The Smell of Non-Kosher Food

I spoke to Stephanie, who was coming out of the very tasty (and very not kosher) Tartine Bakery, on 18th and Guerrero Streets in San Francisco. She'd just gotten an iced coffee, and she was complaining about it.

Stephanie: Every time I walk past this bakery, I'm reminded of that Gemara that says that God's going to ask if we enjoyed all the pleasures of this world. And I'm going to be like, no, I didn't, because the pleasures of this world weren't kosher.

Me: I used to read this book of Chinese stories when I was a kid. One of them was about a poor student who lived above the fanciest restaurant in Peking and each night, he would sit by the window and eat his plain rice and smell all the good-food smells. Then one day the restaurant owner noticed him and asked what he was doing -- he had the entire apartment to eat in; why was he by the window? The student said that the smell of the good food made his rice taste better.

The owner was furious, and brought him to court. He contended that the student should pay him for the past year's worth of meals. Now, most families in Peking couldn't afford to eat in the restaurant. Couples only went there on their anniversaries, or special occasions. One meal there cost a month's wages. For the cost of a year's meals, the student would have to pay for the rest of his life.

After hearing the case, the judge asked the student, How much money do you have? The student got terrified and said, only 5 copper coins. It was the only money he had in the world -- for his rent, his tuition, his rice.

The judge told the student to take them out. He did. Then the judge ordered the student to toss them from one hand to the other. He did. The restaurant owner, unable to conceal his glee, rubbed his hands together.

Then the judge said to put the coins back in his pocket.

"What!?" the owner burst out. "Those coins are mine!"

But the judge shook his head no. "Just as the student stole the smell of the food from you," he said, "the sound of the coins will be his payment."

G-dcast in the (Old) Country

This morning, my friend/comix collaborator Mat called me up and said that this week's G-dcast was his favorite one yet. "Really?" I said, surprised -- I love the hell out of this one, but does it really beat, say, the narrator for Noah?

"I can't get it out of my head," he said. "'Because the strangest things happen in the dey-serrrrt..."

And he proceeded to sing me the next three verses. At least, until I got onto the subway and the wheels cut him off.

Regina Spektor Is Not Funny, But Still She Makes Me Happy

Last winter, I was supposed to interview Regina Spektor in connection with Losers, my own Russian immigrant weirdo story, but she decided she needed to withdraw from all human contact while working on her new album.

Today her new video is out. It was totally worth it, and I'm glad.



(thank you Tamar)

The Mystery Box

Just watched (via Zach Posner's blog) a 2007 presentation with J.J. Abrams talking about misdirection and the sources of creativity. It ties in magic boxes, do-it-yourself special effects, and how he loves a blank page more than anything. I just want to keep coming back to this and watching it whenever I need a kick of "Oh yeah -- this is what writers should be doing."

Father's Day: Win a Load of Stuff

With Father's Day practically sinking in on us -- and an awesome new MJL article from Neal Pollack just a few days away from being launched -- there's a huge new giveaway from me, ModernTribe.com, the Cool Jew book, and a whole bunch of other people.

In order to enter, all you have to do is answer this question: What makes your dad, brother, cousin, friend or husband a cool Jew? (Not that it's a BEST DAD competition or anything, but I can think of at least 2 people who could theoretically nominate me, and one of them even knows how to write.) A winner will be chosen from the answers and announced on Father’s Day, Sunday, June 21.

Here's the full list of stuff you can win. But, really, what do you need to know beyond the fact that you'll own copies of both my Scholastic books -- Never Mind the Goldbergs and Losers -- along with $240 worth of other merchandise? And the fact that it includes CDs and concert shirts from Can Can and Rav Shmuel, and Sam Apple's new book, is all just bonus material. Just fill out the official form here.

Sherman Alexie on Kindle: "I want to hit her."

Sherman Alexie, one of my favorite writers, refuses to let his books be released in digital form because the e-book devices are so expensive. I don't agree with him about refusing to publish -- dammit, if someone wants to read my book, I'm gonna let them -- but I totally feel him:

Inevitably there was a backlash. At a panel of authors speaking mainly to independent booksellers, Sherman Alexie, the National Book Award-winning author of “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” said he refused to allow his novels to be made available in digital form. He called the expensive reading devices “elitist” and declared that when he saw a woman sitting on the plane with a Kindle on his flight to New York, “I wanted to hit her.”

(it's in the New York Times, via Eliyahu Enriquez

How Jews Pray

How Jews Pray, the third in our "How Jews..." series, checks out what Jews are talking about -- from an Australian Jew in New York to an Argentinian Jew in Los Angeles, and other folks in the woods, the cities, and some places in between. What do people who don't believe in God think about praying?

When I was young, a secular Jewish kid living down the street from Hasidim -- a weird remix of The Chosen -- I thought it was mysterious how all the long-black-coated, hair-covered Jews was that they seemed to have their own way of talking to God. They didn't just go to synagogue and pray like normal people -- they would pray in living rooms, or in backyards, and they muttered to themselves walking down the street. Plus, they wore those funny clothes. Was God telling them something that God wasn't telling the rest of us?

I guess I just felt disenfranchised.

This was before I met Jewish Renewalists who meditate and pray. And musicians like Chana Rothman and Jeremiah Lockwood, who pray by singing their hearts out. And before I learned how to pray myself, wherever I was and whatever was on my mind, sometimes in a "thank you" way, and sometimes in an "I need to save myself" way.

A few weeks ago, in introducing his new prayerbook, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, "We have a problem with prayer" -- and proceeded to detail how, in this world where we're obsessed with talking about ourselves and eavesdropping on other people, we've forgotten what it's like to speak to God. Whatever each of us think of God, and even, in one person's case, whether or not we believe in God.

I think that's my favorite thing about this video, above all the others we've done so far. It helps us remember.

What Makes a Kosher Pickle Kosher?

When we hear the word pickle, most of us think of cucumbers -- brined, shriveled, sour, cut into chips and floating alongside red onion half-moons and tomato slices atop a deli sandwich. When my class visited New York in fifth grade, I remember that, over the course of the day, we were given three different food items to sample -- apples (for the Big Apple), Chinese food, and a plump kosher dill.

We may be forgiven, then, for not knowing about the rest of the spectrum of pickled foods.

That's why The Joy of Pickling was created. Its chapters touch every arena of cuisine, from desserty pickles (apples, watermelon) to antipasto (asparagus and mushrooms) to main courses -- Korean kimchi and pickled meats, for instance. (The original edition, shockingly to us, left out kosher dill pickles, but this edition corrects that oversight. First published ten years ago, a new, expanded and enhanced edition was released this month.

keep reading >

Barbra Streisand Watches G-dcast

In my advanced Torah research for an upcoming MyJewishLearning article, I found this particular image -- which totally relates to Inbal's G-dcast for Naso this week:

That's right -- it's Barbra Streisand's personal notebook. With the "ish"/"isha" diagram, showing God's presence in the names for "man" and "woman." Go Barbra! Go Inbal!

