I won’t bore you with too much of the details leading up to my trip to the south of France, but just so you know: My ideal vacation involves staying in a chateau in the Loire valley and listening to the Marie Antoinette soundtrack, headphones on, ambling thoughtfully from room to room, touching objects lightly with the back of my hand and trailing my fingertips along the walls. Well, I did do that, and then went to a French Jewish wedding where they served a lot of shrimp. After the wedding, we popped down to Saint Tropez.

Call me Jia Tolentino for the way I always be optimizing. For months, my entire Instagram feed was Reels about how to do the South of France correctly. My husband sent me 45 a day. So I bought our tickets and our hotels and arranged our day trips and our reservations and our scheduled downtime, and thought we were good. But I was completely, completely wrong.

At every family event leading up to our trip, we’d run through our itinerary to a Greek chorus of Persian cousins. NO!!!! They screamed. We would be standing in a circle smoking cigars at a toddler’s luxurious birthday party in Bel Air. They were all seasoned South-of-Francers. Mostly from their single days. Now everyone was married with luxurious toddlers.

Don’t do this, do that, are you crazy?! I picked the 12:30 beach club reservation instead of 3:30, for example. And could we at least try to get a spot at the place Jeff Bezos went after his wedding? No, they were booked out months in advance. But the Cousins were shocked. At least, they pleaded, make a reservation at L’Opera. Please, please, please. You’ll love it, they insisted. Go late.

Because I only see these people at parties, I think their impression of me is that I love to throw it down. But I’m not that kind of girl. My husband is kind of that girl. But me, I’m a simple Canadian amish woman (Jewish) who grew up in a neighbourhood that looks like this. So also remember that when I talk about literally anything and seem easily impressed.

But I’m not a partier, and certainly not when I travel. While we were in Nantes, I wanted to find the Dupont du Ligoness house. I told my husband that the father murdered his whole family and buried them in the yard before disappearing, and he was like, why are you taking me here? Why do you know this? We stood in front of an unimpressive old townhouse an inconvenient distance from the city centre. In Paris, I took him to the Bataclan. It was near Folderol, which is a stupid gimmicky ice cream and wine bar. I’ve gone to the Bataclan every time I’ve been in Paris. I don’t know why. It’s like how I always find time to go to Ground Zero when I’m in New York. I think to myself: I need to get to the bottom of this. And then I poke around the scene. In Nice, standing in front of our hotel on the Promenade des Anglais, I traced the path of the truck that killed 86 people and pointed to where it stopped, metres from where we were staying.

“I wish you didn’t tell me that,” he said.

Anyway, I’m jumping ahead. Saint Tropez was crowded and hot. On Instagram, there was a lot of concern about people traveling there who were pretending to be rich. I looked around and wondered if anyone was pretending. In one Reel, a childlike sommelier wags his finger and says that if you drive a Lamborghini but live in a Monaco studio apartment, you’re larping. I watched a lady with Monaco plates drive into the Saint Tropez Chanel store, where we were waiting in line. There were a lot of lines in Saint Tropez. There were lines at the only place in the marina that served matcha, which boasted sister locations in Riyadh and Dubai. I stood behind a dozen Russian women and got a room temp Americano with 3 ice cubes.

In the same way I am not a big partier, I am also not a big shopper. My husband is, and I support him because this is his vacation too. We spend a lot of time popping into luxury boutiques – which also involves a lot of waiting in line. At some point, I decide I’m not interested in looking at Hermes sandals, so I plop myself down on a terrasse with a book and chainsmoke until my husband is done. The Hermes sandals become a white whale that haunts us for the rest of the trip. We stop at every Hermes store. There are so many Hermes stores. We live near an Hermes store. We have Rodeo Drive at home. But it’s different here, I’m told, though I don’t really believe that. At least you get money back on the taxes, and that makes it worth it. The elite global shopperati obviously feel similarly, because they’re all here too. Bitches be shopping, and we are bitches.

Our late reservation at L’Opera is coming up. It was suggested by the cousins. When we made the booking, we said it was our wedding anniversary. I have no idea what I was expecting about this place, but when we walked in, there were sci-fi costumed gogo dancers and enormous AI-generated pictures of bald robot women on every wall. Most of the tables hosted large groups of Arab men and Russian women. The bodacious but skinny hostess walked us to our table. It was long. We were sharing with other couples. At the head of the table were stairs.

The moment the server set down my pumpkin ravioli, the gogo dancers resumed operations and marched up the stairs on top of our table. Around the restaurant, they performed a bizarre synchronized dance. Directly in front of me, a dancer swooped her butt down, nearly touching my ravioli. I could tell that this was a very coveted experience for some people. Between the gogo dancer performances, the servers would get up on the tables and perform their own less dramatic dances. An art piece, if you could call it that, directly in front of me said “ROBOT IS MY FUCKING BITCH” in huge letters. After a couple of drinks, we left and walked around the marina. In line for gelato, a 20 year old asked us what we thought and said that that place was sooooooo trashy. We were like yeah, so weird! Won’t do that again. He told us he had been coming to Saint Tropez since he was a little kid, and there were way better clubs if we wanted suggestions. We said we weren’t really club people.

We moved on to Cannes. Cannes is Rodeo Drive but more of it. We go into more of the same stores. I desperately need a new pair of white linen pants because I accidentally ruined mine, so I pop into a Zara. Also I need to say that if somebody tells you that Zara in Europe is better or different, they are wrong and they are stupid. It’s the same.

My child sister-in-law and her husband came to Cannes for their honeymoon. They are very frum. I cannot imagine what they did the entire time besides try on shoes. They don’t like museums and they don’t eat at non-kosher restaurants. Sounds really fun.

Our dinner plan in Cannes is another cousin recommendation at a restaurant I found out is a global chain after arriving. I hear from our Uber driver that this building hosts a casino and a famous nightclub too and it’s where the best parties in Cannes are. I’m like: Great! So we poke around the lobby of this multi-purpose casino night club shopping restaurant space until it’s time for dinner, which is on the roof overlooking the marina.

And it’s beautiful. Of course it is. And not a single member on staff is from France. People pose for photos in front of the sign. I think to myself that I would also pose for a photo in front of the sign if I were a real estate agent or something, because that would be a flex. On the rooftop, I look at the sky and at the constellations and think about my dad, who pointed out the constellations to me on our back deck. I wonder what we would think of me now, sitting at this luxury global chain dining and hospitality experience.

My husband is charismatic and will talk to anyone. He struck up a conversation with a tall blonde family on a train and asked where they were from.

“Sweden,” they said. “And you?”

“Los Angeles,” he said. Americans always say the city. In Monaco, he compliments an elderly woman with a white alligator Birkin who says she’s from Qatar.

“Be careful in Paris,” she said. “You can’t wear your jewelry. I take it all off.” She points to her earrings and bracelets and rings, like the Bama Rush girls on TikTok. Sometimes people say the same thing about LA. On the train from Monaco to Nice we sit beside two young women from Egypt who are visiting the area having done absolutely no research or planning anything in advance.

“What do you do in Cannes,” they ask.

“Shop and eat by the water,” we say.

“And Saint Tropez, what is there to do?”

“Shop and eat by the water.”

Even after we’ve gone home, I see endless Reels about how to do Saint Tropez with $5000, $50,000 and $500,000. There’s a right way to do it at every price point, and you’re rubbing shoulders with beautiful Russian women at all of them. And the whole time, everyone is just sizing each other up. We can do that at home, too.

Thanks for reading Bagel Emoji. I actually had a really nice time in France but there was a little too much shopping. I have a tan. It was also nice to see old friends. There’s my disclaimer. If you liked this, you might also like my other bits and bobs about rich people (Jewish and normal):

Every time I sit down to talk about my job, I get hives. When people in real life ask me what I do, I say, “Oh I do like… marketing… in tech,” and then usually get no follow-up questions, which is fabulous for me because I don’t want to talk about it. Except right now, because if I get this out of my system, I can enjoy shubbes to the fullest extent of the law.

Because I work in tech, I’ve experienced my fair share of layoffs in the last few years, and that causes me a lot of anxiety. Before my first layoff, I had been employed continuously from my fourteenth birthday. I had never not had a job. My family had no money to help me out with, and I was very proud of being self-sufficient. Losing my job for the first time made me feel like at any moment, a giant bird would drop down from the sky and pluck me out of the middle class with its talons and then feed me to its grubby fat little babies. Or force me to work at Starbucks again.

Alarm bells start wingadinging when I feel like things at work go from doing stuff to playing pretend. My layoffs have been preceded by what felt like a lot of roleplaying productivity as budgets turn to dust and hiring sashays away. My first layoff was at a company I was at for like six years, and the last couple of months were a lot of me showing up to weekly meetings where absolutely no progress was made. There were multiple rounds of layoffs and I was probably affected in the fifth wave. It felt like forced disappearances.

I flew into the San Francisco office to help film an ad, and the person responsible for letting the production company into the building had been let go, as well as our on-camera talent. We scrambled to find somebody in the office who would sit and read off a teleprompter and the only person that was down was a lady who did not brush her hair and had never been in front of a camera in her life. I stood off set with my hands on my hips, watching her stumble through her lines over and over, and in the end we had basically unusable footage because she looked absolutely crazy. But she was so excited to do this, and she was nice, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings? That’s a #lessoninleadership for me!

All the while, the project manager insisted we keep the weekly meeting even though we all knew we weren’t actually going to launch this campaign. She was in denial that the company was going through some shit. In the end, the entire team was let go.

Once I joined a company where everyone on my team had an “operating manual” that outlined what their job was, how they worked with everyone, and a section for values, strengths, and working style. Then there was a section on “how to contact me” and a section for “how to deliver feedback.” Everyone on the team was a self-described introvert who prioritized asynchronous communication via Slack, having their camera off during meetings, and having their feedback delivered gently and sandwiched between positive observations. In meetings, people openly talked about having imposter syndrome and being neurodivergent, with one person frequently referring back to their recent mental health leave and the stressful conditions leading up to their bout of burnout, as if one additional project would tip them back over the edge. Another person pushed back at deadlines because of their ADHD.

I thought to myself: How does anyone get anything done? And then I entered the machine and realized that not a lot actually gets done. I did exactly what I was scoped for in my contract and absolutely nothing else.

Projects moved slowly through rounds of planning and pre-approval and feedback. Nobody ever said that anything was a bad idea for what felt like a fear of hurting feelings. I was pulled into a really bizarre workstream where a bunch of us had to refine a Gemini prompt that was supposed to generate creative briefs in a spreadsheet. I think AI has gotten better than it did at the time, but the person responsible for creating the prompt was a very non-technical marketing person. The prompt lived in a Google doc and was like two pages long. It was full of instructions like “Please only provide FACTUAL data” and “Pretend you’re an SEO expert.” I was like, I don’t want to be a huge bitch, but there’s no way to tell if the output is factual and no way to tell if it’s an SEO expert, what you’re basically doing here is a really elaborate roleplay that outputs into a spreadsheet. The guy was like, “No, look, it works,” and then showed me a bunch of content that was bad.

To be honest, I didn’t say “I don’t want to be a huge bitch,” but I should have, because my manager gently provided feedback to me so that I could deliver my feedback more carefully. I was like, okay, but just so you know, this whole project doesn’t make sense and this person doesn’t understand how LLMs work. And then eventually priorities shifted and the project went into purgatory. All the while, other people on the team were making suggestions like, “Make sure to tell it to be 100% accurate,” and “Make sure it only pulls data from academic journals!” which, again, is not how this works. I was literally old man yells at a cloud.

The worst job I ever had came right after my first layoff. My dad died, I got married, and my head was all over the place. I took the first job offer I got because I was afraid of being unemployed. It was at a startup, and I was the first marketing hire. Unlike my previous job, which had been remote since the onset of covid, this was hybrid between two different WeWorks, chosen depending on when it was easiest to get free parking nearby. I reported directly the the founder, who seemed energetic and was very sweaty all the time.

My first day, I joined a cohort of new hires at 7am at a coffee shop across from the WeWork. The founder said we had to start at 7 because we were having an all-hands with employees in Europe. After a day of training and brainstorming, we were told that our hours were 7am to 5pm, in-person Monday through Thursday, and on Friday we had to be online for the 6am company-wide all-hands with our cameras on, but we could work from home. I told myself that the in-person collaboration and working directly with the founder would probably be good for me, considering I just spent the last four months with basically nothing to do. Now I had a lot to do and I had to be awake at odd hours to get it done.

I am fairly certain the founder has a personality disorder. He was a micromanager in the scariest way possible. Had I read the Glassdoor reviews for the previous company he founded, I may have known that.

On the first Friday I had the privilege of working from home, my boss called me every few minutes and asked me to share my screen. He wanted to make sure I was actually working. In the office, he would hover behind me and touch my laptop screen with his fingers. He requested slide decks and case studies and reports and copy and emails and then told me they were shitty. He insisted on approving all comms and content before they went out. I once sent him a draft of a nurture campaign. He highlighted the entire document, hit “delete,” and told me that it wasn’t connecting. Before I worked on anything else, he was going to give me a test about the product and our customers. The test would be administered verbally, with no notes. Until then, I had to sit in on every sales call and live demo. It was Monday. The test would be on Thursday. I posted about my woes on a career advice subreddit, wondering if I should just quit. The comments suggested not to, because the economy was bad.

All of the other local employees were guys in sales who were much younger than me. They loved the hustle and ate raw liver at lunch. Once, we all got into a physical huddle in the office and one of them shared a story about horses in ancient Rome that were strong on their own but more powerful as a team. We, in this allegory, were the horses. But I did not feel like a horse. I felt like a gnome. The founder would chew them out in front of everyone, too. One them was demoted. I had been there for two months. The vibes were bad. One of the guys added me on LinkedIn and noticed I hadn’t updated my job. I said, “Oh, I’m just not really active on LinkedIn.” Then I blocked him.

On the Thursday of the test, I scheduled time with him at the start of the day in a private meeting room away from the hustle and bustle. I waited there for an hour. I sent him a message asking if he could meet with me. He said he was busy, we could talk at the end of the day when it was time to do the test. I waited until I saw him go into the kitchen. I walked up to him and said, “Hey, could we have a chat for a minute,” and he said no, he was extremely busy and he told me it could wait. I was like, “No, I wanted to let you know that I’m resigning,” and handed him my laptop in its original packaging. “This clearly isn’t working for either of us,” I said. He said, “okay,” and that was it. I said, “okay…… well……….. I’m going.” Then I left! I lay down in the grass of the park across the street. I called my husband, who reassured me that we wouldn’t become homeless. After that whole ordeal, I think I slept for a month straight.

Thanks for reading. Did you know that Bagel Emoji is free because there is no way in hell I could make money doing this? Thanks for supporting. Back to regular programming soon. In the meantime, you might enjoy these stories. Also for what it’s worth, I got a new job after and it was fine. I’m actually not bad at my job. It’s just so boring to talk about.

Also I need to clarify something really quick: I am a man.

That’s most of what you missed on Glee! Back to regular programming soon.

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Bagel Emoji

The Orthodox Jewish Swinging Scandal You've Never Heard Of

There’s a swingers scandal erupting in Toms River that you’ll only hear about if you’re in specific WhatsApp group chats. I’m going to tell you about it the same way that my sister-in-law told me about it, which was by burying the lede…

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3 months ago · 46 likes · 8 comments · Bagel Emoji

Bagel Emoji

Love thy evil little neighbour

A buddy of mine married a girl from the five towns and he gets on well with his in-laws despite the fact that, in his opinion, people from the five towns have no middos. At a shabbos table Lawrence, he was discussing “ve’ahavta l’re’akha kamokha” with a group of people and somebody said that they make the commandment easier for themselves to fulfill by …

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4 months ago · 32 likes · 3 comments · Bagel Emoji

There’s a swingers scandal erupting in Toms River that you’ll only hear about if you’re in specific WhatsApp group chats. I’m going to tell you about it the same way that my sister-in-law told me about it, which was by burying the lede.

I found myself in what I think is a Chinese part of Brooklyn. The thing about Brooklyn is that I only know the frum parts and sometimes neighbourhood names are not what they are on a map, and I’ve never heard anyone say “Gravesend” before. Perhaps that’s always been a pocket of frumkeit, but maybe it’s considered part of Greater Flatbush. Remember that my entire frame of reference for New York is from TV and I’m from the armpit of Canada.

So picture this: Cipriani’s, but kosher. Speaking of which, there’s a Cipriani’s in Beverly Hills now and if you go inside, everyone is Persian (except me), and we talk about it like we’ve been going there for years. It feels good to say. Cipriani’s. It feels good to say, even though it’s kind of Chubai. But every new restaurant in Beverly Hills is a chain and all of the chains are kind of Chubai. I was listening to two Russian women at the gym talking about how Novikov isn’t good anymore. Novikov has been open in Beverly Hills for like two seconds. Anyway, the point of this is that nobody who is actually cool hangs out in Beverly Hills.

“Tell them about the girl who’s bicurious,” my sister-in-law says to her husband. They live in the Five Towns. We have a joke in our family that people from the Five Towns have no middos, because that’s something our friend said before marrying a girl from the Five Towns, and we thought that was a hysterical condemnation. So now we’re always saying it. But right now it’s kind of true.

My brother-in-law pulled out his phone to show us a screenshot of a Feeld profile. Feeld is a dating app for kink and swinging and polyamory. It was a 25-year-old woman, posing in a photo with a young-looking man, and they were wearing plasticky looking club gear, like they were at a party where the mandate was to dress “sexy”. Sure enough, she self-described in her profile as “bi-curious,” and the man, her husband, described himself as “not as innocent as I look.”

