http://www.jewcy.com/blogs Most Recent Posts en http://www.jewcy.com/post/for_the_rabbinical_judge <strong>Author:</strong> <br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 15, 2008 8:48 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Lisa Katz FOR THE RABBINICAL JUDGE I might have pulled your beard, Santa Claus or Shakespearian king, your black silk coat damasked with mock flowers. You drew an anthropologist&#39;s bouquet of questions out of your hat, too warm to wear in the court and placed between us on the judge&#39;s bench like a street musician&#39;s cup. The scribe entered and exited. Extras dozed on their feet until called to witness the scene. I was surprised by my part. The newspaper says you usually rule in favor of the husband but I want to thank you for commissioning today&#39;s freedom scroll, in which my name was spelled wrong with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet instead of the fifth. You ordered the scribe to correct the mistake, to turn the aleph of beginning into a hieroglyph signaling a decorative end to the marriage. And thanks to the frowning gentleman who sat on one side of you wearing a Lincoln stovepipe. He folded the official paper into an origami bird, and cut it with a scissors because damage authenticates experience. Thank you for asking my husband whether he had promised to divorce me, for asking my husband again whether he had promised to divorce me, for asking my husband until repetition cleared the air. Thank you for allowing me to bare my head until the end of the ceremony. Thank you for explaining that a head covering on a woman is the custom among you, not us. Thank you for advising me not to move my hands when my husband dropped the tattooed bird into my cupped palms and we flew on. &nbsp; ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/for_the_rabbinical_judge</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/for_the_rabbinical_judge#comments Culture Thu, 15 May 2008 08:48:06 -0500 13280 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/interview_daniel_libeskind <strong>Author:</strong> Jo Ellen Green Kaiser<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 15, 2008 8:38 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Wowed by the example of Frank Gehry&#39;s Bilbao Guggenheim, museums around the world have raced to commission brilliant, experimental architects to build structures at least as noteworthy as their collections. Architect Daniel Libeskind has become the star of the Jewish museum world with his stunning designs for the Jewish Museum Berlin, Danish Jewish Museum, and now the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum. Unique in being a museum without a permanent collection, the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum has, for over twenty years, devoted itself to exhibitions that explore contemporary perspectives on Jewish culture. Libeskind&#39;s new building, opening June 8, 2008, will allow the museum to remain flexible in defining Jewish identity by offering a variety of differently shaped and purposed spaces, including ones specially designed for music, film, and hands-on art education, as well as the more typical white-wall galleries. Daniel Libeskind has become best-known for winning the World Trade Center design competition (and the resultant brouhaha). Yet his most important work may well be found elsewhere, ranging from the severe angles and sharp edges of the Royal Ontario Museum to the graceful, curving, almost bowed forms of his Reflections project in Singapore to the San Francisco museum with its almost aggressive blue beacon jutting out from the shell of an old water pumping station. Zeek talked with Libeskind about creating a specifically Jewish space for the San Francisco museum in the conversation that follows. ZEEK: I&#39;ve had an opportunity to tour the Jewish Museum of San Francisco and I was very impressed-the spaces are complex visually and yet open and...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/interview_daniel_libeskind</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/interview_daniel_libeskind#comments Culture Holocaust Jewish museum Libeskind museum World Trade Center Thu, 15 May 2008 08:38:24 -0500 13353 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/haredi_conversion <strong>Author:</strong> David Kelsey<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 14, 2008 5:37 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Rabbi Leib Tropper: says who's who IN JUNE 2006, ultra-Orthodox Rabbi Leib Tropper nullified a conversion over a year after supervising it himself. He decided that the convert, whom we will call “Sarah,” had become a Jew under “false Pretext [sic].” Rabbi Tropper informed Sarah’s husband, “Avraham,” that his wife’s conversion had been overturned by the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, and that the child produced by their marriage would not be regarded as Jewish, either. Finally, Rabbi Tropper declared that it was “forbidden” for Avraham to be married to Sarah. “Even if she decides to become observant,” Rabbi Tropper wrote via email, “she will need a new conversion,” and the couple would require a “new halachic marriage.” What happens if despite a rabbi’s best due diligence, a convert to Orthodox Judaism doesn&#39;t keep Jewish law for the long haul? If that convert begins eating cheeseburgers and driving on Shabbat? Does the conversion remain valid? Is a convert 100% Jewish no matter what? Historically, a lapsed convert was still considered a Jew unless those lapses were immediate to the conversion, public, and intentional. The convert had to know what he was about to do was wrong, and then had to do it anyway. (Before the 19th century and the advent of ultra-Orthodoxy, according to Zvi Zohar, an Israeli scholar who studies this issue, there is no evidence a rabbi ever revoked a conversion for any reason.) Times...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/haredi_conversion</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/haredi_conversion#comments conversion Eternal Jewish Family Haredi Israel Kol Yaakov Leib Tropper Modern Orthodoxy Orthodoxy Religion Wed, 14 May 2008 17:37:00 -0500 13583 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/hump_day_art_animated_graffiti <strong>Author:</strong> Izzy Grinspan<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 14, 2008 3:13 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> All of the diamond-headed babies, eight-armed monkey men, and skittering teeth in this video were drawn on public walls in Buenos Aires and Baden, Germany. The art is astonishing enough, but if you start contemplating the work that went into making it, your head might explode and give birth to another head. Just like in the film. ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/hump_day_art_animated_graffiti</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/hump_day_art_animated_graffiti#comments Animation BLU Buenos Aires Culture Street art Wed, 14 May 2008 15:13:21 -0500 13605 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/republican_jewish_coalition_collapses_itself <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 14, 2008 10:57 am<br />=====<br /> <p> That interview Barack Obama did with Jeffrey Goldberg over the weekend outlined the perils of running for president without shutting off your brain. At the tail-end of his effusive praise of the Jewish people and the Jewish state, after pledging &quot;unyielding support for Israel&#39;s security,&quot; Obama described the lack of resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict as &quot;a constant wound, a constant sore&quot; that bolsters Islamists&#39; recruitment efforts and enables them to claim a moral high ground illegitimately. The idea was to frame the peace process, correctly, as a matter of American as well as Israeli national security. Naturally, within hours, the Republican Jewish Coalition had its knickers in a painfulJohn Boehner, Anti-Semite: The Republican House leader attacks Israel viciously; just look at the quote twist. According to JTA&#39;s Ami Eden, the group released a statement accusing Obama of &quot;excus[ing] the inexcusable actions of anti-American militant jihadists by putting the blame for their actions on America’s foreign policy.&quot; Right. This is the real-world foreign policy version of Kyle Smith&#39;s lunatic review of Iron Man. It&#39;s not enough for Israel&#39;s false friends to swear &quot;unyielding&quot; fealty to Israeli security, pre-emptively decline to negotiate with...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/republican_jewish_coalition_collapses_itself</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/republican_jewish_coalition_collapses_itself#comments Israel-Palestine Conflict Politics Republican Jews Wed, 14 May 2008 10:57:20 -0500 13602 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/crazy_religious_paranoiacs_attack_mccain_too <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 14, 2008 9:32 am<br />=====<br /> <p> For those who are struck by the dangerously corrosive left-wing secularMike Huckabee: Is this man part of John McCain's "Christian problem"? cosmopolitanism inherent in the belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim fifth columnist who must be stopped at all costs, Michael Farris offers solace. A former Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor in Virginia and current Chancellor of Patrick Henry College, a private college for Christian home-schoolers (fully accredited as of April 2007!), Farris has a large following among Virginia Evangelicals. And in that community, Bob Novak reports, Farris is promoting &quot;the biblical justification for an Obama plague-like presidency,&quot; in rejection of John McCain and the GOP. And that&#39;s just the tip of the iceberg. According to Novak&#39;s sources, Mike Huckabee is secretly in league with Farris and other elements of the Christian &quot;bitter end opposition&quot; hoping to sabotage McCain&#39;s candidacy. How will they do that? So far, it&#39;s unclear. And with just five months and change left until the election, they&#39;d better figure out a plan soon, if they&#39;re going to manage to call down the Obama-plague upon the heads of the wicked (it&#39;s mentioned in Revelation, somewhere between the fifth and sixth trumpets, IIRC.) Not to cast any aspersions on Novak&#39;s...