Heh, classic! WASP moves to Los Angeles to mingle with the stars, and instead finds herself mingling with lots of talky Westside Jews. Instead of learning how to get into a Dennis Hopper party, they end up learning about Rosh HaShanah and Gefilte Fish. Oh, the pathos of it!

I actually dig the cards, too. The Jewish woman is sexy yet prim. She looks nothing at all like Bella Abzug!

"What is offered under a Jewish roof is Jewish stuff."

Good lord! Does that mean that my collection of vintage mint-condition Ken dolls qualifies as "Jewish stuff"?? And then would the Jewish Federation buy my Jewish family that hard-to-find 1962 Painted Hair Ken??

Anonymous, I agree that action is required here. But what should I do? How might I help Jewish orgs see reason on this?

Wonderful. I'm so with you. Personally, though, I don't detest the French because of the Dreyfus Affair, I think that's silly; there are so many more recent trespasses to detest them for.

In any case, when a Frenchman says "We will smash the Americans," you know that he either forgot to take his medication, or needs to be smacked around like a French-speaking stepchild.

Jason Lezak, thank you for making God's will be done.

Gosh, I'm giddy like a schoolgirl to have Jeffrey Sachs, beautiful genius behind the Millenium Development Goals, contributing to Jewcy. He wants to end poverty, I want to end poverty; you and I could be such a team, Prof Sachs!

Super interesting that he's thinking about the Cuban Missile Crisis right now. I wonder whether Prof Sachs is feeling pessimistic about his work! One of the things I dig about Sachs is his thing for "clinical economics"--i.e., he now knows there's no one-size-fits-all Keynes-oid master theory of economic development. If economists hope to improve the material circumstances of people in an underdeveloped area, they've got to start with careful observation of the idiosyncratic economic systems at work in that area. The medical profession is now hot for "evidence-based medicine"; economists like Sachs are trying to learn "evidence-based economics." Good idea, I say!

The Cuban Missile Crisis is an interesting choice for Sacks because the Crisis could have ended either with a nuclear catastrophe or more ho-hum early 60s Cold War posturing. The outcome hinged not so much on an "international system" as on the emotions, thinking, and egos of a bunch of guys sitting around in the White House trying to keep calm. For someone from a theory-rich field like economics, it must be a humbling reminder that, damn, there's only so much an academic like me can do to fix the world! In the end, it still comes down to decisions made by individuals--and individuals are unpredictable.

So thanks for the recommendation, Jeffrey! There's only so much we can do, sure, but there's still plenty that we can.

Shit. Eli's tone here is so indignant that only a bit of quick and well-calculated Jewcy self-effacement (adorable, endearing, cool, self-satirical, I'm talking the whole enchilada/megillah) could block our enemies from swinging bloggers' sentiments against us.

But then the above commenter demanded that we self-satirize, and did so in the context of his own self-satire. There's nowhere left to move, no imaginable posture we can adopt to the devastation of Jewcy's enemies. How could it have come to this? 

Adam says, "I suppose I just wonder [how]...the fence sitters will...react to this speech?"

Yep, that's the big unanswered question here.

What surprised me about Obama's speech was that I thought it was fantastic. He said things that I thought were true, right, and brave. Another way of putting that: Obama said all kinds of shit that I already agree with, and that I want people in power to say.

But that could be a bit of a problem. The day before the speech, some of the Jewcers discussed how we should cover it. One thing we felt certain of: Obama wasn't looking to give a speech that would be a smash among young, cosmopolitan white Jews who either think that a Presidential candidate's blackness is irrelevant, or that at this point in history it ought to fall on the positive side of the ledger when we're deciding who to vote for.

We thought he was going after, for example, the rural whites in Iowa who blew the world away by deciding en masse, "fuck it, what do I care that he's black? He'd be a great president." And also the ones who thought about making that decision, but didn't.

No one can really know how to reassure those people that it's not a big deal that a black Presidential candidate has a spiritual advisor who really, really doesn't like them. We don't know because we've never before had a black Presidential candidate with a genuine shot at winning. So I expected the most interesting thing about the speech would be the chance to see what Obama really thinks about how those voters think.

But I don't believe the speech he delivered was directed at them; or if it was, then it wasn't intended to help Obama win the presidential election.

But he *is* a politician, and he didn't get where he is by deciding, "I'm just going to speak the truth, end of story." So maybe the speech was a move in service of his longer-term vision of social change in the country. Or, who knows, maybe he was just writing for the history books.

He's in good shape there, because the people who write the history books are going to like the speech a lot, and they won't care much what rural white Iowan fence-sitters thought. But Obama, if he's going to be President, really needs to.

 

Anonymous, I'm told that somebody filmed it, I'll see if I can track that down.

Hi guys, thanks for the kind thoughts, gotta run, heading to NY to see the East Coast Jewcers, but here's an update. 

Marla, we hear you, we hear you.

Here's a quick summary of why we implemented the redesign, and what's happening next.

From the time Jewcy launched, site visitors were confused by the way our content was organized—they didn't understand the difference between our different types of content, or know where to retrieve them (even some staff had problems with this). Over time we made the site pretty cool visually, but people still found the organization of content overcomplicated and confusing.

Instead of spending scads of time preparing for a single redesign that tried to kill all birds with one huge stone, we decided to simplify things first. So instead of having to look in several different places to find the different types of Jewcy content, you can now look in the center column to see everything we've published. Many visitors have said they like the simplicity of the new design, but others dislike the loss of visual "Jewce." So do we. We're gonna gradually restore the Jewce, but this time it'll be prettifying an uncomplicated organization of content.

The other main issue: although we added the "recent comments" tab next to the "recent posts" column, this doesn't promote user comments/discussions nearly enough. So we're going to be rectifying that, as well. In the end this should get you a homepage that looks sweet, makes it easy to find the stuff you want, and promotes the discussions that visitors are having.

So we're trudging along toward the best of all possible worlds, we think. The perfect Jewcy homepage is nigh! Not super nigh, but pretty damn nigh. 

Thanks!

Joey 

Nancyyy, I think he's just saying, "Either you're KSW, or you're an infidel! And we need infidels out of the way! I'll open up a can of whoopass on anyone who says differently."

Doesn't this kind of thing scare rank-and-file Scientologists? What if Tom looks into your eyes and sees that you're not KSW?