‘The Atlantic’ Attempts A New York Party, Bombs

Posted on November 12, 2007 by Luke Ford

From Gawker:

Last night, the D.C.-based Atlantic magazine celebrated 150 years of thought at the Kimmel Center Loading Dock at N.Y.U. In a striking display of awful judgment, the VIPs (Arianna Huffington, Moby, the Mayor) were allowed (forced) to mingle on stage. The poors sat in chairs in the auditorium and watched. Jared Kushner was either wryly funny or a dick. Porn queen Robyn Bird went unrecognized by Robert DeNiro and Boykin Curry claimed he doesn’t rent his island paradise to whores. God, ‘Ad Age’ even turned against local goddess Patti Smith. Richard Blakeley was there to tell us what social apartheid looks like. That’s satirist P.J. O’Rourke trashing the party from the stage, by the way. Welcome to the social disaster of the season!

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Couple puts faith in their new magazine ‘Jewish Living’

Posted on November 12, 2007 by Luke Ford

From NY Daily News:

Daniel Zimerman put it all on the line five months ago: he quit his job, uprooted his wife and two young kids from Toronto and spent a small fortune to launch a new business.

The 42-year-old’s big move had its roots in a conversation with his college roommate more than 20 years ago.

His buddy had returned from a Passover Seder, the holiday where Jews recount the story of the Exodus from Egypt.

When Zimerman asked how it went, the roommate replied, " ‘It was a lot of sitting and a lot of eating.’ I thought, ‘How unfortunate. That’s all he gets out of it?’ "

Zimerman now has an answer for his college roommate – and for anyone interested in learning more about Jewish culture.

Jewish Living, a bimonthly magazine that Zimerman created with his wife, graphic artist Carol Moskot, 43, debuts on newsstands tomorrow.

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Camera Of Death Vs. Women’s Image Network Awards Sunday Night At Pacific Design Center

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Luke Ford

Click here for photos and report.

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‘Will You Die Soon?’

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Luke Ford

At American Jewish University’s Celebration of Jewish Books Sunday, I catch lectures by Gina Nahai, Ellen Feldman and Judith Viorst.

Viorst talks about her son and daughter-in-law moving in for three months with their three kids. One of the kids asked Judith about the wrinkles on her arm and, "Will you die soon?"

Here’s a photo of the Jewish Journal essay contest winners. Kimber Sax, Journal COO, is the cutie second from the left wearing boots. Rob Eshman is on the right. Managing editor Susan Freudenheim is in the red sweater. Video

(The Jewish Journal’s Danielle Berrin steals my photo. Let me be clear: I’m honored Danielle used my photo (she’s way hotter than Perez Hilton who also steals my photos, though at least he adds some of his distinctive art work to them). I just wish she’d give me some credit. I’m getting tired of gorgeous women using my body (of work) without even saying thank you.)

Thirteen hundred people bought tickets in advance and another 1,000 people showed up despite the rain.

Whatever Gady Levy does, he does it first-rate.

The first lecture I catch is by Nahai.

She’s younger and hotter than I expected. She has shiny brown hair and that killer body possessed by most Persian women I know.

No wonder we marry them instead of dragging them behind trucks.

I’ve always wanted to marry a Persian Jewess. Now that I’m a haggard 41, I’ll settle for dating one.

They all seem to have curves in the right places and they age at least as well as the Orientals.

Nahai’s mother is in the audience and I keep looking over at her during the lecture.

Towards the end of the session, I ask Gina: "Where does the writer stand in the Persian-Jewish social pecking order?"

Gina: "In the basement… It’s such a new phenomenon. Publisher’s Weekly asked me to write about the surge of Iranian authors… I laughed… When my first book came out…nobody had heard of Iranian Jews. The manager of Brentanos in Century City didn’t know where to put it. So she put it in Judaica."

"There are so few of us, I don’t think we’ve been categorized yet in the social pecking order."

