The Jewcy candidateSome people in the Jewcy community are understandably concerned that creating a shirt that supports Barack Obama's presidential candidacy will alienate some of our readers. Here's why we're going to make one anyway.

We make a big case of saying that a primary principle of ours is that we're not partisan so much as polypartisan. In practice, that means we work toward integrating the views and opinions of unorthodox voices across the continuum (right, left, Gentile, Hindi, and so on). This sets us distinctly apart from the rest of Jewish media, as does the knowledge that such inclusion makes for the best conversation.

'Polypartisanship' doesn't mean that Jewcy won't take a stand, or that we don't work towards articulating a specific worldview and a shared set of values. The brand's origins stem from an incredibly polarizing shirt, "Shalom Motherfucker." "Shalom Motherfucker" was a passionate and strong announcement of a very particular and new kind of J ewish identity, one that repulsed a significant segment of the Jewish community. We're not a news organization. And we're not unbiased.

In our editorial objectives, we've stated that:

for all the prosperity America Jewry has enjoyed -- its charities, its new temples, its countless organizations -- the community is in a moment of transition where the outcome is far from certain. Much of the Jewish establishment is unsound at its roots, built on ugly ethnocentric, parochial values, mortified of change, riddled by hypocrisy, resistant to criticism and prone to empty self-congratulation, and completely out of touch with the needs and desires of a new generation of Jews. We've had enough; it's open season on these pretenders, phonies, and purveyors of intellectual, communal, and spiritual snake oil. At the same time, there is an emerging new community with its own legitimate heroes and heroines, its models and mentors. We'll set out to identify the values of these people who are creating change, leading lives, and building organizations that embody them.

And:

With a sense of imagination, we will undermine the distinctions and blur the boundaries between what is and isn't considered Jewish. In an effort to recreate a Jewish culture that feeds the soul, that enervating both intellectually and creatively, we need to transform the community from one based solely on ethnocentric, tribal, belonging....Choosing either modernity or religion is a false choice

The point is, we can take a stand on Obama because we're not just a media outlet (though it's worth noting that newspapers do endorse candidates). We're attempting to create a new community. We're attempting to create the largest, most intellectually engaging Web-based discussion about how to be a hyphenated American in the early 21st century, and more specifically, what it means to be Jewish in America now.

Jewcy's take on what it means to be Jewish in America will be tempered, and tested, by the alternative viewpoints we include in the discussion and by you, our readers, who will have the last word on what works for you.

Over the last year and a half, Jewcy's proudest editorial accomplishments have all articulated a well thought out bias that provoked both those who agreed with us, and those who didn't, into action. I'm talking about provocative topics like our confrontation of the ADL over their policy of genocide denial,our debate about the future of Jewish peoplehood with Jack Wertheimer, our editorial on why Israeli assholes should be a source of Jewish pride, our argument that writers should stop mining the Holocaust for material, and our debate between Sam Harris and Denis Prager, which arguably established the template for the rest of mainstream media on how to cover the growing Atheism phenomenon.

Action is the best case scenario (we want participants, not just readers). And hopefully, as we do better and better work, the aggregation of all those biases will constitute a somewhat unified, clear vision of the world that does more than ask what it means to be a Jew now, but actually provides a compelling and persuasive answer to a growing amalgam of Jews and other Americans disenfranchised and alienated by the institutions and leaders that once provided them with a sense of community and meaning.

As for Obama, our coverage has made it clear that he's the Jewcy New Jew candidate for a hundred different reasons, not least because of our reaction to the extraordinary racism, xenophobia, and dirty tricks employed by the Jewish establishment to discredit him.

So, yes, an Obama tee would alienate people in our audience. Precisely, and perfectly, in the same way our Shalom Motherfucker Tee did a couple years ago, and still does today.

We're interested in hearing your take. And if you have design suggestions, email our art director Tara Rice at tara@jewcy.com.

According to a high ranking official in Obama's campaign, JEWCY was informed this weekend that plans have been discussed for a joint Gore/Edwards endorsement of Barack Obama.

