Nicki Minaj did a stellar impression of Beyonce on SNL this past weekend—so good, in fact, that the Jewish world totally overlooked her slightly-less-stellar-but-still-excellent Kim Kardashian impersonation, in which she revealed the big scoop of the holiday season, which we solemnly bring to you now: the story behind the Official Kim K Hanukkah card.

Dressed in a nude body-con dress, her luscious hair extensions cascading over her shoulders, Minaj-as-Kardashian patiently explained the truth behind her beloved/infamous nude photo shoot for Paper Magazine. Apparently, editors “forgot to put the backgrounds in so the photos are completely out of context,” and they’re actually all, like, super-noble public service announcements in service of the betterment of humanity! Like, her oil-slicked body is really “a warning about the new Keystone Pipeline.” And that crazy champagne-parabola pic is actually a “part of a math competition for high school seniors.” (“X equals full frontal!”)

And that final shot of Kardashian exuberantly facing the camera front on, breasts akimbo? “It was going to be my Hanukkah card for my Jewish friends,” Minaj cooed in Kim’s signature vocal fry register. “L’Chaim!”

Quoth Kim: that’s hot.

The post Nicki Minaj Has the Scoop on Kim Kardashian’s Hanukkah Card appeared first on Jewcy.

Lena Dunham is hosting Saturday Night Live this week. Here’s the official promo with cast member and fellow young feminist, Kate McKinnon. For your convenience, we have included a transcript of the most aspirational and inspirational part of the video! (But there’s a good shirtless bit too, so keep watching you lecherous bastards.)

Lena Dunham‘s Goals For The Week:

1. Be on time,
2. Wear comfortable shoes,
3. Don’t ask too many questions,
4. Be present at all times,
5. Take deep breaths,
6. Have some sort of vegetable serving every day,
7. Focus on what I like about myself rather than what I don’t like about myself,
8. Stretch every morning,
9. Have two cups of coffee max per day,
10. Relax,
11. And have fun.

Kate McKinnon‘s Goal For The Week:

The post Here Are Lena Dunham’s Goals For The Week appeared first on Jewcy.

The rise and rise of Lena Dunham continues. Variety reports that the creator and star of HBO’s Girls will be hosting Saturday Night Live on March 8. Indie rock band The National will be special musical guests. (Fun Jewy fact: guitarist and songwriter Aaron Dessner studied Jewish history at Columbia and worked in Yale’s Holocaust archive.)

We are very excited, but probably not as excited as Ms. Dunham:

Thank you for the SNL love. Dream come true. Can’t wait to debut my character “girl who googled serial killers all night & has lots to say”!

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) February 25, 2014

(Photo credit: Robyn Beck/Getty Images)

Also on the topic of SNL: See Fred Armisen’s Un-aired SNL Impersonation of Ira Glass

The post Lena Dunham to Host Saturday Night Live appeared first on Jewcy.

Fred Armisen’s totally on point, previously un-aired impersonation of Ira Glass has been rescued from the dustbin of history, and for that we can all give thanks. It was filmed in a Saturday Night Live dress rehearsal in 2011 but left out of the final cut. Armisen nails Glass’ intonation and uptalk, Seth Meyers is the perfect straight man, and there’s a delightfully accented Mexican factory worker.

p.s. Bonus link! You can hear Armisen and Glass co-host an episode of This American Life (called Doppelgängers, natch) here. Don’t try to keep track of who’s who! Just relax into the slightly creepy Twin Peaksy vibe and enjoy.

The post See Fred Armisen’s Un-aired SNL Impersonation of Ira Glass appeared first on Jewcy.

If you haven’t heard about Spike Jonze’s newest film, Her, it’s a movie about a lonely man, played by Joaquin Phoenix, who falls in love in the future with a Siri-like operating device with the pretty voice of Scarlett Johansson.

Jonah Hill hosted Saturday Night Live on Saturday and starred in a parody version of Her, titled, Me, where Hill falls in love with his OS who then reveals himself as Michael Cera. The dialogue is hysterical and of course, the pants are super high.

