A Child By Any Other Name: might have a harder time being taken seriously?Victoria has six post-it notes hanging above her desk:  Mateo, Nicolas, Tomas, Alejandro, Santiago, and Simon.  I have one:  Nikolai.  

I love the name Nikolai.  This morning, I woke up thinking:  We can call our boy Niko.  

When I mentioned Nikolai the first time, four and a half months ago, when we found out Victoria was pregnant, she said, “Too Russian.”

I said, “What ya got against Russians?”

She said, “You just like it because it’s YOUR heritage.”   

I’m half Romanian, one quarter Russian and another quarter Ukranian, but The Ukraine may have been Russia when my great grandmother was born there.  So maybe I’m half Russian.  

I said, “I don’t feel Russian.”

She said, “I want my child to have a Latin name.  I want him to have a Latin identity.”  And then I got it.

Victoria lives in America, but she’s Venezuelan, so she feels like she has to hold on to her culture or it will get washed away.  Her extended family is still in Venezuela while mine is here.  We inevitably spend much more time with my family.  At home, we speak Spanish at dinner, but we speak English at breakfast and at lunch.  We also go to synagogue on occasion and except for the one time Victoria took Tashi to church; in our house, my cultures are ahead three to one.  

She also wants our boy to play in both worlds.  She wants him to be successful and thinks he’ll have to fight to be taken seriously by Latins if his name is Nikolai.

“Who cares what they think?”  I said. “Look at Barack, his name is Arabic or Swahili and he’s doing just fine here in the US.”

“That’s true,” she said, “but he’s taken shit for it.  And he’s not Latin.”


Today, for some reason, I was back on the Niko train and thought I'd try again.  ”Nikolai sounds Latin, to me,” I said.  It sounds a little Russian, I see that but also Italian and Portuguese and Latin.  

Victoria sighed.  

Then even before brushing my teeth, I ran to my computer to google “Latinos named Nikolai.” I found Nikolai Garcia, Nikolai Guerra, Nikolai de Lyra,…

I ran back to Victoria and told her my findings.  

She said, “Try googling Latinos named Jefferson.”

“I see your point. But Niko is so cute.”

“Then let’s do Nicolas.”

“Too Christian,” I said.

Andrea Askowitz, author of My Miserable, Lonely, Lesbian Pregnancy, is guest blogging for Jewcy, and she'll be here all week.  Lucky you!

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.

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.

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.

By the way, the image of the mom in the green shirt is a "before" picture: Isn't she just the fattest fat-ass?Hey parents, concerned that your kids are suffering from too much self-esteem? Does your six-year-old stand to inherit a big Ashkenazi snout, and is she distressingly cavalier about this eventuality? Luckily, a Florida plastic surgeon named Dr. Michael Salzhauer is here to help.

Salzhauer’s new children’s book, My Beautiful Mommy, follows a mother as she explains to her little girl why she’s going in for plastic surgery. "You see, as I got older, my body stretched and I couldn't fit into my clothes anymore,” the mom says. Then she comes home skinnier -- and with a new nose. Because the only thing kids like better than having a parent in the hospital is a half-assed explanation of what they’re doing there.

Newsweek, reporting on the story, gets a child psychologist named Elizabeth Berger to play the voice of reason.

Then there are the body image issues raised by cosmetic surgery—especially for daughters. Berger worries that kids will think their own body parts must need "fixing" too. The surgery on a nose, for example, may "convey to the child that the child's nose, which always seemed OK, might be perceived by Mommy or by somebody as unacceptable," she says.

Yeah, no shit. By the way, the surgeon in the book is named “Dr. Michael” and is portrayed as a teeny head on a jacked-up mega-torso. Body image issues for everybody!

By far the best entry on Postcards From Yo Momma today:

urgent text

Nate got circmscd this mrnng. we will go 2 c him soon.

Previously: Why isn't Postcards From Yo Momma more Jewish? 

We don't have any actual commentary here. It just seemed like something the Jewish community should know about. [Via Jezebel]

Barack Atah Adonai: Obama and his haloI bet Radar’s “Jesus or Obama” quiz is quickly going to become the most-linked piece on their site. Why did no one think of this before?

