And speaking of Brooklyn…The Park Slope Food Coop is currently considering joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions organization, a movement that wants everyone in the world to stop ordering vegan marshmallows, olive pesto, and a machine that helps you make your own seltzer from Israel. The coop which has 16,000 members will vote on March 27th. It’s actually incredible to me that this is a thing that is happening. In America. Never mind the fact that this foolishness impacts businessmen with families, and kids, and dogs, and babies, and all of those things, but to think that this is the way to harbor peace and change in the world. Welcome to protesting 2012. We don’t leave our homes to stand outside consulates any more with placards and bullhorns. We just don’t buy tehina.

Look, I can’t say that I agree with 100% of the things Israel does, but to think that a change in a Brooklyn supermarket’s inventory will impact an incredibly fraught political atmosphere. The notion of punishing the people, not the politicians frankly doesn’t work. And this by no means justifies any social injustice perpetrated around the world (whether or not such a thing exists is up for debate), but to hypocritically not exercise this practice in other aspects of your consumer life is baffling. Why are the socially conscious in Park Slope (16,000 of them!) still buying Apple products after news report after news report establishes Foxconn as an unhealthy workplace causing more than a couple of employees to commit suicide? And why isn’t the plight of the Tibetans a more widespread cause–after all, how many Park Slope Food Coop products are exported from China? Should I go on? Shall we walk down the aisles of the coop and point out how many problems there are associated with each and every food item? I mean, I’d be there all day. And that wouldn’t be allowed because I’m not a Coop members (hey, how’d you get in here!?!)

But the point here is not that the Coop’s cooperative heart isn’t in the right place because I’m sure it is. In fact, I know plenty of people from Park Slope. They’re adorably idealistic. I want to hug them all. But once you open this Pandora’s Box of finger pointing, why should it start and end with Israel? My parents’ generation would say that this is another form of Anti-Semitism. I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s coming from an uneducated and myopic place, where the world is made up of black and whites and where more is expected of Jews. It’s kind of a backhanded compliment.
Yet, there’s nothing black and white about the political situation in Israel, and there are no absolute right and wrongs. Both the Palestinians and the Israelis have a mutual responsibility to work this through which is why it’s taking so long to find resolution. They’re very passionate people, but perhaps everything could be worked out over vegan marshmallows and seltzer?

Jewdar is pleased to announce that the Jewish people no longer face any problems. That, at least, is the conclusion we draw from Elie Wiesel’s comments last week that Mitt Romney “morally…must respond” to news that some members of the Mormon Church did a posthumous baptism of Simon Wiesenthal. For those unaware, the Church of Latter Day Saints believes that one can be posthumously saved from eternal damnation; all they need is for a living Mormon to conduct a proxy baptism of the dead, whose soul will then be given the opportunity of remaining in hell or entering the Kingdom of Heaven (we presume most choose the latter). They’ve been doing this for years, but got into a bit of trouble years back when it turned out that they were baptizing Jews who’d died in the Holocaust. The Church had promised to stop baptizing deceased Jews, but a furor arose last week when it turned out that some Mormons, on their own initiative, had baptized Simon Wiesenthal. Which brings us to Elie Wiesel’s comments.

Now let’s say, first of all, that Jewdar couldn’t care less about posthumous baptism. In fact, we’ll go even further and say that as far as we’re concerned, any Mormon who wants to posthumously baptize us is free to do so. If, as we presume, the LDS are wrong, our soul will be untouched, and if they are right, then we get to go to heaven, which sounds like a pretty good deal on our part. But we strongly object to the notion that Mitt Romney needs to say anything on the subject. Romney is a Mormon; some other Mormons did something which some people think is wrong. At what point does a member of a particular religious community–even a prominent member–need to respond to every misdeed on the part of another member of that group? Joe Lieberman, for example, is the nation’s most prominent Sabbath-observing Jewish politician; I don’t recall anybody expecting that he needs to answer for the misdeeds of haredim in Beit Shemesh (and can’t help but feel that if he were called upon to do so, Elie Wiesel would be among those decrying it). Romney is a jackass, but we firmly support his right to be his own jackass, and not to be held accountable for the jackassery (real or imagined) of others.

