Help Dad: get laidI like to whine about the trials and tribulations of the dating scene for young observant Jews. Besides the innumerable suggestions (read: pressure) to join JDate, there’s the never-ending parental push towards marriage and the intolerable Jewish singles events. But my annoying dates with guys named Reuven and Judah don’t come close to New York Times columnist Bob Morris’s experiences trying to find a match for his widower, octogenarian dad.

In his new book Assisted Loving Morris recounts his experiences guiding his dad through the murky waters of dating, all while looking for his own beshert.

Check out the hilarious Assisted Loving website (make sure your volume is up), listen to a great Fresh Air interview with Morris, and watch the preview below. Then, go out and buy yourself a copy.

 

Kids, stay back: MazoPhil Mazo’s upcoming comedy-album debut, Pervert, drops April 1. Listen as Mazo, a vaguely creepy comic from Jersey, riffs on the "I'm less Jewy than you are" J-Date courtship ritual.

 

 

This week’s theme: Wacky pictures. First up is HoneyiLOVEYOUso, who’s got some amazing text to accompany his intensely ‘80s photo.

I quote:

Hey Woman where are you? I need you. help me to find you, cause I love you I swore to budda I know how to love if she be good to me and be kind to me I will not let her go No way if she is a keeper she will be kept for ever and ever my friend come to me New Year is here I am not getting any younger and I need Love. Perpetual love. see you my love later sweet dreams for now.

Yeesh. On the opposite end of the “would you want to be alone in a dark alley with this person?” spectrum is EricBD32.

Eric, Eric, dude, in two of your pictures you’re with a woman. In one of them, you appear to be gazing deep into her eyes. Your other two photos are adorable—cute kid, cute kitty, cute motorcycle—and you seem like a really nice guy, but the happy-in-love pics suggest that maybe you’re not quite ready to move on.

And then there's the girl I like to call Red. I can't remember where I found her, which is probably good because it afford her at least some measure of anonymity. There's so much to love about Red: The neckline on her dress, the choker, the burnt-caramel tan, the Chanel bracelet. But I think my favorite thing about this picture is the pose. Nothing says "classy and not self-absorbed" like a picture of you taking a picture of yourself.

 

No Babies: until I'm good and ready. And any rabbi who disagrees can stick it where the sun don't shineThere has been a lot of talk recently about women in the Jewish community feeling bullied into having kids. Here at Jewcy Izzy noted that a lot of the desperation and frustration that comes out of JDate is a result of communal expectations that good Jewish girls will have lots of kids to help populate Israel and stick it to Hitler. Much as I love Israel and hate Hitler, those are not good enough reasons for me to want to bear children. If I have kids, it should be because I feel able and ready to take care of someone else, provide for them, and love them unconditionally. And anyway, it’s not like women make babies all on our own—there are men involved, and it’s ridiculous that they don’t seem to be getting the same pressure as women.

Some of the best analysis of the push towards baby-making in observant Jewish communities is over at JSpot, where Hannah Farber has a post titled “I’m Going to Count to Three, and Then All Rabbis Need To Get Out Of My Uterus.” She writes:

I say: if the rabbis are so committed to making this a communal issue, the rabbis should raise the children. In fact, given their comfortable salaries and high communal status, they have no excuse: they should be adopting and converting children by the dozen. Given the impressive recent developments in medicine that prolong human life, I wouldn’t excuse any rabbi under sixty from performing this mitzvah. Wouldn’t that make a fine statement of commitment to the Jewish future?

And even when men are included in the directives for having kids, I’m still offended when a bunch of rabbis want to tell me how many times I have to grow a person and then push that person out of my vagina.  Did you know the Conservative Movement’s law committee (the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards) recently published a position paper that says any couple capable of raising more than two children, should do so, and Conservative rabbis should all be pushing this on their congregants? The extra children should be called “Mitzvah children” because they’ll ensure a Jewish community well into the future.

