My 12-year-old cousin called me this past weekend and asked me to give the aliyot at his Bar Mitzvah next January.

It is a great honor to give the aliyot, reserved for those family members who have had a deep impact on the young Jew’s life. It basically involves me standing at his Bar Mitzvah and performing an interactive reading from the Torah.

Aside from nearly getting my cousin drunk at Passover and taking him to a Nats game two months ago, I’m not sure how I have positively influenced his life. Still, I was flattered to be asked and eagerly accepted the offer.

The problem, though, is that giving the aliyot (or aliyah) will combine two of my greatest fears: speaking in public and speaking in Hebrew.

When it comes to public speaking, I can pinpoint exactly when my fear comes from.

When I was in 10th grade, I had to do an oral book report. I chose the book “The Natural”. I never read it, though, since I was too busy crushing on girls in my class and distracted by things far more important than learning.

When the day of my book report came, I decided instead to just go off the movie The Natural, one of my favorite baseball movies albeit a flawed one. I stood in front of the class and provided an in-depth examination of Robert Redford’s, er, Roy Hobbes’ life.

I delved into motifs, foreshadowing, and plot development, completing my masterpiece by comparing Hobbes’ epic homerun in his final at bat of the movie as the ultimate act of redemption.

My teacher, Mr. Sanchez, looked at me and asked, in front of the entire class, “Uh, did you read the book?”

Why did he ask me that, I thought. Could he see through my ruse? Was I not convincing enough? Act confident, he won’t suspect a thing.

“Of course!” I answered.

“Well,” he continued, “here’s the thing. In the book, Roy Hobbes strikes out in his last at bat. In the movie, he hits the homerun.”

Whoops.

The class “oohed” and “aahed”. I could feel my face burning with embarrassment. I stammered, trying to explain the disparity. Mr. Sanchez looked at me with disappointed eyes. He let me stand there, suffering, for what felt like hours, no, weeks, until he finally let me off the hook.

“Take your seat.”

I never got over that moment and, to this day, cannot make a speech in front of even friends and family without nearly fainting from shame.

So standing in front of hundreds of people, reading Hebrew from the Torah, isn’t exactly at the top of my bucket list. I don’t expect my family to heckle me (though I wouldn’t out it past my dad). I expect them to be supportive, pat me on the back, and tell me what a great job I did when it’s all over.

But I hope this time, I at least get the ending right.

Observing Passover is like having a systematic spring cleaning. Only with more persecution.

Part of this “cleaning” involves a major overhaul of dietary rules. Now four days (out of eight) into my ban on eating anything leavened or, you know, tasty, I’m starting to wonder if any of those fleeing Jews in Exodus couldn’t have waited just a few more minutes for the bread to rise.

I spent Passover weekend entertaining my 12-year-old cousin (again) and decided to make it the Jewiest weekend ever. So I did what any cool, older cousin would do in this situation. I got him drunk.

Actually, my friend Foxymoron got him drunk. Off kosher wine. At seder on Saturday night, Foxymoron pulled off an amazing meal, cooking the traditional foods, reciting the Passover prayers from the Haggadah, and blessing the candles and wine. And, of course, getting us all drunk.

To be fair, my cousin only had three glasses of wine, and they were more like half glasses. But that boy would not stop jabbering and laughing toward the end of the evening and talking about how much game he had with the girls at his leadership conference last week. Fucking drunk.

Earlier that day my cousin, The Princess, and I had gone down to the Mall to visit the National Air and Space Museum. Since my cousin wants to be a commercial pilot someday, he was pretty stoked.

That museum, though, is incredibly out-of-date. Between the broken displays, the low-tech features, and the barrage of immensely ugly children wandering around, it was a miracle we got out of there.

Rockets

What we look light in infrared light.

“Get off my plane!”

Of course, on the way to the museum, we had noticed a litany of police setting up along Constitution Avenue. The Princess walked up to one of the security guards nearby and asked what was going on. When he stopped staring at her cleavage, he informed her that they were preparing for a neo-Nazi rally.

“On Passover?” I yelled.

I then described to my cousin how our country’s first amendment allows bigots to scream hatred as long as they have an approved permit issued by the Park Police.

