"It is poetry," she adds, after kiss. "It's from the Song of Solomon."

"And you just have it memorized?"

"It's pretty!"

"I don't deny it."

"Also I'm kind of a huge nerd about my heritage."

"Speaking as a person with extremely boring heritage, how come?"

"Lots of reasons. Partly it's because stories about my family specifically are...kinda thin, after the Holocaust, and our history is a way of connecting to the people my grandparents lost. Partly it's to spite everyone who ever tried to wipe us out. Partly it's because I think Hebrew is beautiful."

"And backward!"

"Backwards and forwards is completely arbitrary!"

"Yes, I know."

"And it's not like I care about any heritage I might have on Mom's side of the family, so much."

"Generic white people like me?"

"Yep. Possibly less generic since her family came over from England only a couple of generations ago--one time when someone was asking me for my ethnicity in a particularly obnoxious way I identified as 'half Anglo-Saxon half Ashkenazi'--but for all intents and purposes yes."

"What was particularly obnoxious about it?"

"It was follow-up to some racist remarks, and I think he was expecting me to just answer 'white' in a way that would have supported his point, if he had a meaningful point to make."

"These conversations never seem to happen to me, I wonder why."

"Probably because you're generically white and don't make a point of doing relevant forms of social justice work?"

"My mom has social justicey inclinations, but not in a particularly activist way, so I guess that might not do it."

"Yeah. For every rally there'll be idiots in opposition loitering nearby jeering."

"And you go have conversations with them because?"

"Because I'm loitering nearby getting ready in a way that doesn't make it visually obvious which side I'm on and they address me first."

"Aha."

"Since then I have taken to wearing t-shirts printed with relevant slogans to that kind of event."

"How much does that help?"

"Well, I haven't had a repeat of that particular incident, but it was a bit of a one-off even beforehand, so who knows."