JustASC

Wednesday night after sundown, when normally I’d be looking for the three stars that signal the end of a Jewish holiday, I was also scanning the night sky for the International Space Station, which is making a series of unusually bright flybys this week and next. I entered the nearest town at NASA’s sightings site, which gives exact times and locations in your area.

And there it was — a distant unblinking star, perhaps more gold than silver-white, streaking across the sky at about the pace of an airplane. NPR explained that it is about the size of a football field, including the endzones. Two nights in a row I’ve gathered the family on the front lawn to wave as the six astronauts shoot by at five miles a second.

Truth be told, I’ve never given a thought to the ISS before this, and now I’m a little obsessed. Yesterday, Flight Engineer Cady Coleman gave a guided tour of the station with a high-definition video camera. The interior looks less like the sleekly antiseptic sets of 2001 than it does an over-used college physics or engineering lab — lots of tangled wires, bags of equipment lashed down with bungee cords, empty space suits, battered cabinetry. And there’s an M.C. Escher quality too — since there’s no gravity, the distinction between floor and ceiling disappears, and doors and equipment appear at unexpected angles and orientations to one another.

The climax of Coleman’s tour is a visit to the cupola, through whose windows the earth glows bright and blue and beautiful. The sight was unexpectedly moving.

Appropriately enough, Google reminds me that today is Earth Day.

The Times profiles Kiryas Joel, the Orange County, N.Y. Satmer hasidic enclave that is officially “the poorest place in America.” Blame the huge birth rate, the dearth of high school and bachelor’s degrees, and the tendency of men to forgo gainful employment for full-time Torah study, and you get a place where:

About 70 percent of the village’s 21,000 residents live in households whose income falls below the federal poverty threshold…

Which means widespread dependence on food stamps, Medicaid, and housing vouchers.

Give credit (and the article does) to the culture of philanthropy, self-restraint, and modesty that keeps the place from becoming a slum. Still, there’s something icky about the degree to which the community depends on government largesse and, as sociologist William Helmreich puts it, their “unorthodox methods of getting financial support.”

And it raises the question of what the tradition really intended — Jewish communities focused on child-rearing and Torah study to the exclusion of all else, or diverse, worldy communities in which commerce, civic engagement, lesiure, and culture are in full conversation with Torah. I appreciate that today’s haredi communities are engaged in resurrecting what was lost in the Shoa, and that they are over-compensating for the rampant assimilation and Jewish illiteracy found throughout the Jewish world. But all this study for study’s sake, and the economic pressures it places on individuals, communities, and municipalities, seems both unseemly and unsustainable.     

As Marc Tracy points out at Tablet, village administrator Gedalye Szegedin has the money quote:

“I wouldn’t call it a poor community…. I would call it a community with a lot of income-related challenges.”

I think a contest is in order. Complete the following sentence:

“I wouldn’t call it a poor community…. I would call it____________.”

Looking for last minute ways to spice up your Seder? Some resources:

Masorti Olami has “Four ways to connect your seder to Israel”

Uri L’Tzedek has a “Food and Justice Haggadah Supplement,” featuring “essays, insights and action to unite food, social justice, and ethical consumption”

“A S(W)inging Seder” has dozens of song parodies, including “Where Have Our Haggadahs Gone?” and “Fifty Ways to Lead Your Seder.” 

Rhymes with Orange has a cute Pesach strip today.

Rutgers prof Eddy Portnoy rounds up the 19th century’s ”robust mock haggadah industry,”  with parodies of  every aspect of Jewish life.

The reliably hilarious Simon Rich contributes to The New Yorker‘s “Four Questions—Extended Version”

Vanity Fair asks 10 Jewish car buffs ”to each choose an automotive plague and a car that represents it”

Moshe Sokolow asks, what was so wrong withthe Wicked Son’s question?

AlefNEXT asks Jewish orgs to propose a “fifth question” (besides “when do we eat”)

Finall, NJDC has President Obama’s Passover greetings 

A zeesen Pesach!

(Illustration courtesy Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs NNJ Region)

Brooklyn bar mitzva boy Jesse Naranjo has an interesting idea for a mitzva project:

The Middle School 51 eighth-grader is donating $2,700 he got as gifts to help producers of “Liberty: The Musical” take it to a major Manhattan venue.