Why hasn't it already happened?

According to the official, the endorsement's value for Super Tuesday would be relatively minor given that it would only have 24 hours to circulate.

It would seem that the Obama campaign has determined that a Gore/Edwards endorsement would be more effective coming after what most expect to be a narrow Clinton win on Tuesday, helping the presidential hopeful rebound and regain some momentum going into the weekend's carousel of political talk shows.

There was a time when a Fat Old Jew (FOJ) like Harvey Weinstein marrying a Skinny Young Gentile (SYG) like Georgina Chapman would have caused a perfect storm of cultural anxieties around sex, power, and religion. Today, it's just another small gossip item.

The nuptials of the conniving, overeating, materialistic Hollywood mogul – the flesh-and-blood quintessence of the kind of crudely drawn stereotypical Jewish male who equates acceptance into the broader American culture with the acquisition of a hot shiksa – passed without so much of a media peep. More interestingly, the Jewish chattering class (a wild generalization referring to my friends) barely found it worthy of cocktail prattle.

Beatles Wrong: Money Buys Love: Beauty and the beast Such a high-profile FOJ triumph would once have tweaked all sorts of anxieties. Some Jews would have worried what it meant for the future of the people; others would have been scared at what gentiles thought about it. Jewish and non-Jewish feminists alike would have been horrified at the way a prominent man was so shamelessly using power and wealth to win such a “yummy mummy,” to use a phrase wielded by Maureen Dowd.

Chattering away about this curiosity with my friends, editors at Jewcy, and others, I realized that none of them interpreted the union as a suppressed lust for inclusion, but instead that less psycho-dramatic, nonsectarian lust…for a hot piece of ass.

What’s interesting is how that particular lust is no longer the sole province of the male beast. The enfranchisement of males at the expense of females (particularly Jewish males and Jewish females) is coming to an end. Firmly ensconced in the middle and upper classes, our generation of Jewish women find power, and its application (sexual, or otherwise), far less problematic than their predecessors.

Hot Piece of Ass: She loves this gentleman for his mind

Unlike the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd -- who came of age in the late 1960s in male-dominated universities and workplaces, and has become known for bemoaning a perceived return to 1950s courtship rituals -- our generation of women are achieving unlike any other. They’re used to female-dominated universities, and, soon, workplaces too. And with that equality, they’re becoming a bit beastly themselves.

Edith Wharton's single woman's ambivalence toward marriage has given way to fearless casual sex (with only a smidgen of ambivalence about getting herpes). Women are marrying later. They’re marrying twice, sometimes three times. And like Harvey, their second and third marriages are occurring from a place of greater social stability and financial prosperity.

That particular place – successful women of an advanced age reveling in their single-dom – has been fertile fodder for pop culture, with TV and film glorifying its wonderful lusty freedoms. There’s Sex and the City, The L Word, Cashmere Mafia, The Real Housewives of Orange Country, and on and on.

Get the Get: If at first you don't succeed... Being a “pig” no longer has a gender, or for that matter an age. It’s hard to condemn Weinstein for being shallow after watching A Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, in which 16 men and 16 women competing for the right to “love” Tequila, who is known mainly for having 2 million “friends” listed on MySpace.

Tila first entertains the men, interviewing some of them and making out with others. Then she does the same with the women. That’s the show. It might not have the novelistic complexity of The Wire, but it does prove you can be young, female, and utterly unaccomplished and still get a place at the trough.

Maybe I’m just a cynic. Maybe Harvey swoons over the way Georgina thinks. Maybe Georgina just loves portly men with prominent noses, liberal attitudes, and discerning taste in films. Maybe it’s not “love” Tila is looking for but love. Or maybe, when it comes to relationships and sex these days -- casual, matrimonial, queer, straight, and everything in between -- we’re all allowed to be pigs.

I can personally vouch for David F. Smydra's insightful post into the reasons mainstream media fails at substantively covering religion. It was the summer of 1999, a year after graduation, and in the pre-millennial madness that enveloped God's city – the sanatorium averaged two messiahs a month the years before, it was getting seven a week at the time – I lost my bearings somewhere around the Damascus Gate. Only in Jerusalem can one feel so lost.