Gentlemen, by Michael Northrop, will scare your underpants off.

Best morning subway ride EVER. Last night, I finished (yes! finally! finished! for real, this time!) my screenplay, and I didn't have anything to do on the subway. So I read Michael Northrop's Gentlemen, which tied for my #1 score at Book Expo this year with the advance copy of Poppy Z. Brite's gay New Orleans food couture mystery. So good that I wrote an Amazon review. Yes, I couldn't help myself.

Small-Town Horror Meets Classic American Fiction

The thing that dawned on me, reading this novel, is how little a percentage of horror books actually involve capital-H Horror. Stephen King isn't about googly-eyed monsters and crazed psychos -- or, at least, he isn't about that so much as he's about the most basic human reactions. Fear. Anxiety. Loss. Regret. That's what separates, say, "The Catcher in the Rye" from "The Road" -- in other words, a really well-done non-horror story from a really good horror story.

And there's a lot of Stephen King in Michael Northrop's book. Actually, it reminded me more of Michael ("The Hours") Cunningham. For much of the book, the main plot moves slowly, but interesting, well-developed and well-savored. Almost every page there's a side story that made me want to tell the person next to me about what I was reading -- like how Tommy threw a desk across the room in order to distract a girl he liked, or the summer of the two Jennys. And Micheal's language (the narrator -- whose name was misspelled on his birth certificate, not the author) is so graceful that when he suddenly becomes "typical guy"-ish and talks about throwing a punch at his teacher, you're blown away. Not because it's out of character, but because it makes him so multi-dimensional and real.

Then, of course, there's the scary stuff. And Michael (the author) seems to know his way around both scary stuff and the more Gothic parts of small-town America: the secrets people keep and the way that dark seems to swallow up the country after twilight. As the novel moves on, the simple question of whether or not their teacher has a dead body no longer feels like the point of the book -- it's more about Micheal, his friends, his town, and the darkness that's inside him.

Sabra's Last Stand

Here's a poem. I wrote it half-jokingly as a pitch for Marvel, recasting Sabra (who started showing up as the "Defender of Israel" in the '80s) as a baal teshuva -- or, at least, someone who was playing with the idea of becoming religious. My friend Nicole had just gotten a job as an editor at Marvel, and she was coming to my show, and I'd always wanted to write Sabra. So then I tried to.


Sabra the Jewish superhero
hides behind a tree
when changing
into costume,

modesty taking precedence
over the instinctive urge
to protect and preserve

Or to pull away her shirt
revealing the bright blue
Star of David
of vengeance
splashed across her chest

In the '80s, she saved
bales of Israelis from their graves
every day

Since then, business has gotten slow
confusion about foreign policy
a canceled comic book,
and she took so much shit about
who she’s supposed
to save.

You’d think
the Second Intifada would be good
for business as a hero,
but no -—

Saving Palestinians makes Israelis mad
Saving Israelis makes Palestinians mad

And the day she saved that
suicide bomber,
sent his TNT careening
into the sea

Sabra got told off enough
to send her into
an early retirement.

After singlehandedly launching
the Jewish look into vogue
ten years ago
girls got reverse nose jobs
Sabra became
a teenage heartthrob

Her uniform sent yeshiva boys
into enjoyable pangs
of premature puberty

Today she lays in bed
not in the mood for anything
except complaining to G-d
and so she does

She picks up a prayerbook
yells the first blessing
like a lightning bolt

yells the afternoon prayers
yells the evening prayers
yells the Sabbath prayers

and she doesn’t stop till
the traveler’s prayer
in the back of the book.

When she’s done,
Sabra takes her sewing machine
makes her cape into a skirt
(it was always bulky, anyway)

slips on her arm-covering gloves
and flies through the night
saying to herself, I fought Magneto
and my worst enemy
is still me

She swoops down
with power like a shofar
and grace like the cedars of Lebanon

whispers a prayer
under her breath
with every blow

saves every damn person in danger
whether they want to be or not

And she doesn’t stop
until Shabbos.

G-dcast: How to Tell if Your Girlfriend Is Cheating

Inbal Freund is one of the most incredible human beings I know. She's the former director of Mavoi Satum, an organization that stops men from refusing their wives divorces in Israel. She scripted (with Chari Pere) a (masterful, brilliant) short comic about the agunah situation called Unmasked, which explains her life work in more vivid emotion than I can hit you with. (Ouch. Sorry. Bad use of the colloquial...)

And this week, she takes on the Torah.

Inbal is fiercely Orthodox, and fiercely feminist, and she's also just plain fierce. This was probably the single parsha that we were most nervous to do. Even now, when I watch it, I get a feeling at certain points like I was punched in the gut -- it's pretty intense. No one comes off 100% pure: not the wife, not the husband, not the priest, not even G*d.

It's things like this that remind me that I'm Orthodox, and that keep me Orthodox. If Judaism was simple, and I agreed with every little bit of it, I could just say "amen" and keep moving, comfortable with the role of religion in my life. If I was secular, or not Orthodox, I could just resign this to one of those parts of Judaism that I don't agree with -- or that's old or outdated or misogynistic or just straight-up lame -- and move on to something cool, like strawberry cheesecake or listening to Y-Love.

But I'm not. Even after watching Naso, I'm perturbed -- so, what, this dude thought his wife was cheating on her and sold her out to the rest of the tribe? He threw her in front of a priest, who uncovered her hair (which, to a married Orthodox woman, is like ripping off all her clothes in public)? How is that just on anyone's behalf?

Relationships are passionate. (Unless they are boring, and you're comfortable and uninspired by each other, in which case a break-up is probably looming in the distance.) Some couples fight like hell, and some couples love each other with every bit as much passion. A dude has to be a real self-centered douche to accuse his wife publicly of one of the most heinous private sins...and a woman has to be the most forgiving person in the world to stick with him after that. It's true -- whether you're in a relationship or you aren't -- people never understand how other people's relationships work. Compared to this procedure, getting divorced is probably the easiest thing in the world. But if a couple really wants to get this thing resolved, I suppose the message of the parsha is that there's always a way...except that the best way, like marriage itself, it isn't always the easiest way.

Losers: More Bullies, More Books

Things you find out by Googling yourself -- or, rather, things you learn when you're trying to find your new book's listing on Amazon: there's a book by C.J. Bott (don't know him, but awesome name) called More Bullies in More Books that seems to be exactly that. A compendium that lists all books that have bullies in them, and the relationship between the bullies and the bullied.

Jupiter Jason Glazer and his parents left Russia seven years ago and now live in an empty warehouse outside Philadelphia. Now in junior high, Jupiter wants to avoid the insane bully Bates and find a way to fit in. For him, his first step is to lose his accent.

My reaction is split pretty evenly between (a) Rock!, (b) People are doing book reports on me!, and (c) How many errors can you fit into one sentence? Not in a nitpicky way -- it actually cuts pretty well to the point of the book.

