Jew Me

Have you ever wondered how to make a Jew?

No? Too bad, because I’m going to tell ya’ anyway.

You take an Italian and Mexican add two years of courtship, three years of marriage, many cold rainy days in March spent in a tiny house, a Barry White album or two, and bam! nine months later out pops a Jew.

Sound a little wacky? I think so, but that must be how it works because I am constantly being mistaken for a Jew despite having parents of Mexican and Italian heritage. So what does a Jew look like to all of these schmucks? Apparently the quintessential Jew-Boy has a bunch of curly brown hair sprouting from his head like a stalk of broccoli, a big nose, ears that stick out from the side of his head, and a slightly gawky look that makes people think I must be really good at chess or Scrabble (I’m terrible at both).

Unfortunately, over the years it’s this image that has become the Hollywood standard for the dopy, but lovable, Jew-kid that usually ends up the butt of some geek joke. If it’s a high school movie, there’s almost certainly a scene in which the character finds himself calling for help from inside of a locker. This would have been physically impossible at any of my schools because our lockers were only a foot and a half tall, but during my middle school days I was constantly teased with the name “Screech,” the sad little nerdy tag-along from “Saved by the Bell.” I never really watched the series myself, and I’m not even sure is this guy was supposed to be Jewish, but whenever somebody didn’t know my name, they usually referenced me as that “nerdy Jewish dude that looks like Screech.” As you can imagine, I was a huge hit with the ladies.

Things really didn’t get better with time. As I grew older and Adam Sandler gained popularity, I was called “Happy Gilmore” or the “Water Boy.” I actually didn’t mind this as much, because Sandler kind of funny and I’ve memorized enough of his Saturday Night Live skits to do a pretty good impression of him as “Crazy Protractor Man” or “the goat” from his comedy CD (and yes, I can sing most versions of the “Hanukah Song”).

However, after a while the comparison did grow a little tiresome. And when my mom, who’s an elementary school teacher, put my photograph on her desk and the school children excitedly clamored for her to get autographs from her son, “Mr. Deeds,” I was more than ready for a change. Couldn’t there be a really cool Jewish kid in a Hollywood film or show that looked at like me? Like some kid that’s a spy, or a ninja, or even a super smart dude like the guy in “Hackers” that rides neon rollerblades and hooks up with Angelina Jolie?

Pleaseeeee Hollywood? Pretty please?

Apparently my cries fell on deaf ears, because aside from a very brief comparison to John Stewart (which I was extremely flattered by until I found out that this same person had the racial myopia to think that Wesley Snipes and Ving Rhames looked the same) things just got worse. Much worse.

In 1999, months before I was supposed to go to college and finally enjoy the wonders of manhood in a flurry of drunken parties and crazy co-ed orgies (or so I thought), Jason Biggs entered the scene. Why was this bad? Because Jason Biggs made me a pie fucker. I didn’t literally start fucking pies, but Biggs, as my doppelganger, “wowed” audiences everywhere by sticking his male member into this crusty American fav. This culinary fornication occurs after Bigg’s “loser virgin” character is told by his much cooler friends that a vagina feels exactly like “warm apple pie.” So of course, one scene later he’s in the kitchen making strudel with his jimmy noodle when his parents walk in. Not nice. But even worse was the fact that I actually looked like this guy! Almost exactly like this guy! And once again he was Jewish. Waaaaay Jewish. Reinforcing this was his dad, played by the nasally, Groucho-Marxish Eugene Levy.

It wasn’t long before people were calling me “pie fucker” from across the street while high-fiving their friends, or stopping me to say that I looked extremely familiar.

“Do I know you?” they would ask.

“Nope,” I would respond trying to ignore what I knew was coming.

“No, I think I’ve seen you somewhere…”

“Nope.”

“No really.”

“God,” I would sigh, giving up. “Ok, you probably just think you know me because you’ve seen my alter-ego masturbating into a pie on the movie screen.”

“Oh, the ‘pie fucker’!”

“You got it!”

Ugh. Why couldn’t Jason Biggs just disappear? Just shove his dick, his legs, his arms, his whole freakin’ body into a pie and fuck off?

But he didn’t.

In fact, he followed up American Pie, with “American Pie 2” in 2001, and “American Pie 3” in 2003, giving him plenty of opportunities to shave his balls on screen, help his friend eat a piece of dog crap, and stick his genitals into people and places they should never have gone. Oh, and along the way he made “Loser.” Yeah, real great movie. And as you can imagine, he’s wasn’t exactly a super stud in it.

With the cultural sensitivity that Hollywood is known for, Biggs’ “Jewiness” was usually a shticky punch line, so that his characters stutter like a young Woody Allen and kvetch like an old woman- which made me very happy, and excited, to be compared to him.

Soon after American Pie came out the obvious resemblance between Biggs and myself filtered down far enough to reach my family. When my mom saw the posters and billboards with Biggs holding a pie over his groin, she would always say with pride that “I looked just like that handsome Jewish boy in all the movies.”

“Moooom, that’s gross. Do you know what he does in that film? Plus, he’s a terrible loser that everyone laughs at!”

“Oh, no, I think he’s actually very sweet. Girls love him for that.”

“Yeah… mom I think girls like ‘Stiffler’ in those movies better than Biggs!”

Even my dad, who usually doesn’t even remember movies he’s seen, caught the resemblance. After returning to school after one spring break I received a sock in the mail.

“What the hell is this?” I thought, unfolding a note.

“I found this alone behind your door,” my dad wrote. “Don’t worry. It’s washed.”

It took me a second to realize that my dad was referencing the opening scene of American Pie in which Biggs gets caught by his parents masturbating into a gym sock.

Nice. Really dad? How could you?

I shouldn’t be totally mad at Biggs. After all he has it pretty bad too. I did a little research recently and found out that he’s not even Jewish!

“Everyone thinks I’m Jewish,” complains Biggs in an interview with the “Jewish Journal.”

No shit, Biggs. You play a Jew in nearly every role. But if he’s not Jewish, exactly what breed of Gentile is he? It turns out he’s an Italian Catholic from New Jersey, which actually explains why he looks a lot like me. I guess it really doesn’t matter to Hollywood though—they’re equal opportunity stereotypers. If you look like a Jew, talk like a Jew, and walk like a Jew, than damn it, get ready, because you’re going to be cast as a Jew! I may not be a movie star like you, Mr. Biggs, but like a freshly cut putz, I feel your pain.

Although I’m not competing for roles in stereotyped casting calls, my fake Jewiness has led to some amusing situations in the workplace.

Once I was in a cafeteria with one of my coworkers when she asked if “it was difficult for me to find food to eat.”

Food to eat? In cafeteria?? Maybe she just thought I was vegetarian.

“No,” she told me. Is it difficult to eat Jewish here?”

“Eat Jewish?” Ugh. I was really annoyed, but decided to go along with it. Because I had dated a Jewish girl from Israel months before, I knew just a little bit about Jewish custom. And my co-worker hadn’t really asked if I was Jewish, so…

“Well,” I scanned the food with mock concern. “I suppose if you were Glatt Kosher, it would be a problem. But then you’d probably bring your own lunch. I’m not, so that’s not a problem.” Which was true. It wasn’t a problem for me. Because I wasn’t Jewish!

“Oh,” she said. “But if you’re just Kosher-Kosher, you know? You can still eat in the cafeteria?”

“Well,” I said making a cheese, bacon, and ham sandwich, “I suppose you could find something to eat here...”

My co-worker noticed my extremely non-kosher sandwich and watched with grimace of confusion as I took a big bite.

There was a pause as I chewed.

“You’re not Jewish are you?”

“No,” I said through another mouthful of cheese and bacon, “I’m not.”

Situations like this come up randomly all the time in the office, but the main time that my faux-Jewishness is sure to draw comment is around holidays. In most offices across America, Christmas means tinsel and pine trees, Rudolph and Santa, angels singing and wise men with gifts—but no menorah. To be honest I usually don’t notice it because I really don’t care about holiday decorations whatsoever. However, with all the poinsettias adorning shelves and holly bordering every in and out box, it’s hardly surprising that some “ethnically sensitive” person usually comes up to me to ask the big “J-Boy” pride question.

