August 15, 2009 | 6:51 am

Bob Dylan? Never heard of ya

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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I try not to roll on Shabbos. But being the house goy, I was asked by the VideoJew for this one favor.

The impetus is a story about Bob Dylan, who recently was stopped by cops along the Jersey coast who were so culturally clueless that they had no idea who they were hassling:

“What is your name, sir?” the officer asked.

“Bob Dylan,” Dylan said.

“OK, what are you doing here?” the officer asked.

“I’m on tour,” the singer replied.

A second officer, also in his 20s, responded to assist the first officer. He, too, apparently was unfamiliar with Dylan, Woolley said.

The officers asked Dylan for identification. The singer of such classics as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” said that he didn’t have any ID with him, that he was just walking around looking at houses to pass some time before that night’s show.

The officers asked Dylan, 68, to accompany them back to the Ocean Place Resort and Spa, where the performers were staying. Once there, tour staff vouched for Dylan.

The officers thanked him for his cooperation.

“He couldn’t have been any nicer to them,” Woolley added.

What a mensch. P.S., Bob, you look great in gold.

August 13, 2009 | 4:42 pm

Skateboard legend Andy Kessler Jewish?

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Andy Kessler, courtesy photo via New York

Not sure about whether Andy Kessler, a skateboarding legend who died Monday following an allergic reaction to a wasp sting, was Jewish. He’s being buried at Cedar Park, a Jewish cemetery, so it seems incredibly likely. (More like certain.)

What that meant to him, though, who knows. Action sports stars have long been uncomfortable with displaying any religiosity.

Regardless, Kessler, who was born in Greece and adopted by an American family, was a member of another lost tribe: Zoo York.

From a 2005 New York magazine article:

On an exquisite late-spring afternoon, Andy Kessler is leaning against the promenade wall overlooking the Riverside Park skate park, at 108th Street, when a skateboarder approaches and asks him when the park will open. Kessler, who has skated the city streets for most of his 44 years and has the raw-boned build and craggy, could’ve-been-a-Ramones-roadie look to prove it, doesn’t know. The two strike up a conversation, and at one point, the term “Zoo York” comes up. Of course he’s heard of it, the kid says, rattling off the names of riders associated with the skateboard-and-clothing company owned by Ecko Unlimited.

Kessler says nothing, but after the younger skater departs, a pained frown washes over his face. “That’s a prime example,” he says, his voice a sharp rasp. “Prime. He has no clue. No clue whatsoever.”

Kessler has grown accustomed to these reactions. Thanks to the 2001 documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys and now Lords of Dogtown, a new feature film based on it, everyone seems to know about the California latchkey kids who revolutionized skateboarding in the seventies. But what few realize is that during the same period, New York had its own Dogtown: a loose-knit collective of skateboarders and graffiti artists known as the Soul Artists of Zoo York, with Kessler its most prominent rider. This Zoo York—not the Ecko brand—attacked embankments and plazas with the same body-be-damned abandon as its peers on the West Coast. This Zoo York had members with Warriors-style names like Puppethead, PaPo, and Haze. (In fact, the two worlds converged when the movie was filming in 1978 in Riverside Park—the Zoo crew’s Upper West Side turf—and extras dressed as gang members gathered to watch the teenage skaters.) This Zoo York pioneered the art of city skating, and did so in an environment that iconic Dogtown rider Tony Alva calls “f—-ing gnarly. We live in paradise compared to those guys.” The Zoo York riders, whom Alva met and rode with in the seventies, “were one step behind us,” he recalls, “right on our heels, doing verticals as high as you can go, getting as aggressive as you can get. They were super hard-core.”

Sounds like a real Maccabee. Well, except for the fact he was Greek and may or may not have been religious.

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August 13, 2009 | 4:26 pm

The spin doctors of Scientology

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

New Scientology sign

It’s been a bad few years for the Church of Scientology. Germany moved to ban the religion founded by L. Ron Hubbard. Then Wikipedia banned Scientology IP addresses from editing its pages. And finally in June the St. Petersburg Times wrote a scathing three-part series on the church and its current leader, David Miscavige.

