The shirt that started it all: Plus, a really terrifying navel tattoo! Jewcy’s seen a lot of changes in the past six months: Michael Weiss left, the homepage turned into a blog, we opened an art store that sold $1250 worth of paintings its first day, loveable office grandma Maya Wainhaus left us to become the Internet’s leading Tetris blogger, short-term consultant Emily Gould left us to fade quietly into a life of anonymity and yoga, Michael Weiss came back.

But you know, the seasons, they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down, and now it’s my turn to say goodbye to this ferkakte operation (I know we have a strict anti-Yiddish rule, but come on, it’s my LAST DAY). Like so many of my Hebraic forebearers, I’m trading religion for capitalism: Starting July 7 I’ll be blogging at Racked, a website about retail news in New York. Before that, though, I’m getting married, which means next time you see me in print I’ll be Mrs. Izzy Grinspan.

I’m going to miss the whole lot of you, even though I’m a little relieved to stop thinking about Obama’s relationship with Israel 23 hours out of the day. The Jewcy office is made up of total lunatics, of course, but they're all smart, skilled, wildly capable lunatics, and it's bittersweet to know they'll be here playing Guitar Hero long after I'm gone.

I've also been really lucky to work with a ton of talented writers. Thanks for putting up with my passive-aggressive edits (“This piece on your grandma’s matzoh balls is really, really, really good, but maybe not counterintuitive enough, so would you mind making a tiny change by switching all the verbs with their opposites?”) and for being a continuing source of great ideas.

Enough sentimentality? NEVER. To end this post on an appropriately emotional note, I would like you all to look at more pictures of cats being Bat and Bar Mitzvah’d:

At least she's not a perpetual teenager: Carrie Bradshaw“We still live vicariously through Carrie,” says one woman in this New York Times video about the movie’s premiere.

“Well, that used to be us in our twenties,” says her friend.

And therein lies the hands-down weirdest thing about the Sex and the City madness. Carrie isn’t in her twenties. Carrie is in her thirties. By the era of the movie, she’s 40. It feels almost rude to point this out, as if I’m suggesting that Carrie is old and therefore unsexy, or uninteresting, or unhip. I don’t think any of those things – I just know, objectively, chronologically even, that 40 is not the same age as 20.

Sex in the City is very much about age -- about how to be an adult woman when for most of the history of civilization female adulthood meant becoming a mother and a wife. The women of SATC variously chase, embrace, and reject those roles. Mostly, they agonize about them. But alongside the painful awareness that they’re still living ostensibly youthful lives comes delight in the fact that they’re old enough, and therefore rich and established enough, to live glamorously. When the ladies go to parties, they know everyone there. Carrie may have spent all her savings on shoes, but she can certainly afford dinner; Miranda’s been out of law school so long she’s a partner in her firm. All four women have paid their New York dues, presumably during the previous decade, and now their lifestyles are all about access.

The show believes firmly that it’s better to be 35 than 25. When twentysomething female characters do appear—even in the form of the heroines in flashbacks—they’re always depicted as irritatingly clueless children. The show doesn’t treat twentysomething men much better, though it does occasionally promote them from brats to boy-toys. (Samantha’s so well-established that she can establish a relationship with Smith Jerrod’s cock, which I think is the only character in the story who’s the same age I am.)

So why do twentysomething women embrace the SATC women as their—our—peers? Why does sex columnist Julia Allison, at 28, think she’s Carrie? Pop culture usually glamorizes youth, so in a way it’s nice to see the fetish run in the opposite direction. It's just that, as with so many other things, the show's mythology doesn't fully connect with objective reality in the lives of its fans.

BUILDING a better Baltimore: KeeneIn the story of Exodus, Nachshon was the first Israelite to wade into the Red Sea, confident that it would part like Moses promised. Jewish Funds for Justice is taking this metaphor and running with it: Their Nachshon Challenge gives grants to leaders who are boldly going, to mix Jewish metaphors, where no one has gone before.

A couple weeks ago, Jewcy’s editor-in-chief Tahl wondered what would justify Judaism’s continuing existence in the 21st century. Not being a prophet or religious genius, I won’t pretend I have an answer, but I do think programs like the Nachshon Challenge are an excellent step towards continued relevance for one shockingly basic reason: Some of the people funded by the program aren’t Jewish. One, in fact, is a minister of a Baptist church. And their projects generally aim to do good not just within the Jewish world, but within the world at large.