“This is Mortgages by Mimi,” my SIL said. I’ve changed the names to protect the accused. She showed me her instagram profile. Pictures of her clients, pictures of her, pictures of her husband. Religious in pants kind of vibe. Well-to-do. There was a post about how small minds talk about gossip, but big brains focus on business.

So they were swingers. My mind flashed to Olive Days. There was talk of threesomes and cruises and sex parties. It wasn’t just because they were spotted on the app, either. Photos and videos from these parties broke containment, and now they being forwarded from one WhatsApp group chat to the next.

We’ve gone far enough into lashon hara territory. I won’t tell you what I saw in the photos, just that everyone’s faces were visible and some of the men were wearing their kippahs. Which means, shalom, the call is coming from inside the house! They were betrayed by their own! But you know how the old adage goes: Don’t make where you eat.

They pulled up another Instagram profile. It was a dude from one of the sex party photos.

“He’s already destroyed one marriage by shtupping the wife,” my BIL said. He actually said shtupping. I’m not just using that word because this is a Jewish newsletter.

Before the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, they were just swinging Mormons. They were nominally religious, raised in a bubble, and married young. There was a lot of talk about how what they were doing was the kind of stuff that college students and normal single people would have done. But they skipped that step and went straight to changing diapers, and now they were making up for lost time.

People love stories of religious people behaving badly. That’s what gave SLOMW its edge. But people also did this really annoying thing where they’d be like “Well they’re not really Mormon because Mormons don’t do that,” which is like telling a cat that it’s actually not a cat because it can skillfully pee in a toilet. Some would say the same of the people involved in this scandal, that a real Orthodox Jew would never do this. For that reason, I wonder if a Secret Lives of Orthodox Jewish Wives would be possible. It probably wouldn’t go over well.

And Orthodox Jews are people, and people do strange and sexy things. Black-and-white framing doesn’t help us understand how things like this happen. It would be more helpful to apply a spectrum or a matrix to our reasoning. The cat would need a few more points to qualify as human, the Mormon-ness of the soft swinger cannot be determined by one gesture alone, and the frumkeit of Mortgages by Mimi and her husband can’t prevent them from engaging in behaviour that outsiders would find scandalous. They are a result of the bubble that created them, attended their sex parties, leaked the photos into the community WhatsApp chats, and whispered about it over arancini at Castell’s.

“They’ll probably get kicked out of Toms River,” they said. “There’s no way they’re gonna stay after this.”

Speaking of wasting seed, there’s a new rabbi in town!

So I have some good news and I have some bad news. The bad news is that you have to give them your phone number and email to sign up, and then you can only ask five questions before being directed to a payment window. You cannot actually subscribe right now – that feature isn’t ready – but for the price of $15, $50, or $100 a month, you can ask tens to thousands of questions! There is no proposed payment tier for unlimited questions.

The other bad news is that the chats are not persistent, so the AI doesn’t remember the previous question when asked a follow-up question. This is how customer service bots basically worked until AI became a thing a few years ago, and I know this because I work for companies that build customer service bots. So whatever they used to create this is bad and old.

And there’s more bad news. The AI doesn’t believe it’s AI. The AI believes it is actually Rabbi Yaron Reuven, whose teaching and shiurim form the knowledge base of its content. And also it uses a tone with me that I really don’t like. Like why is tatty mad at me?!

Not-AI rabbi Yaron Reuven is a scary fire-and-brimstone kiruv rabbi who loves talking about wasting seed. I cannot imagine what goes on in the brain of a man who is mekareved by a dude who’s biggest thing is instilling fear of wasting seed, but I imagine he posts a lot the r/AskMen subreddit about how hard it is to find high-value women or how they don’t have hobbies outside of watching YouTube Shorts.

So, um, I guess it’s gehinnom for me until I get a handle on things. And there’s more bad news: There is no way for me to access my AI Rabbi account details. I can’t change my email or password, and I can’t delete my account. So now I’m stuck, and I’m out of tokens, and I can’t even ask him more about tikkun ha brit.

Thanks for reading Bagel Emoji. If you liked this, you might enjoy other bits of gossip from my Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, family, and friends. Gossip update: I think the girl who was reposting Reels about infidelity and cheating husbands is pregnant, because now she’s reposting a lot of Reels about pregnancy. Bshah tova!

Gashmius means unholy crap.

You subscribed for Jewish stuff but sometimes I just really need to express myself.

America is experiencing a crisis: A crisis in understanding. A crisis in content creation. A crisis in paying attention to the TV. A crisis in literacy!

A fun fact about me is that I love the Handmaid’s Tale! I read it in high school and I thought to myself: So fun! So I watched the bad movie that was filmed in the Durham house where The Staircase happened, I dutifully watched the series even though the last season was weird, I have the beautifully illustrated graphic novel by Renee Nault, I gleefully read The Testaments and didn’t think it deserved the Booker Prize but I still mostly liked it, and I was thrilled when the series came out and they changed all the details from the book that made it weird (shiny silver outfits for the Pearl Girls?? Margaret Atwood has no sense of fashion for somebody really into sumptuary laws).

Now that the first season of the Testaments is done, the content creators are out in full swing saying literally whatever. I’m lost somewhere in the delta of rage bait and illiteracy. I keep seeing these Reels where people are talking about what is happening on the show, but they are basically just making shit up. They see the clues laid out in each episode, put them all together, and come out with theories that are so detached from the fabric of the show that I genuinely think they might have a concussion. Like they’re not watching the same show, and if they are, their TBI is preventing them from understanding what’s happening.

People don’t know the difference between theory, personal interpretation, and what is actually happening on the screen. I get the same feeling when reading Housewives commentary and people just make shit up.

I don’t even know where to start with this video besides the fact that there is no way for the audience to know what this character’s specific background and motivation is down to the point where we can theorize that she acted in a specific way expecting a specific outcome. What we see in the series is that there is tension between the character of Vidala and the character of Lydia. We see a little bit of their backstory, which adds complexity. If we can rely on the book to give us a clue, we know that their relationship is adversarial, that Vidala is harsh and seems to be a true believer. The series hints at complicity between her and Judd. But to take that and be like “she was secretly feeding information to the regime and now she’s mad!” is basically like writing fan fiction and positing it as a valid theory.

This one is so bewildering that it gave me full body alopecia and I had to fly to Turkey for a hair transplant. And who do you think donated the hair? Elisabeth Moss.

The book The Testaments came out the same year the Handmaid’s Tale episode about Lydia’s backstory did. Without getting too much into the weeds, the first season of THT covered and expanded on the events of the novel, and everything after that was new material. The Testaments book took characters and plotlines from the TV show and took them in a new direction years in the future. It was picked up as a series almost immediately. When THT wrapped, it had to tie up its loose ends in a way that was favourable to the sequel, but it wasn’t perfect. The Testaments series made a lot of changes from the book. I think it works. I feel like this is too much info. Sorry!

In the book, Lydia is against the regime and secretly feeds information to the rebels. Her backstory reveals that she was a judge. In the series, she was an elementary school teacher and practiced family law. Also in the Testaments series, they give her a completely different wig than she had in her Handmaid’s Tale flashbacks. Which is fine, but I just think it’s worth nothing.

Anyway I lost my mind when I saw this Reel. The creator points out an inconsistency in her backstory between THT and The Testaments. In THT, she mentions being divorced. In The Testaments, a file on her says she was never married. This creator theorizes that rather than being a retcon (possible) or an error, this possible discrepancy is an indication of something darker.

“Assuming that she was previously married, there are only a few situations when her marriage wouldn’t be recorded or legally acknowledged,” she says. “I think that Lydia could have been the victim of human trafficking and forced marriage, making her a child bride.”

I don’t want to freak out here, but this is such a reach that it exceeded fan fiction and landed among the stars. There’s nothing in the series that would indicate this – and this character is given so much attention – and there is nothing remotely close to this in the book. In fact, there’s an in-universe explanation that could answer this if it’s not a retcon or an error, and it’s the whole reason the main character of THT becomes a Handmaid in the first place!!!! Oh my god I’m so sorry this is so much explanation. This is what it’s like being in my head.

In THT, June was married to a guy named Luke. Luke was divorced. The state invalidated divorce, which made June an adulteress. Adulteress bad, so they took away her daughter and made her a handmaid. The daughter would go on to be the star of the Testaments.

I have no idea what the writers were thinking when they mentioned Lydia was never married. Her wonky characterization was the subject of a Times piece called “The Testaments has an Aunt Lydia problem,” so it’s not like me and this illiterate content creator are the only people noticing things. I just think it’s absolutely crazy to be out there making #content about a #series, positing theories that are so wackadoodle doo and ignoring the framework the series actually gives you to understand the plot. So if you’re missing these key elements, what do you think is happening in the show? How do you understand what’s happening? You don’t!!!!! What a weird way to go through life!!!!!!!!!!

In the last episode of the Testaments, a lot of crazy shit happens. Spoiler alert, but one of the characters gets married. In the scene, she cries for her mother (who is having a terrible day on her own account) while an Aunt puts away a syringe into a box. Spooky! Then she stumbles groggily through the wedding and her husband carries her up to bed, tucks her in, and locks the door.

This creator has a theory: “I think she’s paralyzed.” Then she extrapolates the theory for two minutes. I thought it was so cracked out that I even commented on it and then I decided to write this. The spirit moved me.

I don’t want to split hairs! I really don’t want to split hairs. Please don’t make me split hairs. But there’s a line in chapter 36 of the book that says: “I’d overheard the Marthas saying that before some weddings tranquilizing drugs had been administered, with needles. They had to be careful with the dose: mild staggering and slurred speech could be put down to emotion, a wedding being a hugely important moment in a girl’s life, but a ceremony at which the bride was unconscious did not count.”

So I just think it’s very very interesting!!!! That there are people!!!!! Who have decided to make content about something!!!!!! And they put in all this effort to edit videos!!!!!!! And they don’t even consult the source material!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And they say really stupid shit!!!!!!!!! How did this happen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shout out to Melissa who has had to listen to me say all of this out loud before I wrote it down.

Thank you for reading Bagel Emoji. If you liked this, here are the other times I’ve covered gashmius. You might notice they are very old:

My screen time is hitting a fever pitch. I need to take a break because everything Jewish online right now is so weird and bad. Rabbis are using AI to generate mussar shmoozes, the French are using AI to praise Trump and Hashem on equal footing, regular people are using AI to generate chassidic influencers and ebooks, creepy people are using AI to generate a sexy chassidic lady who threatens to sexily her shpitzel at the drop of a shtreimel, and every day at work I use AI to populate spreadsheets at scale. I feel like I’m hobbling through the world like Aviva Drescher, trying to answer the question “what is real? What is real about me?!”

Speaking of “what is real,” a company in Israel has created something called “New Milk,” a “pareve alternative” to “milk” made with lab-grown proteins that are identical to dairy in mostly every way save for the lactose and bovine involvement. New Milk, according to headlines, threatens to have “kosher foodies salivating.”

In a press release shared by the OU, “the result is something that, according to the company, looks like milk, tastes like milk, and behaves like milk when frothed or used in cooking, unlike any previous plant-based milk alternative, opening up the potential for a revolution in the kosher culinary world.”

Some stress that this can cause problems with maris ayin, a prohibition against doing things that look forbidden but are actually fine because it might cause somebody to think you’re violating halakha. A classic example of this seeing someone eat a veggie cheeseburger. In the 90s and early 2000s, this was a shocking gesture that could give the appearance that one is eating a real cheeseburger because back then nobody ate anything nice. Now with our Beyond Meats and our fake processed cheeses and our kosher smashburgers it’s hard to imagine anybody would care.

I was a barista when oat milk happened. It was like a coup d’état. I showed up to work one morning and there were flats of Minor Figures everywhere. All of us – the customers, the staff – snapped right into action. For a moment I really think we made more oat milk drinks than anything with real milk. Unlike soy or almond milk, oat milk was easy to steam into the foam needed for latte art or cappuccinos. The taste was more neutral, in comparison. Drinking real milk seemed like kind of a gross thing to do. Potentially fattening, a little morally suspect. We freaked ourselves out talking about hormones and parasites.

Oat milk was so ubiquitous for a moment that it was hard to imagine a world where it never existed. The term “plant-based” cropped up more and more (Google search trends show an initial spike in 2015). We tried Beyond Meat burgers and thought about the implications of factory farming and sustainability.

“It bleeds! Just like real meat,” we said, repeating the plant-based press releases, beet juice running down our chins.

When Joan Didion wrote about the newly constructed fugly California governor’s residence in her essay Many Mansions, she said: “‘Flow’ is a word that crops up quite a bit when one is walking through the place, and so is ‘resemble’. The walls ‘resemble’ local adobe, but they are not: they are the same concrete blocks, plastered and painted a rather stale yellowed cream, used in so many supermarkets and Coca-Cola bottling plants. The door frames and exposed beams ‘resemble’ native redwood, but they are not: they are construction-grade lumber of indeterminate quality, stained brown… the vinyl ‘resembles’ slate.”

“Resembles” does a lot of the heavy lifting when we talk about this kind of food. The plant-based meat resembles beef because it browns and bleeds. The oat milk resembles real milk because it foams and froths. The New Milk, in fact, doesn’t just “resemble” milk – according to the excerpt above it actually “behaves” like milk.

I went to Blue Bottle the other day and tried a cold brew with cold foam. Cold foam is one of those coffee innovations that I’m really into. I’m not a third wave purist. I took a slip and blaueugguehaguhg. It was oat milk! Even the vanilla flavouring couldn’t mask the bitter, crinkly taste of static electricity. I was blindsided. I haven’t ordered oat milk on purpose in years.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment, but it was probably around covid when a lot of things changed. I walked into my Montreal office wearing stretchy skinny Zara dress pants and walked out, married in California, wearing low-rise boot cut jeans. Influencers published their ins-and-outs lists and I remember seeing a lot of “full fat milk,” was in. We, the people, started talking about how oat milk wasn’t as natural as we’d thought – many popular brands contained starches, sugars, and oils that helped it behave milk-like, and that felt kind of gross. Plant-based and processed gave way to whole and real. Even I can’t resist the sexy, creeping tendrils of MAHA.

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Over pesach, my sister-in-law got into a fight with my mother-in-law because my SIL didn’t think my MIL checked her lettuce leaves closely enough. She broke out a special light and started inspecting them herself. My MIL was embarrassed and insulted. My SIL feared for her neshama and the neshama of her children. The whole family has been hearing versions of this story for weeks. My MIL said something along the lines of “I’ve been Orthodox longer than you’ve been alive, and you think I don’t know how to check my lettuce?” And my SIL said yes, exactly.

Though my sister-in-law turns observance of stringencies into a competitive sport (I imagine there’s not much else to do for yeshivish folk in Toronto), she’s exemplary of her generation of religious folk who are more stringent than their parents. More black and white, more wiggy. Blame the yeshiva system, blame the internet, blame science – people have access to more information than ever about the world, and they’re adopting stringencies that are unthinkable to the generation before. There are families where people don’t eat berries because of aphids that nobody cared about until they could detect them with a special light. There are people that wash their produce with soap. And worst of all, cholov yisroel cheese tastes like absolutely nothing. Like it truly tastes like absolutely nothing and it freaks me out. I cannot believe people go their whole lives eating cholov yisroel cheese. When mashiach comes I hope he says it’s okay to have tablet K.

My favourite local spot right now is the place I’ve referred to as Kosher Erewhon because they make smoothies that resemble (this word is haunting me now) Erewhon smoothies. It’s a meat restaurant that strives to be healthy in a neighbourhood where most of the meat places are fast food adjacent. They do breakfast burritos and omelets with no cheese, which is hard for some people to wrap their heads around, but they’re good. They also serve coffee. Since it’s a meat restaurant, they only have non-dairy alternatives. I ordered an iced matcha latte that was like 16oz of oat milk and I was like, ew. I thought to myself, “this feels dated,” even though there’s basically no alternative. So the next time I asked for it to be made with water instead of oat milk, and it tasted fine.

Nearly all of the emphasis on New Milk and its competitors is placed on the fact that it contains proteins identical to the ones in milk, but very little is said about the rest of the ingredients. Without reading closely, one might think that New Milk or Freemilk are just milk. Stories circulate my WhatsApp groups and influencers post it and I see how people can come away with that idea.

New Milk contains dairy proteins, but it also contains coconut fats, shea, monk fruit extract, sugar, and stabilizers. Freemilk, another OU-certified “animal free” pareve option, contains sunflower oil and sugar, though the package claims they contain 50% less sugar than regular milk. I don’t want to scaremonger about seed oils or the weird ingredients (I do enjoy the occasional processed food), but point out the fact that despite the marketing language and the excitement being drummed up by the brand that people who keep kosher can finally enjoy dairy and meat together, this is as much of a simulacrum of milk as any other milk alternative. Maybe it will taste marginally more like milk. When mixed into batter and used to fry chicken, maybe it will resemble buttermilk. Maybe it will behave like milk when steamed so you can finally enjoy a cappuccino with your hot dog.

It might be New Milk, but it feels like we’ve all been here before. Before the Beyond Meat, before the oat milk. Nondairy creamer – a distinctly American product, once ubiquitous at kiddush coffee and tea stations – contains the same proteins, oils, starches, and sugars. Its creators also aimed to “replicate the mouthfeel” of milk. But remember also that there was also a time when we collectively realized that nondairy creamer was actually pretty gross. We will come around to this, too, once the flashy marketing language and the novelty wears off. Of course, in the kosher world, that might take a few extra years.

Thanks for reading Bagel Emoji. If you liked my milky moral outrage, you might enjoy my other forays into Jewish food and culture or stories about when I was a barista and thought my life would never pan out.

