The Good Wife, Part II: Hurry Up and Wait

Matthue Roth worked on the set of the new CBS drama The Good Wife as an extra, and first blogged about it Friday. The episode, "Unorthodox," is about the Hasidic Jewish community in Chicago. It airs on Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 10 EDT.


The Good Wife takes place in Chicago -- fictionally, anyway. There are three Hasidic synagogues in Chicago that I can think of, having lived there for a year, but even the mostly-Jewish neighborhood, West Rodgers Park, is scarcely a hotbed of Hasidic culture like they're portraying it today, with dozens of Hasidic families swarming down the streets. And they definitely don't live in the stately downtown brownstones that we're filming in front of today.

It's kind of bizarre, but it's also kind of flattering. I mean, over the course of the day I will listen to Julianna Margulies inquiring again and again about the meaning of an eruv. Up-and-coming actors are dressed in the cultural garb of my people. What's not to like?They bring us out to the street where they're filming. Fake props abound: clip-on payos (for kids and adults), fake beards, strollers packed with plastic kids. It's particularly disorienting to hear a bunch of ten-year-olds, all payos-and-yarmulked up, talking about the Wii games that they want for Christmas. But, in a way, it's kind of nice to not get stared at by everyone on the street for the way I look. Or, at least, that the staring is divided up between me and all the fake Hasidim.

We are told to wait. I know about this part because everyone's told me that this is the cardinal rule of being an extra: "Hurry up and wait." In a fit of nervousness, I asked my token Hollywood-star friend Mayim Bialik for advice before the filming. She starred on a TV show in the '80s, but more recently has recurring roles on Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. She told me two things to remember:

1) Expect a lot of waiting (unrelated to your being Hasidic, just that's what it may be like), and
2) Expect to be poorly treated (ditto)

She also told me: "People may ask you random questions, and you are representing all of us, Hasidic and not, so do us proud!"

A production assistant grabbed my shoulder and started steering me down the street. He grouped me with two other Hasidim (the real ones, that is) and told us, when they called action, we were supposed to walk down the street.

I looked down the street. There, for the first time that day, I catch sight of Julianna Margulies. She's standing in front of the crane, inhaling wisps of coffee and talking to the other principal cast member there, Archie Panjabi. The director is telling them about the scene. I edge closer to the curb until I'm able to overhear, a process which causes several other extras to look at me like I'm crazy, but they do this for a living. They're used to it.

I overhear, and the plot for this scene is thus: They are going to climb out of a car. Then Ms. Margulies is going to walk around to Ms. Panjabi's side, and they are going to walk over to the curb together.

There's a tiny moment of disappointment in my chest. I was hoping for big spoilers. Juicy spoilers. Or possibly a moment where Ms. Margulies makes eye contact with me, something passionate and familiar is sighted, and she decides that the show needs a recurring Hasidic character. In this moment, I realize that walking down the street with two other long-coated dudes, as badass as we look, will probably not make that happen.

Not that it matters. That's not what I'm here for. I'm here to represent my people positively, and to look good. "Action!" the PA calls. We fall into step.

This happens two or three times. Then another PA, our original PA, walks up to us, shaking his head. "Something's not right," he announces, finally, after looking each of us up and down. "You. Come here."

He is talking to me.

He takes my coat again, pulls me back down the sidewalk to the other end. There's a young, short woman there who's been doing exactly what we've been doing from the other end, walking down the street pushing a stroller. Three small kids are in tow. "Walk with her," he tells me. "Be a family. Hustle your kids along. You know -- help out the wife."

I actually do have a wife. She's small and Hasidic and dark-haired. I have a daughter, too. I peek inside the carriage. Yep. Plastic. This is not my wife. This is not my child.

But, hey, I am an actor. That's why I got here. Because I can lie so well, I can even fool myself.

Again, someone calls action. We hustle.

One thing I never thought I'd have to do on a film set: babysit.

My new wife and I have four kids -- three real, one plastic. The real kids (the youngest is five, the oldest is eight; improbable, even for a Hasidic family) are pretty clearly not Hasidic. One boy is flicking the other's payos. The girl is trying to reach into the baby carriage without us noticing and turn the baby upside down. "What's your name, sweetie?" asks my ostensible wife. "Charlotte," says the girl, sweet as pop rocks. "Well, Charlotte, sweetie," she says, "please stop messing around with your little baby brother, or else you'll never work in the industry again."

Her lips curl back in a cruel smile. She manages to be elegant, polite, and unflinchingly brutal. She could completely pass as a Hasidic mother. Well, she could if it weren't for the hair and the hat. She introduces herself as Beatrice, and offers her hand -- a telling sign (as if everything else wasn't) that she's only Orthodox for the day.

And now, a note about the clothes: She's wearing her hair short, tucked up under a cloche, which is a '50s-style hat that's become weirdly fashionable in Modern Orthodox communities in recent years, but is next to anathema in most Hasidic circles. All the women are wearing flats (correct) and dark tights (depends which neighborhood you're in, but, okay, potentially correct) and long skirts, which definitely are Hasidic...although there's something unspoken, something intangible about some long skirts that is Hasidic, and something about others that isn't. I can't tell you what it is. Maybe I've been Hasidic so long that I have some sort of Hasid-dar, like when I had a gay roommate and developed really good gaydar? But right now, I am ostensibly surrounded by Hasidim, and it ain't goin' off.

One thing I will say that they got accurate: the kids aren't wearing Hasidic clothes. For some reason, although men are required to wear white shirts and black pants, and women have to have their wrists and nostrils covered, young boys can wear Gap jeans and girls can wear two-inch skirts and spandex everythings. (As a parent, my hypothesis is that kids will ruin clothes as fast as they wear them, so you're better off just getting the cheap stuff.) Similarly, these kids were dressed in their Children's Place best -- except for the fake payos and (real) yarmulkes, you couldn't tell they were Jewish. As a matter of fact, the next time that Beatrice tells the kids to be quiet and pay attention, they're discussing what Halloween costumes they're going to wear.

A costuming person runs up to us in a frenzy, stopping the action just as it's about to be called. "Your rings!" she yelps. She empties a variety of small gold bands into her palm. The PA grins at us wickedly. "Wouldn't do for that baby to be born out of sin," he says, gesturing toward our plastic progeny.

Beatrice chooses a ring swiftly. With me, it's harder. "I'll wear one," I offer. "But married Jewish men don't wear rings."

The costuming person doesn't believe me. I tell her, I'm married -- do you see a ring on my hand? We go back and forth a bit. Eventually, she shrugs it off and leaves.

"Typical," Beatrice says -- gently, but unmistakably critical. "The women get marked, and the men get let off easy."

"That's not true!" I insist. "There are ways to tell if a man's married, too."

"What are they, then?"

I flounder. The 5 a.m. curtain call is catching up with me. Then I recover: "By this coat," I say, remembering for the first time in a while how I'm dressed. "Only married men wear coats like this. There are also special kinds of hats, and socks"--well, okay, stockings, but I don't want to get too (ahem) technical--"and unmarried men don't wear a tallis when they pray…"

We both fall silent. The Hasidic guest stars for the episode arrive on set, and everyone is checking them out.

The woman looks legit. Her clothes are a little frumpy, but manageable; at least, they don't scream I'm a backwater shtetl girl from the 18th century like the Hasidim in Stranger Among Us. She actually looks pretty decent. And pretty, well, pretty. That's another unexpected development, that the Hasidim are young and actually sort of cool-looking. (She's also in a clochet, though.)

The guy, though. He has a three-day beard as if he came from the other half of Williamsburg. His hat would look more appropriate on a snowman. His jacket is buttoned the wrong way on top. He has long curly hair--not long, but much longer than a Hasid would--and his stuck-on sidecurls aren't much longer than the curls of his actual hair.

When the scene cuts, the Hasidic actors crowd together to complain. One of the younger ones is all afire. "He looks ridiculous!" he shrills. "He looks like a moron!" The older actors laugh at his outburst. "It'll never show up," they say. "When people watch on TV, they'll edit it out of their heads."

