Don’t Dress Your Baby Like Hitler

Trust me, it’s not funny. I know what you’re thinking: “Why the fuck would you dress your child up like Hitler for Halloween, you sick bastard?” I don’t know, the costume was on sale, and they were all out of Power Rangers. As a Jew I am also enamored with my son’s Aryan features. The blond hair and blue eyes are as exotic to me as if he were from Mars.

You see, long ago a friend of mine decided that there were two kinds of Jews in the world. First and foremost, what we called Desert Warrior Jews. Think Rahm Emmanuel–bad motherfucker, blow up your house, Eric Bana in Munich Jew. These are the people at the front of the International Zionist Conspiracy that the Tea Partiers are always going on about. They run Hollywood and control most of the financial world. They get people elected to public office and run tabloid newspapers. The famous Detroit Tiger Hank Greenberg was a Desert Warrior Jew. Tony Curtis, who just passed away, was one, as well.

Then there are the shtetl Jews. For all the goyim out there who don’t speak Yiddish, shtetl is an old-world term for “neighborhood.” As it applies to broad stereotypes, the shtetl Jew is your run-of-the-mill asthmatic, allergic to everything, Crohn’s disease-suffering, last picked for the baseball team, alone on a Saturday night Hebrew. Think Larry David or your dentist. It’s the person your friend at work thinks about when she’s being unwittingly racist and anti-Semitic. You know, when they describe someone who is Jewish to you but don’t want to say he’s a Jew, you’ll get the whole, “He’s so funny, he’s just like Woody Allen.” When in fact he’s neither funny and nothing like Woody Allen at all. He’s  just the only representation of Jew they can muster and becomes a defacto stand-in for all Jews.

As much as I fancied myself of the Desert Warrior mold, I spent most of my youth in the basement with a coterie of dorks puffing on asthma inhalers doing poor imitations of Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live. No matter how hard you try or successful you become you can’t change your nature. UNLESS you do what I did and find yourself the blondest, WASPIEST, most English Gentile on the block and subvert your destiny. Yes, my poor suffering wife has other traits, but chief among them is her abject shiks-appeal. We want what we can’t have, and while I was neck-deep in deviated septums, I longed for the loving embrace of a woman who rode horses and whose parents were alcoholics. And then that fateful day when my progeny, my proud Zionist baby sprung forth, I cried, wondering, “Is this even my child?” He is beautiful and blond and blue-eyed. There is not an ounce of Jew in this child whatsoever. But appearances can be deceiving. Despite his beautiful Master Race features, he was born with the digestive system of a 45-year-old accountant–acid reflux, irritable bowl syndrome and a strange psoriasis that made his skin feel like my sister’s Fendi purse.

So what does this have to do with you dressing your child like Hitler? I could make some excuse about ironic racism, about taking the power away from such symbols of hate by embracing them and cloaking my child in swastikas. I would be lying. I just enjoy fucking with people, and in my neighborhood in Brooklyn, where there are more same-sex parents than traditional families, your baby dressed as Das Führer will cause a shitstorm. Especially when young Lizbeth is dressed as a suffragette at the Halloween parade with a sash around her that reads “Votes for Women,” your son’s shoe-shine Hitler ‘stache is liable to raise a few hackles. I try to mitigate the anger by dressing up as Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism, and thus creating an ironic nexus between father and son, or if you were so inclined a walking Hegelian dialectic. But, yeah, total bullshit. Sue me, I got problems, and I work them out through my son in profoundly strange and disturbing ways.

Happy Halloween!