rabbijaffe

 So I was creating a PowerPoint to teach about the laws of Chanukah.

I wanted to put in some links to songs that were related to the holiday, or to Hallel, which is said each day of Chanukah.

My “research” yielded some pretty interesting results. 

I wanted to share with the world two of my favorite videos I stumbled upon.

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The first is a public school singing the ever famous Maoz Tzur:

They might a bit unnecessarily mean to each other mid-video, but I have to admit, not only do they do a surprisingly amazing job, but their Hebrew pronunciation is excellent!

I think we’ve come quite a long way from the days of the two Jewish kids in class singing the stupid dreidel song.

* * *

This next video, well, it kind of leaves me speechless:

A gospel church singing Shlomo Carlebach’s rendition of the tune Pitchu Li (Pischu li), which is included in the Hallel prayers!

My conclusion (ironically, if you’re familiar with my blog):

Everybody loves the Jews!

Happy Chanukah!  

I’m a guy. Therefore it’s not surprising that I enjoy the new television trend of episodic violence. I’m not the first nor the last person who accidentally stumbled upon an episode of 24 and developed a heroin-esque addiction.

So a show like The Sarah Connors Chronicles is truly right up my alley. It not only filled each episode with not-stop action and tons of happy violence, but it helped many of us enjoy the nostalgia of how great it was when pre-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger joined together with Guns n’ Roses music.

So I should be upset that Fox decided to not renew the show, right?

But I’ve shed not a tear.

No, not because of the somewhat awkward effect of the ‘teenager trying to find himself’, which usually makes me cringe. Nor because of the fact that the Terminator is a chick. It didn’t work in the movies (not for the Terminator, or the Karate Kid for that matter), so why should it work on TV? To be perfectly honest, I thought Summer Glau was doing an excellent job and the casting was perfect.

No, it’s something a bit deeper.

Maybe I’m being a bit of a picky Jew, but one episode just made me nauseous.

Check out season 2, episode 7 (Brothers of Nablus).

At several specific points in the episode you will encounter the horrifically overacted Moish. (Look for 8:55-11:15, 17:45-18:30, and 35:40-36:00.)

Moish is a sniveling, conniving, wimpy, exceptionally dishonest Jewish diamond dealer, supporting many generations of dangerous and incorrect stereotypes. He is a liar and a cheat who hides behind verses in the Torah to justify what he does, a la Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof. And he dies a horrible, pathetic, and deserved death, a la Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.

Take out the Jewishness of the dealer, and your show doesn’t change a bit. Put it in and you have at least one person who’s not banging on Fox’s door to have the show back on the air.  

I’ve often said that television will most certainly have an impact on what people do and think, sometimes very obviously, and sometimes deep, deep in the inner psyche of the viewer.

For example, I believe the television show 24 simultaneously (and perhaps paradoxically) prepared the American public for the concept of an African-American president, as well as convinced many that torture is an extremely effective tool to gain essential and accurate information from people in custody. I would take this to such an extreme level as to say that this show (and others like it) made it that when Americans elected Barack Obama it was just a given that such an accomplishment could happen, and not the historically shockingly incredible event that it truly should have been.

If the show didn’t exist, I’m willing to bet the world would be a very different place right now.

But I digress…

Knowing how intrinsically connected television shows are to public perception makes me a bit on the edgey side when it comes to the character of Ziva David on CBS’s NCIS.

Whereas I love the fact that a Chilean Catholic actress (Cote de Pablo) is portraying an Israeli (very successfully I might add), I am somewhat unnerved by the show’s vilification of Mossad.

Perhaps I’m a little too connected to Israel and the Israeli army to look at the whole picture objectively, but I can’t ignore how much their portrayal reminds me of Ayn Rand’s philosophy which I encountered in my teenage years.

As I remember it, the philosophy places YOU at the center of everything, and you must do everything in your power to accomplish your own goals. So much so that it was entirely fine to stomp on others, even the people closest to you, to accomplish those goals.

In NCIS the director of Mossad is more than willing to incriminate or even murder his own relatives so long as it serves his own needs.

Israel is a country where it is forbidden to put a soldier on the front line without express written permission of both parents if he is either an only child or had a sibling die while serving in the army. Israel is a country that is willing to trade scores of imprisoned terrorists in exchange for one captured Israeli, just so he can once again be in his mother’s embrace.

Not very Ayn Randish.

I’m not saying Israel or its military is perfect, but NCIS’s portrayal is not even bordering on truthful.

