The other day, I made a list of pros and cons about the city. I jotted down, rather quickly, 27 cons ( cramped living, subways!!!, stressful, unfriendly people, terrorism???). On the pro side I wrote Cuban-Chinese food and then below that I wrote friends and family (but I can keep in touch). And then I was done. ‘

Have my ties to New York become so tenuous? Is that all that keeps me here: the promise of good plantains any night of the week? When did I go from being the archetypal New Yorker to someone who cannot wait to get out?

I didn’t move here to break into acting or to become a rock star. I was born and raised here. And when I say “here,” I don’t mean Long Island or Westchester, but the isle of Manhattan. I was born at Beth Israel hospital and had most of my major life moments in New York City. In the 29 years I’ve been alive, I’ve only spent four of them away. Those were my college years in California, when I grew out my armpit hair and rode a mountain bike everywhere (because, as a New Yorker, I’ve never learned to drive). But while those years were liberating, I spent almost every minute missing New York: the bagels, the pizza, the diversity, the all-night transportation. I moved back right after graduation. How could I not? Why would anyone choose to live anywhere else?

I mean, New York. It’s New York! It’s sophisticated. It’s intellectual. It’s energized. In New York, anything can happen at any minute. That’s what it feels like, right? Like there’s so much possibility in New York. These days, though, I’d trade some of that possibility for a porch. I’d gladly sacrifice that “New York feeling” to get a little peace.

This first dawned on me at the beginning of the summer, as a good buddy was recapping her weekend. She and her boyfriend had driven to New Jersey to get away. They’d decided to go to the beach and she’d worn a bikini. This is a friend who would rather suffer from heat stroke than have to wear shorts in New York.

“Wow, you’re brave,” I said. “A bikini! I’m too out of shape to put on a bikini.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. “You just need to leave New York. As soon as you leave New York, you won’t feel out of shape. Trust me, we’re in great shape in the rest of the country.”

She was right. A few weeks later, I went away to visit a friend who lives in Pittsburgh. After a day there, I thought: You know, I could stand to gain a few pounds ….

I used to leave New York and scoff at how small-town the rest of the country was. Everything seemed quaint outside of New York, but a kind of quaint I could do without. I used to return home and breathe a sigh of relief. Oh, thank God! Back in New York. Back to reality. This time, my return was not so upbeat. When I got back to New York, it had lost some of its sheen. It was hot and smelly, and everything seemed to be an ordeal.

On my first subway ride back to work, I was seated next to a man who was choosing between two cell-phone rings: a rooster crowing or a samba tune. I couldn’t believe it. This guy was subjecting an entire subway car full of people to 10-second bursts of tinny samba, then crowing rooster, tinny samba, crowing rooster. Shouldn’t this be something that he does at home…? I thought. On the second train, a middle-aged woman was reciting the Scriptures and praising Jesus. By the time I got to my office on 59th Street, I was ready to give notice and set out for the countryside.

I spent hours on the Internet researching. I’d Google “I want to move out of New York,” just to see what came up. I hadn’t yet uttered the sentence; it seemed like heresy. So I typed it out instead: I want to move out of New York. I found tons of like-minded people. People who were bitching and complaining about sporadic train schedules, small apartments, unfriendly faces, the cost of living.

The next step was saying it aloud—first, casually, in a phone conversation with my folks. “What?” My father choked. “Move out of New York? Who moves out of New York? Everybody’s trying to move into New York.”

But once I’d said the words, I found it nearly impossible not to shout them from the rooftops. I’d run into someone I hadn’t seen in ages and I’d launch right in with: “I want to move out of New York.” It’s like I was possessed. I couldn’t hold it back.

Most people greeted my news with total shock. “Can you get a job outside of New York?” a journalist friend asked, eyes blinking. A befuddled co-worker said: “Can you do that? Just move out of New York?” Like there’s some actual barrier that keeps us here. A neighbor of mine, an indie filmmaker, refused to accept it: “No,” he said. “Impossible. Can you survive outside of New York?” He didn’t mean can I survive. He meant can one survive.

Look, I’m just guessing here, but I do think that people have moved out of New York and lived.

