Israel: Visiting Graves, and Digging Your Own

This is Israel: Yesterday I was on a "nature trail," which, without doubt, is an Israeli euphemism for X-treme Sports. In Philadelphia, there was a nature trail that swept around a few meadows and groves of trees and dovetailed into a new housing development that had chopped away the rest of the forest. Here in the Golan, the phrase "nature trail" indicates a trail of barely-there rocks, the plurality of which are equal to or smaller than the width of your foot, jutting out of a cliff.

About an hour and a half in, without warning (and, certainly, without any semblance of sanity) the narrow trail of rocks which we've been precariously balancing ourselves upon gives out, replaced by a handful of metal rungs plopped into the side of the rock bed. Horizontal surfaces as we know them cease to exist, and there's a 20-foot drop into a steam that's 25 feet deep.

It's extreme, alright. But it’s also that particularly Israeli brand of springing total insanity upon you without warning, a reminder that for every anxiety-filled border crossing there's a mountain with a view that will knock the fear of God into you, and for every bomb around the corner, there's also a tiny 3000-year-old synagogue with immaculate stone buttresses around the next corner.

This afternoon we visited Tsfat. It was supposed to be a 30-minute drive, but we kept passing graves. There's a weird code to Israeli gravesites: many tzaddikim, or righteous people, are buried outside of cemeteries—in their own mini-graveyards, or in the middle of nature trails, or just on the side of the road. (One hopes that those ever-lovin' nature trails were not the cause of most of these tzaddikim being buried there, but since the stories about tzaddikim always seem to involve granting miracles, impossible journeys, and staring death right in the face, you have to allow for the possibility that, sometimes, death will not just stare idly back at them.) Some of the graves have domes over them, which indicates their more-exalted-than-normal status. Others, for a similar reason, are painted a turquoise shade of sea blue. I don't know if either or both of those things intimate something specific, or whether there’s a general hierarchy, but these are the things I’ve learned here in a very short time.

That, and that gravesites sometimes make the best concert venues.

Vegetarians and Passover

If you're a Jewish vegetarian, Passover can be really a really trying time, health-wise. All of a sudden, you've got a lot fewer sources of protein, both from wheat products and, for those Ashkenazic vegetarians in the audience, beans and legumes.

From KatiBlack, one of the followers on MJL's Twitter feed, I got a link for VegCooking.com's vegan and vegetarian Passover recipes. A lot of us are going to need this in the next few weeks -- not just those vegans and vegetarians among us, but also anyone who gets sick of matzo brei and brisket after about 2 meals, and then realizes that we have seven and a half days left of Passover.

In some ways, the above link is really great. There's traditional food, some modern twists, and a bit of variety. But VegCooking's Passover reads like a menu consisting entirely of side orders, not meant to fill up anyone whose stomach is bigger than their fist -- and it falls way short in the health arena. (The site, made by PETA, really should take itself more seriously, especially with an advertising budget as big as theirs.) VegCooking also doesn't talk about what to do instead of a shankbone on the seder plate. Fortunately, however, we've got a solution for you.

VegCooking's failings made me wonder what alternatives were out there. Recipezaar has some cool recipes -- especially half-sour pickles -- but you can tell it's not a site made by people who know about kosher cooking. For one thing, it has a bunch of stuff that isn't universally kosher for Passover, and nowhere does it warn that, for instance, no Ashkenazic Jew would ever eat lentils on Passover.

If you are Sephardic, however, you've got to check out VegKitchen.com. I've never done Passover this way, but the recipes look amazing, and a bunch of my Sephardic Facebook friends swear by her.

One of the best resources (and with some great writing) are the brief-but-thorough entries on The Chocolate Lady's blog, which goes through an encyclopedic list of vegetables and other foods, and includes some bonus recipes. (Plantains! Plantain chips! Now this is a Passover to dream about.)

Back to nutrition, though. "It's all about almonds, walnuts, and pumpkin seeds," says Sarah Chandler, a practicing vegan and the webmaster of JewSchool. Pumpkin seeds especially -- they have amazing stores of iron and protein. (Here's a complete chart, just in case you're wondering.) But vegetables are also a good source of protein -- "Even one cup of broccoli has a good deal of protein in it," notes Chandler.

Other good, solid bets for Passover food include:

• Plantains! Plantains look like bananas, although they sometimes look spoiled or bruised. They're not! That's just how plantains grow. Take it as a warning not to eat them raw -- they're starchy and thick, and they taste like biting into thick dough. Fried, however, they're bloody amazing. You can make them sweet (cinnamon, nutmeg) or savory (salt, pepper, paprika) and it's like two entirely different foods. You know that amazing smell that always hits you walking past Latin American restaurants? A lot of that comes from plantains.
  
  
• Wheatgrass! OK, I'm not a big wheatgrass fan. It's not actually made of wheat (it's not exactly grass, either, though the similarity is disturbing), and therefore, it's 100% kosher for Passover.
  
  
• Quinoa! is a great underused food, not just for Passover (and not just for vegetarians) but for pretty much everyone, all the time. It feels like couscous, tastes like whatever you spice it with (it's really good at absorbing flavor) -- but it's actually a tuber, a distant cousin of the potato. (It's also loaded with vitamins and protein.) It comes from South America, so no ancient rabbis ever thought to outlaw it. Today, there's a big question among observant Jews about whether or not quinoa's allowed on Passover, but Rabbi Avrohom Blumenkrantz, who basically wrote the rulebook on Passover food, says that it's impossible to forbid it outright -- and that many people have a custom of not eating quinoa just because it's so weird, but for vegetarians and anyone else who's conscious of their health, you not only can eat it, but you should eat it.

