Losing My Religion

Text © Robert Barry Francos / FFanzeen, 2020
Images from the Internet

 

Losing My Religion

The part of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, in which I grew up, 99 percent of the population was either Italian or Jewish. Most of Bensonhurst was Italian, but my little area was more a 50-50 mix. There were two Chinese Families (both of whom owned the local Asian restaurants), two African-American domiciles, a smattering of Irish, and then the rest of us. Our grade-school teachers were all white, nearly all women, and a vast majority Jewish.

We were quite typical for that area’s Jewish Lower Middle Class. That meant on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we went to the local synagogue, the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst on 78 Street (now a private middle and high school called the Sinai Academy, geared towards the children of Russian Immigrants), and that was pretty much the only time. You needed to buy a ticket per person, and it sold out. It is not a small temple, and had an enormous balcony (where we usually sat).

The Italian kids in our elementary school (PS 128, the same as attended by the Three Stooges in their youth) got Wednesday afternoon off to attend classes for their Communion and general Catholic instruction, while we Jewish kids sat in the classroom, bored because the teacher didn’t want to do lessons to just half the class. In the mid-1960s, however, a small synagogue and shul (Jewish school) run by a Hassidic group opened up on 21 Avenue in a house a block away from the school (now the Congregation Anshei Sfard Khal Faltishen). They started sending the Jewish kids there for religious instructions. My memories of it are vague because I would just zone out. My only remembrance of it was being taught about King David.

During the summer, I would attend a three-week sleepaway camp for a number of years called H.E.S. (Hebrew Education Society), run by the United Jewish Appeal (usually just referred to as the UJA). It was a beautiful location in Harriman State Park along Lake Stahahe, on the side of a mountain called High Peak, which we climbed every year. There was Saturday morning services and a prayer before and after each meal, but otherwise it was a normal summer camp. Evenings were often spent in the rec hall singing Jewish songs (“Zoom Gali, Gali”) and folk protest songs (e.g., Phil Ochs’ “Draft Dodger Rag” and others like the Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion”). I remember one year, the only 45 they had was Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love,” and during a social gathering, we’d play it at 45 to dance, 33-1/3 for slow grinds, and 78 for fast ones; I don’t remember them ever playing the flipside. Most of the time I had fun there, and the religious part was merely a function of the routine to get to the rest. I acquired a new black yarmulke each year, some of which I still own.

Within our household we were “Kosher.” My aunt Elsie (my mother’s sister) was not as keen on this, so when I would go visit her for a couple of weeks during the summer, she’d make me a pile of bacon. We were Kosher in the house because of my dad, Leo. I really don’t believe my mother, Helen, cared one way or another, and she found the whole Koshering process (using salt water to drain the blood out of the meat) tiresome, but she kept it up for him. I still have and employ the big yellow mixing bowl she used but not for that purpose. When we ate outside of the house, including with my father, such as when we ate at the local Chinese restaurant or at a friend’s house, we all ate whatever we wanted.

Like many of my friends back then, our family had five sets of dishes: there was the two daily meat and dairy set, the two in the upper cabinet that were brought down for Passover week only, and then the one under the sink that only saw light when a neighbor made lasagna and shared (thank  you Madeline), or on the very rare occasion when Chinese food was brought into the house. We never did the stereotypical Chinese food on Christmas thing. We also never had a tree, ever.

At the age of 11 or so, I started attending Hebrew School once a week at the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst, to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah. I was a terrible student, as I was slow to learn Hebrew and I honestly couldn’t care about the religious instruction. By the time of my Bar Mitzvah, I could read Hebrew phonetically quite well (a skill I no longer possess), but I still could not translate much. Around my house, my mother and father spoke Yiddish to each other when they did not want my older brother Richie and I to know what they were talking about, and so I never learned it other than a smattering of words or phrases, and that also applied to Hebrew School (I took Italian in Middle School and that was a failure, as well).

