Passover . . . "it's like the Jewish Christmas?"

so it seems my long hiatus cost me at least a few devoted readers/commenters. oh well.

expect to spend the night reading hundres of pages of War & Peace. Also need to do a 'critical reading' of Zionist Culture and West European Jewry Before the First World War (by Michael Berkowitz) and write a short response paper. So keeping busy. . .

But I had to share this, overheard in (Columbia University's) Butler Library cafeteria/lounge:

(ok my memory is not perfect so I'm taking some editorial license here, but this is basically what I overheard.)

"So we're going to Florida for Passover."
"Yeah Passover, gosh for years we'd celebrate my birthday with a matzoh-meal cake. It was awful."
"Passover, it's like Christmas, I guess?"
"Christmas?"
"Well, I mean, like even secular Christians celebrate Christmas, it's like that one time of the year. . ."
"Yeah I guess. It's a pretty important holiday."
"Well not like Yom Kippur."
"Yeah, not like Yom Kippur. But it's still pretty important like one of the major 4 holidays. . Like Hannukah, it's pretty much a joke. As a kid you're all into it you think it's about this great miracle until you realize it's basically all about slaughtering some Greeks. It's like Purim, it's not like a real holiday."
"What's Sukkot?"
"Um. . umm."

Well it doesn't look quite as funny here but it was amusing. . I thought of cutting in but I didn't want to disrupt the flow of a conversation that seemed, to me, to sum up the narrative of the 21st century American Jew. Then again, this is probably more than the average American Jewish college kid knows about being Jewish, so maybe this doesn't quite sum it up. . .