My personal favorite technique for Passover is to make normal food. Uh, whut? Pretend it's not Passover -- just cook without wheat or grain. A really good tomato soup (basil! leeks!) is an awesome meal that's totally kosher for Passover as long as you don't remind yourself; MJL's beet and potato frittata was made to be a light and fluffy post-Yom Kippur fast meal, but light & fluffy is exactly on the menu for someone who's just made it through two seders.

And, if you needed a reason to go vegetarian, this supplies it: In the midst of my complaining about VegCooking, I found a tiny link that sent me to a tiny 3-minute documentary that shows the horrors that went on at Rubashkin's. I know it's old -- but I'd never actually seen the footage before, of a kashrut inspector cutting open a cow and then someone right behind him yanking out the cow's trachea. And now I think I'm more freaked than ever.

Birkat Hachamah: The Untold Dangers and Sinister Pratfalls

On Tuesday, April 8, we celebrate Birkat Hahama, the Blessing over the Sun. It's observed once every 28 years, when the sun reaches the exact location that it did when it was created.

Jews actually also recite a Blessing over the Moon, too. This occurs at night, of course, and it happens once every month -- and, for that reason, is not nearly as interesting and obscure and cool-sounding.

There might be another reason that we only celebrate Birkat Hahama once a generation, however. Check out the beginning of this article, wherein one rabbi is arrested by brave Policeman Foley -- in Tompkins Square Park, one of New York's punk-rock meccas, no less! -- and another, that tricky Rabbi Klein, flees the scene.

Candy gets covered

The open mic last night was insanely, smashably hit. The place was packed, both with performers and audience -- and we even had an open mic virgin come up at the end and ask if he could perform a song, which is how you know you're being inspiring. Danny Raphael, who's usually an M.C. of the highest order, was like "there's no mic? I don't mind" and blasted into an a capella set, over the course of which I didn't even miss the music. And then these wacky un-yeshiva boys came with their guitars and made a little soundtrack of their own. Yeah -- it was a good night. And I could actually eat the food, since it was kosher (and vegan!), which is always a nice change.

And I got an amazing note from Adam Luckwaldt, significant beau of last month's feature, who's wringing his own inner muse by the neck and making a comic a day. He'd read Candy in Action, listened to the soundtrack, and covered one of the songs (the one by Postal, Odin Smith, and me -- literally turned it into a comic.

Yay art. Yay collaboration. And yay -- continually -- Maurice Sendak.

Make my heart sing.

Q: What does it take to make me burst into tears at work?

A: The trailer for Where the Wild Things Are.

I could be critical. I could start second-guessing what the rest of the movie is going to be like, and whether the Wild Things will have the same voices that they did in my head as a child (they won't) or that I give them when I read out loud to my daughter (probably not). Somewhere in my head right now, I'm thinking about it from the perspective of Maurice Sendak, and whether he would have expected the film version to be anything like his book (no) and whether he would be happy anyway (I really, really believe yes).

But at this very moment in time, I don't care. I just want to run out of here and not stop till I get to the ocean.

Open Mic - A Cry for Help

After much confusion and venue-switching, tomorrow night's Open Mic is safe -- we're doing it at Sacred Chow in the West Village, right near Washington Square Park. Free, of course, and the best kosher sangrias in New York City (and otherworldly food, too). And the estimable Danny Raphael as a feature, just in from London...tomorrow at 7:30. Please, spread the word.

Oh, Excellent.

At the out-of-control and totally uncouth forty-author-signing yesterday at Books of Wonder, it seemed like everyone had a story -- the people who hadn't written books most of all. There was the woman who gave me the MMORPG-type business card and told me that her just-finished novel was like a girl version of the Goonies -- total booklust on that front. And Michael Northrop, who was lurking like a fan, even though his first book is coming out in 2 weeks, and it's going to be bigger than Twilight. And then the awesome punk-rock girl who stormed up to me to announce that she went to an Orthodox day school and we probably had the same history -- and I was like, no, I just wish I had your history. (Which I actually don't. I'm pretty alright having gone to a school which has been fictionalized as North Shore High, and became religious when I did -- but it still would've been fun, I think.

And then there's Hayley Anne Perkins, who was walking around with a beautiful oversized dictionary yesterday (American Heritage, I think) and asking everyone to sign on their favorite word. She very courteously listed them on her site, right after a poem called "Ned Vizzini Stole My Pen" -- but here are a few of my favorites:

SOMETHING (BECAUSE “SOMETHING IS GOOD”) - Billy Merrell
CRASH - Blake Nelson
BONVIVANT - Micol Ostow
SNEAK - Lisa Ann Sandell
SLUICE - Adrienne Maria Vrettos

Adrienne replied "oh, sluice!" after not even a second's pause, as if it was the most matter-of-fact thing that could ever occur to anyone. Because every time you say it, it sounds like you're pronouncing it wrong. Go check out the whole unexpurgated list, though -- if only to read that fun poem.

Sometimes Even I Write about Meat

This week on G-dcast: how to grill an animal in the Temple.

Rachel Kohl Finegold, the exemplary ritual director of our old synagogue in Chicago, was totally great about jumping in to launch this episode. As a matter of fact, she (shomer-negiah) strongarmed me at Alan and Miriam's wedding and was like "what's the G-dcast emergency, huh? How many weeks do I have to do this?" We hadn't found anyone for Vayikra. She and her husband, Rebbetzin Avi, started pelting me with pitches right then and there. Usually, it takes us *weeks* to get to pitch level.

But: boom.

(and i know which lines you will probably think come straight from me and my wacky radical vegetarian-separatist mentality. well, you're WRONG. and, may i point out that rachel is a proud meat-eater....?)

