This Is Where I Leave You, the latest offering from director Shawn Levy, is based on Jonathan Tropper’s novel of the same name. But the film never bothers to explain the significance of its title and probably would have benefited from something a little more descriptive, like This Is Where Fine Actors Waste Their Talents, This Is Where We Make Incessant Jokes About Fake Boobs, or This Is Where A Dad Dies and Nobody Really Cares.

The protagonist of this frenetic mess is Judd Altman (Jason Bateman), whose life is already in shambles when he learns that his father has succumbed to an unspecified, but evidently severe illness. Judd seems to find the death of his father mildly heartbreaking and terribly annoying; the funeral forces him to head to the ‘burbs and reunite with his abrasive family members, who don’t know that Judd is on the verge of a messy divorce. The Altman siblings soon learn that their father’s dying wish was for his children to sit shiva in his honor, which they are upset about because a) it means they will have to spend seven whole days together, and b) they will have to sit on low chairs.

As the Altmans interact in close quarters, we discover that Judd’s three siblings are also leading tattered lives. There is Wendy (Tina Fey), a snipey mom of two who spends much of the film lusting after an old flame (apparently this is OK, because Wendy’s husband is a conveniently obnoxious businessman). Paul (Corey Stall) and his wife are on a desperate, passionless mission to conceive a child, funerals be damned. And Phillip (Adam Driver) is an inept man-child, who decides to announce mid-shiva that he is engaged to his (much older) shrink.

The matriarch of the family is Hillary (Jane Fonda), a surgically-enhanced therapist who has managed to scrounge up some fame thanks to her best-selling parenting book. Hillary’s celebrity seems a bit undeserved, though, considering that her own progeny have about as much impulse control as a bunch of unruly baboons. The Altmans scream at each other, scream at other people, punch each other, and punch other people. They have multiple affairs between them, and Judd comes mighty close to committing adultery with an extended family member. Also, an Altman toddler throws poop. I won’t spoil all the details, but let’s just say that by the end of the film, things have basically devolved into a Jerry Springer sideshow.

In an essay on mic.com, Noah Gittel points out that while promotional materials for This Is Where I Leave You completely erase any reference to the characters’ Judaism, the film is one of few mainstream movies to depict an element of Jewish religious practice. We can be thankful for that, I suppose. But for the most part, This Is Where I Leave You treats religion as an inconvenience or a joke. The Altman siblings are just a little too quick to ask if they can sit shiva for three days instead of seven. In a mindlessly funny scene, Judd and his brothers get baked at synagogue during morning services, much to the dismay of the local rabbi. Rabbi Grodner himself (played, a little gratingly, by Ben Schwartz) is a running punch line; he delivers his sermons as though he’s a DJ (“Can I get a Shabbat Shalom?!”) and gets mad when the Altman brothers, for reasons that remain unclear, call him “Boner.”

All of this buffoonery would be fine if This Is Where A Leave You didn’t try to be anything more than what it is: another derivative comedy about yet another dysfunctional family. But the film insists on saddling its dumb humor with watery attempts at sincerity. By the end of the movie, we’re supposed to understand that the function of the shiva narrative is to thrust Altmans together, to force them to overcome their petty grievances and begin to understand one another. But when every genuine moment in the movie is punctured by a joke about Hillary’s mountainous implants, it’s hard to care about what happens to this band of adult-babies. If This is Where I Leave You doesn’t take its characters seriously, why should we?

(Image: Warner Bros.)

The post Review: “This Is Where I Leave You” appeared first on Jewcy.

As a professional living and working in Manhattan, I—and I alone (as I fit into the have-yet-to-find-my-bashert contingent)—pay for all my monthly basics: rent, utilities, phone, cable, renter’s insurance, co-pays, Trader Joe’s shops, and even the occasional manicure, 8-week French class or Alexis Bittar bangle. The living ain’t easy, but I get by and I’m grateful.

I’m also grateful for the fact that my mother (and, OK, my father too) continues to occasionally “help me out.” In other words, spoil me. Still. At 35.

Maybe it has something to do with my singledom. Or maybe it’s the lack of grandchildren, or the fact that I just last year resigned from my cushion-y full-time job as an editor to pursue a career as a freelance writer. But to be honest, I can’t quite offer a justifiable reason for the occasional generosity beyond unconditional, smothering love (with a side of pity).