In Part III: Pork loin for lunch. Never Mind the Goldbergs. And a push for Hollywood's first Hasidic sitcom.

Burying Books

Here's a cool and poignant little short film about going to a genizah, a sort of cemetery for books. A Torah scroll has been damaged in a flood, and the young rabbi of an elderly community packs up his congregation and takes them to the genizah section of their local cemetery. It's a little bit touching and a little funny.

The commentary is simple, but profound: "It doesn't happen a lot, that a Torah has to be buried," to which another child says: "It's good that it doesn't happen a lot!" Death, in general, is really hard to understand. The death of a Torah is sometimes even harder -- if only because we don't really know what to make of it in the first place. We know we're not supposed to touch a Torah or sit down while it's in the air or curse in front of it. But what is the physical object of a Torah? What does it mean?

And the truth is: we don't know. Like anything else death-related, theories and hopes are all we really have. That's why, when I hear rabbis with fluffily empowering sermons or young kids with no background analyzing stuff like this, I listen more closely: because they're probably closer to knowing what's actually going on than I ever will be.

On National Novel Writing Month

Q: National Novel Writing Month is making me wanna hurt myself. I'm trying to do 6 pages a day, but I'm constantly behind and nothing is actually happening at all and I try to use music to time it, like I average 1/3-1/2 a page per song.

The problem with NaNoWriMo, to get my soapbox hottened, is that it's purely homogeneous. It's not made to adjust for anyone who fits outside the norm. Stephen King writes maddeningly fast. Dickens wrote maddeningly slow. James Herriot writes 1 page a day, no matter what else is going on or how inspired he is. What Nano *is* good for is, it gives you a default deadline. If you need to adjust that deadline, hey, no one's stopping you. But at least you have a backup.

**

Oh, and update on the secret movie update soon, I promise. To keep you in suspense, though, check this out:



(Thanks to Joy for that.)

Hasid for a Day

(A few weeks ago, I somehow convinced my bosses to let me work as an extra on the set of the new CBS drama The Good Wife for a day. The episode, “Unorthodox,” is about the Hasidic Jewish community in Chicago. It airs on Tuesday, Nov. 10.)

I've protested so frequently about the portrayal of Hasidic Jews in movies and TV that one would probably figure that I should know how to do it correctly. Being one myself, I'm pretty quick to catch the common errors: eating in non-kosher restaurants (Pi), mixed dancing (A Stranger among Us), being in inappropriate situations between men and women (pretty much every movie out there that involves Hasidim in any capacity). In my head, as I've gone through the little suite of everyday movements that make up our life, I've thought several times about how perfect something would be for a movie -- probably due to a healthy amount of egotism combined with a cinematic outlook. Swishing my talis around me before morning prayers would make a great pan! Washing hands from a double-handled cup would look so meaningful in slow motion! Walking down the street with my black overcoat swishing against my calves like a cape is -- well, yeah, that's my fantasy of being a superhero combining with my fantasy of living inside a movie.

The reality of Hasidic Jews on film, from The Chosen to New York, I Love You, is a different story. When we're not represented as shadowy figures crossing streets in the background, we're old, un-English-speaking naïfs with poor posture and weird hair. The weird hair part, we are totally guilty of, but the rest of it is due in large part to the dumbing down of culture to its barest essence -- when it's not straight-out making stuff up.

But nothing quite prepares me for this: Sitting at a bridge table at 5:45 A.M. with a dozen men dressed as Hasidic Jews, discussing the new Quentin Crisp biopic. Or, more specifically: how one of the 70-year-old rabbi-lookin' guys at the table, whose payos are much straighter and more even and perfectly grayed than mine, is telling me about his role cross-examining an actor playing Quentin Crisp in a new film.

The guys at my table have run through the gamut of Hasidim in films. They're like the gods of Hasidic acting -- they've been in A Price above Rubies and A Stranger Among Us. They've been in sitcoms, dramas, and Law & Order. (This, I will learn, is a benchmark among extras* in New York; as my trophy-wife {we'll get there} will tell me later that day: "If you haven't been on Law & Order, you don't really live in New York City.") These guys have stories as long as their fake beards. Of Stranger, one is saying: "We were filming, and one of the real guys says, 'Hold up! That's not how it's really done.' So the director calls cut, everyone stops, and he shows them how to do it. Then they start again, they roll tape, and someone else says, 'Hold up!' And everyone else has their own way to do it.

"Ah," he cackles, leaning back into his seat, "Jews."

And the whole group starts laughing.

Elli Meyer, nicknamed "the king of Broadway" and known in the industry as the go-to person to play Hasidic Jews, very kindly set me up with this gig. His IMDB profile lists nearly fifty credits to his name (in reality, it's much higher) -- mostly as "unnamed rabbi" or "unnamed Hasid," but he's also played a hillbilly, a trucker, and (once, on The Sorpranos) a Muslim cleric. He put out a call for actors on his Facebook profile -- this new television show needs Hasidim!

It was almost like I couldn't say no. So far, being a Hasidic Jew has only gotten me a whole bunch of fast days that I wouldn't have otherwise known existed. I figured, it was about time looking like a crazy-haired freak should start paying off. I emailed him my details, and he emailed me back the info. Starting, I should note, with the 5:45 call time.

The camera crew isn't scheduled to arrive until seven, but makeup and wardrobe have already set up. One of the makeup artists comes over and starts sending people over to the makeshift station, which is really a bunch of mirrors duct-taped to a wall. The other guys are fishing out their sidecurls. They all have pre-made payos, dyed the exact white of their hair, with little clips at the top. Most of them have beard extensions, too.

The younger guys, the professional would-be actors who are here because it's another gig, and maybe because they happen to look Jewish, are being sent away to be outfitted with fake ones from the wardrobe department. I do a double-take when I see the blond underwear-model guy walk past in his skullcap and tzitzis. The makeup guy does a double-take on me and says: "Oh. You've already been."

Coming on Friday: Part 2. Fake kids! Fake cars! And my fake wife!?

__
* — I’m grossly oversimplifying it, I know.

Because you asked for it...

Like a butterfly, he emerged from his hairstyling cocoon looking fuller, more wholesome, and distinctly devoid of the trappings of post-17th century life.

Paul Rudnick: The Man Who Tells Bette Midler What to Say

There is no better introduction to Paul Rudnick's book of essays, I Shudder, than its subtitle: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey. And there is nowhere that this description is more apt than the first essay: in which Rudnick tells his life story -- a common story, really, of being a writer and moving to the Big City and coming out as a gay man -- through a series of visits, by his mother and her two sisters, of his West Village apartments.

Rudnick has a gift for writing about any situation -- whether facing off against a movie producer high on cocaine or being a Jew doing fieldwork at a convent for a film script (Sister Act) or emigrating from New Jersey to Manhattan -- with good humor and total nonchalance. More remarkably, he shares that sort of easy wisdom with his characters. He doesn't offer a coming-out story so much as an understanding, sometimes silent and sometimes not, and even the darker sides of his new New York neighborhood are treated with a gentle glibness by his aunts: "'S and M,' said Lil, nodding her head. 'That's when people like to have other people beat them up, right? Like on dates?'"

Aunt Lil, the don of the Rudnick aunt mafia, reappears again and again in these stories. When Rudnick finally achieves the Jewish dream of dating a doctor, his Aunt Lil is the judge and jury to whom he must present his new acquisition. The comic tension is insurmountable, of course -- not so much because of the doctor's gender, male, so much as his name, John -- and the ensuing conclusions about his religion.

And then there are the essays that don't dwell on the Jew stuff at all. Reading about the making of the Addams Family film is a bit of gleeful joy that arouses both my sycophantic goth side and my faux-pas-friendly flamboyant side. Reading Bette Midler stories during the writing of Sister Act (she was contracted to star in the film, until the last moment) is pure joy. His series of grumpy-old-man meditations -- well, meditations, fashion tips, and plots to assassinate Rachel Ray -- are a weird series of interstitial fantasies that make the rest of his essays that much more vividly real.