You can take it here. Personally, I got totally pwned – 3/10 points – but I think that’s because I don’t know anything about Jesus.

No more Thin Mints for you: Girls are dropping out of the Scouts in record numbers“Defy conformity” declares a new ad for the Girl Scouts—an odd slogan for a group that requires its members to wear matching outfits. The Scouts, according to an article in today's Wall Street Journal, are floundering. Young girls no longer want to earn badges or sell cookies, and the organization has lost 1-2% of its numbers every year for a decade now.

Sound familiar? In fact, you could swap “the organized Jewish community” for “the Girl Scouts” in pretty much every paragraph of the piece and come up with a pretty accurate trend piece on Judaism today. Something like this:

Laurel Richie will be in charge of modernizing the image of the Girl Scouts, which is viewed by many as a rigid, old-fashioned organization focused on cookie fund-raisers and campouts. "Girls think of us as outdated," says Kathy Cloninger, chief executive of Girl Scouts of the USA. "They have stereotypes of who we are that are not right."

could so easily be this:

Laurel Richie will be in charge of modernizing the image of [Judaism], which is viewed by many as a rigid, old-fashioned organization focused on [Israel] and [intermarriage]. "[Kids] think of us as outdated," says Kathy Cloninger, chief executive of [Hillel]. "They have stereotypes of who we are that are not right."

OK, now it’s your turn! See what you can do with the passage below. Hey, if your tagline is good enough, you could probably parlay it into some kind of major job with the JCC:

Advertising efforts over the past two years also reflect the group's new direction, including public-service announcements in publications such as Entertainment Weekly and Girls Life that highlight girls' independence, and the tagline: "It's a Girl's Life. Lead it."

Repositioning the organization "isn't about us trying to be cool," says Ms. Richie. "We've seen jeans, sneakers and soft drinks try to do that and you just cringe."

Related: Hipster Judaism Mad-Libs

There’s so much good stuff in Leon Wieseltier’s recent essay on why the Jewish community need not fear Barack Obama that we’re just going to pick out our five and a half favorite quotes:

1. The quote: "Russert then broached the embarrassment of Obama's pastor, and his racialist and anti-Zionist assertions. Suddenly the wild broodings of the Jewish blogosphere were erupting into prime time."
   Why we like it: Sometimes it's reassuring to know other people think the Jewish blogosphere has a "wild brooding" problem.
2. The quote: "As for Obama's notorious middle name: it is the rankest Islamophobia to suggest that all Husseins are the same. I run into Islamophobia in the Jewish community rather often. It is unpretty and it is un-Judaic. Barack Hussein Obama is as splendid a name for a patriotic American as, say, Abner Mikva."
   Why we like it: "Unpretty and un-Judaic" -- well said.
3. The first part of the quote: "It is true that sometimes American Jewish identity appears to consist in a great competition in worry, and whoever worries most, wins; and it is true that American Jewish culture is too consumed by the commemoration, or the anticipation, of disaster."
   Why we like it: "Whoever worries most, wins" is totally the motto of Judaism. I think it's in Latin on the Brandeis University crest.
   The second part of the quote: "Anyway, worry is also an expression of love. The more intensely you cherish something, the more regularly you contemplate the possibility of its disappearance."
   Why we like it: Because it's an empathic explanation of why the topic of Israel makes American Jews (us included) so crazy.
4. The quote: "This Jewish need to believe in the friendship of the highest power in the land is a survival of the political mentality of medieval Jewry, with its preference for "vertical alliances" over any reliance upon the goodwill of the local population--a highly anomalous survival in the American case, in which horizontal alliances, at every level of politics, are a regular feature of Jewish existence."
   Why we like it: Because context is key.
5. The quote: "September 11 drew the United States into a new and deep and justified engagement with the Arab world, and American Jews will have to accustom themselves to this historical complication--but hold the kaddish, because in American presidential politics now there is not an enemy in sight."
   Why we like it: Because it's true.

