Before speed dating, J-Date, Valentines Day or Sadie Hawkins Day, there was the original ancient Love Holiday -Tu B’Av. Jewish maidelach and suitors went out into the fields to see and be seen, really, the first Jewish singles event.  It’s a celebration of love for everyone.

Tu B’Av, the 15th Day of Av, is a day of joy, a day for matchmaking dating back to the second Temple period (before the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.).

Jewlicious and JconnectLA are producing the biggest celebration of Tu B’Av to hit the City of Angels, Love Fest, on Aug. 14, 8:30pm-1am, at Fu’s Palace Restaurant. Tickets are just $15 in advance, $20 at the door and include your first drink ticket.  Students with ID can get in for $15.

Co-sponsored by Taglit Birthright Israel-NEXT, Jewcy, the Jewish Agency, ModernTribe.com, and Cool Jew Book, expect a festive romantic evening of music, humor, matchmaking, cool swag, $7 drinks, and yummy eats.

Entertainment for the evening includes the hilarious and talented Smooth-E, Jewish rockers 8th Day, the mystic rhythms of DJ Eric Rosen, and the unmatched energy and spirit of MOSHAV.

Lisa Alkalay Klug will be offering a sneak preview of her much anticipated book Cool Jew, which is not for sale until Sept. 1 - but we’ll have it on sale at Love Fest.

Rabbi Yonah and Rachel Bookstein will be unveiling Instant Matchmaking™.  Love Fest’ers need to be there early to have your chance at an Instant Match - all done in the spirit of Tu B’Av. Who knows what waits in store for you at Love Fest?

If you already have a special someone, celebrate your love during this ancient festival, with hundreds of others at Love Fest. Don’t let Love Fest pass you by, it only happens once a year.

For tickets go to Jconnectla.com today!

Every Tuesday during the summer in Central Park, various teams made up of the city’s media elite compete in various sports challenges. As the house organ of the people that actually do control the media, Heeb Magazine is sort of forced to participate in these athletic shenanigans. Of course, faced with competition from burly goyim and women who played Lacrosse in College, Heeb has had a perfectly winless record. That is until last week, when they faced a team of what must have been totally inebriated Irishmen who could barely stand, Heeb had its first taste of victory in a game of capture the flag.

Addicted to the adrenaline rush of victory, Heeb Business manager and Kvetcher David Kelsey recruited me as a sort of ringer for their next match up against the funny folks at the Onion. I say sort of because I think I got a photo credit there once - it was a pic of me reading Heeb over Arafat’s grave.

Anyhow, sure enough we swept the Onioners 2-0 in a best of three game of Kubb, a Swedish lawn game where the object is to knock over wooden blocks by throwing wooden sticks at them. No, I’m not kidding. Google it if you don’t believe me. In any case, next week they play some other game against the hotties at L’Oreal. If you want to go cheer - go the Heeb Web site and use the contact info to ask when and where the next game is. The L’Oreal women wear short shorts and knee high socks. Just so you know…

Thanks to Lori for the pics and moral support, thanks to Heeb for letting me play and giving me the opportunity to help my shtetlach diaspora Jews achieve some success in an area of physical prowess. For a change.

While we’re on the topic of summer reads, the official launch of Cool Jew: The Ultimate Guide for Every Member of the Tribe is around the bend.

On September 1st, cooljewbook.com will announce the winner of its first giveaway: an autographed and personalized copy of Cool Jew sent to you, where ever you may roam.

Wanna win a freebie? Get your entry in!

Heck, maybe we’ll throw in a t-shirt–if there are any left after the extravaganza also known as Love Fest 2008, co-sponsored by JConnect LA and Jewlicious. Guest performers include Moshav, Smooth-E aka comedian Eric Schwartz, 8th Day, DJ Eric Rosen, and a certain author.

When: 8:30 pm - 1 am, Thursday, August 14th

Where: Fu’s Palace
8751 West Pico Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90035-2212
(310) 271-7887
Free parking

$15 in advance — $20 at the door, includes one free drink and kosha buffet
Pre-pay at www.jconnectla.com. For more info: Michal@jconnectla.com or 310-405-2336.

Co-presented by Birthright Israel NEXT–Los Angeles, Jewish Agency,
ModernTribe.com and Jewcy with assistance from FunkyFrum.com.

Actually, I find it messy to read at a beach. It is so much easier to read at a pool, a tar or asphalt covered roof, a park, a couch, a bench or an air conditioned subway car. But wherever you end up committing this reading task, they still call it “beach reads.” And since Jewish people are the people of the book, it is not too late to discuss some recommended books for the People of the Summer book.

