The Yankees win! The Yankees win! Oh, I’m sorry. That would be in the “Worst of the Week.” Quick rant: Instead of 50 game suspensions for baseball players caught using steroids, how about they make a rule that every time a player’s name is ever mentioned in the media again, whether it be in newspapers, magazines, box scores, (and most importantly) broadcasting, their steroid use has to be disclosed.

How much more fun would Game 6 of the World Series been if instead of gushing about how great Andy Pettitte is, Joe Buck had to mention that he was in the Mitchell Report every single pitch. That I would watch.

Sorry. Best articles of the week:

It’s a shame that Johnny Knoxville isn’t Jewish. Because it would be great to have an article about Jackass right next to our new (and fascinating) article about The Three Stooges.

I think that it has been established that challah is the great Jewish food out there. But that does not mean that the greatest food doesn’t ever have to be spiced up a bit. I bring to you Pumpkin Challah. Trick your kids into vegetables.

Finally, don’t forget to look at Julie Seltzer’s weekly challah for the Torah portion. This week’s is a depiction of Lot’s wife. Needless to say, it’s a little bit salty.

Micol Ostow, author of So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), is guest-blogging all week with MyJewishLearning and Jewish Book Council.

It occurs to me that after the somewhat irreverent tone of my last post, I may have given the impression that I’ve taken a very “out with the old, in with the new” attitude toward Jewish children’s literature. And while I do (clearly) appreciate authors who are incorporating religious and spiritual themes into fresh, modern narratives, obviously I didn’t become a young adult author myself within a vacuum. Every aspect of both my writing, and my vision of the kid-lit landscape is shaped by the books that influenced me when I was young.

As a child, I was a voracious reader. Truly, the printed word was practically a compulsion for me, almost a vice of sorts. In my darkest hours, it built to the point where my parents would literally beg me, in the summertime, to go outside, for the love of Hashem, and expose my sad, pallid skin to some fresh air and a little bit of Vitamin D. (I ignored them, of course.)
When left to my own devices, I gravitated, like so many girls, to the Little House series of books, or to Noel Streatfield’s “shoes” stories. It’s hard to get between a middle grade reader and her ballet, or her bonnets, after all. Later came what was almost a foregone conclusion: Judy Blume, and later still, Francine Pascal, whose Sweet Valley series set the tone for my own summer-camp romance fantasies.

For the record, my love life was never as juicy as the Wakefield twins’. Still, I was, after all, a Solomon Schechter student, and no matter how all-American my extracurricular reading aspired to be, Jewish literature permeated. I gained perspective on the Lower East Side tenement lifestyle (history, religion, and culture, all wrapped up in one!) from the five mischievous sisters of Sydney Taylor’s All of a Kind Family. I reconsidered my grandmother’s gefilte fish, a time-worn recipe passed down through many generations, after reading The Carp in the Bathtub (Barbara Cohen and Joan Halpern). (Don’t worry; my squeamishness was short-lived. The fact that we’ve resorted to store-bought now that my grandmother is no longer with us is one of the great disappointments of my adult life.) Judy Blume’s Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself was my first realization that the Holocaust was indeed a tragedy that reached beyond the academic, antiseptic environs of a school assembly.

The fantastic thing about being someone who reads a lot is that it often goes hand-in-hand with reading widely. And while of course I have my own proclivities and preferences, I’ve learned that you can’t take the Shalom Aleichem out of the girl.

Not completely, anyway. And frankly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’m getting married soon, to a man who was raised with very similar religious values as my own. We recently sat down with our rabbi to discuss our vision for the Jewish household we plan to build together.

I immediately thought back to book fairs, library visits, and nights listening to my mother or father read to my brother and me. Certain practices, habits, and decisions are easy; you can bet that my contribution to our home will include a healthy dose of K’ton Ton. And then some.

Micol Ostow is a young adult writer living and working in New York City. If she were any more kosher, she’d be totally traif. Or so they say. Visit Micol at www.micolostow.com.

The Holy One, Blessed be He, said to Moses, “Go speak to the daughters of Israel and ask them whether they wish to receive the Torah.” Why were the women asked first? Because the way of men is to follow the opinion of women.

–Pirkei d’Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 41
Find more Wise Fridays wisdom on MJL.

A few weeks ago, Matthue Roth, associate editor at MJL, worked on the set of the new CBS drama The Good Wife as an extra. The episode, “Unorthodox,” is about the Hasidic Jewish community in Chicago. It airs on Tuesday, Nov. 10 at 10 EDT.

I’ve protested so frequently about the portrayal of Hasidic Jews in movies and TV that one would probably figure that I should know how to do it correctly. Being one myself, I’m pretty quick to catch the common errors: eating in non-kosher restaurants (Pi), mixed dancing (A Stranger Among Us), being in inappropriate situations between men and women (pretty much every movie out there that involves Hasidim in any capacity).

