Isla Fisher isn’t exactly a Jewbie – she converted almost two years ago!! This makes a lot more sense because if she hadn’t than little Olive wouldn’t be a yid and I’m sure Sacha Baron Cohen’s mama would be inconsolable. Jewssip’s so glad that everything is in order, but come on already, when’s the wedding? We could be dead before we see Isla walk down the aisle, even though she promises in February’s Allure that the day is in the works.
“We are going to get married, really, really, even more now than ever.
“We have been talking about it and we have been very close, but it has been difficult to plan.
“It is very important to me to have a beautiful ritual celebrated with all my family and friends and to feel part of a community.
“And when you are in the public eye, to keep that private and to make it happen without it being really visible is really difficult.”
I feel like she’s only teasing us with this wedding talk to get us all excited for Confessions of a Shopaholic, her new movie. I know a faker when I hear it – I use the same lines on my Bubbie.
Author Michal Tal ([email protected]) emails me a pitch about her new book for which she seeks a publisher:
Genre: Social Issues / Women’s Interests
Word Count: 44, 196
Pages: 155
Dear:
My newest book, Beauty: Its Secret Pleasures, Pain, and Power, is written for every woman who gets up in the morning and sees a hag in the mirror. It is also a reprieve for attractive women who ‘pay’ for it.
Being beautiful certainly has its perks. It’s like winning the lottery, and it’s the ultimate ‘freebie’. When you look like a princess, people think you have the keys to a magical kingdom, and they seek you out, and often treat you with deference. However, all reactions are not so positive.
As a pretty child, and later, as an attractive adult, I have been forced again and again to question people’s attitudes towards good-looking people. Attractive people are often the victims of misconceptions and misbehaviors which are reactions to their looks. This is not surprising.
In Western society, the media’s barrage of beautiful images, air-brushed to ageless perfection, creates a difficult environment from which to attain a sense of self- acceptance, a sense or reality, or realize professional or personal accomplishment. In a job interview, one’s appearance can cancel out the most prestigious of resumes.
Being beautiful makes life easier, you say? Watch what you wish for! For the beautiful ‘other’, this same reality can be a place of opportunity, such as a promotion, or alternatively, a terrain of nettles and briars, such as being a ‘brain’ but considered a ‘bimbo’. Good looks can be a source of torment and the cause of derailed relationships and sabotaged family connections.
This ‘gift of the gods’ is, sometimes dipped in anguish. The beautiful woman can inhabit a desolate, lonely moonscape tread exclusively by the outwardly blessed and the inwardly distressed.
This book is not a journey for the faint-hearted.; it is a frank investigation of the unstable world of the beautiful, and an exploration of the destructive character of
That taboo emotion; jealousy. Included are the topics of women’s aging, the pressures of society, and the psychological and the social aspects of plastic surgery, and what it feels like to be beautiful.
I am a mother of four and an artist and an editor. I received my M.A. in English Literature from Tel Aviv University (Thesis: An Evil and Corrupting Presence: the Gothic House and Its Occupants). I have published feature articles in the Israeli media, including Being a Blonde in Israel, for the major newspaper, Yediot Ahronot. In 1995, I published my historical novel, The Lion & the Cross (for which I was interviewed on BBC radio).
More recently, I published a children’s book, The Secrets of Silver Lake, with the publisher, Eric Cohen Books, under the nom de plume Michelle Telford.
I believe I am uniquely qualified to write on this subject. I must stress, that I don’t feel like I was born as one of those goddesses of perfection that people worship. This is not because of any outstanding physical deficiency, but because my glamorous looks have made me miserable throughout my life
Although Susan Shapiro Barash researched the prevalence of female jealousy in Tripping the Prom Queen, and Naomi Wolf used political feminism to explore this topic in The Beauty Myth, not only have my recent academic works focused on the historical themes of the ideal woman but, as an attractive ‘victim’, I am able to ‘write from the gut’, which allows the reader to experience being the proverbial ‘fly on the wall’.
In the contemporary world, all women are victims of the media’s impossible standards. However, the subject of the victimization of the beautiful woman, and the ensuing psychological scars, are never discussed.
This book may be of interest to models, scholars, social critics, people in the media, the masses, and mostly, to the average woman, who, feeling travel-worn or tired from her job or her day’s chores, is stuck at the supermarket check-out line, and forced to face those impossibly perfect, relaxed, carefree faces peering out from the glossy covers of women’s magazines. With so much emphasis on the superficial in contemporary society, I believe my book can be entertaining and informative, and will resonate with a familiar truth.