Things went along quite smoothly, and I accepted all of this Jewish culture on face value, pretty much, until I was still young, when something very subtle but ground shaking for me occurred. My father took me to the Automobile Show at the Coliseum at Columbus Circle on a lovely Spring day. It was morning when we got there and it was late afternoon when we were leaving. We were both hungry, but I knew we’d have to wait until we got home, because it was Passover, and on Passover you only eat Passover food. But my father bought us both a salted pretzel (with mustard, of course) from a street vendor. Wait, I thought, you can eat regular food on Passover? That was a thing? It took me a long time to process this, but what I realized is that being Kosher was merely arbitrary and was therefore meaningless. Keeping Kosher in the house sort of balanced the outside world eating of whatever as a yin-yang thing of centering, but this was Passover, and until that time we only ate Passover food during that period. It blew my little mind.

A couple of years after that, there was another change, again involving Passover: when the holiday came, my mother would climb up and take the Passover dishes down from the upper kitchen cabinet, and put the daily dishes in their place. Of course, living in an apartment in Brooklyn meant cockroaches were a natural part of our environment, so my mother would have to wash all the Passover dishes, and eight days later, when she switched them back, she’d have to wash all the daily dishes. At some point she had enough. “Leo,” she said, “I’m not doing this anymore. Enough!” This led to a multi-day fight that ended with my mother – all five-feet of her – standing her ground and saying, “Fine, you want it done, you do it!” And he did. That was the last year we switched dishes. In fact, they got rid of the entire two sets (leaving the one under the sink) and bought glass dishes at were used for – shock – both meat and dairy. Again, it all felt random and pointless.

Chai ("Living" or "18")

The day of my Bar Mitzvah, May 18, 1968, was the last day I set foot into the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst (YoB) until my mother passed away in 1981. You are supposed to attend synagogue every day for a year to say the Kaddish, the prayer for the dead, when a close relative dies. The funeral itself was at a synagogue on Long Island near where she was buried, so I attended the YoB after the week of sitting Shiva. This also turned into a negative experience for me. The people attending the regular service (who were unknown to us) were dressed to the nines, showing off their new clothes in direct competition with each other. I found that crass (“Sadie! $125 at Bergmans!,” shouted across the aisles). Also, as Wikipedia explains, “In gematria (a form of Jewish numerology), the number 18 stands for ‘life,’ because the Hebrew letter that spell chai, meaning ‘living,’ adds up to 18.” So when you contribute, you donate in “chais”; for example saying “I donate two chai” means $36, “three chais” is $54, and so forth. The competition with the people there was fierce, like an auction, on how many “chai” they were going to give. The final one stood up and shouted, “I donate 12 chai! Anonymously!!” It was such a turnoff and I felt ashamed just to be there. I never went back.

At PS 128, we Jewish kids were often picked on by the bigger Christian kids. It was even worse when we got to middle school, the recently opened PS 281, which was rechristened Joseph B. Cavallaro Junior High the year after. I was even called a “Jew Bastard” by one of the Italian kids in my class (my response was, “at least I don’t bow down to one,” which got me a good solid punch to the jaw). While it was 50-50 at PS 128, here we were far outnumbered by various non-Jewish groups and races. I was running scared all the time through middle school and at Lafayette High School, which a local news outlet referred to as “The School from Hell.” No argument from me.

In 1993, thanks to my Masters’ program in Media Ecology, I had the chance to take a class on communication methodologies in Tel Aviv for a week, led by social critic and philosopher Neil Postman. I found Tel Aviv proper quite uninteresting, and often referred to it as “Miami Beach with guns,” as it seemed most males walked around with rifles around their shoulders even on casual walks, in case there was a terrorist attack (SCUD missiles had landed recently not far from where we were staying). It was very modern and very tense, with lots of glass and steel. I felt more at ease outside the city, in places like Jaffa (to which we walked a few times) and the one day we had the opportunity to spend in Jerusalem on a bus trip.

