Y-Love is an international rap star who seamlessly blends Judaism, Hebrew, English, and Aramaic into his music. So he was the perfect person to help OMGWTFBIBLE host David Tuchman come up with creative new ways to read Parshat Va’era, the second portion in Exodus.

In this first part of the reading, Y-Love dropped some serious knowledge about how Facebook’s been penalizing people not using their legal names on their profiles (which they kinda-sorta fixed today) and about the Hebrew word “Vayikach”. Check it all out below!

Note: Y-Love sang at the live show. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to record his music well enough to share it online, so it’s been edited out of the podcast. All the more reason to come to the live show if you live in New York. You never know what you’ll miss!

David Tuchman translated the Tanakh as a comedy and called it OMGWTFBIBLE. Each month on his podcast, he calls up a different guest to read as many chapters of OMGWTFBIBLE as they can while they both make fun of it.

Jewcy is the proud (internet) co-host of OMGWTFBIBLE. Read more about the project here, and listen to previous episodes here.

Check back here in a week for the next installment of OMGWTFBIBLE. David will be reading the next live show with Rishe Groner at Beauty Bar on October 27!

Related: Hip Hop Artist Yitz “Y-Love” Jordan Discusses Being Black, Gay, and Jewish

(Image: Schneur Menaker via Wikipedia Commons)

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Like most other young academics, I’m always agonizing about tenure and job security. “Peace? Who wants peace?” I often jokingly respond when people ask me for my opinion about the Arab-Israeli conflict. “As a professor of Israel Studies, instability is good for my career!” Unfortunately, thanks to recent weeks of war and crisis, it seems like my employment prospects are bright. The line between the personal and professional is liminal in this so-called Holy Land.

I’m writing from Jerusalem, where I’ve left the library for the classroom of lived experience this summer. I arrived for a few months of research on my book only days into the national drama of the kidnapping of three teenagers in the West Bank (at a hitchhiking post I myself have stood at, no less), later found murdered by rogue terrorists from Hebron. Later that week, while running errands in the center of town, I was quite shaken when I unintentionally found myself in the midst of a mob protest by radical right-wing Israelis screaming “Kahane was right,” and “Arabs are sons of bitches,” as they ran past me toward a fast-food restaurant looking for a Palestinian employee to lynch.

A few days later, a splinter group seemingly inspired by these riots brutally tortured and immolated Muhammed al-Kheidr, an innocent teenager from East Jerusalem. As Israelis and Palestinians began to reckon with these dual tragedies, the Hamas rocket campaign and corresponding Israeli retaliatory bombings of Gaza started in earnest, with the conversation soon shifting from searching our souls to searching for the nearest bomb shelter. There has been no refuge for the tumult in our collective consciousness over the past month. (On the bright side, I did get to meet all my new neighbors without proper underwear, as the first rocket siren caught me in the shower with less than a minute to throw on a sundress and seek shelter.)

Last week, Israel initiated a ground invasion to uncertain ends. So much for that relaxing summer sabbatical on the beach and sipping cappuccinos in the Old City, I thought to myself. Here we go again.

Every day I turn on my laptop to more bad news. How have we not hit bottom, I wonder, how can it possibly be getting worse? I’ve probably read every major book written on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the past few decades—I skimmed them all for my doctoral exams so you don’t have to!—and feel that scholarship has failed us completely. How can I feel so ill-equipped respond to the current crisis, when understanding the Israel-Palestinian conflict is my day job?

Perhaps because years of reading, researching, writing, and thinking about the conflict have deprived me of simple, easy dichotomies: good vs. evil, Israel vs. Palestine, winners vs. losers, peace vs. war, past vs. future. How I long to luxuriate in the realm of intellectual, emotional, and moral certitude! I sometimes wish for a world of black and white, when all I see is complexity in shades of grey.