Most compelling of all, however, is "Good Enough to Eat," which, though it's entirely devoid of gastrointestinal jokes, is no less a quintessentially Jewish musing on food than anything you're likely to find on Seinfeld or the humor bank:

An unlikely number of people, and particularly my family, have always been obsessed with my diet. This is because, since I was born, I have never had the slightest interest in eating any sort of meat, fish, poultry, or vegetable. I wasn't the sad-eyed victim of some childhood trauma; I was never frightened by a malevolent tube steak or a rampaging halibut. A greasy-haired stranger never lured me into his van and forced me to stroke an ear of corn while he took photos. I don't have what daytime talk shows and the Healthy Living sections of newspapers call food issues. What I have is a sweet tooth which has spread to all of my other organs. I probably have a sweet appendix.

I've always thought that David Sedaris was Jewish, even when I've been corrected by people much more in the know than I. Paul Rudnick has done more than enough to convince me -- not that Sedaris is Jewish, but that Rudnick is actually David Sedaris. It's good, and so is he.

B&H Photo: Camera Shopping As a Religious Experience

We love B&H Photo & Video, the only midtown New York store that I actually have fun in that doesn't sell comic books or Legos. It's not just a massive electronics store. It's not just a massive electronics store owned and operated by Hasidic Jews. And it's not just a Hasidic electronics store with bowls of free sour candy all over the place and mysterious, amazing conveyor belts over your heads that move merchandise with seeming lightning speed. It's unearthly. It's unnatural. And yet, it seems to function with all the determination and efficiency of a synagogue service.

Every time I visit the store -- whether it's a 3-hour trip to pick out a new video camera or a quick run-in for some batteries -- I come out with a new story. Sometimes it's as simple as the Satmar Hasid at the checkout counter asking me what I think of the Sleater-Kinney album blasting from my earbuds. Sometimes it's a little more complicated. Other times, I don't even have to go inside the store to get a new B&H story. Here are three of my favorites:

1. Someone stops me on the street. He asks, in bad Hebrew with a bad put-on Israeli accent, "Ayfo B&H" -- Do you know where B&H is? I start to answer -- in my own equally bad Israeli accent -- but then I stop. Something about the lilt of his Hebrew sounds familiar. "Are you Australian?" He is. He's from Sydney. He ends up knowing not just my wife, but her entire family. As a matter of fact, he had lunch at my parents'-in-law's house a few months ago. He apologizes to me for not wearing a yarmulke (I'm not clear on why) and wishing me a good Shabbos. It's Wednesday afternoon. It makes me look forward to Shabbat. It makes me feel good.

2. Someone stops me on the street. He asks me the same question -- in English, this time -- laughing, like he knows it's ironic. I answer, although I'm a little offended at the stereotype. I mean, does every Jew in midtown Manhattan with a beard and sidecurls have to be affiliated with B&H? If he stopped to pay attention to the person I am, and not just the way I look, maybe he'd be a bit less stereotypical and bit more astounded. I'm a freakin' Hasidic Jew who writes films, dude! I'm more than my payos! Just because I'm Hasidic, it doesn't mean I know every other Orthodox Jew in New York. Or where they work.

I smile. Graciously, I give him directions. Fifteen minutes later, we bump into each other at B&H, where I'm buying equipment for a new short film. Sigh. Not so ironic.

3. I'm waiting in line for a refund. I thought we needed a .25" microphone cord and we need a .125". When I get to the front of the line, the guy -- a clean-shaven Israeli guy who starts talking to me in Hebrew -- asks me if everything's inside. I tell him it's all there; I didn't even open it. He tells me, more as a by-the-way sort of thing than as criticism, that we all need to be very careful. People in the world distrust Orthodox Jews. They think we're all out to get them. That's why we need to be even nicer than the world, and more polite and more meticulous in all our dealings. Business. Personal. Life.

With that, he finishes scrutinizing the corners of the box -- all undented -- and drops it into the chute that takes it back home. He offers me a candy. In spite of myself, I accept. He smiles, seeing my momentary indulgence. And, as the others around him all chime in to add their two cents to the issue, he counts out one of each flavor candy from the bowl and gives it to me. When I protest, he tells me to give some to strangers. "They need it," he insists.

Later that day, I speak to Frum Satire. Without telling him about it, he tells me about his B&H blog post -- which talks about basically the same thing. And how B&H turns all that around. He asks: "How many instances can you think of when Charedi Jews make a good impression on non-Jews and irreligious Jews on a constant basis? It's unfortunate, but much of the world only has negative experience and rarely see the beauty of the ultra-orthodox community." Not at B&H, though.

4. This is a bonus -- not that it's an experience, just because it's cool. My cousin Mendy works for B&H's customer service phone line. The other day, someone called him Sammy. We asked what was up with that. He told us that (a) half the floor was named Menachem Mendel, and (b) no one can pronounce Menachem anyway.

We Experiment on A.J. Jacobs

I got to interview A.J. Jacobs for MyJewishLearning. I was excited and nervous and trepidatious -- I liked The Year of Living Biblically a lot, although there were more than a few parts that made me wince, and I loved the hell out of his just-released The Guinea Pig Diaries.

But in his writing he comes across as smarmy and self-assured and, well, a bit of a smartass. And I'm not very good at thinking on my feet -- let alone, having to go up against superpowers like you'd suspect Jacobs to have. In his books, he is a comeback machine. He has a zingy one-liner response for everything, and his subjects quiver and crumble against him.

But it turns out that he's hugely nice and polite and good-humored and actually sort of docile. He's the kind of person who tells jokes that you'd find in joke books for kids and really laugh at them. When I started the interview, I actually thought he was from the Midwest. Maybe I'd just seen A Serious Man too recently, but that sort of homeliness and courtesy was unmistakable. Check out the full interview...

A.J. Jacobs is a bit of a gonzo journalist and a little bit of an undercover secret agent -- but, most of all, he is a living, walking experiment. In his first book, The Know-It-All, he read the entire Encyclopædia Britannica from beginning to end. In his follow-up, The Year of Living Biblically, he attempted to follow the Bible as literally as possible -- expunging all polyfibrous garments from his wardrobe, not shaving for a year, living inside a tent in his living room for a week (his wife, an enduring spectator and the eternally good-natured Teller to his Penn, was invited to join him inside but chose to sleep in their bedroom instead) and even stoning sinners in Central Park.

In Jacobs' new collection, The Guinea Pig Diaries, he embarks upon a new project every chapter, from outsourcing every aspect of his life to India (including emails, calls from his boss, and sending love letters to his wife) to practicing Radical Honesty, a method of living in which he tells everyone exactly what's on his mind, from his mother-in-law to an attractive editor at Rachel Ray magazine. He even sneaks into the Oscars, impersonating Australian actor Noah Taylor, and becomes a celebrity for a night.

Jacobs is less a guinea pig than a test tube, letting new theories pass through him with nearly no absorption. But he never misses an opportunity for profundity, and he's always ready to learn life lessons from any source, great or small. Sometimes, it feels like he's learning the same lessons every time --that he needs to stop multitasking, stop being shallow, and relearn the simple lessons of being a child. Although it's never explicitly stated, Jacobs' hero could be Robert Fulghum, the author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten -- with a side dish of Kurt Vonnegut, perhaps.

The new book doesn't come close to the emotional honesty and rawness of Jacobs' attempt at in vitro fertilization in Biblically or his reconciliation with his father in Know-It-All, there are basic emotional truths in each chapter of Guinea Pig, like the let's-work-together-and-save-the-world moment at the end of a Stephen King book, or a really good rabbi's sermon. It's punchy, funny, constantly self-deprecating but unfailingly optimistic.

