When Grey’s Anatomy premiered in 2005, it was one of the year’s buzziest dramas. It was like ER, but in Seattle, with a better soundtrack and (maybe) a better-looking cast. By Season 4, Grey’s had become a bit of a Hollywood punch line, thanks to stars with big mouths and huge egos, and plot lines involving very loud sex with a ghost/hallucination. But in its ripe old age, Grey’s has enjoyed a renaissance, returning to the sexy, soapy glory of its youth. One of the characters who’s lasted through it all is Seattle Grace’s resident Korean-Jewish-American cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Cristina Yang, played by Sandra Oh.

Yang drops her J-bomb in Season 2’s perfunctory Christmas episode, when her boyfriend/medical mentor Dr. Preston Burke (Isaiah Washington) asks her to help decorate a Christmas tree. Turns out Cristina’s not interested in XMas—she converted to Judaism after her mother’s second marriage to a well-known oral surgeon named Saul Rubenstein. Oh delivers the news perfectly, and Washington’s shocked reaction over his morning coffee is classic.

Other shows might have been content to leave Yang’s religion as a multicultural punch line. (According to my not-very-thorough research, Dr. Yang has the distinction of being the only Asian-American Jew on American television. Please comment if you know another one—other than Cristina Yang’s mother that is.) On the other hand, in most hospitals, an ambitious young medical intern might not sleep with her mentor. Neither of these rules apply to Grey’s Anatomy or Seattle Grace Hospital.

Drs. Burke and Yang eventually get engaged. It doesn’t look like there was a chuppah at the Burke-Yang nuptials, but we never get to find out whether any Jewish ritual snuck into the wedding since Burke doesn’t go through with the ceremony (actor Isaiah Washington was on his way off the show, see above re: big mouths).

Most likely, though, the ceremony would have skipped the sheva brachot, since Dr. Yang is an atheist. By far the most intense of the Grey’s team of young surgeons, Cristina believes only in science, and her own talent. She’s only interested in things you can operate on, and God doesn’t make the cut.

Believer or not, Cristina knows how to effectively make use of the great Jewish tradition of guilt, comparing her problems at work to the Holocaust. (There’s a list involved. One list means life…you see where it’s going.) And when Izzy’s (Katherine Heigl) patient/fiancé dies at the end of Season 2 (don’t worry, he comes back, see above re: ghost/hallucination), Cristina is the only one around who doesn’t panic. “I know what to do when someone dies. I am a Jew. I know food and death, it’s shiva.” Cristina’s knowledge of shiva is thorough—she explains that shiva is a week with no mirrors, no sitting on anything higher than a foot, no clean clothes, and no sex (a week is a VERY long time to go without sex on Grey’s). So, we have a spiritually alienated young Jew who instinctively falls back on religion in moments of crisis. Grey’s Anatomy just got real.

At the end of the most recent season of Grey’s Anatomy, Cristina had finally finished up her residency at Seattle Grace. Dr. Yang was planning on moving to the East Coast for a fellowship at Mount Sinai hospital in New York—surely she’s coming for the strong Jewish community. Cristina’s plans might just have been derailed, since she was in a plane crash in the annual season finale bloodbath. But imagine the possibilities if Cristina makes it to New York. A young, talented, newly single Jewish doctor heading to the Upper East Side? I smell a spinoff.

Previously on Network Jews:

Ross Geller, the nerdy paleontologist on Friends

Dr. Glenn Richie, the Jewish doctor on Childrens Hospital

Jeremy Goodwin, the wide-eyed Wunderkind on Sports Night

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Olympic season. For you, this might mean a chance to express your deep love for your country, maybe through a new Ralph Lauren outfit. It might be a rare opportunity to watch Taekwondo on national television. But for me, it means the return of one of my least favorite questions: “So, are you so excited for Olympic wrestling? Or do you only like the fake kind?”

I’m almost 25 now, and I have watched wrestling no more than four times in the last six years. Still, to people who knew me when I was a teenager, this is my legacy. When I run into someone from middle school or summer camp on the street, the small talk inevitably turns back to my fling with professional wrestling.

When I was 13, I asked everybody I knew to describe me in two words. All but two gave the exact same response: Smart and Nice.(a) So, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that people were pretty weirded out when they found out that I was also a passionate, borderline obsessive, professional wrestling fan. To be specific, I was a fan of the organization formerly known as the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), now called World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) after losing a lawsuit against the World Wildlife Fund.