Despite this—or perhaps because of it—I feel an obligation to explain, to dialogue, to argue, to share my expertise, for whatever it’s worth. With campuses empty on summer vacation, I’ve traded lecture halls for social media, which has become my classroom, my battlefield (since I am privileged not to have to experience the real one), and even my (Jewish) cross to bear. Whether it’s fighting open-heartedly with a Gazan friend on Facebook, trading quips on Twitter, or writing blog posts, I feel compelled to contribute my knowledge and continue the conversation.  I sometimes feel like I should receive danger pay in this business: moderating between right-wingers and left-wingers, challenging conventional dogma, trying (sometimes unsuccessfully) to bring new voices and keep old faces involved in a discussion can be emotionally taxing and ego-bruising. But I see my job as much as a calling as a career, so tuning out isn’t really a choice.

Engaging in a “war” online, however,  prompts big questions. How can academics best contribute to public debate in times of crisis?  Switching my scholar’s tweed cap for my pundit hat blurs the boundary between the personal and the professional, the private and the political. Online discourse is a challenge to “that noble dream” of academic objectivity, but it’s also some of the most important work a historian can do these days. I do not hide my proud affiliation as a liberal Zionist, but my primary agenda is to bring my knowledge and historical perspective to contemporary issues, helping to put them in context.  Mostly, I try to mediate between multiple narratives. I doubt I’ll be winning a Nobel Peace Prize anytime soon. Truth be told, it can sometimes feel futile—when earnest efforts at engagement, analysis, and dialogue devolve into name-calling and uncritical ranting; when you just can’t get people to see eye-to-eye late at night on Facebook. It’s intellectually and emotionally exhausting work — I don’t blame many of my colleagues for giving up, taking a break, or avoiding this work entirely, since not every academic feels it is part of their job description.  Sometimes, I feel like tuning out and going back to writing that obscure book or journal article that only four people in the universe will read, including my Mom.

But in those few moments when people—especially those who are perhaps not involved or ideologically committed—plead with you to proceed, to continue the authentic multi-dimensional discussion, or even to begin to redefine what Israel and Zionism mean to our generation, how can I give up? Online engagement is one important component of that precious opportunity to be a Jewish and Zionist leader—it’s a mission I won’t pass up.

Mostly, being a historian in a time of crisis is a heart-breaking business, especially when one becomes a historical witness to the profound lack of empathy on both sides of the conflict. Dehumanization is our worst enemy. How we can ever have peace without acknowledging the “other” as a person; without acknowledging the basic truth that they are human beings with human rights? How can we co-exist without compassion in the present? Perhaps it would be useful to reinvent the role of historian as a kind of ‘empatharian,’ one who teaches others how to empathize with the lived past, so that we can be encouraged to contemplate our future together.

Unfortunately, professors don’t have all the answers about how to solve the Arab-Israeli conflict. But the most important thing is to ask the right questions. Since I began teaching in England, I am often reminded of Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.”

If we can continue to remind ourselves that both Israelis and Palestinians are people deserving of human rights—and also capable of acts of vengeance—historical empathy may lead us one step closer to an enduring peace.

Dr. Sara Yael Hirschhorn is the University Research Lecturer/Sidney Brichto fellow in Israel Studies at the University of Oxford (UK), where she’s working on a forthcoming book (from Harvard University Press) entitled “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement Since 1967.” Her twitter handle is @SaraHirschhorn1. 

Image: Sukharevskyy Dmytro (nevodka) / Shutterstock.com

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Well, it looks like Facebook Overlord Mark Zuckerberg might be in the midst of a family feud. His sister, Randi Zuckerberg, has come out with a charming picture book for children. Dot tells the story of a young girl named Dot. She taps, swipes, and shares, but mostly on her computer. She’s probably Facebooking a hell of a lot, too— maybe she even sends pokes to Uncle Mark.

Through Zuckerberg’s story, Dot learns to put the screens away, go outside, and explore with other humans. And through Dot, Zuckerberg reminds us of the downside of spending too much time connected. Dot’s going unplugged and maybe we will too… well, at least for the weekend.

Watch an animated preview of Dot.

