So Jimmy Breslin is Jewish because you like him.

So let’s count, you were wrong about what the cartoonist was attempting. You were wrong about Jimmy Breslin who was famously Catholic. And and yes you were wrong about me. I grew up in Brooklyn, riding the N train and sometimes even with my eyes open and I still think your post is nonsense

In the New Yorker she had a chance to portray the complete, vaguely disturbing range of Western fundamentalisms that clothe the female devout of NYC — including Jews.

I guess she also had the chance to portray Joseph Stalin playing a tuba while riding an alligator. She didn’t take it.

Blog editor’s reply: Breslin became Jewish when he spent his childhood in Queens, did ballsy daily journalism in the city, hit the streets, talked to people, paid attention, and took a stand and a stand and a stand. You appear to be in NYC, so don’t worry: you, too, can be Jewish. Just leave 73rd St. and Second once in awhile, keep your eyes open, and forget the tuba and alligator: try a shofar and the N train (even Stalin could have cleaned up, busking on the subways. If he had, he would have been Jewish, too).

Mary

P.S. I live in a half Hassidic neighborhood in Montreal. Two doors down from us a family had five girls, clustered in age around my daughter’s, and as they moved through school it was interesting to see that they studied for some of the same provincial exams (history, math, geography–the girls’ schools get provincial money and must follow a set secular curriculum in part) at the same time. Now all of them ahve several kids, and find it astsonishing and maybe a little shocking that Elin at 31 isn’t married, and is very serious about a music career.

The Jews are the most successful people on the planet, hands down. So much so that in Japan Antisemitism exists when the only Jews there are a few enterprising Israelis selling trinkets to the tourists. They don’t need representation on a a weekly even though Abe Foxman would beg to differ. He feels that if a Jew is burglarizing a home and is arrested, the police are anti-Semitic.

Do the women of BP, Williamsburg, Crown Heights et al. really mean so much to you that you have became their ambassador?

Believe me–and i know–these women just want to be left alone and don’t care if they are portrayed on a magazine half of them have never even heard of. They would rather leave that to their secular sisters who have all but forgotten about what it means to live modestly, and who feel that their path in the world must be paved with the revelation of their breasts and thighs.

Debbie, I hope you’re well.