Sacha Baron Cohen is loose in Israel, and he's creating some confusion over the thin linguistic line between hummus and Hamas. Posing as his character Bruno, a gay Austrian rock star, Cohen has been interviewing unsuspecting Israeli and Palestinian political experts, leaving them flabbergasted by his "confusion" between chick pea paste and the militant political organization. This delicate differentiation has been dealt with before, most notably in West Bank Story, winner of the 2007 Live Action Short Film Oscar, and an official selection of Sundance Festival.

Hungry for more? Check out this video of Adam Sandler discussing the hummus factor in his recent flick, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan.

Mo Money Mo Problems: so think about giving some of that phat check awayTax rebates are trickling into American mailboxes. Some of us will be getting a pretty sweet chunk of change back, and with the economy going down the tubes, there are plenty of places we can think of to use that money. But if you don’t absolutely need it to pay rent, put food on the table, or pay off some debt, some people think you should give your rebate (or at least, part of it) to charity. A number of churches have started funds where people can donate their tax rebate money to charities that haven’t been doing so well due to the crappy economy.

"It's an unbelievable amount of cash that people of faith or people of conscience could choose to say, 'You know, we could get along without this. We could put this money to use,' " said Ken Sehested, co-pastor at the Circle of Mercy church in Asheville, N.C.

His congregation of about 50 adults, which is affiliated with the United Church of Christ and Alliance of Baptists, voted to give at least 10 percent of their checks to charities. He and his wife plan to give their entire $1,200 check to the church's partner congregation in Cuba.

Kiva.org: give to entrepeneurs all over the world and help end poverty You may already have a favorite charity where you’d like to designate your money, but if you’re looking for some suggestions, Low Impact Living has some tips for spending your money in eco-smart ways that will save you money later on, and also happen to be good for the planet. Or how about helping communities in need all over the world—including Darfur, India, and Colombia—by donating to the American Jewish World Service, which funds hundreds of grassroots organizations working to promote health, education, economic development, disaster relief, and social and political change in the developing world.

And here’s our favorite idea for your rebate check: Use it to make a micro-loan to empower an entrepeneur in the developing world to lift him or herself out of poverty. And since you’re only loaning the money, you can even get it back to spend on a night out on the town in a few months, or reinvest in another venture, or donate it. Check out kiva.org to choose the micro-loan you’ll support.

Newsflash: Hitler is dead. In fact, today is the 63rd anniversary of his death. Alas, since World War II, Jewish discourse on absolutely every single matter of import to Jews has been crippled by the rhetoric of comparing perceived enemies and threats to Hitler. Whether it's intermarriage, Israel, matrilineal succession (i.e. "who is a Jew?"), whether Jews should retain their separateness, how America should deal with Iran, or whether we should care about Jeremiah Wright's sermons, again and again and again, Nazism and Hitlerism are invoked on every side.

In 1990, a guy named Mike Godwin noticed a similar problem in the online community Usenet. He formulated what's now known as Godwin's Law: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." In the intervening eighteen years, Godwin's Law spread far beyond Usenet to became a bona fide Internet meme. It's now shorthand for any conversation riddled with useless comparisons to Hitler or the Nazis.

It's fine to be sensitive to the historical lessons of WWII, but the tragedy of Godwin's Law is that the Hitler fetish doesn't improve our understanding or insight into any problem. Instead, it diminishes our ability to discuss it. The preoccupation with Hitler and WWII prevents us from honestly considering the opposing side of any debate. We dehumanize our opponent as complicit in genocide, and isn't that very dehumanization and strawmanning and simplifying of people's motives...sort of like Hitler?

In honor of the anniversary of Hitler's death, we looked for some unexpected personalities to Godwin. It's surprisingly easy! More are on their way, so check back often.

Hitlery Rodham Clinton propels herself to power through bogus, distorted, simplified economic pandering targeted at the lowest common denominator of an electorate.

John Sidney Hitler McCain sees politics as a break in between wars and seeks to impose his country's values on the rest of world.

Santa Claus, Enemy of the Jews has at least half of the world’s children under his thumb and saturates the media with his own likeness, ideas, and philosophy.

Baraq Hitler-ssein Osama leads a frightening cult of personality.

Everyone at Columbia is accusing everyone else of Hitlerian tactics in honor of Israel's 60th anniversary.