Please feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments area. Thanks.

Why is a Summer read different from a regular read? Summer gives you the permission to read about light subjects and indulge in guilty pleasures. My main reads so far were a Vietnamese memoir and a book on the Shapes of U.S. States. I am currently reading a son’s mesmerizing book on his father’s Kurdish Jewish childhood. But herewith are the books on my more Jewish oriented list:

CERTAIN GIRLS
A NOVEL
BY JENNIFER WEINER

When I went to the book reading, I was in heaven. I was nearly the only male and surrounded by the author and over 100, how shall I say it, zaftig women. Weiner tells the story of Candace Cannie Shapiro, as she handles a rebellious saughter, plans for a bat mitzvah, struggles with her weight and ponders whether to indulge in the fatherhood desiers of her cousin loving husband, Peter.

Moscow Rules
by Daniel Silva

July 2008, Putnam
The newest Gabriel Allon thriller, already a best seller in the USA. The death of a journalist leads Allon to Moscow, a place filled with glamour and oil wealth. Neo-Stalinists are plotting a renewed Russian empire and a way to fund al-Qaeda to destroy the USA

Golda
by Elinor Burkett

May 2008, HarperCollins
Don’t mess with Golda. Yeah, Ghandi. She beat you. Golda was the woman to head a modern Western country. Can you spell tenacious? And what about sexy? Who else, other than Mao, out-maneuvered Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger? Burkett looks at Golda’s motivations and ideals, personal victories and disappointments

Shut Up, I’m Talking
And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government
A Memoir
by Gregory Levey

Gregory Levey, currently a teacher at Ryerson University, was a law student in Manhattan when he applied for an internship at the Israeli Consulate. He was 25, and ended up getting much more than he expected. After an interview process that was more complex than a prostate exam, he started the internship, and was asked to fill in for a speechwriter. He started to write speeches for the Israeli delegation to the United Nations. Soon enough, he was also attended UN sessions and drafting statements. Then he was flown to Jerusalem so that he could write speeches for Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister. The book recounts the comical and bizarre experiences he had in Israel and New York City. Is Israeli Government any place for a nice Jewish boy?

Ambivalence
Adventures in Israel and Palestine
by Jonathan Garfinkel

August 2008, Norton
A memoir by a naïve confused North American, Jonathan Garfinkel, who visits Israel and ventures into a mythic house in Jerusalem where Jews and Arabs coexist in peace

As you may or may not know, a short while back we launched a Russian language version of Jewlicious. The idea is that they take select blog posts from Jewlicious and translate them into Russian. They also write their own original Jewlicious-esque content which they share with their international, Russian speaking audience. Editor Tanya Gutsol, who I met at ROI120, and the rest of her crew seem to have been plugging away quite nicely. I have no idea what they’re writing really, but with a little help from Google translate I am fairly certain that Jewlicious.ru is not a front for some shady Russian mail-order bride operation.

As part of our desire to publicize Jewlicious.ru, Tanya decided that I should design a clever t-shirt. Thus was born the Rucking Fussian shirts you see displayed above. I originally used a Russian style font that emulated Cyrillic lettering by doing things like reversing the “N” - total nonsense of course but I thought it was kind of funny.

Well, the Cyrillic purists at Jewlicious.ru did not think so. They felt that the reverse N and faux Cyrillic would confuse native Russian speakers who would not be able to figure out that we were, you know, kidding. So to please Tanya and to settle this dispute we decided to keep both and see what you, our loyal Jewlicious readers felt. Which shirt is more, well, Jewlicious? The faux Cyrillic one? Or the normal one Tanya forced me to re-design?

At stake is my credibility and the future of who gets to call the shots around here as well as some unspecified and unimportant side bet Tanya and I have going. You may vote below or better yet, vote with your wallet and buy your favorite shirt, thus earning us $5 per sale which we will use to keep Jewlicious.ru running and to feed hungry Soviet seniors. With whatever is left over.

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Every summer, Rabbi Naftali Citron of the Carlebach Shul in Manhattan comes out to Santa Cruz to lead a Shabbaton at Four Gates Winery. Kosher organic estate-bottled vino is served at every meal. The place is idyllic. And the chevre is so chill we tent camp all over the hill. The stars don’t disappoint.

The vineyard sits atop many acres. Horses on this property wander freely. One even dropped by during the Torah service on Shabbat. We had to lure him away with a carrot.

Blackberries, plums, mint, lavender and nasturtium grow wild. Towering redwoods provide shade and, well, I’d keep gushing but I’m sure you’re getting the picture. The sun setting Erev Shabbat over the vineyard, with the forest in the background and a blushing sky, prompted even five-year-old Shlomo Bookstein to describe it “as a painting.”

