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You Will Not Recognize Larry David

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:10:00 GMT-5

Larry David has got himself a long beard and hair for his upcoming HBO film, “Clear History,” leaving the Jewish funnyman basically unrecognizable.

After watching the bald character on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” for so many years, the character in his new film, out this August, resembles nothing of the personality of anal, self-inflicting, persona, just by the fact that he has hair— and lots of it.

The new trailer doesn’t have any dialogue so we don’t know for sure if there will be any David-isms, but film director Greg Mottola of “Super Bad,” said the movie has a lot of improv, according to New York Mag.

“Clear History” will also star Bill Hader, Jon Hamm, Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton, Danny McBride, and Amy Ryan.

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No 'Israeli ABBA' — Again

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:57:00 GMT-5

A Romanian opera singer dressed like Dracula and wailing falsetto. Dancers in a Perspex boxes and drummers dosed in baby oil. Moustachioed Greeks dancing and singing about the joys of free alcohol. A Russian plea for world peace in three minutes with a key change.

In case you missed it, that was the Eurovision Song Contest, Europe’s annual festival of music, costumes, and lights that at once unites, divides, and simply baffles the continent. And the winner wasn’t half bad this year. Denmark’s Emmilie de Forest sang “Only Teardrops,” a steady tune with a smattering of drums and Celtic pipes, and won 281 points, including the maximum points from eight countries, beating out Azerbaijan and the Ukraine respectively.

Absent once more from the spectacle was Israel. Since Harel Skaat placed 14th in the 2010 final with “Milim” (“Words”), Israel has failed to make it out of the semi-finals on three successive occasions. This year, Israel entered the talented if unknown reality show winner Moran Mazor, and her ballad “Rak bishvilo” (“Only for him”) fell flat in the semi-final, finishing 14th out of 17 acts.

For its size, Israel has a very strong record in Eurovision. Since it first entered in 1973, Israel has won on three occasions – including back-to-back in 1978 and 1979 with “A-Ba-Ni-Bi” and “Hallelujah” – and has come second twice and third once. This is more remarkable given Israel hasn’t even submitted an entry every year, missing the contest when it has fallen on the memorial days Yom HaShoah or Yom Hazikaron.

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Curing My iPhone Addiction

Tue, 21 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

This is the third post in a Sisterhood series by Nina Badzin on gadgets, family and work.

As I reported last month, I’ve made some progress in cutting my iPhone time in half. I started charging my phone in the kitchen instead of my bedroom, which eliminated any phone use in the early morning and during the last moments of the night. (And by “moments” I mean an hour, which is true for many late-night smartphone abusers.) I increased my iPhone-free time on Shabbat and stopped placing my phone on the table when I’m out with friends or family at restaurants and coffee shops.

Progress! Right? From the way I brag about my new habits you would think an awards reception was in order. Unfortunately, my progress has stalled since implementing the aforementioned measures. While I have not backtracked on the changes I made, what’s happening is something I like to call The Spanx Effect.

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Wise Sons' Deli Brings Pastrami to SF Jewish Museum

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:26:00 GMT-5

For those who may have been wondering whether new tastes would arrive at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco with its new director, there is now an answer. While Lori Starr will not officially become the museum’s new executive director until June 10, word is already out that Wise Sons will be moving into the downtown museum’s vacant restaurant not long afterwards.

Wise Sons’ Evan Bloom and Leo Beckerman, who are among the leaders of the Jewish deli revival of recent years, told j., the Jewish news weekly of Northern California, that they were very excited to open a second location at CJM. “It’s the next logical step for us,” Bloom said about the projected mid-to-late June opening.

To accommodate the additional food production involved in expanding beyond their restaurant at the corner of 24th and Shotwell Streets in the Mission District, Bloom and Beckerman have leased a new space that will allow for the increased production of baked goods and cured meats.

