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Shake It Up Baby: Mystical Meditations on the Lulav (Mishpacha.org)
"For Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, the shaking of the lulav was a meditation that could last half an hour. Each direction had significance; each represented a different prayer."
Ditto: Suit Claims Pokemon Is Lottery, Not Just a Fad (NYTimes)
"A team of class-action lawyers on both coasts to charge that the Pokémon craze constitutes a form of illegal gambling no less addictive than scratch tickets or slot machines."The lawsuit, against Nintendo of America Inc. and two other defendants, is the latest of several filed against the trading-card industry by Alan S. Hock, a Garden City lawyer who became concerned several years ago after his own 8-year-old son became obsessed with baseball and other cards. He seized on the industry's switch, in the late 1980's, from printing equal numbers of each player's card to including limited-run cards known as chase cards -- which he says turned a harmless childhood pastime into an illegal lottery, and also generated billions in profits."
Privacy Plea: Nosy Parker Lives (William Safire, NYTimes)
"The libertarian principle is plain: excepting legitimate needs of law enforcement and public interest, control of information about an individual must rest with the person himself."
A Midrash: Dan Bern's Holiday Cards (Dan Bern HQ)
"It was yom kippur, the holiest day in all of judaism. a fat man with a long beard sat in the furthest-back pew. suddenly he rose and began distributing candy and little gifts to the children."
Yizkor: Yellow Star (Dan Bern)
"This time I won't go gently into the slaughter
I am Lenny Bruce with a machine gun
I’m wearing the yellow star
I've got spikes on my wristMy spiked collar should be for frontlets between mine eyes
And they shall be for booby trap on the doorposts of my house and upon
my gates
That ye may remember to not go meekly to the slaughter"
And You Thought Shul Was Long: The look of desperation on the bus driver's face (Bergen Record)
"That takeout coffee container your driver keeps at the front of the bus may not be for coffee. In fact, some bus drivers say, it might be the closest they get to a bathroom during the work day."
21st Century Lox: Attack of the Frankenfish (Wired)
"A breed of fast-growing Atlantic salmon -- likely to be the first genetically modified livestock served to consumers -- is being readied for market by AF Protein of Waltham, Massachusetts."
Sin Pickings: Rabbis warn against harming nature for Succot (JPost)
"Chief Rabbis Eliahu Bakshi-Doron and Yisrael Lau have repeated their annual call not to harm trees and vegetation for use during Succot."Bakshi-Doron and Lau noted that, since the four species are protected by law and anyone who takes them from the wild is considered to have stolen them, this automatically invalidates them for use during the festival."
Stepping Back: Barak to be first world leader to visit restored Berlin (JPost)
"John Cornwell, a serious Catholic author who has written many books sympathetic to the Vatican and who once studied for the priesthood, set out to disprove the accusation that Pius XII was soft on Nazism. But his archival discoveries persuaded him that the charge was actually too lenient. This Pope was not so much soft on Nazism as actually keen on it, as his new book Hitler's Pope reveals."
Victims of Capitalism: Did Wall St. Kill Them? (Counterpunch.com)
"When Mark Barton, a stock trader in Atlanta, loses a bundle and wastes his second wife (after possibly doing in the first a few years earlier), plus his two children, plus nine in two brokerage houses, plus 12 more injured, do we hear lectures about the lethal perils of the market?"And come to think of it, how many commentators bothered to trace the deaths of John Kennedy, along with his wife and sister-in-law, to capitalism and the greed that can lead to doom?
"Kennedy, according to some press accounts, had been planning to fly in daylight, but had to wait for his sister-in-law Lauren Besette, who was working late at Morgan Stanley/Dean Witter, making deals. She couldn't just tear herself away."
Less Powerful than a Siegel: DC Comics Could Lose Exclusive Superman Rights (AnotherUniverse.Com)
"Look up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a Copyright Custody Battle! For more than 60 years, Superman could not be stopped, not even by Kryptonite. But now the last son of Krypton, an orphan rocketed to Earth, is torn between the family of one of his creators and publisher DC Comics in a super-battle over his copyright.
"DC Comics stands to lose half the rights to Superman due to documents filed in the U.S. Copyright Office by heirs of the late Superman creator Jerry Siegel."
Pogroming the Promised Land: Jehovah's Witnesses' apartment trashed (JPost)
"The Holon home of Josef and Sima Levi, who are Jehovah's Witnesses, was trashed on Monday night when they were out walking their dog. Levi said yesterday that he saw three suspicious haredi men leaving his building immediately after the attack."
