Every grieving Philip Roth reader who is Jewish understands that, as David Remnick of The New Yorker pointed out about the author who died Tuesday, “His sin was simple: he’d had the audacity to write about a Jewish kid as being flawed… He had violated the tribal code on Jewish self-exposure.”

Roth’s “Defender of the Faith,” from his 1959 collection Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, is the tale of a Jewish kid who is not only flawed but self-serving, manipulative, and frankly repulsive. Stuck in Missouri for basic training during the Second World War, Private Sheldon Grossbart is a grotesque reflection of everything gentiles think about Jews. He connives to prey on the Jewish guilt and self-doubt of his sergeant, fellow New York Jew Nathan Marx, to achieve two goals: avoiding service in the expected invasion of Japan, and getting time off to eat a really delicious and totally treif “Chinese goddam egg roll.”

Roth himself discovered in his early confrontations with American Jews that many of them preferred to keep the egg roll consumption out of public view. Some of his coreligionists believed that inconsistencies and conflicts within the American Jewish community were better discussed only among Jews, if at all.

As Grossbart explains to a non-Jewish captain frustrated with his odd requests for religious accommodations, “Some things are more important to some Jews than other things to other Jews.” Roth explodes every sacred stereotype about Jewish life, leaving ugly little fragments. Respect for parents? Grossbart forges a letter from his mother complaining about the non-kosher food he is forced to eat. The letter ends up on the desk of a “goddam congressman,” forcing the ambivalent Jew Nathan Marx to explain to his superiors that “Jewish parents, sir—they’re apt to be more protective than you expect. I mean, Jews have a very close family life.”

Grossbart’s scheme to get Marx to sign off on a leave from base during basic training involves a persistent claim that he needs to eat kosher food, and to attend his aunt’s Seder, although Passover has been over for a month. When Marx shows disdain for the soldier’s implausible fidelity to Jewish law, Grossbart compares him to the passive Jews who had only recently allowed themselves to be slaughtered: “That’s what happened in Germany…They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.”

Before the term Holocaust had even come into use, Roth has one Jewish character accuse another of complicity in this horror. In an even more outrageous violation of Jewish solidarity, it is the vaguely anti-Semitic Captain Barrett who rather sensibly points out to Grossbart the hypocrisy of his religious scruples, stating that Marx had been killing Nazis in Europe when he, Grossbart, was still in high school. Yet Marx was perfectly willing to eat non-kosher food as part of his army service.

Marx, the tough, secular Jewish combat veteran finally gives in to Grossbart’s incessant whining and gives him and several of his friends the pass they crave. After all, for all his cynicism, Marx still remembers his own grandmother’s loving attention and its lesson that “mercy overrides justice.” One more cherished belief dissolves, as Grossbart returns, not with the promised gefilte fish and horseradish, but with that egg roll in a greasy paper bag.

Marx has his revenge, pulling strings to reverse Grossbart’s successful campaign to be sent to Monmouth, New Jersey, rather than the Pacific. So one Jewish soldier goes out of his way to have another sent to his probable death. Of course, Marx does not know what Philip Roth did: the atomic bomb would shortly end the War in the Pacific, so his anguish over having pushed a fellow Jew into the line of fire was wasted, as anguish often is. Yes, “some things are more important to some Jews than other things to other Jews.”

Fortunately for us, telling the complicated and sometimes ugly truth was supremely important to Philip Roth.

The post Remembering Philip Roth’s ‘Defender of the Faith’ appeared first on Jewcy.

The film stars Logan Lerman, and if he’s not your Jewish Crush yet he should be (heck, even go watch him in the critically-panned The Three Musketeers. I’ll wait).

Or maybe this will convince you: Indignation is now in theaters (to positive reviews), but if you don’t want to wait to see another clip you’ve come to the right place. Jewcy has an exclusive scene from the movie, in which an infirmary-bound Marcus (Lerman) shares a New Jersey-memory (accent included) with the object of his affection, Olivia (Sarah Gadon).

See for yourself below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfDVmg-NJzs

The post Exclusive: Watch a New Clip from ‘Indignation’ appeared first on Jewcy.

The new trailer is out for Indignation, the film based on the 2008 Philip Roth novel, and wow, does it look good.

The story is right in Roth’s wheelhouse: a Jewish young man from a traditional family in Newark is ambivalent about his heritage (he’s an atheist), so he breaks away from his family (and avoids the draft into the Korean War) by enrolling in a college in Ohio. There, he struggles with adjusting, including mandatory attendance for Christian services, an antagonistic dean, and, of course (this is a Philip Roth story), a relationship with a troubled young woman.

