Last week we all went to a going-away/birthday party for one of adot’s school friends. (This is a high-turnover neighbourhood.) The hosts are a Muslim family but what we didn’t find out until the day of the party was that, because some of their highly orthodox friends would be attending, the party would be segregated: men upstairs, women and children downstairs.
At first I was a bit put off (mostly because Heather was already beat and would have to manage the kids solo at someone else’s house), but then I realized that here was a facet of multiculturalism entirely new to me – and one I had no right to judge. In any case we agreed to call it an evening in an hour, or once the cake was served. When we showed up, I was whisked upstairs to the makeshift men’s room, where we sat and talked as the din of kids downstairs steadily increased. The talk started out okay – we tried to figure out an immigrant colleague’s tax situation as a postdoc, which is vexing enough for non-immigrant postdocs like Yours Truly. And once more had showed up, the talk turned to other finer points of immigration, the neighbourly quality of Western family housing, and whose cars were superior: those from the USA, Europe, or Asia. All solidly manly topics.
But things started going wobbly when somebody in the room of largely middle eastern and south asian men made a Jewish joke. As the only white guy in the room I was asked (more embarrassedly than apologetically) if I was Jewish. After it became clear I wasn’t but I still hadn’t found it funny (no more than I’d find a middle eastern or south asian joke funny), I was then treated to one of the middle eastern guest’s interpretation of an obscure passage from Mein Kampf. Oy vay, how to change the subject? Here was a Palestinian explicating Hitler, and the Pakistani guy who’d cracked the Jewish joke backing him up. I said I sympathized with Palestine’s cause, and I have no qualms criticizing Israeli state policy, but that’s different from anti-Semitism and racism in general. (At this point, I asked them both why their people weren’t ganging up on Britain instead, since the UK’s postwar impositions had structured their respective regional conflicts.)
The arrival of a familiar face, a Serbian dad whose kids are in adot’s class, gave me an out: we talked about why hip hop doesn’t suck, and what music do you like, then, anyway? And I guess the cake showed up an hour after our agreed-upon parachute time: adot popped in the door at 9 pm, to tell me it was time to go home. Okay, I quickly said. All the men laughed and joked that she must be the boss of me. If she’s the boss, I thought, then who got to sit in a room of grown-ups, effectively relieved of parenting duties for two hours?
Still in all, despite the awkward moments, this was an interesting and instructive experience in the wages of multiculturalism.
