Gentiles must cease their relentless cultural appropriation of bagels

April 4, 2016 • 11:00 am

There is much talk about cultural appropriation these days, as oppressed groups are waking up to the great harm that has been done to them by PoPs (persons of power) who simply steal aspects of minority culture. This shameless theft has involved everything from mis-prepared General Tso’s chicken in college cafeterias to Americans being allowed to try on kimonos for fun—and even to dreadlocks being worn by white people.

It’s distressing that this rampant borrowing of foods, clothing, hairstyles, and behaviors from their proper cultures isn’t merely done, but done without acknowledging the oppression that historically weighed on the offended groups. The fact that General Tso’s chicken, for instance, is not a real Chinese dish should not distract us from the fact that it’s regularly enjoyed by Westerners wholly ignorant of the atrocities committed by the Japanese on the Chinese during World War II.

But one oppressed group has been the victim of rampant cultural appropriation without the slightest acknowledgement, recognition, or opprobrium. I am referring, of course, to the Jews.

Although cultural theft from Jews is rampant (look at the Yiddish words and phrases like “oy vey,” “nosh”, and “schmuck” that regularly litter the language of oppressive Christians), I want to mention perhaps its clearest instantiation in America—the pervasive consumption of bagels.

I’ll be brief, but I need to establish three things: Jews are an oppressed minority, bagels are a Jewish food, and borrowing foodstuffs from Jews is clearly cultural appropriation. That appropriation is, by the way, defined in its most Sophisticated Form as follows:

. . . a particular power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.

And let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about Jews not being oppressed, regardless of your take on Israel. Historically, Jews are probably the most oppressed religious group, driven from land to land—and pogrom to pogrom—by Christians who viewed them as killers of Christ. Jews were, of course, nearly exterminated in Europe by the Germans, and still experience discrimination everywhere, including the U.S. Remember that only 0.2% of the world’s population is Jewish (in contrast, 22% is Muslim and 5% is Buddhist), and even in America Jews make up only 2% of the population. (I estimate that at least 94.7% of Americans have eaten a bagel.)

Therefore, any element of Jewish culture taken over by non-Jews is cultural appropriation, pure and simple. One might call it Gentile Entitlement.

I thought of this a few weeks ago when I was in a campus coffee shop and observed several students noshing on bagels with cream cheese—students who were clearly not Jewish. And as they shoveled the snack into their maws, they were just as clearly ignorant of the history behind that donut-shaped bread. How dare they be?

Bagels are an Eastern European Jewish food, and combining them with cream cheese and lox, while a later invention, is clearly a Jewish comestible as well. In an article in the Independent on the offense commited by white people who wear dreadlocks, author Wedaeli Chibelushi notes that the real problem is not just cultural theft, but ignorance of the oppression experienced by the co-opted group:

As the black actress Amandla Stenberg says, “appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in”. By wearing dreadlocks without acknowledging their symbolic resistance, Goldstein reduces cultural power to a “cool” trend.  As part of the oppressive culture, he emulates minority tradition while bypassing the discriminations that comes with it.

But as far as that criticism goes for dreadlocks, it goes ten times farther for bagels. After all, not many white people wear dreadlocks, but nearly every goy eats bagels. Not only that, but even the concept of bagels as Jewish food has been stolen by Gentiles. Take, for example, the offensively named “Einstein Bros. Bagel” chain, a name conjuring up Jews (after all, it brings to mind the world’s most famous Jew after Jesus). But it’s a name that’s wholly confected. There are no Einstein Brothers: the name was made up by the Boston Market corporation to sell bagels.

It’s time to bring this to a halt. If you find yourself craving or ordering bagels, at least be mindful of the two millennia of oppression and bigotry weighing on the people who lovingly shaped each ring of bread. And think about how the genuine article, a small chewy circle, has been completely transformed by goyim into a large circular and tasteless pillow of dough. (The use of steamed rather than fried meat in General Tso’s Chicken pales before such corruption.) If these thoughts don’t occur to you as you have your bagel, you don’t deserve to eat it.

As genuine bagel eaters might say, “Hent avek aundzunder beygelekh.” (“Hands off our bagels.”)

bagel-lox1000a
This is Jewish.

292 thoughts on “Gentiles must cease their relentless cultural appropriation of bagels”

    1. Sweatpants and a t-shirt being worn by people who have never even been on the internet. While snacking, too.

      How dare they.

    2. Funny about the pants as my daughter sent me this idea for a skit I did at an atheist comedy night at a pub in Kelowna BC.

      “I have a friend who refuses to wear culturally appropriated items. Which means she’s pretty much always naked, but I don’t have the courage to tell her that nakedness is also another barbaric cultural practice.

      So I’m starting a charity…it’s called fripple—free the nipple—Hopefully nobody dies of culturally appropriated nudity.”

    3. In Kubla Khan, Coleridge clearly implies that pants are not limited to Caucasians:

      And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething
      As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing…

    4. I think that you mean anyone not Persian or from the Central Asian Steppes may not appropriate pants.

      Ancient Romans and Greeks use to look down on pants as being barbaric.

  3. Do Reuben sandwiches count as cultural appropriation??? Ceiling Cat help me I love Reubens…and fancy myself a bit of a connoisseur.

    I’ve got to say; General Relativity, Psychoanalysis and the Italian Symphony are all wonderful, but you jews really outdid yourselves when you invented the Reuben Sandwich!

      2. The Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich, so if you’re not blue-blooded English aristocracy you have no right to partake of one!

    2. Reubens are not only a cultural appropriation, but a cultural misappropriation along the lines of General Tso’s Chicken made with steamed meat. Reubens have both cheese and meat in a single meal, and are therefore not kosher.

      1. I was wondering. Isn’t a bagel with lox and cream cheese not kosher either? You can’t get any milk product at the 2nd Ave Deli. At least, 40 years ago…

        1. The bagel is pareve: No milk products in it, and no meat products in it, either. The cream cheese is what makes the combination dairy. Fish aren’t considered meat. Meat applies only to land-based animals. Fish, like plain bagels, are pareve (neutral).

          1. I recall a few years ago remarking on the irony of a McDonalds(?) Bacon Bagel that a young colleague was tucking into; she looked at me blankly, had no concept of bagels being ‘ethnic’ food…

        2. The reason you can’t get milk products at the 2nd Ave. Deli is that they serve meat. So, no cream cheese and no Asiago bagels.

          Fish is neither meat nor milk, so it can be served with either — but not both at the same time.