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What We Can Learn From Mel Brooks About Racism

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:00:00 GMT-5

“Blazing Saddles” is generally regarded as Mel Brooks’s best movie: It was ranked sixth on the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 greatest American comedies and it was nominated for three Academy Awards. “Best,” though, is a relative term. Brooks’s Borscht Belt-meets-absurdism style is so unique and so indelible that what we call the “best” is usually the first of his movies we fell in love with.

It’s safer to say that “Blazing Saddles” was Brooks’s most timely movie, even his most serious movie. And it’s as safe to say that there wouldn’t be a Mel Brooks installment of PBS’s “American Masters” (premiering May 20; check local listings) without “Blazing Saddles.”

The opening scene is terrific and justifiably famous. We see a mix of Chinese and black workers pounding hammers under the desert sun. Their vicious and idiotic white overseers demand they sing spirituals like they did when they were slaves. The workers huddle, break apart, and slowly we hear a sweet, beautiful voice: “I get no kick from champagne.” Almost before we can process the joke, Brooks lays a second one atop the first: the black workers join in, harmonizing with the lead singer. This isn’t one person singing Cole Porter; this is a full, sophisticated a cappella routine. Brooks continues to add inversion after inversion, but the jokes work because the first few bars of that unexpected, anachronistic song say so much about racial ignorance.

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Ashton Kutcher Meets Mila Kunis's Mishpacha

Mon, 20 May 2013 15:35:00 GMT-5

Ashton Kutcher met the parents.

Over the weekend, the Steve Jobs impersonator was spotted in London hanging out with the parents of his Jewish girlfriend, “Oz” star Mila Kunis.

The Hollywood power couple have been dating for about a year now, and this was Kutcher’s first time meeting the Kunis family, the Daily Mail reports.

Kunis’s parents, Mark and Elvira, were visiting their daughter in London, where she lives while filming her new movie, “Jupiter Ascending.” Things with the parents must have gone well because paparazzi snapped photos of Kutcher and Kunis happily holding hands as they went for a stroll around Hampstead on Sunday, with Kunis’s parents following closely behind.

This is somewhat of a big step for Kutcher and Kunis — only two months ago, Kutcher told Elle that he is extremely private about his relationship with Kunis and will do all that he can to keep it that way. Yet weeks later, he’s strolling around town, getting cozy with the family.

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Researchers Feud Over Jewish Genes

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:50:00 GMT-5

Are Jews genetically homogenous? Though it’s certainly been a loaded question historically, the quandary has been the domain of scientists for a number of years now, all of whom have pretty much come up with the same answer: yes. But that was before Eran Elhaik entered the picture. An Israeli molecular geneticist, Elhaik is interested, it seems, not just in doing science, but in reveling in his role as a spoiler.

As a Forward story recently described it, he has written a report that claims Ashkenazi Jews are descendent from Khazars, a Turkic people from the Caucasus who converted to Judaism in the eighth century. This flies in the face of that established genetic research, which did prove a continuous genetic link between Ashkenazi Jews and the Middle East, positing that they descended from Jews who fled Palestine after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century. As Elhaik put it in the article, he sees this fairly well accepted theory as “nonsense.”

Perhaps to be expected, the comments section of this article became a microcosm for all the heated emotion that this issue inspires. Elhaik himself even jumped into the fray.

The person who kicked off the fierce debate was Jon Entine, who wrote a book, “Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People”, which presents the more established reading of Jewish genetic history. He also runs the Genetic Literacy Project at George Mason University. Entine insisted that the evidence is “incontrovertible”: “Ashkenazi Jewry is a coherent population, much like blacks descended from western Africa, the Amish or Icelanders.” Pointing out the Caucasian/Asiatic markers on his own chromosome – which he says typically makes up 20% of Ashkenazi genes – Entine says this might be because of the Khazar conversion, which took place among the elites of Khazaria and not the general population, as Elhaik contends. “When Khazaria collapsed, a fraction of the elite integrated themselves into the then tiny Eastern European Jewish communities,” Entine notes. “Today’s percentage of Khazarian like markers is congruent with the extrapolation of that core group to the founding of Ashkenazi Jewry in the 12-14 centuries, when Jews in Eastern Europe numbered only 15,000-20,000.” In other words, he writes, “Elhaik is just wrong.”

