The New Jerusalem

Ethnic Struggle

My mother is half jewish and half native american. It's led to a highly ambivalent attitude towards camping. On the one hand, she believes firmly that wilderness skills are the best test of a person's worth. Her most regularly voiced criticism of my father is "If my father knew I married a man who can't even build a motherfucking fire, he'd roll over in his goddamn grave." At the same time, she hates camping. I asked her why when I was 9. She told me "Jews don't camp. The last time we went to camps, it didn't work out so well." The holocaust is my mother's answer to everything.