On slumlords, and slums, and not wanting anyone dead

I completely agree that this morning's New York Post cover is sketchy, and racist, and is basically anti-Semite-baiting creepiness.



But can we talk for one moment about how many Orthodox Jews are running slums and shitty housing operations, and how none of us is saying enough about it?

I'm not going to share the whole story right now. (I'm not.) (My kids are out for an hour, and I'm in the middle of a short story, and although this is burning me up right now, I have to act like writing is my profession and not just listening to whatever the voices in my head are telling me to write about.) But when I was trying to become more observant, and living in Crown Heights, and the only place I could find was a big old tenement on Empire Blvd. -- I was the only Orthodox Jew in the building, and my roommate and I were the only Jews/white people whatsoever -- conditions were atrocious. The halls and stairways smelled like pee. A toilet backup would last weeks before somebody came. You had to wait in line for an hour to hand in your rent check every month, in a dirty office through a glass window. (I wrote this short story about it, although I exaggerated things.) There were roaches the size of hot dogs. One morning I was on a wheezy elevator with a 6-year-old kid, and I stepped on one of those giant roaches, and a mountain of pus oozed out, but he was relieved. (I think he was relieved.)

It stayed there for almost a month, that body and that hardening pus. No other residents would touch it. I kept thinking maybe I should scrape it off, since I was the murderer in question, but I was squeamish, and besides, I kept thinking, I did the good deed in the first place. But, come on. How ridiculous, how devoid of humanity, is it that the landlords and all the people who work for them spent an entire month not going on an elevator in their own building, not even looking inside, and letting all sorts of terrible things happen -- most of which are way more traumatic than a dead squashed cockroach.

I'm not saying that the deceased, may he be remembered in blessing, was one of those people. I'm not saying he didn't do amazing things for other people. But maybe we can do one more act of kindness in his memory, and look at the money we're making from people, and ask just how we've earned every dollar, and if we're truly helping every single person we can.

(Edit: Changed the first line from the questionable "possibly echoes the Holocaust in a really scary and journalistically questionable way" because Yitz and David said it sounded weird and was drawing away from my main point. Thanks for the edits {you can still read about it in the comments below}.)

Ghosting

The last girl I danced with was my Aunt Et. It was my sister's wedding. She was 98. Aunt Et was, not my sister. I'd spent most of the time retreating in the corner with my wife, the only two Orthodox people at the wedding, me clapping in a circle with my family at the beginning while the band played the Hora, the lead singer, this black woman in a sparkly nothing dress who pronounced all the Jewish words way too perfectly to actually be Jewish herself, belting out "Siman Tov u'Mazel Tov" while the big baritone sax gave it an illicitly funky bassline.

So then we retreated, and then my wife, who grew up both Orthodox and in a big family, told me, forget it, she was diving in to dance, and I stood on the sidelines alone. I clapped along and plastered this big toothy smile. It felt fake at first, my face muscles contorted too tightly, and then I watched my sister and her husband dancing and it got to be real. This guy was going to be with her forever. Then I watched my wife get roped into the inner circle, the family circle, by my uncle, who officially shouldn't have held her hand, but I think I was the only one thinking about that. My cheeks burned. I felt more and more awkward with every passing moment. I went to check on the kids. I went to get another drink. Then my wife, who'd been at it this whole time, grabbed me and pulled me in.

Flash forward: Almost an hour later, most of the bridal party has retreated to their seats. Even my sister and her husband are taking a breather at the head table. I, meanwhile, am still on the dance floor, dancing up a storm with all the cousins whose names I can barely keep straight. Somebody pushes me to the center. It's just me and Aunt Et. I am way more out of breath than she is. She has way better moves than I do. She's dressed better, too. She wears a swanky white pantsuit and is snapping her fingers above her shiny hair. I try to do the Fiddler-on-the-Roof thing with my feet, because that's as much as I can compete with. We are holding hands. We are laughing and salsaing and trying our best to ignore everyone around us, because they are laughing too, and watching us like we are the only thing on TV, and probably deservedly so. It's the only near-centenarian in the room and the only Bigfoot-bearded Hasidic Jew in the room, and they're reenacting a scene from Pulp Fiction that's itself a reenactment of Saturday Night Fever. This is how our traditions prosper: One hazy memory transmits from one generation to the next, passed like a drunken game of Telephone, or rocked on the dance floor.

It's two years later. My sister and her husband have just had their first baby. And I have just gotten a call: Aunt Et died today.

I'm not really going to process it right now. She's my grandmother's sister, and now she feels like she's a little lonelier in the world, which makes me feel a little more lonely too. And death is one of those things I can't talk about and can't even think about too hard, or else my brain will revert to thinking about something else entirely, and even when I write a book about it I can't even really tell you what I think, or how much I miss the people who aren't around anymore, or think much past the times we've had to think about what they might be doing now. I've never actually seen a ghost. Unless these count as ghosts, in which case, I think I see them all the time.


I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because I was a little too emotionally unstable to think about it myself.

Life after Kafka

It's been a weird run of weeks. My First Kafka is doing amazing. The BBC! The New Yorker! Electric Lit! Google! (Granted, the Google thing was more, well, Kafka himself than the little book that Rohan and I put together, but I'm so not complaining.)

And the same week I got some hugely awful news about a close friend, and some more pretty hugely awful news about my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, going out of print -- this had actually happened back in April, but Scholastic didn't tell me, and they sold all the remaining copies to some Amazon reseller, and the only way I found out was that people kept asking me why it was out of stock. (I still have a bunch of copies on my site store, which you can buy if you want, until they run out, and if they do, I'll just send you a pdf if you ask.) And then I came down with this cold that turned into a cough that didn't go away that, apparently, is pneumonia.

Anyway. it's been pretty wild. Thank you for sticking with me. The fact that I have now appeared on the same network as Doctor Who is really all I've ever asked out of life, and I've got it, and the blessings are flooding in like moldy bread.

