Faith & Spirituality

Defending J.D. Salinger's Half-Jewish Roots

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 10:43:47 -0600

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I was reading Virginia Heffernan's article for Tablet about her encounter as a young woman with J.D. Salinger in Cornish, NH. Salinger died at age 91 on January 28th, 2010. Heffernan, who is a convert, reflected nicely on his half-Jewish identity and his troubled family life, but much to my astonishment, she was met with a barrage of comments that Salinger wasn't Jewish because he had a Jewish father, and that he had deserted Judaism as an adult, etc., etc. Here is my reply: ...

Real Talk Parsha: Beshalach

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:17:53 -0600

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MaNishtana Fact No. 11: I'm a big fan of Aquaman. Not so much the costume but the character. I think he's highly underused and has a lot of untapped potential because it's easier to write him off as a third string character. But the dude is the King Arthur of the sea, PLUS he can command fish...Of course while that sounds kickass on paper, it doesn't really work so much in real life. Fish have a memory span of about 3 seconds. That's why they die if you put too much food in the water: ...

On Being Black, White, and Jewish

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:44:47 -0600

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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 ...

Cousin Moishe's Thoughts On Your Upcoming Interfaith Wedding

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:30:05 -0600

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The following email was sent to Noah, a secular Jew about to marry his non-Jewish fiancee Sheila, by Noah's baal teshuvah cousin Moishe. By an odd and fortuitous chain of events, the email found its way to Jewcy HQ. The people in this exchange are all real but have had their names changed to protect the innocent - and the guilty. In other words, we could not have made this shit up if we tried. That includes the spelling and grammar errors. Subject: hi noah So I have some very bad news ...

Real Talk Parsha: Bo

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 15:54:53 -0600

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So, after Pharaoh's back and forth yo-yo game with Moses, Egypt gets hit with the last of the plagues, including Death of the Firstborn. Not sure if anyone realizes, but Death of the Firstborn is quite possibly the most devastating plague anybody can get hit with. And I say this not because of the obvious "death" part but because Death of the Firstborn is the plague that just keeps on giving: Maury: Welcome back. Now this is Imhotep and Anck-su-namun. Imhotep says that he ...

Garfield Minus Garfield Plus God

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:38:10 -0600

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When Dubliner Dan Walsh removed Garfield from the classic Jim Davis cartoons, drawing attention to the peculiar life and mind of his owner Jon Arbuckle, he created an internet phenomenon which has drawn between 30,000 and 300,000 hits per day since February. Without the fat, waggish, sarcastic, star of the cartoon, all we are left with is Jon Arbuckle, Garfield's owner. Walsh would have us believe that this results in "an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and the ...

The Cynicism Behind Restoring Jewish Synagogues in Arab Countries

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:47:43 -0600

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Are we witnessing a new vogue in restoring Jewish sites in the Middle East? The renovated Maimonides synagogue in Cairo will be officially inaugurated in March to much fanfare. The Maghen Avraham Synagogue in the heart of Beirut is being rebuilt. Across Morocco and Tunisia, holy sites and synagogues are getting a facelift. What is going on? Nobody can pretend that these restored sites are ever going to be working synagogues. Like Hitler's project for a Jewish Museum in Prague, they are ...

What Non-Jews May Think of Some Jewish Rituals

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:18:22 -0600

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There has been a lot of talk about the Tefillin bomb scare, and quite frankly, I understand where these people are coming from. Imagine some bearded individual whips out a strange device that looks like it could either be a weapon or something out of a BDSM party, and then starts mumbling to himself and swaying. Now imagine that he's in the middle of the amidah and he cannot talk. One of my roommates during Birthright thought that my tefillin were just straps to tie my arm in order to shoot ...

Mel Gibson Is Tired of Apologizing for Being a Big Ol' Antisemite

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 10:58:13 -0600

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Former Sexiest Man Alive Mel Gibson has gone through somewhat of a life crisis over the last few years. He divorced his longtime wife (and the mother of seven of his children) to knock up an aspiring singer from Russia. He also, perhaps more infamously, got pulled over for drunk driving in 2006 and launched into a tirade that involved antisemitic comments like "the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world" and calling a female police offer "sugartits." Now, with ...

We Are All Converts: Reviewing Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People"

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:03:55 -0600

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As these things go, Israeli and Jewish publications have been arguing furiously over a... history book. Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People alleges that a historical "Jewish people" does not exist and that the bulk of Jewry today descends from converts, rather than from the inhabitants of pre-Roman Judea. Sand, in writing the book, has placed himself in a proud tradition of Jewish contrarians. Given that us Jews are the most self-mythologizing and status-quo doubting ...

