Jewdar, and Why I've Become a Lapsed Catholic

Hear, oh, Israel! The Lord Thy God Seems Tacitly to Condone Genocide

After nearly eight decades of being a secular Jew, I have decided. as I inch ever nearer Lights-Out, to become a lapsed Catholic.

Forgive me. I read on line somewhere in the past couple of weeks that referring to someone as a Jew is a small step up from calling them a kike. So let’s make it “After nearly eight decades of being a person of the Jewish faith…” Nothing confers respect like additional syllables, unless it’s capitalization. (Are you listening, Black?)

My DNA is apparently 100 percent kosher, but I’ve never really bought into Judaism as a, you know, spiritual framework except for a few months in 1960 when I was preparing for my bar mitzvah (because my best friend intended to so prepare, leaving me with no one to get into trouble with of a Saturday morning). After my bar mitzvah, for which I received about $20 in cash and a cheap nail care kit that did me no good whatever since I wouldn’t stop ravaging my own fingernails until in my 40s), I delighted my grandmother by saying I wanted to become a rabbi.

Around the same time, I was also saying I wanted to play second base for the Los Angeles Dodgers. I knew deep down that was unlikely, as my actual ability in baseball was in inverse proportion to my enthusiasm for the game, but I was pretty sure I could be a better rabbi — or at least a kinder, gentler mentor to bar mitzvah candidates — than the peevish, foul-smelling Mordecai I. Soloff, who, as Temple Israel of Westchester’s own version of The Lord Thy God, put a whole generation of young West LA Jews off Judaism.

My rabbinical ambitions may have lasted around 48 hours, but God, do I wish I’d asked my sweet, generous grandmother in depth about her girlhood in Ukraine, and to teach me to cook.

Over the years, I would take pride in Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, David Lee Roth, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, Leslie West, Randy California, Leonard Cohen, the Maels, Graham Gouldman of 10cc, Joey Ramone, Benny Goodman, Susanna Hoffs, Pat Smear, Amy Winehouse, Philip Roth, Lenny Bruce, Elvis, and Paul McCartney all being Jewish, as I took pride in my genetic kinship to Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax, but my family’s Jewishness began and ended with my dad voting for candidates with Jewish surnames for minor offices he’d never heard of, and Mama believing that a particular restaurant on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica didn’t welcome…our kind.

I liked that at Orville Wright Junior High School, absences due to the High Holiday Days (of which my family traditionally became aware only 48 hours or so after the fact) were officially blamed on Urgent Personal Necessities.

Between early 2013 and the autumn of 2015, I resided in a high-rise apartment building just across 3rd Street from Los Angeles’s Jewishest neighborhood. One afternoon in September 2014 I was enjoying a walk in said neck of the woods when I was set upon by a quintet of Hasidic-looking young men. One of them brandished a shofar (a ram’s-horn trumpet used to mobilize the faithful), and another had Jewdar (sort of like gaydar, but in this case referring to one’s ability to sense another’s ethnicity). It was Yom Kippur or Rush Limbaugh or whatever that other High Holy Day is called, and he asked irately why I wasn’t on my way to a synagogue. “Because I’m not the Monkees,” I advised him, winking.

He frowned in confusion, and I explained, “I’m not a believer.”

If looks could kill! And not just Mr. Jewdar’s, but his four homeboys’ as well.

It occurred to me to note that I could never believe in a God that ordered the murders of Canaanites, Assyrians, and all the residents of Jericho except Rehab and her family, even though He’d created them all, or that wanted me to wear sidelocks. But I was afraid Mr. Jewdar might hit me over the head with his shofar, or get his chauffeur to do it, and left it at my being a non-believer.

I don\t believe regarding Benjamin Netanyahu as monstrous, or being horrified by Israel’s brutalization of Gaza, qualifies me as a self-hating Jew. Be assured, though, that occasionally hate myself for other things, like having been a ghastly little shit to my sweet, generous grandmother.