A buddy of mine married a girl from the five towns and he gets on well with his in-laws despite the fact that, in his opinion, people from the five towns have no middos. At a shabbos table Lawrence, he was discussing “ve’ahavta l’re’akha kamokha” with a group of people and somebody said that they make the commandment easier for themselves to fulfill by surrounding themselves with similar, like-minded people. Obviously my buddy here, who has good middos, found that outrageous. But it definitely says a lot about like…. Us…. our culture….. um..Anywho!

All of that to say is that I’ve had a lot of trouble loving my neighbour as I love myself because my neighbours are no-neck monsters without a drop of middos to their name. The windows of my home office look down into the yard where their kids play games like “drop the cinderblock off of a chair” and “spray into my open windows with a hose.” When they think their parents can’t hear them, they take turns saying “fuck” and “bitch” and then sing “it’s geshmak to be a yid” at the top fo their lungs. But the issue is not the children.

The issue revolves around the fact that I constantly receive their Amazon packages. What happens is I find a box at my front gate and think, “I wasn’t expecting a package!” and then I look at the label and see that it’s for them. I put on my slippers, walk over to their front gate, and leave the box there. Sometimes I even put it behind the gate!

A fact about me is that I am not a huge Amazon shopper. Because I work from home I am addicted to leaving the house as frequently as possible. Especially if it means popping to the shops. However I’ve been imprisoned at my desk lately tittering at my keyboard and haven’t had time (also to write this). So the other day I ordered 4 bottles of contact lens solution with next day delivery.

You can probably guess that I didn’t receive my contact lens solution. When I ran out 2 days later, I opened the app to assess the delivery situation and saw it had been delivered the day before, but next door. The driver snapped a picture of the package perched peacefully (ppbpbpbththtthppbpbbhth) on the rickety little garden bench on the other side of the gate. I popped over to see if it was still there, the bench was empty.

I experienced a flurry of emotion. Somebody brought in the package, probably opened it, saw something they did not order, possibly checked the label, saw it belonged to me, their neighbour, and they decided: Yes, I need four bottles of contact lens solution. Maybe the children can play with it in the yard.

This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Once I ordered a bunch of Skims briefs and the same thing happened. The delivery person gave it to them while I was at the gym. I went straight to their house and buzzed their intercom.

“Hi, I’m your neighbour! My package was delivered to your house by mistake.”

“What? Who? No, no,” said the nice lady.

“I have a picture that shows the package at your gate. Are you sure you don’t have it?”

“Oh. Okay.”

An old woman walked out of the house with the little box. It was open and the briefs were hastily stuffed back inside, which means now she knows I have an assortment of beige ribbed briefs, and I wonder if she was planning on saving that for her husband or her adult son.

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I have this friend named Arabella (not really) who has really bizarre dating habits. She is not on the apps and has no trouble meeting men but she constantly finds herself in undesirable romantic situations. Every time she brings up someone new, she knows to pad the story with pre-emptive apologies and trigger warnings. If I wouldn’t touch a man with a ten-foot pole, she sees it as a luring rod. She has dated her boss and manager at different jobs, her next-door neighbour who practiced BDSM full time, a dog owner from a dog walking app she signed up for, and recently a man in the middle of a rocky divorce.

It’s obvious to me that a man mid-divorce is probably not going to be a very consistent and stable partner, especially if he has also just realized he loves to go to parties. Not obvious to her. She wanted him to commit and be serious and he loved the way strippers made him feel.

When this question came up in the Judaism subreddit a couple of months ago, I wanted to reply like “are you dumb?” but I don’t want to get banned. She recently posted a follow-up, and in true reddit fashion, it’s not so much what happened that’s interesting, but the discussion that followed.

A lot of it hinged on the question of how could this man possibly be Orthodox (even modern) if he was sleeping with women.

I don’t know if everyone here went to the Rebbe’s Ideal School of Menchlik Behaviour where we get it drilled in our heads that everyone who is religious is also a really good and chaste person, but the consensus in the comments was that this man couldn’t possibly actually be Orthodox based on his behaviour. An Orthodox man would never date a non-Jewish woman – let alone cheat on her.

OP explained that he was also Israeli, involved in Chabad, and sent his kids to a Jewish Montessori. A commenter suggested he was lying about his identity because Lubavitchers would never send their kids to a Jewish Montessori.

Are you new?!

This is factually incorrect, but also not my argument to win. Rather than contend with the idea that maybe it’s hard for people to fit neatly into a box or a label, it’s apparently easier to imagine that he fabricated his entire religious identity as a ruse to appear more trusting to OP so she would sleep with him.

In the same way that I’m obsessed with people who convert to Islam, I’m also obsessed with people whose experience with Jews and Judaism is filtered through the internet. If everything you read about Jews is based on what you read or see online, you might start believing in the infallibility of The Categories. I see this a lot on reddit when people ask questions about switching shuls. Somebody might be dissatisfied with their current setup (too many old people, too many children’s events) and say “my only options are the conservative temple and Chabad” and then all of the comments will be like “well the conservative temple services will be too hard to follow and Chabad will give you a hard time because you’re unmarried with ADHD.”

It’s never “go into a new experience with an open mind,” but “however you label yourself will determine your experience and it will be bad.” It’s like the song from High School Musical about oh no no, stick to the stuff you know, it’s better by far to stay right where you are, oh no, stick to the status quo.

Anyway the status quo and the Categories as it pertains to Orthodox Jews, according to people who only know their daled amos and the internet, is that Orthodox Jews are modest and chaste and moral and perfect. Which, like, I don’t want to make a checklist of like, every single horrible thing an Orthodox Jew could possibly do, but if you’ve spent any amount of time with frum people you know that it’s not beyond the realm of the imagination to imagine that one, especially going through something like a divorce, might be interested in casual sex. I didn’t invent the concept of the tefillin date. Just because something is discouraged – nay, forbidden! – doesn’t mean people won’t do it anyway. Being a fuckboy transcends culture. Orthodoxy isn’t a checklist. Actually it kind of is but it should be weighted heavier in certain areas. My point is that it’s not helpful to no-true-Scotsman our way around the world. There is a fence around the Torah but the fence is really porous. If an observant Israeli man involved in Chabad wants to call himself Modern Orthodox even though he didn’t go to Frisch, Camp Stone, Hakotel, YU, and live in a gated community because that’s the label he decides fits what he thinks about his level of observance is in a complex fast-paced world? Sure buddy, go for it.

Side note, but how much of an idiot do you have to be to date a man in the middle of a crazy divorce who is also from a wildly different cultural background…. That’s what I want to know.

Before we were constantly inundated with AI content, we were still inundated with regular bad content. Obviously now it’s worse, though I think people (some of them…. Maybe us!) are slightly more discerning. The common tells (it’s not about blah blah blah – it’s about lalalala) are usually easy to spot. But sometimes it’s not…. to most people!!

A few months ago there were a lot of videos of AI-generated rabbis and sheikhs dispensing life advice in order to sell ebooks. Those were obviously AI and have mostly disappeared.

Now I keep seeing videos of this rabbi pop up on my Instagram. All of his videos follow a formula of him saying something provocative, then he says “let me tell you why” or something, and then gives live advice that ties to a line from Jewish text. The thing that makes me think they’re scripted with AI are that they basically all follow the Mel Robbins reel formula that Princess Ayesha also uses. Everything follows the same beats. I’m not talking about this, I’m saying this. Blah. Blah. Blah. And here’s the thing: Blah. And what qualifies him to give advice about like…. Sales and marketing?!

Even if what he says has a ring of truth (especially about sales and marketing), the mechanism for delivery cheapens it. All I can see is that this is a person who is willing to outsource their brain and brand to an LLM while relying on his image as a frum yid to appear reliable and knowledgeable, with the goal of growing their following. I don’t even know if I have a call to action here beyond like…. be discerning.

Correction Corner: In an earlier story, I incorrectly stated that I was inundated with people sending me the story of the Montreal Jewish girl who converted to Islam. It actually started with one person, Melindra (name changed), whose initial investigation into the case kicked off the exchange.

Thanks for reading Bagel Emoji. If you liked this, you might like the roundups of all the gossip going on in my Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood and between my monstrous sisters-in-law.

Reader bonus: If you are one of the people who has encountered one of my real-life friends and told them you liked reading this, thank you! When it gets back to me it makes my day.

I can’t believe it, but it’s that time of year again. We’ve cleared our homes of dust and crumbs. We’ve boiled our spoons and forks. We’ve covered our kitchens from floor to ceiling in foil. We’ve packed our bags and flown private to a program in Playa del Carmen (thunder showers expected, enjoy!).

Passover is a time of reflection – where did we come from, where are we now, and where are you guys for sedarim? – and every year I, personally, like to reflect on something that I saw online when I was too young to understand what it was but it really melted into my brain:

Avadim Hayinu: The Leather Seder, or, a Seder for the BDSM/Leather Community.

But first, a question: Has S&M fallen off? I hardly hear anyone talk about it anymore. The last time I heard anyone mention S&M out loud was when Rihanna wrote a song about it, but I don’t really believe she had her finger on the pulse of what’s current in kink, and that was over a decade ago. The term BDSM feels like a bigger tent, like the QTIA+ of the LGB spectrum, but even that dominates less of the cultural conversation now than it did in the 2010s.

Relegated to the internet and private meet-ups, S&M practitioners really bloomed in the late 90s and early 2000s. The Haggadah in question was originally published in 2002 (a more recent, slightly updated version was published in 2017). Today, with everything being kind of porny and things once considered taboo being considered kind of mainstream, plus the endless Tumblr discourse around power dynamics and social justice in kink, and also the fact that I’m not actually a member of the S&M BDSM leather community, I’m not really sure I have my finger on the pulse either.

So I embarked on my yearly search for the Haggadah, which lives somewhere online as a PDF. Of course, Google is insane now, so when I searched for the BDSM Haggadah, the first result was from Artscroll.

It wasn’t even a sponsored result. They literally just ticked off all the possible keywords matching the search intent for “BDSM haggadah.”

There is a link to buy the 2017 edition on Amazon.

Further down the page was an event page for the 2014 Kinky Jews seder. The page wouldn’t load for me, so I took a peek in the Wayback Machine archives.

KinkyJews was (is?! They have a sort of active Facebook group? Does that count?!) a Jewish denomination (hahahahahahahahahaha just kidding) for Jews who found themselves on the sexy fringes of the broader community. A 2009 Forward write-up said that “at its core, KinkyJews is about engaging those who might not otherwise participate in Jewish communal life.” Their seder, hosted in locations like Brooklyn swingers bars, were popping, drawing crowds into the hundreds.

As described in the write-up and the event description, they celebrate their not-technically-a-seder-Seder with four cups of chocolate milk, chocolate covered matzah, and licorice (to whip you!). Which kind of seems unsexy and childish to me, but again, I’m pretty vanilla. And in writing that out I think I just realized why it’s chocolate. Okay, um….. Anyway, scroll past the kinky object show-and-tell, erotic storytelling and sexy role-play, you’ll see that they are using their very own KinkyJews Haggadah!

Well I am excited to announce that the KinkyJews Haggadah is actually a custom version of the BDSM Haggadah. I tried to find a copy for free online, but could only find a dead link on an Israeli BDSM forum that mentioned KinkyJews early-aughts online origins on Friendster, Myspace, and Suicide Girls.

An early 2000s discussion about Jewish sex and kink wouldn’t be complete without a cameo from Shmuley Boteach, a rabbi once famous for a TLC show and a book called Kosher Sex, now probably better known for his attention-seeking and divisive Instagram posts.

“Millions of God’s children were sold on the block, and here you are trivializing evil with this vulgar celebration,” he is quoted saying in the 2009 Forward piece. Safe to say he wasn’t a frequent attendee.

Kosher Sex came out in 1999, dealing with the mechanics of casual and premarital sex through an Orthodox Jewish lens. Boteach later turned Kosher Sex into something of a lifestyle brand, selling lube made in Israel. In a 2010 discussion about threats to American marriage (divorce, rather than gay marriage, posed a greater threat to the institution, Boteach said) on a website called “Large Penis Support Group,” (now used mostly to dox Onlyfans creators), one commenter wrote, “You need not be Orthodox or even Jewish to learn from his wisdom.”

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I turned to my copy of Kosher Sex to see what it had to say. Though Boteach is an Orthodox rabbi, the book makes an argument towards “sexual openness.” “Spicy sex” (his words) is kosher in the right circumstances (“The Kama Sutra – its explicit nature aside – can be a kosher book,” he writes), men should care about their wives’ pleasure. It’s anti-masturbation (“it lessens our vital need for sex with [our spouse]”), and most interestingly, very anti S&M.

There’s an entire chapter dedicated to sadomasochism. He describes a man who likes lighting firecrackers in his butt and another who ties weights to his balls. I don’t think he draws a distinction between fetish and sadomasochism, because I don’t know if this is the entry point I would have made on this topic, but it’s not my book.

“Sadomasochism,” he writes, “results directly from our contemporary jaded, fatigued, and overused approach to sex. Only when people have become totally bored to death of sex in its natural and instinctive form would they resort to such acts of desperation such as hanging pieces of hardware from their penis to jump-start sexual interest.”

It leaves the individual feeling empty when it’s over, he says. And worse, it leads to violence or turpitude.

How lonely, then, it must be to be a Jewish kinkster. Of course they’d seek out an affinity group. The BDSM Haggadah addresses this near the beginning.

Now I will admit that this line always stood out to me as being very funny. I wonder how many of them read Kosher Sex when it came out and took it to heart.

A Haggadah is also an instructive document, and they usually tell us a lot about the person who assembled it. This one likens slaves (in the BDSM sense) to “personal chametz” and instructs masters to “free their slaves during the 8 days of pesach. It offers the suggestion to “[put] the items that mark slavery away for 8 days in a locked cabinet” so that slaves can “fully experience the opportunity to move from slavery to freedom,” and invites the newly freed slave to carry out the ritual of bedikat chametz, searching for the last remains by candlelight.

We are also invited to contemplate the master/slave dynamic vis-a-vis the Exodus story – itself about slavery, power, redemption – and weaves this framing through the retelling.

The 2002 edition cites the contribution of gay men to the leather community as forebearers of modern BDSM culture, while the 2017 edition expands this to include “the old clubs, communities, and figures of the leather and kink world of the past.” It makes me think of the progress pride flag that changes shape and design to accommodate more people and their identities, but looks very different. Is that what happened to the Kinky BDSM Jewish community?! Did they negotiate and discourse themselves out of existence? Where did everyone go?!!

Of course, we can’t talk about kinky Jewish events without mentioning Sinners Shabbat. Self-described as a “Chabad house meets the Kit Kat club” (I’m not explaining this) and “immersive ritual cabaret,” their events are buzzy, sexy, and glam, and I would probably feel out of place there. But with nearly 45k Instagram followers (and the hottest events in town) I’m not sure I would argue that they’re outsiders. My normie friends from Birthright follow the account. And of course I think the BDSM Haggadah crowd has probably aged out of the Sinners Shabbat bracket, which veers more Gen Z. Maybe you’re reading this?!

Maybe the funniest thing about the BDSM Haggadah is how ordinary it is. If you weren’t looking too closely, you’d miss the extra mentions of whips and slaves between the Debbie Friedman song inclusions, or the thoughtful poems adapted from other feminist haggadot. No harnesses or hot wax in sight.

So tonight, when you go into your seders with your family, I hope you consider how BDSM dynamics and the Exodus story go hand-in-hand. And if you “own slaves” (in a sexual way), consider “freeing them” for the next eight days so they, like us, can enjoy the feeling of redemption.

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To read the free 2002 edition of Avadim Chayinu, click here!

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my other forays in kinky sex and Passover.

First a quick dispatch from the regular Erewhon, reporting live: The Tonic Bar is completely swamped. It reminds me of working at Starbucks during Frappuccino Happy Hour and how I would dread that week all year, but it’s like this all the time for them. They make the most popular smoothies in batches. I’m shoulder to shoulder with the influencer and transplant types that get dressed up to come to Beverly Hills. I just worked out my chest, triceps, shoulders, and I’m waiting for my smoothie.

Commotion behind me adds to the chaos. 15 identical high school Persian boys with permed hair are pushing their way inside and standing directly in front of the doors. It’s Friday afternoon. LA is going through a heatwave. Two schvitzy Lubavitchers make their way through the crowd. Excuse me, are you Jewish? They move quickly. I consider, for the first time in years, saying yes and letting them put tefillin on me, having them take a photo for me to send to my WhatsApp group chats, maybe even upload here. I’m feeling pleased with myself before they can come anywhere near me. They walk into the folie of Persian high school boys. Intercepted. Are you Jewish? Yeah bro, actually bro, say yes bro haha come on bro! Like actually. Jackpot. One by one, they each make a little connection to heaven. Above Erewhon. Of all places.

The kosher Erewhon isn’t quite anything like Erewhon at all, in any fashion whatsoever except for their smoothies. The smoothies are actually cheaper and do not contain Erewhon’s strange, mystical ingredients.

We’ve been meeting there to work remotely. We, the young, supple professionals. The initiative was born from a group chat (Jewish group chats beget group chats). It’s a “healthy” fleish restaurant – they serve smoothies, breakfast burritos with avocado and beef, lattes with oat milk. When they open all the windows, it feels airy and Californian. Not kosher. The space used to be a terrible bagel spot, but the kosher appetite is changing around here. Still, it’s hard to get attached to new restaurants because all the new ones seem to close within the year, reaffirming my feeling that the only thing people want to eat is expensive cheese pizza cut into 18 slices or sushi.

