Kafka & Kafka

Somebody just sent me this picture, of My First Kafka and Kafka's first Kafka.

Also, if you haven't seen Rohan's work yet, you really need to. In addition to illustrating Kafka, he's done Wolves of Waverly Place and some simply breathtaking other stuff. (Including a gorgeous book that's out of print and like $100 on Amazon, and I wish I had a copy of it.)

Got rabbi?

In 2002, I went on tour with this crazy Australian Jewish punk band called YIDcore. We played a Jewish punk-rock ball at Wesleyan, some New York gigs, possibly Yale?, and one or two other places. I'd always hoped they would pull me on stage to sing "Just One Shabbos" with them (editor's note: this version), which never happened, but just the feeling that it could, that it might, was incredible enough to burst my chest open.

I received this email this morning:

Found an old t shirt of yours :)

Loved it after you left it at Wesleyan and wore it to death, I now think it's time to donate to fabric recycling, unless you want it back?

Kosher Cooking in Melbourne

Just in case you weren't ready to have your mind blown, turn back now. You might think Darth Vader is narrating, but it's my uncle. (I mean that as a compliment, I promise.) And you can spot glimpses of my brother-in-law as well as my soul brother, local (Melbourne) Jewish celebrity Bram Presser, ex-lead singer of YIDCore.



OK -- I laugh, and you kind of need to laugh, but this video is awesome. Partly that kosher cooking has gotten sophisticated enough so that a competition like this (a) exists, (b) is taken seriously, and (c) people are paying money to go to a swanky theater (that isn't even a Jewish theater) to watch the competition. I mean, sure, they do this kind of kosher cooking contest in New York (and my wife reports on it)...but in Melbourne? Go you people.

I really should be rooting for my bro, but DL, the wife of my chevrusa, is also involved. It's hard.

Tenth of Tevet! Stop Eating Now!

Today is a fast day, and it's a weird one.

The Tenth of Tevet, according to MyJewishLearning (you can read more here), is the day when the prophet

Yeheskel, together with the Jewish community forced into Babylonian exile, received news of the destruction of Jerusalem: "In the 12th year of our exile, on the fifth day of the 10th month, a fugitive came to me from Jerusalem and reported, 'The city has fallen' " (Yeheskel 33, verse 21). The Babylonian Talmud in Rosh Hashanah tractate 18B even purports that the fast should be held on the fifth of Tevet and not on the 10th: "And they equated receipt of the report of the destruction with that of Jerusalem's burning."

Normally, fast days almost never come on Fridays. I'd actually thought it was a halacha that you couldn't fast right before Shabbat -- and, in some cases, it really is; other minor fast days, like the Fast of Esther, get moved to Thursday or Sunday when they fall out on Friday. But Tevet is an exception, if a rare one (the last time this happened was 14 years ago). The reason is that the Tenth of Tevet is described as "עצם היום הזה ('the very day')," according to Yeheskel himself (who we like to call Ezekiel).

My latest Jewish nightmare came yesterday afternoon, via my father-in-law. At the end of a totally unrelated email, as a sort of throwaway P.S., he wrote: "Have an easy fast and spare a thought for us who have to wait till after 9pm to break it."

Now, he lives in Australia, where (as you might know) it's summer right now -- meaning that the sun sets later. So, where a fast day in America might end at 5 p.m., there it's going to go way into the night. Yesterday, I was sort of upset and totally spazzing, and only the good graces of our good Editorial Fellow Jeremy Moses kept me alive. "Want to go out to lunch?" he said.

We did. To an amazingly luscious, colorful, and totally explode-our-stomachs-huge Indian buffet. Jeremy did two trips; I did three. Whereupon we shlepped back to work, stuffed ourselves into our chairs (I barely fit) and I read the email from my father-in-law.

And I felt my stomach retch. I feared of tasting that delicious lunch all over again. How could I have forgotten a fast day?!

Of course, you already know the moral. Part 1: Yesterday wasn't a fast day, it's today. Part 2: Australia is something like 16 hours ahead of us. My father-in-law emailed me at about 4 a.m. (which, for him, is already mid-morning). And I'm still not perfect, but I'm working on it. We all deserve a second chance. Even if it happens in that Groundhog Day-like way of experiencing the same day twice, courtesy of Australian time.

