You heard me. We are Sarah Palin’s main source of inspiration. Don’t believe me? Just check out her new book, Going Rogue. In it, you will find clean, pure evidence that Sarah Palin uses our site, what I can only assume to be, daily.

I’m not making this stuff up. And I have two reputable sources to back me up. First, the Washington Post. Check out this headline from yesterday: “The Book of Sarah Embraces God & Todd.” Sure, they totally missed the story. And got the order wrong. But any loyal MJL reader will know that Palin’s main inspiration in life is The Adventures of Todd & God.

Now, it would be one thing if it was just the Washington Post. But what if I told you that the New York Times also covered the story? That’s right. Here is a quote from Palin herself in an article from yesterday’s paper, p. A16, upper left corner: “I get through a lot of my challenges in life thanks to God and Todd.”

I hear you Sarah. I was lost and confused to…until Todd and God taught me how to hang a mezuzah.

This Haaretz story makes my head explode.

Police arrest woman for wearing prayer shawl at Western Wall 

Police on Wednesday arrested a woman who was praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, due to the fact that she was wrapped in a prayer shawl (tallit).

The woman was visiting the site with the religious women’s group “Women of the Wall” to take part in the monthly Rosh Hodesh prayer.

Police were called to the area after the group asked to read aloud from a Torah scroll.

Police said they arrested the women in the wake of a High Court ruling, which states that the public visiting the Western Wall is obligated to dress in accordance with the site’s dress code.

Western Wall Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz said the act was a provocation meant to turn the wall into a fighting ground. “We must distance politics and disagreement from this sacred place,” Rabinowitz said.

Chairman of the women’s group, Anat Hoffman, said that this is the first time in the history of Israel that a woman has been arrested because she wrapped herself in a tallit and read from the Torah.

Rabbi Gilad Kariv, associate director of Israel’s reform movement, said that all over the world women are entitled to wear the tallit, and only in the land of the Jews are they excluded from the social custom and even arrested for praying.

“Israeli police should be ashamed of themselves,” Kariv said.

Last week Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi, said during his weekly sermon that the women in the feminist movement are “stupid” and act the way they do out of a selfish desire for equality, not “for heavens’ sake.”

Rabbi Ovadia also said about the groups’ custom to pray at the Western Wall that “there are stupid women who come to the Western Wall, put on a tallit (prayer shawl), and pray,” and added that they should be condemned.

Emphasis mine.

Maybe I’m naïve, but I never thought wearing a tallit could really be this controversial. Why is it such a big deal if a woman wears a tallit, especially if she’s modestly dressed? The lady is on the other side of the mehitza (separating wall) from any guys, so I just don’t understand how she could possibly be distracting or really upsetting in any way.

I can’t even begin to respond to Rav Ovadia Yosef’s comments. I have never been as disappointed in a religious leader as I am right now. How someone can be so brilliant and so absolutely clueless and ignorant is mind boggling to me.

I also want to mention that when I brought up women wearing a tallit on a Jewcy post a few years back the post garnered 106 comments, including a memorable one which accused my editors and me of being part of a “ruling cuntocracy.” Seriously, what is it about tallitot that makes people so crazy?

Yesterday Matthue and I had the opportunity to study with the good folks at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies (at their New York office. Jerusalem is too far away for a lunch and learn). And as it’s Rosh Chodesh Kislev, our topic with Yaffa Epstein centered around Hanukkah.

We looked at the traditional Talmudic text that distinguishes between wicks and oil that may be used for Shabbat and Hanukkah (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 21b). What it boils down to is that one can use candles of a lesser quality for Hanukkah. There are many more candles to light on Hanukkah and the goal was not to prohibit anyone from participating by requiring the high quality oil that is essentially required for Shabbat.

