More fashion for a cause? You betcha. After all, why \”Livestrong\” when you could \”Get Sababa?\”
Lance Armstrong\’s yellow \”Livestrong\” bracelets to benefit his cancer foundation are already passé. But hoping to start a fashion craze of her own, 27-year-old Traci Szymanski has launched Get Sababa, a clothing line in progress, complete with the now-requisite rubber-band bracelets. (Hers are blue-and-white tie-dye.)
My 90-year-old mother-in-law, who was born in Jerusalem, says that when she was a child no one had heard of red string. It was red ribbon then, and a bit was tied around her wrist after she recuperated from typhus.
Trends in apparel production are extremely important. Fashion is a $24.3 billion industry in California, and some of its larger corporations are intimately linked to Jewish philanthropic causes. Jewish involvement in the business nationwide stretches back 100 years, when European immigrants struggled to lift their families into the middle class.
Just remember: The most important parts of planning an event is having fun and enjoying the benefits of all your hard work.
Some might have found the joke funny, but the Orthodox Union (OU) isn\’t laughing. In May, Castaic resident Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik started YidGear.com , an online T-shirt shop that features humorous Jewish slogans — some mellow, some crude. One of the more sexually provocative designs featured the well-known OU kosher symbol with the phrase \”Eat me — I\’m kosher,\” available on T-shirts, boxers and thongs.
The Ohr Dessa Project was established 11 years ago by Rabbi Shlomo Bakst to rebuild Kiev\’s Great Choral Synagogue, completed in 1997. During reconstruction, Bakst became aware of numerous homeless Jewish orphans in Odessa. The Tikva Children\’s Home was created in 1996 as a spin-off of the Ohr Dessa Project.
The spring 2004 fashions have arrived in the chic boutiques of Paris, and along with 50s-style full skirts and prim lace collars, anti-Semitism is back in fashion.
In the past, PETA has been responsible for in-your-face activism like slinging red paint at people wearing fur coats and breaking into laboratories to set animals free. Their antics have at times influenced public opinion — such as turning the fashion tide against fur in the \’90s. But will this Holocaust campaign have a similar effect?
Is your image of a sweatshop a black-and- white photograph of Jewish garment workers marching for labor rights 100 years ago, or the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in 1911, in which hundreds of Jewish workers were trapped inside a burning building in New York (see sidebar)?
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