Last week, I ran into my friend Jon in Park Slope. We went to fourth grade together at Calhoun and we’ve lived 15 blocks apart for most of our lives—originally on the Upper West Side and now in Brooklyn. I immediately blurted out my news, expecting the usual response. But instead: “Let’s go,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. Enough with New York already.”

So, it’s settled. I’m leaving. Really, it’s just a matter of time. Now all I have to do is figure out where. I mean, where do you go after New York?

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel seems to be looking for something similar at work: How did the unlived life—or, at least, the secret life—of her father seep into her unconscious? Did it shape her life as an artist? As a homosexual woman?

Ms. Bechdel calls Fun Home a “tragicomic,” a witty description of a graphic memoir for those of us who (though we’re aware of the new developments) are still adjusting to the idea that what we used to call “comics” can be a serious venture. And, in fact, Fun Home is sad, funny, dark, intense.

In the first few pages, we’re introduced to an unhappy family: a tense and cold marriage, repercussions felt by the three children. We see a father who’s exacting, full of self-hate and ruled by an intense passion for home decorating. Early on, Ms. Bechdel jokingly compares her father to Martha Stewart, but later we see how his seemingly benign preoccupation takes its toll on the family. He yells at his children and hits them; he treats them as “extensions of his own body, like precision robot arms.” It appears that most of their childhood is spent decorating, dusting, rearranging their museum of a home. Ms. Bechdel writes: “[S]ometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children.” The drawing here is of three small children kneeling at the foot of a gigantic Christmas tree, flanked on either side by long, heavy curtains; their father standing in the shadows, drinking wine and admiring the scene.

The father, it turns out, is a closeted homosexual who has sex with the family baby-sitters, yard hands and others. He brings these young men along on family vacations while the mother stays behind—because she “doesn’t like the woods.” Of course, the mother is aware all along of what’s going on, but she chooses not to make trouble.

As an adult, Ms. Bechdel finds an envelope marked “FAMILY” in her father’s handwriting. Inside, along with pictures of her and her two brothers on one of the family vacations, is a photograph of the young baby-sitter who accompanied them on several holidays. He’s posed on a hotel bed in his underwear. The photo is dark and sexy.

So there it was, the whole time, only partially veiled.

Ms. Bechdel, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, got her start more than 20 years ago when she began drawing a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Since then, DTWOF has become a cult favorite, spawning a biweekly strip that’s syndicated in over 50 periodicals, as well as 10 book-length collections. Fun Home is Ms. Bechdel’s first full-length foray into autobiography, and she does an excellent job. The writing is smart and meditative; the drawings are sharp and gothic and add depth to the already layered memoir, reinforcing the darkness of the text.

Literature played an important part in Ms. Bechdel’s development, and she makes more than just passing reference to Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wallace Stevens. Her father introduced her to the great works and accidentally showed the way to a life of writing. It was through her father that Alison was introduced to lesbian culture in literature: He insisted at one point—before she came out—that she read Colette.

The title of Fun Home refers to the family business, a funeral home. Ms. Bechdel’s father took over the business when his own father became too ill to clean up corpses and arrange funerals. It was at the Fun Home, when Alison was still a child, that her father introduced her to death—in a manner befitting a cold and unemotional family: He calls her into the back room of the funeral home, where he’s preparing a corpse. Ms. Bechdel recalls the “strange pile of genitals,” but what really gets her attention was the corpse’s “chest, split open to a dark red cave.” She tries not to betray any emotion. Her father asks her to hand him the scissors. “It felt like a test. Maybe this was the same offhanded way his own notoriously cold father had shown him his first cadaver. Or maybe he felt that he’d become too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of.” She hands her father the scissors and asks if that’s all, just the scissors. “Mm-hmm,” is her father’s only response.

In a chapter titled “Happy Death” (an allusion to Camus’ novel), we find out that Ms. Bechdel’s father died after being hit by a truck. It’s not entirely clear whether it was an accident or not, but Ms. Bechdel chooses to think of it as suicide: “It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials … smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.”

Ms. Bechdel came out to her parents in the hope of putting some distance between her and the family, only to be “pulled further into their orbit.” From a liberal-arts college in a different state, she types a coming-out letter. When her mother gets the letter, she phones to disclose all the family secrets. Alison’s own coming out is overshadowed by her father’s hidden life. Note that the mother, not the father, delivers the news.