While this makes sense in the context of ancient Jewish life (candles were a precious commodity), it also resonates today. I’ve only bought Hanukkah candles once in my life. Every year growing up, those free blue-box-don’t burn-more-than-10-minutes candles from Hebrew school seemed to be just fine for Hanukkah. But Shabbat candles were beautiful pure white candles, which had to be purchased.

The most beautiful lesson we learned, though, comes from the Sefat Emet, who expands on this teaching. He says that the word nefesh (soul) stands for ner/petilah/shemen or “lamp/wick/oil.” And for those whose soul does not “rise up” and light the Shabbat candles, they can be “brought up on Hanukkah.”

He further explains that while the three pilgrimage festivals were given to the Jewish people by God, Hanukkah, along with Purim, “are special times that Israel merited by their own deeds…. Because these holidays were brought about by Israel’s own deeds, every Jewish soul can be restored through them. Every single Jew can find a way of belonging and attaching to them.”

Meaning that Hanukkah is a holiday–in a sense–by the people, of the people, and for the people. And it is surely true that Hanukkah is arguably the most accessible holiday. We only celebrate it once a year, we only celebrate it for about 10 minutes a day, and all we have to do is light some candles and maybe eat some delicious fried food. Who can’t commit to that?

The National Jewish Population Survey proves that this is true. According to their findings, Hanukkah is the most observed holiday with 72% of Jewish lighting candles, while only 28% light candles on Shabbat.

So while some people may dismiss Hanukkah as a “not important or significant” holiday for real Jewish observance, perhaps our tradition — and now our practices teach us quite the opposite.

Seth Rogovoy, author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, wrote yesterday about Bob Dylan’s Judaism. He is guest-blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Almost lost in all the commotion surrounding Bob Dylan’s new Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart — his first charity album, as the proceeds from all sales are being donated to hunger charities, according to his website — is a fair consideration of the music itself: where it sits in the context of Dylan’s overall output, and how it relates to the decades-old genre of Christmas recordings by popular music artists.

For the last twenty years or so, and especially over the last decade, Bob Dylan has been honing a particular sound, especially in his live appearances — about 100 concerts per year on what’s been termed his “Never Ending Tour.” Dylan’s aesthetic, which bears almost no relationship to that of any other artist in contemporary music, is a unique fusion of his own style of rock music (which in itself is a blend of many genres, including blues, folk, country, rockabilly, gospel, pop, and R&B) with pre-rock influences, such as western swing, bluegrass, jump blues, jazz, and Tin Pan Alley. More ethnic sounds have been creeping into Dylan’s work as of late, too, including the polka rhythms of his northern Minnesota youth, as well as Tex-Mex and French chansons, all of which gained prominence on his entertaining album released earlier this year, Together Through Life.

Given the revival of Dylan’s interest in pre-rock musical traditions, it makes sense that he would now, from a musical point of view, tackle the timeless genre of holiday music, which in and of itself spans multiple styles and sounds. (Indeed, it’s not for nothing that the back cover of the CD booklet sports a photo-illustration of the 1950s pin-up queen, Betty Page, dressed in a scanty Santa Claus outfit). On Christmas In the Heart, Dylan revels in the genre’s eclecticism, turning in a bluesy version of “The Christmas Blues,” a polka-infused “Must Be Santa,” and a tropical take on “Christmas Island” (as my son said disbelievingly upon first hearing this, “There’s such a thing as Hawaiian Christmas music?”). Dylan even has a go at the 13th-century hymn, “O Come All Ye Faithful (Adeste Fideles),” tackling the first verse in the original Latin, Bing Crosby-style.

Dylan has taken his licks for some of his less-inspired forays into the holiday-music tradition. The album employs a corps of backup singers who trade verses with Dylan on several numbers, and instead of sounding like the soulful gospel choirs on his albums of the late 1970s and 1980s, these arrangements sound more like the sugary-sweet Ray Conniff singers, making for, to say the least, an odd juxtaposition with Dylan’s craggy vocals.