It happens to most at some point, my editor at the Jerusalem Post explained, "The book of psalms calls Jerusalem the City of God and Zechariah calls it the City of Truth – but which God and whose truth?"

The city and the country itself forces one to wrestle with these eternal questions. And without answers, the lines between fact and faith, religion and politics, the sacred and the secular blurred, leaving behind a conflicted and confused young reporter.

My parents are Israeli-born, but raised their children in America. I've been straddling borders religious, national or otherwise all my life. I thought I was as well equipped as anyone to deal with whatever Israel threw at me: a degree in philosophy from Vassar, a thesis on Kierkegaard and Jewish thought, and a six-month research and ethnographic study at Hebrew University.

It wasn't enough to cover religion in Israel. While interviewing a Sufi mystic in Ramallah, the man leaned over and whispered, "Hamas will some day live by the words of Rumi and not the sword of Allah." If I had known then that he was referring to the 13th century poet Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, who preached tolerance, I would have recognized the importance of his statement. A Palestinian religious leader was, in effect, condemning his own. It didn't make the paper, because I didn't realize what was meant till much later.

Many of my colleagues had similar experiences. The American Press, by and large, lacks a critical perspective informed by knowledge. To a journalist, skepticism is the pillar in which all else is built. But how can one honestly question doctrine or deed without an understanding of either?

In Israel, my experience as a journalist begged the question of how religion is covered. In America, it's why religion isn't covered enough.

After a year, I left the Jerusalem Post to help start a media venture started by CNN executives targeting Baby Boomers, a demographic in hot pursuit of 'what it all means.' I interviewed Deepak Chopra, Rabbi Harold Kushner, leading academics and other figures in the spiritual marketplace, and I came to understand that you cannot grapple with America, its history and contemporary forces, without understanding the nature and history of its religious life.

Spotty religious reporting isn't a new thing. Louis Cassels wrote a much-read syndicated religion column from 1959 to 1973 for United Press International. He admitted that the worst error he remembered making was repeating the historically discredited claim that Islam was spread forcibly by the sword during religion's years of early growth, "My error stemmed from plain ignorance rather than malice."

Faith matters, and not only within the walls of a church, synagogue or mosque. There is Bible study at a Houston oil and gas company. Weekly yoga at dot-coms. Torah class at Microsoft and Islamic study at Whirlpool. In this year's presidential elections, there are relentless invocations of the Almighty. So why isn't coverage better? Why do editors show such a disregard when pitched with a religion story?

A media and religion survey by the First Amendment Center found that 76% of religion writers felt that formal training in religious studies is either helpful or essential. Sadly, 6 out of 10 writers said they had no such training.

Much of the media views religion suspiciously, or worse, as irrelevant. Journalists deal in matters of fact, religion in matters of faith, and rarely the twain shall meet. When they do, it's usually because religion intersects with politics or scandal. The latter usually determines the treatment of the former and as a result neither is dealt with wisely. So it's not just a question of giving religion more prominence, but encountering it with more understanding.

More important than the sort of knowledge one gains in the academy is what you might call religious street smarts or pew-level understanding. Contending with the powerful convictions and lofty ideas inherent to the beat require an intellectual grounding supported by a naive narrator's immersion into the experience of faith -- what journalists covering a war call "embedded." The "small" stories, the quiet, daily influence of religion on people's lives are as important as the larger issues that arise from covering belief systems or religious philosophy.

Is anyone doing a good job? There are a handful. Jeff Sharlet, editorial adviser to Jewcy, may be among the finest. His investigative reports from the evangelical front lines appearing in publications like Rolling Stone and Harpers are the very embodiment of pew-level reportage that are also intellectually grounded. His daily review of religion and the press, called The Revealer, is one of the better religion sites on the Web.