We were lucky enough to talk to Jacobs by phone from Denver, where he was preparing for a reading. After the swarthy, self-assured-but-inquisitive tone of his books, I wasn't sure what to expect -- either the snarkiest person alive or the gentlest. To my surprise, the voice that answered the phone was laid-back, chilled out, and not at all what I imagined from already having read about his innermost thoughts. Inadvertently, I blurted out:

MJL: Where are you from?

A.J. Jacobs: I am actually from New York City. I grew up in Manhattan.

Weird! You have such a...I don't know what to call it, a relaxed accent. It's not at all what I expected.

Well, I'm in the middle of my book tour in Denver. Maybe I've adapted a Colorado accent unknowingly!

This new collection kind of feels like a best-of. There's not really a point A that you're starting from, or a point B that you're aiming for, like you had in your first two books.

About half of the pieces come from Esquire, and half are new. One piece I did, the one about pretending to be Noah Taylor at the Academy Awards, I did a tiny version of it in Entertainment Weekly -- which was just a couple hundred words in a box. I sort of built it up into a full story in here.

How did you recreate the experience? Do you keep a journal?

I do keep a journal, and I did keep some notes. So I felt good. It felt like delving back into the glory that was being a celebrity. As a matter of fact, it felt good revisiting all these pieces.

Did you feel like you were digging up dirt on your own past?

Actually, no. Most of them were either very recent or they were completely new, so it wasn't like I had to do too much digging.

You say you always keep a little bit of each experiment over the rest of your life. As a Sabbath-observant person, I felt a little bit of myself shrivel up at that...like a lot of people I know, I hoped you were going to keep with it, or that we were somehow different from all your other experiments.

The Biblical experiment changed my life forever in so many profound ways. First of all, we joined a synagogue. We don't really go, but we're members, which is a pretty big step for me. Also, we're sending our kids to Hebrew day school there. I'm okay whether they become observant or non-observant, as long as they're mentsches. At first, I thought it would be nice to send them there. Now they know more Hebrew than I do.

One of the biggest ways it affected me was in blessings, where the Bible says to bless everything you eat. It changed my whole attitude toward gratitude. During my year, I was saying all these blessings of thanksgiving, and I kind of got carried away, as the Bible tells us to do. I was saying thanks for every little thing in my life. Over the course of our day, we tend to ignore all the things we have that go right. Instead, we focus on the three or four that go wrong, and this has kind of taught me not to overlook those things.

And the same for many of the experiments in the new book, they've changed me for good as well.

Did any of the new experiments activate something in you that you don't like?

Maybe the celebrity-for-a-night experiment. I was getting so many compliments, and people telling me how great I was, that my ego started to balloon out of control, even though I knew deep down that I wasn't a famous celebrity. I got a taste of how these celebrities become egotistical maniacs. Afterward, I remember waiting in line at a restaurant, thinking, "Don't these people know who I am?"

Noah Was a Survivor

Of all the gigs I've ever had, this had to be the most extreme. And I wasn't even there.

To celebrate reading the story of Noah in the Torah, Amsterdam Jewish Salon had a cruise. And they showed the Noah G-dcast, which I {humbly} narrated.





You might think it's heretical to take a leisurely cruise in order to honor the sole survivor of a catastrophic event that, well, annihilated the rest of the world. I might disagree with you. I grew not far from the ocean. My parents carried on the ancient Jewish tradition of taking us to Atlantic City for weekends during the summer. When I lived on my own, I moved to San Francisco, and stopped at the ocean every week before Shabbos.

I love watching the ocean. And I'm scared to death of it. It's the most tangible part of God that we can get close to: it's bigger than any human eye can fathom, shapeless, and deadly. I think I've read somewhere that humans have explored less than 10% of the total mass of the ocean. If there's undeniable proof of the Flood, or any other mysteries of creation/the Big Bang/early Earth history, it's probably lurking somewhere down deep, protected by some fearsome sea creatures bigger than dinosaurs.

Or maybe there's nothing...and that just makes the mystery that much more mysterious.

Either way, the ocean is huge. It's big and it's bad. There's a reason that nearly every sea shanty ends in tragedy, the same as every life ends in death. Noah's not just the story of some dude and his boat. It's the story of the sole survivor of a global tragedy, and -- although my G-dcast implies that he wasn't the best person in the world -- tragedies transform people. The same way Holocaust survivors and military veterans have some unspoken piece of wisdom that the rest of us will never be able to understand, that's what Noah has. And that, much as God and the depths of the ocean itself, is un-understandable.

Free Losers, and Stories for Drunk Baseball Fans

First of all: I'm doing a special deal thing. Order Candy in Action from me, and get a free copy of Losers along with it.

And here's a great reason why. The folks at Stanton Park Review have kindly reviewed Losers. It was pretty awesome of them to do so. The site was inspired by Chuck Palahniuk -- specifically, the idea that "What people consider to be good books are the ones that comfort and lull us to sleep. No, drunk baseball fans don’t want to hear about a kid dying of cancer but if you read them a story about consensual fighting or about waiters pissing in soup or about a guy being gutted in a swimming pool, those baseball fans, they will shut up and listen. Given the right stories, those drunk guys, they will really love books."

So, yeah. I'm pretty proud to be included.

Check it:

Matthue Roth's Losers is a fun read from start to finish. The main character, Jupiter Glazer, is a Russian immigrant who is trying to negotiate the pit falls of his first year in high school. Aside from the normal social awkwardness of high school, Jupiter has to deal with a bully named Bates who is determined to turn him into a human pancake.

keep reading

"Circles" Live with Mista Cookie Jar

I was going to wait till Monday morning to post this, and get the maximum traffic or whatever, but me waiting that long is just not gonna happen.

Mista Cookie Jar just got YouTubetry of some live versions of new songs -- including "Circles," one of the songs I co-wrote for his Love Bubble album, which you can purchase right now for not a lot of money. But, relax. First, just enjoy the songs.

Here's "Magic World," which I didn't write but has CJ workin' it and kids going crazy.



And, now, "Circles."

For Every Phoenix Born, Another Tastes Dust

Rain in New York is never pretty, except when you're inside.

Last night they put Murphy to sleep. Murphy was my best friend's cat. His mother said it was like losing another part of Mike. One of the reasons I think cats are creepy is that they don't always recognize you -- or, at least, they don't always act like they do. After Mike died, every time I saw Murphy, he'd slink across the room like he was avoiding me. I wanted to tell him, it's ok, we're suffering together. He just wanted to suffer alone. Basically the same way I was with everyone else.

Mike's parents are going to have pawprints made and put them next to his grave. I said it sounded nice, in a Coptic Egyptian sort of way. I got off the phone and put on Velocity Girl, his favorite band, loud. Itta was cooking. She couldn't hear the volume. Yalta started to dance, so I did, too, but only because I didn't want her to stop.

Just found out that one of my closest friends had a baby. Two weeks ago. I don't blame them for it; I can totally understand the need to hibernate. But, especially with the wicked weather and the way the cold has been slowly making its play, I'm starting to remember just how easy it is to fall out of touch with people. Here's my resolution for the season: I will not forget the rest of the world. I won't.

From Last to First

So...Simchas Torah. Lately, it's become famous for being the #2 Jewish drinking holiday, but my past few Simchas Torahs have all been pretty clean events -- festive and debaucherous in that wholesome way where we jump around with the Torah and sweat up our thrift-store suits until we've soo earned every penny of that $15 dry-cleaning visit.

And it's not just me, I don't think. People have been raving about G-dcast in a way that makes me blush like they're saying how good I look, and it's all positive and gung-ho in a way that appeals to 5-year-olds. And David's post about the new Moses movie probably will owe more to 300 than Charlton Heston...but making an action movie about the Torah is as close as Hollywood will probably ever come to a studying-books-can-be-cool movie as we'll get.

This year, I went to San Francisco. I'd somehow managed to convince my ex-boss, David Levithan (who wrote the awesome Boy Meets Boy, as well as the so-indie-its-jeans-hurt Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist), to narrate for us. So we did V'Zot Habracha with a bang.