My Erewhon knockoff smoothie is addictive. I can’t get enough of them. I get the Hailey Bieber knockoff, which is really just strawberry and white lines drawn on the cup with coconut milk fat. Once I ordered an iced matcha latte but the oat milk was too oat milky. I ask for a matcha lemonade instead and the woman behind the counter is shocked.

“Is that good? That sounds crazy. I should try it. Have you tried that before?!”

I get the same feeling as when I introduce somebody to orange wine. Wine?? From oranges??? No babe. Try this.

We do get work done. We pop in for a couple of hours and pop back out. It’s a real who’s who of the YP group chat – at least, those of us with remote jobs. We’ve forayed into the world, but this place is just so easy. We all live in walking distance. We are the only people in LA who live within walking distance of all of our friends. I struggle to quiet my mind and pray, I struggle with the impulse to check my phone on Shabbos, but everyone I care about is within a couple mile radius of the fake kosher Erewhon.

We distract each other from our work and discuss pesach plans. A lot of people are staying put this year. I’m relieved for them. I’m worried about the people running for shelter. Shabbos comes in and goes out so late now. This heatwave is unrelenting. It’s summer in March. Somebody asks another if they’ve joined the war group chat, started by young professionals in the community to discuss the war.

“It’s unofficial,” they say, as if the shul would ever sanction a member’s only war group chat. They moderate the official channels like military generals. There are so many, and I’ve muted most of them. Except the arts and culture chat, where only one woman is allowed to send messages, but I don’t know if she realizes she’s the only one because she asks a lot of open-ended questions.

There’s an old woman sitting inside who seems homeless but possibly isn’t. She pushes her cart around Pico, around Beverlywood, around Beverly Hills. I see here everywhere, all the time. If I was schizophrenic I would think she’s one of my gangstalkers. She speaks Hebrew to the staff and to some of us. They give her ice water and she sits at a table for hours, the entire duration of our workday. A group of very young Chabad ladies in identical brown sheitels meet for birthday smoothies. One of them is holding her baby whose hair is standing straight out in every direction. They ask the maschgiach if their sandwich is hamotzi or mezonos. It’s mezonos. Score!

Two men pull up in a Cybertruck and talk loudly to each other like they’re reciting from a script of suspect things: Prediction markets, sports betting, bottle service girls. I get the heebie jeebies when I see guys in kippahs talking so openly about women, like I’m hearing something I shouldn’t be, like I’ll get in trouble. Both of them have very high, nasally voices. They are very friendly to the girl behind the counter, asking where she’s from. Beer Sheva. The not-homeless woman chimes in, stealing all of her attention, but I have no idea what she’s saying. The men can’t get a word in edgewise, and take off.

Then two YULA girls coming in wearing floor length black cotton skirts and pullover hoodies, relieved to be somewhere air conditioning. They sit down, pull off their skirts to reveal grey sweatpants. I can’t tell if that’s extremely rebellious or ordinary, but the teenage girls around here are like that. I’ve noticed the ankle length black skirts more and more lately, the same way that the public school kids wear shapeless sweatpants. They play videos out loud on their phones and ask the employee if the burritos are healthy (not really, she says) or if they should get salads, but they don’t order anything. Before going back outside, they pull the long skirts back on. They join a group of girls dressed identically, and they head off together for the rest of the long afternoon.

Thanks for reading. If you liked this, you might also enjoy these carefully curated kosher picks:

What is Jewish culture outside of religion? Is it Zionism? Is it bagels? No. It’s shopping. Beverly Hills is percolating with prattle about the competing Skims Bat Mitzvahs this past weekend.

You probably saw the LoveShackFancy Bat Mitzvah break containment on Instagram this week. The one with the custom pink sefer torah cover at the Plaza Hotel. Queue the commentary about Bat Mitzvahs looking like brand activations now, but at least the LoveShackFancy Bat Mitzvah was made by the family who founded the company. It’s not as if Kim Kardashian appeared at the Skims Mitzvahs.

Both Skims activations recreated the branding for each kid. Both had merch tables (the word is out on whether they actually had Skims for the guests). But of course the more religious girl’s party was a little less nice than the girl who hired models in cropped babydoll shirts to help get the crowds going. One probably cost the family $150,000, the other probably cost $45,000.

I can’t fathom how devastating it must be to be the girl with the crappier Skims Bat Mitzvah.

It also made me think about how weird it would have been to me if, in 2007, I saw somebody have a Victoria’s Secret Bat Mitzvah. Because, at the time, their pushup bras formed an integral part of middle school culture (something about puberty) – but to make that the theme of your party?! Crazy!!!!! At least I thought so until I googled it and saw that there have been many Victoria’s Secret Bat Mitzvahs in the last 20 years.

Anyway the other thing everyone keeps talking to me about is this Jewish girl from Montreal who converted to Islam. Her videos keep popping up on Instagram and Tiktok and then everyone sends them to me. In all of her content she explains that she grew up in an observant home, did not connect to the religion, and then secretly converted to Islam. Piecing together the story through the rest of her videos, she entered into a long distance relationship with a Palestinian guy, brought him to Canada, had a baby with him, got his permanent residency sorted, and then they split up! And now she lives with her baby at her mom’s house and makes electrifying, troubling content.

As you know about the editorial team here at Bagel Emoji, we are obsessed with people who convert to Islam! So when it’s a Jewish person who loves posting online a ton, it’s like being given a Ferrero Rocher. One simply cannot imagine a morsel more decadent!

Besides the parts of this girl’s story that I find kind of sad are the throughlines with my other stories about cultivating an Islamic instagram feed and Reform tichels. Like the Reform tichel ladies, her practice is largely isolated to her private home. Like the Reform tichel ladies, she used to make content wearing a niqab that she never wore out of the house. And like the story about my Catholic friend who met a guy, converted to Islam, got secretly married and had a baby and then found out that he already had a wife and grown children in Egypt, I see a person who grew up very sheltered and wanted to believe that a man who professes to be religious would also be a good person, a good partner, a present father. And that’s not how it worked out for her. So now she’s fallen into this trap where all of her dopamine comes from people engaging with her rather sensational online content about preparing kosher food for Iftar and on top of that she also has a baby that will grow up in the world’s tensest cultural melange. For his sake I hope he leaves it all behind and becomes Mormon.

Anyway, sorry for making it so dark. My sister-in-law just had a baby and we’re all very happy for her. That leaves us with 15 nieces and nephews and puts me, regrettably, squarely in guncle territory. Which is not a label I identify with, by the way. Anyway my sister-in-law is obsessed with ordering custom cookies to mark every simcha and holiday. She gave out custom cookies in her shalach manos for Purim. She gave out custom cookies at the bris this week, where she also gave her baby the most yiddishe name on the planet with a spelling I’ve never seen before in my LIFE despite the fact that she and her husband are Sephardic. And then they had all this fried and smokey food in the hall, and the hall filled with food smoke and then everyone left with their nice clothes smelling like oil. And she fedexed her sheitel to get fixed in New York but the sheitel didn’t arrive back on time so she had to wear a placeholder wig. But everyone agreed it looked nice. Anyway the custom cookies were Burberry baby themed, which kind of gave off an Irish Traveller vibe, but she doesn’t know anything about that. When she announced her pregnancy, she sent everyone custom “save the date” cookies with a month circled on a calendar.

Since she had her baby, I’ve gotten 450 DMs every day asking what her push present was. I’ll tell you: Diamond stud earrings. Lab grown? Don’t ask! But she wore them to the bris. Her older sister saw them sparkling from across the room, beelined towards her to ask if they were new, and then told her that her husband was actually going to buy her the exact same ones! Which, not to be a hater, but like no he wasn’t? But that’s the kind of relationship they have. Meanwhile their unmarried 19-year-old youngest sister has been giving mixed signals to the dating market. She tells one boy that she’s going to stop eating out and that she’s going to cover her hair, but then she tells her friends that she’s never going to stop eating out and doesn’t want to cover her hair!

“She thinks she’s ready but she doesn’t know herself at all,” SIL says. “She needs to date a guy for like a year before getting married.”

I’m excited for when my SIL turns 21, because with two kids under her belt, I’m sure she could use a drink.

Speaking of marriage, a few months ago this couple showed up to our young professional minyan. We were like, wow! They’re so hot! So one of us invited them for Shabbat lunch, where they were weirdly antagonistic and got into a fight. Then another one of us invited them for a meal and they did the same thing. Then I invited them for a meal and they did it again! We were like, wow, these people are so fun! Then they randomly moved back to New York without telling anyone. The wife started posting a lot of sexy selfies and angry self-empowerment memes on Instagram, which could only mean one thing: They were separated! After a few weeks she started posting pictures of her holding a hairy hand, or glimpses of a forearm with a Rolex. Soft-launch stuff, right? Well, a few more weeks go by and one of us spotted them together at the kosher market on the other side of town. And they pretended not to see her!!!!!!!!! The wife keeps reposting Reels about infidelity and loyalty. But I’m so excited they’re back. If they haven’t totally reinvented themselves in Hancock Park, I’ll try and invite them for lunch and get to the bottom of this.

I’ve been absolutely loving Amiel Joberg’s Men Who Pray at Dusk on Airplanes. I really think it’s the Modern Orthodox novel of our generation. I wanted to share this excerpt I found particularly…… titillating!

He had only ever been to the men’s mikveh once in his life. His father brought him one year before Yom Kippur when he was 14. They pulled up to a squat, brick building that looked like an abattoir. They were the only people there without beards. He felt like everyone was staring at him. The water was warm, but when it stilled there was an oily sheen on the surface. Not to mention all of the random hairs.

“I don’t know why your mom hates this so much,” his father said, bobbing in the water. “It’s not that bad. And the women’s looks like a spa.”

“Why does mom need to go to the mikveh?” asked Jonah. He imagined the inverse situation where instead of dozens of naked, hairy old men, there were beautiful bodacious babes.

“Oh,” his dad said. “You never learned about that? I guess not. Never mind.”

In the present, he contemplated purity while sinking under the water. He didn’t feel impure, but he knew that his personal feelings around the matter had nothing to do with whatever God might think, or not think. Dov went to the mikveh every day, except the morning he was flattened by Shloime’s Falafel and Pizza food truck the week after his wedding. That was three months ago. He tried to picture how Dov felt in the water, or how the Jewish people at large felt in the water. Was it a womb? He kicked out his legs in the water and let himself settle at the bottom.

His self-driving Tesla drove him straight home. He didn’t feel like going to shul today. At home, his mother was preparing for shabbos. She was up before him that morning, making puff pastry canapes and challah.

“Oh, Baruch Hashem you’re home,” she said, kissing him on the forehead in the doorway. “I made cookies, cakes, muffins. I’ve been fressing like a chazer. Please eat something! You look famished!”

“Thanks, Ima, but I’m not hungry,” he said. His phone buzzed. It was Daniella Gomez, sending him photos of her trying on bikinis at the mall. “Miss you babe,” she wrote. His mother’s phone buzzed at the same time. She looked at her messages and then covered her mouth in shock.

“Jonah!” she shouted. “Dov’s widow is pregnant! And it’s his!”

He felt his heart sink. Jonah’s phone buzzed again. It was also a message from Dov’s widow.

The words flashed on his screen: “We need to talk.”

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Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy more stories about my sisters-in-law fighting about diamond earrings, conversion to Islam, and Beverly Hills lashon hara.

What’s the etiquette for reaching out when somebody forgets your meal train? The question was asked recently in a group chat by a young father of three who realized that the dinner they were promised 3000 years ago would not materialize.

“Text them within 30 minutes of the window telling them it can be hard to find your place and give them directions,” one person replied.

“Just order takeout,” another said.

It reminded me of a conversation we had with another couple with a newborn who skipped the meal train entirely.

“Honestly, our chef has been a life saver.”

Go figure.

I’m a bit light on the gossip this week. The talk of the town this week is that a group of kosher restaurants momentarily lost their hechsher. The changes in status were communicated breathlessly by the LA Scoop WhatsApp feed, which I subscribed to immediately, hoping for more hock but actually getting a basically nonstop feed announcing every car crash and shooting in Pico Robertson. The restaurants in question are in the valley and I had only ever gone to one. It’s a gorgeous tapas clubstaurant. When the news came out that they lost their hechsher, I was heartbroken. I feared the worst. I thought our moment in the sun —where we could be religious but sexy while sharing 3-4 small plates per person — was over. And then all of a sudden, the news came through that the hechsher was reinstated.

The hock? The restaurants didn’t want to pay their mashgiachs overtime. They sent the mashgiachs home. The RCC, who provides supervision for the restaurants, immediately broadcast to the entire community that since the mashgiachs left the premises, they had suspended their hechsher. Then the restaurants and the mashgiachs came to an agreement, and they were suddenly once again safe for the yiddishe neshamas in Encino.

I wonder if Kyle Richards has ever been?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the hills, a restaurant on Pico has been carrying out a humiliation ritual and posting it on their Instagram. In the spirit of Purim. The deal is that if you come to Lieders and dance for them, you’ll get two free dips. First of all, I’ve never heard of anything so untznius in my life. Second of all they post the videos on Instagram and the guy behind the camera says stuff like “come on, dance for that dip!”

Mostly everyone is doing a self conscious little jig. Then in one video a child ballerina walks across the floor en pointe. I suppose that is also dancing.

Speaking of untznius, my sister-in-law saw me on a run and then told her husband who told my husband that I was galavanting down Beverly Drive in microscopic shorts and a singlet, when I was actually wearing half tights and a tastefully cut off tee. But this is what I mean that every time I go for a run I feel like the Whore of Pico. Then sometimes when I’m actually walking down Pico, which is really only on Shabbos because there’s basically nothing there, I see people run by who are basically naked and I think to myself: It’s February. And they look at me and think: That’s one of those religious extremists. Fair enough.

It has been a beautiful February. My job has intensified and I find myself with a lot less time to focus on my passion (developing my core strength, doing squats) but about 30 minutes a day to take a walk at lunch time. Every time I leave the house I see the neighbourhood nannies with their charges and they are doing something I find very scary, which is giving their babies phones. Now: I am not yet a parent, but I do aspire to hire a nanny someday (while making sure my future baby is also well socialized and trilingual). So it scares me to think that I might accidentally leave my designer bébé in the care of somebody who outsources their attention to a screen, and then I’ll be wondering why my dearest Robespierre is suddenly very reactive at home and unhappy with his once cherished collection of faceless Amish dolls. My worst nightmare as a non parent.

Dispatch from the dead and dying: My friend Becky’s mom just got back from the annual Chevra Kadisha dinner. When asked for comment, she said: “It’s pareve.”

So I was in a used bookstore and I came across a copy of this novel. You know how I feel about fiction about Orthodox Jews. But this one……….. feels………….. different. It might actually be the first great Orthodox Jewish American Novel (since anything written by Tova Mirvis). I want to share some excerpts with you over the next little while. It’s called “Men Who Pray at Dusk on Airplanes” by Amiel Jobeg. It’s about a guy named Jonah who is torn between tradition and modernity, family expectations and his own dreams, in a world that feels increasingly strange and unrecognizable, possibly due to climate change. Here’s an excerpt that I thought was really moving :

“You’re so different from all the girls back home in Teaneck,” he said. Her nipple piercings rustled against her blouse like branches in the autumn wind.

“How so?” she asked.

He thought of his mother and her obsession with nonfat Greek yogurt, his sister and her obsession chemically straightening her hair, and Leora, his dead best friend Dov’s sister, who was in love with him but totally lame.

“You’re… so Dominican,” he said. “I mean flexible. And a good dancer.”

Gabriella laughed, threw her long, wavy hair into an effortless messy bun, and did the splits.

“I’ve lived in Teaneck my whole life before coming to Miami,” she said, shimmying. “You just never noticed your own neighbours. But we noticed you.”

The realization hit him like the Shloime’s Falafel and Pizza food truck that killed Dov last year, only a week after his wedding. His own neighbors — shrouded in mystery, yet surprisingly sexy? He felt stupid for not noticing sooner.

Maybe Bubbe was right. Maybe there was more to the world than Torah.

“On three things the world stands,” Jonah said, wistfully. “Maybe I need to focus on the other two.”

“What?” Gabriella said, moving into a handstand.

“Nothing, babe. You’re so hot,” he replied.

Stay tuned for more….

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Can I be vulnerable for a sec? I’ve never pooped in front of my husband. And I plan to never do that because I believe very strongly in keeping the mystery alive. Spouses who are comfortable with all that business love to tell you that they will poop with the door open and have a whole conversation and I am truly celebrating them but that isn’t my style because I grew up in a very quiet house where we all respected each other’s privacy by ignoring each other behind locked doors and I am determined to preserve that.

We are, however living in a time when we all know too much about each other. Some people really love sharing little facts about themselves despite the fact that they are not very interesting. They’re addicted! I think if somebody wanted to create a startup that was sort of like socialized group therapy meetups where you could sit in a circle and then everyone takes turns sharing facts about themselves, it would really take off. It would be really huge. Especially for the people who really don’t have a whole lot going on.

Anyway, this ties back to poop sharing because there’s an epidemic in the Jewish community, and it ties together stolen valour, Munchausen’s, and striving for negative attention. It’s the epidemic of people in our community identifying heavily with having IBS.

Let me start by telling you who in the community doesn’t often identify with having IBS. I’ve never seen a Chabad woman – and those women do be posting everything online – identify heavily with IBS. I’ve never seen an Israeli woman anywhere on the religious spectrum identify with IBS. I’ve never met a Persian girl from Beverly Hills identify with IBS. I’ve never seen an Ashkenazi girl who gets keratin hair treatments and lip filler identify with IBS. I’ve never seen a straight man identify with IBS, but I believe they suffer in silence regardless of whether or not they have it.

