My friend Meredith and I were standing in line at Starbucks when she mentioned she would like to get lunch at Chick-fil-A to which I obviously responded “I can’t eat there because it’s not Kosher.” Marriage material, I know. It was then that the guy in front of me turned around and butt in with a “Wow. You keep Kosher STILL.” Um … STILL? I’m sorry, were you at my fifth birthday party at the ceramics center? Do I know you? He then barked out another weirdly worded question. “Have you lived in Israel YET?” This guy had bizarre grammar choices. Meredith was taken a back by this freak, but not me. As someone who exudes more Jewishness than Barbara Streisand in Yentl, I’m used to people trying to “bagel” with me. Yup, I said “Bagel,” you know, when someone tries to bond with you by awkwardly and sometimes not so subtly by letting you in on the fact that they’re Jewish.

I can’t take credit for the term, but it is brilliant. Lord knows we had a bageler on our hands, but this bageler was an amateur. Upon noticing a fellow Jew in line at the supermarket, a tasteful, professional bageler would break out the good ol’ “Oh, I forgot the challah!” It works like a charm. Less is more. I felt bad for this guy so I helped him out, “Judging from your hair, I see you too are part of the tribe.” Of course he had a massive Jew fro. “Yes,” he responded in a highly socially awkward way. Good talk. Glad we did this.

We finally got up to the register and the barista asked the bageler what his name was so they could write it on his cup. “Neil,” he said, and then turns around and looks me dead in the eye and says “I mean Nachhhhhmann.” Oh, boy. Sweet Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Why do we feel the need to bagel? Is it because being Jewish is special and we all want to reach out to our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters to establish a sense of community no matter where we are … OR … is it because we need to scout out who is Jewish at all times just in case there’s a pogrom or something? Or is that just me? Either way, why do I have to be bageled all the time, sometimes I want to bagel too! And so I will admit I have been guilty of bageling others, and not just regular bageling, but competitive bageling. The absolute worst kind.

I was doing some work in Starbucks when a young man wearing a yarmulke sat down across from me at the table and started studying Talmud. I must mention that 99 percent of all bageling happens at Starbucks. That is a REAL statistic. The young man was deep into his Talmud studies and this was my time to shine. I wanted to be slick but still let Talmud Kid know he was in the presence of a big Jew. I let out a few subtle “oy veys” and kept it classy. All of a sudden this other kid across the table, let’s call him “Moses” just for the hell of it, popped up out of nowhere with a “What mesechta (volume) are you learning?” Oh screw you, Moses. What do you know? I knew it was Talmud too! Moses and Talmud Kid carried on with a very Jewish related conversation until I self consciously butt in with “Yeah I learned Talmud too because I went to a Jewish day school.” Silence. I was desperate and had hit an all time low. I was being competitive with Moses because I wanted Talmud Kid’s approval of my Jewishness and I wanted it NOW. To my disappointment, he was completely unimpressed by all the bageling.

A few minutes later, I had to go outside to make a phone call so I asked Talmud Kid and Moses to watch my laptop. “I trust you,” I said while I dazzled them with my bageling eyes. They got the picture. Clear as day. We were all Jews and could therefore leave our laptops with one another worry-free. Bageling at it’s finest.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post Tales of a Competitive Bageler appeared first on Jewcy.

Even so, Levey’s been surprised by the response.

“There are people who, just from the title and the tongue-in-cheek website, are absolutely positive that this is a play that promotes Holocaust denial and are furious and are leaving messages about some really heavy, horrible stuff. Like, ‘I don’t know who you are, but I hope your family burns in hell.’ ”

Others have left “grateful messages,” believing that the website is in line with their own denialist beliefs. Levey and his team have made an effort to scrub these comments (the show has a fairly vigorous social media campaign and has encouraged discussion on its various online platforms).

Running through June 17 at the Theater for the New City (the location is “off off Bowery,” according to one of the play’s jokes), Hoaxocaust! tells an exaggerated version of Levey’s own story—that is, of a liberal, gay, secular Jewish man searching for a religious and Zionist identity that is not dependent upon the memory of the Shoah. The play is at times schematic (and includes a post-show talkback session with producers that I found a little trite and wearisome), but it’s also clever, cooly provocative, and takes the audience in some unexpected directions. Moreover, it manages to introduce some levity into an area of discussion that would seem humor-proof.

The setting is simple to the point of austere: a black box theater with three low risers, a large white screen as a backdrop, and a number of chairs that are rotated in throughout, allowing the Levey character to act out conversations with a murderer’s row of well-known Holocaust deniers: Arthur Butz, David Irving, Robert Faurrison, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

True to title, there’s a great hoax at the heart of Hoaxocaust!. There are several, in fact, and one is that the play-version of Barry Levey (let’s call him Barry) begins to believe the deniers whom he interviews. It’s partly a willed delusion: If the Holocaust were not as bad as advertised, Barry thinks, then Jews wouldn’t have to consider themselves victims, and the Holocaust wouldn’t form such a central part of modern Jewish identity. And, the play also argues, the Shoah wouldn’t serve as justification for Israel’s perceived belligerence towards its neighbors.

