No Shlomo

I love Survivor. Love, love, love, love, love. So if you haven't watched last night's episode yet, SPOILER ALERT, although I am going to remove names so that you can read this interview with the ousted Survivor and hopefully it won't fug you up too much (although if you haven't watched last night's Survivor, you shouldn't be on the internets, you know that.) Anyway. From EW/Dalton Ross's interview with the person who was (SPOILER ALERT) voted off of Survivor last night:

Q: Since your wrestling match with Person X ended way too early for my taste, tell me what would have happened had it continued? Would you have come out on top?
A: Oh yeah, are you kidding me? I wanted Person Y just to get (pronoun redacted) off me, then I was going to run to the bathroom, read the clue, and flush it down the toilet. That was the plan. Then all of a sudden, my weakness is I have a big conscience and I feel bad about things pretty quickly. I’m not Jewish or anything; it just happens.

Let's just go over one little comment in there again, shall we? "My weakness is I have a big conscience and I feel bad about things pretty quickly. I’m not Jewish or anything; it just happens."

UMMMMM. Look, I am not a practicing Jew or anything. But I was raised pretty hardcore culturally (and religiously) Jewish and that included attending Camp Ramah for eight summers where we performed broadway musicals in Hebrew because we were that fucking hardcore, and I feel like that, combined with the fact that I can still read and write Hebrew and read the Torah even if I no longer practice the religion, and also, have you seen my nose recently, gives me the permission to say: THIS IS REALLY ICKY.

Having a big conscience and feeling bad about things pretty quickly is not necessarily a Jewish thing, because if it were, Hollywood wouldn't exist. (ha ha, Elders of Zion joke, ha ha). And look, I'm a not-practicing-but-definitely-a-Jew, and I do feel bad about things pretty quickly, and I have a huge conscience. Like if a 3-inch-tall Jiminy Cricket represents Pinocchio's conscience, then my conscience is one of those ginormous woolly mammoths that they were always hunting in the 3rd book in the Clan of the Cave Bear series. With the spear-thrower. A HUGE, big, keeps me up at night thinking about things I might not have done perfectly or things I ought not to have said out loud sort of conscience.

And of course I wasn't there when the Ex-Survivor gave this delightful little soundbite, but the way that its tossed off -- "I'm not Jewish or anything" -- like this person feels the need to assert that (spoiler alert at this point, fuck it with the pronoun shifting) she HAS TO TELL THE PUBLIC THAT SHE IS NOT JEWISH. Lest we instantly assume that just because she feels bad about things that she is Jewish, and HEAVEN FORBID that we possibly think that this one-time pageant queen and former Miss Montana is a Jew? As in: she is so quick to assert that she is not Jewish that it seems like she would be horrified if we all thought that she was.

It's like the weirdly anti-semitic no homo. "I am saying these things that apply to my own preconceptions of what it is like to be Jewish, and I am implying that I behave in a manner that I am judging to be Jewish, but don't think that I am Jewish, because I am totally not. Do not think that I'm a Jew. I'm not. "

Or, rather: "I like bagels. No Shlomo."