Yoni Appelbaum, a doctoral candidate at Brandeis University, explains why sweet, sweet Concord grape wine became a peculiarly American Passover passion.

You can thank “an eccentric Yankee named Ephraim Wales Bull, who was determined to breed a grape hardy enough to thrive in New England by planting the seeds of native vines.”

The resulting grape, Concord, was a hit among Jews:

It was fairly cheap, abundant, and most important of all, local. Controversy raged over California wines arriving in eastern markets, with some influential rabbis questioning whether [their kashrut, presumably] could really be trusted. Concord grapes could be harvested, and turned into wine, under local rabbinical supervision. The wine also had another key advantage: shelf-life. “[W]hen I was a little girl,” one former denizen of the Lower East Side recalled, “…my father used to buy a gallon and have it for a whole year.”

It was also unmistakably and thoroughly American. In 1895, Welch’s had launched a national campaign touting its Concord grape juice as “The National Drink.” The first commercial kosher winery in New York opened just four years later as the California Valley Wine Company, emphasizing its American sophistication. It fermented Concord grapes from upstate New York into a fortified, syrupy, highly alcoholic wine that soon took the name of the proprietors–Schapiro’s. Others followed. The Monterey Wine Company in Brooklyn sold Lipschutz Kosher Wine. Chicago had the California Wine Company, which became the Wine Corporation of America. These companies were not marketing tradition–they were offering a new, American way to fulfill an ancient obligation.

Perhaps the greatest headline on a Jewish story ever:

Transplant recipient holding
bar mitzvah for his liver

(Hat Tip: Bob Lichtman)

Legislative backlash to charter schools, including the Hebrew-language charter in East Brunswick: NJ Assemblyman Patrick J. Diegnan Jr., D-South Plainfield, wants local voters to approve such schools, before they are authorized to operate by the state:

East Brunswick recently appealed approval for a Hebrew-based charter school in its district, arguing it did not enroll enough East Brunswick students. The dispute will be decided by a state official tucked into some office somewhere. That’s not how democracy should work. The community should be making these decisions. A similar school has been proposed in Highland Park. The residents should approve any request as a prerequisite of state review.

The Home News Tribune editorializes in support of Diegnan’s proposal:

While Diegnan doesn’t say it directly — he instead emphasizes the need to let the people choose — his plan clearly would place a greater burden of proof on charter advocates to make the case for the need for a new school. And that case would be more difficult to make in a quality school district, such as East Brunswick, which has absorbed the Hatikvah International Academy Charter School in an example cited by Diegnan.

The Hatikvah school is distinguished from the school district primarily by its Hebrew language component. That’s the main difference, in a district where most residents weren’t exactly clamoring for another choice in public schools. That’s the type of charter school that Diegnan and others refer to as a “boutique” school — or put another way, a special-interest school. Highland Park has grappled with a similar application.

Jewcy runs a confession of a “bad Jew” named Tara Dublin:

We’re the ones who eat bacon and shrimp with happy abandon. We don’t keep kosher (although we love us a kosher hot dog), we only set foot inside of a temple when someone dies, we never fast, and we refuse to live without unleavened carbs. Ever.

And so on. Dublin writes that she is “proud of my heritage and would never deny it,” but she doesn’t suggest even a whiff of curiosity about that heritage or demonstrate any interest in developing her superficial understanding of it.

I sound grumpy. But when it comes to these “confessions” of Jewish superficiality, and their stunning lack of intellectual curiosity about the heritage they are simultaneously claiming and deriding, I am with Leon Weiseltier:  

I can respect heresy, I can respect alienation… I don’t mind renegades or apostates. Again I really have a lot of respect for the renegades and the apostates and the angry ones and the bitter ones. Jewish history is full of such people. And there are good reasons to be angry and alienated. Sometimes I think the synagogue is Judaism’s lead bulwark against spiritual life. There are many reasons to be angry.

But the problem is that even the assimilation of the self-proclaimed “bad Jews” lacks integrity. They’re not rebels — just “slackers”:

I don’t mind assimilation — we’re all assimilated. In fact, assimilation is a good thing. It’s about, what are their grounds for their Jewishnewss? What have they decided to be and not be? What are their reasons? And the scandal is, they often don’t have reasons. It’s very lazy. They just don’t care. And this is not worthy of respect.  