Jewdar’s mother, however, offered an interesting possibility. Wiesel and Wiesenthal were longtime rivals, both for their differing ideas of how the Holocaust should be memorialized as well as for the status of “most prominent survivor.” Given this rivalry, Jewdar’s mother couldn’t help but wondering if this was Wiesel’s last little dig at his rival, denying him that last chance at salvation. We have an image of Wiesenthal about to enter the Pearly Gates, when St. Peter stops him and says “We’re sorry, Mr. Wiesenthal, but Elie Wiesel had them annul your baptism.” Wiesenthal drops to his knees, looks to the heavens (which in this case is straight ahead, not up) and shouts “Wieseellllllllllllllllllll!”
 
At any rate, if we’ve reached the point where we have nothing else to worry about other than the baptism of Jews who are far past the point of caring, we must be doing okay.

Two years ago, Brown and his then-girlfriend Rihanna were driving together when an argument ensued. Brown pulled the car over and then unleashed a physical assault so reprehensible and unforgivable that it included a choke-hold, multiple punches to the face and ribs, and, incredibly enough, borderline cannibalistic biting. Think about the unadulterated rage living inside of Brown, so all consuming that he never considered bruising the face of one of world’s most popular and most visible vocalists as a bad idea.

Now two years later, after the rumors of their reuniting have been substantiated, the conversation happening all over the Internet is both a bit confusing and very unfortunate. There are those that think beating a woman is something to make light of: the night of Brown’s Grammy performance, Twitter blew up with women inviting Brown to beat them, too. Have we reached a low point yet, Society? Then there are those that think Rihanna and Brown have a right to move on with their lives and if they make the choice to rekindle, then let it be. In fact, just moments ago, someone wrote to me in an email “I think survivors of violence should be allowed to make whatever decisions they want. Being beaten is a terrible experience. Whatever you need to do to process that and move forward is your prerogative as a survivor.” Rihanna should probably get used to her “survivor” title then.

I understand that major couple drama between two narcissistic performers is far from being analogous to the Holocaust, but when discussing today’s news with a fellow staff member, he said he couldn’t help but think of “survivor guilt.” “Does going back into an abusive relationship even make one a “survivor” anymore?” he asked. And it’s a point worth thinking about. Does Rihanna running back to Brown make our sympathies all for naught in retrospect. Does subjecting oneself to potential danger, danger that she or he is already familiar with, make that person less of a victim, and more of a masochist? “My own mind wanders to the Holocaust,” he continued. “I can’t help but think of the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry brings together a Holocaust survivor and a dude who was on the TV show Survivor, and they battled out who was the real survivor. My mind leans in that direction; that there is something ludicrous to think that one can actually “survive” something so brutal.”

But what about the songs themselves? Rihanna’s track “Birthday Cake,” which is as hyper-sexual as it is mediocre, eerily calls for Brown to “blow her candles out” and “I know you want to bite this.” Surely I can’t be alone in being incredibly uncomfortable with all of this. Brown’s “Turn Up The Music,” in contrast, is lighthearted and thematically unthreatening, but the underlying message is very clear. Men can get away with anything.

Rihanna’s capacity to forgive Brown for the monstrous beating he delivered to every inch of her body unsettles me as a parent, as a human, as a man who thinks hitting a woman is always wrong. It’s the way that we, as a society, are allowing for this to happen. It’s the way that her peers are not coming forth to disapprove or deliver a message of enlightenment and hope to Rihanna’s millions of fans. It’s the way that the Grammy Executive Producer Ken Ehrlich said “I think people deserve a second chance, you know. If you’ll note, he has not been on the Grammys for the past few years and it may have taken us a while to kind of get over the fact that we were the victim of what happened.” Yes, that we were the victims of what happened.

