Last year, I shot my first (but hopefully not my last!) book trailer for my anthology Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica.

One common question I get is...what's a book trailer?

Well, it's like a movie trailer, but for a book, and in some ways, even more ingenious. Movies have way more buzz around them than books; it's likely that even if you never plan to see, say, Revolutionary Road, you've heard about it, but not so much with books.

So book trailers are a way for authors to spread the word about their books using blogs, YouTube, and other video sharing sites.

I hired a friend of mine who I'd known from her own comedic videos for $500; that was the total budget for our shoot, and quite a bargain in the world of book trailers, I learned.

I had a few friends come over to a friend's place one afternoon, and we proceeded to "act out" a few key scenes from the book.

Once concern I had is that even though my book is full of X-rated stories, I didn't want my trailer to be. I was aiming for light, positive, fun, with a hint of naughtiness. My main goal in making the trailer was to let people who might otherwise never hear of a book like Spanked to know it existed. From there, they could go to the book's blog and read story samples, or just keep watching the trailer.

We did some voiceovers and there was lots of giggling as we tried to come up with a variety of implements that I would get spanked with. In large part, it was an experiment, to see what would happen (I will soon find out if it paid off in sales, though that's not the only reason to make one). The final product was one I was really pleased with. I got to get my personality across, tease the reader with the content of the book, and hopefully make them want to find out more about it. I also like that the one word that came up again and again in reactions to the book was "cute." That's what I was going for. (Sorry, I'm not as smart as the fabulous Molly Crabapple and can't figure out how to atually add the video here, but you can see it on YouTube.)

Reasons to make a book trailer:
1. To spread the word about your book, especially to those who don't tend to buy books
2. To let you introduce yourself to your audience in ways type simply can't
3. To have multimedia work samples on your website 4. Others can easily post it on their sites. 5. Because it's fun!

What happened after we released the trailer was an unexpected bonus. My director uploaded it to four sites: Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, and Blip. Within hours, Flickr had taken it down, and then Vimeo did the same, providing me with very little feedback. They claim they don't allow commercial materials, yet if you look up book trailers on Vimeo, there are plenty there. There is no nudity in my trailer, and no cursing.

The story about Vimeo removing my video got me some bonus press, from Silicon Alley Insider and gossip site Jossip. I managed to meet my goal in totally unexpected ways! It's now been viewed over 80,000 times on YouTube, which I consider a huge success.

Very soon, I plan to shoot new trailers, one in a hotel room for my hotel erotica book Do Not Disturb, and one, if I can find one to rent, on a private plane, for The Mile High Club. Neither will have nudity, but both will hopefully give a hint of what kind of material is in my book.

Based on my experience, I recommend hiring someone who knows what they're doing, who's good at troubleshooting, and understands your vision. Set a budget in advance, and if you're working with a tiny budget, make sure you get your money's worth. While some companies charge upwards of $5,000 or more, you can make your own. Poke around on YouTube or sites like Watch the Book or Book Trailers, or just use Google, to see a sample of what's out there. As a reader, it can be fun to watch a book's trailer after you've finished reading, to add to the reading experience. Book trailers should be short, to best capture the reader's attention. Another one I really loved is for my friend Samara O'Shea's Note to Self, about keeping a journal; she got her ex-boyfriend, who she writes about in the book (he found her journal chronicling her affair), to be in it!

You can watch's Samara's trailer here.

Rachel Kramer Bussel, author of Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

Here are today's top stories in no particular order:

• Blagojevich-appointed Senate seat successor Roland Burris was turned away from the Capitol when he came to claim his seat this morning. Burris, who was expecting to fill Barack Obama's vacant Senate seat, is supposedly not certified by the State of Illinois because of the Blagojevich seat-selling debacle.

• Two UN schools were hit by Israeli missiles today, as the death toll in Gaza rises to around 600.

• An Australian woman has been charged with murder after setting her husband's genitals on fire. The enraged wife set her husband's package ablaze after claiming to see him hug another woman, and is quoted as saying, " I just wanted to burn his penis so it belongs to me and no one else."

• Ron Asheton, guitarist for the legendary proto-punk outfit the Stooges, was found dead this morning at his Ann Arbor, Michigan home. The cause of death has not been determined. Asheton was 60 years old.

• Yesterday's autopsy of John Travolta's teenage son Jett is raising more questions than answers.

• Toyota will close its factories and hold production for 11 days in an effort to reduce the number of cars being produced. The production halt is due to poor vehicle sales and the sinking economy.

• Controversial Republican pundit Ann Coulter's scheduled appearance on NBC's Today Show was cancelled. Instead, she brought her inflammatory antics to the Early Show, where anchor Harry Smith called her "goofy."