But, ok, there are several facts in those three narrow sentences that...well, aren't facts. What are they? Whoever gets closest wins something cool. What, I haven't decided yet. Just email me or post it to my Facebook or something...and, no, saying that Bates isn't certifiably insane is not one of the inaccuracies. He is totally, completely, mentally and in all other ways insane.

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.

keep reading >

Free Love and Communal Shabbos Dinners

When I lived in San Francisco, I didn't have much going on in the way of hospitality -- mainly because I had so much going on in the way of running to concerts and readings and bars and keeping myself sleep-deprived after hours.

My one respite from the constant influx of alcohol and art was to throw Friday night Shabbat dinners. I could spend pages telling you about it, but I actually already wrote a book about it, so I'll skip that part for now. At any rate, when I was out-cooked, around the time of the holidays, I used to go to the local rabbi's house for Rosh Hashana dinner and Passover seders and stuff.

Always, without exception, there was a formidable crowd -- a combination of local families stopping by, semi-detached 20somethings looking for a free and decent meal, and the odd traveler. One of those travelers, brought by a friend of his who owned a (fabulous) local bed and breakfast, Noe's Nest, was Robert Altman. "Oh, wow!" I gushed. "Like the dude who made all those movies!"

"I am not," he replied -- gallantly, and especially so, considering that, on a later occasion, he would (good-naturedly) rant that everyone mixed them up, and his web site was ranked higher on Google.

Robert, it turned out, was a cameraman in his own right -- and one of more than significant merits, having been the photo editor for Rolling Stone magazine for much of the Sixties. Through the meal, we sat next to each other, sticking out in both our career choices (him: photographer, me: professional poet) and attire (him: black mock turtleneck; me: probably something 20 years old and paisley) and not exactly fitting in with the rest of the crowd, although fitting in in the way that we were all of us mismatched, all of us more-or-less haphazardly tossed into the melting pot that is a Chabad House.

Through the meal, he kept joking that he wasn't really Jewish because he didn't keep kosher and this was his first Rosh Hashana meal in years. I kept telling him back: if he hasn't done any of that and he still remembers he's Jewish, he's doing better than most of us.

Flash forward the better part of a decade. I live in New York now, and walking down 35th Street on my way to work, I pass a bunch of familiar-looking black-and-white photos, iconic flashes of the '60s: they are familiar because they are the photographs of my childhood, but they're not only familiar because of that. They remind me of the first time I Googled Robert, really Googled him: a flood of images, some of them iconic, some of them just really damn good (check his portraiture of Tina Turner). That night, meeting him as just some random guy at an even randomer meal for the Jewish New Year, it seemed like a logical extension: just some well-dressed dude who had a knack for telling good stories and better jokes.

Back in San Francisco, we met up a bunch of times. I invited him to my poetry readings; he invited me to his parties -- including, for some reason, a huge exhibition inside an abandoned warehouse in SoMA where his sorts of people rarely if ever ventured and where my sort of people frolicked nonstop. They didn't expect to see some punk kid in a yarmulke and foot-long sidelocks, both more overtly Jewish and more overtly non-Jewish than they were (because most of them were Jews anyway)...but I think after a while I just became one more part of the landscape, one more odd person doing things his own way, just like the rest of them were.

In a side room, the photography on the wall shifted abruptly, and there were canvases scrawled with otherworldly abstractions -- some sort of Miro aliens with bodies made of different kinds of fabric. There was a guy who started talking to me, the artist of these paintings. Later, Robert told me he was the lead guitarist of one of the biggest bands of the '60s. He sold all his guitars and swore only to paint. Everyone said his painting was awful. Truthfully, though, I really liked it -- that is, until he tried to sell me one of them for $26,000. I told him I hadn't even owned $26,000 over the course of my life.

He threw his arm around my shoulders and gestured grandly to the painting. "Then you can look at them for free," he said. "This art, kid -- it's yours. For the next ten seconds, at least. Enjoy it while it lasts."

Robert Altman's series The Sixties is now showing at Macy's, 34th St. and Broadway in New York. He'll be signing books today from 5-6 p.m. -- I've got to pick up my kid from day care, but you should stop by and say hi for me.

Evil Alien Matthue

OK, I Romulanated myself. If you sat through the new Star Trek movie and thought, hey, I bet Matthue would do a better job than that dude in the trench coat, well, you've probably already seen this in your head. If you haven't, this is just plain weird.

Then again, I'm too much of a sucker for the original series to ever blow up Vulcan. Peace (and long life) out.

Me and the Maharal (Down By the Schoolyard)

Just got my copy of Curt Leviant's translation of The Golem and the Wondrous Deeds of the Maharal of Prague, the softcover edition, which has a quote from my review on the back.

I actually don't remember writing it at all -- which is kind of surprising, because I make it sound like exactly the kind of book I'd want to read. Which I already did, I mean -- but it still made my eyebrows shoot up.

"Leviant's translation of Rosenberg's work is both an academic triumph and a fun read....Rosenberg's book succeeds in offering a mix of suspense and Torah with a dash of humor. It's a weird, anachronistic romp through both the mysticism of the 16th century, the sensibilities of the 19th, and the timeless humor and mysticism of Judaism."
— Matthue Roth, World Jewish Digest

The only part that makes me cringe is the fact that I'll never be able to write "weird, anachronistic romp" about anything ever again. Because it is such a good phrase, and I would seriously use it any time I call my kids down to dinner.

Hasidic Poetry Slam

OK, as promised:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who loves Chasidim?

Once upon a time, Hasidim were known as a closeted, tight-lipped sect of Jews who practiced mysticism, dressed in an extreme and foreign manner, and offered up little contact with the outside world.

Today, every second household in Hasidic Brooklyn has a webcam, a Twitter feed, and a New York Times story about them.

Continuing the Times' fetishization of Orthodox Judaism, this week's e-paper includes a photo gallery of 47-year-old Colombian hatmaker Bruno Lacorazza, who is not Jewish himself, but whose trade involves selling hats almost exclusively to Orthodox and Hasidic Jews in New York.

The photos, by Times photographer Ozier Muhammad, are actually beautiful. Between the haphazardness of traveling haphazardly with luxury hats and the Old Worldliness of crumbling shops like Feltly Hats in Williamsburg and the more modern Primo Hatters in Crown Heights.

Of course, the only interior photographs seem to be from the Crown Heights store, where Lubavitchers were probably more than amiable than Satmars to being photographed (here's one of one of our favorite family friends) and possibly even saw it as an opportunity for kiruv. You can imagine the conversation: "Can we take pictures of people trying on hats?" "Uh, I don't know..." "But secular Jewish readers of the New York Times will read it and instantly be persuaded to become religious and don big black hats of their own!"

If you've never seen a foot-long beard light up in a smile, it did just now.