Rupert Murdoch Dreams

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yiddish 2.0

It's weird and somewhat scary to realize that you can put a cap on the number of Yiddish books ever published -- and, by most reckonings (for the secular world, anyway), the number of Yiddish books that will ever be published. But that's exactly what the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library says in its introductory statement: "Over ten thousand Yiddish texts, estimated as over 1/2 of all the published works in Yiddish, are now online" -- and the implicit notion is, there aren't going to be that many more Yiddish works published.

This by no means diminishes the excellent, massive, and spotlessly-presented Yiddish library on Archive.org, which came online a few weeks ago -- one of the most unbelievably selfless and thorough nonprofits on the Web. They've been collating every single website since 1996 and keeping track of them (so, if you ever wanted to see your first-ever freshman-year I-just-learned-HTML site, you can), and they also have a massive Live Music Archive with tens of thousands of concerts.

In a way, perusing their archive feels kind of like looking at a time-capsule after the end of the world: It's a perfect fossil record of the Web at any point in time. Michael Chabon, while talking about the impetus to write his Yiddish Policemen's Union, spoke of finding a Yiddish travel phrasebook with translations like "How much is a ticket to Lublin?" and instructions for ordering in restuarants...like a key to a lost world. If the world was no more, and all that remained were the echoes of the Internet bouncing off distant quasars (I know that isn't how it really works), Archive.org would be the container with every nuanced bit of what we are contained inside, from badly-scrawled blogs to even worse-scrawled CNN and MSNBC reports, and all the beauty that they contain.

The Spielberg Archive is kind of like that, only using Yiddish books instead of websites. Der Purim-Ber is a children's book, as far as I can tell, narrated by the bear itself. A Shṭeṭele in Poyln is a travelogue of the author's trip to his hometown of Ciechanowiec -- which, like Chabon's idea, no longer exists.

This, of course, doesn't include the hundreds of new Yiddish books being published every year, almost exclusively by religious Yiddish publishers, for the Haredi public...one of which my daughter is currently chewing on at this very moment. I don't speak Yiddish, but we can both read it. It's kind of the exact opposite of this archive -- I certainly didn't grow up with this language, but in the place where I live now, it's almost certain that she'll learn it in school, and it will almost undoubtedly come in handy at some point.

Free Music, Filipinos, and (how) Jews (look)

Hey, remember our video? The one about how Jews look? The theme song was composed by my very good friend, the astute and fearless C.J. Pizarro -- and, by the way, you can download the mp3 for free or download the whole album, Snow Crabs, if you like.

C.J. is (gasp!) not Jewish. He is, unrelatedly, Filipino -- and together, he and I are in a science-fiction hip-hop band, Chibi Vision, which we used to refer to as an Orthodox Jewish-Filipino cross-cultural multi-platform geek project -- or, to save breath, the "Jew-o-pino team-o."

Anyway: the other day, I received an email from him, sounding as astounded as it is possible for an email to sound. "I found our love child!" he wrote.

The love child in question: Eliyahu Enriquez, a Jewish Filipino poet, publisher, cultural theorist and active Twitterer. After receiving Honorable Mention in Lincoln Center's Robert Nettleton/Ully Hirsh Poetry Prize, he's released several poetry chapbooks, and is currently working on a collection of piyyutim. I've been blasting madly through his stuff, and you should, too. Equal parts irreverent and reverent, his poems are random and play off a big-muscled veneer of stream-of-consciousness, but actually connect and make sense in ways that are both cerebral and factual.

A lifetime of lesion has brought us
Back together in Balikbayan coffins.
His memory is erection.
Forget forgiveness.
Navigate our leather
Phylacteries and arteries.
Toda Rabba for traveling
Cosmos de Vie.
So long,
Galut Graveyard!

That was R.S.V.P. He's grinning in one corner of his mouth and keeping the other corner totally solemn. In "Akhdut," though, he's formal, sentimental, although, curiously, playing it just as cool:

I attended two funerals today
I did not bother to bring an umbrella
Or flower
Or Bible
Or date
A few others did
A few

READ MORE >

Me and Robert Pinsky down by the Schoolyard

On the heels of this bizarre viral video from the 92Y, JBooks, needing a big kick in the donations bucket, asked former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky -- who, apparently, is both a fan of poetry and a fan of JBooks -- to help them promote their site. Pinsky hails from the classical tradition, but has both an excellent sense of irony and exquisite comic timing (as evidenced on his Colbert Report appearance).

I could act all swaggery and say that's the reason I'm there, too. It's not -- I'm just a kid who writes books who got asked to talk about Losers, which is just a loosely autobiographical book anyway, except that, in the book, I say and do everything that I'm too inhibited or embarrassed or just straight-up dorky to do in real life.

But asking to talk about yourself is a pretty cool feeling. It's kind of the opposite of a blog, where you're asking other people to listen to you talk about yourself. Here, I kind of excoriate the fabulous Nathan Englander for writing Orthodoxsploitation, and talk about how I there need to be more books in the world that make you feel good about being a geek.

I don't know if Mr. Pinsky would self-label as a geek, but I certainly would label him as one. Purely, purely as a compliment.

A few years ago, I had a bright future as a Young Orthodox Novelist—surely you know the type. A little bit disgruntled, a little bit smarmy; a bit of an idealist, a bit of an exhibitionist. If Nathan Englander and Shalom Auslander were the literary world's reaction to Orthodoxy, then I was the reaction to them. I was a punk-rock kid who'd grown up as a Saturday-morning Jew, going to Hebrew School at my Conservative synagogue when I couldn't get out of it, and sick of the half-baked theories of God that were Xeroxed through three generations of crappy old textbooks. That's the way Judaism felt to me—like a smudgy third-generation bootleg of something that, to my great-great-grandparents, was crystal clear. Whatever that crystal-clearness actually was, I imagined it was God.