And now it's the Three Weeks, this period in Judaism where we mourn for the burning of the Temple, and more crazy stuff is happening. I have a ton to say about it, but most of it's not really relevant -- for actual insightful stuff from an Orthodox perspective, you should totally read Rabbi Fink or Yakov Horowitz. Me, I'm just good for stories, mostly. These days I keep getting a Kafka quote stuck in my head: "The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary." (Granted, it was part of the Talmud a while before Kafka, but who am I to come down on the man for appropriation?)

It's almost two in the morning. I have a head stuffed with snot and a brain stuffed with thoughts that won't quit. But the trees look so nice out my window in the streetlights that they're actually glowing, and Brooklyn doesn't feel like an iron city but an actual place to live, and I'm going to try to sleep for a bit before I have to wake up and make video games. Like I said. I'm blessed. Thank you.

Orthodox High School Poetry Slam

Listen to this right now. Download it if you know what's best for you, just so you can listen to it constantly and nonstop. These are mp3s from the last Yeshiva Poetry Slam Championships, held at the end of February 2013. They're all high school kids. They're all amazing. I mean, you'll find out.

The pieces were recorded by Aaron Roller, who's been putting these meets together. At this point it's sort of all held together by the duct tape of a few people's determination and passion. Because, you know, Orthodox yeshivas don't automatically have poetry slam programs going on -- no, not even in Brooklyn.

I wish someone was doing this stuff while I was in yeshiva. (Not that I was ever in yeshiva.) But -- it's inspiring and crazy and electric, what these kids say about their lives. What they say about G-d.

Dressing the Part

So a few weeks ago I stumbled across this weird video. It's a fashion show from the '80s, a Jean-Paul Gaultier collection featuring hot bored-looking chicks dressed up as Hasidic Jewish men.

Of course.

I was basically compelled to feature it in a Jewniverse, which I did (it's out next week--subscribe right now to get it!). Then I wrote it. Then I thought that was the end of it.

It wasn't.

Today I'm wearing a white button-down shirt. It's a far cry from the punk-rock t-shirts of my choice, the vaguely hip blazers of my wife's selection, but it's what I've been wearing more often lately. Like Gaultier, I might be going through a phase of my own -- albeit, less fashionably. And, uh, less revealingly.

I have to say, I kind of like it. I feel more serious -- about work, about myself, and about little things. (My posture is improving dramatically.) It's a little more distinguished. And when I walk down the streets of my own relatively ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn, I get this whole stare of respect and/or identification with a group of people whose respect or comradeship I never thought I'd be after. Which is to say, the old guys. I always wondered why the bulk of retired people didn't just wear t-shirts and Bermuda shorts. Now I think I know.

Anyway. A few weeks ago, the online show Rew and Who did a feature on 1/20, the movie I wrote. It's filmed in the East Village, in a studio in the back of a bar called Otto's Shrunken Head, and it's every bit as punk and alterna-something as you think it is. I was invited in for an interview along with one of the stars. Heading out of the office, I shed my starched and Jewish shirt and changed into a more-suitable Mumm-Ra t-shirt (which you might think is related to Mamre, where Abraham pitched his famous tent, but is actually the bad guy on ThunderCats) and ran downtown.

So that was how I filmed the first interview:  

We got invited back today -- we're appearing with Alan Merill, who wrote "I Love Rock 'n Roll." And again, I'm wearing a white shirt. This time, I'm not taking it off. After all, there's nothing more punk than not looking very punk in the first place. This might not be all of who I am, but it's a part of who I am.

Even if they mistake me for Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Why We Pray What We Pray

I became Orthodox under the guidance of someone who advised me to run from it. Rabbi Dr. Barry Freundel, the rabbi of the Kesher Israel Congregation in Washington D.C. -- whose name you might recognize from the 2000 presidential election, when he was constantly quoted as "Joe Lieberman's rabbi" and asked deeply-thought questions like, "If a nuclear war breaks out on Shabbat, will Senator Lieberman be allowed to help out in the ensuing battles?"

In addition to being a rabbi, he holds advanced degrees in chemistry and biology, and is a fiendishly rational thinker. While many people are attracted to religion through mystical stories and supernatural powers, for me the draw was the exact opposite. I was already totally nuts. I needed something to ground me, a rational set of rules to lead my life by. I started by going to Rabbi Freundel's weekly halacha shiur -- a three-hour class about everything from washing your hands before getting out of bed to whether one needs to tie tzitzit on a rain poncho to what happens if you start eating a ham sandwich, realize it's not kosher, then get a craving for macaroni and cheese -- are you allowed to? (Yes: because ham doesn't fall under the category of kosher meat.) "Run the other way," he said. "We are competists." I'm a masochist. It just made me hungry for more.

Anyway. Rabbi Freundel has a new book, Why We Pray What We Pray, and it's a doozy. The book is an excellent field guide to Jewish prayers, perhaps the most well-conceived and fully-realized book on the subject in English to come out in years. (And just so you don't think my opinion is weighted, he is also the man who forced me to type up 112 pages of notes about tefillin. Five times.) What the book lacks in scope, it makes up in depth -- choosing just six different prayers, giving their history, previous incarnations,

Which might sound boring under someone else's wing. The first chapter is dedicated to the Shema -- and Freundel picks apart its history step by step, discovering that, in its 3000-year lifespan, the prayer once included several other parts of the Torah -- and things that didn't even come from the Torah, including the second line of its present incarnation -- as well as one whole Torah portion (this part was ultimately excised, on the grounds that it would take too damn long for normal people to get through) and the entirety of the Ten Commandments. Later chapters go through other prayers, some of which (like "Nishmat") have just become known as long and sort of meandering in the present liturgy, others (such as "Alenu") have become sing-songy and equally meaningless for us. This book is an adventure in the best way, a book that makes us love words again.

Reading Why We Pray, I sometimes wished that Freundel, and not some boring dictionary-like rabbi, wrote the lines of commentary underneath the prayers in my normal old prayerbook. Then I changed my mind. Those little two-line insights are good for ignoring on a day-to-day basis, and jumping right back into the prayerbook. These stories are at their best for actual reading, for paying attention to and for diving into. As Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Lord Sacks says (in this superb video), Jewish people are great at being kind to others and at studying, two of the three pillars on which the world rests. The praying part -- taking these words that we say every time we set foot in a synagogue* and giving our prayer meaning, a life beyond our lips, and a meaning above the dullness of mundane routine -- is what we need to work on.