Create Your Own Shavuos

The best Shavuot I ever had, I made myself. I invited a bunch of friends, cooked a bunch of food, and then prepared myself for the all-night study extravaganza that is traditional to the holiday. I'm an author, and a geek, and for both reasons a holiday in which you're commanded to stay up all night and study hugely appeals to my sensibilities.

I scattered a bunch of books in the center of the room. Some were Jewish books (my faves: Ben Ish Chai, Outpouring of the Soul, and a book of Rebbe Nachman's stories). There was a Torah and some printed-out translations of the Talmud. And then I scattered a bunch of X-Men comics, for good measure.

Slowly, people started to scatter in. At first, except for the lack of music, it resembled an ordinary night at the house -- a bunch of kids leafing through books, sitting on the couch. Then, a friend of a friend -- a Hasidic kid who'd been visiting from New York -- jumped on the couch and started to tell a story.

From that point on, it was social, but social in a way that parties never had been. It was like there were twice as much company in the room, people + books. We studied individually. We studied together. The night wore on, and not many people stuck around till sunrise, but there were a few of us who did. (We watched it on the back porch, with the world still, one of those rare days when you can actually see through to the Pacific Ocean.) For the final half hour, in the time when we weren't sure whether it still counted as night or not, I ripped open my X-Men comics (the Grant Morrison run, #141-144, I believe) and started learning things from there.

Torah is kind of like a Swiss Army knife. It has a thousand tools that can be used in half a million different permutations. I'm never as smart as I am when I stand up after learning Torah, when it's all fresh in my mind and I really feel like I can do anything. Reading X-Men after seven hours of learning -- reading it aloud to a room of other people who've also had seven hours of nothing but Torah in their heads -- was one of the most transcendent reading experiences of my life. Do you remember the first time you saw your favorite movie? It was that good. Each panel was like a new world of meaning -- the way they fought and spoke, the way Wolverine's adamantium skeleton was actually a permutation of his inner kabbalistic sefirot not being as fluid as, say, Jean Grey's.

So this year, we're hanging out at home. The brilliant Jake Marmer and will just be getting home from Israel, and crashing at his in-laws' near our place. We're going to set up camp and learn. No plans for a big event, either like San Francisco or like the integrated Reform-Conservative-Orthodox all-nite affair last year in Chicago, where 75 people showed up for a random lecture on Hasidic thought and time travel. But sometimes, a good friend and a good book is all you need.

Oh, and a tiny tiny plug -- my old yeshiva, Simchat Shlomo, is having a Shavuot night learn-a-thon, where people sponsor you $10 or $1 or whatever per hour of Torah study. It's a great cause on both ends...and I've got a kid who wakes up early, so I promise not to study *too* long. If you want to sponsor me, give me a holler.

Gourmet Jews, Kosher Wine & Cheese Tastings, and Hasidic Beer Parties

On the way out of his goodbye party last night, my doppelganger-in-name Shimon Roth grabbed me and said, "Are you gonna write about this on your website?" Usually, I hate those questions, but between Shimon's good-natured drunkenness on one of his last nights in Crown Heights and the sheer Hasidic wackiness of our day, there was no way I couldn't say yes.

It started at about four P.M., when we went to a kosher wine and cheese tasting at BenZ's Gourmet. If you don't know, wine and cheese are two of the hardest items to find kosher, and until recently, most Orthodox Jews -- especially outside of New York -- had to put up with a very small selection of both. (To this day, when we visit Melbourne, my in-laws order us to bring back as much cheese as our suitcases can fit: "Anything but the processed crap!")

In the past few years, however, due to the combined force of Internet ease-of-purchasing and the greater availability of disposable income in certain demographics of the religious Jewish community, and a small but noticeable closet industry has sprung up: a Hasidic fine food industry.

Because my wife is a personal chef, I've got a bird's-eye view of the situation: In this section of the community, people are struggling to learn as much about fine food as they can, and the easiest way of investigating is with their wallets.

Thus, we rolled up to BenZ's thinking we wouldn't be the only guests with a kid in tow (we were). Instead, we found a crowd that was part gourmands (actual and aspiring), part food-industry people, and part businessmen. That last group were the easiest to spot -- they were the ones at the pouring station who were complaining that the pours were "too stingy." (Author's note: I still have to figure out the correct way to ask for more, since apparently you aren't really supposed to drink the same wine twice at a wine tasting.)

To make matters even more unspeakably complicated, the night before had been Crown Heights's first poetry slam ever (oh, geez, that's another blog entry -- remind me) and, randomly, I kept catching snatches of conversation about "the slam recital" and "hippies yelling hip-hop rhymes." I felt instantly both scandalized and famous. Add that to the fact that some middle-aged dude kept coming up to me and asking if I was Matisyahu (in Crown Heights, mind you) and it was as trippy an experience as Sunday afternoons get.

From there, it was on to Shimon's party. Straight through the door, I began getting major flashes from college: beer in a Tupperware trunk, Rock Band on the Xbox (currently playing: semi-recent Metallica) and, most telling of all, a kitchen crammed to the seams with people. Just like college, there were the token sketchily-dressed girls in a corner with know-it-all boys. Except that these girls were sketchily-dressed because they were wearing pants, and the boys were those guys in the back of the class, the ones who never paid attention but always answered the questions right.

There were the slackers -- a long-haired kid with no yarmulke who asked after my brother-in-law (he's currently locked away in a yeshiva, off becoming a rabbi in a land with no TV, internet, or women). There were the married-and-reproduced people who were trying desperately to pretend that they still had a life after dark (uh, us). There were the Upper West Side kids with one foot in the Modern Orthodox world, one foot in the secular world, who still came back to the shtetl to check in (briefly, second-guessingly) and see whether there was anyone promising to date in the Old Country. And there was one girl in a tweedy plaid shirt and skirt who I honestly couldn't tell whether she was a Williamsburg cool kid or an old-school Hasid.

And then, Shimon, on the way out, asking me if I was going to record this. I didn't answer him -- just reached into my wife's handbag and took out the gift we'd gotten him, a copy of Benyamin Cohen's My Jesus Year, a book about getting back in touch with Judaism while checking out everything but Judaism. He's moving to LA. I figured it might remind him just a little bit of the old Jewish neighborhood. You know, a place not very different from the environment that Jesus probably grew up in.

I don't know if there's a moral to this story, except to say that Hasidim live much the same lives, at least on a quotidian Sunday afternoon level, as their non-Hasidic brethren. The same things just manifest a little differently.

G-dcast: Amish Beards Are Coming

Not to overwhelm you with posts this morning, but there's a new book of the Torah to talk about. Existentialism, bondage, and Amish beards...and that's just in the first minute.

Candy in Action: The Cover Story

Today on Melissa Walker's blog, she quizzes me about the cover of Candy in Action. Candy's publisher, Soft Skull Press, shared a bunch of the old cover versions and some of the original designs that inspired my editor Jody and I. If you've ever wanted a behind-the-scenes look at cover design, it doesn't get more behind-the-scenesy than this.

(And -- extra added bonus feature! -- here's the very first cover of Candy, which we talk about in the article, but which I stupidly couldn't convert into a normal file. But oh, do I have good powers of persuasion.)

"The moment that my publishers accepted the Candy in Action, I knew what the cover was going to look like. It wasn't even a matter of, what do I want it to look like. I just knew. It was going to be a sleek, glossy cover with black widescreen boxes at the top and bottom. Then the center was going to be a bright, vivid picture of the Los Angeles coast at night, taken from overhead--all neon lights and a million sparkling house parties--and then a black silhouette of a girl doing a kung-fu drop kick over it. That, uh, never happened.

"The publishers didn't ask for my input. I gave it to them anyway. My first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was with Scholastic. At most big publishing houses, if you're a first-time writer and you're really nice to them, you get to say 'no' once, and they might listen to you. I said no three times--I was a total diva. They were cool with it each time, though.

keep reading >

You Should Have Seen His Bat Mitzvah

Here's the wonder that is Athens Boys Choir. The name is deceiving -- ABC is actually a hip-hop group of one, and that one happens to be a mild-mannered boy named Katz who was born a girl.

I first heard of ABC when I received his CD -- with possibly the most hilariously understated cover you can imagine -- to review for B*tch Magazine. His lyrics tend toward the risque, although he's frequently more playful than offensive (on his latest single, Fagette, he shouts out "girls with the chubby chubbs/and the boys who ain't got no butts")....but, the opposite of every hip-hop sensibility you've ever encountered, this is probably the tamest rap video ever.

It's a composite of videos from Katz's bat mitzvah.

Or, as the intro puts it: "In 2002 I came out as a man. But before I could do that, I had to become...a woman."

Thence follows some of the trippiest '80s retro Bar Mitzvah footage that the human brain can wrap itself around. It's a one-man pitch for the next book in the Bar Mitzvah Disco series.

What I love most about it: how it's so nice. And how even the requisite Jewish kitsch is sweet: ""Now my bubby wanted a doctor to marry me/You got two Ph.D.'s/one in fine and one in sexy!"

The Sway Machinery Cover the Torah

Jeremiah Lockwood, the venerable proprietor of the band The Sway Machinery -- a side project of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Antibalas, and Tom Waits's band -- blasts out, as warned, with the second G-dcast of the week.

It's abstract and moody and kind of the opposite of anything we've ever done. It's courteously animated by the fabulous Liesje Kraai, of They Might Be Giants movie fame. And it kidn of reminds me of that Dr. Seuss book that came out after his death, My Many Colored Days -- which, instead of trying to jive with Dr. Seuss's own style, skews radically against it, possibly even for the better. In any case -- my favorite G-dcasts are always the ones where I have nothing to do with the animation. This one, I've had the least to do with of all -- and, true to form, it's one of my favorites.

Jeremiah closes out the book of Leviticus, the third book of the Torah -- and I am so wildly exhausted and dizzy and I can't believe that we're more than halfway through this one year tour. And if you're up for a retrospective, here one is....

i found a tiny tiny baby bird

Itta: matthue!
can you help me for a sec?
i found a tiny tiny baby bird
and i need to find a number to call to speak to someone...
me: call 311
Itta: well, online it says to call wildlife and fish something
an agency
a gov agenc
me: (718) 482-4922
me: let me know if it doesn't work!
Itta: i'm on the phone to someone, thanks
Itta: it's dead
you'll see it when you get home, it's amazing
but sad
me: what happened?
Itta: i found it on the ground
and i didn't even know what it was
so tiny
so i bent down and looked closer
and it looks like alitle alien
so i put it in a bag
and brought it home
and looked online for what to do
i thought i saw it move
but it's dead
me: you did the best you could
you did good

Lag B'Omer: The Lag Blog, Pt. 2

aLast night: campfire was every bit as awesome as we wanted it to be, except the kids were asleep. This was probably better for all concerned, because Boruch and Itta were doing musical stuff, Karen was tending the fire, and I would have been grabbing all three of them by the scruffs of their collars and held them in the air and not let them walk anywhere because there were ticks and an open fire pit and I am pretty much the typified neurotic paranoid parent who never lets my daughter out of the house, except to stand in the sun for 10 minutes twice a week to get exactly her recommended dose of vitamin D. Yeah.



This morning: Taking the Monsey Bus back to the city. Monsey being the place that it is [thanx, Chaviva], I expected the bus to be packed with every sort of Hasid -- the roly-poly kind, the diamond kind, and the opens-three-hardcover-books-on-your-lap-at-once kind -- but found that, pleasantly, it was filled with every sort of Jew, like a mini-Israel crammed into the narrow borders of a Greyhound-type bus. Hot girls in tight pants with sunglasses bigger than the circumference of their faces. Yarmulke-less balding dudes with cell phones that look like Star Trek phasers. And, yes, the roly-poly Hasidim.

At one bus stop, there was nobody waiting except for two pint-size boys in identical white shirts and argyle vests, heads shaved except for their payos. They couldn't have been more than five and six, respectively. As the bus rolled to a stop, the driver joked to the person in the front seat, "You think they're going to 47th Street?" -- a wink and a nod to the street where all the Hasidic diamond merchants work.

The bus pulled over, and a passenger leaned out. "Where you headed, boys?" he asked, then repeated the question in Yiddish. "Monroe," they replied -- saying the word like it had never referred to a president of the United States, much less pronounced in English. They moaned the M through their noses, rolled the r, and hooted the o from the apex of their mouth, not the back, owl-like.

Next to me, two men talked about their respective kids, all of whom had gone to Meron the night before for the holiday. My traveling companions were both old, and both Orthodox, but, you know, casual Orthodox -- colored shirts, knit yarmulkes. Their kids had gone Hasidic, with twenty grandchildren each and wives in burqas, the whole deal. But they talked about them like rebellious teenagers. Their crazy bonfires, the crazy praying. It was pretty utterly awesome. It inspired me to crank up the Sonic Youth on my headset all the way, startling the hell out of the dude sitting next to me, who was learning Talmud out of three books at once.

We're taught that a plague killed off thousands of Rabbi Akiva's students because they did not treat one another respectfully. I feel like the massive party that happens in Israel every year -- and like, in some small way, my bus ride -- are all tikkunim, or healings, of that rift.

And the trip took under an hour -- less than the time from Brooklyn to here! If the bus ride is this exciting every morning, I think we may have a new neighborhood to consider.

G-dcast: Behar!

I hate these two-Torah-readings weeks -- not because we have to do twice as much work, but because we run two G-dcasts on these weeks (one on Monday, one on Wednesday), and not everybody realizes that there's twice as much video goodness to see. Today, we get a farmer (Emily Freed) to talk about the Torah's version of Poor Richard's Almanack. This Wednesday...ok, I can't spoil anything, but Jeremiah Lockwood of The Sway Machinery closes out the Book of Leviticus. Chills of anticipation.

