But you know, the seasons, they go round and round, and the painted ponies go up and down, and now it’s my turn to say goodbye to this ferkakte operation (I know we have a strict anti-Yiddish rule, but come on, it’s my LAST DAY). Like so many of my Hebraic forebearers, I’m trading religion for capitalism: Starting July 7 I’ll be blogging at Racked, a website about retail news in New York. Before that, though, I’m getting married, which means next time you see me in print I’ll be Mrs. Izzy Grinspan.

I’m going to miss the whole lot of you, even though I’m a little relieved to stop thinking about Obama’s relationship with Israel 23 hours out of the day. The Jewcy office is made up of total lunatics, of course, but they're all smart, skilled, wildly capable lunatics, and it's bittersweet to know they'll be here playing Guitar Hero long after I'm gone.

I've also been really lucky to work with a ton of talented writers. Thanks for putting up with my passive-aggressive edits (“This piece on your grandma’s matzoh balls is really, really, really good, but maybe not counterintuitive enough, so would you mind making a tiny change by switching all the verbs with their opposites?”) and for being a continuing source of great ideas.

Enough sentimentality? NEVER. To end this post on an appropriately emotional note, I would like you all to look at more pictures of cats being Bat and Bar Mitzvah’d:

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“Well, that used to be us in our twenties,” says her friend.

And therein lies the hands-down weirdest thing about the Sex and the City madness. Carrie isn’t in her twenties. Carrie is in her thirties. By the era of the movie, she’s 40. It feels almost rude to point this out, as if I’m suggesting that Carrie is old and therefore unsexy, or uninteresting, or unhip. I don’t think any of those things – I just know, objectively, chronologically even, that 40 is not the same age as 20.

Sex in the City is very much about age — about how to be an adult woman when for most of the history of civilization female adulthood meant becoming a mother and a wife. The women of SATC variously chase, embrace, and reject those roles. Mostly, they agonize about them. But alongside the painful awareness that they’re still living ostensibly youthful lives comes delight in the fact that they’re old enough, and therefore rich and established enough, to live glamorously. When the ladies go to parties, they know everyone there. Carrie may have spent all her savings on shoes, but she can certainly afford dinner; Miranda’s been out of law school so long she’s a partner in her firm. All four women have paid their New York dues, presumably during the previous decade, and now their lifestyles are all about access.

The show believes firmly that it’s better to be 35 than 25. When twentysomething female characters do appear—even in the form of the heroines in flashbacks—they’re always depicted as irritatingly clueless children. The show doesn’t treat twentysomething men much better, though it does occasionally promote them from brats to boy-toys. (Samantha’s so well-established that she can establish a relationship with Smith Jerrod’s cock, which I think is the only character in the story who’s the same age I am.)

So why do twentysomething women embrace the SATC women as their—our—peers? Why does sex columnist Julia Allison, at 28, think she’s Carrie? Pop culture usually glamorizes youth, so in a way it’s nice to see the fetish run in the opposite direction. It's just that, as with so many other things, the show's mythology doesn't fully connect with objective reality in the lives of its fans.

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Rev. Keene left a career as a successful businessman to become the pastor of Memorial Baptist Church in the Oliver neighborhood in East Baltimore, where he grew up. Working with BUILD (Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development), Pastor Keene has been a driving force in the renewal of the economically depressed Oliver neighborhood, which gained notoriety through the HBO series The Wire. Along with other members of the community, Memorial Baptist acquired adjacent houses and parcels of land to create a foundation for the area’s redevelopment. JFSJ is working in close partnership with Rev. Keene, BUILD, The Reinvestment Fund, THE ASSOCIATED: The Jewish Federation of Greater Baltimore, and other members of the Baltimore Jewish community, to revitalize the area and develop hundreds of lots for new homes and businesses.

