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Smoked Salmon No Longer Kosher

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:34:00 GMT-5

It’s Karp vs. Salmon in the strange story of the Israeli rabbi who declared salmon non-kosher.

If you thought Rabbinic ruling which pronounced New York water treyf was not odd enough, in recent weeks Rabbi Moshe Karp of Modi’in Illit (Israel) damned salmon, halibut and flounder as no longer kosher due to Anisakis, a tiny roundworm, that lives inside them.

Although explicitly allowed by the Gemara, Karp and some of his haredi colleagues claim that the worm has mutated and grown to proportions unprecedented by Talmud, and is therefore now prohibited. No more lox and bagels for Modi’in Illit folks, his Brooklyn audiences seemed unconvinced though.

Sources: MSNBC and The Jewish Star

Eat Kike's Treyf (pron. "Keekay")

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 20:47:00 GMT-5

There’s something about street food and the word “kike.”

On November 19, 2009 I blogged about San Francisco’s “Kike on a Bike” and now, not to be outdone, Los Angeles has offered us “Kike’s Tacos.”

Though often an antisemitic slur KUOR assures us that, in this case, Kike is pronounced “Keekay” and is a regular abbreviation for Enrique. Plus, by all accounts, the menu offers a mouthwatering selection of pig-oriented treyf so the kosher clientele would be keeping away before they even reached the ambiguous welcome sign.

Although the number of Enriques in America is growing, the starting point is fairly low, with the 1990 census only ranking Enrique 298 out of 1219 new boys names. With relatively few Enriques and a little encouragement to standardize the rendering of the abbreviation as Quique or Keekay, the gentle sensibilities of our compatriots need not be disturbed too much in future.

Hat tip to Dan Polsby.

Israel’s New PR Scheme: Healthy Zionism or Sinister Stalinism?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 19:17:00 GMT-5

So, Yuli Edelstein has decided to turn every Israeli in to an ambassador. As part of a new campaign called “Explaining Israel” he is putting out pamphlets, running television advertisements and operating a website asking citizens to get involved in a public diplomacy drive for Israel. “We decided to give Israelis who go abroad tools and tips to help them deal with the attacks on Israel in their conversations with people, media appearances and lectures before wide audiences,” Edelstein, Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister, told the Jerusalem Post close to the start of the campaign. “I hope we succeed together in changing the picture and proving to the world that there is a different Israel.”

Last week his office said that the campaign’s Web site Masbirim (“explainers”) received 150,000 hits in its first fortnight, and revealed that an English-language site is in the pipeline.

Israel's 'Most Sexist' Ads

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:39:00 GMT-5

Sex sells. This marketing approach has become so commonplace that it is not only used to sell cars, beer, and football, but also to sell seemingly innocuous items like yogurt, laundry detergent, toothpaste, potato chips and lawn mowers. It is even used to target female consumers, for products such as facial cleanser, diet soda, perfume, tampons, and salads at McDonald’s. The marketplace has become so immersed in sexed-up images of women that, apparently, many people do not even realize anymore how hurtful these ads can be to the female gender.

To remind people that using women as sex objects in order to sell products is hurtful and distorted, WIZO has launched a campaign for the second year in a row to highlight “Israel’s Most Sexist Commercials of the Year.” No, not “sexiest” but most “sexist.” Their criteria for “sexist” is frighteningly simple. Sexist ads are ones that chop up women’s bodies into parts or depict women’s bodies without the faces, that depict women’s bodies as edible replacements for food or meat, that offer women’s bodies as objects for sale or consumption, that reinforce stereotypes and stigmas about women, that infantilize women or portray women as stupid, that promote women as sexual servants, that encourage violence or sexual violence against women, and that legitimize rape.

From YouTube to Broadway

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:45:00 GMT-5

Singer-songwriter Michelle Citrin, perhaps best known for her YouTube hits “Rosh Hashanah Girl” and “20 Things to Do with Matzah,” has the Internet to thank for her latest gig: composer and lyricist for the Broadway-bound “Sleepless in Seattle: The Musical,” set to debut February 2011.

The show’s producer, David Shor, saw her YouTube postings and tracked down the diminutive, dreadlocked musician on her Facebook page, sending her an e-mail in September asking her to lend her musical chops to the production. She was asked to write a couple of songs as an audition.

After getting over the shock, Citrin contacted her good friend, fellow Jewish musician Josh Nelson, to co-write the audition lyrics. They sent Shor two songs, and “the next thing I know we’re flying to Santa Barbara to meet the team,” Citrin said.

