There’s a bit of history that you need to know to clarify the situation. Kadima, a Jewish community in Washington, wanted to buy a Torah written by a woman. After making inquiries, they learned that there were no Torahs written by women. So they decided to commission six women to write one.
Since the time that this Torah was commissioned, in 2003, several women have become Torah scribes (or sofrot) is and completed the writing of a Torah on their own. (In fact, one of those is Julie Seltzer, an MJL writer who bakes a different challah for every Torah portion {here’s this week’s — not that it has anything to do with the movie; it’s just independently cool}.)
Perry explains a bit of the background:
Since the time the Women’s Torah Project began, nearly 50 women have become Torah scribes, and one woman, Jen Taylor Friedman, has written 3 sefer Torahs by herself. Not only has Kadima created a beautiful Torah for their community, they have also opened doors for women to take their places in Judaism one step further.
Now that the community has this Torah, what are they going to do with it? The next step is, of course, decorating it — other women from the community are already starting to work on the crown, mantle and yad. But really, the next big step is Shabbat — like any other Torah, they’re going to read the eternal story of our people’s history each week.
Dan Sieradski, who revolutionizes the Jewish world on just about a weekly basis, has a massive new project planned. It’s called Jew It Yourself, and it’s a great crowd-sourced Jewish learning opportunity. Eventually, the site’s going to be full of videos of different people — of all Jewish stripes and subdivisions — showing how to do Jewish rituals, both traditional rituals and rituals we make up ourselves.
Eventually, Sieradski plans on having videos for all sorts of Jewish rituals on the site. But he figured the best place to start his work is where it stops — with rituals related to Shabbat.
Here’s the deal:
To enter, make a short video (under 5 minutes long) with “do it yourself” instructions for practicing a Jewish ritual, making a Jewish craft, or cooking Jewish food that is specifically connected to Shabbat, the Jewish Day of Rest.
To encourage the world to chip in, JIY is sweetening the deal the old-fashioned way — with bribery. You can win a Flip Ultra HD video camera, a $50 iTunes/Amazon gift certificate, and a bunch of CDs and t-shirts. All of which are valid reasons to enter a contest, but we still say the best reason is the old-fashioned reason, the reason Jews are best at — because you know how to do something better than other people.
So there’s a new Jewish parenting blog in town. It’s called Kveller, and those folks in charge are encouraging us to think of it as “not your parents’ parenting blog.” Not that your parents necessarily have a blog (or know what a blog is)…but you get the idea.
As my usual, responsible self, my first blog post was about keeping my kids up till 2 in the morning. Which I thought was pretty (a) embarrassing and (b) destructive, but Sarah said that I should reprint it here. So, here it is. Don’t take it as representative of everything on Kveller, but think of it as one dish on a very varied menu. Come check out the main course.
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By 11:30 P.M., I was almost wiped. Two hours of carrying a kid on your shoulders, and she starts to feel a lot heavier than that six-pack-sized newborn that your wife delivered only two years ago.
When is it ok to let your kid stay up all night?
You’re tired. You want to go to sleep. You remember fishing her out of her cot at 7 a.m. that morning, she couldn’t possibly have weighed as heavy as she does now, and how does she manage to go this long with only having one nap? You would kill for a nap.
An hour later, she is still going strong. It’s nearly one in the morning, we’re just sitting down to dinner at the house of people we just met, I’m trying to remember their names at the same time as I’m trying not to fall asleep in the far-too-comfortable chairs in their dining room…and my daughter is having an all-out Lego war in the living room with the family’s son.
I swear: This isn’t like us. Our kids are usually in bed by 7:oo. On most nights, we are responsible people.
This post came our way courtesy of Alan Jay Sufrin, singer/guitarist/bassist/keyboardist for the band Stereo Sinai. He’s also the official shofar blower at Congregation Anshe Shalom in Chicago this year (and is tremendously excited about it). Here he is with his newest instrument in the recording booth.
So, here we go.
