Jews You Can Use

The following are fields in which Jewish men are believed to excel: gastroenterology, the violin, political consulting, the domination of world financial markets, and particle physics. One field in which it is believed we do poorly, however, is beating people up. We are, the stereotype has it, lousy fighters, and this rankles. Some of us respond to this slander by embracing, in the words of the cultural critic Daniel Boyarin, our "sissy heritage" and taking up, among other things, the study of Yiddish (not for nothing is it known as "mama-loshen," the mother tongue). Others move in the opposite direction and join the Israeli army, where Yiddish, the language of our sissy exile, is most definitely not spoken. Still others take up ice hockey.
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