The interview was a success, and Citrin and Nelson were asked to collaborate on the show’s music and lyrics.

Citrin is currently working with Hollywood veterans to bring “Sleepless in Seattle” to Broadway. Along with Shor, she’ll be collaborating on the lyrics with Michael Garin, a composer and lyricist who worked on the musical “Song of Singapore”; Jeff Arch, who wrote the original screenplay for the movie and is writing the dialog for the production; and Joel Zwick, who will direct the show.

These days, Michelle’s incredibly busy, pulling all nighters on the collaboration – “sometimes [we stay up working] until 4 a.m.,” she says – and simultaneously juggling the upcoming release of her first album, “Left Brained, Right Hearted.”

So has this former medical school student finally convinced her family that she made the right choice by dropping out to pursue her dream? “I don’t know,” she laughs, “They still send me the latest articles about upcoming professions in the medical world and say, ‘Oh, you’d be so good at this!’”

Perhaps that’s something she can fall back on if her current career doesn’t pan out. If however, she wins a Tony Award some day, Citrin says, “It would be great to be the first person to get up on stage and thank my family and friends … and unleavened bread.”

Kelly Hartog is a freelance writer living in Los Angeles. She is the founder and editor of Scribblers on the Roof, a Web site devoted to writers of Jewish fiction and poetry.

International Women's Day: Whom Should We Celebrate?

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:44:00 GMT-5

Today is International Women’s Day, a day to – what? I’m not really sure. It is, according to the [official site] of the day, “a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, IWD is a national holiday.”

This is its 99th year, after being established by a German socialist politician and agitator for change, Clara Zetkin. She established the first International Women’s Day in Germany.

Zetkin came up with the idea in 1910, at the second International Conference of Working Women. According to the IWD site:

She proposed that every year in every country there should be a celebration on the same day - a Women’s Day - to press for their demands. The conference of over 100 women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties, working women’s clubs, and including the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, greeted Zetkin’s suggestion with unanimous approval and thus International Women’s Day was the result.

At the Oscars, Golda's Biographer Pulls a Kanye West

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 10:32:00 GMT-5

In an Oscars ceremony that seemed languid at times and straight up bizarre at others (interpretive breakdancing?!), one moment stood out as one of the more dramatic of the evening. If you were watching, you know what I’m talking about: the woman who pulled a Kanye. Well, it turns out — doesn’t it always — that there is a Jewish connection, and a pretty funny one given the circumstances.

The winner for best documentary short went to “Music By Prudence,” a film about a group of Zimbabwean musicians. Its director, Roger Ross Williams, stepped up to the microphone to make his acceptance speech, got about 10 seconds into it, and was then, almost literally, shoved aside by a woman in a purple gown, saying “Let a woman talk!” Williams then stood there stunned, as the woman indeed talked until those telltale strains of orchestral music sounded and the show moved on.

The name of the woman, Elinor Burkett, didn’t register last night, but this morning I suddenly remembered where I had heard it before. Burkett is also an author, and last year I reviewed in the Forward a biography of Golda Meir that she wrote. The book, titled “Golda” was published in 2008 and — to quote myself — it is a “sympathetic but unapologetic” look at Israel’s first woman premier. I estimated at the time that Burkett had done a pretty good job giving us a more complex picture of Golda, one I described as presenting “a tragic, lonely, sickly figure, a terrible mother who cuckolded and neglected her husband, alienated her loved ones and often terrorized her closest friends.”

‘Ajami’ Co-Director Says He Does Not Represent Israel

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 15:54:00 GMT-5

Since everything in Israel ultimately boils down to politics, it was only a matter of time before “Ajami,” the Israeli movie nominated for an Oscar, would be thrust into the fray. And what a better time to do so than hours before the film’s creators walk down the red carpet, waiting for the envelope to be opened.

It was the film’s co-director, Scandar Copti, who ignited the debate. Speaking to reporters after attending a symposium with other directors of movies nominated in the foreign-language film category, Copti made a point of distancing himself from the state of Israel.

“I’m not here representing Israel,” he said. “I’m an Israeli citizen, but I cannot represent a state that doesn’t represent me,” Copti, an Arab Israel from Jaffa said.

Pre-Oscar Reading: Meaning Between the Lines of 'A Serious Man'

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:15:00 GMT-5

Like a lot of people I know, I was blown away by the Coen Brothers’ Oscar nominee, “A Serious Man.” Behind the absurdist comedy, it captured a penetrating insight about the Job theme in Jewish tradition and the vapidity so pervasive in contemporary American Jewish life. But I’ve been struggling in the months since I saw it to find words that could capture the depth of insight. I know I’m not the only one.

