The 188th Crybaby Brigade
For Joel (Yoel) Chasnoff, “a skinny Jewish kid from Chicago (as he is described in his book’s subtitle), joining the Israeli Army for one year might seem counterintuitive: He was 24 years old, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he acted in the all-male Mask and Wig Club dressed in drag. He was a left-leaning, lactose-intolerant peacenik who passed out when he saw blood. Still, there was his strong sense of Jewishness, nourished in a Conservative home and day school--where he met his first Israeli, a teacher whose love of the country infected him--and family and youth group trips to Israel. Finally, there was Dorit, a Yemenite-Persian Israeli and Israel programs director at the Brooklyn College Hillel, where Chasnoff was hired to perform stand-up comedy. When Chasnoff realized he might one day want to spend his life with Dorit in Israel, he knew he first had to serve…