My friends who have made the journey to Iowa many times now for RAGBRAI all say the same thing. People in Iowa are amazingly welcoming and friendly – and I know my friends clearly fit the definition of “different” compared to the stereotype of the conservative Iowa Christian.

Is this heaven? No – it’s Iowa…

That said, though, I have to wonder what they protected you from, when you and your sibs were growing up. As a Jewish mother in Iowa, there are many conversations that I don’t report to my daughter, and many times I’ve been angry with people’s disrespect of her background and mine and not let on in front of her. Nor do I teach her to mistrust the interest that goes beyond curiosity into an unpleasant and often disrespectful exoticism, or the evangelical lusting after “the first Christians”, the eagerness to have me teach them this pure form of Christianity, as they see it (alas, the reality is not at all what they expect); I’ll let her come to all that on her own. After all, this is where she lives, and she is a native Iowan.

She notices things on her own, though. Though still young, she’s figured out that “We all believe the same things” simply isn’t true. She’s noticed that Christian holidays are taken seriously, with vacations and closings, and the others are ignored. She finds it rude when people insist on Merry-Christmasing her, though it’s something I’ve accepted. And when I told a funny story about a friend of hers — the family had gone to New York and was eating at a deli, and the child, talking to a stranger, made the astonishing discovery that *there was a Jewish man in New York* — and explained by telling her that there were many, many Jews in NY, she got a sudden urgent, faraway look, and asked if we could move there. (When I explained what it cost to live there, her attitude changed.) She’s proud of being Jewish, and shows off her Hebrew to her friends, of course, and brings them home for latkes, but — if she had her druthers, she’d live in a place with more Jews.

Personally, I find it tiring to live with the Iowan tolerance. Yes, certainly things could be much worse. But tolerance is not respect. I am tired, too, of being a one-woman Chautauqua for Iowans who — as far as I can make out — really have no intention of using what they learn in the service of making a genuinely diverse society, which requires not blindness to other groups’ doings but a certain relativism. It’s not unlike the difference between a hotel and a college dorm, I suppose: one has strangers who do their best to ignore each other, and the other has a life, a community, of people accidentally thrown together, some of whom are very different from others. Iowans are endlessly open to arm’s-length educational opportunities, I find. It’s all very interesting. But I’m not an exhibit; I live here, and so does my daughter, and so do other Jews. The fact that Yom Kippur comes each and every year, and that Jews will not be at work or sporting events, should not at this point be a surprise.

As for Bloom’s article…yeah, some expected anti-semitism came out in the comments. But what really left my jaw on the floor was a blog post by a UI communications PhD candidate who’d had the nerve to call Bloom’s editor at the Atlantic and basically tell her that Bloom was treating Iowa like anti-semites had historically treated Jews. She hung up on him. At the time of his writing, he still didn’t get why what he’d said was off-the-charts wrong.

So…your parents are wise, and your dad’s smart about how to get along. But I’m tired. I’m here for several more years, but when they’re up, I’ll be looking to get along with people who don’t steamroll my culture so much, and who I don’t have to explain myself to, from nothing, over and over again, and who — oh, what’s the use, really. I’m just tired, and ready to go, and hiding that as best I can while my daughter grows up. (Wincing now at the memory of a Catholic lady who wanted the local Jews to come have a Passover seder at her church; she couldn’t understand why we just stared at her and said um no. Absolutely not.)

Mimi’s review reawakened the tense knot of worry I felt when in the badlands of Texas we were running out of gas. The place was remote: So remote that a scan of the radio dial put it through a full spin without a single stop…not even a stop for a spot of static. No radio, no cell reception: I think our guardian angels worked over-time in helping us spot that gas station…and that’s all there was…one lonely gas station…on the side of the road!