by Mobius [➚] · Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
The NY Times reports,
When it was introduced in 2002, [Heeb] magazine, particularly its name playing on an anti-Semitic slur, drew headlines and the ire of the Anti-Defamation League. “When we started, we didn’t have advertisers and literally couldn’t give ads away, because people were freaked out by the name,†Mr. Neuman said.
So Heeb started running parody ads. Unbeknownst to Streit’s, the 82-year-old kosher foods company on Rivington Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Heeb published a full-page parody of Streit’s in late 2003.
“We were just goofing off,†Mr. Neuman said. But then, Streit’s got so much positive response from the ad that the company paid to run it in the next issue, and has been paying for ads ever since.
Since then, Heeb has served as what Mr. Neuman called a “quasi ad agency.â€
Full story.
by Mobius [➚] · Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
Our anonymous Conservative rabbinical student returns with a third installment, commenting on JTS’s decision to permit openly gay students. I reiterate, as has become necessary from the last two posts contributed by this individual, that I am not the author.
This is the third in my series of “Both Proud and Ashamed” to be a student, preparing for the rabbinate, within the Conservative Movement. The “Gay issue” has generated more ink for the Conservative Movement than any issue in recent memory. The secular press has carried stories, the Israeli media has taken an interest, the Orthodox Jewish media vehicles have been relentless in their criticism, and there has been much back and forth within the Conservative community.
Overall, dialogue is healthy. I am proud that the Conservative Movement is taking on an issue, in Halachic terms, that profoundly touches the lives of untold numbers of people. In this sense I think we are about two decades ahead of the Orthodox.
We saw this with regard to the woman’s issue. Today, many have nothing but praise for Shira Hadasha, an Orthodox congregation with deep ritual involvement of women. Women study Torah and Talmud in a myriad of Orthodox institutions. Women are trained to serve as “lawyers” in the all male Hardei rabbinic courts. This may have not come about without the progressive Halachic positions taken within the Conservative community.
More »
by Josh Frankel [➚] · Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
Steven I. Weiss has been covering an interesting story about the OU’s restaurant kashrut program. A mashgiach, Yitzchak Bitton at Le Marais, a kosher steakhouse in NY, claims that on his watch there were major kashrut violations, and that despite his best attempts at solving them, the OU repeatedly turned a blind eye, and tried to cover up the problems that were there, rather then possibly losing a client and taking a hard line approach. The OU has since denied that there any major problems, and that minor infractions have been dealt with, and now Le Marais is suing Mr. Bitton.
While I have no knowledge of this actual case, it sounds entirely possible. About ten years ago, when I was a teenager living in NY, I got a job as an OU mashgiach at pizzeria on the Upper West Side. While this is an entirely different caliber of job from what Mr. Bitton had (there’s not much that can go wrong in a pizzeria) I feel a similar somewhat cavalier attitude. Back then, I was employed not by the OU, but by the pizza place. That meant, of course, that if I saw any problem, I couldn’t exactly walk out. If I had insisted here was a problem, then someone else would have taken my job, and I wouldn’t have been able to eat.
More »
by Mobius [➚] · Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
I got a pingback earlier from a post on Tikkun Olam, Richard Silverstein’s blog, in which Richard expresses his dismay at apparently being banned from JBlog Central, the Jewish blog aggregator hosted by Israel Forum, a site for “24-Hour News, Discussion & Debate from a Pro-Israeli Viewpoint.” Richard had linked to my post from February in which I recounted the sordid tale of JBlog Central and the Jewish & Israeli Blog Awards.
Taking Richard’s concern that he had been “blackballed” with a grain of salt, I decided to check if there was some foul conspiracy afoot against Left-wing Jewish bloggers, and, sure enough, discovered that Jew School, Radical Torah and Orthodox Anarchist had also been removed from JBlog Central’s aggregator. (Politics? Maybe. Ridiculing his ad campaign? Probably.)
This mildly confounding and yet hardly surprising news comes at an interesting juncture, whereas Chaim, the blogger behind Life-of-Rubin and founder of the J-Blogosphere Blog, recently announced the relaunch of the Jewish & Israeli Blog Awards (JIBs).