(Photo by Getty)

The post Jonah Hill and Michael Cera Parody ‘Her’ appeared first on Jewcy.

Max Greenfield, the man behind New Girl’s Schmidt, stopped by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night and, naturally, talked about his mother and his bar mitzvah.

He called his mother right away when he found out he got nominated for an Emmy, and her response was “You’re nominated against SAUL?” He imagines her spitting out her Nespresso coffee (“They just got a machine, they’re very excited about it”) when he listed the rest of the nominees.

Fallon also showed pictures from Greenfield’s Saturday Night Live-themed bar mitzvah, which we’ve heard about several times before. SNL people, just let the guy host already—please?

Previously: Network Jews: Schmidt from ‘New Girl’

(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

The post Max Greenfield Tells Jimmy Fallon About His Mom and His Bar Mitzvah appeared first on Jewcy.

• The New Yorker has some very Jewish fiction from Nicole Krauss. [New Yorker]

• Go the F*ck to Sleep author Adam Mansbach is offering a fake college course you should probably enroll in. [Salon]

• Animating the Talmud, G-dcast style. [Tablet]

• Jonathan Ames and Jason Schwartzman (the man, not the flu mask) are teaming up again for a film adaptation of a Bernard Malamud story story collection. [THR]

• A look at SkinnyGirl maven Bethenny Frankel’s TriBeCa condo, presumably sans soon-to-be-ex-husband Jason Hoppy. [Curbed]

• In Adam Levine’s The Voice-inspired SNL opening monologue, Jerry Seinfeld played the Jewish card: “I get you—appealing, not as Jewish as your name. I know that racket inside and out.”

The post Daily Jewce: Ames and Schwartzman Are Back, Meet Professor Mansbach appeared first on Jewcy.

• Beardless Matisyahu is so unrecognizable these days, he can’t even get into clubs. [NYP]

• Turns out not everyone is a fan of Mandy Patinkin’s memorable Princess Bride character, Inigo Montoya—a guy flying from Sydney to Auckland was asked to change his shirt, which said “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” [Gawker]

• Mel Brooks talks Catskills comedy and the garment district. [NPR]

• Gwyneth Paltrow does not tolerate slutty friends. [Jezebel]

• Adam Levine was spotted filming what looks like an SNL Digital Short with Andy Samberg and the Lonely Planet guys. [BuzzFeed]

• Children’s frightmaster and author R.L. Stine discusses the early horror classics that influenced him growing up. [MediaBistro TV]

The post Daily Jewce: Matisyahu Can’t Get Into Clubs, R.L. Stine’s Horror Influence 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

The post Culture Kvetch: Beyond Nepotism appeared first on Jewcy.

While one could argue that all the digital shorts are Jewish due to the heavy involvement of Andy Samberg and his menschy The Lonely Island crew, to tide you over till next season (or at least for the next 20 minutes) here are the top five Jewish digital short guests. While they may not hold a candle to such famed sketches as “Dick in a Box,” “I’m on a Boat,” or even my personal favorite, “Jack Sparrow,” they’re absurdly entertaining.

5. Some strange stuff happens in this trailer/promo/something for a fictional movie starring Paul Rudd and Andy Samberg (there’s some Titanic-style sketching and lots of fake blood). Even if we don’t love, or understand, this short so much, we always love us some Paul Rudd:

4. Pre-Moneyball Jonah Hill starts dating Andy’s dad. Be prepared for some uncomfortable kissing:

3. Natalie Portman has a cameo in the mashup that makes up the 100th short, an ode to her uncharacteristic rap from 2006:

2. There are so many great lines in this Andy Samberg-Adam Levine love song to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “Iran so Far:”

1. No need to explain the brilliance of this interview with Jewcy favorite Drake:

Still want more Samberg? Here’s the Harvard graduation speech he gave yesterday.

The post The Top Five Jewish Guest Stars in Andy Samberg’s SNL Digital Shorts appeared first on Jewcy.