Then, of course -- because some good things don't have to come to an end -- we did our real conclusion episode, and did Bereshit again. (There was a whole huge concert, and Elana Jagoda performed her alterna-folk-dancey children's anthems, and Julie Seltzer talked about being a soferet, but mostly talked about her project baking a different challah for every parsha in the Torah, and we all just generally rocked out.)

And then the lights dimmed, and we rewound the Torah, and showed our final episode.



Anyway, some good things do come to an end -- and this was the end of the line for G-dcast. Or, at least, G-dcast as it exists now. We've got some wild stuff in the pipeline, and some even wilder stuff that might happen, but we're leaving you to jump into the Good Book on your own. (And it's definitely not the end of my involvement with Torah -- I'll probably have a new blog about how I got caught in a typhoon next week for Parshat Noah -- but for now, this is G-dcast signing out.

Crossposted on Jewschool

Buying an Etrog in Brooklyn

What do you look for in an etrog? It was hard to top last year, but we had to try. Heshy Fried and I went on a fact-finding mission in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn to investigate.

Here's what we discovered:

(By the way: The dude with the amazing etrog at the end is Yossi Keller, who might know more about etrogim than any other human being alive. He runs the etrog shop in the abandoned matzah bakery on Empire Blvd. and Albany Ave. in Crown Heights, and you should check him out.)

Sukkot on the Run

One thing I've always wondered about the holiday of Sukkot: If the makeshift tabernacles that we're commanded to erect are supposed to function as our houses, then why do we spend so much damn time in them?

Let's review. We're commanded to go into the sukkah any time we want to eat. When we sleep. When we hang out with our friends. You know -- all the stuff that, normally, would be done at home, we do in a sukkah. Basically, for one week of our lives, we run a 24-hour marathon between our normal lives and our little palm-covered huts.

However, here are the most frequent locations where those actions take place for me:

Eating: At my desk at work, and/or walking down the street.
Sleeping: Subway, riding home from work.
Hanging out: Gmail's little chat windows.

To be fair, I could definitely accomplish the last one while inside a sukkah. But the others? Not so house-intensive, for the rest of the year. Last year, I was so busy that, instead of trekking to have my lunch at the beautiful (but impractical) West Side Synagogue all the way on 9th Avenue, I just didn't eat.

This year, I'm going to try to do it different. In our prayers, Sukkot is called "zman simchatenu," which translates to "the time of our rejoicing (or, if you're feeling literal, "happy time"). In the times of the Temple, everyone traveled to Jerusalem to bring their harvest offerings.

It really was a vacation time -- or, at least, it was as close to a vacation as the Children of Israel got in those days. Even though there are five work-days crammed right in the middle of Sukkot between the first days and Shemini Atzeret, it's not supposed to be a return to our dreary business of working and running and not-eating-until-9-p.m. -- it's God demanding that, even when we return to our between-holidays lives, we bring a little bit of the holiday with us. And if I have to take a little bit longer to run out to the sukkah and get back, and put my mind in a different mental space just as I put my body in a different physical space...well, that's putting the "moed" in "hol hamoed," I guess.

(Note to bosses: I'm not actually going to take a two-hour lunch, I promise. Er...every day.)

Inglourious Basterds: What You Didn't See

So I've been reading the script (downloadable here) to the film Inglourious Basterds. And it's pretty over-the-top insane.

Not that you wouldn't expect that from a movie that's (a) by Quentin Tarantino, (b) about Jews, and (c) borderline sadophiliac in its embrace of violence. But there are some moments, excised from the final film, that tell the story as...well, as a much different story.

In this scene, Donny Donowitz, the "Bear Jew," has just bought himself a baseball bat. (Proprietor: "You gettin' your little brother a present before you ship out?" Donny: "No." Stony silence, as they both realize its significance.) Donny then pays a visit to a tiny little old Jewish lady in an apartment building who invites him in for tea:

Donny: Mrs. Himmelstein, do you have any loved ones over in Europe who you're concerned for?
Mrs. Himmelstein: What compels you, young man, to ask a stranger such a personal question?
Donny: Because I'm going to Europe. And I'm gonna make it right.
Mrs. Himmelstein: And just how do you intend to do that, Joshua?

He holds up his [baseball] bat.

Donny: With this.
Mrs. Himmelstein: And what exactly do you intend to do with that toy?
Donny: I'm gonna beat every Nazi I find to death with it....I'm going through the neighborhood. If you have any loved ones in Europe, whose safety you fear for, I'd like you to write their name on my bat.

I'd assume that part of the reason this scene was cut is because the scene that introduces the Basterds unit -- post-battle, where the soldiers are interrogating Nazi prisoners and collecting scalps -- flows with such brutal elegance. But also, the scenes that feature the Brookline Jewish community would probably take the movie away from being the squarely violent war film that Tarantino intended to make and cast it more as a Holocaust-era character piece.

In Jordana Horn's excellent interview with Tarantino, both acknowledge (correctly, I think) that Basterds wasn't a Holocaust film. But, when looking at Tarantino's original visions for the film -- some reports suggest that his original script, which clocked in at over 270 pages and 5 1/2 hours of shooting time -- the final product could have been any of several types of film.

(One final note: Ostensibly, Tarantino's original concept was to make the film entirely about Shoshana, the Jewish girl whose family was killed in front of her, in which she makes a list of Nazis responsible and extracts vengeance. That apparently turned into his last film, Kill Bill. I do wish Basterds was more like Kill Bill in its embrace of the hero -- nearly all the Jews die, and all the women die in particularly horrific circumstances -- but I understand how both women's deaths were called for by the storytelling ethic. Which doesn't make their portrayal any less anti-woman.)

What I'm Listening to

Tonight's my first night editing in a while. Just found out that my fave Jewish punk band of the day, Can!!Can, is going to be in the movie. But that's not what I'm listening to. This is what I'm listening to. One's a dancing-by-yourself-in-the-center-of-the-room song by the emotionally perfect Hadara. And then my friend Soce just sent me this, and in the middle of it, who should be washing a car shirtless but Fred Chao. And that should make anybody's night.

P.S.

The producer of our film just forwarded this to the production staff. It's small, but I think it's sweet. I know it sucks to turn every Hollywood death into a Grand Statement (or, as is more usually the case, egotism), but I was blown away that he wanted to keep working on his TV series after the cancer diagnosis. It's like, 98% of acting might be being a celebrity or flirting with tabloids, but behind that facade are some people who really sincerely believe in their creative juices.

In an interview following Patrick Swayze's untimely death, Jennifer Gray recently stated:

"When I think of him, I think of being in his arms when we were kids, dancing, practicing the lift in the freezing lake, having a blast doing this tiny little movie we thought no one would ever see. My heart goes out to his wife and childhood sweetheart, Lisa Niemi, to his mom, Patsy, and to the rest of their family."

An Interview and a confession

Marjolein, of the wonderful Marjolein Book Blog, just interviewed me. She's both one of the most voracious readers on the interwebs, and one of the most devoted. I honestly think she's one of the thirty-six secret pillars holding up the world of young adult literature. She just read and reviewed Goldbergs, so she gets to a bit of Hava analysis:

If you could be a character from your books for one day, who would it be?
Without a doubt, Hava from Never Mind the Goldbergs. I'm an Orthodox Jew, and when I wrote the book and I was single, everyone thought that Hava was my ideal girlfriend. The truth was more like, Hava is my ideal for myself. She's weird and awkward and very cool, and everything that she does, she takes the time to think about. She believes in doing it. She's purposeful about its execution, and she makes it rock. She's like the person version of Sleater-Kinney, my favorite band. Even when they cover B-52's songs, they put, like, 110% of themselves into it.
MORE >

Goldbergs/Yom Kippur a Go-Go Giveaway!

It's almost Yom Kippur. And what better way is there to celebrate than to get a free copy of my tell-all memoir Yom Kippur a Go-Go, about how a bunch of friendly bull-dykes and queens taught me how to be an Orthodox Jew, along with a copy of my first book, Never Mind the Goldbergs?