And here, folks, is where it starts.

____
* -- every time we set foot in a synagogue and it's not for a disco Bar Mitzvah party, I mean.

Zealots and Bullies

So right now I'm on vacation in Chicago. Weird to do a trip where we're just visiting people and not Having Meetings or Running To Do Insanely Complicated Things In An Unreasonably Short Amount of Time or something of that sort. But before I turn my computer off and vacate, I just needed to share these two little parting gifts:

The Jewish Press, which is the biggest Orthodox paper in New York and which all my Hasidic Cousins actually read, wrote an article about art in the Orthodox world. More specifically:

A nascent community of religious artists - including the Orthodox African-American hip-hop musician Y-Love, poet Matthue Roth, novelist Tova Mirvis, and the novelist and playwright Naomi Ragen - are all working to create a more art-friendly and embracing religious model.

It is so, so unimaginably cool to be cited as an example of how people can be Orthodox and artists and how it doesn't have to be some big religious crisis. This is my favorite part of the article, though -- apparently, before Yeshiva University introduced its business school, everyone thought it was a crazy idea:

In 1977, a fake ad in Yeshiva University's yearbook made fun of the idea of a business school at the university. The mock ad promised that a school of business "will be opening its doors to all students who cannot cope with liberal arts."

The rest is at the link.


And the Scholastic blog came out with a post about bullying, and how to deal with bullying, and what to do about it. And that, no surprise, one of the best ways to cope and not just be damaged by it is to read about it. They suggest a bunch of resources, and one of the recommended titles is 

Losers by Matthue Roth: This off-the-wall novel introduces readers to Jupiter—a Russian immigrant learning to deal with high-school life in America. With dead-on deadpan humor, Matthue Roth makes everything illuminated about American teen life—like Borat as directed by John Hughes.

Okay. Now I've got some Sears Tower to climb. Shabbos and out.

Jewish Christmas Music, 2010 Edition

You know, I don't think I've ever actually heard "White Christmas."

Sure, I know that it was written by Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant, and that it's become a vital part of American culture. I'd definitely heard part of it before, the end part, where everyone sings "may all your Christmases be white"...but does the song really go like that? Is it really sort of pretty and actually funny? Does this make me a bad Jew? (Add this to the fact that I admitted on our Jewish parenting site that I actually like Halloween, I'm about to be kicked out of the so-Orthodox-I-don't-own-a-TV camp for reals.)

read more -->

Casting the Perfect Baal Teshuva

Just spent way more time than I realized on the phone with some folks at National Geographic, who are planning a documentary on the baal teshuva lifestyle -- that is, people who weren't born Orthodox who somehow or another wind up that way.

"Yeah," I said with a nervous giggle that I wasn't sure where it came from, "I'm a baal teshuva." And right away, it felt like I was admitting something, like I'd come out of the closet with a deviancy that was way too obscure for anybody in the room to know what I was talking about, but which was nonetheless embarrassing the hell out of me to say aloud.


And I wasn't even 100% sure why. Admitting that you didn't grow up Orthodox should be as easy as admitting you didn't grow up Buddhist (for a white person, anyway) -- it's not like anyone expects a fresh-faced kid who can't pronounce Hebrew right and just barely knows how to keep a kosher kitchen to be undetectably Orthodox.

But when you're first starting to be a religious Jew, the last thing you want is to stick out. You want

So I told her my story. I told her how I became Orthodox on my own, outside of a community (in San Francisco, with a bunch of middle-aged gay men teaching me to be Orthodox and a bunch of female-to-male transsexuals teaching me how to act like a guy). I told her about wanting to do Orthodoxy my own way, and then marrying into a family who'd been Hasidim ever since Hasidism started. I told her about how you start thinking in two different languages, one in your job and with your old friends and another with your new friends and the new places you hang out with, how you spend all your time inside a synagogue with random men who you'd never hang out with on your own, and how even your wife doesn't totally understand the life you used to lead.

I realized about two minutes in that I was basically just narrating my memoir (the seasonally-apt Yom Kippur a Go-Go -- read it now! Let it inspire your thoughts of repentance! Or just get a kick out of me explaining Shabbos to my stripper girlfriend!). But I kept talking anyway.

And then, about half an hour later, the National Geographic person (who was being very kind and patient with me) told me that, uh, they were looking for recent baalei teshuva. That is, people who were just starting to become religious, and had just moved into religious neighborhoods.

"But I'll tell my producer about you," she promised.

And then she asked if I could find a baal teshuva (or a few) who might be interested in being profiled.

I reiterated her biggest problem -- that recent baalei teshuva don't want to be stigmatized as baalei teshuva. Not to mention the whole film-crew-following-you-around-as-you-try-to-learn-about-your-new-life thing. But hey, if they cast Jersey Shore, that shouldn't be a problem. Also, for most people I know, Orthodoxy isn't really a gradual process -- people wade in the pool a little, and the next thing you know, they're either living in Bnei Brak with a pile of Shabbos stones or they're straight back to being hippies or investment bankers or reggae singers or whatever they were doing before they started being frum.

So there you have it. Are you a baal teshuva? Do you know anyone? Give me a shout, and I'll hook you guys up.

Beginnings: Jewels of Elul

I decided to be Orthodox in the middle of college. I was on scholarship to a very big school, and I was feeling very small. One of my best friends had just gotten raped and then sort of ignored by most of our circle of friends, and ran away to Europe. I'd thought I was going to New York for college, then realized that going to New York for college actually cost money, and so I was back in Washington D.C. on scholarship and with noplace to live.

I surfed around on people's couches. Some of them were good friends, but more often than not, they were randoms -- people I'd met once or twice at a concert or a club meeting, the ones who noticed I was looking even shabbier than I usually did. I tried never to stay more than a day or two. I didn't want to impose, but more, I didn't really want these people -- these vague people who faded in and out of my life -- to notice I was changing.

