"paghat" wrote in message

Would YOU have guessed a regular old Marin County HOA would expend months
of volunteer energy & easily get 600 signatures practically overnight in
their desire to stop Orthodox Jews from living just outside the boundaries
of their HOA -- as their first excuse for their behavior, a fear that
Orthodox Jews will be racing their cars through the neighborhoods on
Saturday while children play!

That is truly bizarre!


But when these enclaves define themselves as Christian and/or advertise
how many churches their community has (INVARIABLY leaving off the lists
the only synogogue & the only Buddhist temple), the message is pretty
damned clear without them having to be more explicit.

Whenever I see anything defining themselves as "Christian", I'm afraid my
prejudices come to the fore. I have an extremely gut-negative response! My
experiences with people who make a big deal about being Christian is that
they are anything *but. Yuck.

If you think these same people LIKE Jews, you've clearly made it
easy for them to not notice you are one, in the same way faggots & dykes
learn to keep heads down.

We've always had a mezuzah on our door wherever we've lived. Not terribly
noticable I suppose and most people, if they did notice it, wouldn't have
any idea what it meant anyway. Where we lived with the HOA also had a
synagogue, so, obviously not the typical (if you are right about most of the
rest of the country) HOA community. My husband, though, is *stereoypically
Jewish looking. Dark, bearded, large aquiline nose, etc. I've run into the
occassional redneck out here who has (without knowing I was Jewish) made
disparaging comments about Jews, but, overall, this area (with the highest
education level in the country and in the top ten for household income) is
quite enlightened and diverse. I suppose I do take it for granted at this
point and would have a hard time living anywhere else.

Which is not to say you might be wonderfully
lucky to live in a genuinely liberal area, & no reason to look TOO hard
for another underlying reality.

Yup.