(Okay, trick question. The correct answer is: "by praying, giving charity, and doing good stuff for other people." But this is a nifty runner-up.)

To win, just go here and answer the question:

In which way are you "casting off" and starting new this year?

And then you can win my books, along with Eprhyme's awesome new album, the Cool Jew book and $250 more worth of swag:



And if the rumours are true, there's another Yom Kippur a Go-Go giveaway right around the corner.

(sorry I spelled it "rumours." we're having british houseguests and it's contagious.)

I Am My Beloved's...But I'm Not Only That

For the month of Elul, I've been trying to get myself into shape. One of the things that Rebbe Nachman (and basically everyone else) suggests doing in order to achieve this goal is learning Jewish laws. My father-in-law recently gave us this tiny, awesome Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, which is a handy guidebook to what Jewish stuff you're supposed to be doing at any given moment. It's much more of a Judaism for Dummies than the actual book.

So I've been reading up on my life as a Jew. Sometimes a line or two at a shot (the entries are mostly really short, which plays to our advantage) and sometimes -- like this morning, on the stalled 5 train -- an entire chapter. Part of what got me so excited was the talk of Psalm 27, which we read at the end of morning prayers all this month. (If you've ever seen a horror movie, you've probably heard it in some form; it's the one that starts "The Lord is my light and my salvation; who should I fear?") I know that our article says it's a slightly schizophrenic psalm, I still like it. I get a shiver every time I read "The only thing I ask for is to live in God's house all the days of my life." Not that I have any clue what God's house looks like, but it seems like it would be a good place to be. Just the idea of having a house to curl up into, metaphorical or otherwise, sounds like a pretty good deal. And like a pretty comforting thing, especially in the

(My other favorite line, "When evil men come close to eat my flesh, they stumble and fall," clearly plays to the action-adventure author side of my personality, but that's another blog entry.)

So the Kitzur, whose role usually shies away from the sort of non-how-to thing, goes out of its way to talk about the different acronyms for Elul. Usually, people like to say how Elul is the healing time after the catastrophes of Tisha B'Av, and the strain on our relationship with God that things like massive destruction tend to cause. They point out how the Hebrew letters alef, lamed, vov, lamed -- the four letters that spell "Elul" -- stand for "Ani L'dodi v'dodi li," or "I am my beloved's, and my beloved is for me."

But wait! There's more!

Apparently, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the Ari, was the first to play with acronyms. He first cites the verse in Exodus that talks about someone accidentally killing a man: if this happens, God says, "I will find you a place to which he can flee" (21:13). The words "I will find you" begin with aleph, lamed, vov, lamed.

Again with the morbidity, right? But it's actually a comforting verse at heart: even a murderer can find peace. Then he cites Deuteronomy 30:6: "God will open up your heart." This one doesn't just work the obvious (hearts! open! understanding! empathy! Rosh Hashanah!) but also alludes to the exact opposite of what happened to Pharaoh: Our hearts are becoming un-hardened.

Then the Ari proceeds to blow us all out of the water by explaining how each of these three verses covertly refers, respectively, to repentance, charity, and praying -- the three things that, according to the mahzor, dissipate a death sentence on Yom Kippur.

One more cool thing that the Kitzur points out about Psalm 27 and its first few words, "God is my light and my salvation." When the psalm says "salvation," it's referring to Yom Kippur, of course -- since that's the time when some souls get salvated (er, saved) and some don't. But the "my light" part is talking about Rosh Hashanah. It's a complicated holiday, neither 100% good (uh, a lot of us are about to die) nor 100% sad (it's the birthday of the world, and a lot of us are going to get good decrees)...but we do what we can. And that's where the light comes from. We're saying that God should reveal everything...and that God should make it all good.

G-d, Kids, and Movies

First of all: the important things in life.


It's pretty quiet here, for a change. Working furiously on the new book, now that the movie script is in, approved (mostly), and everyone seems more-or-less happy with it, or if they're not, they're not being unhappy in my direction. Which is a relief. Secretly, by the beginning I was thinking that 120 pages was nothing and that I could spit it out in a heartbeat, but by the fifth complete revision, as I was adding up each 120-page draft in my head -- that's something like 600 pages. Definitely longer than any novel I've ever written. Way longer than anything I've written in three freakin' months!

For a good portion of preproduction, they tried to keep their top casting choices secret from me. They didn't want the people getting in the way of my voices for them, the producer said. Before the last draft, I sneaked a look at the audition tapes, and I could see why. Suddenly, I wasn't writing for my main character, I was writing for this snarky, beautiful, a-little-too-candid young woman who was going to become my main character.

But: There's a new novel in the pots. I don't know what's going to happen, but it tastes great so far.

And, finally, there's a new G-dcast in the house! These are the final few episodes, and I feel like we've upped our ante with them. First up this week: Dahlia Lithwick, who edits for Slate and NPR and Newsweek. And you have to come back on Wednesday to see Mayim Bialik's take on Vayelech. Oops. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to say that.

Me. Live. Rapping.

Okay, I actually can't watch this. I'm a squirmer. Here's some live video footage of me doing my verse on Stereo Sinai's song "Hafachta Mitzpedi (Dance)," the first time I've ever done it in front of people. "It" meaning "performing the song live," and "it" also meaning "rapping."

Not sure whether this is totally awful or just plain gawkward. Somebody watch it and tell me. If you can't say something nice, you can totally just pat me on the back and say I was wearing a cute shirt. (Or talk about Miriam's sheitel instead, and then go watch Alan and Miriam performing the song Eleven Below from that night instead. Tell me it doesn't make you want to fall in love with life itself.)

Ahem. On to me.

Plant Names in Yiddish

One of the most encyclopedic Web collections I've seen recently was created, ironically, to put to rest a supposition that I've never heard of. Plant Names in Yiddish is the Web adaptation of Di Geviksan-Velt In Idish, a 2005 publication by Yiddish linguist Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter -- who, according to the site, "confronts the stereotype that 'there aren't any plant names in Yiddish'."

I can see where the stereotype would come from -- since, you know, Yiddish was developed primarily in climates where the ground was encrusted with snow for 90% of the time. However, I can honestly say that, in all the conversations I've had about Yiddish {and I've had a bunch, at least, compared to the average American} the issue of plant names has never come up.

Which isn't to say that it isn't interesting. As Apodion.net notes, "The somewhat-uninspiring English title belies the amazing nature of the work." He proceeds to kvell:

As a reference work it’s indispensable. But as a simple joy—as an impossibly rich and dense body to dive into at immediately satisying random—it is even dearer. At a random page turn I can tell you that the Yiddish name for Artillery Clearweed, Pilea microphylla, is הארמאטניק.. Harmatnik, that is, ‘cannoneer’—I have never heard of Artillery Clearweed but apparently its offensive associations are not unique to English. Sweetflag, the genus Acorus, goes by the name שאװער, or shaver....[F]ar from being some wasteland of natural terminology, where the urban, mercantile Yid is happy to lump all ferns with ferns, trees with trees, birds with birds, and so on, stemming from a general lack of engagement with nature, Yiddish natural terminology is a happy and well-churned melange of influences, Polish, Hebrew, German, Russian, French, Ukrainian and original coinages, where the language’s syncretic, cosmopolitan nature joyously shines through.

My own Yiddish, and my own understanding of the book, is not nearly as poetic. I struggled through a few lines in the first chapter before turning ahead to the shorter and more digestible later chapters. But I'm bowled over by the potential for this knowledge to exist. That, say, one day, when I finally settle down and learn Yiddish -- or, if we stay in Brooklyn, when my kid speaks fluent Yiddish -- that, if she ever wants to describe the most perfect seeded dandelion in the world, or a beautiful ghost orchid, she'll have a way to do just that.