In my head, as I’ve gone through the everyday movements that make up our life, I’ve thought several times about how perfect something would be for a movie — probably due to a healthy amount of egotism combined with a cinematic outlook. Swishing my talis around me before morning prayers would make a great pan! Washing hands from a double-handled cup would look so meaningful in slow motion! Walking down the street with my black overcoat swishing against my calves like a cape is — well, yeah, that’s my fantasy of being a superhero combining with my fantasy of living inside a movie.

The reality of Hasidic Jews on film, from The Chosen to New York, I Love You, is a different story. When we’re not represented as shadowy figures crossing streets in the background, we’re old, un-English-speaking naïfs with poor posture and weird hair. The weird hair part, we are totally guilty of, but the rest of it is due in large part to the dumbing down of culture to its barest essence — when it’s not straight-out making stuff up.

But nothing quite prepared me for this: Sitting at a bridge table at 5:45 A.M. with a dozen men dressed as Hasidic Jews, discussing the new Quentin Crisp biopic. Or, more specifically: how one of the 70-year-old rabbi-lookin’ guys at the table, whose payos are much straighter and more even and perfectly grayed than mine, is telling me about his role cross-examining an actor playing Quentin Crisp in a new film.

The guys at my table have run through the gamut of Hasidim in films. They’re like the gods of Hasidic acting — they’ve been in A Price above Rubies and A Stranger Among Us. They’ve been in sitcoms, dramas, and Law & Order. (This, I will learn, is a benchmark among extras* in New York; as my trophy-wife {we’ll get there} will tell me later that day: “If you haven’t been on Law & Order, you don’t really live in New York City.”) These guys have stories as long as their fake beards. Of Stranger, one is saying: “We were filming, and one of the real guys says, ‘Hold up! That’s not how it’s really done.’ So the director calls cut, everyone stops, and he shows them how to do it. Then they start again, they roll tape, and someone else says, ‘Hold up!’ And everyone else has their own way to do it.”

“Ah,” he cackles, leaning back into his seat, “Jews.”

And the whole group starts laughing.

Elli Meyer, nicknamed “the king of Broadway” and known in the industry as the go-to person to play Hasidic Jews, very kindly set me up with this gig. His IMDB profile lists nearly 50 credits to his name (in reality, it’s much larger) — mostly as “unnamed rabbi” or “unnamed Hasid,” but he’s also played a hillbilly, a trucker, and (once, on The Sorpranos) a Muslim cleric. He put out a call for actors on his Facebook profile — this new television show needs Hasidim!

It was almost like I couldn’t say no. So far, being a Hasidic Jew has only gotten me a whole bunch of fast days that I wouldn’t have otherwise known existed. I figured, it was about time looking like a crazy-haired freak should start paying off. I emailed him my details, and he emailed me back the info. Starting, I should note, with the 5:45 call time.

The camera crew isn’t scheduled to arrive until seven, but makeup and wardrobe have already set up. One of the makeup artists comes over and starts sending people over to the makeshift station, which is really a bunch of mirrors duct-taped to a wall. The other guys are fishing out their sidecurls. They all have pre-made payos, dyed the exact white of their hair, with little clips at the top. Most of them have beard extensions, too.

The younger guys, the professional would-be actors who are here because it’s another gig, and maybe because they happen to look Jewish, are being sent away to be outfitted with fake ones from the wardrobe department. I do a double-take when I see the blond underwear-model guy walk past in his skullcap and tzitzis. The makeup guy does a double-take on me and says: “Oh. You’ve already been.”

Coming on Friday: Part 2. Fake kids! Fake cars! And my fake wife!?

__
* — I’m grossly oversimplifying it, I know.

First of all: keeping kosher doesn’t necessarily mean that you eat healthier food than anyone else. It frequently means, however, that you eat weirder food than anyone else.

And, at the KosherFest expo, you have a room as big as a football field, jam-packed with the newest and weirdest in food technology. We sent of Heshy Fried to check it out.

And then, when you’re done, go back and read Tamar’s liveblog reports from the scene of the crime.

I’m not sure if all have you have heard about the Jewish Community Heroes contest being run by the Jewish Federations of North America. With over 400 nominees, the contest had over 500,000 votes. Not a shabby number at all.

After they announced the Top 20 semifinalists, they have now announced the five finalists. And proud we are of all of them.

But what a missed opportunity!!!! Why not make it a Final Four? Everyone loves tournaments. That’s just a fact. A cold, hard fact. It’s probably even in an encyclopedia (or at least Wikipedia). Maybe even give them seeds. Then if #4 beats out all the others, it would be like the biggest upset of all time!

Also, is there anything cooler than two heroes going up against each other? Imagine a battle between Spiderman and Superman? And the winner would get to battle Batman! It’s basically the same thing. Except with Jews.

Of course, I’m kidding. Congratulations to all the finalists.

I’m a vegetarian, but I kiss meat-eating men pretty regularly. I’m not afraid of cooking a chicken (or a brisket, for that matter) and I won’t get grossed out or condemnatory if the conversation turns to the juiciest hamburgers in the world. I do what I do and beyond that I’m not imposing my food choices on anyone else.

