My friend Nechama* puts out the plastic cups. She drops several on the floor. She picks them up and puts them on the table. I seize those cups, take them to the sink, wash them out, and put them back on the table.
Nechama’s sister Jackie* comes out. I ask her if she’d drink from a cup that fell on the floor. She says yes. I drop one to the floor and challenge her to drink from it.
She picks it up, goes to the frig, pours herself a cup of juice, and drinks.
Nechama’s man Sid* comes over.
He is like me and would not drink from a cup that had fallen on the floor and was not washed.
The third roommate, Jez, comes out. She drops something to floor. Despite wearing a short skirt, Jez bends over to pick it up, her skirt riding her on her thighs.
I stare.
Jez is rooting around on the floor for her lost object, her skirt riding higher.
"Carry on!" I say in my most nonchalant voice.
Jez straightens up. "Levi!" she says.
At 9:30 pm, the rest of the guests arrive. We have about 20 for Shabbat dinner. Two are goyim, about 15 are frum yidden and the rest are non-Orthodox Jews.
I sit next to the rabbi, Avi*, and across from the goy Sean*, a graduate student in engineering at USC.
He says he took off Thursday night and went to a Depeche Mode street concert.
I try to explain to the rabbi, who’s never been to a rock concert, what happened. "It was a Gentile pride event, rabbi," I say. "Gentiles such as Sean like to gather with other Gentiles and affirm each other in their goyisha identity through the performance of certain exotic rituals such as swaying side to side with one another while listening to goyisha music that says that being Gentile is cool and that one can have a meaningful life without HaShem’s commandments.
"The goyim get to feel good about their meaningless lives as goyim and frequently these rubbing rituals leads them to pair off and take matters further behind closed doors.
"Depeche Mode is a New Wave rock group from England from 1980.
"You should behold the goyim at such events. They look sweetly innocently happy. You’d never realize they were capable of genocide at the least provocation.
"They say they only want their human rights — to have their marriages recognized as every bit as valid as Jewish marriages, they want to count in a minyan, and they want to be admitted into rabbinical schools as (openly) goyim according to the same percentage they make up in the American population."
