A woke shiksa tried to pander to me and my people. Oy vey, such mishegoss! I was verklempt!

 For this type of rant, I will sometimes think in the voice of a relative, or perhaps some old codger from shul, or at least, my memory of shul, having not been in a while, but this morning, I am thinking in the voice of Sheila Broflovski.  Why?  Dunno.  I will occasionally type phonetically, based on the accent in my head as I rant.  Just deal.  And here.  We.  Go!

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So I had this thing.  It was a thing.  And there was this shiksa there!  Oy, so woke she was!  Have you ever met such a woke shiksa?  Oh.  So this shiksa, she says, "Well I think everyone should be requiyah-ed to take judayicah studies coahses!"  Shiksa, mind you!  She does not stop there!  She says this studies and that studies and everyone studies!  But she stahted with judayicah studies!  Why did our little shiksa do this?  Half the room?  Chosen people!

I am a professah.  You do not need to take judayicah studies coahses.  This, you do not need to do.  [I realize that the voice has morphed away from Sheila.  I think it's more of a cross between Sheila and Jackie Mason at this point.  Maybe a touch of a Jerry Lewis character thrown in.  Dunno.]  Has any jewish muthah evah said, "oy, I was so worried that my son would become a doctah or a lawyah, but then, he came to his senses, and switched to judayicah studies!  Oh, it would have brought such shame to me, to the family to have a doctah or a lawyah, but oh, we'ah so proud now!  Judayicah studies!  We tried so hahd to get him not to take any of that math or science!  Think of you poor muthah, I said!

At shul, all we can tawk about is how we can get the goyim to take judayicah studies, and appreciate the beauty of oven-baked chicken, unseasoned, cooked for five hou-ahs at 600 degrees!  [Author's note:  only a slight exaggeration from orthodox cooking.  Not kidding.  It's bad.  You wanna talk mishegoss?  That's mishegoss.  Must... not... make... oven joke!  Did that count?  Fuck off, I'm allowed.  I paid the price with a bar mitzvah.]

So this shiksa, she keeps going, and how many of us join her?  None.  Why?  Why?  Because no jew has evah said, "ya' know, the problem is that we don't make the goyim take judayicah studies!"  What do we tell our adults to take?  Remembah, they're adults at 13!  We still guilt them into doing what we want them to do, mind you, but they're adults!  [Note to goyim:  that joke, you're allowed to make.  Oven jokes are off-limits.  Shower jokes too.  When in doubt, consult your friendly, neighborhood chosen person.  You can find us in doctor's offices, law offices, accounting offices, and other highly-paid professions, because we didn't major in judayicah studies, and we don't give a rat's ass about it, rats' asses not being kosher.]

Do I have to tell you what we guilt them into doing?  "My son/daughtah, the doctah."  You mean you're not taking math?  You're not taking science?  You're going to bring shame to your muthah and your fathah?  Aftah awl that we've done for you?  Oy.  That's fine!  It's your life!  It's not like we spent 18 years raising you, and loving you, and suppowting you, awl so you could have a successful life, to say nothing of carrying you inside me for nine months, and oy the birthing!  But fine, you want to major in judayicah studies and have no job, and I suppose then you'll want to climb back into my womb, and oy the medical bills for that, but fine, it's fine, at least you won't be moving back into your room, which we rent out to a nice, young Asian girl who is majoring in engineering, and oh, she'll make her parents so proud.  She shoulda gotten into Harvard!  {zing!}

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OK, so that post happened.  Un-clutch those pearls, it was funny, and I'm allowed to write those jokes!  Don't expect me to tell you who the shiksa was, nor the context, nor anything else.  I just thought a) it was absolutely hilarious on its own, b) that it contrasted so strongly with everything about being raised chosen, and c) that it demonstrated so much about how the woke think about education, and where it goes wrong.  A few serious observations.