Nahai writes in the Nov. 9 Jewish Journal:

If you grew up as I did, on more than one continent and surrounded by people of different faiths, you know what I mean when I say I’ve never had real heroes: For every truth in one place, I’ve encountered doubt in another; for every icon in one culture, I’ve met iconoclasts in another.

As I look back, I realize that the only public figures I have admired and perhaps trusted were authors — those authors, that is, who wrote about the time and place they lived in, whose purpose was to discover the truth, bear witness, unveil secrets, no matter what the cost to themselves or others. Most of these authors — Albert Camus, Marguerite Duras, Oriana Fallaci — lived through World War II. Most of them explored the mysteries of the human soul — how it’s at once capable of great kindness and unspeakable cruelty, how it tends to shy away from taking ownership of its sins.

Among them, of course, was Gunter Grass, Germany’s greatest author since World War II, who wrote "The Tin Drum" and a dozen other books; who has dedicated his career and his public life to exposing the dark corners of his nation’s psyche, making sure it doesn’t forget, doesn’t rationalize, minimize or move on from — the Holocaust.

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The Humble Little Condom

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times:

…If this were ancient Rome, you might find yourself wearing a fur condom made from the mane of a she-mule. In the Islamic world around the turn of the first millennium, your device might have been fashioned of tar or liquid lead. Savor the mental image.

The author is Aine Collier, an assistant professor of English at the University of Maryland, and her survey of primitive condoms and other pregnancy preventives leaves you amazed that there aren’t 60.6 billion of us by now instead of merely 6.6 billion. Birth control, a minor annoyance these days, was for centuries more akin to torture. “You want to have sex using that?” either partner might well have said way back when. “Are you kidding me? That thing’s made of tree bark. I’d rather just have a baby.”

Gradually, animal intestines became the preferred material, giving way only relatively recently to rubber, latex and such. But Collier’s book is as much a history of venereal disease and the ebb and flow of social mores as it is of the condom. And that (aided by Collier’s liquid-lead writing style) makes it surprisingly dull. There’s only so much to be said about the odd rectangle of religion, birth control, sexually transmitted disease and war. This book says it over and over:

  • Culture discovers or rediscovers that sex leads to pregnancy.
  • Culture engages in war or conquest, spreading sexually transmitted diseases.
  • Culture discovers or rediscovers that condoms protect against sexually transmitted diseases.
  • Religious leaders and others rail against birth control.

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Football Books

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Luke Ford

Whever I’ve passionate about something, from football to sex, I read a heap of books on the topic.

From the New York Times:

About 15 years ago, pro football lost me, and therefore I am out of step with millions of Americans, if one believes the weekly TV ratings. Maybe it was the four-hour games that ran the same two commercials on every change of possession. Maybe it was expansion to Jacksonville (the Jaguars) and Charlotte (the Panthers), whose teams seem to have the same teal turbo-cat logos on their helmets and so appeared to be more marketing strategies than football teams. Maybe it was the lack of a sonorous voice like that of Ray Scott — a minimalist announcer, unlike today’s bombastic entertainers — who could ennoble a late-afternoon game from the Los Angeles Coliseum by describing an arching touchdown pass from the Rams’ John Hadl to Harold Jackson with the simple “This is Jackson,” followed only by the roar of the crowd.

Or maybe it was the dearth of good books illuminating the game, filling out characters and teams and making you care about individuals as well as outcomes. Of just nine books about pro football on Sports Illustrated’s 2002 list of the top 100 sports books of all time, all but one were published between 1965 and 1974, and the one exception was David Maraniss’s “When Pride Still Mattered” (1999), a biography of Vince Lombardi, who coached during that golden era. As it happens, those years also coincided with my adolescence, when I was a member of the Sports Illustrated Book Club and happily devoured now-canonical works like “Semi-Tough,” “Paper Lion,” “About Three Bricks Shy of a Load,” “Instant Replay” and “A Fan’s Notes” — not to mention ones that didn’t make the list, like Gale Sayers’s “I Am Third” and Bernie Parrish’s “They Call It a Game.”