On Sunday, I tried to wash away the stench of neo-Nazis invading our city and took my cousin to see records of real Nazis at the Holocaust Museum. The Nazi-themed weekend took on an ominous tone when we noticed the Department of Agriculture’s exterior design:

Also, it being Hitler’s birthday and all (April 20) made me wonder if it all amounted to irony.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one:

Now, the Jewiest weekend since Yom Kippur involving the Ten Plagues, Hitler, and Nazis has given way to a week without eating any sandwiches, tacos, burritos, cheeseburgers, or sushi. And not drinking beer.

This has been harder than I thought and, I would argue, tougher to do than fasting for 24 hours.

For those who remember, I once wrote the following words on this blog:

…when I go out, I turn into Teen Wolf hooked on bread.
Bread? They have bread? Give me some bread! You have any more bread? Give me five motherfucking baskets of bread!

I better get a good seat in synagogue. You know, the next time I go.

I celebrated Easter for the first time with The Princess’ family last year, which was kind of fun since I learned new Christ-loving traditions. One was torturing children by hiding eggs in places they can’t find. Another was torturing Jews by reminding them about what we did to their Messianic magician.

My favorite tradition, though, was Peeps. In particular, the “eating of” segment.

These seasonal treats are considered by many to be the delicious reincarnation of childhood goodness. Others think of Peeps as the most evil “food” to plague this world since coconut.

Yes, coconut is evil. Especially when your girlfriend sneaks it into your food without your knowledge.

Whatever your feelings about the marshmallow/sugar/gelatin/carnauba wax treat, though, everyone agrees Peeps are at least good for one thing: creating representative models of pop culture inside a common shoe box.

The Washington Post last April held its first — and surprisingly successful — Peeps Diorama Contest. Billions of Peep artists entered. Many of them were incredibly creative and unique. All looked delicious. Bridal Bird, the artist formerly known as Brunch Bird, even promoted a friend’s entry, “Marpeep Antoinette: Let Them Eat Jelly Beans”, which ended up being a contest finalist (thanks, I’m sure to my one vote).

The winner, however, ended up being Charles Johnston, a freelance graphic artist and designer in Manassas, with “Peeps Are a Girl’s Best Friend”, which changed the way I think of Marilyn Monroe forever. I heard this year he’s making a similar one but with Lindsay Lohan.

The Princess and I considered entering this year’s contest until we realized we would have to actually do some work. If there’s something I take seriously about myself is my ability to do nothing yet provide opinionated commentary on other’s efforts. And I wasn’t about to let some Peep contest change that.

So we did the next best thing, which was come up with diorama ideas we had no intention of creating.

I thought of “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peeps”, which I envisioned showing a Peep’s heart, or red jelly bean, being taken out of his body. It would be the bloodiest entry of all time and would force the Post to create a PG-13 rating system for next year’s contest.

The Princess thought of “Harry Peeper and the Peeper of Azkaban”, but she gave up on the idea when I told her she wouldn’t be allowed to actually eat her entry.

Our friends Rory and Cagey, however, didn’t share our laziness and instead entered the contest.

Rory created “S’more Peeps”, explaining he “wanted to explore the visceral connection we have with the outdoors while illustrating the moral and ethical dilemmas involved in marshmallow beings themselves roasting marshmallows.”

I asked Rory what he learned from his experience.

“Let’s just say, I learned you should always wash your hands BEFORE using the restroom when working with super glue.”

Cagey made “Peeps go to Washington”, an homage to this city’s clueless tourists. The reasoning behind her entry wasn’t nearly as haughty.

“I just wanted to dress up peeps,” she said. “It’s like playing with dolls only this time they are squishy and you can eat them. I love animated objects or animated inanimate objects? ummmm….”

Cagey, who somehow always manages to innocently elicit “That’s what she said” responses, added that she found the process more difficult than she imagined, saying, “Nothing sticks to the peeps and they’re so little it’s hard to work with them. And somehow they keep ending up in your mouth!”

So true, Cagey, so true.

PHOTO CREDITS:
First Photo
Washington Post photos
Cagey

I met Jared Stern late last year while attending the Good for the Jews show at the Birchmere, where Jared was the opening comedy act. I spoke with him after the show and, as it turns out, we both knew a mutual friend (my South American Jewish counterpart, Flavio, who hails from Brazil). I loved Jared’s set and asked him to write a guest blog about what it’s like to be a Jewish comedian.

