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.

In pursuit of this nebulous goal, I’d cold-called dozens of organizations, staying up late to thwart the seven-hour time difference, until a “yes” came crackling at last through the speaker. By early May, I’d become a volunteer tour guide at the Odessa Museum of Jewish History. I bought a ticket, said a prayer to whatever god was listening, and set out, telling myself I’d find a place to live once I got there.

Stumbling out of the tiny, grimy airport, I faced the brightest sun I’d seen in two long days of travel. The crush of heat plastered my hair to the back of my neck, deflating any surviving curls. All I had with me was a suitcase full of too many books and two words of Ukrainian—“Yak spravi?” (what’s up?)—scrawled on the back of my hand, where they were fast turning into an illegible blotch of ink. I stood on the curb and squinted into the blaze that washed the linden trees with light, filled with trepidation.

Salvation came for me in a puke-brown 1977 Volga. Out of the car climbed the man I’d soon come to know as Vova Chaplin, blue-eyed museum tour guide and avid Ukrainian student of Jewish history. “Are you Talia?” he asked (in Russian—I wouldn’t hear English for another few months). “Yak spravi?,” he added mockingly, eyeing the still-legible words on my hand. “Welcome to Odessa.”



We drove over the highway into the city, bumped our way over the stony avenues, and, flashing past glimpses of the Black Sea, we arrived at our destination: 66 Nezhinskaya Street, a sooty apartment building barred by an iron gate. Glued demurely to the arch of the gate was a blue tile that read, “Odessa Jewish Museum-apartment.” The museum was in a converted communal apartment, most of its collection crammed into five small rooms. That afternoon I received my first tour from Misha, its dour, grizzled, chain-smoking director, an art historian who projected an air of perpetual gloom.

At first glance, the five rooms of the Odessa Jewish History Museum appear to be filled with a random scattering of junk. Over the course of a 45 minute museum tour, administered by Misha, Vova, or (for a short time only!) yours truly, the collection is revealed for what it really is: the detritus of centuries of Jewish presence in the city, each object with a story large or small.

A small sampling of the collection: A jolly, animatronic figure in peyes and a gartel, which was a department-store Santa before the museum staff converted him; the dilapidated bra of a Russian-Jewish army doctor captured by Germans during World War II; a haunting black-and-white portrait of the Odessa Cheka, later the KGB, made up for the most part of ardently Communist Jews; an Odessa night newspaper with a young Vladimir Jabotinsky’s byline; Isaac Babel’s parents’ china cabinet; a mortar and pestle, once used by the goodwives of Odessa to smash carp flesh into gefilte fish; a rusted set of mohel’s tools; a spoon from Café Franconi, once a hangout for the city’s many Jewish gangsters, stolen by a long-ago immigrant to America and mailed back by his penitent descendants; a portrait of the sole survivor of the Domanevka concentration camp; and so on, until the last exhibit—improbably, a collection of artifacts from the Jewish community of Odessa’s sister city, Baltimore, Md.

Each day I walked from the apartment I’d rented under the table just off Primorskiy Bulvar, the entrance nearly obscured by a shaggy grapevine. Vova and Misha and I waited for the occasional wanderer to find the museum despite its humble signage. Waiting, we smoked, watching the stray cats sun themselves in the courtyard and the neighbors’ kids get tangled in the clotheslines. A couple of leathery Israelis, some soft-spoken Germans, and a trio of chubby Brandeis students trickled through, and I walked backwards through the rooms, making slow sense of this riot of object history as I spoke.

On long, sunny afternoons, I wandered down the avenues, woozy with the scent of catalpa trees, watching the heavy ships steam into the industrial port. I bought batteries, jewel-toned strawberries, matrioshka dolls, and a wooden cigarette holder from under the long rows of umbrellas in the open-air bazaar. On weekends, I crept through the Odessa Catacombs, drank Lviv’ska beer, ate salt fish and rode the overnight train to Kyiv.

History peered out from cast-brass monuments and bas-reliefs, between Soviet apartments and dingy, once-glamorous homes from the nineteenth century. Wild grapes hung from every balcony. American and Russian pop music blared from the nightclubs on Ekaterinska Street, signaling, with its thumping newness, the immediacy of the present and the banishment of the past. But each day I came back to the museum on Nezhinskaya Street, wearing the sunwashed cobbles down still further, until the city once the roaming grounds of Hebrew poets and Jewish gangsters belonged, somehow, to me too.