Look at the description of the project run by the Baptist minister, Reverend Calvin Keene:

Rev. Keene left a career as a successful businessman to become the pastor of Memorial Baptist Church in the Oliver neighborhood in East Baltimore, where he grew up. Working with BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development), Pastor Keene has been a driving force in the renewal of the economically depressed Oliver neighborhood, which gained notoriety through the HBO series The Wire. Along with other members of the community, Memorial Baptist acquired adjacent houses and parcels of land to create a foundation for the area’s redevelopment. JFSJ is working in close partnership with Rev. Keene, BUILD, The Reinvestment Fund, THE ASSOCIATED: The Jewish Federation of Greater Baltimore, and other members of the Baltimore Jewish community, to revitalize the area and develop hundreds of lots for new homes and businesses.

Is social justice the soul of Judaism, as a Jewcy dialog once asked? Not necessarily. But is social justice in the Baltimore ghetto a Jewish issue? Of course, because Jewish organizations are making it a Jewish issue. And not even youngish leftish organizations like the JFSJ, but the Jewish Federation of Greater Baltimore, which is not exactly a "Shalom Motherfucker" kind of place. A Judaism that can help a Baptist minister fund a totally non-Jewy project simply because it's a good cause—that’s the kind of pluralistic Judaism that has a chance of meaning something in the 21st century.

You can read about other leaders and donate to the Nachshon Challenge here.

You guys might remember Rachel Papo from her stint as a Jewcy artist, during which her photos of women in the IDF generated more comments than nearly any other art we've ever featured. Now, Powerhouse Books is publishing a collection of Rachel's work. You can buy it here or visit her website for more photos.

Here's Rachel on her soldier series:

Rather than portraying the soldier as heroic, confident, or proud, my images disclose a complexity of emotions. The soldier is often caught in a transient moment of self-reflection, uncertainty, a break from her daily reality, as if questioning her own identity and state of contradiction. She is a soldier in uniform but at the same time she is a teenage girl who is trying to negotiate between these two extreme dimensions. She is in an army base surrounded by hundreds like her, but underneath the uniform there is an individual that wishes to be noticed.

And here's one of my favorites, a picture that reminds me of nothing so much as Jewish overnight camp:

In the 1980s, audiences thrilled to the foibles of Kimberley Featherbeak, Pamela Ann Windchime, Devon St. Palestine, and a host of other tempestuous beauties who starred in the prime time soap "Wasp Cove." Now, if you’re lucky enough to be in New York, you can see the lost episodes live at Comix (and starring Jewcy contributer Rachel Shukert alongside This American Life's David Rakoff). Even if you can’t go witness the passion and the pain in person, you can still watch the credit sequence below:

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.

Ommmmm: This guy's been hanging out in the mantra trailer"I Will Survive" + "I Am Nothing" = 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"Let It Go" and "It's All Okay" to the inscrutable "Pet The Wolf Run From The Rat") to create your own multi-layered mantra symphony. I especially like "Keep Your Eye on the Doughnut" plus "You Shall Know The Truth" plus "Concentrate and Expand." "Love" plus "Open Your Heart" is awesome. "It's All Gravy" 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 "instrument of thought" or "mind tool." A mantra is a sacred word, chant or sound that is repeated during mediation to reduce our everyday material worries and elevate our worldly, spiritual aims.

Mantra Trailer mastermind Sherri Lynn Wood says mantras are "a homeopathic remedy for the mass media slogans of the day."

(Dig especially, then, the clever soul who chants "Visa takes Life.")

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's actual surname is Lipshitz; his father famously changed it to Lauren when he realized that "Ralph Lipshitz" didn'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't paint the Bushes in the most tolerant light:

"There are religious differences," one points out. "Would he expect her to convert to Judaism?"

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 a birkenstock wearer. Here, however, for the purposes of partial disclosure, are some things I have worn or done that embarrass me in retrospect, though I stop short of regret:

1. Wore an earring briefly in high school, and again in college
   
2. Goatee for about a week, also in college
   
3. Wore a bandana in that hippee-helmet kind of way, though at a summer camp, which makes it slightly less obnoxious.
   
4. Frequently wore white tube socks with sneakers and shorts while not engaging in athletic activity
   
5. Killed a man just to watch him die

One of those things actually does not embarrass me.

