December 6, 2010 | 11:15 am

Ninth Circuit to hear Prop. 8 appeal

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

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We are less than an hour away from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals hearing the Prop. 8 case. In August, U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn R. Walker deemed unconstitutional the California voter-passed amendment banning gay marriage. Now the appellate court must decide whether Walker was correct.

But there is a chance we’ll never get an answer to that question. First the three-judge panel must decide whether supporters of Prop. 8 even have standing to bring this appeal. I’m not sure if this is an issue of first impression for the court, but traditionally only the state can appeal the constitutionality of its own laws—and Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown, who will soon replace Schwarzenegger, both agreed with Walker and declined to back the law.

Check out the hearing live on C-SPAN. Also, check out the live-updating from KPCC, which is where I found that photo of a Prop. 8 supporter outside the courthouse.

December 6, 2010 | 10:31 am

First Team All-Jewish NBA

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

You know I love talking about Jews and basketball. Obviously I’d relish the chance to pick my all-Jewish starting five. Tablet has made that possible:

he story of Jews in American basketball remains one to be proud of. Which is why we’ve teamed up with FreeDarko, the amazing five-year-old collective of basketball writers known for its wit, one-of-a-kind drawings, and revealing focus on unorthodox statistics, to let you select your top all-time Jewish-American starting five, plus a Jewish coach, naturally.

Naturally because one of basketball’s greatest legends is a Jewish coach—Red Auerbach—and many other Jews have been great coaches. The surprising history of Jews in basketball, which I discussed at length in this Jordan Farmar profile, is that for the first half of the 20th century basketball was dominated by Jewish players.

Tablet allows you to pick from three Jewish players for each position. Farmar made the cut, as did Amar’e Stoudemire, who actually isn’t Jewish. Omri Casspi was left off. More surprisingly, Hy Gotkin was too.

My starting five are shown in the above image. Whom would you choose?

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December 5, 2010 | 3:32 pm

Blaming God for a dropped ball

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Steve Johnson of the Buffalo Bills did not have a monster game today. ESPN’s fantasy guru Matthew Berry had predicted that Johnson would in response to making a disastrous drop in the end zone last Sunday during overtime against the Steelers.

That drop was tough to watch—not as tough as the two chip shots missed by the Boise State kicker, but tough still. And Johnson was visibly shaken at the post-game press conference. I recall him saying something to the effect of: I’ll never get over this.

That seemed a bit dramatic. I mean: Why so serious?

The Bills aren’t playing for anything but pride and Johnson has emerged as their brightest star. But the misery continued after the press conference. Thanks to Brian for tipping me to Johnson’s loathing on Twitter:

I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!!!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW???!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…

THX THO ... wow. I get fighting with God. Some great biblical men have done that. But this seems just a tad entitled.

I’m used to seeing athletes blame God for their mistakes—but usually only when they got caught doing something stupid. See: A-Rod getting busted for steroids or Michael Vick for dog fighting. Johnson, instead, did the opposite of the end zone prayer.

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December 5, 2010 | 2:46 pm

Professional dreidel spinning

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Image: 20s and 30s at BZB

Speaking of dreidels, it appears that dreidel spin offs are becoming quite the competitive event. (I’m not comfortable calling it a “sport”—I mean, it isn’t poker.) Three years ago, a Sacramento synagogue started the World Series of Dreidel.

Now there’s Major League Dreidel. The story from RNS:

This year’s tournament will be held Dec. 9 at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn, one day after Hanukkah has ended. The Jewish Festival of Lights began on Wednesday evening.

“We want to extend the dreidel season,” said Eric Pavony, the league’s founder. “We are behind the idea that spinning the dreidel can happen at any point throughout the year.”

Pavony started the Major League Dreidel—or MLD—series four years ago. It has grown from an informal family gathering into a cult phenomenon with a global fan base. Pavony said it all started late one Hanukkah night after his family’s annual dinner party.

He explains, “I’m sitting there and I looked at a dreidel and it looks at me as if to say, `Spin me.’ I started playing around with different ways to hold it, different ways to spin it and I noticed that my spins were getting better. I challenged my dad and some folks at the table to a spin-off. We broke out the timer and before we knew it, people were chanting and fist-pumping.”

A year later, Pavony organized a marathon dreidel night with 32 participants at an East Village bar. Social networking and the Internet has enabled the league to grow exponentially over the past three Hanukkahs. ...
Dreaming up a clever name is half the dreidel battle, according to Pavony. He calls himself “Knishioner.”

Other competitors include the Spintuation (meh) and Jewbacca (solid). I think I’d be the Bladel, right Jay?

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December 4, 2010 | 12:41 pm

‘I fling my latkes in the air sometimes’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is no way Taio Cruz does better with the ladies than The Maccabeats do. Thanks for the link Spaniel and for the reminder Rutschman. Here’s the JPost talking with the Maccabeats’ associate director Immanuel Shalev:

A group of Yeshiva University students have become a somewhat-unlikely YouTube sensation, by transforming Mike Tompkins’ a cappella cover of Taio Cruz’s hit song “Dynamite” into an irrepressibly catchy and entertaining Hanukka parody, “Candlelight.”

The Maccabeats, an all-male a cappella group at the Orthodox Jewish university, authored and put together the video. The video is a hilarious montage of spoofs on music videos, battle scenes between Jews and Greeks, the inexplicable appearance of a NASA astronaut, and at least one sufganiyah whose fillings cannot be contained. ...