Logan Lerman, a woefully underrated young actor (from a Conservative Jewish family), is getting early critical buzz as a breakout in the lead role of Marcus Messner.

The film’s exciting cast also includes Danny Burstein as Messner’s father, a kosher butcher, which is apt, since Burstein is currently Tony-nominated for playing Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway.

(Fun fact: Burstein once shared the Broadway stage in Cabaret with Linda Emond as his love interest in a doomed Weimar interfaith relationship. Emond plays his wife in this film.)

The film’s director is Jewish screenwriter James Schamus in his directorial debut (he also adapted the screenplay).

Indignation is in theaters July 29th, but feast your eyes in the meantime on the trailer below:

Image Credit: YouTube

The post Check Out the Amazing (Very Jewish) Trailer for ‘Indignation’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Michael Orbach caught up with her recently to talk about autobiography in fiction, drawing, Bernard Malamud, and the perverse pleasures of OkCupid.

So your new book begins with your lead character blaming the U.S. State department for her sexual awakening. That’s actually coincidental since I blame the U.S. Department of Agriculture for my own belated sexual awakening…

[Laughs] Actually I would like to stop you right there—it’s a novel, not a memoir, so I don’t want to discuss my own sexual awakening. It’s definitely semi-autobiographical. It’s informed from my own experience, there’s no question about that, but it’s not straight out of it. My life is much more boring.

I think some people are writers who write stuff because they’re very interested in what happens to them; other people aren’t like that. I can think of many writers who write about places they’ve never been to. Some people can’t do that. I need a personal connection to the material.

What was the genesis of this graphic novel?

My first novel [Petropolis] came out in 2007 and I wrote another one, and it was just not good. I didn’t entirely like it; I showed it to my agent and she didn’t exactly love it; my editor didn’t like it. After that, I was in a kind of bad personal state. I couldn’t get myself to start writing another novel but I was doing a lot of drawing and doodles. I haven’t drawn for ten years and then a freelance illustration job fell in my lap. I found that drawing was soothing. I showed those drawings to my agent and she said maybe this was my next project. I have never done any comics before—I didn’t grow up with comics. And I haven’t read that many graphic novels. The graphic novels I did read were basically literary fiction or memoirs: Persepolis [Marjane Satrapi], Fun Home [Alison Bechdel], and stories by Adrian Tomine. I read them the same way I’d read any fiction. I didn’t really know what I was doing at all.

But when I was telling stories with drawing, the space constraints of a comic panel or a speech bubble actually helped me construct a story. When I write fiction it tends to sprawl. With handwritten text, there is the issue of space constraint. It forces you to get the story out. It was an easier process in a way. Do I wrap up a scene or extend it? The choice was obvious; I have to say what I have to say, or draw it all over again. It gave me a kick in the pants as a writer. It made it more vivid. It was a good experience overall.

How long did this take you?

I started it in May 2012 and I finished it last summer—less than a year. I sold it to Penguin on proposal and they gave me a few months. I was really rushing. Drawing takes up a lot of time; the first draft was completed in a few months. I did 16-hour days, it was crazy. I work at home and my kids would be like “There’s no food!” and I’d be like “Here’s twenty bucks, go to the grocery store.” I was disappointed that I didn’t have time to perfect the drawings. Writing is finite, there’s a stopping point when you can’t improve, but with drawing it’s much more ambiguous. I’m much more judgmental of my artwork than of my prose. I would have loved to have more time to make the book more more beautiful. On the other hand, when it was finished, I was happy because the speed gave the book a kind of urgency. The momentum is more intense because the pace is intense and it’s matched by the quality of hand-written text.

I love the dialog. Did some of that come from your own experience on OkCupid?

Yes, I have that in common with my character. I spent my whole adult life in a marriage; I was married at 21, and I had a kid when I was 24 and another one when I was 28. I stayed in this marriage for 15 years. I never dated; you don’t “date” when you’re in college, you “meet people” which is different. I was absolutely fascinated by the whole dating thing; I met people whom I never would have encountered in my normal social circle. All these crazy different stories.