It’s the Hebrew month of Elul, during which it’s a custom to sound the shofar every day. The blog HearingShofar (which, amazingly, is a year-round blog about shofars) just reprinted a page from the comic Teen Titans #45, from 1976, in which Malcom “Mal” Duncan, DC Comics’ first black superhero, is attacked by a shadowy figure who promises to kill him. Then, randomly, he receives a magical ram’s horn from the angel Gabriel.
According to HearingShofar:
[T]he tale seems kind of goyish. But hey, Superman was invented by several Jews and much has been written postulating how Jewish legends and archetypes influenced the creation of his character. And we are instructed to sound shofar in times of crisis, just like Mal is.
Which reminds me of a joke that my friend tells way too much — as illustrated by the illimitable comic artist Mat Tonti. What do pirates say to each other on Rosh Hashanah?
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.)
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.)
A call for submissions was just sent out by Tamar Fox and her sister, Deena Fox, soliciting writing about the experiences of Jewish women in dealing with death and mourning.
The full submissions call is below, after the jump. They’re looking for all sorts of writing, but to show you the depth and breadth of the collection-to-be, I thought I’d include a little cut from Tamar’s bleak and wholly incredible blog, Blogging the Kaddish, which she wrote over a year of mourning for her mother:
It has been a pretty scary month since I stopped saying Kaddish. Two weeks ago the family gathered in Chicago for the unveiling of the headstone, and since then I’ve been feeling pretty strange. I’m calmer than I have been in months. I’m getting more sleep. I’m seeing more of the people I want to see more of. I’m riding my bike, and reading interesting books and staying up all night with friends drinking whiskey and laughing. I don’t think I’m better, really. I certainly have a lot more “grief-work” to do, but I think that ending Kaddish allowed me to settle into my grief in a way that I never could during the eleven months.
For me, saying Kaddish was really a struggle. It hurt, but it felt important. I guess it was like the intense ache you get in muscles after you work out really hard. The next day it’s painful, but also a sign of increasing strength. You’re not exactly glad for the pain, but you appreciate that it’s necessary for the work you have to do.
So…Simchas Torah. Lately, it’s become famous for being the #2 Jewish drinking holiday, but my past few Simchas Torahs have all been pretty clean events — festive and debaucherous in that wholesome way where we jump around with the Torah and sweat up our thrift-store suits until we’ve soo earned every penny of that $15 dry-cleaning visit.
And it’s not just me, I don’t think. People have been raving about G-dcast in a way that makes me blush like they’re saying how good I look, and it’s all positive and gung-ho in a way that appeals to 5-year-olds. And David’s post about the new Moses movie that probably will owe more to 300 than Charlton Heston…but making an action movie about the Torah is as close as Hollywood will probably ever come to a studying-books-can-be-cool movie as we’ll get.
This year, I went to San Francisco. I’d somehow managed to convince my ex-boss, David Levithan (who wrote the awesome Boy Meets Boy, as well as the so-indie-its-jeans-hurt Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), to narrate for us. So we did V’Zot Habracha with a bang.
Then, of course — because some good things don’t have to come to an end — we did our real conclusion episode, and did Bereshit again. (There was a whole huge concert, and Elana Jagoda performed her alterna-folk-dancey children’s anthems, and Julie Seltzer talked about being a soferet, but mostly talked about her project baking a different challah for every parsha in the Torah, and we all just generally rocked out.)
And then the lights dimmed, and we rewound the Torah, and showed our final episode.
So I’ve been reading the script (downloadable here) to the film Inglourious Basterds. And it’s pretty over-the-top insane.
Not that you wouldn’t expect that from a movie that’s (a) by Quentin Tarantino, (b) about Jews, and (c) borderline sadophiliac in its embrace of violence. But there are some moments, excised from the final film, that tell the story as…well, as a much different story.
In this scene, Donny Donowitz, the “Bear Jew,” has just bought himself a baseball bat. (Proprietor: “You gettin’ your little brother a present before you ship out?” Donny: “No.” Stony silence, as they both realize its significance.) Donny then pays a visit to a tiny little old Jewish lady in an apartment building who invites him in for tea:
Donny: Mrs. Himmelstein, do you have any loved ones over in Europe who you’re concerned for? Mrs. Himmelstein: What compels you, young man, to ask a stranger such a personal question? Donny: Because I’m going to Europe. And I’m gonna make it right. Mrs. Himmelstein: And just how do you intend to do that, Joshua?