Sunday, after most guests had departed and the rest of us had packed up our gear, chef Chaim Davids started cooking up his breakfast. And soon, the rest of the die-hards who weren’t so eager to leave started piling up a table outdoors with all the leftovers, fresh bread Bubbie Bookstein brought in from town, a giant watermelon and tiny sweet plums gathered from the forest. Chaim recently moved west to open a full-serv kosha res in the Silicon Valley called Noya. And the food was so delish, once again, the horses came around to see what we were up to…

As we sat there, under the trees, Rabbi Yonah crowned our meal a Summer Harvest Feast. It could have been right out of a Martha mag. Except none of us were WASPS. The food was kosh. We were all buying bottles of Binyo’s wine to take back home. And most of us really needed a shower.

Now for a small test. Who wrote this:

Tires that are underinflated by 6 to 7 pounds per square inch increase tire rolling resistance 10 percent or more, increase tread wear rates and tire fatigue. When a tire is underinflated, the tire’s road contact zone and cyclic stress level changes resulting in undesirable loss in tire and vehicle performance.

To prevent the above, we recommend the following in maintaining proper inflation level (a vehicle’s proper inflation level can be found either on the door or on a placard in the glove box) and in checking tire wear:

• Check tire inflation pressure (including the spare) at least once a month and before every long trip. Tires must be checked when they are cold; that is, before they been run a mile.

• Tires should be rotated at least every 6,000-8,000 miles and the alignment should be checked once a year. Misaligned tires can cause the car to drag, which lowers mileage and causes unnecessary tire wear.

• At least once a month, motorists should inspect the tires closely for signs of uneven wear. Uneven wear patterns may be caused by improper inflation pressures, misalignment, improper balance or suspension neglect. If not corrected, further tire damage will occur.

Nearly ninety percent of drivers don’t check their tire inflation properly. However, this percentage is starting to drop as gas prices underinflate consumer pocketbooks.

With escalating fuel prices, the time is now for drivers to focus on simple things like proper tire pressure to maximize tire performance and increase fuel economy.

This was published in 2006 by:

1. Hippy, help-wearing, granola eating lefties
2. Obama for President Guide to being Green
3. Consumer Reports Tire rating report
4. NASCAR - blue-collar entertainment megalith

The answer is “4″. Check it our for yourselves.

Meanwhile McCain is mocking Obama’s suggestion that Americans can do more for immediate relief with proper tire inflation than with off shore drilling, and handing out these tire pressure gauges.

Tell John McCain to shove this thing up his ass.

Ramblings about oil, elections, and the economy - Part One

Demand in the US is down. Speculators make their money. Hedge funds that put billions into the sector, are running. And other ideas are being sloshed around.  i.e. Having made more money than any companies in history, American Oil companies can now bank it, and get an oil friendly replacement for the current oil friendly Chief.

Oil has a way of falling before an election.  Gasoline prices have fallen before federal elections almost every year since 1990,and almost always this has been attributed to supply and demand.

In 2006, oil fell $.85 from August to November before the elections, with oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange closing at $57.88 a barrel, down sharply from the record high of that year of $78.40 on July 14.

Today the price of oil started at $118, having almost hit 150 a barrel not a month ago.  Experts say that the weakening American economy means that America needs less oil.

Whatever the reasons, the oil and stock cycle in the months leading up to elections is a discussion that cannot be avoided.  Back in September, 2000, the NY Times wrote:

This will be the 26th presidential election since Charles H. Dow put his industrial average together in 1897. So far, its record as an election prognosticator is 22-3 — not perfect, but at least as good as the average pollster.

The indicator says that if the Dow rises from the end of July through the end of October — the three months when investors are most attuned to the political season — the incumbent party will win the election. If the Dow falls, however, the incumbents will be thrown out. Perhaps a rising stock market reflects contented voters.

If the current oil slide continues, propping up the Dow and the markets, it would put a John in the White House, according to the Dow factor.

Meanwhile, consumption of oil worldwide continues to rise at steady rates. China, India, and the developing world are chugging oil.  OPEC says that demand is up, however less than it was - in other words the world needs more and more oil everyday, but less that they thought it would need.

Domestically, the pressure to extract more oil from off-shore and on-shore drilling is great.  The campaign trail is being paved with arguments about energy policies, and who-can-drill-where arguments.  Not that more oil wells will lower the price of oil on a huge scale, or help our economy.   But it sounds good, as if every American’s patriotic duty is to drill for oil in their backyard to help America become “energy independent” or whatever that means.