I appreciate your reading of this query, considering your busy schedule. I would be happy to supply you with any other material at your request.
Chaim Amalek emails: "We all know about the Shiksa Menace, V1.0 – the blonde with boobs and bearing who turned the heads of many a yid one or two generations removed from the shtetl, and who continues to lure Jewish men to the doom of happiness. Then came Shiksa Menace 2.0 in the form of the Yellow Peril – Asian women morphing themselves into good “jewish” wives while still eating dog meat. Now comes Shiksa Menace 3.0, possibly the most pernicious and effective of all because, well, they know Jewish men through their fathers, and have the good looks of the gentile mothers. This Lilit person is an example of that. She may think of herself as Jewish, but in terms of rabbinical law she simply is not. How many Jewish men will be lured to their communal doom by this new breed of shiksa?”
I love the writing Lilit Marcus, who’s revived Jewcy.com.
She comments: "I know that a large part of the reason I am so insecure about my religious identity is because of men I’ve dated and their judgments on my Jewishness. When I was dating a modern Orthodox guy, he considered me "not Jewish enough" because my mom isn’t Jewish, regardless of my level of observance or the depths of my beliefs. [Although, as Julie G. very cleverly pointed out, I am always Jewish enough for people to ask me to chip in for seder ingredients, even if everyone spends the meal telling me I should convert if I want to be taken seriously!] When I dated a secular guy, he called me "too Jewish" because I actually believed in G-d and didn’t just boil Judaism down to matzoh ball soup and holidays. It took a long time before I could define my faith in my terms, and not a man’s. I’m still struggling to decide where I belong (as this post indicates), but I’m a lot more confident than I used to be."
I think other people in these instances can only amplify our own insecurities, not create them. The reason the Orthodox make the non-Orthodox question their legitimacy is primarily because of the gulf in commitment between the typical member of an Orthodox shul and the typical member of a non-Orthodox shul.
Anonymous posts on the same Jewcy thread:
Orthodoxy is like moving to a law-abiding city, after foraging for berries, in constant terror, in the old Wild West. No, it’s not perfect. But it beats wandering around moon-calf, wondering what Jewish time it is, duh.
Is there anything more emotionally dangerous than non-Orthodox dating? The person opposite you isn’t clear what he is, or wants. Meanwhile, your tender little pink heart is both beating to quarters, and, getting older by the minute. Better stay home.
Go to Chabad. Get up to speed. Then see what experienced, trained, people think about your Situation. They can help. Rules can help. Anarchy isn’t as much fun as it’s cracked up to be.
It seems that Hayley and I made the right decision to leave when we did. My friend Dan Sieradski, who arrived Thursday evening in order to prepare for seminars he was going to teach and was put up in a nearby hotel when the Nevele’s boiler died, has been blogging and updating his Facebook page semi-regularly over the weekend. On his blog, he wrote:
As of Saturday evening, only some bedrooms had working heat (attendees have been squeezed into a limited number of heated bedrooms, with, in some cases, 5 to a room) and most classrooms are being heated by electric space heaters.
By visual estimate, more than half the participants — including featured presenters — have either left of didn’t bother showing up. And on Friday, event organizers sent frigid Shabbat-observant participants home with whole roasted chickens to compensate for the time they would not have to prepare dinner.
The kicker? Dan also noted that Limmud organizers – who are entirely volunteers – have stated that no one will get a refund for the lost weekend. I don’t think that’s going to sit well with the disappointed attendees who simply wanted to spend a weekend socializing, participating in panel discussions, and taking classes – and it certainly doesn’t sit well with me. According to Patrick, we weren’t the first people this winter who had called from the Nevele in a panic asking if he could get them to the bus station in time. In fact, there’s an entire website devoted to complaining about the Nevele’s poor service and outdated amenities. It also seems that a lack of heat is a semi-regular occurrence there.
"We arrived on Friday night and left on Saturday morning because of the filth — everywhere, multi-legged creatrues walking around in my room, no heat and a "too bad" response from "management," food which makes hospital food look like a 5-star restaurnant [sic], and a sense that the people working there really don’t care about the place or the guests."
Although the selection of Rick Warren to deliver the invocation was widely scrutinized because of his opposition to the gay rights agenda the press has ignored Lowery’s well-documented PLO slumming and fancy for Marxist dictators. The January 14 Washington Post profile of the Methodist minister entirely omitted his far left endeavors.