Not every guy I met was somehow interesting or entirely insane, like the guys in the novel. The novel does its fiction thing—even if based on reality, everything is kind of exaggerated and tweaked… But still, it was a really interesting experience for me. Doing online dating as a writer, I couldn’t help deconstructing the way people misrepresented themselves online; even if they are trying to say one thing about themselves, they said another. The way they write about themselves and what they include or choose to exclude, it’s very telling. You learn to read between the lines.

I never looked at OkCupid like that, but I probably should.

I’m almost tempted to do a sociological study of OkCupid profiles and what people do. Our relationship with our photographs for example: we all have something we think is our best feature and our worst feature and we take pictures accordingly. Or something that’s meaningful and sentimental and we put it in our profile, but it’s not necessarily our best picture or looks like that you, or that you’re visible in. Another interesting thing is the language people use and what we chose to include in our reading lists. We don’t put down our favorite guilty pleasure, we put down the kind of stuff that we think will attract the kind of people we want. The men OkCupid matched me with usually “loved” David Sedaris and Charles Bukowski. There’s a list of three writers that the guy who doesn’t actually read books likes to use. No man ever likes any women writers, except for Sylvia Plath.

I’m going to my OkCupid profile to add a female writer now.

Add one who isn’t Sylvia Plath. You can so get the chicks.

Our interview is on hold, while I add Margaret Atwood.

She’s okay. Put Lorrie Moore in there.

Alice Munro?

Yeah, that’ll help.

If I get laid because of this interview…

You can buy me a drink.

I waste a lot of time on OkCupid, but you really made something useful out of it.

To me it was not a waste of time. I waste time professionally, I’m a writer. I gather material. It was fascinating, especially the way people answer some of the questions. Probably 90 percent of men answer the question “Are you smarter than most people?” in the affirmative. I get matched with a certain sub-set of men: basically, educated New Yorkers. And lot of them are white people, and I guess white men think they’re smarter than most people. I wouldn’t date anyone who said that he was smarter than people. What kind of thing is that to say?

I liked how you picked up on the question OkCupid has about whether people with low IQs shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce. They should rename the site OkHitler.

How many over-educated hipsters actually say yes—that the world would be a better place if people with low IQs couldn’t reproduce? It’s really crazy.

In the book, Lena has this moment where she has a nightmare about Philip Roth and picks Bernard Malamud instead. Can you talk a little about that?

Lena has a nightmare about Philip Roth on a Greyhound bus. I had a good dream about Roth on a Greyhound bus, he was really nice to me, but narratively speaking it needed be a nightmare. Malamud is a great artist—his writing is so fine. I like him as an artist better than Roth—but I identity with Roth’s autobiographical characters more. But although I identify with them, I also think if Roth and I met he wouldn’t have given me the time of day. He’d dismiss me. I relate to Alexander Portnoy but I’m not supposed to, because I’m a woman. It’s complicated with Philip Roth… Anyway, sometimes things in novels aren’t put in to be straightforward; it’s not like Lena picking Malamud over Roth. it’s just a sequence.

The story “The Magic Barrel” spoke to me so much because it’s about an existential crisis and desperate scramble for meaning and love. I really related it and I got a kick out of the parallel between the marriage broker’s Magic Barrel full of girls and OkCupid. It’s just a nice framing device for the book. Lena is similar to Leo [the lead character in “The Magic Barrel”], but Leo becomes depressed and is pretty passive. He gives up and mopes around his apartment and finally finds the girl he falls in in love with in an envelope of photos, right in his apartment. But Lena is a woman and women tend to be proactive about fixing their fate. They get off their ass—if things aren’t good, let’s make them better. Especially immigrant women; they’re kinda into survival of all sorts. Lena’s actively searching, rather than throwing up her hands and saying “There is no such thing as love and meaning.” She thinks there might not be, but she doesn’t give up and then she finds it.

Related: Russian as an American Language: A Conversation with Anya Ulinich
Graphic Novelist Liana Finck on Yiddish Letters, Teen Angst, and Becoming a Book Person
Boris Fishman on Grandfathers, Russian Hirsuteness, and the Immigrant Experience

The post Anya Ulinich on Autobiography in Fiction, Drawing, and the Perverse Pleasures of OkCupid appeared first on Jewcy.