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/crazy_religious_paranoiacs_attack_mccain_too</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/crazy_religious_paranoiacs_attack_mccain_too#comments Christianity Election 2008 Eschatology John McCain Mike Huckabee Politics Wed, 14 May 2008 09:32:45 -0500 13597 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/why_you_should_bring_sunglasses_your_wedding <strong>Author:</strong> Ben Karlin<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 5:04 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Ben Karlin To: Elizabeth Wurtzel Well, this is it, I guess. What started as a series of un-furtive, semi-intellectual, vaguely thematic exchanges between relative strangers has totally....well, stayed that way. Yet it has been anything but a zero sum game. No, I have learned that I lack two of the three essential qualities necessary to date Elizabeth Wurtzel and Elizabeth Wurtzel, in short order will, if there is a Christ in Heaven, receive a $60,000 purse. I can’t answer your last questions, because if I do, it will mean I will be telling you things I haven’t even told my wife. And I read somewhere, perhaps in a magazine, or in a manual of some sort, that this is wrong. All I will say is this: For the better part of my existence I was convinced I would not get married. Even when I got engaged and planned an entire wedding, it still didn’t feel real. I observed it from outside my body. Outside my element even. I basically snorkeled through the entire process, feeling nothing, until the moment I walked up the stairs with my father to the place where the ceremony was happening. It was just he and I. And then I just started crying. Like, hard. Not from joy, nor sadness. Momentousness hit me with one giant punch – the kind that knocks the wind out of you and makes you think you will never get it back. It was a bright day in May, so I was able to hide behind sunglasses. But I truly worried I would not be able to stop crying. Not before the ceremony, nor ever. That was the best day of my life. Ben &nbsp; ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/why_you_should_bring_sunglasses_your_wedding</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/why_you_should_bring_sunglasses_your_wedding#comments Sex Tue, 13 May 2008 17:04:01 -0500 13540 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/do_you_being_married <strong>Author:</strong> Elizabeth Wurtzel<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 4:53 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Elizabeth Wurtzel To: Ben Karlin Hey, sorry I&#39;ve been a bit slow to reply. It&#39;s been a weird 24 hours. First, someone posted a really quite funny joke on the Yale Law School electronic bulletin board that was a mock-up of a Harvard Crimson article that said I had been hired as a professor at Harvard Law School. Some people thought it was actually serious! I guess April Fool&#39;s Day was a while ago, but I am, as anyone can tell you, not particularly a legal scholar, so it seemed an obvious lampoon. But crazier things have happened. Then I had to figure out if I was actually going to write this op-ed piece which could be really bad for Obama, who I like. The problem is, it could be bad for me too, because it&#39;s about his friendship with the leaders of the Weather Underground, and I think unless I condemn them utterly I look like a bad person. Then some other things happened, but I can&#39;t remember what they are. Life never really stops being high school, which is worrisome, though I suppose I&#39;ve made an effort to never quite escape college. So, back to your question: What am I looking for? I am not going to say that old trope that I&#39;d like someone with a sense of humor, because EVERYBODY says that, and what does that even mean? I&#39;m afraid the answer really is tall, handsome and smart, everything else is just extra. I really like the standard good things. All my boyfriends have been the theme, with very little variation on the theme. They&#39;ve all been kind of obvious choices, except that they have been terribly difficult, given me a hard time, made my life unmanageable--and I think I&#39;ve had enough of that. What&#39;s your wife like? How long have you been married? Do you like being married? Someone I know who is happily married recently described the whole thing to me as kind of tawdry, and he didn&#39;t mean it in a bad way. I think...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/do_you_being_married</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/do_you_being_married#comments Sex Tue, 13 May 2008 16:53:51 -0500 13539 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/daniel_pipes_patient_zero <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 4:24 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Edward Luttwak doesn&#39;t know anything about Islamic law, but he does have an agenda to push, which is apparently enough to get him space on the New York Times op-ed page arguing that Barack Obama, being the son of an atheist who renounced Islam and abandoned Obama at the age of two, is considered a Muslim apostate, and thus is subject to a sentence of death. Ali Eteraz, who does know some things about Islamic law, noted in the Huffington Post that Luttwak is wrong in every single particular. Ali only obliquely addresses the larger point, which is that even if Luttwak were (stopped-clockwise) right about Islamic law, his political argument beggars parody. Daniel Pipes: He is to character assassination what Charlie Parker was to bebop Are we actually meant to believe that there is a government or organization on earth that would attempt to assassinate an American president because his grandfather was a Luo Muslim, but would leave any other American president alone? The question can&#39;t be asked with a straight face. Self-evidently, what Luttwak is trying to do is to sustain the belief that Obama is a Muslim in one form or another --- and it isn&#39;t particularly difficult to figure out what the next wave of Luttwak-inspired chain-emails will look like: Even the liberal New York Times admits.... But that&#39;s...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/daniel_pipes_patient_zero</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/daniel_pipes_patient_zero#comments Daniel Pipes Edward Luttwak Islamic law Politics Tue, 13 May 2008 16:24:46 -0500 13589 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_man_and_diaspora_boy <strong>Author:</strong> Eli Valley<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 4:20 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> To many people, the concept of Zionism signifies the establishment of a Jewish State, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or cheesy Eurotechno discos on the beach. But from its inception, Zionist philosophy was imbued with some rather startling attitudes towards Diaspora Jews. Whether in Zionist ideology, in ways in which the nascent state conceived its identity, or in contemporary Israel-Diaspora relations, the philosophy known as &quot;Negation of the Diaspora&quot; has been one of the most persistent elements of Zionist discourse. In honor of Israel&#39;s 60th Anniversary, Jewcy comic artist Eli Valley explores this aspect of Zionist mythology with superheroes that would fit seamlessly into almost any Jewish educational setting today. ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_man_and_diaspora_boy</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_man_and_diaspora_boy#comments Culture Tue, 13 May 2008 16:20:52 -0500 13587 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/mix_and_match_mantras_extra_spiritual_kick <strong>Author:</strong> Izzy Grinspan<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 3:25 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Ommmmm: This guy's been hanging out in the mantra trailer&quot;I Will Survive&quot; + &quot;I Am Nothing&quot; = the truth is somewhere in between. From the addictive website for The Mantra Trailer: Parked at the intersection of imagination, evangelism and propaganda, The Mantra Trailer is a traveling mediation space, recording studio and site of mysterious broadcast in the form of a 1972 breadbox trailer. The Mantra Trailer invites us to contemplate, chant, voice and explore our prayers, aspirations, desires, frustrations and petitions for the transformation of self and society, or whatever resonates within us, even the nonsensical. By-passers drawn to the Mantra Trailer are invited inside one at a time to contemplate and record their mantras in privacy. Yes indeed, the mantra trailer is exactly what it sounds like! Click on any number of mantras (from the expected&quot;Let It Go&quot; and &quot;It&#39;s All Okay&quot; to the inscrutable &quot;Pet The Wolf Run From The Rat&quot;) to create your own multi-layered mantra symphony. I especially like &quot;Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut&quot; plus &quot;You Shall Know The Truth&quot; plus &quot;Concentrate and Expand.&quot; &quot;Love&quot; plus &quot;Open Your Heart&quot; is awesome. &quot;It&#39;s All Gravy&quot; goes well with pretty much everything. Go nuts. The Sanskrit word mantra consists of the root man- (to think) (also in manas, or mind) and the suffix -tra (tool). So literally an &quot;instrument of thought&quot; or &quot;mind...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/mix_and_match_mantras_extra_spiritual_kick</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/mix_and_match_mantras_extra_spiritual_kick#comments Art buddhism Meditation Religion spirituality The Mantra website Tue, 13 May 2008 15:25:16 -0500 13591 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/when_black_folks_say_we_should_be_more_jews <strong>Author:</strong> Adam Serwer<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 2:35 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Ta-Nehisi Coates on blacks and Jews: There is this constant meme among black folks that we can never come together to do anything right. As Ice Cube once said, &quot;Broke up the family forever\And to this day black folk can&#39;t stick together.&quot; The other part of that logic holds that other ethnic groups--Jews are usually cited--are somehow better at supporting their own. I remember, a few years back, me and my good friend Eyal Press were coming home from a party and Brooklyn. During the train ride, I explained to him that while black antisemitism gets all the headlines, there is a certain sector of black folks that worship Jews for their vaunted sense of unity. Eyal got a good laugh out of that, mostly because in his picture of Jewish life, debating and fighting were central. Actually, I think it&#39;s often the same sector. Jews see that kind of admiration as threatening because to them it sounds a lot like traditional antisemitism, especially when you get into stuff like &quot;Jews only spend money in their community.” But even when the most antisemitic Black Nationalist starts talking about the Jews, there&#39;s this grudging respect, like &quot;You&#39;re ruthless, but we wanna be like you and run shit.&quot; The most famous black Jew since Jesus: Sammy Davis Jr But even the idea that Jews &quot;run shit&quot; is based off antisemitic conspiracy theories. Yeah, there are a lot of Jews in high places, but the vast majority of people in positions of power are white gentile...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/when_black_folks_say_we_should_be_more_jews</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/when_black_folks_say_we_should_be_more_jews#comments African-Americans Antisemitism Barack Obama Culture John Hagee Malcolm X Ta-Nehisi Coates Tue, 13 May 2008 14:35:44 -0500 13584 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/good_jewish_boy_buys_halal_chicken_britain_s_apprentice <strong>Author:</strong> Tamar Fox<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 1:21 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> The British version of &quot;The Apprentice,&quot; helmed by Sir Alan Sugar, a Jew, has an odd source of controversy this week: kosher vs. halal chicken. It also touches on the &quot;who is a Jew&quot; issue, and has us wondering why anyone would put &quot;good Jewish boy&quot; on their resume. Michael Sophocles: a half-Jewish schmuck In last week’s episode, two teams were tasked with haggling for various items in Marrakech, including  a kosher chicken.  One team succeeded, but the other ended up with a chicken that was halal. (At the market, they keep asking that the chicken be blessed by someone from the mosque and inexplicably making the sign of the cross. You can watch the video here). Michael Sophocles was one of the two people sent to look for the kosher chicken, and when his team was called to the boardroom to discuss their loss with Sir Alan, he was called out for his lack of knowledge of kashrut, for not knowing what l’chaim means, and for putting &quot;good Jewish boy&quot; on his CV, which Sir Alan concluded was basically just a method of kissing up. His scintillating response: Well, he’s half-Jewish, and he does know what the word schmuck means. Sophocles narrowly avoided being fired, but the whole spectacle is really amazing to watch. (You can see the boardroom interrogation here and here). In the boardroom...