Does it sometimes feel funny to accept a $50 bill for a cab that’s likely to cost $8? Yes. Is there a lingering guilt festering inside when she hands over a coupon and her Gap card for new PJs and underwear? Very much so. Do I long for the day when I can finally take her to dinner in the West Village without worrying I might be charged an overdraft fee? You betcha. Yet, I’m still all “thank-you-very-much-I-love-you-longtime.”

And I’m not the only one, either. This month sees the publication of The Jewish Daughter Diaries, edited by journalist Rachel Ament, in which 27 writers share tales of their mothers’ undeniable love—including Buzzfeed’s Lauren Yapalater, who confesses that her mother continued to bag her lunch well into her 20s.

Inspired by this phenomenon, I’ve put together a list of the top five “gifts” my mom’s given me this past year, followed by her spiel as to why:

1. Holy Moly (AKA Trip to Israel)

I’m a city girl, and after a few months living in London last year and some time in Paris, Edinburgh and Amsterdam, I wanted to see Berlin, too. But funds were dwindling, so I propositioned a few friends to come with to help cut costs. None were free. Then I spoke to Mom, whose arm I could practically see waving from across the Atlantic as if to say, “Me! Me! Me!” Except, she didn’t want to go to Germany…

The Spiel: “When you called from London you sounded kind of down about being alone and not sure where to go. I remembered the time you called from Singapore or Hong Kong or somewhere when you were in Asia and I couldn’t meet you. This time, I could, but I didn’t like the options you suggested. I knew paying for it would lure you, so I suggested Israel. For selfish reasons, yes—because oh my god it had been so long since I’d been—but also because I wanted to travel with you!”

2. Woman With an Audi (AKA Moving Help)

After returning from the six-month stint abroad, during which I rented out my West Village studio and stuffed a small storage space in Chelsea with excess handbags, toiletries and more, I just couldn’t swallow paying a man with a van to help move a few things. But I also couldn’t do it myself—no car. So my 62-year-old mother, in all her Athleta-clad glory, volunteered to schlep boxes and bags down from the dank space and back up five flights of stairs. Twice. In summer. On 80-degree plus days.

The Spiel: “I physically can. It’s quality time. You needed the help and your father would never do it. Plus, you’re single, you don’t have a man to do it with you.”

3. Mumford & Mom (AKA Concert Tickets)

I love Mumford & Sons, and while I was tempted to see them play at a newish venue in Queens, I wasn’t tempted by the $90-something price tag—especially since I had just seen them in Amsterdam and my safety savings for the aforementioned career change and travels were depleting fast. Then, in swept Mom…

The Spiel: “It was a great venue. I wanted to see them, too. Also, it was your birthday! Though, in retrospect I realize I was just about the oldest person there and I learned that new music is better listened to on Sirius Radio.”

4. Mac Attack (AKA New  Computer)

My six-year-old iBook was outdated and out of memory. Plus, it was too damn heavy to carry around from coffee shop to library to coffee shop in my new career as non-nine-to-fiver. Could I have financed a new Macbook Air and then declared that bad boy like I did my first Mac 10 years ago? Probably. But…

The Spiel: “I knew you needed it. You didn’t have any money and you helped us with the business website, so I too, could declare it as an expense!”

5. Happy Feet (AKA Sneakers)

The idea of spending over $100 on shoes with boring arch support that I might-hopefully-maybe wear in my new pursuit as a sometimes-runner seemed silly. Sparkly Kate Spade peep-toes are way more my style, despite the fact that they won’t get me very far without blisters or a prescription for a new knee. While on the Upper East Side visiting a museum one day, we passed a Super Runners Shop and…

The Spiel: “I knew you wouldn’t spend the money. They were good for your feet and I still feel guilty for putting your legs in bars as a child to straighten out your pigeon toes. You have terribly flat fleet and I’ve always felt bad. Because of them you shouldn’t be buying the shoes you do.”

So thanks and Happy Mother’s Day, Mom! Johnny Walker Black on the rocks—your treat?

Sara Lieberman is a writer and editor based in New York City. Her work has appeared in The Daily Beast, The New York Post, Cosmo UK, Hemispheres, and Fodor’s. She’s also the founder of News Girl About Towns, a blog featuring musings on self-discovery while discovering the world. She allows herself a cup of black coffee on Yom Kippur and implores you to try the babka from Breads Bakery.

Image: Sara and her mom in Jerusalem (supplied by the author)

The post How Does My Jewish Mother Spoil Me? Let Me Count The Ways appeared first on Jewcy.

“My mom is the only one who gets excited if I tell her I got my bangs trimmed or if I bought a new kind of frozen food at Trader Joe’s,” Rachel Ament jokes, via email. That’s the thing about moms: they love us when we’re grocery shopping or even when we’re editing an essay anthology about them.

Ament, 30, is the editor of the new essay anthology Jewish Daughter Diaries: True Stories of Being Loved Too Much By Our Moms, which features essays from Jewish women of all ages about their beloved mothers and grandmothers, including—but not limited to—actress Mayim Bialik of The Big Bang Theory; Jena Friedman, producer of The Daily Show; Iliza Shlesinger, winner of NBC’s Last Comic Standing, and Anna Breslaw, Cosmopolitan‘s Sex and Relationships editor.

Ament—whose essay “Seth Cohen is the One For You,” about an evening at the infamous Matzoh Ball at her mother’s behest, appears in the anthology—began working on Jewish Daughter Diaries in 2012 in the hours away from her day job as a Social Media Writer for Capital One. “The hours varied. Maybe an hour or so a night. It just depended on what stage I was at in the process,” she said. “During the final editing process this [past] summer, I probably spent about three or more hours a day on it.”

But what makes someone decide to assemble a collection of essays about Jewish moms? Well, said Ament, the key was realizing how similar the experiences of Jewish daughters were: “Whenever my Jewish friends tell me stories about their moms, the stories are always so funny and endearing and relatable. I see my mom in their moms. I thought that there was this great universality about Jewish moms that Jewish women could embrace and bond over, instead of ignore.” My own feelings were the same when reading Jewish Daughter Diaries—whether I was on the subway or at the gym, I was cupping my hands over my eyes and laughing, thanking the universe, thinking, “It’s not just me!”

To wit: in the introduction Ament recounts an all-too-familiar phone call with her mother, who doesn’t identify the reason she’s calling, but instead twists winds her way through the conversation with a variety of cockamamie suggestions (“Did you tell Blossom you used to look just like her when you were a kid?”), yells to her father in the another room (“Mark, get on the phone!”) and asks absurd questions about the future (“How do you think you will respond to my death? A loud hysterical reaction or a quiet detachment?”), never getting to the actual point of the call.

I’ve had similar phone conversations with my own mother, who will inevitably call while I’m buried to my ears in work:

“Do you have time to talk?”

“No, I’m sorry, I’m really busy. Can I please call you later?”

“So how are you, how is your day?”

“What can I do for you, ma?”

“Daddy wants to know if you heard from that editor. Oh! And I went to Bloomingdale’s with Aunt Addie today and we found this wild plum lipstick at Clinique we thought you would love so we got it for you. We had lunch at that stir fry place again. What’s it called? Stir Crazy? You know the food there isn’t what it used to be. Maybe they need new woks. You know, they had the best deal on woks at Ikea the other day. Do you want me to get you one? I’ll send it to you in the mail with that bread knife you left here…”

And so on.

But as the reader soon learns, the point is that a Jewish mom doesn’t need a reason to call. She’s your mother, and whether you like it or not, she’s allowed to call you as many times per day as she likes and say absolutely anything or, as it so happens, nothing at all. To her, that’s what love looks like.

Ament draws on this idea throughout the anthology to tie the essays together. In “You Should Be Playing Tennis,” Jena Friedman calls her mother for a chocolate chip cookie recipe—and receives a diatribe about the life mistakes she’s making, interspersed with baking instructions (“Off hand, I don’t know the exact proportions but I bet you can find it online… I’ve actually become quite an internet junkie now that I have so much alone time since neither you nor your sister ever come home to visit me.”) Gaby Dunn’s “Home for the Apocalypse,” recounts the numerous mom-safety emails she’s received over the years (“Did you know that dialing *677 tells you if the unmarked police car trying to pull you over is actually a murderer? You didn’t? That’s because none of these myths are true, but all of these tips have been heralded as life-saving advice by my mother.”) The message is that Jewish moms schmear on the guilt and forward the emails and make directionless phone calls because they miss you and they want you to be safe.

“No matter how much our cultural and political landscape shifts,” said Ament, “mothers still want the same thing for their kids. They will still want them to be happy and find love and success. The difference between Jewish and helicopter moms is in the associations. We think of a helicopter mom as someone who is constantly over our shoulder, buzzing around us, policing and controlling us. There is more warmth and love attached to our idea of a Jewish mom. A Jewish mom is softer. She just wants to feed us.”

