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.

The Boys Boys from Brazil

Not a typo: There's a village in Brazil where one out of every five births produces twins, most of them blond-haired and blue-eyed. If you can guess who might have been behind them -- or what experiments may have set the stage for this sort of medical tampering -- you win a cookie.

According to a new book, Mengele: the Angel of Death in South America, the head doctor of Auschwitz shuttled himself between German colonies in Paraguay and Brazil, avoiding capture by the authorities until his death in 1979. (There's a pretty intense article about his background and evasion of post-war capture here.) But Angel of Death sheds new light, so to speak, on his Brazilian activities and suggests that he might have succeeded in creating a race of perfect Aryan children.

For years scientists have failed to discover why as many as one in five pregnancies in a small Brazilian town have resulted in twins – most of them blond haired and blue eyed.

But residents of Candido Godoi now claim that Mengele made repeated visits there in the early 1960s, posing at first as a vet but then offering medical treatment to the women of the town.

Uh....if a strange man showed up in town claiming to be a veterinarian but then asking to see the inflated stomach of your pregnant loved one, would you let them? The Telegraph article continues:

"There is testimony that he attended women, followed their pregnancies, treated them with new types of drugs and preparations, that he talked of artificial insemination in human beings, and that he continued working with animals, proclaiming that he was capable of getting cows to produce male twins."

If you're pregnant, and you're going to a German animal doctor with a shady past for pregnancy advice, Mengele's new biography probably isn't the book for you -- but maybe this one is.

Orthodox Jew s for Obama

Last night, the Orthodox Union called me in a frizzle -- they wanted to run an article on Inauguration. Did I have anything to say? Could I have anything to say?

I don't know how well-acquainted you are with me, but, uh, yeah. Throw me a party, and I will fill the house with ruminations on the Obamanation. I wrote about it once, in this book about chicken soup and Democrats, and I didn't think someone would be nice enough to ask for more. But here's what I said.

I have a friend, an underground playwright, who hates Obama. He's convinced that, six months after Inauguration, nobody's going to notice anything different from the past eight years of George W. Bush's administration -- we'll be paying just as many taxes, our troops will still be mired in war, and everything will be much the same. Nothing will have changed.

But he was one of the first Philadelphians in the poll booths.

Why? "Hope," he said. "The man's all about hope. He believes in something. It's a nice change from all the politicians who believe in nothing."

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Brave New Candy

I should not be getting this excited over a cover, but please believe me, it is hard to contain myself and restrain myself from writing more. Today at work I received a huge box of somethings, which is usually computer parts or promotional keychains or some bizarre food product.

But, today, it was Candy.

That's right: Candy is in paperback.

I am utterly fetishizing the cover, and I don't feel apologetic about it at all. Richard, my publisher, said that if I could get a new cover done, and it didn't cost them anything, they'd do it, and the comic artist Fred Chao pulled through amazingly. (His own Johnny Hiro: Half-Asian, All Hero is a remarkable book...and, as I keep pointing out, he tied with Joss Whedon for the most Eisner nominations this year, which in itself testifies to how much geek cred he should be going on right now.)

And, boom, we have this.

I love the split-screen cover. The quote from Melissa Walker on the front, if you can't read it, says "Part James Bond, part Bond girl, Candy is one unforgettable heroine!" And the rose bleeds across the spine and onto the back, which is great. The title font stretches off the cover, kind of that old-school Superman logo feeling, but in an understated way, like a natural evolution after the credits to "Smallville"...and just the sheer number of drawings that Fred uses (there's another one on the back of Candy looking badass with a hair dryer) is astounding. Especially in this world where most cover designers choose one picture from a clip-art file and paste it around the book a bunch of times....with the amount of Candys that Fred drew for the cover, he might as well have made a whole comic. Hey, there's still time.

The spine, though, is what really gives me shivers. The way that Candy in Action snakes down with little circles and blips is just crying out for another book to stand next to it. It's stirring up all these primal urges within me to write a sequel. And, dammit, I just might.

G-dcast! D'oh!

Have you ever worked on something for forever, fallen asleep with your head on the keyboard, and then realized that your nose had somehow hit the SEND button? It's half past noon on a Monday, the morning having long gone and evaporated, and I realized: holy crap, I wonder if there's a new G-dcast.
Most of my work comes in the early stages -- working with the G-dcasters, writing scripts and talking through doubts and beliefs and names and dates, coordinating recording sessions. And then talking with the animators about what to draw. It's kind of like writing down a few lines of conversation, leaving it alone, and when you come back -- poof! -- somehow it's a comic book.

Or a cool little three-minute movie.

Here's Rabbi Katie Mizrahi talking about the Ten Plagues. And some really neat bulldozing frogs.

Ten Bests

My editor, the ever-loving David Levithan, asks -- well, pretty much everyone who's ever sent him an email to pass on a list of the top ten albums of the year. This year, because it's the tenth time doing it, he's asked us to compile a list of the ten best of the past ten years.

I know I am damning myself to doom. I also know that it's 3:30 AM, I just spent five hours wrestling with medieval commentators on the Bible, and I'm not thinking clearly. (I just had to remember to delete two albums because they were actually books.) So, with that in mind, here are my almost-weigh-ins for this year and this decade. Please, if I've forgotten anything mercilessly important, let me know -- and a gadillion thank-yous to you Twitter and Facebook people who jogged and jagged my memory.

THIS YEAR

The Sway Machinery, self-titled
Mirah, (a)spera
Tender Forever, Wider
Jeremy Jay, A Place Where We Could Go
Y-Love, This Is Babylon
Nine Inch Nails, The Slip
The Roots, Rising Down
TV On the Radio, Dear Science
Northern State, Can I Keep This Pen?

TEN YEARS

Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
Amy Winehouse, Back to Black
Regina Spektor, Begin to Hope
Ani Difranco, Knuckle Down
CocoRosie, La Maison de mon Reve
OutKast, Love Below/Speakerboxxx
Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
Kanye West, College Dropout
Architecture in Helsinki, Fingers Crossed
Liz Phair, Liz Phair (i know. i know. but it just keeps showing up.)