While in Jerusalem, we went to the Wailing Wall and went through the security checks as everyone did, both Jews and Arabs, and learned where not to tread. At the Wall, we were told that men had to go to the left, women to the right, and they were not allowed to mix (this is still true today). I put a request on a piece of paper, and put it into the Wall, but it felt as hollow as going to a tarot card reader at a fair, or a soothsayer with a crystal ball. I also wandered into the Cave, and found many a man praying fervently (no women allowed in such a holy place), davening and shaking back and forth. All of this misogyny and exclusion was slowly eating away at the religious part of me.

As I said in an earlier blog, at the burial of the mother of a good friend, I started talking to the rabbi-for-hire who would do the ceremony. At some point, he asked me, what was my sect, and I told him somewhere between reform and conservative (probably more to the latter in those confused days). He grimaced and snarled, “No such thing, you’re either Orthodox or you’re not really a Jew.” I turned from the hole in the ground to face him, stuck my finger in his face, and said, “Whether you believe that or not, we would have both been in the same gas chamber, so don't you dare tell me I'm not a Jew.”

Jews have always been viewed as “Other” by the larger majority Christian and Muslim world, and have been persecuted for it. This is my connection to being a Jew. Whether I believe in the religion or not, it is part of my literal genetics, and I am willing to accept that. As for the religion, I refer to myself as either an agnostic, or secular Jew. We go to friends on Passover and have them over for Purim suppers. At night I say thanks as acknowledging what has happened to me during the day as a sign of appreciation of the events that have occurred (e.g., “thank you for me just catching the bus…”).

While, again, I didn’t really quite have the words for it and it would take me decades to figure it out, I realized that I was proud of my heritage but my religion meant little to me. My paternal grandparents had been kicked out of Hungary in 1910, and my maternal grandparents were forced from Prussia around the same time. I felt and feel no connection to these sites, so my being a Jew became part of my identity in a sense of culture, rather than religion. I’m proud to be a Jew. I love Israel and believe it has a right to exist (though I’m not always a fan of its government) as a homeland for the Jews (and others), as I have experienced transgenerational separateness from the land in which my family came.

Tefillin

I have felt a lot of pressure from religious groups through my life. When I was a first-year undergraduate at Kingsborough Community College in 1974, I was targeted by the Jews for Jesus for me to “gabba gabba one of us” join their cult. At Queens College in the late 1970s, we were inundated by a sect of Hassidism that would grab men (again, can’t touch women because they might be having their “filthy” periods) and make them do their tefillin prayers in a van (again from Wikipedia, tefillin, “or phylacteries, is a set of small black leather boxes containing scrolls inscribed with verses from the Torah”). During the summer of 1977, when I worked at the Baskin-Robbins on Seventh Avenue South (a block south of the Stonewall in the West Village), there was a constant flow of young faces asking me if I had “accepted Jesus as my personal savior” (I’m sure they were there trying to “save the gays”). Over the years, there have also been subway preachers who ignored the “Jesus is Love” route and went straight for the “You’re going to Hell” line of religiosity. I often challenged them. I came to see the anti-science of religion in the late 1980s when my apartment was visited by a couple of Jehovah Witnesses. They handed me a little blue book “disproving” evolution using this argument: a computer’s molecules are simple, and a monkey’s molecules are complex. If a monkey can turn those complex molecules into an even more complex human, why can’t a simple calculator turn into a supercomputer? I laughed in their faces, and said, “A calculator doesn’t reproduce so there is no margin for mutation” (never mind that evolution takes millions of years, and calculators have only been around for a few dozen at that point). They were baffled by this, and tried to change the subject.

Now I am comfortable disassociating myself from religious beliefs. Recently, an online Orthodox Rabbi said I should be reading the Torah with the commentaries from beginning to end, and with an open mind. My reply was, “That is the exact wording used by Christians (about the New Testament) and Muslims (the Koran) who try to tell someone why they should believe their god without proof.”

