soferBot
Apparently, this robot likes to write perfect copies of the Bible onto “endless rolls of paper.” Hmmmm….
From Boing Boing gadgets
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Stories from camp
As many of you know, I used to work at Camp Tawonga for years as their outreach director (gasp! kiruv!) – consider this a piece of emeritus outreach. This is a lovely, challenging and exciting evening every year where you can meet people from far flung places straddling borders of conflict…with stories of everyday life and passion for change.
“Camp Stories”
from Oseh Shalom ~ Sanea al-Salam: Peacemakers WeekendAn evening of inspiring stories about conflict, about change – told together by Palestinian and Jewish youth and adults – women and men — Christians, Muslims, and Jews – from 33 towns “back home” in Israel and Palestine, and from America.
Hear compelling stories from the mouths of courageous Arabs and Jews, refusing to be enemies, crossing emotional and physical boundaries, listening, understanding and building relationships while discovering that “an enemy is one whose story we have not heard.”
Tuesday, October 9, 2007, 7:30 sharp – 9:30 PM
St. Mary’s Cathedral, 1111 Gough Street at Geary in San Francisco
Visual and educational displays – Middle Eastern refreshments
About Camp Tawonga, the 2007 Peacemakers weekend , and the growing family of 14 North American camp programs for the Middle East public peace process
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The Rainbow connection
“They’re a little insistent, but that’s the way Jews are.” – Bouncing Baby, on Chabad’s presence at the Rainbow Gathering.
Like a lot of you on this page, I go to a lot of festivals, gatherings, hoedowns and whatnot. The one big festival I’ve never been to is the Rainbow Gathering, that annual summer celebration of peace, love, and shared food in the national forest. I was pretty curious for a long while, but never got it together, and then I met E, my next-door neighbor on East 12th Street in the Village. (This was back in 2000, before I made the Westward Migration.)
E was born into the “Family,” raised in Yogaville and bringing light and music to the world with Doofus and other NYC hobos. She went to every Rainbow gathering in New York and tried to bring me along. But I was having my baalat teshuva moment at the time and all I wanted to do was gather with my newfound family…down on Grand Street. All of E’s friends seemed like mooches that wanted to eat all her food and stink up the the hallway with patchouli.
So years later, it was with interest that I today watched Under the Rainbow, Ryan Lifchitz’s documentary about a group of Lubavitchers who go to the 1998 Arizona Rainbow gathering to set up a kosher kitchen and basically, do the Chabad thing. They Bar Mitzvah people, wrap tefillin, share their food, upgrade some neshamas and so forth. They also get their minds opened a little bit about the counterculture. Our heroes have varied experiences of the scene – some are more interested and accepting than others, who see the nudity, drugs and seeker vibe as a symptom of our greater ailing moral culture.
This is a fun little documentary, and a good glimpse of a world many haven’t had the chance to see in person. The film is a bit heavy on crazy old hippies talking shit, and far too few women doing anything, but still, if you’re at all interested in Rainbow, or in Chabad, it’s worth a peek.
San Francisco seekers will get a special kick out of an adorable young Yoav Potash, who’s excited to see the Chabadniks in the forest and what the event will do to them, as well as how they will elevate the event.
Under the Rainbow (three clips of about 20 minutes each)
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Tiyul it up
This is so unpolitical, so unprogressive, so unreligious, so goshdarned secularly luxuriant and indulgent that I am almost ashamed. But that’s what you guys keep me around for right? The shameless product promotion and the random culture tips.
Okay, so a friend of a friend has launched a bimonthly e-newsletter called The Honey which is kind of an upscale travel guide to Israel. Where to get your high thread count, slow-cooked, shiatsu, wild-berry picking vacay on. This week’s issue hypes a Mitze Ramon inn with private sukkot.
I don’t live in Israel but this is the sort of thing I would have loved to read while planning my summer trip.
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Morning Becomes Israeli
I am excited to introduce the Diaspora to my friend Assaf Krauss (at far right in the photo), who besides being a total sweetheart and stylish dude, is the hardworking drummer behind the Israeli indie rock band missFlag. They sing in English, tour occasionally in the States, and bring the house down in Israel. When I saw these guys in Jerusalem during ROI120, there were all the requisite touches – cute indie rock tee shirts, misshapen hairdos, screaming girls…
Somehow, missFlag has caught the ears of KCRW’s uber-tastemaker Nic Harcourt and will be performing a live studio set this (Monday) morning at 11:15 AM Pacific, or on the web whenever you damn well please. Tune in…this is an enormous vote of confidence in the band. Kol hakavod for making it happen, guys. Welcome to the indie big time.