The classic Maxwell House Haggadah is getting a makeover:

[I]n recent decades, Jewish denominations have been modernizing prayer books. The Maxwell House Haggadah lagged — until now. The book was translated anew, by Henry Frisch of Teaneck, N.J., a former high school English teacher who taught a course in the Bible as literature.

Although he had never before translated a Hebrew book, Mr. Frisch was chosen, Mr. Rosenfeld said, because the agency was looking for someone who would simply tweak the existing text without substantially altering its meaning or adding commentary.

The new Haggadah does not refer to “leavened or unleavened bread” but prefers “bread or matzoh” so children can better understand. The Third Plague, once called “Vermin,” is now called “Lice.” For the first of the Four Questions, which are read by the youngest literate child, the old version of the Haggadah said: “Wherefore is this night distinguished from all other nights?” The new Maxwell houses puts it simply: “Why is this night different from all other nights?”

Mr. Rosenfeld said of the old version, “What 7-year-old is going to be able to read this and understand what they’re asking.”

A few years back, reviewing a new haggadah in Moment magazine, I asked cheekily, “Did Maxwell House Kill the American Seder?”  (Maxwell House, an advertiser, wasn’t thrilled):

It seems like a heavy charge to pin on a coffee company. But who knows how many Jewish children, numbly and obediently flipping through the pages of the blue and white Maxwell House, came to regard the seder as a stultifying arcane ritual, a regimented recitation of thees and thous, an endurance test as lacking in levity as leaven? Is it only a coincidence that in the 70 years since Maxwell House began distributing tens of thousands of haggadot as promotional items, the intermarriage rate among Jews has soared?

Bu I kid the coffee giant.

Over at Tablet, Allison Hoffman compares the Maxwell House to a haggadah distributed to troops during World War II.

When the composer David Yazbek broke big in 2001 with The Full Monty, I felt the world caught on to what had been my secret. My family were huge fans of the soundtrack albums to the kids game show Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, which featured Rockapella on vocals and a bunch of terrific, genre-bending songs written by Yazbek. I found his 1996 CD The Laughing Man in a second-hand shop in Denver; it’s reminiscent of Squeeze and Joe Jackson, and already marked with the diabolically clever wordplay and black humor he’d bring to Monty and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Last night Yazbek was the featured artist at 92YTribeca’s Lyrics and Lyricists series, singing and answering questions from B’way director and longtime collaborator Jack O’Brien (who was in good spirits despite a bland NYT review that day for his new show, Catch Me If You Can).  A bunch of Broadway talent joined him to sing songs from his musicals, including Laura Benanti, John Ellison Conlee, Mylinda Hull, and Patrick Wilson. Wilson, who looks like Paul Newman but only slightly more handsome, was in the original cast of Monty and sang the “Breeze off the River” ballad — which kills me.

I was excited to see Sean Altman, who led Rockapella and now does a funny and filthy act called Jewmongous. He has an amazing tenor voice, and sounded like an angel on the hymn-like “You Walk with Me.” 

At one point Altman was preparing to sing “Like Zis/Like Zat” from Scoundrels when Gregory Jbara, who sang the song in the show, popped up from the audience, and Altman graciously surrendered the mic. I’d seen Jbarra in Billy Elliot; “The theater queens must be creaming themselves,” said Yazbek, and mimed someone frantically texting his friends (or blogging, I suppose).

Yazbek closed the night with his Jewy suburbs song, ”Sandy Koufax,” with an unforgettable chorus — “Is it good for baseball, is it good for the Jews?” — that neatly sums up the American Jewish experience in 11 words.

Laura Benanti performed a terrific patter song from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The show flopped, but hearing the skill that went into the writing and peformance of the song and how much of their hearts Yazbek and O’Brien poured into the show, reminded me of the little human tragedies that must accompany every bad review in the Times.

And Yazbek suggested, that as good as he is with a hook and a killer rhyme, it rarely comes easy. “Arbeit does not macht frei,” he said. Like a lot of his lyrics, that’s a dark joke that shouldn’t work but does.