To identify with IBS is not the same to as having IBS. Having IBS is a curse. One friends of mine (Alyssa) who will remain anonymous cannot eat garlic and onions or drink alcohol. She is Italian and Jewish and she can’t eat garlic and onions or have a glass of wine. Think about living life that way! But is that worse than being in constant discomfort, pain, and distress?!

So why does the Radically Inclusive Jewish Listicle Industrial Complex sell merch that says “I’m not like other girls. I have IBS.”

Who is that for? What would cause somebody to buy that?

In 2023, the Hot Girls Have IBS billboard campaign by a brand I have never heard of since set forth a cacophony of positive PR content about how the brand was destigmatizing and helping people reclaim IBS. No longer was this something to be embarrassed about (bloating, farting, cramping, shitting) but something to shout from the rooftops!!! The IBS-being-funny-ooooh-my-tummy content train set sail long before that, however, because TikTokers had been riffing on the notion of hot girls having IBS for years by that point. It’s a funny thought. You can be a hot girl who shits and farts?! What the heck?!

The Hot Girls Have IBS campaign activated hordes of unconfident young women like a sleeper cell. Whatever being “hot” could have meant in the past, the definition now stretched to included gastrointestinal issues and talking about yourself the way an insecure child petitions the school nurse for Tums.

I don’t know what it is about the target audience of this publication. Based on the memes they post alone, they are deeply nostalgic college-aged to young millennial woman raised in affluent suburban New Jersey who really, really loved summer camp and whose bat mitzvahs were the most important day of their life before their wedding. Their Jewish identity is being a teenager, but they are no longer teenagers, and then sometimes they mention being Sephardic in a way that like a Reform temple might invite a Sephardic Jew to speak once a year on what it’s like being different during Pesach. And the other part of their Jewish identity is having a Jewish tummy and peepee poopoo.

Toddlers think peepee poopoo is the funniest thing on Earth. It’s yucky but it makes them laugh and laugh and laugh. But as we get older, we learn to appreciate the separate, private spaces created for this. We all do it but we don’t talk about it. And what could there possibly be to say?!! I understand it’s not necessarily a straight and narrow road for everyone. But you know when your friends in real life start really leaning into memes and it becomes kind of annoying? That’s what this feels like. Like maybe there’s a grain of truth there, but now too many people in our tiny, ancient community have appropriated talking about IBS to be quirky.

I’ll admit that I was initially skeptical that all these people had IBS and most of them were leaning into it for the shock factor. However, the science says that Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to develop inflammatory bowel diseases. Combine that with a community penchant for self deprecating humour (annoying) and the personality trait of not-being-like-other-girls resurfacing in every generation (like moshiach for quirk chunguses) and you can actually have a profitable market-driven media outlet selling quirky girly IBS merch to a carefully targeted audience.

If somebody in my life was like, “haha sorry my tummy hurts all the time,” I would be like, okay, let’s sit down together and figure out a plan to fix this. This isn’t a scenario where I’d be like, “do you want me to just listen or do you want a solution,” because being passive when it comes to your gut health should be considered an act of self harm. And talking about it all the time (or buying IBS affinity t shirts) is doing nothing to address stigma (the stigma of farting and shitting) or reclaim illness.

We cannot let this go on. We have to be better than this as a people. We have to be more than theatre kids who really loved camp. We have to stop saying “look at me!!” when there’s nothing to see. Instead of trying to be quirky and wearing a shirt about it – or dare I say, liking a meme – go out into the world and live a quirky life. If you are a Jewish upper middle class recovering theatre kid who loved camp and has tummy problems, take Metamucil every day for the rest of your life and do something crazy like get addicted to shoplifting or dabble in a cult. But please no more peepee poopoo.

If you liked this emergency investigation, you might also enjoy my immersive Jewish role-plays:

Recently my husband and I were guests at a Shabbat meal where the Ashkenazi hosts regaled us with tales of growing up among LA Persians. The wife was telling us about how she dropped her son off at a Persian kid’s bar mitzvah party.

“I dropped him off at 6pm because that’s when the invitation said the party was going to start,” she said. We all exchanged knowing glances. “The family wasn’t even dressed!!!”

We laughed. Maybe we chortled a little – I admit. She kept going, charged up.

“And my son didn’t have a cellphone at the time, so I had no idea nobody was there. He just wandered around the MANSION the whole time!” she said, gearing up for the punchline.

“But their house was SO BIG that by the time he walked ALL THE WAY ACROSS, the PARTY was FINALLY STARTING!!!!”

The family laughed and laughed, very pleased with themselves, filling their plates with slices of gefilte fish served as the main protein for the lunch. The Persians of Beverly Hills were off doing whatever ridiculous, materialistic things they do elsewhere. The order of the world was right.

But I left that lunch with questions. Who are LA’s Persians? Are they really so rich? Why do we always laugh at them? Why do parties never start on time – and how can I get invited to them?

I was determined to get to the bottom of this mystery.

I already had an in. I started by getting married to a Persian man over a year ago. In fact, I belong to a long tradition of Beautiful Beverly Hills Blondes Married to Persian Men. Truthfully, I haven’t been on time to a party in years. I assembled a quorum of members of the BBHBM2PM+ community (the + accounts for brunettes) to discuss our shared experiences.

For those of you who aren’t history buffs like me, Beverly Hills was founded in 1979 – the year of the Iranian Revolution, when Persian Jews left Iran en masse and settled here. You see signs of them everywhere: In the Persian Palaces that dot the city, hearing Farsi spoken in the street as much as English and Spanish, and in encountering members of the diaspora community in hotspots like the line at Maru on Canon Drive, or shopping at 260 Sample Sale.

In the popular imagination, Persians confuse people. Like, what’s the difference between Persian and Iranian? Aren’t they Muslim? Are they Arab? I’d wager that most Americans aren’t aware that Persian Jews exist, and the ones who are aware probably sit in the same camp as my Shabbat hosts, who see them as very rich and easy to joke about. And to be fully honest, before I met my husband, I knew basically nothing about Persian Jews beyond Queen Esther.

Thankfully, documentaries like Shahs of Sunset and The Valley: Persian Style have worked to shed light on this insular community. For example, Mercedeh Javid’s mother is very critical of her (her life, her choices, her weight, her marriage) on camera, and she is not afraid to tell you exactly what she thinks! It’s never nice. In fact, none of the people on the show are particularly nice. It’s actually kind of a hard watch. But – as of the airing of the reboot, and much to my relief – none of the cast members are Jewish.

With a little history under my belt, I felt ready to get to the heart of the Persian community – by going to their stomachs.

“I have a cookbook called Persian Food From the Non-Persian Bride. It’s a kosher cookbook that has some good recipes, but none of them are what my in-laws make,” my BBHBM2PM+ friend Paige tells me. “I think they’re from a different part of Iran.”

This is a canon event for folx like us. Many a non-Persian bride (me) has encountered this book in an attempt to learn the recipes our husbands grew up with. I reached my own husband for comment, and he said: “They’re Shirazi,” with an air of dismissal, revealing ancient prejudice against those whose ancestors are from other cities than Tehran.

“The ashe reshteh recipe is bomb,” my BBHBM2PM+ friend Sara says. “But like, she has a recipe for Persian pesto and it has no nuts. Persians have so many nuts in their dishes.”

I couldn’t reach the author of the cookbook for comment. A Persian cookbook is a difficult sell to most Persians, used to measuring with their hearts and cooking with vibes. In my own household, the only Persian food we make is Tahdig. I have to admit that my palate hasn’t acclimated, and my husband himself is not a huge fan of most Persian food. Meat dishes, like kebab, koobideh, and torsh, are less complicated than the saffron-infused, nutty and herbaceous stews that Persian mothers spend ages making in huge quantities.

“I like cooking Persian food,” explains Sara. “Especially as a non-Persian, because it presents as very complicated but really it’s a lot of chopping herbs that I can just buy pre-chopped at Glatt Mart.”

Yes, Glatt Mart. The place that smells like that – which we determined is a result of fenugreek. Called shanbileleh in Farsi, fenugreek is a very pungent and omnipresent ingredient in staples like Gormeh Sabzeh, which my husband said smells and tastes like pee. And he’s not the only one who feels that way.

“I learned that I hate fenugreek,” Sara tells me. “It’s shocking how many things have fenugreek.”

I’ve come to understand that a hallmark of Persian food culture isn’t necessarily the fact that the food itself is Persian. It’s the quantity. A Persian host’s worst nightmare is that a guest, somewhere in the universe, may experience thoughts of hunger. In the early days of my relationship, I hosted a simple dairy Shabbat lunch with Alison Roman’s eggplant parm, a salad, and challah, and my husband was horrified. He was afraid the guests would die and then tell other people we were stingy on the food. That might be the norm in Ashkenazi households (see the gefilte fish lunch above the fold), but it would NOT stand in ours!!

As a traditional wife (I’m a man btw), I might not be adept at cooking Persian food, but I have gotten much better at cooking at a Persian volume – even in a world where GLP-1s are causing my dinner guests to waste away! And if I ever wanted to dip my toe into dishes my husband would probably like, there’s always Arielle Nir.

Arielle’s Kitchen Dispatch

A Persian Shabbat Dinner

Today, I’m sharing a Shabbat menu highlighting beloved Persian family recipes that I learned from my mom and aunts. My grandparents were from the cities of Tehran and Hamadan. I’m grateful to have heard their vivid stories of what life was once like there. It is an honor to keep our heritage alive through these recipes. I’m thinking of the brave people …

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8 months ago · 40 likes · Arielle Nir Mamiye

So what’s the deal with Persians being late to everything? This is a recurring theme in my house, where my husband has never been on time to anything since the day he was born. Our friends will tell him that events start 30 minutes earlier to get him to show up nearly on time. This is perhaps the biggest difference between us.

Though being late makes me feel incredibly anxious, I’ve had to force myself to stop worrying about it in Persian contexts. For family events, from baby birthday parties to weddings, I’ve learned that the start time on the invitation is actually the time to start getting ready. I can usually slot in a long shower and shave my entire body. Then I can spritz myself over and over with perfume (Persian style), call the Uber, and arrive when all the very old people are getting ready to go.

What non-Persians might perceive Persian lateness as a lack of respect for social convention is actually baked into Persian standards of etiquette. An etiquette that asks guests to give their hosts time to be ready and to show them gratitude. There are, in fact, rules for politeness. When you walk into the party late, you absolutely need to find and greet the hosts and their family. And when it’s time to leave, you make your rounds again to the hosts and the family and say thank you. Not doing so is considered violently rude. If somebody Irish goodbyed at a Persian party, people would probably think they were kidnapped.

No discussion about Persian etiquette would be complete without a foray into tarof. To pull from the Google definition:

In practice this would be like inviting someone over, offering them tea, and they keep saying no thank you, even though they do want the tea, and then you keep offering, and they keep saying no, and then eventually they relent and accept the tea. To accept the tea at the first offer is considered psychotic and greedy. Even the most Americanized Persians are deeply familiar with tarof. At dinner the other night with my husband’s cousins, refusing offers of rounds of drinks or dessert were qualified by “no tarof” to express seriousness. In my own relationship, my husband had to learn that when I declined something – from food, to gifts, to literally anything – I truly didn’t want it, and I wasn’t just saying no to be polite. I am really serious that I don’t need him to buy me another pair of pants from 260 sample sale, even if they’re my size and I don’t have anything burgundy yet

“Love it as a joke, hate it as a concept,” fellow BBHBM2PM+ friend Holly says about tarof. “Also, always have small cucumbers on hand in case your mother-in-law pops in for a visit.”

In an effort to more deeply immerse myself, I thought I’d get in with the language. Many second-gen Persian Jews do not speak Farsi fluently. Among Farsi speakers, even fewer can read Persian script. My husband and his siblings grew up in a Farsi-speaking home (before being shuttled out to Ashkenaz yeshivas), but most of his first cousins don’t speak Farsi at all. But dwindling language competency hasn’t stopped many of us from trying.

“They’re usually very impressed with the very little Farsi I’ve learned, mostly from the Pimsleur program, which teaches you how to say things like ‘my son is not here in Iran with me,’” says Paige. “My accent is pretty good.”

Her accent is pretty good. The Pimsleur method focuses on listening and speaking comprehension over reading and writing. This would probably benefit me, because my husband says when I try to speak Farsi, I sound Korean. I’ve tried microdosing the Pimsleur method by repeating all of the high frequency words I hear my husband use on the phone (salam, chetori, khoobi, chikar mikooni, shabbat kojaee, pedarsagh) and trying to learn the viral video of Iranian girls singing about Yaldeh night sales on cosmetics. But I don’t quite have all the pieces, and the language isn’t really sticking. But at least I can answer the phone!

When we have kids (IYH), we’ve talked about whether or not we want them to know Farsi. My husband has talked about only speaking to them in Farsi, the way he grew up. I want them to know Canadian French (in an Alex McCord sort of way but like more serious). We also want them to learn Hebrew in school and not be the kids who haven’t learned the alef beis the year before their bar mitzvahs. It might be too tall of an order, linguistically.

“Most third-generation Persian kids don’t really speak Farsi,” my friend Selina tells me. Selina is a Beverly Hills Blonde Persian Married 2 a Non-Persian (BHBPM2NP, as we in the community say). She grew up in a house speaking Farsi to her mother and English to her father. She is also one of my husband’s few peers with whom he can speak Farsi because most of the time, it’s with the older generation or recent non-Jewish immigrants.

Persian Orthodox synagogues like Nessah and Chabad Persian Youth (which is an extremely strange place that deserves its own deep dive) were built for the first generation of Persians in Los Angeles, but in the few decades they’ve been here, the community is changing a lot. Sephardic Jews are characteristically more traditional than Ashkenazim on a spectrum that has less to do with day-to-day observance and more to do with deeply held beliefs. This is also true of Persians. Nessah is an orthodox shul, but it’s not uncommon to see many of its members driving on Shabbat. On a personal level, Persian Jews less assimilated into mainstream orthodoxy will have flexible definitions of kosher – meaning they might only buy kosher meat, but they will serve a dairy dessert with dinner. Or they’ll eat a burger in a non-kosher restaurant, but not with bacon. In my own experience, they tend to be less self conscious about these things.

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The religious world is becoming more of a melting pot. During the pandemic, many Persian families pulled their kids out of day schools like Sinai Akiba, the Wise School, and Beverly Hills public schools to enroll them in orthodox day schools like Hillel, which remained open through most of the lockdowns. This has made enrollment difficult for new orthodox families who have found it difficult to get their kids into schools that match their level of religious observance, and who find it frustrating that many of their children’s new peers aren’t necessarily Shabbat observant or keep kosher homes.

Sinai Temple, a Conservative congregation that was the home base of many first and second-gen Persians, is also shedding more politically conservative members for frummer pastures. While they might not feel strongly about the particulars of orthodox observance or things like religious egalitarianism, many have privately expressed disdain over the rabbis’ (plural, there are like 40 and the congregation is huge) political liberalism – many Persians, especially in Beverly Hills, lean a little Trumpy. Similar to other wealthy Jewish American enclaves, like Long Island and Miami Beach.

Wanting to deepen my Persian practice (and fit in with Beverly Hills high society), I decided to brush up on my business acumen. And by brush up, I mean I brought my husband with me when I bought a car to help me negotiate a better deal, which he did. In my professional life, he has helped me figure out how to negotiate for better contracts at work, which has honestly given me a huge boost. I’ve also learned to push myself a little harder professionally, and not to sit too comfortably on what I have. He relates this to his parents’ feeling that no matter how successful you are, all of it could be taken away from you. It’s kind of dark. But now when I wait in line at Maru, I can proudly jingle jangle my shiny gold bracelets like everyone else.

It’s been a long week since that Shabbat meal. We’ve said hi to everyone at the party we showed up late to, talked about kebab, gotten a raise, learned Farsi, examined shifting demographics, gone blonde. Of course I’ve had much longer than a week to prepare, and I can skip a lot of the prerequisites like laser hair removal.

The last thing left, I think… is to work on my soul?! And I’d say that with another Shabbat due to start in a few hours, that’s a great place to start. When I think about the conversation with the family who found Persians and their houses to be totally outrageous, I’m glad that I can count myself in with the crowd who doesn’t.

A year ago, when our friend had a baby, Selina hung a card on the mom’s front door frame – the same one hanging on hers from when she had a baby.

“It’s Shir Lama’alot,” she tells me. A custom of hanging the blessing over the door of a new mom so she should have health and a long life.

We have an inside joke that during benching, we always say the word “parnassah” out loud, but the inverse is that my husband believes very strongly in the importance of tzedakah.

“It’s the most heebie-jeebie, spiritual thing about me,” he says. When something good happens to you, you give tzedakah. When you’re worried or anxious or sad, you give tzedakah.

If there’s one thing I am definitely jealous of, it’s Persian spirituality, which feels more raw and real. I’m more the type to be like “maybe God is the universe and we are all the universe? Oh well!” but for many Persians – especially the ones in my life – have a much less bland relationship to the idea of God. My mother-in-law can spend hours in the morning davening meditatively with her coffee, and she takes ages to light all of her dozens and dozens of Shabbat candles spread out over multiple tables. Everything is Hashem, Hashem, Hashem.

“Hashem doesn’t exist in the Ashkenaz/Modern Orthodox lexicon. They talk about Halacha, Torah, but there’s rarely talk of – or much interest in talking to Hashem,” Selina says. “Sephardim, Persian women especially, have a direct line to the big guy. We’re raised to plead, demand, engage with Hashem. It’s Hashem uber alles.”