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Report from the original Film Fest
Hey, for those of you who didn’t know this, San Francisco has the oldest Jewish film festival going. I’m a major fan and multiyear devotee, despite the balagan of long lines and anxious ticket holders. I love the lineup of weird little documentaries, new Israeli features and especially, the films from around the world looking at Jewish stories through Mexican, French, Egyptian, and Russian lenses.
I missed much of the festival this year due to travel, but caught two films. The first was 9 Star Hotel, an overly long but totally compelling Israeli documentary about the lives of Palestinian workers hiding out in the hills near Modi’in to make a living building that city. Ido Haar’s film showed you the human side of these illegal workers without any angry posturing about the conflict or who’s right and wrong.
The unbelievable thing to me was that he made this film without any knowledge of Arabic. During the Q&A, Haar talked about how the subjects didn’t really start relaxing around him until he stopped bringing his translator along, so he was forced to just shoot hours and hours of footage and work with a translator in the edit. Wow. Painful.
Then last night, I saw the closing film in the festival, Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women, a montage-and-talking-heads nostalgia piece profiling six Jewish women in comedy, produced by the Jewish Women’s Archive.
This film relied on talking heads in a way that generally puts me to sleep, but did its job admirably: exposing me to the riches of the Archive – clips of old Yiddish theater and film, and rare filmed performances shot “before the war.†The vignettes of six women were inserted between clips of a Katz’s Deli schmoozefest of contemporary women comics, including Judy Gold, who revved up the crowd at the Castro with a short set of gay, Jewish, and born-to-a-negative-mom jokes before the film.
Obviously, the producers could have looked at any of hundreds of women comics. They focused on Molly Picon, Fanny Brice, Sophie Tucker, Joan Rivers, Wendy Wasserstein and Gilda Radner. With the exception of Wasserstein (whom I’m going to go out on a limb and call a playwright), these were excellent choices. I’m embarrassed how little I knew about the insouciant Picon and the hilarious Tucker, and my familiarity with Brice was limited to Streisand imitations. The audience was crazy for the Gilda sequences (it seems that it might be illegal, or at least inhuman not to love Gilda Radner) and the film gave me the heart-wrenching back-story on Joan Rivers. I’d had no idea why she is so fierce (and so weird) until I saw the often very sad and surprising story of her life. More please!
More or less a good time. Sure, I could have done without the line wrapping to Noe Street, the cranky volunteers who didn’t believe I was with the press (too sexy, huh?), the inconsolable bitch at the end of my row too busy shushing people to watch the film, the male editor on the stage who took most of the Q&A before Heather Gold called him out for hogging the mic from his three women colleagues, and the general oh-my-g-d-there-aren’t-going-to-be-enough-seats anxiety level that my fellow Yidden supplied.
Here’s my question: What will we be watching from the Archive when *I’m* a senior? (Please don’t tell me it’s going to be a white-haired Sarah Silverman telling doodie jokes.)
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Oy, meh haya lanu
Today is the darkest day in the Jewish calendar. It doesn’t have to be the most depressing if we use it to change our ways.
Last night, at the Mission Minyan’s reading of Eicha (the book of Lamentations), I noticed something in the text that spoke anew to me, quite strongly and damningly this year. From Chapter 5, verse 4:
We pay money to drink our own water, obtain our wood at a price.
It is easy for anyone to read Eicha, look around and draw parallels to contemporary society, whether in the modern, literal Jerusalem, or in our various communities – Jewish or otherwise. It is sadly easy to put together a compelling talk about the themes of personal, civil, spiritual and ecological destruction and degradation that Jeremiah intones, which are so revelant today.
It is also easy to stop contributing to the destruction. Stop buying your own water, the water that YOU OWN as a citizen of the earth (and of course as a taxpaying citizen of a first world country with a municipal water supply.)
I live in one of the most environmentally aware places in the US, with a delicious, pure and safe water supply coming from the Hetch Hetchy valley and dam in Yosemite…yet many people I know actually STOCK bottled water in their homes. I complain about this constantly, directly to them, to anyone who will listen. The water in Hetch Hetchy – that comes through our taps in San Francisco – is so great that my former boss at Camp Tawonga used to joke about getting rich by bottling and selling it back to all these bozos.
That’s no joke as it turns out – it’s exactly what the big bottling companies are doing. Most of the bottled water for sale in our cities comes from “municipal sources.” AKA places not even as wonderful as Hetch Hetchy.
