Wait A Minute, I Thought It Was The Mother's Side That Counted

An extremist Orthodox Jewish organization has written a letter to Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli asking her not to marry her non-Jew American boyfriend, Leonardo DiCaprio.

In the letter, as Haaretz reports, a representative of the Israeli nationalist group Lehava writes:

“It is not by chance that you were born Jewish. Your grandmother and her grandmother did not dream that one of their descendants would one day remove the family’s future generations from the Jewish people. Assimilation has forever been one of the enemies of the Jewish people.”

But wait. It was my understanding that it’s the mother’s Jewness that matters in this regard. I myself am half-Jewish. But on my father’s side. So while I was raised Jewish, went to temple and Hebrew school and all that, when it came time for me to be bar mitzvahed, the rabbi said I would have to be officially converted beforehand, in a ceremony that would involve me being ritually RE-CIRCUMCISED at the advanced, yet still very tender in some ways, age of thirteen years old!!! Now, if you think for one minute that there was any way in hell I was going to let those crazy motherfu… Well, let’s just say that another rabbi, a family friend, was able to pull some strings and and sign some papers and I stayed far away from the mohel’s glistening blade. Anyway, even after I was bar mitzvahed, on a trip to Israel almost ten years later, I was stopped at a gate near the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem by an orthodox guy who started asking me all these questions about my family and when I told him that my mom was, in fact, Christian, he wouldn’t let me into the area nearest the wall. If my mother had been Jewish, he said, it would have been okay. So what’s going on? Wouldn’t Bar Rafaeli’s children be automatically Jewish under Jewish law, by virtue of her Jewish womb, despite the traife, goyishe seed it incubated?

Also, isn’t it strange that boys have a “bar” mitzvah and girls have a “bat” mitzvah and yet Bar Rafaeli is named Bar? Wouldn’t that be like an Italian guy being named, like, Bella Donna? Woah. Wait a minute. Is Bar Rafaeli actually a man?!