When I was twelve and desperately wanted to fit in, I went along with my friends’ penny throwing gag at a suburban shopping mall. 

“Bet you can’t resist, Jew.”

Clank, clank, clank. The pennies smacked the tile floor beside my feet, reverberating their cold metallic cries.

“Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!”–chanted my friends. Their voices bounced off the tile floor as each of my pals looked on with excited curiosity. 

“Is he really gonna do it?” Giddy eyes were on me.

Looking back on that day, I wish I could say I stared at the pennies and thought about my family and wondered what they would do. Instead, all I thought about was pleasing my pals.

I bent down, literally and figuratively to stoop beneath the people I........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)