Americans are changing their habits quickly to adjust to the $4 a gallon world, and that is good ultimately for America. Alternate energy sources and means of transportation are everywhere, and more Americans are using mass-transit than ever before.  But will falling oil prices convince Americans that the crisis is over, and that they can go back to driving Hummers, Yukons and Ecalades, and put a John in the White House?  Will falling oil prices kill Israeli electric car projects in Israel and in California?  Too early to predict the future, I say.

It’s day 3 after my return to the Old World, and I still haven’t found satisfactory answers to questions that arose during my umpteenth trip to NYC (lost count after my fifteenth trip there several years ago). I’m aware those questions may well portray stereotypes rather than whatnot, but either I was überstereotype-sensitive or I simply faced more cliché-characters than usually.

1. Why do American women wear jersey hotpants during travel, regardless of the state of their celulitis, varicosities and the fact that it’s usually comparatively cool on planes?
2. Where do all those short, fake beach-blonde 18+ year-olds with padded bras and otherwise boyish features come from? Where do they go? They are on the planes, but apart from two ones, I’ve never seen them in NYC. Are they those legendary sky marshalls, travelling incognito? Do they turn into 6′2″, buff, uniformed chaps after landing?
3. Why do Chasidim always seem to put on an upset face when they appear in public places? (I know enough Chasidim well-enough to know that in private they hardly ever look upset.) Are they trying to reach the tzniusdik hemlines with their jaws?
4. Why do people wear toe-post slippers if they can’t walk in them and just resort to shuffling? It’s not good for the feet afterall.
5. Why do Americans chew gum with their mouth open?
6. Did Chasidishe business travellers gladly eat treyf on the plane (and obviously enjoying it at that; kosher options were available afterall), because their wives / mothers weren’t around?
7. Do hipsters get discounts on their spectacle frame purchase if they can convince twenty more hipsters to get the same kind of spectacle frame? Or have opticians been sworn in by the government to only sell one kind of spectacle frame to hipsters so that in case of a nation-wide emergency the National Guards will know who they should save [first and who not]?
8. Why do people that want donations / spare change from me expect any luck if they’re yelling? (As far as I’m concerned, I consider yelling a pretty irrational way of arguing one’s point, so I don’t respond to people that yell as a rule as their yelling makes it clear they aren’t interested in hearing, thus exchanging, different ideas but are only attempting to silence those that don’t agree with them.)
9. Why is it so easy to tell American visitors to museums apart from European ones?
10. Why do Americans smile so little at service staff? I smile a lot, and this time it even earned me getting away with 24 lbs of exccess luggage for free while others were made to re-pack their stuff.
And finally: 11. Why would some guy with tattoo sleeves (yuck!) ask me to go out with him? I try to look as average over there as I can, no visible body jewellery etc.

This is kind of cool. I am blogging from Ben Gurion Airport (free wifi is so civilized!). I am going to board in about 10 minutes and I have an awesome seat. Yay! I am going to New York as part of a team of Jewish bloggers who will be following new immigrants to Israel as they prepare for and ultimately make aliyah to Israel on August 18th with Nefesh B’Nefesh. NBN will then follow up a day after our arrival with an International Jewish Bloggers Conference, which, if you are a blogger, you ought to sign up for. In any case, NBN will be assigning a new immigrant to me when I get to New York and hopefully you’ll get to know who he or she is and why they decided to go to move to Israel. I’ll try to be informative and entertaining - Stephen, the guy in charge told me I’ll be covering a hottie, but I don’t believe him. In any case, we’ll see. Besides, I’ll be happy to write about (and celebrate) anyone willing to leave the deceptive comforts of Babylon in order to make a life for themselves in Israel, the Jewish homeland. You can meet and see what the rest of our blogging crew are up to at http://www.nbnblog.com/

Zionist much? Hell yeah! Stay tuned for more info…

Shabbat shalom!

(image source)

…and we aren’t giving it back. Hard digging was again repaid with the discovery of an intact seal of the ancient king described in Jeremiah. From Jpost.

A seal impression belonging to a minister of the Biblical King Zedekiah which dates back 2,600 years has been uncovered completely intact during an archeological dig in Jerusalem’s ancient City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said on Thursday.

The seal impression, or bulla, with the name Gedalyahu ben Pashur, who served as minister to King Zedekiah (597-586 BCE) according to the Book of Jeremiah, was found just meters away from a separate seal impression of another of Zedekia’s ministers, Yehukual ben Shelemyahu, which was uncovered three years ago, said Prof. Eilat Mazar who is leading the dig at the site.

The excavation at the history-rich City of David, which is located just outside the walls of the Old City near Dung Gate, has proven, in recent years, to be a treasure trove for archeologists.

“On the one hand it is so unexpected to find such a fragile bulla in such harsh conditions of excavation, while on the other hand it was logical to find precisely here the bulla of Gedalyahu ben Pashur - only meters away from the place where we found the bulla of Yehukhal ben Shelemyahu - since these two ministers are mentioned side by side in the Bible as having served together in the kingdom of King Zedekiah,” Mazar said.

The first bulla was uncovered inside an impressive stone structure, which Mazar believes is the Palace of David, while the second bulla was found at the foot of the external wall of the same structure, under a tower that was built in the days of Nehemiah.

Both of the bullae with the names of the two ministers, measuring 1 cm. in diameter each, were found among the debris of the destruction of the First Temple period.

The letters are in ancient Hebrew and are very clearly preserved, Mazar said.

Both ministers are mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah (Jeremiah 38 1-4) along with two other ministers when they came to King Zedekiah demanding the death of the prophet Jeremiah for preaching to the besieged city to surrender.

Mazar said it was “absolutely fantastic” to have uncovered the seals “complete and in perfect condition” after 2,600 years, affording scholars a clear read of the names that were impressed on them.

“It is not very often that such a discovery happens in which real figures of the past shake off the dust of history and so vividly revive the stories of the Bible,” she said.

The archeologist, who rose to international prominence for her excavation that may have uncovered the Biblical palace of King David nearby, has been at the forefront of a series of back-to-back Jerusalem archeological finds, including the remnants of a wall from the Biblical prophet Nehemiah, also in the area.

Other Biblical-era bullae were previously found a quarter century ago at the City of David site. In 1982, the Israeli archeologist Yigal Shiloh discovered a cache of bullae in a nearby site, including one with the name of Gemaryahu ben Shaphan - mentioned in the Bible as a minister and scribe during the reign of King Jehoiakim (608-597 BCE).

The current dig is being conducted on behalf of the Shalem center, a Jerusalem research institute, and the right-wing City of David Foundation, and was carried out under the academic auspices of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Nigel Savage, founder of Hazon, has written a moving letter about legacy of Jack Nash, who passed away today at the age of 79. Nash had a huge impact in the Jewish world, and may his memory serve as an inspiration and a blessing.

New York

Thursday July 31st 2008 / 28th Tammuz, 5768

Dear All,

A man named Jack Nash died last night, may his memory be for a blessing.

His name is not mentioned anywhere on Hazon’s website, and nor has his name appeared in any previous Hazon email. But there would be no Hazon were it not for Jack Nash: no bike rides, not the more than 700 people who’ve traveled to Israel with Hazon, the thousand families now members of Jewish CSAs, the couples who met at our Rides who’ve got married, the kids who’ve been born, the man who came to our New York Ride and converted to Judaism, the two bat mitzvahs we’ve hosted, the staff and alumni, the programs we’ve supported in Israel and the US, the Jewish food curricula, the teens and families who’ve grown through our programs – none of it.

I met Jack just twice. The first time was when he agreed to give the money to launch Hazon – an extremely significant amount of money, given to an English 30-something who’d never previously worked in the Jewish community, never run a non-profit, never worked in the United States and, for good measure, could barely ride a bike – and had certainly never been on, much less led, a 3000-mile bike ride. (One memorable interchange in that first meeting was when he said “a cross-USA Jewish environmental bike ride? That’s an interesting idea. But why don’t you go by bus – you’d get there quicker…” In this way he taught me my first lesson in the need to explicate more clearly what Hazon was about. )

Jack and his wife Helen and their family in fact provided not only the money but also, initially, everything else we needed: for Hazon’s first year of operations I worked in the offices of the Nash family’s foundation.

To this day, I don’t fully understand why he and his family decided to support the launch of Hazon. But his son spoke at the funeral today of his father’s “incredibly creative and impactful” generosity. Being the person who enabled Hazon to come into existence certainly qualified as creative, and today it is clear that his gift has been impactful beyond what either of us could have imagined eight years ago. He enabled the birth of Hazon because he cared about the Jewish people and because he was willing to take a risk on an unknown 30-something.

Read the rest of this entry »

… and I hope they won’t get weighed at check-in.

One of the flipsides of having a big family is that whenever I go someplace that’s not my workplace, I’m expected to bring souvenirs. Now, not only have I somewhat run out of gift ideas - not everbody finds NYC mini mugs as thrilling as I do -, I find it particularly difficult to find souvenirs for those in my family who are well beyond their best-before-dates a little older and culturally more conservative than me.

