The Great Parade

I've got my first music writing gig in a while, reviewing the new Shondes album for the Forward. And while it's weird to be listening to music in the middle of Sefirat HaOmer, it's also kind of cool. The other day, right before my gig, I got a song stuck in my head ("Maps" by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, if you were wondering). I was fasting from music, but I could still taste it, so to speak -- much like Roger Ebert, who can no longer eat food due to cancer, writes about still getting ghost tastes in his mouth.

And then yesterday was Lag BaOmer, the joyful day that ends it all.

No matter where in the world you are for Lag BaOmer, either Meron or not in Meron, there are crazy celebrations. In Crown Heights yesterday, we stumbled upon a huge parade, a parade that was more like a March on Washington -- literally thousands of little Hasid-lets in bright orange T-shirts worn above white long-sleeve shirts. In the grand tradition of Hasidic events with superlative non-descriptive titles like The Big Event, yesterday's festivities were known as The Great Parade.

And I know this won't mean anything to 99% of you, but it was sort of the Hasidic equivalent of a Beatles reunion show, if the Beatles had never played on stage together before. The (Great!) Parade's three headliners were all one-namers, like Madonna or Prince: Lipa! MBD! Avrohom Fried (who, okay, isn't a one-namer, but has that star appeal nonetheless). And -- and, okay, this was a big one, especially for those of us who are under two years old -- Uncle Moishy!

The biggest show going on wasn't even on the stage. It was in the streets. Intent on making my family happy, I trudged to the end of the line that snaked outside the barbershop, where dozens of men waited for their first haircut in 33 days. Ahead of me, a bunch of people were recounting the age-old debate about whether the Lubavitcher Rebbe is really the Messiah -- since the star-studded event brought in thousands of newcomers to Crown Heights, and there's really only one thing that newcomers to Crown Heights talk about. Behind me, people were discussing the merits of Uncle Moishy's music. As you can imagine, I have some pretty strong opinions -- I'm a huge fan, and I think that Uncle Moishy honestly gets what kids want to hear. My only serious gripe is that, since my Hebrew name is Moishy, there's really no way my daughter can have an Uncle Moishy. Unless he's an uncle-in-law. But, uh...no.

The day went on. Highlight: the What Will Happen When the Messiah Shows Up float, which had a bunch of plastic action figures rising from elaborately-done Styrofoam graves, and a conveyor-belt of babies with impromptu pasted-on cotton-ball beards going around and around in a circle of resurrection. Words can't begin to express how cool it was, and I honestly pray that the real thing, when it happens, will look as cool. Low point: The petting zoo. I honestly don't think I've ever seen more depressed animals. I think the kids were picking up on it, too -- kids were prodding the giant turtle to come out of its shell, which, if you were that turtle, was no incentive to; and there was a monkey inside a cage that was alternately brooding in a corner and having a psychotic meltdown. I'm pretty sure it was mostly the fault of the booking company, and not the parade managers, but still: not cool, folks. And I highly doubt that Shimon bar Yohai's followers had giant turtles or monkeys or ibexes around when they went into the forest for their Lag BaOmer celebrations.

Oh, other high point: Bumping into the awesome singer Dov Rosenblatt (and my brother-in-law Boz, who teaches awesome classes) at a booth for Jnet. In his post-Blue Fringe life, he's moved to Los Angeles and started making musical iPod programs. I was hoping he was performing, but he was just there to have a good time. As is, on Lag BaOmer of all days, totally acceptable.

And now that I can listen to music, it feels like I should binge. My biggest urge so far has been to hear the They Might Be Giants song "Subliminal," which isn't even one of my favorite songs of theirs. But who am I to judge? Like Roger Ebert and his food memories, I don't have control over what my ears want.

1/20: A Motion Picture

Update: Watch the 1/20 trailer.
Other update: read about our first film fest, or all 1/20 news.

I'm finally allowed to tell the title for the movie that I've been working on, and there it is. The title, I mean: "1/20." (We've been saying it out loud as "One-Twenty," but if you want to be a real geek about it, you're welcome to use the "slash.")

The title doesn't give away all of the movie's secrets. It doesn't even reveal that much about the purpose or the theme of the film (although, if you read it the right way, it might).

I'm not really sure where to begin, so I'm just going to do a little interview with myself about it. If you want to see my older blog posts about the movie -- about 1/20, I mean! -- just look for the label the secret movie (by clicking on those words, I mean). And if you have any other questions, just put 'em in the comments section. I'll try to say everything I'm allowed to.

How did this happen?
A producer read my book Never Mind the Goldbergs and really liked it. Then he read all my other books. Then he asked if I could write a screenplay. I told him I'd never done it before, and he said that was okay, he'd never made a film before either. So that was that. A director (expereinced!) was brought on, and he had his own idea of what movie we should make. Then we enlisted a talented (and also experienced!) production company, who were like the Oompa Loompas, but without all the creepy undertones. They were just that damn good.

What's it about?
This is where it gets tricky -- how much I'm allowed to say, I mean. Two girls are stuck in the suburbs, beating their heads against the wall, and they decide to run away to Washington, DC. There's a little bit of science fiction. A little bit of a love story. A little bit about how to break up with your best friend.

You mean it's not Jewish or punk?
It's not Jewish -- well, not flagrantly. None of the main characters are -- all the characters are collaborations between me and the director and the actors, and I think we all squeezed a lot of our spirituality/religion/punkitude into them. Ayako, who plays the lead character, is the kind of brilliant that shatters glass from miles away when she's angry, and spreads love pheromones to people two counties away. She's this demure, soft-spoken girl who -- literally five minutes into the film -- emerges into something fierce and savage and beautiful.

It's pretty flagrantly punk, though. You'll see as soon as I'm allowed to show the movie poster -- Ayako's hair is an art piece. An art piece that's 18 inches tall.

Where did the idea come from, anyway?
I lived in D.C. for five years, from when I was 17 until I turned 22, moved to San Francisco, and decided to be a poet. It was a weird five years -- I became Orthodox, was homeless for a bit, became a coffee addict, got off coffee, spent a lot of time alone wandering around huge empty boulevards. You haven't lived till you've been alone at the Lincoln Memorial at 4 a.m. Of course, you also probably haven't come that close to being abducted by a psycho and disappearing off the face of the earth, either. D.C. is a beautiful place, but it's also frightening. It's where I learned how to be an adult.

Have you seen the movie yet?
I've seen a rough cut, and I've seen about two minutes with film. It's beautiful. Gerardo del Castillo, who directed the film (he's the only one whose name I know I'm allowed to reveal), is a genius. If he made thirty-second TV commercials, prime-time audiences would be jumping to their feet and giving a standing ovation five times an hour.

Where did you film?
All over the place. Most scenes were shot in Queens, Manhattan, and upstate (well, semi-upstate) (well, Monsey). Some great stories came out of that, mostly involving Ayako's mohawk and Hasidic Jews. The last week of filming was all in D.C. proper. I missed the last day of filming, which was on Thanksgiving and at my favorite location in the city. But I got to be at the White House scenes, which was way worth it.

What's your favorite part?
That would be telling.

Fine, then. Biggest surprise?
Melinda, who did the art direction and props. I didn't even consciously realize there would be an art director. But when I wrote about what Ayako's character's bedroom should look like, I was basically fantasizing -- it was my bedroom if I knew way more about electronics and graffiti art and hacking Christmas lights than I do.

What's next?
Filming was completed in November. Now the movie's getting all professional-fied: The film is being cut and edited in Barcelona. The actual sound is getting mastered in London, and they're working out the soundtrack. And we're trying to get a distribution deal, which sounds like nothing, but it's apparently the hardest and scariest part of this whole enterprise.

And, most of all, drumming up support. Talking to people. Letting you know how good 1/20 is going to be once you're watching it in a theater (it will be amazing, I promise) and letting the Hollywood Industry Folks know that there are people who want to see it. That a movie doesn't have to have naked folks or guns or blue naked people with guns...sometimes, that all it takes is a lot of heart.