Rabbi Jason Miller notes on his blog that he’s heard Rabbi Elliot Dorff tell young people they should get married and start having kids in their early twenties, and they should have more than two kids. (I’ve heard Dorff say we should have a minimum of four kids, so I guess he was being a softy when he spoke to Jason’s class.) All of this when day schools are rising well above $15,000 a year for tuition, not to mention the inevitable college costs, and all of the other expenses of being an observant Jew. And what about those of who hadn’t found our soulmates in our early twenties? In the past year I’ve dated an obnoxious Israeli guy, an incredibly self-righteous administrative assistant at a Jewish political organization, a boring hedge fund manager, and a med student who didn’t have time for me. Should I have just picked one to marry so as not to waste any valuable time on my biological clock? Something tells me that would not have been a good plan.

I love babies, and I bet I’ll have one someday. But if my rabbi mentioned to me that it was high time I got hitched and knocked up, I’m pretty sure I’d stop going to shul.

J-Love conquers all: A JDate billboard looms over Boston I am a New York City–dwelling, L Word–watching, liberal-minded hipsterish hetero. A girl who has always thought it would be kinda sorta maybe cool to make out with another girl but never has. That kind. And yet....

As my 30th birthday approached, I found myself single — and celibate — for a longer stretch than I've ever wanted to be. As more and more friends settled into the adult worlds of marriage and parenthood, I started lamenting my missed opportunities, as if 30 marked some sort of slow decline toward death.

I was embroiled in a tumultuous on-again, off-again relationship — with JDate. What had once been exciting — a sea of eligible Jewish men for the taking! — had become a virtual waiting room of guys who liked to work hard and play hard and enjoyed staying in as much as they liked going out.

It was a particularly heinous-feeling I'm-never-going-to-have-sex-again kind of night when I received a Flirt from ArtsyGrrl18*, a curvaceous and pretty woman seeking a woman. Her message was nothing more than a cheesy canned pick-up line chosen from a drop-down menu: "You're burning up my monitor — are you always this hot?" But I felt a flutter in my stomach. And while, yeah, OK, I'm straight, I didn't really care. I was smitten. Sort of.

I was sick of men. Sick of corresponding with guys only to meet them in person and find out we have zero chemistry, to repeatedly come to the soul-crushing realization that the dream lover I'd imagined doesn't exist anywhere in this universe. Sick of pretending to be indifferent just so I won't scare them away. I'm not indifferent. Why should I be? Men could keep their issues and their fear of commitment. They could have their erectile dysfunction and their emotional unavailability. I was moving on to bigger, better (softer, nicer-smelling) things.

I immediately drafted a response. "I'm burning up your monitor?" I asked incredulously. "Come on, that's almost as bad as some of the guys on here." My reply accomplished a few things. It flirted back, it put her in her place and, perhaps most important, it reminded her that I was used to being courted by men. I hit send without stopping to wonder what I was doing.

A few days passed with no reply, and I began to worry. Had it been wrong to mention men? It was no secret that I'm straight. What was the sense of playing down that fact when it was, in fact, a fact? Maybe that was even part of what drew her to me — I was, in theory, off-limits. Every day I skimmed through message upon message from a nondescript crop of men, obsessively refreshing my in-box, automatically declining IM requests from the likes of Mensch4U and JewtasticNYC, hoping that each new page would bring a sign of ArtsyGrrl18.

And then, on the fifth day, there was light, in the form of a blinking-envelope new-message icon. "LOL, Carla," she'd written back. "You rock so hard." How adorable, I thought. What a gem! It's true, a similar response from a man probably would have found its way into my Trash bin. But I was hooked. There was no doubt about it: ArtsyGrrl18 would signify my first trip into Girltown.

"I think I'm going to go out with a girl!" I told friends. They all looked at me strangely, as if I'd told them I was thinking of piercing my nipples or moving to India, that I was going to do something that sounded adventurous and edifying but in reality was probably foolish and regrettable. And they all asked the same thing: "Do you really want to date a woman?"

Straight-girl lesbian-dating: Don't knock it till you've tried it A good question. Did I want to date a woman? Well let's see. I love women. Most of my closest friends are women. But no, all right, that's not what they meant. So did I want to kiss a woman? Well, sure! Maybe. Life's too short not to try it, right? And kissing's always nice. OK, forget kissing. Did I want to get naked and sweaty and dirty with a woman? Oh boy, now it was getting tricky. Maybe if Susan looked like Diane Lane. (She did not.) And maybe if the prospect of a man were anywhere on the horizon. (Mensch4U's ability to feel as comfortable in a T-shirt as in a tux and JewtasticNYC's exciting life as an actuary weren't exactly getting my blood going.) Maybe if I could keep my eyes closed and spend more time receiving than giving. Whatever, I thought. I'd figure out the particulars later. I was going to do this, damn it, so I decided to address my reservations the best way I knew how: by ignoring them.

