Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

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On Forgiveness

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

The post Kosher Salt: A Very Jewish Christmas appeared first on Jewcy.

Christmas – the biggest birthday party of the year. Filled with eccentric relatives, questionable sweaters and indoor trees, Jesus’ big day is a weird ordeal for everyone except for Jews. And as birthday celebrations go, it dwarfs all others – whose is even close to being as recognized? Mary Steenburgen’s? I wish. Us non-Messiahs are relegated to renting out batting cages, blasting out evites and pretending to appreciate that snap bracelet from Aunt Kathy.

With all due respect to Patton Oswalt, who has bravely suggested that there are but a handful of birthdays worth celebrating, I’d like to propose a new birthday celebration policy: none. Enough with the birthdays. The passage of time is not an accomplishment worth acknowledging, not a feat to be honored – it’s only the temporary absence of death, inevitable and impending , rendering those latex balloons and whimsical wrapping paper an absurd symbol of insignificance. Time marches on and, for another year, we’ve done nothing to slow it. Enjoy your cupcake.

Truthfully, the very function of the birthday eludes me. What is the tangible benefit to knowing your date of birth? To measure the passage of time? There are plenty of time-measuring devices – for example, a watch or clock – that tracking your personal age becomes mostly a source of anxiety with no greater cultural function. To symbolize one’s uniqueness? A half million people are born every day, each with wildly different strengths and weaknesses, yet we insist on assigning the day of our birth with acres of personality-defining, idiosyncrasy-validating significance. “I’m June 15, which makes a ton of sense once you get to know me”. No it doesn’t and I won’t get to know you.

A hypothetical: Jerry and Gerry are identical twins. Jerry grows up knowing his birthday, Gerry doesn’t. What’s the discernable difference in their quality of life? I would submit an enthusiastic ‘Hell none’. If anything, Gerry is shrouded in a cloud of mystery, making him irresistibly alluring to men and women alike. My friend Seth doesn’t know his birthday and he seems both ageless and invincible.

Not to mention gifts. Turning 34 isn’t hard enough without a slew of $34 Applebee’s gift cards? Does that Nautica scarf really warm the existential chill of knowing your body and mind are gradually deteriorating? If we bottled all the mental and emotional energy spent on the acquisition of arbitrary goods for people we barely know, we’d have a weird big bottle. So maybe let’s not bottle it. (Note: I hold irrationally ill will towards the gift-giving-and-receiving paradigm due to the fact that I am ABYSMAL at buying people gifts. For my girlfriend’s birthday last year, I gave her an oversized Richard Scarry book which I thought was cute. She frowned and cried and the next day it was gone. In fact, the “frown-cry-and-discard” has been the standard response to most of my gifts. Abysmal.).

So, as a remedy for the over-celebration of our random days of origin, allow to me to propose:  Birth Day. One day, everyone’s birthday. August 11^th (why not? August is due for a major holiday). Like Christmas, but less snowy. And while Birth Day could adopt the ethos of Christmas – family, community, yada and yada – I believe there to be a process that’s more streamlined and equally “fun”. Imagine this regiment to be United Nations-sanctioned and occurring simultaneously around the globe.

Birth Day

9AM – Breakfast at local parking lot. Mess hall tents with hot buffets and picnic tables. Eggs, french toast, coffee – like craft services for a movie, or nicer-than-average army barracks. Modest flower arrangements peppered throughout and a karaoke band that takes requests from citizens oldest to youngest. A staff of enthusiastic youths are available to transcribe and deliver personalized Birth Day messages for a nominal fee.

11AM – Birth Day Activities. Aforementioned enthusiastic youths lead Birth Day citizens through a series of 15-minute activity stations.

– Batting Cage

– Naming of the Year’s Regrets

– NBA Jam (arcade version)

– Nap

– Phone chat with Mom (aka Re-hashing of the Regrets)

– Discarding of the Applebee’s Gift Cards

– Nap again

1PM – Lunch. Citizens are fed one slice of pizza, one bag of Fritos and one cup of Cherry Coke. Except he/she with the highest NBA Jam score, who has the option for Sprite.

3PM – Gift Retrieval. Citizens walk – single file and silently – to the closest post office or bus stop, where there is an orderly pile of wrapped gifts, one gift per-person (Note: children under 5 receive no gift. Their brains are small and they’re clumsy – no gift). Once each citizen has chosen and unwrapped their gift, there is a 15-minute Bartering Block, in which gifts can be traded amongst the masses. If you don’t end up with something you like by the end of the Bartering Block, too bad. Sometimes life is hard. Happy Birthday.

5PM – Citizens re-convene at the Mess Hall for a sing along, consisting of one round of “Happy Birthday” with a name chosen at random to be inserted into the appropriate spot. Enthusiastic youths read personalized messages aloud and all are given one more cup of Cherry Coke.

7PM – Bedtime. You’re older now. Go to sleep.

Doesn’t that sound like a fun, efficient use of our compulsion to celebrate a random day 9 months after one of the times our parents had sex? If Birth Day goes well, we can extend it to Birth Week. Like Holy Week, but more birth-y.

So, this Christmas, as you enjoy your boozy egg nog and watch the NBA (thank god), send a wish up to Santa Claus for no more birthdays. Just Birth Day. And imagine what you’ll do with all that mental space hitherto used to acknowledge everybody’s every birthday forever. You could help me find that Richard Scarry book. Shouldn’t be hard – it’s way oversized.

The post Christmas: A Seasonal Reminder Of How Birthdays Are Dumb appeared first on Jewcy.

The Hasidim teach that the spark of G_d is everywhere. So is it possible that HaShem is in Christmas as well? Yes, Virginia, the G_d of Israel can be found in the dreary haze of post-Chanukah Red and Green retail.

The Jewish values of Christmas are:

Family: Jews are the world’s smallest extended family. And although we may not agree on everything, we respect and celebrate each other as spiritual kin. This is the greatest theme of Christmas; people coming together as one to celebrate the end of the year, to renew family traditions, to patch up old grievances and party it up.

Giving: many families are going without this year. Holidays make us more aware of the abundance that we have and remind us of the less fortunate. There is no holiday in the Jewish lexicon that prevents someone from giving tzedakah. And by dropping a coin in the Salvation Army box, buying pre-bagged canned goods at the grocery for a hungry family or throwing an action figure in the Toys For Tots bin, one is committed to the greatest Jewish value: Tikkun Olam, repairing the world.

Reverence: while Christmas reveres the birth of a man that we do not consider holy, remember that the Torah tells us that all good people, regardless of their background, have a place in the World To Come. Reverence does not have to be culturally fixated. I revere Gandhi, but I am not a Hindu. I revere Martin Luther King, and I am not black. As for Jesus, I can revere a man who wanted to care for the sick and open Judaism up to the gentiles, even if I don’t believe he was the Messiah and fear the violence against the Jews that has been committed in his name. 

So “Gut Yontif” to my fellow Jews who find themselves wiping the menorah candle wax off their table to make room for Christmas cookies. Find a way to bring HaShem into this time and take pride in this very important fact: most egg nog is OU Kosher! 

The post The D’Var Torah For Christmas appeared first on Jewcy.

This won’t make me popular in some neurotic circles, but my Hebrew name means “The Bringer of Light” so I am going to illuminate the obvious for you: Hanukkah is bullshit and Christmas is awesome. When it comes to winter holiday enchantment, our Festival of Lights doesn’t hold a candle to the Festival of Christ.  There are many reasons why Christmas kicks the royal tar out of Hanukkah, but I didn’t fully comprehend them until a few years ago. Unlike many Jewish kids who pine to celebrate the yuletide, I was never ashamed of Hanukkah-I actually took pride in our lackluster, knockoff celebration-and thus remained woefully ignorant of Christmas’s manifest superiority. My gentile classmates got to make cookies shaped like trees and Santa hats, but I busied myself in the back of the room with an activity book of Hanukkah-themed crosswords, mazes and connect-the-dots. As the only Jew in my class, growing up in Alaska, I was special! I got to do my own thing! I didn’t need Christmas!

(Fun Fact: There are not many Jews in Alaska, mostly because Sarah Palin hunts us from her helicopter.)

The bells and whistles of Christmas seemed worthless because I had menorahs, dreidels, latkes and gelt-chocolate coins that Jews use to teach our young children about the glories of compound interest-to occupy my time; they were just as good, right? (Correct Answer: no, they were not.) As the years passed, I evolved from a child to a college student-my central vice evolved from toys to liquor, although my behavior was still “childish” according to various ignorant females-and Hanukkah became more of a joyless obligation: a holiday marked with a shrug instead of celebratory anticipation. It existed, much like homeless people and God, but was not something I bothered to think about, if I could help it, much like homeless people and God. And then my shikse girlfriend’s parents invited me to celebrate Christmas in New England, which changed everything.

At first I nervously turned down their request; I would feel like I were visiting a foreign country without any knowledge of the local customs, such as how to open an advent calendar, or the best way to sit on an old bearded man’s lap as I tell him my deepest desires. (Just kidding, I was already familiar with the latter custom… intimately familiar.) My shikse‘s parents changed my mind, however, when they promised to stifle any discussion of Jesus the Super-Powered Baby, mostly because they are atheists. And guess what? Christmas is FUCKING AMAZING! My family never drank at Hanukkah-everyone knows that Jews can’t drink-but Christmas is a friggin’ booze-fueled bacchanalia: egg nog spiked with whiskey, apple cider flavored with rum (my girlfriend’s grandmother’s recipe-you rock my world, Nana!), and wine by the litre/megalitre/gigalitre/tetralitre/yottalitre. Yes, there is such a thing as a yottalitre, and it will get you fucked up.

I loved the multicolored lights (which become even lovelier as I got hammered on Nana’s apple cider)… the stockings filled with goodies (tiny bottles of Bailey’s Irish Crème)… the communal delight of placing time-treasured ornaments on the tree (none of them Jesus-related)… the warmth of the crackling fire (naked)… scrumptious nutty fudge (the best diarrhea ever)… and the sweaters! Oh my Christ, I even love those horrible scratchy argyle sweaters! And here’s the best part: you get all the gifts on the same day! Gentiles envy Jews for our “eight days of presents,” as if we score eight times as much booty, but in reality we simply ration them over the course of a week, which causes inevitable disappointment. Not every gift is a winner; Day One and Day Two are big scores, but you’re getting useless junk by Day Five… it is more anticlimactic than getting a blow job that ends the moment before you… uh… climax. This rationing takes away the cathartic, overwhelming joy of receiving all the gifts in one amazing primal burst of acquisition. You wake up first thing in the morning-no waiting until sunset, no no no!-and then rip open the wrapping paper in a crazed fit of Luscious Greed and Instant Gratification. It was an orgy! An orgy of presents! An orgy of accrual! An orgy with my girlfriend’s family! (WHAT???) Jesus! Look at all these wonderful goddamned things! All for me! All at once! All right now! OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGodohmyChrist!

Still don’t believe me that Christmas is fucking awesome? I’ll prove it. Go listen to “Jingle Bell Rock.” Does that song kick ass or what? Jingle bell time is a swell time! How could you possibly be sad while listening to this masterpiece of pure sonic joy? It’s like an angel’s voice, whispering into your ear, or the soothing sound of an abortion machine sucking fetuses down to hell (“vvvvvvvvv-vroooooooooooooooooom“). Now go listen to that goofy, obnoxious turd “I Have a Little Dreidel.” What a sick fucking joke. “Then dreidel I shall play”? FAIL. (By the way, I received an instant message from a friend today: “my SIRIUS radio has four holiday stations right now, and one of them is ‘Hanukkah.’ What the hell is Hanukkah music? ‘Money’ by Pink Floyd?” For some reason he did not want his name revealed in this column.)

Here is something else that annoys me: I’ve typed Hanukah/Chanukah/Hanukkah/Hannukkkakahahahaakahaakaaha a trillion different ways while writing this column-despite my commitment toward consistency in everything that I attempt, which normally comes effortlessly-because the goddamned spellchecker accepts all of them. Also: the date of Hanukkah changes dates every fucking year because Jews insist on using the lunar calendar, which the rest of the human race chucked like twenty million years ago. Aren’t we supposed to be smarter than everyone else? What the fuck is wrong with us? How did we get all those Nobel prizes-and control of the mainstream media, Wall Street, Hollywood, the American government, etc. (just kidding about that last one!)-when we can’t settle on one spelling and one date for our most famous fucking holiday? It’s easy to forget the date of Hanukkah, but nobody will ever forget the 25th of December-glorious, blissful Christmas-which is not historically out of place for American Jews. According to David Greenberg at Slate: “Around 1900, millions of eastern European Jews … adopted American traditions, including the newly secularized Christmas. … Jews installed Christmas trees in their homes and thought nothing of the carols their children sang in the public schools.” In other words, “Chrismukkah” is already part of our tradition.

Not to sound like Bill O’Reilly-whom I am sending a handle of Jameson Irish Whiskey for Christmas; we all know that it’s his favorite breakfast snack-but when hysterical Jewish parents (are there any other kind?) protest secular mentions of Christmas in the public square, I want to shove mistletoe down their Grinchy throats. For example, earlier this month a Jewish mother temporarily convinced a North Carolina elementary school to ban “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” from its kindergarten concert because the song contains a lyric about Santa, but local Christians went crazy and basically threatened a Second Holocaust; the administrators caved, which is fine by me because Christmas is awesome. Church and State must be separated, of course, but it’s more important to keep Young Earth creationists out of the classroom than Frosty the Snow Man. (Bonus Culture War Victory: Frosty will make impressionable students far more tolerant of homosexuality.)

By the way, this hysterical Jewish mother is probably unaware that a Jew wrote “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” In fact, Jews are behind such secular holiday classics as “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire),” “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Silver Bells,” “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Sleigh Ride,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “Let It Snow! Let it Snow! Let It Snow!” and “White Christmas,” the perennial favorite of Neo-Nazis around the world. I don’t feel guilty for loving Christmas, mostly because Jews pretty much created Christmas, or at least the contemporary/superior version. (And considering that Jesus popped out of Mary’s untainted Semitic vagina, we gave the world the religious version too.) And I don’t mean to bash Hanukkah, which just seems cruel; it’s a lovable underdog: a minor holiday thrust into the spotlight because something had to compete with Christmas… it’s as if you suddenly found yourself in a boxing ring with Muhammad Ali-at his prime, not the Mohammed Ali who quivers uncontrollably-and the referee told you it was a fight to the death. You would shit your pants! So basically we should love Hanukkah like we love a child who has terminal cancer: it never asked for this! It never asked to suffer! How could a loving God let this happen?  This year, I will teach my girlfriend’s family how to light a menorah, which should be fun to try while I’m obliterated on Nana’s alcoholic apple cider. Perhaps they will enjoy my tribe’s festivities as much as I enjoy theirs… but somehow I doubt it. And that’s “ho ho ho”-kay with me.

The post Why Christmas Kicks Hanukkah’s Ass appeared first on Jewcy.