“Are you sad that we’re celebrating Christmas and not Hanukkah in the office?” one co-worker once asked me.

Like my cafeteria experience, they never bothered to ask me if I was actually Jewish. Just if I was sad. I told them that I was “sad” that we didn’t give Hanukah at least a little attention. Which really wasn’t a lie. I get pretty sick of seeing candy canes, fake inflatable snowmen, and nativities--just about anything to change it up would be great.

Still, I should have shut my mouth and given a simple “no,” because two days later I was presented with little cupcakes bearing white frosting and a huge Star of David drawn on top with blue icing. But, really, what could I do at that point? It’s hard to fess up when a lie tastes creamy and delicious!

In fact my ethno-fakism always got me tasty treats, I’d keep up the lie, but it’s usually just gets me bothersome questions or expectations. At my last job the crew went all out for Christmas, decorating our office with a diorama of children skating across a mirror ice pond, placing up a poster of a fake Christmas hearth, hanging tinsel from the sealing, and cramming miniature Santa Clauses in just about every nook and cranny they could find (almost).

As usual I didn’t do anything for Christmas, preferring to leave my sad little gray cubicle plastered with month old Post-it reminders and my festive 1980’s Rolodex.

“Common, Mark! Don’t be such a party pooper!” my co-workers encouraged me. “Our decorations are an office tradition!”

“Fine,” I rolled my eyes, “but I don’t want to buy anything.”

“Oh, no you don’t have to! We have some stuff just for you!”

Just for me?

The next thing I knew I was being given several long, blue coils of thin wire, wrapped in tiny, shiny blue stars that stuck out like “festive” barbs.

“What is that??” I eyed the glittering blue stars skeptically.

“You don’t like it? But it’s blue with stars! For your cubicle! Like for Hanukah!”

Holy freakin’ Jews for Jesus! Had they just given me what looked like blue “festive” barbed wire for a Jewish holiday?

Although was ridiculous, they meant well, and I didn’t want another cupcake fiasco (my conscience had finally caught up with me), so I did eventually tell them that I wasn’t Jewish. However, I first took the opportunity to “decorate” my cubicle, coiling the festive wire into large loops and taping it along the top parameter of my “enclosure” and around the front entrance.

“What are you doing?” a co-worker asked me, touching the pointed, jutting stars to see if they were actually sharp.

“I’m celebrating Christmas in Auschwitz,” I told her without looking up from my computer.

I guess that aside from being given decorations more suited for concentration camps, it’s not always so bad to be thought of as a geeky Jewish boy. I think that some girls actually kinda dig it. Over the years I have been accused of having an Asian fetish, but I honestly think that there are certain girls out there with a fetish for the J-Boys.

How do I know this? Well, Facebook (aka Stalkerbook) and MySpace, have provide an easy route to see who your exes are currently dating. More often than not I find pictures of my ex’s with very proper looking real Jews, sometimes with slightly smaller noses, sometimes with bigger or smaller Jew-fros, and sometimes with red, or black hair, but more likely than not the similarity’s so uncanny it’s frightening.

This fetish can be taken too far, and I have found that in spite of their love for little Hebrew boys, many Jew-Fetishists, or “J-Fed’s” (no relation to Britney’s amazingly talented ex-husband), really can’t tell their Jews from their Gentiles (no pun intended). This has led to some amusing and particularly advantageous situations.

On one particular occasion, I had been working up the courage to speak to an attractive young lady at a bar, but I couldn’t quite figure out what to say. It took me several solid hours of careful contemplation and five or six shots before I finally settled on the ingenious, “Hi, my name is Mark. How’re you doing?”

However, almost soon as I started to introduce myself she stopped me. “God Jeremy, have your forgotten me already? You were just talking to me about your trip to Israel!”

Trip? Israel? I looked at her with wide eyes, and she gave me a little pinch on my side and a tug at my belt loop.

Now, I have to say that I no idea who “Jeremy” is or what happened to him that night, but apparently he made a fabulous impression and was an absolutely spectacular opener. I definitely owe him a dozen roses and a box of chocolates for an amazing weekend. Shalom, Jeremy wherever you are.

