Student Cooks Eggs on Laptop Overheated by Israel-Palestine Hot Takes – New Vices

A local Jewish college student on the front lines of BDS recently boiled eggs on his AIPAC-sticker-laden laptop using the raw energy of online Israel-Palestine-related hot takes.

Jake Zucker, of rural New York City, New York, said he wasn’t sure what to do when his stovetop stopped working.

“Man, I need a high-protein breakfast if I’m gonna be fighting the battle against BDS,” he said, “And the eggs better cook quick. I have to get to my Philosophy of Unnecessary War Metaphors class on time.”

Stressed and having consumed only three budweisers that morning, he called his local AEPi brothers to see if they could help. Sam Baum picked up the phone.

“I just told him, like, check out Facebook,” Baum recalled. “Facebook had really been heating up. My feed had 18 opinion posts about Israel, America moving the embassy to Jerusalem, the Gaza protests, and Ivanka Trump in the span of five minutes, and my Surface Pro sort of melted from the heat and length of the aggressive but also nuanced and somewhat readable but articulate thesis papers,” he said. “Not even the Natalie Portman hot takes in The Forward were this handy for making a last-minute stove out of your laptop.”

Baum, after confirming with the Chabad rabbi on campus that the number chai, 18 posts, was important to Jews “or a mazel or something,” decided it was a good omen for Zucker’s egg breakfast problem. “So I told him to get on Facebook and wait five minutes, and then just boil the eggs on his MacBook fueled by vitriol,” he said. The experiment was a success, though not without side effects.

“While the eggs were boiling, I didn’t have anything better to do, so I read all the Facebook hot takes,” Zucker said. He agreed most with those he described as the “queer, IfNotNow, progressive college student types who said they love Israel and that’s why they can call it the root of all global conflict,” he said. “But please – don’t tell Andy Borans or my Hillel director.”

All the while, in Washington DC, a Jewish Voice for Peace protest and an opposing Stand With Us protest began.

“Israel is just defending itself,” bawled one sophomore wearing an “Israel Loves You” shirt. “Death is [inaudible] and we’re all sad but not [scream] murderers and why do Palestinians need to protest when they can drink sewage infested water in the rubble of their homes worshiping Hamas as they’re blockaded by Israel.” As an SWU staff member quietly whispered to the sophomore about “Egypt blockading Gaza too,” she fainted onto the sidewalk. “Some people just can’t handle the advocacy,” said the staff member. Holding a sign that read “WHAT ABOUT SYRIA,” he promptly ran off to hit people with it.

A junior wearing a Free Free Palestine hat and a kafiah-like scarf from Forever 21 argued with the SWU member’s retreating back. “Like, 62 people are dead and it doesn’t even matter that Hamas officials said 50 of them were Hamas operatives,” she said. “It’s not like Hamas is a terrorist organization that tries to kill Israeli civilians indiscriminately while keeping money from Gazans and not providing electricity if it wasn’t for the Occupation.”

Another JVP member pitched in. “All the Gaza protests were totally peaceful. The fire kites with swastikas? Hamas leaders offering incentives to Palestinians who storm the border fence and get injured or die? It’s all just far-right Zionist propaganda from Haaretz,” he said. “This is a really easy conflict with straight-up Apartheid, and Israelis are all colonizers because all Israeli Jews are White people from Europe and the Occupation is bad,” he added. He insisted he wasn’t naïve. “I’ve been following the New York Times on Facebook for two whole weeks.”

Asked how they each felt about damage to the Israeli border crossing into Gaza by Palestinian protesters and Hamas’s rejection of humanitarian aid from Israel as hospitals are overflowing from the thousands injured by the IDF, all protesters on both sides simply screamed in unison in a beautiful moment of achdut.

Back in rural New York City, New York, Zucker is just happy to have his eggs. “Baruch Hashem Mark Zuckerburg and other bros at Facebook are connecting the world so we can all indulge in echo chambers of judgment about a place that we don’t live 6,000 miles away from us,” he said, winking.

Now energized by hot-take-cooked protein, Zucker continues to fight the epic battle against Israel’s enemies on campus.

“I think I’ll try to, like, shut down some Hamas Facebook pages or something,” he said.

Lev Gringauz is a New Voices reporting fellow studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.