“Every year, thousands of Jewish mothers are neglected by sons they’ve driven away with their constant, and neurotic, nagging,” begins the faux-serious infomercial beseeching young men to spend time with mothers whose own sons won’t return their calls, or emails, or letter-style text messages.

“You can give these moms hope for as little as two hours a week—plus occasional phone calls if they read an article about someone around your age who died in a freak jet-skiing accident and they need to warn you about it,” it continues.

Yes, this has happened: a comedy sketch advertising a completely made up reverse-babysitting service for Jewish moms. The video comes to us from the team at Landline TV, which includes 2010 Big Jewcy Jared Neumark. Asked back then whether he’d always been a funny person, he replied suspiciously: “Who said I am? My mom?”

There you have it.

The post ‘Adopt a Jewish Mother’ is the Best Fake Charity Ever [VIDEO] appeared first on Jewcy.

Novelist and 2010 Big Jewcy Jami Attenberg will join us and the Jewish Book Council for our third Twitter Book Club tomorrow at 1:30. She’ll be discussing her newest novel, The Middlesteins, and answering questions about Jews, food, and Jews and food.

Follow along on Twitter with the hashtag #JLit and be sure to follow @jamiattenberg and @JewishBook

Here are four easy ways to get ready:

• Check out Attenberg’s posts for the Jewish Book Council’s Visiting Scribes series.

• Read Adam Kirsch on Attenberg’s powerful storytelling in The Middlesteins over at Tablet.

• Take a look at Joe Winkler review of The Middlestein’s.

• Watch Vol. 1 Brooklyn’s entertaining video of Attenberg and Jeffrey Yoskowitz making pickles:

Previously: Like Jews and Books? You’ll Love Our New Twitter Book Club Partnership

The post Join Us Tomorrow For a Twitter Book Club With Novelist Jami Attenberg appeared first on Jewcy.

The latest in Tablet’s original fiction series is from Joshua Cohen, one of the best young writers around (and a 2010 Big Jewcy). Here’s an exclusive excerpt from “Fat:”

“Tomorrow”—six months ago now—Sruly wanted to come pick me up but since I didn’t want him to know where I lived, knowing how close we had to live, with only a freshly planted organic grocery or a block of warehouses/factories turned installationist studios/DJ rehearsal halls between us. I suggested Atlantic Avenue and he agreed—but only to its terminus, the permafrost gird, the onramps.

But when a beaten crummy magnetic gray Nissan hacked up, it was my turn not to recognize—a different Sruly was behind the wheel. He’d trimmed his beard— trimmed his chin into a gash—and he wasn’t wearing a suit but shivered, in baggy jeans each leg like an unfurled umbrella, and a plain white T whose short sleeves were long on him, no yarmulke but a black baseball cap for no team or even sport I recognized, the mascot this unidentifiable lycanthrope that might’ve been ferocious had its stitching been intact, counterfeit Nikes.

Two women were jammed in back—Russians.

In the mirrors their faces were opposites, reversals. The one he kept pressing into convo with me—“Jon, Nastya’s a massager,” “Nastya, Jon’s into finance”—was wreckingball demolished. His, the one he’d claimed as his, was booming.

I realized this only once we’d reached Long Island, dereclined our seats to check them out. They were a before and after photo come to life, his—the after—in icepick heels, a crowded highrise of augmentation, breasts and butt lifted, into tits and ass, face stretched back like a trowel spread of budget stucco, mine—before, Nastya—basically unremodeled, no balconies or even fire escapes sticking out of her, rather she was a fire escape, a 2×4. They weren’t even Russians but pretending. Sleep with a Russian, wake with a Central Asian. A Tatar. Mongoloidal. Sheepshawled beneath the heaters. Our banquet sprawled between neon sky, caged bay. Russian fare for Russian girls, nothing could’ve been crasser, the same menu they could’ve gotten at home but here so much better because more expensive and not prepared by their mothers, their grandmothers, the mottled dyejobs and artificial clawers they’d become. His, I suspected that even her makeup was tattooed. Nothing can shock a permanent blush. She had a snake writhed around her neck, or I guessed it was a snake because no hood had been inked yet and any rattle slithered only in her cleavage. Her nose was pierced with a metal femur. Nastya was only mildly retarded.

Sruly’s was a lingerie whisper: letting slip about a motorboat (an Atlantis), a plane (an Eclipse), a property he was considering purchasing, a three bed/two bath on Park with garage nursery down below, sports utility vehicles cloyed with booster seats and toys. When the bill came he shuffled his creditcards under the table, cut, slapped one down and when it came back declined, shrugged, settled the meal in cash. He turned to the Mongols, “let’s go back to my friend’s place” (which I was against, but he put a hand to my cheek, spoke Yiddish).

It was his mother’s place, my grandmother’s—the dead woman’s muumuus clumped like lipstick at the corners, her porcelain inventoried on the floor, strewn with manuals of poker lore, $$$$ for gold and silver brochures, a gasmask bong, digiscale.

Sruly slushed his lady down the hall. Nastya had learned enough English to ask which room was mine. Which room was Mom’s, her closet. I tried a door, cleared sponges off a divan—where she kinked herself and was immediately dreaming.

