‘Sure,’ I responded, girding myself for something offensive or tone deaf. They looked up at me, trying to figure out how to phrase it. Finally, they let themself speak…

‘Can you explain to me where Jews come from?’ They stared at me expectantly as my mouth betrayed the barest hint of a smile. It’s a simple question, but one that belies a frighteningly common lack of basic understanding of Jewish history, identity, and culture.

Believe it or not, I am asked questions about my Jewishness far more often than I am asked questions about my transness. Perhaps it’s the circles I move in, as most of my friends are queer folks who are either trans themselves, or at least very trans-literate. I’m also a good person to ask. On top of, you know, being a Jew, I wrote my thesis paper, in part, on Jewish ethnogenesis and identity.

While I have of course experienced transphobia in my lifetime, including rather merciless bullying as a child as well as the expected slurs and verbal assaults, I have experienced more extreme and violent antisemitism in my life; bomb threats and suspected arson at local temples, swastika graffiti, being verbally accosted in a restaurant on Christmas, having strangers spot my Hamsa, or the Magen David that was passed down to me by my grandfather and take that as an opening to spew their hatred, and I could go on and on.

People tend to be quite surprised when I express this reality of my life. And I do recognize that I have privileges today that spare me from the worst of transphobic violence; I am often, though not always, white-assumed, and I am typically cis-assumed. These are realities of my life that protect me and cannot be ignored or unaddressed.

However, my larger point is that one of my identities is considered unequivocally marginalized, while many continue to brush over antisemitism as a non-issue despite its meteoric rise over the last decade in the U.S. As David Baddiel so clearly elucidated, it’s the ‘Jews don’t count’ of it all.

This point of view extends to the way we are portrayed in media.

Recently, it was announced that Kathryn Hahn would be playing Joan Rivers in an upcoming biographical series about her life. Quickly, Sarah Silverman waded into the argument over Hahn’s casting, rightly pointing out the clear double standard that in this era where there are greater and greater calls for authenticity, Jews don’t count. Soon after, it was announced that Claire Foy, another non-Jew best known for playing the Queen of England, would be playing Sheryl Sandberg in an upcoming film based on the book An Ugly Truth. 

Hahn and Foy join the ranks of Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Rachel Brosnahan as Midge Maisel, Michael Keaton as Ken Feinberg, Vanessa Kirby and Ellen Burstyn as Martha and Elizabeth Weiss, Helen Mirren as Golda Meir, and the list goes on and on. In fact, it’s almost become a rule that Jews are not played by Jewish actors, which compounds the misunderstanding of who we are.

In my work as a trans media consultant, we often talk about the small percentage of the U.S. population that is trans, and even more importantly, the percentages of cisgender people who personally know a trans person. The reason why these statistics are important to keep in mind is that when people don’t know a trans person personally, and then see inaccurate trans representation on screen, they have no real world baseline to compare it to. This exacerbates transphobia.

Approximately 2.5% of the U.S. population is Jewish. It’s ironic that oftentimes our population is vastly overestimated. I have my theories as to why. There is, of course, the reality of Jewish contribution to American culture. However, because of the adoption of Jewish texts in Christianity and the development of Islam being closely tied to the history of the Jewish diaspora in the Arabian Peninsula, Jews become narrative characters in two of the world’s largest universalist religions (as opposed to Judaism, a particularist spiritual movement that is only concerned with the Jewish people as an ethnic and national identity).

People are comfortable with Jews as a parable. I mean, a whole religion was developed on this foundation. Non-Jews enjoy when we are a mirror for society to hold itself up to, to understand and see its ills. Oftentimes, as Dara Horn pointed out in her book People Love Dead Jews, this functions best when we are dead; a relic. Because then we can be whoever the world wants us to be.

