On page 45 of the latest Jewish Journal, I read that "LA’s Best Online Jewish Calendar Just Got Better!"
Wow, I thought, Dikla Kadosh must’ve broken up with her boyfriend.
But when I scanned her blog, I found no evidence for my supposition.
Then how exactly are the Calendar Girls better?
Brad A. Greenberg, the Jewish Journal’s great white hope, has flamed out. Succumbing to the culture of his new publication, he’s produced the quintessential suck-up piece to Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton.
Lynton could do coke and hookers every Friday night and that would never find its way into the Journal until he was no longer rich and powerful. But as long as you have those two attributes, you’ll only get blowjobs from the Jewish Journal.
There’s not a skeptical syllable in Brad’s latest.
He writes: "After rising to president of Disney publishing, Lynton took over the company’s failing Hollywood Pictures division in 1994; two years later it was shuttered and Lynton ankled Los Angeles for New York, where he would run Penguin books."
Nobody uses "ankled" except Variety.
The Journal’s cover story is titled "A Muslim Mother’s Journey to Dachau."
I suppose that in future weeks, the Journal will feature Pastor Fred "God Hates Fags" Phelps trip to the West Hollywood Gay Pride parade and Yggdrasil’s visit to Friday Night Live.
Are cutbacks to news organizations such as the Journal a threat to democracy?
Kate Coe writes about growing up in Montana. Her senior class play was Fiddler on the Roof.
Rabbi David Wolpe writes about Phiip Roth’s new book Exit Ghost:
This book is blighted. Roth’s great subject reminds me of what Emerson said in his journal about Bronson Alcott: "He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17th October; today, Alcott on 18th October."
Roth’s subject is his body, more accurately, his genitalia. There was his youthful lust, his middle age lust and now we are unwilling voyeurs to his aged, unavailing lust. The reader can trace the distasteful peregrinations of Roth’s libido through a series of books designed to illuminate the modern condition. His subject is Zuckerman’s (Zuckerman is one of Roth’s fictional alter-egos) sexual status on 17th October. Tomorrow it will be Zuckerman’s sexual status on 18th October. Throw in some magnificent verbiage, a few political diatribes, include a young nubile woman always interested in him and usually married, and presto — the novel is cooked.
One thing we do not get in a Roth novel is moral reflection. Not on his own actions, at any rate. Adultery is a great subject in literature; without it we would eviscerate the western canon, from Tolstoy to Flaubert. But usually it entails some moral reflection. Adultery without angst is not literature, just license. In Roth, sexual conquest is an entitlement pure and simple. In this novel, incest and adultery are employed (the incest remains cloudy) for spice, and the great themes of art are reduced to prostates and prostrations. We suffer through considerable anatomically excruciating detail about the results of his prostate cancer; yet again, the degradation entails no elevation.
David Kaufman writes about Shalom Auslander’s memoir:
The conceit of the book, and the source of some of its most outrageous humor, is that the Lord is indeed a wrathful God, not only ready to visit swift death, but also lingering torment on those who affront Him, either directly or indirectly. The teachings of Auslander’s rabbis and the documentary evidence of the ages clearly show Auslander that God "flew off the eternal handle with frightening regularity." Hence Auslander’s ongoing paranoid shtick — both very funny and not a little bit scary — that he will be punished in any number of ways for any number of rebellious acts. He eats treif. He violates the Sabbath. He masturbates incessantly. He smokes vast amounts of marijuana. And he writes this book, which is nothing less than a portrait of the artist with a cheeseburger and fries.
To hear him tell it, Auslander was brutalized by his alcoholic father and fiercely constrained by his deeply depressed mother. But, as he might be the first to admit, he was never truly rejected. Members of his family — however awfully toxic that family might be — keep trying to maintain some sort of relationship with him. Auslander will have none of it. He rejects the superstitions and hair-splitting of their rabbis. He rejects their oppressive restrictions on appetite. He rejects every aspect of their way of life.
The more psychologically minded reader might wonder if Auslander’s struggle with a vengeful God is not a cosmic projection of his own conflict with his violent, laconic father. But because the entire population of Monsey seems to share Auslander’s vision of the Almighty — rather than, say, viewing God as a kindly father or a spurned lover (analogies that are prevalent in both the Tanach and the Talmud) — it could just be the other way around. Auslander’s father is made in the image of God, and so he is less of an issue than God Himself. After all, the father drops out of the narrative pretty early on. One can only assume that Auslander isn’t too concerned with him — or with the rest of his family, for that matter, who are mentioned less and less as the story develops. He’s got bigger fish — the Biggest Fish, actually — to fry.
Do you remember when anyone with their own personal Web page was either a narcissist, a lunatic or a geek you would never give your e-mail to? OK, this was back in 1997 or so, when everyone was just starting to get e-mail, but still. Having your own Web page was a big scarlet L. Lo-ser.
Today, if you’re in the writing industry — or any industry where you want to be known, which seems to be every industry — you’re supposed to promote yourself by at least having a Web page, if not a blog. (In what I can’t decide was either a compliment or an insult, a former editor told me, "Amy, you were born to blog.") But for some reason, I don’t feel like it.
I never built a page on MySpace. In fact, for a while I thought that anyone older than 30 who had a page there was a pedophile, or at least had Peter Pan syndrome. But there was the promotional aspect, and so I was considering relenting, except by then, all the kids — and adults — were moving over to Facebook. Originally designed for college networks, Facebook recently opened itself up to everyone. And everyone, it seems, is on it.