Why I Write about Models

Powells.com, one of the coolest bookstores on the internet, runs a series of original essays. They've asked Neil Gaiman and Dara Horn and Robert Thurman and now they've asked me...which is pretty damn cool.

It started as a dare.

The girl I went out with was friendly, funny, flirty — and all of this was confusing to me. I was a punk-rock kid on my better days, elegantly styled in unkempt hair and an artfully ripped t-shirt held together by a bare minimum of strands that kept it (barely) from coming loose from my shoulders, revealing something both embarrassing and dangerous, like my belly — but, more often, I was just a geek. She was popular, beautiful, successful — traditionally pretty, I mean, but actually beautiful, too. Except for the one random friend we had in common, there was no reason we should rightfully be talking to each other.

Except, of course, that we were.

What was weird was that we got along. Even weirder, we had similar things to say. Not about everything, but about a lot of things, including comic books (Madman, Hellboy, and all the X-Men spinoffs — the more melodramatic, the better), television (Veronica Mars), and food (vegan, lots of courses, served together and eaten separately). We weren't in lurve — we were barely in like — but we were intrigued by each other. We were interested.

And before we had the chance to question it ourselves — no, really, us? — she was sexually assaulted.

keep reading >

Mayim Bialik: From Blossom to Brachot

A few months back, my friend Lisa Klug introduced me to the illimitable joy that is Mayim Bialik. Descendant of the poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, neuroscientist, and former child star, she's going through a whole revolution now. With the birth of her second child and the emergence of her interest in Orthodox Judaism, she's wild and thoughtful and funny. (She's also doing a G-dcast for us, so stay tuned in the coming weeks for that.)

And, oh yeah, she starred in Blossom.

I was a child of the '80s in name only. I never watched Blossom when it first came out. I was aware of it only as - and, the few times that I did, it both intrigued me and turned me off: some too-cool kid who was two or three years older than me (at the time, a vast gap) who wore wild vintage-store outfits, used unnecessarily long vocabulary, and had a penchant for confessional D.I.Y. films about 2 decades before YouTube was even conceived of....It made me feel more than a little protective. This was my subculture they were stealing. She couldn't possibly be doing it right.

Little did I know, for its time - and even for ours - Blossom was completely transcendent. In the pilot episode, The Cosby Show's Phylicia Rashad, wearing a retro-'50s polka-dot dress, drew a map of the human ovaries on a sheet cake with a tube of icing in order to explain to 14-year-old Blossom Russo how her period worked. Subsequent episodes made pretty profound statements on puberty, body image, premarital sex and divorce and parental responsibility. The endings were always sugar-coated, but the TV show itself (which has just been released on DVD) was meaty and unafraid in ways that make current sitcoms like How I Met Your Mother and The Office feel positively sanitized.

As much of a travesty as grouping Blossom together with tepid '80s sitcoms such as Full House might be, mentioning the Mayim Bialik's name together with the name of the television show might be an even more audacious generalization.

In the decades since she stopped playing Blossom Russo, Bialik has not sat still. She's earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience and has undertaken cutting-edge studies at UCLA as one of the top researchers of Prader-Willi Syndrome in the field. (Read more about the disorder here, or sift through Bialik's blog to find out about her work.) She's also testing the waters of going back into acting, with recent appearances on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Bones. And she's also in the middle of another big revival: she's experimenting with being an observant Jew.

What first motivated you to start researching the causes of Prader-Willi Syndrome? Are you still?

I always had an interest in working with kids with special needs, and in the neuroscience department at UCLA, you generally meet a lot of professors and then drop into a project that suits you. There's been a lot of genetic research on Prader-Willi, and there's been a lot of behavioral research, but there isn't a lot of research combining the two..and that's what I thought I could bring to it.

I got my doctorate last year, so my research was my thesis. Since then, I've done some writing for organizations that raise money for Prader-Willi research. In the meantime, I've started acting again, and we just had our second child, so I've had my hands pretty full, taking care of him and doing auditions.

Have you been auditioning a lot?

Yes, actually! Far more than I thought I would be. I'm auditioning for all sorts of things. I'm actually filming an episode of Bones tomorrow. I've auditioned for comedy, drama, movies -- anything they send my way.

Is it mostly one way or the other -- dramatic roles, films, or ironic stuff? Are you being selective about which roles you take?

Not really. I don't think I can afford to be selective. I'm just seeing what's out there, and whatever I do get, like Bones, is great practice to get into the swing of things again.

Have you tried connecting your Prader-Willi research to non-Prader-Willi patients -- that is, once you've discovered the impulse that makes people with Prader-Willi insatiably hungry, can you theoretically control that impulse in people who don't have PWS?



It actually depends on the mechanism itself. There's a lot of reasons that people with Prader-Willi can't control their hunger. Regulating the hypothalamus is difficult, because it connects to the brain and there's a lot of sources in the brain that control every function. There's a theory that the hunger you can explore, there are several different sources for, and we'll never be sure exactly what causes it. You can try and narrow down a little more...but also, the reasons are different. So it's difficult to pinpoint it down to one thing, for sure.

I remember reading a few years ago - you know, the way rumors spread between Jews - that you were active at UCLA Hillel, and that you'd started getting more observant. Um, are you?

My mother was raised Orthodox, and my grandparents are immigrants from Eastern Europe. I was raised in a Reform household, but with a lot of remnants of Orthodoxy. We lit candles. We had two sets of dishes, but my mom never told me why. I thought it was breakfast dishes and dinner dishes. There was no emphasis on halacha and learning. Totally not to disparage my parents; it just wasn't their thing.

When I went to college, I didn't have a lot of friends. Blossom had ended two years before. I'd always gone away to Jewish camps for the summer, and so I kind of ended up at Hillel and I started learning with the rabbi, and it kind of took off from there.

I'm hesitant to label myself or call myself Orthodox because people will be like, "Celebrity Mayim Bialik says she does X, but I saw her doing Y" - I guess, to be safe, I would say I'm Conservative, but in reality, I'd say Conservadox. But my husband and I have definitely increased our observance over the years, and we're always trying to grow.

We kinda do the Big Three [Shabbos, keeping kosher, and family purity], but it's hard. I mean, it's hard for everyone to classify themselves, but it's a whole new level of hard when people are watching you. Like, I pretty much eat a vegan diet, but I eat eggs if they're in things. What I say is, I eat a mostly vegan diet, and that's kind of how it is with Judaism. We keep Shabbos, we keep kosher, and I don't know if people want to hear about the Mikveh, but, um, yeah.

And now that you're acting again, that whole "celebrity Mayim Bialik" factor is coming back into play. Is it weird to get back into the arena after you've been away so long? What sort of gigs are you looking for? What sort of gigs are you getting?

When I was younger, things came in and I got offered things a lot. Now it's my manager saying it's the girl who played Blossom, which has its own attractiveness, and its own stigma.

