In an instance of boredom, I went looking for my roots on the World Wide Web. Last Friday, waiting for friends to return from classes and the weekend to begin, I felt an urge to look into whatever happened to a hotel my family used to vacation at in upstate New York. Entering a few keywords into an Internet search engine, I happened upon a hilarious bit of Jewish Americana. Ron Jeremy, one of the most well-known and endowed pornographic actors, was once a waiter at my favorite vacation spot.My family for many years traveled to the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake, N.Y. for Christmas vacations, Passovers and summers. The Concord was part of the Borscht Belt of hotels in the Catskill Mountains, a veritable inland Jewish Riviera for much of the 20th Century. The hotel was also quite representative of what it meant to be Jewish in America during that time.

Ron Jeremy's tenure as a waiter at the Concord would make an excellent sociological case study in Jewish America. The Borscht Belt -- affectionately named after the much-favored beet stew of Russian-Jewish immigrants -- began as bungalow colonies, escapes from the cramped, polluted habitats of poor Jews in New York City. The Belt grew into well-known hotels famous for their celebrity guests, such as Grossinger's, Kutsher's, the Nevele and the Concord. Almost every Jewish teenager from New York from the 1940s to the '70s worked summer jobs at one hotel or another. Ron Jeremy, arguably America's most famous porn star, was just one of them.

But, I really should not have been so surprised by my X-rated discovery. Jeremy was indeed Jewish -- I should have expected he too once dished up matzo-ball soup and stuffed cabbage to alte-kochkers and yentas. Jeremy even resembles my waiter at the Concord, with his quintessentially Jewish curly black hair and short stature. His famously large penis, however, is a real stereotype killer.

Jeremy, although many decry his profession, is representative of both Jewish and American culture and their influences on each other. He began as so many young Jews did, in the kitchen of a Catskill hotel, and ended up as so few Americans do, in front of the camera. But, Jews have always been disproportionately represented in film, although most memorable Jewish actors, such as Morey Amsterdam -- a frequent guest at the Concord -- and Woody Allen, are truly regular people (at least in the Jewish world).

Jews for a long time have been the cogs in the machinery of modern American culture. The sitcoms on television are the best representation of this fact, from "Seinfeld" to "Will and Grace." The dark sarcasm of Jewish humor is evident everywhere in American popular culture. Ron Jeremy's unusual fame as an ugly, fat porn star is no exception.

I find more and more, however, that the memory of oppression and rejection of religion that defined the first generation of the modern American Jewish community is disappearing. The generation of Jews that make up the majority of Brandeis' student body is for the most part not an immigrant generation, or even the children of an immigrant generation. The new Jew is mostly indiscernible from the general population, which is certainly a good thing for Jewish collective comfort and safety; but, without uniqueness, there ends whatever new contributions Jewish culture can make in American culture.

African-Americans were probably the first minority group in this country to make a unique and fundamental contribution to American culture. Out of black society emerged the basis for rock 'n' roll, to name just one of a galaxy of contributions. Sociologists and popular critics are already observing the contributions of Hispanic-Americans, whose population is for the most part relatively new to this country. Ron Jeremy, just another Jewish kid from New York, is to me one of the best icons for what minority groups have contributed to this country. He might not be the most illustrious of those contributors, but he is certainly exemplary.

-- Matthew Bettinger '05 submits a column to the Justice.