And Entine has a bigger point. He thinks that what really troubles Elhaik is the notion of Judaism as being tribally or ethnically founded in any way:

For those of you pulling out your hair over suggestions that modern Judaism has “racial roots,” get a grip. Christianity and Islam are faith-based religions…anyone can join at a proverbial drop of a hat. Judaism has never been just a faith based religion. It’s a triple helix: belief in god (yet many Jews are atheists/agnostics); belief in the state of Israel as a founding principle of our religion; and recognition of our “blood” connection to fellow Jews. Judaism is one of only two surviving tribal religions (Zoroastrianism, which shares many tribal attributes with Judaism is the other). All or any of those qualities can define one as a Jew. But one can’t just junk the “blood” part in an attempt to be “modern”–that’s an abandonment of a central tenet of what makes us Jewish.

This is when Elhaik chimes in. For him, Entine has revealed his own prejudice in his comments: “I would like to thank Jon Entine for disclosing his scientific guidelines for studying Judaism as believe in God (though it is ok not to), patriotism (though living afar is also okay), and the purity of the blood line…Not surprisingly, the last two scientific principles of Entine share a common ground with the Nazi ideology. While this may makes sense to some people and may fit with their belief, for those of us who actually practice science this is mere nonsense.”

The only thing that matters to Elhaik, the only point of his research, he says, is to discover the cure for genetic disorders in Jews and non-Jews. Identifying the correct genetic provenance of Jews will help find cures for diseases. “Today, we still don’t understand genetic diseases nor do we have a cure (for a large number of them),” Elhaik writes. “Non-Jews who have ‘Jews-only diseases’ are misdiagnosed because they are not Jews. There are serious problems requiring serious solution. The only method that works is the scientific method.”

The frustrating aspect of scientific debates (for us, outside observers, that is) is that both sides assume objective fact is on their side, and so they never really engage with each other’s arguments. As Entine has the last word, this tussle in the comments section is no different. They both seem to be talking past each other:

Elhaik is young enough and immature enough to be a young son of mine. All his rants aside, Judaism is a modernized version of a tribal religion, a fact thatshows up in the genes of Jews, across a range of disease and other traits. Elhaik, in either his overheated “academic” article or his posts just does not come across as a serious intellect. I have not found a mainstream geneticist who thinks much of his analytical ability let alone his care in assembling and analyzing genetic data. Sorry…just stating the facts.

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Palestinian Film Breaks New Ground at Cannes

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:30:00 GMT-5

A tragic love story between two Palestinians living under Israeli occupation received a standing ovation at the Cannes film festival on Monday and broke new ground as the first film fully funded by the Palestinian cinema industry.

“Omar” by director Hany Abu-Assad, known for the 2005 award-winning film “Paradise Now,” is a political thriller interwoven with a story of trust and betrayal as two lovers are torn apart by Israel’s secret police and Palestinian freedom fighters.

Omar, a baker, is in love with Nadia, the sister of his friend Tarek who is a Palestinian fighter on the West Bank.

Arrested and humiliated by the Israeli military police, Omar, played by Adam Bakri, joins Tarek and colleague, Amjad, in a mission to kill an Israeli soldier and ends up imprisoned, tortured, and under pressure to betray his friends.

Earmarked a traitor, he starts to doubt Nadia’s fidelity, especially as she is also pursued by Amjad, and his life falls apart as he is pursued across the ravaged Palestinian landscape.

Abu-Assad said he was delighted by the reception his film received at Cannes, where picky critics are known to boo films that do not meet their expectations, and he hoped the festival would help gain international attention for “Omar.”

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Rihanna Will Perform in Tel Aviv on Election Day

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:00:00 GMT-5

Making Tel Aviv’s upcoming municipal election day even more exciting, Rihanna will be giving a public concert in the city’s Park Hayarkon as the ballots are being counted. Scheduled for October 22, the concert will be the pop star’s first public performance in Israel.