I'd almost been born disenchanted. I was disenchanted with leading a secular lifestyle, sick of the hypocrisy of going to synagogue Saturday mornings and then baseball games Saturday afternoon, and of all of that coming to a dead halt after my bar mitzvah. Like Hella Winston's book Unchosen, I was sick of Jewish culture. Only, I was sick of the other Jewish culture, the secular American kind. I wanted something legitimate. I wanted something real.

READ MORE >

What Makes You Happy

Hand-written scrawl on a bright orange piece of photocopy paper hanging on the street in Crown Heights:

ADAR IS NOT
OVER YET

WHAT ARE YOU
DOING TODAY
TO BE HAPPY?
For all my misgivings about living in the seat of religious Brooklyn, there are things which make me happy. Wildly happy. For all the weird and sometimes uncomfortable social things that happen -- I grew up secular, and yes, I still sometimes extend my hand to shake when meeting women (some of them in my family-in-law -- double ug), I will never tire or de-inspire of seeing these simple, devotion-motivated, joy-inflicted singularly happy testaments to God. Like remembering the commandment that we're supposed to be happy for all of Adar.

So, full disclosure: Yesterday, I danced with my daughter and invited a friend over for sushi when I ran into him in the street and watched the Muppet Show before bed. What can I do to top that today? I'd love to go to the NYC Teen Author Festival, but my #1 contender makes me sound like a total loser: get to bed early.

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.

Shalach Mones Madness

Someone driving through our part of Brooklyn honked at Itta and I, waving us over from the sidewalk. "What's going on?" she said. "Is this a bank robbery, or is it some kind of Jewish holiday?"

It was a fair question, considering we were standing next to a seven-foot-tall in all black clothes and a Mexican wrestler mask. This was my first Purim in a Hasidic neighborhood, and it was literally swarming with people: pre-tween geishas hammered on our neighbor's door. A woman in full turquoise burqa walked down the street next to a man in a streimel and those tight white stockings. People ran everywhere, literally throwing candy at each other at times, and squeezing chocolate bars into people's mail slots at others. "This is like Halloween, but the way Jews celebrate it," Itta pointed out. "By giving people candy instead of demanding it."

I've always been a Halloween-positive boy myself, but yesterday, I had to agree: it was pretty much a madhouse of goodwill and thanksgiving. We made thirty-two of our shalach mones packages, and by the day's end we were down to three. (Frum Satire and his friend, paying us a surprise visit, knocked it down to one.) All told, 'twas better to give than to receive, and it was a mad amount of fun as well.

But, because it's not bad to receive as well, here are my shalach manot highlights of the year:

• A family friend's house had do-it-yourself shalach manot -- there were a row of boxes, both new things and (packaged) food traded in from other shalach moneses earlier that day. "So you guys would like, what, nice chocolate?" she asked, ready to drop in a big old bar that was fancy and Swiss. "No way," I said. It's true -- we're not chocolate people. "Your wife wouldn't like that?" she said. "What should I give her..." she rumbled through the box, pulling out a tin and making a face -- "sardines?" "Actually," I said, "she loves sardines." (Don't worry -- they also gave us two pineapples.)
  
  
• Somewhere along the line (post-Shushan, pre-me becoming observant) a custom started that, ideally, you should give two different kinds of food -- that is, for which you should say two different kinds of blessings -- for Purim. We couldn't find the source for this anywhere, and this year, my in-laws gave wurst and vodka. 40% alcohol, 110% Russian.
  
  
• Berwin, the aforementioned Mexican wrestler, handed us a bodega-bag with a really nice bottle of wine and a three-pound box of granola. I don't understand it, either.
  
  
• Matisyahu and his family gave out falafel, hummus, and vegetables in reusable enviro-plastic containers, along with a plea to keep the Purim-related waste to a minimum -- which was both good advice, and necessary.

Saturday Morning Watchmen

Oh, NOES. Coming slightly behind the Watchmen Babies on The Simpsons is this -- a funked-out '80s recreation of the Minutemen. I love the nod to Scooby-Doo cartoons, but the nod to Jem is what you'll need to rewind and watch in slow motion to catch.

O, Monday.

Jewish Divorce: What You Need to Know

Among the religious community, there's a huge problem of agunot -- that is, women who want a divorce from their husbands, frequently because of abuse or other severe problems, and whose husbands refuse to grant the divorce. Because a Jewish legal stipulation puts divorce solely in the husband's court -- a safeguard from when husbands were required to provide food, money and shelter for their wives, whether or not they were still "together" -- it's become a huge problem in recent times, when to be spiteful, malicious, or merely because of indifference, some men will divorce their wives, sometimes even dating or remarrying, without granting their wife a get.

Among the religious community, there are also a number of insanely heroic people who have made it their life's work to stop these miserable excuses for people. At the forefront of this battle is Mavoi Satum, whose former president, Inbal Freund, is also a gifted writer and performance poet.

She and artist Chari Pere (whose work, btw, you'll be seeing on MJL pretty soon) went to visit one of Mavoi Satum's clients, spent two hours interviewing her and listening to her story, and developed this three-page comic. Pass it around. Spread it everywhere. And let people know that prenuptial agreements aren't just for Donald Trump and his prospective ex-wives -- they're for anyone who wants to avoid years and possibly decades of heartache, legal battles, and trauma for kids that you haven't even conceived of yet.

Go here to read the comic, or here to download a printable PDF.

How Jews Look

A while ago, I got an email from some chick saying asking if I could talk about about being shomer negiah. Yes, it sounds totally sketchy, but Judy Prays was a filmmaker and making a documentary, and you all know how much I like to talk. So, in that context, it was less sketchy -- not much less, but less.

