Personal essays demand honesty. Nothing is more boring than a writer hedging about her life—there’s a reason nobody’s ever published an anthology of college admission essays. But being publicly honest, especially online, especially when you’re talking about Jews and Judaism, can feel extremely risky. There’s a weird sense that every Jewish writer represents world Jewry, and that it’s crucial not to make Am Yisroel look bad. You know the old refrain: “Not in front of the goyim!”
We loved Lauren Grodstein’s essay about struggling to accept her husband’s Catholic, Republican family because it takes those risks. She knows there’s a nasty strain of upper-middle-class Jewish scorn for anything “goyish,” and that “goyish” is often a euphemism covering both religion and class. It would be easy to write a screed denouncing this tendency from afar (“My great-aunt Bernice is so racist about non-Jews, and also senile”), but she took a much more interesting route: She diagnosed it in herself.
The piece was initially called “The Reluctant Anti-Goyite,” but we decided that was a little clunky, so on Wednesday we changed it to a short, punchy distillation of the article’s most provocative point. The new headline: “Christianity Gives Me the Creeps.”
Headlines are ads, foremost, and as a commercial, this worked roughly the same way those old AFLAC ads did: It was abrasive but memorable. People went, they read, they commented. Success! But maybe not the fairest kind of success. Lauren’s point wasn’t that Christians are creepy. If that were her point, we wouldn’t have published the essay—Jewcy’s all about stirring the pot, not picking it up while it’s still boiling and dumping it on a bunch of innocent strangers.
So we decided to swap the headline again, this time for more than just aesthetic reasons. In some cases, it’s dangerous that the internet allows for this kind of ex post facto editing — it would be ethically unforgivable to go into the piece and add another paragraph, for example — but one of the unwritten rules of online journalism is that there’s a distinction between an article itself and the way the editors frame it.
The new headline emphasizes the big question Lauren’s asking: Is there something about Christianity or Judaism that allows her relatives to accept her, even though she has a hard time accepting them? Tell us what you think below, or comment on her piece here.