I deplore Japs even more than the people who throw a fit over the use of the word. I don’t mean the people responsible for drawing alcohol from rice grains; I mean the ones who say their holiday weekend was awe-some while they toss their hair and speak louder than necessary into their mobile phones as they leave their Murray Hill apartments en route to "fourbucks" for their coffee enemas. I know Jews get offended by the term. Get over it. It’s not a Jew thing; it’s regional. While I only know a handful of jappy boys and girls, the ones who are, are japtastic with a vengeance. There's no middle ground. Just like the girl with the little curl right in the middle of her forehead. Japs get their forehead curl straightened with Japanese chemicals.

To set it right, Japs can be male. I regret to say I’ve met a few too many Juvenile Affected Princes who go to Boston to get their eyelashes tinted. They’re not just heteroflexible, they’re judgmental. A jappy guy won’t date a woman with the "wrong" family, friends, or clothes. "Wrong" consists of blue collars, a propensity for hermitic inactivity, and sans logo apparel.  You've got a nice rack, but if you don’t have a Lexus, BMW or Mercedes lease on life, he’s having second thoughts. Japs don't think Saab; they live sob: Oh vey is mir.  You’re his accessory and door, but here’s the real rub: he doesn’t want a jappy woman. See Jewish men detest Jappy women. They complain about how long it takes her to get ready, and how she spends too much money on her hair, tank tops, plaid waders, and doggie treats for a yapping pooch named Gucci. It’s the goyish mensch who covets the Tiffany Bean clad girl. Goys love high-maintenance woman. They love her manicure pedicure time, her affinity for valet parking, and the backbone, heard periodically in a fine whine. It’s the Japman who nibbles on exaggeration and feasts on schadenfreude. I could never let a man who dabbled in Yiddish touch my triangle. I can’t imagine foreplay with a guy who says “fakakta.”

Japs are rarely women; they’re always girls. I can’t take them seriously; it’s the voice. It’s her inflection. It’s not necessarily what she says but how she says it.  It's a four-letter word: tone.  Even her small talk butchers. “Oh, hoy. How awe you?” Talk fucking normal. And learn to pay for your own gym membership. I don't care if real estate is slow. Your parents shouldn't be paying for your life if you're in your twenties.

Even when she’s over forty, she still dresses like her teenage daughter hoping to be deemed M.I.L.F., gets her hair blow twice a week, and buzzes around town in her SUV with a Tasti-D-Lite cup in her like-linen manicured hand. She’s a yenta with a slim cell phone tucked into the back pocket of her I-have-no-ass Habitual jeans. On Sundays she slums and does iced hazelnut coffee from the bagel store, where she orders low-carb bagels and diet lobster salad after her pilates class.  And then you hear her open that glossy lined mouth (you can always see her liner globbing up in the corners. You don’t know why it happens, but it always does.), and you flinch.  These are the jap snobs, not to be confused with the pearly pink and green society snobs. I can bear the WASPS; at least they volunteer and enunciate words.

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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:

• Barack Obama has proposed a whopping $300 billion tax cut as part of the economic stimulus package, which will take effect mid-February.

• An autopsy on Jett Travolta, John Travolta's 16-year-old son who died on Friday, is being conducted today in the Bahamas. Jett, who suffered from Kawasaki Syndrome, is believed to have hit his head on the bathtub while having a seizure.

• Apple CEO Steve Jobs has decided to come clean about his health after rumors swirled about his current drastic weight loss. Jobs claims a hormone imbalance is to blame for his weight fluctuations and will undergo treatment.

• Leon Panetta, former Clinton chief of staff, has been chosen by Barack Obama to head the CIA, although he has no intelligence experience.

• Despite international diplomatic efforts for a ceasefire, Israel will continue to attack Gaza as the death toll rises to 500.

• Family Ties: John "Junior" Gotti is seeking bail after being arrested on racketeering charges. Gotti denies any links to organized crime.

As I'm never one for Hollywood happy endings, or Lifetime melodramas, it takes a lot to tug at my jaundiced heartstrings. But just over ten years ago when I first heard about the sensationalized Holocaust-aided love story of Herman and Roma Rosenblat -- thanks to my mom's strange love of The Oprah Winfrey Show -- I momentarily had the closest thing to a misty-eyed moment that I could muster. This is not saying I gave into the urgings of Oprah and others, but rather to the seeming sincerity with which Herman and his wife conveyed their story. It was hard not to be swept in by the inspirational tale of child-love amidst the devastation and genocide of the Holocaust. The idea of two preteens meeting through the fence of the Buchenwald concentration camp only to be reunited years later on a blind date at Coney Island, though inherently corny and slightly implausible, was a rarefied positive glimpse of one of history's darkest moments. Deemed by Winfrey as "the single best love story, in 22 years of doing this show, we've ever had on the air," the Rosenblats appeared to be an elderly couple drawn together by terrifying events of the past and the magic of serendipity, not the type of people you would automatically identify as shady or deceiving; their hands clasped tightly, their eyes teary, their love endless. Why would anyone have to question such a tale? More importantly: who would make something like this up?