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/good_jewish_boy_buys_halal_chicken_britain_s_apprentice</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/good_jewish_boy_buys_halal_chicken_britain_s_apprentice#comments Apprentice Britain chicken Halal kosher Religion Sir Alan Sugar UK Tue, 13 May 2008 13:21:11 -0500 13582 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/einsteins_atheism <strong>Author:</strong> Michael Weiss<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 11:38 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Not chosen, just posin'Believers have long maintained, based on his ambiguous rhetoric about religion, that Albert Einstein was one of them. Yet in a soon-to-be- auctioned-off letter the father of relativity wrote to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, the mystery as to his true thoughts on the subject has at long last been solved: As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they &quot;have no different quality for me than all other people&quot;. &quot;The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. &quot;No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this...&quot; [...] &quot;For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people.&quot; [...] &quot;As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything &#39;chosen&#39; about them.&quot; Of course, there were plenty of clues leading up to this conclusive...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/einsteins_atheism</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/einsteins_atheism#comments Albert Einstein Atheism Culture Tue, 13 May 2008 11:38:38 -0500 13580 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/which_birthright_why_choosing_home_over_homeland_may_not_be_such_bad_thing <strong>Author:</strong> Jo Ellen Green Kaiser<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 2:36 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, American Jewry has been privy to many (perhaps too many) sociological surveys taking its collective pulse. Surveys have covered everything from attitudes toward intermarriage, Jewish education, politics, literacy, beliefs, and practice. Recently another survey has appeared written by the pre-eminent Jewish sociologist Steven M. Cohen in conjunction with his younger colleague, Ari Y. Kelman, entitled Beyond Distancing: Young Adult American Jews and their Alienation from Israel. The study offers a provocative quantitative analysis regarding young American Jews&#39; attitudes toward Israel. Cohen and Kelman&#39;s study shows the first signs of erosion in unflinching American Jewish support of Israel. It&#39;s a trend that may have started in the aftermath of the first Lebanon War in the mid-1980s and is, in many ways, predictable, perhaps inevitable. The generation of Jews who experienced the establishment of the Jewish State is now over the age of sixty-five. Those with memories of the war in 1967 are approaching fifty. Jews under the age of forty only know Israel as a much more complicated, and compromised, country: an occupying power engaged in a bloody struggle with a largely disempowered and stateless population. Such a battle, while intense and dangerous, is quite different from the more straight-forward struggle of fending off invading Arab armies. Whatever one may think of the present dilemma, or even whether &quot;occupation&quot; is an accurate description of what Israelis call &quot;the situation&quot; (ha-mazav), the experience of Israel for American Jews under the age of forty is, and should be, categorically different from their parents. The reality of this change can be illustrated in various ways. When I show...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/which_birthright_why_choosing_home_over_homeland_may_not_be_such_bad_thing</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/which_birthright_why_choosing_home_over_homeland_may_not_be_such_bad_thing#comments Birthright Culture Israel Politics Shaul Magid Tue, 13 May 2008 02:36:27 -0500 13555 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/homeland_taking_birthright_israel <strong>Author:</strong> Aviva Kasowski<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 13, 2008 2:26 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Young adults today aren&#39;t satisfied with a status quo existence. We want to find our true calling, and hopefully wealth and stability along the way. Unfortunately, real life isn&#39;t always conducive to finding the answers we seek. Immersed in this post-college struggle to find a meaningful and productive life, I found myself with a diverse group of other twenty-somethings on an Israel Experts Birthright trip. Some of us came simply for the free vacation; others hoped to trace their roots and culture to help them find what is &quot;true&quot; and &quot;real.&quot; What we didn&#39;t expect was to find ourselves in a charged atmosphere of questioning minds, as fertile-and at times illuminating-as the desert that was made to bloom. As it turned out, all of us were &quot;seekers,&quot; which is a nice way of saying that we were a little bit lost. I called myself a writer, although writing barely supported my coffee addiction. Before we even checked baggage, I met a girl who had just lost her fashion job along with her boyfriend (who also happened to be her boss), an insurance adjuster who hated his work, and a medical student who was taking a year off to work on a farm in Florida. Most of us had danced around the idea of a Birthright trip before, but avoided it for various reasons. Some thought it would be too much like propaganda. Others had never felt entirely comfortable in Jewish groups. Still others (or their parents) were afraid of ending up on the evening news. The fact that we were finally able to sign on to Birthright (and actually board the plane) was a testament to our development as individuals; we felt sure we could walk away with our authentic selves intact no matter what the trip threw at us. Luckily, the trip didn&#39;t require us to exude a happy-go-lucky attitude. &quot;All we want is for you to ask questions,&quot; Joe...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/homeland_taking_birthright_israel</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/homeland_taking_birthright_israel#comments Birthright Israel Lifestyle Politics twenty-something Tue, 13 May 2008 02:26:00 -0500 13545 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_stereotypes_jews_and_asians_evolved_nerd <strong>Author:</strong> Benjamin Nugent<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 5:34 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> A nerd costume for sale online: Doesn't he look kind of frum?Picture a continuum that runs from “really sensual” to “not sensual.” You could place animals and machines at either end: animals are all sensuality, machines all reason. Contemporary racism sets different ethnic groups along this continuum: animals, then Africans, then Europeans, then Asians, then machines. The MIT-based psychologist Sherry Turkle argues that the machine age, especially the computer, has caused modern educated humans to define what is human as “emotional,” in contrast to thinking machines, instead of just defining what is human as rational, in contrast to animals. If nerds are people who have been sucked into the orbit of the machine and sapped of human emotion, then Asians—who are perceived as industrious, asexual, machinelike—are the nerdiest of ethnic groups. Modern anti-Semitism has been so varied that it’s hard to locate Jews on the animal–machine scale, but in America, the nonsensual, nonearthy Jews generally stand on the same side as the Asians, and both stereotypes are the progenitors of the contemporary nerd. Orientalist racism, powered by the perception that Asians are too calculating and industrious, goes back at least as far as the 18th century. But in the United States it’s taken a distinctive form since 1965, when an immigration act allowed for renewed migration from East and South Asian countries and radically increased America&#39;s Asian population. Because the act’s policies made immigration much easier for educated families, and...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_stereotypes_jews_and_asians_evolved_nerd</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_stereotypes_jews_and_asians_evolved_nerd#comments American Nerd Asians college Culture Geeks Long Duk Dong nerds Revenge of the Nerds Sixteen Candles Mon, 12 May 2008 17:34:52 -0500 13569 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/wed_all_rather_be_liked_known <strong>Author:</strong> Ben Karlin<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 5:10 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Ben Karlin To: Elizabeth Wurtzel Posh Spice plus Birkin: Is it better to be known, or loved? Or does having a really expensive purse trump both those things? The words in your last e-mail all make sense. And they all seem true and heartfelt. But to me, everything boils down to simple want. Every word human beings speak is laden with desire. The engine of socialization coats our language and teaches us moderation and technique, but we are animals striving to survive and thrive. I started out these exchanges with you pleading for you to like me. That was laid out in the form of a joke, but it was fundamentally true. I didn&#39;t plead for you to &quot;know&quot; me. Because ultimately, I don&#39;t think that&#39;s what most people want. It&#39;s why we dress up to go out. It&#39;s why we hope and pray that a person has fallen for us before they find out some of the dark, unpleasant shit. Could you imagine leading with, &quot;Hello my name is Ben. I snore, have psoriasis and can be simultaneously imperious and childish&quot;? I haven&#39;t figured out anything about life or love. I really haven&#39;t. But my overwhelming suspicion is that is a lot simpler than 99% of all people make it. Unfortunately, simple does not mean easy. And honesty isn&#39;t always the best policy. Would that it were. So the natural question is, what do...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/wed_all_rather_be_liked_known</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/wed_all_rather_be_liked_known#comments Sex Mon, 12 May 2008 17:10:05 -0500 13538 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/obama_proves_again_hes_plu <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 5:05 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed Barack Obama this past weekend. Surprising no one who has spent time studying the senator&#39;s career and writings, Obama showed himself to have a deeper and richer understanding of the American Jewish and Israeli experience than any previous presidential aspirants. (By the way, that includes Joe Lieberman, who is becoming a sadder and sadder self-parody with every passing day.) Some highlights: I always joke that my intellectual formation was through Jewish scholars and writers, even though I didn’t know it at the time. Whether it was theologians or Philip Roth who helped shape my sensibility, or some of the more popular writers like Leon Uris. So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience. One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate...[snip]... I think that the idea of a secure Jewish state is a...