Earlier this month, the condiment company J&D’s (“Everything should taste like bacon”) released—and quickly sold out of—a line of bacon condoms. The product is now only available by waiting list, and if you don’t believe that artificially-flavored latex prophylactics would sell, see for yourself.

Not surprisingly, J&D’s is a half-Jewish enterprise, the Jewish half being Dave Lefkow. In an interview, Lefkow said that he thought it would be funny to get J&D’s seminal product, Bacon Salt, kosher certified (it contains no actual bacon).

Traif is a hip(ster) restaurant in Brooklyn whose executive chef is, no surprise, a Jew—and whose tag line is “Celebrating pork, shellfish & globally inspired soul food.” The late David Rakoff wrote about his experience of eating pork in Germany, which made him feel very aware of his own Jewishness. Luzer Twersky, a former Satmar who left his Hasidic community (and may soon star in a reality show about it), told the New York Post, “When I had the first bite, I felt angry…I felt how could my parents keep this from me?”

Bacon is more than a pig product. It’s a cultural statement. The fetish, the joke, and the irony justify consuming bacon, though it is fattier than fat, and the trayfiest of trayf. Did the Post ask an ex-Hasid about an innocuous non-kosher food like Starburst Fruit Chews or Jell-O? No. Because who cares about Starburst Fruit Chews and Jell-o? They went right to the bacon. Bacon carries cultural currency.

As an observant Jew, here’s what bacon represents to me: If you’re Jewish, even if you’re a secular Jew, eating bacon is saying, ‘I am Jewish, but I think I am refuting my Jewishness by eating trayf in public, so therefore I am totally affirming my Jewishness.’

I myself am stringently, stubbornly kosher. When it comes to bacon, though, I’m an outsider. I didn’t grow up kosher, so I’ve tasted it—and I think it’s gross. I’ve thought it was gross since way before I even considered going kosher. Smelling it as I walk by the bodega every morning makes me nauseous. I usually hold my nose past the coffee carts selling egg and bacon sandwiches on my way to work. My worst nightmare is to be feeling a little sick on a warm, poorly-ventilated, rocking subway car only to have some pork eater get on the car eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich. I feel like puking into my messenger bag. (I actually carry barf bags with me in case of this very situation.)

The weird resurgence of bacon in the past five years as an object of culinary fetish seems to me to be a direct reaction to increased awareness of healthy food (Skinny Bitch, Fast Food Nation, et al.), and also to what is basically the emergence of the second wave of American baalei teshuva (the first being in the 1960’s). Suddenly every dudebro and his “ironic” hipster cousin are indulging in bacon as a statement.

That statement is a lot like that of the “bad kids” I went to high school with, the most obnoxious of whom used to sing in the halls to his Rage Against the Machine tape on his walkman, “F*ck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” Except he totally did what people told him. He’s for sure making more money now than I am—and playing a lot of golf. (I know that because of Facebook.)

At Pardes, Brooklyn’s boundary-breaking gourmet kosher restaurant famous for its unlikely combinations of flavors, the chef occasionally makes beef “bacon” ice cream. Pushing the porcine flavor of bacon in the already revolting medium of parve ice cream has to be done to make a point (because there is no way it could be done for flavor). The point is, as Dr. Evil said in Austin Powers, “I’m with it…I’m hip.”

I don’t really care what other people eat, as long as they don’t strap me to a chair, hold my nose, and shove their nasty food in my mouth. But the Jews and bacon shtick—and it is completely shtick—it’s a fetish. It’s a symbol. If Jews want to eat bacon in private because they have a compulsion for it, that’s none of my business.

But Jew fools himself if he eats bacon. No matter what he eats, if he two-fists bacon-wrapped scallops covered in mayonnaise on white bread and washes it down with a glass of milk while kneeling down to idols, he will always be Jewish. In that case, why not give the Jewish soul what it actually wants: kosher food.

From this author: It’s Hard to Be a Mensch at a Crowded Kosher Supermarket on Thursday Night

Previously on Jewcy: Kosher Salt: I Don’t Eat Pork
Hebrew National and Me: Answering to a Higher Authority
Insane Trayf Item of the Week: Bacon Coffin
Exposed: The Jewcy Bacon Fetish

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• Gay parents on Israeli TV shows: so hot right now. [NYT]

• An Italian artist’s statue of Hitler praying, currently on display in the Warsaw Ghetto, has offended a whole bunch of people. [NY Daily News]

• Ariel Kaminer’s moving tribute to the late David Rakoff. [NYT]

• Alison Brie is Captain America. [BuzzFeed]

• Tel Aviv is going Wi-Fi, people [JTA]

• Adam Sandler and Judd Apatow were roommates:

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• A Canadian skateboarding enthusiast runs longboarding demonstrations for kids in Jaffa, Jericho, and East Jerusalem.

• Rapper Action Bronson says the best bagels in New York are from Bagel Oasis, in Fresh Meadows. (They are quite good.)

• Alicia Silverstone wrote a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin requesting vegan meals for jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alekhina, a vegan. What would Cher do?

• Steven Spielberg, no longer Shia Labeouf’s sensei.

• Read David Rakoff’s 2003 GQ story on the creepy cult of cryogenics and the desire to live forever.

• How cute is SJP as Annie?

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David Rakoff passed away yesterday at the age of 47. Sara Ivry offers a lovely tribute to the singularly talented storyteller, calling him “creative, funny, intellectually curious, and gracious,” while former Jewcy editor Jason Diamond recalls and reflects on the transcendence of Rakoff’s voice.