Perhaps it was the potential of greater fame, or the motivation of greed, that led Rosenblat to sell his tale and publish his memoir Angel at the Fence: The True Story of Love That Survived, which up until a week ago was slated to be released in February by Berkley Books (a division of Penguin). After two appearances on Oprah, a smattering of media coverage and even a mention in the feel-good book series Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul, Herman Rosenblat was ready for more—which was most likely incited by the promise of a hefty book advance. Originally inspired by a vision of his mother recovering from a gunshot wound in the hospital, Rosenblat explains that it was time for him to go public with his surreal story of love and survival. The crucial detail he failed to mention was that at the time of Rosenblat's hospital stay - the result of a shooting during a botched burglary that occurred in his TV repair shop, leaving his son Ken permanently wheelchair bound - his business was down the tubes and would eventually close after he was healed and released. It seems as if it was a vision of dollar signs, not his sympathetic mother, that urged Rosenblat to submit his story to a contest he entered and won in the New York Post that would eventually attract the omnipotent Oprah's attention.

It actually wasn't until he put his trite words to paper that Herman Rosenblat began to draw critical speculation. From the details in the memoir that fluctuate from fuzzy and vague to overly descriptive that are far from the childlish musings of a preteen ("...but it really was the color in her cheeks and the sweet innocence in which she stared to artlessly and candidly across the wire that drew me to her") to the shaky premise of Herman and Roma's supposed first meeting between the concentration camp barbed-wire fence, things didn't seem to add up. According to Kenneth Walzer, head of the Jewish Studies department at Michigan State University - who was coincidentally writing his own book on children at Buchenwald - the story was impossible. The more witnesses who were at Buchenwald with Rosenblat that Walzer interviewed, and the more research he did, the more it became clear that Angel was undoubtedly a lie.

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Amy Winehouse

That was some genius who put Alex Haines in charge of the Good Ship Winehouse, working as Amy's assistant.  Though the young bloke in the pea coat had no problem jumping into Amy’s boat, he was barely able to keep her afloat.  Seems Amy’s Boy Friday kept her bed warm as well as buttered her toast and poured her coffee in the morning.  All Wino had to do was craft her pipe and smoke some crack.

"It was like having my own little porn star. Amy was so dirty—she wanted sex all time. We did it four or five times a day and she’d even wake me up for it. She was addicted to sex like she was
to drugs.”

“When Amy ran out of the drug it she would cut the bottle in half and sit there on the floor completely wired, scraping the inside to get the residue with a screwdriver." News of the World 

Alex, who obviously doesn't work for Amy any more, also revealed that Amy was a cutter and bulimic.  He also said, that Wino is haunted that she'll be in the "27 club" - to be dead at 27 just like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain. Oh Amy, aim higher - start your own club!

Crossposted at Jewssip.com - Celebrity News From a Higher Authority

Yeshiva World News is one of the main places where the right-wing Orthodox community gets their news. It's an unfortunate site replete with hateful comments and downright racist remarks, especially when anything related to Barack Obama is reported. There was even a forum on the site asking readers whether or not they felt that non-observant readers should be allowed to comment on the forums. [Editor's note: I would love to know how they intended to prove the strength of commenters' observance. I can't even figure out our commenters' real names.]

It was reported earlier this week that a man from Yeshiva Ner Israel in Baltimore was killed in a car accident while traveling between Baltimore and Passaic, NJ. Yeshiva World News' main competition Vos Iz Neias (Yiddish for "What Is News"), reported the same exact story. 

The next day it was revealed in the Baltimore Jewish Times that the car-accident story was false. According to the Maryland State Police, the man had in fact committed suicide by jumping off the bridge, where the car accident supposedly took place. Vos Iz Neias immediately rescinded their original story and posted the real story with an apology. Yeshiva World News did no such thing, in fact, rather then removing the false story from their website, as of midnight this evening the news story claiming that this man had died in an automotive accident was still on the Yeshiva World News website.