Or, as Barry asks: “I mean really, the Holocaust is our rationalization for everything from our war plan to our dating pool?”

While the play’s editorial line seems clear in arguing that the Holocaust and its legacy have been exploited for political purposes—and have played too central a role in the formation of post-war Jewish identity—Levey is more diffident in person.

“I can certainly understand that there are probably great arguments to be made on both sides of how big of a role the memory of the Holocaust should play in our political discourse about things like the state of Israel or how to deal with Iran,” he said. “So I don’t know. I wouldn’t presume to say one way or the other, and I hope the play doesn’t say one way or the other. But I do worry about it enough that I think it’s worth asking the question and having the play ask the question.”

The play’s genesis can be traced to Operation Cast Lead, which Levey told me, “was one of the first times in my adult life where I found myself questioning, what are the unintended consequences of our actions?” As a child, he said, he had never been taught to empathize with the suffering of Palestinians.

There was also a more recent, and distinctly New York, bit of inspiration. Levey holds down a day-job as a legal secretary in Midtown, where the so-called Mitzvah tanks—RVs out of which Chabadniks dispense prayer, tefillin, and religious literature—are ubiquitous. Their familiar call—“Are you Jewish? Are you Jewish?”—had become a source of anxiety for Levey.

“I find myself tensing up that I don’t know the answer to that question,” he said.

He began crossing to the other side of the street to avoid them.

“Are they asking me about my religion? Because I don’t really feel very religious. Are they asking me, Am I ethnically Jewish? Do I believe in race and ethnicity anyway, and if I do, I guess ethnically [I’m Jewish]. Or are they asking me culturally? This whole thing happens in my head. I feel so overwhelmed by just that question that I figured there was something going on inside me—if I can’t walk past the Mitzvah Mobile without having a minor breakdown.”

This neurotic kernel gives Hoaxocaust! some emotional heft, and prevents it from being simply a creative exercise in historiography. While the play is structured around its fake interviews, there’s also a personal strain to Barry’s plight. His brother is marrying an Arab woman, which has divided the family and caused Barry’s Puerto Rican boyfriend to accuse him of being racist. And there is a void in Barry’s family history, where the Holocaust is present but mostly unaddressed. In one brief scene that’s both haunting and darkly funny, Barry recalls when representatives of the Shoah Foundation arrived to interview his grandfather. A survivor already well into senility, his grandfather refused to entertain his visitors.

“The Holocaust?” he asks, impatiently. “People still believe in that? That’s just a story I cooked up with Satan.”

The scene actually prefigures some bizarre conversations with Ahmadinejad and even Satan himself, as the play embarks on a magical realist bent.

“At first I didn’t think I was going to have to make it fantastical,” Levey said. “When I first had the idea that I was going to write about Holocaust deniers as if they were right, I thought it was going to be so easy to just be funny. Because I thought everything they had to say was just going to be so ridiculous that all I have to do is just say what they said and it would be a laugh riot. But then when I actually started researching what they said, I found that it wasn’t very funny at all, and it was actually terrifying.”

The flights into the fantastic make some ironic sense, as they reflect how deniers’ arguments are so absurd—the Shoah is the most thoroughly recorded and studied event in human history—that they are impossible to believe. Yet a troubling minority do believe deniers, whose arguments, which generally collapse under close scrutiny, can still exhibit a surface-level cogency.

Cribbing deniers’ arguments from websites, speeches, and books, and drawing on the work of Jewish scholars like Deborah Lipstadt and Alex Grobman, Levey found himself bothered by how some deniers, like Arthur Butz, who’s a tenured professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, bedeck themselves in the trappings of respectable scholarship, presenting themselves as the true arbiters of “facts.”

More disturbing, perhaps, were people whom Levey encountered, online and in real life, who weren’t versed in history and seemed open to denialist arguments. It’s this willingness to be skeptical that Levey calls “the first step on the road to denial.”

There’s a distinctly au courant air to how this concern is manifested in Hoaxocaust!. The sense that truth has been fundamentally destabilized in the digital-first, post-print era, that nothing can be known for certain and that old-fashioned, scholarly expertise has been superseded by rankings in search results—all of this, Levey argues, means that Holocaust denial has acquired a new life. It can now propagate through the Internet, free of any gatekeeper and operating on an ostensibly equal footing with an article by Lipstadt or a story in Haaretz. New narratives develop—the type of pen Anne Frank used wasn’t invented until 1953, or the gas chambers show minimal residue of Zyklon B—to take advantage of developments in forensic and material sciences.

(Advances in science and scholarship can also reveal the limits of what can be known, as explored in the play The Soap Myth, which looks at the rumor that Nazis made soap from human flesh.)

All of this has left Levey worried about “how we process information and how we vet information.” Those dives into the rabbit hole of denialism made him understand the power that these narratives, and the “facts” marshaled in their support, can have. And while his alter ego’s willingness to believe isn’t always convincing, he does dramatize the ease with which someone may fall under the spell of an Irving or Faurrison.

