Not included is my favorite Simpons religion line ever: when Homer tries to give a peanut to Apu's Ganesh statue and Apu says "Please do not offer my god a peanut!"

Poor Apu never gets a break. In the episode where Homer almost burns down the house and his neighbors rescue him, Reverend Lovejoy is talking about the people who saved him, pointing, "Christian [points to Flanders], Jew [Krusty], and miscellaneous [Apu]." Apu then says "Hindu! There are 700 million of us!"

It's weird for me to see how old-fashioned soaps have gotten. Soaps used to be really cutting-edge, depicting stuff that primetime shows wouldn't go near. Erica Kane got an abortion on All My Children in the '70s. I remember several shows, including General Hospital, dealing with AIDS in the '80s and '90s. I don't know at what point they started becoming so conservative. Maybe it was a response to a scramble toward the middle when ratings started dropping, or perhaps audience demographics shifted. Either way, I hope that gay storylines can help soaps go back to being on the front line of depicting social issues. When you air 365 episodes a year, that should give you time for a much wider breadth of content.

 

Oh, man, I went to that debate and it was painful: http://www.jewcy.com/faithhacker/royal_rumble_hitchens_vs_boteach

 

Sorry I'm late to the party here, but there's one thing I'm confused about. When I think of a 'zine, I think of something DIY, one or two people photocopying a bunch of papers in their attic. Heeb is a professional, well-put-together magazine with an actual staff and not some teenagers doing a project for the hell of it. Am I totally off base? I get that Heeb carries on the antiestablishment vibe of a lot of older 'zines, but is that enough of a reason to use the term?

When they showed scenes of the wedding at the end, the groom was wearing a kippah and stepped on a glass. So yeah, Jewish. Sigh.

I've kind of had the opposite problem when it comes to being accepted in the Jewish community. My name definitely passes muster, so people put me on their mailing lists and invite me to stuff, and then when those same people see that I don't look like their notion of "what an Ashkenazi Jew looks like" and/or hear that my mom's not Jewish, the invites often get rescinded.

Names are part of it, but the real issue is getting the Jewish community to be more inclusive and welcoming.

There's a really funny (darkly funny) episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show about writing obituaries for people in advance. One night, Mary's stuck late at the office working on some obits and Rhoda convinces her to finish them quickly and do a sloppy job so they can go out. The next day, one of the people actually dies, and Ted reads one of the sloppy obits (which contains lines like "His hobbies included breathing") on the air.

 

You left out a couple of my favorites:

- "Clever" and "ironic" T-shirts

- Guys wearing knitted kippahs that look like recycled hacky sacks

- Making a big show of not observing holidays/not keeping kosher and then talking endlessly about how bad it makes them feel

- When discussing celebrity gossip, conspiratorially whispering "Did you know he/she is Jewish?" about a particular star 

TMBG taught me that the sun is a mass of incandescent gas.

I don't know, I thought it was Fidel Castro for a sec.

Either way, I know what's going to be haunting my nightmares tonight.