Dodging Suicide Bombs

This morning I was walking to work from the subway station, nose stuck in a book as usual. We are the People of the Book, after all; and I follow J.K. Rowling's advice that, any time you're not doing anything else, you should read. I didn't stop until I reached the I HEART N.Y. gift shop on the ground floor of our office building, and then I looked up from the page, saw a kid, and froze. Half of my body wanted to throw up, and the other half wanted to cry.

Sorry -- it's a really emotional week. But let me explain:

That book was Almost Dead, the novel written by our recent Authors' Blog correspondent Assaf Gavron {read his posts here}. It's a book about an Israeli tech geek who lives through several suicide bombings. All the reviews so far have been describing it as a comedy -- and it is funny, you should be warned -- but more than that, it's a real fast-moving, cerebral jaunt through the mind of an average Israeli.

And Eitan Enoch is an average Israeli. He's a chilled-out guy who has his normal routine, taking the Little No. 5 maxi-taxi to work every day in Tel Aviv, working at a time management company, living with his ex-fiancee Duchi (which is a common-enough Israeli nickname, but only occurs to me now that it wouldn't be an out-of-place name on Jersey Shore). When he stumbles into celebrity as a result of his bizarre survival talent, the press demands that Enoch feel angry, or grateful, or demand revenge on the Palestinian population. He does none of them -- he's just more than a bit perplexed, and, as he says on the country's most popular TV show, he doesn't really hate anyone.

Enoch's reactions to the bombs -- and to his bizarre survival skills -- are funny, embarrassing, honest, and real. It's not the gruff caricature of the Israeli (although there is plenty of that, too, especially in his relationship with Duchi). More than any other attempt I've seen, Gavron gets to the heart of the Israeli attitude about Palestinians, and about living in a country where going out to dinner is as dangerous as walking into a combat zone, and doesn't reduce it to an equation of settlers and refugees. Israel is a place where peace is a very fragile and very carefully-constructed illusion, and Gavron depicts both parts with spine-shivering accuracy: both the world behind it and the illusion itself.

So that's what I was thinking about when I was reading this morning. And then, standing outside the T-shirt store, I spotted a boy, maybe six years old, with a vivid shock of red hair. And he looked exactly like the boy in M.I.A.'s new video -- which, if you haven't heard, is the controversy of the moment, depicting red-haired men and boys being rounded up by the U.S. military, taken into the desert, and brutally shot. Starting with the six-year-old boy.

I don't know what to think. Is the world around us getting more violent because our books and movies are? Or are our books and movies getting more violent because the world around us is? Dammit, most of the books that I feel compelled to run up to everyone I know and shake them by the shoulders and shout, "READ THIS!" are books that make me feel good. Almost Dead is definitely not a book that makes me feel good. But it's still a book that I think nearly everyone I know can benefit from reading -- so that's my recommendation.

Any Given Hasid

This morning I got an email from my friend Dugans (of the awesome band Dreams in Static) asking, "Hey, isn't that you on some random person's blog?"

Yep! Turns out it is. Tess Lynch, a writer and actor in LA, weighed in on the Hasidim-vs.-hipsters debacle in Williamsburg. I guess she was scrambling for a picture of Williamsburg folks, and even though my memoir about becoming a Hasid took place in San Francisco and the photo was taken in Jerusalem, I looked the part.

Her observations about the bike-lane controversy are actually pretty astute and non-one-sided. To wit:

Obviously religious beliefs, particularly ones that have their roots in the way-back-in-the-day, aren’t what one would call “flexible” or “evolutionary” or “susceptible to the charms of trends like the sort sold at American Apparel.”
...
Because you are doing something great for the environment, you bikers can have my respect (1 point for you); but because you ignore traffic rules so much of the time, I am going to award one point to the Satmars.

I've never wrote about the issue, although a bunch of people (including the editor of BrooklynTheBorough.com, where, coincidentally, the photo of me was lifted from) have asked. But, for about five minutes, I'm going to let it fly. Hasidim, hipsters, hold onto your outdated hats: All of you are kind of wrong.

So: I've always believed that one person's autonomy stops where another person's starts. Bikers (and bike lanes) are inevitable when you live in the city -- the same way billboards in your face and taxi drivers honking at 6 A.M. are inevitable when you live in the city -- but I think what's really an issue, as you astutely pointed out, isn't the *actual* bike-riding; it's the in-your-face-ness of both the Hasidim and the hipsters.

No one lives in Williamsburg because of convenience. It's expensive, it's crowded, pretty much every wall in the entire borough leaks; it's actually pretty gnarly. My cool-kid friends who live in Williamsburg keep saying they live there because it's cheap. (It's not. A few years ago, I was paying $800 a month for a closet; now that closet is something like $1200.) My Hasidic friends live there because it's where their families have lived there forever. But the kids are drawn to Williamsburg because of the scene and their friends, yes, but also because of the ambiance of living among the Hasidim and the abandoned-warehouse aesthetic. The Hasidim living there don't move out to Monsey or Kiryas Yoel because of family and friends and because they've lived there forever, but also because living in Brooklyn is special -- as one of my cousins put it, "we like to be around a little diversity."

(And yes, there will always be the creepy outsiders, like all those Craigslist stories of a Hasidic guy who proposition a random woman for sex -- but they're a huge minority. I mean, I've met Hasidic pervs, but in a microscopic amount compared to the amount of non-Hasidic pervs I've met; even proportionally.) Again, that's the price of living in New York City -- there are several million people in a very small space, and you will come into contact with most of them.

That said, there's one thing I've learned from living in a very cramped Brooklyn apartment with a wildly copulating couple on one side and someone with every major sneezing disease on the other: You learn to ignore things. You learn to let people have their privacy, to avert your eyes when immodesty rears its naked head, and to politely turn your music up to cover up the mucous and the "Yeah, baby, just like that!"s. You also learn to respect other people: You give your seat to a pregnant woman on the subway. You step out of the way of a person with a cane. And whether you're a dude in Spandex shorts or a chick in Spandex anything (or vice versa), you don't shove yourself in front of people who have never in their lives wished to see that much of you.

Ms. Lynch herself gets it. As she writes:

By the way, in case you didn’t know, as the hipster in the NYMag article seemed to not know: don’t go around damning God in front of a Hasidic jew. It is a bad idea and makes you look like a real idiot. I can do it here because I’m posting a blog and there is no one around to make uncomfortable but myself.

That said, it's also kind of creepy that she lifted a random photo of me and my rabbi and plastered it to an article talking about Hasidim at their worst. I'd hate for one of my kid's friends to be reading about Hasidic protesters and Hasidic perverts and then they look up and think, hey!, I know that guy. We can talk about autonomy, but it's important to remember that it's not "the Hasidim" or "the hipsters" we're hating on -- it's a bunch of individuals who happen to live in the same neighborhood.

Ms. Lynch ends the article with a great proposal: that a cross-cultural barbershop should open, specializing in beards. The idea is a great one, but sadly, it'll never happen. We don't cut or trim our beards. That's why they're all bushy and upside-down Jew-fro-y. But maybe we can all sit out on the stoops and drink Manischewitz together out of brown paper bags some time?

Scholastic Authors' Favorite Books

Scholastic has a wildly cool video of me, Micheal Northrop, Siobhan Vivian and a bunch of other folks talking about our favorite books and how we ended up being writers. And, bonus!, me imitating Hermione Granger right at the beginning.

Coe Booth was going to do it, too, but she got stage fright and chickened out, and I am only telling you this so that you realize the huge glowing ball of inspiration that is Coe and Facebook her right now and tell her she needs to let people film her more. Especially good-hearted folks from the Scholastic blog who are scarcely rude enough to qualify as paparazzi. (Even if they whittled down my 5-minute-long answer to "what's your favorite book?" so that now I just say "Where the Wild Things Are." Although, actually, I probably just took 5 minutes to say that exact thing.)

Where Are You At Sunset?

Three weeks into Sefirat HaOmer, and I don't want to ayin hara myself, but it's the first time that we've gotten this far.

