Neys Gadol Hayah Schill: The Schill, Vol. 2 Edition 1

(A Great Miracle Happened...uhhhhhh, this is a good joke in Hebrew, just trust me)

Meet the new Schill, same as the old Schill.

If there’s one thing I can promise you, it’s commitment to my brand, regardless of the potential (…likely) narrowness of its niche audience. That would explain why, for example, I made the subject line of my email newsletter a transliterated Hebrew phrase from a minor holiday’s celebratory game.

But! This is landing in your inboxes on the first night of Hannukah, as I had hoped to pull off. That was the true miracle this year. That and FDA approval of a COVID-19 vaccine. Equally important.

Also: my very first foray into Internet Content was a little tumblr called Hey Girl Happy Hannukah. This was 2011, or the second wave of the Ryan Gosling “Hey Girl” meme, in which pictures of smolderingly-gazed Ryan Gosling were captioned with increasingly “woke” statements, as if he were trying to seduce all of Wesleyan in one fell swoop. (Had Barack Obama only gone to college thirty years later, perhaps he could have cribbed this technique to finally get with that smooth-skinned black-clad bisexual manic pixie dream socialist).

So I did what my (otherwise highly questionable) years of day school trained me for, and appropriated this meme for Jewish purposes.

To this day, my parents are so proud that I made a play on words that combined our people’s centuries of forced migration with butt stuff. Great payoff for all that tuition.

The rest is — again, extremely niche and inside-baseball — “history.” Next came Beyonceder in 2014 (which currently features seasonal holiday content #Rihannukah).

The point of all of this is not JUST to drive traffic to my old blogs, nor to (rather pathetically) flex about my janky, extremely dorky creations.

The point is ACTUALLY to say, being steeped in a culture, a literature, a repository of references, is a fun superpower to have. A small circle of fellow obsessives is a true delight. But oh, how painfully true the reverse! When there is a hegemonic cultural vocabulary that you had no idea about and that fact is exposed on the spot EEEEE NIGHTMARE DANGER ALIENATION DANGER YOU ARE ALONE IN THE UNIVERRRRSSSSSEEE THEY’RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOOUUUUUU

oKAY hahahaha! reeling. it. in.

That feeling, though? The dread and shame that accompany being Out Of Some Loop You Didn’t Know Existed? THAT phenomenon is the basis of the first episode of ***The Schill Show podcast,*** featuring a segment called:

Lacuna Matata

Where We Take A Gap in Your Pop Culture Knowledge, And We Make It OK.

Big big thanks to the brave and generous INAUGURAL guests, Ali and Noam Stern, truly profiles in courage. Their story is going to help a lot of people.

Give it a listen, share this post with friends who might like it,

oh yeah: leave a comment in the THREAD that you can use ON THE NEWSLETTER ITSELF.

Oh HAY!

(Ahhh, shit, that’s continuing the joke in the subject line.

SOOOOO the saying in the subject line is sort of the slogan of Hannukah — A Great Miracle Happened T/here. On dreidls, the spinning toy used to teach children about gambling, each of the four sides has the first letter of each word - the “Great” is “gadol” which becomes the letter “gimmel,” Miracle is “neys” which becomes “nun,” Happened is “hayah” which become “hay.” Most but not all dreidls have the fourth letter “shin” which corresponds to the word “Sham” for “There.”

Photo credit: MyJewishLearning.com, in an article that conveniently lays out the rules of dreidl for you, just in case you want something new to stare at and get excited about in quarantine.)