Rihanna has been to Israel before, but in a more low-key capacity. During the summer of 2010, she performed at a relatively small venue in Jaffa as part of a deal with a local cellular company. That concert was open mainly to the company’s subscribers. Although details about her upcoming concert in Tel Aviv are not yet available and tickets are not yet being sold, it is believed that tens of thousands of fans will come out to see her perform in October.

The singer’s star power has cranked up considerably since her last visit to Israel, with her “Loud” (2010), “Talk That Talk” (2011), and “Unapologetic” (2012) albums having zoomed to the top of the charts. Billboard has ranked her as one of the best-selling artists of all time, and Forbes named her the fourth most powerful celebrity or 2012 on the basis of her having earned $53 million between May 2011 and May 2012.

While many residents of metropolitan Tel Aviv are looking forward to an entertaining election day, some local authorities are somewhat less enthusiastic about the timing of Rihanna’s show. They are worried that the extra road traffic that will be generated by concertgoers will deter voters from trying to get to polling stations.

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Amar'e Stoudemire Wore a Yarmulke Before Knicks Game

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:22:00 GMT-5

Perhaps trying to invoke the good fortunes of his Jewish ancestors, New York Knicks Power Forward Amar’e Stoudemire sported a yarmulke this past weekend, ahead of the Knicks sixth play-off game against the Indiana Pacers.

Attempting to bring some spirituality to the sport, Stoudemire, who found out his mother was Jewish back in 2010, was wearing a black velvet yarmulke when he spoke to reporters at a shootaround hours before the game Saturday morning.

When one reporter asked if he was wearing the religious item for good luck, Stoudemire responded with a “Shabbat Shalom,” according to the New York Post.

Stoudemire has turned to his Jewish roots in the past for some luck. In March, he put together a minyan before undergoing surgery for a fractured knee, and he wore a yarmulke and talit to his wedding back in December.

Unfortunately, the yarmulke did not bring Stoudemire any luck, as the Pacers beat the Knicks Saturday night, 106 to 99.

Maybe next time he should refrain from working on Saturdays.

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Barbra Streisand To Receive PhD From Hebrew U

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:55:00 GMT-5

Another event has been added to Barbara Streisand’s busy schedule during her upcoming visit to Israel. In addition to singing at President Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday party and giving two public concerts in Tel Aviv, she will receive an honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The honor will be bestowed upon her on June 17, during the 76th Hebrew University International Board of Governors Meeting.

The honor recognizes Streisand for her professional achievements, human and civil rights leadership, philanthropy, and devotion to Israel and the Jewish people. In 1986, she established The Streisand Foundation, which is dedicated to fostering women’s equality and health, protecting human and civil rights, advancing the needs of at-risk children in society and preserving the environment. Since its inception, it has granted $25 million to more than 800 non-profit organizations around the world.

“Barbra Streisand’s transcendent talent is matched by her passionate concern for equality and opportunity for people of every gender and background. Equally important, her love of Israel and her Jewish heritage are reflected in so many aspects of her life and career. We are deeply proud to honor an individual who exemplifies these values which we at the Hebrew University share and uphold,” stated Prof. Menahem Ben-Sasson, president of the Hebrew University.

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Drake to Star in New 'Anchorman'

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:50:00 GMT-5

Sleep with one eye open, Ron Burgundy—there’s competition on the set.

Jewish hiphop bombshell Drake is slated to star in the Anchorman sequel, alongside Will Ferrell and Christina Applegate.

Drizzy was spotted with the filming crew this past weekend in New York City, rocking the classic 1970’s look with an afro, classic sideburns, and leather-bomb jacket, according to the New York Daily News.

Other guest stars expected in “Anchorman: the Legend Continues,” out December 20, include Mr Kim Kardashian Kanye West, Tina Fey, Kristen Wiig, Amy Poehler, Harrison Ford, and Jim Carrey.