This is par for the course. Conservative white preachers are generally treated much harsher by the media than their black counterparts. Indeed, the media almost never uses the term Christian left for the likes of Jesse Jackson. He gets the non-ideological label “civil rights leader.”
It would be more accurate to call Lowery a hardcore leftist. In 2006, Lowery turned the funeral of Martin Luther King’s widow Coretta into an anti-Bush rally–with Bush seated on the stage behind him.
What the hell is a "Jewish faith-based production company"? Judaism and things Jewish are not primarily faith-based, they are primarily action-based. Christian stuff is faith-based. What the hell is Larry Mark writing about?
I was introduced to Matisyahu, once again; his wife, Tali, herself a nascent Jewish documentary filmmaker; Mendel Schwartz of The Chai Center; and Marc Erlbaum of Nationlight Productions, a new Jewish faith-based production company that hopes to reach mainstream audiences.
Nationlight—which had “Sundance” kippahs made up—is led by Erlbaum, who put together an experienced team of Jewish professionals to serve on his board. They include Michael Helfant, executive producer of “Iron Man,” and Doug Mankoff, producer of “Away From Her” and executive producer of Sandra Nettelbeck’s “Helen,” which stars Ashley Judd as a professor coming to terms with her clinical depression, and which screens in the Spectrum section at Sundance. “Nationlight will mingle Jewish wisdom with cutting-edge entertainment in order to highlight human potential, probe the difficult but essential questions of our existence, and inspire viewers to better themselves and their surroundings,“ Erlbaum said. His initial films will include “The Good News,” about a man who sets out to launch a news broadcast that only reports positive stories.
A drash on Moshe was given by Noah BenShea, a writer who is known for his “J
That he was a womanizer. That several of his top advisers (including a jew named Stanley D. Levison) were at one time a card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA. That the title "Doctor" was the result of a course of study culminating in a thesis that his school (Boston University) has since determined he substantially plagiarized off of someone else.
I’d still have voted to make this a national holiday in his honor, even knowing all of this. Most men like a variety of women (unless they are gay); Black people need to have a Jew nearby to tell them what to do (whether it is Jesus or Marx or Rahm Emanuel); and Jews are in no position to call out any other people or person when it comes to committing frauds on goyim for money or self advancement.
I was stunned to find out today that a class I attend daily might not meet tomorrow so people could watch the inauguration.
I don’t get it.
I haven’t watched any inauguration.
I’d be as indifferent to the inauguration of John McCain. I voted for George Bush twice but didn’t even think about watching either inauguration. I had only the mildest interest in finding out what Bush said or what any politician says. Politicians as a group strike me as about the most boring group of people around because most of their incentives are to not offend people.
I can’t think of any speech by a politician in my lifetime that means much to me — and I follow politics closely. I’ve read about a thousand books on the topic.
Everybody is talking about what a great day it will be for America tomorrow. I resent all those who say we should all be celebrating. Why? I didn’t think that those left-of-center should be celebrating George Bush’s inauguration. I feel no reason to celebrate.
If you think it is so wonderful that a black man has been elected president, then you disagree with Martin Luther King’s dream of a color-blind America. King’s dream was that we would not notice a man’s skin color. Obama had parents of different race. Why is he considered more black than white? Because he regards himself as such?
Dennis Prager on his radio show today: "Martin Luther King Day is an important day. I’ve been a supporter of it. His belief that it is not the color of a man’s skin but the content of his character is one of my fundamental beliefs."
"You have to be a real moron to believe that skin color tells you anything about a human being."
Well, Dr. Sally Satel wrote in the New York Times Sunday magazine that if she did not take her patient’s race into consideration when treating him, she would not be doing her job as a doctor.
In practicing medicine, I am not colorblind. I always take note of my patient’s race. So do many of my colleagues. We do it because certain diseases and treatment responses cluster by ethnicity. Recognizing these patterns can help us diagnose disease more efficiently and prescribe medications more effectively. When it comes to practicing medicine, stereotyping often works.