Raised By Wolves: she wasn't actually, but she sure acts like itIt's easy to decry a Holocaust memoir that turns out to be more fantasy than fact.  What’s more difficult is trying to figure out why a woman who’s not even Jewish would pen this story. What drove Misha Defonseca (real name: Monique De Wael) to write a book falsely claiming that she was trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, was subsequently raised by wolves, and later killed a German soldier in self-defense?

Defonesca likely did have a horribly painful childhood. She now claims that her parents were Belgian resistance fighters killed by the Nazis, and that she was raised by her grandfather and uncle who treated her poorly and called her the daughter of traitors because of her parents' role in the resistance. She says this led her to "feel Jewish." I’m not suggesting that Defonesca’s fraud is anything less than atrocious, but it’s not hard to see why she thought writing a Holocaust memoir would be a good way to attract reliable support and sympathy. After all, Bernard Holstein (real name: Bernard Brougham) pulled the same stunt back in 2004--wolves and all. It’s as if Auschwitz is the gold standard for suffering.

The Jewish community should take care to shun “Shoah-business,” and avoid fetishizing the suffering that occurred in the camps. Survivors, Holocaust scholars, and community leaders need to stop going into conniptions whenever the words ‘Holocaust’ or ‘genocide’ are used to describe anything other than the events of World War II. Jews do not have a monopoly on anguish, but when we seem to dominate the field, we can’t be surprised to find those who want to play company to our misery.

Related: Eat Pray Backlash

During the last two years writing my first book, Other People’s Property: A Shadow History of Hip-Hop in White America, I’ve found that, over the past three decades, white people have used hip-hop as a safe, virtual space to tackle or elude the complicated legacy (and present) of race in our country. Every time we buy a Ying-Yang Twins CD or bust a backspin or attempt to use Ebonics, we are telling ourselves a story—about America, about race, and about ourselves. So what story are Jews, specifically, telling ourselves? What draws so many of us to keep it (Is)real? (Full disclosure: that joke was stolen from respected Jewish hip-hop blogger Dan Charnas. See? We're everywhere!) My fascination with hip-hop has always intrigued and amused my third-generation Italian wife, Denise, who grew up in the more ethnically explicit suburbs of Long Island ...

Yet again I direct you over to the Washington Post, where they’re featuring an article on faith based cable channels, including a new Jewish channel, Shalom TV. Shalom!: I mean it in the goodbye way.

A kosher cook-off, hip-hop entertainer Russell Simmons discussing anti-Semitism, Hebrew lessons, Talmud study and the "Jewish Mr. Rogers."

They're all part of the lineup on Shalom TV, a Jewish-oriented cable television channel that expanded last month into the Washington-Baltimore region, its second market.

Shalom TV, which recently expanded into the area, has a wide array of Jewish programming, including kids' show "Agent Emes," above. (ShalomTV.org)

The channel is the latest outgrowth of the burgeoning religion-oriented cable and satellite television business, which has spread beyond its evangelical Christian roots into what the industry calls "faith and values programming" that includes other faiths and cultures.

…

Shalom TV is also aiming at a broader audience by offering cultural, social and religious programming.

"What Shalom TV is doing is really trying to feature the entire panorama of Jewish life, of which Judaism is an element, but it is only one element," said Rabbi Mark Golub, president and chief executive of the Fort Lee, N.J.-based channel, which started last year in the Philadelphia-Delaware area. "We are not a religion channel in the classical sense of that term."

The subscription-based, video-on-demand channel, available on Comcast, shows religious offerings, such as a series on Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, as well as Talmud study. But it also offers movies, celebrity kibitzer Arlene Peck, step-by-step Hebrew lessons and the finals of "The Simply Manischewitz Cook-Off" (winning entree: sweet-potato-encrusted chicken). It touts its children's show "Mr. Bookstein's Store" as the "Jewish Mr. Rogers."

"Most people don't imagine this when you tell them you're doing Jewish television," Golub said.

Full Story

Am I the only one who’s depressed that Jews have joined the ranks of those who get in touch with God via the cable company?