A word about those vocals are in order: Dylan’s voice, even at its best, is a topic worthy of a blogpost series of its own, maybe even a book. Suffice it to say that even for those (like me) who sincerely believe that Dylan is a masterful singer who phrases with the best of them, Dylan’s voice has never sounded worse than it does here: raspy, phlegmy, downright scary. It’s hard to imagine anyone playing this music at a real holiday party; if Christmas music is supposed to evoke warm, holiday feelings, this sounds more like the soundtrack to Christmas courtesy of Ebenezer Scrooge (even if this is a very un-Scrooge-like charity effort).

And with only a few exceptions (“Must Be Santa,” “Here Comes Santa Claus”), the instrumental arrangements are uninspired, eschewing as they do the fine tradition of rocking holiday numbers such as Tom Petty’s “Christmas All Over Again,” Bruce Springsteen’s “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” or any one of many fun versions of “Jingle Bell Rock,” any of which Dylan could have easily imprinted with his own idiosyncratic stamp.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, due from Scribner on Nov. 24, 2009. Please visit Rogovoy’s official website. Photo taken by Scott Barrow.

Here is a somewhat shocking fact. There is only one Jewish high school in all of the United States that boasts a full 11-man tackle football team. Here is another fact: In their first season with an 11-man team, the San Diego Jewish Academy Lions are 6-2, and are heading to the playoffs this Saturday night.

I thought I’d ask Athletic Director Charlie Wund, Coach John Milisitz, and star quarterback Joseph Mizrachi about what it’s like to be on such a unique team.

MyJewishLearning: How long has the team been around?

Charlie Wund: The school itself is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. The high school has been around for 10 or 11 years. The football team is only eight years old. This is actually the first year that we’ve moved to an 11-man football team. In the past, we’ve used an eight man team. We officially entered a league and a conference that has made us eligible for the CIF (California Interscholastic Federation) Playoffs, which we’re playing in this Saturday night.

Tell me a little about your school. How many students? What type of Jewish day school is it?

Joseph Mizrahi: We’re a pluralistic Jewish school. There aren’t a lot of kids here. There’s around 185 kids in the high school.

With only 185 kids in the school, how many people are on the football team?

Mizrachi: Our football team has about 25 kids. A lot of them are freshmen or rookies who have never played football before. We basically had to spend the entire year teaching them how to play.

Coach, what type of challenges have you had with this team, with a small team?

John Milisitz: I would say three quarters of my team didn’t know how to put on their pads the first time.

They remind me of the movie Little Giants.

Milisitz: Actually, our team is big. We have four guys that are 250+. And we have some really good athletes. We’re really fast. It was easy to teach them because of that. Football is different from other sports that, if you’re athletic, and you’re team has a good quarterback and running attack, it’s easy to pick up.

Joseph, I read that, during the game, you use Hebrew audibles to change the play at the line. Can you tell me more about that?

Mizrachi: Well, we don’t want anyone to understand our plays. If we called the plays in English, the other team could easily hear. But what other school teaches Hebrew? We call the counts and blocking assignments in Hebrew too. It’s a major advantage for us.

Whose it was it idea to use Hebrew?

Milisitz: It was actually Joseph’s. We decided to call plays in Hebrew. But some of the guys don’t speak Hebrew as well. So we stopped that, but we started the snap counts, blocking schemes, etc. It won’t be full Hebrew, but enough to call the plays. Even I, and I’m not Jewish, has picked up a lot.

Some people may not know, but many high school football games are played on Friday night. Since your team doesn’t play on Shabbat, has the scheduling changes forced you to play a shorter season?

Wund: No. We played the full seven conference game schedule and one pre-season game before that. We didn’t play as many non-conference games. One reason is that, in the first week of November, we have school trips, so each grade goes to a different part of the country. So we couldn’t play a game then. Last year, we couldn’t play a full schedule because of all the Jewish holidays. Having them fall on Thursdays meant we couldn’t play a lot of games.