The Yiddishe Mameh, the Jewish Daughter Diaries reveals, is not easily tamed, and her daughter is all the better for it.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The post In “The Jewish Daughter Diaries,” True Stories About Fierce and Funny Jewish Moms appeared first on Jewcy.

On paper, Sarah Silverman and Susan Silverman could not be more different. One is a famously provocative comedian living in L.A., the other an activist rabbi living in Israel. (“I’m godless and she’s godfull,” is how Sarah succinctly and irreverently puts it.) But a profile in The Daily Beast reveals that the sisters share a political sensibility which runs in the Silverman family—one that has led Sarah, 43, to launch two Great Schlep campaigns, and Susan, 50, to become a prominent member of the Jewish feminist group, Women of the Wall:

“Our mom is a big brain—very passionate and opinionated,” says Sarah. “She always had buttons on her purse and her overalls (yes, overalls) that said stuff like ‘question authority’ and how the military should have a bake sale and schools should be funded, ‘We have met the enemy and they are US’—you know, that stuff.  And our Dad is also outspoken, very liberal, very funny.  He calls himself a reverse snob. He’ll heckle people: ‘Nice Rolex. That could probably feed a whole town in India—but good for you. I love my Timex—it was $35 and it can go underwater!'”

What’s really touching is how supportive and fond the sisters are of each other (there are four in total). Susan thinks of Sarah as someone who is “carrying on the prophetic tradition, of just pouring out truth and justice.” Sarah recalls that when Susan was in rabbinical school in New York City, “she never left her tiny apartment without a bag full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and dollar bills.”

These days, Susan is an advocate for religious pluralism and refugees’ rights in Israel. When she and her daughter Hallel were arrested last year for wearing tallits and reading Torah at the Western Wall (something only men are permitted to do at the sacred site), Sarah tweeted her support in here characteristically ribald language: “SO proud of my amazing sister @rabbisusan & niece @purplelettuce95 for their ballsout civil disobedience. Ur the tits!”

Apparently the youngest Silverman has been talking this way since she was very little. Once, when offered some brownies by their grandmother, four-year-old Sarah responded, “Shove them up your ass, Nana.” Susan says, “She didn’t know what she was saying, really. She just knew that it was crude and her adorableness saying it was going to be funny.”

Now that’s sisterly love.

Related: Sarah Silverman: Dolls With Ridiculous Bodies Teach Little Girls They “Don’t Deserve Love”
Sarah Silverman Talks Reproductive Rights With Jesus Christ

The post Powerhouse Sisters: Sarah Silverman And Rabbi Susan Silverman appeared first on Jewcy.

I used to love Purim when I was growing up. Mom always came up with the cutest Mishloach Manot for my friends, from candy-filled plastic hearts to sweet little ceramic Claire’s boxes. When the holiday fell on a Sunday, my parents would both be home and the table would look like a garden of cellophane-wrapped baskets. We’d stay up late the night before packing in an assembly line, and the next day I’d drive with Dad around the neighborhood to deliver the gifts. He’d lift up his windshield wipers and cover the tops of them with gloves. Then he’d turn the switch and the makeshift hands would wave. Instead of Jewish music, he’d play Led Zeppelin and drive up and down the neighborhood streets. The tunes shouted from the windows, becoming the soundtrack for the costumed families frolicking up and down the streets. I’d watch them through the window. They’d wave and smile as our blue sedan drove by.

The last Purim I celebrated was my freshman year of college. Interestingly enough, it was the furthest I had ever been from home during a holiday. My friends and I—Jewish and non-Jewish—dressed up and went to a huge carnival that Chabad was throwing. We were in the middle of Nowheresville but there was music, games, and all the food you could ever want.

It’s been a while since anything resembling that has happened on Purim. This year I stayed in and watched Mad Men reruns in my pajamas. Instagram fed me a slew of pictures of family and friends dressed up. In between Don Draper’s affairs, I double-tapped each one. Like.

Growing up in an observant home, I learned that being Jewish meant you just did certain things. I never questioned it. Shabbat happened every week and it was normal not to watch television or drive the car. Holidays were filled with beautiful traditions and family. But now that I live away from home, and am not sure I believe in religion at all, being Jewish doesn’t mean being religious the way it used to.