And it wasn't like I was choosing to change. It was a side-effect of being around different people every day. No one expected me to say "the Matthue thing," whatever sort of thing I always said, or to behave a certain way. I was getting born again every day. If I wanted to skip breakfast, how would they know I had a rigorous routine of a bowl of Cheerios with soy milk every day since 9th grade? Boom. Today, I am no longer a breakfast eater.

But I had all this time. I'd been hanging out with my friend constantly and now she was gone. I'd been searching for a place and now I was promised one; I just had to wait three weeks for the old tenant to move out. It was maddening. I didn't know what to do with all this time. Study more? No; it was college. Why would I do that? Write a book? I'd just written a book. It took time, but not the time I had free -- that was for late nights and early mornings. In my life now, where I used to call my friend constantly or hang out in the privacy of my room, there was just an empty silence.

On Friday I was crashing with the guitarist from my band. He was going to a concert in Alexandria; he left me the keys on the bureau and headed out. Faced with a rare weekend night with no plans, I asked myself the question that, in college, surrounded by a million other people, you never actually ask: What do I WANT to do?

I went on a walk. I didn't carry anything -- not my phone, not my wallet (which was falling apart anyway), not even an ID, just in case I got lost and drowned or the Washington Monument fell on me or something. I was a notorious worrier. I actually thought about these things constantly. But not tonight. I didn't want to worry about anything.

I ended up at synagogue. I'd always known where it was; it was in the middle of Georgetown. I'd just never gone inside. But a hundred other people walking in at the same time, I could do it without anyone noticing. I prayed in the back of the room, alone and with my prayerbook in front of my face. A hundred other people prayed under their breaths; it was a huge noise composed of whispers. In that noise, I could say anything I wanted.

That's when I decided to start coming back every day.

They say, when you want to become an observant Jew, you should do it with baby steps. Stop watching TV for one Shabbat. Give up the Internet a few Shabbats later. I didn't work that way. I dove in. I had all this time, remember. What was I going to do with it? Something productive. And it ended up being something productive in a way that wasn't going to be like publishing a story or playing a concert. Praying is like giving up your time and your energy and your creativity. But it's like giving it up for a reason; saying that I don't just need to impress the people around me. Believing that that's not all that matters.

I talk a lot; you could say I've made a career out of it. But this talking alone -- talking where nobody else can hear you but G*d -- is, in my very small way, saying that not everything I do has to have a specific reason, for work or for my friends or for my writing. Sometimes, you're just giving it up for G*d. Are my prayers going anywhere? It almost doesn't matter.

I became Orthodox overnight. But becoming religious -- that's taking a lifetime.

Crossposted from Mixed Multitudes. This post is part of Jewels of Elul, which celebrates the Jewish tradition to dedicate the 29 days of the month of Elul to growth and discovery in preparation for the coming high holy days. This year the program is benefiting Beit T'shuvah, a residential addiction treatment center in Los Angeles. You can subscribe on Jewels of Elul to receive inspirational reflections from public figures each day of the month. You don’t have to be on the blog tour to write a blog post on “The Art of Beginning... Again”. We invite everyone to post this month (August 11th - September 8th) with Jewels of Elul to grow and learn.

Jews of the Future

Oh, hey! Check it out: My article for Patheos on Orthodox Jews and technology got picked up by the Washington Post and Newsweek!

(I know, it's exactly the same article as I already told you about, but I'm still pretty psyched. Okay. Now I've got to get back to the wedding parties...but I'll see you when I'm back in the States.)

Oh, and thanks to Natasha Nadel for letting me know!

The Future of Orthodox Technology

A few weeks ago, Talia Davis wrote to a bunch of Jewish techy and thinky folks and asked us what we thought about the future of Judaism. Talia is the force of nature behind the religion blog Patheos.com's Jewish site, and when she chops down a tree, we hear it.

A bunch of folks -- including MJL's Anita Diamant and Patrick Aleph -- responded. Some of the highlights include a piece about activism from Rabbi Shmuly Yanklowitz (who's shaking up ethical kashrut in America) and a pretty awesome article on feminism that argues that equality is not the only answer.

I weighed in about how technology changes Orthodox observance and gossip. Here's a snip:

If you look at the biggest change in both communication and skeptical dissent in religious communities, you'll find two web sites with overwhelmingly huge traffic numbers: Vos Iz Neias and Yeshiva World News. These sites have created a sort of self-policing news filter, reprinting mainstream news stories (from sources as varied as FOX News and PETA), sometimes with names filtered out to prevent gossip or immodest photos deleted, with which ultra-Orthodox people can reliably access "safe" internet content. Of course, the actual news stories reprinted pales next to the comments sections of these sites, which routinely run up to 500 or 1000 entries per story, in which people trade information, debate rulings of Jewish law, and call out mainstream Orthodox authorities (and each other) on inconsistencies or simply gossip about the best new kosher restaurants in a certain area. Is the internet becoming the new rabbinical authority among ultra-Orthodox Jews? Of course not. But I'd be lying if I said I didn't know tons of people who have Googled their own halachic questions (and I've used the same methodology once or twice myself).

I also rant a fair bit about Orthodox extremist sites like VosIzNeias and Frum Satire, and talk about how the comments are the best part of the Web. Read the rest here.

(And although they didn't include a photo credit, I'm writing it here: the awesome new pic is from Dan Sieradski. Of course.)

The Good Wife: Who You Callin’ Extra?

Matthue Roth worked on the set of the new CBS drama The Good Wife as an extra, and blogged about it Friday and Tuesday. The episode, "Unorthodox," is about the Hasidic Jewish community in Chicago. It aired yesterday.

If you who don't know, the main use of extras in film and TV is as background. Our job is to make reality look normal, or at least palatable, and fill it with much the same grouping of people who would otherwise exist on the very same street or park or police station -- only we are specifically hired, instead of gaping at the movie stars or straining to overhear the story, to completely ignore all of it.