Mista Cookie Jar Takes It Live

C.J. Pizarro, a.k.a. Mista Cookie Jar, has semi-released his new CD, The Love Bubble, which is the best children's music you'll ever hear. I co-wrote 2 songs and rap on one of them. You can hear the album at Mista Cookie Jar, his Myspace page, and if you email him, you can probably buy one, but he's also taking it live. With the kids. And please believe me, I'm not exaggerating when I say that you haven't lived as an artist until you've heard your words rapped by an exquisitely talented 8-year-old.

Go here to hear the whole album.

Stereo Sinai and me in Chicago!

To recap the show in Chicago with Stereo Sinai, Martin Atkins and Can!!Can, PresenTense posted a bunch of Itta's photographs of the concert, along with a little roundup-let. Seriously: I never expected to perform with a former member of Nine Inch Nails and Ministry. Much less, for him to be doing a Powerpoint presentation.

Interview: Matisyahu Brings the "Light"

Here's the moment I knew Matisyahu had stopped being a Jewish phenomenon and entered the realm of pop culture. My sister, who was living deep in the Bible Belt, told one of her non-Jewish friends that I'd become Orthodox. "Oh," he said. "Does that mean he looks like that Matisyahu dude?"

Portrait by Schneur Menaker


Matisyahu might not be the official face of Judaism in America, but he's a lead contender. The reggae-singing phenomenon, a baal teshuvah who became Orthodox in his twenties, might have the most recognizable profile in pop music due to his beard alone. After learning to be religiously observant through Chabad, Matisyahu expanded his learning to include the teachings and prayer styles of Breslov, Karlin, and other Hasidic groups in addition to the Chabad rebbes.

Matisyahu's third studio album, Light, comes out August 25 -- almost six months after its expected release, and three and a half years since his last album, the pop-infected, Bill Laswell-produced Youth, which sold over half a million units.

Since then, Matisyahu has gone back to the basics. He has a new songwriting cave (an old warehouse in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood), a new synagogue (a Karlin Hasidic synagogue, where the prayers are shouted at the top of your lungs), and, perhaps most radically, a new sound to his music. His new songs, both on last year's single Shattered and on Light, still have the reggae influence that dominated his earlier albums. Yet new album's tone is darker, more varied, and beat-driven. "One Day," the album's first single, has a dreamy, summertime quality that is equal parts Bob Marley playing acoustic and "Eye of the Tiger"-like '80s jams. "Master of the Field" is an electronics-heavy jam that brings his vocal beatboxing to the forefront.

MJL spoke with Matisyahu and learned out about his new band, the stories behind the Light songs that he isn't telling anyone else, and why Matisyahu just can't stop loving God.

MJL: A while ago, you told me how Israel right now is for Jews how Greenwich Village was to hippies in the '60s -- wild and innovative, the only place where Judaism's really alive and mutable and organic, whereas in the United States, Jews are sort of stagnant. Do you still feel that way?

Matisyahu: Anywhere in America where I happen to be -- Crown Heights, Willamsburg -- in any Jewish community, it seems like there's one type of Jew. There's pressure to fit in and dress a certain way, talk a certain way, and if you don't do that, it's almost like you're not Jewish. And then in other places, there are a lot of different types of Jews -- and, in those places, you lose the intensity of belief and of observance and of the lifestyle. And that's only among religious Jews. In America, you can be Jewish and elect not to have anything to do with Judaism.

In Israel, even sitting in the airport, you're among a hundred different kinds of Jews, and it's amazing. It's inspiring. Everyone's doing their own thing, but it's not just their own thing -- they have a whole community of people backing them up.

Then you come back to America, and you really feel that we're a small minority of people. We're trying to hold onto something that doesn't necessarily fit into our hands. In Israel, Judaism is alive. It's a real, tangible, living thing.

Is that where the titles come in? Your last E.P. was called Shattered, and it seemed like the very small prelude to something a lot bigger. And then the new album's going to be called Light.

Yeah, it all kind of figures together. There's a Kabbalistic idea of the first world being shattered, utterly destroyed, and the second world -- the world we're in right now -- being a tikkun, a fixing, of the first one. Are you an artist?

Do you mean --

I mean, like, a visual artist.

I draw a little, but I don't really know what I'm doing.

I know what you mean. That's where I am, too. (Laughs.) So when you look at something without light, it looks dead. It's two-dimensional, without any depth or substance. If there's no shadows and no light twisting off of surfaces, it's like it doesn't exist at all. Just like that, when a person looks at the world, it's like it's dead. Then, with light and a backdrop, everything becomes revealed, and their depth comes out.

That's what Shattered was about. Naming the E.P. "Shattered," it was about stopping running away.

I was running for the past few years, running nonstop. My career, my marriage, my kids -- but mostly my career. This past year I've spent mostly at home, going to minyan, working on my record, jamming in my studio.

The songs on Shattered, and the stuff that's been released from the new album so far, is all way different than anything you've done before -- it's more beat-driven and electronic. Why the change?

The foremost changes were all vocally. Musically, we've used elements of reggae, but it's not traditionally reggae. If you listen to my first single, "King without a Crown," it's not reggae -- the beat isn't a traditional reggae rhythm. It's not really a reggae song.

Your vocals, though, really are very reggae-influenced...

It's true. When I sing that song, a lot of my earlier songs, I'm using a Jamaican accent. When I was first developing my singing, I was only listening to reggae. When you listen to only one kind of music, that style penetrates you. A lot of the big reggae singers, the people who've been around for years, they take new techniques and integrate them into their singing. These days, I'm listening to a lot less reggae. I'm listening to a lot of different things.

Do you feel like you need to keep a certain level of reggae influence in your music? Are you feeling pressure to keep it or to move away from it, one way or the other?

In this record, I allowed myself to drop it. Reggae isn't the prevalent music style I'm listening to these days. Also, I've been taking voice lessons, developing my voice to go in different directions as well. I'll hold onto the reggae in some places -- others, I'll just let it go.

Musically, I allowed for all my interests to come together. I've been writing the music for Light in a different way than we've ever written before. [Guitarist and musical director] Aaron [Dugan] and I -- we wrote all the songs together, all very free-form. He'd play guitar, and I'd beatbox and sing. We'd go into the studio and start jamming for an hour and a half. We'd hit record, and then when we finished, we'd play it back and listen to it.

Then we had a bunch of guests on the album. Ooah from Glitch Mob did a bunch of electronic stuff. We had a producer from Jamaica, Stephen McGregor, and another, Motivate. People are like, "He's lost his reggae thing, he's not reggae anymore -- " It's ironic, [McGregor] is this 17-year-old kid who's producing Sean Paul, Trevor Hall, he's a singer-songwriter in the Marley mold, and another producer who's done Fishbone.

You write really candidly about God, praying, and your relationship with your religion. Does it feel different to write, or less confidential, when you know a million people will hear it? How do you get to the safety of trusting yourself?

It's entirely different. My band, my writing, everything. We changed the band around after Youth. There's a new bassist and a new keyboardist. Building the new band has been a two-to-three-year process.

And then, lyrically, my teacher, mentor, friend Ephraim Rosenstein -- he takes a Chabad ideology and compares it to Breslov ideology -- he asks what's important in each one -- and then he brings in other philosophies, contemporary philosophers like Nietzsche, and he takes wider themes from Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. First we break down the themes into simple ideas. Then we bring in stories to illustrate these ideas.

That's kind of what Rebbe Nachman did. He says that the most important ideas can't be transmitted as abstract ideas, that they have to be transformed into stories.

Definitely. I did a project for the John Lennon Save Darfur project to end child slavery, and I'd been studying a lot of Breslov stories, and I looked for a way to link these together.

I came up with two children -- child soldiers in Africa, they've been forced to fight a war. They escape their army, and then they're lost in a forest, like in [Rebbe Nachman's] Story of the Seven Beggars. One song is called "We Will Walk" -- it's about continuing on, no matter what happens. "Two Child One Drop," from Shattered -- it's pretty clear, it's about killing someone, which Hasidic tradition compares to embarrassing someone. It's like putting a gun up to someone's head and making them do something.