If my week as a Reform Jew taught me anything, it’s that Jews will always carve out the spaces for themselves as they desire, regardless of what anyone thinks. If my week (or years!) with Persian Jews taught me anything, it’s to advocate strongly for myself, dress well for the function, and maybe be a little less spiritually rigid. And of course, never say yes to the first offer.

“Persians are lovely,” Selina tells me. “And complicated.”

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Let’s get the formalities out of the way: A kosher wine bar is opening where Charcoal used to be, billing itself as the first of its kind (that being “Tel-Aviv style”) in LA. This is a welcome change, because Charcoal was stupidly expensive in a way that only made sense if you think a restaurant is somewhere you go to prove a point about something. Thankfully, kosher dining is moving away from horrible steakhouses that think their customers are the stupidest people on earth and towards something a little more crazy sexy chill. Some say gashmius, I say vibes.

Speaking of gashmius, a Jewish OnlyFans star who lives near me was arrested and charged with burglary and extortion after using dating apps to meet men and then steal stuff from their houses. Her neighbour invited me for Shabbat lunch and told me that she had an unusual amount of Amazon packages being delivered to her house. Suspicious? He also told me that the Jerusalem Post article made a point of mentioning that her brother is serving a “long prison sentence in Israel after attacking a police officer.”

A few nights ago my husband and a friend and I went to Wally’s (a Beverly Hills bar that serves kosher wine in case you ever want to come there with me) and we ended up stranded at a bar top with two Russian Armenian girls that looked like they just walked out of the Oppenheim Group offices. My husband, who will talk to anyone, complimented one of them on her jewelry and then they started trying each others’ on and I was afraid she was going to run away. Thankfully she didn’t do that, but she did tell us a story about how she went on a date with a “jew boy doctor” who made her take an IQ test. The thing about Wally’s is that if I ever wanted to meet an insane Jewish man (did I mention they have kosher wine?), that is where I would hang out.

And speaking of parties – well, actually, sidenote: A realtor in the community added the entire shul directory to her email list and now everyone gets her marketing emails. I think this is a horrible idea for her email domain reputation and we may very well never see one come from her again, but I just thought it was funny that she probably copied and pasted every single email into the CC line and was like, “send it!”

Anyway I bring her up because she has been ignoring me. At first I wasn’t sure but then she ignored me blatantly at Glatt Mart. This was after she ignored my husband at kiddush – and I said he will talk to anyone – after he wanted to tell her he saw her signs go up all over neighbourhood bus stops. And she just turned around? The last time she spoke to us she said she was surprised we didn’t invite her and her husband to our wedding when we invited a different couple. I thought that was a completely psychotic thing to say to a newlywed couple you hardly know, but I’m not always current on American etiquette. Well all of this is leading up to a party I went to in Beverlywood where my husband and I were wearing wigs and sunglasses (it was the 70s) and we saw her there and she talked to us for like 3 minutes before realizing it was us.

At the same party a guy told me I had a beautiful jawline. I asked him where he was from and he said “everywhere” which is probably the most annoying and most Israeli thing you could say when answering that question. And he just kept telling me he thought I had a beautiful jawline. And then I saw his tall Eastern European wife who also had a beautiful jawline and I wondered if actually he was a little gay. Some men just love beautiful things – and sometimes that includes me! Nice to know I’ve still got it, even if I was wearing a wig.

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I’ve been getting a lot of “Make Aliyah NOW!” content on Instagram. My stance on that is that I’ll wait for Mashiach and live in a cramped, expensive condo with no natural light. Maybe they will have a socialized housing situation by then and I won’t have to think about that, and I will spend all my time on the beach. Anyway, two of the videos I got were exactly the same. One by a girl in Israel and another by a local influencer who used to be kind of funny but then fell in with a kiruv rabbi who exhibits such bizarre antisocial behaviour that I’m surprised he hasn’t been cancelled. Like when the LA fires happened last year, the influencer posted a video that this rabbi was davening in front of the fire and sent it burning away from the Jewish neighbourhoods. So I feel like he is both not very smart and doesn’t have a lot of integrity. So I was personally not surprised that he plagiarized that girl’s video basically word for word to announce the imminent arrival of mashiach.

Speaking of mashiach, one of my sisters-in-law has been on a real lashon hara kick lately. During Chanukah she asked my husband if I was home during the day, and when he said that I was, she silently dropped off a box of sufganiyot and a book called “Learn Hilchos Lashon Hara in Just 3 Minutes a Day!” at my door. Not that I expected her to stay and chat. At first I wondered if this was a pointed gift for us specifically but apparently she gave it to everyone. And from that I learned that one strategy to prevent speaking or hearing Lashon Hara is to busy oneself with Torah thoughts.

I thought of this today when we ran into our friends (at a bris, how auspicious!) who are on a journey of becoming more religious, and the husband spent the whole time learning. The rest of us caught up on what’s going on with the kids, vacations, jobs, and he was standing off to the side mumbling over the text on his phone, pointing to words and shuckling. He must have a lot of lashon hara at bay if he needed to be learning right now, at this specific moment, while all of us were chatting. I get the impression they’re on the verge of giving away their TV.

And don’t get me started on all these bris milahs. What’s the plural? Brissim? Britot? I’ve been to like 40 in the last month. My community has single-handedly propelled the shidduch crisis into the next generation. A few days ago there was a bris for a couple I would describe as very modern, very quirky, very creative. A little unorthodox. Wink! And there they were, beaming from the bimah, when the rabbi announced the kid’s name. I wasn’t sure I heard it right in Hebrew, and when I looked over at my husband, he was responding to Teams messages on his phone. A murmur filled the room. “Did you hear that? What was it?” Then came the English.

Eliezer Behemoth.

What?! Eliezer Behemoth? They must have said something else. Eliezer Ben-Chaim-Mottel? But no, it was Behemoth, like the monster from the book of Job, famous for clomping and stomping. It’s hard to imagine such a little baby, who looks like a prune, living up to such a reputation. As with all names, they gave a roundabout explanation about how they chose it. Something about a bubbe (starts with a B) who had a towering, frightening presence, and they hoped their son would be as strong. But you know what? It’s original, and few of us can say that about our kids’ names. Everyone else is named Daniel. Such is life in shtetl.

And I get that it’s normal for kids in religious circles to have the same names. But something really crazy happened that I need to get off my chest. Some friends of ours just had twin boys – mazal! Another plural bris! And one by one, they announce the kids’ names, and one by one, I hear that both of the names were the ones I secretly picked out for my own future children. They were so specific too – a mixture of our dead fathers’ names with a contemporary flair – that I thought it was a joke. I looked up at the bimah in distress and I swear they all winked at me. Was it psychosis? Shock. Horror. And now I’ll look like a monster if we do pick those names for our kids because it’s not normal to have more than one “Maor Elvis Presley” per class.

Speaking of monsters (again) All of my sisters-in-law are redecorating and renovating their houses. It’s the only thing anyone talks about. Furniture and wallpaper and upholstery. I can’t tell anyone apart. Even their children are all melded together in my mind like a blob, ripping through everyone’s white and beige living rooms with palm-oil based pareve chocolate on their hands. That’s how they feel to me sometimes. Like the Greek Hydra: Five wigged heads (straight middle part with blonde lowlights) on one Zimmermann-dressed body, dripping in diamonds (mined and lab-grown, thank you very much!).

One of my SILs hired a decorator “because I liked her personality,” paid a steep retainer and $200 an hour for weeks and then redid the entire thing herself. Another SIL said she was shocked she could do it herself because she didn’t think she had good style, but this isn’t her first redecoration. My other SIL, the youngest and most recently married, apparently regrets furnishing her new apartment with pink velvet everything the minute she moved in and is now opting for a more trendy natural subdued woody oaky chocolate vibe. When I asked them if they were reading the Lashon Hara book we apparently all got for Chanukah, they had no idea what I was talking about.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy all the other times I’ve shared the gossip about Orthodox Jews in and around Beverly Hills

First I want to say thank you to everyone who subscribed in the last couple of weeks. I’m glad you’re here and I appreciate all the nice comments, especially on some of my older articles. If you’re new, welcome. If you’re not, lmao hi!

The ladies will understand this: You know when your husband has a cold and he turns into a tiny little NICU baby that needs the aid of a full time nurse? This is the tradition we observe in my house as extremely heteronormative gay men. In this case, my husband is the man and I’m the nurse, imported from overseas. And while I love being able to take care of him, I do have to say that in the years we’ve been together he has been sick a lot. To the point where I really think his human system is more of a confabulation or a distant memory.

My problem is that I grew up in a house where nobody ever got sick and if you did, it was probably your imagination. And when I was in my 20s, I wasn’t really ever in a position to call out sick from work (cafe culture is very cutthroat) so I would just show up with consumption and pinkeye and mix DayQuil with peppermint tea. And that was that! So you can understand that my husband was horrified when I forced him to take a walk around the block with me the first time he had Covid.

“You need fresh air and sunlight,” I said, parroting my mother who I otherwise don’t trust for medical advice.

“It hurts to breathe,” said my husband, fluttering his long eyelashes. Then he stayed in bed for a whole week.

I learned my lesson! Now if my patients need fresh air and sunlight, I’ll fling open a window. These days I’m more focussed on creating a gelatinous soup experience than anything else.

You know how everything in the kosher dining world is like half a decade behind everyone else and then everything is kind of weird? Sushi in pizza restaurants blah blah blah. The clubstaurant is no exception. In the five years I’ve lived in LA, three have opened and I’m not sure they’re going to stop (according to a 2024 Feed Me investigation, they’re on the re-up). If you’re a fixture of the Miami kosher dining scene (you probably aren’t a reader of this) you’re familiar: They’re the places where you can have arrayes, sushi, a $30 cocktail, and engage in a little mixed dancing. Most of them are kind of the same, but they’re tapping into a cultural desire that frum people used to only express on vacation: Being a little raunchy.

So our friend had a birthday dinner at a new kosher clubstaurant. I made the mistake of partaking in shots on top of having wine on top of feeling a little bit like my sinuses were in the early stages of demonic possession. And first of all, let me just say: When you go to a birthday dinner, you should all pay for the birthday girl. Before you say: But I’m a grad student and a minor and I’m on EI! Okay, obviously I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about being in a room full of 35 year-old doctors and lawyers who huff and puff when the cheque comes out because they thought they could get away with just paying for their own salad and drink. This is fine when you’re a teenager, but it’s antisocial when you’re of a certain age.

An uncool fact about me is that the kosher clubstaurant is my ideal place to go out. I can eat all the food, everyone can share the same bottle of wine, and the only occasion I would ever go to one is if a critical mass of my friends who are around my age are there. I don’t always love the Israeli wedding music mais tant pis. It’s really a perfect experience for little old me. I’ve seen, I’ve been seen. It’s great.

So imagine my surprise when an awkward and large gaggle of girls in jean skirts and long, not-heat-styled hair clambered onto the dance floor, singing passionately to Omer Adam:

אלוהים, אלוהים

רק תשמור על הרוקדים

תחבק אוהבים

שתמיד נהיה שמחים

Elohim, Elohim

Just watch over the dancers

Embrace the lovers

Who are always happy

Kashrut blurs the lines between club and restaurant. Families with small iPad children are eating schnitzel and tables with hookahs next to the tables where Israeli bartenders bring out sparklers and trays of fluorescent pink shots.

One of the girls waved me over and said, “I have someone for you!”

“I’m gay!” I said.

“I know! But I have someone for you!” she replied, modernly.

“I’m married! This is my husband!” I said, pulling on his arm.

“Oh!!!”

Egg-shaped single men in slim-fit polos and skinny jeans stood around the bar, glancing over.

“How do you girls know each other,” somebody from our group asked.

“From school!” they said.

“UCLA?”

“No!” they said. They went to an Orthodox girls school.

It was time for us to leave. We piled into our cars and headed to a friend’s house to debrief and have another drink. I even tried buying cigarettes at a gas station, but nobody was at the counter, so I walked away, angels protecting my lungs for another night.

We asked each other: What were they doing there? How could they be there? Were they safe? Not with the egg-shaped single men in slim-fit polos circling the dance floor like penguins of prey. But I remember being their age and going out and feeling very grown-up about it. Since the drinking age was 18, some of the kids in Grade 11 and 12 could go clubbing for real, and everyone knew the places that let people in without IDs. Teenagers are the same everywhere, even (perhaps especially so) in insular, affluent religious communities. And even insular, affluent religious communities can’t resist the temptation to DANCE!

I woke up the next day feeling like somebody folded me into a shoebox and pushed me down the stairs. That’s what I get for taking a shot after drinking wine and going to a second location and having a delicious negroni and getting home and not doing my red light therapy mask, I thought to myself. That’s what’s wrong with me. I grumbled and groggled through my workday and had calls with my realtor and lawyer and estate accountant. The processing of administering my dad’s estate is coming to a close, finally. The previous weekend, my mother and I cleared out his house so it would be ready for the new buyers.

My dad was not a hoarder, but he didn’t really throw anything away. Since he didn’t really have time to get his affairs in order before surprising us with his untimely death, clearing out his house was an arduous and dusty affair. We marked all the furniture to be picked up for donation and started picking through things that we would keep and distribute to family members. My brother, who is annoying, got the Dyson vacuum and two Nespresso machines (I don’t know why there were two. A mystery). I kept t-shirts and baseball caps and books, and a stack of pornographic playing cards labelled “Swedish erotica.” We took every photo out of its frame and organized them into a folio by person. That went home with me. My mother found a box of her own things, forgotten during their divorce. They went straight to the donation.

“I don’t like that his first wife posts on his Facebook wall so much,” she said. I hadn’t noticed that she recently published a long happy heavenly birthday message. Once she sent me a bunch of photos of them together, which I had never seen, because I didn’t find out about her until I was 15.

“This is the day we got married. I think it was the first time he wore a suit.”

On his birthday, his sister also published her own version of an obituary, with his full government name and birth date and death date and everywhere he’s ever lived and worked. It was also full of boomer ellipses… all of this was annoying as fuck to me because I specifically chose not to publish a detailed obituary online because of the uptick in weird obituary scraping by bots after my grandfather’s obituary appeared on a flurry of weird websites that said unhelpful things like “CAUSE OF DEATH: UNKNOWN TO DATE. CLICK HERE TO ADD.”

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His sister texted me helpful reminders throughout the day we were there, like which IKEA wall prints we should save and mail to her, and a reminder to sell his motorcycle, which is interesting that she thinks that never occurred to me. We wrapped the IKEA prints in bubble wrap and mailed them to Montreal. She texted me to say we sold the house for too little. She was also mad at me because I told her I wouldn’t mail her a copy of his death certificate. I packed her box with all the photos of her and her kids and some t-shirts.

The majority of stuff went into the junk pile. VCR and DVD players, cables and unopened blank CDs, every iPhone he ever owned with its box, pantry items that expired in 2015. Pieces of particleboard furniture. Assorted lightbulbs.

Inside a trunk I found a little wooden box with the words “SPIKE” engraved in it. The ashes of our childhood dog, who died a decade ago. I pried open the box with a screwdriver and took out the little plastic bag.

“I don’t think we should throw this away,” I said.

“Do you want to bring it home with you?” my mom asked. I said no.

We broke for lunch and washed the dust off our hands. We drove down the mountain into the little town on the lake, to a restaurant I scouted out weeks in advance that had gluten free options for my mom. Before going into the restaurant, we carried the bag to the shore. It was a grey, wet day and the wind was blasting through the Okanagan valley. A Canadian flag on a high pole flapped in every direction.

“Don’t get any of the ashes on us,” my mom said.

It looked like the waves of the lake were reliably moving in one direction, so we positioned ourselves on a rocky corner of the pier. I opened the bag and let a little bit trickle out into the wind.

“Do you want to say anything before we let it go?”

She thought for a minute. “Spike, I always enjoyed taking you out on walks, even though you barked at everyone.”

I didn’t say anything. I let the ashes fly into the wind and carry over the lake. I hoped nobody who could see us thought that this was a person’s ashes. The wind relented suddenly, and some of the ash clung to a rock at my feet, colouring it white. He was not a particularly good or well-trained dog and I think he would have preferred to run away most of the time, because he always tried to.

“You know he bit our neighbour,” my mom told me while we were standing there. Biting was fresh on our minds. After our first dog from when I was a baby was put down for attacking a woman, I was surprised we, as a family, could let something like that happen again. But nobody came after Spike. Nobody put him down.

A couple of days before, I was running through the flats of Beverly Hills, dreading my upcoming mitzvah trip to the filming location of Canada’s Jersey Shore in the offseason, thinking about how thankful I was to live somewhere so beautiful, when I crossed paths with an old woman walking a little crusty dog. The dog barked at me as I ran towards them, and though I swerved out of the way and onto the grass, it intercepted my path, jumped up, and bit me above the knee.

If this story sounds exactly like David Sedaris’s recent New Yorker story about being bit by a dog, hold onto your pants, because I was floored when I read it. I felt spiritual.

I stopped, turned to the woman, and said, “YOUR DOG BIT ME!” and she said, “Oh! Oh! Sorry! Oh, oh!” while tugging on the animal’s leash. “BE MORE CAREFUL!” She nodded and hobbled off. I kept running, feeling my face turn hot. Two blocks away I realized I was bleeding. I took pictures and I called my husband, who told me to call our friend who is a doctor, who told me I should pop into urgent care just to be safe. She asked me if I did anything to provoke the dog or if it was acting unusual. I didn’t think it was acting unusual. I think she just never bothered to train it. With my mind a little more clear, I ran back in the direction I came to see if I could track down the lady and the dog but they were gone. She probably shuffled into a house and let her dog rip apart a throw pillow.