This led Dan Neil, the Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning auto critic to reflect on the church’s new TV spots. He writes:

All of which has left the church with a smoldering crater where its public image ought to be. And yet, the church didn’t get to be La-La Land’s Holy See for nothing. In May the church launched a series of new commercials, and they are nothing short of brilliant. Sleek, chill and nonthreatening, these ads are visually beautiful, with a kind of tonal waveform of celestial bliss that invites fellow questers on a journey of self-discovery. “Scientology: Know yourself. Know life,” the tag line runs. Well, who wouldn’t want a piece of that?

The pleasure of these ads derives from their glossy cinematic execution, of course—the cerulean monotones, the exquisite jib camera work, the husky, hunky voice-over, the tranquil soundtrack (think U2 jamming with Vangelis).

But it also must be noted that, finally and surprisingly, the church with the greatest affinity for and proximity to Hollywood has finally turned up a decent branding spot. I mean, these are the people of the exploding volcano.

If these spots were produced in-house, somebody’s thetan deserves a case of beer or something.

To be clear, I’m no fan of Scientology, and what I’ve read of its cosmology—the whole tale of Xenu—sounds like a rejected “Star Trek” script to me. Still, I kind of love these ads, or at least their perfect cynicism.

Read the rest of Dan Neil’s column here.

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August 13, 2009 | 2:28 pm

‘Inglourious Basterds’ and the Jewish revenge film

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Throughout a history of persecution, Jews aren’t used to getting revenge against those who did them wrong—at least they haven’t been since the Romans kicked them out of Jerusalem and destroyed the Second Temple.

In no case, though, is this more clear than historical depictions of World War II and its aftermath. Holocaust films typically hinge on suffering and survival. “Munich” tipped that scale—remember that line from “Knocked Up?”—but nothing like Quentin Tarantino does in his new film.

In the new Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg has a great piece about Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” and why no Jewish director could have ever pulled off such a “brazen” film.

Goldberg, whose memoir on the Middle East is worth reading, opens with an account from his childhood:

Early in the spring of 1944, when I was quite a bit younger than I am now, I parachuted into Nazi-occupied Poland as the leader of a team of Brooklyn-born commandos. We landed in a field not far from the train tracks that fed Jews to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. My team laid explosive charges on the tracks, destroying them utterly, and then I moved quickly on foot to the death camp itself, where I found Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death, in bed. I shot him in the face, though not before lecturing him on his sins. Before I killed him, he cried like a little Nazi bitch.

Then I woke up, ate a bowl of Rice Krispies, and walked to school—the Howard T. Herber Middle School—where a sixth-grade pogromist named Patrick Harrington and his Cossack associates pitched pennies at me in a game sometimes known as “Bend the Jew,” which ended, inevitably, with me being jumped for refusing to pick up the aforementioned pennies, and also for killing Jesus. It is in part because of young Mr. Harrington and his lieutenants that I would later join the Israeli army, and that, more recently, I found myself sitting beside Quentin Tarantino’s pool in the Hollywood Hills, listening in wonder as the writer and director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction diagnosed what he saw as the essential, maddening flaw of every Holocaust movie ever made.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”

Fun is an odd choice of words when talking about the Holocaust. But I get what Tarantino is doing here—and I think I’m going to like it. It certainly sounds like Lawrence Bender, “Basterds” producer, does:

Lawrence Bender, says that after reading the first draft of Inglourious Basterds, he told Tarantino, “As your producing partner, I thank you, and as a member of the Jewish tribe, I thank you, motherf—-er, because this movie is a f—-ing Jewish wet dream.”

Read more about how “Basterds” differs from “Munich” and “Schindler’s List” here.

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August 12, 2009 | 8:27 pm

Jew jokes at the Joan Rivers roast

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There were more Jew jokes at the “Comedy Central Roast of Joan Rivers” than I could count. My favorite was from comedian Greg Giraldo:

“You are one irritating Jew broad,” Giraldo said to Rivers. “The first time I heard your voice my foreskin fell off.”

Unlike with the Bob Saget roast, Comedy Central made only a few clips available online. Above, one Jew roasts another.

