This past weekend, Mile End, Tablet Magazine, and ABC Home teamed up to present The Future of Jewish Food, where insiders from across the food industry talked Jews, food, and Jews eating food. Top Chef’s Gail Simmons (who wrote “keep cooking” in my copy of her book!) and Mitchell Davis of the James Beard Foundation (the only acronym that night where the ‘J’ didn’t stand for ‘Jewish’) discussed the future of the Jewish kitchen with food writer Joan Nathan, and then David Sax, author of Save the Deli, probed the future of the Jewish deli with the guys behind uber-trendy new-wave delis like Brooklyn’s Mile End, San Francisco’s Wise Sons, Portland’s Kenny and Zukes, and Saul’s Deli in Berkeley.

The highlight of the event was when Nathan asked her panelists to predict what Jewish food will look like in the year 3000. Simmons assured the crowd, perched on stylish chairs in the ABC Home event space, that there would still be matzoh balls. I like to imagine the ensuing sigh of relief as collective and not just mine.

Check out Tablet’s footage from the event, just be sure to wipe the drool off your computer keyboard after. We fully endorse event MC Alana Newhouse’s endorsement of lox:

The post I’ve Seen the Future of Jewish Food, and There Are Matzoh Balls appeared first on Jewcy.

It looks like anti-Semitic Elmo—last seen getting arrested in Times Square last month—has headed out West, seeking greener pastures and fatter wallets. According to Michael Wilson, a writer for the New York Times’ City Room blog, the 48-year-old former pornographer was spotted at a San Francisco playground, then sent Wilson a bizarre email saying he was posted up at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, making bank:

“Why?” he wrote. “I am the only cartoon character.”

As if to drive the point home, he attached a picture of a pile of cash beside plates of sushi. “Feasting on sashimi,” he wrote.

Watch out, Los Angeles—he’s headed to you next.

Ranting Elmo Finds Prosperity Out West [New York Times] Previously: Anti-Semitic Elmo is Back—He Got Arrested in Times Square Today
Why Anti-Semitic Elmo is Creepier—and Less Funny—Than We Had Thought
The Growing Anti-Semitic Elmo Crisis

The post Anti-Semitic Elmo Heads Out West, Boasts of Cash and Sushi appeared first on Jewcy.

But to place the Jewish Music Stream (JMS) on the same psychic or spiritual level as comfort food or television bingeing is to trivialize its higher significance and, indeed, its sheer awesomeness. The Stream plays solid, 24-hour blocks of contemporary Jewish religious music in stunning digital quality, and without the glitches or gaps in connectivity that are so common to small-cap internet radio stations. The website, which was created in 2009, has somewhere between 250 and 400 listeners at any given time, although that figure likely shortchanges the station’s actual reach through the Intersect World app.

After all, we’re Jews: Klezmer is our jazz, the Banai clan is something like our Rolling Stones (or maybe The Killers), and the Pro Musica Hebraica series, organized by the columnist Charles Krauthammer, even attempts to give us our own place in classical European art music. The music the JMS plays is our gospel; our soul music, even. As I’ve discovered, much modern-day yeshivish music comes from a place of emotional or spiritual jouissance. The semi-orchestral religious music played on the JMS reaches epic heights; it soars, tapers, and then soars even higher still. Musical cultures often have genres or modes of expression reserved for feelings, ideas or experiences that are too vast and too immediate for any other artistic form to contain (Robert Johnson and Brett Michaels both belong in this category). We Jews are no exception. Yeshivisha music is melodramatic and emotionally overstuffed, but even in its textures it is fundamentally, recognizably ours. It’s our people’s attempt at achieving something that, through pure feeling and sheer earnestness, aspires to a kind of musical transcendence.

So what does the Jewish Music Stream play, exactly? Female voices are regrettably assur, or prohibited, so a good amount of airtime is devoted to various boys choirs. The Yeshiva Boys Choir likes adding techno beats to traditional zmirot, although purists are sure to thrill to the Kol Noar or Shir Hadasha Boys Choirs, both of whom are in the JMS rotation. And then there’s the grandaddy of them all, the Miami Boys Choir. I’ve been somewhat disheartened but nevertheless fascinated to learn that AutoTune has made its way into even the most established choir-based acts in yeshivish music—as if the angelic counter-tenor of a nine-year-old cheder student can possibly be improved upon.

