Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg spoke proudly of her Jewish heritage this week to a group of women Jewish philanthropists, which is obviously what the group wanted to hear.
“I am a judge, born, raised and proud of being a Jew. The demand for justice runs throughout the Jewish tradition,” she added. “I hope … in the years I continue to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, that I have the strength to fulfill that demand.”
In the larger world, however, it will be interesting to see how she votes on the display of the Ten Commandments on government property. Do the tablets violate the separation between “church and state” or are they a simple, secular extension of the Golden Rule? In this case, the Commandments precede the invention of church, anyway. It couldn’t hurt anyone to be informed of humanity’s ten basic rules when visiting any government institution. Certainly our leaders could use a reminder, too.

We hope we’re not stomping on anyone’s toes by reposting this here, but God bless Net crawler Alli at Jewlicious for finding this clever little gem of a parody. It’s sure to have your shakin’ like a Polaroid picture all the way through January.
Speaking of Jewlicious, there’s been quite a heated discussion about some comments made by World Jewish Congress leader Edgar Bronfman, who says that the children of intermarried couples should be considered Jewish: “My answer to ‘who is a Jew’ is ‘anybody who wants to be.’ Naturally, we agree since that’s one of the founding concepts of Jmerica. But apparently, Jewlicious does not. Some very interesting points made on both sides- check it out.

We found the art of Peter Falk pretty impressive for its classic lines and whimsical poses, but the thought of our favorite bumbling detective sketching naked women made us feel a little weird. Should you want to purchase a piece for your art collection, it would certainly make for great conversation at your next dinner party.
Thanks to Nate Bloom of J.’s Celebrity Jews column for enlightening us to the hidden talents of Columbo. Who knew?

Damn, just when we got the credit cards paid down and we’re ready for a little action at SheFinds.com (a site no self-respecting Jewish fashion babe should miss- Uggs in five colors? Whoopee!), Brother Billy sends along the news that today we’re supposed to “buycott” all goods and services to protest the “glacial pace of change for working women around the world.”
The brainchild of 85 Broads, a network of female MBA’s who “wants to highlight the mismatch between women’s significant purchasing power and their economic clout and representation on corporate boards.”
Says Melissa Hayes of Yonkers, N.Y: “We don’t buy that women control almost $4 trillion in annual consumer spending, buy two of every three cars, take 50 percent of all business trips and control half of all the personal wealth in the country, yet at the same time only eight CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women and they hold less than 15 percent of board seats in those companies.”
Maybe if it was for those poor women in Guatelmala who knit mukluks for sixteen cents a day, we might be more inclined, but there’s a storm front headed our way and we need rain boots.

The New York Post broke the news Sunday that Kabbalah Center patriarch Philip Berg has suffered a massive stroke and is now confined to a wheelchair. Of course, it would be very cheap and easy to crack some “Where’s your red string now, punk?”-type jokes. But we got to thinking that this old man deserves our respect, not just as a sensation-haloed, money-magnetizing mystic, but as a fellow Jew and human being. The guy’s 76, and it’s snickering gossip that he must now be fed through a tube? Whaddya expect, immortality?
(Strangely, we couldn’t find any images of him around anywhere. He’s kept pretty lo-pro in spite of acting as Madonna’s personal guidance counselor.)

You may only Jacques Derrida as a name in a post-modern philosophy textbook, but you can thank him for his method of deconstructive analysis for getting you through your Bachelor’s degree and its critical thinking requirement. Derrida rocked the philosophy world in his 60’s classic Of Grammatology by positing that since language itself is subjective, it is up to the reader to search out the truth in all we think we know about history, science and philosophy. Our education ends about there and since we barely retain enough daily brain cells to tie our shoes, we offer up Derrida’s own “least bad definition” that deconstruction is “a certain experience of the impossible.”
Later in life, Derrida was derided (hey, linguists- any connection?) by fellow Jews for applying his deconstructionist ideas towards Zionism and caught heat for defending an anti-Semitic colleague.
Derrida died of pancreatic cancer October 10th at the age of 74.

For those of you who missed The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart lambasting the sorry state of American media on CNN’s Crossfire (yeah, we were busy braiding our navel hair, too) here’s the transcript (scroll down to skip hosts Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson doing their own version of navelgazing.)
Here’s a little nosh from our MOT newshero, just before he rightly pegs Begala and Carlson as partisan hacks :
STEWART (to Crossfire): Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.
BEGALA: OK. Now-
STEWART: And come work for us, because we, as the people…
CARLSON: How do you pay?
STEWART: The people — not well.
(LAUGHTER)
BEGALA: Better than CNN, I’m sure.
STEWART: But you can sleep at night.

(c/o Fark.)

The Macon Telegraph reports that Marilou Braswell, the former University of Georgia cheerleading coach who bumped Jewish pompom activist Jaclyn Steele from the varsity skirt line-up for not participating in team Bible study, has filed an anti-discrimination suit in federal court, claiming her “religious freedom and civil rights were violated by her firing.”
While this is a ridiculous assertion, it’s certainly on par with the kind of logic it takes to make a career out of encouraging young women to flash their asses in the name of Jesus.