More »
by Mobius [➚] · Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
Jason Maoz at the Jewish Press has an interesting strategy for making his blog relevant — picking fights with me. I suppose he figures if he pisses me off often enough that I’ll keep driving traffic to his dinky little weblog and increase the Jewish Press’ share of the jblog market. So I’m gonna throw him his last bone here just to make a salient and long overdue point.
Call it my Al Gore moment — an unsettling moment of hubris if you must. But the sheer fact of the matter is that the Jewish Press now has a weblog because of me and everyone else’s other favorite blogger they love to hate, Steven I. Weiss.
More »
by Mobius [➚] · Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
Oh, I thought it said “You shall have no products made from weed within your borders…”
JPost reports:
Every Sunday school student knows Pessah for its ban on food that rises, but a growing number of Jews are asking whether the holiday also precludes them from getting high.
Hemp has increasingly been spotted on the list of kitniyot, or legumes, that Ashkenazi Jews abstain from eating during Pessah, according to several influential rabbinical Web sites, including kashrut.com. But not everyone agrees that hemp qualifies for the ban, and the debate has led many to question the definition of kitniyot.
While hemp isn’t a kitchen staple for most people, hemp oil can be found in a number of hygiene products and in some alternative baked goods. But it’s hemp’s more notorious cousin, commonly known as marijuana, that has set the sparks flying. As debate over the kitniyot tradition has gathered steam among rabbinic circles, many are looking at hemp as a case in point of why the practice of abstention needs to be reexamined.
Due to my work researching the relationship between Jews and drugs, I was interviewed for this story and just made the final cut towards the end.
More »
by BZ [➚] · Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
Amid all the discussion about who the top rabbis are, there’s no question what the top city is in the organized Jewish world: CHICAGO.
The Central Conference of American Rabbis, the rabbinic organization of the North American Reform movement, recently installed a new board, and the City of Big Shoulders dominates all the top positions. Rabbi Peter Knobel of Beth Emet the Free Synagogue in Evanston is the new president, and Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus of B’nai Yehuda Beth Sholom in Homewood is the new vice president, and will be the next president in 2009 barring any unforeseen circumstances. Thus, the North Side and South Side are both represented.
by Danya [➚] · Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
Three people emailed me this story within a span of about two hours.
The AP reports,
It was an old school bus that had been converted into a supersized oven for Passover matzos — complete with a smokestack, exhaust fans and working fire. A building inspector said that while the bakery bus wasn’t nearly up to code, it was “very creative.”
The derelict red-and-white bus, connected by a plywood passageway to a single-family house, was out of sight of casual passers-by in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood and had apparently long escaped the notice of authorities. Its owner, Rabbi Aaron Winternitz, said Monday he had been making the unleavened bread there for three Passovers and was eager to do the same this year, with Passover coming up in a week.
He said that the oven-in-a-bus was his invention, and that he purposely bought an old school bus because “school buses are made strong and safe.” He said the bus he purchased had also been used as a home and as a race-car carrier….
Police Sgt. Lou Scorziello said police traced the smoke to the bus at about 3 a.m. Friday. The oven, he said, “was up and running.”
Given the illegal gas line, “There certainly was the potential for an explosion.”
He said the back door of the bus, formerly the emergency exit, was the oven door.
“All the seats had been removed and the whole inside was an oven,” he said.
Winternitz, who said he lived with his wife and three children in the light pink two-story house that fronted the bus, brushed aside any safety concerns.
“Everything was always done properly,” he said. The rabbi said he made about 100 pounds of crispy matzo, in 10-inch square crackers, each Passover for his 50-member Congregation Mivtzar Hatorah.
I think the thing that surprises me the most about this is that it isn’t Chabad. But if it were Chabad, the bus would actually have to be drivable, which this, it seems, is not.
Full story here.
by Josh Frankel [➚] · Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
As part of it’s first film festival, Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future ran an undergraduate short film competition. The topic – Who is Your Jewish Hero. The five finalists are featured online, and voting for the winner is public. They are definitely interesting to see. One is in praise of a soldier injured in the recent Lebanon war, another makes an appeal to Orthodox star power, with the Moshav Band in the background, and Avraham Fried narrating. My favorite, is an over the top, ironic accolade dedicated to Richard Joel.
