Hot, Jewish, normal, and gay – Who is Bagel Emoji???

Reintroducing myself

I’ve gotten a lot of new followers and subscribers lately which has been cute. I’m thrilled that you’re here!!! The following is a train of thought story about what’s happening around here:

Something about me is that it took me an extremely long time to finish undergrad because I didn’t know what I was doing and I went to school part time. The rest of the time I was a barista and freelancing for a horrible clickbait website writing mean listicles about Meghan Markle. And then for a minute I wrote porn.

There’s a Chassidic concept that every human has a human soul and an animal soul battling within them. In my case, it’s a suburban boring normie soul and a crusty crinkly cigarette bohemian. I wore my Birkenstocks to the cafe where I worked and sunbathed nearly nude in the park, then I would clomp my long toes down to Chabad dressed like a Serbian real estate broker and hang out with people from Cote St Luc who went to high school together. I loved them but I knew they thought I was really odd for living in a horrible apartment and speaking better French than them. All the while, my cool Mile-End friends gossiped behind my back about how I was a crazy Zionist for enjoying my birthright trip.

When the Tree of Life shooting happened, I was at work, following the news on my phone and crying in front of customers. It was a weird, lonely experience. I decided that I wanted to try keeping Shabbat. I stopped working on Saturdays, showing up to things more. I started really looking forward to it.

It was always freezing during sukkot. Once I built a sukkah on a rooftop and it blew away

My graduation was also looming. I didn’t want to be a barista forever because the only obvious next step to that was becoming a sommelier, and even back then the market was saturated. I started to apply to jobs I was not qualified for. Eventually one worked out for me, and to this very day I am a “marketing professional.”

I felt like my life was crystallizing around me for the first time. I could get a gorgeous high-fade haircut at the barber every two weeks for $25. There were happy hours and after hours and I moved into a nicer apartment in Westmount and furnished it with new ugly mid-century modern furniture from Structube – nicer than anything I had ever owned from Ikea. I made Shabbat the centre of my social life.

At the same time, I began co-chairing a young adult group for a shul. I started building links with other young adult organizations in Montreal so we could do events together. The goal was to build a community in a shul bereft of young people and what actually happened was that the young people who were part of that community had absolutely no interest in socializing with people in the broader community. And then this really annoying thing started happening where these guys would come to every event and freak people out, so the cool normal people would stop coming.

The median age of participants was probably like 22 but there was a guy in his 40s and still frequented all of the campus Jewish events. He was honestly probably very mentally ill but also really leaned into the language of social justice and inclusivity and people were afraid of excluding him because he would post long call-outs on Facebook. The first time I met him, he came to a kab shab/picnic in the park that I organized and got into an argument with a student about landback. And true to form he posted about it immediately after on Facebook, calling him “fragile and aggressive,” and blaming the group for “rallying in his defense,” (I told them that maybe this wasn’t the time and place to argue with each other). And this guy would come to almost everything.

I had this really annoying feeling that these circles are plagued by people who suck all of the air out of the room. They demand spaces be made more inclusive and then terrorize all of the normies who show up and casually disagree with them, then scare them away from ever coming back to an event. Another time, I made a Facebook event advertising a Carlebach-style minyan and I got a concerned message from somebody I had never met, somebody who had never been to one of my events, and as it turns out would never attend one of my events, advising me that it would be wise to remove the mention of Carlebach because of his history as an abuser. So I was like wow thank you for letting me know!!

AND THEN!!! Another time!!! A different guy, who identified as neurodivergent and gay came up behind me to give me a hug and squeezed me so hard that he bruised my rib. It took weeks before I felt better, and then at the shul gala he reached under the table to try and grab my inner thigh.

I went to the rabbi/coordinator and I was like “I cannot handle this guy, he is making me miserable and he freaks out all of the people who come to our events” and the rabbi was like “well he can’t help himself!” And I was like oh my god! Fuck this! And handed the reins off to a French guy who proceeded to destroy every relationship we had built with all of the other Jewish YP organizations in the city by acting like a monster. Then the pandemic happened, I met my now-husband on Jswipe, and I left.

Of course that was an era of prolific tweeting. In fact, I just posted about it.

I joined Twitter because I wanted to participate in conversations I was seeing from my private account. Mainly because I felt like everything I was seeing was so crazy. People were acting absolutely fucking crazy and nobody was saying anything about it.

Responding to the idiotic things in Jewish spaces online, realizing how little these people have to do with IRL Jewish communities. People with little interaction with IRL Jewish communities dominate a lot of the online conversation, and people with extreme and sometimes really stupid ideas take up a lot of space. And it wasn’t just annoying leftists like I complained about earlier. Do you remember when that guy started trying to sell “sudras” (literally cheap blue and white keffiyahs, made in the same Chinese factories as all the other ones) and very beautiful, very well meaning people tried to make “decolonize Judea” a thing? That was so stupid. It pissed me off!!!!!

I made a twitter account so I could be like “you’re so fucking annoying! Stop being annoying!” and then that got old because nobody wants to be told they’re being annoying.

All of this was born out of a need to EXPRESS MYSELF and now I can’t stop! Except now I’m in my 30s and married and my favourite thing to talk about is how materialistic and weird Modern Orthodox culture is and the funny things that rich people do. Over the last couple of years I’ve had this little newsletter, I’ve talked a lot about what Jews in online spaces do – when it’s annoying, when it’s weird, when it makes me feel like the only normal person on the planet. Now I try not to write about what’s happening online because it feels so stupid to comment on what the craziest person I’ve never met said in a 30 second video. Real life is so much more interesting. Like for example, I just committed a grave social faux pas at a Persian engagement party where I told somebody I loved their house. More on that in another story.

This is what I look like

Thanks for reading along! Hope to see you around more!