When it is time for me to pass on from this world, I am comfortable knowing that, well, that’s it, it is over. I joke about my mother and father sitting at a bar in heaven with their friends Ralph (and eventually Audrey), waiting for us to join them. It’s a lovely thought, and to me the imagery is sublime, but I believe the reality is when the brain no longer functions, the person is at a permanent rest.

So use your time wisely, and I wish you all the best of health, a long and fruitful life, and when I go, I am content to know I won’t think about anything.

Book Review: "From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books" by Arie Kaplan

Text by Robert Barry Francos
Images from the Internet

As Arie Kaplan clearly shows in his book, From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (The Jewish Publication Society, 2008, $25; more information below), one cannot tell the story of the Jews’ role in comic books without telling the history of comics.

From the start, Kaplan illustrates how Jews, being excluded from the general graphics design business due to their heritage, created not created a means in, but fashioned an entire industry along the way.

The first official comic, published by Max “Charlie” Gains (Ginsburg), and titled Famous Funnies, was a pasted together book of newspaper comic strips that sold independently in 1933. The depression was in full swing, and people were looking for inventive ways to make a living, which was made all the harder by prejudice, be it racial or religious. As this new idea started out, as often follows, there were imitators.

Just a few short years later as the market for reprints was waning, National Comics (which would change it’s name to DC), published the first Superman story in 1938, created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, two childhood friends who had been percolating the idea since they were 12 (in their youth they were members of a Science Fiction club whose fellow clubmember and friend was the late Forrest J. Ackermann, the Jewish creator of Famous Monsters of Filmland, as Kaplan notes). It was then that comics started booming, and the era of the superhero started.

In typical Jewish fashion of the ‘30s, a time of social reform, Superman represents that idea of being a “man of the people,” and protector of the under-represented. As Kaplan also correctly points out, as his popularity rose, he became more of a symbol of the “protector of everyman,” in which he became more of a “leader of men.” [I want to acknowledge here and now that I am aware of my masculine use of the word “man” for humanity; simply, I am trying to speak in terms of the book, and the period of which I am discussing.]

In other words, if I may use the allegory of which this book is informed, Superman basically went from Golem, a symbol of protection of the weak, to rabbi, who is a representative of the entire congregation (i.e., humanity). However, due to the time period and the approaching war in Europe, Superman came across as very “Protestant,” despite his Jewish origins (such as his escape from Krypton in a Moses-like rocket/basket by a family that hoped he would be safe at the other end). This is especially true during World War II, when Superman became a symbol of Americana, to a grander purpose to protect the United States, the Allies, and the world from Nazi aggression. Despite some codified Jewish signatures, he became the icon of a (mostly) Christian nation, and the books reflected that.

The next big addition to the comics universe was by Bob Kane (Kahn) and the under-appreciated Bill Finger, the Jewish creators of my personal favorite comics character, the Bat-man (later shortened to just Batman, of course). Will Eisner’s The Spirit, and Jack Kirby (Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon’s Captain America, shortly followed. From there, it just kept exploding, including stalwarts such as Stan Lee (Leiber) and Gil Kane (Eli Katz). In fact, the field becomes so crowded with artists and writers, most of whom are from Jewish backgrounds (though excellent comic book people like Joe Orlando, obviously, are not), it is hard to tell who is Jewish and who is not, especially since so many names were changed as Jews in many fields often did up until the ‘50s. Even though there were some who sported their own birth names, such as Will Eisner, Al Jaffee, Chris Claremont (that was easy), and Joe Kubert, it was more common to have an assimilated name. By the time of the underground comix, however, it was ordinary to see names like Harvey Pekar, Trina Robbins, and Art Spiegelman.