But that was all a long time ago. No one asks me if I’m still into The Chronicles of Narnia (yes), Tamagotchis (no), or treasure hunt birthday parties (hmm … maybe next year). But, because I am Smart, and Nice, and, of course, a Lady, the fact that I was really into this one television show for a few years turns out to be a pretty big deal.

So, you may ask, how did I get into WWF anyway? That’s easy. My little brother watched it. Every Thursday night he tuned into WWF Smackdown!, and I sat with him, making fun of the fake chair shots, shiny spandex (b), and screaming, ‘roided up dudes. But soon I started asking questions. Like, why did the CEO of the WWF secretly orchestrate the kidnapping of his own daughter as part of a Corporate-Goth conspiracy with a crew called the Ministry of Darkness? And what is a Con-Chair-To? He made the fairly reasonable point that rather than interrupting him, I should shut up and watch the show. So I did, and a new world opened up for me.

I realized that the WWF was actually the greatest, most elaborate soap opera on television, and I was hooked.(c)  I went from watching Smackdown! on Thursdays (two hours a week) to spending about 20 hours a week watching (d) or reading about wrestling online. I was so serious about it that I used to tape Friends so I could watch Smackdown! live.

At first, this was my dirty secret. If I got caught checking one of my beloved forums at school, I changed the screen and pretended I was doing homework. Here’s a story I’ve never told anyone. I once sent a question to Molly Brown, my favorite online wrestling columnist at the time.(e) Molly actually wrote back, told me that she loved my letter and wanted to write a whole column in response. But, I had written my question anonymously, could I send her my name so she could include it in her column? I did respond with my name, but it must have gotten lost in her inbox. So Molly wrote her column, dedicated to an anonymous reader.

My heart was broken. One of the reasons I loved Molly’s column was because it was so exciting to see another lady who was passionate about wrestling. It didn’t bother me that Molly’s column didn’t use my name, but it killed me that she kept referring to the inspiration for the column as “he.”(f) I felt like I had missed my opportunity to proclaim myself as part of the small sisterhood of hardcore wrestling fans.

After that, I let go of my secret. I decided being the only girl in my high school who could recite every Royal Rumble winner was infinitely cooler than just being another smart and nice girl. I sat in class and drew elaborate diagrams based on wrestling plotlines. I convinced friends to watch it with me (usually only once), and I even wrote my college application essay about WWE. I fantasized about my future writing pro wrestling storylines, where I would translate my real-life friendships (and romances—I was madly in love with this dreamboat) with the wrestlers into plotlines.

The peak of my wrestling mania lasted about 5 years. Then Chris Benoit, one of my favorite wrestlers, killed his wife, son, and himself in an episode probably spurred by steroid use. The Wrestler came out. Things like bra and panties matches started bothering me, a lot. And I got bored of watching fake fighting.

I moved on, but my reputation did not. OK, I sort of get it. The WWF wasn’t exactly a common interest, and I was pretty hardcore about it. I also get that one could argue writing this article is just asking for the questions about my ex-hobby to continue. But really, this summer I just want to watch gymnastics and Ryan Lochte like the rest of you. So if I run into you on the street, can you ask me about that instead?

Footnotes:

(f) I don’t have any statistics about what percents of wrestling’s audience is female. But check out this article for an example of how deeply wrestling and maleness are linked together.

The post Yes, I Know It’s Fake: Confessions of a Recovered Pro Wrestling Addict appeared first on Jewcy.

Milla got me thinking about life as a Goldenberg, and what the are chances that my soul mate does, in fact, have the same last name as me (in my opinion, weird even if we’re not related). So, here is my comprehensive study on life as a Goldenberg:

Source: Census

Source: New York Times

Source: New York Times

Source: Wikipedia

Source: Facebook

(Main image credit: New York Times)

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Every conversation I ever had with Ben Zion Wacholder, my Zayde (grandfather), turned to that same question. When I was in Yeshiva high school, I would start telling Zayde about a Talmud passage I’d learned recently and he would recite the next five lines by heart. In college, I’d mention Homer and he would nod in approval. After I graduated and took a part-time personal assistant job, answering Zayde’s well-intentioned interrogations became a painful part of returning home, a reminder that my brain was melting away answering phones and booking travel arrangements. Stuttering through an answer, visiting Zayde became a constant reminder that I was learning … nothing.

