November 15, 2007 | 8:26 pm

¡Hasta la lingua! Goodbye, tongue! Hello, pastrami!

Posted by The Web Guy

From the BBC:

An indigenous language in southern Mexico is in danger of disappearing because its last two speakers have stopped talking to one another.

Of course, this begs the question “If two Jews means three opinions, how many languages do two Jews speak?”

OK.  Maybe not ‘of course,’ but with the writers on strike, it’s hard to get a good segue in this town!

At The Jewish Journal, people speak English, Hebrew, and Farsi;  sometimes the odd Yiddish or Yinglish word sneaks in.

I’d post some more—I’m fascinated with words—but I’m not speaking with you anymore.

Instead, let’s all sing along to the only song I know that mentions pastrami—the klezmer classic ‘Rumania, Rumania’

November 14, 2007 | 12:21 am

Times are a-changin’, Mobius tells Jewish establishment

Posted by JewishJournal.com

One of the inspirations for my work here at JewishJournal.com was a guy I at first knew only from his blog.

He called himself ‘Mobius,’ and founded the Jewschool blog which talked about being Jewish in the 21st century in a way I could relate to, and, arguably, started the JBlog onslaught online.

Passionate, smart, and impatient,  Mobius was recently plucked from blogistan and hired as The Web Guy at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (The Al-Jazeera of the Jewish International Media Conspiracy, Inc.).

Mobius—real name Dan Sieradski—is in Nashville for this year’s General Assembly of The United Jewish Communities. The 2006 ‘GA.’ was a real snoozer, according to the coverage we ran last year.

He blogged about the GA earlier this week (pointing out some of the rampant BS in the air) and spoke to the part of the august assemblage today, reinforcing Stanley Gold’s insistence that the Federation system as we know it is largely irrelevant.

Mobius used the ‘web as empowering agent’ model to illustrate one way to the future. The WWW is two-way conduit, and the future lies in helping people connect and work together, on their own ideas, on their own initiatives, on and offline. 

(I like how he was described in the news story.  I wonder how many editorial hours were were spent on the wording!)

. . . Closing the plenary was JTA’s director of digital media, Dan Sieradski, a Jewish Web maven. Known outside JTA as Mobius, the Orthodox Anarchist, Sieradski started the influential and iconoclastic blog Jewschool, and is prone to post-Zionist outbursts.

The speakers offered some critical advice. Sieradski scolded the established Jewish community as too parochial in its funding, and he called grant makers “disconnected” and “soul crushing.”

The next big Jewish idea, in fact, “has probably already come and gone, and been shot down by no less than a dozen Jewish grant-making organizations,” he said. “And because the innovator will have no resources at his or her disposal with which to continue his project, he will probably walk away from it crushed and discouraged. And a revolutionary idea that could have transformed American Jewry forever will never come to be.”

Still, Sieradski envisioned a future federation system much like the one described by Kanfer, in which the federation is not the seed bearer for new Jewish initiatives but the system that nurtures those ideas by accepting and funding them.

The full article is here.

Anyhow, right on, Mobius, and let’s go, Stanley Gold.  Enabling and empowering are the most important parts of your job. 

Chabad’s Bob Zimmerman said it in 1963, too:

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin’.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’.

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November 12, 2007 | 8:54 pm

Jewish Army chaplain in Afghanistan juggles outreach to local Muslims, interfaith counseling, and th

Posted by JewishJournal.com

Excellent profile of Army chaplain Rabbi Shmuel Felzenberg from the Christian Science Monitor:

Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan - When the bus doors open, 20 soldiers clamber out, laughing, reaching for their cameras like college kids on spring break. Yet they haven’t traveled far. Part of the Army’s 82nd Airborne, they’ve driven 10 minutes across this coalition forces base from their US camp to the Egyptian-run hospital compound.

Still, in a space bound by blast-walls and concertina wire, this qualifies as an adventure because, during the next couple of hours, they will bring together two disparate worlds: that of Afghan villagers who’ve suffered the ravages of consecutive wars and that of Americans who have gathered in church basements and synagogues, private homes and community centers from New Jersey to California, filling boxes with donated items – everything from toys to toiletries.

Directly or indirectly, the boxes wend their way to the offices of US Army chaplains, who turn the distribution of donations into a feel-good outing for their soldiers.

At the helm of this base outreach program is Shmuel Felzenberg, an Army captain who darts around the grounds as soldiers unload boxes from a truck and set up tables. Under his military cap he wears a black yarmulke, and on his uniform the insignia that mark him as a Jewish chaplain – two tablets topped by a star.

“Ready to go hot,” he calls out, and the soldiers position themselves behind the tables.

Minutes later, Afghan women in dark-colored head scarves and blue, pleated chadris (full head and body veils) queue up at the gate. Egyptian soldiers usher them in, and as the Afghans move from table to table, American soldiers, semiautomatic rifles slung across their backs, reach into the boxes and hand them sweaters, shoes, baby clothes, notebooks, and toys.

Chaplain Felzenberg rummages through a separate box and extracts woolen caps that one of his daughters knitted – “Bless her heart, he says, “she put them in separate bags but didn’t mark the sizes.” Then he pulls out a loose-fitting top he last saw on his wife. “It’s going to be emotional to give some of this out,” he says, “but hey….”

While his supplies last, he hands clothing from his ultra-Orthodox Jewish home to Muslim Afghan children whose mothers wear the orthodox-Muslim chadri.

Read the whole article and screen the video. 

It’s the least we can do on Veterans Day.

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November 12, 2007 | 11:39 am

We are having technical difficulties

Posted by JewishJournal.com

JewishJournal.com was offline for about ten hours overnight, a repeat of the same technical glitch that knocked us offline earlier last week. 