Susan and I e-mailed for about a week, and then she decided we should talk on the phone.

When she called, on a lazy Sunday afternoon, I jumped, even though I knew it was her before picking up. She'd scheduled the time for our phone date (who schedules a phone date?), but even if she hadn't, there was an urgency in the ring that told me it was her. Or maybe it just seemed that way.

But the conversation was easy. There were no awkward silences. Aside from the weird feeling in my stomach, talking to Susan was just like talking to a girlfriend. You know, a girl friend. When she let slip, "You're cute," or worse, tried to talk about "us," I shifted the topic to more platonic things.

At one point, I managed to get out, "I don't know how much of a tease I'm being." It was the only thing I'd rehearsed, the one thing I'd known I would have to say, even before the phone rang.

I was still speaking when she said, "That's OK." I could feel the period of my sentence hanging somewhere in the middle of hers. She wasn't listening to me. "Do you like more masculine or feminine women?" she asked.

Oh, Jesus. "I'm not sure what kind of women I like because I've never liked a woman before."

I had thrown in the "before" to be kind, even though I knew lying now might result in an even bigger cruelty later. What was true was that I was curious, I was intrigued, I was flattered, I was bored. But I did not know if I was interested. And wasn't that what she was really asking?

When she pressed it further, I tried to think of celebrities I found hot. Jennifer Lopez, sure. Rosie O'Donnell, not so much. Scarlett Johansson? Yes, please. Lea Delaria? Hell to the no. "Feminine, I guess."

Which led to a discussion of the photographs she had posted with her profile. "The one of you in the red top is nice," I said. I regretted it as soon as the words were out of my mouth. The red top was pretty low-cut. I could hear her smiling.

"You like the boobies, then."

Like a boy, but nicer-smelling: As a straight girl, would you switch teams for J-Lo? "You just look happy in that picture. And red's a really good color on you. " There was no fucking way I was talking about boobies.

We chatted a bit longer and hung up with a time and a place to meet. Ten minutes later, the phone rang again. "It's me," she said. Her sense of familiarity annoyed me, and the second call caught me more off-guard. Men did not hang up the phone and call back 20 minutes later. At least not men I've ever known. I suddenly understood that old joke: What do lesbians bring on a first date? A U-Haul.

"You make a person want to cancel her appointments and just keep talking to you," she said. I wouldn't have believed it if I'd read it in a book. I'd have chalked it up to melodrama if it were a line in some asinine romantic comedy.

"Oh," was all I could muster.

"Can you talk a bit more?" I was already planning on telling her not really, but then she added, "Just for like 20 minutes." It was so exact, so needy, so faux casual that I couldn't even consider saying yes.

"Look," I said, "I've really got to go. We're going to see each other in a few days." I could sense disappointment on her end, but what could I do? This woman seemed crazy! We'd never even met! Didn't she know you can't just act on every impulse you have? That you need to play the game? I shuddered. What the hell was going on here?

Susan's disappointment didn't last long because that night, around midnight, my phone rang again and we had our third conversation of the day. On the first day we'd ever talked at all. I had gotten my wish: an attentive mate who said what she meant and meant what she said. And I couldn't have been more freaked out about it.

But the truth is I enjoyed talking to her. In fact, I opened up to Susan in that third conversation more than I have with some men I've dated for months. But Susan was sensitive. She didn't spook at the first mention of imperfection, of baggage. She was, after all, a girl.

The week after our first day of phone calls passed with alarming speed. I grew increasingly panicked as our date neared. "Blow it off," one friend advised. "You're not a lesbian!" A good point. And yet, didn't I owe it to myself to see how this thing played out? I'd already come so far! Wasn't it time to live a little dangerously in homage to all the friends who were now shopping for Bugaboos and obsessing over seating arrangements? Going out with Susan wasn't something I necessarily wanted to do, but something I felt I should, to build character. I mean, going weak in the knees for someone or wanting to tear his clothes off the second you see him is nice, I guess, but it doesn't hold a candle to character, right? Right?!