        1. That was mostly a “look what I know” post. Lantog referred to the Italian symphony, or Symphony No. 4 by Felix Mendelssohn, who was Jewish by birth, but who made a big deal of rejecting Judaism and embracing Lutheranism. His 5th symphony is nicknamed the “Reformation” because he based the last movement on the hymn “Ein Feste Burg” (A Mighty Fortress), whose text and tune are both by Luther himself.

          1. Oh, I thought you were talking about another 5th symphony — Beethoven’s. Because in his letters, he makes disparaging remarks about his jewish publisher, named Schlesinger. I always wonder if that was the same family as the one whose wife Flaubert fell for in “L’éducation sentimentale”. But now I show off…;)

          2. IIRC, Mendelsohn the composer was the son (or grandson?) of Mendelsohn the art critic, who came out of the ghetto soon as that was legally permissible, and married a non-Jewish woman. So Mendelsohn the composer was not born of a Jewish mother, hence not Jewish by Jewish law, but still Jewish under Nazi Law.

            Incidently, Mendelsohn the critic told his future bride a very romantic story in which his own hunchback had originally been hers, but when the angels told him, before he was born, he begged to carry it for her, so she, as an otherwise beautiful woman, wouldn’t have to deal with the public humiliation, and had done so very proudly ever since. That’s what won her over, or so I read, somewhere.

          3. Different Mendelssohns, I think. Felix’s father was a banker, his grandfather a philosopher, and his mother was also Jewish – a member of a prominent Jewish family, in fact.

          4. Felix’s grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was the most famous Jewish man in Germany – he came out of the shtetl, studied philosophy and languages, and became a famous Enlightenment Jewish thinker (and the model for Lessing’s Philo-Semitic play “Nathan the Wise”). His son Abraham was a banker – yes, part of the profession that also included the Rothschilds, at Mendelssohn and Co., one of Germany’s foremost banks in the 19th C – and married Lea, the granddaughter of Daniel Itzig, who was Frederick the Great’s “Hofjuden” (“Court Jew” – that is, the person who did private banking for the king). In 1815, Abraham had his children Fanny and Felix converted to Lutheranism – as did half the Jews of Berlin that year, out of fear of the post-Napoleonic reaction. So Felix was converted to Lutheranism at age 7; evidence is that he became a pious believer in Lutheranism and didn’t identify as Jewish. He died just before the post-1848 reaction that brought the racial anti-Semitism of Richard Wagner, whose polemics targeted the late Felix Mendelssohn. He is surely one of the supreme examples of the complexities surrounding Jewish assimilation; the Jews of 19th-c Germany identified strongly with being German, and yes, that worked out tragically.

    4. The Reuben is not a Jewish food. Ruining a good piece of pastrami by putting cheese on it, takes it out of the kosher category and makes it a goyishe snack.

    1. Emeril gets a pass, due to the sheer number of Bar Mitzvah brunches he did when he was head chef at Commander’s Palace in New Orleans. (he did mine 🙂 )

      1. What a lovely coincidence that Emeril did your Bar Mitzvah brunch! 🙂

        Did you notice the Chinese-looking bagel baker at the very start of the video?! It reminded me of a fairly recent discovery pointing to the Chinese having invented golf!

  5. You sure salmon is Jewish?

    And if Japanese put mayo in their nigiri sushi, who is appropriating whom?

    2. Last time I was in Japan, corn was used liberally on Japanese pastries. Shocking in that corn isn’t Japanese, but also in that corn kernels aren’t seen as embellishments on the pastries of westerners.

        2. Maybe you should try it in my mother’s hometown, Madison MN, where they proudly have this in the town square. (She wasn’t Scandinavian, tho, and I never had it as a kid. But just think of it as grits made outta cod.)

          And yes, that’s why there’s aquavit!

    4. Or manischewitz. Sure there are always a few outliers, but in general that novelty will also stay safely ensconced in Jewish culture.

      1. I dunno… we love manischewitz. Makes a good chicken and wine soup too! Cook with tons of fresh ginger and garlic and a little cane/brown sugar. It’s also great for people with sensitivity to the high tannin content in other red wines.

  7. And as Paddies, Spike Milligan and I have always been horrified at the ultimately insulting British cultural appropriation of Irish identity: “Irish stew, in the name of the law.”

  8. We may have lost bagels, but I draw the line at stuffed derma.

    Give me Kishka or give me death!

    Hands off those intestines!!!11!!

    2. their horror only slightly exceeding cinnamon raisin and — god help me — jalapeno cheddar.

  12. One might call it Gentile Entitlement.

    How about: Gentitlement? You could even write a semi-regular update on the latest horror of gentitlement. 🙂

  13. Ummm, how did you know the students eating bagels were not Jewish? Seems to me there’s some stereotyping going on. I’m of Jewish descent, but I look German (the other side of the family.) And my Jewish descent is Sephardic.)

      1. Israel is in Asia. Also, a lot of Jews historically in Persia, Russia, Turkey, Uzbekistan, etc. 🙂
        At least I didn’t say, “Ummmm”.

    1. The point seems to be about the appropriators accompanying their appropriations with proper knowledge, so you don’t have to feel embarrassed at all, if you recognize the historical significance of what you are doing. Now, please, enjoy a nice bagele mit schmeer over a good book on European Jewish History.

    1. A little more seriously: Here, in Texas, I introduced two men to each other with high praise, calling each a “mensch”, the Yiddish word for “a real human being, someone with heart, someone with humanity, someone who knows how to care about others and do the right thing.” (My wording for the universal definition.)

      Both faces looked shocked. It turned out, both had been taught (by non-Jews, of course) that “mensch” meant exactly the opposite, that it was the worst insult ever, and that when Jew tells someone he’s a mensch, it’s meant to insult him without him knowing it, laughing behind his back in front of his face, doubling the insult.

      I googled and emailed both men legitimately sourced definitions. One was never heard from, again, despite that. No doubt, “mensch” was not only appropriated but deliberately mis-appropriated by antisemites (I suspect the Nazi/neo-Nazi sort), who take their antisemitism as such a natural thing, they’d be offended to be so labeled, while simultaneously dishing out the hate.

      1. That is quite consistent with the widespread belief that the word “Jew” is itself an insult and must be replaced by “Jewish person” in civil discourse, a belief linguistically internalized even by many Jews. I had never heard of what you recounted, and am glad you alerted me to it, saving me possible future bewilderment — thank you!

        1. I grew up in The South — how Deep South is a matter of contention, but the White House of the Confederacy was walking distance away — and I’d never heard of this. I was well into my 50s, when coming across it in Texas. It was generations old, at least, according to both men, so I expect, when such people were told they were mensches, they pretended to know nothing, then went home and told their families what they knew, which was all based on the lies they’d been taught, growing up.