But even when that’s the case, there are so many opportunities for food to come between an otherwise happy couple. Maybe one partner only eats at kosher restaurants, and another eats dairy out. Maybe the mister requires halav yisrael dairy products, but the lady is happy with a regular hashgakhah. Maybe he loves shrimp, and she avoids all biblically forbidden foods. It gets complicated!

There are other options, of course. You can cook together, though that requires that you’ll eat in each other’s kitchens and can settle on a common meal. You can try to find a common cuisine you like and head to an appropriate restaurant (sometimes and in some places this is harder to do than others). Or you can suck it up and sometimes eat something you don’t like or find to be problematic.

How come people never really talk about this problem in the Jewish community? It’s one step down from intermarriage, of course, but it’s not nothing.

…And so are you. Michaelson’s new book, Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, is a call to arms, a kind of populist manifesto based upon the kabbalistic notion that all humans are infused with a breath of God.

And, last week, he threw a party to prove it.

Check out the Shemspeed video:

Michaelson shone at a sort of mini-symposium that night about contemporary religion, centering on his book. He posited for the validity of religious experiences on the part of the individual, effectively arguing that the Baal Shem Tov wasn’t the only one who could have direct communication with God — that the BeShT’s message was, literally, that that type of eschatological ecstasy could be (and should be) widespread, even universal.

I had conflicting opinions about the other speakers, all of whom were impressive people with mighty things to say — although the majority of the conversation mainly dealt with, disappointingly, the various disappointments they’ve had with organized religion. One panelist spoke about how he went to the Chaim Berlin yeshiva and was told that, if he spoke about kabbalah, he’d be kicked out. Well, duh. If you go to an institution that has a 300-year-old feud with Hasidim — founded by a group whose name itself means “the opponents,” referring to “opponents of Hasidim” — and start spouting propaganda about their mortal enemies, well, you’ve only got yourself to blame. I mean, dude, you’re pretty much the equivalent of the black Ku Klux Klan guy in Blazing Saddles. You’re setting yourself up for disaster.

But the speeches were the smallest part of the night. Like the book itself, it existed on a bunch of levels. You could take the “Everything Is God” thing as a one-note joke, or you could take it deeper; similarly, you could look at the four people on the stage, or the 300 people in the audience. Afterward, there was a sort of Jewish-freak bazaar in which an ecological summer camp, a Jewish hip-hop label, and organic picklers, indie minyanim, and Shabbat dinner purveyors proffered their wares. The righteous band Darshan played — fronted by Eprhyme, and possibly the only acoustic hip-hop band to have a fiddler, a percussion box, and a guitar-playing diva — and I did a few poems. But, as Jewish thinker Yoni Gordis would be quick to point out, the best conversations happen in the hallways. And the biggest mark of Godliness that night was the crowd — people talking to each other, shutting themselves up and doing what us religious folks call being mevatel each other — or, essentially, listening to each other.

Maybe that’s what Jay and the Besht meant when they said that everything is God. Not that I am, but that everything else is, too.

David Ostow, the comic artist behind So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), and his sister, Micol Ostow, are guest-blogging all week with MyJewishLearning and Jewish Book Council.

These are the first two pages of a strip I’m currently drawing with the working title “In Defense of The Irrational: A Brief and Not Terribly Accurate History of Faith versus Reason.” Beyond my goal of making people laugh (the tone of the comic is very tongue-in-cheek), I hope that readers will find the comic strip -when complete- thought provoking.

Can a good case be made for maintaining religious ritual in our secular age? Sure, scientific research and technological innovation have brought us far from our primitive ancestors (with whom my comic begins). However,I think that just as ritual was a reflection of our ancestors’ bewilderment and wonder in a world full of mysteries, it can play the same role in our lives. Knowing the universe started with a ‘big bang’ doesn’t make the concept of the universe any less ineffable. Quite to the contrary, it only adds to the mystery.

( Click here for page 1 )

( Click here for page 2 )

David Ostow works at a design firm in New York City, illustrates on a freelance basis, and is the co-creator of So Punk Rock (And Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother). Come back all week to see his and his sister Micol’s blogs.

I first saw Jeremy Fisher at a bar in Nashville. My friend Danny invited with me to go see his former camp counselor Jeremy. It was Nashville–there were dozens of places to see live music every night, and you never knew if you were in for something great, or thoroughly mediocre.

Jeremy was great. Better than great, really. The music was a folksy-pop mix, like if Bon Iver had a kid with Marc Broussard, or if Kevin Devine jammed with The Format. At one point, Fisher did a cover of I Want You Back by the Jackson 5 (this was years before MJs untimely demise) and I nearly swooned. Plus, he was a nice guy, sitting with us for a drink afterwards, and chatting with Danny about the joys of Canadian Jewish summer camp.

I have never been a camp person, but Jeremy Fisher makes me wish I could go back in time and sign up for whatever camp he worked at just to hear him play his guitar around a campfire. Also, his Jewfro is adorable.

Anyway, watch the videos below (some of which feature the Jewfro-huzzah!) and keep your eyes peeled for signs that Fisher is coming to your town. It probably won’t be a huge blockbusting show, but I promise you’ll be smiling for a solid week afterwards.