In 2006, Rakoff valiantly tried to see every screening of a three-week Woody Allen film festival in New York, and chronicled the experience in a way that would surely have made Allen proud. Of Annie Hall, Rakoff memorably wrote,

Walking out, my friend Rick, thirty-plus years resident said, “I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.” I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, “Do things around here seem really wet to you?”

Upon seing Manhattan (yet again), he mused,

Like many immigrants, I cannot be objective about the city and its role in my life. I habitually give it almost exclusive credit in the forming of my character, as if I moved here at age seventeen as protoplasmic and inert as one of those human larvae in The Matrix. Still, to paraphrase the movie, I idolize the city all out of proportion.

The world has lost a brilliant writer, thinker, and a true New Yorker.

Related: In Memoriam, David Rakoff (1964-2012) [Tablet Magazine] Allentown [Tablet Magazine]

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• Ever heard the one about the baby whose penis was so small the mohel tweeted about it? Oh wait, that really happened.

• “I’m all about seeing your bra through your clothes,” says Community star (and Jewcy obsession) Alison Brie.

• Writer David Rakoff eats a lot of Israeli couscous.

• Nicky Hilton, still dating a Rothschild.

•The trailer for season three of Louis C.K.’s FX show Louie looks a lot like Woody Allen’s Manhattan intro, with Rachmaninoff subbing in for Gershwin.

The post Daily Jewce: Mohel Tweets About Baby’s Small Penis, Israeli Gas Mask Bongs for Sale, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

Everything’s Coming Up Moses is a musical retelling of the Jews’ flight from Egypt as seen through the larger-than-life journey of Moses, the original pushy stage mother. Through an irresistible blend of theatrical razzle-dazzle, old fashioned show biz moxie and soon-to-be classic show tune spoofs, Moses tirelessly shepherds the Children of Israel to the Promised Land—whether they like it or not.

The show is Wednesday, April 4 at 7:30 p.m. You can buy tickets here. As they say, “Lift the staff! Part the sea! We got nothin’ to do but be free!“

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Santa Ira deems us good kids , packing our stockings with Rakoff, Sedaris, Vowell and the like in this week’s The This American Life Holiday Spectacular. Armageddon hits through the corny scenario of a burnt book with its Christmas tales destroyed, leaving no choice but for the TAL Force Five to manufacture brand new (in 2005) stories for a new American crowd.

Act 1: The coppery scent of their afternoon sin

David Rakoff narrates in rhyme fictional Helen’s Christmas offenses via office romances. Grinchlike transformations after heartbreak disclose where one might find personal bliss, pointing to the safe, accountable perks of self-service. It’s Scrooge with a bad case of the frigid.

Act 2: There is no way that Christ was a Capricorn.

John Hodgman tunes in and expounds upon the origin story of chopped trees at Christmastime, telling of Victorian Germans embracing pagan rituals. A real Triumph of the Will.

Act 3: Other people’s parents said I looked like a whore, and they didn’t want their kids to catch my whore cooties or something.

Misunderstood and occult Jesus goes to school and hangs with another outcast–an absolute classic. Heather O’Neill’s anachronistic story hits you with some holy magical realism set in engaging suburban imagery like “a cockroach high on roach poison” and “a great view right out over the record store, probably helps you dream of music.” The stoic Jesus sells common sense Christianity to Mary Mags and appears schizophrenic to onlookers . In the end, the brilliance of Jesus’s advocacy is tapped: “these were the things that were good to say and it felt good to say them.”

Act 4: The pig tried looking behind him but all he could see was his sides.

David Sedaris does his take on a very Animal Farm Christmas Special, complete with truth seeking, betrayal, and secret Santas, and as expected it conveys much suffering.

Act 5: That was Christmas at Valley Forge.

Sarah Vowell wrote the lyrics for guest band Marah’s patriotic performance in honor of Revolutionary War heroes at holiday time. Theatrical singing and whimsical turns make for a montage-y Yuletide hit.

Act 6: I’ve worked my whole life only to have my wife give birth to an angel baby in a lousy manger.

Jonathan Goldstein transitions to explaining fatherhood from the perspective of a “surrogate father to the lord.” Obsessed with the good time had with a hot angel by the radiant ball filled with love that is his pregnant wife, Goldstein reminds that the holy family was as American as the Palins. As Jon Brion tunes ease tension to Michel Gondry-style dreamscapes, Goldstein shifts attention to simple beauty. This kind of wild meandering on religious studies found extensively in Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bible! channels the wisdom of the abrasive Lenny Bruce who muttered with repercussions, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

The post The Ira Glass Infatuation Post/This American Life Review: The This American Life Holiday Spectacular appeared first on Jewcy.

• Graffiti artist and Chicago activist William “Upski” Wimsatt’s (above) new book, Please Don’t Bomb the Suburbs is discussed at Lit Kicks.

• Melville House turns down an Amazon award for the English translation of Israeli novel The Confessions of Noa Weber: “The point is, it’s clear to us that Amazon’s interests, and those of a healthy book culture, whether electronic or not, are antithetical.”

• New York Observer reviews The Instructions by Adam Levin.

• Mr. Franzen goes to Washington.

• Big Jewcy alumni Adam Whitney Nichols launches his multimedia project, Fortnight Journal.

• At NPR, Myla Goldberg’s newest novel, The False Friend, is discussed.

• David Rakoff talks to the Bat Segundo Show.  We really like the way Rakoff talks.  Is that weird?

The post The Weekly Yiderati: William “Upski” Wimsatt, Melville House Turns Down Award, Myla Goldberg, David Rakoff and More appeared first on Jewcy.