Next: What the memoirist and the comedy writer have in common

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't believe I said that!

Failed to write an autobiography in six words.

I had a few for myself, couldn'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't come, but I wrote.

I hate myself. Want to die.

Bad parents, bad boyfriends, good words.

Harvard. Job. Fired. Job. Fired. Yale.

So, Ben, what's yours?

Next: Don't hate me for living in Brooklyn

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'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'm not going to explain anything about the Birkin bag, just let you know that it would be nice to have one. I'd prefer the Hermes orange color, but I'm not fussy.

But enough about that. Glad to hear you don't cheat on your wife. Or at least not that you're going to admit to me and everyone else. That's wise. Of course, if there's anything you want to put out there, this might be the way to do it.

So you're working on a movie, and you're doing something more with television. You're busy! What'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, which is about intellectual property and the Constitution and the invention of Hollywood and the commercial nature of American creativity and how much it sucks to move and how bicycles improved courtship possibilities in 1818. It's about other things too, it's pretty much about whatever is on my mind as I'm working on it, because Yale Law School encourages its students to think expansively. Pat Robertson, for instance, is a graduate of this institution, and he makes diet drinks.

There are many graduates of Yale Law School we're more proud to cop to, but Pat Robertson is a funny one.

So I've been living in New Haven for the last few years, but once I finish studying for the bar I'm moving back to NYC. Where do you live? Please don't say Brooklyn! Everyone lives there at this point. It's become so impossibly hip that my motto is now Kabul before Cobble Hill.

Do you wear Birkenstocks?

Have you already ordered me a Birkin bag?

Do you think anyone reading this will?

Next: Telling your life story in six words

Better than blintzes: Dengue FeverThree reasons we like the idea of DAWN ’08, the all-night Shavuot celebration sponsored by the New Jew group Reboot:

1. It’s not on Hanukkah or Passover. Both holidays have been co-opted by a ton of Jewish organizations running “fun” events for young, curious, marginally affiliated Jews, but Shavuot never gets any love.
2. It’s in San Francisco, thereby disproving the general misconception (at least among New Yorkers) that New Jew culture only exists in NYC.
3. It features Dengue Fever, the Cambodian surf rock band we profiled way back in January of last year.

This year, DAWN coincides with the opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s new Daniel Libeskind–designed building. It takes place June 7, and you can find out more about it here.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

This is a picture of my dog. I live with her. I do not live with the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. I do not live with the 1986 New York Mets. I have never been a Communist. I have never voted for a Republican. Just thought you should know.

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

I am really proud of the fact that I have no idea what a “Birkin bag” is. I assume it is a handbag and that it is not made by the same people who make the sandals. I think that’s "birken" – and I guess I am also proud I don’t know how to spell that....and am too lazy to take the 3.2 seconds to look it up on the computer.

In many respects, this is the equivalent of you not getting the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates reference – which was a team known as “The Family.” They adopted Sister Sledge’s “We are Family” as their theme song and went on to win the World Series with Willie “Pops” Stargell and the pitcher with the baddest-ass looking glasses and delivery in baseball history.

Pitch-perfect: No athlete has ever again achieved such magnificent sunglasses I love that guy.

I am working on a movie right now and it’s about someone who lives in the shadow of his parent’s really bad divorce. Like, even though he is an adult and on his own, it still colors everything he does. And early on he brags to a friend about having never cheated on a girlfriend. (His dad has cheated on all his wives) And the friend tells him that he is an emotional cheater. He gets bored and cheats emotionally, which is basically the same thing.

But it is and it isn’t. Like, there are three levels to an affair:

1. Thinking about it, wanting it, but not acting on it in any way
2. Thinking about it, wanting it, talking about it with the person, but stopping short of physically consummating it.
3. Thinking abut it, wanting it, and doing it. (“It” here referring to frottage.)

They are all affairs and carry consequence, emotional and otherwise, but my strong feeling is #1 and even #2 can be forgiven. We are flawed. And sometimes even #3 can be forgiven – but not really. I mean, people forgive affairs all the time – and maybe if I was writing this from the perspective of a 65-year-old instead of 36, I would be more kind to cheaters. But I kind of think you can’t justify messing around on someone you have made a commitment to. Unless of course, the relationship is already over and it just hasn’t collapsed yet. Then the affair is basically just punctuation. Dirty, dirty punctuation.

