December 2, 2009

Football and Thanksgiving have gone together since the first professional league formed in 1902. It’s an American tradition found in every level of the game, from high school to the NFL’s Thanksgiving Classic.

Eric Schwartz has accomplished a lot in one day. He’s played dreidel with a Lady Gaga impersonator, avoided a meteor shower of mitzvah balls in space, fended off Martians and spent time text messaging in a synagogue — which he refers to as “temple textin’” — all by 6 p.m. There’s an hour to go before production on his new music video, “Honika Electronica,” wraps in Burbank, bringing an 11-hour shoot to a close.

It sounds like perfect fodder for a comic working the improv scene. A Jewish woman who is half African American and half Swedish is being sued by her Jewish in-laws because, they claim, she made them sound like racists in her stand-up comedy act. Oh, and by the way, the woman’s husband’s law firm is representing her against her husband’s own mother. This all may seem like a set-up to a great punchline, but for Los Angeles-based comedian Sunda Croonquist, “It’s not funny.”

European anti-Semites are pushing a new line “more pernicious than Holocaust denial” to denigrate the murder of six million Jews, warns veteran Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff.