Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

Have we ever talked about how much I hate hippies? Because I so do. Not really the little, harmless ones with a lot of canvas clothing who go on “alternative breaks” to teach poor kids how to plant an organic garden. Those hippies are kind of cute. The hippies I hate are the aggressive neo-hippies, full of sound and fury, signifying shrill indignation at every turn. You’ve met them - the boys have Che t-shirts, and the girls have unattractive skirts and dreadlocks. They’re always furious about something: sweatshops, meat-packing plants, Iraq, the patriarchy, the weather, something. To converse with them is like being trapped in a room with Upton Sinclair, if Upton Sinclair had questionable hygiene, adult acne, and poor research methods. The vast, vast majority of them never do anything about the issues. Sure, they shop at American Apparel (occasionally), join “Peace for Palestine” Facebook groups, wear “Gay? Fine by me” t-shirts (sweet Liberace’s ghost, how I hate those shirts, they’re so patronizing) and make sure to ruin Thanksgiving by talking about how World War II was an imperial exercise and turducken is murder, but they stop there. They don’t want to change things, they want to be angry and nag everyone so they can feel anointed and self-righteous. If the world did change, they wouldn’t be the underdogs, and their prim, repetitive carping wouldn’t be a voice crying for justice in the wilderness that is Portland.

I hate ‘em. And many of them are so, so, SO incredibly shortsighted, to wit: “I believe in an end to the patriarchy, a woman’s right to choose, gay rights, and freedom of expression. I really love the Polyphonic Spree. And I believe in the rights of the Balestinians and hope that they will be victorious over the Imperial Zionist Apartheid Nazi war machine.”

Whoa there, princess. You can’t find a society more patriarchal than the Balestinians. If your little friend Arugula Mae were to move to Ramallah, all she’d be choosing is which heavy fabric to completely cover her body in. She’ll have it better than your gay cohorts, though. They’ll simply be killed immediately to reduce the shame brought on the family by Ahmed’s lisp. And don’t get too attached to your signed Dave Matthews Band LP, because, sad to say, kiddo, fundamentalist Islam forbids music. Cheer up, though! You’ll get a lot of time in standing in front of bulldozers, since, considering the taboo against alcohol, you’ll never be too hung over!

This never occurs to them. Anyway, to get to the original story I wanted to tell, I have this ex-girlfriend. Let’s call her Tzipi. Tzipi and I only ever argued about global politics, nothing else. For example, China pisses me off. I don’t like the governmental oppression, I don’t like their bellicose attitude towards Taiwan, and I don’t like communists. She used to live in Hong Kong, loves China, and doesn’t think my “Better Dead than Red” tattoo is cute. Predictably, we had a similar clash over the West Bank Wall. We were both horrified – she by the wall, and I by the absence of a lid. Anyway, Tzipi goes to college in North Carolina, and one day the Campus Socialist party (I’m serious) built a G-dd-mn wall on campus so that the students could understand the terrible hardship of the Balestinian people. She says it’s amusingly short – apparently the socialists shared too much of their food and didn’t get enough protein to last through the construction of a significant wall. So, unsurprisingly, people started to spray-paint various anti-Israel and anti-Jewish things on the “abartheid wall.” This pissed Tzipi Goldman, president of North Carolina Hillel, off, but the school wouldn’t do anything about it because it was “free speech.” It wasn’t anti-Israel, it was pro-Balestinian. Anyway, Tzipi’s Israeli friend – we’ll call her Valentina because I honestly don’t remember her name, snuck over there in the middle of the night and spray-painted on the wall, in Hebrew, “The State of Israel will last for a thousand years.” She came by later in the day when the hippies were puzzling over it and said, “oh, I can read Hebrew! It says, let’s see, ’send the Jews back where they came from!’” And do you know what those hippies did?

Not only did they miss the joke entirely, they liked it so much that they painted a decorative border around it so that no one would paint over it.