In fact, I see it all the time. Every Christmas season, I see a litany of posts saying ‘Jesus was…’ and nearly universally the words that complete this sentence are not, ‘a Jew’… the only ethnic identity that Jesus indisputably was. What I find interesting is that I often see it posted by the same people who are dead-set on the concept of universal Jewish whiteness. This in turn is often an argument only conveniently invoked by non-Jews when they want to argue that they don’t need to care about antisemitism. Ironically, it’s another role we get cast in to make non-Jews feel better about their own world-view: Jews as a mirror. And when the representation they see is Vanessa Kirby in a large manor house pretending to be the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, it’s no wonder people feel this way.

These are prime examples of this dynamic. And it creates a disconnection point in popular imagination between ‘the literary Jew,’ who teaches the world a lesson about themselves, and real live living Jews who are currently experiencing the highest levels of antisemitism in this country since the first half of the 20th century. And confronting this antisemitism in the here and now, which would need to start with a basic understanding of who we actually are, would upset the balance of whatever morality play we’ve been cast in by others. Then this silence helps perpetuate the hatred and allows it to flourish.

Add socially ingrained casual antisemitism into the mix, as opposed to overt antisemitism like the white-supremacists marching in Charlottesville chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’, and it’s a toxic stew. For example, a person I know well was sued by a man for ‘wrongful termination’ after he fired him for stealing a lot of money from his business. Of course, firing someone for stealing from you is hardly wrongful. This person I know counter-sued. After depositions were filed, it was decided that it would be a jury trial. This person was then advised by his lawyers to settle, because the man who stole from him was a white Christian, and the jury was ‘unlikely to trust the word of a Jewish doctor.’ No wonder we’re rarely trusted to tell our own story. 

But herein lies the problem. And it’s the same problem that I spoke of when it comes to trans representation. Because we are such a small percentage of the population, most people’s first encounters with us are either in biblical stories, or they are in media. Stories have a unique power, as does accurate representation. We’ve seen massive shifts in perceptions of LGBTQ people thanks to shifts in how we are portrayed in film and television. But when it comes to my other identity, we barely register in the discourse.

And so the problem that Sarah Silverman brought into the spotlight stretches beyond the disparity in opportunity, which is certainly a problem. When Jews are misrepresented in media by non-Jews doing their best caricatures of us, it enshrines us as a character in someone else’s passion play rather than human beings and a living culture that is still here. It perpetuates misunderstanding of who we are. And when our population is so small, it becomes impossible for many people to have real life living breathing Jews that they know to hold these representations against.

This isn’t just problematic. It helps to perpetuate antisemitism in all of its mutations.

So I sit across from my friend and I say, “Well, to answer that question, I need to go back to about 1600 B.C.” I watch as their mind explodes a little bit. 

I tell them about the various historically-based theories of our ethnogenesis. I explain the consolidation of Jewish national identity at the dawn of the 1000s B.C. I talk about the Romans, and Bar Kokhba. I talk about Beta Yisrael. I talk about Shammai and Hillel and the origins of rabbinical Judaism. I talk about The Crusades, The Inquisition, and Sephardi Pirates; Sabbatai, Chassidism, and Haskalah; Pogroms, the Dreyfuss Affair, and of course The Holocaust; Farhud, Operation Magic Carpet, and Operation Solomon. I talk about the diversity of the American Jewish experience, where intermixture with other ethnic groups has often strengthened our community and made it better. 

But most of all, I talk about Jewish pride and Jewish resilience, and the fact that while people still try to tell us who we are, we refuse to be defined by others.

Media matters. It especially matters for marginalized people. And we are marginalized people. One only needs to look at the last few years; we’ve had multiple deadly shootings, stabbings, arsons, physical assaults, car attacks, and murders motivated by antisemitism. The claim that we’ve assimilated to the point that hatred of our community is a non-issue falls apart with the barest interrogation. Jews deserve all of the same consideration and care that any other marginalized group does.

It is high time that we are allowed to wrestle ourselves out of someone else’s narrative, and instead, with clarity, honesty, and the lived experience that only Jewish artists can bring to our own stories, have the chance to tell our own. After all, our histories live in our blood, from generation to generation. 

The post The Jewish (Casting) Question appeared first on Jewcy.

Good news, Jews! America loves you.

A new survey conducted by the Pew Research Center indicates that Jews are America’s favorite religious group, JTA reports.

The survey of 3,217 adults conducted in June asked respondents to rate their feelings toward various religious groups on a scale of 1 to 100, with 1 being coldest, 100 warmest and 50 meaning they have neither positive nor negative feelings.

Jews rated 63, slightly ahead of Catholics (62) and evangelicals (61). Buddhists, Hindus and Mormons prompted neutral ratings, from 48 to 53. Muslims were given the worst rating, at 40. Atheists rated 41.

I think we all owe the creators of The O.C. a debt of gratitude for America’s philo-Semitism:

(Image: Shutterstock/ Photon75)

The post The Data is in: America Loves Jews! appeared first on Jewcy.

Today over at Tablet, Rachel Shukert raises an interesting point about our beloved Downton Abbey, whose second season began airing on this side of the pond last Sunday. She argues that for a 1920s period drama that prides itself on historical accuracy and impeccable attention to detail, that there has been no mention at all of Lady Grantham’s Jewish father, Isidore Levinson, whose heritage you’d think might ruffle a few feathers at Downton, represents a quizzical omission on the show’s part.

While this season’s arrival of Lady Grantham’s mother (Shirley MacLaine!) at Downton would seem to be the perfect time to address the very Jewish elephant in the finely decorated room—her husband, the “dry goods multi millionaire from Cincinnati”—Shukert laments that (spoiler alert) no such moment occurs:

But if you started fantasizing about Seder at Waddesdon Manor with the Rothschilds or, say, the deliciously glacial retort of Lady Mary to some Unity Mitford-esque baby fascist, I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. (I’m one of the illegal downloaders Hugh Bonneville hates, and I know.) From the moment MacLaine’s hennaed and befeathered head peeks out from the door of her Rolls Royce Phantom, the J-word is never mentioned, never alluded to, never even euphemized (that is, unless you count “American”). The silence is not only glaringly anachronistic on a program so obsessed with accurate period details, if not accuracy itself. (This is Downton, after all, where the wrong class of person moving a tea tray can inspire a sudden recovery from total paraplegia.) It’s also a major loss of dramatic opportunity on a show that, having served us up one of the most dramatically inert representations of worldwide conflict—the Great War only killed characters that were dispensable, and everyone was able to make it home from the front for important black-tie events—can’t afford to miss many more.

Of course, MacLaine’s character isn’t Jewish, and Lady Grantham was raised Episcopalian. Still, I’d expect a barb or two from the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess by now, at the very least.

Downton’s Missing Jews [Tablet]
Previously: Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Downton Abbey Viewing Party Edition
Why Downton Abbey Is The Least Jewish Show On Television

The post Why Does No One on Downton Abbey Mention Lady Grantham’s Jewish Dad? appeared first on Jewcy.

Something is troubling Rachel Shukert. Despite all of the bells and Steve Buscemi whistles, HBO’s Prohibition-era drama Boardwalk Empire just doesn’t do it for her. Why? “It’s because I want Boardwalk Empire to be a show all about the Jewish gangsters,” she explains. After all, they’re the most unpredictable characters on the show:

What we get on the show is just enough to whet my appetite. I thrill every time the legendary criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein (played by the great Michael Stuhlbarg), the man who fixed the 1919 World Series and inspired the character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, appears on screen, demurely sipping a cup of coffee and smiling quietly at something known only to himself; why do we get him in such small doses, and mainly reacting to the machinations of Nucky Thompson, the world’s most sheepish crime boss? When Meyer Lansky (Anatol Yusuf) first showed up, I let out a Belieber-esque squeal; this season he’s playing second fiddle to Gyp Rosetti (Bobby Cannavale), your standard-issue maniac killer/sex pervert (he likes women to tie him up and choke him. Snore.) I was fascinated by the character of Manny Horvitz, the garrulous kosher-butcher-cum-bloodthirsty-gangster who calls everybody “boychik” and dry-ages his enemies on meat hooks in the deep freeze, until (spoiler alert!) they let the guy with half a face (who is Anjelica Huston’s nephew and even with his Phantom of the Opera mask on, is still attractive beyond all sense) blow him away in the first episode of the new season. That was five weeks ago. I’m still sitting shiva.

Read the rest at Tablet Magazine.

Jewcy on Boardwalk Empire: Culture Kvetch: The Jews of HBO’s ‘Boardwalk Empire’
Meyer Lansky Lives: Talking With Anatol Yusef Of Boardwalk Empire
The Unkillable Kosher Butcher Of Boardwalk Empire
From Boardwalk Empire To Gatsby: Top Five Arnold Rothstein Pop Culture Moments

The post Are There Not Enough Jewish Gangsters on ‘Boardwalk Empire?’ appeared first on Jewcy.

I want to get close to Laney, to hear her say my name slo-wly. She is petite but taut-bodied in a yellow sundress, fabric so invitingly thin and wispy I wonder if I could blow it off her torso with a well-timed breath. She is telling me her fingers tremble when she drinks coffee, and that is why she has tiny green glops on the skin between the toenails she’s painted. Her small blue eyes twinkle, and I hold her gaze as if I’m spinning plates on my index finger: the longer I do it, the more likely she might be to applaud, take my hand, and invite me to rest my palm on the small of her back.

“Have you ever eaten at Belle Luna?” she asks me as we stroll the streets of downtown Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve just eaten crepes at a French café: it’s our first date. “Nope,” I say, walking a little behind her to admire her bronzed legs. “Have you ever had a drink at Sapphire?” she asks. “No, but I’d like to, sometime,” I say. “Have you ever gone inside Sterchi Lofts?” “Well,” I say, laughing. “What?” she asks. “No,” I say, “I haven’t been there either.”

Outside of us both being law students and laughing at Will Ferrell movies, Laney and I don’t have much in common: it’s not just that we haven’t frequented the same bars or restaurants; it’s that we don’t like to visit the same regions of human experience. I love reading novels; she doesn’t care for them. She loves shopping; I get headaches at T.J. Maxx. But she’s a sweet girl, and that body…

I sit her on a bench and tell her I can read palms—“because my parents are Russian”—and she either buys my line of reasoning (Russian parents = metaphysical insight) or she accepts that I’m inventing a way to get my hands on hers. I disclose to her a future of three children, a husband, and good health. “Cool,” she says. “Oh, did you see the Christmas lights all along this street last year?”

“Yeah,” I say. “They were really cool.”

“Did you decorate your house for Christmas?”

“No,” I said. “I’m Jewish.”

“What?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“Seriously?” Laney registers my Jewishness with a squirrely wiggle of her nose.

“Yep,” I say. “So no Christmas.”

“Are you joking?”

I laugh aloud. “Why would I joke about that?”

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

“Have you ever met a Jewish person before?”

Laney is from a tiny Tennessee town where controversy can break out if a Baptist considers going to a Methodist church. She thinks to herself and answers no, she’s never met a Jew before. “Do you go to church?”

“Sometimes I go to synagogue.”

“Is that Jewish church?”

“Basically, but it’s called synagogue. Sometimes I’ll go on Friday nights.”

“So you don’t go to Jewish church all the time?”

“Synagogue,” I say.

“Oh, sorry!” she says. “Do you eat special foods?”

And that’s when it hit me: I, a man who has never fasted on Yom Kippur, who has not read the Torah since his bar mitzvah, and who has eaten pork and assorted trayf by the boatload throughout his life, is to be the Spokesman of the Jews for an inquisitive girl from Small Town, Tennessee. Her curiosities and judgments about the whole of the Jewish people will likely be filtered through me in the future; me, the first Jew she’s ever known. I feel underqualified for the job and eerily aware of its weight: I can picture Laney at a dinner party, maybe five years from now, and the talk shifting to something or other related to Jews and Laney saying, “Ya’ll, I know one.”

In my life, I have been cocooned: I went to Jewish Sunday school until my bar mitzvah, I went to a private high school that, while not predominantly Jewish, had its fair share of them, and then I attended a university with a largely Jewish student body. Though I lived in places where Jews were the minority, I had never before been put into a position where I was to be quizzed (in the nicest possible way, of course, because Laney’s smile was very nice) about my faith, identity, culture, and religion. I even feel presumptuous using the possessive “my”: who I am to feign expertise on such a rich, complicated people, for the very word Jew unfurls into thousands of connotations depending on what books you read, who you talk to, and what you experience.

“Some people eat special foods,” I tell Laney. “Kosher.”

“What’s kosher?”

“Well, you can’t eat pork…and certain foods have to be treated a certain way.”

God. It was as if I’d sped-read Judaism for Dummies.

Even though I tell Laney that holidays like Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are more significant in the Jewish calendar, Laney wants to know about Hanukkah. “Is it like Christmas?” she asks.

My Sunday school education, long warehoused and growing musty with disuse, was suddenly called upon. I deliver what I know in fragments: the story of the noble Maccabee warriors, how they thought they had oil to help them survive one cold night, only to discover that the oil, miraculously, would last them eight. “So that’s why we light the candles on eight nights,” I tell Laney. “On this candelabra-looking thing.” I forget to tell her the candelabra-looking thing is called a menorah. “Have you ever eaten potato pancakes?”

“No…” she says, as if she thinks I might offer her one from my pocket.

I am lucky Laney is asking me about Hanukkah, because if she had asked me a broader question like, “What is a Jew?”, I would be flummoxed. The History of the Jews: a history of faith and strength and perseverance over oppression, of tradition and literature and art and family and. And and and. I wasn’t getting to the ands: I was only talking about Hanukkah. But then again, what else could I tell her if she did ask? Where would I start?

Talking about some of the basics of Judaism made me keenly aware of the scattershot knowledge I had of my own Jewish identity, and how difficult it would be for me to explain to a person who had no familiarity with it. My Jewishness has been passed down from my parents, Russian Jews who came to the United States as political refugees in 1979. On their Soviet passports, their nationality was listed not as RUSSIAN, but as JEW. They fled to America for the reasons so many flee: opportunity, freedom, both economic and religious.

In my family, I was a first-generation American Jew, born in Omaha, Nebraska and raised in Memphis, Tennessee on the soothing storyteller sermons of my Reform rabbi and the sing-song cadence of my cantor. However, my day-to-day Jewishness, especially past my bar mitzvah, was molded more by cultural than religious forces: Jerry Seinfeld’s nasal twang, Adam Sandler’s “The Hanukkah Song.”

Hanukkah again. “The potato pancakes are called latkes,” I tell Laney.

I don’t ask Laney if she’s ever heard of Moshe Dayan or Philip Roth or Larry David. I don’t try to present and flatten the contusions of the word Jew itself: is it a signifier of identity? Race? Religion? Culture? All of the above? How much do such distinctions matter when, in the dark pages of history, those who hate don’t care if you’re Orthodox or Reform or Conservative or culturally Jewish, or a Jew for Jesus, or an atheist Jew, or a Jewish Neurotic. For those who hate them, a Jew is a Jew—period. And while many Jews may be reluctant to define their people, even in defiant pride, with the same vocabulary that their enemies use, I am reminded of an Israeli speaker who hated the word “Jewish.” “Why,” he said to me and my fellow Birthright trip travelers in a hotel conference room in Jerusalem, “are you Jew…ISH?” He stressed the palms-raised-in-the-air nebbishness of the ISH. “No, you’re not Jewish,” he scolded us. “You can’t ish your way out of our family. You’re a JEW!”

I am a Jew. This is what I had told Laney, the shiksa goddess from the Tennessee country, and she had asked me if I was kidding. If I had been kidding, what was the joke? What was its set-up, its punchline? What comic ammunition would I have gotten out of pretending to be a Jew?

With the fearlessness of an Israeli commando and the calm dignity of Moses, I ask Laney, “How would your dad feel if you, say, married a Jew?”

She turns her pillowy lips to me. “I think he’d be okay,” she says. “But he’d be mad if I married a black guy.”

Oy.

(image via Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over A Year
Did My Commitment to Dating Only Jews Make Me a Racist?

The post Jewish Law Student Seeks Blonde, Southern Belle appeared first on Jewcy.

Fall can be confusing. There are so many Jewish holidays to keep track of, and only so many times you can tell your employer it’s a ‘Jewish holiday’ without raising some eyebrows (see: Janney, Allison). If only there was a website to tell you whether each day was a Jewish holiday!

Introducing Isitajewishholidaytoday.com, a website that does exactly that. How else would you know that today was the fourth day of Sukkot? Now we just need a website to explain whether that holiday is a legitimate excuse for missing work (FYI, the fourth day of Sukkot is not).

Isitajewishholidaytoday.com

The post New Website Tells You Whether Today Happens to be a Jewish Holiday appeared first on Jewcy.

• Lena Dunham forgot her pants again. Instead, she got a $1 million book deal.

• Brooklyn native Barbra Streisand says playing at the Barclays Center is a homecoming for her.

• Being a Jew in China means everyone assumes you’re good with money.

• Jewish Jocks, a new book edited by Frank Foer and friend-of-Jewcy Marc Tracy, was deemed ‘highbrow brilliant’ by the New York Magazine approval matrix.

• The world came full circle when Jerry Seinfeld wrote to the New York Times to criticize an opinion column hating on the word ‘really.’

• Rashida Jones impersonates a Jewish grandmother and does a German accent on Conan:

The post Daily Jewce: Rashida Jones’ German Lesson, Seinfeld’s Letter to the NYT appeared first on Jewcy.

Executive Director Roman Shmulenson commented, “The number came as a surprise to many. Yet, for a whole range of reasons, Russian-speaking Jews remained either unaffiliated or only marginally affiliated with the existing communal institutions. There were key people in the American and the Russian Jewish communities who realized that in order for the integration to be successful, certain changes had to take place. There was a need for a unified strong voice and coordination for many grassroots efforts existing in the community but not really connecting with the mainstream.”

Three of these key players were the honorees, who have bridged the gap a bit further between the communities. Emphasis was placed on empowering the individual through Jewish values to allow for opportunities to fully integrate as individuals and as a community. UJA Vice President and CEO John Ruskay quoted the famous refusenik Natan Sharansky: “Identity is now the driver for everything we care about. If one is not positively identified, why care about the Jewish poor, renewing Jewish life in the Former Soviet Union, or securing the Jewish state?”

The honorees have focused their efforts on transmitting appealing Jewish values to a formerly outsider demographic, via a Dolly Parton-esque book gifting program (Harold Grinspoon’s PJ Library), Soviet persistence in community organization after immigration (COJECO’s first president and Board Chairman Feliks Frenkel’s efforts in the arts and community), and from within the political machine (COJECO’s first executive director Hon. Alec Brook-Krasny, and the first member of the area’s Russian community to be elected to the New York State Assembly).

COJECO’s current president David Kislin put the decade in perspective: “This is only the beginning of a much larger history that we’ll be talking about for years to come.” The Russian Jewish community seems to be an untapped natural resource in New York with much gain to be had in the further excavation of its creative and cultural inspiration. Most important is COJECO’s vision that such integration is possible through the arts. Its Blueprint Fellowship program has been a beacon of the arts, allocating support for individual creative projects like Yiddish theaters, children’s programs, documentaries and exhibitions that illuminate a thirst to know what this Russian-speaking Jewish identity exactly is, revealing potential beyond the old country, however invisible and tragic that past might have been. Looking toward a vibrant future, as former Blueprint Fellow Mira Stroika, an accordian-clad musician belted at the conclusion of the evening à la Edith Piaf, “Non, je ne regrette rien.”

(Photographed: above, Hon. Alec Brook-Krasny; below, Mira Stroika)

Margarita Korol is one of this year’s Blueprint Fellows, producing an illustrated poetry exhibit honoring her refusenik mother.

The post The 10 Year Itch appeared first on Jewcy.

“Today was one of my more awkward days,” admitted Aaron Schechter when he sat down at a bar on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. He had arrived late, he explained, for a planning meeting at the financial accounting firm where he worked. It’s a job that the 23-year-old, one half of the hip-hop duo Divine Rhyme, didn’t like to publicize. “Kinda ruins the image I’m going for,” he said.

It was a funny story. The “big shot partners,” as he described them, had been waiting in the conference room, but no one mentioned his tardiness. Instead, one said, “Hey man, do you have a twin brother?” When Schechter told him no, the guy replied, “Well, this looks and sounds just like you,” and played a YouTube clip of Divine Rhyme performing, as a few of the guys burst out laughing. It was nothing new; at his previous job, Schechter said, “Every time I fucked up or did something wrong, my boss would say, ‘It must have been those blunts you were rapping about smoking the other day.'”

When he wasn’t enduring razzing from coworkers, Schechter, who is from the Philadelphia suburbs, spent his time writing rap lyrics or recording them with his partner-in-crime, Jason Majlessi. They started Divine Rhyme in 2006 at Lehigh University, where Majlessi, one year younger, graduated in May of 2010. By June, he had moved to New York to join Schechter. The pair calls each other “Sheck” and “Jahizzi,” but it’s hard to be gangsta when you graduated from a fancy liberal arts school in the northeast.

1 Persian + 1 Jew = Jewish group

A year later, Majlessi is working for a real estate firm in midtown, Schechter is with the same accounting group, and they still have their eyes on the prize. But they also have to hold down steady jobs. Divine Rhyme isn’t big yet. Far from it: they don’t have music for sale on iTunes. But they’ve opened shows for The Roots, Ben Folds Five, The Cool Kids, and the Boston rapper Sam Adams. And this year they’ve played gigs in New York (most recently at 310 Lounge on Bowery) and returned to Lehigh for a few more. For now, they’re trying to get fans the hard way: blasting their shit on social media platforms. They post songs to Myspace and the mixtape destination DatPiff. They put videos on YouTube, amass fans on Facebook and Twitter, and hold out hope that their time will come. They remain optimistic—“We’re working hard to keep Divine Rhyme alive even while pursuing full-time jobs,” Schechter says—but you can sense that they know all too well it’s a tough road ahead.

Majlessi, originally from San Francisco, is Persian. “I don’t know much about it,” fumbles Schechter, who is (surprise!) Jewish. He needn’t worry, though—his buddy exhibits the same blasé attitude about personal background right back at him. “He’s not that Jewish, but I mean, he goes home for Yom Kippur or whatever,” says Majlessi. Meanwhile, the duo’s good friend Julian Holguin, who was previously their manager, is half Italian, half Dominican. “He’s at a disadvantage in the music industry because he’s not Jewish,” jokes Schechter.

Growing up, Schechter’s last name gave him away; kids knew it was Jewish, but didn’t know enough to pronounce it right. “It used to make me really upset,” he says. “They would butcher it.” He speaks about Hebrew school like it was serving time. “I did my eight years, had the bar mitzvah. Stuck around for confirmation. But I got annoyed with it.”

Before Schechter got to Lehigh, Hillel sent him a letter about joining. It left him confused. “I really didn’t know why they would have sent me that. My dad probably checked some box and never told me.”  His Judaism is sporadic, like most every young, Jewish hip-hop enthusiast in New York, but inevitably, he does want to go on Birthright at some point. And when his parents came to see him perform at Hiro Ballroom in New York City in March 2010, his mom brought him a big package of matzah.

