Utter Blasphemy: or ancient history? Certain members of my extended family have what my mother affectionately refers to as, "the almond shaped eyes." Their features are so distinctive that they are often mistaken as Asian. People are always surprised to learn that no, they're not Asian at all--in fact, they're Jewish. My mother, ham that she is, laughs it all off with the explanation that, "somewhere along the way, someone must have hooked up with an Asian person." It's funny to imagine a freethinking (read: horny) ancestor of ours with a penchant for lovers of the Asian persuasion, but perhaps there's more to this bedtime story. A few months ago I stumbled upon this YouTube video, which depicts an annual Japanese pilgrimage to Israel:

In and of itself, I find the video to be mind-boggling, amusing, touching, and bizarre. Japanese Jews in Israel, marching down Ben Yehuda street in kimonos, waving Japanese and Israeli flags and singing "Hevenu Shalom Aleichem." Does it get any weirder than that? Well, yes--perhaps it does.

Recently, a couple of fascinating posts about a certain lost tribe (or two, or ten) have appeared on the ol' Internets. The knowledge of a Jewish migration into Asia is nothing new, but these particular posts purport that the Japanese are actually a part of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Published in response to an episode of Nippon TV’s Mino Monta's Japanese Mystery, they present research that has drawn mysterious parallels between Japanese and Jewish history and culture. You can watch some of the clips from the show here.

Israeli officials publicly acknowledge the mysterious similarities between Judaism and Japan. Recently, in March of 2007, Rabbi Avichail of the Israeli Investigative Body Amishav, which searches for descendants of the Lost Tribes, arrived in Japan. Although they only stayed for a short amount of time, the investigative body concluded that “There is no doubt that there is some kind of strong connection between Judaism and Japan. More research is needed to determine the details.”

The connections are very interesting.

For example, the Japanese Shintoist Holy day of July 17th is the Yamaboko Junko, or “Going atop the Mountain to lay to rest the Shrine”. In the old testament, July 17th is the day Noah’s Ark rested atop Mount Ararat. The word “Essa”, which is a carrying chant chanted by the holders of the Omikoshi, or portable shrine, is a word which really has no meaning in Japanese but means “Carry” in Hebrew.

One of Japan’s largest festivals, the Gion Festival, is believed by many, including the Gion Festival officials, to be the same as Ancient Israel’s Zion Festival. The month long festival is almost identical in each event, date, etc. The artwork depicted on the portable shrines in the festival are from ancient Japan, but are renderings of landscapes in the middle east - camels walking the desert, pyramids, Baghdad Palaces, and most surprising is a grand picture of Rebecca offering water to Isaac which is confirmed to be a rendition of Genesis 24 in the Old Testament.

Also explored are some striking similarities between the Japanese and Hebrew languages. Allegedly, there are about 500 Hebrew and Japanese words that are nearly identical, including Kaku (to write), Toru (to pick something up), and Hakushu (to clap). Whether these linguistic similarities are merely coincidental remains to be seen.

The idea that the ancient, immigrant Hata clan, which was active during the Yamato period (disputed dates range from 250 - 710 A.D.), were among the Lost Tribes of Israel is not widely accepted, but it does have its champions. A number of scholars have recognized this theory, and it's a central tenet of certain Japanese "New Religions" (although doctrines based largely on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion discredit some of them entirely).

It's not far-fetched to imagine ancient Jews traveling east from Asia Minor and winding up in Japan, but who they were, when they arrived, how deep they lay their roots, and the legacy they left behind has yet to be determined.

Watching Ken Burns' documentary on the War, I note that it's been ten years since my mother died.

When she was alive, her defining features were her inability to locate her reading glasses (which were usually on top of her head), her strong desire that I eat healthy (including "hiding" wheat toast on the bottom of a tuna sandwich topped with a disguise of white toast), and her inability to throw anything out (her modus operandi was to rifle through the refrigerator and pull out items with the plea, "Quick somebody eat this before it goes bad!").

After she died in 1997, I found her secret cache of documents in the basement. Among them were 4 postcards from France. (Apparently mail from the camps continued throughout the war.)

Postcard From Camp De Gurs These postcards were from the Nazi concentration camp called Gurs in the Pyrenees mountains. She had never told me she had been in a camp. She'd never even told me she wasn't born in Queens until I was in high school.

When I had come home from 7th grade history class asking if she knew what had happened in Germany, she peered at me through those big glasses and "I remember a fence we had run under and some men got made at us." And then she had returned to folding the laundry and I knew not to ask more, but not why.