Alison does get to share a moment of honesty with her father about their sexuality. At the end of the memoir, on their way to see Coal Miner’s Daughter, Alison asks her father whether he knew what he was doing when he gave her Colette to read. This is how she broaches the subject of their shared gayness. The father doesn’t acknowledge his role in her gayness, but does admit to feeling jealous of the openness exhibited these days on college campuses. Then, in an interaction typical of their one-sided relationship, he rattles off the names of men (boys) he’s been with over the years, never thinking to ask her about her sexuality. All the while he’s facing forward, driving. He has one hand on the steering wheel, the other on his face, holding up his chin.

Shaina Feinberg is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

In Fun Home, Alison Bechdel seems to be looking for something similar at work: How did the unlived life—or, at least, the secret life—of her father seep into her unconscious? Did it shape her life as an artist? As a homosexual woman?

Ms. Bechdel calls Fun Home a “tragicomic,” a witty description of a graphic memoir for those of us who (though we’re aware of the new developments) are still adjusting to the idea that what we used to call “comics” can be a serious venture. And, in fact, Fun Home is sad, funny, dark, intense.

In the first few pages, we’re introduced to an unhappy family: a tense and cold marriage, repercussions felt by the three children. We see a father who’s exacting, full of self-hate and ruled by an intense passion for home decorating. Early on, Ms. Bechdel jokingly compares her father to Martha Stewart, but later we see how his seemingly benign preoccupation takes its toll on the family. He yells at his children and hits them; he treats them as “extensions of his own body, like precision robot arms.” It appears that most of their childhood is spent decorating, dusting, rearranging their museum of a home. Ms. Bechdel writes: “[S]ometimes, when things were going well, I think my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least, the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children.” The drawing here is of three small children kneeling at the foot of a gigantic Christmas tree, flanked on either side by long, heavy curtains; their father standing in the shadows, drinking wine and admiring the scene.

The father, it turns out, is a closeted homosexual who has sex with the family baby-sitters, yard hands and others. He brings these young men along on family vacations while the mother stays behind—because she “doesn’t like the woods.” Of course, the mother is aware all along of what’s going on, but she chooses not to make trouble.

As an adult, Ms. Bechdel finds an envelope marked “FAMILY” in her father’s handwriting. Inside, along with pictures of her and her two brothers on one of the family vacations, is a photograph of the young baby-sitter who accompanied them on several holidays. He’s posed on a hotel bed in his underwear. The photo is dark and sexy.

So there it was, the whole time, only partially veiled.

Ms. Bechdel, who grew up in rural Pennsylvania, got her start more than 20 years ago when she began drawing a comic strip called Dykes to Watch Out For. Since then, DTWOF has become a cult favorite, spawning a biweekly strip that’s syndicated in over 50 periodicals, as well as 10 book-length collections. Fun Home is Ms. Bechdel’s first full-length foray into autobiography, and she does an excellent job. The writing is smart and meditative; the drawings are sharp and gothic and add depth to the already layered memoir, reinforcing the darkness of the text.

Literature played an important part in Ms. Bechdel’s development, and she makes more than just passing reference to Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Wallace Stevens. Her father introduced her to the great works and accidentally showed the way to a life of writing. It was through her father that Alison was introduced to lesbian culture in literature: He insisted at one point—before she came out—that she read Colette.

The title of Fun Home refers to the family business, a funeral home. Ms. Bechdel’s father took over the business when his own father became too ill to clean up corpses and arrange funerals. It was at the Fun Home, when Alison was still a child, that her father introduced her to death—in a manner befitting a cold and unemotional family: He calls her into the back room of the funeral home, where he’s preparing a corpse. Ms. Bechdel recalls the “strange pile of genitals,” but what really gets her attention was the corpse’s “chest, split open to a dark red cave.” She tries not to betray any emotion. Her father asks her to hand him the scissors. “It felt like a test. Maybe this was the same offhanded way his own notoriously cold father had shown him his first cadaver. Or maybe he felt that he’d become too inured to death, and was hoping to elicit from me an expression of the natural horror he was no longer capable of.” She hands her father the scissors and asks if that’s all, just the scissors. “Mm-hmm,” is her father’s only response.