Well, this week’s Los Angeles Jewish Journal has a brilliant review-essay on the film and what it says about suburban Judaism in the mid-1960s, on the eve of the Six-Day War. (I confess I hadn’t even noticed the clues in the film that gave away the date the events were supposed to be taking place.) The author, Rabbi Anne Brener, a psychotherapist according to her bio in the Journal, got that (a calendar on the rabbi’s wall!) and a whole lot more.

Her essay is titled“When The Truth Is Found to Be Lies: The Coen Brothers’ Rorschach for Serious People.” Sharp readers will recognize those words as the beginning of a classic 1967 track by the Jefferson Airplane. Brener nails the role that the song plays in the film’s soundtrack. She also gets the Yiddish folk stuff that confused so many viewers.

If you have a moment before tonight’s Best Picture announcement, click the link and check it out.

Here’s a taste:

For the Unlikely Stars of 'Ajami,' Hollywood Is a Balancing Act

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:39:00 GMT-5

The actors of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film, “Ajami” are trying to soak up as much glamour as they can in America’s movie capital. It’s not only their first time in Hollywood; it’s their first time in America.

“Ajami” cast members are not professional actors. Most are Arab residents of Ajami — a violence-stricken neighborhood of Jaffa, where the film is set — and all are ordinary Israelis who thought it could be interesting to join this unusual movie project. They were handpicked by the film’s writers and directors Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani.

Now, seven years after the idea of “Ajami” began to take shape, these amateur actors are starting to feel the glare of stardom. In Israel, they’ve already become local celebrities and their visit to Hollywood made this even clearer — with cameras and reporters capturing their every move.

It’s a tricky balancing act for the actors, who left their day jobs in Jaffa, and made the trip to Los Angeles. Talking to reporters they struggled between natural enthusiasm and a need to maintain their cool, and not to let the glory get to their heads.

Rabbi Avi Weiss Backs Down From Ordaining Women

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:01:00 GMT-5

It’s seems like an effort to put the rabba back in the hat.

Rabbi Avi Weiss, who is not usually known for backing down from a fight, on Friday announced via a statement from the Rabbinical Council of America that after discussions with officials there, he is rescinding his decision to describe the women who complete his five-year course of study at the new Yeshivat Maharat as ordained rabbas — a feminized form of the title rabbi.

Last spring, he announced that women who completed this course of study, comparable to that which male rabbinical school students receive at his Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, would be called Maharat, for Manhiga Hilchatit Ruchanit Toranit, which means leader in Jewish law, spirituality and Torah.

It did not prompt as much of an outcry from the Orthodox world as I had expected it would. But that changed when, in late January, Weiss changed the title of the one woman already bearing this title, Sara Hurwitz, to rabba, saying that the change would “make clear that Sara is a full member of our rabbinic staff” at his Bronx synagogue, the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale.

In Israel, the Most Popular 'Jewish Mother' Is an Arab Muslim

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 17:14:00 GMT-5

In the world of Israeli popular culture, the most popular maternal figure at the moment is a very different kind of Jewish mother — a proud Arab Muslim who prays five times daily, calls the Koran her favorite book, obsessively puffs on a hookah pipe and proudly wears a keffiyah.

Futna Jabber is one of the five finalists on Israel’s version of the reality show hit “Big Brother,” after viewers voted week after week to keep the vivacious 37-year-old on their screens for more than three months. So popular was Futna, that she didn’t even have to worry in the last round of voting: None of her housemates nominated her for eliminations. The results of the final eliminations will be announced Thursday on the show’s finale.

Are Wage Gaps Keeping Israel Out of the OECD?

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:39:00 GMT-5

The gap between women’s wages and men’s wages in Israel is getting wider. According to the latest annual survey conducted by Oketz Systems, men in senior management positions in Israel are making on average 29% more than women in identical positions.

The survey results show a distinct widening of the gender gap in salaries. Last year, the gap was 26%; in 2007 the gap was 25%; in 2005, the gap stood at 23%. It exists in all levels of employment, but increases in senior management positions. The gap is 24% among CEOs, 26% among those second in command, and 41% among product managers. The widest gap of 49% is noted among marketing managers, in which men earn on average 29,480 NIS ($7,833) per month and women earn on average 19,730 NIS ($5,243) per month. Only in administrative positions does the gap all but disappear — with monthly wages of 5,270 NIS ($1,400) for men and 5,260 NIS ($1,397) for women.