Before the rise of comix in the late 60s, most of the “Jewishness” of the characters, Kaplan points out, are codified, such as the Superman/Moses motif mentioned earlier, or the use of the Golem, which Kaplan connects to both Superman (protector) and the Hulk (uncontrollable beast created by man), but oddly, not to Ben Grimm (Fantastic Four’s The Thing), which seems quite obvious to me (clay/stone), especially since Grimm has been “outed” as being Jewish.

One of the ironies of the whole history of the role of Jews in comics is that while the industry was essentially built by this group, it was also almost taken down by one of its own in the ‘50s, thanks to the book Seduction of the Innocent by Frederic Wertham. His was a McCarthy-istic level of attack of seeing sex in the shadows and lines of the comics (especially those put out by EC). This led to a gatekeeping intra-industry self-governance organization (similar to the Hay’s Office in film started 20 years earlier) called the Comics Code Authority, which help stifle originality and a level of social justice, turning the books more into romance and common-denominator superheroes stories. [As a sidebar: censorship is an outside influence, gatekeeping is a inter-industry watchgroup.]

Essentially, the book is broken up into three appropriate sections: The Golden Age (1933-55), The Silver Age (1956-78) and The Bronze Age (1979-present). My personal history of comics (though geek-lite; I was not as much a “collector” as a reader – and re-reader – who kept his comics) started in the Silver Age of the early ‘60s, and went through until around 2003, when my comic collecting sort of curtailed. Kaplan has pointed out much about this period that I had not only been unaware, but also not had the insight to realize. Happily, Kaplan is quite thorough on the “hidden” Jewishness of the character and plots, and about the artists who drew them. Especially enjoyable is the deeper focus on specific creators (such as Siegel and Schuster, Kane and Finger, Eisner, Kirby, Pekar, and Spiegelman).

It was quite nice to see a nod (albeit brief) to Phil Seuling, who created both the comic con, and the comic book specialty shop (the first, opened by Seuling, was in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, on the corner of 20th Avenue and 85th Street, by the way…it’s a liquor store now). He was also my high school teacher who took us to DC Comics to watch them be created, and brought some guests into the classroom like Gray Morrow and Jim Steranko. But I digress…

Another of the aspects I appreciate about From Krakow to Krypton is how Kaplan deconstructs some of the codified information about its subjects (and authors), such as the Golem connections I mentioned previously. Sometimes it felt a bit like a stretch (e.g., Spiderman having “Jewish stereotypes” of being “bespectacled, slight of build, studious, awkward”), but more often it was more of “Ohhhhhh, I get it” and “Ah-ha!” moments.

Two posits of Kaplan that I truly appreciate especially are the degree of “Jewishness” the early artists were trying to express (e.g., social justice), and how after the rise of the independent comics, mainstream characters were not only more overtly Jewish (Rory Regan in Ragman, Kitty Pryde in X-Men), but also how older characters were later revealed to be of the faith (Magneto in X-Men, Ben Grimm in The Fantastic Four). Of course, in the independents, there was more of a connection right from the start, with books like Maus, the works of Harvey Pekar, and important contributors like Will Eisner, such as the amazing A Contract With God. What I would like to see more of by Kaplan, in possible future books (or editions) is more about the writers’ and artists’ background. For example, Kaplan notes that Bill Gaines (publisher of MAD is to have been atheistic, and Eisner was secular, but I’m also interested in the religious history of the others, like Kirby, Kane, and Lee.

I do have two points of contention with the book that I must add. First, on page 107, Kaplan states that, “Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics of the 1960s were also distinct because they were written for a wider audience demographic than most comic books.” I totally disagree, in a friendly, debating kind of way. I believe that these comics were designed for a more specific and knowledgeable readership. Kaplan even states in the same paragraph that “for the first time comic books went out of their way to court high school and college students as well as young kids. Teenagers racked with adolescent neuroses and identity issues identified heavily with characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men…” Earlier comics were broad-based stories that anyone of any age could read, not just kids (this is, in my opinion, the result of the CCA, trying to make sure that everyone can be happy). The second half of the ‘60s brought back cultural relevance and social justice story lines that had been gone for a while. It had to become more focused on a specific demographic that started to be too old and too savvy, and brought them back into the fold.

