Second, let me amend that statement by saying that I'm an absolutely terrible Jew: I've been to church more times than I've been to temple, I can't remember whether you fast on Yom Kippur or Rosh Ha-Shonnah, and the only Hebrew I know is the standard Hannukah prayer, and only then it's by wrote memory - I have no idea what the gobbledy-gook that's coming out of my mouth actually means. I even just had to consult Wikipedia one last time to find out how to spell Rosh Ha-Shonnah. Oh, and I didn't know Purim was a real holiday until today.
[And what a lovely segue that was.]
So, today I was browsing Facebook and noticed some party being held for Purim in LA. Now, any of you who have seen For Your Consideration (or are better Jews than I) know that Purim is a Jewish holiday which "commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people of the ancient Persian Empire from Haman's plot to annihilate them." (It seems we've got a lot of holidays based on escaping from some sort of oppressor or another. A recurrent theme in the Jewish history, if you will.)
Well, I'd seen For Your Consideration (and, as stated before, am a terrible Jew) and had actually thought that they had made up the whole holiday! I mean, it's a Christopher Guest film; I wouldn't put that anywhere near past him. Actually, I'd put the two right fucking side-by-side. So I was shocked when I threw "Purim" into my Wikipedia search bar and what came up was not a page on the film but one meticulously detailing the very real Jewish holiday of Purim.
A few minutes of fascinated clicking went by and I had moved past the Purim article, on to the Ashkenazi Jews page and finally to the article on Jewish Population. It was here that I started looking at the statistics on the distribution of the Jewish population and noticed a few odd things.
First of all, Jews really don't exist outside of the US and Israel (which my friend Meena claims is the 51st state, so that doesn't even count). According to Wikipedia, 38.62% of all Jewish people live in the United States. The next highest populated country is Irael with... wait what?! The US has more Jews than the fucking homeland?? I guess it must be all the New York bagel shops and waiters willing to lightly toast it, cut it into quarters, and with a small amount of butter and light chive cream chesse - do you have that? Oh, and the cream cheese has to be on the side. But not the butter! And half a kosher dill pickle. No, I can't eat a whole one, just half. Anyone want to split it with me then? Oh well, forget the pickle, just the bagel then. And can I get some napkins over here?
It gets worse from there. After the US and Israel, the next highest
So to recap, nearly 75% of the Jews on Earth (I'll get to that later) reside in only two countries, one of which has more Jews and more movie-making than the other. This gives us a fairly decent world view of the
Yes! It is indeed true, according to Wikipedia, that 100% of the Jews are on Earth! Goddamn, I'm glad that someone cleared that up, because I had been beginning to wonder where the Joozians were going to be factored into these population percentages.
But no Jew feels as alienated (Ha! Pun! Get it?) as the one lonely Jewish person in Afghanistan. You read that right: there is 1, count it, 1 Jewish person in Afghanistan, according to Wikipedia. Again in a conversation with Meena, it was decided that someone should edit the page to make it maybe a little more up-to-date:
Sorry little guy, but no one really expected you to make it.
UPDATE: Oh man, would it have been better if I titled this post Stajewstics?
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