Ten Things I'm Looking Forward To in New York City

Packing now. It's been a breathless pair of months in Melbourne, and it's an added awesomeness that we get to come back here in a few months for a family wedding (and a double added bonus that we could be part of the engagement in the first place, packing snow clothes and meting out advice...well, the advice we could, anyway). I'm feeling a bit down on the world for forcing me to go back to New York, and in February at that, and spending all my time behind a desk instead of, well, doing early-morning praying & working out (seriously!) in the dew and going to the park with my kid every day. And the fact that poetry shows here are as energetic and sing-alongy and fist-thumping as AC/DC shows.

Which is why I'm trying to get myself psyched for the USA.

1. Saying the words "NEW YORK CITY" and kind of getting chills.
2. Listening to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album in the East Village.
3. The first incognito day of spring.
4. My free show at Franklin Park with Penina Roth and Stephen Elliott.
5. A zillion kosher restaurants, and none of them are "America-themed."
6. Nirvana Slam. (More on that soon.)
7. Young Adult Writers Drinks Night.
8. Making our own Passover seder.
9. More little MJL internet movies.
10. ______________*

* I'm leaving this one blank, because I want to find something to take up that spot that's even better than anything I'm expecting.

My Comics Debut

Granted, it's not me writing Uncanny X-Men, but it's on the other side of the camera. It's from Ethan Young's excellent e-comic Tails, which you can read free here. (You can actually start on the chapter I'm in and not miss out on too much -- here's the first page -- and then go back and read from the start. Because it is amazing, and highly recommended.)



See? Even when I'm in Australia, New York finds a way to claim me. The temperatures in Melbourne are about the same as the temperatures in New York -- 35 degrees in both places -- but, believe me, it feels a lot better here.

Ethan (SPOILER WARNING) used to live downstairs from us. He designed this card for my daughter's first birthday, which I'm still ga-ga about. The Yiddish was added by his roommate. Check it out and marvel:

Ouch. Sorry for the pun.

This is Where I Was This Weekend

This is where I was this weekend:

We didn't see the Wild Things. Or, we might have. No Spike Jonze, though.

And this is one of my three favourite places in the world.

That's it. For now. New story coming, as soon as we (it and I, that is) stop fighting with each other.

Jews Wear Hats

Jews wear a lot of hats. I mean that metaphorically but also literally: from black hats to fur hats to little white tent-yarmulkes to doilies to the Jackie O cloches of the Modern Orthodox upper-middle-class, hats and headcoverings mean different things -- important things -- to Jews.

There's the idea of covering your head to show modesty before God, and the idea of covering your head to shield it from other people. Observant men cover their heads whenever they make a blessing. And sometimes people cover their head-coverings -- when entering a non-kosher restaurant, for example, or when you're trying to appear inconspicuous for one reason or another. (Lest your mind jump to unkind judgments about people who wear yarmulkes, let me tell you: I spent nine months of my life wearing a tweed hat while living in parts of Eastern Europe where you didn't want to be spotted wearing anything vaguely Jewish except an Uzi.)

What got me thinking about all this was Facebook. Two friends of mine, both amazingly talented performers, both from way different parts of the musical/social/spiritual continuum, and separated by thousands of miles, popped up next to each other on my friends list. Their pictures were next to each other -- and, to be honest, it was hard to look away. If for no other reason than, well, this:



Insert here the jokes about how all Jews look alike. (It's true.) But it's funny how, aside from their finely-trimmed beards or their studiously artistic composure (Jon Madof, left, fronts the experimental jazz band Rashanim; Patrick A is the singer for Jewish punk band Can Can), both of them have singular headgear.

When I started wearing a yarmulke and hanging out with mostly Orthodox people -- significantly guys, for the purposes of this post -- I would frequently realize how often my yarmulked new friends were, well, not yarmulked. We'd go out on a Saturday night and I'd be wearing my new black velvet kippah, possibly still with the price tag on the underbelly, and I'd be accompanied by half a dozen guys in baseball caps, one in a ski cap, one in a Holden Caulfield hunter's hat, and one, only the good Lord knows why, in a sombrero.

The one thing they'd avoid -- like the plague, like the devil, and like every stigma in the book -- is wearing a yarmulke.

Or: they'd avoid wearing just a yarmulke.

At first I thought it was akin to my reticence to wear a yarmulke in Prague. Not that they didn't want to be lynched, necessarily, but that they didn't want to be instantly identified as Jewish. It's a stigma, after all. Either they were being low-key about it or they were being ashamed of their Jewish pride. In fact, I can remember people going on self-righteous anti-hat crusades, saying that hats equated ethnic shame. "You're a Jew!" they would rant and rave. "Be proud of it! Why do you need to hide beneath a hat? Do black people hide their skin beneath a hat? Did Moses need to hide his Judaism? Did Anne Frank?"