Hoaxocaust! ends in this place of uncertainty—a problem articulated but certainly far from being solved, its protagonist, now converted, personifying denialism’s malignant power. Barry’s turn from hero to anti-hero left me in mind of one of his line’s from early in the play:

“If you wanted it easy, you should’ve gone to Old Jews Telling Jokes.”

The post <em>Hoaxocaust!</em> The Satirical Play About Holocaust Denial appeared first on Jewcy.

There are some who may say that trading 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israel soldier is a bit lopsided, or that Bibi’s motivations were “shady.”  While many believe getting Gilad Shalit home free was the number one priority, calling it a “breakthrough.”  But The New York Times sees the story as an opportunity to draw over a thousand teeny tiny Palestinian prisoners by hand for the cover of their latest Sunday Magazine issue.

Aren’t they just adorable?

The post Look At All The Tiny Palestinian Prisoners appeared first on Jewcy.

In the last post, I hinted towards some of the more questionable aspects of the birthright experience. Here I would like to focus on this idea of birthright as experiencing the “real” or “true” culture of Israel. By now we treat the inherent subjectivity of every experience as a truism, but it helps to flesh out how the program itself guides the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of the participants towards its goals.

Birthright’s first, basic, and most important tool is simple fatigue. From the outside, the schedule of birthright doesn’t necessarily impress us with a frenetic pace, but put together jet -lag, nerves, late bedtime and early wake up, hikes, hours on a bus, oily food, foreign ideas, people, and places, mix in moving from hotel to hostel to hotel, emotionally electric experiences ranging from faux-falling in love to the weight of the holocaust, plus the alcohol, of course, and you create a cocktail that will knock out the strongest of people. (I always found this nomadic aspect of the trip ironic. We attend a trip called Birthright only to feel a constant sense of displacement.)

The fatigue causes the different components of the trip to bleed together into one big stain. Or worse, the adventurous aspect overwhelms the participants to the extent that the educational content, regardless of its bent, can only receive a tepid reception from a bunch of reasonably tired Americans, who just want to eat the same piece of schnitzel with rice, again, and then get shitfaced with friends. Consequently, either we lose the educational aspect, or the educational aspect moves into the minds of the participants with little critical thought. However, this sapping of energy accomplishes positive goals as well. Feeling tired after a long day not only engenders a sense of accomplishment, but it also creates an in group feeling, heightens emotions, lowers inhibitions, which makes it easier to connect to everyone on the trip.

Let’s make an obvious point: Often, what you don’t show someone serves as much as propaganda as what you choose to show. Thinking that the birthright experience actually captures the feel of Israel is akin to thinking that Disneyworld represents America. Instead, birthright offers a highlight reel, an anesthetized, simplistic version of Israel.

Here’s what we do see and experience. We see beaches with names like Durex beach, full of attractive young people playing that stupid paddle ball game, wearing speedos or bikinis, with whom we eye flirt. We see sunsets, artist markets, possibly drugged out, or acid addled Cabbalists. We see Israelis, from afar. We see emotionally evocative holy places, and pictures, ceaseless pictures of the holocaust. We hear of the Jews courage to die by their own hands rather than give up in Masada. We hear from a right-wing extremist nut who wears a gun like a pair of suspenders, and wears that novelty shirt that screams with pride that amongst all the ancient nations, only the Jews have survived, which cruelly misrepresents history. (Judaism as a religion has survived. Judaism, just like Ancient Rome has fallen. David’s line no longer sits in his palace in Jerusalem, and if we are using longevity of existence as a gauge for anything, then oy vey.)

We celebrate bar mitzvahs amidst the ruins of the Temple. We remain tourists in every imaginable sense of the word. We visit bars prepared for our visit (An endless loop of Lady Gaga interspersed with other popular American songs.) We dance with creepy Israeli guys and get rejected, mostly, by Israeli women. We ogle, a lot. All of us. We stay up late creating memories over pizza. We jump into the ocean in our underwear for some moonlight swimming, the waves higher than our heads, without lifeguards. We walk around drunk at 3:30 at night searching the streets of Tel Aviv for an open restaurant that better have a great milkshake. We sleep, eventually, huddled up together in a bedouin tent, after a delicious dinner, a campfire, more flirtation, some cuddling, some coupling, and of course, a lot of drinking. We hike short hikes then the men take off their shirts to display their power. We play ad-hoc baseball. We throw rocks at the sunset. We drink sweet bedouin tea together and laugh at or with the poor bedouin tour guide who must put his culture on display to people who clearly do not care. We feel infinite.

Here’s what we don’t see. We don’t see Arabs, or we barely do. We see them in the hotels, sometimes, but most participants wouldn’t notice them or care. We see their towns from a far, but we shy away from them because they look monotonous, deprived. We obviously don’t hear from an Arab Israeli, or any Palestinian, nor can any participant go to Palestinian territories for safety reasons. (This strikes me as a weak excuse because if they really cared, they could have these adult participants sign waivers.)  We don’t see the victims of attacks, on either side, the ones with limbs missing, or faces burned. We don’t see the frustration of the current generation with the army, with the lack of jobs, with a lack of a voice, a general frustration that creates a situation that according to one of the Israeli guards on the trip, “we feel more calm when we know of an imminent threat, and feel less calm in the ambiguity of silence…I can barely imagine what it feels like to live a life where you can make choices for yourself.” (She was actually that eloquent.) We don’t hear about the soldiers, who like Israeli author Etgar Keret’s friend, committed suicide in the army. We don’t see the animosity that so much of the younger generation bears towards their parents ideological Zionist Dreams. We don’t see the apathy. We don’t see the other side of the wall. The terrifying checkpoints that let us glide through, but probably, it’s safe to say, don’t treat everyone that way.