Anthony Bourdain stereotypes minority groups as "persistent irritants" and "the enemy of everything good and decent in the human spirit."

Creator of Godwin's law, Mike Godwin, weighs in. 

Passover has taken quite a hit this year: First Manischewitz announced that it wasn’t going to produce any Tam Tams this year, and then Charlton “Moses” Heston passed on to that great gun range in the sky. Luckily, Jewcy’s here to help you cope. We’ve rounded up everything we’ve ever run on Pesach, then salted the mix liberally with some helpful links from outside sources. Need something you don’t see here? Leave a comment, and our readers just might be able to help you out.

THE BASICS

Not totally solid on the whole no-bread thing? Curious about whether having a Iraqi grandmother means you're allowed to eat rice? My Jewish Learning provides all the background information you could possibly need, while Interfaithfamily.com offers resources for Pesach and Easter.

THE SEDER

• How To: Clean For Passover
• Must Have: Laura Cowan's Space Age Seder Plate
• 5 Alternative Seder Styles for a Personalized Passover
• Must Have: The Passover Box of Questions
  
• Ganja is Off the Seder Plate
  

THE TEXT

• We Rate Ten Haggadahs
• Saying Dayenu to the Maxwell House Haggadah
  

• Dozens of Recipes from the Jew York Times
• This Passover, Forget Your Bouillon Cubes
• Manischewitz Screwed Up, Passover's Gonna Suck
• Passover with Martha Stewart

• Passover: The Extra Day is YOUR Day
• Counting the Omer
• Slate Explains Why Easter Doesn't Overshadow Passover
• Slate Looks at What the Passover Seder Reveals About InterfaithCouples

THE REST

• Passover: The Most S&M Jewish Holiday
• Seder Behind Bars
• Hump Day Art: Modern Day Exodus
• Clip of the Week: Jewish Mothers Behaving Badly
• Must Have: Alternative Jewish Grooves for Passover

Max Mosley: discretion, or dehumanization? Henri is a Jew. He operates a semi-private BDSM bar in Berlin. The first night we met, he wept into my camera. We drank shots of Campari and I promised to keep rolling as he kept talking. The bar was loud, had about a half dozen other kinky people in it flirting and drinking, and some details of our conversation were lost in the classic rock soundtrack. Henri told me, "My parents took part in a mapping project. This was right before the war. They knew what it was for. How else were they going to get the money to get me out of Germany? When I came back, in the '60s, no one in the community would speak to me. The perverts were the only people who took me in."

He told me that he doesn't believe there's such a thing as a really dominant woman.

"They're only acting what men tell them to, even bossing the men around."

Would apparent Nazi roleplay fetishist and (soon to be former) Formula One mogul Max Mosley agree? Would he also tease me, the (almost former) professional fetish mistress, the fair-skinned, blue-eyed, passably WASPy blonde who can carry off a whip? Would he want to hire me, too? I very rarely whipped anyone, and of all my clients, only one ever asked me to play the "cold German type"—nervous and novice submissive client code for "Nazi She Wolf."

That client's name was David, and he used to make appointments with me from a number identified on my phone as the Jewish Community Center. I kept the rosary he brought me to wear when we played. He was never one to step back from his fantasy, to dissect it. The intellectual part of me would have wanted to ask him about the death wish implicit in his desire for me to play the role of a calculating gentile woman seeking to overthrow the JCC. To ask that wasn't my job. I would never demand he let me hold his hand as he reckoned with genocide just to make myself feel less complicit—and as anti-Semitic roleplay goes, the JCC seemed the quaintest target he could choose.

David is a submissive, a bottom.  Henri is a top, which means he gets off on being in erotic control.  But Mosely appears to be a switch. Outside of my professional persona, I'm a switch, too. Switches confuse our myths about SM. When someone claims as a part of their sexual identity that they like to be mostly in charge, or mostly overtaken, we understand that. It already fits a neat power law around intercourse, where one person, even in the vanilla sense, is doing the other.

To watch Mosely go from victim to perpetrator in the course of this SM scene (and we can, thanks to the leaked lo-fi video still online) makes no easy sense, especially to a viewer unfamiliar with the cues of sensual power play. There's something in his ability to take both roles that only throws the theatre of historic cruelty in our face.