My second contention is the lack of mention of one of my favorite series, Shaloman, an independent comic from the early 1990s written, drawn and produced by Al Weisner (Mark 1 Comics). It’s mostly tongue-in-cheek, but the comic also deals with the futility of in-fighting between Jewish sects (portrayed, for example, by a war between the planets Chasidiak Four and Grivenus Seven), anti-Semitism, and cultural food, all wrapped in a sharp sense of Yiddishe humor. As far as I have seen, though, the first Jewish comic book series produced by, for, and about Jews is Mendy and the Golem, created in 1982 by writer Leibel Estrin, artist Dovid Sears, and colorist Barry Grossman. Issued by publisher Yankel Pinson's Mendy Enterprises in New York City, it deals with a Chasidic family and their Golem, Sholem (whose face you never see because he's taller than the comic's frame), and tells of Ashkinaszi Jewish traditions, historical stories and scholars, and ways to live one's life. It is geared towards older children, but has a funny and corny sense of humor with liberal use of puns, and with lots of Hebrew and Yiddish thrown in (with translations, 'natch).

That being said, I want to say I also admire the format of the book. The layout is superb, with many color and black-and-white illustrations, including some full pages of stories that relate to what Kaplan has described. Even the forward, by Harvey Pekar (text) and JT Waldman (art), presented in comic form, feels right.

Russell Wolinsky, ex-singer of the seminal New York band the Sic F*cks, asked me how this book compared to Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero. The answer is simple: I don’t know, as I haven’t yet read Fingeroth. Maybe another blog at another time?

An aspect about Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton that is appealing is that while it respects the comic nerd and never talks down to him/her, this is also a cultural study that is non-exclusive, so even if one is just interested in Jewish cultural history, they can read this and not feel lost, or like an outsider. Kaplan treats all his readers equally, being that he is a mensch.

About the author (from the book jacket): Arie Kaplan is a comedian, MAD Magazine writer, and author of the new comic book miniseries Speed Racer: Chronicles of the Racer. His other comic book credits include the DC title Cartoon Network Action Pack and the Papercutz series Tales From the Crypt. Arie lectures all over the country about comic books, comedians, and popular culture. He is the author of Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed! And he’s also written for MTV, Cartoon Network, and PBS Kids.
www.ariekaplan.com

About the publisher: The Jewish Publication Society is a nonprofit educational organization formed to enhance the Jewish culture by promoting the dissemination of religious and secular works, in the United States and abroad, to all individuals and institutions interested in past and contemporary Jewish life.
www.jewishpub.org

Religious Tolerance Needed This Season

Text © Robert Barry Francos
Photos from the Internet

In this season of good cheer, as the religious and secular supposedly come together, we are all drowned in ads to spend-spend-spend till our daddies take our T-Birds away.What I find astounding – and always have – is how the “orthodox” religious, no matter what the faith, keep insisting that it is their holiday and belongs to no one else but themselves. This is shown in people who demand that public displays of decorations must say Christmas rather than Holiday. Supposedly, this is a country of religious freedom and tolerance, but it seems that is only true as long as the religion and tolerance lines up the same as the “religious” person looking at it.

In my life, some of the most close-minded and evil-spirited people I have ever met have used religion as an excuse for their behavior. Below are some cases in point:

Many years ago while working in a corporate in-house print shop, I was a Phototypesetter. If you don’t know what a phototypesetter is, it really is a moot point because the position doesn’t exist anymore with present technology. When I was there during the 1980s, the shop was in Building 5 of the World Trade Center, and eventually moved to the sub-sub-sub basement (below the garages) of one of the Towers, just before I left.