Nevertheless, de Pablo is a great actress and should keep up the good work. The show in general… well, every plot they do has been done before, and every character is heavily contrived and overdone, but the show more or less remains entertaining regardless.

I just hope they don’t shape the world’s opinion for the worse…

I’ve been an avid reader of Men’s Health magazine for many years now. I can say with sad honesty that the Jewish people are not featured very often in said publication. On occasion a person’s Jewish upbringing is mentioned, or the discovery of an Israeli professor gets a shout out, but this month’s edition features a rather unique hop into the Jewish world.

In an article called “Party Cheer, with Beer” (full article) this recipe is given:

Lucky Dreidel
Drink and dessert? L’chaim!

1 oz vodka
2 oz Manischewitz wine
1 splash cider vinegar
4 oz IPA beer (try He’Brew Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A.)
1 piece of chocolate gelt (those gold-wrapped chocolate coins)

Shake together the vodka, Manischewitz, and cider vinegar. Pour the mixture into a glass with ice, add the beer, and stir.* Garnish with gelt.

*Stir while rotating the spoon with your fingers, so that its back is always against the inside of the glass. Do this for 30 seconds. That will create more movement in the liquid, allowing flavors to mix better. Go ahead, have the chocolate. Your memory improves after you eat milk chocolate, according to a 2007 study in Appetite.

I said in my previous ‘Jews in the Media’ post how amused and surprisingly happy I was when I heard a song about partying toss in Jewish phrases. The joy continues.

I for one am going to try this drink this Channukah.

Thank you Men’s Health. I don’t think today you’ve made me a better Jew…

… but a happy, less thirsty one!

There are a ton of stereotypes out there about the Jews. They range from violent and aggressive to passive and wimpy, from filthy rich to just plain old filthy.

Some stereotypes insult, while others flatter.

And some just seem to just come from out of nowhere.

* * *  

So, I’m sitting in my car when this song pops on the radio:

Here you have a catchy hip-hop song with zero connection to anything within the vicinity of Judaism, and they’re semi-randomly tossing in words like “mazal tov” and “l’chaim”. (starts around the 2 minute mark)

The theme of the song is an all-night, out of control, super fun party… something I am not used to the world associating with Judaism.

Depraved, immoral Mossad agents, deceptive diamond dealers, and overly righteous religious fanatics, this stuff wouldn’t surprise me a bit.

Black Eyed Peas shouting “mazal tov”, this caught me off guard.

But I’ll tell you, it caught me off guard in a good way.

You see, I spent much of my life (as I suspect many a Jew does) thinking of my religion and people as a tad dull. It wasn’t until adulthood that I discovered how not only meaningful and fulfilling, not to mention just downright fun, Judaism could really be.

I heard this song and got nostalgic for my college days, singing and dancing (and drinking) at the Chabad House at SUNY Albany. Most of my best college memories came out of that house. And I forsook all the parties in the world to spend as much time as possible in the place where the real fun was happening.

Maybe the Black Eyed Peas know more about the “real Judaism” than the average Jew does.

Thank you for the memories!   

Jews in Glee 

We Jews pop up again and again.

Recently we made a very fun appearance in Fox’s hit new series Glee. The humor was so quick, subtle, and relatively esoteric that I must say: I’m impressed.

The show has a character, Puckerman, who is only Jewish because, well, the show decided to make him so.

In episode 8 (about 13 minutes in) he was trying to explain why he was fantasizing about dating the much more obviously Jewish Rachel, the star of the series.

He said how it all started when his family was doing their annual Simchas Torah tradition. 

Watching Schindler’s List.

Happily enough for me, I get to be one of the lucky maybe one percent of viewers who understood the ironic humor.

You see, ladies and gentleman, Simchas Torah is a holiday in which Jews across the world celebrate ultra-joyously the completion of the annual Torah reading. It’s filled with non-stop singing and dancing.

Schindler’s List is a violent film about the Holocaust.

The two should never really meet. 

What Glee was poking fun at was a double phenomenon amongst the American Jewish population:

#1: The peripheral (at best) connection to Jewish holidays.

And #2: The fact that so few Jews have a connection to Judaism that extends beyond the Holocaust.

So the Puckerman family knew that Simchas Torah was an existent Jewish holiday, and celebrated it in likely the only way they knew how. Holocaust remembrance.

(Sometimes I feel like I was the only Jew who wasn’t really impressed by Schindler’s List. When I was in high school I remember people treating the film as if it were written by God Himself, and it was a full fledged obligation of every member of the Jewish people to watch and love it. But I digress…)

Oh, but Glee didn’t stop there!

