<\/p>\n
Bill Miller, <\/strong>who went to<\/span> <\/span>law school in South Dakota, wore a cowboy hat to our sons\u2019 Little League games. Jews — the subject — came up, as it tends to around me. Bill ended our conversation with, \u201cThink Yiddish, act British.\u201d This was a new expression to my ears. Also, this guy — Bill Miller — was Jewish? Bill said he was inching his way back to the East Coast. He had lived in South Dakota, Iowa, and now Ohio. He had grown up on Long Island.<\/p>\n Bill got me to thinking about my personal “Think Yiddish, Act British” (TYAB) playbook. I had learned the cardinal rule of TYAB, courtesy of my mom: \u201cDon\u2019t make a scene.\u201d If anybody in my family ever said “Jewish” in a restaurant, for instance, my mother would\u00a0glance around to see if anybody heard. Forget Jew —<\/em> the word — I rarely heard that growing up.<\/p>\n My dad couldn\u2019t read (sound out) Hebrew. My mother could. My father’s parents were \u201cbasically communists,\u201d an elderly cousin told me. That was a\u00a0bit of an exaggeration. My grandparents were entrepreneurs with a socialist background. Par for the course.<\/p>\n We put<\/strong><\/span> out Easter eggs and got Christmas presents. No tree. No yelling. At High Holidays, my mom would write my teachers: \u201cPlease excuse Bert\u2019s absence from school due to religious observances.\u201d My temple held services on Sunday, not Saturday.<\/p>\n Jewish<\/em> got more play beginning in 1967. I was surprised when my parents attended an emergency fundraiser for Israel. A lot of American Jews stepped forward during the Six-Day War. Abba Eban, at the U.N., was my hero. The possibility of a second Holocaust\u00a0seemed very real. A couple kids in my high school began wearing Jewish Power <\/em>buttons, courtesy of a button shop in Greenwich Village. I didn\u2019t have the guts to wear the button. The button-wearing kids had grown up in the Jewish neighborhood, not with the Italians like I had. After the Israeli victory in 1967, the TYAB playbook became nearly obsolete.<\/p>\n At my dad\u2019s funeral in 1986, my father’s brother Milt baited the officiating rabbi: \u201cOne place I\u2019d never go is Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy is that?\u201d the rabbi asked.<\/p>\n \u201cOur mother<\/strong> <\/span>was an ardent Zionist who wanted us to move there, and I didn\u2019t want to.\u201d<\/p>\n My<\/em> mother questioned Milt’s propriety several hours later. According to my mom, 1) Uncle Milt\u2019s mother had been a Zionist, but had never urged her kids to make aliyah. 2) Milt was a jackass for making a scene.<\/p>\n An etiolated version of TYAB was alive. But is TYAB in effect when you’re totally among Jews?<\/p>\n —<\/p>\n Yidd Cup\/ Funk A Deli\u00a0 plays a concert 7 pm Thurs, Aug. 15, at Walter Stinson Community Park. That’s somewhere in University Heights, Ohio. (hint: 2313Fenwick Rd.) Free. Outdoors.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bill Miller, who went to law school in South Dakota, wore a cowboy hat to our sons\u2019 Little League games. Jews — the subject — came up, as it tends to around me. Bill ended our conversation with, \u201cThink Yiddish, act British.\u201d This was a new expression to my ears. Also, this guy — Bill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-history-not-boring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26768"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26875,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26768\/revisions\/26875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}