I'm usually really good at doing it for myself, at completing this strange and obsessive ritual that us Jewish people have. Starting on the second night of Passover, and lasting until the first night of Shavuot exactly 50 days later, we count Omer. Omer used to be a measure of wheat that was brought to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem. These days, omer means a number. And that's basically it. On the first night we say "today is the first day of the omer," and on the second we say "today is the second day of the omer," and so on, up to and including Day 49. Usually, I say it during the evening prayers.

This year, though, I'm draggin' my wife along.

I don't mean this to sound sexist, although given the circumstances, it almost inevitably will: gung-ho religious-nut boy yanks his lady friend along with his particular brand of fundamentalism. But the reality is more like, in my wife's family, the men always counted omer and the women never really did. Until now. (Cue lightning striking.)

We've worked it into a little ritual for our family. Usually we count right at sunset, after we've put the baby to sleep. We'll have dinner (both of us! eating together! the same food! every night! for us, this is revolutionary). We'll hang out a bit, pack for our upcoming move (tomorrow, bli ayin hara), and watch the sun go down. And then as soon as it's dark, one of us will inevitably remind the other by running up to shim and saying, with no prelude, "Baruch!"

Baruch, of course, is the first word in most Hebrew blessings. Including the blessing over counting the omer.

There's a big rabbinical debate over counting omer. Not whether you're supposed to or not --more or less everyone agrees (a rarity, for Judaism) that the omer counts as a mitzvah, or a commandment. But is it one big mitzvah to count all 49 nights, or is counting each night a different mitzvah? The conclusion that the rabbis of the Talmud reached -- which, of course, is more of a compromise than a conclusion -- is that, if you remembered to count every night so far, then you should say a blessing. If you forgot, even for one day, then you can still count -- but you can't score with the blessing. (All of this, of course, is a way-simplified version of the more-or-less official account of how to count the omer on MJL.)

And that's also a roundabout way to say: We haven't forgotten yet. And we're still counting with a blessing.

Yes, it's a bit self-serving. But that's because I'm a little bit proud of us, and a little bit astounded at us, too. Wonder Twin powers, activate.

Image thanks to DWallach.

Huge moving sale going on at the Matthue bookstore! Get books cheap! Help us not have to move them all!

The Hasidic Numa Numa

If you haven't gotten the flavour of Jeremy Moses's writing, what are you waiting for? Here's the direct link on MyJewishLearning.com to read the entire past year and a half of his blog oeuvre. Study it. Memorize it. You will never again be at a loss for a joke, a witty comeback, or an in-depth analysis of a prime-time reality TV show. Or just watch this incredibly viral video of Jeremy setting the world record for matzah eating:

We're proud like parents that Jeremy has a new weekly column on National Lampoon's site. Each week, he's reviewing a YouTube classic video in exhaustive detail and deciding whether it's one for the ages.

Probably more than any other viral video, “Numa Numa Guy” has infiltrated popular culture the most. Quick word of advice to all Moldovan pop group managers. If you get a call from one of Mr. Brolsma’s people, never call him back. Ever. They owe that guy millions of dollars. Trillions. Basically every cent they’ve ever made since 2005 should go straight to Brolsma.....

First, a hypothetical. Let’s say that Gary Brolsma were to appear in a rap video, dancing along side Ludicrous, or 50 Cent, or whoever the young people are listening to these days. Would the video automatically become cooler? Just think about that for a second. The fact that it doesn’t automatically seem out of the question for a rapper to invite Brolsma to be in a video dancing with hot women with champagne on their breasts (and the fact that you’re probably wondering in your head if Brolsma might actually have already been in such a video) is all the proof you need.

His first review, he told us, was of the Numa Numa video -- one of the most popular videos of the Internet world. Which, of course, I nodded and said I'd seen a million times. Which, of course, I'd never seen.

"What!?" Jeremy exploded. "You've never seen Numa Numa? Seven hundred million people have seen Numa Numa."

"Or," I countered, "One person has seen Numa Numa seven hundred million times."

We all logged onto the National Lampoon site the second it was posted (remember: proud parents, proud parents!). Then we saw the video. Then I realised: I have heard the Numa Numa song. About a million times. It's the exact same song -- with slightly altered lyrics -- that played when I lived in Israel, climbing the mountain to Shimon bar Yochai's grave in Meron, dancing with the Hasidic hippies in Crack Square, or just turning the corner into an unexpected party in the middle of nowhere.

Yep: it's the Na Nach Nachman song.


It's hard to explain exactly what this song signifies to me. A combination of religious ecstasy, triumphant dancing, and the cheap religious books that the caravans of Hasidic rave-boys sell across Israel (neon covers! kabbalistic wisdom! all yours for, what, the Israeli equivalent of $2.50?). Yes, there's definitely a lot of drug use among a minority of Na-Nachers. And yes, it's not a sustainable lifestyle -- that is, jumping around to trance music and going village-to-village selling books all day. But for what it is, I think, more than anything, it's really an expression of bittul, the idea of nullifying your own will before God's. The idea that, even if you look like a total dork when you dance (and I do) (but who doesn't, when you're hopping up and down?), you're fulfilling Rebbe Nachman's entreaty that "it's a huge commandment to be happy."

And -- and this, I think, is the hidden mystical dimension of Jeremy's column -- who exemplifies this total self-nullification better than the Numa Numa kid?

Or, like Rebbe Nachman says, Mai yahi, mai yahoo hoo.

Re-Chametz-ification

I still haven't broken Passover. And I'm kind of cool with that.

(Okay, I sort of promised myself as I sat down to write that this wasn't going to turn into a my-Passover-was-cooler-than-yours post. I'll try to keep it that way. But it still might.)

A few years ago, when I was living in Israel, I went out to lunch with a bunch of folks. This was two, maybe three weeks after Passover ended. My friend B., who's kind of a spiritual giant and lives on a different plane of existence than the rest of us -- he routinely takes half an hour or longer to pray the (usually 3-minute) mincha service -- happened to mention, while we passed around the wicker bowl of laffas, that he hadn't broken Passover yet.

This was soundly greeted by a round of "Whut?!"s from the table.

B. explained. It's not that he was purposely prolonging Pesach (say that three times fast) -- he just wanted to hold on to the feeling. He didn't even say that. What he said was much more subtle, and much more wise. Something about how going from from chometz to bread, was a single huge step, like going from slavery to freedom, and if we do it all at once, we miss the full spiritual experience.

Caveat #1: Not everyone has the patience (or the space in their lives) for a full spiritual experience like that -- and most of us need to dive back into our bread. I was going to make a salad for lunch today, but I didn't have time, and so I grabbed a bagel from the freezer, slathered on some cream cheese, and made my train in time. But yesterday I packed Passover leftovers, and I was feeling pretty damn good about it. (Caveat #2: my wife is a personal chef, which most people aren't -- and hence, my lunch of manchego gratin and ratatouille was probably not most people's Passover experience. Gloat gloat gloat.)

People like B. amaze me, not because they have spiritual experiences, but because they have such a talent for making spiritual experiences last. For me, I have a great morning prayer, or hear a great song, it's gone the moment I step out the door and the angry Brooklyn traffic crashes me down to reality. Sooner or later, I know real life is going to sink in -- and, with it, the hametz.

Passover Price Gouging

I told you how my family and I don't use many processed foods for Passover, thus avoiding many of the ugly price-fixing that goes on during the holiday. But some things, you just can't buy -- unless, of course, you want to squeeze your own olive oil.

These two bottles of grapeseed oil look basically the same, don't they?

There's just one tiny difference: One bottle, we bought a couple of weeks ago, before the Passover rush (that's the open one). We ran out last night (during Chol Hamoed) to buy the second. Aside from that, they're virtually identical. Or are they? Oops -- look again.



That's the bottle of oil we bought way before Passover -- before the supermarkets started isolating their Passover products to a specially-tagged PASSOVER SALE NOW! section. And what about the bottle on the right? You'll notice it doesn't have a price tag.

Fortunately, we managed to save the receipt.