The JMS is delightfully Ashkenazi. There’s the occasional Sephardi tune but for the most part there is no Torah on the JMS. There is the Toyrah. Today is not hayom, it’s hayoim; this morning is haboyker. Melachto? Puh-leeze: Our King is Melachtoi. And so on. I don’t mean to mock—indeed, this antediluvianism (I’m a hard-tav pronouncing, largely assimilated American Jew, thank you very much) explains much of the JMS’s power over me. This is the music of a mythical and most-likely imaginary before-time; a time when dybbuks existed and Chelm was best known as a real place, and when Warsaw (or possibly Baghdad) was the center of the Jewish world. Some of the music the JMS plays is actually in Yiddish!

At the same time, it is the JMS’s modernity—its connection to a real and thriving and even Yiddish-speaking now-time—that makes it so consistently surprising. The studio version of Yoely Greenfeld’s “Zemer” ends in a New Orleans jazz breakdown; Dovid Gabay’s “Berum Olam” begins with a pretty mind-wrecking (although obviously synthetic) blast of bagpipes. Ya’akov Shweky’s infectious “Ten Lo” has a slow-building, almost dub-like lead-in, complete with a meandering and virtuosic oud solo. Even in the famously internet-averse ultra-Orthodox community, Yisroel Werdyger has won over 1,000 Twitter followers. And why shouldn’t he, considering the presence, the subtlety of feeling—the kavana, for lack of a superior English equivalent—with which he sings?

The JMS showcases musical eclecticism, and, the heck with it, cultural modernity within an ultra-orthodox Jewish context. My intrigue at such a harmony of apparent opposites might simply be the result of false preconceptions. I can’t say that my pre-JMS world allowed for the possibility of zmirot capped with power ballad-worthy electric guitar solos.

When I reached out to the man responsible for the JMS—an IT professional and sometimes computer-programmer who runs the site anonymously and asked not to be named—he was somewhere between winding down from work and preparing for a night at the Beit Midrash. He created the site, he said, because “I saw what was out there in terms of Jewish music streams and saw that I would be able to build a better system.”

“I’ve met a lot of these artists,” he continued. “They’re regular people who happen to be blessed with these talents and are happy to have others enjoy it.”

The clash between the ultra-Orthodox and modern technology has been in the news lately, and the mere existence of the JMS suggested to me that this relationship is more complicated than many have given it credit for. The JMS founder and proprietor actually attended the recent Ichud HaKehillos asifa against the Internet, which packed Citi Field and nearby Arthur Ashe Stadium with nearly 50,000 ultra-orthodox Jewish men, who had come to hear their teachers’ concerns over the web’s effects on religious practice and communal life. After the speech, more than a few attendees took to the web to share their reactions. Some argued that the Internet could be helpful so long as it could be controlled. Others insisted that the technology itself was irredeemably evil.

Unsurprisingly, the JMS’s founder sits on the more liberal side of this simmering communal debate. “Personally, I do computer work most of the day, and from a general background perspective I use the Internet all the time,” he told me. “But I’m always pushing myself to make sure everything’s filtered.”

For him, having a “Jewish listening experience” is one way the Internet can foster and celebrate Jewish culture. “If you try to take all these types of sites offline, people aren’t going to listen to Jewish music,” he said. And people like me will likely never hear a techno version of Kol Hamispalel.

The post Streaming Jewish Music on My iPhone appeared first on Jewcy.

There’s a revolution brewing. This isn’t a freedom mic, military coup, or hostile-romper-takeover type of revolution either. It’s a Jewish ethnic-food revolution. Based primarily in Manhattan (obviously), chefs—Jewish and non-Jewish alike—are taking stereotypically Jewish food up a notch or seven. Adeena Sussman fittingly calls it “haute-haimish grub.” Your very own bubbe’s recipes are being transformed, upgraded, and elegantly served for $30 a plate.

But it doesn’t take a celebrity chef to add finishing touches to old classics. These tweaks happen with every generation—probably every time a recipe is followed. I have a feeling your old family recipe doesn’t produce exactly the same kasha varnishkas your great bubbe made in her Russian shtetl.