In a chapter titled “Happy Death” (an allusion to Camus’ novel), we find out that Ms. Bechdel’s father died after being hit by a truck. It’s not entirely clear whether it was an accident or not, but Ms. Bechdel chooses to think of it as suicide: “It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence steaming off the wallpaper, digging up the dogwoods, polishing the finials … smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.”

Ms. Bechdel came out to her parents in the hope of putting some distance between her and the family, only to be “pulled further into their orbit.” From a liberal-arts college in a different state, she types a coming-out letter. When her mother gets the letter, she phones to disclose all the family secrets. Alison’s own coming out is overshadowed by her father’s hidden life. Note that the mother, not the father, delivers the news.

Alison does get to share a moment of honesty with her father about their sexuality. At the end of the memoir, on their way to see Coal Miner’s Daughter, Alison asks her father whether he knew what he was doing when he gave her Colette to read. This is how she broaches the subject of their shared gayness. The father doesn’t acknowledge his role in her gayness, but does admit to feeling jealous of the openness exhibited these days on college campuses. Then, in an interaction typical of their one-sided relationship, he rattles off the names of men (boys) he’s been with over the years, never thinking to ask her about her sexuality. All the while he’s facing forward, driving. He has one hand on the steering wheel, the other on his face, holding up his chin.

Shaina Feinberg is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.

Where I come from-Upper West Side, Jewish intellectuals-you lean left. There's a spectrum to that, of course: left to lefter to leftist. Growing up, I knew my folks were liberal, but it didn't take long for me to learn that they were stodgy compared to other families.

My best friend's family was lefter than ours. At 7, she told me that her parents had thought of calling her Emma, rather than Sara, to honor Emma Goldman. When I said, "Who?", she was able to rattle off a mini history lesson on the feminist/anarchist who hung around with assassins and was pegged by J. Edgar Hoover as "one of the most dangerous women in America." Other friends had parents who were in the S.D.S. (Students for a Democratic Society). They met at hunger strikes and fell in love. They'd taken the trip down South in 1964. They'd marched on Washington. Organized, picketed.

And then there were the leftists, the radicals. They hadn't just marched-they'd blown things up. These folks were known as the Weather Underground. They didn't just want to reform things-they wanted to overthrow the government, incite a revolution. And their kids had an aura. Sure, they'd come over for birthday parties, eat cake, play Uno. But there was something serious about those kids. Something you couldn't touch.

Thai Jones was one of those kids.

I didn't know Mr. Jones, but we're the same age. I heard about him, through friends, and I knew that we were worlds apart. In 1981, we were both 4 years old-but while I was busy playing make-believe, Mr. Jones' family was getting raided by the F.B.I. At the time, Mr. Jones was known as Timmy Maynard, and he lived in the Bronx with his parents, Sally and John Maynard (their real names were Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein). In October of that year, when the Maynards had just finished a spaghetti dinner, F.B.I. Special Agent Lawrence Wack called to inform them that he had their apartment surrounded. The F.B.I. doesn't usually make courtesy calls. But in this instance, Agent Wack knew there was a child involved and decided to call ahead to give the family advance warning.

Mr. Jones describes the scene vividly in his memoir, A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family's Century of Conscience. The apartment was overrun by police officers dressed in riot gear. Timmy Maynard's father was crawling across the hallway's tiled floor (at gunpoint), his mother was fighting with the police, and little Timmy was lost amidst the chaos. He escaped into his room: "I made a fast survey of my possessions: a cowboy outfit, a coloring book, a stuffed Tyrannosaurus. I opened the drawer of my little desk and picked up my child's scissors. The ends were rounded, and the blades were covered by blue plastic guards. Bouncing them in my hand and snipping at the air, I considered putting on the cowboy hat and charging into the hallway with scissors blazing to defeat these men who had come to hurt our family. Even then, I knew it was a battle against long odds. But I didn't realize it was a question that many in my family had already faced. They had chosen to fight."

For Mr. Jones, this was the defining moment, when he first became aware of his family's involvement in politics.

He has a fascinating story to tell, and he covers a lot of ground, giving a history of the radical left from 1913 through 1981. The text weaves its way through McCarthyism, the civil-rights movement, S.D.S., the "Days of Rage." But what makes Mr. Jones' account so enthralling is that it's history personalized-history from the inside out. You don't just see how individuals effected political change, but how the act of making history affected individuals-their families, their romances, their hearts and minds.