One of my grandmothers hinted at liking the silk scarves I brought her from the past half a dozen trips (creative, I know), so I set out on my quest to find her another. Problem is she only wears beige. At all times. No exceptions. No off-white. No cream-white. No pastel rose. No taupe. No sand. Just plain beige. No patterns in such striking colours like, uh, black, red, dark green, and, Golemforbid, blue allowed. Eventually, I found one beige silk scarf that is printed in three shades of beige. Heureka!

The other grandma’s getting a blouse by Kenneth Cole. Just because she’s 80 doesn’t mean she’s got to dress as if she were ready to go, does it?

So, unless you want to keep me from travelling during both my grandmothers’ lifetimes, I’d appreciate a few suggestions on souvenirs for elderly ladies (in their eighties) that neither require understanding a foreign language, dusting (the above-mentioned grandmother won’t put up any decoration as they might catch dust), or intense chewing.

And how is all of that Jewlicious? Well, grandmothers are.

Since I posted a few days ago about the Olympics + China + Darfur connection, I thought I’d give an update of what’s going on in the intersections of those subjects.

Recent developments in intergovernmental bodies:

A few weeks ago, on 7 July, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Luis Moreno Ocampo, asked the Court to indict Sudanese President Omar al Bashir on charges of genocide and other human rights abuses. This will be the first time that a sitting head of state will be charged thus.

People have both cheered and condemned this move. Alex de Wall, recently listed in Foreign Policy magazine’s Top 100 Intellectuals list, sums up the argument on his “Making Sense of Darfur” blog post: “Will this be a historic victory for human rights, a principled blow on behalf of the victims of atrocity against the men who orchestrated massacre and destruction? Or will it be a tragedy, a clash between the needs for justice and for peace, which will send Sudan into a vortex of turmoil and bloodshed?” Those who criticize the latter view say there are no prospects for peace under Bashir anyway.

Keep reading, and why I’m writing about this on the Lish will all become clear.
Read the rest of this entry »

Since Heeb Mag’s release is tomorrow night at NYC’s Bowery Electric, we figured we would share something from the Issue that they will be celebrating! This piece is written by our good friend Arye Dworkin. BUT, Before we get into that….Diwon just remixed her single, “New Soul“ for the club kids. Check it out (or download it free) HERE or listen to it now using the player below. “Yael Naim does in fact have a MacBook Air Notebook, and yes, it was free. Apple gave it to her because she recorded the perfect song to launch its revolutionary laptop. You know the commercial—it’s the one in which a jaunty piano introduces a fragile female voice with a slight accent singing about a new soul while an anonymous hand pulls the tech desirable from an interoffice envelope. The delicately petite, Israeli-raised singer is keenly aware of the attention that 30 seconds gave her and appreciates it greatly, but still wants to set the record straight: “Steve Jobs did not pick the song himself…. It says that on the Internet [on her Wikipedia entry] for some strange reason, but this is not the story.” Naim found out the true story of how “New Soul” was chosen by a computer super-company to accompany the unveiling of a sexy piece of aluminum when the song was, at the time, still unavailable as a domestic release. “It was a guy at the company who heard it on a radio station there. I don’t know how they found the song. But he came into work that day and said, ‘We have to use this song.’”

Read the rest of this entry »

You know you’ve landed in Facebook hell when your favorite Scrabulous dies an early death due to a legal battle. Then to make things worse, the beta substitute of Hasbro’s Scrabble crashes and burns. However, you know you’ve landed in some kind of Jew heaven when Yiddish rules the National Scrabble Championship.

On NPR’s “All Things Considered,” the Wall Street Journal’s Stefan Fatsis reported the big news. More than 660 players played for four days in 28 games in Orlando. Nigel Richards, a security engineer from New Zealand, who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia was holding steady in a tie-breaker at 370 points against Brian Cappalletto (all you word geeks out there: just look at all those double letters). Cappalletto is an options trader from Chicago and a former national and world Scrabble champion. The boys were at a stand-off. There was nary a tile left in the bag.

These guys are smarties. Brian had played words like scerrying and sarcine, Fatsis reports. Nigel had played innerve and penates.

Nigel’s winning word?

Shuln. The Yiddish plural for shul.

That’s right, people. Shuln as in synagogues.

ck, this one’s for you!

This short film was created to promote the 1st Annual Arab-American Comedy Festival and has been re-released in order to promote the 2nd Annual Arab-American Comedy Festival which will be taking place at the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center in Dearborn, Michigan on August 15th 2008. The film is 13 minutes long and you can get more info about the Festival at mizna.tv.