A little background. Famously, while living in hiding as a non-Jew on a Polish farm during World War II, my Zayde used to teach Talmud to the cows. Even alone in the fields, talking about Judaism put his life in danger, but life without learning was impossible for him. Decades later, when he was a Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, my Zayde and his student Marty Abegg published the first partial translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which previously had been kept secret by a small group of scholars, earning himself more than a few enemies in the world of early Christian and Rabbinic scholarship. Again, he believed that knowledge is meant to be used, and he couldn’t stand to see it hidden away.

In March of 2011, Zayde passed away and I traveled to Israel with my mother and her siblings for his funeral. We were in Israel for five days, and the whole trip is a blur of emotions, jet lag, confusing ritual dancing at the cemetery, and small talk with strangers at shiva. But what I do remember is the stories my Zayde’s former students, colleagues, and friends told me about him, and the letters they started sending my family.

The stories were so rich and varied that I decided I wanted to compile them and piece together a complete picture of my Zayde. While I was struggling to decide whether I was capable of putting together anything that somebody would publish, my mother—who was using Google while the rest of us were still Asking Jeeves—put my 21st-century self to shame by pointing out that the best way to share information with lots of people is online. So I went back to school, and signed myself up for courses in Web programming and design.

It turned out that after drowning in the liberal arts for years, my brain was starving for a little quantitative reason and binary logic. After four years of college and then two years working in the art world, I was bored to death with spurious interpretations and pretentious nonsense masquerading as theory. Growing up in a family of academics, I felt like a failure when I realized that academia frustrated me, that my brain is too concrete and results-oriented for the ambiguities and abstractions of studying the humanities. But Web programming was empowering. Work with a clear purpose and a defined end point! Actual right and wrong answers! Visible results! I finally found a field that feels relevant and current, and a place I could contribute more than yet another paper or article.

It also turns out that programming was kind of hard. For a year and a half, instead of building an online archive about my Zayde, I’ve been busy building HTML tables and struggling through PHP control structures. But, as I slogged through the busywork, I was relieved that I finally had an answer to Zayde’s eternal question, “So, what are you learning?”

And so, a year and six programming languages later, I finally created BenZionWacholder.org. It is a tribute to my Zayde not just because it contains his writing and writing about him, but because through preparing this project I rediscovered my love of learning. The site is a work in progress—I’m still gathering knowledge about my Zayde and the programming skills I need. And that’s exactly as it should be. As long as I’m still learning, I know that I’m remembering him the right way.

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In actual camp programming, the only vestiges of real Hebrew education were our daily proyekt class, run by the extremely attractive Israeli soldiers familiar to anyone who has attended Jewish camp in the United States. Proyekt really translates to “skip class and avoid eye contact with staff members.” So, the only real Hebrew content of the summer was in the plays that every age group put on. Highlights of my own camp performances include Rocky Horror Picture Show, She’s All That, and The Prince of Egypt, staged with varying degrees of coherence and faithfulness to the original source. In my last summer as a camper, we put on Tommy, which makes surprisingly frequent appearances in the camp repertoire thanks to a truly impressive translation. Israeli theater producers: take note.

I spent one summer as a camp counselor. That year, thanks to our Jewish day school education, my friend Ilana and I were asked to write the script for the play my campers would perform—101 Dalmations. I hope that when I die, I am primarily remembered for my Hebrew version of Britney Spears’  “Toxic,” about Cruella DeVille.

For campers, play performances were among the grand events of the summer. One night, the summer before seventh grade, as I squeezed onto the floor of an unventilated wooden barn directly behind a boy a foot taller than me, I was ready for a magical performance of The Wizard of Oz. I had no idea I was about to experience the most meaningful Hebrew educational moment in my 10 years at camp.

I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz far more times than is healthy, and I spoke Hebrew just about as well as anybody at camp. So, I thought I had a pretty good grasp of the plot. The first act went exactly as I expected. But when Dorothy and Co. finally reached Oz, events took an unexpected twist.

During the Scarecrow’s big moment with the Wizard, the crowd suddenly went wild—or at least the part of the crowd who knew Hebrew. I did not get the joke. I turned to my counselor, bewildered, who generously explained that instead of saying, “I wish for a brain,” the brilliant 14-year-old performer had turned to the Wizard of Oz and said ten li rosh—“give me head”.

So, that emphasis on the Hebrew language paid off after all, as I got a handy lesson in describing the act of fellatio in the holy tongue. Thanks, Camp.

Shifra M. Goldenberg is an arts administrator and freelance web designer.

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