WASP’s Confession: My Jew-Envy
Passover 2011 is half-way over, my muscles ache from work, and I am once again rudely reminded of a personal issue of which my close Jewish friends are already abundantly aware: my Jew-Envy.
Simply put, I am a WASP, the boring, tasteless Wonder Bread of ethnicities. Granted, I am a quarter Cherokee Indian (a paltry eighth on both sides), but I was raised WASP. What does this mean? It means I grew up devoid of tradition. Of course, we did do the same thing every year for holidays, but these habits were completely upstart without any grounding in something as impressive as thousands of years of history. We, like all WASPS, made it up as we went along, with one finger in the wind and the other on the untouchable pulse-beat of the stubbornly whimsical yet wondrous matriarchs of the family: the grandmothers.