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/obama_proves_again_hes_plu</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/obama_proves_again_hes_plu#comments Barack Obama Israel Judaism Politics Mon, 12 May 2008 17:05:23 -0500 13562 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_relationships_end <strong>Author:</strong> Elizabeth Wurtzel<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 5:00 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Elizabeth Wurtzel To: Ben Karlin I agree with you the that Birkin bag situation amounts to madness. It&#39;s not like it brings you pleasure, like absinthe or cocaine, and yet it&#39;s being dealt with as such. Crazy! But women are crazy. And bags are cult objects. See? As for boyfriends, I gave your interrogatory considerable thought. I must explain that my relationships amount to these rather rambling affairs with no real beginning or end, and what goes on in the middle is pretty indefensible. Pretty much, the way it always goes is it starts by, I meet some guy, sparks fly like shooting stars and fireworks and every other pyromaniac&#39;s delight--until things cool off of their own accord. Then usually he realizes he just doesn&#39;t want to get involved, which I know is code for doesn&#39;t want to get involved with me. And logically, that should be the end. But it never is. Somehow, I just don&#39;t or won&#39;t go away, and there&#39;s enough good energy to keep things going, sometimes in fact years will go by in this middling state of no relationship, but here we are. I am very good at the bad dynamic. And I&#39;ve managed to derive a reasonable amount of pleasure and satisfaction from it, or I suppose I would have recovered from this sickness by now. At any rate, the way these relationships usually end is that finally, one fine day, I can no longer bear the pain of what&#39;s not happening, or I meet someone else who I defy technology with, or my friends give me an ultimatum because they can no longer stand to listen to me complain, or we just drift apart. Someone moves to another city or another continent, somehow I am saved by the bell. Not that I haven&#39;t had my share of cohesive relationships that have ended with screaming matches in the TWA terminal in the Saint Louis...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_relationships_end</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_relationships_end#comments Sex Mon, 12 May 2008 17:00:59 -0500 13532 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/kids_should_have_right_vote <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 4:58 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Your weekend was incomplete if you didn&#39;t catch Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry&#39;s brilliant cameo at The American Scene arguing persuasively for the complete abolition of minimum voting age requirements. The argument works as a pincers, first by lowering resistance to the thought of toddlers lining up to fill out ballots they can&#39;t comprehend --- children are much more perspicuous than adults like to give them credit for --- and then shutting the door by pointing out the execrable qualifications and performance of adults as voters. Our New Overlords: Aren't they adorable? Gobry places his emphasis on the first point. It&#39;s worth taking some time to flesh out the second. The standard objection to the idea of doing away with voting age requirements is that before a certain stage in development, people have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. Drawing the line at 18 years may be arbitrary, but the line needs to be drawn somewhere. So the thought goes. But to state the standard objection to child-voting is to refute it. The overwhelming majority of adults have neither the experience nor the basic mental tools to make informed decisions in the voting booth. In his classic study &quot;The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,&quot; Philip Converse found that for 90 percent of the public, voting is simply an act of tribal affiliation, having nothing to do with competing political ideologies,...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/kids_should_have_right_vote</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/kids_should_have_right_vote#comments democratic theory kids Politics Mon, 12 May 2008 16:58:54 -0500 13565 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/could_david_cameron_be_british_obama <strong>Author:</strong> Andy Hume<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 4:19 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> A few days before Christmas last year, I penned a piece for Jewcy outlining the similarities between the Democratic frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, and the new British PM, Gordon Brown. The analysis was sound enough, but I trust you didn&#39;t put any money on the outcome. Hillary is dead and now merely awaiting burial, and Brown --- well, more on him in a moment. The focus has now shifted squarely onto the men who will lead the opposition into the next elections, Barack Obama and the British Tories&#39; David Cameron. David Cameron And BoJo: The Tory leader with the new Mayor of London: "Yes we can" elect toffs from the Bullingdon Club, Britons say Despite the real difficulty in reading across from one political system to another, commentators can&#39;t resist looking across the Atlantic and trying to divine trends that might be replicated in their own backyards. Making comparisons is usually a mugs game but, watching the progress of the two young pretenders, it&#39;s hard to avoid the similarities between them. (And keep in mind, despite the notions that the Democrats are the &quot;left&quot; party and Conservatives the &quot;right&quot; party in their respective countries, that the Tories are well to the left of the Democrats on...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/could_david_cameron_be_british_obama</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/could_david_cameron_be_british_obama#comments Barack Obama David Cameron Politics UK politics Mon, 12 May 2008 16:19:12 -0500 13558 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/meritocracy_and_other_fairy_tales <strong>Author:</strong> David Samuels<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 10:25 am<br />=====<br /> <p> From: David Samuels To: Shmuel Rosner Dear Shmuel, Thank you for your provocative and insightful response to The Runner. I am not a conventional journalist, in the sense that I don&#39;t see my job as advancing the big picture group-think narratives embedded in front-page news stories. I believe that the surface cleverness and sense of assurance and stability conveyed by most third-person news stories is misleading and largely unearned. Reality is always darker and more unstable. For example: Maybe the State of Israel should be shut down over the next decade or so and its Jewish inhabitants shipped off to a reservation in Wyoming in order to ensure the future viability of the Jewish spiritual legacy for mankind, and to prevent a future nuclear holocaust that will kill tens of millions of people in Israel and Iran. Or maybe the Palestinian national cause is bankrupt and needs to be uprooted once and for all, beginning with the forced military depopulation of large areas of the West Bank and the Stalinist-style &quot;liquidation&quot; of tens of thousands of Hamas foot-soldiers in Gaza. The Meritocracy Fairy Tale: Elite universities maintain a bizarre hierarchy of preferences As horrifying as both of these alternate narratives might seem, they have more in common with the common run of the historical experience of Jews and Arabs alike than the underlying expectation of an eventual peaceful accommodation between Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Islamists that drives nearly all Western...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/meritocracy_and_other_fairy_tales</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/meritocracy_and_other_fairy_tales#comments confidence games Culture Ivy League Politics Mon, 12 May 2008 10:25:09 -0500 13551 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_fake_your_way_ivy_league <strong>Author:</strong> Shmuel Rosner<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 9:52 am<br />=====<br /> <p> For many people, publishing even one book can be a lifelong dream. David Samuels, a prolific contributor to The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and many other magazines, managed to publish two books just in the last month. The Runner is the story of James Hogue, one of the great con men in recent American history. Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a collection of the kind of literary adventures, ranging from Woodstock &#39;99 to a $2000-a-plate Bush-Cheney fund-raiser, that have led the National Magazine Award committee to name Samuels as a finalist. Shmuel Rosner recently interviewed Samuels about his projects, and tried to see if there were any common threads uniting them. To: David Samuels From: Shmuel Rosner Dear David, I spent the last couple of days reading the two books that you simultaneously published, and can now officially claim to be suffering from Samuels-fatigue. But it was enjoyable and sometimes challenging, and it made me think about the strange ways journalism can present one with surprising moral dilemmas. This is especially true for The Runner, your wonderfully crafted story of a con man who was smart enough and able enough to get into Princeton University using a fake name and identity. It is a well-known story that you managed to bring to life again. And it is intriguing and troubling in the way such stories often are: the reader --- at least this reader (and the writer, no doubt) --- finds himself identifying with, admiring, the con man, hoping for his vindication, finding fault with the people exposing him, arresting him, expelling...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_fake_your_way_ivy_league</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_fake_your_way_ivy_league#comments confidence games Culture Ivy League Politics Mon, 12 May 2008 09:52:13 -0500 13548 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/review_counterfeiters <strong>Author:</strong> Ethan S.<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 12, 2008 9:17 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Markovics plays Salomon &quot;Sally&quot; Sorowitsch, a character based on the real-life Russian Jew and world-class counterfeiter Salomon Smolianoff who had the misfortune of being captured by the Nazis during World War II. Like the real-life Smolianoff, Sorowitsch is eventually given special treatment in the Sachenhausen camp to mass-counterfeit the pound sterling and the dollar. Throughout this Oscar-award winning film, Markovics never lets that scowl leave his face, even when he cracks a half-smile. Sally&#39;s abject refusal to let his guard down, whether at a Monte Carlo poker table or facing the humiliation of having an SS agent urinate on him, forms the core of The Counterfeiters, one of the most daring, innovative Holocaust films ever made. As Spielberg proved, it&#39;s easy to hate monstrous Nazi guards and sympathize with abused prisoners. It&#39;s much harder to depict a Jew in a camp who&#39;s just as Machiavellian as the guards, and it&#39;s even harder to depict the S.S. as a pathetic, almost Keystone Kops-esque set of mental weaklings. It&#39;s true that there is much in this movie that will initially dismay the Jewish viewer. The unusually multi-dimensional approach to the Nazis may alienate some who reject any shred of humanity in Nazism altogether. The movie&#39;s implicit thesis that, no matter who you are, in a life-or-death situation like World War II your principle motivation is going to be your own survival, will dismay those of us who prefer death-defying moral heroics. All I can say to these points is: watch the film. There&#39;s a payoff for watching The Counterfeiters to the end. It turns out that Sally, who seems willing to do anything to survive, actually has a political conscience. He not only picks the right...