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Subcontinental Drift

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Luke Ford

Walter Kirn writes in the New York Times:

Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport. Theroux delivers richer prose than Michener, subtler insights and slyer dilemmas, but he resembles the late mass-market master of narrative geography by treating societies as his true protagonists while giving his characters (in his novels, at least) the auxiliary role of inciting, observing or acting out the conflicts latent in their surrounding cultures. Art for art’s sake isn’t Theroux’s bag, and it needn’t be, of course. He likes to lecture a little between the lines, to show off the artifacts gathered during his travels and speculate on their significance.

Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place.

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‘Shalom Auslander is my failure’

Posted on November 11, 2007 by Luke Ford

Rabbi Moshe Rosenberg writes:

A review of Shalom Auslander’s new memoir caught my eye — was this author the curly-haired boy who had been my ninth-grade student at Yeshiva University High School?

Reading the review confirmed, first, that it was the same person, though now the curls had given way to a contemporary buzz cut, and second, that his writing was to Noah Feldman, another controversial former yeshiva student, what Junior Classics are to Shakespeare.

Then I saw his eponymous Web site, and realized that my initial estimate had been over generous. Self-promotion, biblical inaccuracies, shock value, uber alles. I have no admiration for what my former high school student has done. I can sympathize with his pain growing up, but abuse doesn’t produce pseudo-philosophy of this caliber. Neither does a school.

If Feldman wants acceptance, Auslander wants a book tour and a cheeseburger without the guilt. But shorn of the elaborate gyrations that don’t quite succeed in justifying a lifestyle of pot, pork and pater-bashing, Auslander has hit on a point that troubles every thinking religious person.

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In DNA Era, New Worries About Prejudice From People Who Fear Reality

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Luke Ford

From the New York Times:

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2000, they were quick to portray it as proof of humankind’s remarkable similarity. The DNA of any two people, they emphasized, is at least 99 percent identical.

But new research is exploring the remaining fraction to explain differences between people of different continental origins.

Scientists, for instance, have recently identified small changes in DNA that account for the pale skin of Europeans, the tendency of Asians to sweat less and West Africans’ resistance to certain diseases.

At the same time, genetic information is slipping out of the laboratory and into everyday life, carrying with it the inescapable message that people of different races have different DNA. Ancestry tests tell customers what percentage of their genes are from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. The heart-disease drug BiDil is marketed exclusively to African-Americans, who seem genetically predisposed to respond to it. Jews are offered prenatal tests for genetic disorders rarely found in other ethnic groups.

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‘The Kosher Billionaire’s Secret Recipe’

Posted on November 10, 2007 by Luke Ford

From the Marin Independent Journal:

…The Cohens live wealthy inside and out.

Stacy Cohen’s husband is Israeli-born tycoon Mouli Cohen, who made his fortune in the high-tech and biotech industries. The couple met in 2000 at a Hollywood party and, as Stacy Cohen puts it, fell in love at first sight.

They eloped to Rome to get married in 2004. If the photos and copy on either of their Web sites (www.stacycohen.com and www.moulicohen.com) is anything to go by, the couple love spending money as much as they love making it and giving it away to child-focused charities such as Camp Okizu.

…But most readers will probably have the most fun with the first 172 pages, in which Cohen writes about what it means to be kosher (a discipline more than 5,000 years old) and offers sample menus for entertaining at home while photographed wearing dozens of outfits from her collection of designer ensembles and jewels.

She poses in gorgeous settings that range from her Belvedere mansion to Paris, India and other exotic locales. In one of the most provocative shots, she wears a satiny bathrobe while standing above some of her shoes, a boutique’s worth of colorful, high-end heels that spill down a staircase like sparkly spiked rocks on a river of deep-pile carpet.

While she may seem at first like a Judith Krantz heroine crossed with a non-political modern-day Marie Antoinette, spend some time with her and Cohen emerges as a warm, engagingly shrewd woman who says she likes to give back to the community as much as she feels blessed by her lavish lifestyle.

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