Pandering, but pretty: Warhol's KafkaWhat the Jewish media has been getting up to this week:

• In a Dear Abby column last month, Abby answered a question from a man who thinks one of his brothers tricked his wife into sex. Rather than get outraged on the part of the wife—because, um, isn’t that rape?—Abby suggests maybe she was in on the deception. Feminist bloggers called this victim-blaming; Dan Savage called bullshit on the question. Given the opportunity to ask Abby about this controversy in their interview with her this week, Jewishsf.com instead wonders: If she had to eat one Jewish food every Saturday for the rest of her life, would she go with chopped liver, gefilte fish or matzo ball soup? [JewishSF.com]
• Clinton administration policy advisor Jeremy Ben-Ami is launching an “alternative AIPAC”—a liberal pro-Israel group. “About freakin’ time” says Jewschool. [The Jewish Week, Jewschool]
  
• Ugh, this is a terrible story: Remember the haredi women in Israel who wear burqas? The leader of the group was just arrested for child abuse and the failure to report incest. [Jewlicious]
• Heeb discovers it has a Christian twin in Geez Magazine. [Heeb]
• Andy Warhol’s portraits of Jews at the Jewish Museum: Was he exploiting the Jewish community, or vice versa? [The Forward]
• In his seminal book about life as a chef, Kitchen Confidential, Anthony Bourdain refers to veganism as a “Hezbollah-like splinter faction” of vegetarianism. So a bunch of vegans have started a blog called Hezbollah Tofu in which they veganize Bourdain recipes. Is the name offensive? Eric Schulmiller at the Jew and the Carrot thinks it might be. (By the way, best post title ever.) [The Jew and the Carrot]
  
• Uplifting story of the week: The IDF gives a residency permit to a gay Palestinian man so that he can live in Tel Aviv with his Israeli boyfriend. [YNet]

Too much testosterone: Elliot Spitzer and his giant man-chin Why does the Spitzer story feel so Jewish? Is it because New York is the other Jewish capital of the world? Is it because Spitzer has always been a bit of a Jewish stereotype—the pushy bulldog lawyer? Is it because of the Israeli pimp? It’s hard to say, but both Jewish publications and the mainstream media seem to think this is totally a tribal issue.

• In The New Republic, Noam Scheiber suggests that Spitzer is bit of an Alexander Portnoy:
  

  Like Portnoy, maybe Spitzer felt simultaneously driven (by stultifying parents) to be a good Jewish boy and rebel against his good Jewish boy-ness, and so you get the weird spectacle of the most upright guy in the world acting out some pretty deviant urges.

• In the Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar predicts how the story will play in the Jewish media "Oy, such a nice Jewish boy, on his way to becoming the first Jewish President! What's this girl's name, Kristen? Sigh. To think he threw it all away for a shiksa."
• Heeb thinks Spitzer’s pseudonym, “George Fox,” might have something to do with “a ho bustin’ Wild West Rabbi.” As a good Quaker Jew, I should point out that George Fox was also the founder of the Friends movement, although I can’t even begin to imagine a Quaker pay-for-play sex scandal.
• Jewschool wonders if Bush administration Justice Department appointees targeted Spitzer for a takedown.
  
• In the Forward, Alan Dershowitz asks everyone to give Spitzer a break: “These may be sins, but there are no real victims, except for family members.” Yeah, except for them. Also? Few things could be more humiliating than having your former mentor defend your libido-led mistakes in the Jewish Daily Forward.
• New governor David Paterson + New York Jews = BFF
• Not Jewish, just hilarious (which is, by the way, going to be the title of my memoir if I ever leave this job): Samantha Bee forces her husband to stand by her side as she confesses to infidelity on the Daily Show. I LOL’d; so did Jon Stewart.

Yiddish modernism: High design from Henryk Berlewi This week in Jewish media:

• Kickass Yiddish Modernism. [Jewschool]
• Commentary considers beards: “By forbidding Jews to destroy their hair, the Bible warns them away from seeking the siren song of eternal youth.” Yes, but eternal youth is sexy! [Commentary]
• Jewlicious is all over the story of Don Siegelman, the imprisoned former Alabama governor. Siegelman is serving seven years for bribery, but he might have been targeted by Karl Rove as the lone powerful Democrat in a heavily Republican state. [Jewlicious, 60 Minutes]
• LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa: Honorary Sephardic Jew. [The Forward]
  
• Did you know that Patti Stanger, Bravo’s “Millionaire Matchmaker,” is a third-generation yenta? Did you know that out of the reality show’s seven episodes, five feature Jewish millionaires? Bad, bad, bad for the Jews! [San Diego Jewish Journal]
  
• Remember that episode of My So-Called Life where Angela says she’s jealous of Anne Frank because she got to hang out in an attic with her crush? A photo of that crush, Peter Schiff, has turned up in Europe. [Yahoo, the Yada Blog]
• Remember that Dave Chappelle sketch about the blind African-American KKK member? (For some reason I can only find it online in German.) Pinchads Zlotosvsky used to be a Neo-Nazi. Then he found out his mother was Jewish, and now he’s ultra-Orthodox. [Ha'aretz]

Don't be fooled by his innocuous nickname: Schwarztie This week in J-media:

• Did you know that the gays cause earthquakes? The ultra-Orthodox Israeli political party Shas just suggested that instead of reinforcing buildings, the government should spend more money discouraging homosexuality. Insert obligatory San Francisco joke here, and then bang your head against the wall while wondering how you’ve managed to get stuck in the same religio-ethic group as these people. [Jewschool via Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post.]
• At JSpot, Hannah Farber asks the world’s rabbis to please stop insisting that she (and every other Jewish professional woman) pop out some babies right this very minute. Jewschool responds. [JSpot, Jewschool]
  
• This writer is really, really angry at Jerry Seinfeld, and not because of Bee Movie. [San Diego Jewish Journal]
• From the department of How Not to Grow the Jewish People: Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, who runs the Chai Center in California, just can’t stop sending angry text-message-speak e-mails to women who appeal to him for Jewish knowledge. A steller example: “Shame on U 4 yr disgusting unpaid whoring ways 2 try & take Jewish men away from Jewish women. Hitler murdered Jews & U R also trying 2 exterminate Jews." [LA Jewish Journal]
• An Orange County task force says antisemitism is so rampant at UC Irvine that Jewish students should stay away. [JTA]
  
• Heeb gets at the biggest issue facing young Jews today: Beefy men playing strip dreidel. [Heeb Magazine]

We weren't exaggerating: The cover, naked bird-men and allThings of note in the Jewish media this week:

• The LA Jewish Journal runs the ugliest cover of all time (pictured right)

• Hamas’s lovable children’s characters Farfel and Nahul have been replaced by Assud the rabbit, who suspiciously resembles a famous American bunny and sings songs like "We Will Never Recognize Israel." [Heeb]

• The Jewish Awareness Movement, an outreach organization dedicated to frum-inizing college students, is run by a woman who regularly makes people cry. David Kelsey points out that her tactics are surprisingly successful. [New Voices, The Kvetcher]

• The English edition of the daily Jewish paper Hamodia won’t run pictures of women because the female form is “immodest”—which means no Hillary pictures, even if she becomes president. [Jewish SF via JTA]

• Australia’s Prime Minister apologized to the nation’s Aboriginal population for years of discrimination and abuse. Behind this measure? Jews! “We’ve suffered 2,000 years of persecution, and we understand what it is to be the underdog,” said Mark Leibler, the co-chair of Reconciliation Australia. [JTA]