• Girls’ Zosia Mamet sits front row at the Marc Jacobs show during Fashion Week. Shoshanna would FREAK.

• Diane von Furstenberg got personal with Fern Mallis at 92Y, crediting her mother with developing her strength and character.

• Former SNL cast member Jenny Slate, also known as the voice of Marcel the Shell, is writing the script for a new Looney Tunes movie.

• Rashida Jones, our favorite person in the entire world, did a photo shoot for Flaunt.

• Two Nora Ephron books, Crazy Salad and Scribble, Scribble, are being released as a single-volume next month.

• Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly are facing off October 6 in a 90-minute presidential-style debate:

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92Y has an audio recording of the reading:

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It all started when Lieberman was living in Los Angeles, and he attended a lecture at a synagogue on a whim. The speaker was a rabbi who had recently returned from Uganda and Nigeria, and as he showed photographs of his trip, Lieberman was captivated by one of the images. “One photo in particular caught my eye,” he explained. “It was a small building in the middle of a wooded area. You wouldn’t notice right away, but there was a large Star of David on the building—it was a synagogue.”

After the lecture, Lieberman approached the rabbi and told him that he wanted to join the next trip to Africa. After more than a year of Lieberman’s somewhat persistent prodding, he got a call from the rabbi, telling him to get his visa in order and his shots up to date; they would be leaving in a few months.

Lieberman was in Africa for just over a month. “We spent all of our time in the communities, attended community meetings, spent Shabbat with families,” he explained. “We met with politicians, interfaith groups. We prayed in large synagogues and small synagogues.”

I asked Lieberman whether making the film changed the way he identified as a Jewish person. “Halfway through the trip I met Shmuel, who is the central figure of the film,” he told me. “We were talking one day and I realized that he knew more about Judaism than I did.” Mostly, Lieberman explained, he now has a greater appreciation for how easy it is for him to practice his Judaism.

“In the West, we can sort of pop in and out of Judaism as we wish. We have access to so many resources-synagogues, JCCs, classes and courses, books magazines and any Jewish material you want.” In Nigeria there are far fewer opportunities to engage with Jewish material.

One issue that I have a hard time reconciling is who gets to say who is and who is not Jewish. Jewish tradition teaches that the first people to accept the covenant with God were Abram and Sarai. Accepting God’s covenant, the couple is renamed and become the matriarch and patriarch of the Jewish people. Several books tell of another famous convert—Ruth. She makes the choice to go with her mother-in-law, Naomi, and declares Naomi’s god her god.

The name I took when I converted to Judaism, Batyah, is the same name the Talmud tells us Pharoah’s daughter adopted when she left with the ancient Israelites out of Egypt. Judaism is mine because I took and accepted the covenant, but what about people who believe that they were cut off from that Jewish covenant through forced conversion, exile, or persecution. Should they be held to the same standards as a non-Jew who wishes to become a Jew? Who gets the privilege of accepting or rejecting a person’s Jewish heritage?

Shmuel’s story, Lieberman tells me, is similar to the story of many in the community. Raised within a Christian community, he wanted to explore a possible Jewish connection. “He had a deep feeling that their ancestral way was a Jewish way and wanted to go back to that,” Lieberman explains, “This is the story of his journey. He really challenged his own beliefs.”

Lieberman recognizes the complexity of Jewish identity, and tried to make sense of it while putting together the documentary. His conclusion is understandably frustrated:

It comes down to the question of what does it mean to be Jewish. Is it a birthright, is it in your mind, is it in your spirit? I spent a lot of time in the film exploring how they could be Jewish, but ultimately, there aren’t any records to prove that they are or that they are not. But there are no records that say that I am Jewish. I know that I’m Jewish because my parents are Jewish and their parents are Jewish. There’s the scientific evidence, which I find incredibly problematic. No one is asking me to take a DNA test to prove my Jewishness, so why should they? Who gets to say who is and who is not Jewish?

He’s realistic about the insular nature of many Jewish communities, even those that consider themselves to be liberal. “We’re used to people acting and looking a certain way,” he says. “Most Jews don’t know or haven’t met Jews of Color, and when they do they find it odd or strange.”

I asked Lieberman what he wanted viewers to take away from the film. “The Nigerian Jews that I met asked me to be the messenger to the wider Jewish world to let them know that they exist,” Lieberman explained. “Books would be nice, they’d like people to come and teach, but more than any of that they want other Jews to know that they exist, that they’re there, and that they’re counted as Jews.”

Jeff Lieberman’s documentary, RE-EMERGING: The Jews of Nigeria is premiering at 92Y on Thursday, May 17 at 8PM, and screens Sunday, May 20th at Congregation Tikvat Israel in Rockville, MD.

(photo credit: Jeff Lieberman)

Erika Davis is a writer, blogger, thinker and innovator who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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Went to 92Y this Monday — it was my first visit to what Jon Stewart called “the third holiest site in the Jewish Religion,” after the Wailing Wall and Zabar’s. I had been warned that it was a dark place, an alternate universe comprised of old Upper East Side Jews ravenous for their next nosh of culture. The agenda that night, an installment of the 2010 Reading Series with authors Lori Moore and Jonathan Franzen, wasn’t even remotely Jewish, but I was fully prepared for the equivalent of a matinee concert at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

As I approached the holy landmark, I was pleasantly surprised to not have been the lone kid in the pool during JCC senior swim. While hundreds of patrons of all ages, sizes, and creeds swarmed the building, they all somehow managed to embody the cultured Jewish persona imposed upon them by their surroundings.

The Kaufmann Concert Hall is a beautiful venue, one that would appeal to any Jew growing up with grandparents with an affinity for decorating with fine wood. The impressive sound system hovered above an audience sitting as one sea of Jewish literati. Never before had I owned that as my identity, but like the Indonesian man by the aisle and the non-Jewish authors on the stage, we had been swept into the kibbutz of the YM-YWHA.

Looking around as editors Victoria Wilson and Jonathan Galassi introduced Moore and Franzen over the course of the evening, the audience seemed moved, devouring the writers’ non sequitors, innuendos, and profundities.

Franzen’s observations of the reproachful mother paired with his nasal disposition helped him seem like one of the crowd, while Lori Moore was the darling of the evening, revving up the bookish audience with such semantic wanderings of the mind as, “I would imagine things like ergonomic meant thereforishness.” Franzen’s handling of the typically New York question from the audience, “Why are Midwesterners so funny,” satisfied them with a diasporic observation: “There are a lot of humorless Midwesterners…people who leave the Midwest behind have developed some coping skills, such as flight. So maybe people who can master one coping skill can master others, like humor.” Explosions of laughter from the balcony below EINSTEIN and the aisles by BEETHOVEN outed the displaced Midwesterners, who, like me, had made their pilgrimage and worked their way seamlessly into the fabric of sophisticated New York Jewry that evening.

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Jews of the world, lend Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz your ears, your hearts and forty bucks to do what Jews are supposed to do without much prompt: Learn.

Failed Messiah isn’t too happy with Steinsaltz and 92Y’s”Global Day of Jewish Learning,” and took the rabbi and New York institution to task for what he sees as “pay-to-play” religion. Saying “[t]hat Steinsaltz and the 92nd Street Y don’t understand this speaks volumes about the decayed state of Judaism and the people who lead it.”

Forty bucks is a lot, but do I really need to schlep all the way to New York to be part of this “global” event?  I mean I know New Yorkers think their burg is the center of the world and all, but this seems like sort of a pain in the ass.

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