Talia Lavin is a recent Harvard graduate and aspiring novelist. She will be starting a Fulbright grant in Ukraine this September, where she hopes to get used to pickled herring, pelmeni and pit toilets.

The post My Summer at the Odessa Museum of Jewish History appeared first on Jewcy.

Anyway, I decided to join JDate for a few reasons. 1. My dad said he would pay me to do it although I have yet to see that money direct deposited into my account. 2. My roommate from college met her now fiancé on it (although when she joined we all made fun of her NON STOP). Now the bitch is laughing all the way to the chuppah. In addition, everyone’s cousin, including my own, has met their wife on JDate, so I realized I gotta keep up with the times. I don’t have an Instagram so the least I could do is keep up in other ways. The last straw came when I read a quote from Robert Frost or JFK or someone and it said, “Your destiny is not something to wait for, it’s something to be achieved.” Clearly, he was talking about JDate. Or the Cold War. Whatever.

So I made a sexually appealing profile and let me tell you, I found so many people who I know in real life and would never expect to see on the site. The problem is instead of looking for new guys, I just sit there and send sexual messages to the people I already know (both male and female) because I find it humorous. I just imagine them thinking they got a message from some hot bitch, and it’s just little old me sexually harassing them … usually in Hebrew. My roommates will often call me from their rooms and say “what are you doing?” I answer with a simple “Ohhhh, nothin. Just JDating in the living room.” It’s my new favorite verb and lately, I’m constantly tempted to put a J before everything. Whenever I use the word J-Walking I laugh to myself.

So … there are a few guys worth mentioning. One is the guy who messaged me and the subject of his email was “NINNNNJJJJJJAAAA.” ENOUGH SAID. Then there was the gem whose personality profile is fine but looks like the spitting image of The Craigslist Killer. Too much, too soon. My favorite was a guy from New York who could not have been better looking. His profile seemed cool and I was starting to think he might be my other half when I noticed that he may or may not have been 5’5’’. That isn’t just short, that’s minuscule. Really rude of God to do to him. If he was an Atheist, I would get that. Last but not least, came “Dimitry.” Dimitry had a name that immediately gave away that he was a Ruski. Ever since my Russian ballet teacher had no sympathy for me—the poor child with a red, hand-me-down leotard when everyone else had a regal pink tutu—I just haven’t been able to connect with Russians. Sue me.

Anyway, Dimitry looked identical to my ex boyfriend, so logically, I wanted to give him a try. Always a healthy decision. So he seemed cool, we messaged back and forth a little and then he asked for my number. I gave it to him with the rationale that Time Warner and the Gas company have my social security number, so what’s one more asshole knowing my personal info. He texted me right away. Like within 5 minutes. Eh. We chatted and then the convo was over and I said bye … and after my bye … he sent A SMILEY. No, no, no. It was over. Long story short, he left me a voicemail the next day. Let’s just say his voice was at an octave I don’t think Susan Boyle could reach. So high pitched. My soul mate doesn’t have a mouse voice. He just doesn’t.

The point is I’m gonna J-Wait and see if there are any gem stones for me to meet on JDate because that’s what my look-a-like Gisele would do … if she wasn’t married to Tom fucking Brady.

A version of this post originally appeared on Another Day in Paradise on May 31, 2012.

Gabriela Marcus graduated NYU Tisch School of the Arts a few years ago with a degree in drama. She is an aspiring actress and writer living in Los Angeles. If you want to know how that’s going, you can read her blog.

The post J-Dating in the Dark appeared first on Jewcy.

Almost immediately, a female police officer approached me with a video camera about 10 inches from my face. “Change your tallit to look like a scarf,” she said. I looked at her puzzled. I’ve prayed with Women of the Wall a few times throughout the year, and no one from security had ever made a request like that. “Change your tallit!,” she barked again. “But everyone else is wearing their tallit in a regular way,”—hanging over their shoulders—I said as I motioned to rest of the crowd. She didn’t budge, and I draped one side of my tallit around my neck. Another officer approached and said, “that’s not good enough. Make it look like a scarf.”

I got frustrated at this point. “Can you please leave me alone, I’m trying to pray.” “You have to change your tallit,” said the male officer, as he volunteered to help change the way I was wearing my tallit. I rolled my eyes and draped the second corner of my tallit over my neck, creating a cape of tzitzit. I finished praying and all of us at the Wall began to join in song, arm in arm, making our way over to Robinson’s Arch to read Torah and begin the additional musaf prayer for Rosh Chodesh.

The women’s rights struggle within the religious sphere in Israel is nothing new. Throughout my year in Israel, there have been campaigns about women’s voices being heard (literally), gender segregated buses, and public images of women allowed on posters or billboards. Women’s rights in public prayer spaces is just one of the many issues. An article about this week’s Kotel incident cites a 2001 law that states, “it is illegal for women to perform religious practices traditionally done by men in Orthodox Jewish practice at the Western Wall, such as reading from a Torah scroll, wearing tefillin or a tallit, or blowing a shofar.”

I had no idea that the police had their eyes on us, but as we moved through the security gates I made eye contact with the same female officer who recorded me and gave me the initial instructions to change my tallit. She pointed at me and said to another officer, “that’s her.” Immediately I was brought to a stairway along with two other rabbinical students.

“Israeli ID, now”

“I’m not an Israeli citizen.”

“OK, passport.”

“I don’t have it on me.” (Thank God.)

“OK, any other ID.” I handed him my Texas state driver’s license, which I’m sure meant nothing to him, and he took down my full name and address. He asked me for my phone number in Israel and my address. I hesitated, but then offered the officer my information. I was told, after a bit of waiting, that we will be contacted for further questioning and investigation, but that we were not being arrested at this point.

Behind me, I felt the support of the dozens of women and men singing, along with the spirits of all those who cry out against the injustice I am experiencing, standing there with the police. The voices behind me changed from a niggun, or tune, to the words of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, “kol haolam kulo, gesher tzar me’od, vahaikar lo l’fached klal—The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to fear at all.” These words have never felt more powerful to me.

As the officer took down our information, I sang, with tears in my eyes, “vahaikar lo l’fached klal.” Yes, this is scary. But I will not fear. The homeland we dream of, that we have dreamed of for thousands of years, is not one that arrests women for religious expression through wearing a tallit. The homeland I know we can attain is one that embraces multiple forms of Judaism to create a richer, deeper, and stronger Jewish State.

Sarit Horwitz is a second year Rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, currently studying in Jerusalem at the Schechter Institute.

(photo: flickr)

The post Detained at the Western Wall for Praying in a Tallit, One Woman Speaks Out appeared first on Jewcy.

Jewcy has asked me to describe “the Jewish influence” on THE INSTRUCTIONS and I’m not finding it very easy to do. Even after all kinds of narrowing and qualifying, it seems impossible to get it down to just one person. I tried to pretend, for example, that by “the Jewish influence” on THE INSTRUCTIONS, what Jewcy really meant was, “the TWO BIGGEST Jewish-AMERICAN influenceS” on THE INSTRUCTIONS, and I still wound up with a four-way tie of influence between Sean Connery, Kate Moss, this guy Patrick who used to mow our lawn, and–obviously–Rutger Hauer.

Probably best to start out describing Rutger Hauer, since his influence is the one that gets me the most anxious. So. Although we look alike in the face, Rutger Hauer and I have different taste in clothing. I, for example, pretty much exclusively wear the standard Chicago fuck-you-I-don’t-have-to-dress-up-you-New York/Hollywood-pussies-who-are-always-trying-to-get-me-to-dress-up-and-plus-you-can’t-tell-if-I’ve-got-muscles-under-here-or-am-skinny-or-even-maybe-kinda-fat-or-deformed uniform of blue hoodie and blue jeans and brown sneakers with some occasional variance re. hoodie color, whereas Rutger Hauer’s is a no-hoodies-outside-the-gym policy. Also, he played a replicant in BLADE RUNNER, the screen adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP, a book I’ve never read, but–who knows–one day might, though I have seen the movie, enjoyed the movie, and also played a replicant in the movie.

Next up is Patrick who used to mow our lawn, aka “Patrick who used to mow our lawn in Buffalo Grove, IL and then in Highland Park, IL, which is roughly 20 minutes by car from Buffalo Grove, IL”: This guy, Patrick, moved all the way from Buffalo Grove to Highland Park so that he could continue to mow our lawn. He had a dog called Pony and a certain way about him, and Pony and the way both deeply affected me.