Read the rest here.

The post Read an Exclusive Excerpt of ‘Witz’ Author Joshua Cohen’s New Story, ‘Fat’ appeared first on Jewcy.

“You’ve got to be a fucking idiot to be an undecided at this point,” Mike Edison declared Thursday night while celebrating the publication of his new sex-and-politics-themed e-book, Bye Bye, Miss American Pie. Edison, formerly the publisher of High Times and editor-in-chief of Screw Magazine—and a 2011 Big Jewcy—offered the call to action in time for tonight’s final presidential debate and next month’s election.

At Jimmy’s No. 43 in the East Village, the mensch-pornographer was accompanied by a band that included Sonic Youth’s Bob Bert for a literature-meets-music-meets-revolution book party, the latest event in a tour that has included stops at the New York Public Library, where Edison is an Allen Room scholar, and 92Y Tribeca for the fifth annual Banned Books Festival, which featured an appearance by fellow Big Jewcy Rachel Shukert. “What brand was Lewinski’s blue dress?” Fleshbot.com editor Lux Alptrum asked the crowd before Edison’s reading. It was Gap, it turns out, and Judy McGuire, Edison’s co-host on the Mike and Judy Show, won a porn DVD for answering correctly.

Edison’s latest, which was what the amped up crowd was really there for, mounts an attack on political apathy. The novella channels the raunchy libertarianism of Edison’s past for a relevant conversation about sex, scandal, and politics. It reads like the 1968 cult classic flick, Wild in the Streets, in which a rock-star-turned-politician calls for the end of power in the hands of anyone over thirty years old and lowers the voting age to 14—except in Bye Bye, Miss American Pie, a female politician’s indiscretions lead to orgies across the country, and this year’s party lines, press relations, and voter opinions are on full display.

Edison doesn’t hesitate to include a Hillary Clinton-esque woman in the canon of badly behaved public figures, embroiling politician Barbra Bernstein in a sex scandal after her husband’s exploits go public. Bernstein boldly defends herself in a surprisingly powerful passage:

“The problem with self righteous people,” she began, “is that they always want to rain on someone else’s parade. Haven’t we had enough of prudes running this country?” It wasn’t Lincoln’s first inaugural, nor Kennedy’s, for that matter, but it was loaded with pith and dramatic import. It didn’t quite hit the high notes of Martin Luther King’s “I have been to the Mountaintop” speech, but for some members of the American people, it still rang with the bell tones of liberation.

She went on to talk about the Pursuit of Happiness. She talked about Liberty, and Freedom from Tyranny at home. She looked straight into the camera, straight into the hearts and loins of America, and this is what she said: “I got mine, America, now get yours. You know you want it!”

Edison acknowledges that his pornography past might turn off potential new readers. If he were a horny housewife from Toronto, perhaps, people might embrace Bye Bye, Miss American Pie as quickly as they devoured Fifty Shades of Grey. Regardless, Edison hopes the book will wake people up. “Reading Bye Bye, Miss American Pie should be like taking the red pill in the Matrix,” he told me. “It should tear the sheets off of a fabricated reality.” In this election year, we need that more than ever.

The post Mike Edison Talks Sex, Politics, and the 2012 Presidential Election appeared first on Jewcy.

The very funny Julie Klausner, who was a 2010 Big Jewcy and is currently spearheading a bold campaign to pet Duke, the Bush’s Beans dog, also has a lot to say about politics. In an interview with Comedy Central’s Indecision, Klausner talks about Walter Mondale, Pitbull, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s sexy ghost. Here’s a snippet:

If you could meet any political figure, living or dead, who would it be?

Definitely not Hitler. I’m not looking to change any minds with a single example. I guess Teddy Roosevelt, unless he wanted to go hunting. I’m not into killing rhinos, but I’d love to watch him tuck into a meal and I’d happily walk his dog with him around his property. And depending on how things went, maybe I’d angle for a mustache ride as well.

You’re trapped in an elevator with the president. Strangely enough, you also have a superpower: the ability to make him do one thing of your choosing. What would you have him do?

Obama, right? Definitely oral. Haha! I’m joking. Obviously, I’d get him to commit to marriage equality.

She has our vote.

Previously: The Most Jewish Episodes Of Julie Klausner’s ‘How Was Your Week’ Podcast
The Big Jewcy: Julie Klausner, Writer
Jewcy Interviews: Julie Klausner

The post Julie Klausner Talks Politics for Comedy Central’s Indecision 11 appeared first on Jewcy.

We knew that Jami Attenberg was so much more than just the “Joyce Carol Oates of Brooklyn” when we added her to our Big Jewcy list.

Last night the novelist was given an award for her real life story about her bicycle being stolen, and then the justice she got by hunting down the man who stole it via Craigslist, at the Village Voice Web Awards.

Since we’re fans of both vigilante justice and Jami Attenberg, we are going to follow up the award she got last night with our own Jewish Literary Vigilante of the Year award.  We are also going to point out that this will be the last of these awards, unless something happens where Gary Shteyngart starts wearing a cape to 92Y events and calling himself “Russian Jewish Literature Man.”

The post Jami Attenberg Wins Jewish Literary Vigilante Of The Year appeared first on Jewcy.