I wish I could have introduced Henri to one of my lovers, the only man who exclusively topped me. His father was black, and committed suicide after never being able to really make sense of his life after the Vietnam War. His mother's parents are Polish Jews, Holocaust survivors who came to America to start over. My lover told me he knew a little German because, on a long car trip as a kid, his grandfather had taught him a work song. It turned my lover on to sing this. When he gave me an SS pin to wear to a sex party with him, I didn't know whether to thank him for confiding in me about the fantasy, didn't know if I could do right by it without breaking down utterly. We parted ways before I ever found the words for where the sex we had—rough, passionate, brutal, raw, connected to something bigger than we could bear as just two people—took us. Maybe that's why he wanted to see me gangbanged in a uniform. It wasn't only to see me used and on display. The act and what it signified just needed that many witnesses.

If Max Mosely had that kind of trusted access to people who understood and accepted his fantasies, we'd have no reason—other than those demonstrated by history—to call him monstrous. Whatever demons he had to face, be they his family's fascist past or the annoyance of an afternoon hard-on, he made the choice to hire players and a beige-carpeted "torture chamber" in which to enact his sex games. More power to the man for trying to carry out this encounter with an effort towards minimizing real harm to anyone. Mosley thought he was paying for discretion, not dehumanization. Of course, how well or not he treated the sex workers who entertained him isn't the story of dehumanization anyone is interested in telling—maybe because it's clear he was very fair with them. If there's one thing we can fault him for, it's imagining that his "transgressions" weren't a story worth telling anyone but the women he paid to enact them with.

Related: Howard Jacobson on the British Race Car Nazi Sex Scandal

Pay Up: or pull outIsraeli mikvah attendants—the women who supervise dunks into the ritual baths to make sure they’re kosher—haven’t been paid in five months, so Kolech, an Orthodox feminist organization, is working to organize a mikvah boycott until ladies of the bath get paid. Without dunking in the mikvah after her period, a woman isn’t supposed to have sexual relations with her husband, so the boycott would effectively deprive Orthodox couples of intimacy until the issue is worked out.

On the Kolech website (Hebrew) Batia Kahana-Dror writes: "Let's drive them crazy, all those who wait restlessly for the night that their woman goes to the mikvah. All those who make up the majority in the religious councils, the Treasury, the Religious Services Ministry and the Knesset, the rabbis and the leaders. Stop. No more sex."

Kahana-Dror is echoing an ancient theme of women withholding sex for the good of their communities. Here are some examples:

• Lysistrata: First and foremost, we have Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens decide to withhold sex from their husbands until peace is declared—a strategy that proves entirely effective. In that vein, The Lysistrata Project began staging readings of the play in 2002. They sponsor events and encourage activism to seek inventive solutions to violence and economic crises, specifically the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• The Strike of Crossed Legs: In 2006 in Pereira, Colombia, dozens of women took part in the "Strike of Crossed Legs." When gang members weren't handing in their guns, their wives and girlfriends organized and decided to stage a sex strike. They came up with a strike anthem rap song that included the lyrics: "As women we are worth a lot. We don't want to fall for violent men because with them we lose too much."

• Water for Sex: In Sirt, Turkey, women staged a month long sex strike, protesting the lack of accessible running water in their village. After the existing water supply system broke and the women were forced to walk miles and wait in lines for hours to get water for their homes, they came up with the idea of withholding sex from their husbands until the water supply problem was fixed. After what CNN called "frantic lobbying on the part of Sirt's male population" a governmental official was convinced to pipe water into the town.
  

• Lysistrata with a Twist: Bolivian prostitutes went on a hunger strike when the bars and strip joints where they worked were shut down in 2007. In addition to taking over the local AIDS clinic and refusing to eat, the sex workers threatened to parade around naked. A spokesperson said that if the town of El Alto wanted to do away with prostitution, "then the government should give us a hand and take care of our children, and afterward provide us with jobs."