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August 12, 2009 | 4:08 pm

Madoff aide testifies: ‘It was all fake’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Nine months after we learned about Bernard Madoff’s mammoth investment fraud, one of his closest aides, Frank DiPascali, pleaded guilty yesterday to helping Madoff pull off the $65-billion Ponzi scheme:

Mr. DiPascali described how he, Mr. Madoff and unidentified “other people” created fake account statements, shuffled money between bank accounts and perpetuated a years-long fairy tale that they were making money for clients of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

“No purchases or sales of securities were actually taking place in their accounts,” Mr. DiPascali said. “It was all fake. It was all fictitious. It was wrong, and I knew it was wrong at the time.”

And, from his account, keeping the scheme afloat and investors and regulators duped was a full-time job. To give the appearance that Mr. Madoff’s firm had mastered the markets, Mr. Madoff and his employees would track stock prices and then simply pretend to buy stocks whose trajectories matched the firm’s investment goals, Mr. DiPascali said.

They created and mailed out reams of account statements and trading slips for trades that had never taken place. Prosecutors said that the ruse extended as far as designing a fake computer stock-trading platform and using a random-number generator to assign times and amounts to trade records, so that no one would detect any pattern.

Equally intriguing details emerged in a civil lawsuit filed against Mr. DiPascali on Tuesday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, with which Mr. DiPascali has also agreed to cooperate.

For the first time, that complaint suggested that Mr. Madoff may have started his money-management business as a legitimate operation, investing money mostly for friends and family using arbitrage and stock-picking strategies.

But “at least as early as the 1980s,” the S.E.C. asserted, Mr. DiPascali was helping Mr. Madoff create fictitious trades to generate phantom returns for particular accounts — specifically, accounts set up by some early feeder funds, which steered money from other investors into Mr. Madoff’s hands.

Read the rest here.

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August 12, 2009 | 6:28 am

Israelis worry about calm before storm

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Nirvana said it best: Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.

Rocket fire from Gaza has markedly declined. The Lebanese border is quiet. Terrorist attacks from the West Bank are rare. The national airport processed a record number of travelers in the first week of August. The currency is so strong that the central bank has bought billions of dollars to keep the exchange rate down.

Israel is flourishing this summer, and one might imagine its people and leaders to be breathing a sigh of relief after nearly a decade of violence and unease. That, however, is far from the case. On every front, Israel is worried that it is living a false calm that could explode at any moment. Its airwaves and public discourse are filled with menace and concern.

“This is a deceptive quiet,” said Daniel Ayalon, the deputy foreign minister. “When a sunny day turns cloudy, it can happen very quickly.”

Read the rest from The New York Times here.

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August 11, 2009 | 3:34 pm

Muslim sect forcibly removing gold and silver teeth

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Remember that story I wrote about the San Bernardino pentecostal church that believed God had blessed their revival by giving the most faithful mouths-ful of gold teeth? No? Well, it wasn’t that memorable. Here’s a reminder:

“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘It didn’t have anything to do with faith. I did it to increase your faith.‘’ said the church’s pastor, Larry Baker. “It has done so for me and this church tremendously.‘

God only knows what’s really going on, but about 15 of the church’s 70 members say their teeth or fillings have turned to gold during the past three weeks. Some are now on a mission to get their dental records and prove their claims are true.

Anyway, they better hope these guys don’t hear about their gifts from God:

Residents in Marka say al Shabaab has been rounding up anyone seen with a silver or gold tooth and taking them to a masked man who then rips them out using basic tools.

“I never thought al Shabaab would see my denture as a sin. They took me to their station and removed my silver tooth,” resident Bashir said.

“I met several men and women whose dentures were being pulled out by a masked man they called a doctor. The doctor used a pincer or his gloved hand depending on the strength of the tooth,” Bashir said. Al Shabaab officials declined to comment.

The Islamist group says the gold and silver teeth are used for fashion and beauty, which is against strict interpretations of Islam, residents said. The crude dental work has fuelled fears of health risks. Al Shabaab is an al-Qa’ida-inspired group that has taken control of large swathes of south and central Somalia.

Read the rest here.

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August 11, 2009 | 6:05 am

Jerusalem mayor attacked by ultra-Orthodox mob

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Oy:

Fervently Orthodox Jews mobbed Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat and threw stones at his car.

The mayor’s car was damaged in Sunday evening’s attack, which occurred as Barkat was leaving a personal meeting with a prominent Jerusalem rabbi in the Ezrat Torah neighborhood. Police were called to bring the mayor to safety.

