Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Read online

  What was there for Jews to be proud of, I wondered. Christians had inspiring cathedrals and interesting saints. They had Christmas, and Easter bunnies, and suntanned ministers in ice-cream-colored suits with their own TV shows. They had numbers and certainty. Granted, heaven and hell seemed to me like transparent attempts at crowd control. But all we Jews seemed to have was Israel and the Holocaust. Christians were visited by angels, Jews by the Gestapo. It was no contest.

  I warned the editor I’d been educated in Presbyterian and Quaker schools. “Not only that, but I sang in the choir,” I confessed. “My family has a Christmas tree that we don’t even pretend to call a ‘Chanukah bush.’ My mother quotes this guru named Baba Ram Dass. We spent a year following a Maharishi, another doing Buddhist chanting, and another being macrobiotic, which, believe me, is kind of a cult. So you see,” I concluded haplessly, “I’m really not Jewish at all.”

  “That’s funny,” Sheldon laughed. “You sound pretty Jewish to me.”

  “Really?” I said, trying to hide my displeasure at this news.

  “Sure. Who else puts their kids through all that? You don’t see Catholics sending their kids to synagogue just to ‘expand their horizons.’ Look,” he said, “if I want a religious expert, I’ll hire a rabbi. Until then, we pay $22K and 80 percent of your medical. When do you want to start?”

  My first day on the job, I was given my own desk, computer, press card, and stapler—all the trimmings I associated with world-class journalism. After rearranging my office supplies several times, I practiced whipping out my press card with authority. Then I called my father and made him call me back so he could listen to my professional-sounding voice mail message: Hello, this is Susan Gilman, staff writer for The Jewish Week newspaper. After that, however, the thrill and novelty pretty much wore off, and I settled down to demonstrate to my editor just what a terrible choice he’d made by hiring me.

  Although I harbored fantasies of being a cutting-edge journalist, writing with great insight and acumen about the substantive issues of the day, I somehow could not get past the fact that I was working for such a totally dweeby newspaper. Whenever I went to happy hours or to little networking parties with my friends, someone invariably hooted, “You write for The Jewish Week? My grandmother reads that.”

  In the meantime, my friend Giles—a fact checker for The New Yorker—got free backstage passes to see R.E.M. Julia, an editorial assistant I knew at a trendy start-up called 7 Days, got review copies of Bret Easton Ellis books and advance-release CDs by the Hothouse Flowers and Prince. Another girl, Belinda, a gofer at Vogue, went to press parties at the Rainbow Room, where she was able to shovel three pounds of jumbo shrimp into a Ziploc bag in her purse. The only freebie at my job was a pamphlet called The Manischewitz Guide to Kosher Wine Tasting, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

  New York City is arguably the most competitive city in the world. Never mind the professional ambitions: People race to be the first person to cross the street! The first person in the elevator! The first person at the dry cleaners! It’s the Urban Living Olympics. All around me, other college graduates were pushing their way to the front of the bar and flaunting their new business cards from the New York Times, Sassy magazine, The Village Voice. How had they landed these jobs? And how had I missed them? Although I told myself that I was the only twenty-two-year-old I knew with a real byline, this wasn’t very comforting. Dancing at the Limelight, nobody was going to be reading the heart-rending obituaries I wrote. When people asked where I worked, I answered “Jew Week,” hoping they’d mishear it as Newsweek and be really impressed.

  “I can’t believe I spend my days writing about Jews,” I moaned to my friend Jill. “How fucking un-cool is that?”

  “What are you talking about?” Jill said. “Susie, you’re Jewish. I’m Jewish. Loads of our friends are Jewish. And we’re all cool.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not Jewishy Jews,” I said. “We don’t run around in those creepy beards and yarmulkes, or act all JAPPY, talking in Long Island accents and waving around our gold jewelry.” Jill sat back on her sofa and stared at me. “Listen to you,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe how anti-Semitic you are.”

  “We don’t say oy vey all the time. We don’t keep moaning about the Holocaust and Israel, or go on about what victims we are,” I said.

  Jill laughed. “Neither you nor I know a single person like that,” she said. “Where on earth did you get the idea that that’s how Jews really behave?”