Is it something that you expect people to pick up on and intuit when they listen to your music -- or do you think they're just going to go, wow, that's some intense violent imagery, and move on?

I don't know. A lot of it's not explicit in the songs, Africa or Rebbe Nachman -- maybe when they read this interview with you, they'll get it. But I think the ideas come through.

Rabbi Rosenstein and I came up with thirty categories of ideas, of stories -- and then we pared the concepts down to words. Then we went into my studio in Green Point, just Aaron [Dugan, Matisyahu's longtime guitarist] and I -- Aaron would play and I'd beatbox. We'd jam for an hour without stopping.

Then I'd listen to the sound. It was some really dark stuff we were coming up with. I'd take the music, write down some lyrics, and form the songs that way. We brought in other people -- I flew to Jamaica, where we brought in [legendary drum and bass production team] Sly and Robbie. We had the oud player from The Idan Raichel Project, Yehuda Solomon from Moshav singing Hebrew on top of me. The songs ended up in a totally different place from where it started.

Has all the new stuff you're doing transitioned into your live show?

A lot of what we've been doing is totally new. We've abandoned writing set lists in advance. We're abandoning expectations about what the show should be -- we have moments of in-between songs and improvs that become longer than the songs themselves. There's better dynamics. People drop out, we get quieter than we've ever been. The space and the music almost do the job for us. The lyrics are the smallest part.

Are you nervous about the reception of the album? It feels like a lot is riding on this new record -- it's really experimental, but it's also really personal.

In the end, when someone listens to the record, they won't hear that story I told you. I guess the worst reaction could be, "Aw man, this is a love story, Matisyahu isn't writing Jewish songs anymore."

Or everyone might love it, and decide you're not writing just-Jewish songs, but universal songs -- songs that hit everyone in the same way. There was one song about a boy dying in a desert, telling a girl to carry on without him. I was playing some of the songs for my wife's family, and my sister-in-law was like, "What girl is this about? It isn't about my sister." In a way, that's the best compliment I could get.

Steps to Tishrei

Today is the first day of Rosh Chodesh Elul, which is basically a whole month spent preparing for one day. We blow the shofar and start reciting selichot (well, unless you're Ashkenazic or something). At dawn and at nightfall, we recite Psalm 27, which is both weirdly hopeful ("The L*rd is my light and my salvation") and weirdly catastrophic ("Do not hide Your face ... do not thrust [me] aside ... do not forsake me, do not abandon me," which was actually quoted in a They Might Be Giants song. Well, a really gloomy TMBG song).

In this morning's Simchat Shlomo email, Sholom Brodt talks about how Yom Kippur is all about fixing our external behavior, the things we do to other people -- "both knowingly and unknowingly," as we say about a zillion times over in the High Holiday liturgy. Elul, on the other hand, is about fixing our unconscious, and making ourselves good on the inside, in our thoughts. It's like taking the potential goodness or badness of everything you can do, and making sure it's aimed in the right direction -- so that, once Rosh Hashanah rolls around, we're ready to make it actual.

One more thing: The month of Elul is symbolized by the letter yud and the left hand -- which sounds cool, although I've never really understood where all these things come from. (According to Rav Sholom, it's from the Sefer Yetzirah ... although that still doesn't explain it.) He writes: "The letter yud is the smallest letter and it is also a part of every letter -- as soon as you put the quill to the parchment, you have already written a yud. So the yud represents the innermost point--your innermost point of being a "yid'."

That part, I do get. Just by existing, we're continuing to create.

When Books Go Bad

First the ladybugs come alive. Then the trees grow through the roof, and then the Goodnight Moon bunnies start eating you. Don't say I didn't warn you.



Thanks to Scholastic for the book.

Eprhyme's "Punklezmerap" Video Deciphered

Eprhyme's new music video is getting all sorts of play -- at least, among the world of Jewish YouTube videos. But what's it all about? We asked Eprhyme as well as Shemspeed founder Diwon, the Yemenite DJ, to tell us.

The "Punklezmerap" video, shot by hip-hop and R&B director Lenny Bass (Fantasia, De La Soul), incorporates a crazy cast of characters from the sacred to the profane, to the profanely sacred. There are several fun cameos, both of other awesome artists in the Jewish world and of people who you wouldn't expect to find there, and some cool allusions to Jewish tradition and ritual.

First, watch the video. Then, read below for our exegetical commentary.



1 A.M. Eprhyme says: "The video was filmed in the basement of Levi Okunov's boutique, The 1929, in SoHo." Okunov is a fashion designer with Hasidic roots who's made a name of mixing Hasidic fashion sensibilities with radical couture.

Eprhyme: The video opens with Shir Yaakov gettin' his freak on in a boa....Shir is an amazing singer/songwriter, and the other half of my newest project, Darshan."

Elke Reva Sudin, a NY-based Orthodox artist and comic book creator, sketches away. (And, yep, her hair's covered.) "No one expected the energy to be quite so insane," says Diwon. "I think Lenny did a great job of capturing the energy that was there and the energy in the song and getting that across on film."

Y-Love, another Orthodox rapper and Eprhyme's labelmate, can be seen goofing off throughout the video. Here, he's wrapping up a wine glass in a cloth napkin, a common practice at Jewish weddings. "Twelve cheap wine glasses were smashed during the making of this video," Eprhyme notes. Also in the background is DeScribe, a.k.a. Shneur HaSofer, who recorded the Change E.P. with Y-Love. "Shneur just dropped by to see how the next video was coming out," says Diwon. "He had no idea what to expect."

Eprhyme: "Arrington de Dionysion (Old Time Relijun, [a band on legendary Olympia indie-rock label] K Records) plays bass clarinet. He brought along two of his free jazz buddies for the shoot." K Records, Eprhyme's former label, also released Beck's first album, as well as the Moldy Peaches, from the film "Juno."

On the turntables throughout the video is Diwon, the Yemenite DJ, who also owns Shemspeed Records. What record is he holding? "Eprhyme's single," he says. "It's the original vinyl of the song from K Records, on their international pop underground series."

Eprhyme: "We basically wanted to recreate an Olympia basement party. We were representing underground music...literally underground. This is what hip hop looks and feels like outside the club. It's a freakshow of religious fun addicts! [Someone named] Segulah was sportin' an Ecudorian spirit mask. My homeboy Moshe the Peddler, who was a wine distributor at the time, had a kosher wine tasting during the shoot. Look out for Emily Peck on stilts!"

The video concludes with the boys sitting around on the floor, getting ready to smash a glass. MJL's guide to Jewish weddings says: "The wedding ceremony ends with the breaking of the glass, which symbolizes that even in times of great joy, we remember that there is still pain in the world (which Jewish tradition relates to the destruction of the Jewish Temple). In most weddings, after the glass is broken it is time to jump up and yell, 'Mazal Tov!'"

Follow Your Twitter Bliss

I was a judge for Ben Yehuda Press's Twitter Love Contest. The entries have now been announced, and I would be embarrassed to have been a part of something so totally and unabashedly sweet, if the entries hadn't been so genuine -- and if we weren't running our own totally un-sweet Bad Poetry Contest, with the first two runners up announced yesterday, and the first-place winner being announced later today. And, after all, it is Bad Poetry Day.

1. @velveteenrabbi: My love plans built-in bookshelves, buys paint for the nursery, shapes where our child will dwell. We find home in each other. #15av

2. @vegdem: to my true love, the one who completes me: Thank you for pursuing me relentlessly. Relentlessly! #15av

3. @KatiBlack: chickpea & wilted spinach salad for lunch. thx @n_q_mainstream for being my #vegan meal pimp. u know how to keep ur girl happy #15av

The winners all receive copies of Shefa Gold's new book, In the Fever of Love: An Illumination of the Song of Songs. You can read the first chapter on the nifty Google Reader at the bottom of Ben-Yehuda Press's original announcement of winners.