This is not the first time Yeshiva World News has covered up, or failed to report on, a story affecting the frum community. When news broke that Rabbi Dr. Benzion Twersky was threatened for being the head of a task force to deal with growing problems of child molestation in the Orthodox community, Yeshiva World News failed to mention anything, while Vos Iz Neias had complete coverage of the story. 

Unfortunately, the frum community would rather turn a blind eye to issues that affect them just like everyone else, rather than face the cold hard fact that every community - no matter how pious or insular - has issues.

Video by William Zoe FitzGerald
Bettie's inspirational 21st century counterpart: Darenzia

Here are today's top stories in no particular order:

• After almost a week of brutal air attacks on the Gaza Strip, Israel has rejected a 48-hour ceasefire with Hamas, but will not rule out the hope for future diplomacy.

• According to the Wall Street Journal, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is planning to write a tell-all book about his tenure with the Bush Administration in hopes of setting the record straight about his role in the war on terror.

• Obama's inauguration parties happening mid-January might have some stiff competition: The Mid-Atlantic Leather Weekend, where leather daddies and the men that love them meet annually in Washington DC. Hopefully Obama will don some chaps to show his love for the gay leather community and to make up for Rick Warren's inaugural invocation.

• Former NBA star Charles Barkley was arrested this morning on suspicion of driving under the influence in Scottsdale, Arizona after he failed to stop at a stop sign.

• Whip it good! As if karaoke wasn't scary enough, five patrons at a Florida karaoke bar were pistol-whipped by three armed men, who robbed the karaokers and others in the bar. The men have not been apprehended.

• Crash star—and speed demon— Matt Dillon was arrested last night for speeding in Vermont. Dillon was going 106 mph in a 65mph zone.

18-year-old Bristol Palin, daughter of also-ran Vice Presidential candidate and current Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, gave birth to a son on Saturday. She and fiance Levi Johnston named the new addition Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston. Depending who you ask, this is either Bristol's first child or her second.

Bristol did not finish high school (neither did her brother Track, who is in the army, which brings Sarah Palin's total of high school graduate offspring to 0/5), but will earn her GED via correspondence courses. Levi, who is also a high school dropout, is training to work as an electrician. Lest we worry that the young couple won't be able to support themselves financially, People magazine has reportedly ponied up $300,000 for the first photographs of little Tripp. Perhaps I should have seen that coming - after all, People got to break the news of the baby's birth, and the magazine has earned a reputation for paying outrageous sums of money for celebrity baby photos (past 'gets' included the Brangelina twins, Knox and Vivienne, J.Lo's twins, Max and Emme, and Nicole Richie's daughter Harlow).

If People is willing to drop a lot of coin for pictures of your infant, I guess that makes you by their logic a celebrity. What does this mean? It means that, for now, we're stuck with Bristol, Levi, Tripp, and the rest of the gang. That doesn't just include Sarah Palin, it includes Tripp's other grandma, Sherry Johnston, who got busted last week for selling OxyContin to an undercover police informant. Apparently Johnston's arrest and the subsequent media attention helped drive up the price of the baby pictures.

To quote an old Irish poem about a mother talking to her baby: "I hurl you into the world and pray."

X-posted at Offsprung.

Here are today's top stories in no particular order:

• Fighting in the Gaza Strip is far from over: On the fourth day of attacks, Israel's airstrikes are "the first of several stages," according to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

• We're a happy family: Sarah Palin may not be the Vice President, but she is officially a grandmother. Palin's teenage daughter Bristol gave birth to baby boy Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston yesterday. The newborn is already in the midst of a tabloid bidding war—which is rumored to have started at a sweet $100,000—for the exclusive first photo. The asking price, which is supposedly around $300,000, wasn't due to the popularity of grandma Palin, but to the fact that the mother of Bristol's baby daddy, Levi Johnston, was recently arrested on drug charges.

• According to new accounts, Bruce Pardo, the Santa suit-clad man behind the Christmas Eve murders of his ex-wife's family and friends, was also planning to murder his mother and his wife's divorce attorney.

• What do you get when you mix a has-been new wave artist and an overpriced sex toy? You get the "Little Steel Tonight" vibrator created by former Eurythmic Dave Stewart, which, as its name suggests, is made of solid steel and is lavishly encrusted with diamonds. This pleasure treasure not only includes sultry song lyrics from Stewart's new solo effort, but also has the over-the-top price tag of $2,000.

• Blood is more than just an essential life force in Japan - it's a compatibility litmus test for potential suitors. The latest Japanese dating craze is matchingmaking based on blood type, which supposedly helps to determine personality traits, although there has been no firm scientific evidence to back this up.

