Last weekend, Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory played all acoustic sets at the tiny, sold-out, Highline Ballroom in the New York Meatpacking distract. Dashboard Confessional is already mostly acoustic -- soft songs about breakups and heartache, but stripped-down NFG was practically a revelation. The pop-punkers are generally less snot-nosed versions of Blink 182, or Sum 41 -- songs about breakup delivered with good natured snark, tongues-in-cheek. But at Highline, tearing out all the poppy electric hooks revealed a beating emo heart. They were still goofy, no doubt. They wore painted-on lounge suits on their t-shirts and bantered between songs. But they also suggested after every song that this wasn't the occasion for moshpits, and prefacing their "My Friends Over You," a song about, essentially, the precept that "bros come before hos," they cautioned that it was one of the most serious songs they've ever written. The intention seemed ironic, but then they launched into the song and, yeah, it was pretty serious.

NFG lyricist Steve Klein is Jewish, as is bassist Ian Grushka. If you didn't know before the show, you knew when lead vocalist Jordan Pundik wished all the Jews in the audience a Happy Channukah during a holiday song and then indicated Klein + Grushka playing behind him. Of the three holiday wishes (a Merry Christmas, a Happy Channukah and a Happy Kwanza), the second got the biggest applause from the crowd. It probably helped that the show actually took place during Channukah, but also suggested that a lot of NFG fans, at least in NYC, are Jewish emo kids. With another Jewish artist, Max Bemis, releasing the two best emo albums of the year (the collaborative project Two Tongues + his own band's eponymous Say Anything), maybe it's time to ask (as though we haven't before), is there something Jewish about being emo?

Unlikely. Chris Carrabba (Dashboard Confessional) is, as Rolling Stone puts it, the "godfather" of emo music, and his former band, Further Seems Forever, is explicitly Christian. But there are certain emo tropes that suggest some Judaism slipping through. (Full disclosure: I love emo music, so I'm willing to stretch this connection for the sake of personal titillation.) For one, the anxiety-ridden lyrical tropes of the genre, weeping over girls, worrying whether girls like you, worrying about how to ask a girl out, seem like natural reflections of the anxious Jewish public culture archetype. It's probably not a coincidence that The OC's very Jewish Seth Cohen (Adam Brody) loved emo music (side note: he also invented Chrismukkah). Moreover, if you ignore that King David was generally singing about God, there's a lot of emo in Tehillim.

"They mounted up to the heaven, they went down to the deeps; their souls melted away because of trouble. They reeled to and fro, and staggered like a drunken man, and all their wisdom was swallowed up. They cried unto the LORD in their trouble, and He brought them out of their distresses." (107)

Emo! I mean, it's a religion full of lamentations. Literally. In Lamentations, (attributed to Jeremiah), "She weeps sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks. She has no one to comfort her among all her lovers. All her friends have dealt treacherously with her. They have become her enemies." Am I wrong in thinking that this could easily be dealing with a woman contending with frenemies, as it could be dealing with the nation Israel?

At some point, I held out hope for a real Jewish emo band. Ie: One where the songs were about being a young religious Jew. It was ripe for the writing -- tons of agony over being shomer negiah, over your Rabbis/Parents not understanding you, over how tough fast days are. Alas, as the decade comes to an end, and emo slips further and further into the passe regions of pop culture, it seems like that'll never come to pass. I'll assuage my own sorrow by listening to NFG + Say Anything and pretend they're really really Jewish, and not just incidentally Jewish. The closest we ever came was a Say Anything song, Alive with the Glory of Love. It's about falling in love in a Concentration Camp. It's bleak, but when is emo (or Judaism) not?

In "Stars of David," a book about Jews in rock music, Grushka says about New Found Glory's name sounding like a born-again Christian band, "Sometimes when people ask, I just say, 'Yeah, we're a Christian band.' They'll figure it out sooner or later." Maybe the secret Jewish message is in the weeping.

As seems de rigeur for this sort of post, let me prove my Star Trek bona fides (or lack thereof) before going forward. I was a child of Star Trek: The Next Generation, only three years old when it premiered, but ten when it concluded and old enough to remember the season finale broadcast. I later caught up on every episode of that series. I have also seen more than a handful of the original series, and about two to three dozen episodes of Deep Space 9. So I'm not trekkie, as it goes. But I'm familiar with the shows, and if my knowledge is not encyclopedic, it is viable. I may not be able to recall the exact science-fiction hook used in season 4, episode seven offhand, but if you hum a few bars, I think I could sing along.              

Once said, let's put that to rest. If my credentials aren't enough to discuss the new film with any depth, please skip ahead. I won't be offended. I understand fandom, and if someone wanted to write about the X-Men without an encyclopedic background, I'd thank them kindly to their face and say bad things about them behind their backs. So go ahead. Say bad things.              

What struck me about the film was the role of the Jew, or the lack thereof. The Original Series always had Leonard Nimoy as Spock. He was not simply the intellectual rationalist to Kirk's fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants adventurer, as a number of critics have suggested. What is clear from those earliest episodes is that Spock was an equal partner in the great adventure. He may have brought a cooler head from time to time, but the mission was equally his. As such, he was something of a philosopher-warrior, a Jewish archetype rare in contemporary society, but rich in our history; from the Biblical Joshua, King David, to Franz Rosenzweig writing The Star of Redemption "in the Macedonian trenches," or maybe David Ben-Gurion.              

The Next Generation took the Jew in Star Trek one step further. Despite not having as public a Jewish identity as Nimoy in a main role, one could say TNG was even more Jewish than the Original Series. Watch them argue about the Prime Directive, debate subtleties of ethical and intellectual dilemmas, or entirely forgo physical confrontation in favor of multiculturalism and empathy. Hell, the crew was so neurotic, they kept a full-time therapist on the ship. The greatest triumphs were not the defeat of an adversary, but the breaching of borders, the comprehension of foreign language. Watch "Darmok," in my most humble opinion the greatest episode of The Next Generation. It is moving beyond words.

I mean, they might as well have called it Star Trek: The Great Jew Extravaganza. The central themes of the Star Trek shows - exploring new worlds, making contact with new civilizations, doing mitzvoth and good deeds throughout the universe - are central tenets of Judaism. Would a Michael Lerner luncheon have been out of place on The Next Generation? Picard was already, always doing birur nitzutzot (elevating the sparks of the universe) and performing tikkun on the galaxies.              

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