A linguist and a sociologist at Hebrew Union College have teamed up to track the inroads made into American English by words and idioms from traditionally Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and Hebrew. They've created an online survey and are looking for people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds to answer a few questions about their word choices, phrasing, and pronunciation. They're also trying to determine whether certain linguistic quirks usually attributed to Yiddish's influence are actually carried over from Jewish ancestors' speech patterns and accents, or whether they're merely an artifact from growing up in or near New York City. [via]
posted on Jul 23, 2008 - View this thread

Medinat Weimar wishes to establish a Jewish state in Thuringia, Germany, with the city of Weimar as its capital. A land without a people for a people without a land! Oh, wait ...
posted on Jul 8, 2008 - View this thread

Forgotten Architects: In the 1920s and early 1930s, German Jewish architects created some of the greatest modern buildings in Germany, mainly in the capital Berlin. A law issued by the newly elected German National Socialist Government in 1933 banned all of them from practicing architecture in Germany. In the years after 1933, many of them managed to emigrate, while many others were deported or killed under Hitler’s regime. Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects is a survey of 43 of these architects and their groundbreaking work.
posted on Jun 16, 2008 - View this thread

Houda Nonoo heads up Bahrain's Human Rights Watch and now she's been appointed Bahrain's (and anywhere else in the Arab world) first Jewish ambassador.
posted on May 29, 2008 - View this thread

Nationwide matzo shortage! Competing theories offer possible explanations. If you get desperate, make your own. (Gratuitous youtube matzo themed video.)
posted on Apr 20, 2008 - View this thread

"Today there is no eggroll..." As posted at jewschool, your best source for hip heeb hype,

Asian restaurants across [Israel]detante went on a one-day spring roll strike on Tuesday in protest over government plans to rid kitchens of foreign chefs, and said sushi and noodles would be the next items off the menu.
posted on Feb 13, 2008 - View this thread

Inspired by this article, I thought Christmas would be the perfect (huh?) day to introduce the late poet, author, spiritual leader, thinker, and civil rights activist Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel.
posted on Dec 25, 2007 - View this thread

Know your musical Jews!
posted on Dec 10, 2007 - View this thread

The Heeb 100 Heeb Magazine, you know that sometimes controversial magazine out of Jew York has recently released their list of the "100 people you need to know about" who also happen to be Jewish. Also, be sure to check out their reposting of an interview with art world honcho and big time heeb Zach Feuer.
posted on Nov 5, 2007 - View this thread

Upon the Nazi invasion of Poland, pediatrician Eugeniusz Łazowski and his friend Stanisław Matulewicz fabricated a fake typhus epidemic to save Polish Jews from the Nazis. Knowing that typhus-infected Jews would be summarily executed, non-Jews were injected with the harmless Proteus OX19, which would generate false positives for typhus.
posted on Oct 19, 2007 - View this thread

The SY Empire: A rare and fascinating look inside the secretive Syrian Jewish community of Brooklyn, which has drawn a bright line against assimilation called the Edict that casts out for life any "SY" who marries a gentile, even if they convert. (Crazy Eddie -- who knew? Seinfeld's mom -- who knew? Isaac Misrahi -- who knew? "J-Dubs" -- who knew?)
posted on Oct 15, 2007 - View this thread

An Unholy Act. This is the story of when two Jews disagree. Nothing new there. But a violent confrontation at UCLA brings to light the emerging divide among American Jews in regards to the most contentious issue of modern Jewish identity: Israel.
posted on Sep 10, 2007 - View this thread

JewTube. It's exactly what it sounds like.
posted on Aug 1, 2007 - View this thread

Got a spiritual question? Ask an Islamic scholar. Or ask a Trappist monk. Or ask a Catholic priest. Or a Lutheran pastor. Jewish? Ask a Rabbi. Jewish and like firearms? Ask a rabbi with a gun.
posted on Mar 14, 2007 - View this thread

My Jewish Birthday is better than yours. On my birthday, the Hasidic movement was founded, the first Chabad rabbi was brought into the world, and the Baal Shem Tov was born. So, how cool is your Jewish birthday?
posted on Mar 14, 2007 - View this thread

"Cohen on the Telephone" (real audio) is "not politically correct by modern standards, due to its Yiddish stereotyping, but certainly popular in its time and rumored to be the first comedy record to sell a million copies. This bit primarily made fun of the crude telephone system in use during 1913, when Joe Hayman recorded it in London in July of that year for Regal/Zonophone (it was issued on Columbia here in the States the following year). Several other labels hastily released versions by other artists, and a series of sequels followed right up into the mid-20's." Such as "Cohen Exceeds the Speed Limit", "Cohen at the Pay-station", "Cohen Phones His Tailor", "Cohen Telephones the Health Department" and "Cohen's Recruiting Speech" (all mp3s from The Virtual Gramaphone). There was even a movie.
posted on Feb 26, 2007 - View this thread