Embracing the Bad-Ass and the Beauty

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:30:00 GMT-5

I couldn’t read all the Esther and Vashti talk around the Web, without chiming in myself. Like Elissa Strauss, I dressed up as one of the two queens every year at my Jewish day school’s Purim carnival — at least until 3rd or 4th grade when we started getting more creative with our costumes. Whether I was Esther or Vashti depended on the statement I wanted to make any given year. I remember feeling quite torn between being the perfect princess and being the bad-ass one (not that I knew what such a term meant, but I knew they were different).

The way I was told the story of Esther and Vashti makes me realize how early we’re indoctrinated with certain conceptions of gender — the good, obedient, selfless girl vs. the rebel. These two are our very own Jewish version of the Madonna-Eve, or Virgin-Whore dichotomy. Many feminists this week have talked about the way Esther and Vashti represent two ways of dealing with the patriarchy — either using beauty and patience to get your way, or standing up outright and facing the consequences. It’s the kind of debate we have in feminist circles all the time: Do we concede rhetoric to get change accomplished (the Esther way) or do we stand up for our principles at any cost (the Vashti way)?

More Jewish Conspiracies? Avent and Microsoft

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 11:52:00 GMT-5

We’re convinced that all these Jewish conspiracy theories originate with an in joke.

For instance, anyone with a young child, sleep deprivation and a history of working in the Jewish media would see how infant-product company Avent is a secret Jewish cabal.

And furthermore, a few weeks ago, Darren Garnick spotted the uncanny resemblance of the new MS Office for Mac icons to Hebrew letters and wrote about it on his Culture Shlock blog.

He went as far as contacting Microsoft about it, and a representative responded that the company merely attempted to create a new look that is “Approachable, Energetic, Exacting and Elegant. Any resemblance… is purely coincidental.”

The Hebrew letters, positioned one next to the other, as on the image above, spell out the word “kash,” which means “straw” in Hebrew (the alef is extraneous but phonetically it works out). What could all this mean? Nothing, of course, but we’re sure conspiracy-theory fans will find yet another message of Jewish world-domination here. The straw that broke the camel’s back! Camel being the white Western male, of course. The straw they sip their hummus through! The straw they gathered to make Pharaoh’s bricks — Israel is about to reclaim the storage cities of Pithom and Ramses.

No, no, we swear, we’re just being… Approachable and Energetic!

They Won’t Leave Lonesome Joe Alone

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 01:41:00 GMT-5

The stormy relationship between Joe Lieberman and the Democrats is proving to be a bottomless source of inspiration for political reporters and philosophers of our time. Occasionally somebody writes something that can make you smarter. But not always. In the smart category is this piece in Time magazine by Massimo Calabrese, titled “The Loneliest Senator: Can the Democrats Forgive Joe Lieberman?”

Calabrese isn’t very sanguine on whether the rancor will go away.

Most of the tension may never abate. While fellow Democrats in the Senate treat him much as they always have, he is a pariah to the fundraisers, liberal activists and netroots bloggers who have largely engineered the party’s comeback since 2006.

On the other hand, Calabrese is pretty clear that they should make the effort to patch things up. Lieberman is turning out to be one of the White House’s more important allies in the Senate, Calabrese writes. He’s served as a bridge to Republicans at moments when no one else on the Democratic side had the relationships. As a an example, he’s taken the lead role, at White House request, in the effort to draft and enact legislation ending the current Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on gays in the military.

It is the latest bit of cooperation between the President and the man the party nominated to be its Vice President a decade ago. Over the past year, Lieberman has rounded up votes and searched for compromise on issues ranging from the stimulus bill to energy legislation and has worked behind the scenes to grease the wheels for a few of the Administration’s most controversial nominees.

“There is a certain irony to this,” Lieberman tells Calabrese.

“I have been called in to help the Obama Administration for the very reason that has made some Democrats unhappy with me, which is that I have ongoing, trusting relationships with some of the Republicans.”

At the opposite extreme, here’s a piece from the year-old conservative webzine The New Ledger that is so dumb it achieves a certain sublime nobility. The author, Benjamin Kerstein, an assistant editor at the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center’s Azure magazine, wants to show that the recent wave of liberal attacks on Lieberman for his health-care obstructionism is somehow rooted in antisemitism — or, as he delicately puts it, “seemed to return again and again, as if by some gravitational force, to the issue of Lieberman’s Judaism.”