We interact with Israeli’s that the program chooses. The Israeli soldiers, make no mistake about it, will gladly explain their ulterior motives as a desire for a vacation and to sleep with pretty Americans, besides the stated purpose of representing their country and army. The army and birthright, obviously so, but this still should raise questions, chooses Israeli soldiers who either hold admirable positions in the army, or do not veer from the path/party line. The soldiers who go on birthright get chosen for their pride in their job, their country, and their army, or their willingness to play that part.

Also, they always happen to turn out attractive. Shocking. The thought of an 18 year old fighting for something that they can barely choose to believe in, disturbed me, and perhaps a few other participants, but most of the people fall in love with the soldiers, in a manner incommensurate to the time spent together. After just five days, not counting the first in which the soldiers fumble through introductions, some of the participants think they’ve found love incarnate in this foreign soldier. The soldiers lend our American lives value, while us Americans provide these Israelis both a taste of freedom and more importantly, admiration and validation. Through this symbiotic connection, birthright creates a bond that though tenuous, elicits impossible reactions: beautiful, teary eyed, repeated good byes, hugs, kisses, more hugs, even more hugs, waves goodbye from the bus, more crying, and then constant Facebook messaging. Birthright, brilliantly, puts an attractive, emotionally connected face to the culture and army of Israel. No longer can any of the participants think in the abstract about Israeli society. From now on, we will all think of Tamir, or Agnayu or Maya etc.

That we see the culture they want us to see is understandable. If I received guests in my house and then proceeded to give them the royal tour I would not show them the unfinished or messy rooms. But this infantilizes the participants. It creates an Israel in their minds that bears little resemblance to Israel. The worst part is that we pull off this magic trick without telling them. So much of the rhetoric on the trip presupposes we treat the participants as adults, but this experience undermines our words. Respecting adulthood in others entails respecting their ability to think, critically, to make decisions based on exploring the range of opinions.

Which all leads to a less obvious point: This trip, though touted and repeatedly referred to as a gift, is more similar to a gift from your in-laws that implicitly creates a contract of sorts where you now must visit them, listen to their rules, and opinions. On a basic, non-controversial level let’s refer to this as an investment by Jewish Federations, two super rich Jews, and recently the Israeli government. Each invests to gain something, whether Jewish continuity or fiscal and political support of Israel, or perhaps to inculcate a certain vision of Israel. The governments involvement doesn’t change the nature of the trip, it just highlights the true nature of the trip as teleological, or simply, as a purposeful investment.

Birthright advertises as a trip without an agenda, but even with generosity, their program seriously limits the range of reactions to the trip. There is a reason that most trips sounds the same, but differ just in volume of excitement. Of course, exceptions exist, but like many exceptions they point to the rule. However, despite the not-so-hidden agenda, I understand the tension in creating the right kind of balance on this trip. As much as the participants are adults, and they are full-fledged adults, they are children, babies almost, when it comes to Jewish religion, culture, and Israel. How do you create a trip that both represents Israel in all its complexity, while respecting both the maturity and lack of education of the participants? I hope to speak about this, and the politics of the trip in the next post.

The post Birthright Revisited: “Real” And “True” Culture appeared first on Jewcy.

Pretty much anything with pumpkin is amazing: Pumpkin pie, pumpkin ale, the Great Pumpkin, Pumpkinhead, and don’t even get me started on pumpkin ice cream.  Pumpkin is possibly the most popular squash in the world, and it has been totally underused by the Jews; probably due to the fact that there wasn’t exactly a bumper crop of the big orange gourds in the desert or the Pale of the Settlement.

The good people at My Jewish Learning are doing what they can to reverse that trend, and maybe their posting of a stuffed pumpkin recipe to be enjoyed in your sukkah will help place these sorts of dishes next to more tradition seasonal Jewish fare

The post Stuff Some Pumpkin For Your Sukkah appeared first on Jewcy.

We live in a generation of doubt. To trace the roots of this pervasive sense of uncertainty requires an exploration that glides throughout the different worlds of academia. In contrast, here I hope to discuss the practical effects on a thinking Jew in their religious life. For the most part, a person can live their life as a practicing Jew regardless of their doubts. Shul might strike them as boring, and possibly purposeless, but they can find value in community. Rituals might lack a certain sense of divinity, but can infuse structure into life, and connect a person to a rich tradition. When it comes down to it, even if some disagree with the propriety of orthopraxy (i.e. the idea of practicing regardless of beliefs) as an extension of tradition, we cannot argue for it as an untenable lifestyle. In fact, for all intents and purposes I would claim that many people do not truly care about the foundations of their faith, or they do, and find them lacking, but enjoy Judaism regardless for what it still provides: meaning, structure, community, values, and a sense of historical identity.