What would actually happen if colleges and universities required everyone to take ___ Studies courses for every identity?  Start listing the identities.  African-Americans, women, Latinos, LGBTQ, Asian-Americans, start adding religions as ethnic groups and keep going and you're just going to take up so many classes that nobody has room to take anything else.  One could design a major around the study of various identities!  I actually think that might be kind of an interesting major, conceptually.  But to make this a requirement for everyone?  Nobody would be able to take anything else.  It would eat up too many classes.

Yet this is, to an extent, the woke project.  To supplant substantive education with the study of identity, identity being the only thing that really matters.

Yes, the shiksa in question actually did assert that every student should be required to take ___ Studies, for essentially every category of ___, beginning with my people.

Why does this fail so hilariously on a thinking jew?  As my rant above demonstrates, this is not how most of us think.  Jews tend to lean left, for a variety of reasons, but as students?  That's just not the pathway, for a lot of reasons.  How much of that is parental pressure?  Cultural pressure?  Sorting that out is hard.  I wrote this in the voice of a cartoon-character stereotype because it amused me, and I'm allowed, but the basic point is that when we are sent off to college, the med school/law school/practical career path thing is real.  For whatever reason, the victim complex that we all have?  Which... yeah, we all have that... does not result in majoring in judaic studies to the exclusion of everything else, and I have never once heard a jew say, "you know, the problem is that the goyim aren't taking judaic studies in college!"  Not once.  Ever.

Nobody has more of a victim complex than us, but that's not how it manifests.

So when a wokestir says, "everyone should have to take judaic studies," as a clear attempt to pander in a situation with a bunch of jews and no African-Americans... pander-fail!  Overcook some bland chicken, blow tunelessly into a ram's horn, hock up some phlegm and pretend it's a consonant, then picture your mother throwing guilt at you.  That's the jewish existence.  Thus end-eth the lesson.  Don't waste any college courses on it when you could be learning something useful, like math or foreign languages, setting yourself on a practical career path.  Or fine.  Throw your life away.  It's not like I'm trying to help you, or anything.  Oy, we try, and we try, but it's your life.

The question about education is as follows.  What is most important to learn?  For the woke, the critical theorists, the answer is very different.  I want people to learn math and science, read literature, study history, learn basic writing technique, some public speaking technique, and so forth.  I have precisely zero interest in promoting any political agenda.  I have political beliefs, many of which are now strongly at odds with the official religion of academia.  As examples, I believe in freedom of speech, classical liberalism in the tradition of John Stuart Mill, the veil of ignorance as a theory of justice as elucidated by John Rawls, the Martin Luther King vision of racial equality, and all of that great stuff that I was taught and still believe, but that is now heresy according to the Church of Critical Theory, which does not even accept the existence of objective reality, arguing instead that knowledge is socially constructed through language as an exercise in power.

When you go down that road, you wind up with a reductio ad absurdum position that college curriculum should simply be a set of ___ Studies courses rather than math, science, etc.  The thing is, we now live in the era of Poe's law.  Poe's law states that without a clear indication of the author's intent, you cannot distinguish between satire and true extremism because regardless of how batshit a position seems, someone out there really does believe it.  The woke shiksa of this cautionary tale?  Not fakin' it.

Oy.  Such mishegoss.  I was verklempt.

Music.  I just have to go with Gary Lucas today.  I wanted to find a track from Street Of Lost Brothers, or something, where he does a bunch of tracks based on jewish heritage, but no joy on youtube, so I'm going with a live rendition of "Rise Up To Be," which will be familiar to anyone who is a Jeff Buckley fan.  Lucas is one of the reasons Buckley's Grace was such an amazing album, between his guitar work, and having taught Buckley a lot about guitar.  (Buckley's voice meant that people often didn't notice that he was a fine, if unusual guitarist too.)  Anyway, Gary Lucas is one of those greatest-guitarist-you've-never-heard types, except that you have heard him, without noticing.