Has the conference been accommodating?

Wund: Absolutely. We are the only Jewish school in San Diego with a sports program. But there is a Seventh Day Adventists school in the area, so they’ve faced many of the same issues that we have. For example, our volleyball team made it to the Div. 5 finals, and we had to switch the location and the time. This year, they got wind that they were going to be good again. So they switched the time in advance.

How many of players on the team are Shomer Shabbat?

Mizrachi: I think we have three Shomer Shabbat players. We have a couple of players who pray Orthodox-style but not that many of us are very observant.

Do you think teams take you less seriously because you’re Jewish?

Milisitz: I said this in pre-season. Everyone looks at the calendar and sees us and predicts a win. But we started the year 4-0. I think we won our first game, something like 67-0. I think three of our first four games were shutouts. Our defense is smothering.

Has anyone been scouted?

Milisitz: Well, our long snapper could play anywhere because he’s so good at it. I think he is ranked Top 10 in the country. And he’s a big kid. Joseph could play in college too if he chooses to. One of our lineman, a Junior, is second in the state in sacks, with 19 or something. Most of our players are looking at good colleges for academics though. Our team GPA is between 3.7-3.8.

In the upcoming weeks, I’ll try to give some updates on how the Lions do in the playoffs. Good luck guys!

Seth Rogovoy, author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, wrote yesterday about Bob Dylan’s Judaism. He is guest-blogging all week for MyJewishLearning and the Jewish Book Council.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Bob Dylan’s Christmas album is that it took nearly fifty years for him to make one. There is a long-established tradition of pop artists recording Christmas music, after all. Artists in all genres, from classic pop crooners such as Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Mel Tormé to white-bread entertainers such as Connie Francis, Dinah Shore, Bobby Darin, Dean Martin, Perry Como, and Andy Williams, to early rock n’ rollers such as Elvis Presley and the Beatles, to country singers such as Gene Autry, Merle Haggard, and Eddy Arnold, to soul/R&B artists such as Charles Brown and Luther Vandross, to hard-rockers such as Foghat, Slade, and the White Stripes, to classical vocalists such as Andrea Bocelli and Luciano Pavarottti, to punk-rock artists such as the Kinks and the Ramones, to hip-hop artists Run-DMC, Raekwon, and Kurtis Blow — all have recorded Christmas songs or Christmas albums.

And not just a few of these songs happen to have been written or recorded by Jewish artists. In fact, the bestselling song of all time is a Christmas song written by a Jew. I speak, of course, of “White Christmas,” written by the son and grandson of cantors, Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline in eastern Belarus, the man also responsible for that springtime favorite, “Easter Parade.”

While Irving Berlin holds the title as author of the bestselling song (and Christmas song) of all time, another Jewish musician, saxophonist Kenny G — born Kenneth Bruce Gorelick — is the all-time Christmas-album champion, with not one but two albums in the all-time Top 10, including the number-one bestselling Christmas album of all time, Miracles. (Kenny G has recorded five “holiday” albums in sum, and to his credit, a few of these have included token Hanukkah songs.)

Other Jewish stars of the “holiday” music genre include Barry Manilow, Herb Alpert, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Neil Diamond, and Mel Tormé. Tormé is both writer and originator of one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time, titled, aptly enough, “The Christmas Song,” but perhaps best known for its opening phrase, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…” (Dylan includes a rendition of this song on his album.)
Other Jewish songwriters who hit paydirt catering to the seasonal music market included Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, whose efforts include “Let It Snow,” and Johnny Marks, who made something of a specialty of writing Christmas songs, including “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and that novelty classic, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

There is perhaps nothing more American, nothing more traditional, and, perhaps, nothing more traditional for a Jewish-American musician, than recording Christmas music.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, due from Scribner on Nov. 24, 2009. Please visit Rogovoy’s official website.