Judy Blume is click-bait catnip to me. I love her books, sure, but more than that I love her wisdom, her seventy-something joie de vivre, her I’m-too-old-to-give-a-fuck-what-anyone-thinks attitude. In this excellent profile by Alison Flood in The Guardian, Blume talks at length about all sorts of controversial things, like why it’s a bad idea to get married young, what it’s like to tour with a bodyguard (she’s received death threats for speaking out in support of Planned Parenthood and, you know, women’s bodily autonomy), and what it’s like to be censored (according to the American Library Association, she’s one of the most challenged authors of the 21st century):

Deenie, Forever…, every year, somewhere, they’re challenged. When I started, in the 70s, it was a good time for children’s book writers. Children’s reading was much freer than in the 80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy. My feeling in the beginning was wait, this is America: we don’t have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don’t do this, we don’t ban books. But then they did.

Other notable facts: Blume wrote Forever… for her daughter Randy, who wanted to read a novel where a girl enjoyed sex and didn’t die or get pregnant (has there ever been a more poignant writer request?!); Amanda Palmer has written a song about her; and the eponymous protagonist of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, is based on Blume’s adolescent experiences. The best part of the piece, though, is the kicker—a sly dig at Philip Roth’s very public announcement(s) that he’s going into retirement:

Teasingly, Blume says right at the end of the interview that she’s now planning, sort of, a memoir up until the age of 12; she’s not, she ends by chuckling, “going to do a Philip Roth” and announce her retirement.

“George just read me a really funny one [a blog in the New Yorker], it was, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Philip Roth has announced he has eaten his last sandwich.'” She laughs. George is waiting. She heads off to enjoy London.

Judy Blume, biz hundert un tvansik! (And keep your eyes peeled for her new novel for adults, due to hit the shelves next summer.)

http://youtu.be/qsGb-X1sj8c

Image: Judy Blume with Sofia Coppola and Sarah Flack on November 13, 2003 in New York City. (Scott Gries/Getty Images)

The post Judy Blume on Censorship, Death Threats, Divorce, and Not Retiring Like Philip Roth appeared first on Jewcy.

Philip Roth has been dying for a long time. I don’t mean this in the sense that we begin dying as soon as we enter this world—one of those rare dorm-room epiphanies that has some staying power. No, it’s more that Roth has been considering, and even choreographing, his death in a way few writers have. For decades he’s been writing and speaking about death, especially his own, with anger and bafflement, sure, but also with wonder and mystery, as if it were some esoteric math problem, theorized centuries ago by some mad monk-turned-philosopher. Perhaps, with some heroic effort, a Large Hadron Collider of metaphysics, it could be figured out, if not staved off.

Talking to Der Spiegel in 2006, Roth offered some idea of his relationship with the subject:

Most of my older friends say more or less what I say, which is that I think about dying less now than I did when I was an adolescent. The first discovery was so shocking. Death seemed so unfair. That’s what you think when you’re 14—that it’s so unfair, and ridiculous. I think the closer death comes the more people try to just not think about it.

There’s something peculiar in Roth’s saying he thinks about death less now. It becomes truly weird if you look at his 21st century output—novels about polio, the end of Zuckerman, an expired everyman (“Old age isn’t a battle, it’s a massacre”), an actor’s senescence, a young soldier killed in Korea. And that’s just the last decade or so; from the doddering last days of E.I. Lonoff (The Ghost Writer) to a novelist’s ruminations on his father’s terminal cancer (Patrimony) to “The Day It Snowed,” Roth’s first published short story, which is about a young boy’s confusion over the “disappearance” of some family members (when each dies, he’s left home alone while his family heads to the funerals)—death becomes Roth. It’s the paper he writes on, the ink in his pen.

And here comes the opening of Philip Roth: Unmasked, a new documentary set to air March 29 on PBS, in which Roth says he has two things to look forward to: his biography and his death. He hopes the latter comes first, he says, his expression sly and even happy.

But who’s to say that it will? Maybe the great cosmic joke won’t be that Roth will die, only that the end will come later than he expects. As he writes in The Facts, “the aged know everything about their dying except exactly when.”

Lately we’ve had a lot of time to consider the end of Philip Roth. This year he announced his retirement from writing, speaking as if he were unburdening himself of some awful weight, though it hasn’t been trying enough to stop him from putting together a few dozen books. That news inaugurated a round of encomiums and elegiac tributes that made it seem as if the great writer had died. (It’s also became a litmus test for parishioners in the Church of Roth whether you think that he has actually put down the pen. Count me among the unbelievers.)

But the old master is still vitally, crankily alive. Just last week Roth turned 80, and during a birthday celebration, he read from Sabbath’s Theater, the angriest and most death-obsessed of his books. As David Remnick cracked, “Happy birthday, indeed!”