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “The media?”

  Back at my job in the media, I had such contempt for my employers that I didn’t bother even pretending to have a work ethic. Expected in the office by 9:30 A.M., I waltzed in around 9:50, then went downstairs to buy breakfast. Scheduling hair appointments and aerobics classes for noon, I stretched the concept of “lunch hour” to new limits. And since the workday technically ended at five, I made sure to be out the door by exactly 5:01 P.M. “Shalom y’all,” I’d holler, leaving the other reporters scrambling to meet the deadlines. The way I saw it, the only real purpose of my stint at The Jewish Week was to help me cultivate a far groovier freelance career and highly important social life. One of my editors, Steven Schloss, told me he practiced counting to one hundred every day keeping track of my personal phone calls.

  “But what I can’t figure out,” he said, “is when do you have time to make them? It’s not like you’re ever here.”

  After work, I’d often go meet my friends at a bar, where we’d all sit around complaining about how our bosses never gave us any responsibility. Ugh, the Xeroxing, said Julia. My database was programmed by idiots, said Kim. “I have a college degree,” Maureen groaned. “How exactly does that translate into ‘envelope stuffing expert’?” But while I joined in the chorus of entry-level grievances, I secretly could not believe that I had not, as of yet, been fired.

  As I’d learned the hard way, reporters were not supposed to wear miniskirts to Holocaust memorials. Nor were they, under any circumstances, to refer to rabbinical students as “co-eds.” Also, if you handed in your story late, and the proofreader didn’t catch that you’d misspelled the word “cult” with an “n” instead of an “I,” well, there’d be no end to the grief for everyone.

  One day, I was assigned to conduct a lunch interview with a high-powered rabbi who had just flown in from Israel. The features editor, Roberta, went over the questions with me so I’d appear to know what I was talking about.

  “So, how did it go?” she said afterward.

  “Augh, it was great,” I said. “The lobster ravioli was amazing.”

  “You ate lobster ravioli,” she said.

  “Not just any lobster ravioli. In a sherry cream sauce with chives,” I said. “And chocolate mousse for dessert.”

  “With the top Orthodox rabbi in Israel,” said Roberta.

  “Well, actually, he wasn’t hungry,” I said. “He just had tea.”

  “Excuse me a moment, please.” Roberta walked into the managing editor’s office. A moment later, I heard Sheldon shout, “GILMAN, GET IN HERE.”

  I came in to find him standing red-faced behind his desk.

  “Gilman, did you really order lobster ravioli for lunch with a rabbi?” he demanded.

  From his tone, I knew I’d done something wrong, though I couldn’t imagine what. All I could think to say was, “It was the house special.”

  “You know, Gilman, what you choose to eat on your own time is your own business,” Sheldon said, almost spitting with anger, “but when you’re representing The Jewish Week and you’re in the presence of an Orthodox rabbi, who is doing you an enormous favor by granting you an interview, don’t you think it behooves you to keep kosher?”

  “Lobster ravioli in cream sauce isn’t kosher?” I said.

  He looked as though he was about to have an aneurysm.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “Well. You seem pretty upset, so I’m betting it’s not,�
� I said brightly.

  “Why is it not?”

  Kosher, I recalled vaguely, had something to do with milk and meat. “The cream sauce?” I guessed.

  “No. The lobster. Shellfish isn’t kosher, Gilman.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Not kidding,” said Sheldon.

  “Really?” I said. “Are you sure about that? Not even in Chinese food?”

  Sheldon called out to the bullpen, “LIPPY, GET IN HERE.”

  Lippy was another staff reporter. He was modern Orthodox, which meant that while he didn’t dress traditionally, he observed the Sabbath and a zillion other religious restrictions. These included abstaining from drinking, gossiping, and gratuitous cursing. How he’d survived in a newsroom was completely beyond me.

  Though Lippy was kindhearted and intelligent, I tended to avoid him. Devoutly religious people made me irritable. Instead of compelling me to become more pious, their rectitude and moral certainty just made me want to act out even more. Around them, I often had the impulse to writhe around orgiastically on top of a pool table and pour Sangria on my tits—if only to balance out the universe. I got the urge to be yin to their yang, sinner to their saint, Godzilla to their Bambi.

