JDate and Superheroes

Our dear friend JT Waldman alerted us to this cool little wink to the Jewluminati. This week, DC Comics -- the company that publishes Superman and Wonder Woman -- is completely rebooting its line of comics. What does this mean? Watch this video, and you'll know more than you ever wanted to. (Don't worry. It's funny.)

A totally minor caveat: The video isn't overtly Jewish at all until 1:27. Then, for the final 3 seconds, it retcons the entire video into being nothing BUT Jewish.

Oh, I know JDate is an easy punchline. But I have to confess (as someone who's never been on the site), it does what it's supposed to do. My sister met her boyfriend on JDate, and they're getting married this weekend. Did you notice there's absolutely no sarcasm in this post? JDate really does work magic.

A Wish, An Excerpt, and Some Music

Today is my grandmom's birthday. Here's a link to a poem I wrote about her. It's called Dizzy.

I learned what Halloween as the same time I learned what Mischief Night was. My parents left all the lights on downstairs that night, and they closed all the blinds. I smiled to myself. It was like our private family hideout. Why didn’t home always feel like that? But their mouths were grim. In the morning, broken eggs streaked the windows of the houses on our block. The tree on the corner was mummified in toilet paper. I had nothing but my mind to connect the dots between last night and that morning. Halloween for me wasn’t about ghosts and candy; it was about the shadowy strangers who liked to threaten you from the shadows finally stepping out of the shadows.

Best Reason for a Border Crossing

The cast and crew of 1/20, the movie I wrote, were invited to speak at New York Law School last week. I wasn't there, but Ayako Ibaraki and Kayla Dempsey were. Gerardo, the director, was Skyping in, which is why he looks like a talking head from Futurama.

Also, if you're in Mexico City, 1/20 is showing at La Casa Del Cine this Monday, August 24. Admission is free, so if you really want to see it, you can buy a plane ticket and count that as your admission. (Plus, bonus, Mexico!)

C MALO PRODUCCIONES Presenta la cinta: “1/20” El documental “1/20” muestra la perspectiva de México desde unapunk inmigrante japonesa orgullosa de los Estados Unidos.  No hay subtítulos, porque la sutileza de las demandas de actuación se centra en la audiencia.  La presentación es suave e infantil como una nueva forma de rebelión contra las convenciones cinematográficas.   La generación de “1/20” ha rechazado todas las reglas, mientras que secretamente busca el sentido en una cortina del nihilismo. La presentación de “1/20” se realizará en Lacasadelcine.mx el miércoles 24 de Agosto a las 9 PM. ¡LA ENTRADA ES LIBRE! ¡NO FALTEN!

Meanwhile, I'm still pretty lost in my new memoir. (In a good way, I think.) (Uh, mostly.) With fiction, you're creating a story, and every part of it--characters, plot, setting, accidents--goes toward building the story. When you write nonfiction, you're dealing with stuff that already happened, and trying to magically change those things into a story. Even if you already know what the story is, you don't necessarily know what needs to be there for the story to happen. So you can -- hypothetically -- write a chapter that's 15,000 words long, and then realize that it doesn't belong in there at all. And then you just hit DELETE, or tuck it into your back pocket and think it might be good for another story someday, and then you just carry on.

Hypothetically, I mean.

Books for Bullies

I promise, I'm not going to turn my blog into a collection of reviews. There are things I really honestly want to tell you about my OWN life, not some wacky fictional characters in my imagination or something like that.

But Brianna at TeensReadToo.com had really really cool things to say about Losers:

This was a good read. From the very beginning, I sided with Jupiter, of course. It wasn't fair to him that he always got picked on because he wasn't from around there and had a different accent. I loved how he decided to change when he got tired of always being bullied. It made sense to transform himself when he was starting a new high school. Not everyone knew who he was, so he could really be anybody that he wanted to be. I thought that was a really brave thing of him to do.

My fave part: "I definitely think bullies should read LOSERS so that they can understand what the people being bullied are going through - and maybe, just maybe, they'll understand that it's not right."

Amen. And, here -- read the whole dang thing.

Every Day Is Yom Kippur

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a writer named Adi Elbaz. She'd just finished Yom Kippur a Go-Go and wanted to talk to me. Could she do it? And could she do something with it?

She just wrote a really, really sweet piece about my book. It's here. This is just a bit of the awesomeness contained:


Lonely (Wo)man of Faith in a Modern World

In many ways, Yom Kippur A Go-Go  is the story of Hava Aaronson, or me as a 12th-grader: the story of to-thine-own-self-be-true-ing against the odds. And the odds are even stronger when you purposely seek them out, as Roth does: when you consciously make yourself a stranger in a strange land, no matter how appealing its social ethic. Because Roth’s story of religious tribulation takes place, almost entirely, in the anything-goes wastelands of San Francisco’s Mission District, where, as an Orthodox Jew, he—not the chick doing performance art with her own menstrual blood—is the freak. 

Read the rest >>

We also had a pretty intense email interview. I'm not sure if she'll use it for something else, or I might ask if it's ok just to put up here.

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.

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