My name is Michael Pace and I am a real-live Jew living in Austin. What, you couldn’t tell because of my Italian last name? It’s probably because my horns are hidden in a Jew-fro thick enough to rival Gene Shalit’s. Truth be told, I’m not a particularly observant member of the Tribe, but I respect and somewhat admire the thousands of years of tradition passed down through the generations. I also really love my grandparents. Oh shit, I forgot to fast on Yom Kippur this year. Again. Regardless, I’m schvitzing in excitement because Chanukah is coming to Texas early this year, in the form of the Austin Jewish Book Fair. For local and transplanted Jews like myself (as well as the rest of you goyim), it’ll be an opportunity to listen, converse, nosh, kvetch, and engage with others on a variety of topics, Talmudic and otherwise. Over the course of eight crazy nights a battery of rabbis, Judaic scholars, esteemed lecturers, serious journalists, and a guy from HEEB magazine will tackle topics ranging from nazi hunting to the creation of Jewish homelands in the Middle East and on Long Island to growing up with the unfortunate surname of “Plotz.”
While I wasn’t raised in Levittown, I did grow up a few towns over in another semi-affluent suburb on Long Island where Jews ruled. There was nary a weekend between 1991 and ’93 where I wasn’t inappropriately clapping at the end of someone’s Torah portion, writing obscenities on someone’s sign-in board, or shaking my tuchas to Black Box and Kris Kross, all of which was inevitably followed by playing an inflatable guitar along to Van Halen’s “Right Now” at some schlub’s bar mitzvah (notice I didn’t say “bat” mitzvah – were you hanging out with the opposite sex at 13?) David Kushner, who’ll be speaking Tuesday night as part of “A Night of History – the Rest of the Story,” knows this terrain well. His new book, Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America's Legendary Suburb chronicles the post-WWII white flight to the first pre-fab suburbs along the North Shore of Long Island and the civil unrest that followed in the wake. While I haven’t been back to Levittown since I saw the Howard Stern movie in a dumpy theater there (and got a horrible case of food poisoning eating the traef at Blimpie’s beforehand), I can attest that a hidden undercurrent of segregation still exists because there was one black person in my high school.
There were no black kids at the Hebrew school I attended, just a bunch of obnoxious “jappy” kids, 98% of who decided to end their Judaic education after their bar/bat mitzvahs. Although it’s an opportunity to continue your studies, “Hebrew High” probably has the greatest dropout rate of any educational institution anywhere in the history of the world (part 1). Slate editor David Plotz is well aware of this. In fact, he was inspired to pick up the bible because he was BORED TO SHIT at his niece’s bat mitzvah service and wanted some reading material while the Cantor droned on, calling people to the Torah for the umpteenth aliyah. He’ll be on hand Thursday night to discuss what they don’t teach you in shul and talk about his new tome Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. Joining him will be New Yorker editor and actual New Yorker Ben Greenman, talking about and reading excerpts from Sex, Drugs and Gefilte Fish, a new collection of fiction from the pages of beloved hip Jewish humor magazine, HEEB. Don’t quote me on the reading part, it’s just a known fact that Jews love to read aloud in public.
The festivities come to a close Sunday night with “A Salute to Israel,” and while Itzhak Perlman will not be performing. Saul Singer, columnist for the Jerusalem Post, will discuss his book Start Up Nation, which chronicles the country’s rise as an economic power despite no natural resources, constant war and religious unrest, and general tsuris. Hey, did you know that if you’re a Jew under the age of 27 you can get a free trip to Israel? I didn’t learn about this until I was 28. I also had no urge to go to the Motherland until I discovered that I really like Middle Eastern cuisine (this happened last week). Speaking of which, my grandmother makes matzoh balls from a secret recipe that are the size of bull testicles and twice as delish! She also wears a gold pendant that says “21 PLUS” and thinks I’m the smartest, most handsome boy in the whole world.
Back to the book fair. Much like the youngest at the table during Pesach, I’ve got four questions for ya: Will classic stereotypes be perpetuated at the bagel breakfast? Will someone call Woody Allen a self-hating Jew, much like my Hebrew school teacher did? Will it come as a surprise that more than two of these writers live in Park Slope, Brooklyn? Will David Lee Roth show up to autograph copies of his 1995 autobiography Crazy From the Heat?
To find out why these nights are different from all other nights, check out: http://www.shalomaustin.org.