  Now, Sheldon announced that, until further notice, Lippy was going to serve as my de facto rabbi. “I’m not saying you have to teach her Kabbalah,” he said to Lippy, “but at least make sure she knows not to order lobster ravioli again in front of Rabbi Turkletaub.”

  Lippy clamped his hands over his mouth to stifle a laugh. “You ordered lobster ravioli in front of Rabbi Turkletaub?” he said to me.

  “How was I supposed to know it wasn’t kosher?” I said irritably. “Christ, I ate matzo for Yom Kippur this year. What more do you people want?”

  The next week, Lippy took me to lunch at a restaurant on Broadway that tried to disguise the fact that it was kosher by devising overly clever names for its sandwiches like the Bruce HornesBeef and the Tina Tuna. Having endured years of health food, I expected the meal to be yet another exercise in inedibility. Instead, I was presented with an overstuffed fresh turkey sandwich (the Cluck Norris) and a bowl of free pickles.

  “Hey, not bad,” I said, digging in. “This actually tastes normal.”

  “The human sacrifices come later,” Lippy said dryly. “With dessert.”

  With his yarmulke, his 1950s eyeglasses held in place with elastic, and his pants pulled up to his nipples, Lippy was nebishhood incarnate, a caricature of nerdiness, the poster boy for anti-Semites everywhere. Even though he’d been nothing but generous toward me, I felt it was my duty to inform him of this.

  “Okay, Lippy,” I said to him over our third lunch together. “I get the whole ‘Torah’ thing now, and how Jews regard it as divine law and blah blah blah. But just where, in the Bible, does it instruct us to dress like dorks?” I waved my hand in his general direction. “I mean, the high-water pants, the pocket protector, the yarmulke stuck on your head with a bobby pin. Why don’t you just wear a sign taped to your ass reading ‘Kick me, I’m Jewish.’”

  Lippy grinned, then scratched the underside of his chin. “Actually, I was going to suggest that you tape a sign to your backside saying ‘Vain, superficial, misguided feminist.’ But then,” he said philosophically, “I realized your miniskirt pretty much says it for you.”

  I had to admit: Lippy was no dummy. No matter how many inane or purposely offensive questions I peppered him with—Why don’t Jews just call it a day and believe in Jesus? Why can’t synagogues print the Torah in English so people can actually read it?—Lippy answered me calmly and intelligently. Even when I sent him a sympathy card on his fortieth birthday, he refused to be provoked.

  “I’ve got to give you credit, Lippy,” I said finally. “I’m impressed with your patience.”

  “Jews have been waiting almost six thousand years for the messiah,” Lippy said. “You think one little schmendrick like you is going to faze us?”

  As a journalist, Lippy told me, it was always good to develop an area of expertise that you could parlay into your own “beat.” Since my one talent at the paper seemed to be infuriating our readers, I decided my specialty would be to give our conservative and elderly readership regular heart attacks.

  Luckily, this was not difficult to do. Much to my surprise, there was no end to the number of Jewish freaks and renegades running loose with the rest of the yahoos in America. Sorting through press releases I’d previously ignored, I discovered a Jewish doctor who’d spent twenty-five years taking peyote on various Indian reservations and discussing the Kabbalah with Hopi tribes. I discovered a satirical Yiddish heavy metal band called Black Shabbos that sang songs like “Reggae Rabbi (He Eats Bagels with Dread Lox).” I discovered a pregnant lesbian rabbi, a black hip-hop artist who ran a sideline business drawing portraits of Hasidic rabbis, and a biker gang called the Star of David Motorcycle Club created by beefy Harley-Davidson aficionados as the Jewish alternative to the Hell’s Angels.

  Soon, I did in fact have a niche, unofficially known among my fellow reporters as the “freak beat,” which seemed to entertain them no end. “Hey, Susan,” Lippy liked to call across the bullpen, “I just heard that a group of transgendered Communist rabbis are going to be skateboarding across Jerusalem in support of human cloning. You want to cover that?”