When I heard about Anna Nicole Smith's untimely passing last night my impulse was to post something, but I didn't. This was for two reasons. The first being I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all and secondly, I saw that Izzy had beaten me to the Shvitz and furthermore, had reiterated my immediate reaction to the news: disappointment with the press. I fueled this fire by watching the Extra correspondents feed on this story and bearing witness to the worst kind of exploitative spectacle. Although, inarguably the media's lowest low was Entertainment Tonight's exclusive interview with Anna Nicole Smith from the Bahamas back in October when the poor woman was so drugged up that she couldn't separate her upper and bottom lip and she kept slurring her words.

So what is it with a "blond bombshell" on the verge that whets our appetites so?

I'm not saying Anna Nicole wasn't an attention-starved oddity and didn't at times relish the media frenzy, but she was never a darling of the media. I always had the impression that the relationship between Anna Nicole and the press was similar to the relationship between the special needs children at my elementary school that got picked on and the bullies that did the picking on.There was something so cruel and unjust about the way the press handled her, that I couldn't stomach it. I feel a similar way now.

Anna Nicole isn't special needs. I realize that. I know I posted yesterday on how little compassion I had for Britney Spears and the circumstances here aren't all that dissimilar. Izzy even made the correlation between Spears and Smith in her post. Maybe it was observing Smith's tightrope act for just a little too long after the circus had left town that humanized her for me. Whatever the case, her death is something that needs to be respected and dignified as we would any other person. Translation: Let's cool it a bit on the death video talk.

Zeek: Just artsyfartsy enoughPosting about the bookish trip to Israel this morning made me think about ZEEK, a pretty great Jewish literary magazine (in print or online).  There's really nothing else quite like it out there.

That's not to say that there aren't all manner of Jewishy magazine that like to consider themselves literary, but ZEEK actually manages to maintain a fairly high standard of literary quality (I'm something of a snob when it comes to litmags)... but isn't afraid to get into real Jewish topics.   

So for people who like their Judaism to be a little artsy-fartsy, or people who like their contemporary culture to be a little bit shtetl... ZEEK is a good read.  Where else are you going to find new translations of poetry by  Rav Kook (a 19^th century Hasidic dude) alongside new poems by Ilya Kaminsky (perhaps the youngest poet-hipster in the USA)?

Their mission:…We welcome the heretical, honor the sincere, and are generally bored by in-jokes, apologetics, and irony. We value independence, courage, and thoughtfulness, and publish stories which say something new about that which is meaningful. Above all, we believe that an intelligent, articulate Jewish sensibility is one that speaks from its place of particularity in a far wider conversation -- and true conversation requires both a fearlessness to create and an openness to change.

Bonus:  for those of you who write, it’s a good place to submit your work!

I got to thinking today about how I’m not really someone who reads a lot of non-fiction.  When I was in college, I had trouble “getting into” my textbooks, and though I can handle the occasional biography, I have to admit that I’m just plain lazy when it comes to fact-finding. 

Which means that a lot of what I know I learned from fiction.  And while that can be dangerous (bearing in mind my confession about my knowledge of Israeli history) it’s also true that fiction is a great place to start learning about Jewish culture, religious tradition, and ritual.  Maybe not the place to get your “facts” but a good place for a secular-ish Jew to begin understanding the roots and faith of her religion.  I remember distinctly that I learned about Jewish baby-buying and the Jewish need to salt meat from the All of a Kind Family.

So I thought I’d link to a few of my favorite all-time-good-reading-books, books  that I’ve found especially helpful for inspiring the right questions, books that provide a sense of culture and tradition, and I thought I’d ask what books taught YOU something about being Jewish?  Or taught you something about how NOT to be Jewish?

In My Father’s Court  (my dad claims this is the best partially fictive memoir ever written)

Portnoy’s Complaint  (for dirty naughty  Jews and/or contrarians)

As a Driven Leaf  (you wouldn't think the Talmudic age would be so un-boring)

Davita’s Harp  (hugely important for me as an interfaith-baby, and an angsty teen)

Shosha  (dybbuks, weird fornication, WWII Poland, and American actresses... tragic and moving)

Call It Sleep (ghetto Jews in New York, rough boys, and hard dialect)