As the product of a Jewish family with a wide range of geographic and cultural influences, I don’t have strong connections to many of the foods that typically dominate the standard Ashkenazi menu. (Don’t worry, matzah ball soup has and always will hold a warm spherical place in my heart.) Mandel bread is a major exception. I remember my dad connecting to his fake Italian heritage as he dipped it in his coffee after dinner and nestled up with the serious spread of desserts at my aunt’s Shabbat lunch table. And though I dearly love the family recipe, wherever it may have come from, mandel bread, too, would benefit from a bit of a facelift.

Unlike my father, mandel bread, or mandelbrot, is actually a relative of delectable Italian cookies, biscotti. Joan Nathan posits that Piedmont, Italy was the first place a Jew tasted biscotti and later brought the idea to Eastern Europe where it became mandelbrot. The idea behind biscotti is all about efficiency and shelf life. By baking the cookie twice—once as a loaf and once sliced—pre-preservative and refrigerator Italian bakers were able to keep their product fresh for longer. According to Gil Marks, biscotti were originally sugar and fat free. Once sugar made its way to Europe, the wedges were still dense, which is why Italians started dunking their cookies into their drinks (sorry, Oreo, you weren’t first). Next thing you know, they ended up traveling through Europe where they were flavored with almonds, known in German and Yiddish as mandel (brot means bread). While my dad takes his mandel bread back to its root as biscotti, my aunt capitalized on its traditional use in the Jewish community—a pareve dessert that could be prepared in advance and kept fresh for Shabbat.

Once this durable cookie made its way over the Atlantic, technology in the form of Crisco made its way into the classic recipe, as did chocolate chips and other non-almond add-ins. I can do without the Cricso, but the addition of mix-ins definitely elevated mandel bread from a dry, bland cookie to a dessert to be reckoned with. As tribute to the tradition of this ever-evolving cookie, this mandel bread recipe is decidedly not like your bubbe’s. Taking a cue from the chefs of lower Manhattan, I’ve added a touch of haute to the mix-ins, straying from the cookie’s namesake (mandel) and throwing in pistachios and cherries in place of the almonds. If you want to go completely crazy (and I do recommend it), dip the finished product into dark chocolate melted with cinnamon and a pinch of cayenne pepper. This spiced finish, inspired by Mexican chocolate, brings mandel bread another step along its evolutionary journey and into our even more globalized world.

Nota bene—mandel bread is not meant to be soft. These days people bake a chocolate chip cookie in the shape of a loaf, slice it, and call it mandel bread. Wrong. People with TMJ: beware. Mandel bread should have a crunch to it. In fact, it should be hard to bite even if you have a functional jaw. This is a cookie merchants and travelling rabbis tossed into their rucksacks. The whole point of mandel bread is that it’s a food that tastes good and can withstand the elements. So make sure you follow these baking directions closely—you bake it twice and at different temperatures to dry the cookie out, thus transforming it from an ordinary cookie into mandel bread.

Not Your Bubbe’s Mandel Bread

Makes 24 cookies

Ingredients:

2 ½ cups all purpose flour
¾ cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 ½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup melted butter or vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 eggs
¾ cup unsalted, shelled pistachios
1 cup dried sour cherries
3 ounces dark chocolate chips (optional)
cinnamon, to taste (optional)
cayenne, to taste (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease two cookie sheets with butter or oil.

2. Mix all ingredients in a bowl.

3. Split the dough into two and form into long loaves about ¾ inch thick, one on each pan. Bake until browned.

4. Remove the pans from the oven and raise the temperature to 400°F. While the oven is heating, slice the loaves into ¾ inch thick slices. Turn each slice on its side so a cut side is down. Bake for 10 minutes.

5. Turn off the oven. Remove the pans from the oven and flip each cookie over. Return the trays to the oven for one hour.

6. (Optional) Melt 2 ounces of chocolate over a double boiler until it reaches 115°F. Remove from heat and stir in the remaining chocolate in batches. Continue to stir until the chocolate comes down to 85°F. Return the chocolate to heat and continue stirring until it reaches 90-95°F. Stir in cinnamon and cayenne to taste.

7. (Optional) When the cookies have completely cooled, paint one side of each mandel bread with the melted chocolate. Cool on a rack until fully set.

Also try:

Not Your Bubbe’s Cranberry Crunch

Not Your Bubbe’s Cole Slaw

Not Your Bubbe’s Cheese and Spinach Blintzes

The post Not Your Bubbe’s Recipe: Pistachio Mandel Bread appeared first on Jewcy.