The characters Mr. Jones portrays sacrificed a lot. We learn of Mr. Jones' grandfather, Albert, a conscientious objector during World War II, who was forced to leave his life behind to spend years in a work camp. Later on, Albert was separated from his outlaw son, Jeff. They went nine years without seeing one another.

Mr. Jones doesn't rely on content alone to pull the reader in; the writing is crisp and evocative: "Annie's father had a widow's peak like a ship's prow. He could comb it forward, backward, or to the side, and still it would point down unmercifully to the bridge of his nose." Of Brooklyn in the hot ache of summertime, Mr. Jones writes: "On the street below, nothing stirred unless it had to. Glass, steel, stone, concrete: everything in the borough absorbed the sun and was too hot to touch."

What people seem to remember about the radical politics of the Weather Underground is the accidental explosion that leveled a New York City brownstone, killing three members of the group. Or the Brinks robbery, which left innocent people dead. It's too bad that Mr. Jones doesn't spend much time on either of those sad incidents; he's missed the opportunity to explore their meaning from the inside.

Mr. Jones is smart to leave out any predictions about our political future. It's promising, however, to read about our nation's sinuous past: violent swings both left and right, some powerful mistakes and some equally powerful achievements. And reading A Radical Line, you remember that even in the hardest, darkest moments, certain individuals are willing to stand up, no matter what the cost, no matter which way the wind blows.

Shaina Feinberg is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn.

And then something changed for me. I started to feel bored and restless. I felt like she was holding me back. She'd constantly redirect conversations to my childhood- we'd cover the same material over and over. I wanted someone younger, someone less focused on the past. I wanted to speed up the healing process, and her halting and slow manner seemed only to anchor me to my old self.

I dreaded going to therapy. And I couldn't tell her that. She was a sweet little lady. I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

We took a six-week break last summer, at the end of which I was supposed to call to schedule an appointment. But I didn't. A week later, she called and left me a message. I didn't call back. Not ever. It was like the perfect crime. At the time, it felt great.

If there's any place to feel like you can get away with weaseling, it's here. New York is so big, you can always tell yourself you'll never see so-and-so again. If I lived in some small town, I'd never have been able to ditch my shrink that way. I'd run into her at the post office, the grocery store, the hair salon. In New York, even if you do happen to see someone you don't want to see, you can just keep walking, pretend you didn't see them. Or you can run for the bus, scoot across the street. Moments later, you're lost in the crowd.

There are strange, lesser forms of weaseling that also thrive here. A friend of a friend of mine (I'll call her Ann) recently started dating this guy she met at a party. She was shocked by how nice he was, and how interested. In less than two weeks, they had hung out six times. Then she got a call from a girl who said, "Jack can't see you anymore." Ann didn't hear from him after that.

Another friend of mine was working Sundays as a bartender at a Chinese restaurant. A few weeks into working there, she got a call from her boss, who said, "We don't need you on Sundays anymore." She only worked Sundays. Clearly he was firing her. She asked him, "Are you firing me?" He just laughed and said, "No, no, of course not. We just don't need you anymore." Again she asked, "Are you firing me?" And again he said: "No, no." To make things even more confusing, he said, "I look forward to working with you again," and then he hung up.

My roommate will do a slow-burn weasel, spending months letting a guy down gently. Meaning, she'll always be busy or have to call him back. It doesn't occur to her to just say, "Look, I'm not interested."

But the fact is, no matter what you tell yourself, weaseling will come back to haunt you. When I weaseled my shrink, it didn't take long for me to feel awful about it. A month or so later, I started to notice that I was thinking about her a lot. I decided I should write her a letter apologizing. I put it on my to-do list: Write apology letter to Dr. G . That was in October. It's now May and I haven't written the letter yet. What would I tell her? "Hey, sorry." Or: "Don't hate me, I was bored of therapy, bored of my childhood. Can we be friends?" Only, we were never friends. It was a professional relationship. But that doesn't mean I don't owe her anything.