Sunday arrived, and I woke up groggy. My sleep had been fitful and uneasy. I was supposed to get in touch with Susan to confirm the details of our date. I didn't. Later that day I received an e-mail from her: "Am I right in assuming you've lost interest in meeting me?"

Hot straight girl-on-girl action: Sca-Jo and N-Po (Even worse, she had accidentally sent a slightly altered draft of the message, too. I was mortified for her. I was mortified for me—how many times had I agonized over every syllable in a one-line missive to a man who probably skimmed it anyway, too distracted by ball-scratching or mirror-gazing to care?)

My response to Susan's e-mail surprised even me: "What makes you think I've lost interest?" Holy shit, I thought. I am a guy. I am a motherfucking guy. I was full-on playing with her head, and it terrified me how naturally it came, how easily and effortlessly the transition had occurred. Didn't I complain that men can never just make a plan and stick with it? That they're purposefully evasive? That they toy with our emotions for sport? What could I have been thinking?

Not much, I guess, because I strung Susan along for a week or two. I answered her phone messages with e-mails. I canceled plans at the last minute once because I got stuck at work and another time because a friend sprang last-minute birthday plans on me (a last-minute birthday?). Finally I decided to do something no man has ever done with me: I decided to come clean.

"Look," I wrote, "I'm really sorry. I never meant for this to happen or for things to get this far only to have me chicken out. I just don't think my heart is really in it. And I sort of wish it were. I'm truly sorry if I've hurt you."

And she, also being female, responded in a similarly refreshing way: with honesty, compassion and understanding: "I'm a little bummed because I thought we were connecting, but no worries, OK? Please. Call me if you ever change your mind. Goodbye, beautiful."

Her e-mailed crushed me. It made me want to write back and tell her I was wrong, that we should meet, but I didn't. The kindness was what I was attracted to. It always had been. I just couldn't get down with the boobies.

In the end, Girltown turned out to be less like an exciting vacation spot and more like a restaurant I wanted to gawk at through the windows but never actually eat in. Today when friends and I are contemplating how to proceed with men we're dating, what the best course of action is, we invoke the question WWSD — What Would Susan Do? We figure out the answer, then do the opposite. And I hate that we have to. But I guess that's the price you pay for being a straight girl.

*Names and Jdate handles have been changed.

This column has been man-heavy lately, so I feel like it’s only fair to focus on the women. But I’ve run into a problem, or maybe just an eternal truth: Boys on JDate are way funnier. This probably stems from the fact that insecure men, unlike insecure women, sometimes channel their insecurities into hilarious bluster about kung fu. It might also be because we tend to act, as a society, as if single women are lonely and unlovable (a la this weirdly cruel Onion video), whereas single men are just swinging bachelors.

Still, I made a promise and I plan to keep it – plus I really DON’T think the women of JDate are in any way sadder than the men, so it seems hypocritical not to give them the standard treatment. Some notable profiles from my search:

• The (gorgeous) woman who says “I can’t stand when people are pessimistic, vain, pompous, and/or mean. So if you feel the need to talk about yourself and your achievements constantly I am probably not the one for you. I am not going to even discuss my looks because honestly beauty is in the eye of the beholder so judge for yourself.” Yeah, seriously. What kind of vain, pompous person are you, expecting her to expound at length upon her looks?
• The woman whose profile throws down the gauntlet right away: “he must be charming, loyal, attractive, intelectual, sexual, passionate, financially supportive (meaning: no cheap men) o but wait; am i describing a gay guy? or can anyone prove me wrong?”
• The gentle tripster who describes who she wants to meet thus: “I am all about quality not quanity(substance)!! Strength is truth-not suppression nor delusion.but acceptance.”
• This girl, who sounds remarkably non-insane and appears to be super-cute (she has a flower in her hair!) and who all you boys should probably contact immediately.