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Backyard Chickens and Window Box Gardens

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:00:00 GMT-5

The brand new magazine Modern Farmer is no more for farmers than Sports Illustrated is for professional athletes, or Everyday Food is for chefs. It’s for the growing numbers of farm enthusiasts. Lured by a handsome portrait of a rooster on the front cover, I picked up a copy when it came out last month to see what it’s all about.

As someone who grew up on a small farm (and now lives in a big city) I enjoy the satisfaction of being able to identify different breeds of ducks, recognize a blueberry bush well before it offers anything to harvest, or decide when an ear of corn is ready to pick. These basic pleasures shouldn’t be reserved for country folk, and Modern Farmer is here to clue in urban and suburban readers.

The premier issue spans an impressive breadth of topics, from mango grafting in Malawi to a “rurbanist” shepherds’ cottage in Tasmania. Its cheeky tone entertains without falling into snarky territory, and manages to sidestep waxing too devoutly about the virtues of agrarian life. What the articles may lack in depth, the magazine makes up for by showcasing the rich variety of contemporary agricultural practices — and practitioners. It has much to offer anyone who wants to know more about where their food comes from, or to begin getting their hands in the dirt — excuse me, soil — if only a window box.

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Author Blog: The Memorial

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:00:00 GMT-5

Joanna Hershon’s most recent novel, “A Dual Inheritance,” was published earlier this month by Ballantine Books. Her blog posts are featured on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more information on the series, please visit:

I recently attended my friend’s father’s memorial. It was held at the Faculty House of Columbia University in a perfectly lovely nondescript room with a bar. An elegant man with an appealingly mysterious accent led the service. I imagined he’d been a student of my friend’s father, who was a playwright and professor, or perhaps he worked for the University in some capacity. As the memorial unfolded, three things immediately came to mind: the deceased was roughly the age of the two protagonists in my new novel, “A Dual Inheritance” ; like my protagonists, he’d gone to Harvard, and — though I knew my friend’s father was Jewish — there was no reference to it here. It was an entirely secular experience.

I thought of how my mother always says that there’s something cold and empty when an official service has no religious framework, and as so many friends and family paid loving and witty tribute to this obviously talented, stubborn, erudite, caring man, I carried on a mental argument with my mother, whose Judaism is expressed differently — more politically, more conservatively, less fraught — than mine is. I argued in my head for secularism. Here was a great example, I reasoned; here was a deep tribute without being defined by a religion into which my friend’s father happened to be born. He’d been orphaned fairly young, had a massive heart attack as a young man, had never thought he’d live past 40. He’d also been widowed young and had raised a daughter — my friend — who was now happily living in Berlin, raising a German-speaking son with a non-Jewish husband. You see, I told my mother in my silent protest, life can be so much bigger than religion.

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Irish and Jewish Humor on Display at Robert Briscoe Awards

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:38:00 GMT-5

At the May 13 Emerald Isle Immigration Center’s 2013 Annual Robert Briscoe Award Ceremony at Manhattan’s 21 Club honoring Robert Astrowsky, assistant secretary of the United Federation of Teachers and Edward Grebow, president and CEO of Amalgamated Bank, EIIC chair Brian O’Dwyer told the assemblage: “At a bad time in Belfast, in a dark alley, a man was confronted by a thug: ‘Are ye a Catholic or a Protestant?’ The man replied ‘I am a Jew.’ The thug persisted, ‘Are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?’” After the laughter subsided, O’Dwyer introduced the “dueling clergy” — Monsignor James Kelly, pastor of St. Brigid in Brooklyn and Rabbi Jay Rosenbaum, of Temple Israel in Lawrence, N.Y. Both spoke passionately about the interfaith effort to help the devastated Jewish and Irish communities in the wake of “Superstorm Sandy.” With a twinkle in his eye, O’Dwyer joshed: “In typical Irish-Jewish tradition, we proclaim a winner, and this being an Irish room, the fix is in already.”