Some though, obsessed with these questions will tire, will reach a point where nothing appears more compelling than any other choice, so why not choose Judaism, but either way, they end up in a less passionate place than during their naivete. Regardless of these artificial groupings, the biggest question for the Jewish community, the one that grounds and centers the rest of the issues facing our people is from where will the next generation’s passion come? Because as it stands now, many of us feel a dwindling connection to the Judaism of yore at the same time that we see few, if any, options for a future connection to organized religion.

However, as we encounter this month of Elul and the High Holidays, the end/beginning of the Jewish year, this path of ease and comfort begins to fade as the mood of the calendar brings us face to face with our beliefs. In these months, traditionally, we search our souls for the accumulated stains of time, for the misstep in our paths that brought us to a foreign version of ourselves. But to many, this idea itself will sound foreign. We can imagine what it entails to repent in relationships: to revive old friendships that died due to the winds of apathy, or fear of confrontation, or personal weakness or pettiness; to make time for our family, for those who truly matter to us; To actively seek out opportunities to actually help others, not just our friends, but the truly needy. To give of our time, to volunteer, to join that organization we always knew we belonged to but never took a formal step to join. But for me, and according to numerous conversations and my general impression, for large swathes of Jews, the concept of repentance in regards to our relationship with the divine will feel muddled at best. In this way the holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, the time of Elul, and the concept of repentance in relationship to God forces us to confront like no other concept and holiday what we actually believe and want in life.

Think of any other holiday. Each one can easily turn into a secular affair, into an affirmation of our nationhood, into a celebration of freedom, a celebration of our responsibility, or our historical culture. On Pesach we can get together as a family, sit around the oddly decorated table, pillows at our back, leaning to our left eating strange foods, while we marvel at our ability to survive and thrive, and celebrate freedom from exile. We can divest each holiday of its holiness, of its godliness in turning it into a familial or cultural day.  However, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, those solemn days of endless prayer and repentance, of crowning God the sovereign king, do not lend themselves easily to secularization. God inheres so much in these holidays that at best we can begin to discuss apples and honey, or more seriously, death, but that saps these days of their celestial strength so that for many Jews these days serve as their connections to synagogues and Judaism, but the connection rests on the sacrifice of giving a day to heritage and nothing more, because its hard to attach ourselves to the great drama of the day without a visceral belief in a providential God.

No other holidays rests on the assumption of foundational beliefs as these two days, and consequently, in these two days I feel the pangs of my doubts the most. How can I read the frightening words of Netaneh Tokef without confronting my true beliefs? How can we read of who will die, whether by fire or water, without realizing that I need to assume that God exists, cares about my specific deeds, and would actually kill me, or my loved ones for their transgressions. How do we hit our hearts and apologize for the sin of cursing god, or licentious behavior, if we stand uncertain in the complete divinity of the Torah? In short, how can we embrace a holiday in which we doubt the truth of its basic fundamental assumptions? How can we return in repentance for “sins”  we now value, how can we crown a king with pomp and circumstance when we doubt his existence? If this day enacts a cosmic drama of the most important ramifications can we partake in it if it signifies no more than barely plausible wishful thinking?

Some might respond that besides the idea of repentance as a return to what was, it demands forward movement. It is exactly at this time that we must revisit our concept of God from the days of our youth, a concept handed down to us by the previous generation to mold a more subtle, nuanced, less childish conception of God. One shorn of his need for vengeance, of hell and heaven, but at what point in our creation of a more palatable version of God do we lapse into self worship, or do we empty out religion of its power to grab hold of our lives, to comfort us on the deepest levels?

Others, using truth as a beacon to live our lives would demand we give up our childish playthings, our baby blankets, pacifiers, and see religion for the man made artifice we so desperately are afraid to see. One some days, I feel the pull of all of these claims compounding the doubt. I cannot run away from this total noise of the world, from the truths of philosophy, the claims of my family and my heart, and my deepest hopes for something else, something larger. I long for the years before secularism when these questions garnered as much relevancy as the existence of purple elephants, but for me, and for many others, we live in this world, a world so inundated by conflicting truths that it becomes easy to let it all wash over you and to simply not choose.

I don’t know answers to these questions. Today, repentance, for me, entails a movement towards completion, towards that elusive concept of self-actualization, and an acknowledgment that a ceaseless search for a personal understanding of God and Judaism is for many of us, all we can hope for in this era of uncertainty. The rabbis explain that Elul, the name of this month, serves as an acronym for ani l’dodi v’dodi li, I am for my beloved and my beloved is for me. In a time in which we still believe that love conquers most if not all problems, I find it comforting that for so long my ancestors believed simply that if you reach out to the infinite, the Almighty will reach back with unconditional love, even if, on most days, I cannot always feel His divine caress.

The post A Shul Hopper’s Thought On The High Holidays appeared first on Jewcy.

