Yom Kippur Pedicure

Love this essay by Daphne Merkin on Jewish guilt. It's a testament to Merkin's great writing that I connect with this piece given that her struggle is (by her own admission) the Ashkenazi (German-Jewish) brand of walking the religion tightrope. Being a Parsi gal myself, the tension in my house was usually a looser, louder, spicier version of being wracked by the obligation to be pious. And really, who wouldn't go nuts after having to endure 12 years of private school where the dress code mandates this:

To get a sense of the confused atmosphere, you have only to stand outside a Jewish day school like the one I went to on the Upper East Side and watch the girls emerge in clothes that are maximally revealing while being at the same time appropriately unscanty — an aesthetic approach most typically characterized by the long, tight denim skirts that are usually slit halfway up the back or side and look difficult to navigate without resorting to the kind of mincing steps that I imagine Chinese women with bound feet were forced to adopt.

I believe the accurate term is "denim burritos."