Sean Connery couldn’t get a date to prom, I once read, whereas I could, and did, though, like Patrick–and unlike Connery who, because he couldn’t get a date to prom didn’t have a prom-date who smoked crack–my prom-date smoked crack. True story. Kind of. The part you think isn’t, I mean. Unless the part you think isn’t is the part about Patrick. Or you want to get really dubiously technical about the distinction between crack and freebase, but we’re talking about Connery, who played Tony in Who’s The Boss, which I saw a couple times, but only a couple since it wasn’t as good as the book, which got me sad.

As for Kate Moss, I was totally fucken kidding. Kate Moss’s influence on THE INSTRUCTIONS was minimal.

The post Adam Levin Guest Posts On The Jewish Influence In <i>The Instructions</i> appeared first on Jewcy.

This piece appears in response to an article by Professor Ari Kelman, which can be read here.

First, I should say that I agree with nearly everything Ari has to say, but I think we need to zoom out. To my mind, Jewcy and United Jewish Communities (UJC), which is now called Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), have very different functions. JFNA represents the body of Jewish communities that raise and distribute more than $3 billion per year for social welfare, social services, and education. Jewcy is a web platform for the ideas that matter to young Jews today. We don’t feed the hungry or heal the sick, although we increasingly do have better and better chicken soup recipes. Moreover, from our bat cave, we can see that Jewcy actually has 60,000+ links in, and is at least 10 times more popular than JFNA – but I digress, that’s really not the point.

The point is structure must follow strategy.

Quick quiz: how many websites do you actually visit per day on a consistent basis? The experts agree on a range at least, and the answer is an average of five to seven. So in fact, our world wide web is quite small. If you take a social network, such as Facebook, out of that equation, as well as a news site, and maybe a web based email client – well, you guessed it – the answer is really three or four. This has been expanded slightly by the app market and a generation of kids who don’t know what a library looks like, but still, not by much. Bottom-line: we’ve mostly settled into our internet usage, and when we find something we like, we stick with it, until we find something better to fill the time between pretending to work and all the other stuff we have to get done.

So what does this mean for Jewish websites? Well, in our view, it all depends on what purpose the website serves. For us, it’s simple really. We’re dedicated to our audience. I’m not just saying that – we are our audience and we really like you too! We serve our mission of forging vibrant connections to Judaism through providing free content on a consistent basis from an expanding spectrum of voices. Some of it’s funny, some of it’s edgy, some of it’s dead serious. I disagree with Ari on the implication that the network is equally important as the content – it’s really all about the content, and if you have great content, network development becomes much easier to navigate. Accordingly, I wholeheartedly agree that an “increasing number of people turn to the internet as the first source of information about Jewish life.” Our only secret (sssshhhhh) is that we know they’d rather read about leftover brisket, intermarriage, Israeli porn, and imaginary kosher animals than local Israel rallies, consortiums of people they don’t know, and a daily dose of not-so-shocking, yet still highly depressing anti-Semitism. This is not to say that the latter topics aren’t important. They are very important and I read about them every day. BUT they don’t sum total Jewish life…and thus we have a whole lot of traffic and a whole lot of links. Incidentally, our Jewish website also has a ton of very smart and savvy people loyally reading it, who magically often figure out for themselves how Judaism fits into their lives. For some, that involves donating to the very worthy causes JFNA represents, or participating in an American Jewish World Service trip to Uganda.  For others, that involves getting a tattoo.

Our structure (both on the web and organizationally) follows our strategy of expanding the definition of community. It is surely more inclusive, fluid, self-defined, diverse, and complex than your average Jewish institution, but that doesn’t mean it is any less meaningful, relevant, proud, and real.

So in considering what a Federation or synagogue website should be or should do now that the internet has changed the communal conversation for the next generation, my question is what’s the objective and really what’s the strategy that is going to get you there? What are you going to focus on? …and most importantly, who is going to care? If you can’t honestly answer these questions with evidence, it may be nearly impossible to figure out what you should (or shouldn’t) be doing on the web.

The post Thoughts On Mapping The Network Of Jewish Websites appeared first on Jewcy.