First of all, in DC, it’s awful lonely.

There’s a dearth of Jewish comics in DC. Including me, the Jewish DC comedy community barely makes a minyan. Maybe there’s more out there than I’ve seen but, to borrow a line from one of us proud few, whose attic are they hiding in? Well, the fewer of us there are, the more of a niche act that makes me…and that’s where the money is these days…I just need to find the Semitic equivalent Git-R-Done. I digress.

There’s a rich nebbishy history of Jewish comedy, from Woody Allen and Jackie Mason to Lewis Black and Jerry Seinfeld. You’d think their footsteps would be easy to follow, since they mostly paced back and forth.

I’m in a bit of a quandary, though. I am Jewish and I am a comedian, but I don’t really consider myself a Jewish comedian. I have one joke about JDate and I dusted off another one about inventing the Nicotine Yarmulke (instead of attacking your addiction directly, it’s passive aggressive) for the Birchmere show, but I don’t really strap on the miner’s helmet and dig for gold(berg).

If I did, my cup of Maneschevitz runneth over. Aside from the easy jokes that come from the classic familial disappointment of not going to law or med school, my sister recently got her black belt in Judaism and became ultra-Orthodox. What keeps me from going there? Well, for me it’s about making the material relatable to an audience of people who don’t know me. Brevity is the soul of wit, and the time it would take to set up why an Orthodox Seder takes only slightly longer than it did for the Jews to cross the desert in the first place, is like…well, do I even need to complete the simile? The other reason I don’t use my family for material is because they keep expecting me to. At every family function, every innocuous little episode is followed by, “You’re not going to use that in your act are you?”

Stylistically, I’m not a storyteller. My jokes are short…set-up, punchline, pause for awkward silence, move on. Plus, my comedy isn’t necessarily rooted in truth (I feel like I should be lying on a couch as I type this). I should pause here in case you guys think I take myself too seriously, yammering about “my comedy” and lofty nonsense like that. It’s a testament to the stereotypical Jewish low self-esteem that I felt the need to apologize.

So, what have we learned about being a Jewish comedian? Let’s sum up. Comedy is cheaper than therapy. That’s not something that’s specific to Jewish comedians, though. All comedians suffer from a very basic form of Attention Deficit Disorder. We all have an attention deficit, and thus, we constantly crave attention. Thanks for helping me fill the void, for now.

I have known my friend Big I since the 2nd grade. When he married the love of his life last March, The Princess and I met Erin, an amazingly kind, sweet woman who had converted to Judaism before the wedding. I won’t even pick up the phone when he calls, so to meet someone who would change religions for him and their marriage made me curious as to what she went through. This is her story:

When Arjewtino asked me to write a guest blog on my funny experiences while converting to Judaism, I was having a very hard time trying to figure out what to write about.

See, the whole experience was a lot of work, pretty emotionally draining, and really just not that funny. To me the decision to convert was never just about getting my husband Big I to decide I was worthy enough to marry, but it needed to be something I could live with too. There was also the issue that I didn’t think of Judaism as being so much a different religion as it was a different/foreign culture all together!

Case in point – I come from a quiet, Midwestern family where our family get-togethers included maybe six people and it was usually a quiet, relaxing, enjoyable experience. My husband comes from a large family of New York Jews – there is a BIG difference. So, besides the fact that I had believed one thing for my entire life and now was being asked to believe something else, I was expected to interact with all of these crazy, loud people with who I had nothing in common!

In the end, I ended up taking the conversion class, taking a swim in the Bay here in Tampa for my Mikvah, and becoming Jewish ( if it weren’t for Jesus, wouldn’t we all be Jewish anyway?).

I learned quite a bit during my experience about what I needed to do to be a “good Jew”. Ask Big I - I tried to do everything “right” at first (which is extremely exhausting). I was very big into the whole Friday night Shabbat experience (complete with challah, prayers, the lighting of the candles, and going to Temple). I even attempted to make my own challah once (it was never attempted again because the bread could have doubled as an anchor it was so dense).