An old friend of mine from high school, Liz, would spend a lot of energy coming up with the perfect excuses when there was nothing wrong with the truth. If she didn't want to go somewhere because she was broke or tired, she'd say that she had to get something for her mom at a specific time and place or that her dad needed something done immediately. Then she'd spend the rest of the day feeling nervous. She'd say: "Do you think it was totally obvious that I was lying? Do you think they'll figure it out?" She'd get so paranoid, she wouldn't go outside. She was afraid of running into someone who could then, in a court of law, verify that she was not in fact where she had said she was going to be.

That's the essence of the problem. We're kidding ourselves, all us weasels. Because while you think you can disappear in New York, you also run into people you don't expect to run into, in places you'd never think you'd see them. It happened to a co-worker of mine. He'd been dating this girl for three months or so. It was casual-they saw each other once a week. They'd watch The Sopranos together, go out for dinner in her neighborhood in the East Village. Then he went to Italy for 10 days on business. When he got home, she didn't answer his calls or e-mails. Soon enough he wised up. He'd been weaseled. And for a while, he didn't run into her. They didn't have friends in common, didn't live in the same neighborhood. But six months later, he saw her leaving the apartment building directly across the street from his. Even though she was the weasel, he was embarrassed and dreaded having to revisit their situation. He's seen her a bunch of times now, leaving the same building with some guy. To avoid her, he speeds up or slows down, appears really interested in his shoes. But the tension is rising. "She must see me, right? I mean, I can see her," he said to me. "How long can I keep this up? When we do make eye contact, it's going to totally suck."

Just recently, I've started to worry about running into Dr. G. I mean, sure, I'm just one person in 10 million in this city. But still. We could show up at the same synagogue on Rosh Hashanah. The same play, dinner party, restaurant. I wouldn't be able to pretend I didn't see her. I'd feel too rotten about that. If I did see her, what would I say?

If I could, I would do it over. I'd just be straight about the whole thing. And then it would've been done, really.

But I can't do it over. I'm stuck with the guilt of having weaseled my shrink. Dr. G., if you're reading this, I'm sorry. It wasn't you, it was me. I think I've learned my lesson.

Russell left Rachel eight months ago. And thank God. Rachel's mother said: "Good. Feh . Stick to your own kind."

I get that one, too. My good friend Julie, she sees me founder and sink in all my romantic forays. She sees the boys I date: tall, thin blonds, the pug-nosed type. She says: "You have no luck with these boys because they're not Jewish." Julie isn't Jewish, but somehow she knows this. "You need to stick to your own kind."

So what is that kind? Stocky, shortish, couldn't use a drill if his life depended on it? No, thank you. I don't want my kind.

Rachel and I talk about this a lot. She's now pining away for a big brute of a man, Casey O'Hannon. He is broad-shouldered and he is thick. He looks vaguely thuggish. Rachel says, "He's so big, and he's all maleness. But my shrink wants me to date Jewish. She thinks my lack of interest in Jewish boys is very telling. It means I'm self-hating, and as soon as I can get over that, I'm done. I'm good. No more therapy."

I had a shrink who thought the same way. She'd say, with a thick Israeli accent, "So much self-hatred, Shaina. Why do you shun the Jewish boys?"

I'll tell you why. Because they are gentle and they have no masculine moves. No machismo. They wouldn't look right bloodied up after a bar fight. They don't swagger. And never have I had a Jewish boyfriend offer to build me a bookshelf.

I want a guy who can find a stud and put up a wall bracket, who knows what a molly is.

Rachel's shrink suggested that Rachel go to Jewish dining night-a once-weekly thing. Jews gather at a restaurant to eat and schmooze. Her shrink thought it was a great way to dispel unflattering stereotypes. So she went.

I asked what she thought of it. "What'd I think of it? I'll tell you what I thought of it. No stereotypes were dispelled-only reinforced. You know, I met a pediatrician. A nice fellow. He told me why he's a pediatrician: He just loves the little babies. That is exactly what he said. He said, 'I just love the little babies.' That is not manly."

I've dated Jews and non-Jews-plenty of both. And the Jewish boys have all faded now into a lump of Jewish ex-boyfriend. They all resemble each other somehow. Either physically or generally-their manner. They reminded me of boys I knew in Hebrew school. I can't separate them from those memories I have of them-or their predecessors-being hauled around by their Jewish mothers. The mothers would then go on and on about Daniel or Joshua and what he does best. But ultimately, I guess, these boys feel so familiar because they remind me of someone who is kind and smart, but not the least bit exciting to me: My pop.