I’m not sure any of this equation is relative to nerdlingers talking about it all theoretical and shit on a website.

Now I am realizing that I kind of evaded your question. Do I do this? Well, there was definitely a time in my life when I felt at ease flirting with people, in print and in person, when I was otherwise engaged. I think even when I was actually otherwise engaged. But since I got married, not so much. I wish I could say this is because of gallantry or some other such romantic ideal – and maybe there is a tiny part of it that is driven by that impulse – but I think it has more to do with guilt and the whole Golden Rule thing.

I re-wrote this last part a lot, torn between being totally honest and the realization that upwards of 67 other people may be reading it. I wonder if it’s possible to forget them. Make this a Method exercise. Probably not. Fuckin’ Heisenberg.

Ben

Next: Birkin Bags, Yale Law School, and the perils of hipster Brooklyn

Life lessons: Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me Not long ago, Ben Karlin quit his job as producer of The Colbert Report to edit a book of confessional essays about breaking up, Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me. Karlin began his career at The Onion and worked at The Daily Show before helping to launch Colbert. He was used to occupying a position behind the scenes, riffing on current events and the world around him. But confessional writing reverses those polarities. Suddenly his job was to direct the jokes inward—to wring comedy out of his own life, and encourage a bunch of other writers to do the same.

Elizabeth Wurtzel knows a thing or two about confessional writing. Her 1995 memoir, Prozac Nation, took an almost masochistically candid look at her experiences with depression. It made her a household name, equally beloved and reviled. She published several more books and then, inspired by the chaos that immediately followed 9/11, applied to law school at Yale, where she’s currently finishing up her thesis.

We thought Wurtzel probably needed a distraction, so we sent her a copy of Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me and set her up in an e-mail conversation with Karlin, who now heads a production company called Superego. To say it got confessional quickly is the understatement of the year. If you’ve ever wondered what Elizabeth Wurtzel’s dog looks like, read on.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Why superego? Why not id?

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Well, the id comes up with the better ideas but is pretty shitty at getting things done.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Getting things done is so overrated! For every brilliant idea, there are a million shitty executions. Have you been to the movies lately?

Sorry...this is not what we're supposed to be talking about at all! I think we're meant to talk about dating, another nice concept that often fails when acted upon. But I guess that's not news.

How are you? And while I'm asking questions, the author blurb on your book says you live with your family, which would seem to suggest that you have a family to live with. Correct?

We are family: A 1979 Pittsburgh Pirate From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

First of all, has any one pointed out how odd it is to have a physical address as part of your electronic signature? Is that like saying, “In case this whole revolutionary form of communication that is changing the face of humanity as I type this doesn’t work out, drop me a note”?

Anyway, I do, in fact, live with my family, if wife and child constitute family. I guess that does, though I tend to think of family in more pluralistic terms – like multiple children or at the very least the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates.

I am winding down all my book stuff, which has mostly been fun and fine, and am back to working on content to put on the TV.

This is like an internet first date. All awkward stops and starts and I am already convinced it is going terribly. Like me! Why won’t you like me!

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Yes, it is odd to have one's physical address attached to an email. They tell you to do that, though. Don't know why. I guess if you're a girl there's always the secret hope that someone might send flowers or something even better, like diamonds. Or a Birkin bag. Or a really good vacuum cleaner. Or, in my case, I could use a new sofa.

Gossip girl: You never know when a third party might be listening I could go on.

But enough small talk.

Let's start our second date.

And truly, since you are married and I'm not, it's more like an affair. Right?

Do you do that? Have emotional affairs? That seems to be the new thing--to not bother with the whole mess of physical intimacy but just get deeply intellectually or otherwise entangled with a person you're not married to or going out with as a way to relieve the tedium of foreverness. Not that marriage is necessarily tedious. Of course, I'm sure yours isn't...

Forgive me for being so forward. I just don't know anything about the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates. I know a fair amount about the 1986 Mets. And the Red Sox of that same year. Who could forget the Bill Buckner fumble? Probably not Bill Buckner. My guess is that he still occasionally wakes up screaming over that snafu.