But my absolute favorite profile this week is less a woman than an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a bunch of old issues of Us Weekly. SJ81211E’s profile consists of nothing but the lyrics to the Ashlee Simpson song "Autobiography," and the picture looks like Ashlee taking a camera-phone self-portrait. Pete Wentz, do you know about this?

Everyone loves JDating: But not everyone finds love there Is JDate a feminist issue? The Jewish quarterly journal Lilith certainly thinks so -- their winter issue devotes over eight pages to a package looking at the negative effects of Internet dating on Jewish women.

Trying and failing to find love online, writes Susan Shnur, makes women (especially those in their thirties and older) “feel isolated and at fault.” Male-female ratios are roughly equal on dating sites, but women don’t get nearly as many responses as men. When they do find likely candidates, those guys often turn out to be self-centered, married, or both. And online dating promotes a shopping mentality, wherein it’s easy to click past the pretty-good profiles in search of more perfect acquisitions.

I buy all of these facts, but I’m not sure it helps to blame JDate for the unhappiness of unmarried Jewish women. Love was unfair long before the rise of Internet dating, and while sites like JDate definitely encourage non-empathetic behavior, I don’t believe that breaks down by gender. (Shnur inadvertently backs me up on this -- all of her quotes about dating-as-shopping come from women.)

To me, it seems like that sense of isolation and personal failure felt by older single Jewish women might be less about the beastliness of the Internet and more about our culture’s unhealthy emphasis on making babies. Mainstream American culture is baby-crazy to begin with, but the amount of pressure on Jewish women is drastically increased because we’re not just supposed to be fulfilling our womanly destinies – we’re supposed to be ensuring the survival of our race.

No one ever says it outright, but if intermarriage is 'finishing what Hitler started' (as the trolls like to point out in our comments section) because it produces insufficiently Jewish children, then what about those Jewish women who don’t produce any children at all? Are they, like, Goebbels's little helpers? And isn't that adding insult to injury -- taking women who already feel rejected due to their unsuccessful JDate profiles, and then telling them nothing they accomplish in life matters if they don't have kids? If that's the case, maybe we Jewish feminists should be less worried about the fact that online dating is an impersonal experience, and more worried about how even in this enlightened age -- a time when egalitarianism is utterly the norm in some strains of Judaism, e.g. the female-rabbi–dominated Reform movement -- we’re still haranguing women to work those wombs.

Ugh. It took me exactly two weeks of searching for JDaters of the Week before I had an ethical crisis. Who am I to rain down judgment upon the good people of JDate just because they call themselves things like "Portnoy4U" and adamantly refuse to proofread? If someone dug up my long-retired Nerve profile and mocked it on the Internet, I’d be pretty devastated. (And it’s SO mockable – I’m pretty sure I actually compared myself to Natalie Portman in Garden State. In public. In order to impress boys.)

The feedback I’ve gotten about the column didn’t help much. Readers like it, but my friends and family all seemed ambivalent at best. This weekend a rabbi I know told me he thought it was un-Jewish. “Like lashon hara?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A lot worse.”

The truth is that the column doesn’t have to be cruel. As it happens, the whole time I was scouring the site last week, my mock JDate profile (you need one to check out the goods) was getting IM’d by a totally cute, totally interesting, totally un-douchey-seeming Manhattan boy. I kept ignoring him, caught up in my quest to find the most ridiculous profiles on the site, but maybe I should have just featured him. Maybe one of you would have sent him a message, and a lovely shidduch would have been made.

So this week, I’m taking a new approach, mitigating the negativity a bit with a three-pronged format. I’m picking one profile that’s good, one profile that, um, needs work, and one profile that represents the most fascinating tribe on JDate—the non-Jews.

The JDate matrix: Welcome to the desert of the realThe good: He’s a twin! He has five little sisters! He says his family life has giving him “Mideast-peace-summit -level negotiating skills and Barack Obama-esque motivational speaking” abilities! You will seriously never be able to have a fight with this guy—no matter how hard you try.

The bad: “Sometimes I feel that I am Neo” is a totally understandable sentiment. We all get a little Keanu sometimes. But it’s generally a good idea to save that kind of revelation for the second date.

