Remember that time Jerry Seinfeld was kicked off a plane? If you know all 180 Seinfeld episodes by heart, you must recall the flight attendant asking him to leave the aircraft:

“The pilot doesn’t want you on this plane.”

Jerry protests: “He can’t just throw me off the plane!”

“Yes he can, if he has cause to believe a passenger will be a disturbance,” replies the flight attendant.

Does she legally have a case to remove Jerry from the plane? Or does Jerry have a case against the airline for being kicked off? If you’ve ever watched any episode of Seinfeld and asked yourself these kind of questions, now there’s an entire website dedicated to the analysis of the legal issues from the show. It’s aptly called “Seinfeld Law,” and it was created by four Manhattan-based law students.

It all started off as idea of Aharon and Zachary Schrieber, 27-year old twins from New Jersey. Both are currently in their last year of law school—the former at New York University, the latter at Columbia—and love Seinfeld. After toying with the idea for months, they made it happen and launched the site. Their schoolmates love the project, as well as many fellow Seinfeld fans they found on Reddit and Twitter.

“We started watching Seinfeld while in our sophomore year of high school. We’d run from the school bus into our basement every night to watch it,” Aharon told Jewcy. “Watching the show is like reading a great novel, or the Bible—each time, you can see new nuances or jokes. You’re never really done with it.”

The four students dive into episodes of the show and analyze potential legal issues that the characters face in them. “Seinfeld is known to be the show about nothing,” said Aharon. Zachary convened: “It’s about what happens in the characters’ day-to-day life, and that’s where most legal issues come up. Other shows don’t deal with these little things.”

In the blog, they discuss whether a store owner is allowed to reject a payment made in legal tender; whether it’s possible to claim back an engagement gift if the receiving couple breaks up; and whether it’s legal to send pornography through the mail. (Yes, all of the above happens on Seinfeld.)

Of course, some laws have changed since the show aired in the nineties. The contract of carriage of United Airlines—which would likely make Jerry entitled to a compensation after being removed from the flight, I learned from the blog—has definitely changed since then. But the idea that anyone can learn some useful legal insights with the help of a popular sitcom is fascinating.

“We don’t want [the blog] to be too high brow, too legal,” said Aharon. “It’s not only for people who are in law school.”

The group of students is considering expanding their idea to other television shows. The characters from Friends and How I Met Your Mother could make guest appearances on the site in the future. The twins even hope that in the long run they could turn this project into a book.

In the meantime, what of the infamous finale— should the gang have actually gone to jail for refusing to help a carjacking victim?

We’ll wait and see.

Image via “Seinfeld Law”

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YidLife Crisis is a new web series that grapples with some of the great quandaries of contemporary Jewish life: Should Jews continue to practice archaic traditions? How do we define Jewish culture, which bears the influence of nationalities from around the globe? Also, how much badonkadonk is too much badonkadonk?

The series consists of four raucous, five-minute episodes written and performed by Eli Batalion and Jamie Elman, two Montreal-born actors who play Chaimie and Laizer, respectively. Each episode follows the two thirty-somethings as they grapple with their secular Jewish identity, revel in iconic Montreal restaurants, and extol the virtues of schmaltz (an absolute must, when it comes to smoked meat). This would be sufficiently wonderful on its own, but Batalion and Elman deliver something even better: the series is performed almost entirely in Yiddish.

Batalion and Elman studied Yiddish at Bialik High School in Montreal. Years after graduating, they connected in Los Angeles and began brainstorming ideas for a project that they could work on together. They knew they wanted to create a Yiddish web series, but not because they had lofty goals of preserving a “dying language.” As comic actors, Batalion and Elman were drawn to the vitality and rhythm of Yiddish, which has played an integral role in shaping humor and comedy in North America.

“I think a large part of what we’re doing here is a form of preservation of culture, but it’s not based on some sort of pure altruism,” Batalion explains. “It’s based on the fact that we just thought Yiddish was funny. Jamie and I are big fans of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, and that kind of comedy is built on a Yiddish style that’s coming out in English, but it really owes royalties to the Yiddish language.”

Initially, they planned to recreate classic Seinfeld sketches in Yiddish, as a homage to the language that lends its flavor to their favorite sitcom. But they soon realized that they could do more than borrow material from an existing show. Batalion and Elman applied for and received a grant from the Jewish Community Foundation, an organization that promotes Jewish culture in Montreal. Then, with some translation help from Batalion’s father, the duo started to write their own Yiddish scripts, which explored their concerns as young, secular Jews.

“The grant led us to realizations that we had about how the show could be deeper than just redoing Seinfeld sketches, “Elman says. “We could actually use the content of what we’re going to talk about in the show as a way of reaching out to other communities, and as a way of explaining our narishkeit, our Jewish neuroses, to the non-Jewish world.”

