the security in knowing that you are allowed.
And then October 7th happened.
I’ll just let that sit there for a sec.
*Long sigh*
At a time when I believed Tor’s family would be coming together in solidarity over the horrific attack on Israel by a terrorist group, they didn’t. I truly did not understand the magnitude of this conflict and how it has manifested in the varying viewpoints between Jews; arguably the most persecuted people to ever roam the earth. How could any Jew defend the cause of an Iran-backed regime? But some family members were defending it. The elders of the family were enraged and afraid for their Israeli family and friends. The younger intellectuals of the family were righteous and afraid for the Palestinians. Almost seven months later, everyone is now afraid and the family is divided. The only person who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind loudly and proudly was Tor. In the height of the feelings around those emotional first couple of weeks, he re-storied a family member’s story of conflicting belief on Instagram which set off its own kind of air-to-ground missile that divided the family to liken Moses parting the Red Sea. And now we are exiled. Sound familiar?
Which brings me back to my original experience with family. No matter the struggle, no matter the disagreements, no matter the heinous, egregious, country-as-fuck, ignorant shit that went down in my own St. Louis family, at the end of the day, we were there for each other. When my aunt was going to be sent to the state psych ward, my mother took her in against the rest of the family’s wishes because she would have been lost forever in that system. As a kid I remember my mom and her other sister flying out of the front door of my grandma’s house like wild animals beating the shit out of each other over the whole thing and guess what? We all still celebrated Christmas together a few months later. Family is family, no matter what. You didn’t have to agree with one another in order to continue to love each other and allow for each other’s views…punch fights or not.
So, for this Passover we celebrated with Tor’s immediate family led by his 17-year-old son. His mom had it catered so, no cooking (another huge *sigh*…of relief!), and instead of sitting down at a giant formal table with formal silverware and forty other people, we sat down at a table of ten over Chilean sea bass and vegan chocolate cake that causes diarrhea and laughed our asses off about farts and puberty and absolutely inappropriate table conversation. (My brother-in-law is a comedian so…laughing was inevitable.) We didn’t talk about politics or opinions or anything divisive. It was a happy ending to what feels like the end of an era. But aren’t endings just another word for new beginnings? Cue the burnt egg. IYKYK.
I don’t regret the effect Jerome Greenblatt had on me that fateful year at BU. That said, I’d like to believe that our greater Jewish American family will get past this someday soon. I want to believe it with all my heart because it is breaking the hearts of the older generation as well as causing pain for the young’ins. In fact, I’d like to believe the whole world will get past this someday soon, but that would take something of a miracle. I guess miracles can still happen…even for a Jew-Bu-Christian with Arab blood running through her veins.
In Laughter,
LStL
p.s. Tor wrote a beautiful essay below about the whole ordeal and it was published on Substack by a phenomenal writer named Jason Curtis Anderson.
It’s a tale of the complexities in understanding our microcosmic conflict that lives within the macrocosmic conflict happening 24/7 around the world.
p.p.s. Another great Substack article I found on the matter: What Was the American Jew?, Reflections on the outburst of anti-Semitism on Columbia’s Campus, written by Sam Kahn
p.p.p.s. I thought I would leave you laughing with a video of Robin Williams telling the entire story of Passover in under 2 minutes. What a genius.
That was fabulous and very insightful