The non-Jewish: He recently shattered his knee in a motorcycle crash and quotes Courtney Love on his profile. He says he majored in keg stands and freely admits that he looks like a serial killer in his photo. And I bet that every time a Jewish organization releases a study about the perils of intermarriage, his profile gets another thousand hits.

Previously:
The Guy Who Volunteered
Jerry Seinfeld Meets James Bond

Did you know that JDate offers bulk rates to rabbis who want to sign up their entire congregations wholesale? And that some rabbis are paying out of pocket to get their flocks hitched? JDate is seriously the greatest racket in the history of the Internet.

Just because HaShem seems to think you’re wasting your time on Nerve, though, doesn’t mean that JDate isn’t fraught with peril. Look at the Good Samaritan who calls himself Portnoy4U (which, as unappealing literary characters go, is pretty much the male equivalent of a woman calling herself LilLadyMacbeth) and whose “What I’m Looking For” essay contained the following aside:

“IF YOU NEVER SAY ONE WORD TO ME IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE, STILL HEED THESE NEXT PEARLS OF WISDOM!!!! UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU EVER GO TO THE MATZOH BALL IN BOCA RATON!!!! DON'T DO IT.”

Or the lady whose terse profile said only “looking for someone special to spend my time with, please have hair on ur head.”

My winner this week, though, is the GUY WHO VOLUNTEERED. BullofBudapest, seriously, you’re my hero. Not only did you e-mail me specifically requesting to be featured in this column, which shows megaballs, but your profile is approximately 3000 words long. I’m excerpting my favorite part, but ladies, you kind of have to read the whole thing:

With Holocaust survivor parents I KNOW Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Hence, I love to party, dance (wild/dirty, imagining I'm Black, to slow/soft taking long, tight dips), get into heavy discussions & light flirtations, make passionate love (any other kind?), humble the arrogant, fight the "good fight"(charge windmills), challenge the smug; solitude, silence, spiritiuality, nature, current affairs, NPR, Air Amerika; high-volume stereo singing along with Orbison, CCR, Rait, Motown, James Taylor, The Eagles; and seeking to understand my God.

Previously: Jerry Seinfeld Meets James Bond

Whoa ... JDate! Since 1997, the Jewish singles site has given the world tons of Times wedding announcements, inspired plenty of trend pieces, and spawned a bunch of similar dating sites aimed at members of ethnic groups whose parents will disown them if they find love outside the tribe. Personally, I’ve never used it, being both categorically opposed to the idea of socializing only with other Jews and fanatical about proofreading. (Speaking of which, Ml3302, if you’re reading this, you might want to reconsider using the tagline “Disover me.”)

Like a lot of secular Jews, though, I’m kind of fascinated by the way JDate blends Craigslist’s obsessive focus on the bottom line with Nerve’s desperate posturing. So starting today, every Tuesday I’m going to feature a JDate profile of the week.

This can't be a real person...can it?: The JDater known as Babypackwell It was hard to pick just one when confronted with:

• The gay man in giant sunglasses who said “I have a rabbit, she’s a Jew too”
• A woman named Babypackwell (pictured), who I’m 99% sure co-starred with Ryan Gosling in Lars and the Real Girl
• The guy who listed one of his interests, unironically, as “discovering new soy products”
• The profile that ended “PLEASE DO NOT BE INTIMATED ... I AM NOT HIGH MAINTANCE !!!!!!!”

But my favorite was CreativeandFun6417, a surprisingly cute 40-year-old music-business entrepreneur from Chicago who described himself as follows:

I'm a perfect cross between Jerry Seinfeld, Ansel Adams, James Bond and a little George Castanza [sic].

In other words, he’s a nebbishy superspy who takes meditative black-and-white pictures of the American West. Ladies, the line forms on the right.

 

IS THE RICH YANKEE JEW RUNNING?

The News:
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg sheds his GOP label in what many speculate as a sign of presidential aspirations.