So it's not surprising that, when they were originally casting this, they didn't think to call real Hasidim.You don't have to have an intimacy with God or an extensive knowledge of esoteric kabbalistic teachings to be able to walk down the street in a fur hat. As a matter of fact, it's probably better if you don't. A bunch of us were hassled by wardrobe people for having our tzitzit on the side, covered by our coat, instead of sticking out in front like a weird sort of phallic symbol. Authenticity gives people a reason to worry. They want to make things look right, not be right, and rightly so -- they're in the business of visuals. Instead, we give them roadblocks.

And more than a few additional problems.

We were supposed to have a sukkah. It is the middle of the Feast of Tabernacles, and observant Jews don't eat anything outside of a small palm frond-covered booth. Okay, anything is an overstatement. In severe cases, there's dispensation for eating snack food in small amounts. And it has to be certain kinds: only foods that satisfy the most general blessing, which means they basically have to be either completely ground up or chemically based. (Potato chips, for instance, are a question, because they still sort of look like potatoes.**) But that doesn't change the fact that the catering crew is putting out the lunch buffet, and it smells really good. Even when the menus are posted, and they're serving -- wait for it -- barbecue pork loins. It's not offensive. It's just funny.

Rabbi Elli grabs me by the kapote and whisks me out of there. We head to a local bodega, where we secure the most healthy choices we can muster with our restrictions: tortilla chips and hummus. When we return, everyone's looking at us. When we sit at our own table, with the other Hasidim-for-a-day, and start digging into our Garden of Eatin' Sesame Blues, it does nothing to diminish our conspicuousness. We might all be playing Hasidic Jews, but one thing never changes: the more Jewish you are, the more you stick out.

By the end of the day, playing a Hasid has run its course. I'm a little edgy, since people told me the shoot would take half a day, we've been here since 6 am, and it's already 4:30 pm. I told work I'd be in a few hours late. The other actors laugh at me. "'Half a day' means till 5!" they exclaim. "A full day will take you till midnight or one am" Then everyone takes turns telling their nightmare stories -- Elli was once filming in a concrete tube off the river in the middle of winter until 4 am -- and trade fables of Golden Time. Union pay scale provides for time-and-a-half for hours 9-10 in a day; then double-time up to hour 16. After that is something they call "Golden Time" -- for every hour worked past the 16th hour of a day, actors earn an entire day's pay. Possibly the only thing more legendary than getting paid Golden Time is the tradition of telling set stories itself.

For the final scene, the producers bundle all the extras out into the sidewalk. A truck pulls away from the curb; Ms. Margulies and Ms. Panjabi stand in the center of the street, watching meaningfully as it zooms off. I'm again paired with my wife (sans kids, this time), and we take upon ourselves the now-familiar goal of walking down the street and pretending to talk to each other. Now, though, we actually talk. Either I'm getting to be a passable actor, or we have enough shared experience that we can.

She tells me how she started out as a stage actor, got into this area. How she's good at this, how it's kind of become her regular schedule, how being stereotyped is an advantage. (Her agent says she looks "ethnic," which means that she's often called upon to play Jews, Greeks, and Arabs. Recently, she purchased her own burqa and learned to tie it, which means that, like my beard and sidecurls, she's paid $18 extra a day for "authentic attire.")

Last year, she scored the dream of dreams, a recurring role on a TV show that happened to be made by one of my favorite TV writers (Rob Thomas, who did Veronica Mars). The show was canceled, however, and she was back to doing this.

"It's not a bad life," she told me. "I get to stand in front of cameras. I get to be recognized. And sometimes, occasionally, when I get thrown a line or placed in a good spot in front of the camera, I get to really flex my acting muscles. I get to be somebody else."

My first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was the story of a girl who starred on a sitcom about an Orthodox Jewish family. The girl, Hava, was Orthodox herself -- but being Orthodox was one small part of who she was. You'd never tell by looking at her: she was also a punk-rock New York kid who dressed in different outrageous outfits every day. On the sitcom, however, she wasn't playing the sort of Jew that she was; she was just playing a Jew, an everyman sort of stereotypical Jewish girl. For the time that the camera was on her, the rest of her sort of disappeared.

All day, I've been going through the same sort of thing. The pretty and familiar-looking girl who'd been walking down the other side of street all day -- as soon as the last cut was called, she whisked off her wig. Her jet-black wig was replaced by a shock of bright red Manic Panic-ed hair. Her Jewish features now could have been Turkish, or Greek, or Arabic or just straight-up generic American. She was a Jew for the day, and now the day was over.

As I pulled off my hat and coat and pulled on my actual cold-weather puffy coat -- still Hasidic, just a little less obviously so -- I felt the barest shudder of a Hollywood wish. Would Hasidim ever be more than that? Would anyone in television ever be more than a cliché of themselves? Did we even want to be?

The answer is, in some ways, embodied by Archie Panjabi, who plays Margulies's sidekick, the show's investigator. She might be the only Punjabi Sikh actor on prime-time American television. She is smart, sassy, flirty and just a touch mysterious. She doesn't have any trouble manifesting her cultural identity -- by which I mean, it isn't like she's acting white on the show -- but it's more that she is so many other things in addition to that.

Maybe that's why the knee-jerk reaction of Hasidic Jews to seeing Hasidic Jews on television is to be offended. Not because they're stereotyping us, but because they're reducing us. And, just like every Hollywood actor who gets glamorized in every inch of their lives, from their cellulite to their multiple adoptions -- and just like, I suppose, everyone, in their own way -- we just want to be adored.

____
** -- I'm grossly oversimplifying it, I know.

B&H Photo: Camera Shopping As a Religious Experience

We love B&H Photo & Video, the only midtown New York store that I actually have fun in that doesn't sell comic books or Legos. It's not just a massive electronics store. It's not just a massive electronics store owned and operated by Hasidic Jews. And it's not just a Hasidic electronics store with bowls of free sour candy all over the place and mysterious, amazing conveyor belts over your heads that move merchandise with seeming lightning speed. It's unearthly. It's unnatural. And yet, it seems to function with all the determination and efficiency of a synagogue service.