Why is this here? Well… it’s kind of funny - reminds me of my 1st generation immigrant family (we also had a living room no one was ever allowed to use), they use the same logo as Jewlicious and… it’s really so over the top! Look, we can all sit in a circle, sing Kumbaya and then I can tell you that this is really some sort of plea for better relations between our communities. Of course I’d like nothing more than for the Arabs and the Jews to live in peace and all that, but really? I put this up because it’s well shot, well acted, well scripted and? Totally retarded.

It’s true, they do. (so says DJ Balagan) But for real check out his mix entitled “Germans Wear Obama Pajamas”, a mix that he made on trains and planes coming back through Germany last week right before Obama spoke in Berlin…
Grab it for a week before its gone! EXCLUSIVE! (download here)

also, pay special attention to O.C.’s - “Time’s Up”. The beat and rhymes are very Edan. You could see where Edan got his influence from….O.C. and mad old school joints….

Tracklisting:
Muddy Waters - Tom Cat
Annex Productions - www.com
Jorge Ben - Hermes Trimegisto Escreveu
Yusef Lateef - Mushmouth
El Guincho - Palmitos Park
MC Lyte - Cha Cha Cha
Stink - Girls Anthem
Leon Haywood - I Wanna Do Something Freaky To You
Grammatik - Friko
O.C. - Time’s Up
Los Pico Pico - Pico Pico
The Sylvers - Misdemeanor
Tones On Tail - Go!
Kaveret - The Grocery Store
Murderbot - Onlyworld

Note: The Messiah image was made by Yossi Belkin

Not soon enough for some.
CNN (as well as everyone else) is reporting that in a special address this evening in Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert announced that “he will not be his party’s leader going into the next election.”

Citing “a wave of investigations and criticism” at the hands of his political opponents, he said he will resign once his Kadima party elects a new chairman… “I am not doing this out of a feeling that I cannot do my job … I believe in my ability to continue,” he said at a news conference at his official residence… “When forced to choose between my own personal standing and considerations that relate to the welfare of the state, it is the latter that will take precedence.”

Olmert’s party, Kadima will be choosing a new leader on September 17th. General elections will be held some time next year although no date has been set. Olmert seems to have gone back on his previous assertion that he would resign only if he is indicted on corruption charges.

Recent peace overtures with Syria and the Palestine Authority, which many have claimed were a stunt meant to deflect attention from corruption investigations, will probably be stalled as Israel deals with being lead by a lame duck leader.

I have to say this whole affair, and the general corruption one finds amongst many of our elected leaders has been kind of, well… embarrassing. The image of Olmert chowing down on lobster with his son in New York at a meal paid for with scads of cash provided by Moshe Talansky, a shul going Modern Orthodox New York Jew is like, just tip of the iceberg. Will this embarrassment, this national shame be the straw that broke the camels back? Will it lead to much needed electoral reform and a system of checks and balances in the justice system that will help ensure that this never happens again? I hope so, otherwise we’ll just keep plotzing along - condemned to living in what is effectively a banana republic run by a corrupt, materialistic and greedy political elite.

Remember how horrified you were as a Jew when you read that Barack Obama’s Western Wall note was snatched and then republished by Israeli newspaper Maariv? And then afterward, how touched you were by the humility demonstrated by what was supposed to be a private message between Obama and God? Now it’s time to feel a little peeved and indignant if the claims of a Maariv spokesman are true that the contents of the note were approved for publication by the Obama campaign prior to the note’s insertion into the Western Wall. IsraelInsider claims that:

it now appears that Maariv had collaborated with the Obama campaign in getting the “private” prayer, with its “modest” supplicaton to the Lord, out to the public, buffing his Christian credentials and showing his “humility.” … It appears that Obama made Maariv an instrument of his will. The paper, of course, was a most willing tool … If the Maariv statement about pre-approval of publication of the note is true, it would mean that the Obama campaign had managed the event brilliantly, if deceptively, getting the double benefit of appearing to be victimized by the invasive Israeli press and prayer-thieving Jew while at the same time leaking out his humble Christian plea to the Lord … Revelation of this latest Obama collaboration with the media might detract a bit from the perceived sincerity of the prayer and strike some as an especially cynical use of the Kotel and an obstensibly private prayer to the Deity as a campaign prop. Most politicians suffice with getting a photo-op. Obama may be the first to take a prayer-leak on the Wall.

So either Obama was in fact a victim of some slimeball Kotel rat who filched his note and sold it to an Israeli newspaper, or the paper already had the contents of the note and may have been the victim of cynical manipulation or right wing elements are using this incident to paint Obama as a cynical manipulator or… Or all of the above. Or none of the above. Or people are just out to fuck with me.