Something is fundamentally broken. One, that we can accept women beaters back into society despite the fact that they have not really taken the time off to seek true therapy. Keep in mind that Brown started work on his fourth album two months after he went rabid dog on his girlfriend. Why did his label think it was appropriate for him to get right back to work? What kind of message did that send to his fans and to Brown himself?
Two, I’m so tired of the retort that celebrities don’t choose to be role models. It’s unfortunately not a choice. I don’t expect Brown and Rihanna to know any better–they’re kids–but shame on the industry people around them for, if not dissuading them, bringing them to a more socially responsible place where this whole scenario culminates into a healthy message and pure resolve.

I find it disquieting that Brown’s Twitter profile proclaims “IM JUST MEEEE!FRESH IZ A WAY OF LIFE..so everyday is a new beginning.” Maybe it’s an over-think, but I see a guilt-free criminal asking that we accept him for who he is–a troubled and raging individual–asserting that he’s starting fresh with a new slate he hasn’t really earned. Everyday is a new beginning, the abuser tells the abused. Just come back. It won’t happen again.

Meet the king of New York’s gay Jewish nightlife. (Times of Israel)

He likes San Francsico. (The DCC)

Israel changes organ transplant policy to exclude haredim and others who refuse to donate organs. (Failed Messiah)

Sitting is the new smoking. (MNN)

Norman Finkelstein denounces “dishonest” and “cult” behavior by BDS. (Judaism Without Borders) (Jewlicious)

Next Thursday, February 23rd beginning at 8 PM, Heeb will be hosting a 10th anniversary party at New York’s notorious Lower East Side establishment Fontana’s. And as they used to say in 2002, things will most certainly get “jiggy,” the atmosphere will undoubtedly “raise the roof,” and it will be way more awesome than updating your “Friendster profile.”

HEEB’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY PARTY
2/23/12
8 PM
FONTANA’S, 105 ELDRIDGE ST.

Free gift bags and pins
Free mini knishes courtesy of Yonah Schimmel
Free vodka drinks from 8 – 9 PM
SO MANY FREE THINGS!!!!!

Leave your dignity at home. World touring DJs Krowd Pleezr, Jaclyn, and Yamez will make you do things with your body that even your Soul Cycle instructor can’t convince you to do.

See you there.

Now, it could be without backers because the only thing more boring than watching grown men tussle with gloves on is watching them whine about the humidity while they do it. It could also just be our old standby, anti-semitism! Probably not though.

Most likely, the folks who happened upon IMPACT’s fundraising page noticed that the project description is only one sentence long:

IMPACT–Jewish Boxers in America….Profiles of current great Jewish boxers in America who have left their mark on society and the Jewish people.

$20 gets you a DVD, $50 gets you “promotional consideration” on The Jewish Channel where it will be “seen” in 300,000 homes. The filmmakers are hoping to raise $10,000. Not a single shnook has backed this film yet, and it ends this Saturday at 4:38 PM EST.

Kickstarter can be like the wild west for artists and designers. Just last week the site broke all of its own records when it funded two separate million dollar projects in the space of 24 hours. Not everyone can rock wallets that hard, but at least put a little elbow grease into it and tell us why the hell we should give you a measly Andrew Jackson. If there’s anything Jews are good at, it’s asking people for money.

Well, apparently not all Jews are good at it. Try again, team IMPACT.

Along with microchips and falafel bars, Etgar Keret’s prose is one of Israel’s most widely exported creative products. Born in 1967, Keret has developed a literary voice that is unadorned, everyday and quirky, with voluminous pop culture references and an entire occupying army of recently dumped loser boyfriends—a big departure from what came before him in Israeli literature. Missing Kissinger in 1994 and The Story of the Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God, ten years later, propelled and cemented Keret’s reputation.

I recently spoke with the author over the phone in anticipation of the publication of his most recent short story collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door. I called Keret up on his cell phone, and he politely asked if I could try back on a landline after waiting five minutes. When I finally got him back on the phone half an hour later, he apologized:

“My son just kicked his grandmother, so I had to show some parental authority.”

I ask if the grandmother is alright.