Every time I visit the store -- whether it's a 3-hour trip to pick out a new video camera or a quick run-in for some batteries -- I come out with a new story. Sometimes it's as simple as the Satmar Hasid at the checkout counter asking me what I think of the Sleater-Kinney album blasting from my earbuds. Sometimes it's a little more complicated. Other times, I don't even have to go inside the store to get a new B&H story. Here are three of my favorites:

1. Someone stops me on the street. He asks, in bad Hebrew with a bad put-on Israeli accent, "Ayfo B&H" -- Do you know where B&H is? I start to answer -- in my own equally bad Israeli accent -- but then I stop. Something about the lilt of his Hebrew sounds familiar. "Are you Australian?" He is. He's from Sydney. He ends up knowing not just my wife, but her entire family. As a matter of fact, he had lunch at my parents'-in-law's house a few months ago. He apologizes to me for not wearing a yarmulke (I'm not clear on why) and wishing me a good Shabbos. It's Wednesday afternoon. It makes me look forward to Shabbat. It makes me feel good.

2. Someone stops me on the street. He asks me the same question -- in English, this time -- laughing, like he knows it's ironic. I answer, although I'm a little offended at the stereotype. I mean, does every Jew in midtown Manhattan with a beard and sidecurls have to be affiliated with B&H? If he stopped to pay attention to the person I am, and not just the way I look, maybe he'd be a bit less stereotypical and bit more astounded. I'm a freakin' Hasidic Jew who writes films, dude! I'm more than my payos! Just because I'm Hasidic, it doesn't mean I know every other Orthodox Jew in New York. Or where they work.

I smile. Graciously, I give him directions. Fifteen minutes later, we bump into each other at B&H, where I'm buying equipment for a new short film. Sigh. Not so ironic.

3. I'm waiting in line for a refund. I thought we needed a .25" microphone cord and we need a .125". When I get to the front of the line, the guy -- a clean-shaven Israeli guy who starts talking to me in Hebrew -- asks me if everything's inside. I tell him it's all there; I didn't even open it. He tells me, more as a by-the-way sort of thing than as criticism, that we all need to be very careful. People in the world distrust Orthodox Jews. They think we're all out to get them. That's why we need to be even nicer than the world, and more polite and more meticulous in all our dealings. Business. Personal. Life.

With that, he finishes scrutinizing the corners of the box -- all undented -- and drops it into the chute that takes it back home. He offers me a candy. In spite of myself, I accept. He smiles, seeing my momentary indulgence. And, as the others around him all chime in to add their two cents to the issue, he counts out one of each flavor candy from the bowl and gives it to me. When I protest, he tells me to give some to strangers. "They need it," he insists.

Later that day, I speak to Frum Satire. Without telling him about it, he tells me about his B&H blog post -- which talks about basically the same thing. And how B&H turns all that around. He asks: "How many instances can you think of when Charedi Jews make a good impression on non-Jews and irreligious Jews on a constant basis? It's unfortunate, but much of the world only has negative experience and rarely see the beauty of the ultra-orthodox community." Not at B&H, though.

4. This is a bonus -- not that it's an experience, just because it's cool. My cousin Mendy works for B&H's customer service phone line. The other day, someone called him Sammy. We asked what was up with that. He told us that (a) half the floor was named Menachem Mendel, and (b) no one can pronounce Menachem anyway.

We Experiment on A.J. Jacobs

I got to interview A.J. Jacobs for MyJewishLearning. I was excited and nervous and trepidatious -- I liked The Year of Living Biblically a lot, although there were more than a few parts that made me wince, and I loved the hell out of his just-released The Guinea Pig Diaries.

But in his writing he comes across as smarmy and self-assured and, well, a bit of a smartass. And I'm not very good at thinking on my feet -- let alone, having to go up against superpowers like you'd suspect Jacobs to have. In his books, he is a comeback machine. He has a zingy one-liner response for everything, and his subjects quiver and crumble against him.

But it turns out that he's hugely nice and polite and good-humored and actually sort of docile. He's the kind of person who tells jokes that you'd find in joke books for kids and really laugh at them. When I started the interview, I actually thought he was from the Midwest. Maybe I'd just seen A Serious Man too recently, but that sort of homeliness and courtesy was unmistakable. Check out the full interview...

A.J. Jacobs is a bit of a gonzo journalist and a little bit of an undercover secret agent -- but, most of all, he is a living, walking experiment. In his first book, The Know-It-All, he read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica from beginning to end. In his follow-up, The Year of Living Biblically, he attempted to follow the Bible as literally as possible -- expunging all polyfibrous garments from his wardrobe, not shaving for a year, living inside a tent in his living room for a week (his wife, an enduring spectator and the eternally good-natured Teller to his Penn, was invited to join him inside but chose to sleep in their bedroom instead) and even stoning sinners in Central Park.

In Jacobs' new collection, The Guinea Pig Diaries, he embarks upon a new project every chapter, from outsourcing every aspect of his life to India (including emails, calls from his boss, and sending love letters to his wife) to practicing Radical Honesty, a method of living in which he tells everyone exactly what's on his mind, from his mother-in-law to an attractive editor at Rachel Ray magazine. He even sneaks into the Oscars, impersonating Australian actor Noah Taylor, and becomes a celebrity for a night.

Jacobs is less a guinea pig than a test tube, letting new theories pass through him with nearly no absorption. But he never misses an opportunity for profundity, and he's always ready to learn life lessons from any source, great or small. Sometimes, it feels like he's learning the same lessons every time --that he needs to stop multitasking, stop being shallow, and relearn the simple lessons of being a child. Although it's never explicitly stated, Jacobs' hero could be Robert Fulghum, the author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten -- with a side dish of Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps.

The new book doesn't come close to the emotional honesty and rawness of Jacobs' attempt at in vitro fertilization in Biblically or his reconciliation with his father in Know-It-All, there are basic emotional truths in each chapter of Guinea Pig, like the let's-work-together-and-save-the-world moment at the end of a Stephen King book, or a really good rabbi's sermon. It's punchy, funny, constantly self-deprecating but unfailingly optimistic.

