December 2010
8 posts
About
I recently found out that, like me, my cousin Caryn once told a mall Santa she was Jewish.
“It must be a rite of passage,” I thought, and asked around. Negative. As it turns out, telling Santa that you’re Jewish is a rite of passage only in my socially maladroit family.
In my defense, Christmas in the United States is kinda weird if you’re non-Christian....
Bios
Emmy Blotnick is a writer in New York. She is not to be trusted around noodle kugel.
Tonight the role of Max Goldblatt will be played by his understudy, Max Goldblatt.
Joshua Staman grew up in Phoenix, Arizona and attended the Catholic high school Brophy College Prep while simultaneously taking Hebrew High classes at night. He is now a practicing Nichiren Soshu Buddhist screenwriter...
“Praise Susan” by Emmy Blotnick
As a ten-year-old, I really wanted to be good at sports.
I played basketball at a community center in Boston, and I was good in the sense that I could kick other girls in the shins without the referee noticing. After each shot (or we can be honest: airball), the coach would yell at us to catch the rebound and we would all crowd together under the...
“A Jew-Child’s Christmas in Santa Monica” by Max Goldblatt
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and...
“Complain about Something Else” by Joshua Staman
Seriously, why can’t we eat cheese with chicken? Until the age of twelve, this was my go-to for my Hebrew school teachers. Since when do chickens need milking? If we are not to bathe a child in the milk of their mothers, then whither chicken melts for the entirety of my deprived childhood? The true skill of a Hebrew school teacher or...
“I Told Santa I Was Jewish” by Arianna Stern
When I was six, my mom took me to this water park with her best friend and her best friend’s son. His name was Alex, and he was also six years old. His family was non-Jewish and fairly religious. I remember we had an exchange once, while my family celebrated Chanukah, where he asked me,
“Do you believe in Jesus even a little? Because it...
“Yeah, That’s Normal” by L. Stall
My mother always told me I was Jewish. As a little girl in Cleveland, even then as I was cast aside by fellow toddlers in the kinder garden, she would hum tiny tunes or hand me a dradle. My father, a Catholic of hearty German stock who once would have been a priest, retreats in these memories, a shadow with a mustache lighting candles on an...
“Baby’s First Christmas” by Carlye Wisel
I used to think I was born in the wrong body, religiously speaking. Not in the way that a cracker can be the body of Christ, like when they let kids drink wine at church and eat Jesus’ body as an hors d’ouvres, but more in the standard transsexual form of the phrase. Christmas was happening, it was out there, and while ...