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/review_counterfeiters</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/review_counterfeiters#comments counterfeiter Culture Holocaust Markovics Smolianoff Mon, 12 May 2008 09:17:00 -0500 13249 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/must_have_few_ideas_last_minute_mothers_day_shoppers <strong>Author:</strong> Helen Jupiter<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 4:15 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Meredith L. Jacob's: Modern Jewish Mom's Guide to ShabbatHello there thirty-is-the-new-twentysomething! That&#39;s right, I&#39;m talking to you. Do you have a friend, sibling, cousin, or co-worker who recently procreated? Perhaps a girlfriend with a young family who could use a kid-friendly, modern guide to Shabbat? You do? Just as I expected. Well, here&#39;s something to consider: Mother&#39;s Day doesn&#39;t only have to be about your own mom. If you&#39;re looking for a gift to let the young moms in your life know you appreciate how hard they&#39;re working, consider Meredith L. Jacob&#39;s The Modern Jewish Mom&#39;s Guide to Shabbat. In addition to thoughtful and creative guidance on how to prepare the house, the table, and the family, Jacobs offers projects, recipes, and summaries of the weekly Torah portions with family discussion questions. There&#39;s even a chapter on how to keep Shabbat interesting and meaningful for teenagers. If you&#39;re in search of a last minute gift for your own mother this Sunday, here are a couple of foolproof ideas: ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/must_have_few_ideas_last_minute_mothers_day_shoppers</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/must_have_few_ideas_last_minute_mothers_day_shoppers#comments ahava Lifestyle mother&#039;s day Must Have sabon shopping the modern jewish mom&#039;s guide to shabbat Fri, 09 May 2008 16:15:01 -0500 13544 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/muslims_and_evangelical_manifesto <strong>Author:</strong> Ali Eteraz<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 4:14 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Recently, a group of Evangelical Christian leaders let loose an Evangelical Manifesto upon the world (short summary here). By attempting to save Evangelical Christianity from the political and religious excesses that threaten believers and non-believers alike, the authors point to possible way forward for Muslims living in western countries, attempting to be good liberal democratic citizens and maintain their faith at the same time. &quot;Insistently moderate&quot; as Alan Jacobs calls it, the Manifesto abjures a sound-biteAmerican Muslims: American, as well as Muslim discussion of Christianity and criticizes the whole spectrum of the Evangelical movement from right to left, including its own authors. And it extends beyond its own tribe, asking secular humanists and new atheists and liberals of all stripes if they are satisfied with the relationship that society and religion currently have, and taking a pox-on-both-thy-houses approach to &quot;French style secularism&quot; as well as &quot;Islamist violence.&quot; Evangelicals must not, the authors contend, become &quot;useful idiots&quot; to any political party --- no doubt a reference to Republican operatives like Karl who call Evangelicals &quot;loons&quot; behind their backs --- and they must not try to coerce or force other people to believe in their way. They must not try and depict...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/muslims_and_evangelical_manifesto</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/muslims_and_evangelical_manifesto#comments Evangelicals Muslims Politics Fri, 09 May 2008 16:14:01 -0500 13535 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/olmert_government_teeters_web_responds <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 3:40 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Playing farce in the history of the Cinco de Mayo Week &#39;08 to the tragedy of the possible conquest of Lebanon by Iran Hezbollah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is fighting off allegations that he accepted bribes from American Jewish businessman Morris Talansky to help fund his wife&#39;s art career, and unlike previous Olmert scandals, this one credibly threatens both Olmert&#39;s political career and the viability of his Kadima party. Toni O&#39;Loughlin: &quot;The scandal threatens to demolish the already shaky coalition government and raises questions about whether a general election would be required if Olmert resigns. It also risks overshadowing next week&#39;s visit by the US president, George Bush, who has scheduled the trip to celebrate Israel&#39;s 60th anniversary and to shore up the faltering peace talks with the Palestinians.&quot; Avi Green: &quot;I see that Ehud Barak is still stalling and biding for time...All he&#39;s doing is stalling out of his apparently being more interested in a government seat than in true responsibility. I suggest he start to rethink his position, because his colleagues are getting very restless.&quot; Nathan Guttman: &quot;The [Talansky] case is being described in the Israeli press as the most serious of three investigations currently being conducted into Olmert’s affairs...Talansky and Olmert first crossed paths when the Long Island businessman directed the...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/olmert_government_teeters_web_responds</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/olmert_government_teeters_web_responds#comments Ehud Olmert Israel Politics Fri, 09 May 2008 15:40:56 -0500 13534 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/hezbollah_takes_beirut_israeli_governmet_teeters_and_web_responds <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 3:33 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> The eastern world seems to be exploding this week. After the US-backed Future Movement government in Lebanon declared Hezbollah&#39;s private telecommunications network illegal, the Iran- and Syria-backed militia responded by attacking Beirut and seizing control of much the city. Jeffrey Goldberg: &quot;Hezbollah has been doing a bang-up job this week undermining Lebanon&#39;s future on behalf of its sponsors, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Syrian intelligence. It is simultaneously doing effective work undermining its apologists in the West. We&#39;ve heard the arguments over and over again: Hezbollah is social service agency; Hezbollah wants to join the Lebanese political process; Hezbollah is not in fact dominated by murderous Jew-haters. And so on. It&#39;s been a tough year already for Hezbollah&#39;s apologists....&quot; Nicholas Noe: &quot;The open question then, as it has been for the last 30 years, now seems to be whether the Israelis might be the ones to intervene if March 14 steadily loses its capacity to cling on to its remaining levers of power - or whether Israel might be content to sit back and watch its bitter enemy fight its own countrymen. Nasrallah certainly thinks the former might be the case, saying yesterday that Hizbullah is well equipped to fight on two fronts. Either way, having reached a point where the spectre of yet another Israeli invasion and/or another civil war is being seriously discussed as imminent....&quot; The...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/hezbollah_takes_beirut_israeli_governmet_teeters_and_web_responds</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/hezbollah_takes_beirut_israeli_governmet_teeters_and_web_responds#comments Politics Fri, 09 May 2008 15:33:39 -0500 13529 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/can_married_people_be_friends_their_exes_0 <strong>Author:</strong> Ben Karlin<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 3:04 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Ben Karlin To: Elizabeth Wurtzel Read the following in a cranky old man voice: What the hell kind of world are we living in? I’m sorry, but it’s a fucking bag. There is little in this world that makes less sense to me than smart people going nuts over fancy pants clothing and/or accessories. I understand people trampling each other ever a $29 dvd player. I even understand why people would believe that a secret US-Israeli cabal conspired to bring down the twin towers. Seriously, that is not exaggeration. I have an easier time believing that shit than why people care about a bag. Even if it is nice. Even if it is made of the finest materials man has ever brought together in bag form. Okay, you can call me a cretin now. Here’s a whiplash turn: So you are still in touch with all your exes? Interesting. Who initiates that? It can’t be mutual. And how has or does the current guy feel about the past? That’s where you get into trouble. I tried and succeeded for some time in keeping in touch with many of my former girlfriends. Something about wanting to prove that it really was us and not just me, or just her. &quot;Look, we can still be friends. That’s real! Not just something we said to soften a blow.&quot; But one by one they fell away. People moved or got married or finally just gave up because after all, we were really only hanging out because we used to go out – not necessarily because we were super into the same things. (Otherwise, we might still be together, no?) I have one friend who is a former girlfriend. She was my Bar Mitzvah date and we broke up in the 7th grade. We made out in a closet once. We had braces and it wasn’t particularly fun. But back to you., since you&#39;re the single one. Do guys break up with you and then regret it? Do you dump them, then...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/can_married_people_be_friends_their_exes_0</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/can_married_people_be_friends_their_exes_0#comments Sex Fri, 09 May 2008 15:04:42 -0500 13531 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/can_married_people_be_friends_their_exes <strong>Author:</strong> Elizabeth Wurtzel<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 2:34 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Elizabeth Wurtzel To: Ben Karlin Hope you killed the man in Reno! You are so Johnny Cash! That is so Jew-y of you! I love that you are multitasking TV shows. Excellent! I too multitask, thereby accomplishing nothing, but you, you create hit fake news shows. Right now, as I compose this email, I am also sitting on an Amtrak train and reading an article about this poor (actually, apparently quite wealthy, but never mind) Palestinian scholar who can&#39;t get tenure at Barnard because she wrote things that might be construed as less than kind about Israel, and I am also eating a Cup-of-Noodles soup, and having a phone conversation about termites with my mother. But you are probably coming up with the next Daily Show for HBO and an online version of The Onion for Slate or something like that, and maybe even writing a buddy movie for Adam Sandler and Chris Rock, or whoever the kids think are funny these days, all the while I&#39;m just typing this email and slurping away and telling my mom to look in the Yellow Pages for an exterminator. If that paragraph made no sense, forgive me. I&#39;m not good at doing six things at once. It&#39;s funny you should mention the 237th richest man in the world. As I told you, my thesis is about intellectual property, and there&#39;s a section about how rich you would be based on the order in which you receive valuable information, like a hot stock tip. And I go through the regression from the 27th richest to the 270th richest to the 27,000th richest person in the world. The college nose ring: Still got yours? So,...