Without consciously deciding to, I drifted away from community and observance. Part of me is happy about that—even before I left, I knew I didn’t quite fit in. There was no one for me to discuss literature with or argue over the arts. I’d sit on the floor of used bookshops by myself while my friends hung out at the mall. As soon as school—our common denominator—vanished, so did our bond. And yet, another part of me feels bad that Purim came and went without a single sparkle of the delight and fun it once held for me. I’ve been on a religious roller-coaster for most of my life, and in my twenties—on the cusp of adulthood—it has become even more difficult.

So now I am faced with the task of redefining observance.

The meat of observance, for me, lies in two things: culture and community. What I believe, or don’t believe, about where the bible came from doesn’t have to disrupt my connection to Judaism. Realizing that I don’t have to practice religion the way my family does has helped me to reconcile my nostalgia for my childhood with my discomfort with traditional observance. If I want to, I can still spend Purim with my family, or call up an old friend and ask if I can latch onto her plans. Culture is about tradition and the group of people you belong to, and that has little to do with theology and faith.

In terms of seeking out a new community: I haven’t found one that’s quite right for me, yet. Many of the people I grew up with, if they left home at all, left for the Upper West Side or Washington heights. I chose the East Village. I don’t know where my generation of culturally-identified, secular Jews is going. But for now, I am coming to realize that despite the choices I have made, I can hold onto the parts I want and still call myself observant, without feeling like I am lying or cheating. I can create new traditions, keep old ones, and find new communities and friends. I can have my own garden of cellophane-wrapped baskets.

Daniella Bondar is a MFA Creative Writing Nonfiction student at The New School. Wandering New Yorker. Insomniac. She’s working on a memoir about her gold dress phobia. Follow her on twitter and find her writing at DaniellaRobin.com.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Related: I Hid My Non-Jewish Boyfriend From My Family For Over a Year

The post Passing on Purim For A Night In With Netflix appeared first on Jewcy.

Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, begins with Jewish housewife Rose Zimmer getting kicked out of the Communist party for having an affair with a black police officer. Rose’s character was loosely based on Lethem’s own grandmother, whom he described as “fearsome.”

I spoke with Lethem over the phone about his latest book, Brooklyn, and why he hates the article headlines on Salon. Lethem is the author of Fortress of Solitude, Chronic City and Motherless Brooklyn, which won the National Book Critic Circle Award in 1999.

What was the genesis of Dissident Gardens?

It originates inversions of my own family history. Mysteries I grew up with, surrounding both my mother and grandmother, who were gone before I could approach them as an adult and demand some accounting or some explanation for things that fascinated me, things that had always been under a pall of legend or silence—in my grandmother’s case, a lot of silence.

What was your grandmother like?

My grandmother was a first-generation immigrant. She grew up in the back of a candy store in Brooklyn. She couldn’t be more classic in a way, one of six daughters pointed toward marriage and gentle assimilation, but she was an iconoclast. Without going to college she became self-educated and secularized and politically radicalized and those things separated her from her origins in many ways. Her own separation from the spiritual and intellectual life of her family inaugurated her sense of estrangement or betrayal.

I always knew her as someone with a multiple sense of betrayal in the world: politics had failed her; the Jewish god had failed her and New York city was always on the verge of letting her down. She was very dynamic, very charismatic; I loved being with her, but she was a pretty fearsome human being for a kid to hang with too. [Laughs] There was a mystery in her life: what has she done as a single woman after her husband left her in the forties? I couldn’t name it at the time, but her life was rich and problematic and she was a formidable person. She wasn’t just a grandmother. She wasn’t around for me to really interrogate by the time I could articulate those questions, so instead I wrote a novel and made it all up to satisfy my own sense of fascination.

Are you satisfied?

Hah! What happens when you render intimate parts of your own experience in fiction is that it becomes a formal problem. The novel has demands; the characters suddenly gain a gravity which attracts other kinds of material and so the character divides from life and factuality and becomes something else. The novel is a derivation and a confabulation—it isn’t life itself. As much as you as may fill it up with those feelings at the outset, it becomes something else completely. There isn’t even a question of that kind of satisfaction. I’d only be satisfied if I could hang out with my grandmother again.

One of your characters, Cicero, sort of does that in the novel. As a random segue, I find myself getting lost in your language very easily. Your grasp of language is amazing.