(Photo by Waytao Shing/Getty)

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The Huffington Post pointed out today that Seinfeld basically predicted Facebook. Seriously: in this stand-up routine, Jerry describes the unfortunate circumstance of calling someone on the telephone—and having them actually pick up. All you ever really want to do is leave a message.

Then he summarizes the entire point of Facebook’s existence, explaining why we so eagerly embrace this social networking force. Hint: it’s so we’d never actually have to talk to people.

Here what we have is two people who hate each other, don’t really ever want to talk, but the phone machine is like this relationship respirator keeping these marginal brain-dead relationships alive, and we all do it. Why? So that when we come home you can see that little flashing red light. You go, ‘all right, messages.’

You see, people need that. It’s very important for human beings to feel that they are popular and well-liked amongst a large group of people that we don’t care for.

Emphasis ours. Touche, Jerry. And while you’re at it, can you accept our friend request?

The post ‘Seinfeld’ Saw the Future, And it Was Facebook appeared first on Jewcy.

Israeli news site Walla said the women were new recruits stationed on a base in southern Israel. One picture showed the soldiers removing their fatigue uniforms to expose their underwear and back sides. In another, five women posed in what appeared to be a barracks room, dressed only in helmets and a small amount of combat equipment. The faces of the soldiers were blurred in the photos.

In a statement, the military said the young women had acted in a manner that showed “unbecoming behavior” for Israeli soldiers. “The commanding officers disciplined the soldiers as they saw fitting,” it said.

It doesn’t seem to have stopped them, though—Gawker reported that they’ve since uploaded three new images (see above). This means they probably won’t get to join any of the Birthright trips, which may be the greatest punishment of all—at least for American Jewish boys aged 18-26. The best part of the whole story, though, might be this homepage image on British newspaper The Sun’s website.

Female Soldiers Defy IDF, Post More Semi-Nude Facebook Pics [Gawker]

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• According to Lena Dunham, Drake has a crush on Jewish actress Kat Dennings. Could it be beshert? [Vulture]

• You can send Mark Zuckerberg a Facebook message, but it might set you back $100. [Newser]

• What happens when you discover your husband’s great uncle was a Jewish gangster. [Tablet]

• Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger has some restaurant recommendations for you. [Immaculate Infatuation]

• Jonah Hill + Leo DiCaprio = BFF [Page Six]

• Here’s the trailer for Joan Rivers’ latest DVD, Don’t Start With Me:

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• Bob Dylan is celebrating the 50th anniversary of his first album with a new album, out in September.

• Billionaires, they’re just like us (with lower interest rates): Mark Zuckerberg refinanced his California home’s $6 million mortgage.

• Introducing Dossim, a website for young Haredim by young Haredim.

• Donald Sobel, the brilliant Encyclopedia Brown creator, has died at 87.

The post Daily Jewce: Olympic-Sized Outrage, Bob Dylan’s Album-versary, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

• At last, a simple flow chart that tells you if/why you’re anti-Semitic, from Tablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy.

• That time Jason Schwartzman accidentally wore a g-string.

• Spotted: Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan dining at a kosher restaurant while honeymooning in Rome.

• Jediists and Matrixists are (religious) people too.

• Bob Dylan was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Booyah.

The post Daily Jewce: Kosher Zuck, Bob Dylan Awarded, Best Flowchart Ever, and more appeared first on Jewcy.

I wish you and your wife Priscilla this same genuine happiness that connects love and friendship, that connects the intimate world and the social world, just as you have made with your creation.

“Like!”

(image via Facebook, obviously)

The post Shimon Peres Has a Wedding Message for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan appeared first on Jewcy.

• Mark Zuckerberg married longtime girlfriend Priscilla Chan. What did you get them?

• Meet Bill Berman, a frum dairy farmer in Florida.

• That men-only Orthodox anti-Internet rally happened this weekend.

• Sholem Aleichem’s great-great-granddaughter remembers the writer on his 96th yahrzeit.

The post Daily Jewce: Bar Refaeli’s Hotness Confirmed, Zuck Ties the Knot, and more appeared first on Jewcy.