Voting ends today.
by LastTrumpet [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Cross-posted to LastTrumpet
From Lazer Beams:
Once a year, during the Hebrew month of Nissan, we have the special mitzva of making a blessing over (at least two) blossoming fruit trees. According to Kabbala, this blessing is deeply significant, and helps correct the soul that is reincarnated within the tree. That soul is forever beholding to the person that makes the blessing, for he or she has done a great favor in helping that soul attain its tikkun, or correction.
For your convenience, here is the blessing,
In English: Blessed are You, Hashem our God, King of the Universe, who let nothing lack in His universe and created within it good creatures and good trees in order to give pleasure to human beings.
In Transliteration: Baruch ata Adonoi, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, she-lo chisar be-olamo klum v-vara vo beriyyot tovot ve-ilanot tovim lehanot bahem bnai Adam.
In Hebrew: áøåê à úä ä’ à ìäéðå îìê äòåìà ùìà çñø áòåìîå ëìåà åáøà áå áøéåú èåáåú åà éìðåú èåáéà ìäðåú áäà áðé à ãÃ
It’s significant that the trees are fruit-bearing. The ultimate pleasure those trees give us, as Reb Lazer explains later, is when we eat their fruit – “If you haven’t eaten a red grapefruit right off the tree in Eretz Yisroel, you don’t know what the taste of heaven is.”
Does anyone know any for veggies? Or for non-tree fruit? Is it safe to assume that the same principle applies?
I’m liberating kiwi souls right now.
More »
by Mobius [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Ken Marino, Michael Showalter and David Wain
The crew behind Jewish summer camp classic Wet Hot American Summer is back with an exciting and apparently uproarious new film that’s currently making the festival rounds.
An absurdist’s twist on Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski’s series The Dekalog, David Wain’s The Ten is comprised of ten shorts, each relating to one of the Ten Commandments, from “I am the Lord, your G-d,” through “Thou shalt not covet…”
The film features all your WHAS favorites plus an all-star ensemble (87 actors in total) including ex-Daily Show star Rob Corddry, Gretchen Mol, Winona Ryder, Jessica Alba and Liev Schrieber.
An official selection at Sundance 2007, The Ten will open nation-wide August 3. Catch a sneak preview at one of their upcoming festival screenings, or make due with interview and teaser clips here. Trailer here.
See previously: That’s awful, eating run over Muppet!
by Mobius [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
The NY Times reports,
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further believe that if morality grew out of behavioral rules shaped by evolution, it is for biologists, not philosophers or theologians, to say what these rules are.
Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists’ bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.
Full story.
So if monkeys have morals, what’s our excuse?
by Mobius [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Ariel Sharon’s ex-spokesman Ra’anan Gissin has some ideas for how to improve Israel’s image:
For example, Gissin said, instead of a giving diatribe about Islamic terror and Israel’s virtues, why not try telling a couple of jokes?
“You can make the same message by retelling 4,000 years of Jewish history and boring [your audience] or by telling two good jokes in 30 seconds.
What kind of jokes, you might ask?
“I don’t have any jokes!†Gissin blasted at a decibel level roughly equivalent to a steam train plowing into a drum factory.
“But young people, bloggers, could do a marvelous job of this counter-insurgency warfare in the media without using weapons.â€
I’ll let you know when I’ve finished composing my list of everything wrong with this.
by Mobius [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Daryl Temkin at The Conservative Voice gets top honors for scribing the most absurd and politically skewed “modern” interpretation of the Exodus story ever written.
The “progressive†slaves hated Moses’ freedom campaign because they saw it as disruptive to Egypt, and a justification for anti-Jewish protests. The progressive intellectual slaves proclaimed Moses to be a stupid stutterer who couldn’t even pronounce basic words. Although all the documents of Egypt consistently pressed for the annihilation of the Jews, the progressives argued that Pharaoh was really benign and had recognized the existence and rights of the Nation of Israel — it was only for political reasons that Pharaoh couldn’t publicly state his recognition.
Two professors from the prestigious Nile University published research which indicated suspicion that the Israelite nation was not politically supportive of Egyptian attitudes and was organizing to achieve its own goals. Progressive slaves quickly argued in favor of continued Jewish enslavement.