(NSFW) “If you are denying yourself pleasure then you have to take responsibility for where you are right now. When you get to a place where you are happy then love comes into your life. When you begin to love yourself then people recognize that and you can start receiving it. Self-pity will get you nowhere. Our society is sexist, racist, ageist, but I am a biological creature with all these amazing gifts of orgasm and I cannot wait for the world out there to change for me to be happy. I have all the happiness I need inside myself and I’m keeping it. I have denied it and avoided it for myself for too long. I have waited around for other things to be arranged before I gave myself happiness and I’m not going to do that anymore. It wasn’t until I stopped wallowing in all that self-pity and took matters into my own hands that things started to change for me. . . . Don’t wait around for another person to give that to you, give it to yourself. . . . We have been taught to not like ourselves and it takes a lot to unteach that to ourselves. There is a lot of conditioning and everyone has their own kind of conditioning that they have to unlearn. . . . All I can tell people about myself is that I give it to myself just as I can. My area just happens to be sex, while others have art, painting or public health or whatever. I’m just as true to myself as I can be.” --Nina Hartley
posted on Sep 23, 2006 - View this thread

I'm a Jewish Yankee Doodle Dandy and other Yiddish sheet music on topics ranging from the Dreyfus affair to interreligious romance. How Broadway evolved from Yiddish theater.
posted on Sep 22, 2006 - View this thread

Chinese Jews and the Silk Road. Maps. [more inside]
posted on Jul 25, 2006 - View this thread

Jewsfilter: Rabbinic Council of America bans smoking for all Orthodox Jews "Jewish law is fully able to incorporate new realities, recognize new and reliable scientific findings, and embrace the need to change heretofore acceptable behavior." Read the full technical legal opinion here. [pdf] Now if only the Orthodox Union would stand up for the LBGT community in same the way that it has for Darfur, stem cell research, heck, even global warming...
posted on Jul 7, 2006 - View this thread

For Orthodox Jewish mothers with small children, the Shabbat can be challenging. The answer, for many communities, is the establishment of an eruv (discussed previously here, in passing). This San Francisco Chronicle article details the history behind Berkeley, California's unique instance. This isn't the first time an eruv has been attempted in the Bay Area: the failed effort to create one in Palo Alto was covered by the Chronicle, as well as the Jewish News Weekly. Berkeley isn't the only United States city with an eruv—the Boston eruv maintains a large list of domestic and international eruvim—nor is it the city with the most unusual eruv, or even the largest. Inevitably, perhaps, there's a blog entirely dedicated to the subject of eruvim, and vigorous commentary on the subject from several others.
posted on Jul 7, 2006 - View this thread

The War For Hasidic Williamsburg: Immediately after the recent death of the Satmar Grand Rebbe his two sons went to war over over which one will be the new leader of what is perhaps the largest Hasidic sect in the United States. This sect is extremely anti-modernist, even compared to other Hasidic groups, and it also strongly anti-Zionist. A former leader of the Satmars once blamed the Holocaust on the Zionist campaign for a Jewish homeland. But this internal battle is not the only threat to the community. The gentrification of Brooklyn (warning: pdf link) has both driven up the price of land, making it extremely difficult for the large families of the Satmar to obtain additional housing, and made it far more difficult for the youth to escape the corrupting moral values of the outside culture.
posted on May 6, 2006 - View this thread

Jerry Lewis at 80 (more inside)
posted on Mar 13, 2006 - View this thread

“Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution” -- an online exhibit
posted on Mar 7, 2006 - View this thread

It's lonely to be a Jewish neo-Nazi.
posted on Mar 2, 2006 - View this thread

London's mayor suspended for four weeks for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.
posted on Feb 24, 2006 - View this thread

The real Jewish Underground — During the Nazi occupation of World War II, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Jews were killed or transported to Nazi concentration camps. In 1942 and 1943, thirty-eight men, women, and children aged 4 to 74 years survived by living underground in two caves for nearly two years (their 344 day stay in Priest's Grotto beat Michel Siffre's 1972 NASA research study.) Emerging at night to cut firewood and steal food, these unwilling troglodytes returned to the cave before dawn to avoid capture. Spelunker Chris Nicola first discovered their survival story (PDF, pp. 6-12) in 1993.
posted on Feb 22, 2006 - View this thread