The doctor at urgent care said that rabies was unlikely because it wasn’t a wild animal. “The dogs around here are usually vaccinated.” She gave me antibiotics and a bandaid and I paid $300. The next morning I boarded a flight to Canada, huffing and puffing about the weekend ahead of me. The bite on my leg turned purple, then green.

Back in the near-present, my clubstaurant birthday dinner hangover carried into the next day. I made my appearances, took my advil, went to the gym, and woke up in the night having sweated through my cotton pajama set. I slept through most of Saturday, eating only plain beige foods, and felt a little better when I had a glass of wine while seeing a play that night.

“Maybe if the only thing that makes me feel better is a glass of wine, I should cut back on the drinking,” I thought to myself. Then I sweat through another pair of pajamas and coughed myself awake. Whatever plans we had for Sunday, I wasn’t up for anymore. My husband was worried for me. He came back with cold medicine I’ve never heard of and made chicken soup. The nurse had become the patient, and the patient graduated nursing school with honours.

“I’m a physician’s assistant,” he corrected me.

That night I had a nightmare about the Gilded Age TV series. They were in my bedroom and I had to coordinate an event, and people were asking me detailed questions that I didn’t care about. I woke up, freezing, to my husband saying the power had gone out. A power outage in Beverly Hills seemed unbelievable to me, but during the day I made myself a nest on the sofa next to the fireplace so I could look at my phone and feel woozy. We went back and forth about whether it was okay to have caffeine while sick (I said yes because I don’t want a migraine on top of this) and he went out to grab coffee for us.

The sun went down at 2pm, on the completely dark streets, menorahs stood out brilliantly in the windows. In the haze of DayQuil it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, especially given what happened. Edison said the outage was caused by a water main break and expected service to be restored the next day. We charged our phones in the lobby of a nice hotel and went home. My fever broke in the middle of the night, though unfortunately I sweat through another pair of PJs, and I rebuilt my nest beside the fireplace. The power hasn’t been restored, but I woke up warm and feeling well enough to take a long walk. I think the fresh air and the sun will do me well.

Every day I get people sending me messages like “Jesse from Bagel Emoji, I really want to hear what your voice sounds like!” and I’m always like “It’s really deep and raspy in a sexy way but my webcam is broken so I can’t show you!”

Well that’s all about to change! This week I had the honour of sitting down to talk to Phoebe Maltz Bovy on her podcast The Jewish Angle, where we discussed my story I spent a week as a Reform Jew, and this is what happened. We separate fact from fiction (did I really see Kyle Richards at a bat mitzvah?!), dumb people on Twitter who don’t know anything, and talk about why different Jewish denominations are important to people even if I personally think they’re weird. And maybe more!

You can listen here:

• Spotify

• Apple

Please don’t make fun of my voice! I’m shy!

Further reading:

On the difference between Reform Judaism in Canada and the US

• The Canadian Way: Does Canadian Jewry have a unique character as opposed to American Jewry? (2007)

• The Forward: Why are Canadian Reform Jews so Conservative? (2018)

• Vogue: Meet the Rabbi With a Freaky Shoe for Every Occasion (2025)

  • The world’s only young straight female rabbi?

• This isn’t really about Reform Judaism but it’s an op-ed from a conservative Canadian journalist that I think about all the time where she switches her shul membership from Reconstructionist (what’s going on there btw?!) to an Orthodox one (albeit the most liberal Orthodox shul in the country) and then she’s like “maybe egalitarianism is bad for the Jews.” I didn’t talk about it in the interview but I literally do think about this piece of writing all the time because I used to see the author at her new shul and I’d think to myself: Ummmmmmmmm okay…..

Speaking of The Jewish Angle, podcast from the Canadian Jewish News, my physical copy of Scribe Quarterly just came in the mail. How auspicious!

There is much alarm about the state of Reform Jews these days, and the call is NOT coming from inside the house.

Something about this day and age is that people are always expressing themselves. They’re always reacting to something. Everyone is so pissed off all the time. No more angry were they than when screenshots of the study on LGBTQ rabbinical school enrolment went micro-viral on Jewish twitter. According to the study, 51% of the current cohort of rabbinical school students (not Orthodox, though many on twitter thought to include YCT in their outrage), and LGBTQ enrolment has been steadily climbing for years. People were upset for all the reasons you’d think.

It’s not Jewish, it’s against Torah-values, Reform Judaism is turning people away from Israel. The spectre of a blue-haired enby Rabbi wearing an n95 at a protest danced in peoples’ minds.

Mind you, right-wing frum-adjacent tweeters have never been warm to the idea of Reform Judaism. A 2023 tweet from kol isha practitioner Chanaleh highlighted the terrible things the Reform movement has done for uncountable Jewish souls (creating mamzerim, intermarriage, etc). Her concern didn’t stop there. Following the wedding of two self-described Modern Orthodox women, her widely circulated voice note lamented the fact they used a chuppah and wedding dresses to show that, “they can eat each other out for the rest of their lives,” she said. “To publicly celebrate the fact they’ll be fingering each other and having lesbian sex is appalling!”

(Side note, but the negative reactions to this wedding was why I’ve shared very little online about my own wedding. Makes you think!)

Now, I’ve always said that the Reform Jew in peoples’ imaginations has little to do with Reform Jews in real life. People with little contact with others unlike themselves imagine a cartoon character of the kind of person they’d imagine at a pro-Palestine protest and they scoff. I imagine bonafide JAPs, Range Rovers, and Bar Mitzvah parties that are nicer than my wedding.

To get to the bottom of whatever is going on here, I spent a week as a Reform Jew to really try and get at the truth. Is it as bad as we think?

First, I cast off all the things Reform Jews don’t do: I stopped going to daily minyan, wrapping tefillin, eating in non-Kosher restaurants… though in truth, the last time I went to daily minyan was an accident (a favour, really), and the last time I wrapped tefillin? Um… And my gay husband and I had dinner just this week at the new Momofuku restaurant in Century City – wine included.

Alright, so there’s a lot about my life that is pretty Reform. I pick and choose. My observance waxes and wanes. As I said in one comment on here before, sometimes I feel like my yiddishkeit hangs by a thread. But do Reform Jews feel that way?

So to get at the heart of what it really means to be a Reform Jew, I knew I had to go undercover. I would have to infiltrate the community, and find out what’s happening on the ground.

Now, if you know anything about Reform Jews, you know that there are fundamentally two types: The kind who go to shul (Temple) and the kind that do not. The kind that do with any regularity range between 20 years old and 115, but with no representation in between. Yes, the 20-year-old will be queer. Yes, the 115 year old will be bussed to-and-from their care home. The do-not camp centres their yiddishkeit around lifecycle events: Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs. Somewhere in between are the ones who turn up consistently to seders and High Holiday services.

Most Reform temples host Friday night services, usually at the same time year long. It lasts around an hour to 90 minutes, and consists of some form of an abbreviated Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv. The services are musical (sometimes with instruments), and contain responsive readings in English and Hebrew from the siddur. Many temples will read from the Torah on Friday night, because few congregants will return Saturday morning. Another practice many frummies might find odd is the lighting of candles on the bimah (oriented often at the front of the room) regardless of whether Shabbat starts in two hours (for early summer services) or two hours ago (in the depths of winter).

Had I wanted to get a real sense of the culture, I would have driven to the temple, but I knew I wanted to drink after. So I did the responsible thing and took an uber.

A Reform temple in a major city will either look like a beautiful cathedral or a 70s carpeted basement. I don’t think there is anything in between. Reform temple architecture is so particularly unique – from what I imagine was explosive growth in the 70s – that it inspired Jonathan Adler to create a line of furniture that includes a $7000 oak and brass credenza.

Tonight, I’ve found myself in one that resembles a cathedral. The rabbi is wearing a pink silk tallis and a beaded kippah. She also has had a facelift. The overall vibe is much more Hollywood than Columbia encampment. An American and Israeli flag flank the bimah, where the oldest woman you’ve ever seen is lighting two enormous silver candlesticks. She holds the match and her hand shakes. She waves her hands and covers her eyes, and the congregants join in blessing the Shabbat candles, followed by a reading from the Mishkan Tefillah siddur in English.

We skip the psalms and head straight into L’chah dodi, where the cantor – a younger man with a guitar – instructs us to sing verses 1, 2, 3, and 9 before standing to face the door. The rest rolls out as expected. The songs are familiar to me, but not having attended Reform services in nearly a decade, everything feels very rushed. As we get to the shema, the congregation is standing, then the cantor strums his guitar. I feel a bit of a chill. Then the amidah, sang out loud with everyone, which includes the matriarchs, and a very brief torah reading. There is a lot more English in the service than I remember from when I was younger, but Reform Judaism in the US has always been “less traditional” than Reform communities in Canada.

Am I sad or nostalgic? I notice everything omitted and I feel like I’m personally doing something wrong. But nobody around me seems to notice – or if they do, they obviously don’t care.

And why should they? They’re making an active choice to be there on a Friday night. If they’re there, they must enjoy it. They must find it meaningful. Judging them or feeling sorry for them won’t do anything to change their relationship with Judaism. If they have any reservations against Orthodoxy, then knowing I have any negative feeling towards the experience at all would probably reaffirm their existing beliefs. At this moment, my feelings of judgement or inadequacy seem to say a lot more about me than it does about them.

We shuffle into a hall for the oneg. My eyes dart around the room for a bar. There is none. The elderly people make themselves decaf coffee and the 20 year olds stand in a corner with paper plates of tuna and Ritz crackers. I introduce myself to the rabbi, whose taught face does its best impression of a smile (her eyes widen), and she asks me if I’m interested in their Judaism 101 class. If so, I should talk to Adeena or Daniella or somebody. I say no thank you. The rabbi is swarmed by old ladies and gobbled up like an hors d’oeuvre.

The aloof rabbi is a character I’m very familiar with. They are always very busy and are constantly jetting off to something important. A lot of Reform rabbis give me the impression that they’re the star of their own big show. For example, they are always working on their high holiday sermon. They are always posting about it on Facebook, where they all post a lot. Their high holiday sermon is perpetually in the works. Everyone loves their high holiday sermon, which addresses our current times and the importance of this, that, and the other. Now the high holiday sermon will be available online to download on the Temple website very soon.

The issue with rabbinical students, and this is probably the meanest thing I’ll say in this story, isn’t that they’re queer or leftist, but that the model of rabbi they’re exposed to is the person who commands all the attention at the front of the room twice a year for their life-changing sermons. The rabbi often feels like a celebrity. Then when a young Reform Jew shows any interest in Judaism beyond Hebrew school or summer camp, somebody taps them on the shoulder and says “have you ever considered rabbinical school?” and if they’re the kind of person who likes attention they think, wow, maybe some people will look and listen to me like that! And voila!

On Saturday, I decide to explore the other side of Reform Judaism – the traditions of those who never go to shul. Whatever do people do when the entire weekend is available to them? I go for a run, I stop for a coffee. I think about popping by the club for some golf (not that I’m a member of a club or that I golf, but I have all the necessary clothes for it and my buddy Harrison could get me in as a guest).

I think of all the tiktoks from Reform rabbinical students who answer bad-faith questions about their observance. “Shabbat is about whatever you find meaningful,” is the general vibe. “I personally do not shop or respond to emails, but I will watch movies.”

What I’m really excited about is the Bat Mitzvah I’m invited to this evening. I’ve been to plenty of bat mitzvahs, but never one in Beverly Hills. I can already tell this whole thing will cost more than my own wedding, and I know that because I’ve been invited by my wedding planner. This is a woman who balls out. The theme is “Pink Disco.”

It’s being held in a purpose-built tent on a vacant lot in the hills. They’ve brought their own bathrooms. The Bat Mitzvah girl herself is wearing a pink silk dress and pink feathery heels. She and all of her friends are wearing heels, and they’re clomping around from station (airbrushed sweatsuit) to station (dirty sodas) collecting merch and taking pictures. The dance floor lights up with a monogram of her initials, and I recognize the DJ from my own wedding. I also recognize the florist, a frenemy of the wedding planner. She hired him to fill the room with hydrangeas and peonies. He spray painted them pink. He circles the room in his brocade suit and smiles through his filler, and he recognizes my husband and I.

“How have you been, my darlings?” he says, kissing us on both cheeks. Before we can answer, he looks past us, waves and runs over to Kyle Richards.

At this point, Shabbat is long-over and there’s no havdalah service in sight. The adults are drinking and dancing, and the teenagers are clustered around their phones on velvet sofas.

The Reform movement has been negotiating its relationship to tradition since its inception in the late 1800s. In the last few decades, there has been more of a feeling that its congregants or its rabbis want to return to tradition. A 1989 NYT article quotes a Reform rabbi as saying “contemporary society, recognizing the limitations of the intellect, looks to religious ritual as a way of binding us to our community and bringing us closer to the sacred.” In 2007, the newly published Reform siddur contained more Hebrew – and more transliterated Hebrew – than its predecessor, making participation in more traditional services possible for those who couldn’t read it. The article cites another rabbi saying, “Reform Jews [are] not imitating the Orthodox but rather taking ancient forms and adapting them to modern times.”

There are some who resist the return to tradition. The Roots of Reform organization’s mission statement expresses a desire to carry out services primarily in English, and provides materials for congregations who wish to do so – though this feels more like wishful thinking in an era where the Jewish world feels very porous.

Even secular Reform Jews can’t lay claim to rampant materialism. Clips from a recent LA Jewish wedding went viral for their opulence – a celebrity musical lineup, millions of dollars in florals, the chosson and kallah descending from the ceiling on a platform. Classic and traditional!

Perhaps “us vs. them” is not a helpful framework. If the existence of the Reform movement is troubling to you, maybe a change of attitude is required.

Despite what you or I personally believe about Judaism and Torah and what is right and what is wrong, we cannot control what other people do and feel. People will choose, again and again, a Jewish life that reflects their values, their time commitment, their interests. A lot of frum people might believe that Reform Jews are completely misinformed – and with the right information, they would change their speed, but the truth is most simply don’t care. In fact, with the information they have available to them, they feel that they are making the right choice for themselves. People want what they want and will do what they do.

I don’t think we should be worried about queer rabbinical students flooding our community. You probably won’t go to a Reform temple anyway. If their tiktoks or their online presence upsets you, then I suppose the solution is less screen time.

And unless you live in Los Angeles or New York, and you’re a young person interested in interacting with diverse Jewish community institutions, you probably won’t run into any of these people anyway. But I can tell you from experience that I am interested in interacting with diverse Jewish institutions and that I do rub shoulders with rabbinical students at parties and meals and events. And I’ve noticed something else about this present cohort of rabbinical students that is far more insidious than being queer.

They are all obsessed with musical theatre. All of them. They cannot stop singing. They are always bursting into song. And nobody tells them to stop. And then you swipe through your instagram stories and bam! They’re belting fearlessly to the camera.

It’s just really, really not my thing.

I posted this without proofreading. If you notice a mistake… umm…. maybe you’ll enjoy these other stories.

I had a horrible interaction the other day with a haunted woman at the grocery store. After placing all of my items (cucumbers, chicken thighs, Baron Herzog sauvignon blanc, frozen diced onions, bulk watermelon candy) on the conveyor, and just before the cashier began to scan them, she stomped over to the front of the line waving a single package of beef.

“Can you let me pay for this first? I just have one thing.”

She was small, dressed in grey, and wearing a lumpy hat. And she was making her face do a little smile to sweeten the deal.

Much to my surprise I said, “Well… no…” and shook my head. I also made a my face do a little smile to soften the blow. The cashier began scanning my items, and the woman took her place in line behind me. She was fuming. She huffed and she puffed and she sighed and she looked me in the eyes the entire time. As I collected my bags and turned to the door, she said, “Thank you for your kindness.”

What a bitchy little thing to say! I wish I had said something mean, like “This isn’t the bazaar! We don’t cut in line!” or “You don’t need my kindness!” or “I have places to be too, ma’am!” but instead I said, “You’re WELCOME!” and rolled my eyes and left.

Had I been somewhere else, or maybe in a different mood, I probably would have let her go in front of me. But moments before I was caught in an impossible gridlock traffic jam in the parking lot and then watched an old frum dude park his car cleanly across two open spots and leave the rest of us trapped. Inside, my large as fuck shopping cart was caught in a jam in an aisle where people leave them as they shop because they’re too large to fit anywhere. They were out of leeks, which seems impossible, and they didn’t have the thinly pounded chicken breast my husband likes. There was no way I was going to let somebody step in front of me in line. To top it off, the whole store smelled absolutely horrible.

I know it’s not very takes-a-village communitarian of me, but if I lived in a village the woman probably would have cursed me and my goats with an amulet. I got bad vibes. The vibes are often bad at Glatt Mart, which has the best produce to meat to sushi to wine ratio of any kosher market on Pico. Koshco has La Croix, great meat and unique packaged goods (and it’s very very clean) but good like trying to find fresh parsley. Livonia has sold me fully spoiled chicken at least three times, but they have imported French butter. Most of us around these parts have a practice of visiting multiple grocery stores to get what we need, but I like to keep it to a maximum of two before I start feeling like I live in my car.

But Glatt Mart has that smell. It’s hard to describe. At my husband’s grandmother’s Persian funeral, an Ashkenazi friend noted that a cluster of ladies on the women’s side carried the Glatt Mart smell on them. It was a bit surprising because usually Persian ladies smell like Nuxe Huile Prodigieuse and Baccarat Rouge 540. But she was right. It was bitter and rancid and hung in the air. The shul was full. The decedent and her widower were pillars of the community, and every Persian in Beverly Hills came to pay their respects. When the services concluded, the immediately family filed off into a hall for dinner while everyone else took for the exit. The smell wafted from the hall.