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/can_married_people_be_friends_their_exes</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/can_married_people_be_friends_their_exes#comments Sex Fri, 09 May 2008 14:34:57 -0500 13530 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/itemized_guide_how_john_mccain_stays_classy <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 1:05 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Two weeks before Cindy McCain swore to NBC&#39;s Ann Curry that her &quot;husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all,&quot; Commentary&#39;s Jennifer Rubin spoke to John McCain on a conference call and baited him into describing Barack Obama as --- simultaneously --- the stealth candidate of Hamas, the Sandinistas, and the Weather Underground. Obama responded yesterday on CNN, saying that McCain was &quot;losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination.&quot; How would the campaign Abe Greenwald assures us is the veritable Platonic form ofSenator Tamburlaine the Great: McCain's Potemkin stroll through a Baghdad market in April 2007 allowed terrorists to set up an ambush that killed 21 people...and provided his campaign with a fitting metaphor maturity and masculine wisdom react? Why, with a near-instantaneous hysterical...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/itemized_guide_how_john_mccain_stays_classy</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/itemized_guide_how_john_mccain_stays_classy#comments Barack Obama Election 2008 John McCain Politics Fri, 09 May 2008 13:05:59 -0500 13524 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/africans_israel_immigration_issue_or_human_rights_disaster <strong>Author:</strong> Tamar Fox<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 11:07 am<br />=====<br /> <p> You Don't Have To Go Home: but you can't stay here?At Slate, Emily Bazelon recently explored the rarely-discussed issue of African immigrants in Israel, noting that PM Ehud Olmert has complained about how many Africans sneak into Israel every year—a situation that raises issues of immigration, religion, economics, and infrastructure. These Africans are Christians and Muslims, which means they’re not eligible for Israeli citizenship, but Israel won’t extradite them back to their home countries because of their potential persecution for being affiliated with a Jewish State. Many are sent to detention centers, where they languish doing manual labor in poor conditions, and others are sent to Tel Aviv, where they end up living near the bus station, in slumlike conditions that may be worse than the refugee camps they’ve fled in Africa. Of course, this is nothing new: We previously posted about Darfurian refugees who were imprisoned when they arrived in Israel, because Sudan is technically an Arab country. After sneaking in via Egypt, they were kept on army bases, or put under house arrest on kibbutzim in the North while the Israeli government tried to figure out where to send them. We also let you know when, more than a year later, 600 Darfurian refugees were granted temporary residency, and 2,000 illegal immigrants from Eritrea were granted work permits when it was made clear that their lives...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/africans_israel_immigration_issue_or_human_rights_disaster</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/africans_israel_immigration_issue_or_human_rights_disaster#comments African Darfur Immigration Israel Politics Sudan Fri, 09 May 2008 11:07:25 -0500 13438 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/if_olmert_falls_whats_next_israel <strong>Author:</strong> Bernard Avishai<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 09, 2008 11:06 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Tzipi Livni, Soon-To-Be-PM?: Certainly beats the hell out of Bibi Israeli journalists are pre-celebrating Israel&#39;s sixtieth with a big, compelling story, yet another police investigation of Ehud Olmert over possible bribes he accepted from an American Jewish businessman. But their tone, this time, is subtly different from the past. The reports of interrogation (of Olmert himself, former staffers, etc.,) are less sassy. Ministers are keeping their counsel instead of rushing to Olmert&#39;s defense. There are confident leaks that the &quot;situation is grave.&quot; The police seem to have got their man -- anyway, if their case is not bullet-proof, it is they who should be investigated for doing this to the public, of all times, now. So reasonable people are preparing themselves for the possibility that Olmert will soon have to resign. This would be bad news -- and good. First, the bad: I have not hidden my personal fondness for Ehud Olmert, which makes me completely unremarkable. Olmert is a likable, glad-handing centrist, a poster-child for Israel&#39;s rising professional and entrepreneurial élites, who has cultivated Western journalists and back-and-forth Israelis like myself for years. But this is not personal. It is business. Waiting in the wings, liking the polls,...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/if_olmert_falls_whats_next_israel</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/if_olmert_falls_whats_next_israel#comments Ehud Olmert Israel Politics Tzipi Livni Fri, 09 May 2008 11:06:59 -0500 13528 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/jerusalem_eco_housing_pilot_project_turning_talk_action <strong>Author:</strong> Michael Green<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 6:00 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Gil Peled: knows how to get resultsOne thing Israelis aren&#39;t short on: Talk.  So it’s a reassuring sign of the times that whether it’s climate change, the rapidly shrinking Dead Sea, or the way urban pollution effects everyday quality of life, the environment—HaSviva—is becoming a much more common topic of conversation. It hasn&#39;t always been that way. Gil Peled, an Israeli architect and green building consultant, explains, “Now everyone is aware of environmental problems, but when we had suicide bombers up the road it was the last thing on people’s minds.&quot; Fortunately, converting talk into action is precisely what Peled’s Eco-Housing Pilot Project has been doing. Like so many people in the country, Peled lives in a stone-brick apartment block erected two generations ago when the national priority was ‘building the land’ rather than ‘saving the planet’. But what sets Peled’s building in central Jerusalem apart from the others nearby is that the residents have reduced their ecological footprint by over 30% since the project began in 2002. The trademark stone floors and thin walls work well in the summer, letting heat escape, but that same lack of insulation becomes a burden during the icy Jerusalem winter. I’m not alone in huddling around an electricity-hungry portable heater from December to February. Not exactly what the Jewish Agency promised… And when it comes to recycling, if there’s a deposit...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/jerusalem_eco_housing_pilot_project_turning_talk_action</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/jerusalem_eco_housing_pilot_project_turning_talk_action#comments eco-housing Environment Gil Peled Green Israel Lifestyle Thu, 08 May 2008 18:00:12 -0500 13517 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/hidden_gems_israel <strong>Author:</strong> Tamar Fox<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 5:48 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Whether you&#39;re contemplating your first or fifteenth trip to Israel, the following destinations are unique, hidden gems that won’t be crawling with tour groups.  Birthright, Ulpan, and Federation trip alums can rest assured that these won&#39;t be repeats. Care For Some: Biblical grass?1. Stroll in Neot Kedumim, the Biblical Landscape Reserve You may have already visited the amazing Biblical Zoo, but how about a botanical gardens that shows you all of the plants and flowers mentioned in the Bible? It’s gorgeous, fun, and educational in the marginal ‘not-too-boring’ kind of way. 2. Check Out the Rockefeller Museum of Archaeology It’s easy to skip most of East Jerusalem on your first few trips because there’s so much going on in West Jerusalem, but the Rockefeller Museum is definitely worth a trip. They have some of the Dead Sea Scrolls, displayed differently than the big exhibit in the Israel Museum, and all kinds of cool things that have been dug up in Israel from the Iron Age to the Byzantine Empire. Shen Ramon: mean's...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/hidden_gems_israel</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/hidden_gems_israel#comments Aramaic elijah Israel Jerusalem Kibbutz last supper Lifestyle Religion sermon on the mount tourism Thu, 08 May 2008 17:48:18 -0500 13498 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/crashing_passion_play <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Radosh<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 5:30 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Welcome to Arkansas: The entrance to the play Over seven million people have seen the Great Passion Play of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, since its opening in 1969. The play was founded by a Midwestern preacher and politician, Gerald L.K. Smith, whose thrice-failed bid for president promised “the preservation of our Christian faith against the threat of Jew Communism.” It has been re-written several times since Smith’s death in 1976, and I wanted to see if it still reflected its anti-Semitic roots—not only was Smith an avowed foe of “Christ-hating Jews,” but Passion Plays as a genre have a troubled history dating back to the Middle Ages. The most interesting way to see the show, I decided, was from the inside. So I volunteered as an extra. While researching Rapture Ready, my exploration of Christian pop culture, I planned always to identify myself and my intentions honestly. But The Great Passion Play has had some bad experience with the media so I decided, just this once, to go incognito… and just avoid any outright lies. I called the 800 number and asked if there were any openings. The man who answered seemed disappointed that I hadn’t seen the show. “We usually ask people to be familiar with the play first.” “I understand,” I said, seeing my opportunity slip away. “but I was really hoping to do this.” And then I heard myself say, “It’s something I felt called to do.” “Do you have your own sandals?” he asked. “You the fella from New York?” A man...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/crashing_passion_play</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/crashing_passion_play#comments Culture Eureka Springs Evangelicals Jesus Passion Plays Rapture Ready Thu, 08 May 2008 17:30:51 -0500 13470 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/no_lipshitzes_jenna_bush_s_wedding <strong>Author:</strong> Izzy Grinspan<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 4:40 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Guess who's coming to dinner: David Lauren and Lauren BushLauren Bush, niece of George, has been dating David Lauren, son of Ralph, for three years. On the surface, that’s a match made in madras-print heaven. But according to the New York Daily News, Jenna Bush invited her cousin to her upcoming wedding without a date. Why was David Lauren excluded? It could be because the family’s upset that the couple has been together for three years without getting engaged, says one source. Or it could be because, as Radar helpfully explains: David&#39;s actual surname is Lipshitz; his father famously changed it to Lauren when he realized that &quot;Ralph Lipshitz&quot; didn&#39;t quite fit the profile of a company whose logo features an aristocrat playing an aristocratic game on a horse. The wedding is on the small side—only 200 people—and some of George H.W. Bush’s siblings aren’t invited. But this quote, from another anonymous source, doesn&#39;t paint the Bushes in the most tolerant light: &quot;There are religious differences,&quot; one points out. &quot;Would he expect her to convert to Judaism?