We were lucky enough to talk to Jacobs by phone from Denver, where he was preparing for a reading. After the swarthy, self-assured-but-inquisitive tone of his books, I wasn't sure what to expect -- either the snarkiest person alive or the gentlest. To my surprise, the voice that answered the phone was laid-back, chilled out, and not at all what I imagined from already having read about his innermost thoughts. Inadvertently, I blurted out:

MJL: Where are you from?

A.J. Jacobs: I am actually from New York City. I grew up in Manhattan.

Weird! You have such a...I don't know what to call it, a relaxed accent. It's not at all what I expected.

Well, I'm in the middle of my book tour in Denver. Maybe I've adapted a Colorado accent unknowingly!

This new collection kind of feels like a best-of. There's not really a point A that you're starting from, or a point B that you're aiming for, like you had in your first two books.

About half of the pieces come from Esquire, and half are new. One piece I did, the one about pretending to be Noah Taylor at the Academy Awards, I did a tiny version of it in Entertainment Weekly -- which was just a couple hundred words in a box. I sort of built it up into a full story in here.

How did you recreate the experience? Do you keep a journal?

I do keep a journal, and I did keep some notes. So I felt good. It felt like delving back into the glory that was being a celebrity. As a matter of fact, it felt good revisiting all these pieces.

Did you feel like you were digging up dirt on your own past?

Actually, no. Most of them were either very recent or they were completely new, so it wasn't like I had to do too much digging.

You say you always keep a little bit of each experiment over the rest of your life. As a Sabbath-observant person, I felt a little bit of myself shrivel up at that...like a lot of people I know, I hoped you were going to keep with it, or that we were somehow different from all your other experiments.

The Biblical experiment changed my life forever in so many profound ways. First of all, we joined a synagogue. We don't really go, but we're members, which is a pretty big step for me. Also, we're sending our kids to Hebrew day school there. I'm okay whether they become observant or non-observant, as long as they're mentsches. At first, I thought it would be nice to send them there. Now they know more Hebrew than I do.

One of the biggest ways it affected me was in blessings, where the Bible says to bless everything you eat. It changed my whole attitude toward gratitude. During my year, I was saying all these blessings of thanksgiving, and I kind of got carried away, as the Bible tells us to do. I was saying thanks for every little thing in my life. Over the course of our day, we tend to ignore all the things we have that go right. Instead, we focus on the three or four that go wrong, and this has kind of taught me not to overlook those things.

And the same for many of the experiments in the new book, they've changed me for good as well.

Did any of the new experiments activate something in you that you don't like?

Maybe the celebrity-for-a-night experiment. I was getting so many compliments, and people telling me how great I was, that my ego started to balloon out of control, even though I knew deep down that I wasn't a famous celebrity. I got a taste of how these celebrities become egotistical maniacs. Afterward, I remember waiting in line at a restaurant, thinking, "Don't these people know who I am?"

10 Things I Hate about Commandments

I'm a big proponent of making the Torah relevant for modern society and everyday life. Maybe it's my whole Orthodox Jew trip of believing that Torah was given to us as a gift. Maybe it's because I'm a writer, and I want to believe that the stories we tell have life beyond when we tell them, and that they can pertain to different people in different circumstances -- and that the Torah, as the greatest story of all, can apply to anyone, anywhere.

But I don't think I have any excuse for loving this video as much as I do. Except, possibly, that I have dreamt all my life of someone turning my book into the next Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

OK, so the addition of Samuel L. Jackson "as Principal Firebush" at the end is a bit of a stretch, and doesn't at all fit with the tight-as-anything leitmotif that the rest of the video established. But who doesn't love themselves some Samuel L.? He didn't even totally suck playing a one-eyed black Nazi in The Spirit.

(One more note: yes, it is creepy that the narrator says "we'll see who can get the girl" just as Basya -- otherwise known as Moses's freakin' ADOPTIVE MOTHER -- comes onscreen.)

Hasidic Poetry Slam

OK, as promised:

This past Saturday night was the first Hasidic poetry slam in Crown Heights, at least in the estimations of everyone there. It started out as the brainchild of Levi Welton, a kid in his early 20s (and, incidentally, a rabbi) who does live theater and a weekly comic about the haftarah. He was raised in the Bay Area -- his father is one of the Chabad rabbis there -- and, on his last visit back, he happened upon the Berkeley Slam. He came back to yeshiva in Crown Heights all fired up and bouncing, ready to do this.

And he did. He enlisted the aid of a bunch of us -- mainly, Mimulo, a flowershop and tea bar run by Hasidic hippies who were cool with opening shop at 10:30 on a Saturday night after Shabbat was out. And a bunch of us poets -- coincidentally, I'd learned to slam in Berkeley as well -- and Alona (who, for the evening, was known as Alona the Purple Prophetess), also a Bay Area alumna.

At first, I wasn't sure whether women would be there at all. I pushed the question nervously. Levi barked out a laugh. "If they weren't," he said, "we wouldn't have a show!"

It's true that, even in the most right-wing of circles, there's no halakhic reason why a woman can't get up and launch a poem into a crowd. But most of what Jews do, Orthodox and otherwise, has next to nothing to do with halakha -- it's about social mores. (For that reason, perhaps, the poetry reading that Mimaamakim threw last month was overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly male-centric.)

But this was pretty incredible. Beside Alona, one super-Orthodox girl read a few short, funny, wry poems about being frum in spite of what everyone else around her thinks. This one bad-guy yeshiva kid in jeans got up and read a poem he'd written on the way over -- it was honest and it was about love and being lonely and it was so simple and beautiful that, I feel like there's no way to say this without being cliche, but literally everyone in the room was pushed to the border of crying.

And then, of course, there was the Russian Hasid in one of those Boro Park business-suits that all the real super-religious women wear. She pulled out a piece of paper, mumbled an apology into it -- "I'm sorry, this is not how everyone else writes, but I am not like everyone else" -- and then, no lie, busted out a hip-hop poem about the spirituality of taking the morning subway.