“I don’t want to go in there. It smells like piss,” my husband said. We were standing with the aforementioned friend.

“That’s the Glatt Mart smell. That’s exactly what I was talking about,” she said.

“That? That’s shanbalileh. It’s the green stuff in gormeh sabzi. I hate it. My mom never made it for us.”

Mystery solved. Partially. Gormeh sabzi is a Persian stew made with herbs and bitter greens. Dried shanbalileh, or fenugreek, gives it a unique flavour that is challenging to the untrained palate. My mother actually tried it for the first time this week (she liked it), at a restaurant that serves both Persian kabob and Chinese food.

She wanted to have a traditional Persian experience. My husband ordered for the table. Khoresh bademjan lapeh – a red, split pea stew with chicken. Then tahdig, the famous gormeh sabzi, a selection of kabob, and a serving of orange chicken (part of the authentic experience – it’s a fusion restaurant after all). Sitting at the table next to us was a large family. The adults were at the far end of the table, and their children sat closest to us. The kids were glued to their phones, watching AI slop. The server brought over their platters of orange chicken and white rice. One of the kids stood up from the table, without taking his eyes of his phone, walked up to our table and took our lavash bread without saying a word. We had already ripped pieces off. The parents, completely occupied at their end of the table, didn’t notice or say anything.

Well! My mom loved the Persian food! Even the gormeh sabzi, with its unique fenugreek-laden flavour. And that should solve the mystery of the mysterious odour, but it really only accounts for the top note of the Glatt Mart perfume.

Growing up, my mom cleaned the floors with white vinegar and a steam mop. She has a strong anti-chemical philosophy and an aversion to strong scents, so we never had anything like Pine-sol and Lemon Pledge. It wasn’t until my first job at an amusement park pizza shop that I discovered industrial strength cleaners (a likely place for a first encounter, if I think about it). We filled buckets from a rubber hose that diluted a sanitizing solution with very hot water, sprinkled the greasy concrete floors with Comet powder and inhaled what was probably straight up mustard gas as we mopped. I have no idea how nobody was poisoned or died. I would go home smelling like a mix of bread yeast, Comet, and fryer oil – both sour and chemical – and hope that it didn’t transfer in the laundry.

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On an unusually hot September day, trapped in the Glatt Mart parking lot, the memory of this specific scent story flooded back to me. I have mopped many floors and cleaned many public toilets in my life, but never again with such a sketchy combination of products. It was all there, hidden behind the dominant smell of fenugreek. It was the smell created by people who, live 14-year-old me, didn’t really care how it got done, as long as it was cleaned up in the end. The employees in the market seem like perfectly nice people, but I don’t envision them being up-to-date on their WHMIS or OSHA training. And it makes sense that they would use such strong chemicals, because underneath the Fenugreek and the Comet was something more sinister and disgusting – and it goes back to the meat department.

Now I’ve never had a problem with their meat. I also have no idea what goes on behind the glass display case. I’ve never asked them to hack a chicken into pieces for me, but I know that they’re not digging up cemeteries and calling it chicken breast like [REDACTED] up the street. But it’s undeniable that the smell of raw meat permeates the entire store, if not the parking lot and most of the surrounding block. Not rotting. Just raw and wet. Like meat left too long in the fridge, or out on the counter. Like peeling back the plastic and realizing it’s a bit slimy. And then getting the slime on the floor, and tracking it around with your shoes, and doing that every single day, and then at the end of a long, hot day, applying a mixture of bleach powder and hot water to try and get rid of the stickiness. That’s what it is. I’m almost certain it is.

I’m also certain that Glatt Mart has the best sushi in LA, but that’s a tale for another day.

Thanks for reading! If you’re a new subscriber, I pray you will enjoy these other pieces of Jewish investigative journalism and how-to guides for the Modern Orthodox gnome in all of us.

Every good story starts with a new wig. My mother-in-law just got one and it’s tearing the family apart. “It’s too long”, they say. It’s too blonde, there’s too much volume. It’s so unlike her old one – an ashy little bob, and now people stop her at Century City mall thinking she’s Charlene Aminoff. Even I’m tempted to ask her for a bracha, and I don’t ask her for anything.

Previously in Beverly Hills Jewish gossip:

The other day I was in shul, catching up on reading all of the local LA Jewish papers, when I noticed that basically everything in the LA Jewish Home was AI-generated, apart from the 3-page long letter from the editor which was mostly unedited. Otherwise all of the imagery, all of the copy, all of the ads showed the tell-tale signs of AI. There are three possibilities as to what’s going on here: Either nobody reads this paper, or the readers are NOT very discerning at all, or the editorial staff just don’t give a shit. Well, I did some digging, and as it turns out, it’s all of the above!

Jewish publishing has a mediocrity crisis and I think it’s because our extremely expensive schools are not teaching people how to read. The school situation is dire. Now I won’t say which schools… that’s a secret… but I have multiple friends with school-aged children who pulled them out of day school because they couldn’t accommodate their kids with ADHD. Which, as an Amish woman, is shocking to me, but then again I find the funding structure of these schools to be completely opaque.

But now these kids with ADHD are thriving in public school, which has a lot of bells and whistles around these parts (Beverly Hills, in case you forgot!!), and their siblings are just not learning to read. They just don’t do it. I think the kids spend all day being dropped off in a long line of black SUVs that takes hours to loop around the block, then go straight to being picked up as the line of SUVs starts over, blocking traffic and causing my parking spot to vanish.

Now that the girls are back from sem as young marriageable ladies, there’s tea to spill. One girl who got kicked out of her Bnei Akiva seminary for sneaking out at night and coming back in the early hours of the morning wearing pants. It’s like an episode of Downton Abbey, except they caught her on the security cameras, which seems kind of unfair, because I thought your year in Israel was supposed to teach independence (going to the bar unchaperoned), but thanks to technology all of these kids are trapped in the panopticon and can’t do anything fun.

Another girl was kicked out for drinking alone in her dorm (it’s so nice that she got her own room!), apparently because of the stress, (“I don’t know why she was so stressed,” my anonymous source said), and they only found out because the Houthis attacked and everyone was forced into the mamad and she was drunk!

So I have to ask – are we, as a community, sheltering these kids too much? I would never extol the virtues of the secular world, but when I was her age, I was treated more or less like an adult. I drank alone in my dorm (poetically), I left at night and returned wearing pants (every time), and had nobody to report to but myself. I just don’t know if this is good for them!

This new generation of Modern Orthodox zoomers is very interesting!!!! Do they have middos? Do they value their yiddishkeit? One girl was explaining to me during lunch at her parents’ house that she was polyamorous and in a very emotionally turbulent relationship with an older woman. I didn’t want to judge, because I’m cool, but inwardly I was like, why would you do that to yourself?? If I was young and gay and polyamorous, I don’t think I’d tell my parents all of that. Partly to keep the mystery alive (for myself), but also because these things change.

More of these kids are cropping up with cameras in public places, taking a stab at being an influencer. In the kosher restaurants, they’re filming food reviews. There’s one girl who is always singing and dancing on the street or in the markets like she’s the star of a summer camp musical, and nobody really looks at her but she gets a lot of positive comments on her social media. This is the kind of thing you’d expect to see a mile north, on Rodeo Drive, not on Pico Boulevard!! But I suppose everyone is kind of the same everywhere.

Of course, I don’t know a lot about raising kids. I do know that a family with their first baby just discovered you are supposed to clean behind the baby’s ears. Everyone was like, “wow, that baby is so stinky!” and it wasn’t diapers! It was a week of accumulated breast milk.

In mother-in-law news (not mine again), the stinky baby’s mom doesn’t get along with hers. She just found out that when she comes over to “help with the baby”, she’s been taking bags of clothes out of storage to donate to Goodwill. Bags of her daughter-in-law’s clothes that do not belong to her. She’s just been donating random pieces of her clothing.

The shul I don’t go to launched a new initiative for singles, which is probably nice, but they’ve been choosing a lot of questionable names for their events. Sukktober. Meat-cute. It’s not nice to make fun, of course, but do you think they know??? Do you think they know?!?!!?!?!!?!

One of the terrible papers published a warning that a father-son panhandling duo have taken to the streets again. And not only are they panhandling in front of Jewish business, but they are also very rude. I think the paper should publish a warning about a very rude woman at Glatt Mart that tried to cut in front of me at the check-out counter because she only had one thing and I had a week’s worth of groceries. I also think people should be aware of the little vegan woman who has been going up to people and asking them if they know what veal is. I have a question: When does anyone ever eat veal? I really don’t think veal is something that happens that often. You hear about it the same way you hear about quicksand and the Bermuda triangle – horrifying, but it’s not something we really encounter in our day-to-day lives.

Meanwhile, I waited 25 minutes for a smoothie at the new meat breakfast restaurant. The nice vegan place in Brentwood is closed forever. The Chinese vegan restaurant in Echo Park is the best food I’ve had in my life. It rained on Simchas Torah and I couldn’t smoke a cigarette I’d been saving for the occasion. And a woman told me that her mother asked her husband to get a sperm test because she thought he was too handsome and normal to marry her hideous daughter, so he must be infertile.

Shabbat Shalom!

As a teenager with a sponge-like brain, I was a regular reader of a blog called “Diary of a Latex Lady,” which chronicled the day-to-day lives of a Texas couple who engaged in a form of BDSM that involved the wife wearing a latex burqa 24/7. She uploaded pictures of herself lounging around the house in her burqa and wrote long, detailed posts about the attention she got from strangers while wandering around her Dallas suburb.

Once stopped by a curious police officer who asked if she was Muslim, she writes: “I explained it was a ‘sex thing’ between me and my husband and I always wore rubber and always covered in public.”

Sex thing or not, there are a ton of people online who find themselves drawn to “veiling”. Much of the time it resembles what we would recognize as a Muslim covering – the hijab, where only the hair and neck are covered, or a niqab, where only the eyes are visible, and sometimes, like the Latex Lady, a burqa, where the entire face and body is covered.

There was a lot of discussion on X a few weeks ago (editor’s note: a hundred years ago at the time of publishing) after a person posted about their secularized hijab accessory. Was it a real person or a troll? I have no idea. Then somebody else pointed out how “white pagans” love wearing hijabs (“veiling”), and shared screenshots of mostly young women and teenage girls dressed like Muslims but talking about tending to the hearth of Hera or something.

What’s the Jewish angle? I am excited to announce that we have our own home-grown version of white pagan veiling, and it’s one of my pet interests.

Before I get into it with examples, I do want to say that I am not passing any sort of judgement towards these individuals. I don’t actually care if people do this. If you do this and you like it, then by all means. It’s your life. I just think it’s sooooooo interesting.

Some background for the unititiated (though I’d be surprised if you’d be reading this) When Orthodox Jewish women get married, they opt for some kind of hair covering. The whens and the hows depend. Sometimes it’s only sometimes. Sometimes it’s always. Sometimes it’s a hat, sometimes it’s a wig. Sometimes the wig is very obvious. Sometimes it’s a very tiny, practically undetectable wig buried under their real hair. Sometimes they opt for a headband or a bandana. And sometimes they opt for a big old scarf – or tichel.

I am not going to break down every single variation of tichel on the planet because there are approximately 80 million. In the early 2010s, the Google search volume for the word “tichel” began climbing steadily. Around the same time, online retailer Wrapunzel, born out of a blog of the same name, began forming a community around the elaborate, voluminous styles of tichels and “hair wraps” more commonly seen on Israeli women than in, say, Teaneck. Anybody online who was nominally curious about Orthodox Jews in this time would have come across these posts, whether from the Facebook group with thousands of members, or on personal blogs or Jewish tumblr.

It’s no wonder, because this particular styling photographs very well. It’s fun and it’s interesting. There are so many colours and textures and shapes. Factors like volume and fabrics and how much hair is visible depends as much on individual observance level as it does on trends. I never thought it would be possible for a simple triangle-fold tichel to look chic, but of course the Brooklyn girls found a way. And while a voluminous turban look with multiple scarves might read now as very 2014, crunchy Dati women are opting for natural looking linens and muslin draped over shapers and trailing down their backs. Everything has a context.

Anyone who has spent any time in the religious world would probably agree that we all have some pretty conformist tendencies. There’s a lot of in-group signalling to go around. The people who are the most socially successful usually don’t stand out too much. A lot of married Jewish religious women who cover their hair have taken it upon themselves to do it as discreetly as possible, and their wigs look like real hair. And if they don’t wear wigs, whatever they’re doing is usually more or less the same as what their neighbours are doing. Which isn’t to say people don’t express themselves as individuals – in a sea of Van Cleef Alhambra bracelets, there will always be a couple two-toned Bulgari Serpenti watches. But as a general practice, standing out is not always a good thing.

Two articles, one by our frenemy Alma and the other by Jewitches, chronicled how and why some non-Orthodox women cover their hair. They even gave it a name: “Ticheling,” both levelling on the the same assertion:

“In the modern-day, [...] there is a misconception, fueled by the most popular articles that show up when you Google ‘Tichel’, that tichels belong exclusively to married Orthodox women. This is not true.

While we must acknowledge that Orthodox women have maintained the tradition and kept it alive, the use of head coverings does not solely belong to them.”

Though I don’t doubt the people who do it find it meaningful, I have to question why they choose this practice and not something else.

That’s what makes non-Orthodox “veiling” feel so odd. Removed from the context of marriage and heteronormativity, it’s an act of snackable spiritual conspicuous consumption. It’s an invitation to be perceived. Not as Sadie Sadie Married Lady, nor as somebody who is observant in a recognizable way, but as a person who is, for all intents and purposes, a little bit… ethnic?

Like I said, the act of veiling is very attractive to certain kinds of people, and the draw is largely aesthetic. It’s the pagan veilers and the Christian veilers and now, even the non-religious Jews. For lack of real space and real community, they find each other online. Living an observant life is harder to share than posting a selfie (side note, one of the saddest things about being religious is that I never have pictures of anything on Shabbat despite most of my favourite memories happening then).

While a traditionally observant Jew will consider the gamut of factors that go into hair covering, ranging from community practice to modesty to how much hair should be covered in front of who and when and with what, the online ticheler is primarily concerned with being seen. There’s a reason why they will do it despite being unmarried or unobservant in every other aspect. There’s a reason why they don’t opt for a more discreet wig.

Without doing any formal research, I think it’s pretty safe to say there’s a lot of overlap with people who lead with their diagnoses and pronouns in their bios, because the impulse is the same. This is all of me, flattened, and I’m not like other girls.

I don’t think non-frum women wrapping their hair is bad or wrong. Like I said, I just think it’s interesting. It’s a classic case of Jewish by Internet, where people do and say things they would never ordinarily do in real life, and then disappear when they’re no longer interested. That’s not always bad, either, but it’s a reflection of an actual trend, as articulated by cultural commentator Jay Tibbits in a video that has absolutely nothing to do with this at all.

“Algorithmic distribution of content has completely changed the way we engage with the world,” he says. In context, he’s speaking about the way that destinations that were once hard to travel to are now all over our feeds, and people are not engaging in experiences as deeply or as thoughtfully as they once did. Whether that’s travel, shopping, or even spiritually.

“I’ll admit I’m a bit of a gatekeeper [...]. Culturally, we’ve been conditioned that everybody deserves access to everything, which just isn’t reality. Access once required effort, research, planning, assimilation, and respect for a particular space.”

Despite what content mills would have you think, a few people online doing something does not a trend make. It’s not like there are droves of Reform Jews who are suddenly wearing tichels with tank tops at their local temple (they’re probably catching the live stream).

Where modesty is concerned, I am less of an expert (I am frequently immodest). The Jewish Tiktoker who often wore Islamic-style veils in the name of modesty also warned against Jewish women wearing certain kinds of abayas, lest they accidentally culturally appropriate (which itself seems like a concern from another lifetime, but tracks when we consider the very-online worldviews of the people who do this). As if there is some kind of problem where tznius Jewish women are climbing over each other to wear abayas! It’s so interesting because it is fundamentally not a problem that exists in real life. It is entirely in the imagination of the six Jewish people on Earth who would wear a hijab on purpose in the first place.

One thing people in the Orthodox world can struggle with is nuance. People don’t always care to understand the hows and whys of why people do things. Being socialized in an insular community and having a propensity for black-and-white thinking will produce people who think that a statement like “I’ve never seen anyone wear a fall on Shabbat” is an absolute given in every community, or be completely flabbergasted that a man would light his own Shabbat candles, or why a Chabad woman might show a centimetre of collar bone or something.

For that reason, it feels like a lot of frum Jewish content creators spend an inordinate amount of time explaining themselves and posting about the importance of not judging somebody on their own personal journey. We might judge ourselves very harshly for our own personal journeys towards or away from observance, and that judgement often turns outwards into a lack of compassion.

But for any lack of understanding there may be, there’s something so interesting about seeing the way outsiders look back at you. It’s interesting to see what they take, what they leave behind, it’s interesting to think they have more of a choice in the matter than we do. It’s interesting (and challenging) to see something so familiar take an unfamiliar shape. What makes it jarring to witness, maybe, is the feeling that doing it doesn’t really require the same effort, assimilation, and intentionality, to echo Tibbits.

Because this phenomenon is one that is squarely online and there is very little chance of encountering such people in the real world, I’d say we can save ourselves the trouble of feeling too much indignation and let them play dress-up until the day they get bored and stop. Even the prolific Latex Lady couldn’t keep running away from real life.

Maybe they’ll find a home in normative Orthodox Judaism. Maybe a combination of therapy and medication will help them spend more time outside, fostering face-to-face relationships. Or maybe they’ll convert to Islam – perhaps where they should have landed all along.

But isn’t it just sooooo interesting?

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