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I got an odd comment on an old fic yesterday.

The fic, "Jamie and Every Shapiro in Washington Heights (and one Shiksa Goddess)", was written for the purimgifts exchange several years back. I have discovered to my dismay that it is not uncommon to receive odd comments much later on fics I wrote for that exchange- purimgifts is a venue where I feel comfortable writing stories that more deeply, but also more allusively, invoke my Jewish identity and experience, because the audience for purimgifts has much more shared context in terms of lived Jewish experience than the general fanfic reading audience. But stories from the exchange are then archived on AO3, so down the line my stories get discovered by other readers who do not share the necessary context to see what I am doing in these stories, and so sometimes I get odd comments, and sometimes I get upsettingly clueless comments.

"Jamie and Every Shapiro in Washington Heights (and one Shiksa Goddess)" is a story inspired by a single lyric in the off-broadway musical "The Last 5 Years" by Jason Robert Brown. In the song, "Shiksa Goddess", the male romantic lead Jamie enthuses to his new lover that one reason he loves her is because she is not Jewish and he- a secular Jew from Spring Valley, NY- is full of anxiety and self-loathing about his Jewish identity and the pressures it imposes upon him. In a litany, he talks about succumbing to the pressure to date Jewish women:

I've been waiting through Danica Schwartz and Erica Weiss
And the Handelman twins
I've been waiting through Heather Greenblatt, Annie Mincus, Karen Pincus and Lisa Katz
And Stacy Rosen, Ellen Kaplan, Julie Silber and Janie Stein
I've had Shabbas dinners on Friday nights
With every Shapiro in Washington Heights

The names were chosen by JRB for a particular resonance- these are Jewish-sounding names of a very specific sort, the kind of names common among secular Ashkenazi Jews of JRB's generation. Shapiro is a very common Jewish last name, and it struck me that the idea of actually imagining Jamie on a series of successive Shabbas dates with dozens of women all named Shapiro was a fun way of taking a funny line and extending the joke.

The names of my Shapiros in the story follow similar form to the names in JRB's original litany. They are, to my ear at least, Jewish sounding names. They are not necessarily Biblical names, not necessarily names that are exclusively Jewish names, but they are names that in my intuition the kinds of Jewish girls Jamie would be dating would have. But they are very carefully chosen. Each in its way, I think, tells a story to people who have enough shared intuition with me about Jewish names.

In one such joke, perhaps a little too allusive, I named one of the girls Mary Shapiro. There is nothing, per se, wrong with the name Mary Shapiro. There is in fact an extremely well known Jew, the former chair of the SEC, named Mary Schapiro. It's just that Mary is the name of Jesus's mother and it is for that reason generally considered a goyische name. Many Jews would hesitate to give their daughter the name Mary. But there's nothing wrong with it, it's just a little odd. However it's something that to a Jew obsessively anxious about his Jewishness and what it means in the way Jamie is, would register as strange and worth comment.

And so Jamie, who is a giant ass, starts to dig himself in a hole. And it gets worse as I comment on another form of name anxiety in the Jewish community, which is for people given the sorts of secular Jewishy names I've been talking about to resolve their own name anxiety by taking a more Jewish name, as an announcement to the world that they are Jewish. This is typically but not always accompanied by a change in Jewish observance- when several Reform or Conservative friends of mine with Americanized names became Orthodox, they asked to be called by their Hebrew names.

So Jamie's friend who introduced Mary Shapiro to him was named Becca, and my intention was to suggest these two secular Jewish girls who grew up together with their awkwardly-somewhat-Jewish names and as adults they are dealing in different ways with their name anxiety and their Jewish identity anxiety more generally. Becca has become more observant and has asked to be called by her Hebrew name Rivka, but Jamie is an ass and Jamie's self-loathing Jewishness cannot deal with people becoming more observant as he is drifting away from whatever faith he had, so Jamie keeps calling her Becca, even though he must know it is an insulting thing to do to refuse to call someone by their chosen name. And so I think a bit of him enjoys the fact that Mary Shapiro is named Mary, that she has this name that almost tries to camouflage her Judaism, even though it fails. He admires her name, but because he admires it, he obsesses over it, bringing the conversation back to it again and again as it becomes more and more awkward and insulting.


I don't plan to respond to the comment "what does mary shapiro mean" on AO3, because there is too much to say and no guarantee the commenter will understand any of it. Purimgifts stories are written for Purimgifts because the people who do Purimgifts will appreciate them. But I wanted to say something in response to the comment, anyway. To remind myself that even though I sometimes get clueless comments, there was an original audience for this story and they appreciated what I was doing.