• William Balfour, the man suspected of killing three members of Oscar-winning actress and singer Jennifer Hudson's family, is due in a Chicago courtroom today. Balfour is the estranged husband of Hudson's sister Julia and is charged with three counts of first-degree murder.

I am sitting in a random kosher pizza shop in Brooklyn. I am sitting here, eyebrows furrowed, pissed off at the racket we know as the kosher pizza shop cartel. Three dollars for a slice of pizza. The quality of this one-side-of-a-grilled-cheese-plus-blood-sauce-sandwich hasn't risen in tandem with its escalating price; how can it? My plan to bankrupt the place by loading up on staples from the tables (oregano or crushed red pepper) are hardly shifting the imbalanced weights of the joint's crooked restaurateur. To add insult to injury, there are three little kids staring at me, pointing, as if I am some sort of oddity, some sort of alien dropped from sky, weirdly landing in Brooklyn at a kosher pizza shop.

If I only knew Yiddish, I could tell them to fuck off - nicely of course, they are little kids after all. Maybe I could get fancy and ask them their names and then explain to them that beyond their little world of Williamsburg or Borough Park there lives a whole species of people like me - and guess what, we are just as Jewish as them. But my Yiddish is so poor I can only pretend that I understand what they are saying as they twirl their side locks while pointing at me as they continue to talk in derisive tones about me right in front of my face.

My friend calls the reprehensible gaze of these children "the Borough Park Stare." He used to refer to it as getting the 'BeePS', as if it were some club term. It wasn't, it was merely an annoyance that all people, both Jewish and non-Jewish, get from little Chassidic kids.

My father loves to mess with little Chassidic children in part because it allows him to let his Yiddish (which he loves so much) roll out in spades. I think it scares the shit out of them when some guy in flannel shirt, blue jeans and a baseball cap starts talking in Yiddish to them. So my pop related a story that happened to him in New Square - a sheltered village, a real life modern day Chassidic shtetl - many years ago. He was walking along one of the town's artificially quaint streets and these two kids started debating in Yiddish whether or not this strange humanoid was Jewish. Mind you, he was wearing a yarmulke. Finally my father got so frustrated with their stares that he told them in Yiddish that he was in fact a Jew, simultaneously illustrating this fact by reaching into his fly and pulling out his tzitzit.

"Say ‘Ho! Ho! Ho!'" Mr. Dennis instructed a student.

I could have taken the picture and nobody would have known the difference-nobody but parents ever saw these pictures. But suddenly the Christmas tree was wrong. I didn't understand why I was so angry so abruptly, but I refused to cooperate.

"What do you mean, no?" asked Mr. Dennis.

"I'm not taking a picture in front of something I don't celebrate. I'm Jewish." Mr. Dennis locked his jaw, but he wasn't surprised. Though my second-grade teacher had not yet sent me to his office, I had visited Mr. Dennis in kindergarten and first grade because of "behavioral problems." These amounted to eye rolling and talking back-behavior I had seen my grandmother model. What neither my teachers nor Mr. Dennis ever realized was that there were patterns to my behavior.

I caused trouble when I felt threatened. And that almost always happened on holidays. For instance, in first grade, on Mother's Day, the teacher had us sit in a circle and, one by one, recite a favorite thing about our mothers.Well, what was I supposed to say? My favorite thing about my mother is how she never calls or visits. No thank you. I was so scared someone would figure out I didn't have a mother at home and laugh at me that I ran across to the art-supplies table and knocked it over. Pasta and rice and finger paints spilled all over the carpet. My teacher was so furious she sent me directly to Mr. Dennis. But Mr. Dennis didn't ask me any questions, either. Instead he stared at the space just above my head and recited some jargon about the school's high expectations. Because he was afraid of upsetting parents-they were potential donors, after all-he never bothered calling home to investigate. Now it was Christmas, and I was causing a scene all over again, but he still didn't get it.

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Here are today's top stories in no particular order:

• The third day of violence in the Gaza Strip, after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was called to a halt, has resulted in a death toll of 315, a large number of which are civilians.

• Getting crunk in the name of Jesus: despite the fact that he's an ordained Episcopal priest, Father Greg Malia keeps the champagne flowing and the party ranging in top New York night clubs—where he generously over-tips and sometimes takes the cocktail waitresses on shopping sprees.

• According to a study by San Francisco State University, children of parents who respond negatively to their coming out as gay are more likely to commit suicide, use drugs and suffer from depression.

• Promise rings full of empty promises? A new study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health claims that teens who make virginity pledges are just as likely to have sex as teens who don't pledge and are less likely to use contraceptives.

