The Jew in You lyrics

All you drunken chicks of sweethearts with your bloodshot eyes of blue

All you border-crossing faygelekh who’ve been quarantined for flu

All you lost exilic aliens, you migrant mongrel strew

You needn’t feel farloyren, you don’t have to be blue

Just climb aboard this ark of ours and join the soggy crew

It’s a diasporic politic, it’s a reconstructed you

With permeable borders in between the old and new

It’s a way to hide away what they would take away from you

Forget your god and country, and your revolution too

It’s possible for you to leave the many for the few

It don’t matter if your daddy was from Poland or Peru

Your blood might come from Turkey, Detroit or Timbuktu

Your language could be Farsi, Sanskrit, German or Zulu

Come on we’ve got some wandering to do

So bring out your Jew, bring out your Jew

You may have a Jew inside of you

A Jew, a Jew a secret little Jew

A secret Jew is buried inside you

My definition here could use some explanation, true

You have to ask yourself just what I mean when I say “Jew”

Well the Jewishness concerning us should not be misconstrued

Blood are land are things with which it doesn’t have to do

And religion is a matter most irrelevant here, too

So let’s try to look at this anew.

To find a category underneath the ones we knew

A mercurical identity for people who are strewn in countries far and wide

Who haven’t got a home in view

Who drag aronud like shackles on the roots from which they grew

While others have endured this “gulles,” too

And here I offer it all up to you

A kosher YIddish food for thoguht that goyim now can chew

It’s what they did with Jesus when they wrote the Bible new

Rebranded monotheism for wider public view

So learn to take the rootless cosmopolitan world view

And hidden interstices we all normally aschew

To schlup your gulles proudly you must learn to make do

And learn, learn, learn is what the wise men tell us to

So learn to be Jew

Learn to bae a Jew

Learn to be a Jew among the Jews

Among the Jews…

Well, so, what about us people who are actually Jews?

With problems all my deconstructed theories can’t subdue

Well, you know what I’m talking about. I don’t have to tell you.

Just ask a gentle German for a history review

She’ll tell you how they marked us with numerical tattoos

They turned us into ashes, hair, and lamps, and soap, and glue,

And no, it wasn’t something that I personally knew, but I mean,

they taught it to me at temple Sunday school,

And I guess it kind of left me with some hangups and some tabboos

But how can we wear the matnle of the martyred ghetto Jews?

We turned our backs on so many things that brought our people through

And did it really work to make a new Hebrew?

With the enemies we slew, the hatred grew and grew

But the things you hate in others, is the thing you hate in you

And where it all went wrong nobody knew

Now exile will return like deja vu

And we will have to learn it all anew

Not only as a victim, but maybe as a perpetrator, too?

To learn to take the rootless cosmopolitan world view?

To learn to be a Jew

Learn to be a Jew

Learn to be a Jew among the Jews

A Jew, a Jew, the problem isn’t new

A homeless Jew is buried inside you

Now the hour is getting late

Soon we’ll have to pay our dues

We’ll face our situations where we all will have to choose

And the world is turning colder

And the walls are high and true

And the cities are turning the skies a color black and blue

So when they ask you for your papers, and you don’t know what to do,

Remember in this moment what you’re carrying with you

Because the day will come when all your papers are refused

And then you’ll find yourself in exile, too

You’re living in a land and time that aren’t made for you

You’re refugees from wars between religious points of view

And you schlep around like shackles on the roots from which you grew

So I talk about the inner other hiding inside you

And, well, the name I give this other, is a Jew

But by a Jew I mean you can be an Arab, or a German, or a Druze,

So if you have a better name that you would like to use,

We’ll I’d love to read the testament of you.

The imaginary diasporic messianic you

Cause there’s only one messiah and he’s buried inside you

So bring him out and show the world what we all need to do

These aren’t just the dreams of us; these are the dreams of you

But forgive the self-indulgence that I spew

I mean, I mean it as a question, and not an answer to your blues

The question is the answer, and the question, it is you

Anyway, I just wrote this goddamn thing where every sentence just rhymes with Jew

So

Bring out your Jew, bring out your Jew

You may have a Jew inside of you…

• Artist:Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird