Cooking with the Anarchist Kosher Cookbook

Like the allusory joke of its title, Maxwell Bauman’s collection of short stories The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook has a very limited audience—a niche within a niche, that limited number of beautiful people who will have at least a passing familiarity with both The Anarchist Cookbook, the perpetually-Xeroxed manual of homemade explosive devices for domestic uprisings, and the sub-genre of cookbooks that do not merely contain kosher recipes, and certainly bear only the most passing resemblance to the miniature culinary museums-on-paper put out by Yotam Ottolenghi and his ilk, but echo more the haimishe delights and misspellings of Spice & Spirit and The Molly Goldberg Cookbook and The Famous Jewish Cookbook — that is, those garishly-printed 1970s volumes that regard jello as an all-purpose ingredient and expound on the myriad ways that tuna fish can be turned into salad.

In other words: Maxwell Bauman, don’t expect this book to become the next Da Vinci Code.

But a few weeks ago, the comedian Moshe Kasher posted a tweet that was just as niche: “Martin Buber’s personal pronouns are I/Thou,” summoning the intersection of those at the forefront of the evolution of nonbinary queer grammar and post-WWII Jewish theological philosophy, and I watched in pleased surprise as the numbers of hearts and retweets circulated higher and higher. Maybe there’s still few enough of us weird Jews to warrant a manifesto, but there’s also enough to cling to these tiny sporadic appearances in the overlap of people who are really into Judaism and really into oddness — enough, at least, to deserve a book like The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook, and to will Maxwell Bauman into existence.

I’m going to reprint the book’s table of contents here, partly just so you can appreciate it:

• When the Bush Burns
• The Messiah in New York
• You’ve Lost that L’chaim Feeling
• The Leviathan Blues
• The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook
• Baphomitzvah

Partly, it’s that his combination of deviously clever puns and intermixing lingos — Baphomitzvah, for example (and if you didn’t know), portmanteaus the demonic celestial Baphomet with the time-honored Jewish ritual of Bar Mitzvahs, or, in the case of this story, a b’nai mitzvah. As we see the first sparkle of the demonic creature’s existence, the repeated snubbings and the heightening impending revenge of the titular bas mitzvah girl, we see both tropes of stories rearing their heads: the ugly-girl horror-story narrative, in which our likeable but socially-spurned antiheroine comes into contact with satanic powers, claims them for her own, then wreaks a mirrored havoc on the community and town who have wreaked a similar sort of havoc on her. To put this on top of the modern secular bar mitzvah narrative isn’t subversive, it just makes sense — but it works, and it works so joyously well.

That’s a lot of the joy of The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook. Substituting a golem for homemade molotov cocktails in the title story is a no-brainer, but the story’s power comes from the effortlessness of the twin narratives. Yes, Emma Goldman and Abbie Hoffman were Jewish and pillars of countercultural uprisings, but much of their personal journeys lay in ignoring or minimizing their background and/or affiliation. In the title story, he embraces it. The language of revolution is weaponized not by youngsters and upstarts and in spite of their Judaism, but by elderly rabbis and bubbes, and because of it — and by those youngsters and upstarts who claim that tradition.

The mixing occasionally has mixed results. I first encountered this book at an indie-books conference held in one of those sports arena-size conference halls with a million aisles and people swarming them like an ant farm. If you know anything about me, you can picture our first encounter: me catching sight of the cover typography, then actually reading the title, eyes popping out of head, body popping out of skin, &tc. To paraphrase Moshe Kasher’s tweet, I was pretty sure the audience for the title was me.

I read the first page of the first story, “When the Bush Burns,” and I was in weird Jewish heaven. Forgive me (and, by extension, Maxwell), but it’s raunchy.

I curled up and pulled the covers over my head, but the light was much stronger under the sheets. I opened my eyes to discover bright orange flames flickering out the edges of my panties.

“Good morning, Beth,” said the fire.

I screamed and kicked off the sheets.

“What’s wrong?” my husband called from the kitchen.

“My pussy’s on fire!”

“I’ll get you some cranberry juice,” he said.

It works on so many levels, right? Geez, I was into this. But the story devolves into — minor spoilers in this paragraph — the couple’s inability to conceive, and the work of a G-dly miracle/satanic imp/odd vaginal trickster to get her to hook up with the sketchy, overly willing rabbi of their synagogue. The story felt like it started promising Talmudic deconstruction and ended as a MAD magazine take on what a page of Talmud would look like, but without the sly evenhanded irony of a MAD article. At a few other places in the collection, Bauman makes a few errors/assumptions/missteps with regards to historical or cultural accuracy, especially when dipping into his Hasidic caricatures, which at other times in my life I’d get annoyed at or offended by — but this collection is meant to offend, good-naturedly, and for the annoyance part, I’ll just say that nothing’s too egregious, and probably could have used a little more research/asking questions, but it all really does seem to be coming from a good place.

And then there’s “The Leviathan Blues.” This story. I could write an entire other essay about this story, and how much I loved it, and how much it disturbed me — not about the character of G-d in the story, but about our entire notion of G-d as an almighty arbiter of our lives, as a storyteller in the most evil and poetic way, as Someone who’s looking out for everyone in the world, and because of this makes some decisions that are, at best, direly sad.

I don’t want to give too much of it away, but you know the story of the Leviathan, right? When G-d created the world, G-d made the Leviathan, a sea monster bigger than all other animals, and soon realized that they would fill up the sea and the Earth and there would be no room for other creatures. So G-d had to uncreate it. Anyway, this story takes that particular story and expands it, and it really does bear the fruit of a bit of research, or of digging into the several stories on this aggadic cryptozoid, but the story’s most successful technique, I think, is its simple way lingering on every moment, filling it with detail and thought.

It still has Bauman’s irreverence and his humor, it still has that cruelty and irony, but it fills the pages with the Leviathan’s pain and rage the way the Leviathan fills the sea. It’s graceful, it’s tragic, and it makes all of us who aren’t majestic, lonely sea monsters see a little more just how big, and how small, the world can be.

Pray Loud

Yankel, who used to be Jack, got kicked out of his last club on a Tuesday night. He wasn’t acting rowdy, not nearly as rowdy as the night when Nail and Anarchia brought the homemade volcano to the Dismemberment Plan concert, not even as crazy as the Godheadsilo show where he’d jumped from the balcony into the audience below. It wasn’t a 21+ show — not that that had mattered for quite a few years now. He even had I.D.

It was the bouncer. He was a big shaved-head guy of indeterminate ethnicity, his face like a Disney gargoyle’s face frozen with a piece of sharp metal hanging out of it. The guy did have the metal, a whole row of hoops erupting out of his lower lip. He looked like every James Bond henchman at once.

He was doing a sweep of the crowd, making sure nobody was up to no good. It’s the hardest part of these shows, Yankel knew from experience. Over the years he’d worked both sides of the table. The guy passed over the guys with piercings sharper than knives, passed over the pot-huddle in the corner. And he stopped in front of Yankel.

Yankel pretended not to notice him. It worked every bit as well as it did when he was 16.

The guy gave him a shrug, crossed his arms. It wasn’t a fierce arm-crossing. It was just to show Yankel that he wasn’t impressed.

“What are you doin’ here, man?”

Yankel leaned forward.

“I’m sorry?” He cocked an ear. Maybe he’d misheard? “What is the problem, sir?”

He’d always been polite, no matter what else he had going on. He respected these guys. It was hard being paid to constantly be about to fight and never fighting.

The guy undid his arms. One of his hands he waved at Yankel. Vaguely at first, fanning the air around him, then zeroing in on his belly — his white shirt, his black vest, the stripes of his over-the-shirt tzitzis that his potbelly poked out like a family camper.

“You, man. It’s no problem, I ain’t kicking you out — but it’s you, man, what’s somebody like you doing here?”

Most nights Yankel didn’t come to these things alone. He brought friends, he found buddies. The few guys still in town from the old days, or someone from the forums. Yankel worked in computers, on the days when business was slow, he still logged onto the chat boards, eavesdropped on what people were saying about the bands he liked, which new bands were like them, lobbing insults at each other for musical taste, avatar use, lyrical quotes in their signatures. Yankel was brief and to the point. He tried never to insult people. His avatar was a gray profile. He didn’t have enemies. No friends, really, but everyone was his ally.

Tonight, though, none of his conspirators could make it. He came alone. Watched the opening band alone. Bought a beer for him and for nobody else. Stood alone in the corner between acts, drinking it as a substitute for between-sets small talk.

“I just come for the music. I like this music.”

The guy wasn’t buying it.

“You people have your own music, man. You ain’t here to dance, you hear to look. Listen. You wanna hook up, there’s a bar across the street, this trance bar, you can rub up against all the girls you want to over there. Girls, boys, whatever you’re after. Maybe take off your little cap next time, dress a little more low key.”

“No, you don’t understand — this band, I got all their albums, I got everything.”

“That’s all I’m saying,” said the guy, hands up, backing away. “That’s all.”

Yankel didn’t have to leave. Yankel left anyway. He listened to the first two songs of the next band’s set, his favorite band from when he’d started coming to these places — but there was no point. It was so long ago. You could hear it in the music, the band’s passion just wasn’t there anymore.

**

He can hear the goings-on inside his house from down the block. The screams get louder as he gets close. They are tiny, breathless, pathetic. The most incredibly syncopated rhythmic cries, like some weird Norwegian or Icelandic art-rock sampling crew.

He climbs the stairs to his apartment, kicks snow off his boots, removes his coat and heads straight for the dark room in the rear.

At once he is confronted.

“Yankie, please, take her.” She thrusts the baby into his hands. The little thing sits there, tiny arms drooping over his huge hands. “She’s been nonstop since dinnertime. I can’t do it anymore, I can’t make her stop.”

For a moment the tiny thing is confused. Then it regains its motivation, starts screaming again, its entire face contorted into the wrinkles around one huge gaping void of a mouth. There aren’t even teeth. No creature in G-d’s great Earth has ever screamed so mightily, so forcefully, and yet still produced such an insignificant squeak.

The door shuts hard. From the other room he can hear a rustle in the closet, a shuffle, a sigh, the welcome sound that the Netflix makes. She is such a special woman, and so selfless. He is unworthy of her.

But what he’s really unworthy of is this baby. This tiny beautiful creature who he has somehow contributed to the existence of. Even as she cries he wants to hug her, to squeeze her tight and protect her from the world, to find anything in the exile of our lives that could possibly be good enough for her.

He rocks her. He jiggles her. He puts a lullaby on the tape player; he tries reciting to her from Psalms, which always seemed like a good idea. He tries everything. From the other room, a fresh theme song. The episode has ended. Another is starting.

“Ba, ba, baba,” he coos softly in her ear. “Ba, ba, baba. I wanna be sedated.”

The tickle of his voice on her earlobe only protracts the worldly anxiety. Her scream becomes an uproar. Her entire body shudders with every blow.

He has no choice but to match it.

“When we have nothing left to give,” he sings, “there’ll be no reason for us to live.” The music screeches with urgency, the backing music in his mind, and he sings, louder now, “We owe you nothing,” again, “We owe you nothing,” and now he’s really screaming out, “We owe you nothing, you have no control,” and “You are not what you own,” and all the lyrics are tumbling out of him now, all the words to all the songs, and he is roaring them at the walls, roaring them against the night, against the world of exile, against his entire life, and remarkably, miraculously, the louder he goes he is like an all-encompassing tsunami, he is nature sounds, he is every white noise at once, and her eyes flutter, maybe taken by surprise or maybe just amused, and her mouth exercises into shapes, an O, an O, a horizontal I, and he is consumed by everything and she snuggles contentedly into the warmth of his exploding chest and settles into a perfect sleep.

Image by Jon Pack, who was very amenable about my waking him up in the middle of the night and asking if I could use it. Find more of his stuff here, or you can acquire some of his work for yourself right here. Lyrics sampled from Fugazi and the Ramones. 

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?

Patrick Aleph Rocks My Religion

For someone whose life is writing on the Internet, Patrick Aleph still has a lot of secrets.
Aside from running the alterna-Torah site PunkTorah, the "online minyan" OneShul, the collection The G-d Project, and a bunch of other sites, Aleph is an astoundingly prolific blogger and YouTube video-maker. As a convert, his perspective on Judaism -- and on Jews -- is that of both an insider and outsider, and his observations on Jewish life and belief are often reflective of that. The things he loves, he loves. And the things he finds disquieting or hard to swallow -- well, he doesn't have any hesitation about making note of that, either.


If you've never encountered Aleph before, or if there's too much of his stuff out in the universe for you to know where to start, here's a great place. He's just released -- for free -- an e-book collection of his writings, titled, appropriately,PunkTorah, named after both his punk do-it-yourself principles and his website. The two dozen or so essays touch on everything from the actual nuts-and-bolts of Jewish practice to the more aesthetic and eschatological wtf-nesses of belief (how weird is it that we believe in an intangible, invisible G-d who doesn't actively interact with humanity, anyway?). And he really isn't afraid to break boundaries or mess around with tradition: In one piece, Patrick talks about working with queer Jews, self-proclaimed Jews who've neither traditionally converted nor been born into the religion. And the next piece is titled "Everything I Needed To Know I Learned From Chabad."

Actually, his essays are almost all amazingly-titled. OK, let me just give you my five favorites:

* Indie Rock Is My Shacharit Siddur
* Alterna-frum
* Walgreens and Tempeh Reubens Brought Me Closer To God
* Star Wars and Andy Warhol: PunkTorah's Non-Jewish Influences
* Diary of An Angry Convert

Full disclosure: Patrick cites me in a few of the essays. But I didn't remember that until after I was almost finished writing this, and I still think it's a pretty damn great book. And it's free, so you aren't wasting any money -- or any trees, for that matter.

1/20: The Official Sub-Page

Just as a matter of site stuff: I added a page here for 1/20, the movie I wrote. (It isn't the film's actual website, which is more comprehensive and informed; this is just sort of reminding me that I wrote a movie, and anyone else who winds up on that page too I guess.)

And Kayla Dempsey, who plays Yvette, and I were just interviewed yesterday on the punk variety show Rew & Who. Kayla bursts out with some a capella Janis Joplin because she is incredible. Rew is pretty amazing, too. I mostly just giggle and prevaricate. Here's Part 1. Edit: Here's Part 2! With Kayla singing Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz." She is so amazing.



And because I'm not quite ready yet to stop talking about it constantly: I wrote a new book! It's about my best friend dying and the R.E.M. album Automatic for the People and the first time I fell in love. Check it out and review it. You can even maybe buy it, if you've got $2.

12 Steps to a Better Matthue

I wrote this last year. Stumbled across it on the Intertube. I don't know how I got there, but it feels like a sign from somewhere. I hate reruns, but this one's pretty intense. I hope you like it.

Oh, yeah -- we hit it again. Two parking tickets this morning, and one's more than $100.

Man, this Rosh Hashana is shaping up to a great start.

I flipped. It's not pleasant to say, but I felt steam coming out of my nostrils and ears. There was a very small phone, and I started yelling into it -- to a friend, who really didn't deserve any of it. I mean, he didn't write the tickets.

"How do you do it?" I asked my friend. "You're always growing." It's true: he's always talking about how he's waking up at 5:30 a.m. instead of 6 in order to get more stuff done, or the vegetable patch he's tending on his balcony, or new recipes for cobbler (I don't even know what cobbler is).

He told me: "It's hard to perfect your butterfly stroke when you're struggling to keep your head above water." And I feel like this is hitting pretty much everyone I know right now. How do the Lehman brothers (assuming there are brothers, and that they're Jewish) focus on being better people? How do we keep from going bankrupt? How does the girl I know who just tried to kill herself work on the abstract idea of "improving herself"? How do I start helping out with the cooking and the laundry when I'm in the office for 8 hours, the subway for two more, and there's this book I wrote that I'm supposed to be promoting?

Pretty much the only one I know who's having an easy time of it is my editor David, and that's because he's being played by Michael Cera in the movie of his book. Okay, stop. Not to pick on David (L*rd knows he's pick-on-able), but he could probably tell me about problems of his own. Problems that seem at least as dire as the $160 worth of tickets we racked up today...or the innumerably worse sin that I keep on committing by telling the rest of the world about it.* Everyone's in a different spot in life. And even each of us -- we're in a different spot than we were last year, or last month, or 5 minutes ago. And we don't do penance in Judaism. Instead, the idea is to constantly be moving up -- ratzu v'shuv, we call it. One of my friends just moved to the South last year, met an amazing rabbi, and blasted through Rosh Hashana. This year, he got fired and she's skipping it. I was better at doing a lot of things last year than I am this year...and I can say that having a screaming 7-month-old got in the way of some of them. (Sayonara, complete-and-uninterrupted morning prayers.) Most of them, though -- well, I spent some time trying to do the perfect butterfly stroke, and some of that time trying to sink myself.

Every year I put together a top-12 list of ways to a better Matthue for Rosh Hashana. Last year, it took me till Simchat Torah. But here's my Rosh Hashana resolution for this year: Try to stay in the moment. Don't worry about things until they're right in front of me -- but, as much as I can, try to see everything that's front of me, and try to keep them from turning into things to worry about. When Zusha came to the Ba'al Shem Tov and mourned that he'd never be perfect, the Ba'al Shem Tov told him, "Try to be less like me, and more like Zusha."

This Rosh Hashana, I'm going to try and be more like Zusha.

And I'm going to be better about seeing what's in front of my face.

* - It's true. Lashon Hara, or gossiping, is one of the worst things you can do to a person. I'm praying as I write this that her good humor, together with the faint possibility of teaching people a constructive lesson through it. D'oh.

Graffiti in Prague

When I lived in Prague, My friend K. and I used to do graffiti. You can call it stencil art or tagging or whatever, but in Eastern Europe, they say "graffiti," and that's what we called it in Philly when I was growing up so that's the word I'm saying.

Right from the beginning, K. set a few rules. 1: No tagging on architectural magnificence. We only did old Communist buildings, the kind that looked like gray Legos. And one or two places downtown that were similarly horrific. 2: As I had no idea what I was doing, I was basically her apprentice -- I was to lay low, hold the stencils, and wait for her to start with the spray paint. As we went, I sprayed a bit. But mostly I liked being the assistant. Like I was one step between the artist and the art appreciator: just doing my best to beautify and weird-ify Prague for the rest of us.

I'd lived in Prague since January. We started tagging in late June, right around my birthday. I knew the city well by that time. We'd do it late at night, when nobody was around. Once we squeezed into a train tunnel and almost got caught. I was really skinny. K. was really small. We were safe, but I remember the lit-up faces of those old people on the way home when they saw two kids where there shouldn't have been any. Almost as if they were in a submarine and we'd popped up underwater.

I don't have any pictures of our actual piece, but Aviva wrote to me about posting the Moshiach Oi! video, and somehow graffiti came up. And then I remembered that this whole part of my life happened. Weird, the things you can forget.

(Thanks to Aviva for reminding me, and for digging up the carrots in Prague images.)

Na Nach Nachman Punks

I kind of love this video, but I'm not sure how I feel about it morally. It's the Moshiach Oi! guys (your favorite Hasidic punk-rock band and mine) rocking out and sticking Na Nach stickers to public buildings, signs, and a car.



On one hand, the song is great -- if you like loud, raucous, energetic punk music, that is. And it's all structured around the mantra Na Nach Nachma Nachman Me'Uman, which, according to Breslov Hasidic folklore, will make depression fade away. On the other, it is, uh, vandalizing public and private property. I'm not necessarily opposed to it on a personal level (I used to be a street stencil artist, which we called "doing graffiti," and I've busked in public places more times than I can count), but is it a bit of a chilul Hashem, a public embarrassment, to go stickering while looking like religious Jews? (There's also some graffiti tagging, though I'm assuming that was on the house of a consenting party.)

Or maybe I'm just getting old and, perish the thought, conservative. What do you folks think?

Nirvana's "Polly" Live (the cover version)

The slammin' Melissa Broder hosts the Polestar Poetry series, and she just tried something new*: picking an album (in this case Nirvana's Nevermind, and having a team of poets (in this case, us) write poems about it, one poet per song.

I got in early, which meant that I got one of the first picks. I chose "Polly," the song about sexual assault and boys who think they control the world. Don't ask me why.

I didn't plan it this way, but the story I'm telling -- and especially Christian -- all ties in to my story in the anthology Punk Rock Saved My Ass, an incredible little collection to benefit 924 Gilman, one of the first punk collectives in Berkeley. It's only $10, and you should check it out. In order to get what I'm talking about in the video, though, check out the adrenaline-fueled piece Kat Georges did before me.

And then go check out the whole series.

Punk Torah Prayerbook

On MyJewishLearning, I interview Patrick Aleph and Michael Sabani about the Punk Torah Siddur that they wrote designed, and released. My favorite part:

Some of the prayers — especially the bedtime shema — are surprisingly peaceful for, well, someone who shouts for a living. How’d you swing that?

Patrick: That’s fair. I’m in a band where I scream and roll around on the floor, but there’s a place for meditation in every person’s life. This is the best example I can give of this: I was at Jewlicious, and I was working in the kitchen with Sasha Edge and her father, who catered it — they’re screaming and there’s knives everywhere, and fire. But then when it was time for Shabbos, we ended up making motzi over a vegan cookie and drinking Kedem grape juice and some of the back-of-the-house volunteers had a great, awesome, totally spiritual and peaceful moment. If you’re a rambunctious person like myself, it’s even more important.

read the rest >

The Movie Gets a Little Realer

Just wanted to share two quick items of movie awesomeness with you:

1) "1/20" has an IMDB page! (No, I'm not on it yet. But my title is! Really, though, it has the movie's tagline and the actors and all sorts of official information that I didn't know anyone was allowed to know. But the big thrill is that, dude, it's the Internet Movie Database. It's the Hollywood equivalent of seeing your name in print for the first time.)

2)And we also have a movie poster:

That mohawk in the poster belongs to Xiomara, the star of the  show. The director, the producer, and I were eating hummus on Ninth Avenue and this bubbly, cute, sane-looking girl strolled by. She was wearing a pink dress. Our producer leaped up and chased her down half a block, then dragged her back by one of her ponytails (she had two). "This is Ayako," he told us. "She's auditioning for Xiomara."

I didn't believe him. Then I saw her audition tape -- it was one of those tapes that you think might have been filmed at an asylum, where one minute she's sweet and docile and courteous, the next she's ranting and screaming and about to knock the camera out of the cameraman's hand -- and I was like, okay, this is working. Then she showed up for her haircut on the first day of filming -- I ran into her the next day in the dressing rooms, all spikes and leather jackets and hair that looked like it could pierce skin -- and she blew my mind. She wasn't that bubbly Ninth Avenue girl anymore. She was Xi.

Give Her a Get

Jewish punk music might have ditched the kitsch for good. While I love myself some YIDcore, the silly Australian punk band, the Groggers' new music video for the song "Get" is everything that punk is supposed to be about -- mostly, positive social change and making you uncomfortable.

I have no idea whether they're disgruntled yeshiva boys or sardonically clever baal teshuvas or another monster entirely. Dear Groggers, who are you? Do you have more songs? And are you actually cool in real life? Give me a shout.

And, if you want to know more about what a get is or exactly why it's permissible in Jewish law to kick that dude's tuchus six ways to Sunday, read MyJewishLearning.com's article on agunot get, and check out this other swanky example of art-as-activism: a comic called the Unmasked Project.