Now, $8.99 versus $12.49 isn't a huge difference, 29% of the total cost -- unless you think of it on a macro scale. Imagine being charged 1/3 more for everything you bought in a week. (In our part of Brooklyn, with an average family size of 10, chances are almost everyone is affected more than we are.) Despite the successful lawsuits against Manischewitz and other matzah companies for price-fixing, there are huge problems that need fixing. Even after all that Pesach cleaning, it's still a dirty business.

Ignoring Passover

I always look forward to the Passover seder. Any ritual organised around reading a book is good by me (those people who shout Bible verses in your face on the subway platform notwithstanding...although, if you catch them in a quiet mood and ask about their lives, you'll get some pretty wild verbal autobiographies), especially when you're with the people you love, or a bunch of strangers with interesting things to say, or some combination of the two, which is the way it played out this year.

We were de-invited from our first seder because our hosts' kid developed mumps, which, since we've got an 8-months-pregnant woman and a toddler, is not an ideal situation. (Of course: we live in Crown Heights. Where else in the world is there an outbreak of mumps in 2010?!) On the other hand: Being that we're in Crown Heights, it's totally natural and normal and not at all a breach of social etiquette to call some random folks and say, we need a seder, can we come over?

And that's what we did -- my friend (and awesome poet) Jake Marmer's in-laws were glad to take us in for the night. And the next night, we returned the favour -- not to them, but to the aforementioned combination of friends and strangers, some of whom knew the seder inside, out, and backwards, and some of whom hadn't been to a seder in years.

That's one of the advantages of a seder. With the same text in front of you, the preeminent Torah scholars of the generation and the Child Who Does Not Know How to Ask a Question are on the same footing. The big question of the Haggadah isn't "How is this night different?" -- anyone can see how this night is different, and the Four Questions are really just statements that echo that. The real question is, why is this night different? And anyone is equally qualified to dig into the text and answer that.

When I was a kid, Passover eating was pretty simple. Most nights, we had regular meals with matzah replacing the bread: matzah burgers, matzah pizza, matzah lasagna. It's totally doable, and even cool as a change-of-pace sort of thing. Desserts were plentiful: macaroons, coconut marshmallows, and jelly-filled whatevers. My grandmother made "matzah rolls" out of matzo meal and lots of eggs, and we could even have sandwiches. We were always okay with that, with the matzahfication of our food. Or at least we were for the first couple of days, until we got bored of matzah and our pee started smelling like burnt toast and we started counting down the days (ok, hours) until we could eat the B-word again. Life -- for the 8 days of Passover, the day before (when you stop eating grains in mid-morning), and the month before (when you stock up desperately for food you can barely stand) -- becomes centered around this frantic rush of fortifying our boundaries to Passover. Food substitutes and iPhone apps seem to be created for that very purpose, to help us ignore the un-ignorable: that we're neck-deep in a leaven-less life.

This year, it seems to be the official position of MJL's blog (well, of Tamar's posts and my own) to advocate a different sort of simplicity: rather than doing a simple find-and-replace routine on your diet, where you replace any sort of grain with matzah, try eating simpler foods, unprocessed foods, and stuff that doesn't come out of a package.

All of this is a long way of saying, there are as many ways to keep Passover (both food-wise and otherwise) as there are people who are keeping it. And one of those ways is to pretend that nothing's wrong, that your diet is completely fine and that you just forgot to buy some bre -- yeah. But why turn a potentially awesome transformation of your diet into a gnarly routine of substitution?

Matzo lasagna image from Albion Cooks.

Happy Passover (and, oh yeah, a kosher one)

A rabbi used to go around wishing everyone a kosher Purim and a happy Passover. Someone stopped him and said, What are you, crazy? Don't you have it backward?

The rabbi shook it off. "Not at all," he said. "On Purim, everyone is very concerned about being happy, so they make sure to do it. And on Passover, everyone's worried about cleaning their houses and getting rid of their hametz, so they make sure to do that. But on Purim, with all the happiness, people sometimes need to remember to keep it kosher. And on Passover, when everyone's stressed out, they need to remember to keep it happy."

I don't remember where this originally came from, but I heard it from Shlomo Carlebach, as quoted by Shalom Brodt. Either way, have a rockin' Passover. And, yes, a kosher one.

Passover with the Four Sons

If you haven't noticed, since G-dcast started, we've been playing around with the way we tell stories. For Chanukah, we did a sweeping story of the Maccabees. For Passover, we decided to zero in a little bit...and tell you a nice little family story. About arguing. Of course.

Eat Matzah Fast

Jeremy Moses of MyJewishLearning just took it upon himself to break the world record for matzah eating. (Disclaimer: before he tried, there was no world record for matzah eating.)

Every year at seder, we're supposed to eat the entire 2/3 of a piece of matzah (okay, that's if you're eating shmura matzah -- 1 entire sheet, if you go by the machine-made *ahem* cheating *ahem* kind) in one action, without swallowing. Add that to the fact that you're not supposed to have eaten matzah at all in the past 30 days...Well, if you can get it down in one gulp, you're kind of a hero.

(Jeremy also wants me to add that, when he was practicing, he did it much faster than he did on the video. So there.)

Can anyone break it?

The Costs of Keeping Kosher

No one ever said keeping kosher was easy -- or cheap. As we get closer to Passover, things like this become painfully apparent to anyone who's walking in the vicinity of any supermarket: small bottles of grape juice for $5? Marshmallows for $10!? And let's not even start with the matzah cakes....

(Although, of course, you could get all the matzah you need absolutely free -- just send us a few sentences about your favorite Passover!)



This article about recession pizza specials in New York -- it focuses on the heated competition between a $1.00-a-slice pizza place and a $.99-a-slice place -- is one more reason for us kosher keepers to grumble. The cost of a lunch special at either of those restaurants ($2.75 for two slices and a beverage) is less than the price of a single slice at a kosher place. But, as the article says, it's a "basic fundamental of the city’s economy — charging as much as you can whenever and wherever you can."

On the other hand, pizza is notoriously bad for things like your heart and your fat glands. And, whether you're talking about Passover or the other 357 days of the year, kosher food can actually be a lot cheaper than non-kosher food -- just make it yourself. My family and I, hard-line fundamentalist zealots that we are, don't use any processed foods for Passover.* Our grocery receipt for the holiday reads like a shopping list in Odessa, 200 years ago: Onions. Beets. Radishes. Apples. Walnuts. Milk. Avocados. Quinoa. (Okay, maybe they didn't have quinoa or avocados back in Odessa -- but they're some necessary ingredients for a vegetarian Passover.) It wasn't originally intended this way -- mostly because they didn't have things like MSG or high-fructose corn syrup during the redacting of the Talmud -- but one aspect of keeping kosher is the simplicity of the food. No tallow. No solidifying fats. No additives. These days, kosher-food manufacturers are as bad as the rest of the world with that stuff (some are even worse, in the case of "pareve" foods that are about 90% fake-stuff). But the best kosher food -- like the best non-kosher food -- are the foods we make ourselves.

But, if you must eat in restaurants, console yourself with this: Kosher-keepers don't have to deal with the other, sinister side of restaurants: the ostentatious overpriced luxury-food places that sell thousand-dollar omelets.

* -- There are a few exceptions, of course: things that are necessary for the holiday, like wine and matzah, and a few things we can't easily make, like olive oil. (I know. We'll get an olive press, I promise. But probably not till next year.)

Tznius Envy

There are deadlines, and then there are deadlines. I'm the Writer in Residence this month over at BrooklynTheBorough.com, and I was supposed to turn in my column Friday. How I feel about deadlines is best expressed in an email that my (other) editor (at Scholastic) just wrote me in the form of an epic poem beginning "O deadlines! How I hate thee" and spiraling from there.

But sometimes deadlines can be fun. Nicole, who runs BrooklynTheBorough, asked me to write "a piece just about being a Hasid in Brooklyn...you know, a slice-of-life sort of thing." I know she wanted me to write about the conflict between Hasidic and hipster worlds, but I just couldn't stomach it. (Sorry, Nicole.) It's just that I live that way 24/7, and there really isn't much of a conflict.