Of course, not everyone’s a J-Fed. In fact, aside from their looks, I also get to share the superficial racism directed toward Jews. Not that I really experience it that often. I just really wish that rednecks could get their pejoratives straight! Why do I always have to be a “hebe” or a “kike”? Common guys! Get it right and call me a “beaner,” “wetback,” “goomba,” or even a “whop”! Then I could sleep a little better at night (as long as you aren’t trying to burn down my house).

Things usually aren’t that extreme, but I frequently do get the lame white American apologist. The white American apologist for Jews is very similar to the white American apologist for blacks in America. For blacks they seem to feel personally and confusingly responsible on a very direct immediate level for putting blacks into bondage and setting them to work on plantations. They grovel and insist to black people that they actually have “some very nice black friends,” like hip-hop music, and would never use the “N” word. I don’t understand these people, and unless they still have some residual guilt from Catholic school, they need to just volunteer at an inner city Boys & Girls Club and get that shit out of their system.

Accordingly apologist for Jews in America follows a comparable line of “logic” and seems to feel personally responsible for anything that has ever gone wrong for the “chosen people” over the last century or so. Just the other night, in fact, I was at a bar talking to a group of nurses from Colorado when they started to discuss the Holocaust. Why were they talking about the Holocaust? Probably because they were drunk and I was within their line of sight (or at least my nose was blocking their view).

“Oh, it was so terrible,” one patted my arm as if the Holocaust happened yesterday and I had somehow experienced an event that took place in the 40’s.

“Yeah, it was pretty “terrible,” I reiterated. “Fifteen million people wiped off the face of the planet is pretty ‘terrible.’”

“But don’t worry, the other one told me taking a swig from her glass. I’m not anti-semantic.”

“Wait,” I said. “Anti-semantic? Like against language?” I stopped drinking my beer. “You’re not Anti-semantic? That’s, like, a double negative. Does that mean that you’re into good grammar and prose?”

“Huh,” the girl said, still not understanding.

“Like ‘semantics,’ words, organization…usage…instead of ‘Semitic’…which is…”

The other girls looked at me with open mouths like cows chewing cud.

“Never mind…”

Really, what am I supposed to do with that?

I just wish that people would see me and associate my appearance with other, more positive Jewish stereotypes. Like, why can’t they just assume I’m a rich lawyer or a Hollywood talent agent? Maybe I just need better clothes.

I once had a friend that would complain to me about her overbearing Jewish mother.

“Really,” she told me, “be glad you’re not Jewish.”

“I think I will,” I said, “just as soon as the rest of the world realizes I’m not.”


-Mark Jordan ©2009

Raising Your Roommates

It’s difficult raising your roommates. Especially when you realize that you’re just raising an earlier version of yourself—maybe even one removed by only a couple months. I’ve just moved to New York from the West Coast and was forced, due to expenses, to room with two other people. This really isn’t that uncommon in Manhattan. Even young professionals often have several housemates to save cash.

My female roommate is a very mature Italian jazz musician in her mid-thirties named Silvana. She’s clean, courteous, and employed: all of the things you could want in a roommate. On the other end of the spectrum is my male roommate Ben. Six months ago Ben left his studies as an engineer at a college in Virginia and decided that he was going to be a rock musician. Being the consummate romantic, Ben took little more than his guitar and his clothes and flew his twenty-year-old-self out to the Big Apple to be a star. There’s simultaneously something profoundly stupid and admirable about this kid leaving his comfortable home and trying something like this. I certainly couldn’t have at his age-- but then again I wouldn’t have had a mother sending me a weekly check to pay the bills.

Predictably I never really have a problem with Silvana. It’s Ben that drives me nuts on a regular basis. Before I discuss some of Ben’s little shenanigans, I just want to apologize to my parents and roommates past, because I’ve certainly had my share of “being Ben.” I honestly have no idea how people put up with me. Really. I guess Ben is just the kind of karmic kick in the nuts that I needed to reform my evil ways.