(And thanks to the innumerable Heshy Fried for showing me this.)

Defending Punk

924 Gilman Street in Berkeley is a volunteer-run concert space that was famous in the '80s for hosting huge fights and riots, and famous in the '90s for introducing Green Day (among other folks) to the world. By the time I moved to San Francisco in 2001 (if you want to read the full story, it's here) it classified as a legitimate shrine to visit. A few weeks after I moved there, my friend Edie Sedgwick played a show there -- which was kind of like having one of your siblings be named High Priest of Judaism (or whatever religion you happen to be a member of), if only for one night.

I'm in an upcoming anthology about the space. Terena Scott, the editor of the anthology, just interviewed me for her site. Here's a snip:

How do you personally define punk?
I'm really bad at personally defining anything -- I just do what I do. But a lot of what I love is punk, and so that rubs off on the stuff I write and the person I am. So I guess that makes me punk?

Punk, I think, is anything that flies in the face of what you'd expect. Punk is yelling at the top of your lungs when you're expected to be quiet, and it's acting like a full-on gentleperson when everyone expects you to stage a riot...or the exact opposite.

But it's more than that, I guess. It's not just going against what people expect of you. It's really ignoring the idea of expectation itself and doing whatever you want or whatever you're feeling. I'm talking about art, mainly, although I think it still holds true with everything else.

READ THE REST >

G-dcast: Good Rebellion & Bad Rebellion

This week's G-dcast makes me really happy. Not the idea of Korach rebelling, or the whole thing where the earth itself swallows up 250 people...I just think it looks really cool. And I wrote the curriculum to be all about good rebelling vs. bad rebelling.

Or, like axiom I once heard: In other religions, if you question authority, they call you a heretic. In Judaism, if you question authority, they call you a rabbi.

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.

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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.

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Punk Rock Parsha

While Googling for Torah texts, the last thing you expect to pop up is the kinetic face of your new favorite band. But Patrick A., the lead singer of Atlanta-based Can Can, just started posting his thoughts on the weekly Torah portion on YouTube -- starting last week with Tetzaveh, and onto this week's confrontation of the Golden Calf.

In Patrick's reading, the Children of Israel emerge from the sin of the Calf with a valuable lesson learned -- a lesson in the importance of avoiding groupthink and learning to think independently. In short, he says, the Torah teaches that individuality and nonconformity is the only way to go, and especially the only way to form a meaningful relationship with God -- which, to me at least, seems like the most punk-rock thing of all.

Jennifer Blowdryer: How to Write the Great American Novel on Food Stamps

On Jewcy, I interview Jennifer Blowdryer, who might be my favorite person in the world who ever made me inadvertently homeless. Two days before I was supposed to get to New York City and rent her (swoon) East Village apartment for two months -- a block from the Bowery Poetry Club, two from ABC No Rio, and right down the street from the most amazing graffiti in the country -- she told me that some Long Island girl in a bar had offered to pay her five times the going cost.

Somehow, with her writing and her sense of humor, I was okay with that. Eventually.

Okay enough to cover her new and hilarious short novel, The Laziest Secretary in the World, for Jewcy:

Jennifer Blowdryer revels in those truths about ourselves that we'd rather not hear. While that is ostensibly the job of every writer, few do it with such grace, aplomb, and lack of restraint. Part Emily Post and part Morton Downey, Jr., Blowdryer's subjects are punk-rock Artful Dodgers and Malcom MacLaren-worthy bastards, lovable and loathable in equal doses, people who take a free drink when they're given one and scam one when they're not.

The protagonist of her latest book, The Laziest Secretary in the World, is named Latoya (she's white). She's alternately pathetic and brilliant, a powerhouse at drinking, social analysis, and anything that involves the bottom-most echelon of pop culture. Latoya could write for McSweeney's but instead makes fun of tabloid celebrities. She daydreams of the limitless variety of frozen dinners, having an unlimited cash flow, and of being interviewed on a daytime talk show, answering difficult questions with, "Merv, even if I had a million dollars, I would still buy Butterfingers and M&Ms. I mean, what could possibly replace them?"