Awesome beyond belief. In a way, it was a more real poetry experience than any I've ever had -- way back before avant garde poetry and university experiences were created, poetry was supposed to be the tool of the people. Think king's courts. Think Shakespeare. It was Lost and Star Wars and Buffy and Lindsey Lohan's relationship troubles all rolled together: it was drama and comedy and tragedy all together.

And, yes, even the fabulous Eliyahu Enriquez came in, and shot the video below.

The Googliness of It All

Never Mind the Goldbergs flashback moment: Patrick A. of the band Can Can goes on a rant against hating Orthodox folks. "Some of the most hardcore dudes I know are Orthodox." And so are you, brother.



And, also under the heading of people whose company I am humbled to be in: Eliyahu Enriquez, whose poetry continues to slay me every time he gets on a stage, shouts me out in a new poem:

Ontological Anarchy
For Matthue Roth and Naftali Yawitz

When Elijah prayed
You sent fire
And charged him
To care
For a widow and orphan.

What I got was asylum.
I got angry,
Despised my roots,
So I became orphaned.

more

Jew on the Train

Judaism is one of those cultural identities that, for most people, is able to be turned on or off. Matt Bar has an awesome song about it ("I'm Not White, I'm Jewish") and we have an awesome video about it. But for some of us -- those of us who wear turbans on their heads or have big, puffy beards and bigger, puffier sidelocks -- it's an all-the-time sort of thing. (Ironically*, these people who insist most loudly that Judaism is a religion and not a culture are the ones who look most culturally Jewish.)

On the subway most mornings, people are in as bad a mood as it gets. They elbow old ladies and pregnant people out of the way for seats. They play their music loud and their iPod TV shows even louder. They sneeze and cough on you. And once people do sit down, they make sure to spread their legs as wide as they can, protecting their territory, the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the serf & vassal systems back in 9th-grade Medieval English History.

And this entire time, everyone is ready, eager, even, to be the one to catch the odd-looking Jewish kid doing something untoward. Taking up two seats, maybe, or squashing some baby beneath the seat so that he can make notes for a new blog entry. Suddenly, the stakes seem much higher. Instead of being just some potentially-rude punk kid, I'm a potentially-rude ambassador of an entire culture.

We have a special sort of term for it, because this is Judaism and we seem to have special terms for everything. It's called a hilul Hashem, or a desecration of the name of God, when someone who's obviously Jewish does something that's not befitting someone who looks obviously Jewish.

Well, I've got the better hand -- in the almost-a-year since I started working here, I have mastered the art of writing while standing up. I don't even need a pole or a door to prop against. I sometimes wobble during the treacherous zig-zag beneath the East River, but for the most part, I'm solid.

And this all came about through the canniest of ways: J.K. Rowling (or, as we at Scholastic like to call her, J-Ro). Shortly before I started working here, I was reading an interview with her in which she was talking about people who don't have time to read. Paraphrased, she basically said: "I don't get those people. I read in the bathtub. I read waiting for appointments, and while I'm on hold on the phone. I read walking down the street, and I generally trust that, even if the other person's reading, one of us will fortuitously steer clear of the other."

I realized, I have a lot of empty time on my hands. Every day, I'm at work 8 hours, and riding the subway for another 2. (Which leaves me with almost no time with my daughter...but that's another story.) I'm pretty sure Rebbe Nachman says something about taking advantage of time and making every moment count, too, but, well, nobody says it like J-Ro.


* -- I say ironically because, at (ahem) certain Jewish websites, we tend to stigmatize ourselves into a common battle of pitting the culture of Judaism against the religion of Judaism, as though the two were opposites. And, culturally, it isn't the bagels-and-lox Jews who are most commonly identified visually as Jews, like other people are identified visually as black or Asian or Martian -- it's the religious Jews.

Hating “Loving Leah,” But Loving The Orthodox Girls

I never thought I'd say it -- at least, in this context -- but thank God that Matisyahu wears good clothes on MTV.

On The View yesterday, Susie Essman -- who plays the Lubavitch mother of the eponymous character in the Hallmark Hall of Fame special Loving Leah -- served as the world's authority to Orthodox Jews. Do you know how many people watch The View? Do you know how many of those people have never met an Orthodox Jew in their lives? And, thankfully, someone as knowledgeable and as accurate a researcher as Susie Essman is their only dose of exposure to Orthodox Jews.

BARBARA WALTERS: What did you learn in your course of researching the Hasidim?
SUSIE ESSMAN: I learned they're not very good dressers.

Sara Ester Crispe, webmaster of TheJewishWoman.org, just told her off on JTA. And there's definitely no shortage of articles about hot Orthodox women -- including a whole Hot Chani Field Guide and a blog -- to the contrary. I don't know if the fact-checkers for The View didn't get a chance to do their homework, or if it all just happened too quickly to edit, but there's something wrong in View-land.

I can't believe that not even Whoopi Goldberg called her out on it. I mean, she starred in the COLOR FREAKING PURPLE. (What she's doing on daytime TV is a total mystery -- I mean, it's not, everyone needs a good paycheck -- but I figured she'd be using her role to better the universe, not be Barbara Walters' funny-glasses'd sidekick.)

Fortunately, it's the easiest thing in the universe to send a comment to The View just telling them that Susie Essman was gross, inappropriate, and doesn't know what she was talking about -- but that Sara Ester Crispe is funny, charming, and a laugh riot. Put her up next to Barbara -- then we'll see who's better-dressed.

In actuality, what offended me most about her comments wasn't that -- it was the intimation that Orthodox men are perverts who are uncontrollably turned on by a woman's hair. (Not yours, honey.) Okay, I don't expect anyone (least of all Susie Essman) to understand the finer points of Jewish mysticism, but check this out: ONLY MARRIED WOMEN COVER THEIR HAIR. If hair is that sexually arousing, and that's why crazy Orthodox people cover it, then wouldn't all women's hair be covered? Anyway, Susie: If you're reading this, next time, do a little research. You don't even have to meet a real Orthodox woman -- just read about it on MyJewishLearning. I promise, the entire article will take you less than 5 minutes, flat.

In any case, here's the video. Susie's bad side comes out right at 3:00, if you want to skip the kibitzing.