When reflect on the term “Member of the Tribe” a lot of images come to mind.  It sounds a bit primal, it sounds cultural, it sounds communal, it sounds familial.  The community, cultural, and familial aspects of Judaism have always been the hardest ares for me to feel connected to, while the spiritual is easy.  I come from a strong black family that I get support from, but I don’t have a Jewish family.  I have a strong cultural heritage that is not yet Jewish.  I have a rich queer community that sometime overlaps with my Judaism but rarely with my black community.  So how does a black lesbian woman blend her culture to a Jewish culture that has been in existence since the dawn of humanity?  I still don’t have the answer, but in the past week I have definitely felt what it means to be a part of the broader Jewish community.

As mentioned in the Daily Jewce last week I was awarded a scholarship to visit Israel with LGBTQ Jewish groups Nehirim, Keshet and A Wider Bridge.  Having been unemployed since June the prospect of finding the money for a flight to Israel seemed quite literally an impossible dream.  I figured that I would open a Paypal account, hold my breath and pray.  I didn’t pray, “God help me go to Israel!”  but instead prayed, “If it is meant to be, it will be.”  Less than a week after setting up the account it is fairly safe to say that I will be going to Israel because of my Jewish community.

I’ve received plenty of donations from my friends who are Jewish and those who are not. Colleagues have donated as well as my rabbis, but the most unexpected has been donations that I have received from people I’ve never met, from states and countries I’ve never visited.  One donation in particular came from a woman who was “paying it forward” since she’d received financial help when she traveled to Israel.  Besides the outpouring of money flowing into my Paypal account, the messages and e-mails of support and encouragement that I receive every day has been more than overwhelming.  The Jewish community can never replace my black community or my lesbian community and I don’t want it to.  That said, the response from the Jews around the world sending their hard-earned money to send me, a stranger, on a journey to a country not everyone agrees with is incredible.

Every day I open my e-mail account and have notification that I’ve received a donation and every day I thank God.  In one week I got a job, I got a scholarship to go to Israel, and I’ve received donations.  I’m a spiritual person, but not always a “It’s because of God” kind of person.  Last week I couldn’t help but wonder, if it’s not God then who is it?  Is it just the kindness of strangers, is it the “it takes a village (a Tribe)” mentality, is it luck, is it fate?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that wonderful things are happening in my Jewish life and I feel like I’m part of the Jewish Community not because of the donations, but because of the love and support.

People still ask me why I chose to become Jewish when the cards were already stacked against me.  I’m black.  I’m a woman.  I’m a lesbian and I’m a Jew.  It doesn’t seem like those things, these communities go together.  In the end they are just labels. It’s just the name of my blog and the name of this column.  They aren’t what make or define me, they just are parts of me and it would seem that they do in fact fit together quite nicely.

The post Black, Gay, And Jewish: I’m A Member Of The Tribe appeared first on Jewcy.

Jewcy interviewed Marc Maron almost exactly one year ago. At the time he had a very popular podcast that was essential listening for comedy fans. He had already interviewed Judd Apatow, Ben Stiller, and Robin Williams and had show defining episodes with Dane Cook and Carlos Mencia. Then his cult hit slowly grew into a full-grown hit with a New York Times Profile, a NPR Syndication deal, and a Pilot Presentation for Fox.

His interviews are often accurately described as intimate, uncompromising, and intense and more than just conversations about comedy they’re one of the purest looks into the mind of the artist that we have. This is why the show has greatly extended beyond its initial comedian and comedy nerd fanbase.

One of the most prominent themes of the show is Marc’s exploration of both his relationship and the relationship of comedians in general with Judaism.  This has always been a part of Maron’s work culminating in his one-man show The Jerusalem Syndrome. What has manifested itself over the course of the podcast’s run is an exploration of the evolution of the Jewish comedian archetype. He implicitly creates a narrative that links Woody Allen to Richard Lewis to him to Joe Mande.

Here is a list of the top Jewish episodes:

Episode 16 Eugene Mirman

In the very early goings the podcast started to develop a reputation for being too Jewy (as pointed out in Episode 39 by Chelsea Peretti). However, it was interview with Eugene where it was most Jew forward. In so much that talking about Hitler is the most Jewish thing to Jews could do.  Maybe it was a coincidence or maybe not, but after this episode the frequency of Jewish guests slowed significantly.

Episode 103 & 104 Judd Apatow

Despite having such a prolific career, it’s arguable that no one has done more to define today’s man-child Jewish comedic archetype than Judd. Yet, as was apparent in his interview with Marc, Judd cares and worries a lot. The two men bonded over what is best described by a very Jewish term David Rakoff popularized, “defensive pessimism.” Still, much of the episode was spent talking about comedy, so as an added bonus there is a priceless clip from an interview a teenage Apatow conducted with a very young Jerry Seinfeld, who has never sounded more like a Long Island Jew.

Episode 114 Jonathan Ames

Jonathan Ames and Marc Maron are opposite sides of the same coin in a way. Both are known for the hyper-confessional nature of their art that is cut with a grittier version of the whole Woody Allen thing. There is a sense that partially Jonathan rather he was a stand-up like Marc and Marc a writer like Jonathan. As Marc is able to joke about being angrier version of the Jewish comedian, Jonathan can with being a more perverted one.

Episode 117 Ira Glass

Ira Glass is not a comedian but there is no way he’d be off this list (or else I’d fear the wrath of Bambi). This was an episode of dueling insecurity. Both feel like they don’t measure up to the other and don’t deserve the success they have. Their wavering between narcissistic confidence and nagging feelings of inadequacy would not have felt out of place at many creative Jews therapy sessions.

Episode 142 Joe Mande

Joe grew up primarily in Minnesota, but he was born in Alburcurque, which was enough to bond Marc with him over being a Southwest-Jew. The Jewishness of the interview took the form of Joe’s story about how he lost faith. Not to spoil too much, because it’s a pretty amazing story, but it involves a Hassidic con artist, who may or many not have hid a shiv in his beard (spoiler alert: he didn’t).

Episode 162 Michael Showalter

Michael Showalter is a different strain of the Jewish Comedian archetype. He has plenty of neurosis, but being the son of two professors, they manifest with an intellectuals bent. The standout moment was his explanation that he was plagued with sexual anxieties for much of his youth because he tried to treat it like an academic pursuit.

Episode 191 Will Arnett, Keith Robinson, Marina Franklin, Judy Gold, Jon Benjamin, Jonathan Katz

Live episodes are a very different beast than the standard WTF, leaning towards being more performative. The conversations are drastically less personal, which results in less religion talk.  This one is the exception, however. Seconds after Jonathan Katz gets introduced, Marc asks, ““Where do you stand on the whole Jew thing?” This set off minutes of great Semitic riffing, including a discussion on their issues with Klezmer music. Katz puts it perfectly, “Why are we living our lives in a minor key?” They even mumble an aliyah together.

Episode 193 Richard Lewis

This might be the show’s most Jew-packed episode. It’s wall-to-wall manic neuroticism. The episode started with Marc describing the first time he saw Richard’s “Woody Allen on speed” shtick and wanting to be a comic just like that. In a way, this episode is Marc’s tribute to Richard’s comic persona both in terms of his stand-up and his self-destructive life-style

Episode 203 Carol Leifer

Carol is from Long Island and the rumored basis for Elaine on Seinfeld, which is probably enough to get her on this list. However, the moment that really stands out from her episode was her story about telling her parents that she was in love with a woman. Carol before she met her partner lived a completely straight life, which didn’t make an already very tough conversation any easier. Choked up, she explained their response, “at least she’s Jewish.”

Episode 207 Sandra Bernhard

The episode has a Jewy intro, as Marc discusses the plight of the “Jews with tools” and his anxiety surrounding bugs in his house. Then Sandra sits down and Marc puts it best, “Sandra Bernhard is in my garage, we’re talking about old Jews in a very abstract way, as we’re slowly becoming them.” The first fifteen minutes of the interview is all-Jew talk, including discussions of how the Orthodox smell bad, being Jewish anti-Semites, and Sandra’s time working on a kibbutz. Later she talks about getting her daughter Bar Mitzvah at a Chabad. It is might have the most total time of explicit Jew talking.

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ESPN recently banned the fantasy football league Jews Are Terrible, or the JAT, as it’s commonly referred to among sports fans, and whose motto was “Burn Jews Wherever Possible.”

“They may have been Fantasy Leagues, but the hate is all too real,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a leading Jewish Human Rights organization.  The Simon Wisenthal Center took credit for banishment, which required two followups from two law school interns, and sent out a press release celebrating he triumph.

But the three teams that make up the JAT are still reeling from the shock that their season has ended so abruptly.  After coming so close to not even having an NFL season due to labor disputes, there were high expectations for this year to be a banner one for the JAT.  As we enter week two of the football season, the mood at JAT headquarters, located in the bedroom of 14-year-old commissioner who goes under the name “Anonymous,” is  reportedly low, and there are, at present, no plans as to what should be done with the 10,000  “Crush the Jews” foam fingers ordered in anticipation for the season.

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Day 12: Memphis

“Tell me are you a Christian child/And I said ‘Ma’am, I am tonight”’ I sing along, eyes closed, like I have for twenty years. I don’t care how obvious I’m being, I’m in Memphis.

“I’m in Memphis, I’m in Memphis,” I say like a mantra. I’ve been idealizing the city as long as my brain has been capable of idealization and “Walking to Memphis” is entirely to blame. I wanted to live that song—to shed my Northeastern pretension in favor of something more authentic, or, well, black—to turn myself over to the will of the city and be mistaken for a Christian.

Yet, when I do “touch down in the land of the Delta Blues,” all I’m thinking about is my glasses, or lack thereof. “If I can’t keep track of a stupid pair of glasses, how do I expect to survive in New York City,” I berate myself and turn my car upside down. I jostle around my suitcases, blankets, and garbage bags filled with miscellany like hangers and matchbooks. It’s the last stop on my trip and only now do I confront the fact that I’m moving. I stare at the driver’s side door wondering if I could rip it off—I can’t. And I shouldn’t because I’m in Memphis and I’ll need it to drive downtown. This city is supposed to fall for me, and I it, and we can’t do so from my hotel’s parking lot.