Two weeks ago in Parashat Vayera we read about how Abraham and Sarah were really stellar hosts, and on MJL we even featured our article on how to be a good host and a good guest. I think our ideas are pretty good, but Apartment Therapy is featuring a bunch of other tips to keep in mind as you’re hosting. The tips come from an etiquette manual first published in 1906 but they’re remarkably relevant today. For instance:

“True hospitality is not in inviting guests to a lavish display of flowers, viands and wines, with the object of astonishing them by such profusion. Life will be robbed of much of its good cheer if we hesitate to bring people together because we can be neither magnificent nor wonder-making hosts. A well-cooked, well-served dinner where a few congenial friends are assembled, may be delightful.”

Check out the other tips here.

There’s a chapter in A.J. Jacobs’ new book, The Guinea Pig Diaries (which we just interviewed him about on MJL) about outsourcing jobs to India. Specifically, Jacobs outsources the job of being A.J. Jacobs: he hires an executive assistant (at a very reasonable rate) to reply to his email, ask his boss for deadline extensions, and even schedule a date with his wife. His assistant has immaculate grammar, access to his personal calendar (niece’s birthday card? Check) and she employs flourishes that American workers frequently overlook — saying “thank you” and signing emails with a salutation, for instance.

In fact, suggests Jacobs in his book, he wouldn’t be surprised if American executive assistants went extinct in the next few years.

You can therefore imagine my surprise when a friend sent me this email:

Are you looking for a virtual executive assistant? Have you been unable to find one in the US who charges rates you can afford?

Secretary in Israel has a team of American college-graduates who all work as your marketing and administrative assistant. You can read the bios of each of their American virtual executive assistants and find one who is a fit for you.

When we lived in Israel, there were three categories of friends: yeshiva students, workers, and IDTers. Yeshiva students were supported either by meager kollel payments or by relatives abroad. Workers made often-substandard wages — one of our close friends, a physical therapist with an advanced degree, makes under $6 an hour working at a hospital…without health benefits. IDT was a telecommunications company that paid American wages to answer helplines, so that people could study in yeshiva or be full-time parents and work night hours.

And now, the inevitable has happened. You can now have your very own Ivy-educated, native-English-speaking Israeli oleh or olah to do your menial tasks for you. Life is good.

Last week I was at this salon type thing where a diverse group of Jews had a conversation about Jewish peoplehood. I have no sense of what that means, and to be honest, I don’t think it makes that big of a difference, but one thing that someone mentioned was if there’s a way to unite all kinds of Jews from all over the world under one message. Could Jews be the first carbon neutral religion in the world? Maybe Jews should be championing literacy for all?

It was an interesting idea, but one that I don’t think has a huge amount of realism behind it. Getting all the Jews in the world, or even most of the Jews in the world, to agree on anything is a laughable goal. But even if it was possible, I don’t think carbon neutrality or literacy are likely to be issues that unite everyone, if only because in some ways those seem to me to be very lefty issues. You might be able to get lots of liberal Jews together on these issues, but coming from an Orthodox community, I have to say I can’t imagine the principal of my high school getting behind a carbon neutral initiative that united his school with, say, a Reform Temple. I don’t think he’d be anti carbon neutrality, but I don’t think he’d be as excited about it as he would be if it was a purely Orthodox endeavor.

But you know what I think he would get behind, if only because there would simply be no way he could come out against it? An organization dedicated to eliminating poverty. Poverty and hunger are the kinds of things that everyone can agree on. It’s bad when people don’t have enough money to provide safe drinking water for their village. It’s bad when mothers can’t afford to feed their kids. There’s no other side to that, you know?

So even though I know it’s impossible, I’d like to suggest that all Jews everywhere get on board with NURU, a new organization that aims to fight terrorism by ending poverty. Learn more in the video below:

The End (Jake’s Story) from Nuru International on Vimeo.