On our first Rosh Hashanah as a married couple, I even hosted dinner and prepared food for 14 people all by myself (my mother-in-law kept saying I was crazy – I had fun doing it though). More than anything, I have been afraid of doing something “wrong” and disgracing the whole religion.

Big I: “You can’t serve a Honey Baked Ham at Rosh Hashanah!”
Me: “Why not – we eat it at Thanksgiving?”

I have found that the hardest part is that there are all of these rules to Judaism that I don’t always understand or agree with (in Christianity it was easy and fairly basic – be a good person, do unto others, etc.). There weren’t all of these rules about things you couldn’t eat, either.

When I started the conversion class I was told the following: don’t eat pigs (“But I LOVE ham”), don’t mix meat and cheese (“No more chicken and cheese quesadillas?”), don’t drive your car on Shabbat (“But we live 30 miles away!!”), etc. What I have come to understand is that most people understand what you “should” do but kind of make up their own rules and follow them as they see fit.

For example, we are meat-and-cheese-eating, Shabbat-driving Jews who observe the high holidays and go to Temple on the occasional Friday night. We have some friends who keep Kosher in their home but eat Cheeseburgers when they eat out and go to Temple on Friday AND Saturday (that’s commitment!).

Then we also have other friends that follow more rules than most, eat Kosher-style at all times, but have been known to drive and spend money on Shabbat. But on Rosh Hashanah, he made his wife, who was 8 months pregnant at the time, walk the 3 miles home from Temple because it seems you must be stricter on the High Holy Days. This is one of those rules that I don’t understand - isn’t that one of those things that could be overlooked in the special circumstance of being 8 months pregnant? I looked at Big I and told him if he ever thought to pull something like that – HE could walk home while I took the car (with a few other choice words thrown in for emphasis).

So, it was a long journey to get where I am today, and it is far from over. But in the end, I am glad that I made it. It certainly wasn’t always easy and there have been many heated discussions between Big I and myself about the handling of some situations – but now we are happily married, I’m knocked up and we are expecting our first child in July!

Along with our new addition will come many more experiences and traditions that I know nothing about and will have to wade through and hopefully do them “right”. I will say one thing, though - our kids will go through all of the things that Jewish kids are supposed to – they won’t get the choice of whether or not they are going to Hebrew School and having their bar/bat mitzvah. I went through a lot of trouble so that our children could have that experience. I don’t care if they complain and say that don’t want to do it – ungrateful little buggers.

Torah Photo Credit

I walked into my bedroom Sunday afternoon to find The Princess relaxing on the bed, doing something girlie like clipping coupons or reading some book about cooking or food. I engaged her in the following conversation:

Arjewtino: Woman. Make me a sandwich.
The Princess: Make your own damn sandwich.
Arjewtino: Oh, I’m sorry. SIMON SAYS make me a sandwich.

She never made me that sandwich.

There was a time when preceding a command with “Simon says…” was like enacting your own fascist regime on your friends. “Simon says dance like a monkey and smell your own butt.” And people had to do it. It was like calling dibs on something, the ultimate game of social domination.

“Give me the Nintendo controller.”

“Screw you, I’m playing Excitebike.”

“I called it.”

“Fuck. Here you go.”

Somewhere along the way, though, we lost our way and community justice became about laws and absurd regulations. Imagine how much better the world would work if “calling ‘dibs’” was an act of suppliance and “Simon Says” was the support of that request. Ron Paul would be able to participate in the GOP debates. The TV writers would be fairly compensated for their online contributions. And Nitro would be back on the new American Gladiators.

I want to bring back the power of “Simon Says” and “dibs”. They are needed now more than ever.

My first act? Well, that would be this:

Simon says you CANNOT make a musical about the Diary of Anne Frank:

Does this story really need a song-and-dance routine? Does the most-read story about the Holocaust really need a cabaret? Should this fated girl’s last written words be turned into what seems like exploitative stage entertainment?

There is an old urban legend that when stage actress Pia Zadora starred in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank in the 1950s, her performance was so bad that an audience member yelled “She’s in the attic!” when the Nazis showed up.

This apocryphal story is not true. But it just goes to show the problematic ramifications of turning something tragic into something to be showcased.

UPDATE.

I never believed in Santa Claus.

This might not come as much of a shock considering I’m Jewish. But even growing up in Catholic-heavy Argentina, I just never considered the possibility that an overweight stranger who employed slave labor and made it a habit to spy on every child in the world would spend his days making toys and delivering them all in one night.

It just wasn’t possible, I thought as a child. The man had to travel to 75 million homes, traversing different time zones and hemispheres, all the while battling the principles of astrophysics, merely on the backs of flying caribou? Yeah, right, Santa Fraud.

I never figured out exactly who was responsible for this underhanded delivery system until I was older. All I knew was that it wasn’t my parents because they swore it wasn’t them and I always believed them. In a way, their ignorance made it scarier since I felt they were being duped as well.

Neither did I ever believe in the Tooth Fairy, though she seemed like a much more plausible idea. Still, the skepticism was too much to ignore: why did this psychotic mythological creature care if I lost a baby tooth? How did she earn enough money to pay all the kids around the world? And why did my friends make either more or less money than me? What kind of crazy chick was she, favoring one child over another for something we couldn’t control? Bitch.

My mom insisted I was wrong and that this magical sprite existed until one night I caught her with her hand under my pillow.

“I saw you,” I told my mom the next morning after I reached for the cash.

“No, that was the tooth fairy,” she told me.

Jesus. My mom thought I was an idiot.

The only idea of magical realism that I did believe in was Día de los Tres Reyes Magos (the day of the Three Royal Magi). This was always celebrated on the twelfth night after Christmas.

It involved us leaving our shoes outside our bedroom doors for los Magos, who left presents inside them before we went to bed on the eve of January 6.

This scared the shit out of me.

So I was supposed to get to sleep knowing that the very same people who followed some star to visit the baby Jesus AND survived 2,000 years later would show up at my house? And my parents allowed them to break and enter into our house while encouraging us to be happy about this?

Every January 6th, I would stay awake far past my bedtime huddled under the sheets devising ways to jump out the window should these regal criminals try to break down my door. This holiday, as I recently learned, is called Epiphany and is very Christian-oriented.

Why would my parents celebrate something so gentile? The answer, it seems, is tradition.

My dad last night sent my sister, brother, and me an e-mail last night in which he explained why my Jewish family celebrated Epiphany:

As you all know, I am not too much into Christmas or Hanukkah. I am more about New Years…and January 6th brings me sweet memories of my childhood. I know you are not children any more, but…Have a Happy One…!”

My dad went on to give each of us our Reyes Magos presents: plane tickets to Portland, Oregon, in two months to visit my sister.

Thanks, Papi. This time, I slept like a baby.

Santa Photo Credit

Tres Magos Photo Credit

On the 19th night of Hanukkah last Friday night. a couple of Jews stood on the Birchmere stage and opened their live performance with the following lyrics:

“I’ve got two pubic hairs and a three-piece suit, today I am a man.”

This song about a boy’s Bar Mitzvah was a harbinger of things to come for Good for the Jews, a music/comedy duo who last Friday night shocked and entertained a concert hall of Sabbath-ditching Jews by riffing on the Holocaust, joking about Jewish stereotypes, and singing about how Members of the Tribe spend Christmas.

“Did anyone come here expecting to see Horah dancing?” warned Rob Tannenbaum, who along with friend David Fagin makes up the group Good for the Jews. “Or did you come to hear funny and sometimes disgusting music?”

I heard about Good for the Jews after reading an artcile about them in the Express. Intrigued, I listened to their hilariously written songs on their MySpace page and asked Tannenbaum if I could come see their show.

He left me two tickets at will call.

Good for the Jews is a part music, part comedy act that spent the last weekend before Christmas on the penultimate stop of their 13-city “Putting the Ha! in Hanukkah” tour.

A few minutes before the show started, The Princess and I met Tannenbaum at our table as I ate the Jewiest food I could order from the Birchmere menu: the Toasted Smoked Corned Beef Reuben. Tannebaum and I talked about me having a shiksa girlfriend, how “Jewy” we perceived the audience was, and about the lone Nazi who “protested” at their show in San Francisco earlier this month.

I asked him about the origins of his band’s name. Tannenabum leaned in and admitted what felt like a private confession: “I’m not even sure that we are good for the Jews.”