“I am so Reform, that the last kosher occasion I went to was my bris,” confessed Rabbi Rosenbaum who told of a “beautiful Russian ubermodel whom I converted who wanted Israeli citizenship. Here I was a Reform rabbi and, [just] my luck, at that moment, the Israeli rabbinate was not even accepting conversions by Orthodox rabbis in America!” After contacting Bibi Netanyahu’s office,” Rosenbaum said he was told: “ ‘With your involvement with the Emerald Isle [and] the Vatican,’ they didn’t want to piss off the Catholics so they accepted the conversion.” Msgr. Kelly countered with a bit about Irish guys making fun of “Old Jewish guys telling jokes” a reference to the Off-Broadway hit, “Old Jews Telling Jokes.” On a serious note, he informed, “in Ireland the prior week, the Irish government gave amnesty to those who deserted the Irish Army to join the fight against Hitler’s Nazi Germany…. Desertion in Ireland was very serious, but there was the fear that if Germany had invaded Britain, then Ireland would be next on the list.”

The annual Emerald Isle Immigration Center event honors Jewish leaders for their work in bettering the lives of immigrants. The event is named for Robert Briscoe, the former Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin (the honorific title for the chairman of the Dublin city council) who was raised Orthodox by his parents, who came to Ireland from Lithuania. Ben Briscoe, the mayor’s son and himself a former Lord Mayor of Dublin, flew in from Ireland to present the awards. In an Irish brogue, he mused about “following in my father’s footsteps…. You’ll never be as good as your father…. I think it’s a bad mistake for sons and daughters to ape their fathers and mothers.”

Getting on the comedy bandwagon, Ben Briscoe told of a constituent at the time his father was politically active who could not get in to the Irish police force because in those days “you had to be ‘perfect in wind and limb’ and the man had a bit of his thumb missing. When he petitioned, the applicant commented that Jews were allowed to join the force and ‘they got a little bit of them missing.’” Briscoe said: “The law was changed. True story.”

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Jewish Lessons of Murder in Greenwich Village

Mon, 20 May 2013 07:39:00 GMT-5

Mark Carson was a 32-year-old gay man in New York City, who happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

The place is one familiar to many New Yorkers: the busy corner of 6th Avenue and 8th Street, in Greenwich Village. Just two blocks from the famous Stonewall Inn, Carson talked back to the wrong homophobe, and was shot dead last Friday night.

The expressions of outrage that followed have been both appropriate and predictable. Less predictable, at least from a Jewish point of view, have been the expressions of surprise: many people, straight and LGBT, took to the blogosophere to say how astonished they were that such violence could still be possible, in this day and age.

Really? Consider what would have happened had Carson been targeted for being Jewish, instead of being gay. Shock, outrage, and condemnation would surely pour in from all quarters. But surprise? Probably not. We Jews are used to persecution, and we see it even when it isn’t there. So when it is, it’s a confirmation of our sense of persecution, not a shock to our sense of imperviousness.

That anti-gay violence continues should not be a surprise. The advent of civil rights for African Americans did not end racial violence, still widespread nearly fifty years after the Civil Rights Act. Feminism has not ended violence against women. Indeed, from Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, to echo President Obama’s historic turn of phrase, legal inequality is only the tip of the iceberg. Submerged beneath it are deep-seated patterns of injustice, privilege, prejudice, and fear.

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Cleveland Kidnapping, Elizabeth Smart and Us

Mon, 20 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

Sexual assault cases don’t occur in a vacuum, even when they are so egregious that they defy the imagination. For example: the recent Cleveland story involving the long-term imprisonment and rape of three local women by an alleged perpetrator who comes across as a complete sadist. Coverage of this story has been rife with speculation, yet there are few answers available — partly due to the survivors’ understandable desire for privacy.

We can’t examine the details yet, obsessing as we so often do. But we can examine ourselves.

As I noted when I wrote about sexual assault in the military (a scandal which continues to evolve), these kinds of crimes occur in a rape culture. Rape culture doesn’t mean only that there’s a high incidence of sexual assault, but also that sex is treated as a commodity, one for women to withhold and men to take, a commodity that also comes to represent women’s entire value and worth. Pure or defiled. Virginal or slutty — so slutty that consent is implied, not sought.