  My editor Sheldon, however, was less amused. “So what if you met a bunch of Jewish call girls?” he’d say with exasperation. “How is the fact that they’re Jewish news?”

  “Well,” I said, “most people don’t think of Jewish girls as prostitutes.”

  “So what are you proposing? That we run the headline Hey, Jewish Chicks Are Hookers, Too! No dice, Gilman. The day a group of Jewish prostitutes brokers peace in the Middle East, we’ll run a story about them. Until then,” Sheldon said, “I’d like to see you write a story for a change that does not begin with someone trading in their bar mitzvah money for a box of bondage equipment. Call me crazy, but it would be nice to have an article from you once in a while that we could actually publish.”

  He didn’t seem to care that I was finally taking an interest in my work. I loved going out on assignment, interviewing different people, and hearing their colorful, often heartwarming stories—especially when I could schedule interviews in a way that allowed me to sleep late. And after my first year as a cub reporter, I had to admit I was starting to see Judaism in a more favorable light. Jews—it seemed— did more than eat pickled herring and argue about paying retail. And Judaism was actually more than a state of perpetual victimhood. As religions went, it even had a few moments of stunning common sense. For example, I discovered, Jews didn’t believe in original sin. In Judaism, you never had to excuse yourself for living, and you could think about any despicable, depraved thing you wanted to, provided you didn’t act on it.

  Moreover, Jews seemed to believe that literacy was next to godliness. No spiritual leader should spoon-feed ideas to you; rather, you were required to read, study, and think for yourself. Bookish as I was, I liked the idea of a religion that required you to do extra homework, even if I, personally, had absolutely no intention of ever doing it.

  For me, though, the one real appeal of Judaism was that no other religion or culture seemed nearly so tolerant of smart-asses. What others considered blasphemy, Jews tended to regard as a poor attempt at comedy. How else to explain my continued employment?

  Yet just as I was beginning to hit my stride as Susie Gilman, Jew Girl Reporter, I got a call from my friend Giles at The New Yorker. “Guess what?” he said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I just got my own column.” The New Yorker was adding a new nightlife section to the front of the magazine. Hip, literary, and supremely talented, Giles had been tapped by the editors to write it. When he said, “Want to come out and celebrate? My treat,” I felt like lopping off my head with a paper cutter.

  The next week, my friend Julia called from 7 Days. “You won’t believe this,” she said breathlessly, “but I jus
t interviewed Kevin Bacon.”

  At that moment, I was working on a piece Sheldon had assigned me about a new girls’ religious school that had opened in the basement of a town house on West 73rd Street. The school had only seven students, and while the rabbi who’d founded it was full of lofty plans, all the girls cared about were boys. Said the one student who’d deigned to go on record, “Torah, Schmorah. If I don’t get a date in the next three weeks, I’m out of this dump.”

  As Julia told me about her interview with Kevin Bacon, my stomach felt like someone had run it through an industrial juicer. How was it that my friends were living out my dreams, while I was stuck writing about single-sex yeshivas?

  As I walked home through Times Square, blazing with newsstands and gargantuan billboards, the whole city seemed to mock me, to set up a tantalizing display of other people’s celebrity and accomplishments in order to underscore my own obscurity. In New York City, in the entire world, I was an absolute nobody. Why, most of the time, I thought miserably, you couldn’t even find The Jewish Week on the newsstands; better to rifle through the magazine rack at your local geriatric hospital. And while my peers in, say, Bangladesh or Afghanistan might have told me to cry them a river, all I could see were other people’s bylines, other people’s fabulous literary careers, other people hurtling toward greatness.

  The next morning when I stumbled into work late, Sheldon poked his head into the bullpen and yelled, “GILMAN, GET IN HERE.” Setting down my coffee and donuts, I figured this was it: my first post-graduate firing. Armed guards, no doubt, would be summoned, and they’d stand as sentries beside me as I untaped my Doonesbury cartoons from the side of the file cabinet.

  Instead, when I walked into Sheldon’s office, he leaned back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head and said, “Poland.”

  “Poland?” I said.

  “How’d you like to go there?”

  “Forever?” I asked.

  Sheldon laughed. “For a week. To cover a story.”