He holds up his [baseball] bat.
Donny: With this. Mrs. Himmelstein: And what exactly do you intend to do with that toy? Donny: I’m gonna beat every Nazi I find to death with it….I’m going through the neighborhood. If you have any loved ones in Europe, whose safety you fear for, I’d like you to write their name on my bat.
I’d assume that part of the reason this scene was cut is because the scene that introduces the Basterds unit — post-battle, where the soldiers are interrogating Nazi prisoners and collecting scalps — flows with such brutal elegance. But also, the scenes that feature the Brookline Jewish community would probably take the movie away from being the squarely violent war film that Tarantino intended to make and cast it more as a Holocaust-era character piece.
In Jordana Horn’s excellent interview with Tarantino, both acknowledge (correctly, I think) that Basterds wasn’t a Holocaust film. But, when looking at Tarantino’s original visions for the film — some reports suggest that his original script, which clocked in at over 270 pages and 5 1/2 hours of shooting time — the final product could have been any of several types of film.
(One final note: Ostensibly, Tarantino’s original concept was to make the film entirely about Shoshana, the Jewish girl whose family was killed in front of her, in which she makes a list of Nazis responsible and extracts vengeance. That apparently turned into his last film, Kill Bill. I do wish Basterds was more like Kill Bill in its embrace of the hero — nearly all the Jews die, and all the women die in particularly horrific circumstances — but I understand how both women’s deaths were called for by the storytelling ethic. Which doesn’t make their portrayal any less anti-woman.)
There’s that thing that people say about the Torah: that every word and every letter is there for a reason. When I first saw Mayim Bialik’s G-dcast, I winced. I mean — she is, of course, smart and funny and clever — but she was, after all, Blossom. And the silly-hat thing — I mean, did we have to include it?
I should not have worried. Just like every word has its purpose, so too does every accoutrement have its purpose — including Mayim’s hat.
And, because we are nothing if not Torah-study completists, here’s the incomparable Dahlia Lithwick, of NPR/Slate/Newsweek fame, talking about the other Torah reading of the week, Nitzavim:
At my day job at MyJewishLearning, we were planning the calendar events of the Jewish year. Some of us were reaching, and some of us were showing off just a little bit. Famed JCarrot blogger Tamar Fox just happened to know when National Blueberry Month was, leaving the rest of our jaws dropping to the floor. As far as cool holidays go, this set the bar.
My best effort to come close was Bad Poetry Day. It’s celebrated every August 18, and has inspired events around the world, the most famous of which — so far, anyway — is Columbia University’s Joyce Kilmer Poetry Contest (named, not for the New Jersey Turnpike rest stop, but for the man who wrote “I think that I shall never see/A poem lovely as a tree”).
But we’re here to change that. Jews are known for writing good poetry — some really good poetry, from the Song of Songs to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” to the awesome Hasidic poetry slam in Crown Heights.
Well, Jewish world — here’s your new goal.
See if you can beat the Vogons at poetry. Then send it to badpoetry@myjewishlearning.com. And you could win very not-bad prizes, including an iPod, a bunch of JDub CDs, new books from Jewish Publication Society, and a rubber chicken. Just make sure you get it in by August 11…or else someone who’s not nearly as bad as you might take steal your title as Worst Jewish Poet Ever.
In hip-hop, Soce the Elemental Wizard is as self-aware as it gets. Not that you could accuse the man of any less. His new album, the inspiringly-titled “Master of Fine Arts,” was released this week, and there’s a launch party Saturday night at the Bowery Poetry Club. (Tickets are $10, which includes a CD, so it’s basically like getting a Saturday night concert for free.)