And then I have projects that I want to do. I just optioned the Rashi's Daughters books. I love that I can do something like that in the first place, and I'd love to get it made into a film. But I don't have the kind of star power to say, I'm ready to talk to Steven Spielberg next weekend....

Do you ever watch old episodes of Blossom? Would you ever show them to your kids, or is it kind of something you want to keep in the past?

No! I stopped watching in the middle of the first season, and I would kind of watch the last half and part of the second season. But I literally have never watched the last three seasons. So, needless to say, my kids haven't, either.

What was your life like during Blossom? Did you have much contact with the outside world?

Yeah. It was actually pretty normal - we would work for three weeks, then I would go to school on my week off. I had tutors on the rest of the set. We got there two hours early than everyone else - me, Joey, and Michael each had our own tutors, and our lessons started at 7:00 and lasted until everyone showed up at 9. I was on the show from when I was 14 years old until when I was 19. At a certain point, I was very recognizable-I'm a pretty normal person, I was always a pretty normal person. I wasn't motivated by fame or money. I just wanted to act.

Were you doing anything Jewish at the time?

Not so much. We filmed on Friday nights. The local Bureau of Jewish Education used to have programs for beyond-bar-mitzvah-age kids, which was helpful. I went on retreats like Shabbatons, and that actually really cemented my Jewish identity. When my parents weren't doing Jewish stuff anymore, I still had a place to pray and live Jewishly. But it wasn't until UCLA that I really fully realized my Jewish identity.

And that was where you started doing chazzanut and leading services, right?

I haven't done that for about 2 years. It's in conflict with some of what I've been learning, but it's also in line with a lot of what I do as a performer. It's a great honor to daven, and to daven on behalf of a community. My grandfather was a chazzan in San Diego and the Bronx, and I inherited his voice. It takes a lot of learning, and it takes a lot of kavanah [concentration], but it's complicated, as anyone in this line knows.

And there's a reason that, in traditional Jewish circles, women don't lead services. I've been pregnant twice in the past three years. Going to shul has been incredibly different after having one child, and then having, thank God, two children, it's been even more different, and Judaism kind of knows that.

How has your Jewish life changed with the birth of your sons? Are you taking them along?

At this point, my oldest son's not yet in preschool. Religiously, my husband and I are both still growing. We're not quite ready for day school yet - we don't feel like it's quite our niche - but a Conservative day school wouldn't meet our needs at this point. Kosher home, but you get into all sorts of conflicts about other things....You have to find the right place; it's very important to find the right place. At this point, he knows all the holidays, and we've started studying Torah, and he knows all the brachos, and he doesn't know the English alphabet but he knows the Hebrew alphabet.

I grew up speaking Yiddish, and I'm trying to do the same thing with my son. He has a large vocabulary - well, for a 3-year-old, at any rate.

Are you still working?

No, it's just me. All day. With both of them. That's how it is most of the time -- I'm filming tomorrow.

Is it true that you're related to Chaim Nachman Bialik?

Yes, I am. I'm from his brother's line; he was my great-great-grandfather's uncle. My grandfather met him when he came to America. My grandfather was young, and Chaim Nachman Bialik passed away young as well, so they didn't have a chance to know each other well. We do get in free to the Bialik Museum in Tel Aviv. We have some nice collections of books, and we carry that heritage.

But all the Bialiks have been extraordinary people. I'm very proud -- especially in Israel -- to carry his name.

What do you have planned next, after Bones? How far are you into Rashi's Daughters; do you have a screenwriter or anything lined up?

I optioned it. So I'm looking to have it written as a movie or a miniseries. I'm kind of a classic actress-performer: I like to be given a script, and then I try to make you laugh or cry. This is the first project that I found that I'm really inspired by, inspired to get involved in the production of. There's a good story there, a meaningful story. But what I'm interested in emphasizing is the beauty of Orthodoxy, and the dimension and depth of women's relationship with study. It's a wonderful story that shows a lot of facets of Judaism that I think want to be appreciated.

Other than that, I'm just auditioning and taking care of my kids.

Which can pretty much fill up your time, just that.

And I learn once a week. My mentor lives in New York -- we were paired up totally accidentally, and it's been amazing. Her name is Allison Josephs, and she runs a YouTube series about Jewish topics. She was a Blossom fan, and wanted to study with me, and I called an organization and they paired her with me. She couldn't believe it, that she found me after all that time. She's my Jewish instructor and my guru. We study melachos of Shabbos and tznius and stuff, but even when my son had a bris, I go to her for moral support.

What are your favorite things to learn?

I didn't grow up with a strong sense of halacha, and I have family who are religious Zionists, but I never really knew about halacha. I'm a nitty-gritty person. I love that our tradition encourages debate, and a lot of what I love to learn is practical -- how to kasher things for Pesach, what legally constitutes bishul. My husband calls it my Jewish book club. It's more than that, though. We read a Soloveitchik book. I read Rivka Slonim's book Bread and Fire, which I've gained so much from. We're making our way through our lives with whatever we come up with.

Star Trek: Social Revolution and Jewish Thought

Am I a sellout? Probably. Here's my new article about Star Trek and Jews for the day job.

When I was young, I used to imagine a dream-team synagogue made up of my heroes from movies, books, and TV shows. There would still be the rabbi, the cantor, the sisterhood president; only, in my head, they were all either famous or fictional people. Most of the minyan was taken from Star Trek.

In my Hebrew school class, the model hazzan who led the day's prayers was always, without doubt, the most popular kid in class. So my imaginary synagogue would have a ribald, take-charge cantor, with a deep booming voice and a gung-ho manner: Captain James Tiberius Kirk, the ladies' man of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Still, personally, I was more taken by the perpetually calm, thoughtful, and withdrawn rabbi, who would be (of course) Mr. Spock, the starship's first officer. He hailed from the planet Vulcan, and came from a race of people whose philosophy, lifestyle, and very essence of being demanded logic. This, to me, seemed like the essence of Jewish thought--or, at least, my eight-year-old representation of Jewish (or, at least, Maimonidean) thought: that logic was the backbone to the universe, a clean, crisp and ordered hierarchy through which problems would be solved, differences mended, and harmony achieved.

KEEP READING >

On the Transformation from 2D Cranky Character to 3D Cranky Actual Girl

How much does this entry from writer/artist Bryan Lee O'Malley make me look forward to the Scott Pilgrim movie?

And you also have Scott Pilgrim vs. the World coming up, with Michael Cera. Your character, Julie Powers, could be described as "difficult"...
Julie Powers is a crazy bitch! She has a big chip on her shoulder. She's a supporting character who pops up a couple times in the film and is confrontational toward Michael Cera's character. Every time I'm on-screen, I yell at him.

Am I getting giddy for the way-too-built-up meeting about my own movie tomorrow? I am getting just a little bit giddy.

