Streets of Fire

Some things written by Jeff Kelley, a man in Richmond, Va. He likes aircraft carriers but doesn't really know the intricacies of them (weight, length, etc.)

Monster Jews

When I was in second grade, our teacher introduced us to a nonfiction series called Eyewitness Books. You’ve undoubtedly seen these mini-atlases before, especially if you’re in your 20s and 30s: oversized white books, each title dedicated to a single topic - say, Mesopotamia, Armor, or Dinosaurs - and filled with colorful images and details about the subject at hand. Eyewitness Books came out around the time I was in second grade, and our teacher was thrilled - well, mostly thrilled, as we’d come to find out - to share them with us.

I recall our class sitting in a circle with the teacher, as was typical protocol when having a book read to a group. “These are wonderful new books where you can learn all sorts of interesting facts about a variety of things,” she extolled, holding up one of the books, I forget which one, so let’s just say it was Ancient Egypt. Filled with pyramids and mummies and a picture of King Tut, as I recall.

“However,” she said with a firm voice, “you need to all be aware that the publishers of these books are Jews.”

Our class of 7 and 8-year-olds sat in near silence, shocked at what she’d just said. “What are Jews?” we whispered to one another. 

Most of us really wanted to look at the book, but were afraid to do so out of fear that we could potentially be eaten by a big hungry Jew. 

Given, none of us knew what a Jew was, or if Jews even ate, or, if Jews did eat, if they enjoyed the taste of children. It seemed no one in that class really knew what a Jew was capable of, much less the type of terrible things they’d done to this woman to make her hate them. All we knew about Jews what our teacher, just moments ago, had explained us: ‘Be wary of The Jews.’

In the years that have passed, I’ve since come to learn the definition of a Jew. Once I did, I quickly realized that some of my friends were Jews - short for Jewish, by the way - and that most of them were very nice people. I’m sure some Jews are truly horrible people, as that teacher implied, but I don’t believe there’s like some disproportionate number of bad Jews when compared to, say, bad non-Jews. In my life, I have come to find that there are indeed more funny Jews in the world when compared to those human beings that are not Jewish.

Those people are called Gentiles, by the way.

When you are that young, however, a child is still very impressionable. Plant a seed at that age, and it sprouts an eternal tree. To this day - more than 20 years later - whenever I come across an Eyewitness Book there is a moment where I hesitate to pick it up, wondering if it’s bad to do so because it was published by The Jews, the race of monster publishers that eat children and possibly have a third or fourth eye or something different from the rest of us that therefore makes them terrible. But I quickly snap out of it, pick up the book and skim it, as if to say to a teacher somewhere out there alive or dead, You didn’t work on me.

  1. girl-detective said: On the flip side: I happen to know that Eyewitness books are published by Dorling Kindersley, so when I read your post, my first thought was “No way. Dorling and Kindersley aren’t Jewish names.”
  2. froggeek said: Indeed. Well said.
  3. jephkelley posted this