If you’ve ever been to New York in December, you’ve probably walked through one of these random street corners lined with trees wrapped in large hair nets and strings of bulbish lights precariously dangling from red wooden stakes.  Tucked within the trees is almost always a shabby little shack cobbled out of bits and pieces with perhaps a bit of heat to protect and provide comfort from the elements to these sentinel street vendors who indefatigably hock their wares. Walking through these temporary showrooms can be a briefly transformative experience.  The street noise dampens slightly, the scent of pine sap gently assails your nostrils, and for a moment you don’t feel you are in a loud bustling city of eight million people.  Perhaps it was this feeling that sparked the romance. Several years ago I had an ecologically conscientious roommate.   She cared about the environment so much that she never flushed the toilet.  Purportedly this omission of common courtesy was an effort to save water, but it only really resulted in pissing off her roommate who – with my own standards of sanitation – would flush twice.  That and her other earth-saving tricks made me conclude that she really would be much happier in life living in a cabin in the woods.  This conclusion was reinforced by her December fling – our Christmas Tree Guy. Our neighborhood Christmas tree stand was only about a hundred yards from our apartment and directly in the path to our closest subway stop.  So it wasn’t uncommon to walk through the trees several times a day.  First it was, “oh, I’m just bringing the Christmas Tree Guy some coffee,” she’d giggle as she ran out the door with a travel mug in hand.  Then there was a dinner date.  Not too long after came the late night moans and the ecstatic rhythmic thuds of Christmas Tree Guy sex. The next morning my walk to the subway was a vicarious walk of shame.  “Oh hi,” I bashfully managed, “you know, the walls in our apartment are really thin.”  But the Christmas Tree Guy turned out to be very sweet.  He was a forest ranger by trade, but during the winter makes good money by selling Christmas trees.  When we wasn’t on duty, he shared a tiny apartment with about 15 other guys.  He said people were generally friendly and welcoming, bringing him coffee and snacks, but even so I suspected my roommate was the only one providing carnal comforts.  The local street gang had dubbed him “Tree Guy” and helped protect his trees from petty theft.  The only trouble he said that he was having was with the bank at the street corner where his trees were set up.  They would argue about where he could place his wares and hassled the vendors until the Christmas Tree Guy posted a sign that said “***** Bank Hates Christmas.”  Christmas eventually won. But Christmas trees, obviously, are the biggest and most obvious symbol of, well, Christmas – a Christian holiday.  In my journey to become Jewish one of the big questions many Jews by Choice who had Christian backgrounds are faced with is – what do you do about Christmas?  That, is basically what my roommate asked as she started bringing home trees.  Perhaps it was her hyper ecological savvy, but she only brought home live trees – the little ones in tiny pots.  They were just green needle covered plants pruned to roughly resemble the conical shape of Christmas trees.  She never decorated them, although she did dress a bookcase in steady white lights, but those had stayed up all year and were turned on occasionally for mood lighting.  But nonetheless our apartment was beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and I was trying to be Jewish. December came and went and our apartment contained a half dozen little trees and one large one in a big pot that the Christmas Tree Guy had wrapped in a black plastic bag and asked me to drag home to surprise my roommate.  Their romance trickled to a near stop by February since he had retuned to Canada and the long distance diminished the interest.  But November of the following year she got a phone call from the Christmas Tree Guy and by the time he returned to the City things were hot and heavy again. That year he didn’t gift us with nearly as many trees.  Perhaps since we had managed to kill all of them in fairly quick succession.  Our apartment did smell strongly of pine when he would shed his multiple layers of work clothes, but that was about as much Christmas as we had in the apartment. We both moved after that.  But when I walked through a street corner last week, breathing in the sweet smell of pine, I wondered what our Christmas Tree Guy was up to this year.  Was he back at our street corner?  Does he keep in touch with his December lover?  Although my life is so recognizably Jewish now I won’t forget that during a period of questioning Christmas in my conversion process, I was very intimately – if vicariously – exposed to a lot of Christmas trees.

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STOP freaking out so much about Christmas trees!!! I’ve spent the last year of my life traveling around the country, reading and talking to people who are either intermarried, or mightily afraid of intermarriage, and without fail, the thing everyone is most scared about is a fucking pine tree. “What will the kids think if we have a tree???” “What will my mother say???” Tell your mom it’s not a big deal. Tell her it’s a houseplant. There are plenty of hard issues you’ll face in your religiously pluralistic household, and you may need a therapist to help you figure out your kids’ Sunday school identity, or how to handle the in-laws. You may need to talk about whether your new extended family thinks you’re going to hell, and whether you’re allowed to avoid them altogether if they do… but a tree? C’mon, it’s no different than little pink hearts at Valentines Day or a jack-o-lantern at Halloween (a similarly druidic/Christian holiday… and I doubt you’ll freak out about those. What’s the big deal with Christmas trees? I mean, Israelis put them up for Sylvester (itself basically a Christian holiday). Instead of worrying about these symbols, ask yourself how to make your own observance more meaningful, so that the tree isn’t a threat. Take a look at what your own symbols stand for, and if you aren’t sure… go read a book (I use this one)! The more your own tradition means to you, the less upsetting and threatening you’ll find a cultural Christian symbol.

And if the absence of a tree is what makes you Jewish… well, that’s pretty lame.

The post Christmas Trees are NOT the Problem appeared first on Jewcy.