          I put it in the same category as Elders of Zion material.

      2. It may not have been a deliberate conspiracy. To an English speaker, the ‘sch’ sound is rather suspect, not least because it leaves one a little apprehensive of getting splashed. And among the few best-known-to-non-Jew Yiddish words are e.g. schmaltz, kitsch, schlock, schmuck – all of which are uncomplimentary. So if I heard the word ‘mensch’ without a prior explanation I would be at least vaguely suspicious.

        cr

      3. You should have explained to them that a mensch is the sort of person who’d go out of his way to do a mitzvah. I’m sure that would have clarified it for them.

        1. Gee, I didn’t think of that. I wonder what sort of mis-directing definition of mitzvah they’d have learned from their antisemitic source?

  16. I doubt there’s any such thing as an entirely single culture phenomenon. Cultures mix and, in doing so, customs, rituals and habits mingle. So talking about cultural appropriation in the first place is meaningless.

    Anyhow, I really don’t like bagels.

    1. Have you ever had a real one? Soft on the inside and crusty on the outside from being boiled?

        1. I’n no expert on keeping kosher, but I believe for a food item to be kosher, all ingredients need to be kosher. I would think if you used the water to wash down your pig then it couldn’t be used to make bagels. But since it is boiled….who knows?

          One example of kosher laws:

          “All products that grow in the soil or on plants, bushes, or trees are kosher. However, all insects and animals that have many legs or very short legs are NOT kosher. Consequently, vegetables, fruits and other products infested with such insects must be checked and the insects removed.”

          3. I believe them just from watching the videos and knowing how scientifically they approach whatever they do. Thank you for the link. Soon as I have the proper facility, I’m going to try these things. Back in college, I taught myself to bake bread from scratch. It turned out to be a great way to entice other students to come visit, and as we were all “starving students”, it was economical, too. I miss that.

  18. This wonderful post reveals the lunacy of those who take offense at the supposed evils of cultural appropriation. It seems to me that if group X adopts certain customs of group Y then group X is implicitly praising at least one element of group Y’s culture. But, I do not doubt that this inanity will eventually pass.

    I have wondered as to why it is at this time in our nation’s history that certain people, particularly college students, have gotten so worked up about the trivial and essentially non-existent “problem” of cultural appropriation. I speculate that it may have something to do with the fact that students feel powerless to change the real things that negatively impact their lives: high tuition, student debt, income inequality and diminished job opportunities. Hence, to psychologically relieve the anxiety caused by a not particularly bright future, they work to change a situation, i.e., cultural appropriation, which although essentially meaningless makes them feel better. They will quickly forget about cultural appropriation when their first 50 job applications get rejected.

    1. I had always understood that “cultural appropriation” was a positive sign of one culture admiring and accepting aspects of another group so much that they were willing to blur and cross lines. The necessary precursor to civil rights it seems to me is a minority of the majority recognizing, admiring, and adopting a ‘good trick’ the Others have. Have a new ‘hero.’ That means the oppressive majority is finally beginning to stop thinking of another culture as either uniformly inferior or different.

      The negative pushback comes then from the folks who don’t WANT the open-minded to be so open-minded. “You will NOT listen to that ‘voodoo music’ (jazz.) You will NOT eat that Mexican food. You will not normalize Them.”

      1. Imagine the first time an Italian bit into a new world tomato.

        If only for a moment, and only on that one subject, that man had to acknowledge that these savages are not without value. That for all their primitive ways, they managed to cultivate one of the finest foods to grace the Italian palette.

        And what native american can say with sincerity, that their life wouldn’t be just a little bit darker without the occassional plate of pasta.

        “Cultural appropriation” brings people together. It’s the threads of our culture crossing over and intertwining with each other, making both cultures stronger and richer.

        To not culturally appropriate is to stick everyone in their own little ghetto. To never learn from others, and to disallow others from adapting or improving their own creations. Leaving everyone worse off.

        1. Yes, the interchanging of positive values and traditions between different cultures can only enrich the world.

        2. Pasta is not even Italian originally. Legend has it that it was brought there while the Chinese (supposed inventors of the stuff – though I think I have a Persian cook book that claims pasta was from that end of the silk road) were being oppressed by the Mongols.

        3. “Imagine the first time an Italian bit into a new world tomato.”

          So what on earth did Italians put on their pizza before then?

          (Probably the same stuff, whatever it may have been, as the British used to have with their sausages BP**)

          cr

          ** Before Potatoes

  22. I’ve only had a bagel once in my life. It looked like the one in the picture, with salmon and cream cheese. I was in a situation where I had to eat it with a knife and fork, and the knife was blunt. It rather put me off them, and I haven’t had one since.

    1. There is no situation in which one has to eat it with a knife and fork. That’s almost blasphemous. You can use a knife to cut it in half, but a fork? How would that even work? I honestly can’t figure out where you are expected to stick the fork?

      1. Into the bits I stuck in my mouth. I spent the whole time desperate to pick it up with my fingers.

        I went to a restaurant in New Caledonia with a German friend once and ordered pizza. When it came, I picked it up with my fingers and she gave me a shocked look. I thought maybe it was just because she was German, but then I noticed that half the restaurant was looking at me in a scandalized way. I had to eat that with my knife and fork too, and it just wasn’t the same.

        As far as I’m concerned, all food tastes better if you can eat it with your fingers! 🙂

        1. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if some researcher found chemoreceptors in our fingertips which acted like tastebuds, proving that we really can appreciated food better when eaten with our fingers? I wouldn’t be surprised, as it makes evolutionary sense.

          1. I never thought of that, but it does make sense.

            When you’re testing a new food source in the bush, the first thing you do is touch it to see if your skin shows any adverse reactions. Next is touching it to your lips to see whether they go numb or something else bad, and so it goes on. That must be similar to what our ancestors did. It’d be cool if the receptors actually included some for taste.

          3. Good question.

            The following articles are interesting. As we all know, texture (and appearance, while we’re at it), add to our enjoyment of food, including how something feels to the touch of our fingers. Smell and taste take the cake, except for fish and flies and other critters.
            http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/question/2687/
            http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2012-12-26/health/fl-jjps-taste-1226-20121226_1_flavors-taste-buds-smell

            http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/psych115s/notes/lecture11/
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense

            It would be cool to be able to taste through our fingers but I imagine we’d want an on/off button. 🙂 I wonder if anyone with synesthesia has this ability.

          4. Anything you touch with your fingers ends up under your nose in a matter of seconds (unless you have trained rigorously to avoid doing so, or sit on your hands). E.g., there was a study published last year showing that people sniff their hands after handshakes. So there’s probably not much of a fitness increment in adding olfactory-grade chemoreception to the already-densely-innervated fingertips.