UPDATE: Yeah. I think people are just out to fuck with me. Zvika Krieger over at the New Republic reports vis-a-vis the statements by the unnamed Maariv spokesman:

I just got off the phone with a Ma’ariv spokesman who says that the accusation is “completely false,” and that he has no idea who these papers were quoting from Ma’ariv. “No official spokesman for Ma’ariv told this to any of the papers.” I’ve got some calls in to these papers to find out where they got the quote. (I’ll update here when I hear back.) He told me definitively that “the Obama campaign did not give us a copy of the letter or approve it for printing.” … UPDATE 1: I just spoke with an editor at one of the four publications who quoted the alleged “Ma’ariv spokesman.” This editor broached the possibility that Ma’ariv was trying to deflect criticisms of it by releasing these spurious rumors about the Obama campaign, but upon realizing that they’ll have to back up those accusations, is now disavowing them. This editor is going to look into this alleged “Ma’ariv spokesman” they quoted in his publication so we can try to ascertain if this is a Ma’ariv cover-up. I’ll update here when I hear back from him and if I get anything interesting from the other publications who also quoted this alleged spokesman.

Oy. Stay tuned?

The Associated Press reports the following:

Two prayer services will be held at St. Louis gas stations to thank God for lower fuel prices and to ask that they continue to drop. Darrell Alexander, Midwest co-chair of the Pray at the Pump movement, says prayer gatherings will be held Monday afternoon and evening at a Mobil station west of downtown St. Louis… Participants say they plan to buy gas, pray and then sing “We Shall Overcome” with a new verse, “We’ll have lower gas prices.” … An activist from the Washington D.C. area, Rocky Twyman, started the effort, saying if politicians couldn’t lower gas prices, it was time to ask God to intervene… The group thinks the prayer is helping, saying prices are starting to fall below $4 a gallon.

I’m going to have to ask these people to please stop or else risk divine wrath. I mean if I were God and people started petitioning me for sub-$4 a gallon gasoline in a world full of poverty, hunger, disease and misery, well, let’s just say I’d be pretty annoyed. Besides, if you were going to have special transportation-related prayers, wouldn’t it make more sense to ask for better public transit or more environmentally friendly sources of energy? So as to, you know, better preserve and protect God’s green earth? At times like this, I would ask my Christian friends to consider “What would Jesus do?” and the answer to that is “He’d walk.” I mean do you really think Jesus would tool around the holy land in some crazy gas guzzling, smog belching SUV? Dudes! He’d walk! Maybe on special occasions he’d ride a donkey - but that’s as far as it would go.

So yeah, good people of St. Louis? Cut it out. Please.

June Walker, the chairperson of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and former national president of Hadassah, has died.

Walker died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer. She was 74 and lived in Rockaway, N.J.

“Leaders of the United States and Israel held her in high regard and respected the person even more than the positions she held,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the Presidents Conference’s executive vice chairman. “They, as we, recognized immediately her integrity, her intelligence and the sincerity of her advocacy. I am personally, as is the conference collectively, devastated by her passing.”

Walker took over last year as chairperson of the Presidents Conference, an umbrella group of some 50 Jewish organizations that aims to forge a communal consensus on matters of foreign policy.

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“Where are you my ratty assed Compadre?”

It’s really an irresistible combination - a smokey latin tune by Venezuelan-raised Banhart, featuring his girlfriend Natalie Portman in an only somewhat over the top Bollywood style scenario. It’s very cute, although I can certainly do without the peek at Banhart’s pubes…

The response to Heeb Magazine’s “Girls of 69″ Swimsuit calendar has been nothing short of spectacular, but this isn’t the case for all religion-based sexy calendars. Case in point: Chad Hardy, a lifetime member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and producer of both the 2008 and upcoming 2009 “Men on a Mission” calendar. Chad’s calendars feature shirtless Mormon missionaries as well as photos with them in their traditional white shirt, black tie and name tag outfits and biographical information outlining their religious beliefs. It seems kind of harmless, right?

Not so say the Church Elders who recently excommunicated Hardy for his role in producing the controversial calendar. Hardy, who has sold nearly 10,000 2008 calendars at $14.99 a pop and donated part of the proceeds to charity, is no longer an active Mormon so while he is a bit upset, it’s not likely this will affect him too much. As for Heeb’s calendar, you can probably order a copy from Heeb’s Web site, but if Ron Jeremy hasn’t been excommunicated by the Jews then it’s unlikely that Heeb Editor Josh Neuman will be.

Although really? They ought to excommunicate David Kelsey already. Not that he would care though.

Source: Jonathan Turley