'Go The F**k To Sleep': Kosher Version

Too Much Free Time

from the halal-version-presumably-right-around-the-corner dept

As Dr. David Arredondo suggested during his panicked moralizing, if Go the F**k to Sleep had been written about "Jews, blacks, Muslims or Latinos," we would all immediately stop our hearty chortling and view Mansbach’s best-seller as the evil racist book it actually is.Good news, everybody! Someone did exactly that! Marc Tracy over at The Tablet converted Mansbach’s bedtime story to Judaism (so to speak) and has knocked one "marginalized group" off Arredondo’s list. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s Yom Kippur, and you’re far away,
The last thing I want’s to be cruel.
I’m your mother, son, you know I adore you,
But please go the fuck to shul.

You’d only go for a few hours,
Shorter than a full day of school.
You’ll probably run into people you know
If you go the fuck to shul.

We don’t observe the birth of Christ, son,
This isn’t some lame fucking Yule.
It’s the Day of Atonement, a big deal:
Go the fuck to shul.

Go ahead, eat something beforehand.
Gay gezunt, no reason to drool.
I’m not asking you to believe in it,
Only to go to fucking shul.

The whole thing can be read at the link above.

With that out of the way, and no one the worse for wear, I’m sure it will only be a matter of time before Dr. Arredondo emerges again, perhaps to make a statement like: "Well, that’s all good for the Jewish community, but this only highlights how often authors (and bloggers) exclude blacks, Muslims and Latinos from their mockery."

You can’t win, but what the hell? You’d think at least we’d be allowed to laugh without having to keep all of these "possible" (I’m using that term loosely, hence the quotes) ramifications at the back of our minds, just in case. Or maybe Dr. Arredondo could have used some of the time he put into creating a set of victims into researching Adam Mansbach, who has already written other books dealing with Dr. A’s favorite underserved demographics.

There’s The End of the Jews, which "explores the creative interchange between blacks and Jews and the give-and-take dynamic of artistic partnership." Angry Black White Boy is described as Mansbach applying a monkey-wrench to "the formula of the angry black man in the white man’s world" and "cutting to the heart of the issue of race in America today." So, if anyone would have written a book dealing with sleep, the word f**k and multi-culturalism, it would have been the evidently fully-qualified Mansbach. And since he didn’t do it, there’s really no reason to assume that he just forgot to, no matter how perversely happy that would have made a certain overwrought doctor.

The books is, and will always remain, simply a piece of satire. If anyone wants to read anything else into it, they’ll have to drag their interpretations, kicking and screaming, into the book and beat them with Fists of Twisted Logic +2 until they fit.

Filed Under: adam mansbach, go the fuck to sleep