Anyway...

As much as you want me to like you, I want you to like me too--after all I'm Jewish, with all that implies. But I must admit, I have a few vicious tendencies. Like it occurred to me that this is the perfect forum for gossip, because we're having a conversation that's sort of being overheard, so I could say something mean about someone who irritates me and pretend to have forgotten that I was speaking to anyone besides you. Which would be a vicious thing to do, but only sort of.

Girls are so tricky...

Next: Married people have three kinds of affairs. One can't be forgiven.

Columbia's main lawn: In a rare protester-free momentSo, protests sometimes happen at Columbia University. In the past month alone there has been a commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the 1968 riots, a week-long CU Democrats war protest (including a massive red balloon display that, despite its seriousness, only succeeded in getting that song stuck in my head), a protest about Tibet, protests about Columbia’s impending expansion into Manhattanville, and a Take Back the Night rally. Not to mention the blood drive, arts fair, sex fair, free Mumia posters, a relay for life, and that random jumping castle and pink balloon-display that showed up last Friday. Seriously, Columbia students have recently done everything short of throwing a pie in Thomas Friedman’s face.

So what are those crazy kids going to do next? How about an al-Nakba rally – Say, day before Yom Hashoah-ish? Sure, why not – it can at least provide topical fodder for name-calling.

Many Jewcy readers will know that this May is the 60th anniversary of Israeli independence. They might be less familiar with the fact that many Palestinians and Palestinian support groups are marking this time as the 60th anniversary of al-Nakba, a time in which Palestinians were forced out of their homes to make room for the new state of Israel. That's why, starting this week, a new flier campaign began over at the Columbia campus about the mistreatment of Palestinians as a casualty of Zionism. According to the fliers, it’s officially Nakba Week.

Competing birthdays: A poster commemorating Al-Nakba's 60th anniversary Also, a Pro-Nakba Week student published this article in the campus newspaper, accusing the campus Hillel (and its president, Emily Steinberger) of disrespecting the week’s commemoration by refusing to co-sponsor the event simply because it used the word “Nakba.”

Then came the backlash. LionPAC, the pro-Israel group under the broader Hillel umbrella, put up a bunch of retaliation fliers equipped with their own pro-Israel statistics. And in retaliation to the original Spectator article, Steinberger submitted this report, which, among other things brings up (drumroll, please)…the Holocaust! So the whole debate becomes not the “new chapter in Columbia’s Israel-Arab discourse” that LionPAC says it wants, but instead a great big print-based shouting match.

It is of course the prerogative of every ethnic group to raise sympathy for and awareness of their respective oppression by waiving their grievances in people’s faces. But will shoving opposing tragedies at the opposition really solve anything? As Spectator columnist Armin Rosen puts it, this methodology is “more proof that the Zionist and anti-Zionist blocs totally deserve each other.”

Holocaust discourse in general is something that is all too easily buffeted about. Palestinian supporters often accuse Zionists of acting like Nazis toward the Palestinians -- within a homeland that was created to be a Jewish safe haven in the face of Nazism. Similarly, Zionist are often too quick to pull their own Holocaust card. We’ll see who racks up the most references when we get down to the “discourse.”

Please don't look under the veil, mom and dad: Why having a secret non-Jewish significant other is, um, impracticalThis week, the advice column Dear Prudence takes on a problem familiar to anyone whose parents expect them to marry within their own religion and/or ethnic group: The secret significant other. Writes a 25-year-old Indian-American guy:

I started dating a Caucasian classmate four and a half years ago in college…. I see us together for the rest of our lives. There is only one problem: My parents are very traditional Indians and have told me since I was a young boy that they wanted me to have an arranged marriage, and if I did "bring home an American girl" that they would disown me. After two years, I told them about the relationship, and they were rightfully hurt and upset I'd kept it a secret. They say now that they were "joking" about disowning me and that I should have come to them. But it is close to three years later, and my girlfriend has still never met my parents.

Obviously, there are some Jewish resonances here, as well as Persian resonances, and Vietnamese resonances, and Italian-last-century resonances, ad infinitum. My evidence is, of course, totally anecdotal, but among the people I know with strictly tribal parents—Jewish and otherwise—there’s a distressingly large number with long-term “study partners,” and even more whose parents think they’re asexual because they’ve never brought home a date. It’s kind of like being gay before the seventies, except for one major, major difference: The parents don’t approve, but the rest of America truly does not care. So the kids wind up keeping a secret from their family that’s open knowledge in every other part of their lives.