We apologize for any inconvenience and want to reassure you that we are working closely with our hosting company’s network engineers to stop the foo.

This was not the rumored Al-Qaeda cyber jihad attack, by the way, just some runaway PHP/MySQL madness.

Thank you for your patience.

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November 9, 2007 | 4:22 pm

They hate us for our freedom—and Christmas and Chanukah soft drinks, too!

Posted by JewishJournal.com

God bless America—the only place in the world where intrepid food technologists dare create ham-flavored sodas for Xmas and latke-flavored pop for Chanukah!

From the AP:

SEATTLE - It’s rare to find kosher ham. Rarer still to find it carbonated and bottled. Jones Soda Co., the Seattle-based purveyor of offbeat fizzy water, said Friday that it was shelving its traditional seasonal flavors of turkey and gravy this year to produce limited-edition theme packs for Christmas and Hanukkah.

The Christmas pack will feature such flavors as Sugar Plum, Christmas Tree, Egg Nog and Christmas Ham. The Hanukkah pack will have Jelly Doughnut, Apple Sauce, Chocolate Coins and Latkes sodas.

Jones Soda may be onto something, especially if the flavahs are kosher!

Think of the possiblities—a nice glass chicken-soup-flavored pop for Shabbat, a maztoh-brie cooler for Pesach, and some poppyseed-based elixir for ‘ad lo yadah’ on Purim!

And that’s not chopped liver!

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November 8, 2007 | 7:54 pm

Thank God for coffee

Posted by JewishJournal.com

No, I really mean it.  We must not forget to thank God for coffee—it gets you up in the morning, helps you maintain on extremely difficult work days and it tastes darn delicious!

The brewed extract of the roasted seeds of an evergreen bush of the genus Coffea is one of HaShem’s miracle drugs.  Aside from its uplifting effect, it eases migraines and also appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, diabetes mellitus type 2, cirrhosis of the liver, and gout.

So how to thank God for coffee?

My friend The One True b!X composed this prayer, popularly known as the ‘Hail Juan’ prayer”

Hail Juan
Full of grace
The Bean is with Thee.

Blessed art Thou among bloggers
And blessed is the fruit of Thy agriculture
Coffee.

Holy Juan
Father of *twitch*
Pray for us sinners
Now and at the hour of our final cup

An excellent sentiment, but Roman Catholic, like its purported patron saint, coffee grower Juan Valdez.  Juan does not look Jewish, either.

So what is the proper Jewish blessing one should offer before sipping this magic elixir?

ברוך אתה ה’ א‑לוהינו מלך העולם, שהכל נהיה בדברו.‏

Transliteration: Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha‑olam, she‑hakol nih’ye bidvaro.

Translation: “Blessed are you, LORD, our God, King of the universe, through whose word everything comes into being.

Mmmmmmmmm, coffee!  (I’m currently featuring Peet’s newly-released 2007 Holiday (non-sectarian) Blend.

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November 2, 2007 | 3:28 pm

Top Ten Ways to tell if Al-Qaeda has vandalized this Web site

Posted by JewishJournal.com

Debka.com, an Israeli site that tracks intelligence news, claims the cowardly pigs of Al-Qaeda are about to launch a cyber jihad:

On Sunday, Nov. 11, al Qaeda’s [sic] electronic experts will start attacking Western, Jewish, Israeli, Muslim apostate and Shiite Web sites. On Day One, they will test their skills against 15 targeted sites expand the operation from day to day thereafter until hundreds of thousands of Islamist hackers are in action against untold numbers of anti-Muslim sites.

While JewishJournal.com is not an anti-Muslim site, we are both American and Jewish, and therefore a potential target if this report is true. We think our firewall is secure, and we make daily off-site backups, so we’re not scared.

If I’m out of touch November 11, however, here are the Top Ten Ways to tell if Al-Qaeda crackers have vandalized this Web site:

10. The Calendar Girls get burkas

9. Obituaries page is now the Martyrs page

8. JDate.com links now go to Jihad Date

7. Internal search engine no longer lists synagogues, but you can find suicide bombers by zipcode

6. Shabbat candlelighting time changed to weekly bomb-making time

5. Letters-from-the-editor replaces letters-to-the editor

4. Arts & Entertainment section renamed Ignorance & Misery

3. Hey, gimme a break we have a writers’ strike here!

2. Web pages now read from right to left

And the Number One way to tell if Al-Qaeda has vandalized this Web site is   . . .

1. Web site only works if you use Windows

—Dennis Wilen AKA The Web Guy

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October 30, 2007 | 5:42 pm

Jewish monster ‘The Golem’ arises from the mists, with new music!

Posted by JewishJournal.com

In the 16th Century CE Rabbi Judah Loew was said to have created a powerful Golem to defend Prague’s Jewish ghetto.

Although I composed this segment of score for the scene in Paul Wegener’s 1920 prequel to his silent Golem series in the summer of 2002,  I only recorded it during the last weekend of October.

I played all the brass and woodwinds myself, including the oboe solo near the beginning and the gong, all in my small Hollywood apartment.

In this scene, Rabbi Loew summons the Sumerian demon Astaroth to learn the word that will bring the Golem to life—rendered in the most arcane transliteration from Hebrew that I have ever seen, the word is “Aemath”  meaning ‘emet’ (Hebrew)’ or ‘truth.’ I had imagined Rabbi Loew reciting the Shema to hold the ancient demon at bay.

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by Der Golem, the great Jewish monster of clay who only comes to life when Truth is in his breast (or on his tongue, in the original text).

Whether it is the silent film or the Hammer horror version or even Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” (which, incidentally, had its premier in Prague), the living statue has always terrified and thrilled me.

It is my pleasure to share a little piece of that with our audience at JewishJournal.com.

Enjoy!

—Carvin Knowles

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