#antijudaism tw

[sobbingoverthechallah]

Pesach Problems! Or: Are My Housemates Assholes, Or Am I Too Sensitive?

Okay, I’ve got about an hour before candle lighting so I’m just going to dump this into your figurative laps and yeet myself off of Tumblr for the time being. It’s a long rant. I apologize in advance, and i’ll probably delete it later, but anyway please don’t reblog this! Because! It’s! Garbage!

So, this week has been my first PESACH! The two seders I went to at my university’s Hillel were absolutely incredible. I have never felt more included in my life, and my rabbi encouraged so much introspection and debating among us students and alums. I was allowed to bring my old family charoset recipe (I made it vegan, gluten-free AND kosher for Passover, which is almost impossible with a Sephardic-turned-Texas-hick charoset recipe for some reason). I have been eating matzah for a week straight, and I’m not going to lie, I really miss my morning toast. A lot. So much. But it’ll be over tomorrow, and then I can exhale a little bit and go back to not depriving myself of the joys of chametz. 

But that’s been outside of my house, where I live with thirteen other individuals- some undergraduate students, some PhD candidates, some who aren’t even in university. If you read my little rants on here, then you know that my roommate is an atheist, and she has a huge problem with me. See, she’s the only person in this entire house who knows that I’m in the middle of converting. I don’t advertise it, obviously, and my eating matzah noisily with every meal has attracted the attention of my other housemates. If they’re curious about something, I have no problem answering questions. But no one knows that I didn’t grow up Jewish except for my roommate. 

This past week has been filled with little passive-aggressive jabs about, well, Judaism. And my practices. It’s been one long week of side-eye and demeaning jokes about matzah. Of one housemate asking “why are you celebrating something so irrelevant, and without J*sus on Good Friday?” When I dressed according to tznius for the first seder- because, you know, it’s important to be respectful and I wanted to honor my ancestors by wearing some white with my long black skirt- my housemate made sure to give me a long, hard stare and then say “Well! Don’t you... look... modest”, in the most condescending and patronizing tone I think I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s been jokes about “Jews” being thrown around despite the house being FULL of goyim, with the exception of one housemate who’s Jewish and who has been sharing his kosher wine and matzah with me. I was honestly trying to brush all of it off, I swear I was, because I thought I was being too sensitive. But I think I have fully lost my patience. And it starts with my bacon pants. See, I used to LOVE bacon- I loved it so much, my aunt bought me pajama pants covered in bacon for Xmas six or seven years ago. I still wear them quite frequently. I have worn them on a very regular basis over the last five weeks that I’ve been living in this house. 

So imagine my surprise when, after coming into the kitchen to get a glass of wine post-dinner dressed in my pants, a housemate stopped me and said “oh wow, you know, I knew that you had bacon pants, but I didn’t make the connection between JEW and bacon pants until right now!” That’s when I think that I decided to not let the next comment slide. Because Gd knows what kind of crap they would have been telling me over the past week if they’d known that I wasn’t born Jewish.

 And I really don’t want to know. They were comfortable mocking “Jews”, referring to me as a “Jew” right in front of me (pro tip: if you’re not Jewish, don’t fucking call a Jewish person a Jew), making nasty jokes about matzah and blood libels (that came up exactly once this week, but they mercifully withdrew from the conversation after seeing how close I was to exploding sans apologizing), insulting the cultural and ancestral significance that Pesach has for me , because that charoset recipe is all I have left of my ancestors and I won’t stand for someone calling it “a mediocre garbage thing to eat” when they think I’m out of earshot. Lastly, someone put needles (???) on top of my quinoa faux-oatmeal, but that could have just been someone’s stupid negligence, although I don’t know why they thought it was okay to put things in my cubby full of Passover food. It got to the point where I was uncomfortable eating in the house, so I had to eat my breakfast very early in the morning and then eat a big lunch at Hillel, then run up to my room with some matzah before anyone saw me. But Pesach ends tomorrow night, and after saying havdalah, I am going to run to the grocery store and stuff my face full of bread and say a big fat “fuck you” to the guy who thought it was okay to eat a thick slice of freshly-baked bread right in front of my face while saying “oh man, it’s so terrible that you can’t have any of this”. It’s going to be glorious. 

So, am I being too sensitive? Probably. I haven’t had to deal with this before, and it’s become very apparent to me how much privilege I had the last 21 years of my life not having to worry about what I say about spirituality and what I eat in front of other people. That being said, are some of my housemates assholes? Absolutely. I hesitate to put a label on their behavior, because it’s too mild to be something serious enough where I was afraid for my safety, but it’s enough to make me feel slightly on-edge whenever I’m around the same three to five people that think it’s appropriate to insult my life choices, my spirituality, my practices, and my identity. 

I am going to go to Shabbos, hear the yom tov reading, have a lovely Shabbos dinner, and then count both the omer and the hours until I can eat my morning toast on Sunday. Thank you for reading. I just needed to tell someone, anyone, who might understand why I’m so uncomfortable in my own house.