In the area adjacent to mine was the layout tables, and one of the artists was a follower of Oral Roberts named Angela, who was in her early 20s. She prayed before she ate, she said “Thank you Jesus” often, and considered herself devout. Meanwhile, she tried to get anyone she did not like fired, and manipulated as many people as she could. She unabashedly told me she was justified in whatever she did because Jesus wanted her to be successful. I thought she was an attractive woman when I started there, but she became more ugly to me every day as I got to know her. Punk was devil’s music to her; her favorite was the “Born Again” BJ Thomas. I once called him lame, and she refused to talk to me for a while, and my boss said she complained to him about everything I did after that, trying to get rid of me. But my boss knew who she was, and I was good at what I did, and it did not have any repercussions on me.

Inside the darkroom, Angela had an Oral Roberts calendar. I was in there with a temp one day getting some chemicals for my processor, and we saw the calendar had an image of a hand floating in the sky and the message read, “I seek the Lord in the quiet places of my heart.” We starting improvising to the Bobby Fuller Four song, “Killing Jews and the Muslim / I sought the Lord and the Lord won / I sought the Lord and the / Lord won!” She walked in while we were doing this and started screaming at us. She tried real hard to make my life even more difficult after that. Note that we were not making fun of Christianity, but of the particular narrow thinking of who published the calendar, much as many of us protested the appearance of the JDL’s leader Meir Kahane when he appeared at Queens College for similar reasons.

She was not the only religious zealot in the printshop bunch; also she was not the most abrasive, by far. Another person working there was a huge man named Al who was a deacon in his church (he looked a lot like Cleveland on Family Guy, right down to the moustache). He used his size to bully many of the people there, but I refused to budge, all 120 lbs of me. To show you just how “devout” he was, he did some work there on the side for his church (service pamphlets and the like) and when he asked me to typeset them for him, I offered to do it for nothing because it was for his church. Later I found out that not only was he taking money for it from the church, he told them that I was also asking for money, and he kept that as well. From his church, I remind you.

One day, this religious man turned to me and said, “I hear your mother is good in bed.” And then he waited for me to react. Thing is, I had an uncle who was often instigating and obnoxious, and I did not like him at all. One day, I realized a formula for people like him: When someone says "A" expecting a reaction of "B," instead say "7." In other words, say something they totally don’t expect, and throw them off. I got along with my uncle after that. In the case of Al, what I very calmly said as the “7”: “Yeah, that’s what your daughter was telling me last night while I drilled her brains out.”

Al turned bright red and said, “I oughta kill you for that!” After he insults my mother, yet. I said back, “You won’t touch me.” Looking sharply at me, he said, making and unclenching his fists, “Why not?” I responded, “First of all, you know you can beat me up.” He gloated, “Yeah!” Continuing, I said, “Secondly, I know you can beat me up.” He looked confused at this point. I concluded with, “And most importantly, you know that I know you can beat me up.” He sighed and walked away.

There were other times he would try to rile me, but never succeeded. I was quick back then. One day this righteous man (as he considered himself) said to me, “I got me 10 inches. Bet you Jews don’t know nothin’ about 10 inches.” Not even turning around, I said, “That’s very true. I don’t know any Jew that small.” He stormed off and I kept working.

Of course, these kinds of conversations could never go on now, because of rules that have come in (and rightfully so) about workplace tolerance. Al could have been gone after his first of many “Jew” comments (i.e., his "name" for me was Jewboy. He would call across the huge room at full volume, "Hey, Jewboy, phone call for you!"

In another job years later, for a time I worked in a room with a guy from Staten Island. He was really into speed and coke (though being the non-drug person I am, I did not know this). One day at home, high on PCP, he saw the face of Jesus come through the wall and tell him to stop. Days later, his own brother shot him in the face in a botched drug deal. He came close to dying and lost an eye. After that he stopped taking drugs, and found Jesus as a replacement.