Witness the reactions in Slate’s online forum, all variants on the general sentiment of “Dude, by the time you’re 25 you ought to be able to date whoever you want.” As for Prudence, she sensibly suggests bringing the girlfriend home for the holidays and insisting that everyone get along. Because duh, this is America, and all that Romeo and Juliet stuff is so old-world. Jewcy contributor Neal Pollack got a similar reaction in the comments section of a Salon article he wrote about his choice not to circumcise his son: Nobody seemed to understand how parents could threaten to disown a grown man.

Ultimately, this is one of the toughest things about the lingering taboo against intermarriage in certain cultures within America. It’s nice when the whole world agrees that your parents are crazy, but isn't it also kind of horrible?

I'm categorically opposed to all fonts that look like handwriting -- I mean, seriously, Comic Sans, you're not fooling anyone -- so I'm not a huge fan of the new ads for Showtime's television version of the radio show This American Life, which depict host Ira Glass with a cutesy little tag identifying him, as if a helpful imp had just graffitoed it on with a Sharpie. Plus I know messing with posters in the subway is a time-honored New York City art, even when the artistry consists entirely of drawing mini-peens on Jodi Applegate's neckerchief. But still: L-train riders of the East Village, the picture below has made me extremely disappointed in all of you.

(Wait! Is this maybe a statement about Jewishness and how we define it in our post-religious, post-nationalist era? About how any show that aims to analyze how we live now is, by its very nature, "a Jew of a TV series"? In that case, though, what's with the "queen" tag?)

Girls can be robots too: Whither the fembots of yesteryear?My son has reached the dread age where the genders start to separate at school, and he’s not happy. While he likes nominally traditional boy things, such as baseball and basketball and watching cartoon explosions, he also enjoys the company of girls. But the girls at his school mostly play sugar-and-spicy games like princess or Holly Hobbie (which, amazingly, still exists), while the boys run around and pretend to be robots. Given a choice, my son, who’s repeatedly declared that princesses are for losers, would always rather be a robot. But given an additional choice, he’d want the girls to be robots and aliens too. Somewhere in the universe, and certainly in his mind, there are tough female robot and alien role models, but they never show up on the playground. Sadly, the era of pre-school egalitarianism seems to be ending fast.

In my vast experience as an alternative-themed parenting guru, I’ve heard from a lot of parents concerned that our culture is feeding gender stereotypes to their children, almost from birth. They worry about the Disney Princess marketing juggernaut and worry more seriously about Bratz culture, with its makeover parties for six-year-olds and dolls who live only to shop, gossip, and show off their flat bellies. They seem less bothered by the culture surrounding their boys, who, as usual, are playing with trucks and beating one another with sticks, but there’s still concern. An ad for Tonka trucks says “Boys: They’re just built different." This goes along beautifully with an ad for a hideous product called “Rose Petal Cottage,” which features a little girl doing the wash and making cookies accompanied by the lyrics "I love when my laundry gets so clean/ Taking care of my home is a dream, dream, dream!" It would be foolish to completely deny gender differences, but is it really smart to propagandize our children into Stanley and Stella Kowalski? Man as brute and woman as precious subservient flower is so last century.

We’ve all encountered the tomboy who can execute a perfect hook slide and the little guy who enjoys wearing mommy’s pantyhose. We also know the girl who wears princess dresses to school or the boy whose only mission in life appears to be pile-driving other children into the ground. But the rest of our kids, the ones whose tastes and behaviors don’t entirely seem bound by their chromosomal makeup, can occupy something I call the “nerd middle.” Therein lies the solution to gender stereotyping.

Spongebob's friend Sandy: One tough squirrel Beyond the Transformers and Hannah Montana is a rich menu of dorky gender-neutral characters that command fan fealty, like all corporate entertainment products must. But they also confound traditional notions of what boys and girls should be, and how they should behave. The major female character on Spongebob Squarepants is an ass-kicking karate squirrel from Texas, while the show’s titular hero breaks out into show tunes unbidden, can’t drive a lick, and cares for his pet snail like a little girl would her kitty.