I am tired about hearing about “convenience”. Convenience is digging us a grave of plastic. This is an easy thing to fix. Get a water bottle. Use your tap. Enjoy a wonderful municipal asset.
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Zara put its chocolate in my peanut butter
This little story is interesting because I used to love to shop at Zara. They had neat sweaters, cheap shoes and black pants that made my booty look kind of okay. (And when you live in New York you’re not allowed to wear anything besides black pants, so that worked out great.)
It seems Zara’s Israeli stores were selling some similarly black, similarly booty-enhancing clothing to the frum community in Israel without disclosing a few shatnez violations…doh.
The Spanish clothing empire took out a series of adverts in Israeli newspapers to apologise for the error, which it said happened after a mistake in one of its factories. The suit contained a combination of cotton and linen which some rabbinical authorities class as an “unnatural” blend, known as shatnez to ultra-Orthodox Jews.
In a statement, the company said: “Zara regrets this mistake and would like to reassure its clients in Israel and particularly Orthodox Jews that it will do everything possible to prevent it happening again.” Zara has also promised to refund the cost of scientific checks for shatnez, which Orthodox Jews routinely carry out when they buy clothes. They return those which test positive.
I am going to ask my Orthodox friends if they have any extra shatnez testing kits lyng around, because I have no time for ironing linen clothes anyway and if they sneak that crap into my cotton I want nothing to do with them either.
Fashion chain Zara apologises for selling ‘non-kosher’ clothing (The Independent via Jezebel)
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That “anti-war scarf” trend just doesn’t quit
It’s baaaaaack!
Everyone’s favorite anti-war scarf is back, still in four hott colors.
Spotted these in San Francisco’s Union Square Urban Outfitters the other day. I asked the checkout dude what happened, and he said,
“Oh yeah. They pulled them for awhile last month and we weren’t allowed to sell them anymore. But they just put them back. I don’t know why.”
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High fructose corn syrup is for the goyim
Get your Passover Coke, kids. It’s, like rare and stuff. I’ll be buying up all the Cali supplies and eBaying them off to you East Coast Hymietown suckas.
Read more here.
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San Francisco: Skip the Oscars and learn some Torah
If you haven’t yet marked your calendar and RSVPed for this Sunday’s BJE Feast of Jewish Learning, do it now! We have an out-of-hand lineup of classes, music, kosher deli, hamantaschen and He’Brew beer – and it’s all FREE. Best of all you get to come out and see Jewschool poster Y-Love kick it live in the truly hip atmosphere of the JCC atrium. 
The workshops range from serious text study to a niggun singing workshop to academic history lectures to a yoga class to a staged production of an Israeli play to queer readings of Talmud to depth psychology and the Purim story. There’s definitely something for everyone.
Sunday, February 25 from 4:00-10:00pm
at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco
3200 California St. @ Presidio Ave.
Download the event program here.
Full event details are at www.bjesf.org/feast
RSVP to feastrsvp@bjesf.org
See ya there. I’ll be the harried producer in the event tee shirt.
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I’m sure Wiesel will take it all back now
In a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks.
In a posting Tuesday on the anti-Zionist Web site ZioPedia, a writer using the name Eric Hunt takes credit for the attack: “After ensuring no women would be traumatized by what I had to do (I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks), I stopped the elevator at the sixth floor. I pulled Wiesel out of the elevator. I said I wanted to interview him.â€
Wiesel grabbed at his chest and yelled for help, according to the posting. “I told him, ‘Why don’t you want people to know the truth?’ His expression changed, and he began screaming again. …†the posting reads.Police reported that the suspect tried to force Wiesel into one of the rooms, but ran away when Wiesel started yelling.
The online posting states that the writer intended to “bring Wiesel to my hotel room where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, Night, is almost entirely fictitious.†Later in the posting, the Holocaust is portrayed as a “myth.â€
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Feast on this, San Francisco
Last year, I went to this awesome event here in San Francisco, and I babbled on at such great length to the organizers about how great it was that they turned around and hired me to produce it this year. Seriously.
It gives me great pleasure to announce the BJE’s Second Annual Feast of Jewish Learning in San Francisco with special guest Y-Love. This is a Limmud-style event that happens in one giant building on one giant day in the heart of SF. It is the onl event of its kind all year long in our fair city so you won’t want to miss it! Last year, 500 people attended. Let’s make it even bigger. Please RSVP immediately so’s we can get our caterer busy schechting and stuff.