            Senses can end up in surprising places though. Some species of seasnakes have light-sensitive tails, so the snake knows when it’s fully entered a shelter and doesn’t leave a tasty lure hanging out. (As far as I know, this hasn’t been looked for in a wide range of land snakes, so might be more common.)

  24. “As the black actress Amandla Stenberg says, “appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in”. By wearing dreadlocks without acknowledging their symbolic resistance, Goldstein reduces cultural power to a “cool” trend.”

    – does this mean, according to Stenberg, that white people simply cannot wear dreadlocks? Or can they do so only if “they acknowledge their symbolic resistance”? What form should the ‘acknowledgement’ take? If I, say, record a youtube video in which I ‘acknowledge the symbolic resistance” of dreadlocks, may i then wear dreadlocks?

    1. And what about Bob Marley and other mixed race people? Are they half-appropriating dreadlocks?

      1. And what about black people, who simply wear the dreadlocks because they think they look cool, with no knowledge of their history or symbolism?

        1. We’re all going to have to start wearing those big placards that hang down a person’s front and back, detailing our understandings of, and remorse for, all the “wrongs” our oppressive ancestors committed on this planet throughout history; Ooops! I meant, “hxtory”- sorry!

      1. In the case of the bagels, I think large financial reparations are in order, too….

      2. See, the problem here is cultural appropriation of elderly culture. Young people should not be allowed to give the “get off my lawn” speech about anything, including someone else’s fashion. Its ageistly appropriative to be that curmudgeonly.

    3. what about people who just don’t want to brush their hair? do they need to vocally proclaim their not at all symbolic resistance to socially acceptable grooming?

  25. According to the author of The Independent article, Goldstein is guilty of more than just cultural appropriation:
    ““My hair, my rules, my body”, Goldstein asserts, displaying a deep sense of entitlement. ”

    Imagine that – feeling a deep sense of entitlement about his own hair and body!
    The monster!

    Maybe I’m mistaken, but didn’t Lincoln fight a war so that all Americans could have this right?

  26. When I was growing up in New York City in the 1950s, there was only one kind of bagel: plain. It was damn good with its hard crust as it was bought freshly baked at the local bakery and nobody had the least desire for any other kind. Now there are many different kinds, most of which taste awful, particularly packaged bagels. Blueberry bagels? Give me a break! Now that is cultural genocide.

  28. Bagels have a long history of use by Christians. Bagels were given out to children attending Christening ceremonies, at least in Lithuania (according to my grandmother). I think that pretzels as we know them have a similar history. A colleague of mine told me of a Jewish baker in Lviv, Ukraine whom he knew who used to knead the bagel dough by stomping on it with his bare feet in a big wooden tub.

      1. Yuck! I may never be able to look any fermented comestible in the eye again. The image of yeasty feet will haunt me for some time.

  31. My partner is very fond of challa bread, as he is Chinese I am not sure if he is appropriating or not – should I tell him to stop it? I prefer Polish Chleb Zwykly na Zakwasie. I am not Polish, I am from Essex; should I be ashamed?

      1. Help I’m being oppressed! Essexboiz are people too! And we have nothing anyone wants to appropriate . . .

  32. When I was growing up, bagels were a common food in our (gentile) home. (My parents lived and still live in an area with many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds.) So was sliced ham, at least for a while. It wasn’t long before I tried them together.

    Before I largely gave up on coldcuts, I used to also buy the two together when I was a student at CMU – I lived in Squirrel Hill. Those who know Pittsburgh may know why that might have been odd. In fact, outside that very Giant Eagle is the only place where I’ve encountered Jewish proselytization. A Lubavitcher (according to their pamphlet) gave me something for gentiles about the “Noahide laws” after I said “no” to “are you Jewish?”

  33. Which brings to mind the pirate joke I heard not too long ago:

    It’s about two pirates and their misadventures. Nevermind the misadventures, the pirates were named Morty and Saul — you know, the Jewish pirates from Brooklyn!

        1. Nothing made of flour could be further from a bagel than matza. Are you kidding me? (Cuz if you are, I’m so literal, I’ll fall for it like a fool.) Gevalt!

  38. PCC, you triggered me with a photo of that lovely bagel. I am going to whine about it on twitter now !!!

    😛

    This line from the Independent article blew my mind:

    “”“My hair, my rules, my body”, Goldstein asserts, displaying a deep sense of entitlement.””

    Authoritarian leftists screech endlessly about bodily autonomy, until the time that it intersects with the pet cause of an ‘oppressed’ group, at which time they throw BA under the bus.

  39. We are at a unique time in the history of our species. Millennia after millennia has marked the appropriation of one culture by another, and all peoples that have ever contacted another have done it. It is like horizontal gene transfer between bacteria, only this is horizontal meme transfer.
    Now we are discussing — well, maybe arguing — about whether the perfectly normal process of horizontal meme transfer should be allowed to happen without the proper genuflections and expressions of gravitas. But of course trying to police horizontal meme transfer is like trying to control horizontal gene transfer in a soup of bacteria. People are gonna dress the way they like, dance the way they like, and eat the way they like.

    1. Culture is just a bunch of ideas that are shared by a bunch of people. There is no culture that is unshared. There is no culture that is not “appropriated”. “Appropriation” is just another word for “adopting an idea from someone else”.

      1. “There is no culture that is unshared.”

        That’s the lesson that needs teaching. Here’s another way to say it:

        “What is, is.” or another way

        “If you can know it, I can know it.”

  40. It could be considered a just retribution for past crimes for the goyim to be forced to eat never-boiled “bagels” that taste nothing like actual bagels. And to have these supposed “bagels” get ever larger until the hole is filled in.

    Of course, I have only half a right to say this.

      1. Which brings me to a question: an earlier post mentioned a Chinese eating cholla bread; can a member of one “oppressed” group eat the foods of another oppressed group freely without committing Cu.Ap.? If the two were not equally oppressed, would it mean that the lesser-oppressed one could only eat SOME of the others ethnic food? And, by the way, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

          3. According to Dr John Dee, who coined the term, the angels (which he was quite sure he saw in his peer-glass) had faces ‘very fair and bright’

          4. So, they can’t really dance, much less on the head of a pin… Can’t play basketball, either… unless, maybe, they get lucky at appropriating the moves!

      2. My Dad was, but to me that makes me half, not zero.

        I sometimes lie down on my left side and punch upwards with my left hand while punching downwards with my right hand.