• Inspirational Holocaust love story deemed false: Author Herman Rosenblat has confirmed that details in his memoir Angel at the Fence, about finding love after escaping a Nazi concentration camp, are fabricated. The book—which was slated for an early 2009 release—has had its publication cancelled.

• Woman overboard: The FBI has been called in to help the search of missing cruise ship passenger Jennifer Seitz, who has been missing since Friday. The ship was off the coast of Cancun, Mexico, when Seitz fell into the water. 

• George Francis, the nation's oldest man, died on Sunday of congestive heart failure. He was 112 years old.

Dani Rosenberg's 2007 drama Homeland , which made its American debut at the 23rd Israeli Film Festival, provides an opportunity to examine how contemporary Israeli cinema reflects upon history: upon the history of the state of Israel as represented in cinema, but also upon the history of Israeli cinema itself.

More often than not, Israeli films focus on the present. In stark contrast to American cinema, the historical genre occupies only a marginal place in Israeli cinema, and relatively few films could genuinely be called historical. This could be attributed to the poverty of the Israeli film industry; the small scale of Israeli productions seems unbefitting the historical genre, in its expanses of sets, costumes, and multitudes of characters. The resources required are simply unavailable to Israeli filmmakers.

Beyond such prosaic reasons, however, lies an inability to move beyond the didactic terms dictated by the Zionist ethos in order to conceptualize the past. The few films that have succeeded in doing so — Ilan Moshenson ’s 1979 film The Wooden Gun, Dan Wolman ’s Hide and Seek (1980), Amos Gitai ’s Kippur (2000), and most recently Joseph Cedar ’s Campfire (2004) and 2007 Beaufort (2007)—have turned the past into a chamber drama that puts into relief the interaction of characters at the expense of action, the driving force of the historical spectacle.

Homeland (Beit Avi) - English Trailer

Dani Rosenberg turns necessity into merit, and makes the poverty of means into a formal principle that shapes Homeland. By and large, his film is a piece for two actors. History is rendered not through the perspective of large collectives, nor through the perspective of the family—literally or metaphorically—like many historical Israel films, but rather, through the perspective of the individual.

The year is 1948, and Lolek, played by Itay Tiran, a young Holocaust survivor, arrives in the newly established state of Israel hoping to join his pre-war lover in Haifa.

Lolek finds himself completely disoriented when he is dropped off from a military truck in the middle of the wilderness, made to repeat an oath of allegiance in Hebrew— a language he does not understand—to the state and to the IDF, and pointed in the direction of a military outpost on top of a nearby hill. The outpost is manned by sunburnt and muscular Mickey Leon, who is determined to transform the unsoldierly, slender and pale Lolek into an image of the Israeli sabra. To this end, Leon continuously abuses Lolek, both mentally and physically.

Rosenberg’s film is the often-told story of Jewish immigrants to pre-state Palestine and to post-independence Israel, who were ask to shed off their exhilic mentality, to immerse themselves in the new society and to become new Jews: upright, strong, ready to fight and to sacrifice themselves on the alter of their old-new homeland. Yet, unlike the didactic Zionist-Israeli story that celebrates the Israeli melting pot, or the more recent, critical story, that points to the price paid by immigrants in their endeavors to become Israelis, Rosenberg’s protagonist resists the forceful, violent attempt to both undo and redo his body and soul.

In taking this position, Rosenberg seems to be responding to the film often dubbed “the first Israeli movie,” namely, to Herbert Klein and Meyer Levin ’s My Father’s House, which was produced in 1947, but released only after the establishment of the state. The two films, which share the same Hebrew title— Beyt Avi (my father’s house)—also share the same premise: a young survivor who arrives in Palestine/Israel after losing his whole family in the Holocaust. Yet each film takes this premise in a very different direction.

David, the protagonist of the original My Father’s House, fails to immerse himself in the kibbutz or in the boarding school to which he is subsequently sent, because he clings to the hope that he could still unite with his father. In search of him, David goes on a long tour of the land, a tour in which his sorrow is supplanted with admiration for it’s beauty and for Zionist achievements. Towards the end of the film, he is adopted by a Holocaust survivor and her Israeli partner, and all of them join a new kibbutz in the Negev. When the three arrive there, the kibbutz members uncover an old stone carving of a menorah. All gather around it, and one of them points at the carving and addresses the child: “This is your father’s house.”

