When I first got a complaint on Wikipedia about my name, I sent an email explanation:
Friday, March 13, 2009 11:12:21 AM
Last night, I was just casually looking at my page and talk section, and that message just about gave me a heart attack!
I'm not sure what would cause an alert for vandalism, but I'm guessing it's the "goy" part of my username? I can try to explain. I didn't want to do this on my talk page.
I grew up in a devoutly Christian family, basically bordering on Pentecostal. Though I tried, I had trouble reconciling religious dogma with the real world events, as well as my own homosexual desires with the traditional biblical view that homosexuality is an evil act and a sin. This eventually led to me rejecting Christianity around 1993.
For a couple of years, I experimented with other beliefs. Around 1995, on a lark, I stopped by a Reconstructionist shul, and was intrigued by seeing a religion that was not focused believing the world was scary and soaked in evil, but simply on worship, tradition, and modern concepts of human rights, including gay rights.
I began to change my habits and actions, lighting Shabbat candles and saying the brachas, studying Hebrew, giving up pork. I studied for conversion, and came close, but found myself balking at writing essays about halakhic observance (which I was still very liberal about) and "my contribution to the Jewish community", which I felt would be next to nothing. I decided to put it on hold.
Over the last few years, something strange happened to me. I started to become less and less convinced of supernatural beings, and at the same time, more and more in touch with the cultural, ethnic, and historical history of Jews, specifically Eastern European and Polish Jews (I'm half-Polish) and the Yiddish language, which I enjoy and am trying to teach myself.
I associate myself with Jewish culture and history, as much in my mind as I do with Polish or American history. I certainly have an affinity to Jewish religious tradition that I done have to Polish Catholicism or American Protestant Christianity. Nonetheless, I am likely to never convert, as I now don't believe in a literal Deity, and if I do, it would be a conversion under Reform or Reconstructionist auspices, so I can never be universally accepted as a Jew. I've made peace with that; I feel no need to make aliah or stand in an Orthodox minyan, anyway.
I created the nickname "Feygele Goy" as an online ID almost on a lark. I love it because it honors three aspects of my personality, my being gay, my complicated relationship with Judaism, and above all, my love for Yiddish. I also enjoyed the irony of mixing two words with arguably derogatory meaning, and winding up with a Yiddish parallel to "Queer Nation".
Of course, the Yiddish use of goy can simply be neutral, though it depends on the speaker's attitude. In fact, in the Torah, Israel itself is referred to as a "goy", i.e. a nation.
I started a blog in 2005, but haven't been able sustain the interest in continuing. It is located at http://feygelegoy.com/new . It is also backed up on the "Wayback Machine" at http://web.archive.org/web/*/feygelegoy.com , though for some reason this only goes back to 2007.
I understand that some Jew-haters use the term "goy" as a bizarre sign of pride, hating Jews so much that their main identity becomes simply who they're not, not who they are. Part of me wants to dig in my heels and not let dumbass Jew-haters on the 'net who refuse to read anything other than the "Protocols of Zion" steal "goy" from me. However, I can understand guilt by association, and can probably choose another name if this letter doesn't convince you or whoever will make the decision.
Sorry if this bio is slipshod, but I'm trying to hurry and stay to the relevant facts, but still mention why the pun "Feygele Goy", and it's ironic yet reverent use of Yiddish, has so much meaning to me. I hope to hear back soon.
FeygeleGoy/פֿײגעלע גױ 17:35, 19 March 2009 (UTC)
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