        1. I admire you for claiming that Jewish half, rather than hiding from it. Your last name shows which half is which.

          Incidently, there was a wave of Jewish men marrying out of the faith, leaving many female peers without Jewish husbands. It was prominent in The South, and my own brother was/is included. Tell a Jewish boy that he can date (and do more) with a nonJewish girl, but that he must marry a (virgin) Jewish girl, and this is what happens. Many children of such marriages do not claim their paternal Jewish half. I’m glad you claim yours.

          1. Reform Judaism lost that limitation, and the State of Israel accepts for aliyah anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, whether maternal or paternal, because these are whom the Nazis targeted for elimination. The exception, with regard to aliyah, is a Jew who leaves Judaism for another religion. I think leaving god for atheism is allowed, as it should be, considering how common it is/was, especially after the Holocaust.

          3. Ooh, neat thought! Wasn’t there something about a Y chromosome identifier of cohanim, too? Or was that a hoax I also fell for?

          4. Regardless, the rule is an inductive/recursive data structure without a base case, unless it is supposed to be the very first life form on earth, in which case the vast majority of living things on earth qualify for membership … (dependent also on whether one can leave or not, I guess)

  42. At my next party, we are going to wear bagels as hats, like the sombrero fiesta we heard about a while back.

    And here’s a joke:

    Why do sea gulls live by the sea?

    Because if they lived by the bay, they’d be ____.

    1. This made me giggle out loud. My daughter would refer to this as ‘Dad humor’.

    2. Reminds me of a high school biology class where the teacher said something that sounded like “everything is made up of cells” and I start riffing about pen-cells and window-cells. I may have misheard him, but the kids sitting near me thought it was funny.
      (I often got oppressed for talking in class, on my ‘up’ days.)

      1. I did the pun too: in my high school at the time there was a fundraising activity. The same teacher who taught grade 9 biology also was responsible for the fundraising drive. So I did a drawing of a “ciliated sell” 😉

      2. My sister once asked our father what kinds of Jews there were, and before any adult could answer, our brother piped up with: “Orange Jews, Apples Jews, Grape Jews…”

  43. I buy fresh bagels from my local kosher deli in London, they’re wonderful. Then I fill them with ham and cheese, and no I don’t give a damn.

    Your culture will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

  44. Bagel and dreadlocks. Borrowing cultures have always existed. But when a Black person gets discriminated against, not getting a job, housing because of your dreadlocks while White folks who borrowed the hairstyles are seen as cool…It is comparing someone who burns a book and a authority burning a library.

      1. That it’s wrong for white people to celebrate elements of black culture because black culture is frowned upon if expressed by black people.

        Perhaps there should be a law against white people wearing dreads? Ticket them 500$ and 3 days in jail or something?

        1. People can wear whatever they want, that is not the issue. The issue is empathy, understanding where the other is coming from. From my own perspective as a Black man who constantly receives the double standard treatment, cultural appropriation is not as funny as the bagel story. My former employers in a High School warned me for my “non-professional” appearance, not for the lack of suit and tie but for my long hair dreadlocks, while there was no issue for my former White colleagues with long hair. I had to sue the school. The headmaster was Black and I had more support from White folks ! Now, when White people have dreadlocks and are praised for celebrating Black culture, I am both happy and sad ! Happy for the openness White folks can have and sad for the way society treated me compared to them. Some will understand, some won’t, some will pretend not to understand…

  46. I like the flattened bagels with lots of sesame seeds on top. I toast them and cover them with peanut butter and jam. Heaven on Earth.

  47. Well, I must admit to siding with those who disapprove of white people wearing dreadlocks – but only because I find dreadlocked hair (on anyone) unkempt, dirty-looking and deeply unattractive.

    As for the other main subject of the post, I must also admit to never having eaten a bagel. People have mentioned various other Jewish foods that I’ve never heard of and have no idea what they are. Outside of some London districts and a few other urban enclaves, Jews are just not very visible here in the UK, and Jewish culture is far less familiar to us than it is to the inhabitants of New York or Chicago. I’m struggling to remember ever having knowingly met a Jewish person in my 55 years of British life.

    Maybe I need to get out more, appropriate some cultures and find out what I’m missing.

  49. Well, its a good thing the salmon (lox) on the bagel is smoked, otherwise the Japanese would consider it an appropriation of sashimi.

  50. Ironic prose aside, the most offensive new example of cultural appropriation of Jewish culture (and I must specify “new” to distinguish all modern instances from the earliest and most destructive one of all) was someone adding lyrics praising Jesus to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” a song by a Jew about a Jew. The only way I could think of explaining my outrage was this (and I may be taking liberties with someone else’s oppressed culture here, which would add another layer of irony to it all, wouldn’t it?): Imagine you’re an American native, and you have a favorite song about a prominent person in your nation’s history, written by a prominent person of your nation – and one day you hear someone of European descent replacing the words with lyrics talking about how wonderful it is to be a white European. THEN how would you feel?

    1. On the positive side, Jesus was also a Jew. Although it is likely that the (probably) Christian who changed the lyric is ignoring that part of the Jesus narrative

    2. The misuse of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics is an act of cultural EXPROPRIATION. Appropriation is. . . appropriate; and, as several posts here have noted, appropriations have long occurred and will continue to occur among Homo sapiens no matter what. But expropriation can and should be opposed, even destroyed.

      Here’s a current instance of expropriation: the caricature of a male native American brave used by the Cleveland ‘Indians’ as the team’s emblem. Behind this image are 500+ years of genocidal behavior by Europeans against the indigenous peoples of the so-called New World. Sure, changing the culture of the Cleveland ‘Indians’ and their fans would be a small thing, though tough to achieve. But such small things count toward large things. The battle against expropriation need not be, in the long term, a losing one.

    3. “THEN how would you feel?”

      Who cares? Maybe I’d be annoyed. So what? Maybe I’d write a song ridiculing the person who offended me. Maybe they would be offended in return.

      I’ve no privilege that protects me from being offended. And if I take offense when humans borrow the ideas of other humans for their own purposes then I’m an offended idiot. That’s what culture is, shared ideas. Being offended because people share ideas is profoundly stupid.

  52. With rare exceptions, the typical bagel is nothing more than a toroidal shaped piece of bread. It’s oversized, too soft, and fails to adequately resist the impact of teeth and jaws.
    Other than the plain, sesame, onion or pumpernickel bagel anything else is goyische cultural appropriation. Sun-dried, blueberry? Feh!

    BTW, does anyone know where to get a good bagel or pastrami sandwich in Tallahassee, FL? We’re moving there next year.

    1. You could drive 6 hours (429 miles) and come to Flakowitz deli and bakery in Boynton Beach.

      Best Bagels in the area, also, the chocolate babka is wonderful.

