Glossary of Jewish Terms for the uneducated reader
Afikoman: Christians celebrating Easter wish they could be us. Oh you search for colorful eggs? Try a part of a large cracker. Your seven year old cousin will become a feral Sherlock Holmes and it will become everyone's problem.
Bar/Bat mitzvah: The service in which a 13 year old Jewish boy/girl becomes a Jewish adult. Your parents will not treat you as an adult though. (They never will.)
Birkat Hamazon: The set of prayers said after meals which at camp is accompanied by a near-canonical set of hand motions and sayings, among the more dubious of which is the classic “I swear I saw her bra.”
Chag sameach: Hebrew for happy holidays!
Fiddler on the Roof: A classic.
Four questions: The thing you still have to sing during Passover because you are still the youngest at the seder despite being old enough to vote and own a gun.
Gefilte fish: an Ashkenazi gelatinous fish loaf; It’s good I promise, just maybe not the first 2000 times you try it.
Goy: a gentile (non-Jewish person), but in yiddish because readme can't spell well enough to risk using the word ~~genital~~ gentile
Hashem: the one you call on at every minor inconvenience
Hamentashen: Geez you try to kill the Jews one time and now they eat a cookie that looks like your hat for the next 2400 years; also somehow the least Jewish cookie you’ll find in a New York City bakery
Jewish Geography: ‘Oh where in Brooklyn?’
Maccabeats: Every year twenty balding former Yeshiva University students, will release a banger of an acapella parody that will get sent to every synagogue email list in the matter of minutes, as G-d intended.
Matzah: The shitty cracker-like unleavened bread we eat on Passover that non-Jews seem to actually like for some fucking reason.
Mazel tov: Congratulations; Said often during bar/bat mitzvahs to distract from the crushing loneliness of middle school
Passover: Like Easter but instead of finding brightly colored eggs you have one hard boiled egg you put on a plate next to some bitter herbs and animal bones. Also instead of a magical rabbit there's bitter herbs you eat on step 9 of 15 steps of a minimum 3 hour service. Actually not at all like Easter but if you want to get drunk and cry for religious reasons boy do I have a holiday for you.
Purim: The holiday that’s much closer to the release of this issue, Purim celebrates the time the Jews of Persia were allowed to kill anyone trying to kill them, after which they all got super wasted. Jews of today are encouraged to get super wasted on Purim in their honor. Also just Jewish Halloween.
Shabbat: Day of rest. Most CMU students don’t celebrate. Also the holiest day of the week to have sex. Most CMU students don’t celebrate.
Shabbos Kodesh: fancy way of saying shabbat
Schlemiel: ‘one who spills their soup’, often upon the unfortunate schlimazel
Schmuck: only an idiot like you wouldn’t know
Shul: another word for temple
Seder: The ‘let’s eat’ part of ‘They tried to kill us, We survived, Let’s eat’
Seder plate: a boiled egg, a shank bone, bitter herbs, horseradish, a vegetable and haroset (mix of chopped fruit and nuts meant to resemble mortar) on a plate. Honestly a pretty normal combination of things to put on a plate. Could not think of a more normal combination of things to put on a plate.
Sukkah: Go touch some grass and find out in person
Temple: another word for shul