(And it's a massive distraction from the idea that i now am actually legally allowed behind the wheel of a car. Praise the One Above.)

my driving karma

This morning, after 14 uneventful years of being above the age of 16, the inexplicable happened. I got my driver's permit.

Granted, it was in many ways time for it to happen. My wife has a car. We both have a kid. My parents live 2 hours away, in Philadelphia: far enough so it's not a crosstown train, but close enough so that I really should be able to pop down once in a while. My friends are happy as anything. And it's good in an emergency, so that one of us can drive to a hospital. Except that we live 5 blocks from a hospital, and with all the one-way streets in Brooklyn, running there would probably be faster.

But I've been saying for years (YEARS) that driving is evil, and I stand by it. Cars are dangerous, dirty, unwieldy, and they've killed millions of people. Not to mention that car production in the USA was pioneered by a vicious anti-Semite.

I used to shoot guns, and for that you have to have unwavering concentration, a steady hand, and perfect vision. And still, there's a reason that people clean their guns constantly and firing ranges are miles and miles away from where anybody lives. Cars are huge, rusty, and almost everybody who drives them has an attention span equal to the shortest commercial time slot on MTV (15 seconds). Unless they're old people, who have lousy sight, lousy tendons, the shakes, and can't even see over the steering wheel. When you look out the window during rush hour, you recognize the power and beauty of God -- not that this many cars exist in the first place, but that the combined weight and destructiveness of them hasn't murdered all of us in the first place.

If you think this is bad, just wait 6 months till I get my license.

The Googliness of It All

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



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

Ontological Anarchy
For Matthue Roth and Naftali Yawitz

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

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

more

Vote for Mold!

Awesome open mic last night, courtesy of Mimaamakim, the Stanton Street Shul, and -- unexpectedly -- Yori Yanover, author of The Cabalist's Daughter, a sort of 24-meets-Apocalypse Now-meets-the-Apocalypse novel about the Lubavitcher Rebbe dying, his followers creating a clone, and the clone turning out to be a girl. It's always awkward to meet someone whom you've just written about. Square that when it's onstage in front of a bunch of people. Factor in any potential uncomfortability that might come about if the book wasn't a good one. Fortunately, it was, and fortunately, Mr. Yanover is just as large and funny and unhinged in real life as he is on the page -- and even more Douglas Adams-dik -- and so all was good on the Lower East Side.

OK, and now:

Vote for my poem "Mould" (that's "Mold" to you Americans out there) as the best in Melbourne! First do the super-fast registration, and then vote for my poem! (Or whichever poem you'd like to vote for. Not to play favorites. Ahem.)

Jew on the Train

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

G-dcast: Acharei Mot

OK, you asked for it -- this week's G-dcast. Zombies, vampires, incest, and a special Lode Runner cameo.

How Jews Eat

Here's the new MyJewishLearning movie I produced. It's just in time for a return to the b-word -- you know, the one that some people won’t even say during Passover. We're proud to present an introspective, intergenerational, intercultural look at the most Jewish of all Jewish holiday activities: eating.



Last month, director Judy Prays took a decidedly non-how-to-like approach to examining How Jews Look. Which is to say, instead of looking at how Judaism tells people to dress or look like, she looked at what Jews actually do look like. This time around, Ms. Prays (yes, that's her real name) takes a look at How Jews Eat.

In the film, we hear from four radically different people about everyone's favorite Jewish social activity. Henry returns to show us around a Manhattan Jewish deli, a scene he knows well--he's been in the deli business for over 60 years. Arielle gives us survival tips for hunting down vegetarian food in South America. We also return to visit Miriam, a Hasidic Jew whose family Shabbat custom is not at all what you'd expect it to be. And Yoni invites us over for dinner, and for what we promise will be the coolest song you'll ever hear in your life about sushi (yes, sushi).

So check it out. Let us know what you think. And share your own stories in the comments section about how you eat, or what you think.

Koren Sacks Siddur: Jewish Prayerbook 2.0

In a few weeks, a new siddur is hitting the market with a translation and commentary by Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks, the chief rabbi of the United Kingdom. The publication itself is noticeable if only because a siddur is something that's used so often by so many people, and comparatively few of them exist -- but, more to the point, the Koren Sacks siddur is attempting to do the impossible: to challenge ArtScroll's near-monopoly on the market. I'm getting one of these in the mail, and I've haven't been this excited to get a book since the board-book version of In the Night Kitchen came out when I was two.

The siddur is being published by Koren, whose biggest entry into the US market to date is the Jerusalem Bible. It's more widely known in Israel and Sephardic communities for printing a Shabbat prayerbook together with an ultra-thin Chumash, which provided the most luxurious experience my hand has ever had on a Saturday morning. You don't even have to go jumping into the mid-service melee before the Torah reading, because, boom! -- you've already got a Torah in your back pocket. Needless to say, my hopes for this siddur are high.

This JTA article does a good job of subtly making the point about ArtScroll's domination of the market. For a number of reasons -- everything from the clarity of its typeface and the helpful addition of gray-shaded boxes to separate special additions to the text -- to the fact that, sadly, there isn't much competition out there. But ArtScroll has come under fire for a number of offenses. Some of those offenses are textual. For instance, the ArtScroll Siddur translates the Song of Songs allegorically, translating "breasts" (to pull an example at random) as "the Twin Tablets of the Law." Its "Women's Siddur" has been widely criticized by both Orthodox and secular women's groups for asserting itself as a feminist prayerbook while simultaneously printing disclaimers before Kaddish that advise that it's inappropriate for a woman to say kaddish.

Despite all this, ArtScroll is still the preeminent prayerbook used in Jewish congregations -- both in Orthodox synagogues and in many Conservative and Reform shuls as well. The Orthodox Union -- which, in the past, has voiced its displeasure with the absence of the Prayer for the State of Israel in ArtScroll siddurim -- is on board as a sponsor of the new siddur. And Koren has pages on its own website that go on and on talking about things like paper weight and typeface choice, which makes book nerds like me go all shivery in anticipation. Even among the greater, non-nerdy Jewish community, there's a considerable amount of hype.

Is the new siddur worth it? Stay tuned -- in the next couple days, I'll be taking it through the motions, everything from morning Shacharit to the Bedtime Shema. Will it get the best of me? Or will I wind up loving every dot and dagesh? Stick with us for the answers.

unsettlingly new technology

Mad cool:

Running into mr. Jewlicious himself, David Abitbol, at the shuk.

Even cooler:

When the "only Orthodox female hip-hop M.C.," Rinat Guttman -- who, ok, is not the only frum woman M.C., but is nonetheless way cool (and, if that will get her a record deal, it's fine in my book to call her that), pops by. even if the shuk crowd ate my wife and daughter (it's ok, they can fend for themselves), mysterious and remarkable things will still happen.



Unsettlingly postmodern:

That Abitbol's camera has a wifi card that, instead of saving pictures, sends them directly online.

Meep. Happy almost Shabbos, people.