Rosenberg’s Beyt Avi paints a picture of a very different homeland. The film takes place in a desolated, uninhabited wilderness. This wilderness is not the setting for pioneering settlement, but of destruction, one that encompasses the whole land. By a military logic he does not understand, Lolek is shackled to the outpost, and is forbidden the opportunity to explore other parts of the country. Indeed, when he insists that he would leave for Haifa, the commander brutally assures him: “Haifa is gone! There is no more Haifa!” The commander undoes the Zionist slogan of turning the wilderness into a blooming garden, turning the entire country into a wilderness. There is no reprieve, the commander suggests, from the empty landscape and the scorching sun that burns their skin. Indeed, there is no reprieve from war, so one should give up the illusion of finding or founding a new home.

Nothing breaks the solitariness of the outpost. The enemy has last been seen over three weeks ago, and the war is present only in the form of a radio broadcasting anxious screams begging for help. The only sign of war that, ironically, is also the only sign of life—past or present— are the haunted ruins of a Palestinian village. In an eerie scene Lolek, who is sent to the village to bring fresh water to the outpost, enters one of the destroyed houses, and is watched by the ghost of a Palestinian boy that hides underneath a bed. Lolek lies on the ground and stares back at him. The desolation of the land, the film seems to suggest, results from the devastation of pre-existing civilizations, not only Palestinian civilization, but Jewish exhilic civilization as well. Both are victims of the destructive forces unleashed by militarism embraced by the young Israeli state.

The growing tension between Lolek and his commander cannot be resolved by anything but violence. In this, Homeland follows the footsteps of such films as Yehuda Ne’eman ’s 1977 Paratroopers, which likewise portrays the intense relationship between a fresh, puny and pale paratrooper recruit and his chauvinist commander, who believes that discipline and hazing would make a true soldier out of him. Yet, whereas all of the characters in Ne’eman’s film accept the soldierly ethos, whether they are capable of realizing it or not, Lolek rejects this ethos. In defiance, he challenges his commander with buffoonish, Charlie Chaplin-like antics that mock the commander’s chauvinist-military mannerism and express resistance to the demand to put behind exhilic values.

The friction between the two, however, is not one between a native and a new immigrant, between an arrogant Israeli—who, in the effort to establish and secure a new state, refuses to acknowledge the emotional and physical needs of others—and his victim, as it might seem at first glance. The number on his forearm and, more than that, his nightmares reveal the antipathetic sabra to be but another suffering Holocaust survivor. The conflict is between two damaged newcomers and the divergent strategies they adopt in their struggle with the past in Europe and the present in an inhospitable country. Not only does the transition to Israel fails to relieve newcomers of the traumas they suffered in exile, the film suggests. It also leads them to victimize each other.

The ambiguity that underlies the conflict between the two characters also makes ambiguous the most conspicuous aspect of the film, namely, its Yiddish. Homeland is one of only a handful of Yiddish-speaking films to be produced since World Word II. Most obviously, Homeland's employment of Yiddish marks the destroyed European culture that the new immigrants were expected to forget upon their arrival. In his insistence on speaking Yiddish and on using Yiddish humor, Lolek mounts a critique of the Hebrew’s militaristic character. Yiddish is the language that links him to his past home and murdered family, but also to the hope of a future new home and family in “Haifa.”

Hebrew, on the other hand, is the language of war and of destruction. Yet, the conflict is not between Yiddish and Hebrew since, by and large, the dialogue takes place in Yiddish. The conflict seems to be between two types of Yiddish: between Yiddish that desires to become Hebrew and Yiddish that insists on its independence from Hebrew. The outcome of the film (which, for the sake of those who have not seen the film yet, I avoid from revealing) leaves uncertain not only which Yiddish wins but, more than that, what is the significance of the victory.

Homeland offers not only a revisionist account of Israeli history, but of Israeli cinema as well. More than any other Israeli director, Dani Rosenberg explores the price paid by the individual for the demands put on them by the Zionist endeavor. Other Israeli filmmakers, no matter how critical of the Zionist project and of Israeli society, tended to mitigate the stress of this demand by placing their protagonists within the context of a collective—commonly represented by a small group of people or a family—and in doing so, submitted their anguish to its impersonal logic. By placing this community outside of the film’s frame and by rendering the significance of the struggle against its demands uncertain, Homeland turns that anguish into a challenge to talk about Israeli history.

In the Bible, "shibboleth" was the test password used by the Gileadites to sift out the enemy Ephraimites, who could not pronounce the ‘sh' sound. The word "shibboleth" in Hebrew originally meant stream or flood, but in English it's taken on the meaning of being an empty phrase, or jargon, or a truism that a specific group adheres to. In the internet world, various programs that authenticate identity and provide privacy and security for users contain "shibboleth" as part of their moniker. I love the way the word began as one thing but then, like a stream, it twists and turns, its original meaning disappearing in the tides of history and washing ashore in an artificial, manmade world, the worldwide web.