This is the paradox of Good for the Jews’ comedy: they ridicule stereotypes non-Jews have of us while also mocking our culture themselves. For example, they perform songs titled “They Tried to Kill Us”, a purposefully disjointed history lesson set to catchy pop-rock music, but also satirical songs like “Ruben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer”.

The idea of a “Jewish sense of humor” as being a shared experience borne out of struggle is a well-known, albeit potentially spurious, idea. In the classic “anti-Dentite” Seinfeld episode, newly converted Jew Tim Watley tells Jerry, “It’s our sense of humor that has sustained us as a people for 4,000 years.”

“Five thousand…” Seinfeld replies.

“Five thousand! Even better!”

This self-deprecating absurdity is prevalant in the tongue-in-cheek manner Tannenbaum and Fagin (a gifted professional musician who performs all the guitar work) sing their songs and interact with the crowd. Tannenbaum unites the audience early by finding a combined experience — none of us mostly Reform Jews are home on this Friday night observing the Jewish Sabbath.

“We’re not Shomer Shabbos,” Tannebaum admits. “Obviously, neither are you guys.”

Tannenbaum carries himself on a stage much like a rabbinical master of ceremonies. Presiding over his “synagogue”, he wears a burgundy blazer over a powder-blue ruffled tuxedo shirt and sips delicately from a glass of red wine.

He spends much of his time making scoffing at himself and Fagin, the audience, and his own religion. Though he is confident with his material, it sometimes seems that even he is not sure whether his comedy will hit the right chord.

For example, while discussing possible alternatives for band names he and Fagin considered before settling on Good for the Jews, he mentions the option Start Spreading the Jews. But, he said, “it sounded too much like a brand of Nazi peanut butter.”

The audience groans.

“It was 60 years ago,” he reminds us, “too soon?”

“Yes,” shouts one brave soul.

Yes, Good for the Jews’ songs are rife with lyrics that would make Sarah Silverman proud (“They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat, they tried to kill us, we were faster on our feet, and we knew how to resist ’cause we rented Schindler’s List…”.

But they also feel like inside jokes that we are in on because of our shared culture.

The song “Jews for Jesus” is an amusing tirade aimed at the heavily reviled Christian sect. The song serves as a reminder of the religious hieracrhy as Tannenbaum reminds the audience: “Orthodox Jews look down on Conservative Jews for not being observant enough. Conservative Jews look down on Reform Jews for not being pious enough. And Reform Jews look down on Orthodox Jews, for not showering enough.”

But we all look down on Jews for Jesus, the incorrectly named, pamphlet-distributing cult. Tannenbaum and Fagin eviscerate them in the song’s chorus:

“Jews for Jesus, Jews for Jesus…It’s time for you to learn about the Holocaust, I’d really like to nail you to the cross.”

On Friday night, this line stunned the audience — a mixture of families, couples, older Jews, and ever children — which cheered some of the song’s tamer lines. But this is what makes Good for the Jews brilliant. They push the discomfort level while simultaneously empowering the audience. They deride Jewish stereotypes yet feel free to mock them themselves.

Before singing “JDate”, for example, Tannebaum uses the stage to discuss his problems with women. He tells us that his family got him a membership to the online Jewish dating web site and met a nice Jewish girl.

“I knew she was Jewish,” he announces, “because she licked my balls right to left.”

The subversive Good for the Jews’ tour is, sadly, done. That doesn’t mean you are farkakt. To hear four of their more popular songs on MySpace, click HERE. For more information, visit their Web site. And to follow their tour diary on Jewcy.com, click HERE.

By most accounts, Sarah Marshak is a better Jew than me.

The 18-year-old George Washington University freshman has visited concentration camps in Poland through March of the Living International. She has observed Yom HaZikaron, Israel Memorial Day, and Yom Ha’Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day, while visiting Israel.

Sarah also belongs to a group on Facebook called simply “Israel”, which boasts more than 138,000 members to discuss current events and activities affecting Jews and the Chosen People’s motherland.

Yes, Sarah Marshak is probably a better Jew than me.

Except I never drew swastikas on my own door for attention.

Marshak is the person who first reported that someone had drawn the irregular icosagon on her dry erase board that hangs on her dorm door a few weeks ago. In an interview with the school newspaper GW Hatchet, for which she also works as a reporter, she claimed she only drew the final three of six swastikas in an effort to highlight the school administration’s “inaction”.