I would stop myself before mentioning that Moses lived several decades undercover as a Coptic Egyptian, and that Anne Frank probably didn't have a choice in the matter -- yellow armbands, you know -- but it's each person's choice. Besides, wasn't wearing a yarmulke and hiding it better than not wearing a yarmulke at all?

Now I'm older. I still wear a yarmulke (covered, sometimes, by a knit cap or a hoody). I live in New York, where I'm surrounded by a lot of other people who also wear yarmulkes -- and many people who don't. Some of them, of course, just don't wear yarmulkes straight-out. But others are deeply devout, and yet you'll rarely catch a glimpse of them in just a kippah -- the hip-hop artist Y-Love, for instance (he wears a tweed jeff-cap), or rabbi/author Danya Ruttenberg (yarmulke with attached devil-horns -- well, sometimes), or even the Biala Rebbe (either a Stetson hat or a fur-tipped streimel, depending on the day of the week).

And I think I've hit upon the reason. Even though we're all Jews, and we all cover our heads to honor the same ancient decree, we all want to do it in our own way. We don't all pray with the same voice, or using the same language. We don't dress the same. We have our own traditions that we might share with our family, or our friends, or the synagogue we attend. But in the modern cult of individuality, for better or for worse, we feel the need to self-identify with everything we do, from the way we act to the way we practice our religious rituals...to the clothes we wear.

And that's why we cover our heads in different ways.

One last point: In the '80s, the two big foreign synth-pop groups were Men Without Hats and Men at Work. Men Without Hats, in spite of writing a song with a Jewish mother-approved title ("The Safety Dance"), faded from sight. Men at Work, on the other hand -- who have frequently been seen wearing hats, and come from Australia, where ozone conditions dictate that you should always wear a hat -- have a song that's become the most recognizable Jewish wedding song ever:




You see? It's the hats that always win. Hence my argument that, given the choice, Jews will always gravitate toward odd and unique headgear. So there.

Another Home

Just called a friend from my work number. We haven't seen each other in a while. He's Australian, but has lived in Los Angeles for years. He picked up, saw the 212 area code, and was like, "You're calling on an American number; are you in America?"

What he actually meant was Are you in New York? There's something deep about this, I think. For Australians, anywhere they are is Australia. And anywhere you're calling from where they can't meet you for a beer in five minutes...that means, you're somewhere else.

Punk Torah: Alive and On Fire

The new site Punk Torah is live today! A few weeks ago, Patrick A -- the lead singer of the band Can Can -- started doing Punk Rock Parsha, a weekly video podcast about the week's Torah portion from a punk perspective.

As the podcast built up steam, Patrick has also delivered rants about anti-Orthodox diatribes (in spite of the fact that he isn't Orthodox by a longshot), Shabbos poems, and Judaism in the year 5000.

In recent weeks, the spillover of new Punk Torahs has seemed to hint that it's building up into something...and, well, this is it. In the introduction, Patrick declares, "If you love G_d, Torah, and the Jewish people...but are really tired of the crap that comes along with it, then keep reading."

The mission statement continues: "We think of synagogues as the Jewish night club...a place where you go and relax for the first time all week. Take a load off, make a new friend, sing, drink, dance...whatever moves you! Somewhere along the way, the Jewish People lost sight of that."

The site has sections for both the weekly parsha and random other videos, and then there are sporadic other features -- including one on YIDCore, who are quite possibly the most talented Australian Jewish punk band to ever play through the entire "Fiddler on the Roof" soundtrack...and, uh, an interview with me. It covers Never Mind the Goldbergs, of course, but also delves into Muslim punks, Hasidic underground culture, and why Jews are always outsiders.

But, really, the most amazing thing there so far is a poem/rant from somebody named "Michael S." I don't want to quote it, because I'm mentioned and it might be namedropping, but it makes me believe so strongly in everything we're doing, so much that I can't not write it:

They talk about their mortgages.
We stand there nodding our heads, trying to interject and talk about the concert we went to the night before, the religious ecstasy of watching another human being bare their soul in front of other people.
They wear khakis and polo shirts.
I wear my tzizits, a t-shirt and jeans.
They like pastels.
I have tattoos.

...