When I started working at MyJewishLearning, one of my first gigs was to start producing short films. I called in the heavy artillery -- by which I mean, Judy -- and we set to work on creating a sort of anti-how-to series.

By which I mean, instead of showing how people should do things, we showed how Jews actually do do them.

The first one premieres today! Check it out:


And this all comes just in time for this week's Torah portion: It's all about the clothes of the High Priest! Whoo, mysterious.

92 words a minute on the subway, standing up.

So good to be in the swing of a new story. This is a short one, and I'm not usually good with writing short stories -- I tend to either build up too much steam so I trick myself into thinking I'm working on a novel, and then 60 or 70 pages later I look up and, woops, I realize I forgot these things are supposed to end.

But I have a good feeling about this one. It started when I was listening to this album, which you can download free from that link, so if anyone wants to start writing, we can have a fun little war.

Also fun: Neil Gaiman's new children's book has been turned into a Flash film by his publishers. A little bit magic, but a little bit cheesy. A friend at HC says that they're starting to do this for all their picture books. Reactions?

Richard Nash Leaves Soft Skull

OK, I'm as freaked out as you are -- here is the story, if you haven't heard. The halloween candy-size version: Richard Nash, who took over Soft Skull Press and polished it and shined it made it (even) great(er), is relinquishing command.

My guess is as good as yours, people. I thought that, if it ever happened, Richard would blast off straight into some new Web 4.0 idea of Twitter novels or Books That Read You or something even more revolutionary. Of course, what he says on his site makes just as much sense -- that he'll be consulting publishers and working to save our industry.

According to their press release, Soft Skull will keep going. Candy in Action will stay in print -- and have I mentioned it looks great in paperback? -- and I'm still friendly with them, as far as I know....and yes, if "Orthodox Girls" gets made into a movie and I sell a million copies of all my books, I still want to put out all my future books on a tiny indie press. There is no back catalogue I have a crush on more than Soft Skull's, from Daphne Gottlieb's manifestos to Mike Doughty's couplets. And, praise G-d, they're still going to be alive (well, except for Doughty, who went out of print a while ago....dammit). And Soft Skull's associate editor is sticking around, which gives me hope for the future, as much as it does for the present.

So there is no reason to be afraid. And every reason to think that Soft Skull will keep going, and that Richard will get under the skin of other publishers and implant little Soft Skull-like parasites there and create new little Soft Skull-inspired life forms crawling through Random House and Harper's and even (gasp) Scholastic...Hey, here's hoping.

A very short review of "Dollhouse"

What did you think of Dollhouse?

I liked it -- I mean, I think I did?? It started slow. Red flag in my brain: this is why Firefly got canceled. If you don't start with a bang, you lose people on TV -- and this is starting with a timid, lo-energy conversation in an office.

It cut to a motorcycle chase. Good intentions, but not as good as it should have been....

The first half didn't seem like a Joss Whedon show at ALL. then the second half was totally Joss Whedon. The show feels a bit manufactured, like it's something they're getting paid to make, whereas Buffy was something that the actors and writers needed to make, whether there was fame and fortune or not...but it was still a pretty damn good action-adventure 45 minutes of my life. The greater plots feel the most forced of all. But last night, the resolution to the kidnapping and the trauma-that-wasn't-really-a-trauma....damn. All of us - me, Itta, house guests - were shaking when we got up afterward.

(And no, we didn't watch it on Shabbos....thank you, Hulu.)

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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Hasidic Rabbis, Indian Jews, and The Manic Frum Music Report

My latest column on Nextbook: Rabbi Raz Hartman and the songs of the Bnei Menashe tribe of Southeast India.

Three minutes is about the length of my attention span—and the average pop song—and within its limits I have come to expect a dance party, a manic heavy-metal freakout, or an angry but ultimately hopeful statement about love. I could never be a product of the classical era. I need pop music. But there are some experiences that can't be captured in a bite-size musical nugget.

Raz Hartman writes songs that, in length and in musical theme, straddle the division between classical, pop, and religious music. I wouldn’t call it music to meditate to, but that’s only because the term has come to mean music to fall asleep to. Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, Hartman’s spiritual inspiration, said other people tell stories to put themselves to sleep—Jews tell stories to wake themselves up. And Hartman's second album, Shuva (his second) is definitely music to wake up to.

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TV Stuff and Free Stuff

First, the free. Courtesy of SimonPulse, by way of Cupcake Witch -- email your favorite fictional couple to pulsespringfling at geemail:

You can say Hava and Charles (ewww) or Candy and Mr. Patterson (double eww) or Jupiter and just about anyone....or, you know, people who are in books I didn't write, as well.

And the TV: I've told you about Chuck, right? At times it feels more like a sanitized TV Show Geeks Should Watch than a TV show that geeks actually do watch...but there are the moments that make it worth everything. And the show's ministering angels really do play a good game of keeping the characters' lives moving in unexpected ways. And then, of course, there are the gimmicks. Like this week, when the episode is shown in 3-D (I shlepped my glasses out of my copy of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier)...

Famous people, socks, and goats.

A truly baffling video advertisement for the 92Y Tribeca, where I host a monthly poetry & music open mic. It was directed by Michael Showalter, stars Paul Rudd, and has a spot from Eugene Mirman, the landlord on "Flight of the Conchords" (and, I'm sure, a bunch of other comedy people I should know but don't). It's very Stella/State humor, which is to say, it's reeeally subtle -- I'm totally down with surrealism and Dada, but this isn't quite surreal, it just has nothing to do with anything. Sub-surrealism? Semidada?