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Taqwacore wisdom

All weekend I've continued my obsession with Michael Muhammad Knight's book The Taqwacores, which follows a bunch of young Muslim Punks living in a group house in upstate New York. The setting is often just an excuse to explore the dynamics in Muslim culture, but those dynamics are insightful and often brilliant. In one part, the main characters (all single, all roughly college-age) are arguing over whether or not they're going to raise their children within Muslim tradition:

"I'd just give my kid a Quran," said Fasiq, "and tell him to be on his way. Go find your own truth, you know?"

"I dont' need my kids saying 'Allahu Akbar' when they pray," said Rabeya [who wears full-body burqa and sings Iggy Pop covers]. "That works for me, and I would teach it to them so they know me and who I am and where they're coming from, but if they found something else, cool."

"I wnat my kids to be smart," said Muzammil. I admit it took me a second to remember that homosexuals do raise families. "If I was ever a father I'd take my kid to every kind of temple, real early on. By the time he or she was eight years old they'd have been to a masjid, a church, a synagogue, a Buddhist temple, a Sikh gurudwara, whatever we could find. I want a worldly child. Buy second or third grade my son-slash-daughter will have more appreciation for diversity and the beliefs of others than most adults."

"I believe in teaching my children Islam," I offered. "Just as Pakistan is part of their heritage, so is our religion. You can't separate it. I don't know how strict I'll be; maybe we'll just go to the masjid for Eids and that's it. I doubt we'd pray five times a day, though we wouldn't admit that outside the house. I don't know how I'd be if I had a daughter who wanted to go to the prom...or if my son came home drunk one night. But my own values are constantly changing, so it's hard to say. I honestly have no idea but I have a nice little image in my head of what Islam can be for them.

And, bonus: A startling, impassioned, and sometimes violent Al-Jazeera video segment that profiles the Taqwacore movement:

Subverting - and Loving - Islam

A few weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times did a story on Muslim punk-rock teenagers -- and we ran a critique of it -- and noted how the article was actually about one Muslim punk-rock teenager, and a bunch of other girls who talked about how weird it was.

Yesterday the New York Times profiled Michael Muhammad Knight, a Muslim and author of The Taqwacores, a novel about punk-rock Muslims. Both vehemently religious and sometimes vehemently opposed to the official Muslim platform on things -- or what's come to be accepted as the official Muslim platform on things -- Knight's characters are punk band members, co-ed prayer ritual leaders, and a "riot girl [sic] who plays guitar onstage wearing a burqa." The book started out life as a photocopied manuscript that was passed around between young outlier Muslims, but was soon picked up by Autonomedia and has just been rereleased in a sharp-looking printing by Soft Skull Press. But the Times profile gets both Knight's message and the author himself in a way that I think the L.A. Times just glossed over, which is to say, there's a stunning and humbling combination of chutzpah and devekut -- that is to say, in-your-face-ness and piety -- in Knight's work that connects with readers in a truly profound way.

The most awesome proof of this, I think, comes from the novel itself. When Knight wrote the book five years ago, he was writing a wish. Taqwacore was his made-up name; there weren't any Muslim bands playing revolutionary punk music. (And yes, I know I'm being incredibly gushy; my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was about an Orthodox Jewish punk-rock scene that also didn't exist.) But in the short time since its publication, an entire Taqwacore scene has sprung up.

It seems kind of weird that I'm blogging about this on a Jewish site, I know. But so much of it resonates with my own Judaism -- and who among us doesn't recognize the impetus to both love our religion and despise parts of it? Knight, I think, says it best. It's easy to link Muhammad's actions (the prophet, not the author) to Abraham's riot-boy tantrum that first kicked off monotheism on Earth, but the sentiment of returning our religion to its roots, and separating true Torah from what everyone around you says it is, is a sentiment that we can all relate to:

[Knight] said he wrote “The Taqwacores” to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only Allah.