This is how it goes and how it will probably continue until he passes and only those thousands of pages remain. You can’t have a valedictory celebration of Roth without talking about death, or about sex, Jewish identity, and the onanistic possibilities of liver. And Philip Roth: Unmasked provides a number of these opportunities, featuring interviews with Roth along with Nicole Krauss, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Franzen, Claudia Roth-Pierpont (no relation), and several others, including friends from Newark and Bucknell. Combining archival photographs with Roth’s personal reminiscences, the film is a leisurely and pleasing tour through his life and work.

Leaning on interviews with Roth, there are plenty of sparkling lines (“I had many opportunities to ruin my life”), as well as some excavations of darker periods. He talks about the breakdown he had during his first marriage and how he was tempted towards suicide, in the 1980s, when suffering from excruciating chronic back pain. But his marriages are still largely glossed over—the second, to British actress Claire Bloom, isn’t mentioned at all—and confessions are few. Viewers may wonder, for example, about his relationship with Mia Farrow, which seems quite close but doesn’t receive much examination. Blake Bailey’s forthcoming biography should answer as many of these questions as is possible.

Zooming out a bit, what emerges from this Roth jubilee is not his singular importance as a writer—though there is that—but how much the culture has shifted. A novelist would have to commit a crime today to appear on the evening news. Yet after its publication in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was not only a controversial work; it also sold 350,000 copies in a single month. That’s Harry Potter territory, unthinkable now for a serious literary novel. These days, to have public celebrations and bus tours about a major writer—or even to have one on the cover of Time magazine—feels like a collective act of irony, a deliberate throwback to a time when literature was an essential part of popular culture, rather than a private affair.

As Roth and a number of his peers (Cynthia Ozick, W.S. Merwin, John Ashbery, the recently retired Alice Munro) drift towards the exits, the question isn’t whether we’ll see their like again. It’s if, when they appear, we’ll care enough to honor them before it’s too late.

The post Culture Kvetch: Philip Roth’s Victory Lap appeared first on Jewcy.

Oif a meisseh fregt men kain kasheh nit: Don’t ask questions about fairy tales.

PISCES (FEBRUARY 21-MARCH 20): Pisces, symbolized by two fish swimming in opposite directions, exemplifies the dual nature of this mutable water sign. One fish swims toward the spiritual—the world of the dream, the unconscious mind—while the other fish swims toward the material world.

Fish-themed Judaic tales include Jonah and the whale and the Leviathan. In 6 B.C., a Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Pisces even gave Jewish astrologers hope for a messiah.
 
Perhaps the most romantic and certainly the most intuitive of all the signs of the zodiac, you can be weak-willed in matters of the heart. Wise, sage givers of good advice, you are sensitive to beauty and can be overwhelmed by the feelings of others. Your heightened psychic awareness gives you a keen ability to suffer with others—this combined with your patience and listening skills makes you an excellent therapist and friend, but can have the ill effect of distancing you from your own life and feelings. With an innate receptiveness to everything that’s going on around you, it can be hard to see where others end and you begin.

While Passover begins on the day of the first full moon after the vernal equinox (the cusp between Pisces and Aries), Purim (February 23-24) is in many ways associated with Pisces—the Hebrew month of Adar corresponds with Pisces, and Purim itself has many fish themes.

The new moon on March 11 will be in Pisces; on this day there will be six heavenly bodies in your sign: Mercury, Mars, Venus, your ruling planet, Neptune, and the moon as well as the sun. With so many planets in Pisces, you’ll have the world at your feet (Pisces rules the feet)—lucky you!

Famous Pisces Jews: Gilbert Gottfried, Samm Levine, Bugsy Siegel, Rob Reiner, Carl Reiner, Ron Jeremy, Albert Einstein, Lou Reed, Billy Crystal, David Cronenberg, Jerry Lewis, Philip Roth, Yitzhak Rabin, Shalom Alecheim, Rashi, Renee Taylor, Elizabeth Taylor (converted), Joe Lieberman, Zeppo Marx, Kurt Weill, Ira Glass, Harry Winston, Diane Arbus, Rashida Jones, Judith Butler, Chelsea Handler.

ARIES (MARCH 21-APRIL 20): “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” was once the catchall phrase to explain the eternal debate—but hey, the 1990s called, and they want their dichotomy back: Mars and Venus are two faces of the same coin. Your ruling planet Mars returns to your sign on March 11, where it will stay until April 20, while Venus enters your sign on the spring equinox, balancing out aggressive Mars with its lovely light and helping you roll with the punches.