"They are demanding that I kill the children of my people with my own hands"
On October 4, 1939, a few days after Warsaw's surrender to the Nazis, Adam Czerniaków was made head of the 24 member Judenrat, the Jewish Council (write "Czerniakow" in the linked page's search box) responsible for implementing German orders in the Jewish community (interactive map of the Warsaw ghetto). On July 22, 1942 -- Tisha B'Av, the "saddest day in Jewish history" -- the Judenrat received instructions that all Warsaw Jews were to be deported to the East (exceptions were to be made for Jews working in German factories, Jewish hospital staff, members of the Judenrat and their families, and members of the Jewish police force and their families. Czerniaków tried to convince the Germans at least not to deport the Jewish orphans). Czerniaków kept a diary from September 6, 1939, until the day of his death. It was published in 1979 in the English language as the "The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom", edited by one of the most prominent Holocaust scholars, Raul Hilberg. More inside.
posted on Feb 17, 2006 - View this thread

Nazi's relative turns Israel lover. Matias Goering is a direct descendant of Hitler's right-hand man. He also keeps Shabbat, wears a kippa, and identifies with the Greater Israel vision of West Bank settlers. (via jewlicious)
posted on Jan 24, 2006 - View this thread

"Ala ZongGoNin! Ala YouTaNin!". Jerry Moses last walked on Gaoyang Road in 1947. It was called Chaoufoong Road then, and it was home to many of the 18,000 European Jewish refugees who had sought refuge from Nazi Germany in Shanghai's Hongkew District (today known as Hongkou) during the run-up to World War II. He casts his gaze at the lane, his brow loosens and he begins to nod. "This is it, this is it," he says softly. "I know this is it." One week into his first visit to Shanghai in almost 60 years, Moses has found his third home in an exile that lasted from 1941 to 1947. He strides into the space, his manner now much closer to that of the 12-year-old boy who had left than the 70-year-old man who has returned. More inside.
posted on Jan 19, 2006 - View this thread

"One could go on, and one will -- praising (...) the National Center for Jewish Film for releasing all four of Edgar Ulmer's Yiddish films in restored editions. But the DVD player is beckoning, and I think it is time for me to get back to the couch".
The National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF) is a unique nonprofit motion picture archive, distributor and resource center housing the largest, most comprehensive collection of Jewish-theme film and video in the world. In their archives you can discover the works of Leo Fuchs, the "Yiddish Fred Astaire", restored gems (scroll down) like "Motl the Operator" and re-releases like "The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg". (More on Greenberg, the Jewish kid who challenged Babe Ruth’s homerun record here, more on the NCJF inside).
posted on Jan 9, 2006 - View this thread

A rabbi, some snails, the color purple, and a 1,500 year old mystery. By puzzling through various sources, a group of researchers and religious scholars think they have found in the mollusk Murex trunculus the source of a purplish dye that was used in ancient Jewish ceremonies over a millennia and a half ago. Murex has been used for the last 3,600 years to make Imperial or Tyrian Purple, a key color in the ancient world. There are many other pigments with their own interesting stories as well.
posted on Dec 20, 2005 - View this thread

Jewish movie goers might feel duped by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Millions of readers (and, now, moviegoers) who thoroughly enjoyed a fantasy tale of four World War II-era British children tumbling into the enchanted world of Narnia via a wardrobe, and fighting medieval battles alongside talking animals and mystical creatures, would be surprised to learn that “Lion” and the six other books in Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia were seeping with Christian allegories.
posted on Dec 16, 2005 - View this thread

Eroica. Film director Andrzej Munk’s tragic death at age thirty-nine might have formed the plot for one of his own darkly sardonic works: a Polish Jew and an active resistance worker during the war, he was returning home from shooting his film Passenger at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1961 when an oncoming truck struck his car. He left behind only four feature films, but his influence was prodigious. As one of the key figures of the postwar “Polish School” of filmmaking, along with Wajda and Kawalerowicz, he helped to shape a vision that broke with the official social realist optimism of Eastern-bloc dogma and cast a skeptical eye on official notions of heroism, nationalism, and life in the Stalinist-occupied state. Mentor to Roman Polanski and Jerzy Skolimowski, his influence can be felt even in the films of a later generation of Polish filmmakers — directors like Zanussi and Kieslowski. More inside.
posted on Dec 7, 2005 - View this thread

"It is absurd to talk about a Judeo-Christian tradition".
I had been born in the United States but didn't know any English because none was spoken at home or in the streets. We were a solid enclave of some 600,000 Eastern European, Yiddish-speaking Jews. But I still remember one day that a missionary came to the door with what I still have my copy of: a Yiddish translation of the New Testament. There's a kind of grim joke in that, isn't there? In the mere existence of it.
Harold Bloom on religion in America, God smoking a cigar, and who really is the King of the Jews.
posted on Dec 4, 2005 - View this thread

The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music
posted on Sep 12, 2005 - View this thread

Kabbalah Energy Drink is a combination of Kabbalah Water and and energy drink. The makers are "courting the Red Bull market" according to Darin Ezra, head of the LA Kabbalah center.
posted on Aug 24, 2005 - View this thread