Why I Crossed the George Washington Bridge: Clintons sign deal for N.Y. house (AP)
"The $1.7 million, five-bedroom house in Westchester County will give Hillary Clinton the residency she needs if she officially decides to run for the U.S. Senate."
Kids Those Days: A magical, movable feast (Salon)
"The Beatles live again in the eye- and ear- popping new print of "Yellow Submarine."
Kids These Days: Pokemon actress talks movie (AnotherUniverse.Com)
"Rachael Lillis, one of the voice performers for Kids' WB!'s smash animated series, Pokemon, said the upcoming Pokemon The First Movie theatrical film will have a slightly different tone than the television series."As far as the movie goes, that's kind of surreal," said Lillis, whose Pokemon voices include Misty and Jessie. "The movie is totally different. It will still have the same characters, but it's darker. It's kind of weird with some of the camera angles used."
Larry We Love: 3rd State of the Perl Onion (Larry Wall, Perl.Com)
"Anyway, I'm enough of a postmodern that if you tell me my talk is organized, I'll be insulted, but if you tell me my talk is organic, I'll be complimented...."Back in those days, men were men, boys were boys, and chemistry sets were Chemistry Sets. Chemistry sets had real test tubes, and a real alcohol burner, and real chemicals. Dangerous chemicals. The bottles had warnings like, ``Eat thou not of this. If thou eatest of this, thou shalt surely die.'' Or something like that."
A bit of background here for those of you not already fans of Larry Wall, inventor of the Perl programming language. Besides being a computer geek, he's a trained linguist, evangelical missionary, and a helluva sweet guy. Previous speeches have elaborated on such issues as why God created the world through evolotuion, and what that has to do with designing a computer language. In this speech, Larry reveals and revels in a past life as a chemist. You don't need to know any Perl to enjoy the speech; just read past the in-group cheerleading and the references to obscure language features; Larry's always had a larger agenda than defeating Microsoft.
Hillary, however: Meet Hillary Clinton's Grandmother, Della Rosenberg -- The Feisty Wife of a Yiddish-Speaking Jewish Immigrant (Forward)
As she embarks on her campaign to represent New York in the Senate, Hillary Rodham Clinton will be able to tap a little-known aspect of her family background -- her maternal grandmother was married to a Russian-born Jew named Max Rosenberg, and Mrs. Clinton's half-aunt, Adeline Friedman, was a Jew who was interred at a Jewish mortuary.
Its All Orientation: "Stereotype Threat" and Black College Students (Atlantic Monthly)
When capable black college students fail to perform as well as their white counterparts, the explanation often has less to do with preparation or ability than with the threat of stereotypes about their capacity to succeed. Educators at Stanford who tested this hypothesis report their findings and propose solutions.
Here's the bottom line of this well-written, well-researched, important article: Black college students, driven to succeed both personally and as "a credit to their race," perform poorly because of this added pressure. The article's tested method for overcoming the problem is surprising in its simplicity.
About Time: The Man, the Century and the Jews (David Holzel in The Jewish Angle)
"Am I an insensitive, loutish, blinkered, profane, amnesiac, self-hating ostrich of a Jew who has forgotten history and is doomed to repeat it, or is the current fevered campaign to keep Hitler from becoming Time magazine's person of the century a phenomenal squandering of energy and maybe just plain dumb?"
Bringing it all Back Home: Bergen County (N.J.) Jewish leaders get advice on security (The Record)
""My father fought against the Nazis," said Bergen County Prosecutor William H. Schmidt, sharing his personal story to illustrate his zero-tolerance for hate crimes. "They raised me the way I would hope that parents would raise their children today."Never Forget? White supremacist convict's release worries Jews in Phoenix (Nando)Schmidt was one of the speakers at a meeting called by County Executive William "Pat" Schuber in response to recent antisemitic attacks in Los Angeles and Long Island.
"I understand we're the first county in the state to do this," Schuber said. "I hope the other counties in the state will do this as well."
"I would like to work with the Jewish community and anybody else who wants to be involved in trying to prevent other children from making the same bad decisions that I made," he told the Phoenix Jewish News.
Meanwhile back in Cleveland: Group wants to turn synagogue into Holocaust education center (Cleveland Plain Dealer)
"The Cleveland Holocaust Center has proposed buying the 50-year-old Taylor Road Synagogue, a move that could help preserve Jewish heritage in Cleveland Heights and stem a gradual flow of Jewish residents to outer-ring suburbs."
Yudel's Line: This is the shul where I was a 6th grade Bnei Akiva-nik. We would sing the Bnei Akiva song, and practice standing in Israeli military positions. Wasn't that supposed to be our memorial to the 6 million?
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