TAURUS (APRIL 21-MAY 20): Your ruling planet Venus will be in compassionate Pisces from February 25 to March 21, inspiring you with dreams of a grand romance. But don’t tempt the gods—zindik nit—focus what you need to do for yourself first before succumbing to the gantseh tsimmes (big confusion) that love can bring. Only you can take control of your life, and outside forces often serve as distractions from doing what you need to do.

GEMINI (MAY 21-JUNE 20): Gemini shiksa goddess Marilyn Monroe said, “it is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not,” and you should take her message to heart. Effusive Geminis are rarely unlovable, but your mazik (troublemaker) tendencies may make you seem like a stranger in a strange land if you fight against them. With your ruling planet Mercury in retrograde until March 17 and in dreamy Pisces until April 13, you will be compelled to confront your spiritual side—which you may have been willfully ignoring for fear of losing yourself. 

CANCER (JUNE 21-JULY 20): Gossiping is the worst habit and the biggest calumny—Loshen horeh iz di ergsteh mideh un gresteh tsoreh—and if anyone’s guilty of it, it’s you. We all know that old habits die hard, but with Mercury in retrograde you may want to watch what you say a bit more carefully. The new moon in your fellow water sign—creative, free-wheeling Pisces—on March 11 pit the two sides of your nature against each other. Loose lips may sink ships, but loosening yourself up won’t do anyone any harm.

LEO (JULY 21-AUGUST 20): No matter how hard you try to be inscrutable, the hitsik (hothead) wildcat within you betrays your true nature every time. Temper, temper you imperious beasts! With so many planets in even-keeled Pisces, you just may get the balm you need to keep moving forward. Remember, if you can’t do as you wish, do as you can—Az me ken nit vi me vil, tut men vi me ken.

VIRGO (AUGUST 21-SEPTEMBER 20): All eyes will be on you with the full moon in your sign on February 25. This is a great time to allow yourself a moment in the spotlight for once; after all, too much modesty is half conceit—tsu fil anives iz a halber shtolts. However, with Mercury in retrograde (and in your polar opposite sign, Pisces), you’ll still do well to conduct yourself with the reticence and charm you know best. That does mean you can’t get all farpitzed and let the world bask in your glow.

LIBRA (SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 20): Venus is drifting through languorous Pisces through March 21, encouraging you to patteren tseit (lounge around, waste time) more than usual. This combined with your capacity for dissimulation conceals your true intentions and desires. Libras may have the reputation for being lighthearted lovers, but the mask you wear may be doing you more harm than you think. While it’s great that you can keep a positive mental attitude, suppressing your darker side keeps you from letting others into your heart.

SCORPIO (OCTOBER 21-NOVEMBER 20): Your reputation precedes you, saucy Scorpio—you’ll get what you want by hook or by crook. Oi, a shkandal! (Oh, what a scandal!). While you may not be as thoroughly unscrupulous as your sign suggests, with so many planets in Pisces, another water sign immersed in the waters of the unconscious, your hulyen (hellraiser) impulses could get the better of you. Reign in the danger, but never deny your true nature.

SAGITTARIUS (NOVEMBER 21–DECEMBER 20): With your ruling planet Jupiter still in mischievous Gemini and so many planets in dreamy Pisces, you’d be wise to guard your saykhel (common sense) closely. Surrounding yourself with mamoshes (people of substance) may help you avoid finding yourself at the wrong place at the wrong time. However, if you have a tendency to lead others on, at least have the decency to operate with transparency: if you’re all talk, make sure your partners-in-crime know it. No one likes a con artist!

CAPRICORN (DECEMBER 21–JANUARY 20): Your mantra has been Me krechts, me geht veyter—I complain and I keep going—for longer than you’d care to admit. Saturn’s retrograde through July 7 forces you to confront, and hopefully resolve, issues that have been plaguing you. If you can face your demons head on, you may find that the wild card’s been up your sleeve all along, and the fact that you can keep surprising yourself should be more than enough to get yourself going again, you alter bok (old goat).

AQUARIUS (JANUARY 21-FEBRUARY 20): If you’ve been feeling more kalamutneh (dreary, gloomy, troubled) than usual, you may worry that you’ve reached an impasse in your love life. Fear not, this deadlock may resolve itself at the eleventh hour. Until then, you may just have to grit your teeth and accept that to leiden (suffer) is your fate right now. Focus on all the great things you’ve got going on rather than the bad hand life seems to have dealt you. After all, as Ru Paul says, “If you don’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love somebody else?”