Some people go to yechidus for love or financial decisions. I go for fashion advice.
The broken deadline got me writing about everyday life in Hasid-land, which I don't often do -- mainly because I hate getting too garish or showy about it. I can write fiction, and I can write about what I think about things, but if I started getting blog ideas from walking down the street? Well, (a) I'd be here till tomorrow, but also (b) I'd feel like I'm faking it among my family-in-law and my friends even more than I already feel.

Even so, a deadline is a deadline. And so I wrote, and this is the pastiche that came out. I'm actually sort of proud of it.

The bar mitzvah was a totally crazy affair, as might be expected. In one way, Hasidic Jews are unfailingly, unflinchingly conservative. In another way, it’s an anything-goes scenario. The party started at 9 pm, an hour away from Brooklyn, which isn’t crazy until you remind yourself that the target audience is 11-to-14-year-old kids — and that these parties often go for four, five hours. The mechitza was in full force with a wall dividing men and women, which meant that I couldn’t even play arm-candy to my wife. Our cousin Shmop was there, who’s just about the nicest, most magnetic and fluid guy you could think of. He’s Orthodox but modern, clean-shaven and he wears a tie – both things that make him stand out in this crowd – but he’s got this lackadaisical, no-stick personality that makes him able to get along with anyone. Seamlessly. Five minutes after we hook up, he’s gliding through the crowd, shaking hands and kissing the hairy cheeks of every rabbi in the room, coasting straight to the women’s section as I struggle to keep up with him, dodging furry hats aimed at the level of my head as the crowd threatens to rip the umbilical cord by which I have attached myself to him.

Hasidic Jews are pretty strict about this stuff. And if you missed it right there, that’s the understatement of the century. Half of the family is pretty cool with these casual social interactions. The other half — well, there’s one Hasidic dynasty, of which many of this family are members, that has a custom of men and women eating in separate rooms. The mechitza is properly only for the dancing which will take place later that night, and so that men and women don’t sit at the same tables and, I don’t know, accidentally bump into each other or get into food fights or something, but when Shmop whizzes me across the floor to the other side, my anxiety squeezes a huge rubber band around my stomach and my eyes pop half out of my head. Not from looking at women. Possibly from watching Shmop’s overwhelming casualness. Mostly from the realization that, one way or another, I am probably about to be kicked out of the family, the social hall, or, possibly, Judaism.

Here. Read the whole thing on the BtB site.

The Jewish Authors' Oscars

Last night the Jewish Book Council hosted their annual National Jewish Book Awards, and they were kind enough to invite me. I wasn't a famous author or a famous book-buyer, but they let me in anyway.

At first my (a) shyness and (b) authory anti-social tendencies and (c) not knowing anybody-ness got the best of me. There was a (parenthetically: really fascinating) exhibit about Thomas Mann and German publishing, and the reception was mostly being held in one room ("mostly" meaning that the drinks table was in there, and therefore, so were all the guests) but spilled over into a second room that was ideal retreating space. I gave it an honorable go, checking out people's name tags to see if I recognized anyone. The first I spied was the illustrator of a book that I kind of slammed last year. Then I saw Alicia Susskin Ostriker, whose book of poetry >The Book of Seventy I'd read last week, but what would I say? I always appreciate when people tell me that, but then there's the deadening lack of conversation that's like, where do we go from here?

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin whizzed by. I worked with him last year on a G-dcast episode, but he was moving too fast to interrupt, although I made a mad dash of it. So I retreated to the exhibit, where I made small talk with two gentlemen who spoke about Thomas Mann like they went to grade school with him, that familiar. After spending about five minutes (that's long, in the context of a conversation, anyway) trying to explain what my book was about, and failing, I threw the question back at him: "So what do you do?" "Oh," he replied offhandedly, "I'm an acquisitions editor." He smirked. And my stomach hit the ground.

I'd kind of composed myself by the time dinner began. I saw Rabbi Telushkin again, and actually spoke to him. Randomly, he asked me where I lived. "Crown Heights," I told him, to which he raised an eyebrow -- he's working on a book about Lubavitch. He started to grill me about my Chabad connections (I'm not, my wife is, her family is about as Lubavitch as the town of Lubavitch), and, the way that these things go, he used to live with my grandparents-in-law and wrote a book in their house.

The M.C. for the evening came on mic and called for everyone to take their seats. Rabbi Telushkin, who was in the middle of a sentence -- he speaks in these long, fluid paragraphs, each like a train with a hundred cars -- ignored him. Then the M.C. said something about a "welcoming word from Rabbi Joseph Telushkin" and I broke him off, don't you have to go? He shrugged and did something with his hands. Carolyn Hessel, who's the director of the Jewish Book Council and maybe the most important person ever to hold a book in her hands, gave a much-too-polite word. The rabbi grinned at me. I scattered.

Remember how I thought I wouldn't know what to say to someone whose book I read? I slid into an empty seat at the table. There was one person I knew, a sometimes-editor of mine, and one person I knew but didn't realise I knew, since we had one of those email-only correspondences (a writing/editing one, not a sketchy Internet one) -- and then there was the person whose seat I slid next to, who was Dalia Sofer. Who might have written one of the best books I've ever read. Who is probably as close to a rock star as the literary world can offer. Who was introduced to me, and whom, upon meeting, I shrunk about 25 or 30 percent and told, in as natural and un-awkward a voice as I could muster (it was still incredibly awkward and incredibly unnatural) that, geez, The Septembers of Shiraz was pretty technically proficient. Or something. Graciously, she talked to me until I'd un-awkward-ized. And it was simply really cool, in the middle of a room where I was surrounded by people with amazing ideas, to have a straight-up conversation about writing that was pretense-free and unencumbered by all our fancy clothes (my invitation said "casual," I dressed casual-but-formalish, and I was still underdressed) and the weight of all the potential in the room.

I could tell you more about the food, or the people, or the books. I wish I could tell you more about the awards ceremony -- the speeches people made, and how incredible it was to take an arbitrary topic, like landlords in mid-20th century Chicago, and listen as an author gripped the microphone and talked about how it was her father's passion and she never understood what it was all about until she researched this 400-page book about it. For someone like me, to whom reading anything but novels (stories, action, making up stuff) is hard, if not impossible, the night was nearly revolutionary.

Free Matzah. Act Now.

So part of my day job at MyJewishLearning is to come up with new and zany schemes to...well, basically, to keep the site from seeming old and un-zany. This Passover season, I've decided that we should buy someone more matzah than they'll ever need. Even if they have a whole lot of friends coming over and a studio apartment that needs re-insulation.

Here's what I wrote:

What's your best Passover story? It can be a horror story about Passover cleaning, or the story of how your parents met and fell in love at a Passover concert at college...or about the time your grandfather came to the seder dressed as a giant frog.

My Jewish Learning wants to hear your Passover memory.

It can be silly. It can be serious, or sad, or romantic. It shouldn't be long--tell us in a few sentences (200 words or fewer) the best, worst, or most interesting thing that's ever happened to you during Passover. Or film it, make it 2 minutes or less, and send us the YouTube or Vimeo link.

Send it to matthue@myjewishlearning.com by Monday, March 22, at 5 p.m. EST. Make sure to include your address and phone number. The winning entry will be announced on Wednesday, March 24, and published on MyJewishLearning.com. And we'll send you the biggest box of matzah you've ever seen, just in time for Passover.

(Sorry, but we're only able to send matzah to addresses in the United States and Canada.)

White Purim

I wasn't dreaming of a white Purim, but that's what we got. Saturday night, Shabbat went out, and I shoveled out our car in raver pants that were bigger and bulkier than a dress and a three-piece paisley suit. This was the kind of Purim costume that was the essence of last-minute decision-making: every weird object in your wardrobe thrown out onto the beds, picked over and jigsawed together into a more-or-less coherent outfit. My wife dressed as a pregnant flapper -- only half of it needed a costume. Our daughter was the easiest: we threw wings on her and called her a fairy. Mine was the trickiest of all our costumes, and took the longest time to get ready. A nice change from the usual going-out routine of me being the first dressed.