And what is it, exactly, that occupies the minds of the YidLife guys? Food, for one thing. (“It’s a Jewish show,” Elman says. “What else are we going to be doing?”) Each episode is set in a beloved Montreal eatery, as Chaimie and Laizer chow down on their favorite dishes and engage in Talmudic debates on matters of great Jewish import, like the optimal method for making bagels. They chat about beautiful women, naked selfies, and the merits of a big, um, posterior (the series is rated “Chai plus,” thanks to its racier content). It’s amusing to watch the guys work words like “badonkadonk” into Yiddish dialogue, but their lighthearted banter belies an earnest contemplation of modern Jewish life, with all its inconsistencies and hypocrisies.

In the first episode, Laizer is gorging on poutine—a very treyf Canadian specialty made with fries, cheese curds, and gravy—as Kol Nidre soars in the background. In another episode, Chaimie takes Laizer to task for eating at a Greek restaurant. “After what they did?” he cries. “200 BC? Forced conversion, temple desecration? I can’t eat this crap.” He does, in the end, after Laizer reminds him that most of his favorite “Jewish” foods—latkes, bagels, challah, Danish—were borrowed from other nationalities who, to put it lightly, had fraught relationships with the Jews. In the same episode, Laizer questions the value of continuing to practice ancient Jewish rites, like circumcision. “Is your mother Jewish?” he asks Chaimie. “Then by Jewish law, so are you. So why the schmekle chop?!”

“We’re dealing with everything with humor,” Batalion says of YidLife. “But some of the topics that are broached are fairly serious. I mean, atonement, circumcision are pretty serious acts. It’s not just that the act is serious, but the implications and the discussion about identity is a pretty serious discussion. In some way, Jamie and I grapple with it every single day.”

“I want to clarify,” Elman cuts in. “I don’t grapple with Eli’s circumcision in any way, shape, or form.”

Yiddish might seem like an anachronistic choice of language for a series rooted in a very twenty-first century medium, but it works. During the filming of YidLife’s first episode, Batalion and Elman performed their dialogue twice: once in English and once in Yiddish. The French-Canadian staff of the restaurant where they were shooting watched the English take with little reaction. But they started cracking up when Batalion and Elman performed the sketch in Yiddish.

“They were laughing the whole time we were doing the Yiddish, even though they couldn’t understand a word of it,” Elman says. “And in fact one of our camera guys—he’s a French-Canadian guy—was laughing during the take. I said, ‘Why is this so funny to you?’ He said, ‘Oh, it just sounds funny. It sounds like Seinfeld.’ And we knew right away that we were doing it right.”

Related: New Web Series Celebrates Poutine, Lactaid, and Jewish Angst—in Yiddish
Jews, Proselytizing, and Comedy Collide in ‘Jewvangelist’

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Ever wondered where the iconic Seinfeld phrases ‘yada yada,’ ‘shrinkage,’ and ‘double-dip’ originated? I mean, can you believe there was a time when ‘double dip’ wasn’t part of America’s vernacular? How did grumpy couples passive-aggressively chastise each other at parties before the concept entered our cultural consciousness? (The Jews have actually been double dipping for centuries (see: Passover), but I guess the word ‘matbilin’ doesn’t roll off the tongue quite so easily.)

Anyway, wonder no more! The answers to those questions (OK, some of them) can be found in Vulture’s fascinating interview with Seinfeld writer and producer Peter Mehlman, the man who coined the phrases ‘yada yada’ and ‘double dip,’ among others. Apparently he once heard ‘yada yada’ used by the editor of a women’s magazine (heyyy ladies!), then decided to adopt it as a catch-all term for things you can’t be bothered explaining:

… A couple of times she used the words yada yada and I don’t think I had even heard anyone say it after. And I don’t know why, but it just popped back into my mind. At first, I just thought of it as some little quirk that I could throw in, but then all of a sudden, I started thinking of all of the things you could just gloss over using yada yada.

Seriously, what a goddamned gift to the world. To Mehlman’s surprise, the popularity of ‘yada yada’ quickly usurped ‘anti-dentite,’ which was his personal favorite: “I love when Kramer goes, ‘You’re a rabid anti-dentite!’ I really liked that one more than ‘yada yada.'”

Alas, an ironic professional slur which pokes fun at Jews’ preoccupation with anti-Semitism is no match for a phrase which can mean anything from “we had sex” to “my fiancée died licking our wedding invitation envelopes.”

Related: ‘Seinfeld’ Saw the Future, And it Was Facebook
Now You Can Take a Virtual Tour of Jerry Seinfeld’s TV Apartment

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Ever wanted to take a virtual tour of Jerry Seinfeld’s TV apartment? No? Us neither! But now you can, because technology.

Long-time Seinfeld enthusiast Greg Miller has developed a virtual 3-D rendering of Jerry’s fictional Upper West Side apartment for Oculus Rift users. (Oculus Rift is a virtual reality headset which looks like something out of Back to the Future.) His project transports viewers into Jerry’s home for a virtual pop-in—cereal boxes, clunky computer, blue couches and all.