With non-Jews, nothing's familiar. I feel different from them, in a good way. Being Jewish seems sexy and smart then. With non-Jewish boys, I'm more apt to call on my Jewish heritage; I flaunt it, even. I'll explain Jewish holidays or recall my favorite passages from the Old Testament. I'm eager to bring non-Jewish guys around at Passover or Rosh Hashanah so they can hear me sing along in Hebrew, or so I can show off that I know the meanings of the blessings.

You just can't play the Jewish card with other Jews. When the topic of Israel comes up, or the state of the world today-or a cultural event like The Passion of the Christ -other Jews just agree with me, 100 percent. Yes! Of course, it's still hard to be Jewish. There is still so much hatred! No disagreement there.

With non-Jews, it's a much more interesting story. We talk about anti-Semitism nowadays or Israel, and they roll their eyes. They think I'm paranoid. I draw certain parallels between 1930's Germany and life today in the U.S. They think I'm nuts. But then I say something like: "You just don't understand." And they are putty in my hands. I become their little Anne Frank. Their Jewish girl on the verge of extinction. And only they can protect me.

My girlfriend Deb feels similarly. She wants a non-Jewish man who can protect her against the inevitable armies of neo-Nazis. She has what she calls a blue-collar weakness; she has fantasies of robust non-Jews who work at hauling stuff. "I don't want a little weenie Jewish boy. God, I feel terrible saying that. I have so many stereotypes-I think of dating Jews, and I imagine manicured and petite hands. That's awful, but it's just what I think of. And that's definitely a no-no."

She was quiet a moment and then she said: "Besides, why should we want to date them? They haven't wanted to date us for decades. They all bow down to the shiksa goddess."

Ah, the shiksa goddess. It's like the earth quakes and quivers when she's mentioned. Shiksa goddess-the archnemesis of all Jewish girls.

I was recently introduced to a fellow Jew, a good-looking guy from the Midwest. He is thin and intense. A friend of a friend. Somehow the shiksa goddess came up, and he said: "Up until a week ago, I thought 'shiksa' was a compliment. Like 'über-excellent.' I didn't realize it just meant 'non-Jew.'"

Figures.

For years, Jewish women have been depicted as sturdy, two feet on the ground, shleppy, ethnic, unable to eat without getting food everywhere. Meanwhile, non-Jews are sexy, exotic, willowy.

It's all straight out of Philip Roth.

My friends and I are in our 20's. Our mothers are hoping it's a phase: You still have time to outgrow this thing.

And maybe they're right. Single Jewish women in their 30's seem to want Jewish men. An actress friend of mine in her 30's told me, "I dream of Mandy Patinkin from Yentl . That's what I imagine. He'll be up late studying, wearing wire-rimmed glasses. I'll be puttering around, I'll bring him herbal tea, hydrox."

She belongs to JDate and goes regularly to Makor hoping to find her scholar.

But this is nothing new for her; it's just more urgent these days. "It's what I've always wanted. A Jewish wedding, Jewish babies. A Jewish husband."

So is there hope for us twentysomething Jewish girls who lust after goys? Will we see the error of our ways?

"I don't know," Rachel says when I ask her if she thinks she'll outgrow this. "I mean, doesn't Lenny Bruce say an Irishman who's lost his religion is now a Jew? If that's the case, I'm covered."

The song echoed through their apartment, on constant repeat. My mother would urge him: "Paul, enough! Turn it down a little." More recently, he's discovered Tom Waits. When I visit them now, I hear him in the next room, conjuring up that husky voice, clapping his hands at intervals. In the mornings, while he's getting ready for work, he perfects a deep and guttural impersonation. "I'll admit," I say to my mother, "he does a good Tom Waits." She just rolls her eyes.