I think that increasingly, in the longer books I’ve written since Motherless Brooklyn, I see part of my assignment, my personal imperative and drive, as a wish to create a sensorium, a diorama of past lives or of worlds that I’ve moved through, friendships I’ve known, environments, cultural experiences. I want to reproduce them; I want to trap them in amber. The wordiness—I can be fairly accused of wordiness by now—it’s really just this trick for creating this enormous machine for reproducing past sensations or lost worlds. I guess that’s become more important to me by far than storytelling per se.

Speaking of lost words, you’ve been equated with Brooklyn. I just moved here. I imagine it’s a much different place now than how you described it in your books.

Oh God. It was changing under my feet when I was growing up. When I returned there in my early thirties, there was a kind of shock confrontation with its early gentrification that I depict in some ways in Fortress of Solitude. That was a galactic change. In the last three or four years it’s changed as much again, in ways beyond my grasp. I’m not there these days. The illusion that I’m somehow the master of this territory or can account for it all is very humbling. The world keeps going and turns out to have nothing to do with your sense of taking it personally [laughs].

You’re quoted in Salon as saying that “the literary world is like high school.” What were you like in high school?

Oh, lord. Salon seems to have a special dedication to finding the very stupidest thing I ever say in any given interview and making it the headline of the piece. That’s their M.O. I suspect I was speaking with the kind of irony that immediately gets stripped from the language the minute it gets put in cold type, especially when it gets put on the Internet. I was musing on the fact that a lot of the machinations and hierarchies and alliance-burnishing and so forth that goes on in the world, including the literary world, is no so different from what you encounter in high school. It’s a truly banal remark, but somehow it ended up sounding like I was claiming it as some fierce throw-down on my colleagues — that’s the power of a headline! “Lethem Avenges Himself Against Bullies Thirty Years Too Late”—there’s a headline for your piece, now run with it. God help me.

Let’s not dwell on this any longer, but please be certain you insert lots of “(laughs)” through your piece. You should scatter that almost randomly amidst my remarks to promote the possibility that I’m being provocative or sarcastic. Listen, seriously—the only important thing to say is I’m very lucky that anyone gives a shit about my work. At any given moment I keep that thought foremost in my mind. Sometimes I forget to incant it aloud, but that’s only because it seems so obvious to me. As for the high school stuff, any “popularity” I suffer or enjoy personally means nothing; it’s not me that’s popular, it’s an image of me that the books drag along behind them through the world. The only purpose of that image is to get the books read. That people read them remains a kind of marvel to me.

So back to the question, were you cool in high school? What were you like as a teenager?

It’s a question I ask myself. How should I know what I was like? I wonder about it. I’ve tried to explore it in my work at times, not just to brandish myself on my own sleeve, but because I’m interested in trying to figure out what I was like. Often I receive conflicting clues from other people’s remarks or my own recollections and I think: who was that? I’ve pursued it in the essays in The Disappointment Artist and in the Talking Heads book, that more or less factual me, as opposed to the totally fictional guises that I wear in a couple of novels. I suspect I was probably pretty angry and also pretty cowardly. [Laughs] I experienced myself as devilishly clever and capable, as moving through the world with a kind of sly sideways power of access and insight that none of my behavior would have given evidence of. The inside and outside of the teenage container are two very different things.

You have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of random topics that comes across in your book.

It’s done out of love. I’m the sort of person who traffics in the statistics on the back of the baseball card but it’s not really about that stuff, it’s just articulating some sort of emotional arrow pointing from me to the thing. If you see me flipping around a lot of obscure trivia—”here’s the guy who was playing guitar on Smokey Robinson’s records even though he’s not credited”—it just means my heart falls out of my chest when I hear “I Second That Emotion”. It comes from caring so much that I’m trying to manage the sensation by becoming an expert on the topic. I couldn’t be bothered to know about stuff that doesn’t move me. It’s not like I have any really area of expertise outside my passions. Passions may not be the right word for this stuff—for my emotional cruxes, things that perturb me or reach into me.

What do you mean by having your “heart fall out of your chest?”

There’s something about the way that some things speak to me that I never get over entirely. Plenty of things speak to you once, but some of them, many of them, complete their enunciation: you get it and it’s just a nice song or you forget about it. Other things stir you and can’t ever be finished—those are the things that I find I’ve been very well rewarded by paying close attention to. Whether it’s the squares of slate on sidewalk on Dean Street or a Smokey Robinson song.

Do you find that mainly connected to your childhood?

Of course but it can also still happen. I’m not some sort of finished set of issues, a door that closed when I was seventeen. I believe that I remain eligible to have the world speak to me in that way. I’d like to think so.