They jumped into the next level of poking fun at the ubiquitous inconsistencies of the assimilated Jewish world. Two more phenomena alluded to:

#3: The strange connection Jewish people have to Chinese food. It’s borderline obligatory for the average American Jew to go out for Chinese food on Christmas, mostly stemming from the fact that Chinese restaurants used to be the only thing open. So we would celebrate diversity by, as Puckerman was doing, eating sweet and sour pork, the prince of all non-kosher food.

And #4: Jewish moms love to bash their children with illogical and hypocritical reasons for only dating Jews. 

And the package is complete.

Mom connects the family in an incorrect, inappropriate manner to the Jewish religion (Simchas Torah) by doing something that proves her connection is simply one of a depressing obsession with the Holocaust, while simultaneously plowing her children with pork… and then tells her kids they’re no better than Nazis because they date non-Jews.

I love it.

A healthy and humorous poke at the assimilated Jewish world.

I only hope some folk out there even realized they had been made fun of. 

Have you seen ABC’s hit new series Flash Forward?

Well, if not, this is the super exciting plot:

The entire world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds. During that brief moment earth is filled with massive destruction, everything from car and helicopter crashes, to people falling and hitting their heads, to buses driving into the river.

Also during those 2 minutes and 17 seconds every human being experiences a glimpse of the exact same moment of the future six months later. (Hence: “flash forward“, instead of flashback–witty, huh?)

Pretty decent plot. A solid attempt to capitalize on the incredible success of other shows which tell crazy stories over the course of tons of episodes, like Lost, 24, and Prison Break.

Now, in episode three they decided to reveal to the world the reason behind this mysterious 2 minutes and 17 seconds. An imprisoned Nazi War criminal explained how this amount of time, which is 137 seconds, is… the numerical equivalent (a system called “Gematria“) of the Hebrew word “Kabbalah”, which very loosely translates to Jewish mysticism.

Let’s check it out:

 Kuf = 100

 Bet = 2

 Lamed = 30

 Hay = 5

Voila! We have 137!!

Neat, ay?

Three thoughts (in no particular order) immediately came to mind when I watched this very awkward development unfold before my very eyes.

#1: What the heck!? Could someone in our generation really be this irresponsible? After thousands of years of people attacking Jewish people after someone very falsely accuses us of using devilish Kabbalistic black magic to harm or kill non-Jewish people, do we really need ABC to come along and express the possibility that this very same mysticism caused a fictional world-wide disaster? 

#2: What’s with the Jewish people? On occasion I kick back and watch some TV or movies. We represent approximately 1% of the American society, and somehow or other Jews or Judaism get mentioned every time I turn around. Whether it’s the tasteless ‘Family GOY’ episode of Family Guy, or a dishonest diamond dealer in the Sarah Connors Chronicles, or a religiously confused and curious Jewish FBI agent with a math genius brother (Numbers), I cannot pop my head into modern multi-media without seeing reflections of my own culture staring right at me. I can’t help but be mezmerized by this seemingly incomprehensible phenomenon. Why us?

#3: After the billionth time of noticing this, I’ve decided to start a new series of posts discussing how I feel each of the individual episodes are meant to make the Jewish people appear, and anything else that comes to mind about each episode. (I’m very open to suggestions and other people’s commentaries as well, by the way.)

So, back to Flash Forward:

My take is that a history savvy person recognizes that Nazis were tremendously knowledgable about Judaism. They gained this knowledge for the express purpose of being more formidable enemies of the Jewish people. Knowledge is power. The Nazis were also experts in manipulation and propoganda. They managed to stir up an entire society against a very innocent people, so successfully that the masses just ignored the fact that their Jewish neighbors were disappearing by the thousands.

So, immediately upon discovering that there was a worldwide tragedy, this unrepentant Nazi’s sick mind conjured up how this new information could be used to make more and more people despise the Jews.

The officer recognized this instantly and instead of asking further questions screamed at the Nazi for wasting their time with information that was clearly just useless blah-blah.

Everyone knows the Jews are imperfect (like everyone else). Everyone simultaneoulsy recognizes that with the faults that many of us might manifest, violent terrorism is just not a Jewish thing. A vague, silly Gematria shouldn’t change that.

* * *

And by the way, if I knew that on March 15th I was going to be murdered with three bullet shots to the chest that day… I’d probably wear a bullet proof vest.

I’m just saying…