“I always get videos from my friends, my mom, and pretty much every Jewish relative around the Jewish holidays—they’re usually pretty standard, a Muppet singing “shana tova” or celebrities eating matzah,” Shalev said. “We figured we could probably do a really fun and entertaining video.”

Happy Hanukkah.

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December 3, 2010 | 3:32 pm

“The Liberal Clause’ and the socialist Christmas agenda

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

All along we thought it was the anti-religious who were waging war against Christmas. It turns out the attack is more subtle and strategic:

David Hedrick, a Tea Partier who launched an eventually unsuccessful run for Congress after achieving viral fame for a combative tirade at a town hall meeting in the summer of 2009, is supposedly out to save Christmas from Barack Obama with a new Tea Party children’s book.

From the advance looks at the publication, “The Liberal Clause,” looks to pick up in the same vein that his rant against retiring Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) left off.

In 2009, Hedrick vehemently charged that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi should be checking her sleeve for Nazi insignia. Now, he’s toning down his message for a younger audience by telling a holiday tale of a socialist Santa, Barry “The Liberal Claus” Obama—who is possibly not actually born in the North Pole—and his diminutive companion “Elf Peloosi.” From what he provides on the site, it looks like we can expect appearances by “Mr. Snore” (Al Gore), a Glenn Beck-watching family, Stalin, Hugo Chavez, and at least one hippie, among others.

Don’t act so surprised. Read the rest from the HuffPo here.

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December 2, 2010 | 3:29 pm

The Daily Beast’s dumbfounding list of most Jewish cities

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

If you were ranking the most Jewish cities in the United States, Los Angeles would be somewhere near the top. Right?

Not if you’re the Daily Beast. Here were the top eight of an absolutely dumbfounding list of 30 Jewiest cities:

New York
Miami
Philly
Boston
Washington
Hartford, Conn.
Cleveland

...

Los Angeles

It’s hard to know what the knocks on Los Angeles are (besides the traffic, earthquakes, fires and cost of living). The Daily Beast’s metric quite arbitrarily limited itself to three factors, measured per-capita: Jewish population, synagogues, and kosher restaurants.

So what’s wrong with LA? Is it that Jews only account for 4.1 percent of the population? That’s still higher than Hartford (2.9 percent)—Hartford? Really?! And never mind that 4.1 percent of 4 million is, well, a lot.

Is 90 not enough kosher restaurants? We have Langer’s—what else do you need?

Maybe it’s that LA ranks 30th among the cities the Daily Beast looks at in terms of synagogues per capita. But if covering the Los Angeles Jewish community taught me anything, it’s that there is a lot of Jewishness that exists outside of the place where Jews worship.

This list also fails to consider any of the many things that makes LA a very Jewish town. There is the Jewish culture: the Skirball Center and all of Hollywood. There are the pioneering and influential rabbis: Sharon Brous, Naomi Levy, Marvin Hier, David Wolpe and others included in this list come to mind. And, as I already mentioned, there’s Langer’s. Not to mention the AJU, HUC-JIR and the non-denominational rabbinic seminary; two Holocaust museums and the Shoah Foundation; a massive Israeli community; Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Encino, Pico-Robertson and Hancock Park. Did I mention Hollywood?

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December 2, 2010 | 1:36 pm

Jewish star hiding on Iranian airport building

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

You don’t have to be a geopolitical wonk to know that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is no fan of Israel. So you can imagine he wasn’t too happy to find a Jewish star hiding in plain sight. Yep, that one in the photo from Google Earth, which reminds me of this.

From the JPost:

Did Israeli prankster architects sneak a Star of David onto the roof of the Teheran airport, or is the controversy in Iran over a Google Earth revelation much ado about nothing?

The six-pointed star was discovered by an eagle-eyed Google Earth user recently, over three decades after the building that houses the national airline of the Islamic Republic was constructed by Israeli engineers.

Israel and the Shah’s Iran maintained good ties until the Islamic Revolution of 1979 ended the relationship. Before 1979, Israel brokered arms deals with Iran, and there were regular flights between Teheran and Tel Aviv.

Once the existence of the Star of David was reported in Iranian media, government officials called for the immediate removal of the apparently offensive Jewish symbol.

Obviously, the Elders of Zion had their hand in this one.

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December 1, 2010 | 3:43 pm

Atheist billboard: ‘This season, celebrate reason’

Posted by Brad A. Greenberg

There is so much good stuff to blog about write now, but I need to be judicious today because I’m a bit pressed for time. I’ll start with the Christmas wars story that my wife sent me. This via CNN:

An atheist billboard that calls Christmas “a myth” has sparked a growing controversy near the Lincoln Tunnel, a 1.5-mile-long twin tube that connects New Jersey to New York.

The full message, which appears with a nativity scene, reads: “You know it’s a myth. This season, celebrate reason.”

Its $20,000 price tag was paid for by American Atheists, a New Jersey-based atheist advocacy group, David Silverman, the group’s president, told CNN.

“We are addressing the 50 million atheists in this nation,” Silverman said.

He said the group erected the sign in a high-traffic area in an effort to challenge drivers to “think hard about whether or not they actually believe in what is, in reality, an invisible magic man in the sky.”

To be sure, I’ve never been a believer in the war on Christmas brouhaha. I just don’t see the substance. But I can’t pretend that this billboard isn’t a direct attack on Christmas.

And the New Jersey billboard is not the only one that atheist organizations have put up recently to challenge religious belief. These ones have fared much better than the “Imagine No Religion” billboard that had a short run in Rancho Cucamonga two years ago. But what do they really achieve?

That has been a hotly debated question by atheists, and how they answer it depends on what side of the aisle they sit on.

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