&quot; ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/no_lipshitzes_jenna_bush_s_wedding</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/no_lipshitzes_jenna_bush_s_wedding#comments David Lauren Jenna Bush Lauren Bush Ralph Lauren Sex Thu, 08 May 2008 16:40:22 -0500 13511 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/republican_base_hispanics_go_back_hispania <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 3:34 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Latinos are the fastest growing demographic group in the nation and will play an increasingly decisive role in elections for the foreseeable future. George Bush got re-elected in 2004 by pulling off an eighteen point swing in the Latino vote versus 2000. Hence Republicans should get down on their star-spangled knees to give thanks that their party stumbled, with one hilarious pratfall after another, into nominating John McCain. He&#39;s not just the only Republican candidate with even an outside shot of winning this year&#39;s election. He&#39;s the only one not emphatically determined to reduce the GOP to a rump Anglo regional party of the old Confederacy. Juan McCain's Shocking Plan Revealed: ¡Aztlán o muerte! ¡No a la rendición! So while the eyes of the nation were fixed on the North Carolina and Indiana Democratic primaries, McCain used the occasion of Cinco de Mayo to quietly step up his outreach to Latino voters, launching a Spanish-language version of his website featuring endorsement spots en español (naturalmente) from several prominent Mas Canosistas, and ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/republican_base_hispanics_go_back_hispania</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/republican_base_hispanics_go_back_hispania#comments Election 2008 Immigration John McCain Politics Thu, 08 May 2008 15:34:25 -0500 13503 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_hillary_clinton_finally_got_knocked_out_pt_2 <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 2:35 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> The surprising, spectacular, and deeply encouraging failure of populism to move Democratic primary voters is only part of the story of the long overdue demise of the Clinton dynasty in North Carolina and Indiana Tuesday night. Just as decisive, if not moreso, was the near-total collapse of Hillary Clinton&#39;s support among African-Americans. I&#39;m not talking about the familiar collapse of Clinton&#39;s black support after Barack Obama proved himself to be a viable mainstream presidential candidate by winning the lily-white Iowa caucuses. A second mass exodus of black voters away from Hillary Clinton made Indiana a statistical push, fattened Obama&#39;s margins enough to completely wipe-out Clinton&#39;s pyrrhic, pointless victory in Pennsylvania, and broke down the wall of bullshit sustaining the idea that the Democratic primary didn&#39;t end in February. After Obama&#39;s win in Iowa, her surrogates&#39; public musings about Obama&#39;s possible history of crack dealing, and Bill Clinton&#39;s now infamous trashing of the Palmetto State as a consolation prize for the you-know-whats, Hillary Clinton still managed to pull in about one fifth of the black vote in South Carolina. Yet from one Carolina primary to the other, roughly two thirds of Clinton&#39;s remaining black support dissolved, only slightly less steep a drop, proportionally, than her fall from this October poll in which she actually led Obama in black support, to the South Carolina exit poll. If she had maintained her South Carolina performance among blacks on Super Tuesday, Potomac Tuesday, Super Tuesday II, and...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_hillary_clinton_finally_got_knocked_out_pt_2</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_hillary_clinton_finally_got_knocked_out_pt_2#comments Barack Obama Election 2008 Hillary Clinton Politics Thu, 08 May 2008 14:35:14 -0500 13486 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/dont_hate_me_living_brooklyn <strong>Author:</strong> Izzy Grinspan<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 12:25 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Ben Karlin To: Elizabeth Wurtzel I’m not sure you are going to get your handbag this way. Go for it! Just put it out there that you want one. Why beat around the bush? Everything I want is vague and ill-defined. That goes for life goals too. I have no ability whatsoever to look into the future and conjure a picture of what my life will be – or even what I want it to be. Please read this in as un-angsty voice as possible. It does not make me nervous. Just a bitch to shop for. I am working on a bunch of crap for HBO. Though that is not how I pitched it to them. I presented it in a manner that would make them think it is going to be quite good. I am writing a pilot about the world’s 237th richest man. We have another show, written by someone else, about a UFO alien death cult set in northern Wisconsin, and a third, loosely based on my book, which is a comedy-variety show built around the theme of failed relationships. As much as I loved working on a daily show, there is something about the promise and possibility of developing multiple ideas that thrills me more. Like, even though I ground myself down to a nub running multiple shows, the idea of having multiple shows is still thrilling. This inability to learn from past experience could be labeled either “boundless enthusiasm” or “fatal flaw.” I really don’t want to get into a New York neighborhood apologia. In the 9 years I have been here I have lived in the West Village, Hell’s Kitchen, Greenpoint, Greenwich Village proper, off the Bowery in Noho, Clinton Hill and Fort Greene. What does that say about me other than settle the fuck down? There were things I loved about each place, though I loved Hell’s Kitchen least. Right now, I do live in Brooklyn, ambivalently. Don’t hate me for it. Hate me for a number of other reasons, which I would be more than happy to elucidate herein. I am not now, nor have I ever been...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/dont_hate_me_living_brooklyn</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/dont_hate_me_living_brooklyn#comments Brooklyn comedy HBO Sex The Colbert Report The Daily Show The Onion Things I&#039;ve Learned from Women Who&#039;ve Dumped Me Thu, 08 May 2008 12:25:00 -0500 13488 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/silver_mt_zion_goes_down_river <strong>Author:</strong> JessM<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 12:23 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Efrim Menuck fronts the band currently named Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra &amp; Tra-La-La Band—a band whose appellation, along with its sound, changes and grows with each new release. Currently, the band is a seven-piece composed of (among other instruments) violins, guitars, and a cello—and group choral chanting. Their newest release, Thirteen Blues for Thirteen Moons, finds the band in a more aggressive, rock-edged mood than usual, supplanting their experimental punk backgrounds (Menuck, along with the band’s violinist and bassist, also play in the band Godspeed You! Black Emperor). Just landed from their European tour, Menuck graciously filled us in on the band’s philosophy, writing habits, and the Facebook invasion of Canada.Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band: chilling in a field I can&#39;t make up my mind whether your music and the imagery of your lyrics and albums reminds me more of old Baptist church spirituals, or old Jewish ones. Is that intentional? We grab water from both of those rivers, because faith is a lovely thing, even if you don&#39;t believe in God. It&#39;s partly why the band is named after Mt. Zion—it&#39;s the holy mountain in the awful desert that illuminates the choruses of Baptist hymns, dusty klezmer tunes, and 6-minute dubplates. Also, I spent grades one through nine at Hebrew day school, and came home every night to my atheist father, who would try to undo any little thing I’d happened to learn that day. This means that, somewhere in my little pea-brain,...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/silver_mt_zion_goes_down_river</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/silver_mt_zion_goes_down_river#comments Culture Efrim Menuck music Q&amp;A Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra &amp; Tra-La-La Band Thu, 08 May 2008 12:23:31 -0500 13159 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/describe_your_life_six_words <strong>Author:</strong> Izzy Grinspan<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 10:49 am<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Elizabeth Wurtzel To: Ben Karlin Just for fun, today I challenged my classmates to come up with six-word autobiographies of themselves, because apparently there is some new book that collects such thing. They came up with some good ones: Dead poet reincarnated as lawyer. Remembers. Who has Wire Season 2? Return! Extending childhood by accumulating university degrees. G-Chat. Facebook. YouTube. Where was productivity? Quarterlife crisis eventually becomes midlife crisis. Saw my prettiest sunrise too young. Possible snow Monday, I love California. Why must it all slip away? I can&#39;t believe I said that! Failed to write an autobiography in six words. I had a few for myself, couldn&#39;t narrow it down. Here they are: Your whole life on a sign: From Time Out New York's series of photos, which took the six-word memoir concept to the streets I came, I saw, I wrote. I didn&#39;t come, but I wrote. I hate myself. Want to die. Bad parents, bad boyfriends, good words. Harvard. Job. Fired. Job. Fired....</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/describe_your_life_six_words</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/describe_your_life_six_words#comments Law School Sex Six Word Biographies Things I&#039;ve Learned from Women Who&#039;ve Dumped Me Thu, 08 May 2008 10:49:06 -0500 13489 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/buy_me_birkin_then_tell_me_your_secrets <strong>Author:</strong> Izzy Grinspan<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 10:47 am<br />=====<br /> <p> From: Elizabeth Wurtzel To: Ben Karlin Okay, Ben, I am now writing to you once again with my physical address present, because I am going to explain to you about the Birkin bag, which is nothing like the Birkenstock sandal. This website has some pretty nice pictures of Birkins, which are named for Jane, and you can also refer to the Wikipedia entry for further information. And then you can feel free to order one from wherever you like and send it to my residence, as is written out below, should you feel inclined to do so. I shan&#39;t complain, and indeed will be quite grateful, and will even feel it necessary to pay you tribute, to compose haikus and do ceremonial dances in your honor--in fact to show you gratitude however you see fit. Actually, I guess I&#39;m not going to explain anything about the Birkin bag, just let you know that it would be nice to have one. I&#39;d prefer the Hermes orange color, but I&#39;m not fussy. But enough about that. Glad to hear you don&#39;t cheat on your wife. Or at least not that you&#39;re going to admit to me and everyone else. That&#39;s wise. Of course, if there&#39;s anything you want to put out there, this might be the way to do it. So you&#39;re working on a movie, and you&#39;re doing something more with television. You&#39;re busy! What&#39;s the TV show? Worse than Kabul: Yuppie-hipster BrooklynI myself am not so busy. I finished law school in January, although I am still working on my thesis,...