      1. Oh heavens, what shall this world come to if we cannot appropriate the foods of other cultures? Does that mean that my family (of Swedish descent) is stuck with pickled herring, hard tack, sour milk, and unspiced brown beans? What shall we do without pizza, which bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original Italian version? What shall we do without hot chocolate, which bears no resemblance to Mayan xocolatl? As long as no one claims that eating Einstein Bros. bagels makes them Jewish (like those folks who believe that wearing beads and feathers “puts them in touch with” Native Americans), I really don’t see the problem.

  53. Jerry,

    This particular post is getting many a knicker twisted. Apparently too much bagel prevented some readers from noticing a tongue poking a cheek.

    1. Well, if they’ve ever read my website and know my views, or noticed the “satire” tag at the bottom, their knickers would be fine. I’ll have to go see which readers didn’t read carefully. They deserve a potch on the tuchus!

  54. I read a travel article written by a Westerner who was traveling in Mongolia, a place where few Westerners venture. The author discovered that Mongolians have bagels, presumably self-invented. Take that, you cultural appropriation fanatics! 🙂

    Seriously, I see cultural appropriation as a sensitivity thing. You can just blow it off, or you can have some empathy for the issues a particular cultural artifact has within the culture that spawned it. I think dreadlocks are a good example; there’s some history of oppression connected with them, and it would do the people of the oppressing culture (even if they aren’t racist) good to respect that.

    An example I like to use is Native American/First Nations artifacts. Now some stuff, like jewelry, is often made for general consumption. I have and wear such jewelry, and I sometimes see Native influences sneaking into my own beaded jewelry designs. OTOH, for a non-Native person to don ceremonial regalia strikes me as being un-empathetic, because the Native rituals have spiritual meaning to people raised in that culture that really don’t transfer to us non-Natives. That really is cultural appropriation of the improper variety.

    But we can laugh at the notion that bagels are inappropriate cultural appropriation, there are really some people who take it that far. I know, for example, that there is at least one person who objects to white people doing beadwork. (She obviously doesn’t know about the rich European beading traditions.) Like most things, there’s a difference between extremes and sensibility; as social creatures, it’s necessary to walk a line, and finding that line varies from person to person.

  55. People eating bagels does not oppress me. It does not rub salt in a wound of cultural oppression because it is more okay for a goy to eat a bagel than a Jew. I will not lose a job for eating a bagel while my gentile co-worker is lauded for their edginess and diversity.

    The same is not true for things like dreadlocks and ethnic clothing.

    Eating ethnic foods is rarely an oppressive act. I may be biased because my lunch was palak paneer which I scooped up with tortilla chips, but I’m not indifferent to the plights of the cultures those foods came from, and I actually do make an effort to buy from the people who invented them.

    There are grey areas, even with Jewish food. I recently explained challah to my local foodie moms who were actually making braided brioche and calling it challah. It has religious significance, deep, and complex, and what they were making only looks like challah, it’s not even an authentic recipe. So we talked. But I didn’t tell them not to eat it.

    Because I’m culturally/ethnically Jewish and the idea of telling people NOT to eat is just ridiculous.

    Have a bagel. It’s good with a schmear. Lox is joy. I like mine with avocado and salt, tomato if they’re in season. But I’m not a purist.

    Eat the bagel.

  56. This has been an illuminating article.

    As a Greek, I will begin enumerating all of the cultural artifacts of my people that have been appropriated over the last 2 millennia and get back to you. It will probably take some time.

  57. Hahahaha! I laughed my butt off at this post. Where I live (rural Michigan)you can’t even find a decent bagel anywhere, so my husband and I have learned to make our own bagels. Real bagels with chewy crusts. Not like that crap Panera markets as bagels.

  58. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. This had never occurred to me, though that’s pretty much the way it goes with privilege. I’ll make sure not to let it happen again.

      1. I have some sympathy with the people who didn’t get the joke, because the “cultural appropriation” thing is so ridiculous to begin with that satire of it can be barely distinguishable from the real thing. Still, it was pretty clear that this post was making fun of the silly excesses of the new mantra.

    2. Umm,that was satire, wasn’t it?

      Or was it?

      Impossible to tell, I think.

      My brain is starting to hurt.

      cr

  59. Jerry is jet-lagged. His brain is still on 1 April. Tell me this is a joke appropriate to that day, or somehow delayed by four days in some time-warp!

  60. A bagel with cream cheese and salmon, good coffee, a breezy Sunday morning in NY, sitting outside a nice restaurant chatting with friends…this is simply happiness to me (I intend to go on appropriating, you all be blessed by the Sun and stars)

  61. Jews eat a lot of Chinese food, especially on Christmas and Easter, so it evens out.

  62. Well, I can plead not guilty. I don’t even know what a bagel is. I’ll stick with croissants and pizza, thanks very much.

    cr

    1. Do you have tomato sauce on your pizza? Europeans culturally appropriated tomatoes from the native North Americans.

      1. Actually, I loathe, hate and detest tomato sauce (though I will eat tomatoes). I loathe almost all forms of flavoured slime, in fact, except cauliflower cheese sauce and mushroom sauce. I loathe mayonnaise, pickles, tomato sauce, ketchup, tartare sauce, mustard, chutney, marmite vegemite and other forms of axle grease, vinegar, ‘dip’, salad cream, apple sauce, … oh, here’s the list:
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sauces

        🙁

        cr

          1. Garlic butter I can manage, but it’s kind of academic since I don’t like lobster. Or any seafood except fish, preferably fried in batter.

            You could feed entire countries on the things I won’t eat. 😉

            cr

          3. Umm, no, at least not for the sort of ethical reasons that most people are vegetarian. (Though if I had to kill the food myself I’d probably become vegetarian very rapidly).

            No, I just have capricious and finicky tastes. I much prefer a nice cheeseburger or a mince-n-cheese pie to a steak, for example. So if technology could produce convincing steak-flavoured stuff I’d never miss ‘real’ meat.

            cr

          1. Tomatoes were on the diet in Central and South America long before there were Aztecs (Mexica), at least in the sense that they were a settled dominant population living in the Valley of Mexico. That didn’t happen until the 13th or 14th Century. Tomatoes were probably domesticated at least a millennia before that.

          2. Are you saying the Aztecs culturally appropriated tomatoes from the indigenous South Americans? Bad Aztecs!

  63. The author really needs to get over himself. Cultures have been assimilating items from other cultures since the dawn of mankind. A better stance on the subject by the author would have been “hey! Did you know that bagels were originally Jewish and from Poland? No? Well, here is the history of the bagel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel). Now days they can be prepared any number of ways with all sorts of flavors (http://www.jewocity.com/blog/top-10-bagel-flavors-thursday%E2%80%99s-top-ten-list/503) but most Jews in the United States keep it simple and smother the toasted bagel with lox (smoked salmon) and cream cheese.”