But to a growing number of critics, this statement is viewed as a shocking admission of prejudice. After all, shouldn’t all patients be treated equally, regardless of the color of their skin? The controversy came to a boil last May in The New England Journal of Medicine. The journal published a study revealing that enalapril, a standard treatment for chronic heart failure, was less helpful to blacks than to whites. Researchers found that significantly more black patients treated with enalapril ended up hospitalized. A companion study examined carvedilol, a beta blocker; the results indicated that the drug was equally beneficial to both races. These clinically important studies were accompanied, however, by an essay titled "Racial Profiling in Medical Research." Robert S. Schwartz, a deputy editor at the journal, wrote that prescribing medication by taking race into account was a form of "race-based medicine" that was both morally and scientifically wrong. "Race is not only imprecise but also of no proven value in treating an individual patient," Schwartz wrote. "Tax-supported trolling . . . to find racial distinctions in human biology must end."
Dennis: "Martin Luther King did more than anybody to forestall racial violence in this country. For that alone, I think the country owes him a huge debt of gratitude."
"For liberals, politics is more important than to people right of center. It is close to being a religion. It’s a rite of passage and it means more personally when a Democrat is elected. Democrats want to change America. Republicans want to stop Democrats from changing America. For most Republicans, it is do no harm. For Democrats, it is radical surgery."
In Prager’s second hour, an interview with an editor of this book — Blind Spot: When Reporters Don’t Get Religion.
In Prager’s third hour, he said: "There is going to be a certain cognitive dissonance when young naive people realize that nothing will change. There will still be terror on earth. There will still be economic problems. They will not be happier. People who work hard will have a chance at success and those who don’t won’t. Little will change."
Prager has said over and over that the election of 2004 was far more important than the election of 2008 because we would’ve left Iraq and therefore lost in Iraq if John Kerry had won.
Dennis: "I don’t think it is coincidental that Israel declared a ceasefire the day before Obama’s inauguration."
"If schools’ did not have the kids watch George Bush’s inauguration four years ago, then why do it this year? The only answer is that it is partisan propaganda. It’s so brazen if they kept their kids away from the Bush inauguration… Chutzpah!"
Bill Kristol writes: "The liberal sage Bill Moyers has been a harsh critic of Bush. On Jan. 9, on PBS, he also lambasted Israel for what he called its “state terrorism,” its “waging war on an entire population” in Gaza. He traced this Israeli policy back to the Bible, where “God-soaked violence became genetically coded,” apparently in both Arabs and Jews."
How will journalists react when Barack Obama puts his hand on Lincoln’s Bible? If Election Night was any indication, some of them will be quite happy — and, like everyone else, they’ll say so on Facebook.
Journalists have taken to social networking. They post photos, find old friends, reach out to new ones, and tell them all what’s going on in their lives. Some use Facebook and MySpace to find sources and conduct interviews. Yet judging from the posts in November — and what they likely will broadcast on Tuesday to their Facebook friends — I’m not sure we’ve figured out how these sites fit into our identities as journalists.
Back in November, I asked my colleagues at Poynter to be on the lookout for fellow journalists’ Facebook "status updates" regarding the election. I suspected many would express happiness at Barack Obama’s victory, and that’s pretty much what I saw in the 50 or so status updates we collected.
Some were overt. Others were vague enough that it wasn’t exactly clear what people were so excited about; considering the historic event, though, the context was practically unnecessary. As I learned, that vagueness often was intentional.
In a jarring misreading of the Islamist mentality, the New York Times last month described a Jewish center in Mumbai, India, as the "unlikely target" of the terrorists who attacked various locations there. "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen," the Times went on to declare, "or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
Paul Marshall would not be surprised by such stunningly naïve statements. In "Blind Spot: When Journalists Don’t Get Religion" — a collection of essays that he edited with Lela Gilbert and Roberta Green Ahmanson — he notes that similar assertions have been common in the coverage of Islamic terrorism. The book’s contributors explore all sorts of news stories with a religious component — Islamic and otherwise — showing where reporters have veered off course and discussing the reasons why.
Despite 9/11 and dozens of equally pitiless massacres, some journalists, Mr. Marshall says, are reluctant to accept the "fundamental religious dimension" of jihadist motives. Such journalists concentrate on "terrorist statements that might fit into secular Western preconceptions about oppression, economics, freedom and progress." When terrorists murdered Christian workers while sparing Muslims in the offices of a Karachi charity in 2002, Mr. Marshall observes, "CNN International contented itself with the opinion that there was ‘no indication of a motive.’ Would it have said the same if armed men had invaded a multiracial center, separated the black people from the white people, then methodically killed all the blacks and spared all the whites?"
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
