When I listen to Moshiach Oi, I feel like I am eighteen again, hanging out with my friends at the skate park, watching DIY punk bands break their gear, pour through power chords with sweat and blood on their fingers, and feeling like the world is already healed, we just need to look around!

Moshiach Oi! blows me away with their new album "Better Get Ready." It's a blistering punk rock siddurim that effortlessly ties together Black Flag and Rambam, 7 Seconds and the Rebbe, The Casualties and the Kabballists.

The opening track "Baruch Hashem" gets my fist in the air, ready to mosh. Two and three minute hardcore anthems to Moshiach, Avodah, and the yeshiva system tear through me like a hurricane and leave me weak and on my knees, like Moses with his face in the sand.

It's a damn good feeling when you fall in love with a record.

It's also a great example of something I have always believed in: there is nothing that separates our artistic love from our emotional love of Hashem. Punk, hip hop, spoken word, visual art: these are the tools that G_d gives us to create the World To Come.

I pray that 5770 is the year of Moshiach Oi! But from the looks of it, and the sound of it, they don't need any help at all.

San Francisco now has its first eruv thanks to congregation Adath Israel. Eruvs are important to observant Jews who adhere to the halakhic prohibition against the 39 acts of work on Shabbat, which prevents them from being able to carry anything outside of their homes. The eruv allows those Jews to carry within its boundaries (roughly 20 square blocks), enabling them to wheel strollers, carry purses, and ultimately allow Jewish families to attend Shabbat services together, with the little ones in tow.

Gone are the days when ensuring the eruv was still kosher meant tracking your rabbi down--the eruv has its own Twitter account and will tweet any necessary updates. Fabulous. 

Several dozen eruvs exist across the country, in places one might expect, like New York City and Boca Raton, Florida, but also places you might not, like Mequon, Wisconsin and Overland Park, Kansas. In fact, eruvim exist in 25 states and the District of Columbia. I'll admit I got that information from Wikipedia--eruv.org hasn't published their complete directory yet.

There are also a handful of college campuses enclosed by eruvim, including nine of the fifteen participant universities of Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC), as well as Harvard University and, of course, Yeshiva University.

Debate over the construction of an eruv even played a role in the election of trustees on Long Island recently. 

Stamford, Connecticut and Norfolk, Virginia are among the "emerging Orthodox communities" enticing families relocating from more quintessentially Orthodox neighborhoods in the greater New York area and beyond. Even my home state of Pennsylvania features two "emerging communities," including Allentown and its capital, Harrisburg.

Personally, in my own learning and adapting process of finding exactly where I fit in the Jewish community, I've toyed with a lot of ideas and observances falling into the "conservadox" gray area. I'm okay with no tweeting on Shabbos and I've toyed with the idea of shutting my Blackberry off completely in favor of peace, quiet, and reading books. Prohibitions against toting my matching Coach bag along with me when I (drive) to synagogue, however, have not quite made it into my personal level of observance. Still, though, I think it's important to take note that eruvim are continuing to pop up in observant Jewish communities across the country and around the world. Whether it's a growing trend is difficult to say, as is whether their appearance means a rise in Orthodox Judaism or so-called "liberal Jews" of other movements adopting some of the more traditional observances, but it's something to think about nonetheless. Jews are staking their claim in cities and towns across the country and we're here to stay, eruv and all.

 

On a somewhat unrelated note, anybody interested in Mikvah shopping should check out Lakewood, New Jersey--by some odd anomaly, the town has ten mikvahs. That's more than even Manhattan. The only single location in the country with more? Jewcy's hometown, Brooklyn.

This picture of Natalie Portman on set pretty much lends itself perfectly to a game of Spot the Inaccuracies. I'll go first: Shouldn't she be wearing a wig? From Jezebel.

Maryland Senator Rona E. KramerThe State of Maryland is in the process of legally recognizing that Orthodox women who wish to remarry have the opportunity to do so by decree of a get. The debate between separation of church and state as pertains to this issue was a hot topic on the Senate floor yesterday, especially given that the Bill's sponsor is a Southern Baptist and its primary contestant, the female Jewish Democratic Senator from Maryland.

Sen. Lisa A. Gladden, a Baltimore County Democrat and the bill's sponsor, said the bill promotes equality for women who are divorcing and prevents Orthodox Jewish men from angling for extended property rights or monetary benefits.

"In the case where men are often extorting women - and this is a tragedy that I'm seeing in my own community - and those women need the help of our government," she said. "And this is not about religion; this is about fairness."

Kramer disagreed.

"How can it not be about religion when the reason that they're coming to us for assistance, to the state of Maryland, is not because the state of Maryland will not give them a divorce?" Kramer said. "It's not because our courts of equity will not treat them fairly. ... It is because of their religion. It is their religious belief that doesn't allow them to remarry."

The Senate gave its initial approval, 35-10. A final vote is expected this week.