What’s Your Sign?
Aquarius, Sign of Contradictions
Capricorn, the Cardinal Earth Sign
Sagittarius, the Adventurous Archer
Stinging Scorpio
Lovely, Lawful Libra
Virgo, the Anxious Maiden
Leo, King of the Jungle

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post Jewcy Horoscopes: Pisces, the Dual-Natured Water Sign (Feb. 21-March 20) appeared first on Jewcy.

• Woody Allen references getting hickies in his New York Times essay on hypochondria, and it’s pretty weird. [NYT]

• Not even Paul Rudd can avoid a teleprompter fail. [Vulture]

• There’s a new Israeli cookbook out, and it focuses on Kibbutz cuisine. [Tablet]

• Philip Roth and Mel Brooks both say they don’t identify themselves as ‘Jewish writers.’ [Deadline]

• Also, Retired Philip Roth drinks a lot of orange juice these days. [LAT]

• Lena Dunham, former chimney sweep, is rocking the elfin look, according to Craig Ferguson. [Splitsider]

The post Daily Jewce: Woody Allen Gets Hickies, Paul Rudd’s Teleprompter Fail appeared first on Jewcy.

Forget JDate and the 10,999 Jewish singles who are online now and share your desire for friendship and romance. Seven Jewish men living in DC have decided to find their seven soul mates with a supremely cringeworthy Craiglist ad:

Shalom! We are five handsome and two not so handsome single men. And, yes, we are Jewish. Bound by tradition and emboldened by wit, we are hosting an epic Shabbat dinner — a little challah, a little wine, and a lot of gefilte fish — in downtown Washington, DC on Friday, January 18, 2013. In a nod to our orgiastic traditions, we are inviting seven lucky ladies to feast with us. Echoing the State of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, we will consider you, “irrespective of religion or race,” as long as you “bring your own lactaid pills.

To be considered, please submit a picture of yourself. We’d also like to hear more about you.

While the men have most certainly congratulated their own brilliance (demanding photos ≠ very original), the litmus test they’ve created to narrow down their apparently large romance pool inadvertently concedes the limitations of their wit. If you can correctly decide what the the 11th Commandment should be and what your favorite episode of Seinfeld is, but then avoid revealing your answers, you might just win a spot at the table.

Please answer two of the following questions with another question: What’s your favorite Shabbos activity? Which biblical forefather do you admire most and why? What would you establish as the 11th Commandment? What’s your favorite episode of Seinfeld? Curb Your Enthusiasm? Which character from Girls speaks most to your personality? What is your favorite double mitzvah? Why would you answer a Craigslist ad about a Shabbat dinner?

You must also answer two of the following, not in question form. Where do you go to get your hair straightened? Are you a self-hating Jew? Have you read Portnoy’s Complaint? Explain why a two-state solution would or would not work? How do you feel about the Shoah? What is your favorite yiddish word and farvus? Zach Braff: Dreamy, or in your dreams? Do you appreciate hairy backs?

The ad has been updated to report that many interested parties have in fact already contacted them, though they’d still “love more responses” in order to find their true besherts.

Suffice it so say, Jewcy isn’t swooning.

Seven Single White Jewish Males Looking to Host Seven Single Females [Craigslist] (image via Shutterstock)

The post Craigslist: Desperate Jewish Men Seek Attractive Jewish Women appeared first on Jewcy.

Next week, Lena Dunham’s Girls will return to TV, and no writer in recent memory has been as talmudically dissected. Her work and her life tend to bleed into one another, with questions of Dunham’s privileged upbringing, her connections to the art world and Manhattan’s cultural elite, and her supposedly limited life experience seeming as consequential, to many commentators, as anything she produces in her fictional TV drama. Of course, Dunham has fueled this process by creating a show that’s very much about her peers, but the discussion surrounding her and Girls is also evidence of the hunger commentators have for sifting a creator’s life from the work and judging it accordingly. (Philip Roth has toyed with this phenomenon to great effect.)

Writers have the peculiar position of working in private for a public audience. This produces tension between the story a writer tells himself and the one he tells others. When the work is ready and it’s time for a writer to run the publicity gauntlet, a narrative is created ex post facto. How did this book come together? What motivated this or that choice? How’d you get your start as a writer? Who helped you? Suddenly the jumbled events and workaday struggles of months or years must be stitched together into something resembling a story, and sometimes the story isn’t always the full truth.

