Word: goyishe
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...Cruise's transgressions were more boyish, and less goyish, than Gibson's. The star formerly known as Tom Terrific was guilty only of behaving like a lovesick cockaloony on TV by trampolining on Oprah's couch and trumpeting his love for Katie Holmes, of slamming Brooke Shields for taking anti-depressive medicine after giving birth, and of proselytizing too strenuously for that non-religion he belongs to, the Church of Scientology. All this falls into the severely goofy range but stops somewhere short of actionable...
...knew instantly I had stumbled upon a goldmine, but I was unsure of how to proceed. What would I say to Joey Potter, so artistic, so intelligent, so beautiful, so… goyish. Aha! I discovered my opening...
...second problem is that the show is practically judenrein: there are no Jews. True, you’d be hard pressed to imagine a slew of shul-goers in the remarkably goyish Capeside (though perhaps some Yiddin could have had summer houses?) but in Boston? And at an elite university like Worthington (which seems to be a combination of Harvard and Amherst)? By her second day in attendance, Joey Potter should have tripped over a Jew. Yet I never saw a yarmulke...
Such filagree, scholars concur, would have been foreign to Matthew, who wrote sometime after A.D. 60, a decade or two before Luke. "He would have found it very odd, very goyish, perhaps even offensive," says the University of Texas' White. But that, he contends, is the point. Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than a Jewish convert to Christianity, writing in fine Greek for other non-Jews and so using references they would find familiar. His version's heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, angelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form...
...fame, death--Smith hits all the biggies here, and nearly every major character has a theory about at least one of them. Alex, for instance, is compiling a book that divides the world into people and things with "Jewish" traits (including poplar trees, Jimmy Stewart and John Lennon) and "goyish" traits (including oak trees, Elvis fans and the Jewish troubadour Leonard Cohen). It's inspired by a Lenny Bruce riff, the novel's epigraph, but it becomes a predictable dog-people-vs.-cat-people dichotomy. In her narrative Smith acknowledges and dismisses the pop-psychological interpretations that Alex's book...