“I wasn’t looking to create this, sort of, insanity,” Marshak said in a phone interview with the Hatchet. “I wasn’t looking to become a media darling. I was just looking for acknowledgment from University that someone drew a swastika on the door.”

Upon hearing this story, most people (I imagine) might shake their heads and say, “What was she thinking?”

My first thought, though, was “Munchausen Syndrome”, or at least some form of the illness. Much like Lindsay Lohan constantly hurting herself or that mom in The Sixth Sense who purposely made her daughter sick, this case of a Jewish student drawing swastikas on her OWN DOOR has to be some form of sick attention-getting behavior.

Swastika drawings and other forms of racist or anti-Semitic messages are nothing new to college campuses. Earlier this year, at my own alma mater, students were subjected to signs depicting the Star of David dripping with blood and equating Israeli leaders with Nazis.

And when I was a senior there many years ago, I covered a story for my school newspaper of a Latino man who e-mailed a racist tirade to 59 Asian-American students and teachers blaming them for some perceived inequity.

In Sarah’s case, whether or not she was responsible for the original drawings is irrelevant. As a Jew, she must have realized the backlash she would receive if she were ever discovered (which she was after being caught on a camera set up outside her door by University Police).

And even if she had never been found out, she would have to live with the knowledge that she drew swastikas on her own door for attention, well-meaning or not.

Sarah has 1,283 friends on Facebook, many of them Jewish. I hope one of them acts like one.

UPDATE: GW Hatchet reports on the fallout in the blogosphere.

Most people by now have heard about Halle Berry’s semi-anti-Semitic comment on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno last Friday night. For those of you haven’t heard, Berry was on the show last Friday night showing off photos she took using Mac’s Photobooth feature, which distorts your face into a House of Mirrors-kind of way.

She took out a photo that made her nose look big and cracked, “Here’s where I look like my Jewish cousin.”

No one laughed and Jay Leno replied, “I’m glad you said that and not me.” The Tonight Show aired the segment though they deleted the “Jewish” part and added a laugh track.

Rightly so, many Jews and goyim have been offended.

But they are offended for the wrong reasons.

Halle Berry’s comment was ignorant at best and distasteful at worst. She claims that shortly before coming out on stage, one of her assistants was looking at the same photo and uttered the same comment. If anything, we should be indignant at her ripping off someone else’s joke.

What I can’t forgive, and what upsets me most of all, is that The Tonight Show added a laugh track.

Let me repeat that: THE TONIGHT SHOW. ADDED. A LAUGH TRACK.

They pretended the “joke” was funny by artificially making it seem like the audience was amused by Halle Berry’s guffaw. This offends me more than anything Halle Berry could say, considering the airing makes her look vapid and desperate for acceptance.

The episode, though, seems to have sparked more outrage than Ann Coulter’s recent declaration that Jews should be “perfected” into Christians. The difference is that Berry is an idiot and less aware of her image than she should be; Coulter actually believed in what she said.

There is a long history of Jews overreacting AND underreacting to perceived slurs, slights, and insults. When people call you a kike or make Holocaust jokes, you kick their ass. When they say it’s funny but you don’t look Jewish, you call them idiots.

Some of the funniest Jew jokes I’ve ever heard have come from friends of the Tribe, usually because they’re witty, self-deprecating, and illuminate something poignant about our collective identity. The most offensive jokes come from people who aren’t Chosen because they’re, intentional or not, cheap, cruel, and sadistic.

By the same token, many non-Jews can easily be too paranoid about offending us. One of my favorite stories involves my friend Kwest, who, while we were discussing a few years ago our holiday plans, he said, “Are you celebrating, um, uh, Hanukkah? Did I say that right? Did I offend you?”

Of course, Jews aren’t immune to being overly sensitive to perfectly innocuous comments. Baby Bien once flew into a rage when a mutual friend described Jews as a race, not a culture or religion. I explained to our friend why that kind of comment could offend us but I also explained to Baby Bien why he was overreacting.

So until “Jews 101: How Not to Offend the Chosen People” becomes required reading in school, we’re all going to have to take a deep breath and gain some perspective on things.

Besides, those Photobooth pictures are pretty funny.