My True, Honest Inner Feelings On Robert Smith of the Cure

There's a new interview with me on Cupcake Witch, a fascinating new young-adult lit blog, which is refreshingly dark and refreshingly not gushy about every manner of YA writing. So far they've covered the new Amanda Palmer album and Poppy Z. Brite's handmade journal collection (side-note: ooogle).

And, me. Marie talked to me about Losers, the underground magazines I used to make, and why I'm so attached to stealing titles of Cure songs for my chapters:

Cupcake Witch: I love how several of the chapters in Losers are named after Cure songs. Did you ever see that South Park episode where Robert Smith comes to save the world from Barbara Streisand and at the end Kyle shouts "Disintegration is the best album ever!"? Do you agree with that statement?

Matthue Roth: You won't believe how long I've waited for someone to ask this question. When I saw that episode -- probably the first time it aired -- I was totally incredulous. Disintegration? Really? Not that I don't like Disintegration, but it feels like the default Cure album, the one for people who've barely heard of the Cure. Pornography is so much better.

But, yes, I was out of my seat and standing on the couch the second that the mecha-dinosaur Robert Smith came on the screen. I think that's one of my life goals -- to get made into a Japanese monster movie on South Park.

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Geek Love Doll

One of Itta's friends, I can't remember who, was hanging out with her yesterday, and their babies were playing -- it's what babies do when they don't have to go to time-consuming offices -- and Yalta was sucking on the head of this. When I saw the pictures, I freaked. It's Elly and Iphy from Geek Love. Oh, the girl has hope.

Back to School

The Friday night show at Stony Brook was amazing -- the rabbi had a huge dinner in his house, like 50 people, and more just kept popping in and out and staying for 5 minutes. The performance itself was so cool. The last time i did a college show, I kind of talked too much about my kid, and people were like, "Uh, he's so old," but this time, the preppy kids who NEVER care about this stuff were into it, and coming up to me afterward, and people were flirting with Itta and me and so I feel pretty damn good about the performance.

And I am only being all ego-boosty because it's Monday and here I am, back at the office job, sitting at my desk and answering calls from people who think that because I have extension 1 and they can't wait for the rest of the message, that means I'm the secretary.

Baba Sali: The Messiah Is Coming

The Internet has been around for a while -- and, while the immediacy of the medium is unsurpassed in spreading news stories and viral videos of nose-picking politicians and lightsaber duels, the most emotion that's most commonly associated with retrospective looks at internet viral memes is one of acute, painful embarrassment. For every "ZOMG Look At This" that us bloggers have posted, and then proudly bragged to our colleagues that we broke the story, there are a thousand things that would have made the world a better place if we'd totally ignored it in the first place.

And then there are the truly sad ones. The Heaven's Gate cult, originally thought to be harmless -- hey, they weren't recruiting, and they weren't affecting anyone but themselves -- who were among the early Web presences and whose site endures as a testament to their mass suicide.

Okay, but I wanted to talk about something that also has elements of pathos and sadness, if on a totally different level. It's all about a watch.

The great Moroccan sage the Baba Sali ostensibly gave a couple of watches to Rav Mordechai Eliyahu, one of the most important Sephardic rabbis in Israel. One was silver, one was gold. The watches are broken -- or, rather, they move much slower than normal watches. According to Mishpacha magazine (quoted here), Mordechai Eiliyahu's son relates how the watches work:

"One day, the Baba Sali's son came to my father and presented him with a watch. He explained that his holy father had come to him in a dream and told him that he should look in a certain drawer in a certain desk, where he would find this watch. He was to give it to my father and tell him that when the watch reached twelve o'clock, then Mashiach would come. At that time, the watch hands showed twenty minutes to eleven. Since then, my father keeps a very close eye on the watch, and found that sometimes it goes and other times it just stops."

Recently, I stumbled across, this post on another blog, which reported that one of the watches had struck twelve -- that the Messiah's arrival was imminent. Then I noticed the date of the post, August 2005.

Another Heaven's Gate, I thought.

My stomach sunk. I've always been an insufficient believer in the Messiah -- our sages say we should be ready for Mashiach's imminent arrival at all times. I always want to be. Messiah stories thrill me. But I haven't been able to get my head around the concept that the world might be changing, that I might actually see my grandfather and my dead best friend again. Shlomo Carlebach says that that's the kind of thinking that keeps the Messiah from coming. But, hey, I can barely believe that Obama is president -- and there he is, tellin' off the fat cats of Wall Street on the front page of the New York Times.

So, what of it now? Well, it turns out that the watch that struck twelve was only the silver watch -- and, as of November, there was a report (though unconfirmed) that, while Rav Mordechai Eliyahu was in the hospital, his son had custody of the watch, and it had moved to twelve. Or almost twelve?

I haven't been able to find anything more recent. But, as the Baba Sali Facebook group commemorates, today is his 25th yahrzeit. And I can't think of a better way to honor it by thinking that the Messiah might come today. Hey -- there's still hours before sunset. In New York, anyway.

Duck.

A ridiculous amount of music stuff.

First of all, new music column up on Nextbook: Israeli hip-hop and Bible Belt punk-rock.

Hadara Levin-Areddy is a one-woman cultural steamroller. She’s a secular Jew living in Jerusalem, a pianist who plays rock music, a determined iconoclast who’s at once playful and dark-humored—think early Bruce Springsteen meets early Alanis Morrisette. She's carved out a niche for her own art-pop music in Israeli radio that’s not exactly Top 40, but still holds down a demographic of her own, roughly equivalent to that of NPR listeners. Hadara's seventh album, K’ilu Ain Machar ("Like There’s No Tomorrow"), finds her branching out both musically and lyrically, abandoning pop songs for hip hop. more...