Title: A Tale of Love and Darkness Author: Amos Oz Description: I can think of no better book to introduce a reader into the layered, fragile, complex, and painful truth of what it means to be an Israeli. Amos Oz, already an intellectual hero, taking his own people and his own history to task over the past 30 years, elevates his writing to a level that very few get to experience over centuries of writing. His storytelling is sharp and clear. This beautiful book offers an extraordinary insight into the Israeli psyche, painting it as feverishly idealistic, mortally wounded, and bitterly optimistic. One comes away changed after reading A Tale of Love and Darkness, swearing that the scent of Jerusalem has been seared into their souls forever; knowing Israel in a way never known quite that way before. I feel a sense of tremendous pride and joy that I am part of a nation that gave birth, witnessed, and nourished such a writer, and that has embraced such writing. Recommended By: Born in Israel to American parents, Danny Maseng first came to the United States to star on Broadway in 'Only Fools Are Sad.' A playwright, actor, singer and composer, Danny has served as Evaluator of New American Plays/Opera-Musical Theater for the National Endowment For The Arts. Danny has also been the Director of Hava Nashira for the URJ, the Artisitic Director of the Brandeis-Bardin Instittute in California and the Director of The Spielberg Fellowships for the FJC. Danny has was named the Patron Artist of the Avraham Geiger School for Cantorial Arts in Berlin, Germany, from 2005 - 2007. Danny is also one of the most popular and respected composers of contemporary Liturgical and Synagogue music. He has been the invited guest of the American Conference of Cantors, the Cantor's Assembly, as well as the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. When Danny is not appearing on show's like Law & Order or narrating Wild Discovery, he is a frequent faculty member of The Wexner Heritage Foundation, Synagogue 2000, The Whizin Institute, Limmud and many other national and international institutes and conferences. A much sought after Scholar/Artist-in-Residence, Danny travels the world, inspiring, teaching and rekindling the love of Judaism through Torah, Kabbalah, Jewish culture and the arts.

The New Jew Canon is a long-term project that seeks to canonize essential Jewish (and some Non-Jewish) reads as recommended by extraordinary rabbis, experts, and cultural leaders. Suggestions are welcome via comments or tips.

Previously: Clayton Swisher's The Truth About Camp David, recommended by M.J. Rosenberg

Saving The World Is: no sweat. especially in cool kicks like these.You may have heard about No Sweat: A little apparel company aiming to make a big difference in the Middle East. Run by CEO Adam Neiman, No Sweat is more than just 100% union made apparel. In addition to creating sweatshop-free, organic and vegan products, Neiman is dedicated to creating jobs in Palestine. Unlike a lot of clothing manufacturers, No Sweat is upfront about their sources and production sites, such as the Arja Textiles factory in Bethlehem, Palestine. So, why did a Jewish guy from Boston want to source from a textile factory in Palestine? I'll let him tell you in his own words:

"While economic development is no substitute for a diplomatic settlement, no settlement can survive without a sustainable Palestinian economy. So while waiting for a diplomatic resolution, we have created a mechanism for ordinary citizens of
good faith to build goodwill on the ground, and support the peace to come. The concept is simple. When faced with an apparently irresolvable conflict, if there is any one thing all parties agree on, do that one thing and see what happens."

Neiman's optimistic ideals and goals for No Sweat have garnered a lot of positive press over the past couple of years—they've even been the subject of an Al Jazeera profile. That said, No Sweat still needs major funding to pull off this experiment in entrepreneurial diplomacy properly. As Neiman put it, "Hamas has chosen guns. Abbas has bet on butter. If we don't provide Palestinians on the West Bank with butter—good private sector jobs NOW—Hamas and guns will certainly prevail."

You can help No Sweat by voting for them in this month's Ideablob contest, where they're finalists competing for $10,000. You've got until March 31 to vote.

Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr. The news this week has been saturated with issues of race, otherness, and problems of identity in a society that's most comfortable drawing boundaries and lines. On Sunday, the New York Times ran a story on Rabbi Capers C. Funnye, Jr., the first African-American member of the Chicago Board of Rabbis. On Tuesday, Senator Barack Obama gave a landmark speech on race relations that took the country by storm. We asked documentary filmmaker Lacey Schwartz to weigh in on these two stories by sharing her own parallel experiences as a Black, Jewish woman who is working to incorporate and make sense of her dual identities. Here's what she had to say:

Like any typical upper-middle class Jewish girl growing up in the Eighties, my life revolved around the Bar Mitzvah party circuit, Gap clothing stores, second base, and Madonna. Something was off, though: From a young age, I encountered people who pointed out that I looked different from my white parents because of my darker skin, tightly curled hair and thicker features. From a little boy in nursery school who made me show him my gums because he claimed they determined my race, to my classmates in high school who would verbally accost me in the halls with “What are you?”—an inquiry that they demanded more than asked—questions about my identity were abundant. “Jewish?” I would tentatively respond, afraid of how they might react to my denial of what they saw as my obvious blackness.

