BAM Harvey Theater
90min, no intermission
Tickets: $25, 45, 60, 70

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Go high: In the New York Review of Books, British academic Tony Judt, who’s caused a boatload of controversy with his criticism of Israel, warns that focusing too much on the Holocaust will desensitize people to its very real horrors. Playing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil,” he worries about the “banality of overuse.”

Go low: When guests at a Miami Orthodox wedding saw the rapper/producer Pharrel watching the revelry from a distance, they invited him to join in. TMZ has pictures.

Go high: The New Jerusalem, a play that just opened, dramatizes the life of Spinoza. The Village Voice calls it “Inherit the Wind with a chilling extra touch of proto-Nazism.”

Go low: If you visit the pool at the JCC in Manhattan, you just might spot Jerry Stiller wandering around sans pants.

Go high: Have you ever noticed that Woody Allen uses the same typeface in nearly all of his films? Here's why.

Go low: Demi and Ashton have been missing Shabbat services lately! Might they be giving up on Kabbalah?

Previously: Britney Spears vs. Joseph Epstein

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In a continuation of Jewcy's recent birthright blogging, today's Hump Day Art features some lovely photographs taken by one of the participants on the birthright trip I staffed this summer. Ian Aleksander Adams is a young, accomplished photographer who documented our trip. He managed to come away with some impressive photos, despite an unfortunate run-in with an airport security x-ray on his way home that damaged much of his film. Here are a few of his best from our excursion to the Negev desert.

All this talk about the desert compels me to include this video by Israeli sand artist Ilana Yahav.

Last week: Interview with Patrick Winfield

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Ugh. It took me exactly two weeks of searching for JDaters of the Week before I had an ethical crisis. Who am I to rain down judgment upon the good people of JDate just because they call themselves things like "Portnoy4U" and adamantly refuse to proofread? If someone dug up my long-retired Nerve profile and mocked it on the Internet, I’d be pretty devastated. (And it’s SO mockable – I’m pretty sure I actually compared myself to Natalie Portman in Garden State. In public. In order to impress boys.)

The feedback I’ve gotten about the column didn’t help much. Readers like it, but my friends and family all seemed ambivalent at best. This weekend a rabbi I know told me he thought it was un-Jewish. “Like lashon hara?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “A lot worse.”

The truth is that the column doesn’t have to be cruel. As it happens, the whole time I was scouring the site last week, my mock JDate profile (you need one to check out the goods) was getting IM’d by a totally cute, totally interesting, totally un-douchey-seeming Manhattan boy. I kept ignoring him, caught up in my quest to find the most ridiculous profiles on the site, but maybe I should have just featured him. Maybe one of you would have sent him a message, and a lovely shidduch would have been made.

So this week, I’m taking a new approach, mitigating the negativity a bit with a three-pronged format. I’m picking one profile that’s good, one profile that, um, needs work, and one profile that represents the most fascinating tribe on JDate—the non-Jews.

The good: He’s a twin! He has five little sisters! He says his family life has giving him “Mideast-peace-summit -level negotiating skills and Barack Obama-esque motivational speaking” abilities! You will seriously never be able to have a fight with this guy—no matter how hard you try.

The bad: “Sometimes I feel that I am Neo” is a totally understandable sentiment. We all get a little Keanu sometimes. But it’s generally a good idea to save that kind of revelation for the second date.

The non-Jewish: He recently shattered his knee in a motorcycle crash and quotes Courtney Love on his profile. He says he majored in keg stands and freely admits that he looks like a serial killer in his photo. And I bet that every time a Jewish organization releases a study about the perils of intermarriage, his profile gets another thousand hits.

Previously: The Guy Who Volunteered Jerry Seinfeld Meets James Bond

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Says Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO entertainment, “I don’t know what’s in the drinking water there. But for as tiny as that country is, they make some interesting television shows.”

“A Touch Away” follows the romance between a secular Russian immigrant and a haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) girl who’s already been matched off with an observant fiance. Reviews in the Jewish media have been hugely positive. As one reader who saw a screening at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival put it on IMDB: “No one left the theater to go to the bathroom. A 10 out of 10.”

So far, opinions about HBO’s version of "In Treatment" — including ours! — have been mixed, but Blair Underwood’s episodes, in which he plays a former army pilot who bombed a madrassa full of children, look like they should be good. Check out the clip below.

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Below, Eli Valley imagines what happens when this trend hits the schools.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

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So today's roundup celebrates the good, the honest, and the long.

In this Men’s Vogue excerpt from former Luna frontman Dean Wareham's memoir, he tells the story of how he wound up leaving his wife of seven years for his band’s high-cheekboned bassist. His recounting is the opposite of cavalier, and reading it, you wind up sympathetic to everyone involved. (NB: I’m pretty sure I was at the Philadelphia show where Dean and Britta first made out, but I’d eaten an entire bag of Valentine’s Day candy hearts and spent most of the night outside trying not to puke. Rock and roll!)

There's an exceptionally weird story on Fresh Yarn – always a font of weird stories – by a theater kid whose crush on her fellow Gypsy cast member ended when he stabbed a friend of her parents. OK, yes, total spoiler, but aren’t you curious about the road from “Everything’s Coming Up Roses” to murder in the first degree?

The Morning News has a lovely, simple, raw tale about the overpowering urge to protect one’s children, and what happens when that urge leads one man – an author of kids’ books, no less – to kick a stranger’s dog.

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