If you’re the type of person who likes to compare all your friend-filled sitcoms to Friends, you might want to dismiss Max Blum (Adam Pally) as a classic Joey. The writers of Happy Endings are on to you and have already made that joke, calling him fat Joey. But he’s also gay Joey, funny Joey, and most importantly, Jewish Joey—he’s also just plain better than Joey. Yes the Happy Endings pilot was about as bad as a Jennifer Aniston rom-com (it even starts with a runaway bride—yep, just like Friends), but, if you stuck around, you’d know that the show is truly amahzing.

Happy Endings is a six character ensemble comedy (yep, just like Friends) with four great characters (in addition to Pally, Eliza Coupe and Damon Wayans Jr. play a hilariously eccentric couple and Casey Wilson—who was dismissed from SNL after one season—plays an aggressively single abbreviator) and two not-as-good characters (the runaway bride Elisha Cuthbert and her former fiancé Zachary Knighton haven’t completely found their groove just yet). In a show like this there’s always the schlubby, less successful, but ultimately more entertaining character: that’s Max. He’s done everything from buying a limo and driving around Chicago as an unlicensed tour guide to competing with Coupe’s character Jane to see who would survive longer in the event of a zombie apocalypse. In a recent episode we also learned that Max hibernates for the winter, just like a bear: he won’t shave, he won’t shower, he won’t even speak. You know, normal things.

Since we started with the Friends comparison, we might as well continue with a New Girl one: The mostly jobless, chubby Max is the anti-Schmidt. Instead of wearing trendy running shorts, Max will stage an intervention to get you to stop wearing your deep v-neck. Instead of worrying about his physique, Max will get a tattoo of a taco to ensure free tacos for life. As much as I love Schmidt for his insanity, I’d love making fun of him even more with a friend like Max. Despite that, or perhaps because of that, Emily Nussbaum (who is basically Jewcy’s TV spirit guide) said she would want to be him if she could be any character on TV. (Well, after Leslie Knope from Parks and Recreation, but who doesn’t want to be Amy Poehler?).

No profile of a good Jewish boy would be complete without mentioning his mother, and we do get to meet Max’s parents on their annual visit to Chicago in the first season. The episode, called Mein Coming Out, focuses on Max’s hesitation to come out to his parents. His sexuality is a running joke on the show: the other characters often mock his total lack of “gayness,” asking him if he’s sure he’s gay after a particularly bro-y comment or action (there are many). This conveniently lets the show’s writers remind the audience that not only do they have a black character (and an interracial couple!), but they have a gay Jewish one too. While I’m often tempted to be slightly offended by their not-so-subtle reference to popular stereotypes, somehow, it seems to work. Their poking fun at Max’s sexuality just demonstrates how it is a footnote in his personality, hardly the most obvious (or interesting) thing about him.

Back to the episode—it is, of course, full of all the Yiddishisms a person could want: You got punim, shiksa, even pish. Wilson’s character, Penny, who in the past had posed as Max’s girlfriend, can’t help him out because she has a date. (Completely unrelated to Max, save an excellent end-of-the-episode punch line, Penny date is named Douglas Hitler.) In a state of desperation, Max asks Jane to help him out, later explaining, “My mom is Jewish, if I don’t find someone soon, she’s going to start setting me up with one of her friend’s single daughters … Try going on a six-hour architectural tour with Miriam Schechter’s niece, Chuchel.” (For the record, we’ve never met anyone named “Chuchel,” though we’re rather fond of the name Miriam.) After a series of events, he does ultimately come out to his parents, and on cue his mother tries to set him up with the son of one of her friends.

Sadly the excellent Krav Maga episode (in which Penny develops an alter ego, “Shira Abromovitz”) does not feature any martial arts moves by Max, but does feature a classic Happy Endings-style explanation of Yoni that I feel like sharing: Hebrew for god’s gift, in Sanskrit, means genitals. The show is very invested in this name-dropping brand of Judaism, and Max is an excellent vehicle for sharing them. It’s difficult not to notice the three-letter Hebrew tattoo on Pally’s chest spelling out “Asher,” (something he’s chalked up to as a childhood mistake) and the show runs with it. In response to the earlier-mentioned taco tattoo, Jane, demonstrating her Jewish wisdom, proclaims “Wow, you really don’t want to be buried in a Jewish cemetery” (Urban legend!). At the end of the episode in which he buys the limo, Max presents his rent money with a story about selling his beanie babies and driving Dr. and Mrs. Rosenberg back and forth to shul in time for havdala (“by the way, Jews are actually excellent tippers”).

