While the Break Up might have been the biggest seller this past weekend, its writer and co-producer is not a sell-out. Writer Jeremy Gerelick recently spoke at NYC’s MJE about his career in front of a gazillion people. And hold on the your hats: He’s marrying a member of the Tribe, and going to pre-marriage classes witha Rabbi.

“The Break-Up” opens June 2, and [Jeremy] Garelick is getting married soon thereafter. His bride, Samantha Rifkin, is a chef whose father is the cantor at the Conservative Rockland County, N.Y., synagogue that Garelick’s family attends.

He credited his parents, who were at the event, for raising him with Jewish values. He attended a Solomon Schechter day school from third through eighth grade and spent summers at Camp Ramah. He and Rifkin have been studying at MJE with rabbis Mark Wildes and Ezra Cohen; most recently they have been studying the laws surrounding marriage.

This is all too sweet and it makes this Rabbi cry with joy! MOT and Pre-Marriage counselling with some great Rabbis in NY… Yes of course I am biased, thats what I am paid for.

Wishing Jeremy and Samantha Mazel and Bracha and inviting them to honeymoon in Southern California next February….

PS: This makes it 2 for the year Esther? Is anyone keeping count?
PPS: For an in-depth look at this Garelick the Proud, see this article on Atlanta Jewish Life.

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Rabbi Yonah

13 Comments

  • Never liked the perjorative “Yid,” even from other Jews…Jews who use the term always struck me as trying a little too hard/too self-consciously to be edgy and hip. Why not leave the ethnic slurs to the antisemites?

  • @RabbiYonah:

    Technically, that’s true. But it’s not the way 99.9% of the world (in the Tribe and outside) understands it. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Google (without quotes): “What is a Yid?” The very first thing that comes out is a Wordnet (Princeton U.) entry equating it with “kike.”

    I think you’d be rather hard-pressed to find anyone in the real, 21st-century world who considers the term complimentary, or even neutral. A good comparison is probably “Negro.” Yes, it simply means “black person,” but it’s acquired certain overtones.

    (And the “Yid”-as-perjorative phenomenon isn’t confined to the English-speaking world. “Zhid” (e.g., “Yid”) is used as a perjorative in Russian.)

    At any rate, we can agree to disagree. 🙂

  • Middle:

    Seriously? You didn’t know that? Wow. So, in Yiddish, “Yiddish” means “Jewish”.

    Anti-semites say “Yid”. A Yid pronounces it more like “Yeed”.

    And it’s our word (OK, the Ashkenazi part of us, anyway). Just because the anti-Semites use it as an insult doesn’t mean that it is one.

  • My familarity with yiddish is limited to words that have entered the English lexicon: putz, schmuck, chutzpah, etc…

  • think you’d be rather hard-pressed to find anyone in the real, 21st-century world who considers the term complimentary, or even neutral. A good comparison is probably “Negro.” Yes, it simply means “black person,” but it’s acquired certain overtones.

    Well well, this is not the discussion I though would ensue, but here it goes.

    Observant Jews taht speak YIDdish say the word Yid many times a day in no way other than the simple meaning. How it is pronounced depends on the geography of the dialect. Hungarian Jewish pronunciation is different than a Lithuanian one..

    But what was so strange was your tone. Are you implying that I am not in this century?

    Well I don’t take bait, so I won’t repay the insult in kind.

    Yid, Yeed, Yiden, are all normal terms not unlike Jew. Jew also has the ability to be used in a negative way, “I Jewed him down…” but this does not make the word Jew an off-limit word.

    Heeb on the other hand…

  • Sorry if you thought I was baiting you, or found my tone objectionable. I intended neither of those things, and apologize if I caused offense.

    I’ll simply point out that not all of us (in fact, a majority of us) didn’t grow up in the Orthodox community. Yiddish is not everyone’s mama loshen. (Witness “themiddle’s” comments, which I think are very typical of the average American/Diaspora Jew’s familiarity with the language.)

    Since I don’t travel much in Orthodox circles, I’m perhaps more attuned to hearing this word in the mainsteam-American (or assimilated Jewish, if you like) way. So I should also apologize for not having given you enough credit to realize that you were using the word in its correct sense.

  • Apologies accepted, the Jewish world is huge.

    In Poland, the Jews who didn’t know anything about being Jewish, reclaimed the word Yid with a left-wing ortho-reform anarchist newspaper called Yiddele.

    Zhid is Jew in Russian, Polish, and other slavic tounges. I often got called Zhid walking around Poland when we lived there. While they meant it in a disparaging way, well, I always would smile, and think to myself “What a smart Polish person, who recognizes this son of Abraham and Sarah walking in a strange land.”

  • Yid if from Jehuda. That is where “Jew” comes from also. We are “Judeans” or Jehuda-ans, shortened to the first syllable.

    But anyway, it won’t matter eventually if we don’t have some children. Kid rhymes with Yid.

    How nice this man is doing some intelligent and manly things.

    When is Marry Your Girlfriend Day?

  • Jehuda derives from the word for “thank you” as in Toda. We are all really “Thank You People”. Leah thanked God for her son and named him Jehuda, or Thank You.

    That is why it is good to say the Moda Ani prayer in the morning when you get up. We are thankers first and foremost.

  • I agree with Jewish Mother. When I thank God (for anything, or just for existing), I actually feel better than I did the moment before.
    Has anyone else ever had this feeling?