Foiled Again. And a Bonus.

There are many indignities with being Jewish in a Gentile world. Especially as that famous "light sleeper," anti-semitism, is up and at 'em and becoming more and more assertive. In the New York ad business, which was once about 20-percent Jewish, I've yet to work at a place or with people who didn't schedule meetings during the Jewish holidays (which, btw, are previously scheduled.) I wish I had a dollar for each time someone looked at me cross-eyed because I told them they had arranged a meeting for the holiest day of the Jewish year and I wouldn't be there.

What's more, though Jews make up just 2.4-percent of the US population, for whatever reason, we are not considered by the prevailing powers a "minority." In fact, in hiring circumstances and HR-circles, being Jewish is being part of the dominant class. Though 69-percent of all hate-crimes perpetrated in American are against Jews, we are somehow supposed to be impervious to the hate that is all around us, and rising--even growing acceptable--with each passing day.

Even something dopey and algoritmic like auto-correct seems stacked against us.

Type in a common "yiddish-ism" like "oy vey," and automatically some Gentile super-ego assumes you mean "it is." 

I propose something simple to even things out a bit.

I took the top four Yiddish curses in my limited lexicon, and I propose creating emojis with what my friend Rich Siegel calls "Hebraic Seasonings."

So, we could have this 

for the ever-popular: "May you grow like an onion with your head in the ground and your ass in the air."

My mother loved this curse and visited it upon me with harridanian clockwork regularity:

"May you be like a chandelier and hang all day and burn all night."

God bless her, she was not someone without imagination and creativity. And she certainly understood that variety was the spice of venom.

She would have used this emoji above with the words below.

"May all your teeth fall out except for one and may that one have a toothache."

Perhaps the most all-purpose and purposefully-dismissive of all Yiddish curses sounds, in Yiddish, like "Gay kocken offen yam." Go on, if no member of the tribe is within earshot, try it out loud. I believe the Yiddish has some onomatopoeia in how it sounds. It sounds like what it means. Try it.

Gay kocken offen yam. It's as close as language gets to a linguistic "ptui."

God that feels good

Go shit in the ocean.

Once these are official approved emojis--maybe available on schmoogle, schapple and schmata platforms and not just my off-kilter wish list, I think the world could well-be a better, sunnier, more-honest, and for me, a happier place.

♡

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BONUS OLDIE SECTION
Beer Advertising you've probably never seen.
Featuring Bob and Ray.