The key to hip-hop music–the music part, that is–is restraint. A sparseness of beats, the use of musical samples when they’re needed and a careful placing of the bombast. The first time I heard N.W.A., the original gangsta rap group, I couldn’t believe that this was the music that adults were warning us about. Yes, there were a bunch of curses and adult themes. But it was so not loud. It was smooth, danceable, catchy. It was almost…chilled out.

But that’s the key to getting crazy, isn’t it? Knowing when to get wild and when to hold back. Rebbe Nachman speaks about how a lion only hunts a few hours a day; the rest of the time, it relaxes in the shade. And the feeling you get when Dr. Dre easily, almost drearily, croons the words, “If your @$$ get smoked, it’s my bullet you caught,” is that he’s a yawning lion.

The Tel Aviv hip-hop crew Soulico, the newest assignees to JDub Records, knows this feeling. Their debut full-length, Exotic on the Speaker, features a rotating microphone stand, with different hip-hop M.C.s filling in the vocal duties on each track. It might seem like a strange gambit for an instrumental band, but it’s a less edgy, more accessible way to appeal to listeners…and, although the album is certainly busy with voices, it is undoubtedly the music which is foremost in the speakers.

Clever tricks, otherworldly keyboard noises, and fresh-sounding beats with crisp world-drum sounds and thumping tablas all mix with an eager ferocity…but, wisely, are never given to excess. And maybe it’s an identity crisis, but the rotating-door policy of singers makes sense when you listen, lending the music its signature flow, its recurring hooks, and the constant what-was-that? feeling of a mixtape–or the veneer of famousness that opens Saturday Night Live every week.

The album’s first vocalist is a curious choice for a Tel Aviv-based Israeli collective — it opens with Wu-Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah shouting “Salaam aleikum” at the audience. From there, the song descends into a rapid Arabic/English exchange between Ghostface and an M.C. named Saz. Tomer Yosef–the Tel Aviv-based MC whose solo album Laughing Underground JDub released last year — also contributes a verse, in English.

In fact, it isn’t until the third track, the song “Pitom Banu,” that one of Soulico’s guest M.C.s, the Netanya-based Axum, contributes a verse in Hebrew. You might suggest that it’s JDub and the artists trying to accentuate their “world-music” label. But it’s probably more likely that it’s a more-or-less accurate reflection of Tel Aviv’s party culture, and of its urban culture, as diverse, multilingual, multiracial and multi-rhythm-ed as any city in the world.

Throughout Exotic, there’s a mix of languages, ethnicities, and allegiances, both national and political, but all feature the same party-down lyrics that you’d expect. While the restraint in beatmaking isn’t something you’d expect from Israeli party DJs — this is the country where ’70s disco never died, remember — it pays off well. “S.O.S.” features little more than Arabic drums and a flamenco guitar, but slight embellishments and a great stop-and-go rhythm turn the piece into a full-bodied song.

Perhaps not strangely, there’s a noticeable reluctance for Soulico to overtly identify themselves in songs as Israeli. A handful of Hebrew-language M.C.s make appearances here — Sagol 59 and Axum both make notable appearances — but Tomer Yosef’s verses are all in English (unlike his Hebrew-language solo material), and the album’s considerable guest appearances, from hip-hop heavyweights like Ghostface, Pigeon John, Del the Funky Homosapien, and Rye Rye — who takes vocal duties on the title track — aren’t Jewish, aren’t Israeli, and probably have very little to do with either of the above.

“Basically, politics boils down to this: it’s like, get in where you fit in,” Del says in the spoken intro to “Politix” — before explicating his statement in detail in the main verse. “Politics are inevitable/wherever you go, you can’t go far/without someone you know knowing/someone who owns a gas station and someone else who owns a car.”

In this way, this album is political as anything — by throwing every part of Israel, every part of the planet, and every genre of music up against the wall, watching the colors run into each other, and seeing what you end up with, it’s almost as though Soulico has created a color scheme for a new flag of the world.