Soce’s real name is Andrew Singer, and he has a day job as a computer guy on Wall Street. If you think that disqualifies him from hip-hop greatness, you’re so misled — nerd-rap is the very basis of his raison d’etre. His album begins with the warning “I was a renegade/until I started drinking my lemonade/now I’m better-paid” — and the album’s first video, “They Call Me,” starts out with a 7-year-old Soce getting beaten up in a schoolyard, and lays heavy claims, like that he’s got “an edge like matzoh and cheese.”
He’s not afraid to put himself on the line (and, yes, his rhymes are totally {and intentionally} laughable), but Soce also keeps it real — his jams are legitimate hip-hop, his wordplay as smart as it is silly, and his beats are quality, radio-friendly music. There’s the Jewish thing, of course, and the gay thing, but Soce is refreshingly creative in his lyrics. He’s just as likely to rhyme about Dungeons & Dragons as he is about the dude he’s crushing on. Soce keeps it good-natured but chill, and is likely to pull out the crowd of equally-attractive young Jews, so you should probably get there early. And make sure there’s plenty of room around you to dance.
Just in case you missed her guest stint as a Hasidic Jew on Saving Grace last night — or, like me, you’re just too damn Orthodox to own a television* — there’s still plenty of Mayim Bialik love to go around. On the Jewish Wedding Network yesterday, she talked about her first experience going to a mikveh (and name-drops Aryeh Kaplan!). And she collaborates with Allison Josephs, better known as Jew in the City, to disspell some myths about Orthodox Jewish women:
It’s pretty awesome how Bialik is playing with her ’80s iconoclasm, but isn’t allowing herself to be a prisoner of it. And how she’s playing with her religious identity (dammit, I want to see Mayim in Hasidic drag on TV*) without making it as simple as a non-Orthodox person playing an Orthodox one, or an Orthodox person playing a non-Orthodox one.
______
* — but not to watch Buffy. OK, we just don’t have room for one. Caught.
Next Wednesday, July 8, I’m doing a free reading at the 92Y Tribeca with
one of my heroes. Michael Muhammad Knight wrote the Muslim punk-rock novel “The Taqwacores,” which might just be my favorite spiritual book ever. Sure, we get alterna-Jewish stuff tossed at us from every direction, but MMK started from ground zero, taking the seemingly disparate elements of punk culture and Muslim spirituality and fusing them together in a book about what matters most. (In the book, he wrote about an imaginary socio-political-art movement called Taqwacore — which, amazingly, solidified into a real movement after people read the book and were inspired to form bands. If you haven’t heard me rave about him, you don’t have to lookveryfar.
My own first novel, Never Mind the Goldbergs, was my kind of punk-rock Jewish fantasy. In it, a 17-year-old punk Orthodox Jewish girl is trying to prove to the world that it isn’t a contradiction in terms to like loud, passionate music at the same time that you like loud, passionate praying. (And then she stars on a TV sitcom, where she’s basically not allowed to be loud or passionate about anything.)
I might read some of Goldbergs and/or my memoir about becoming observant, Yom Kippur a Go-Go, as well as something new and exciting and unprepared. And then we might talk about the cultural value of revolution…
How Jews Pray, the third in MyJewishLearning’s “How Jews…” series, checks out what Jews are talking about — from an Australian Jew in New York to an Argentinian Jew in Los Angeles, and other folks in the woods, the cities, and some places in between. What do people who don’t believe in God think about praying?
When I was young, a secular Jewish kid living down the street from Hasidim — a weird remix of The Chosen — I thought it was mysterious how all the long-black-coated, hair-covered Jews was that they seemed to have their own way of talking to God. They didn’t just go to synagogue and pray like normal people — they would pray in living rooms, or in backyards, and they muttered to themselves walking down the street. Plus, they wore those funny clothes. Was God telling them something that God wasn’t telling the rest of us?
I guess I just felt disenfranchised.
This was before I met Jewish Renewalists who meditate and pray. And musicians like Chana Rothman and Jeremiah Lockwood, who pray by singing their hearts out. And before I learned how to pray myself, wherever I was and whatever was on my mind, sometimes in a “thank you” way, and sometimes in an “I need to save myself” way.