Here on the Upper West Side, there are any number of words whose pronunciations give away my Midwestern origin. I say "insurance," "perfume," and "umbrella" with the emphasis on the first syllable, which induces cringes from my East Coast friends. Every letter in "foliage" is dutifully pronounced - "fol-ee-aj" though that might be more of a personal quirk. The days of the week go like this: Mondee, Tuesdee, Wednesdee, Thursdee and then Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Brilliant minds have attempted to offer an explanation as to why the long weekend gets full value; it remains a linguistic mystery.

The ability to sprinkle Yiddishisms into everyday conversation also serves as a Gileadite-like shibboleth, defining one as being from the Tribe born--or perhaps not. (A West coast Jewish friend has argued that using Yiddish is more a shibboleth for being a New Yorker than a Jewish/non-Jewish thing.) Over the years I've absorbed Yiddish words that I comfortably and even unconsciously slip into my every day speech. Sometimes, to listen to me you'd think I was a bubbe from Brooklyn. Last week, my friend, Eva, was reading a proposed toast to me over the phone, and I impatiently interrupted, "Eva, nobody has the spilkes for this!" While spilkes means "pins and needles" having "spilkes" is shorthand for how one feels when sitting on pins and needles--lacking patience.

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Shameless shilling:

Good For The Jews have a concert tonight at the Highline Ballroom, show starting at 8 pm, with comedian Todd Barry ("Flight of the Conchords") as our special guest. The tour continues at the Triple Door in Seattle on Dec 24; Echoplex in L.A. on Dec 25 (with singer Jill Sobule and comedian Dan Levy as our special guests); Red Devil Lounge in S.F. on Dec 26; and Schuba's in Chicago on Dec 27.

Good For The Jews are a hilarious rock duo from NYC currently on their annual “Putting the Ha! in Hanukkah” pilgrimage. They sing about bar mitzvahs, Passover, JDate, Boca Raton, and the plight of being Jewish during Christmas. No songs about dreidels! And no Israeli folk-dancing.

Hear their music at GoodForTheJews.net or MySpace.com/GoodForTheJews. Their national tour is sponsored by Jewcy.

“This is not your father's Judaism: Jews with an edge and proud of it.” * Baltimore Jewish Times

“A hilarious musical act. Don't miss them.” * National Public Radio

"The voice of the Jewish hipster movement." * UR Chicago

“Good For The Jews' have been called 'hilarious' from coast to coast.” * Philadelphia Weekly

Like Sarah Silverman and Jon Stewart, this show is wickedly hilarious.” * Village Voice

In the very beginning God procrastinated. Give the guy a break! It was after all his first crack at action! How to formulate the unformed? How to express the unexpressed? How to distinguish between Himself and it all? So many questions! So many headaches! Oh my God! He would have exclaimed, had the expression already been invented. But the Lord was expressionless, preliterate, totally self-obsessed and altogether uncreative. God was just a floating glob of aimless ions consumed by colossal sloth, killing eternity. There was no one to blame for his unspecified woes and no one's ear to bend. The Jews, those divine kvetchers and all-purpose scapegoats, hadn't yet come onto the scene; nor had the Catholics with their cozy wood-paneled schmooze booths. He wanted to do something, but not know what, was having a Hell of a time of it (another expression that would have come in handy).

Aaaarrrrggggghhhhhhh! He moaned in a wordless way, which the sages have since rendered thus (though the gist may have been modified some in the course of multiple translations from Thunder, via Ugaritic, Hebrew, Greek and Latin Vulgate, to contemporary interdenominational Sermonese): Would that there were someone to give voice to my innermost extrovert tendencies! Would that I had a trusted spokesperson, a porte-parole with basic stenographic skills, a winning smile and a cheerful disposition, species and gender unspecified! Thus saith the Lord.

But all this wishing was of course for naught, a waste of precious eons, since help wanted ads hadn't yet been conceived of, nor was there a rock to engrave or papyrus to so inscribe, or an out of work wordsmith to polish it up and make it sound godly. As frustrated and fed up as He was with the way things were, the Lord did not even have recourse to the ultimate emotional outlet, to take His own name in vain, since no one had heretofore referred to Him, respectfully or in vain, nor had it ever even occurred to Him that such a thing as a name could encapsulate the fluctuating firmament of contradictory and incompatible demiurges raging in His heavenly heart.

Aaaaaarrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh! cried the Lord, still louder than before. Which contemporary sages have enucleated thus: Thou art so self-centered, it's pathetic!

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