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Renee Zellweger's Favorite Laundry Lady

Mon, 20 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

Not everyone has Zack Galifianakis renting an apartment for them, or Renee Zellweger paying to furnish it. But then again, not everyone is Mimi.

Mimi is an 88-year-old woman who, until very recently, lived in a laundromat on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, Calif. She is the subject of a film being made by Israeli actor and director Yaniv Rokah. Now entering post-production thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign, “Queen Mimi” tells the story of how this feisty octogenarian, who was once a San Fernando Valley housewife, ended up living on the streets of Los Angeles for almost a decade before taking up permanent residence at Fox Laundry 18 years ago.

“When I first came to L.A. seven years ago, I would be heading every morning to work at Caffe Luxxe on Santa Monica Avenue. It was 5 a.m. and the street would be dark and empty, but I would always notice Mimi waking up in the laundromat,” Rokah recalled in a phone conversation with The Arty Semite.

“I started talking to her, and we became friends. She is such an interesting person, and I decided I’d better capture this before she’s no longer with us.”

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How the Trinity Impacted Judaism — via Kabbalah

Sun, 19 May 2013 23:53:00 GMT-5

If you don’t follow Philologos, the Forward’s inimitable language columnist, you’re missing one of the outstanding intellectual joys in contemporary Jewish life. I don’t say that idly. Week after week for 20-plus years, with an astonishing combination of erudition, curiosity and wit, he’s used readers’ inquiries into the origins of words and phrases to explore some lesser-known byways of history, culture, philosophy and sacred text. There’s nearly always a Jewish jumping off point, but oh, where he jumps to: Slavic, Anglo-Saxon, Chinese and any number of other civilizations. The bottom line is how interconnected we all are. When Ben Zoma said in Pirkei Avot (drawing on Psalm 119), “mikol melamdai hiskalti” (I have gained wisdom from all my teachers), he had to be thinking of Philologos.

It’s with great hesitation, then, that I take exception to a point he made in this week’s column. In the course of making a slightly different point, having to do with the Jewish origins of Christianity’s “Holy Spirit,” he casually states that “neither biblical nor rabbinic Judaism has anything like the Christian Trinity in its thinking about God.” Actually, rabbinic Judaism has something very much like the Trinity in its thinking about God. It’s called the Sefirot, the Kabbalah’s 10 Emanations or Manifestations of God’s presence. And no, it wasn’t a Jewish concept that found its way into Christianity. Aderaba (on the contrary), it’s a Christian idea that found its way into the heart of normative Judaism.

There’s a very respectable school of Jewish scholarship that sees the influence of the Trinity on Judaism in the Sefirot. I first learned about it in a graduate seminar with the late intellectual historian Amos Funkenstein. He taught that the Sefirot actually emerged in the early Middle Ages as a sort of Jewish retort to the Trinity, a case of rabbinic one-upsmanship: You got, what, three faces of God? Hey, we got 10. Badda-bing. I think Prof. Funkenstein had a more elegant way of phrasing it, if memory serves. But that was the idea.

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Q&A with Maharat Ruth Balinsky Friedman

Sun, 19 May 2013 05:00:00 GMT-5

On June 16, three young Orthodox women will receive a title that no woman (or man) before them has ever held: maharat (short for Manhiga Hilchatit Ruchanit Toranit, which means leader in Jewish law, spirituality and Torah). The graduation of the first class from Riverdale’s Yeshivat Maharat, which trains Orthodox women to be spiritual leaders, has sparked some controversy in the Orthodox community. But, beneath the debates are three women in their late 20s and early 30s who are dedicated to the study of Jewish text and finding a role for women in traditional Judaism.

My former college classmate, Ruth Balinsky Friedman, is one of these women. This summer, she will become a member of the clergy at Ohev Sholom, The National Synagogue in Washington, D.C. I spoke with her about her decision to become a maharat, what it’s like to follow in her father’s footsteps and her thoughts on women’s prayer at the Kotel.

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