First let’s talk about the shower. Ben has this huge fro. As far as I know it’s the biggest thing about him (maybe). I only bring this up because when a person like Ben takes a shower, they know they are going to drop enough hair in the drain to clothe a naked-mole rat. It’s just common courtesy to clean the hairy nublins out of the drain afterward! Right? I think so. But does Ben clean his nasty-McNasty curlies out of the drain? Nope! If my shower follows Ben, I know with dreaded certainty that I will be fishing midget Chewbaccas out of the drain in a goopy mess that makes me want to vomit. It’s taken me years, but I finally know the pain my poor sister suffered who shared the shower back home at my parent’s place (and why she was always complaining of my wolf-man-like hairiness).

Which brings me to the cleaning. Ah the cleaning. I had no idea all these years that I was behaving like a spoiled twenty year old, but Ben’s brought this abysmally to my attention. Every Friday or Sunday, when Silvana and I pick up mops and scrub brushes, brooms and detergent and get to work, Ben can be reliably found asleep on his bed or strumming away at his guitar. When asked to help, he either wonders off or tells us “in a minute, in a minute.” It’s with this last mantra of “in a minute” that I really feel the karmic punch in the stomach, because this is exactly the type of thing that I would say to my mother or father when they tried to get me to do my chores back home. I think that it’s because of this that I don’t really press or complain about this more: I’ve had my share of laziness and now the “Tao of Mark” is coming back to haunt me. Sorry mom. Sorry dad. I realize now that raising kids is tough work.

Aside from slacking off and strummin’ his guitar, Ben has decide that he is one of the great authors of our time (in his six short months in New York). This is fine. Really. I don’t mind him writing bad poetry that laments in a pseudo-Shakespearian/romantic style the loss of his last girlfriend (“Oh how doth the withered leaves whence green torment the brown of autumn on the lovelorn life of love past”). It’s actually kind of charming in a young-and-naïve-high-school-girl sort of way. But when he sees me trying to write and comes up to give me advice, that’s where I draw the line. Big time. Especially when he directs me to his “subway poetry,” which he writes everyday on his way home from work.

“You know, Mark,” he told me after plopping down the “Poem-a-Day” book he has been reading, “I just can’t seem to find any poet or writer that I think is really good-- that really speaks to me. Do you know any writer who is witty like Oscar Wilde but modern and smart?”

“Well, there’s David Sedaris, Vonnegut, a couple columnists like…”

“No,” he cut me off with a dramatic flourish taking in the room and finishing with a clap on his super-tight emo jeans, “I’ve read them. I don’t think there’s anyone out there for me. I guess I’ll just have to be the writer I’m looking for.”

“Guess so, Ben,” I tried to ignore him and return to my writing.

Several days later, and several bad subway poems down the line, Ben excitedly announced to the world that he had, in fact, become his “new favorite author.” This was a bold claim indeed. I don’t even think that Shakespeare was his own favorite author, or that any living author could say that without being laughed off the world stage.

“But check out my new poem on the world’s destruction, posted now on my Facebook,” he urged me.

I sighed and logged in to the page to scan over a poem littered with strange archaic language mashed together with the zest of a schizophrenic hobo trained in sonnets. Tenses were misused and grammar went by the wayside, but it sounded flowery and vaguely like early modern English to someone who didn’t know any better. The main thrust of the poem was that the world was slowly falling apart with ominous signs appearing everywhere.

“It’s interesting,” I commented neutrally. “It actually kind of sounds like that poem by Yeats: The Second Coming.” I meant this comparison in the broadest way possible, like an elementary school teacher complementing a child drawing a lady with long hair and an inconclusive smile as the painter of the Mona Lisa.”

“Yeats?” he asked.

“The poet,” I responded.

“Oh, yeah, I get that a lot. Many have compared my poetry to Yeats and T.S. Elliot.”

Really, Ben? Really? Have you won a Nobel Prize, written several of the most influential poems in the English language, and know at least seven languages fluently?

I might be acting a little harshly toward Ben. I could just be taking out my own frustration as I try to find my own inspiration to write. It’s possible that Ben is an undiscovered genius that even I don’t detect. His childlike bravado and naïveté just irk the crap out of me. I might have once been this way, but life and its lessons have shown me that there are many, many talented people in this world, and it pays to be modest.