A few weeks ago, in introducing his new prayerbook, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, “We have a problem with prayer” — and proceeded to detail how, in this world where we’re obsessed with talking about ourselves and eavesdropping on other people, we’ve forgotten what it’s like to speak to God. Whatever each of us think of God, and even, in one person’s case, whether or not we believe in God.
I think that’s my favorite thing about this video, above all the others we’ve done so far. It helps us remember.
If you don’t know about my obsession with Sabra, the Jewish superhero, then just Google around — I’m kind of a sucker for her. I mean, typical Israeli hotheadedness + super powers + guest appearances in “The Incredible Hulk” and “Uncanny X-Men”…well, it kind of equals my dream girl, if you set aside the facts that (a) she’s fictional and (b) I’m married.
Sabra’s official title is the “Defender of Israel,” which sounds like just about the cheesiest thing ever. She wears a blue-and-white uniform, sometimes with a long cape pinned together with a Star of David, of course, and half of the stuff the writers put into her mouth is gag-worthy, and half is totally, spot-on Israeli. When she’s written well, she is arrogant, good-humored, stubborn, compassionate…that mix of delicate qualities that are the quintessence of Israeli culture.
When I was on tour in Manhattan, I even wrote a poem as a pitch for an editor at Marvel Comics, imagining Sabra — who’s always been the ultimate secular Israeli — starting to dabble in being religious. Then I totally scrapped it and wrote a real pitch, which involved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the religious-secular divide, some really deep character work and some stuff about getting over traumas that “Waltz with Bashir” totally plagiarized, even if they didn’t actually see my treatment.
In the past few years, she started making guest appearances, some wonderfully understated (in the background, portrayed with Yemenite features at Darkstar’s funeral in New X-Men) and some just cool cameos (like defending Israel from the Skrulls in Secret Invasion). Last week, Marvel released a Web one-shot short story featuring Sabra — and, while it’s cool to see our favorite (and, uh, second- and third-favorite) Israeli superhero in the limelight, it wasn’t exactly the most promising of beginnings.
The story opens on Sabra at a picnic with her mother. She meets a girl, Yael, whose father fought alongside Sabra’s father in the Israeli Air Force. Sabra relates her own story of being caught by HYDRA, a Marvel-universe terrorist group, and of her father dying while saving her. It wraps up nicely with the girl confessing her fears — “I don’t know what it’s like to fly,” she confesses — and Sabra swooping her up and taking her for a little flight above the Jerusalem scenery.
It’s a nice little sentimental story. No big whoop, no deeper meaning, and even (bonus!) an explosion. On a storytelling level, I have my complaints — the story wastes far too much time at this stupid party, which has nothing to do with the story Sabra’s telling. And, if we’re supposed to care about Sabra’s father saving her and dying in the act, we should at least see what the man looks like. It also feels a little bit like the writer, Matt Yocum, got most of his information about Israel from a quick Google search. Sabra herself has as much personality as a tube of toothpaste, and the 17-year-old girl’s wide-eyed oh-you’re-so-cool-ness — while it’s also uncharacteristic of Israelis (or, for that matter, anyone) — just doesn’t seem real, or give the reader any reason to care. When Spider-Man is awed to be in a room with Captain America and Daredevil, you can tell it’s because, under his mask, he’s a teenage fanboy.
In the Marvel canon, Ruth Bat-Seraph is a national hero. Sometimes, she’s revered; sometimes, she’s mind-controlled by evil bastards and the public hates her. But she’s never been a sucker. Perhaps the worst part are the token Jewish lines — “I never felt more like David…against HYDRA’s Goliath” — which seem like they were made to be used in Hebrew Schools. And the ending, in which Sabra tells the girl, “This is what our dads lived for. This is what they died for. You’ll make the right decision…” is cringe-worthy — not because it isn’t an inspiring thought, not because it’s not what they believe in, but because, in the entire story, we haven’t heard anything about what “this” is, or what it means to either Sabra or her young fan. If Sabra loves Israel, show us Israel. Don’t give us ten pages, not of Israel, not of a cool fight scene, but of talking about abstract ideas at a party.