Still, Schechter said that Judaism doesn’t much enter his lyrics: “There’s a way that you could make it your whole thing, but that’s not the route I’ve gone.” And yet, in the eyes of listeners, Majlessi admitted, “Sheck being Jewish affects both of us.” For those quick to judge, the equation seems to be: 1 Persian + 1 Jew = Jewish group. When a popular Boston culture blog, Barstool Sports, announced that Divine Rhyme would be opening for the 2010 Stoolapalooza music tour, one tough critic commented, “the jew crew (divine rhyme) will make sam adams sound real good.” Schechter shrugs off the comment: “That guy probably saw me and said ‘Oh, look at this Jew. Another Asher Roth.’”

He’s right that the instant comparison is annoying, but at the same time, he’s certainly more Roth than Matisyahu. Roth, like Schechter—and maybe it’s universal—can’t seem to escape the label of Jewish rapper, even though he’s only half-Jewish, and even though there’s nothing Jewy about his music. Just like Schechter’s. And that omission isn’t some conscious play for more street cred, but happens because, as Schechter wonders, how the hell do you rap about it? “I think I bring elements of being raised as a Jew, but in subtle ways,” he says. “A lot of my lyrics are self-doubting; same vein as Woody Allen or Larry David.” But most college kids don’t want to watch Larry David rap.

Sheck and Jahizzi would much rather take after the characters in a different HBO series: How to Make it in America, which is currently shooting its second season on the Lower East Side. It’s no surprise they’re big fans of the show, with its buddy pairing of Cam and Ben, a short, loud Dominican kid and a tall, Jewish ginger. “We joke about how we embody the two main characters,” says Schechter. “Jason can be just like Cam, with his hustling attitude, and I can be like Ben in the sense that I’m more low key and try to do more of the behind-the-scenes stuff. We identify with the show in terms of what we’re trying to do.” Of course, the show is hardly realistic (the friends breezily come up with a line of t-shirts called Crisp), and these two know that in real life, they can turn down any street in Williamsburg and find two other young rappers hoping to “make it.”

For now, the religious dichotomy of Divine Rhyme only appears occasionally, like on their new track “WorldWide” when Majlessi says he’s “the flyest member on the no-fly list… We smilin’ as they screenin’ us because I’m Persian,” or on one of their best songs, “For the Ages,” when they rap: “Blue, 42, it’s the Persian with the Jew / And the crowd goes crazy every time we come through.” But both boys have vague plans to better incorporate it in the future. After all, if they’re going to try and pursue an eventual career in music, they need to get serious. “We can’t just rap about poppin’ bottles in the club, that’s not original,” says Majlessi, though three minutes later he admits, “Man, I love the bottles.”

For now, the guys have to stay in the rat race until they’re lucky enough to pursue music exclusively. In the long term, they want to make albums and rock packed stadiums. But who doesn’t? “The beauty of it right now is that money’s not the goal,” says Majlessi. “We just care about making music and getting our name out. We can only measure success in people coming up to us saying ‘Yo, I love your stuff, you guys are the shit.’ But we also check the link every day to see how many times the EP was downloaded, and we look at plays of our tracks on Myspace. Plus, rocking a stage in front of 3,000 people at UMass, that counts for something.”

Not everyone approves of the viral marketing. A classmate of theirs from Lehigh tells me: “I actually had to delete Jason as a friend on Facebook due to his barrage of event invites. One day I just said that’s it, this guy is gone. Their music is decent, though.”

Sheck and Jahizzi will hope to keep earning new fans, and to show people that “the Persian and the Jew” are far more than decent. That, or they’ll move on.

—

– Listen to some new Divine Rhyme tracks

– Check out their YouTube videos

– Find them on Facebook

The post Pimpin Ain’t Easy For A Jewish Rapper appeared first on Jewcy.

Jews & Brews happens at Sherlocks Baker St. Pub & Grill, 1952-A West Gray. Join the Jewstontexas Facebook group to learn about the new location.

The post Jews & Brews! appeared first on Jewcy.