“Yeah, my mother is OK, it’s just that I got into a philosophical argument with my son where he said all people are equal, and so everybody should be allowed to kick everybody. I counterattacked with the logic that without his grandmother’s existence he wouldn’t exist, but it doesn’t go vice versa. Therefore, we’re not all equal.”

I suggest that letting his mother kick back might have worked a little quicker.

“No,” he answers me, quite seriously. “Actually, my mother, if she would have kicked him, she would have thrown him a very long way. She kicks very hard, my mom…”

Then we got to the interview…

Your new collection, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, is coming out in English translation soon. Is there a point at which, when you’ve written a bunch of stories, you say, “OK, now I have a new collection?” Is there something that unifies your stories?

For me, basically what I do all my life, I write stories. I don’t write story collections, I just write stories. I think in each of my books there’s always one story where when I read it and say, OK, I’m working on a collection now. I’m not finished, I need to write a few more stories, but there’s something about that story that it makes me realize the other stories have something in common. In Suddenly, a Knock on the Door it was the title story that made me realize that the theme of why we write and what is the function of writing in my life, is at the center of it.

Do you read the translations of your work? Do you check them?

English is the only language beside Hebrew that I can understand so I’m much more involved in my translations into English than with others. Often, you know, I speak with my translators and I try to stress some points that were obvious for me when I wrote the story but which really can’t be accessed by translators unless I tell them about it. I’ll give you an example: when you work with extremely short fiction, I think it’s more difficult than translating, let’s say, novels. It’s actually closer to translating poetry. And many times, if it’s a linguistic story it can rely a lot on a double meaning of a word. And if it doesn’t work in another language it’s not something that you can just ignore and keep on going. It takes a lot of effort and sometimes it’s a question of, if you can’t keep two things—if you can’t keep both the meter and the meaning, which one is more important. That’s something that as a writer – it’s very helpful for the translator if you can show them your intuition. You know, what was the important thing when I wrote this paragraph?

Are there stories you wrote that just didn’t work in translation? Or where you’ve just said, “Look, this is impossible.”

There were a couple of stories that had a very strong, specific cultural association that I thought wouldn’t work in English. There is a story where the protagonist is the son of a famous Hebrew action character, Dani Din—the Israeli equivalent of Superman—and I thought that non-Israelis wouldn’t understand the connotation. The Israeli hero is called Dani Din and his superpower is he is invisible. I wrote a story about his son all the time trying to be like his father, but he could never imitate him because he doesn’t know what his father’s doing or what he looks like – because he can’t be seen. It had a lot to do with the feeling of the younger generation toward the one that came after the Zionist generation, basically that there’s something a little bit obscure and not completely pure about the Zionist ethos. Almost as if we grew up with a role model who was invisible but really powerful. I think it’s very powerful for the Israeli reader, but if you read this story with no associations, it wouldn’t work for you.

You talk about being a second-generation writer. In your movie, Jellyfish, one of the characters says, “Oh, you’re second-generation [Israeli]?” and the protagonist answers, “We’re all the second generation of something.” I think about how different you are from the generation above you—from Amos Oz, Yoram Kaniuk, A. B. Yehoshua—and one thing that jumps out is how they couldn’t escape the Zionist narrative, and all the writing about Jews and Arabs. You don’t do that, really. As you said in an interview once, you write about other issues that are ignored, largely because the focus is always on politics.

For sure. When I started writing I took criticism from writers like A. B. Yehoshua. But the thing is, it’s not that I don’t see myself as a political writer or a political entity, but with me there’s a sense that the hierarchy is the other way around. The political reality is, let’s say, indirectly responsible for our human condition. In Israel, if there’s one thing you can say about the political discourse, it’s that, when you say, “Ok, now I’m being political,” it means you have to say X, Y, and Z. For me, political discourse isn’t necessarily this way. As a writer my primary objective is to show some sort of ambiguity in life, and this ambiguity also exists in the political realm. It doesn’t mean that I don’t know right from wrong, I just don’t think that the stronger power is the one that tells people how to do things. Of course, if pragmatism was my strongest side I wouldn’t have become a writer. It’s definitely not very pragmatic sitting in a separate room and making up stuff that never happened. If I would have been a pragmatic person I would be prime minister by now. Anyway, I feel sometimes that I live in a society where you can choose your alliances. It’s a little bit like a tribal society: you live in this tribe or in that tribe… I want to make a more Socratic tribe.