Miller’s design took one month and a lot of research to complete. He tried to find images of the original products used in the show, and modeled the virtual apartment around those dimensions, rather than relying on blurry episode screenshots. Miller admits that the project is not perfect, noting the particular difficulty of recreating Jerry’s bedroom, which “came out cramped.” But he’s happy overall, and the final product contains over eleven references to various Seinfeld episodes.

For now, Oculus Rift is currently only available to software developers, but it should reach consumers in late 2014 or early 2015. In the meantime, take a tour around “Jerry’s Place”:

Lily Wilf is an editorial intern at Tablet Magazine. You can follow her on Twitter here.

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Scarlett Johansson’s controversial SodaStream ad made its official debut, and—politics aside—it was kind of… uninspiring. Here’s the uncensored version with a shout-out to Coke and Pepsi:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxq4ziu-wrI

The hotly anticipated Seinfeld reunion turned out to be an ad for Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Others thought it was meh; I thought it was kind of cute. (The subversive master-bathroom sneak is a particular pleasure of mine. (TMI?))

The main takeaway here? Seinfeld is rich beyond compare if he can afford a Super Bowl ad slot. (But I guess we already knew that.) Also, Wayne Knight and Jason Alexander look exactly like they did in 1998, minus a bit of hair. What is their fountain of youth?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhmpTxLhqzU

The Coke ad was culturally diverse and surprisingly lovely, and featured two guys wearing kippot (at 0:34). It goes without saying, but don’t read the (racist) comments:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8iM73E6JP8

Our favorite? The trailer for Noah, which looks awesome and thrilling and a little bit ridiculous and unlike anything we learned in Hebrew school:

The post Scarlett Johansson’s Super Bowl SodaStream Debut Is Official appeared first on Jewcy.

When I was at Columbia Journalism School, every time I walked up Broadway, dorkily early for class, I’d manage a smile when I saw Tom’s Diner.

Tom’s Diner, made famous from Seinfeld and Suzanne Vega’s chilling song of the same name, sits on the corner of 112th Street. It makes its customers happy (though many do seem to enjoy needlessly criticizing the grub), but most of all, it gives your father, visiting campus for graduation, a very excited expression—an expression that the Columbia graduation itself could not even provoke.

So it makes sense that Tom’s Diner earned itself a documentary; the place is dripping in history. Directed by Gian Franco Morini, the aptly named Tom’s Diner: A Documentary About Nothing Everything, traces the restaurant’s history and features a ton of interviews with the diner’s loyal patrons—some Cornel West, some Bob Rose, and, of course, the owner and manager of the diner, Mike Zoulis.

Here’s a trailer. We cannot wait to see the whole film.

Learn more about the film here.

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The Huffington Post pointed out today that Seinfeld basically predicted Facebook. Seriously: in this stand-up routine, Jerry describes the unfortunate circumstance of calling someone on the telephone—and having them actually pick up. All you ever really want to do is leave a message.

Then he summarizes the entire point of Facebook’s existence, explaining why we so eagerly embrace this social networking force. Hint: it’s so we’d never actually have to talk to people.

Here what we have is two people who hate each other, don’t really ever want to talk, but the phone machine is like this relationship respirator keeping these marginal brain-dead relationships alive, and we all do it. Why? So that when we come home you can see that little flashing red light. You go, ‘all right, messages.’

You see, people need that. It’s very important for human beings to feel that they are popular and well-liked amongst a large group of people that we don’t care for.

Emphasis ours. Touche, Jerry. And while you’re at it, can you accept our friend request?

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• Our columnist Dvora Meyers on the guy who really wanted her to try pork. [Pork Memoirs]

• How I Met Your Mother get renewed for a ninth (and final!) season, and Jewish star Josh Radnor is excited for the “victory lap.” [Access Hollywood]

• Joe Winkler talks to the guys behind the Comedy Central show Workaholics. [Splitsider]

• Rachel Shukert says Chuck Schumer is America’s Uncle Leo. [Tablet]

• Drew Barrymore talks about Olive, hew baby with husband Will Kopelman. [HuffPost]

• Naturally, Jon Stewart had his own take on the Israeli elections: Circumdecision 5773. [The Daily Show]

The post Daily Jewce: Jon Stewart on the Israeli Elections, Josh Radnor’s Victory Lap 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)

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• It’s official: Hanukkah ham is back for another holiday season. [Snope]

• Adam Levine really expletive hates Honey Boo Boo. [GQ]

• But Honey Boo Boo loves Israel! [Mako]

• Ray from Girls, aka Alex Karpovsky, stopped by the Rookie treehouse and gave some grown man advice. [Rookie]

• Seinfeld beat out Friends for the honor of best sitcom ever. [Romenesko]

• From Day 2 of the best Les Mis advent calendar ever, Jason Segel and Paul Rudd singing “Confrontation.” [Vulture]

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