Kosher Eucharist / יוקאריסט כשר

I’m on the evening’s third bottle of Sol - partly because there was a big sale on six-packs at the Russian grocery down the street which, like all Russian groceries in Israel and around the world, reeks of jam-filled pastries, pork and quiet desperation, partly because the three sun-kissed syllables of “cerveza!” (it demands an exclamation point) create a much more exciting word for carbonated hops beverages than “beer,” a monosyllabic grunt easily combined with “WHOOOOOOOO!” by people who don’t deserve to drink it - and three beers is exactly enough excess liquid to burst the dams and allow the reservoir of bitchiness to spill forth and drown some peasants.

The part of the peasants tonight will be played by my perennial whipping boys, Anglo Jews in Jerusalem, a group who inspires such crippling self-hatred and revulsion that had Philip Roth been born 6000 miles to the East, he would have ended it all a solid decade before Portnoy had the chance to file his first complaint. You may object that I tar Anglos with too broad a brush, subdivided as they are into dozens of camps - American, British, Australian, South African, New Zealander, Canadian, modern Orthodox, classical Orthodox, neo-Chasidic, paleo-Chasidic, yeshiva student, seminary student, Hebrew U Student, Gush Etzion yeshiva student, Pardes student, Nachla’ot resident, German Colony Resident, Bak’a resident, Katamon resident, execrable Cafe Rimon patron, slime-covered Underground/Mike’s Place patron - but I assure you, I’ve considered it very carefully, and I hate them all with absolute equality.

Actually, that’s not strictly true - throw a potent enough combo meal my way, let’s say a Canadian neo-Chasidic Nachla’ot resident who loves knocking back Illy mochaccinos at Cafe Rimon, and I can almost guarantee that I’ve had a wet dream about their untimely death. Hell, it probably wasn’t even a dream, just a straight-out wet.

But I digress. While a complete list of the things that make Jerusalemite Anglos awful would be far too much material for Kosher Eucharist to cover - hello, blog spin-off idea - I can at least focus on a few choice transgressions. Chiefest among them in my mind of late is the tendency of Anglos - particularly Anglos who speak little-to-no Hebrew (i.e. most of them) - to pepper their English with random Hebrew words.

This is similar to the oft-glimpsed phenomenon of a newly-religious young Jew attempting to fit in with his new crowd by running his sentences through a Yiddish meat grinder until he sounds like an ethnic caricature too broad for the Borscht Belt to squeeze around, but trust me, it’s even more annoying. Several words pop up with alarming frequency, and often equally alarming inaccuracy, in the pidgin vocabularies of these kippa-clad amateur Hebraists: mamish (a corruption of mamash, “really”), davka (”ironically,” “of all [noun]…”), tachles (”totally,” “I’ll level wichu”) and a host of other verbal offenses which the Sol has snatched clean from my memory. Even worse is a certain tendency, common among, but in no way particular to, mainline East Coast yeshivish dosim (I’m sorry for throwing in a Hebrew word there, but there is no equivalent English word that can be spat out with the same lip-curling contempt): insisting on using the Hebrew name of cities with a long-established English name. You have not known suffering until you’ve heard yet another denim-beskirted child of Orthodox privilege curl her nasal East Coast inflection around “Yerushalayim,” which invariably comes out so far from the appropriate Hebrew pronunciation you wonder why she bothered in the first place.

Helpful hint: it won’t make you less Jewish if you say “Jerusalem” - it will, however, make you less annoying.

What I’m trying to say is, there’s no reason for a native speaker of English - in fact, someone who speaks ONLY English - to churn out an ear-piercing nugget of Creole like “Sometimes I don’t know why I chose to live davka in Yerushalayim; but tachles, it’s probably because there are mamish fly biddies hanging out at Katzefet on the midrachov every night.” It doesn’t need to be so complicated and so multi-lingual; there’s a much more elegant, and entirely monolingual, way to say exactly the same thing: “I am such a fucking tool.”