Before the postcards, my mother was amusing, annoying, and doddering. Afterwards, she was what now? A holocaust survivor? But she didn't have a tattooed number. She hadn't been to Auschwitz. And what about me? Was I the son of a survivor? How could my mother, who made banana Jello and packed me and my father lunch everyday be a survivor?

I didn't understand, and I still don't, and a blog entry is too short to figure it out. But what I do know is that what my mother tried to protect me from still shaped my life, if just through that act of protection. And that I must, in the end, make sense first of her love.

The 150th anniversary issue of The Atlantic is strong all around, but my favorite part so far is the title Walter Kirn gives our hitherto-unnamable decade: The Roaring Zeroes. It’s good, no? Try it out:

• “Long before she became poet laureate, Lohan was known as one of the biggest trainwrecks of the Roaring Zeroes.”
  
  
• “It’s hard to believe now, but in the Roaring Zeroes people in Los Angeles liked to wear fur-lined boots, even in the summer.”
  
  
• “Back in the Roaring Zeroes, breast implants weren’t available at the local drugstore. It was truly a simpler time.”

Kirn's essay, about multi-tasking, is available online to subscribers only, but it's worth buying the whole issue.

Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, Rangoon

A few years back I received a group email that linked to a chart listing the number of Jews in every nation in the world. The two figures that most blew my mind were those representing the number of Jews in Iran: 20,000, and the number of Jews in Afghanistan: 1. The first number surprised me because I had no idea so many Jews remained in Iran after the Revolution. The second number gripped me on a purely existential level. I imagined, rather dramatically, this lone Jew living out his days against a monochrome landscape of bleached sand and rubble, without a single co-religionist in sight. Practically a sci-fi existence.

The chart linked to this guy’s story, and I was pretty fascinated. For a while there was one other Jew in the country, but the two fought over a bible and became hateful enemies. Then the second to last Jew in Afghanistan died. You can read more about the last Jew in Afghanistan here.

I just came across another interesting statistic, though. There are twenty Jews left in Burma. Their mini-community is in the capital, Rangoon, and they occasionally celebrate holidays with Buddhist monks. Here’s Ynet News on what it’s been like for them lately:

"These are the saddest Rosh Hashana and Sukkot we've had in a very long time… we had to adjust the prayer services to the military's curfew, the streets are crawling with soldiers and the situation here is very unstable. The Jews, like many others here, fear for their lives," said Samuels.

The tensions between the military junta and Buddhist monks have made the Jewish community take extra precautions and they have recently hired a private security company, to guard Yangon's only synagogue.

"The unrest here makes it hard for us to even find the quorum needed for prayers," said Samuels. "There are usually a lot of tourists here this time of year, but this year, because of the riots, there are very few of them. Everywhere you look all you see are people rushing home," he added.

"We all pray that the UN negotiations will help restore the peace and quiet to this country," the article quotes one of the twenty as saying. Pray, indeed. Today, China’s ambassador came out against sanctions, and Burma’s ambassador said he can’t understand why there would be need for international action of any kind. Once again, we witness U.N. paralysis at the hands of sinister opportunists treated as statesmen.

Here’s to justice for the Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and all other good people of Burma.

Archbishop Sean O'Malley of Boston has invited the Pope to the city in 2008, saying that a visit from Pope Benedict XVI would help to heal the wounds of Boston's clergy abuse scandals.

Because if you were raped by an authority figure in a funny hat, a visit from a bigger authority figure in a bigger, funnier hat will totally make you feel better.

Pearl HarborWhen I'm not doing comedy, I make my living as an SAT tutor. A damned good one, if I may say so. Every time I hear about some dumb gimmick for studying the SAT (study on your cellphone, "yo momma" jokes, the SAT shower curtain), I think "Well, that'll work for vocabulary." (It's not, however, likely to teach you to deal with fractional exponents, or any serious comparison of long reading passages).

When Flocabulary came out with a hip-hop vocabulary book and CD, I shrugged. That could work. But when the same people came out with Flocabulary: The Hip-Hop Approach to U.S. History, I bought the book and CD. So I could laugh. Blog and laugh.

I loaded the tracks on my iPod ... and proceeded to have a religious experience. Pedagogically religious, anyway. The music didn't suck. In fact, the first song, about the founding of America, began like this:

Black Male Voice Portraying a European, and Rapping in the Most Drippingly Sarcastic Rapper Voice I Have Ever Heard: Wow, I just discovered America!

Black Male Voice Portraying an Angry Native American Speaking as Though to a Small, Racist Child: You didn't discover it. We were already here.

The song goes on to talk about migration over the Bering Strait, the five "civilized" tribes, and the fact that some Native Americans had slaves ("Indians weren't living on some heaven on earth tip"), and to comment, "Isn't that cheap? They call my Jeep a Jeep Cherokee -- what if they called my Jeep a Jeep Jew?"