My family never seemed to notice or acknowledge the fact that I looked different from them. One overt example of this came at the age of sixteen, when my grandfather strongly encouraged me to break up with my bi-racial boyfriend. Without irony or malice, Grandpa expressed his fear of how people might treat me for being in an interracial relationship. Because of experiences like these, I deeply related when Barack Obama described in a speech earlier this week how he would cringe when his white grandmother uttered racial stereotypes, and yet he could not disown her.

Lacey Schwartz: black, white, jewish? yes, yes, and yes. When I applied to college I left the race/ethnicity box blank and attached a photograph instead. Based on that, I was admitted as a student who was of “Black/Not of Hispanic Origin.” It wasn't until the end of my freshman year that I learned the truth: My biological father was an African-American man who my mother had had an affair with while married to my father. It was quite a shock, but I cherish my university experience as the time and place where my identification with being African-American and my connection to the Black community first began.

Years later, in an attempt to merge my Black identity with my Jewish upbringing, I attended Yom Kippur services at a Black synagogue in Brooklyn. I was skeptical at first: “A group of Black Jews worshipping together?” I thought. On entering the small brownstone converted into a synagogue, I was amazed to find that the entire congregation was Black! I was even more surprised to find the songs, prayers, and Shofar blasts were identical to what I learned growing up. I couldn't help but wonder how someone with two Black parents could possibly be Jewish, but after years of being questioned by strangers about my own identity, I hid my ignorance and didn't ask the questions I so desperately wanted answered.

As featured in last weekend’s NY Times, Rabbi Capers Funnye Jr. embodies both the heart and soul of this community of people. He was one of the first Black rabbis who I came upon in researching other Black Jews, and he has been one of the most inspiring people I have met along the journey. His work, along with others like him, is making the Jewish community more accepting of all Jews and changing the way we all expect Jewish people to look.

For much of my adult life, I have maintained separate cultural identities. Only in the last couple of years, as part of a personal documentary, have I set out to learn what it means to be both Black and Jewish. In recognizing the uniqueness of my situation, I have come to discover that Black Jews are members of a small, but significant minority within a minority: A group of people whose roots are as diverse and dynamic as any other ethnic group or subculture, and who represent the immense complexity of America itself.

If your comments are blatantly racist, sexist or homophobic, we'll probably dialectize them into Elmer Fudd or Swedish Chef. Or babelfish them into Korean and back to English. The same goes for anything personally defamatory or insulting, because who needs that? Also, don't copy-and-paste a whole damn article. It makes our eyes tired. God invented hyperlinks for a reason!

OK, carry on.

Mr. Moneybags: he doesn't know whether Jerusalem is in Palestine or Israel Hasbro, maker of the game Monopoly, is set to become a world leader in political geography: After a recent promotion for their forthcoming "World Edition" created some controversy, they swiftly and deftly nipped the problem in the bud. The international crisis began when the company asked players to vote on what cities should be featured on the new board. Urban centers were listed alongside the countries in which they reside--which created a crisis in consciousness for Palestinians who claim Jerusalem as their own.

With arguments erupting over whether the location should be listed as "Jerusalem, Israel," or "Jerusalem, Palestine," Hasbro reacted the way any fed-up parent or teacher would in the face of squabbling children: "Fine," they all but said. "If you're going to fight over the countries, then you won't have any countries at all."

Perhaps John Lennon's "Imagine" played in the background as the countries were swiftly removed from the site. "Imagine there's no countries, it isn't hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too..." Too bad real life isn't dealt with as simply as board games.

Related: Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect 200 Shekels

This week, we paid a visit to the 92nd Street Y, where Shmuely Boteach and Christopher Hitchens got to the bottom of the whole 'is there a God' thing. People discussed our take on the Huffington Post, as well as here and here.

Two weeks into writing our JDater Of The Week column, Izzy had an ethical crisis and vowed to be nicer. Boinkology noticed.

Our comic artist Eli Valley took on Antisemitism in British textbooks; the Kvetcher wasn't crazy about it.

We watched the new HBO series 'In Treatment' and talked about our troubled childhoods. We thought about what Barack Obama's potential presidency means for Jews.

And we got drunk at a Brooklyn Yeshiva turned bar named Deity.