JEWCY’s The Greatest 3-Minute Guilt Stories Ever

1. Kosher hunks of meat: Our own Scott Lindenbaum, The Faster Times & BlackBook’s Adam Wilson, The Full Ginsberg & McSweeney’s Jared Bloom, and Harvard Sailing Team and Snakes member Adam Lustick (who has way more YouTube views than you ever will). 2. Jewcy.com’s Editor-in-Chief Jason Diamond, bad Jew and The Daily Beast’s Rebecca Dana, and Jewcy’s publisher Jacob Harris.

Poisson Rouge was the scene of last night’s “Jewcy Presents: The Greatest 3-Minute Guilt Stories Ever.” It was a good crowd in a good atmosphere — upbeat, congenial, casual. Thirteen choice writers shared their pieces about guilt, which were supposed to be under three minutes but, as reader Adam Wilson pointed out, it’s a pretty tall order to ask Jews to confine a story to a mere three minutes. Most of the writings were either nonfiction or fiction written by the reader especially for the event, although there was some poetry (Melissa Broder), some fiction by someone else [Ben Greenman, who was “nonexistent”, a.k.a. in Ireland, but we listened to a recording of him reading “The Death of a Clerk” by Chekov on an iPod, except Cherviakov became Conan O’Brian and Brizzhalov became Larry King (you can read this story for yourself in Greenman’s new book, Celebrity Chekov)], and even a holiday tale written by good Jews’ favorite monger of guilt: their mother (Rachel Shukert, author of Everything is Going to be Great).

If this night was based on the assumption that Jews are good at guilt, then I’d like to add two more sweeping generalizations about Jews, and these fine young Semites in particular:

1) Jews love death. Over the course of the stories/poems, at least one cat, two grandfathers, and several dozen biblical characters met their demise. And, every time that one of these characters/animals/actual people died, the majority of the audience laughed.

1. The only poet in the room: the lovely Melissa Broder, author of When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother.

2) Jews are fucking funny. Some topics that were covered last night:

• Jason Diamond (who hosted the event) inadvertently showing his girlfriend’s roommate his poop.
• Jared Bloom’s affinity for Team Jacob (fine, this was a Torah reference, and had nothing to do with Twilight).
• Scott Lindenbaum’s adventures with acid, wayward women, and getting beat up by one particularly wayward woman in the nude.
• Rebecca Dana’s Hassidic rabbi roommate’s consumption of raw bacon.
• The fact that you should never say “I’m like a cat and you’re the milk” to a woman while going down on her, and you should especially never say this to Jami Attenberg (author of The Melting Season).

Oh, and also, this is to Maris Kreizman’s (of Slaughterhouse 90210) parents: Your daughter’s piece was actually about sex. Additionally, she owns — and uses — a vibrator.

–Julia Jackson is working on her MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College, and is a regular contributor for Electric Dish.