Read it and wretch.
by Mobius [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Photo by Fusilli
by Mobius [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Via Rabbi Arthur Waskow:
Dear Friends,
A few hours ago I received a phone call from Susannah Heschel to say that her mother Sylvia, who has been sick, had died.
The funeral will be held 10 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday) at Riverside Chapel, 76th and Amsterdam Avenue on the West Side in New York City.
Sylvia (nee Straus) was the widow of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who died in 1972. They met in Cincinnati, where she had become a skilled and serious pianist. (He was teaching at Hebrew Union College.) They were married shortly after he began teaching at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1945.
Susannah has said that her mother “was a wonderful partner for him…. She brought music to him, which clearly influenced him deeply. He suddenly began to use musical metaphors for the religious life; they are to be found everywhere in “God in Search of Man.’
It has also been apparent to those who knew both Sylvia and Susannah that Susannah’s staunch feminism was encouraged not only by her father’s spiritually rooted ethics but also by her mother’s strength and example.
May the memory of Sylvia’s own life-melody and her steadfast devotion to both husband and daughter serve as a consolation to her friends and as a blessing to the world.
Shalom, Arthur
by Y-Love [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
In Orange, Texas last week, a parole officer filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice alleging that he had endured, over the prior thirteen years, more than enough racism, and the camel’s proverbial back had been broken:
Freddie Hackney Jr. endured a lot of racial and religious prejudices over the 13 years as a parole officer for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice before he stood up for himself.
Hackney, 43, filed a lawsuit in February with the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Beaumont Division. The suit is against not only TDCJ, but also his former supervisor James Gossett Jr.
Hackney continues to work as a parole officer, but Gossett was reportedly given an ultimatum to resign or be fired and he has since resigned from his job and is now working at a local restaurant.
“I cannot continue to be abused for being born. I will not apologize for being the man God made me. I can no longer continue to be TDCJ’s ‘whipping boy,’†said Hackney in a written statement.
Hackney lost his faith in internal investigations shortly after starting his job. He came into work one morning and found the words “nigger you talk you die†spray painted in large letters on his wall. Everyone in the office was forced to work at alternate location during an investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In the weeks prior to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, Hackney submitted a request in writing to be allowed to take the day off in lieu of another traditional holiday. Gossett advised Hackney he had used the wrong form for his request.
Hackney then submitted a second request to be able to observe in his religious freedoms. However, Gossett refused to sign and approve the requests, according to the petition filed with the court.
However, the petition states two other co-workers were allowed to take off from work to observe Ash Wednesday, a Catholic holiday.
Analysis of the story shows: what Mr. Hackney received at the hands of his co-workers were largely racist in nature, calling him a “gorilla”, “nigger” on the wall, etc. And, might I add, indicative of a brain activity level one usually finds only in the demographic for adult diapers. Mr. Gossett’s crime vis-a-vis the racism was largely a crime of omission. Mr. Gossett’s crime of commission was anti-Semitic in nature, the active denial of equal accommodations for religious sensibilities.
The combination of these two facts makes my heart go out to Mr. Hackney even more. To turn to an authority in the face of racism is quite a hard thing to do — especially when the EEOC, with all of their high-falutin’ official paperwork and pomp, gets called in to investigate a warning of “talk and you die.” But then to find that authority to be anti-Semitic, only to be sent back into the sea of racists?
I think that this coming Passover, considering that Mr. Hackney has only recently become free of his unsafe working environment, for Mr. Hackney to “see himself as if he was just released…from the house of bondage” should prove itself to be an easy mental endeavor. The torture of receiving abuse for two different reasons from two different groups of people at one workplace, I’m sure, was Mr. Hackney’s personal “egypt” this year from which he prayed for redemption. It is also my sincere hope that Mr. Hackney’s case draws attention to the precarious situations of other Jews of color going through similar trials.
And to top it off, Mr. Hackney is not seeking punitive damages, only a public admission that he had been wronged. What a mensch.
by Jake Marmer [➚] · Monday, March 26th, 2007
Mima’amakim Journal of Jewish Art is thrilled to announce our seventh annual submissions call!
Please send your poetry, prose, artwork, and essays to makim2007@gmail.com
DEADLINE: May 1st
For more info: www.mimaamakim.org/sub2007.doc
follow us on Twitter
follow us on Facebook
subscribe to our email