American Jews Aren't Quite As Hated As Previously Thought

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:38:22 -0600

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In November, Gallup did a poll of 1,002 Americans, asking them their feelings on three "minority religions" - that would be the Muslims, the Buddhists, and us. This week, they released the findings. Among them: 71 percent report having a "positive" opinion about Jews, including 25 percent who have "very positive" opinions. (Does this remind anyone else of the bit on the final Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien where Steve Carell came out in character as Michael ...

G-d Is A Straight Line

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:03:14 -0600

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With all this talk about non-dual Judaism, whether or not Orthodoxy is the "true" Judaism that Progressive Jews are just too damn lazy or stupid to accept, or whether G-d even exists, I like to propose an idea. That G-d can be explained with a simple, straight line. Take a look at this image and ask yourself, "what is this?" It could be a letter: a lowercase "l" or an uppercase "I." It could be the number "1" or part of ...

Real Talk Parsha: Vaera

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:31:49 -0600

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I gotta tell you: Pharaoh is probably the worst person in the world to order lunch with. Or do anything with really. So Moses comes and is like "Dude, I'm gonna hit you with blood." Pharaoh's like "bet". Moses hits him with blood. Pharaoh's all like "Whoooa, this ish is real! Make it stop and imma let your people go." Moses makes the blood go away. Pharaoh's like "Nahh, not really though." Now take this and rinse, lather, and repeat for frogs, lice, ...

Iran, My Friend Marla, and $13 Million

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 11:01:40 -0600

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I re-met Marla Bennett at Pardes in 2001. We knew each other through friends as teenagers, but developed a relationship and shared a tight social circle during my Junior Year abroad in Jerusalem. After she and fellow Pardes-nik (and DJ) Ben Blutstein were killed in the Hebrew U bombing in July 2002, we were just getting JDub off the ground. We shifted gears and our first event was a memorial concert for them called Zachor, which raised $25K for scholarship funds in their memory at ...

Why Many Jewish Outreach Workers Ignore Half-Jewish People

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:21:37 -0600

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Jewish outreach professionals complain constantly that younger Jews with two Jewish parents are bored with Judaism and are constantly wandering off to join Buddhist zendos and Hindu ashrams, conjuring up an image of disobedient and insolent young lambs scattering defiantly in all directions, proudly wearing nose rings, tattoos, and baaing defiantly at very expensive programs designed to lure them back into the Jewish communal sheep fold. I have assured Jewish outreach workers that many adult ...

Tip of the Week: Don't Fly While Being Jewish

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 09:48:51 -0600

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Another day, another purported terrorism scare at a New York City-area airport. Today, it's out of LaGuardia, where a flight to Louisville had to make an emergency landing in Philadelphia after a passenger's use of a religious item caused flight personnel to fear a bomb scare. What was that religious item, you may ask? Not a Koran, like you might guess. According to CBS, "a Jewish male removed a "tefillin" for prayer purposes after takeoff. The removal of the "religious ...

Chase Bank Will Have to Wait if Jewish Non-Profit Wins $1M

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:59:18 -0600

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If you are shomer shabbos and buy a Sweet Million lottery ticket, you can't check to see if you've won on Shabbat, right? Well, no big deal, because the chance of winning that lottery are about as good as an elephant showing up on your doorstep. Now imagine if your chance of winning 1 Million is 1 out of 5! That's what the Orthodox folks at Friendship Circle are facing. This non-profit that helps special needs kids is in the top five to win the Chase Community Giveaway of 1 Million dollars. ...

Everything Is G-d, and Nothing Makes A Lot of Sense

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:39:08 -0600

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"You can't have everything. Where would you put it?" - Western sage Steven Wright Anyone involved in new age spiritual Judaic practice has probably heard of Jay Michaelson; his influence extends to books, articles, publications, spiritual retreats, speaking tours and the like. He was even recently named as one of the Forward 50, an annual list of important and influential Jewish figures in America. In Everything is God, his magnum opus on the nondualistic Judaism Michaelson ...

Orthodox Union Poll Bolsters Need to Keep Baalei Teshuvah Poor

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:00:00 -0600

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I have long railed against the Orthodox Union and its double-headed outreach group, NCSY and the JSU, for funneling public school teens to haredi places whose trajectories, if followed properly, will lead the indoctrinated to poverty. The problem is that the Orthodox, even the Modern Orthodox, do not see that as a problem. From their P.O.V., they may be correct. In regards to a new national survey, the OU declared, Baalei teshuva, those who do not grow up religiously observant ...

Shmarya Rosenberg In The NY Times

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 13:40:53 -0600

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Congrats (i.e. big mazel) to failedmessiah.com blogger and frequent Jewcy contributor Shmarya Rosenberg on The New York Times profile piece today (January 9, 2010 pg A17). The Times reports Shmarya has "transmuted a combination of muckraking reporting and personal grudge into a must-read digest of the actual and alleged misdeeds of the ultra-Orthodox world." We likey. Truth be told (and please keep this quiet) the Jewish population is not that large and the Jewish media world ...