That this kind of close reading is ultimately circular and exhausting hasn’t stopped it from being the favored sport of the New York commentariat. And to some extent, I understand it. Rampant success, particularly at such a young age, attracts suspicion. There’s no doubt that Dunham has had some advantages in life. To expect her to own up to it in an interview, however, to think that she might flagellate herself or in some way apologize or refuse these perks—that strikes me as an unrealistic expectation. And by doing so, we overlook what should largely inform our judgment of a writer: the work itself.

Still, despite however much I may excuse Dunham, or at the very least tire of the moralistic debate over her upbringing, I’ve recently found myself submitting other writers to similar scrutiny. What aren’t they copping to, I ask myself. And if they won’t say it, why won’t the journalists covering them do it instead?

A new literary journal, The American Reader, has earned an inordinate amount of press coverage, much of it based on the perceived glamour of its founders, their Ivy League degrees, and their connections, much like Dunham, to Manhattan’s art scene. Few of the profiles of the magazine—in the Observer, in the Daily Beast, and in the New York Times—pay much attention to what is in the magazine. (When they do, they often find it lacking.) A glittering social world, one largely populated by a monochromatic cast of the rich and well-connected, is the unacknowledged subject.

Separately, the New York Times this week profiled Nathaniel and Simon Rich, brothers who, at 32 and 28 respectively, already have an enviable roster of accomplishments behind them. (Peer envy is part of the subtext of any Rich brothers profile.) The two are indeed talented, with Nathaniel about to publish his second novel and regularly writing smart features and criticism for The New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, and Simon, having left a job as the youngest staff writer in Saturday Night Live’s history, now a writer at Pixar and the author of several books. (Even that is an abridged version of their resumes.) What raises the specter of nepotism though—and it’s mentioned in the first sentence of the NYT profile—is that their father is Frank Rich, doyen of America’s liberal pundits, their mother is Gail Winston, executive editor at HarperCollins, and their step-mother is Alex Witchel, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. You couldn’t ask for better bloodlines or for an easier entree into the New York literary world.

After reading these stories and many like them, and perhaps more importantly, after living in New York, where in a short time I’ve encountered less successful (but similarly pedigreed) versions of some of the aforementioned characters, I’ve realized that expecting these people to prostrate themselves, to admit their advantages, is a self-defeating game. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong to ask these questions—journalists and critics should always push for uncomfortable truths; we should be trying to make journalism and publishing open to any socioeconomic class—but in the case of a young writer, by asking him to cop to nepotism, you are essentially asking him to admit that he’s a fake.

Again, that doesn’t mean that these questions shouldn’t be asked—a denial might reveal something interesting. But it means that we shouldn’t be outraged when we don’t get the full-throated confessions we want. This conclusion is best expressed by Simon Rich himself. In a thoughtful but overlong profile, which appeared in the New York Press in 2008, journalist Kimberly Thorpe spends a while meditating on the brothers’ background. At the time, Rich told Thorpe:

“It’s just not our job to talk about it. It’s your job to talk about it, if you want to. I feel like it’s not our responsibility to talk about that subject. We’re not the ones getting paid to do it.”

I reluctantly agree. Our outrage is better directed at the journalists who carry water for their gifted subjects, who dismiss these matters with a rhetorical wave of the hand. For example, when the New York Times’ Laura M. Holson writes that Nathaniel Rich “was slower to find his way, working for nearly two years as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before moving to San Francisco to write a nonfiction book about film noir,” it’s time to cry foul. For young writers, a gig at the NYRB, particularly straight out of college, is a dream job (even more so in this economy). It’s hardly a deviation from the path to literary success; rather, it’s a valuable waypoint.

If you’re looking for writers to reveal the benefits they reaped from being born in the right zip code, or attending the right school, look to older generations. Read their memoirs, where there’s less risk in sharing these revelations, where age often leads to wisdom and self-examination. Or listen to the Longform Podcast, where successful, mid-career magazine journalists talk candidly about the help (or lack of) they’ve had in their careers. Don’t look for this in young writers, even fabulously successful ones, who are still in the formative stages of their careers and still may be unable to recognize the boon of their privilege. And if you’re a journalist covering one of these bright young things, keep probing; but don’t patronize your readers by acting like these issues don’t exist.

Previous Kvetches: Holiday Movies As History Books
My Sheldon Adelson Complex

Art by Margarita Korol

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