“I will not succumb to violence, and whoever thinks he will make strides through violence and bullying is incorrect,“ Barkat said following the incident.

In other ultra-Orthodox news, I heard a report on BBC’s “The World” yesterday about the growing ranks of Haredim who hope to rebuild the temple in their lifetime. But the site of the Second Temple, destroyed in 70 AD, was on top of what is now the Dome of the Rock, in the Palestinian part of Jerusalem.

Considering the blood that has been shed over alleged attacks on the Quran, it would take more than an act of God for Jews to rebuild the temple.

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August 10, 2009 | 6:05 pm

Dinosaur Park chief ‘employed by God’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

A great “Yahweh or No Way” segment from “The Colbert Report.” The opening concerns a legal ruling against Dinosaur Adventure Land prompted by the park founder’s refusal to pay $470,000 in employee taxes. His reasoning: He is employed by God.

There’s also some goodness in there about the New Jersey corruption sting that ensnared a few rabbis. Even a circumcision reference.

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August 9, 2009 | 9:09 pm

Kabbalah Centre drops lawsuit against spin-off

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Universal Kabbalah logo

I wrote an article last fall about the Kabbalah Centre’s lawsuit against a spin-off Kabbalah group started by two former teachers at the celebrity-rich centre:

The lawsuit, which seeks damages in excess of $100,000 as well as any profits, accuses Universal Kabbalah Communities of unfairly competing, of stealing “trade secrets,“ of setting up a Web site and using an acronym (UKC) that people could confuse with the Kabbalah Centre (TKC), of trying to steal the center’s members and of claiming to be intellectual successors to the teachings of Rabbi Philip Berg and his predecessors.

The 23-page suit cites numerous cases in which their activities allegedly violated California law. Among them, that their Web site, www.livekabbalah.org, is too similar to the center’s, www.kabbalah.com, and that Universal Kabbalah Communities invited members of the Kabbalah Centre to a celebration on the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Yehuda Brandwein, who led the center before he handed the reins to Berg in 1969.

Aviv Tuchman, an attorney for the Youdkevitches, called the lawsuit “groundless.“

“The word kabbalah is not trademarked; the observance of the rabbi’s yahrzeit is certainly not some proprietary right, the observance of Jewish holidays is not some proprietary right,“ Tuchman said. “The sole purpose of their lawsuit is to harm Shaul and Osnat—it is to intimidate them and deter them from freely practicing Judaism and kabbalah.“

It appears the Kabbalah Centre decided this was a fight they couldn’t win and recently dropped the lawsuit, according to a statement I received today from Universal Kabbalah Communities:

Now that the lawsuit has been dropped, Shaul and Osnat would like to thank the many, gracious, loving, kind people around the world that supported them with unconditional love; with housing, clothing and all their needs since they left the Kabbalah Centre.

Special thanks should go to Suzanne Wilson and John Danos from Arnold & Porter Law firm who took the case as Pro-Bono. Without their gracious support, their kindness, brilliance and unlimited efforts, the activities of Universal Kabbalah Communities around the world would have been severely damaged as well as Shaul and Osnat’s efforts to rebuild their lives.

A little more background at the Youdkevitches’ blog.

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August 9, 2009 | 5:27 am

Predicting the American apocalypse

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

It was the best of times, it was the end of times.

That’s the perspective offered by a fascinating week-long series from Slate. “The End of America” includes some religion angles, which Doug at GetReligion highlights:

The savviest Web feature was “Choose Your Own Apocalypse,” which allowed readers to pick their top five threats to U.S. survival.

I highlighted the factors that are connected in any way to religion, including:

• Social critiques attractive to some believers: decadence; Obama as God; neo-humans; cloning; red vs. blue; the Rapture.

• Arguments or strawmen presented against believers or their concerns: the influence of intelligent design; passivity induced by Christianity; gay marriage leading to a separatist, “heterosexual-only state”; voluntary human extinction; tribalism; theocracy.

• A few leftovers: Dec. 31, 2012, doomsday scenarios; militant Islam; Israel-Arab war.

I’m pleased to see that the random array of readers who voted in Slate’s feature chose only one of these factors — the Israel-Arab War — among the top five threats. It appears these readers are not worried about the civilization-threatening potential of intelligent design, Christianity, red vs. blue tensions or theocracy.

Read the whole Slate series here.

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