    1. Are you really that clueless that you don’t see that this piece is satirical, as is clearly stated in the tag at the bottom? You need to go elsewhere, as you’re apparently ignorant of the rules of this site.

  64. I suppose this would rule out corn (maize), potatoes, tomatoes, chilies and eggplant (aubergine), or does cultural appropriation only refer to the preparation of food?

    What about the use of curare?

    Curiously there is a subtle undercurrent of using “bush tucker” (mostly native fruits and vegetables) in cooking here in Oz.

  66. 1683 — According to legend the first bagels rolled into the world in 1683 when a Viennese baker wanted to pay tribute to Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland. King Jan had just saved the people of Austria from an onslaught of Turkish invaders. The King was a great horseman, and the baker decided to shape the yeast dough into an uneven circle resembling a stirrup (or ‘beugal’). (Other German variations of the word are: ‘beigel’, meaning ‘ring’, and ‘bugel’, meaning bracelet.)

  67. I laughed myself silly during Jerry’s joust with culture, and I’ve just read through the comments, and was amazed at how many missed the fun. In Australia (er….at least in cities), we take our bagels seriously, and I’m offended when a buns with a hole in it is called ‘a bagel’.

    Thank goodness for appropriation, as my cultural heritage is Scottish – ’nuff said. Scots are great philosophers and engineers, however, hideous cooks. My Nana could make food really …last.

    1. You can relax, I think haggis is probably safe from cultural appropriation any time soon.

      cr

        1. (Wondered when you’d pop up)

          Okay, we promise not to eat your brains…

          😉

          cr

  68. Now listen up all you folks who are distressed by tough white guys who wear dreadlocks. You don’t know your history. Whites invented dreadlocks (long ago). Blacks later did the appropriating (or mis-appropriating). In ancient Greece Spartan soldiers wore dreadlocks as a means of intimidating their enemies. Apparently, certain days were set aside as days off by opposing armies. Spartan soldiers would sit around weaving (is this the right word?) the hair of their buddies into dreadlocks. Spies from the opposing army were invited into camp to see this spectacle. The dreadlocks were supposed to frighten the spies who then went back to their own troops spreading the word about how tough the Spartans were and unlikely it was that they could be defeated. At least, that was how it was supposed to work. I assume the Spartans were white guys (maybe sun tanned).

    Man, I love lox and bagels and I’m not even Jewish. I got to get me some real soon.

      1. Those “dreaded locks” of the Spartans were the origin of the word “dreadlocks.”

  69. Irish history – century after century of domination by foreign forces – millions of Irish starved to death in the 1800s, in what now would be called genocide, had to win independence by revolution – many martyrs over the centuries – faced racism when coming to the US – “Irish Need Not Apply” were the job adverts – and yet “everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day”, and how many non-Irish go to St. Patrick’s Day Parades…do you go to a ‘pub’? Had an Irish coffee? Have Waterford Crystal? Own a cable-knit sweater? Have an Irish Setter? Drink Irish whiskey? Have a clover lawn? How dare you! Really, do you not know love when you see it? Love of bagels & lox, of Chinese stir-fry, lasagna, Indian Palak Paneer, Native American fry-bread. These cultures do not have a problem exposing the Caucasians to their cultural heritage. And all of these cultures have had tragic pasts. In fact, they build thriving businesses on such a concept. What exactly is your problem? And in case you don’t know, many white cultures have had tragic histories, genocides, but no one reads about them. My French Huguenot ancestors were slaughtered and whoever survived had to flee France with nothing but the clothes on their backs. My Irish ancestors were basically slaves to the English, and then were purposely starved to death; those that could walk and gather a few cents fled Ireland in order to survive. Most countries have tales of genocide and tragedy. OMG, take a look at Africa, Burma, the aborigines in Australia and Canada.It’s not all about you.

    1. What exactly is my problem? People like you who, as newbies, come over to a site and excoriate the host for completely wrong reasons. Have you read this site before in which I disagree repeatedly with the “cultural appropriation” critics? Did you see “satire” in one of the tags at the bottom? Nope, you’re just a newbie who wants to lecture us all for the wrong reasons. YOUR problem is that you’re on a high horse but too dense to know that my article was satirical. And, of course, you’re rude, which is forbidden in the Roolz (something else you apparently didn’t read). Your comments here are no longer welcome.

  71. Then Jews in the U.S. need to stop their cultural appropriation of all things WASP. Ralph Lauren, I’m looking at you, you wannabe. Off to my Heeb-free country club now. 😀

  72. I am not even sorry to say this, but this is a STUPID post. With terror happening all over the place, a world which is full of hate, you are wasting our time with this load of malarkey?

    Eating and enjoying foods from other cultures is a great thing. It expands people’s palates and their minds. It might even teach them something about another culture.

    1. Oy, yet another rude person who didn’t seem to realize that the piece was satirical. Did you see the tag, or ever read anything else on this site? How thick can people be? Anyway, you’re not welcome here (did you read the Roolz) any more.

      1. To my mind, the finest satire contains nary a nod nor wink, rhetorically. The clues are subtler than that, subtexts of the very sincerity with which the apparently righteous author pushes his points.

        And even the most outrageous assertions, when cleverly done, can fool an audience. Example: Jonathan Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal.’

        ‘I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.’

        Many thanks to PCC(E) for almost nourishing satire.

    2. The humor is subtle, but not so opaque that most people couldn’t catch on to the joke. All the other commenters seem to have understood the absurdity and taken the post in the spirit in which it was intended.

      1. Personal confession: I’ve a history of taking things too literally. The post seemed odd, but I went with it. I’m an idiot, that way. It never occurred to me to look at the tags, and all the serious stuff PCC(E) posts are so well grounded, I didn’t think… It’s a problem I need to address. I should actually think more often.

  73. I’m sorry, but Jews had ~4,000 years to figure out that cinnamon and sugar actually made that tasteless hunk of boiled bread edible and the fact that they didn’t negates any claim that they have to the sole right of the bagel. Viva la doughnut!

    1. What puzzles me is the significant number of clueless newbies who have suddenly appeared here. Where are they coming from? Has somebody shared this on Tw*tter or something?

      cr

        1. I should probably clarify – I did not intend to imply that *all* newbies were clueless! Just some of them, who (mostly) promptly got pounced on by Prof CC.