The post Jonathan Lethem is Happy You Give a Shit appeared first on Jewcy.

The funny minds behind the High Holiday eCards (Yom Kippur? I hardly know her!) are back with Hanukkah eCards that will make even your grumpy uncle laugh.

One says Oy! Oy! Oy! and another features Andy Kaufman’s Latke character. Our favorite shows a man standing near a Prius saying, “With the mileage I get of course this fuel will last 8 days.”

Check out the rest and send one here.

Send a Hanukkah eCard [Tablet Magazine]

The post Send a Funny, Free Hanukkah eCard to Your Relatives Who Use Computers appeared first on Jewcy.

Kosher Salt is Jewcy’s monthly comic about life as a blonde-haired, green-eyed, tattooed Jew.

Get your Kosher Salt Fix: Jesus Christ Superstar and Me
Jews with Tattoos

Elizabeth Simins is a compulsive doodler living in New York. She splits her time between making paintings, being a production designer, and playing pretentious indie video games. She tweets here.

The post Kosher Salt: On Forgiveness appeared first on Jewcy.

Every conversation I ever had with Ben Zion Wacholder, my Zayde (grandfather), turned to that same question. When I was in Yeshiva high school, I would start telling Zayde about a Talmud passage I’d learned recently and he would recite the next five lines by heart. In college, I’d mention Homer and he would nod in approval. After I graduated and took a part-time personal assistant job, answering Zayde’s well-intentioned interrogations became a painful part of returning home, a reminder that my brain was melting away answering phones and booking travel arrangements. Stuttering through an answer, visiting Zayde became a constant reminder that I was learning … nothing.

A little background. Famously, while living in hiding as a non-Jew on a Polish farm during World War II, my Zayde used to teach Talmud to the cows. Even alone in the fields, talking about Judaism put his life in danger, but life without learning was impossible for him. Decades later, when he was a Professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, my Zayde and his student Marty Abegg published the first partial translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which previously had been kept secret by a small group of scholars, earning himself more than a few enemies in the world of early Christian and Rabbinic scholarship. Again, he believed that knowledge is meant to be used, and he couldn’t stand to see it hidden away.

In March of 2011, Zayde passed away and I traveled to Israel with my mother and her siblings for his funeral. We were in Israel for five days, and the whole trip is a blur of emotions, jet lag, confusing ritual dancing at the cemetery, and small talk with strangers at shiva. But what I do remember is the stories my Zayde’s former students, colleagues, and friends told me about him, and the letters they started sending my family.

The stories were so rich and varied that I decided I wanted to compile them and piece together a complete picture of my Zayde. While I was struggling to decide whether I was capable of putting together anything that somebody would publish, my mother—who was using Google while the rest of us were still Asking Jeeves—put my 21st-century self to shame by pointing out that the best way to share information with lots of people is online. So I went back to school, and signed myself up for courses in Web programming and design.

It turned out that after drowning in the liberal arts for years, my brain was starving for a little quantitative reason and binary logic. After four years of college and then two years working in the art world, I was bored to death with spurious interpretations and pretentious nonsense masquerading as theory. Growing up in a family of academics, I felt like a failure when I realized that academia frustrated me, that my brain is too concrete and results-oriented for the ambiguities and abstractions of studying the humanities. But Web programming was empowering. Work with a clear purpose and a defined end point! Actual right and wrong answers! Visible results! I finally found a field that feels relevant and current, and a place I could contribute more than yet another paper or article.

It also turns out that programming was kind of hard. For a year and a half, instead of building an online archive about my Zayde, I’ve been busy building HTML tables and struggling through PHP control structures. But, as I slogged through the busywork, I was relieved that I finally had an answer to Zayde’s eternal question, “So, what are you learning?”

And so, a year and six programming languages later, I finally created BenZionWacholder.org. It is a tribute to my Zayde not just because it contains his writing and writing about him, but because through preparing this project I rediscovered my love of learning. The site is a work in progress—I’m still gathering knowledge about my Zayde and the programming skills I need. And that’s exactly as it should be. As long as I’m still learning, I know that I’m remembering him the right way.

The post Learning Web Programming for Zayde appeared first on Jewcy.

Danielle Wiener-Bronner is a graduate of Barnard College, where she studied economics. She now works as an editor in New York City.

The post Before Leaving for Israel, One Last Stop at the Electronics Store appeared first on Jewcy.