If that’s not enough to convince you of Max’s glory, I’ll just leave you with this Season 2-ending performance by Mandonna:

Previously on Network Jews:

Seth Cohen, The O.C.’s loveable dork

Hesh Rabkin, Jewish Loan Shark on The Sopranos

Eli Gold, The Good Wife’s Political Operator

The post Network Jews: Max Blum from Happy Endings appeared first on Jewcy.

I don’t eat pig or shellfish or any other trayf foods; the meat I do eat must have a hechsher; I won’t mix meat and dairy but am not all that stringent about the amount of time I wait between consuming one or the other; I don’t care whether dairy or other nonmeat animal products are certified kosher; and when I eat out I assume the role of vegetarian, unless in a kosher restaurant. Given all this, it stands to reason that I would have been, if not upset, at least moved by the recent allegations against Hebrew National.

Last month, a number of news sources reported that 11 disgruntled eaters filed a suit against Hebrew National parent company ConAgra Foods, saying that the famously kosher hot dogs did not, as advertised, answer to a higher authority. According to the complaint, AER Services inc., which processes and inspects kosher meat for ConAgra and Triangle K and Associates, which certifies it, ignored employee concerns that the meat was not meeting kashrut standards.

When I first heard about this possible breach I was surprised by my own indifference to the outcome (for now, ConAgra denies all claims and maintains that the suit has no basis) and by the fact that, when I thought about whether or not I’d continue to eat their hot dogs, it took me a long time to decide that I wouldn’t.

It’s hard for me to justify this observance. Logically, the method doesn’t hold up. If, for example, I were truly determined to keep bacon out of my diet I would have to stop ordering eggs at diners. I can’t pretend not to know that they are, in all likelihood, fried in bacon grease. And still, I eat egg sandwiches, I use Jet-Puffed Marshmallows for s’mores, and I won’t turn down Starburst because, as far as I can see, they’re kosher-friendly. A little suspended disbelief goes a long way in rationalizing this system.

Nor am I especially convinced by the ethical efficacy of kashrut. I do believe that, in theory, kosher animals are killed in more humane ways. But I don’t believe that this is true in practice (and for the record, neither does Temple Grandin). If I had decided to stick to the spirit rather than to the letter of the law, I might have swapped the kosher K for a grass-fed, free-range organic certification. But I haven’t done that, and I probably won’t.

Growing up, I treated Judaism as an obligation. I went to synagogue if I had to and I didn’t hate it, but I spent much of my time there wishing I were somewhere else. Over some 12 years at Jewish day school I learned the prayers, knew blessings by heart, and had a working understanding of the tenets of my faith, but buried the knowledge so that it became an inactive, if undeniable, part of me. When I got to college, I shed religious observances and practices, pushing them out of my days in favor of lesser, more pressing mundanities. Time spent at services became time devoted to studying or, more often, sleeping in. Eventually I managed to make spirituality a footnote on my life, and there it has remained. But still, I keep kosher.

So I find myself abiding by a half-baked, personally concocted system that doesn’t make sense morally or ideologically. This version of kashrut is not a burden to me. It’s easy; the easiest way to hold on to a ritual that still connects me to a larger group of believers, and this ease often makes it feel fickle. Mine has become a Judaism of convenience, made up of cherry-picked beliefs and practices that don’t disrupt my lifestyle. It’s something I don’t think about often, but when I do it makes me feel a little sad and a lot wistful and still unwilling to figure out a more committed, more sensible religion.

But for now I’ll stick to it and hope that, in going through the motions of this kaleidoscoped faith, I’ll return to or rebuild a more meaningful one, and will happen again upon God.

The post Hebrew National and Me: Answering to a Higher Authority 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.

My friend Meredith and I were standing in line at Starbucks when she mentioned she would like to get lunch at Chick-fil-A to which I obviously responded “I can’t eat there because it’s not Kosher.” Marriage material, I know. It was then that the guy in front of me turned around and butt in with a “Wow. You keep Kosher STILL.” Um … STILL? I’m sorry, were you at my fifth birthday party at the ceramics center? Do I know you? He then barked out another weirdly worded question. “Have you lived in Israel YET?” This guy had bizarre grammar choices. Meredith was taken a back by this freak, but not me. As someone who exudes more Jewishness than Barbara Streisand in Yentl, I’m used to people trying to “bagel” with me. Yup, I said “Bagel,” you know, when someone tries to bond with you by awkwardly and sometimes not so subtly by letting you in on the fact that they’re Jewish.

I can’t take credit for the term, but it is brilliant. Lord knows we had a bageler on our hands, but this bageler was an amateur. Upon noticing a fellow Jew in line at the supermarket, a tasteful, professional bageler would break out the good ol’ “Oh, I forgot the challah!” It works like a charm. Less is more. I felt bad for this guy so I helped him out, “Judging from your hair, I see you too are part of the tribe.” Of course he had a massive Jew fro. “Yes,” he responded in a highly socially awkward way. Good talk. Glad we did this.

We finally got up to the register and the barista asked the bageler what his name was so they could write it on his cup. “Neil,” he said, and then turns around and looks me dead in the eye and says “I mean Nachhhhhmann.” Oh, boy. Sweet Sweet Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

Why do we feel the need to bagel? Is it because being Jewish is special and we all want to reach out to our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters to establish a sense of community no matter where we are … OR … is it because we need to scout out who is Jewish at all times just in case there’s a pogrom or something? Or is that just me? Either way, why do I have to be bageled all the time, sometimes I want to bagel too! And so I will admit I have been guilty of bageling others, and not just regular bageling, but competitive bageling. The absolute worst kind.

I was doing some work in Starbucks when a young man wearing a yarmulke sat down across from me at the table and started studying Talmud. I must mention that 99 percent of all bageling happens at Starbucks. That is a REAL statistic. The young man was deep into his Talmud studies and this was my time to shine. I wanted to be slick but still let Talmud Kid know he was in the presence of a big Jew. I let out a few subtle “oy veys” and kept it classy. All of a sudden this other kid across the table, let’s call him “Moses” just for the hell of it, popped up out of nowhere with a “What mesechta (volume) are you learning?” Oh screw you, Moses. What do you know? I knew it was Talmud too! Moses and Talmud Kid carried on with a very Jewish related conversation until I self consciously butt in with “Yeah I learned Talmud too because I went to a Jewish day school.” Silence. I was desperate and had hit an all time low. I was being competitive with Moses because I wanted Talmud Kid’s approval of my Jewishness and I wanted it NOW. To my disappointment, he was completely unimpressed by all the bageling.

A few minutes later, I had to go outside to make a phone call so I asked Talmud Kid and Moses to watch my laptop. “I trust you,” I said while I dazzled them with my bageling eyes. They got the picture. Clear as day. We were all Jews and could therefore leave our laptops with one another worry-free. Bageling at it’s finest.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post Tales of a Competitive Bageler appeared first on Jewcy.

García Márquez, who is 85, has been dealing with memory loss for years; in the late-1990s, he began to mention his memory problems in interviews. In Gerald Martin’s Gabriel García Márquez: A Life, Martin describes a 2005 meeting with Gabo in Mexico City: “his short-term memory was fragile and he was manifestly anguished about that and about the phase he seemed to be embarked upon.”

Indeed, dementia contains a built-in irony—though irony seems too pale a term—in that it progresses slowly but perceptibly enough so that the patient has some awareness of what’s taking place. The sense of slippage, of losing control, is palpable—that is, before the rug is pulled out from under him entirely and he no longer understands the cause of his confusion (and no longer understands or recognizes much else).

For García Márquez, who has described himself as a “professional of the memory,” that awareness must be especially piquant, both because his work is so predicated on notions of memory, history, and ancestry, and because neurological conditions run in his family. He knew this might happen. Two of Gabo’s brothers have had Parkinson’s; another died of a brain tumor; and still another, according to Martin’s book, has dealt with memory loss. García Márquez’ mother, late in her life, sometimes failed to recognize her son. At other times, she would tell him about his childhood, the tales unvarnished “because she’s forgotten her prejudices.” There’s honesty in dementia too, at least in its early stages, when it can reveal some truer, hidden self.