Here's a snapshot of what Sharlet, and his colleagues at The Revealer, find worthwhile elsewhere on the Web:

Bartholomew's Notes on Religion looks at "religion in the news" from a perspective that's not so much liberal as relentlessly skeptical of absurdity, and intrigued by belief.

Casing the Promised Land offers an intelligent roundup of religion news from a center-left perspective.

Christianity Today's blog is a superb resource regardless of your faith or lack thereof. Regular blogger Ted Olson roams far and wide and has the wisdom to bring back more than just the controversy of the day.

DeepBlog: Not a God beat blog itself, but a good directory to the blogosphere with a growing list of "Spiritual Blogs."

Direland, a sharply written politcs and media blog by journalist Doug Ireland, occasionally runs a "theocracy watch" colum

On Religion is an excellent newsclipping service -- terrific links to the hot topic of the moment and good finds from the lesser-known press.

OpEdNews's Religion and Politics page publishes a fine collection of original, politically progressive religion essays as well as links to other noteworthy religion articles.

The Raving Atheist, "An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Belief [on] How Religious Devotion Trivializes American Law and Politics," is an intensely intelligent, often funny, and all around well-made blog that's good enough for true believers as well as godless folk.

Relapsed Catholic is a fierce godblog without mercy for liberals or unbelievers, by Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian journalist and poet with a sharp eye for the absurd and compelling.

Brian Flemming is the man behind Bat Boy: The Musical, and his blog is everything you'd expect from a man with such interests. Which, naturally, include religion, commented on from a smart, liberal perspective. Mostly limited to the news of the day, you'll find original ideas here, and, if you care to do some free associating with Brian's other interests, genuine inspiration.

Makeout City's Jay McCarthy understands the art of linking and the collage possibilities of threading together fragments from around the web -- whether they're his own thoughts or collected ideas from others, his posts are always essays. Jay is a man who gets the Montaignesque potential of blog. He often comments on religion, a subject in which Jay has read widely and eclecticly.

The Claremont Review of Books, put out by the conservative Claremont Institute ("a new, reinvigorated conservatism, one that draws upon the timeless principles of the American founding, and applies them to the moral and political problems that we face today") is an interesting, intellectual read, whether or not you agree with their purpose, to help conservatism "understand its own majestic purposes, and become a more effective political force."

Nth Position is a webzine that advertises "high weirdness" in all areas of inquiry; investigate their "strangeness" category for manifestations of the divine. Excellent writing and surprisingly good reporting (given that there's limited cash behind this fine endeavor).

Oliver Willis bills himself as "kryptonite to stupid," and we can testify to that slogan's truth. Hey, wait -- does that make us dumb? Nah. It just means Oliver is really smart. His popular blog is mostly political talk from a "center-left" perspective, but we think it's relevant to Revealer readers because Oliver gets the role of religion in American politics. That is, he gets that it has one, whether we like it or not, and that Dems and liberals in the U.S. are blind to its full influence and importance beyond the borders of New York and L.A.

One Inch Ahead features an interesting confluence of spirit and flesh--in the occasionally religious musings of a long distance runner.

An alcoholic who died after giving himself a sherry enema has won the 2007 Darwin Award.

The Darwin Awards commemorate those who improve the gene pool by accidentally removing themselves from it.

Runners-up include:

Eighth Place: In Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of water after squeezing head first through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate while trying to retrieve his car keys.

Seventh Place: A 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker -- who often bragged he was 'totally-zoned when he ran' -- accidentally jogged off a 100-foot high cliff on his daily workout.

Sixth Place: While at the beach, Daniel Jones, 21, dug an 8-foot hole for protection from the wind and had been sitting in a beach chair at the bottom when it collapsed, burying him beneath 5 feet of sand. People on the beach used their hands and shovels trying to get him out but could not reach him. It took rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hour to free him. Jones was pronounced dead at a local hospital.

Fifth Place: Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed as he fell through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was burglarizing. Death was caused when the long flashlight he had placed in his mouth to keep his hands free rammed into the base of his skull as he hit the floor.

For more good fun, check out darwinawards.com