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July 23, 2008 | 11:50 am
At the expense of incessantly unprepared for marriage Sacha Baron Cohen—you know him as Borat and Bruno and Ali G—Meredith Gordon wrote a very funny piece for Jewcy recently about Jewish moms and marriage. He wrote:
It’s safe to say that hell hath no fury like a pissed off Jewish Mother, and to add insult to injury, Mama Baron Cohen isn’t just mad, she’s…how do I say this…disappointed. Disappointment is the Achilles heal of all Jewish children, who would arguably prefer listening to Paris Hilton’s debut album from beginning to end than having to hear their mother utter the word “disappointed” in reference to them.
For a Jewish Mother, a wedding is the Senior Prom, the mother of all parties. It’s her opportunity to shine. For anyone who has been a bride or a groom at a Jewish wedding, you know that while you may be getting married, your Mother is getting recognition. It’s her day to show the world that she was such a good mom someone else actually finds her child desirable enough to take him or her off Mom’s hands. And while M.B.C. has the brass ring for aging Jewish Mothers--a grandchild--she hasn’t gotten the Crown Jewel of motherhood: a wedding.
While most Jewish parents would be thrilled to have a child like Sacha, whose religion is so important to him that he’s willing to wait to get married until he and his bride are of the same faith, M.B.C. is a reminder that when a pregnant woman says she just wants her child to be happy and healthy, she’s lying. Mothers want the trifecta: Happy, Healthy, and Married. Sacha Baron Cohen created the top grossing movie of last year, is often referred to as a genius, and even boasts a degree from Cambridge where he graduated Summa Cum Everything, and yet his mother is still disappointed because he’s not married.
All around the world, Jewish Mothers are united not by their religion but by disappointment when they can’t marry their children off fast enough. You might have just found a solution to bring peace to the Middle East and chances are your Mom is still going to say, “But solving the world’s problems leaves you no time to date.”
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July 23, 2008 | 11:03 am
I’ve referenced the “South Park” episode mocking 9/11 conspiracy theories countless times. Now, thanks to this shortened version of the episode I found on YouTube, you’ll know just what I’m laughing about.
The premise is ridiculous. One of the boys has gone No. 2 in the school urinal, and the search is on for the culprit. This weaves into a story about 9/11 conspiracy theories and a very insecure American president.
The above clip includes Cartman’s sensational terror theory fingering Kyle, the fourth grade’s only Jew, as the mastermind behind 9/11.
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July 22, 2008 | 5:23 pm
I’ve been waiting for tonight for about six months. In fact, three months ago when I first saw a trailer for the long-awaited “Dark Knight,” I no longer had much interest in the movie I had paid $10.75 for a midnight showing of. “Batman Begins” has been my favorite comic-book movie since it came out, surpassing “X2” and “Spider-Man 2.” And “The Dark Knight” looked so much, um, darker. Some friends have said they left the theaters feeling shaken or a bit sick to their stomach, and ready to see the movie again.
It’s difficult to imagine a film living up to this much hype. But everything I’ve read and heard says “The Dark Knight” does. And one of the comments I’ve heard over and over is that director Christopher Nolan really forces you to think. Not like watching an arthouse movie, but to think about the nature of man and the distinctions between good and evil, which is exactly where Hollywood Jesus picks up this “war of worldviews.”
The Dark Knight is a battle between the post-modern world view and that world view of absolutes. In fact, the Joker is the poster boy for post-modernism. He absolutely believes (and yes, I understand the irony of using that emphatic to express a post-modern viewpoint) that everything is relative, that the world would be better off if it let go of its delusions of order and a civilized society governed by laws. What’s more, the Joker believes that all it takes is some nudging and people will naturally embrace his style of relativistic thinking. When the circumstances are extreme enough, people will see there are no absolutes beyond what they believe is right for themselves. The Joker embraces this way of thinking so completely, that he has multiple realities to explain his scars and his creation, all equally plausible and real in his own relativistic mind.
The Dark Knight also demonstrates what happens when one completely embraces the post modern belief of relativisim: it destroys everything. Everything descends into chaos, fear, uncertaintly, hopelessness, and darkness. Of course standing against this is Batman, the Dark Knight. He believes that order and law are necessary, and he’ll do whatever it takes to enforce that belief… even if it means breaking the very laws that he believes are necessary. If that sounds contradictory to you, then you’re beginning to understand what makes Batman such a fascinating and complex character.
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July 22, 2008 | 2:57 pm
I often appreciate Jeffrey Goldberg’s quips and agree with his logic here:
It appears that Barack Obama has a busy day tomorrow in Israel, including the obligatory visits to Yad Vashem and Sderot, and, as a nightcap, a visit to the Western Wall, where, my friend Dina Kraft suggests, Obama will undoubtedly spend his time praying for the Jews to leave him alone.
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July 22, 2008 | 11:45 am
Yesterday I linked to Ali Eteraz’s classic blog post deciphering the Quranic passages that refer to Jews as “apes” and “swine.” Coincidentally, Slate was on a similar path last night with this report about what textbooks in Saudi Arabia really say about Christians and Jews.
Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question that appears in a recent edition of a Saudi fourth-grade textbook, Monotheism and Jurisprudence, in a section that attempts to teach children to distinguish “true” from “false” belief in god:
Q. Is belief true in the following instances:
a) A man prays but hates those who are virtuous.
b) A man professes that there is no deity other than God but loves the unbelievers.
c) A man worships God alone, loves the believers, and hates the unbelievers.The correct answer, of course, is c). According to the Wahhabi imams who wrote this textbook, it isn’t enough just to worship god or just to love other believers—it is important to hate unbelievers as well. By the same token, b) is also wrong. Even a man who worships god cannot be said to have “true belief” if he loves unbelievers.
“Unbelievers,” in this context, are Christians and Jews. In fact, any child who sticks around in Saudi schools until ninth grade will eventually be taught that “Jews and Christians are enemies of believers.” They will also be taught that Jews conspire to “gain sole control of the world,” that the Christian crusades never ended, and that on Judgment Day “the rocks or the trees” will call out to Muslims to kill Jews.
These passages, it should be noted, are from new, “revised” Saudi textbooks. Following a similar analysis of earlier versions of these same textbooks in 2006, American diplomats immediately approached their Saudi counterparts about the more disturbing passages, and the Saudis agreed to conduct a “comprehensive revision … to weed out disparaging remarks towards religious groups.”
Wow, what an improvement.
This is a major reason some American Jews believe peace in Israel is impossible: Many in the Muslim world are being groomed, through TV and their textbooks, to hate their Zionists enemies. I mean, they killed Farfur.
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July 22, 2008 | 6:04 am
Newsweek had another article recently about what God means to Barack Obama. I know, I’m really tired of this too, but the article had a great tidbit about Obama serving as a Shabbos goy after he joined the Illinois State Senate:
In 1999, while still in the Illinois State Senate, he shared an office suite with Ira Silverstein, an Orthodox Jew. Obama peppered Silverstein with questions about Orthodox restrictions on daily life: the kosher laws and the sanctions against certain kinds of behavior on the Sabbath. “On the Sabbath, if I ever needed anything, Barack would always offer,” remembers Silverstein. “Some of the doors are electric, so he would offer to open them … I didn’t expect that.”
If only Heeb had known. Maybe Obama could have penned these confessions last fall. I know he’s trying to smooth things over with all his Jewish friends.
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July 21, 2008 | 6:43 pm
Ali Eteraz writes a really good blog. At least, he did. His Internet home went dark last month. He can still be found writing for Jewcy and has a new site under construction, but that is taking a back seat to his book, “Children of Dust,” which is about freedom and fundamentalism in Pakistan. Eteraz grew up there, and two years ago today he wrote an excellent post recalling his revulsion the first time he heard Jews described as “apes” and “swine.”
The words, I believe, were spoken by his Islamic tutor, a reference to two Quranic verses that have been a historic source of anti-Semitism. Before Eteraz’s blog went offline, I saved a portion of the post, viewable after the jump:
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July 21, 2008 | 2:24 pm
Barack Obama arrives in Jerusalem tomorrow as part of his trip to countries with a lot of American foreign policy investment (the others were Afghanistan and Iraq). On the eve of this trip, Yossi Klein Halevi, who writes from The New Republic, welcomes Obama on behalf of Israelis who have been intrigued by his candidacy but remain anxious with his plans for handling Iran.
Still, as much as Israelis want to embrace you, there is anxiety here about your candidacy. Not that we doubt your friendship: Your description of Israeli security as “sacrosanct,” and your passionate endorsement of Israel’s cause at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington, were greeted with banner headlines in the Israeli press. Instead, Israelis worry that, as president, you might act too hastily in trying to solve the Palestinian problem, and not hastily enough in trying to solve the Iranian problem.
On the surface, the Israel you will encounter is thriving. The beaches and cafes are crowded, the shekel is one of the world’s strongest currencies, our high-tech companies are dominating NASDAQ, our wineries are winning international medals, and we even export goat cheese to France.
But beneath the exuberance lies a desperate nation. The curse of Jewish history--the inability to take mere existence for granted--has returned to a country whose founding was intended to resolve that uncertainty. Even the most optimistic Israelis sense a dread we have felt only rarely--like in the weeks before the Six Day War, when Egyptian President Gammal Abdul Nasser shut down the Straits of Tiran, moved his army toward our border, and promised the imminent destruction of Israel. At the time, Lyndon Johnson, one of the best friends Israel ever had in the White House, was too preoccupied with an unpopular war to offer real assistance.
We feel our security unraveling.
This article comes on the heels of some new bomb-Iran hysteria, sparked Friday by an op-ed Israeli historian Benny Morris penned for the New York Times. Here is what Gershom Gorenberg, Bernard Avishai (”the patients have the floor”), JTA’s Uriel Heilman and conservative gentile blogger Rod Dreher had to say about that.
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