He was convinced, he told me, that God wanted him to convert me. And he sure did try. He kept turning to me, and quoting me scripture. But his minister was one of those “In the Old Testament, Jews were impure” kinds of guys (Adam and Moses turned their backs on God by disobeying him, etc.). One day, this guy says to me, “When Daniel was in the fire with Jesus…” I immediately said, “Stop! Daniel was with Jesus? Isn’t the story of Daniel in the Old Testament? If you can show me one place where Jesus is mentioned by name in the Old Testament, I will convert right now.” He said, “Daniel was there with three men, two of whom were named. The third one was unnamed, and that was Jesus.” I closed my hanging-open-in-disbelief mouth and said, “Man, that is some conjecture. So anytime someone is left unnamed, it’s Jesus? Naw, that’s not right. Back to zero.” And I went back to work. He was let go about 3 months later, because while I didn’t say anything to anyone else, other people found his proselytizing intolerance intolerable.

But not all this small-mindedness has to do with Christians I would like to strongly add. Once evening in the 1990s I was taking a car service home from work one late night and had a Palestinian driver. I’d had many pleasant conversations with Palestinians who drove cabs over the years, and mostly we agreed that common sense should rule in the Middle East, and it should not matter what the ideology is, we all three religious pray to the same God. But this driver was different. Ariel Sharon had just been elected Prime Minster of Israel (though had not come into office yet), and this man was ranting on and on about how hateful the Zionists (and he clearly meant this as all Jews, not just Israelis) were, how under Sharon they were going to kill all the Arabs (a common misbelief in that region), and Zionists in America were all part of the plot to control the world. He was screaming towards me, though I have the idea he didn’t know I was a Jew. He said “the Zionists”, not “you Zionists,” so I am assuming not. Actually, I had him drop me off a block from my house because I did not want him to know where I lived. The next day, I called the limousine service and did something I had never done before or after: I made a formal complaint about him, not as a Jew, but as a passenger.

Yes, every group has its share of religious bigots. At the funeral of the mother of a good friend, I was at the gravesite. While they were preparing the way and we were waiting for the casket to be taken out of the hearse, I started talking to the rabbi-for-hire who would do the ceremony. At some point, he asked me, what was my sect, and I told him somewhere between reform and conservative (probably more to the latter in those days…now I consider myself a secular Jew). He grimaced and snarled, “No such thing, you’re either Orthodox or you’re not really a Jew.” I couldn’t believe he was saying this crap at my friend’s mother’s grave. As it was, I was close to her and was mourning as well. I turned from the hole in the ground to face him, stuck my finger in his face, and said, “Whether you believe that or not, we would have both been in the same gas chamber, so don't you dare tell me I'm not a Jew.” Then I walked away because I did not want to say something that would have been more disrespectful in the situation.

If I have any real prejudice left, it would have to be towards fundamentalist thinking like that, whatever the belief or creed.

On the flip side, my mother had an Italian friend nicknamed “Chickie” who died when they were still young women, and my mom remained close to her mother, Rose Dolce; I knew her as “Nana” and she was like a grandmother to me as my other two had died when I was a very young age. She was strongly Roman Catholic and spent her later years creating and mending the local nun’s habits from St. Finbars, in Brooklyn. Earlier in her life, she worked in the garment industry as was fluent in Yiddish, as well as Italian. One of my strongest memories of her was that she loved everyone, and she believed her religion taught acceptance, and that we all prayed to one God, and no matter what the differences we are all God’s children. While I don’t feel any need for any formal religion these days, I learned a lot from her and thank her for her open-mindedness.

1 Peter 3:8-9 "To sum up, all of you be harmonious, sympathetic, brotherly, kindhearted, and humble in spirit; not returning evil for evil or insult for insult, but giving a blessing instead; for you were called for the very purpose that you might inherit a blessing."

Happy holidays to one and all.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxaohwlZY2g