But here I was, shoveling away at the Brooklyn snow, making the design of my paisley suit more and more colourful by the moment. (I was dressed as, depending upon who was asking, either a pimp, a bootlegger, or one of my wife's accessories.) Itta came out, saw the car still three-quarters shoveled in after half an hour, and decided we'd never get there. So we called a cab.

We were an hour late, but the advantage of going to an event thrown by Jews is that everyone else is 90 minutes late. We ran in just as the crowd was starting to move away from the snack table and get pumped up for the megillah reading...despite the fact that you're not actually supposed to eat until after you hear megillah. But I'm just one of those anal folks. Seriously, in forty-nine years I'm going to be one of those 80-year-old men at the back of the synagogue complaining about everyone else. Tonight, I just shut up and enjoyed the show.

When you're doing an actual megillah reading -- in Hebrew, that is, and without a break to explain the action -- it's hard to have adults and children in the same room. Kids (especially kids that don't know Hebrew) are not going to follow the rapid-fire delivery. Many adults won't, either. As a potential cure, I've seen puppet shows and simultaneous storytelling.

I have to say, this was the first year I've seen a PowerPoint presentation in synagogue on Purim -- or any other day, for that matter. But, as PowerPoints go, this one was damn impressive. Achashverosh was played by Jabba the Hutt, and Haman, questionably, was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Mordechai was Dumbledore. Nice.) This was all the work of JLA Online, an LA-based collective, unsurprisingly.

Last year, my in-laws gave me an actual megillah. I don't eat animals and have some issues with using a parchment scroll, but I've decided to try and ignore that. For this year, at least. And, for the most part, it worked. I mean, as far as several-thousand-year-old stories go, it's a doozy. Fast-moving, plotted with an expert sense of narrative (I realized for the first time this year just how cinematic the megillah is, introducing the story with the character of Vashti, and then alternating between the story of Mordechai catching the king's would-be assassins with Haman's growing menace.) Even the vocabulary is made for performance -- intentionally simple, with lots of repetitions and mentioning the characters by name over and over again.

So I followed the story. Even though the reading moved with breakneck speed, I let myself get swallowed up. I stopped paying attention to my daughter alternately trying to wreck her wings and to repair them, and to the boys throwing Cheez Stix in the front, and to the rest of the world and even to how much my tied-up beard was annoying me. I just sat. Usually, I reserve this level of blacking-out-the-rest-of-the-world for praying, reading, and brushing my daughter's teeth when she really doesn't want me to. But tonight, I belonged to the story. And it was good.

A day later, I'm wondering whether this isn't part of the Purim mystique. We're commanded to get to the point where ad d'lo yada, where we don't know the difference between Haman and Mordechai. Usually this is interpreted as drinking. This year, since 4 shots before noon barely left me buzzed -- I built up my drinking resilience in Australia -- and since my parents were around and I needed to be responsible, I opted for Option B: the midafternoon nap. But really, I think what the rabbis wanted when they issued that commandment was for us to get to the point where we completely lose ourselves. Like Esther lost her sense of self when she went to the king, not caring whether she'd be sentenced to death. When we lose our senses of self in G*d. And when we lose ourselves in stories...or even, this year, in snow.

Holy Hot Pants

Yes, I have several Mormon friends, and yes, they do make fun of each other for wearing what the more playful adherents of their religion have dubbed holy underpants.

The link between ritual undergarments and religious purity didn't start with Joseph Smith. In this week's Torah portion, Tetzaveh, there's an extensive description of exactly what clothes -- material, color, and otherwise -- the High Priest should wear:

Exodus 28:2 And thou shalt make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, for splendour and for beauty. 3 And thou shalt speak unto all that are wise-hearted, whom I have filled with the spirit of wisdom, that they make Aaron's garments to sanctify him, that he may minister unto Me in the priest's office. 4 And these are the garments which they shall make: a breastplate, and an ephod, and a robe, and a tunic of chequer work, a mitre, and a girdle; and they shall make holy garments for Aaron thy brother, and his sons, that he may minister unto Me in the priest's office. 5 And they shall take the gold, and the blue, and the purple, and the scarlet, and the fine linen.

The Torah goes even further, and actually discusses what type of undergarments the High Priest should wear. Earlier this week, when I was reading the daily Torah portion, my mind was blown, and -- as per norma -- I ran to my wife, who grew up Hasidic. As per norma, she laughed at me. What kind of a Jew am I, not knowing about holy underpants?

(28:42) You shall also make for them linen pants to cover their nakedness; they shall extend from the hips to the thighs. They shall be worn by Aaron and his sons when the enter the Tent of Meeting or when they approach the altar to officiate in the sanctuary, so that they do not incur punishment and die. It shall be a law for all time for him and for his offspring to come.

"What kind of pants start at your hips and go to your thighs?" I said. "That sounds like hot pants."

"They're underwear," said my wife, totally calmly, as if this sort of confusion happens to us on a daily basis -- which, by a much looser definition, it might. We don't always talk about holy underwear, but we did have a conversation the other day about why our kid frequently wears underpants on her head.

I did some digging and checked around with the commentators. They all seemed to be in agreement: this was, indeed, the Tabernacle's modernized version of a fig leaf. Rashi notes that Moses is commanded by G*d to suit up Aaron and his sons in their ritual uniforms, which includes this; a bunch of other commentators say that, because of the placement of the verse in the flow of the Torah (this particular item of clothing is listed last, after the commandment is given), Moses was not required to dress them in these particular lederhoisen. Ohr HaTorah, another Torah commentator, adds, "Were not Aaron and his sons perfectly capable of putting on their own underwear?" It's as near verbatim as the translation lets me get.

So, there you go. Jews and hot pants -- we did it first.

And, while my G-dcast co-producers and I didn't peek beneath the holy vestments, we outlined basically everything else from the parsha in this week's episode. Just in case, you know, you ever get appointed High Priest and the invitation didn't include a dress code.

Defending Punk

924 Gilman Street in Berkeley is a volunteer-run concert space that was famous in the '80s for hosting huge fights and riots, and famous in the '90s for introducing Green Day (among other folks) to the world. By the time I moved to San Francisco in 2001 (if you want to read the full story, it's here) it classified as a legitimate shrine to visit. A few weeks after I moved there, my friend Edie Sedgwick played a show there -- which was kind of like having one of your siblings be named High Priest of Judaism (or whatever religion you happen to be a member of), if only for one night.

I'm in an upcoming anthology about the space. Terena Scott, the editor of the anthology, just interviewed me for her site. Here's a snip:

How do you personally define punk?
I'm really bad at personally defining anything -- I just do what I do. But a lot of what I love is punk, and so that rubs off on the stuff I write and the person I am. So I guess that makes me punk?

Punk, I think, is anything that flies in the face of what you'd expect. Punk is yelling at the top of your lungs when you're expected to be quiet, and it's acting like a full-on gentleperson when everyone expects you to stage a riot...or the exact opposite.

But it's more than that, I guess. It's not just going against what people expect of you. It's really ignoring the idea of expectation itself and doing whatever you want or whatever you're feeling. I'm talking about art, mainly, although I think it still holds true with everything else.

READ THE REST >

Are Dragons Kosher?

The just-released Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals aims to do for kosher food what Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials did for animal guides, and what The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did for...well, the galaxy -- it aims to apply real-world logic to the most unreal, to create an objective guide to the most non-objective things our creative imagination can conceive of.

And the thing is: it really does the job.



Ann and Jeff Vandermeer are both science fiction writers, both married (to each other, not coincidentally), and both armed with a smattering of Jewish knowledge and Jewish texts. In 2007, on a whim, they knocked out a blog post arguing which imaginary animals are kosher. Some of the animals came from different cultural mythologies -- there's Bigfoot, chupacabras, and the abumi-guchi, a furry creature in Japanese mythology that's essentially an animated, live horse stirrup. (Yes, a horse stirrup.)

Mermaids, the Vandermeers decide, are not kosher. Likewise, the jackalope of midwest American folklore. The collection of animals that the Vandermeers summon isn't exhaustive, but it's entertaining, and the hard-line pencil illustrations really make you feel like you're reading one of those medieval demon reference guides that the gang always seems to reference on Buffy. (And, by the way, how do they always look through the right book? Even when they're on the wrong page, they're never like, "Oh, it's in Volume MLXII, not Volume MLXIII." It's always a few flips away. Sorry. Tangent.)

READ MORE >

Ten Things I'm Looking Forward To in New York City

Packing now. It's been a breathless pair of months in Melbourne, and it's an added awesomeness that we get to come back here in a few months for a family wedding (and a double added bonus that we could be part of the engagement in the first place, packing snow clothes and meting out advice...well, the advice we could, anyway). I'm feeling a bit down on the world for forcing me to go back to New York, and in February at that, and spending all my time behind a desk instead of, well, doing early-morning praying & working out (seriously!) in the dew and going to the park with my kid every day. And the fact that poetry shows here are as energetic and sing-alongy and fist-thumping as AC/DC shows.

Which is why I'm trying to get myself psyched for the USA.

1. Saying the words "NEW YORK CITY" and kind of getting chills.
2. Listening to the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album in the East Village.
3. The first incognito day of spring.
4. My free show at Franklin Park with Penina Roth and Stephen Elliott.
5. A zillion kosher restaurants, and none of them are "America-themed."
6. Nirvana Slam. (More on that soon.)
7. Young Adult Writers Drinks Night.
8. Making our own Passover seder.
9. More little MJL internet movies.
10. ______________*

* I'm leaving this one blank, because I want to find something to take up that spot that's even better than anything I'm expecting.

My Comics Debut

Granted, it's not me writing Uncanny X-Men, but it's on the other side of the camera. It's from Ethan Young's excellent e-comic Tails, which you can read free here. (You can actually start on the chapter I'm in and not miss out on too much -- here's the first page -- and then go back and read from the start. Because it is amazing, and highly recommended.)



See? Even when I'm in Australia, New York finds a way to claim me. The temperatures in Melbourne are about the same as the temperatures in New York -- 35 degrees in both places -- but, believe me, it feels a lot better here.

Ethan (SPOILER WARNING) used to live downstairs from us. He designed this card for my daughter's first birthday, which I'm still ga-ga about. The Yiddish was added by his roommate. Check it out and marvel:

Ouch. Sorry for the pun.

This is Where I Was This Weekend

This is where I was this weekend:

We didn't see the Wild Things. Or, we might have. No Spike Jonze, though.

And this is one of my three favourite places in the world.

That's it. For now. New story coming, as soon as we (it and I, that is) stop fighting with each other.

Lost Season 6 Spoilers

After you listen to this, you'll know just as much about the final season of "Lost" as you do now. Which is to say: There aren't really any spoilers.

This is just a poem. It's my fan-fiction version of what's going to happen in the next 18 or so weeks.

I hope you like it.

(If you can't hear it here, go to http://matthue.bandcamp.com.)

Losers Is Gay

My novel Losers is on the American Library Association's 2010 Rainbow List! It's composed of "recommended titles for youth from birth to age 18 that contain significant and authentic gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (GLBTQ) content."

Each time I'm invited to be in a queer space, I feel a little bit queer -- queer in the other sense, a little bit awkward and a little bit trespassy. I think that might be where this part of Losers came from. It's from the coming-out scene, after the actual coming-out part and after Jupiter and the Gay Character crash a gay party, and in the aftermath they don't feel any less isolated or alone. Because, just because you find other people who are the same way you are -- whether it's gay, Jewish, geeky, or anything else -- it doesn't mean they're the same as you are.

Before anything could come out, he cut me off: “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” I asked, more startled than anything.

“Don’t tell me you know what it’s like, okay? Don’t tell me that you’re different too and that you relate and that you understand what I’m going through and all that crap. Just don’t.”

I said back quietly, almost a whisper: “But I do.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. I turned my head and stole a glance at him, nervous about breaking the moment. He was still staring down the sky.

“Because I used to be the kid in school everyone shat on, and, the first day at North Shore, you made it official. And then everyone started being friends with me. Not because they actually liked me or anything, but because, somehow, I became acceptable. And still, nobody cares about me or hangs out with me one-on-one or wants to hear what I actually have to say. As long as my accent doesn’t get out of control and people like Reg and Tonya keep saying hi to me, everyone else will too. And there’s still no one I can trust, and I still wind up having fantasies about imaginary girls and CD covers.”

Thanks, of course, to the indelible Sharon for the hat tip!

i hate it when you say a blessing on food that's way too hot to eat but you already said it, nothing you can do, so you just have to shove it into your mouth and hope for the best.

just saying.

Why I Don't Eat Animals

I was just interviewed on the blog Heeb 'n Vegan. Michael Croland, who runs the site, managed to get a lot out of me in very little space -- we talk about Muslim punk music, my novel Never Mind the Goldbergs, my vegetarianism -- and, randomly, the last book I read, which is Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals:

It's hard not to talk about the stories in the book. I've stopped multiple dinner conversations because something popped into my head, and I'm really bad about not saying something. Usually in a charming and offbeat and punky way. But, uh, you can't really say this stuff charmingly.

Judaism isn't really a religion of choices. In general, in Jewish law, there are no circumstances that get either/or verdicts. You're either commanded to do something, or you're commanded not to do it. Being a vegetarian falls into a kind of shady ground. Some people will tell you that Jews are required to eat meat on Shabbos or holidays. Others will say that eating meat is a condescension that God made to people after that whole Noah thing didn't work out, and the world was full of people with unrealized hostility. (At least that's sort of the way it's portrayed in the Torah.) In essence, you can kind of say that Judaism supports either position -- that we either have to eat meat, or that eating meat is one of the most base and degrading parts of being human that there is.



He also quoted a line from Goldbergs at me -- which, I think, is the highest compliment you can get. It means that you've said something that's affected someone else enough for them to remember it and process it into their brains, and possibly make it part of their thinking. And then he asked me if it was a blueprint for Jewish punk. (The line he quoted was:"I still believed in G-d. I just didn't believe in other people. I mean, some days, I felt like G-d was the only one who believed back at me.")

I don't think anything can be a blueprint for Jewish punk, although it's awesome that you asked. I think that punk is the idea of taking something in a wild new direction, innovating or mutating it, and I think that the essence of any new development/mutation/pwning in Jewish thought involves going back to the source -- to G-d, to the Torah, to the original things that Moses said -- and asking ourselves, what's my relationship to it? And then looking at the relationship that other people and the Greater Jewish World have to those same ideas, and saying that maybe we've got to get back to the source.

DIY Judaism is the way that Judaism's supposed to be. But I think it also means you have to look at the sources and really get to know them, much like food radicals need to read Diet for a New America or political radicals should learn Howard Zinn.

I definitely don't think I'm at the point of Jonathan Safran Foer, where I can lay out a calm and rational blueprint of each of my beliefs in a wowing and awe-inspiring (although possibly hazardous to your dinner-party conversation) book-length tome -- but I guess that's all part of the discovery process. Whether it's the food I eat or the God I pray to. Either way, as soon as I've got it lined up for sure, I'll let you know.

Miep Gies Shows the Secret Annexe

Miep Gies, who helped hide Anne Frank during the Holocaust, has just died at the age of 100.

The New York Times has printed an obituary that gives some interesting background both on Ms. Gies and her role in the family's survival, both during the war and after, as she (along with Otto Frank, Anne's father) spoke out about their experiences, becoming some of the first people to speak publicly about the Holocaust. And here's an utterly riveting clip of Ms. Gies showing the Secret Annexe and the hidden door behind a bookcase:

The Kominas Live: The Only Jew in the Room

Last night I went to my first taqwacore concert. Taqwacore is Muslim punk rock, and what that means to you is basically that I was in a room packed full of angry young Muslims, and I was, well, the only person looking like this. Which could have been a recipe for disaster at best case and ethnic cleansing at worst, if things had gone that way. Lo and behold, though, it was a crazy, jubilant, good-natured and even sort of flamboyant affair. I was nervous and skeptical on the walk to the Bowery Poetry Club, where the concert was being held. A serious-looking muscular dude with three colors of dyed hair, eyeliner, a heavy beard and a skirt was standing there. He nodded at me as I approached.