But my father is enthusiastic-obsessive, some might say-about many things, not just music. He runs, does yoga, knows a coma-inducing amount of information on the stock market, loves to fish. And, in the past few years, he has become an Israel enthusiast. A month after 9/11, he took his first trip to Israel. This also happened to be his first trip abroad. I couldn't understand why he'd decided to travel so soon after the attacks, and especially to Israel. "Why," I asked, "have you decided to become a world-class traveler at this point in time? If you want to go somewhere, why not to the Poconos or Lake George?" "Uff," he sighed, "this is not about travel. This is about Israel -coming out in support of Israel. I've always wanted to do this," he said. "And I feel now that I must. That I can't wait for the right time, I should do it now."

Although I admired my father's seize-the-day attitude, I felt it was selfish. So this was what he wanted. He didn't mind that it could be dangerous. But did it occur to him that his family might care if he never made it back? That we might want him to stick around a while? In the weeks leading up to his trip, my older sister (even more outraged at the idea than I was) and I tried to change his mind. At one point, my sister told him that she was worried her children would grow up without their grandfather. This touched my father, but it didn't change his mind about the trip.

My mother? Her coping mechanism is to act indifferent. She shrugged: "What can you do? He wants to go? Let him go." In response to her nonchalance, I became more outspoken in my opposition. I tried to provoke her with ridiculous and morbid questions. "Ma," I'd say, "how long after his death will you wait before you begin to date?" Her response? A few weeks.

My father went to Israel, and when he returned he said it was more, it was greater than he'd expected. My sister and I were shocked he'd made it back. And we were glad it was over-surely he'd satisfied his curiosity and been cured of his obsession. But we were wrong, and he's already gone back.

Last October, the Shul arranged another group visit. In the weeks leading up to his trip, my father was ecstatic. He couldn't wait to go back. He told my mother and me that he would break off from the group and go to Haifa to visit a cousin. The idea of my father traveling by himself in Israel made me nervous. But my mother was cavalier as ever. "Who am I," she said, "to interfere with a grown man's decision?"

Once there, my father did not break off from the group to go to Haifa; there was too much to do in Jerusalem. He gave blood, he took his first mikvah, he bought prunes and jelly donuts at the market. He left exuberant messages on my machine about the beauty and the people and how he wished I would go soon. He called my mother and told her he'd barely slept, and that he'd looked into buying an apartment in Jerusalem. My mother told me this over the phone. I hung up with her and called my sister, who made it clear she'd never visit them if they moved to Israel. Giving money is one thing, but going there- moving there? It seemed crazy to me. Why now, when every day I heard of the suicide bombings that took so many lives? What next? Would he enlist in the Israeli army? To me, it was clear: My parents would never see me again if they decided to move to Jerusalem. It would come down to choosing between me and the State of Israel. Didn't this bother them?

Since the appearance of my father's latest fascination, I've realized that I'm embarrassed about Israel. Ambivalent, at best. I feel ashamed of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians-and yet I'm intensely offended by anti-Israel sentiment.

Now again, my father plans another visit. Around him, a negative word cannot be uttered about Israel. Believe me, I've tried.

Recently, my father and I went for a jog together in Central Park. Twelve minutes into the run he pulled a muscle, so we turned around. I walked, he hobbled back. As we walked, he told me he would like to pay for me to go to Israel-for two weeks. I have always had a fear of flying and told him that I wouldn't board a plane to Rhode Island, let alone Israel. He said, "Who cares about Rhode Island? I'm talking Israel. I would just love for you to see it." I shook my head and mumbled something about how I wasn't sure how I felt about Israel in a political sense. He was exasperated, but he let it slide.

A few nights after our discussion, while waiting for the Q train to Brooklyn, I heard a musician singing "Hallelujah." He was this reedy man with a curved spine and a multicolored Mohawk. He wore army shorts, sweat socks and beat-up Nikes. It was late and everyone on the platform was quiet, slumped on benches or leaning against columns. I listened to him sing. It was a particularly wonderful rendition of the song. I smiled to myself as I was reminded of my father's "Hallelujah" phase. And it occurred to me then how different his affection for Israel was. It had become deeply a part of him now and wasn't going to go away. At that moment, I felt badly that this wasn't something I could share with him or even fully understand. My father and I would have to stick to other areas of common interest. I walked over to the musician and tossed a dollar into his open guitar case. He looked up at me and, in between the words (almost between breaths), he said, "Thanks." I nodded to him and wondered, only partly in jest, what my father might think of the composition of this version of his song.