Please, Marvel — give us more Sabra. But not like this.
If MyJewishLearning‘s first mini-documentary, How Jews Look, caused a bit of a stir, well, this one is sure to hit home for even more people. It investigates what might be among the things both loved most fully and debated most passionately among all things Jewish in the world: food.
Featuring the frontperson of everyone’s favorite JTS-based band, JamDaven, as well as the mind behind everyone’s favorite non-kosher deli, Lansky’s…and some other good folks as well. We loved how much people had to say about the last video, and believe me, we’ve taken it to heart — and we really do want to hear what you have to say about it. So feel free to hit us up.
Almost two years ago, silkscreen artist David Arfa sent out the call for submissions for MezuzaZine, which is exactly what its name implies — a zine (that is, a photocopied do-it-yourself magazine) that tells everything you need to know about a mezuzah.
In Arfa’s words, MezuzaZine is “a 12 page Do-It-Yourself mitzva guide that contains hip and authentic articles and images about mezuzas.”
Of course, you could just go to our site about mezuzahs and read up on it. But, if you’re old-school or looking for a different approach or just want to see a different sort of art form, Arfa’s printed up 200 copies of it — and probably has done some wild design work or special printing — and is selling them for just $1 to cover his costs. Arfa asks: “Would you like to get your hands on a printed copy? or maybe even help distribute? I am trying to cover the printing costs by selling each for $1- there are 200 copies. Let me know if you want one or a bunch and let’s make a deal.”
The zine features original work by Rabbi Jason Miller, Jeanette Friedman, Ketzirah, Ari Fornari, as well as an essay I did about writing love letters to God.
This is a really cool little project, and I really hope it gets all over the place. There’s nothing like people getting inspired by random things in Judaism and making it their own, and that’s exactly what David did with this zine. There’s a preliminary website, too — but, as of now, only the print zine has the full spectrum of articles. To find out how you can get a copy, or help distribute, drop David a line to find out how you can throw in a buck.
encouraging us to think of it as “not your parents’ parenting blog.” Not that your parents necessarily have a blog (or know what a blog is)…but you get the idea.
Michael Muhammad Knight wrote the Muslim punk-rock novel “The Taqwacores,” which might just be my favorite spiritual book ever. Sure, we get alterna-Jewish stuff tossed at us from every direction, but MMK started from ground zero, taking the seemingly disparate elements of punk culture and Muslim spirituality and fusing them together in a book about what matters most. (In the book, he wrote about an imaginary socio-political-art movement called Taqwacore — which, amazingly, solidified into a real movement after people read the book and were inspired to form bands. If you haven’t heard me rave about him, you don’t have to 
to the world that it isn’t a contradiction in terms to like loud, passionate music at the same time that you like loud, passionate praying. (And then she stars on a TV sitcom, where she’s basically not allowed to be loud or passionate about anything.)
Sabra’s official title is the “Defender of Israel,” which sounds like just about the cheesiest thing ever. She wears a blue-and-white uniform, sometimes with a long cape pinned together with a Star of David, of course, and half of the stuff the writers put into her mouth is gag-worthy, and half is totally, spot-on Israeli. When she’s written well, she is arrogant, good-humored, stubborn, compassionate…that mix of delicate qualities that are the quintessence of Israeli culture. 
Sabra’s telling. And, if we’re supposed to care about Sabra’s father saving her and dying in the act, we should at least see what the man looks like. It also feels a little bit like the writer, Matt Yocum, got most of his information about Israel from a quick Google search. Sabra herself has as much personality as a tube of toothpaste, and the 17-year-old girl’s wide-eyed oh-you’re-so-cool-ness — while it’s also uncharacteristic of Israelis (or, for that matter, anyone) — just doesn’t seem real, or give the reader any reason to care. When Spider-Man is awed to be in a room with Captain America and Daredevil, you can tell it’s because, under his mask, he’s a teenage fanboy. 
In Arfa’s words, MezuzaZine is “a 12 page Do-It-Yourself mitzva guide that contains hip and authentic articles and images about mezuzas.” 
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