So, for example, I wouldn’t write a story against raping women. I don’t think people read a story for that. But I could write a story that would show a person that basically we’re all potentially rapists and we should be aware of it. That’s exactly the kind of discourse that I want to have with my readers. It’s not a discourse that comes from a point of authority. I don’t go to my readers and say “I know what’s right and you should do it,” I speak to my reader and say, “You know, I have a problem and I want to share with you my problem because maybe you have it too. And even if you don’t have it maybe you have some empathy for my problem and maybe you’ll learn something from it.”

Has working in film changed your writing at all?

Well, there is a big difference between writing a story and writing a screenplay because, first of all, all the screenplays I’ve written in my life, I’ve written with another person. But more than that, when you’re writing a screenplay you’re not making a work of art, you’re just kind of making a recipe that if somebody will follow it, he will create a work of art. You have to be aware and conscious and able to explain, because there will be a guy who asks you what’s going on—the director, an actor—and you have to be able to explain to him. When you write a story you don’t need to do that, and I never do that.

There’s something about this cold-blooded aspect that’s always a part of screenplay writing; for me it doesn’t exist in fiction writing, where it’s uncontrolled. So I learned a lot of stuff from filmmaking that I think is relevant for my stories.

Your stories are often read aloud on the radio program This American Life. Do you like hearing your own stories being read, performed?

You’re always curious about the reader: Does he get your story or doesn’t he? It’s something that as a writer you don’t get answers to that much because, with film you can go to the screening and see if people are laughing or crying or if they’re scared, but when you write a book you don’t get to see people reading it. So when you get to hear other people doing a reading of it, it’s an amazing experience.

Suddenly, a Knock on the Door will be published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Translators are Nathan Englander, Miriam Schlesinger, and Sondra Silverston.

Photo by Martina Kenji.

I want to proclaim a Jihad against this Shit ________ Say video. Not just because the entire meme stopped being funny after the first five videos (I’m being generous). And not just because they heavy-handed the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a crudely edited and somewhat redundant video (Shit Girls Say, the original meme, clocked in under 1:30; this one goes on an interminable 5:15). It’s because they’ve created a politicized Shit ________ Say video for the sole purpose of trolling. Yes, that’s right. I know my own kind, and this video is only meant to anger the many, many, many (as I’ve noticed via Heeb commenters) tightly-wound, highly opinionated Jewish people.

Now someone out there will notice that most, if not all the people, in this video are Jewish. This just means you can’t call them anti-Semitic. But you can call them exceptionally lazy.

I run Hipsterjew.com. I’ve become unintentionally keen on noticing lazy jokes based on lazy stereotyping (for an Example, see my lazy post on Nehedar, or anything written on the internet mentioning ‘Hipsters’). It’s like Ann Coulter or Steve Crowder gave these people extensive pointers on how to make terribly unfunny, highly divisive videos. Shouldn’t these people instead be making unfunny PSAs about why stereotypes are hurtful? Or why Alan Dershowitz is the anti-Christ in human form? I suppose at this point I’m supposed to give some feedback about how they could have made this video interesting, but I don’t want another Shit ________ Say video, so I’ll just be a condescending dick instead.

Sexy Israeli fashion shoot parodies Israel’s gender segregated buses. (Jewschool)

The boobie beanie. (Laughing Squid)

How your cat is making you crazy. (The Atlantic)

Shrugging at BDS. (Forward)

Anonymous vows ‘crusade’ against Israel. (RT) (Haaretz)

Victoria’s Secrets coming to Israel. (ynet)

Mossad continues to use UK passports. (ynet)

Malaysia deports Saudi scribe over Prophet tweet. (Zee News)

The lost tribes of New Mexico. (The Seattle Times) via (Jewish Ideas Daily)