Ben also displays behavior that, in spite of my bad habits in the past, I never acquired: the mooch gene. What’s the “mooch gene”? Well, the mooch gene compels its “mooch” carrier, to beg, borrow, and plead for items on a continual basis. Right now scientists are looking for a cure for this pernicious gene, which has an early onset in adolescence. There’s even hope that with President Obama lifting the ban on stem cell research, we may see a partial cure preventing moochie girls from borrowing their roommates’ fabulous shoes and Friday night dresses by 2010—but don’t hold your breath.

Ben’s mooch gene is activated on many occasions, but particularly in the presence of ethanol. Because Ben is twenty years old, he still has trouble getting alcohol, and consequently, there’s a certain mystery about it that makes it extra “neato” to him. When Ben does get his hands on a beer, he usually drinks instantaneously, leaving him to search like a hungry animal for that mysterious “forty” that rolled behind the couch (it happens…).

I used to feel bad for the little guy. In fact, when I first moved in I was a chump for his big, brown puppy dog eyes, and when he asked for a beer, I gave it to him. His mooch gene must have become phosphorylated at this point, because his moochiness soon expressed itself, with him taking my beers from the fridge and telling me not to worry because “he’d pay me back soon.” Occasionally he does “pay me back,” but it’s never in kind, because anyone with dookie for brains will tell you that a six pack of “Heineken” is never the same as a forty of “Miller High Life”! Things have gotten so bad that I’ve taken to keeping my beers in my room, preferring to drink them warm rather than risk Ben stealing them from the fridge.

Ben’s moochiness knows no bounds, extending itself beyond beer to almost any food item that makes its way into our apartment. The other day I came home to find that Ben had used all of my pasta sauce (“sorry, bro”), and several days ago he took a couple artichoke hearts from a jar that my girlfriend had brought especially from California. The pasta sauce was annoying, but the incident with the artichoke hearts thoroughly pissed me off.

“What’s this?” I asked him, noticing that the jar of artichoke hearts had been opened and left on the counter unrefrigerated.

“Oh yeah… I needed an artichoke for my Orange Chicken. You know?”

I shook my head. No, I didn’t “know.” Artichoke hearts for Chinese food? Whatever.

“How long has this been sitting out here unrefrigerated?” I gritted my teeth.

“Ummmmm…” he strummed his discordant bass guitar, “About three days.”

“Three days?” I held my anger in check and tried to be polite. “Ben, I need you to get me a new jar of pasta sauce and another jar of artichoke hearts.”

“Why?: he frowned. “You still have a full jar of artichokes.”

“Yes, Ben,” I put the jar down on the table a little too forcefully, “but it’s bad now. You have to refrigerate these when you open them. It says it right here on the label,” I pointed to it for him.

“Ohhhhh…” he nodded vacantly and flipped through his biography of Bob Dylan. “I’m sorry.”

And I honestly believe he was. Unfortunately he’s just too absentminded to be considerate.

“Mark…?” he called to me as I turned to walk away.

“Yes…” I turned around.

“You know how you let me get that documentary of Bob Dylan through your Netflix account: ‘No Direction Home’?”

“Uh huh…” I said, feeling like a parent about to scold a bad child.

“Well, I don’t know what came over me, but I accidently ripped the return envelope for the movie into tiny pieces. I don’t think there’s any way for me to send it back, you know, unless I tape it back together or something...”

UGH! I don’t have a TV and Netflix is one of my only sources of entertainment. Unless you send in your current DVD, you don’t get another one.

“Well, I guess you should go get some scotch tape, because you’re going to need to tape that envelope up,” I told him.

He wrinkled up his nose like a truculent child and returned to strumming his bass.

God. What is Ben doing to me? I feel like a freaking parent! In fairness to Ben though, he did try to make partial amends ends earlier today—well, sort of, kind of, not really-- in his own Ben way.

“Hey Mark, you know those artichoke hearts?”

“Yes,” I perked up, expecting to hear that he had bought me a new jar.

“I know that they’ve been left out for three days, but I wanted to show you that they’re ok. So I’ve been eating them all day, and check it out! I’m perfectly fine!”

I covered my face. No comment. Really. No comment.

Maybe I don’t have to do anything after all to teach Ben a lesson. As they say, revenge is a dish best served three days old, at room temperature, and a-la-cammode.