"You here for the show?" he asked.

After a moment of hesitation -- did he mean that invitingly or threateningly? -- I threw up my arms and said, as innocently as I could, "Yeah!"

His face split open into a toothy, wild grin. He turned his palms heavenward. "'Mash Allah," he said.

Which, I knew from all the books the movement was based on, meant Boruch Hashem.

The concert was actually only half a concert: the taqwacore band The Kominas played, and preceding that, Michael Muhammad Knight read. He has a new book out, Journey to the End of Islam, and as he took the stage, people shouted requests. It's not that I've never heard requests shouted from the audience -- I have, even for writers -- but these weren't requests for pieces to perform. They were for radical performance art. Mike chuckled into the microphone and shook his head: "Nah, I can't. I didn't bring any thumbtacks this time."

He read a section in which he visits a sacred Muslim tomb, the burial site of a Muslim holy man. One way or another, he's arrested, and quirkily ends up in the office of the curator of the tomb as the man shows Knight movies on his phone of the equivalent (in Pakistani rupees) of millions of dollars being unloaded, the temple's profits from that year's pilgrimage. Knight waxes philosophical about that, and about the unrestrained passion of thousands of pilgrims crammed into a small room -- a scene that reminded me of nothing so much as visiting the tomb of Shimon Bar Yochai in Israel. Knight asks himself: does the sheer capitalist profit-making endeavor mean that the tomb isn't sacred? Does the sheer number of people visiting mean that it is sacred? He doesn't answer the question (although, sharing the experience, it does sound like he went through some sort of religious ecstasy there), but he does say this:

My mission is to make religion applicable to people, even if it's not everything you want it to be.

There was one more thing Knight said that stuck with me, even though I'm going to paraphrase it. When the guards were swarming him at the tomb, nightsticks in hand and ready to bash him in, he said: "If Allah doesn't want a guard to ram a stick up my @$$, it will be as safe as if it were made of iron. And if Allah wants a guard to ram a stick up my @$$, then no force on Earth will be able to stop it getting there."

I turned to Mike's and my editor and whispered: "That's exactly the essence of everything I believe."

I've been wanting to do a followup to the story I wrote about The Book of Jer3miah, the Mormon-LDS (fictional) web series, and the way it's been taken by the rest of the LDS church. Although, curiously, while the original Taqwacores book has become a movement, swearing by its on sets of rules, Jer3miah's validity has been criticized by the simple question: Does telling new stories inspired by the Bible invalidate the originals or lessen their power? And then they dig deeper and ask the question: is making up stories -- and twisting God's will to fit your own narrative arc -- even reverent?

This is what they came up with:

"Life isn’t reverent. If someone wants to tell a story for once that’s more like true life, it can’t always be reverent. We won’t LEARN anything. Think of Les Miserables, or The Grapes of Wrath. Also, remember that Jesus himself told parables to teach us through fiction."

I know, they dropped the J-bomb -- but replace that with Moses or Rebbe Nachman, and it totally makes sense. Just by living Jewishly/Islamically/religiously, we're changing the tradition we grew up with, whether we follow it or rebel against it or a combination. And we're putting our own interpretations on it. We just have to keep hoping -- or, at the very least, I want to keep hoping -- that I'm doing it the way God wants me to, until such time as God decides to speak up in words I can understand and reveal all the answers.

The rest of the night was fabulous, of course. I had to leave the Kominas set early so I could wake up with my kid -- and I even missed them playing "Suicide Bomb the Gap" -- but I'll be back. And next time, I'm spiking my payos.

Jews Wear Hats

Jews wear a lot of hats. I mean that metaphorically but also literally: from black hats to fur hats to little white tent-yarmulkes to doilies to the Jackie O cloches of the Modern Orthodox upper-middle-class, hats and headcoverings mean different things -- important things -- to Jews.

There's the idea of covering your head to show modesty before God, and the idea of covering your head to shield it from other people. Observant men cover their heads whenever they make a blessing. And sometimes people cover their head-coverings -- when entering a non-kosher restaurant, for example, or when you're trying to appear inconspicuous for one reason or another. (Lest your mind jump to unkind judgments about people who wear yarmulkes, let me tell you: I spent nine months of my life wearing a tweed hat while living in parts of Eastern Europe where you didn't want to be spotted wearing anything vaguely Jewish except an Uzi.)

What got me thinking about all this was Facebook. Two friends of mine, both amazingly talented performers, both from way different parts of the musical/social/spiritual continuum, and separated by thousands of miles, popped up next to each other on my friends list. Their pictures were next to each other -- and, to be honest, it was hard to look away. If for no other reason than, well, this:



Insert here the jokes about how all Jews look alike. (It's true.) But it's funny how, aside from their finely-trimmed beards or their studiously artistic composure (Jon Madof, left, fronts the experimental jazz band Rashanim; Patrick A is the singer for Jewish punk band Can Can), both of them have singular headgear.

When I started wearing a yarmulke and hanging out with mostly Orthodox people -- significantly guys, for the purposes of this post -- I would frequently realize how often my yarmulked new friends were, well, not yarmulked. We'd go out on a Saturday night and I'd be wearing my new black velvet kippah, possibly still with the price tag on the underbelly, and I'd be accompanied by half a dozen guys in baseball caps, one in a ski cap, one in a Holden Caulfield hunter's hat, and one, only the good Lord knows why, in a sombrero.

The one thing they'd avoid -- like the plague, like the devil, and like every stigma in the book -- is wearing a yarmulke.

Or: they'd avoid wearing just a yarmulke.

At first I thought it was akin to my reticence to wear a yarmulke in Prague. Not that they didn't want to be lynched, necessarily, but that they didn't want to be instantly identified as Jewish. It's a stigma, after all. Either they were being low-key about it or they were being ashamed of their Jewish pride. In fact, I can remember people going on self-righteous anti-hat crusades, saying that hats equated ethnic shame. "You're a Jew!" they would rant and rave. "Be proud of it! Why do you need to hide beneath a hat? Do black people hide their skin beneath a hat? Did Moses need to hide his Judaism? Did Anne Frank?"

I would stop myself before mentioning that Moses lived several decades undercover as a Coptic Egyptian, and that Anne Frank probably didn't have a choice in the matter -- yellow armbands, you know -- but it's each person's choice. Besides, wasn't wearing a yarmulke and hiding it better than not wearing a yarmulke at all?

Now I'm older. I still wear a yarmulke (covered, sometimes, by a knit cap or a hoody). I live in New York, where I'm surrounded by a lot of other people who also wear yarmulkes -- and many people who don't. Some of them, of course, just don't wear yarmulkes straight-out. But others are deeply devout, and yet you'll rarely catch a glimpse of them in just a kippah -- the hip-hop artist Y-Love, for instance (he wears a tweed jeff-cap), or rabbi/author Danya Ruttenberg (yarmulke with attached devil-horns -- well, sometimes), or even the Biala Rebbe (either a Stetson hat or a fur-tipped streimel, depending on the day of the week).

And I think I've hit upon the reason. Even though we're all Jews, and we all cover our heads to honor the same ancient decree, we all want to do it in our own way. We don't all pray with the same voice, or using the same language. We don't dress the same. We have our own traditions that we might share with our family, or our friends, or the synagogue we attend. But in the modern cult of individuality, for better or for worse, we feel the need to self-identify with everything we do, from the way we act to the way we practice our religious rituals...to the clothes we wear.

And that's why we cover our heads in different ways.

One last point: In the '80s, the two big foreign synth-pop groups were Men Without Hats and Men at Work. Men Without Hats, in spite of writing a song with a Jewish mother-approved title ("The Safety Dance"), faded from sight. Men at Work, on the other hand -- who have frequently been seen wearing hats, and come from Australia, where ozone conditions dictate that you should always wear a hat -- have a song that's become the most recognizable Jewish wedding song ever:




You see? It's the hats that always win. Hence my argument that, given the choice, Jews will always gravitate toward odd and unique headgear. So there.