The Star Wars movies have Princess Leia (if not much else) to balance out the portentous testosterone. The lead children in the Narnia saga and The Golden Compass are smart, capable, brave—and girls. Dora The Explorer doesn’t seem interested in makeup and boys, and her cousin Diego only has eyes for baby animals. The Backyardigans, a show that’s previously received a whuppin’ in this space, also passes the nerd middle test. Crappy music aside, The Backyardigans teaches girls that they can be pirates, spies, Vikings, or cowboys. Just as importantly, they teach boys that girls can be those things.

Even superheroes, the traditional rulers of the fortress of male dorkitude, can and should be presented to girls in the nerd middle. In the Justice League: Unlimited cartoon series, which many of my son’s friends watch, Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Hawkgirl, Black Canary, The Huntress, and several other heroines are presented as the equals, and often the betters, of their male hero counterparts. Kim Possible vaults into action on the Disney Channel, and, while dropping this reference makes me feel old, let us never forget the lessons of The Powerpuff Girls, a show whose central joke revolved around the fact that little girls named Blossom and Buttercup kicked ass.

Golden Compass-Kicker: Lyra Belacqua makes a great role model So the right messages are out there. Why, then, in a world where there’s always a Pink Ranger, has the concept of girl power been so marginalized? Why does it seem radical to suggest that it could be otherwise? For every parent who grumbles about the evils of the Rose Petal Cottage on Feministing, there are a hundred who wouldn’t think twice before taking their girls to the mall to buy Barbie’s Dream Beach House. Even Lisa Simpson, a gender-neutral girl hero if ever one existed, worships her Malibu Stacy dolls. It’s as though we’re willfully ignoring the gender-mixing messages of the media our children consume. Either that, or we never really absorbed the messages in the first place.

From age five on, boys play t-ball while girls take ballet. Coed sleepovers, which really should be acceptable up until age 10, rarely even get off the ground. My wife and I, like good self-righteous urban liberals, try to counteract this as much as possible. Our son plays flag football, but he also takes gymnastics. He likes to peg ants in the backyard with a squirt gun, but he goes to cooking class on Monday evenings. We wrestle in the backyard, and then sometimes on rainy days I take him to kiddie yoga. When he goes over to his girl cousin’s house, they have a gender-free good time: shooting hoops, playing “zoo,” watching Electric Company videos, and staging elaborate High School Musical dance parties. Well, the last activity is pretty girly, but it is her house. Sometimes you must make concessions.

American life, on the surface, has never been more gender-neutral than it is now. Women go to war, and men make dinner. Men win Dancing With The Stars, and there are female American Gladiators. Both genders, apparently, are capable of playing the role of Bob Dylan. The only real gender-exclusive things in the world are the siring of children and childbirth, though recent current events have even called that exclusivity into question. Yet the Bratz persist, and Joe Francis, the pig behind Girls Gone Wild, continues to make millions even as he stews in jail. It’s up to us parents to encourage the gender-neutral side of our culture, and to try and persuade our children that the battle of the sexes need not continue along the same path.

Elijah’s best friend (or second-best, depending on the week) is a cute, smart little girl named Ariel. They’re weird in the exact same way, and it’s obvious that they get each other. Friends like that are rare at any age. Their favorite activity is to play Star Wars, and Ariel always gets to be Luke Skywalker. The fact that a girl is playing a male lead barely even occurs to them.

He will crush you with his manliness: Macho Man Randy SavageDo you need a penis in your pants to speak your mind?

That’s the rhetorical question Amy Alkon, self-proclaimed advice goddess, puts to activist guru Rebecca Solnit in response to Solnit’s Los Angeles Times op-ed suggesting that men—at least some men—are overconfident, overbearing boors who “crush young women into silence”:

Men explain things to me, and to other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men. Every woman knows what I mean. It's the presumption that makes it hard, at times, for any woman in any field; that keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare... It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men's unsupported overconfidence.

To that, Alkon replies that she is a woman (last she looked) and hasn’t had any difficulty speaking up or fending off annoying male conversationalists:

But, wait. Let me check. (Peering down into pants and then panties) Yup, there's a vagina in my pants, which suggests I'm either a woman or there's a matched, escaped set of labia taken up hiding in my underwear. Most mysteriously, I don't seem to suffer the myriad conversational injustices from men that Solnit and so many other women apparently do.