The Bureau of Jewish Education is proud to present:
“Telling Secrets, Revealing Mysteriesâ€
The Second Annual Young Adult Feast of Jewish Learning.
At the JCC of San Francisco: 3200 California St.
Sunday, February 25, 4:00pm to 10:00pm
FREE OF CHARGE
RSVP with your full name to feastrsvp@bjesf.org so that we save you a seat, and know how much food to get!
Join 500 of your best friends for twenty-five free workshops on Jewish thought, text, life and love. It’s all free. All you have to do is show up, and we’ll supply the Bay Area’s most exciting Jewish faculty, free kosher food, the West Coast premiere of hip hop artist Y-Love, plus plenty of He’brew beer and schmooze time.
Whether you’re a little yeshiva bachur or a total newbie, there’s something here for you. The program features different branches of Judaism and totally different outlooks on life – academic, secular, orthodox, queer, activist, romantic, businessy…Feeling texty? There’s lots of Talmud and Torah – in both classic and more edgy presentations – on the menu. Spiritually inclined? Learn about Hasidic practice, study Kabbalah – the real thing, or sing the mystical songs called nigguns. How about something completely different, like yoga, theater, baking or film? Each participant can attend two 90-minute workshops from great local presenters like
Rabbi Camille Angel * Sam Ball * Rabbi Eve Ben-Ora * Maya Bernstein * Mitch Braff Dr. Marc Dollinger * Estelle Frankel * Dr. David Henkin * Hazzan Richard Kaplan * Emily Shapiro Katz * Rabbi Lawrence Kushner * Rabbi Sydney Mintz * Rabbi Gedalia Potash * Leah Potash * Bill Selig * Rabbi Henry Shreibman * Maggid Jhos Singer Rabbi Joshua Strulowitz * Reise Tanner * Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan
Bring your friends and partners: this day of education is open to everyone 21-45. Get the full scoop at www.bjesf.org/feast.
Co-presented by the Taube Center for Jewish Life of JCCSF. The Feast of Jewish Learning is made possible, in part, thanks to the Milton & Sophie Meyer Fund and Sinai Memorial Chapel. Bureau of Jewish Education is a beneficiary of the SF-based Jewish Community Federation.
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A convenient new way to meet toppy Israeli men
“What’s your name?”
The words were shouted inches from my ear, heavily accented, angry.
“What do you do?”
“I’m a reporter.” My words were muffled by the cloth bag over my head, the rope around my throat that tightened every time I started to straighten my duct-taped legs. My hands, wrapped in coils of rope, had lost all sensation.
“A reporter! A Jewish reporter!” the voice roared. “You work for the Zionists! Do you work for the Mossad?” And the blows rained down, not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to make me happy when they stopped.
Then, the same voice: “Get the chain saw.”
I wasn’t too concerned. The voice was that of Doron Benbenisty, 37, owner and lead instructor of Las Vegas-based Crisis Response International. …the amount of muscle behind the beating was less amusing. But I had paid for this treatment: $800 for a three-day class on “Surviving Execution/Beheading/Assassination Attempts & Escaping from Captivity.” That’s with a holiday discount.
Read all about San Francisco’s new training course in hostage avoidance in today’s SF Chronicle.
I’m sure this is an important and probably vital part of training for journalists in some parts of the world these days, and in no way do I mean to trivialize this sort of thing, but why am I so delightedly unphased to find photos of hunky Israeli men – with guns no less – tying people up on the front page of the Chron? Oh yeah, because I live in San Francisco.
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Another reason to hit the Poconos this Labor Day
Watch out, urbanites. Pat Robertson has spoken to God, and we’re in trouble. God apparently told him that a terrorist attack will cause a “mass killing” late in ’07, just as God told him that He smote Ariel Sharon as retribution for the ceding of land to the Palestinians.
“I’m not necessarily saying it’s going to be nuclear,” he said during his news-and-talk television show “The 700 Club” on the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“The Lord didn’t say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that.”
Robertson said God told him about the impending tragedy during a recent prayer retreat.
God also said, he claims, that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place sometime after September.
That’s right, Pat. The Lord didn’t say nuclear. He probably said nucular.
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Ah ha, hush that fuss (Or, an eye for an eye, a hat for a snood)
An update on the “Jewish Rosa Parks” story from Israel:
A woman who reported a vicious attack by an ad-hoc “modesty patrol” on a Jerusalem bus last month is now lining up support for her case and may be included in a petition to the High Court of Justice over the legality of sex-segregated buses.
