I Am Not Making This Up

I spent three precious hours last night at my children's touchy/feely, pc, multi culti, independent school last night beating back the argument that out of "respect" and to "honor" judaism we needed to close the school on Yom Kippur (and Good Friday to make everything come out in balance). The woman advancing these arguments, in the face of the utter rage and fury of the other jewish parents and the utter bewilderment of everyone else? A gay, jewish, single mom who can't bear fluorescent light so we were forced to huddle in the freezing gym, in a half light cast by emergency lighting so she could harangue us about how it all went together--the holocaust, her grandfather's inability to get into Harvard, the kid who was mean to her in kindergarten and the fact that some horrible person had put up a sign for a holiday party using red and green paper. I forebore to stand up and shriek "yes, the warsaw ghetto uprising was over the germans' refusal to let us hang silver and blue paper menorahs at Channuka" and I also forebore to have a bacon throwdown with a woman whose marital status and sexuality would put her out of place in most observant synagogues. I did reject her assertion that "jews" were not coming to the school by asking if the rest of us were chopped liver. I did not point out that since my grandfather and grandmother had attended, variously, harvard and radcliffe at the time her grandfather wasn't getting in that perhaps this was just some kind of bizarre religious bigotry by proxy munchausen like family memory.

For *&^%$ sake (insert your religious figure of choice) when you finally get a place that's actually secular in this god bothering world why mess with it?

aimai