Downtown Memphis looks more like Phoenix than I imagined—polished, impersonal, new. It’s less the place where B.B. King made his name and more the home of the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies and their seven-year-young arena.

Beale Street’s essence has been cut with a bit of Las Vegas and a bit more of Disneyland. The street is blocked off to cars, so white blobs can stumble and bumble into other white blobs, perhaps hoping to stick to one another, becoming a bigger, blurrier white blob. Mostly, they look like they’re having real fun and I wish was one of them.

I have written down the names of two “non-touristy” blues clubs, so we depart whatever this is for something a bit more like what I’d hoped Memphis would be.

We pull up to the first venue. It’s boarded up and must have been for a while. There is one car in the parking lot. Its lights are on. We don’t ask for directions.

The second venue is open. It sits in the back of a very poorly lit, even poorer paved parking lot. Inside, there is no live music, just a DJ and scattered tables of older black couples. We look back at the bouncer for some guidance, or at least a welcoming head nod. Completely void of affect, he offers up, “There is no band tonight, so…” The sentence lingers there as none of us want to speak and accidently say something racist. My friend who has joined me for my trip’s last leg smiles, I nod, and we scurry back to my car.

It’s 10 p.m. and our night is kicked. I’m sleeping in Memphis but do I really feel the way I feel?

Day 13: Memphis

First thing in the morning, I show up to Graceland with almost no opinion about Elvis and leave the same. It’s a silly place, with silly décor—think porcelain monkeys standing upright, debating which sequined lightning bolt pillow to steal.

After, while eating the best fried chicken of my life, I meet Willie, owner of Four Way Restaurant. He speaks in a low, deeply accented mumble. I’m able to make out that he’s lived within five blocks of this place every day of his sixty-three years and he bought this place ten years ago to save it from closing down. I spot a photo of Martin Luther King eating: “Is that here?” Willie: “Yep, that’s why this place needed to stay open.” When we leave, I shake his hand and thank him for everything.

At the gas station, leaving town, I inquire about the mini pecan pies they’re selling at the register. The cashier laughs at me—I guess no one asks about the food—and tells me, “I’ve never tried them so next time remember to tell me how they are.” I leave, and for those eight steps to my car, I’m walking in Memphis.

Day 14: New York City

“Are you excited to be back?” asks a friendly acquaintance from high school, who in my two-year absence has become good friends with one of my best friends’ girlfriends. It’s the same question I’ve already been asked by six closer friends. Worn down, I tell her the truth.

“Four hours ago I had to pull over to the side of the road before entering the Holland Tunnel. I’d seen the skyline and I couldn’t breath.” I explain there wasn’t anything specific I’d focused on, yet I’d never been more physically frightened in my life. I catch her looking around for an out when I tell her that if my friend wasn’t in the car, I might have turned around en route to Austin or Nashville.

She excuses herself (I assume out of fear that my nerves are contagious), before I can tell her that earlier I spent an hour looking at my phone debating all of tonight’s invitations. Most of the people I asked showed up, and I love many of them, but I’m frozen, overwhelmed from trying to decide whom to talk to next.

Epilogue: Brooklyn

Here we are—time to wrap it all up with a cogent, comprehensive, optimistic bow. I’ve spent every day of my five weeks in New York putting off writing this, hoping for something symbolic or idyllic to drop onto my laptop. It’s become another straw on my back broken by plans to make. I’m left not even capable of writing about being incapable of writing, dismissing it as just another thing to do.

I’m gridlocked. This past week I’ve seen three acquaintances on the Subway and quickly walked the other way, evading friendly conversation. I’m exhausted just thinking about turning on my personality and talking loud enough to be heard over the train’s dissonant metal-on-metal clanking and crashing.

I stare at the blank “To” sections of “what are you doing this week?” e-mails, assuming every night I don’t see people I’m losing a friend. I forgot how much friendships in this city are determined by what bars you like patronizing. Everyone cancels each other out, so instead I sit at home looking at too many attractive and projectable OkCupid profiles with no intention of actual interaction—it’s just more plans.

Still, I have a deadline and I’m wide-awake at 4:30 in the morning, having heard two guys loudly smoking a cigarette outside. From my bed, I can see the Chrysler building. I imagine years ago King Kong, giant mallet in hand, used it as his version of the carnival strongman game and the scalloped, escalating lights ended up stuck that way. I love that building in spite of it being so easy to love. I can talk about giving up and living in Marfa but it doesn’t have this building—it barely has any buildings. After traveling through over a dozen dynamic, romantic, comfortable cities I can imagine living in many of them. But I don’t want to. I want to get my ass kicked daily, knowing that this building is watching over me.

Before I embarked, I thought I might die on the road in any one of a plethora of ways. I might have been scared and sweatily uncomfortable, but I never did die—not once. Ever so often, I not only didn’t die—I ate inspiring BBQ and kissed a girl with knee-buckling eyebrows and was embraced by brusque townies (or at least I think I was). Only time (alive) will tell if the trip prepared me to move back here and muddle through discomfort for the chance of something singularly New York. I hope to bring to this city my newly acquired, lukewarm acceptance of danger and headfirst stupidity. Also, I really hope I don’t die.

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