So we temple shop. We go to services everywhere we can. We stand around with the other “adults” and wait for the opportunity to name drop some underground bands. We mention Matthue Roth or Y-Love, G_dcast, the religious orientation of Benjamin Grimm*, looking for a glimmer of recognition, a slight nod from another weirdo like us, hoping against hope that someone will hear us, someone will recognize the passwords to this secret club that we didn’t even know we belong to and show us the clubhouse we didn’t even know existed.

keep reading >

Rupert Murdoch Dreams

Last night, I had dinner with Ronald Lauder and some other folks who tackled a lot of different political, philosophical, and theological questions -- most of which can be summed up pretty simply: Why does everyone hate Israel?

And then this morning, I woke up to Rupert Murdoch saying the same thing:

"I am curious: Why do we never hear calls for Hamas leaders to be charged with war crimes? ... Whether Israel is ever found guilty of any war crime hardly matters. Hamas gets a propaganda win simply by having the charge made often and loudly enough."

Weirdly, his editorial in the Jerusalem Post takes a bit of a stand-uppy beginning -- "Let me set the record straight: I live in New York. I have a wife who craves Chinese food. And people I trust tell me I practically invented the word 'chutzpah'" -- and then segues directly, and intelligently, into an impassioned and fairly creative analysis of Israel's (failed) PR battle. He reiterates several points -- "If you are committed to Israel's destruction, and if you believe that dead Palestinians help you score a propaganda victory, you do things like launch rockets from a Palestinian schoolyard. This ensures that when the Israelis do respond, it will likely lead to the death of an innocent Palestinian - no matter how many precautions Israeli soldiers take" -- but this editorial succeeds so profoundly because of two things:

1. These are facts that, in the past, have primarily been said by Israeli strategists to other Israeli strategists, like shipwreck victims screaming into the wind.
2. It's Rupert Murdoch saying it. Dammit, he's Australian. People listen to him.

The International Herald-Tribune also featured a prominent article on Israeli rebranding -- or it was touted that way, anyway. The text actually ended up spending most of the article talking about Avigdor Lieberman, the allegedly racist head of the Israel Beitenu party (and prospective appointee to be foreign minister) before turning to these sage words -- which have some pretty hot "duh" action, and which most of us could probably recite in our sleep:

"When we show Sderot, others also see Gaza," said Ido Aharoni, head of a rebranding team at the Foreign Ministry. "Everything is twinned when seen through the conflict. The country needs to position itself as an attractive personality, to make outsiders see it in all its reality. Instead, we are focusing on crisis management. And that is never going to get us where we need to go over the long term."

What will work for the long term? G*d knows, probably not Rupert Murdoch. But he's headed in the right direction, at least.

brother-in-law karaoke

today the masses of family-in-law converged upon our house, filling up the living room and dining room for possibly the first time ever. (here i should note that the terms "living room" and "dining room" are location-specific, meaning that, in new york city, the only way to divide a postage-stamp-sized living room from a postage-stamp-stub-sized dining room is by putting a bookcase that takes up half of both rooms but does, nonetheless, create the illusion that you have a normally-segmented (though microscopic) house.
annnyway....

itta spent the afternoon babysitting niece and nephew, and i spent it finishing the passably beta version of the candy in action website. then tonight, my in-from-melbourne brother-in-law dov and i went off in search of a bar.

i'd passed this lounge/bar/internet cafe a bunch, so we went there first. turns out the "bar" part was...well, false advertising. "we might apply for beer," said the hostess. "what do you think?"

we walked around. we found a place that, according to a hipster on the corner, "might be sketch or might be not." we took our chances. dov's tall. i have payos. who in brooklyn would be threatened by us?

so we went into the bar. dov asked them to put on the eagles game. three people worked the TV until green uniforms appeared. and, as the bartender returned with our drinks, she bore a deathly serious countenance as she told us:

"it's karaoke night. and you are both going to sing."

we did. eventually. dov kept flipping through the book, asking should we do this? we can't do this. and telling me that his voice wasn't good. then i signed myself up, and i told the host that he was going to sing "land down under" right after me.

i went up. we were the only white people in the bar, did i tell you that? and the only people who had gone before sang mary j. blige. i was freaked out. usually, when i do karaoke, i do cheesy white-people songs. the dixie chicks and madonna are my friends. alanis. god, alanis. but tonight i did stevie wonder. signed, sealed, delivered. and everyone started clapping along with me. after i was done, dov sang, and he even hit the whistling chorus. and then a middle-aged man sang a note-perfect rendition of luther vandross.

and we all felt like we'd earned our keep in this world.