Miriam Shear says she was traveling to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem’s Old City early on November 24 when a group of ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) men attacked her for refusing to move to the back of the Egged No. 2 bus….In her first interview since the incident, Shear says that on the bus three weeks ago, she was slapped, kicked, punched and pushed by a group of men who demanded that she sit in the back of the bus with the other women.
“Every two or three days, someone would tell me to sit in the back, sometimes politely and sometimes not,” she recalled this week in a telephone interview. “I was always polite and said ‘No. This is not a synagogue. I am not going to sit in the back.’”
But Shear, a 50-year-old religious woman, says that on the morning of the 24th, a man got onto the bus and demanded her seat – even though there were a number of other seats available in the front of the bus.
“I said, I’m not moving and he said, ‘I’m not asking you, I’m telling you.’ Then he spat in my face and at that point, I was in high adrenaline mode and called him a son-of-a-bitch, which I am not proud of. Then I spat back. At that point, he pushed me down and people on the bus were screaming that I was crazy. Four men surrounded me and slapped my face, punched me in the chest, pulled at my clothes, beat me, kicked me. My snood [hair covering] came off. I was fighting back and kicked one of the men in his privates. I will never forget the look on his face.”
Shear says that when she bent down in the aisle to retrieve her hair covering, “one of the men kicked me in the face. Thank God he missed my eye. I got up and punched him. I said, ‘I want my hair covering back’ but he wouldn’t give it to me, so I took his black hat and threw it in the aisle.”
More absolutely infuriating details here. I imagine that those of you who live in Israel have your own eyewitness accounts of this sort of thing. I know we see posts about these incidents from time to time and I think it’s important to keep the issue alive.
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Start your own damn Jewish tee shirt company
In the course of running JewishFashionConspiracy.com I run into lots of schmatte schleppers, and have lately come to know the folks at Goodstorm.com, which is a company doing “progressive eCommerce.” Think CafePress, only you can actually make some money ($6 or more per shirt). Plus they have music downloads and books you can sell.
I would encourage ya’ll who blog or run a non-profit/arts org that needs to raise cash to check out Goodstorm.com – the embedabble store widget is dope and it’s a painless way to open a storefront.
Everyone else, I want to call your attention to their last-minute Chanukah gift thingamahoo, the T-shirt Wizard. $25 gets you an eCard to send to a friend that lets your friend design a shirt herself and get it custom printed and shipped to her. I’m sold, I got two of them.
Hell, now you can all start your own Jewish tee shirt company and spell Nes Gadol Haya Sham however you want.
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Can the Year of Anti-Semitism please end already?
The sniping about Judith Regan’s abrupt dismissal by HarperCollins last Friday is getting uglier and uglier, and I am nauseous to see that conversations about anti-Semitism have entered the arena.
‘Of all people, the Jews should know about ganging up, finding common enemies and telling the big lie,’†Ms. Regan said, according to the notes Mark Jackson made as the conversation unfolded…according to the notes, Ms. Regan then said that the literary agent Esther Newberg; HarperCollins’ executive editor, David Hirshey; HarperCollins’ president, Jane Friedman; and Mr. Jackson “constitute a Jewish cabal against her.â€
A lawyer for Ms. Regan, Bert Fields, denied Monday that she had said there was a “Jewish cabal against her,†saying that she had used only the word “cabal†in the conversation, and that was done in response to Mr. Jackson’s using the word in a question to her. But Mr. Fields acknowledged that during the heated conversation by phone last Friday, she had made some version of the first statement, drawing attention to the fact that her boss and others involved in the controversy over the aborted O. J. Simpson project were Jewish.
He denied, though, that this reflected any anti-Semitism. “There is nothing insulting to Jewish people in saying that Jews should particularly understand what it is to be victims of the big lie,†Mr. Fields said. “They were looking for an excuse to fire her, and they fired her, and called it anti-Semitic. It ain’t anti-Semitic.â€
The New York Times article goes on to dissect whether or not who said what, and whether or not it was lifted out of context. No doubt it was.
Look, I’ve never been a beleagered Judith Regan, or a drunk Mel Gibson. I’ve got no idea what it’s like to be a celebrity millionaire hot head in the midst of getting fired. Who the hell knows what she said? What I want to know is why I should care? Here’s what I do know: a shitstorm of media about whether or not this editor yelled anti-Semitic comments at a lawyer isn’t good for anyone, let alone the Jews. I thought we were past the era of PC policing. If Judith Regan is an anti-Semite, good riddance. Let her fester in her own unemploment and misery. Can’t we talk about something else in the newspapers?
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