          Nevertheless, there did seem to be a lot more (of the clueless sub-variety) than with the average post, which suggested they must have been pointed in this direction by something. That something being, we now know, Farcebook.

          Can we put you down as one of the non-clueless variety? 😉

          cr

        2. Welcome, and I hope you spend the time to play ketchup. Or should that be catsup? 🙂

          This is a cool place to learn about all kinds of things!

  75. Fortunately, I have some Scottish ancestors, so I can’t be accused of culturally appropriating the wee dram of fine Isle of Islay libation I’m about to sip after reading all this!

  76. Funny that in the mid 90s people like the author of this joke of an article, made a huge push to make sure children were exposed to as many cultures as possible, now that these children are adults and have learned to embrace these cultures, they’re now stealing it? This is the most intellectually dishonest garbage I’ve ever read. If you have to go this far out of your way to find something to be offended by, I envy your life.

  77. Homo sapiens sapiens probably appropriated some of its early culture from Homo neanderthalensis, yet where is the recognition???

    1. And you’d be surprised (or not) at what I appropriate from my cats, for that matter!

      Indeed, even cats appropriate. I’ve one who was raised by opossums, before he was adopted. He eats just like they do, too, which is very strange for a cat.

  78. I just realized I forgot my favourite “multicultural” story and it even involves a bagel. I was out with some friends and colleagues when I was a student at UBC. Where did we have lunch? A bagel shop run by Indians (the Asian kind – Sikh, in this case, religiously speaking). I ordered a jalapeno pizza bagel, and my companion was my friend Audrey, who is a Chinese-Canadian who was, IIRC, actually born in Australia to immigrants proximately from Singapore. I am an Anglophone Montrealer (originally) of Scot/English/German ancestry.

  79. Why hasn’t anyone appropriated the Australian
    Vegemite? It’s dearly loved down under. For me,
    It was an acquired taste. Yum.

    1. I don’t think PCC is too worried about threadjacking, the regulars here do it all the time. Monopolising a thread with many lengthy posts is more likely to arouse displeasure.

      cr

    1. You’re not sad!

      You’re oppressed! PCC oppressed you!

      Get the lingo right, how will you ever become a good SJW!

      😛

  85. As a Jewish male, I take great offense at the blatant co-opting of our people’s oldest tradition. By doing so they cheapen the significance of the singlemost essential unit used to perpetuate our nation. The penis. Yes, I’m referring to circumcision. C’mon, we try so hard to stand out, to be unique, that we go out of our way to choose an act that were sure no one will want to copy and the next thing you know the foreskins are flying off babies.

  86. Although cultural theft from Jews is rampant (look at the Yiddish words and phrases like “oy vey,” “nosh”, and “schmuck”

    “Oy vey” I’ve only every used here. “Schmuck” I recall seeing last week coming up in my German lessons. It might be part of Yiddish, but I only know it from German.
    “Bagel” – I recall seeing stalls selling them in London, but not elsewhere. so surely they’re Londoner’s, not Jewish. (I also recall hearing them mentioned in EN_US TV programmes, but since I try to avoid such, I’m not at all clear on the relevance for “real life”.)

  88. The same can be said about Passover. Every church on the block now holds a Seder with a faux Rabbi.

    Detroit has genuine Jewish bagels that are excellent along with many chains that sell impostors.

  89. The term “gentile” is in itself offensive – go ahead and use it in your own private conversations (if you must), but posting it for everyone to see is shameful.

    1. What have you been smoking? “Gentile” means “not Jewish,” for crying out loud, and is not pejorative except perhaps in the minds of some Snowflakes. You’re a prime example of what this piece was satirizing.

  90. Glad to see you aren’t serious. However, to be honest, I took this as serious BECAUSE of the stupidity with safe spaces at colleges. I’m sorry, but our children today are way too sensitive. They will feel that this is true and you will become responsible for some stupidity about cultural appropriation. These days, it’s not about whether it’s funny, it’s about whether some idiot is going to take it seriously.

    1. Shirley you jest.

      This is precisely the kind of satire that is necessary. Ridicule is the appropriate response to the ridiculous. Oversensitive children are not served by throttling back on humor. Or humour, for that matter.

    2. But isn’t it interesting how a thing can be so ridiculous that it becomes barely distinguishable from a parody?

  91. I thought A) We were a Global community who were expected not only to be tolerant of each other’s differences, but to embrace them, experience them and make them part of the global community that we love…and B)The Melting Pot that is the United States where we all come together as one…not Jewish, French, German, Iranian, Chinese or Russian…but American with vastly different backgrounds that we share. I make my German Apple Cake, love potato pancakes and bratwurst all from my mother’s homeland, but I am thrilled when someone enjoys them, too. Jews have made it a standard to eat Chinese food on Christmas – should all Christians and Chinese be offended? Then why is a Jewish writer offended because people are eating bagels and kugel? Give it up.. you should be thrilled that we love your food…because quite frankly it’s better than English food. Now, get over yourself.

    1. Sorry, but you are apparently one of the few readers who didn’t recognize this article as satire. Did you not see the “satire” label at the bottom? Or have read this site long enough to know that I am an opponent of those who cry “cultural appropriation”?

      Jebus.

    2. “Now, get over yourself.” Really? Seriously? Project much?

      If you can follow your own advice, and get over yourself, perhaps you can see fit to do the right thing: apologize.

      The operative word, there, of course, is “If.”

      1. I’m a little bit surprised that he’s still here. PCC must be jetlagged.

        cr

  93. The cultural appropriation of BAGELS? Hah! I sense carbohydrate fueled envy here… the bagel folk are probably just ticked off that pizza is far more appropriated than BAGELS, and since they can’t be number 1, they just want to take their overstarched donut-like rolls home with them. Stop eating bagels, you say? Well, I say that since we are the melting pot of the world, I’ll just melt some of your cheesy bagel over protectiveness into a fondue pot and dip a nice onion bagel into it. Bit by bit, and slowly, so you can see me assimilate your supposedly culturally protected wheel of calories. But then, on second thought, maybe I WILL pass on them and get a bialy instead – after all, everybody who knows anything knows that a bagel is to a bialy what checkers is to chess!

  94. Surely a much worse example of cultural appropriation is Christians using the Hebrew scriptures as their own, giving them a new name implying they are somewhat outdated, and then claiming Jews have misinterpreted their own religion?

    1. Yes, surely.
      This post was actually meant to poke fun at weak and silly claims of cultural appropriation. Yours is a good one, though.

      1. Well, yeah, I understood it was satire. I am surprised that everyone did not.

        I was making a serious point in my comment, however, that religion is a curious blind spot when it comes to political correctness. (Not just with cultural appropriation, by the way.)

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