Can Jewish settlers live as Palestinians? A series of essays from Bitterlemons, which regularly features Israeli and Palestinian commentary on the significant issues of the conflict, with the goal of maintaining a constructive dialogue.
posted on Apr 18, 2005 - View this thread

Israeli Pro-Palestinian activist Tali Fahima to remain in custody. Tali Fahima grew up in a conservative desert town in Israel and voted Likud for years. As the second intifada erupted she read about the brutality of the occupation on the Internet and eventually travelled to Jenin refugee camp where she met Zakariyeh Zbeideh, a local leader of the terrorist organization and Fatah offshoot, Al-Aqsa Martyr's Brigade. She was arrested and jailed in Israel, accused of translating a document for Zbeideh into Arabic. that allowed him to warn fighters marked for Israeli assassination.

Fahima has been under arrest nearly six months. Her case has gained prominence not just because she is an Israeli Jew supporting Palestinian resistance but because she is a Mizrahi, a Sephardic or "Arab" Jew. This group has historically formed a solid bloc of support for aggressive policies against the Palestinians. [MI]
posted on Jan 30, 2005 - View this thread

And then there was one. Following the death of his neighbour Ishaq Levin, Zebulon Simentov has become the last Jew in Afghanistan. There have been Jews here since at least the eighth century, but now Simentov is on his own.

But the saddest fact of all is the fact that up until his death the two men hated each other.
posted on Jan 26, 2005 - View this thread

Highlights bigotry or encourages it?
Ali G comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest Channel 4 show, 'Borat's Television Programme', is being investigated by TV watchdogs following complaints about a sketch featuring an anti-Semitic song titled 'Throw the Jew down the well'.

A Channel 4 spokesman said: "Sacha Baron Cohen's humour is ironic and actually highlights bigotry and ignorance." The irony being that Baron is himself a Jew.
posted on Aug 22, 2004 - View this thread

The Last Jews of Libya.
posted on Oct 16, 2003 - View this thread

Hatred via weblog. The Jewish Internet Association, a tax-exempt, non-profit California corporation, considers the Internet a battleground, where "every channel must be utilized to resist and convert others to our defense and support." A whois showed they have the same mailing address as palestinefacts.org. However, examining their weblog reveals an agenda that is every bit as hateful as Hamas.

From a recent entry: "The Palestinian Arabs go through a pretense of having a government" .... "This must end. In the past the only way such murderous, bastard regimes have ended was through massive destruction of their people and lands." .... "The same process will be required to end the fraudulant "peace process" and come to the point where there can be a new start."

The JIA site links to a guide for shutting down offensive websites. Do you think the same techniques would work against them too?
posted on Oct 16, 2003 - View this thread

Gefiltefilter. Metagefilte?
posted on Oct 2, 2003 - View this thread

Bar Mitzvah Disco • When We Were Shtetl Fabulous
"If you are Jewish, there would have been a golden year when it seemed like you attended a bar mitzvah disco almost weekly. Each one was like a pee-wee Studio 54, a potent cocktail of ritual, acne, insecurity, and hormones run amok." Help the folks at Bar Mitzvah Disco gather photos, stories and details from Bar/Bat Mitzvahs from the 70s and 80s to publish in their forthcoming book on the subject.
posted on Jul 31, 2003 - View this thread

Red, White and Jew --an examination of 6 issues facing the American Jews of today and tomorrow, religious and non, from the holocaust as history to Israel fatigue to Jewish conservatives.
...We can finally be Jewish and American, but somewhere along the line nobody bothered to figure out entirely what that meant. So it falls to us, the next Jewish generation, to balance the scales. Will we be more Jewish, more American, or a fusion of the two? More importantly, how will we do it?
posted on Jun 16, 2003 - View this thread

Have you ever wondered what Xmas would be like if it were a Jewish Holiday? Precisely defined rules for preparing for the holiday, procuring and decorating the tree, cooking the festive meal, giving gifts, and all other seasonal celebrations. With footnotes! Songs! More footnotes! Riddles! Even more footnotes! [via Making Light] (This is a Geocities site, so don't all rush there at once and overload it, OK?)
posted on Dec 10, 2002 - View this thread

Todd Levin: "The United States of America According to my Racist Aunt" There's one in almost every family, and Todd does a hilarious map of the wisdom his racist aunt has shared over the years.
posted on Oct 28, 2002 - View this thread

To be a great photographer, Garry Winogrand liked to claim during the 1970's, it was first of all necessary to be Jewish Why didn't they tell me this in art school? (via NYTimes)
posted on Jul 7, 2002 - View this thread

We all deserve a data sabbath. A weekly shunning of modern technology, shopping, and work. Do you observe one?
posted on Jun 7, 2002 - View this thread