Journalist Dates Two Men, Makes Gross Generalizations About Jews
Carey Purcell dated two men with whom things didn’t work out. That sucks. We all know how it feels to have a relationship go bad. Those lucky few who find the right person and manage to hold on to them know how rare such people are.
When people get into a relationship, they are often asked questions about themselves, and they give what they think are the answers. This is usually done in good faith, even when the answers they give turn out to be wrong. In the case of relationships where people don’t know what they want or need, or ones where one or more people in the relationship are still rapidly changing, those initial promises aren’t always kept. This is sad, but it makes sense. If you don’t have perfect self-knowledge, you might say you want something that it turns out you don’t want. That’s life.
Carey Purcell dated two men who happened to both be Jewish, and it didn’t work out with either of them. She wrote a long piece in the Washington Post about these experiences, and made a lot of claims about how things went down. Her thesis was that Jewish men only date non-Jewish women as a sort of rebellion, then revert to marrying another Jew.
She says the fact that she was not Jewish rarely came up, even in the same paragraph as she talks about how her Jewish boyfriends would visit to help decorate her Christmas tree. She claims they said they weren’t observant (more “culturally” than “spiritually” Jewish) and didn’t mind that she was a Christian.
To her, this was carte blanche. Never mind if, hypothetically, she has chronic halitosis, or she screams obscenities in her sleep, or she has terrible taste in music; if they say religion isn’t a problem, then the relationship must work out because nothing is more important than religion. Never mind that anyone who thinks this must be very into their religion, and anyone who says they don’t mind probably isn’t religious at all and has no interest in becoming religious, in any religion.
For Ms. Purcell, this is where the conversation appears to have ended. It’s unclear if she ever discussed with her boyfriends the fear that some day whatever state one lives in might decide it’s time to round up the Jews, and the people married to them, something every Jew in the world, religious or not, is keenly aware of. It’s unclear if she understood that converting to Christianity didn’t stop Jews from being burned, shot, or gassed by the Germans or the Spanish or the Chinese, or being kicked out of every country in Europe, or being barred from owning land for most of European history, or being enslaved by the Romans, or forced to convert at the point of a sword by most north African countries in the middle ages. Being Jewish isn’t just a religious denomination, it’s a race. It’s not usually a choice. It’s what we are born as, and we cannot shake it even if we try, and boy have we tried.
It seems she had decided that these men were a religious tabula rasa onto which she could inscribe whatever values she had, and they didn’t particularly mind; not that they just didn’t like practicing religion very much. She said they saw being Jewish as more of an “obligation”. What that really means is that no matter where you go, no matter what religion you convert to, at the end of the day the people who hate the Jews will still come for you and your family because you descend from Jews.
This is the history lesson all Jews know, and she apparently never thought to ask about. More importantly, and again, if someone isn’t down with being religious, maybe it has less to do with the religion itself, and more to do with not liking to have to drag your ass out of bed on the weekends to visit a bad theater that always has the same TED talk about Sky God.
Needless to say, I wasn’t there when she claims these men made promises they couldn’t keep, or when they didn’t live up to those expectations. I don’t know if she omitted other potential deal breakers, like putting too much pressure on the relationship, which can kill a love affair as surely as anything else. I’ve certainly made Mark-shaped holes in walls a few times when I’ve had pressure put on me.
I’ll assume she did all that stuff perfectly. It’s possible that people just changed, and what these men wanted at 23 wasn’t what these men wanted at 28. It’s possible that the pinnacle of femininity that she portrays herself as was a matter of taste and the tastes of her boyfriends just evolved over the years.
She mentions going to church often enough to have “church friends” and that’s an implicit statement about her values and perhaps unfairly, her expectations. It’s possible that a Jew who isn’t interested in praying to their god has little interest in praying to the god of a churchgoer, and being pressured to was no different than being pressured to pray by another Jew.
It’s worth considering that all relationships that end (that being the vast majority of them) end because a symphony of reasons that come into play. I don’t think any of these are the reasons they broke up with her.
I think they broke up with her because she’s an oaf.
It’s likely they broke up with her because she’s the sort of person who would write a lunatic screed about Jews, publicly airing her own dirty laundry, and making some pretty awful generalizations as a sort of revenge on her ex-boyfriends.
They probably broke up with her because she is an embarrassment. The sort of person who would write a piece like the one she penned for the Washington Post is the sort of person who makes lots of fabulously idiotic assumptions about large groups of people based on experiences with just two of them, and then broadcasts her idiocy in less public forums than the Washington Post: forums like family dinners, company picnics, or standing in the middle of Times Square, screaming.
I wish Ms. Purcell the best of luck in the dating world. It’s a hard grind. I especially wish her luck, given that having put her thoughts in writing, she’ll be self-selecting a very specific dating pool from now on.
I’ve never been happier to be out of the dating scene.