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/buy_me_birkin_then_tell_me_your_secrets</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/buy_me_birkin_then_tell_me_your_secrets#comments Birkin bags Cobble Hill Marriage Sex Things I&#039;ve Learned from Women Who&#039;ve Dumped Me Thu, 08 May 2008 10:47:58 -0500 13487 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/poem <strong>Author:</strong> <br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 9:00 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Life that swirls in the scraps of swallows in the early evening, reaching out red from within the flower, sprawling lazily along the entire length of the cat, barking and then listening for a moment to itself within the dog, fluttering in the gecko&#39;s transparent belly, hiding behind the appearance of separate forms moving inside the wheat or frozen in a trampled badger&#39;s body on one side of the road all, all of this - life that defines itself and deconstructs in philosophers&#39; minds twisting in the bodies of spring vipers or whispered by a cold carp, its mystery glistening in the geometry of spider webs, endlessly gushing, green, from the earth or wandering restless in the bodies of storks all - rustling in thickets, strangling the lovely homes with clutching ivy, steaming through the window from the pots of barley soup, dispersed in the semen scent of flowering carob rising in bellies and in poems the length of a cigarette, Life that exhales now between the ribs in the heart&#39;s harmonica all of this -- inside you -- blood and bone inside me now. Translated from the Hebrew by Lisa Katz ...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/poem</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/poem#comments Culture poetry Thu, 08 May 2008 09:00:00 -0500 13194 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_sixty <strong>Author:</strong> <br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 08, 2008 8:15 am<br />=====<br /> <p> Qassam rockets rain down on Negev towns; suicide bombings have reappeared; Israel is maintaining a blockade on the Gaza Strip with periodic invasions that are growing in severity; Hezbollah is re-arming itself in a chaotic Lebanon; and the fear of a nuclear Iran remains. It seems an odd time to say that Israel is now in the best position it has ever been to normalize its existence. But that is precisely the case, and Israel&#39;s sixtieth birthday is the perfect opportunity to see this. Israel has been at the center of global intrigue for so long, it&#39;s hard now to recall the idealism in which it was born. But sixty years ago, the first citizens of Israel dreamt of a country that was both Jewish and democratic, and that was welcomed fully into the family of nations and at peace with its neighbors. Today, the view of Israel around the world is at its lowest point ever. Yet it has also been offered full recognition and normal relations by the entire Arab world, and all the negative press it has received has not eroded the general support in the West for its continued existence as a Jewish state. Had this Arab offer been proposed even twenty years ago, most Israelis would have wept in joy at the prospect and leapt at it. But today, Israel is hesitant to extend its hand to that offer, even while it has acknowledged it as a positive step. What&#39;s changed, and how can we change it back? Living By The Sword Beginning with the very birth of the country in 1948, Israelis have lived each day with the sense that their neighbors want to destroy them. One can debate whether Arab determination toward that goal has waned, but that doesn&#39;t change the very real feelings Israelis have or their historical basis. Modern historical research has shown that the Arab effort in 1948 to eliminate Israel in its infancy was half-hearted, but the war still cost Israel one percent of its population....</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_sixty</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/israel_sixty#comments Israel peace Politics Thu, 08 May 2008 08:15:00 -0500 13239 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_hillary_clinton_finally_got_knocked_out_pt_1 <strong>Author:</strong> Daniel Koffler<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 07, 2008 7:05 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Our long national Wrightmare is finally over. With his unexpectedly impressive win in North Carolina and equally unexpected draw in Indiana last night, Barack Obama has successfully withstood a substance-less campaign of defamation from the Clintonites and their allies in the GOP to put to rest any lingering unreasonable doubt over the outcome of the Democratic primary campaign. The Clintonites are still making a show of staying in the race, but they&#39;ve clearly been sapped of the defiant élan of the last few months, have tellingly retired their character assassinations against Senator Obama, and are effectively resigned to watching their superdelegate and high-level surrogate support leak like a sieve. Salt Of The Earth: Didn't Woody Guthrie Sing An Ode To Slack-Jawed Idiocy? So what did the zombie campaign do to finally get its brain killed? Somehow, it managed to disprove one of Barnum&#39;s laws, and went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (That is, literally went broke; last...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_hillary_clinton_finally_got_knocked_out_pt_1</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_hillary_clinton_finally_got_knocked_out_pt_1#comments Barack Obama Election 2008 Hillary Clinton Politics Wed, 07 May 2008 19:05:31 -0500 13466 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/60_years_old_israel_finally_choosing_national_bird <strong>Author:</strong> James Murray-White<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 07, 2008 5:33 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Israel's Yellow Vented Bulbul: one of ten in the running for national birdIt has recently become a bit of an issue here in Israel that there is no national bird, and so sixty years on, we&#39;re finally adopting a bird to symbolize the country. Britain is proud of its little Robin with its red breast, America boasts of its bald Eagle, and Japan celebrates its own aesthetic in the shape of the elegant Crane—now Israel will join the flock. The scheme to match Israel with her bird representative is the brainchild of Dr. Yossi Leshem, pioneering Israeli ornithologist, senior researcher in the Zoology Department at Tel Aviv University, and Director of the International Centre for the study of Bird Migration in Israel. Leshem is justly proud of the scheme, and explains that “Birds are an essential part of the future of Israel’s landscape and environment. Public awareness will be drawn to Israel’s natural ecosystem and the bird’s habitat.” Leshem and his co-initiator Dan Alon of the Israel Ornithology Centre, based near the Knesset in Jerusalem, have designed an educational project that gives both schoolchildren in Israel&#39;s 4,000 schools (and 9500 nursery schools), and soldiers across all the IDF’s regiments, the chance to acquaint themselves with the birds that have been chosen for the contest. 13 fighter planes from...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/60_years_old_israel_finally_choosing_national_bird</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/60_years_old_israel_finally_choosing_national_bird#comments Birds Culture Environment Israel Lifestyle Ornithology Wed, 07 May 2008 17:33:55 -0500 13473 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/are_jews_jesus_jew_y_enough_bible_competition <strong>Author:</strong> Tamar Fox<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 07, 2008 3:16 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Who Should Win Israel's National Bible Quiz: the person with the right answers, or the person with the "right" beliefs?An international youth Bible quiz is held annually in Israel, and the competition is fierce. (I went to a high school with several competitors, and they spent months studying the minutia of Tanach only to make it through the first round of testing.) This year, one of the contestants, an Israeli who won the Jerusalem district quiz in Israel, is a Messianic Jew. Bat El Levy is a world class Old Testament scholar, but she also brings some knowledge of the New Testament to the table, and that’s making a handful of Israeli rabbis, well--a bit testy. Some rabbis are concerned that if Levy competes and win, her success might encourage Jews to convert to Christianity. Another worry they&#39;re harboring: That Levy could make the Jewish competitors who have only mastered Tanach--and not the gospels--look bad. Levy’s Jewishness is being called into question, but so far the Education Ministry has no plans to bar her from the competition. Messianic Jews have always been a hot button issue in the Jewish community, and it’s hardly a surprise that groups like Yad...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/are_jews_jesus_jew_y_enough_bible_competition</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/are_jews_jesus_jew_y_enough_bible_competition#comments Bat El Levy Bible quiz Israel Jerusalem jews for jesus Messianic Jews Religion Wed, 07 May 2008 15:16:00 -0500 13417 at http://www.jewcy.com http://www.jewcy.com/post/putin_and_his_model_wife <strong>Author:</strong> Andy Hume<br /> <strong>Posted to Jewcy:</strong> May 07, 2008 12:37 pm<br />=====<br /> <p> Putin With His New Model Wife?: Those responsible for false reports will pay It was quite possibly the greatest gift to journalists since bars started offering free Wi-Fi. Vladimir Putin, who steps down as Tsar of All The Russias this week, had secretly divorced his wife of 25 years, Lyudmila, and shacked up with a medal-winning rhythmic gymnast and model-turned-politician half his age who had hitherto been known principally for her &quot;extreme flexibility.&quot; The rumours had been circulating in Russia for some time, but only Moskovski Korrespondent newspaper had the balls to run with the story, which unsurprisingly went global with dizzying speed. After all, a quick Google Image search for the young lady in question, Alina Kabaeva, tends to turn up photos of a foxy-looking girl wrapped only in furs (courtesy of a photoshoot for the Russian edition of Maxim) or else pirouetting on the spot with one leg wrapped behind her ear. What, frankly, is not to like? The only thing is, it wasn&#39;t true. Well, apparently. Not only did Mr Putin and Ms Kabaeva flatly deny the story, but, more to the point,  so did the newspaper&#39;s billionaire owner, Alexander Lebedev -- not noted as an ally of the outgoing President. And Moskovski Korrespondent is perhaps more accurately described as an ex-newspaper; immediately after the story...</p> <p> Read this article in its entirety at: http://www.jewcy.com/post/putin_and_his_model_wife</p> <hr /> http://www.jewcy.com/post/putin_and_his_model_wife#comments Politics Wed, 07 May 2008 12:37:14 -0500 13448 at http://www.jewcy.com