And then I talk about it on MJL:

The launch of Jewish Music Report probably has nothing to do with the upcoming Event, starring Lipa Schmeltzer — but I’m sure the timing couldn’t hurt either. Since last year’s sudden cancellation of the Big Event due to rabbinical warnings, Lipa has blown up from a wacky-but-talented opening act into a full-fledged major with wacky Youtube rap videos into a major Hasidic media star. The coverage provoked a profile in the New York Times, and, in many ways, backfired on its organizers — some rabbis who authorized the ban later admitted to having been coerced into signing, or signing without really knowing what was going on. It also propelled Lipa’s fame into uncharted waters. Whereas before, everyone in the Hasidic world kind of knew about the singer who did holy parodies of secular songs in Yiddish, now everyone — even non-music listeners — knew that he was a good Jew who just happened to ire the wrong rabbi.

And I am so, so lucky -- I can't believe that I am related to these people (courtesy of JMR):

Jazz Is the New Klezmer

I know, I know -- I talk about Yoshie Fruchter a lot. But he's worth it -- and he's doing so much stuff that it would be hard not to talk about him.

On Jewcy today, I talk to him about his new band, his new album, and why his parents are so damn cool:

Yoshie Fruchter gets around. Besides being a member of half a dozen bands, from the children's parody band Shlock Rock to guesting with Pharaoh's Daughter, he's made a name for himself in the few short years since he moved to Brooklyn from his hometown of Silver Spring, MD.

It's easy to chalk Yoshie's existence until that point up to the classic story of small-town-boy-makes-it-big. But between the lines, Fruchter has a lot of stories--his mother is a full-time arts educator in the yeshiva system, and his father is a versatile musician who, among his own accolades, was babysat by Elvis as a child.

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Open Mic & Neil Gaiman in New York (but not together)

Tomorrow night: open mic with me at the 92Y Tribeca! 200 Hudson Street, right near pretty much every good after-show bar and restuarant in the city. Featured readers are Jen Hubley, senior style editor for About.com and wild blogger in her own right, and Megan Bruce. Everything moves quickly, and everyone there pretty much rocks. Which is why you should be there. Cause you rock, too. Oh, and it's free. Sign-up and coctails 7:00, show at 7:30.

And, oh, cool -- Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book won this year's Newbery. Although, as a friend pointed out, what awards left has he not won? After a certain point, I feel like people should be immune from awards (which, in NG's defense, he's very good at withdrawing himself from competitions that he wins too much) and create, I don't know, like a hall of fame or something -- a center-of-the-universe Neutral Zone where writers and musicians are recognized as the coolest people ever, and therefore are disqualified from competitions, because you already know that everything they touch pen to is going to be really smoking good. I'm thinking of Maurice Sendak, mostly, although pretty much everything Lydia Millet writes is amazing, as well.

Oh, and in prep for the new movie (courtesy of Alisha at Harper's), you can (and should) read the entirety of Coraline online here for free. If only to prepare yourself.

Oh, and -- he's in New York today!

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.)

Flying Freak Flags

Back on Nextbook: Blanket Statementstein revolutionizes jam-band music for punks (not to mention synagogue fashion fause pas), Y-Love loves Obama, and Nosson Zand comes off tour with Matisyahu for his solo debut:

Blanket Statementstein is a band that shouldn’t work as well as it does. When you put 12 hippies on stage, you don’t expect them to play their instruments in sync, much less make actual music. Not even their name makes sense.

Collected on stage, the band resembles the kitchen of a Manhattan apartment during a particularly crowded party. But there must be some Nightmare Before Christmas-like magic that makes everything turn out perfectly at the last second. The violinist in the knee-high cowboy boots is perfectly in time with the drummer, for whom Animal the Muppet is probably not only a musical guide but a fashion icon.

Through it all, lead singer Ahron Moeller — who sometimes wears a junior high school gym uniform, and sometimes dresses as Alec from A Clockwork Orange — acts as a barely-in-control MC, introducing the numbers with random stream-of-consciousness thoughts as well as occasionally kicking a rhyme or a hip-hop verse.

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Boxing for the Lord

Dmitriy Salita is a Ukranian-born, Brooklyn-raised boxer who, at the age of 26, has an undefeated record over 26 career bouts. He's also an observant Jew. A recent documentary, Orthodox Stance, has just been released on DVD -- it's available at regular DVD stores or at IndiePix, and it follows Salita over three years of his always chaotic and often inspiring career. MJL had a chance to speak to the director, Jason Hutt, who spent three years of his own life chasing after Salita on an unending junket of press conferences, training, and fights, punctuated only by the once-a-week time-out for Shabbat -- often spent in hotel rooms, where Salita's omnipresent "religious trainer" cooks him improvised dinners by cutting up vegetables on a George Foreman grill.

Where did you discover Dmitriy?

My parents live in the DC area and in September 2002 my mother clipped an extensive article on Dmitriy from the Washington Post. Because I had been a highly competitive Jewish athlete myself and had recently moved to Brooklyn, she thought I'd be interested in the article. It mentioned that Dmitriy was affiliated with a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Brooklyn, so I called the Chabad rabbi I knew from college and asked if he would contact Dmitriy's rabbi for me.

After reading the article and meeting Dmitriy, I was really interested in these diverse and wholly original characters and cultures—an elderly African-American trainer, a Hasidic rabbi, a Las Vegas boxing promoter—all intersecting at Dmitriy...as well as the diversity of Dmitriy's experience as a Russian immigrant, religious Jew and top boxing prospect.

I had no idea what the film would be like. I just knew I wanted to see how Dmitriy experiences these very different worlds, and one day share that experience with an audience.

It seems like there are three forces competing for prominence: Dmitriy's boxing, his Judaism, and his Russian identity. The third often gets lost between the first two, but there's still a huge Russian presence in the film--from Dmitriy's stoicism to that scene in the Russian synagogue where people say he's never going to find a wife. Was it hard to get in with the Russians?