The Chatter:
If Bloomberg runs, he wins. [The Huffington Post]
Right, a Jewish billionaire Independent. If only he were a cross-dresser too, he'd be a shoe-in. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]
Though Gotham Jews have got Mike's back. [The Jewish Daily Forward]
And he's already picked his Rove. [CBS]
But an Empire State race with Bloomberg, Giuliani and Hilary could spell disaster for the left: “New York is still a code word for ‘Jew’ in some places.” [The Jewish Week]
Nope, writes George Packer, with the onus on NYC, the Northeast could finally reclaim the White House from the Sun Belt. [The New Yorker]

HITLER'S CROTCH ROT CAUSED THE HOLOCAUST:

The News:
Did Hitler plan the Shoah because a Jewish prostitute gave him syphilis? According to a new psychiatric study, the mental and behavioral disturbances associated with the nefarious STD might have caused Hitler's lethal antisemitism.

The Chatter:
In Mein Kampf, he dedicates 13 pages to, what he calls, “the Jewish disease.” [Daily Mail]
Evidence is not yet definitive, but Adolf’s ugly health records are full of all the right symptoms. Plus, they used to hand out Wagner's Ring Cycle at Berlin health clinics. [BBC]

WILL JEWS BUY DESIGNER DUDS FROM ARABS?

The News:
Dubai-based investment firm Istithmar buys Barney's.

The Chatter:
Will Upper East side Jews panic? [Jezebel]
Maybe not. Isn't UAE, like, one of the cool Arab countries? [Jezebel]
And hey, even if Mercedes supplied tanks to the Nazis, the new S series comes in forest green. Forest green! [Jezebel]

SPOOFING THE ONLINE CRUISE

The News:
The pomo lit mag’s Eric Silver writes a mock J-Date profile: “After we review your essays to make sure the content is appropriate and you're not just looking for another cheap slut to take out for a romantic night pounding beers that ends with a tour of the back seat of your Hyundai, we'll post it right away and you can begin meeting thousands of Jewish singles like yourself!” [McSweeney's]

The Chatter:
You really need a spin on this one?

HEBREW NATIONAL LEAGUE DEBUTS

The News:
Dan Kurtzer, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and Egypt, acts as commissioner for this inaugural league's opening day. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

The Chatter:
Baseball is an American pastime. [The Jerusalem Post]
All catcher signals mean "Go fuck yourself" in Hebrew. [Houston Chronicle]

TONY BLAIR NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE

The News:
Blair leaves Downing Street for Ramallah. Will his experience hurt or help in his new post? [Jewish Telegraph Agency]

The Chatter:
Uncertainty hangs over Blair's role as peacemaker. [Guardian Unlimited]
But he's been on both sides of the fence. That might be a good thing. [Guardian Unlimited]
Israel supports his new role. Hamas, guess again. [PlanetImpressions]
Or maybe his job will be more about money. He'll be the Bono of Gaza. [The New York Times]

UNHOLLYWOOD ENDING

The News:
Michael Winterbottom's A Mighty Heart depicts the kidnapping of WSJ reporter Daniel Pearl, as seen through the eyes of his wife, Mariane (the film is based on her memoir of the event). [YouTube]

The Chatter:
A Mighty Heart suspenseful but everyone knows what's coming, and it's not pretty. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]
Futterman, who plays Pearl, born in Brooklyn and authored Capote. Also the straight son in The Birdcage. [Jewish Telegraph Agency]
Angelina shines as wife Mariane Pearl. [The New Yorker]

[Trailer for the film below]

• What Jew crawled up "American Dad"/"Family Guy" creator Seth McFarlane's butt? An entire "American Dad" episode dedicated to the desperation of single Jewish women over 35? Maybe he's just pissed his new show is weird. [Deseret News]
• Well at least some people still notice the intrinsic value of Jewish babes. [Fanpop!]
• Much like aficionados of Beavis & Butthead, Calvin & Hobbes fans have no life. [FanTent]
• Speaking of bracketology...[Gawker]
• Will Ben Stiller Make Sammy Run? [The Forward]
• I have to keep reminding myself that people watch "Battlestar Galactica" and those that watch are fanatics. [Salon]

JDate modelSee the guy smirking at you over on the right? The one that looks like he's maybe sixteen years old? Say hello to JDate's current model (and please, don't tell me you're one of the suckers who thought that singles sites don't use models to advertise their product). He's been around for long enough to make me want to either smack him or make him my boytoy.

Maybe I'll just flip a coin.

Or maybe JDate can change their model before I track this one down and, uh, flip a coin. Yeah. Flip a coin.