In her blog, Alkon seems to enjoy taking on self-proclaimed feminists and accusing them of a victim-mentality. In this post, she suggests that Solnit is a Rip van Winkle feminist who forgot to wake up. Those days of talking about inequality, analyzing the structure of inequality, protesting against inequality—those are all in the past. In this generation, we don’t talk about how we are victimized and what we need to do to combat our victimization, we just “do it”:

…can you explain how I, who grew up in this culture, and presumably, drink from the same water supply as millions of other women, managed to become a woman who can muster the sheer courage to say, “Hey, ya big lug, lemme talk!”? I had no friends as a child, and became kind of a doormat as a result (desperate to be liked). I fixed that in my 20’s, and now, what I care about is whether I’m being true to what I believe in…which sometimes requires telling some blowhard to put a sock in it so I can be heard.

But wait. Alkon’s comment proves Solnit’s point. Alkon agrees: there are plenty of (male) blowhards out there who try to make women feel like doormats. Women need an awful lot of “sheer courage” to say, “Hey, ya big lug, lemme talk!”

Alkon can fight back against the blowhards because she has learned a shtick that works. It’s the Nanny’s shtick. It’s the bossy, brassy, Bette Midler shtick. It’s a Jewish shtick, agnostic advice goddess.

But does every woman have to be able to call men “big lugs” and elide subject and verb in order to get a word in edgewise? Do we all have to channel Barbra? That’s the question Solnit asks that Alkon doesn’t really answer.

The eccentric and unreadable French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan infamously suggested that all of human society was based on what he called the phallus. The “phallus,” Lacan explained, is not the physical penis, but the symbol of the social order, of the laws that govern relationships. No one can actually ever have the phallus, but those perceived as having it control society and its rules.

Solnit is, in essence, complaining that men don’t just have a penis in their pants—they have the phallus there too. Despite the trappings of an egalitarian society, men still are perceived as having symbolic control over the social order. As long as men feel they have that power, some of them are likely to wield it.

Perhaps Alkon has the right idea after all—women won’t have the freedom to talk until we can change the symbolic social order. It’s time to look in our panties, ladies.

Guilt by association time! In the Democratic debates in Philly Wednesday night, moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Barack Obama to explain his relationship to bomb-happy Weather Underground vet William Ayers. Obama visited the Ayers residence once in 1995, to attend a gathering at which his predecessor in the state senate announced that she was stepping down. He and Ayers also both served on the board of an anti-poverty non-profit (and you know what they say about people who served together on the boards of anti-povery non-profits, nudge nudge wink wink.)

Yesterday Slate’s Timothy Noah, frustrated by the pointlessness of this sort of attack, came up with a contest:

I will call my game Six Degrees of Adolf Hitler. Readers are invited to connect, via documented acquaintanceships—friendly or unfriendly—Der Führer with any one of the three remaining major presidential candidates. Whoever is able to connect a candidate to Hitler with the fewest number of "degrees," or steps, will be named the winner.

Later that day Stephen Colbert ventured his own version, linking Obama to Hitler in six steps via the Pope (watch the video below.)

Oh, come on: What more proof do you people need? Given the Obama-Ayers-Hitler axis of evil, I think it should be pretty clear to all of us that the Democratic candidate is a terrorist-loving, Nazi-supporting, gun-hating, religion-disdaining, arugula-eating, Bruce-Springsteen-listening elitist yuppie Muslim Black Panther. And perhaps that’s why Hamas has decided to endorse him.

Actually, the Hamas news suggests a new kind of political maneuver: the destructo-endorsement. What better way to derail your enemy’s credibility than by endorsing them, thereby forcing them to be affiliated (at least in the minds of people who don’t understand cause and effect) with your own ideology? I mean, wouldn’t it be bad news for Hamas if they were destructo-endorsed by a bunch of Jews? Like, um, this website?

Listen, Jewcy’s pretty free with its favors. We’re happy to damage the credibility of all sorts of organizations with an endorsement smackdown. Hamas is really just the beginning. So if you’ve got a group you’d like to see us destructo-endorse, leave a suggestion in the comments and we’ll start prepping the press release.