I shot Dmitriy wherever he went but his family, except for his brother Michael, were definitely camera shy. You can actually see this in the film when Dmitriy’s father is interviewed by Russian television at the Times Square press conference. You can see and hear how nervous he is in the spotlight—literally and figuratively. So, while I wanted to shoot more with Dmitriy’s family, I had to respect their feelings so I didn’t push it. Of course, when the shooting was finished, Dmitriy told me that his father was finally feeling comfortable with being filmed!

Dmitriy is very much a Russian immigrant, but he’s been here since he was 9 years old. I think you’re right about his personality being very Russian but he grew up in Brooklyn, and when you grow up in New York—whether you’re white, black, Russian, Hispanic, Chinese, whatever—I think you kind of end up being interested in many of the same things, while maintaining your family’s culture and identity at home.

Continue Reading

Torah Commentary For the Rest of Us

This is the kind of commentary that the world needs more of. Last night I was at dinner with a friend from Washington Heights. As far as Orthodox Jews go, they're kind of the opposite of my Crown Heights world -- modern, shaved faces and striped shirts. While the Hasidim are overly concerned about things like the kabbalistic ramifications of our actions -- aah, what if I don't take on a new stringency this year? -- the folks in WashHeights are more troubled by the black-and-whiteness of it all, and will freak out for hours if they do something un-halachic, like touching the bottom of their shoe and not washing their hands immediately afterward.

These might sound like the same thing, but they're not -- think of the difference between breaking the rules of your mother's cleaning regimen and breaking the rules of a really intense game of Risk.

Anyway -- the fact is, that's the way people in each community are supposed to be. How this plays out in real life, however, is quite different. More often than not, people are more concerned about the surfaces of things, less about what they're doing and more about whether they look like they're doing it.

That's why I love Frum Satire. He looks at the texts, not in a classical way of commentary, but how they're being utilized today. It's like a daily dose, not of MyJewishLearning, but of MyJewishLiving. Here, he's talking about kiddush levanah, the sanctification of the moon ritual that Jews perform every month.

Booklust

Last night Ethan and I got lost at the Strand for a while. I'd never been in their graphic-novel section -- and, I found, with good reason. I didn't buy anything, but the struggle was a hard one. The gorgeous special edition of Ghost World was $25, still expensive but more respectable than the $40 cover price; and my current lust, Kramer's Ergot #7 -- a coffee-table collection of comics that's the size of a coffee table -- is $99, listed at $125.

Not to bore you with the money thing. Some people love porn, and some love fast cars. I am addicted to nice-looking books, the kind with bindings that could have been in the Library at Alexandria. This is why I spend so much of my time reviewing books for places that pay dismally -- because, if I wasn't getting a couple of bucks for a three-hour review, I'd be spending massive amounts of cash on the same books.

I've always been wary about where i spend money on books and music -- well, music not as much, I'm fine with used record stores -- but in general i try to mostly buy small-press books and books of new & unknown authors. (hence me always bugging you for, oh, star wars mass-market pop-up books and the such.) i have a huge appetite for books, and not much budget for it, but I'll always buy Stephen King used (and thank you l*rd, there is so much to go around) but i won't buy, say, a Manic D Press book for $.01 on amazon.
it's a hard balance. and i think it especially sucks that so many people who love reading are in industries that don't make money. so the total capital of editors-and-librarians-and-authors-who-buy-books is steadily small, and feeds back into their salaries, which are also small -- whereas, say, pro basketball games are not mostly attended by basketball players and basketball editors (uh, managers? ticket-sellers? I don't know what the equivalent would be).

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:

depression and prayer

A few years ago, right about the time I was becoming religious, I started getting hit with Seasonal Affective Disorder. It's a condition with possibly the dumbest acronym in the universe (sound it out, kids), but it was very real -- I'd graduated college, I was taking on all these new social restrictions (no more random hook-ups, no Friday night concerts) and I didn't have much in the way of happiness coming in.

I asked a rabbi about it, and he said to start regularly praying Mincha, the afternoon service. Ideally, you're supposed to pray right at sunset, which creates a separation (like one Jewish prayer says) between light and darkness, daytime and night. And that way, the sixteen-hour darkness doesn't seem overwhelming and like it's stealing from your day; instead, it feels like a new, unexplored territory.

From this comes the really cool site of the day: Borei Hoshech, a blog that examines the relationship between prayer and depression. At first it may seem like two arbitrary ideas thrown together -- or, on the contrary, two opposites (prayer=hope! depression=sad!) -- but the blog's anonymous author takes a non-judgmental, open approach to both depression and praying, dissecting the liturgical texts piece by piece to see if s/he can find deeper truths, connections, and hope.

In a series of entries on Modeh Ani, the prayer that's said first thing in the morning, Borei Hoshech agonizes over not wanting to get out of bed, and tries to find validation and hope from the words of the prayer:

So even though I am in the pit of a deep, dark depression, and certainly will not or cannot daven this morning, I will say these brief few words, as I struggle out of my pajamas and into work clothes and down a handful of M & M’s in an effort to propel myself out the door.

For Chanuka, Borei Hoshech quoted a disturbingly awesome passage of Talmud:

“Our rabbis taught: When Adam saw the days becoming shorter, he said: ‘Woe is to me, because I have sinned and the world is returning to chaos!’ He prayed and fasted until the winter equinox when he noticed the days becoming longer. ‘This is the way of the world,’ he said, and he established an eight day festival.’”

The author oscillates into and out of depression, and those entries with a distance from depression give a whole different perspective, equally insightful. Both are totally worth reading.