My grandmother, a refugee from Germany (she and her family left in 1938), suffered from dementia for perhaps a decade or more, before she died last August. In the last couple of years, she was rarely able to recognize her children, and she tended to slip deeper into her childhood memories—a last redoubt, perhaps, some fortified keep deep in the brain that is the last to fall. Occasionally a German visitor would come, and for a few seconds, she would regain some fluency in her first language: a poem would be summoned up from the depths, an antique idiom recited, before she dissolved into that look of confusion that anyone who has been around the demented knows.

I lived near her and my grandfather in Los Angeles at the time (she died weeks before my planned move to New York), and I would visit them for lunch. Always my grandmother would be sitting in her chair in the living room, a small table next to her arrayed with everything someone in her condition needed: kleenex, medicine, diapers, a glass of water, and the most important item: a bulky stereo that she used to listen to books on CD. Although she read widely in her life—Karl May’s westerns were an early favorite—Márquez would have been too difficult for her then (though there’s some question of whether she understood anything at all). She liked stories by Jan Karon—so uncomplicated and middlebrow as to be palliative—and anything read by a voice actor whose name I’ve forgotten.

My grandfather, who also wrote a memoir, would make us Italian sandwiches, and he and I would eat and talk. He did most of the speaking (at 90, he’s fortunately in good health, but he’s quieted in the last year), and I listened and asked questions. Sometimes my grandmother sat at the table too, munching on a sandwich and groping, blindly, on her plate for a slice of cheese. Between the two of them it was an unacknowledged study in contrast, as the family’s wellspring of memory unfurled stories, practically testifying to his grandson, to whom he had taught, mostly by example, rather than edict, the value and necessity of remembering.

Sometimes he told me about my grandmother’s life—the flight from Frankfurt, an interregnum in Portugal, their meeting and travels together as a couple—stories which I had mostly heard but seemed essential to hear again. (Now I think of Márquez, who told his biographer, “life is not what one lived but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.” Repetition is part of that, too.)

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, when a plague of insomnia spreads through Macondo, Aureliano fends off the attendant memory loss by labeling objects with their names. Jose Arcadio Buendia, we’re told, seizes on the idea and eventually paints his whole house and, then, the entire village with names of things. But Buendia realizes that it may not be sufficient: “Little by little, studying the infinite possibilities of a loss of memory, he realized that the day might come when things would be recognized by their inscriptions but that no one would remember their use.”

He takes his plan a step further—for example, by hanging a sign around the cow instructing that it must be “milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.” One can see how this methodology will lead to an infinite regress that will become increasingly desperate and fruitless—to name and describe everything is to rewrite the world itself, an endless pursuit; but it is also a not so veiled metaphor for the task of the novelist. It is sand through the fingers, but still it must be done.

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away,” García Márquez writes, “momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”

During that time, my grandparents’ house was like Macondo during the insomnia plague: everything labeled. Even my still-sharp grandfather could occasionally forget things, and the caretakers and visiting family members had to be instructed about medications, the many doctors’ phone numbers, hygiene supplies, clothes, food, emergency contacts. This inscription became the instruction manual for the home; without his scribbled post-its, we wouldn’t have known what to do.

Long before he was a memoirist, my grandfather was already a kind of self-chronicler, writing on the back of every photo the date, location, and names of those pictured. He cut out hundreds of articles, highlighted and scrawled notes on them, and sent them to relatives or organized them in filing cabinets. Take a book off his shelf and out will fall a book review or an article by the book’s author, written years later. Works of art have small pieces of paper secreted behind them, explaining their provenance. All of this, he told me, would make things easier when he’s gone. (Harder, too: there’s so much of the stuff, and each label can seem like an essential vestige of the person who wrote it.)

In One Hundred Years, Márquez described a character with dementia as eventually sinking “into a kind of idiocy that had no past.” That is only partly accurate. There is still the past of her relatives, the binding ties of experience and memory. They differ for each person—I don’t think I can remember anything about my grandmother before she was ill, and my mother and sister’s memories of her are different, and not always pleasant. She was a difficult woman, who, at a younger age, would not have been happy to be told that she’d spend so many years in murky silence, a remote smile on her face.

For García Márquez, who once said he felt “fury” at the possibility of his death, we can understand how that anguish he once expressed to his biographer has given over to something else—sadness, rage, or the paralytic confusion that defines dementia. But Gabo also created a corpus as great as any of the last hundred years. This is how he has inscribed himself upon the world. Few people are allowed to leave behind so many fruitful instructions; most we are keen to forget.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post Culture Kvetch: Gabriel García Márquez and the Slow Fade of Memory appeared first on Jewcy.

Seth Cohen was one of the first times I noticed “indie” being represented in the mainstream. Get in line Zooey Deschanel, because Seth invented adorkable, and the idea of taking something that seemed cool in its own right and packaging it for the masses. I guess if the show had stayed good past the first couple of seasons, and Adam Brody had gone on to bigger and better things, this wouldn’t seem so bad, but given how things turned out, I feel weird about it. I felt weird rewatching the pilot and realizing that Seth, who present-day me would place on the autism spectrum, was so specifically engineered to appeal to teenage me. But that’s Gen Y for you. Before the recession sidelined our economic prospects, we were the first tweens, a new market research category identified for the spending power we wielded. It was nice to matter.

So in the boom days of 2003, here was this 90210-esque redux designed to appeal to teenagers and their lowest-common-denominator taste, and yet like a Trojan horse Josh Schwartz snuck in Seth, talking about graphic novels and Magic: The Gathering and Death Cab for Cutie. The people who beat up Seth shopped at Abercrombie & Fitch or Hollister, but someone like Seth got his clothes at PacSun (being as he was alternative, but not so alternative that he would have worn Hot Topic gothwear). That they were all stores found in every American mall escaped our notice.

A key aspect of Seth’s alternativeness was that, unlike his water polo-playing, debutante ball-curtseying classmates, he was Jewish. Even though, strictly speaking, he so wasn’t. His father Sandy (Peter Gallagher) was a member of the tribe, but his mother Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) was a WASP, and it’s the mother’s religion that determines the child’s. However, Seth did occasionally refer to his bar mitzvah, so until Talmudic scholars pass down a verdict, we’ll have to consider Seth one of those territorial half-Jews who not only sees himself as an heir to the Jewish comedic tradition of wise-cracking, but also wants it to be known that there are core differences between him and Mischa Barton’s Marissa Cooper. The Jewish dad factor was convenient in that it allowed other characters (namely, shiksa goddess Summer, played by Rachel Bilson) to refer to Seth by his last name, Cohen, a little reminder every time they spoke to him that he was a Jewy Jewersonfeld.

On TV when we have a half-Jew, we round up. We focus on the –ukkuh part of Chrismukkah, the hybrid holiday that Seth popularized (as Kirsten said, “We didn’t really know how to raise Seth”), and ignore the fact that Seth thought Moses was the hero of it. Whenever his adopted brother Ryan Atwood (Ben McKenzie) does something particularly at odds with his punch-first, ask-questions-later Chino roots, we smile at Seth’s implication that Ryan’s embracing a kinder, gentler, Jewish-er way: “You just got your butt kicked and you didn’t even fight back. Dude, you really are a Cohen.”

Of course, it’s only through teen soap opera magic, and forcing him to stand next to people like Chris Carmack, that Adam Brody would pass for a skinny, nebbishy geek (this same magic allowed textbook Black Irish Peter Gallagher to stand in for an all-purpose ethnic). Seth may have lacked the muscles that accessorized Ryan’s wife-beaters, but scrawny he wasn’t. The “Jewfro” he rocked was hardly as unruly as Timberlake’s in its prime. He was cute, undeniably so, and he got all the best lines on the show. Were teenage girls suddenly interested in the video games and indie bands Seth Cohen espoused? Sometimes, but mostly they were interested in Adam Brody. What if getting us all to fall in love with Seth was a subliminal message from B’nai B’rith International, a way to get a generation of Jewish girls to give their male Hebrew school classmates another look? It would have been a pretty successful campaign. Even girls who skipped Birthright still hold out the hope of finding their Seth Cohen.

Previously on Network Jews:

Hesh Rabkin, Jewish Loan Shark on The Sopranos

Eli Gold, The Good Wife’s Political Operator

Howard Wolowitz, the nerdy, sex-obsessed engineer on The Big Bang Theory

Heather Schwedel is a writer and editor who is still waiting for her super sweet bat mitzvah.

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