Is social justice the soul of Judaism, as a Jewcy dialog once asked? Not necessarily. But is social justice in the Baltimore ghetto a Jewish issue? Of course, because Jewish organizations are making it a Jewish issue. And not even youngish leftish organizations like the JFSJ, but the Jewish Federation of Greater Baltimore, which is not exactly a "Shalom Motherfucker" kind of place. A Judaism that can help a Baptist minister fund a totally non-Jewy project simply because it's a good cause—that’s the kind of pluralistic Judaism that has a chance of meaning something in the 21st century.

You can read about other leaders and donate to the Nachshon Challenge here.

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Here's Rachel on her soldier series:

Rather than portraying the soldier as heroic, confident, or proud, my images disclose a complexity of emotions. The soldier is often caught in a transient moment of self-reflection, uncertainty, a break from her daily reality, as if questioning her own identity and state of contradiction. She is a soldier in uniform but at the same time she is a teenage girl who is trying to negotiate between these two extreme dimensions. She is in an army base surrounded by hundreds like her, but underneath the uniform there is an individual that wishes to be noticed.

And here's one of my favorites, a picture that reminds me of nothing so much as Jewish overnight camp:

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David's actual surname is Lipshitz; his father famously changed it to Lauren when he realized that "Ralph Lipshitz" didn't quite fit the profile of a company whose logo features an aristocrat playing an aristocratic game on a horse.

The wedding is on the small side—only 200 people—and some of George H.W. Bush’s siblings aren’t invited. But this quote, from another anonymous source, doesn't paint the Bushes in the most tolerant light:

"There are religious differences," one points out. "Would he expect her to convert to Judaism?"

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1. It’s not on Hanukkah or Passover. Both holidays have been co-opted by a ton of Jewish organizations running “fun” events for young, curious, marginally affiliated Jews, but Shavuot never gets any love.
2. It’s in San Francisco, thereby disproving the general misconception (at least among New Yorkers) that New Jew culture only exists in NYC.
3. It features Dengue Fever, the Cambodian surf rock band we profiled way back in January of last year.

This year, DAWN coincides with the opening of the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s new Daniel Libeskind–designed building. It takes place June 7, and you can find out more about it here.

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I started dating a Caucasian classmate four and a half years ago in college…. I see us together for the rest of our lives. There is only one problem: My parents are very traditional Indians and have told me since I was a young boy that they wanted me to have an arranged marriage, and if I did "bring home an American girl" that they would disown me. After two years, I told them about the relationship, and they were rightfully hurt and upset I'd kept it a secret. They say now that they were "joking" about disowning me and that I should have come to them. But it is close to three years later, and my girlfriend has still never met my parents.

Obviously, there are some Jewish resonances here, as well as Persian resonances, and Vietnamese resonances, and Italian-last-century resonances, ad infinitum. My evidence is, of course, totally anecdotal, but among the people I know with strictly tribal parents—Jewish and otherwise—there’s a distressingly large number with long-term “study partners,” and even more whose parents think they’re asexual because they’ve never brought home a date. It’s kind of like being gay before the seventies, except for one major, major difference: The parents don’t approve, but the rest of America truly does not care. So the kids wind up keeping a secret from their family that’s open knowledge in every other part of their lives.

Witness the reactions in Slate’s online forum, all variants on the general sentiment of “Dude, by the time you’re 25 you ought to be able to date whoever you want.” As for Prudence, she sensibly suggests bringing the girlfriend home for the holidays and insisting that everyone get along. Because duh, this is America, and all that Romeo and Juliet stuff is so old-world. Jewcy contributor Neal Pollack got a similar reaction in the comments section of a Salon article he wrote about his choice not to circumcise his son: Nobody seemed to understand how parents could threaten to disown a grown man.

Ultimately, this is one of the toughest things about the lingering taboo against intermarriage in certain cultures within America. It’s nice when the whole world agrees that your parents are crazy, but isn't it also kind of horrible?

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(Wait! Is this maybe a statement about Jewishness and how we define it in our post-religious, post-nationalist era? About how any show that aims to analyze how we live now is, by its very nature, "a Jew of a TV series"? In that case, though, what's with the "queen" tag?)

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