In the course of this album, Harriet Tubman gets a Lil Kim-like solo ("Reward for my capture? 40 G's"), Frederick Douglass gets to sound like the incredible badass he was, Carnegie (in "Big Ballin' in the Gilded Age") raps about Social Darwinism while Rockefeller points out that Jay-Z named his company "after me," and Sacajawea guides Lewis and Clark through the Rockies "like Mapquest." Lincoln (whose Emancipation Proclamation, of course, failed to free any actual slaves) is portrayed with a dorky, squeaky white guy voice -- but FDR gets a booming, dignified white guy voice. Perhaps my favorite line is when Sally Hemings first attracts Thomas Jefferson:

She's dressed in yellow. She says "Hello,

You probably noticed me in the fields of Monticello."

Below is a sound clip (a couple verses, so as to say within fair use) from a song called "Would You Drop It?", which presents, I think, a not-bad-at-all explanation of World War II up to Truman's decision to drop the bomb. I challenge anyone to better explain fascism and its appeal to Germans, isolationism, the Great Depression, and Europe's falling to the Germans until Pearl Harbor galvanized us "like 9/11" -- in one minute, in rhyme.

All these tracks are on iTunes (search "Flocabulary"). If I could buy them for every teenager in America, I would.

"Would You Drop It"? (clip)

For decades, popular wisdom insists that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only the German soldiers had refused to follow orders.  Of course, that naively takes for granted that your ordinary German had some moral objections to persecuting, dragging to ghettos and murdering Jews.

Two summers ago, in Israel, many soldiers were terribly upset by their orders to evict, exile innocent law-abiding Jews from their homes in Gush Katif and Northern Shomron.

Thirty-eight years earlier the world saw Israeli soldiers cry uncontrollably after liberating the kotel, the Western Wall.  What a difference when we saw soldiers crying, in 2005, as they didn't have the guts to go with their morals and feelings.  We saw soldiers breaking down, because they knew that they were obeying evil laws made by immoral politicians.  The Nazi soldiers didn't cry when they murdered Jews.

Many of the soldiers of Disengagement, two years ago suffered the worst of Post Traumatic Stress, and that's why yesterday IDF soldiers from an elite fighting unit refused to evict innocent, patriotic Jews from homes in Hebron.

Today's soldiers are stronger than their elder brothers. Yasher kocham!

Chickpeas, also known as Garbanzo beans, are those little flesh colored legumes that come in a Goya can. Sometimes they're mashed into a creamy paste by Sabra - or some other inferior brand of hummus. At least that's what I thought until tonight's dinner.

The blacker the chickpea, the sweeter the hummusI went over to a friend's apartment to make supper, and along with fresh green beans, ripe tomatoes, and multiple bulbs of garlic, she whipped out a bowl of what looked like dried out raisins. "They're heirloom chickpeas," she said. "My sister got them for me." WTF? On closer inspection these brown spheres did resemble a bean, but definitely not the plump spheres I occasionally tossed into green salads. But that's just the thing about heirloom vegetables. Most of the vegetables found in supermarkets are bred (or genetically modified) to 1. look pretty 2. stand up to the long distances they travel from farm to table. Heirlooms are, as their name suggests, an older variety of a plant that has been largely knocked off the agricultural playing field. If you've ever wondered why heirloom tomatoes often look so ugly, it's because they pre-date our cultural obsession for fat, uniform - and tasteless - produce.

According to Madhur Jaffery, author of the James Beard Award Winning, World Vegetarian cookbook (and one of the fiercest foodies out there): "Chickpeas originated in ancient times, probably in the southern Caucasus region, helping to feed Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Armenia...The early chickpea was probably small and dark, and was eventually bred to be large and pale."

These chickpeas were not gorgeous, but upon tasting one I was more than willing to overlook trivial things like surface beauty. My friend and I made fresh hummus, which resembled a black bean dip and literally made my night. Check out the recipe below.

Heirloom Hummus

(This recipe is very loosely based on Jaffrey's "Bead Hummus." Like a good bubbe's recipe, the quantities are approximate. Just fuss around with it until it "looks right.")

• 2 cups chick peas (black or "kala chana" if you can find them - otherwise Goya will do the trick)
• 4-5 cloves garlic (whole, skins removed)
• 4-5 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 1 1/2 tablespoons tahini
• 1-2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 4 sprigs fresh mint
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne
• 1 3/4 teaspoon salt

Puree the chick peas and garlic cloves in a food processor until roughly chopped. Add all other ingredients and process again until smooth. Taste and adjust seasoning, tahini, etc. until you reach the right consistency and flavor.

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