Parlaying the Power of Pretty

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 19:43:00 GMT-5

When I was in kindergarten I played Queen Esther in our synagogue’s Purim spiel. I remember feeling pretty good about playing the lead, and energized that the role called for playing a heroine and putting on a frilly pink dress.

I thought about this Saturday during a discussion at my synagogue about gender and power in the book of Esther. We looked at the way Esther derives her power from her beauty — and questioned whether she really was powerful at all.

Purim is being increasingly interpreted as a feminist holiday, from the re-reading of the non-Jewish Queen Vashti as a defiant hero, to the all-female megillah readings growing in observant communities. Fellow Sisterhood contributor Elana Sztokman wrote about how Queen Esther is interpreted as an agunah, or a woman stuck in an unwanted marriage, in this recent post.

Israel’s New P.R. Scheme: Healthy Zionism or Sinister Stalinism?

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:30:00 GMT-5

Likud Knesset member Yuli Edelstein has decided to turn every Israeli in to an ambassador. As part of a new campaign called “Explaining Israel” he is putting out pamphlets, running television advertisements and operating a website asking citizens to get involved in a public diplomacy drive for Israel. “We decided to give Israelis who go abroad tools and tips to help them deal with the attacks on Israel in their conversations with people, media appearances and lectures before wide audiences,” Edelstein, Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister, told the Jerusalem Post close to the start of the campaign. “I hope we succeed together in changing the picture and proving to the world that there is a different Israel,” he said.

Last week his office said that the campaign’s website Masbirim (“explainers”) received 150,000 hits in its first fortnight, and revealed that an English-language site is in the pipeline.

Some are excited by the initiative — as much for its potential effect on Israelis as on the country’s PR. Hagai Segal, a right-wing columnist on Ynet wrote that a “lethal virus of skepticism has been running wild here for years and pulverized our faith in the righteousness of our way.” He believes that “these public relations efforts are not directed at the international arena, but rather, are aimed inwards. Israel’s citizens, who are supposed to use the website’s help in order to promote the country abroad, are the real target audience of this new venture, and rightfully so.”

New Studies Show: Layoffs Kill. What Are We Doing About It? Nothing

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 04:56:00 GMT-5

There was a whopper of a scandal on the front page of the New York Times last Wednesday (February 26). It was the sort of story that makes everybody sit up, that changes the national discourse. Think of the Pentagon Papers or Bill Clinton’s Oval Office indiscretions. When misbehavior on a grand scale is brought to the public’s attention the way this Times story was, people usually demand an accounting. Except that this time they haven’t. It’s disappeared with a big yawn.

Perhaps it was the bland headline the Times gave it: “For Workers at Closing Plant, Ordeal Included Heart Attacks.”

Translation: Layoffs kill.

It should have been obvious, when you think about it. It’s no secret that losing your job, especially if you’re a family breadwinner, commonly leads to anxiety, stress, fear for the future, humiliation and loss of self-esteem. It often leads—especially these days—to long-term unemployment, loss of family income, decline in nutrition, loss of home and health coverage. And if you think about, that combination is a recipe for sleeplessness, unhealthy lethargy, cardiac problems and, in the worst case—though hardly a rarity—heart attacks and even suicide.

The trouble is, we don’t think about it.

How big a problem are we talking about? Here’s what the Times said:

Why Orthodox Girls Don't Figure Skate

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:00:00 GMT-5

This is one of my favorite seasons of all time: Olympic figure-skating season. For me, every other sport, in or out of the Olympics, holds a very distant second place, if at all, on my scale of interest. When I read in Gia Kourlas’ New York Times piece that she is always met with laughter when she tells people that she is a former figure skater, I was incredulous. After all, if I were to meet a professional figure skater, my response would undoubtedly be, “That’s so cool!” while inside I would be thinking, “I’m so jealous….” I cannot imagine anyone laughing.

Figure skating is among the many professions that seem like they will never be open to an Orthodox Jewish girl. It’s not just the outfits that reveal far more thigh and shoulder action than the average day school dress code. Although, interestingly, the lovely Israeli pairs’ team, Alexandra and Roman Zaretsky, tried hard to transform Orthodox attire into an ethnically intriguing skating costume; they did not quite pull it off, in part because all the above-the-knee skin made it a bit inauthentic and in part because it’s hard for me to idealize so-called “modest” women’s attire as something quaint, like a an Indian sari or Sioux headdress. Mostly, though, it’s simply hard to imagine an Orthodox Jewish couple dancing with such ardor. It’s of like trying to imagine President Obama knitting, or Rabbi Ovadia Yosef doing yoga.