According to a new survey, the Jewish population of Miami has declined by 15 percent since 1994 reports JTA.
Some 31 percent of the 113,000 Jews in Miami-Dade County are foreign-born, according to the survey, conducted for the Greater Miami Jewish Federation. “While we are a smaller population in Miami-Dade County since the last study was conducted, the percentage of people who have lived here for 20 or more years has increased,” said Michael Adler, president of the federation. “That speaks to the stability, deep roots and connectedness in Miami’s Jewish community.”
Does this mean Miami is no longer the retirement playground where Jews go to sit in the sun and not pay income tax? Or that the swingin’ Jewish singles scene is too much fun to produce offspring?
If the Jews aren’t going to Toronto and Miami anymore, somebody let us know where the next J hotspot could be so we can get into the condo market early!

In our past incarnation as a Volkswagon-dwelling, fuzzy-pitted vegetarian hippie chick, we often ran into folks who spoke to us of a lovely, wonderful experience that happened every summer since 1972 called The Rainbow Gathering. Though we never made it to a “Gathering” (the VW broke down in NoCal and we’ve never left) we feel a certain kinship with our community-minded brothers and sisters who set up camp in a different national forest each year to celebrate the things our society seems to have forgotten.
Since it’s a spiritual gig, it makes sense that a hard-working group of observant hippies have set up Jerusalem Camp, complete with kosher organic kitchen and Torah study under the trees. Man, we wish we had the gas money to schlep out to West Virginia for July 4 weekend.

Hat tip to BeachHillel.

In a new report on CJjews.com, it looks like our Jewish neighbors to the north are in serious need of a boost in their population growth. In Canada, it seems that Jewish communities are not holding on to their numbers very well due to emigration, the elderly passing away, and the low birth rates. CJnews.com explains that

“… the census found that Canada’s Jewish population rose by a modest 3.5 per cent between 1991 and 2001, to just over 370,000. It was one of the lowest rates of growth among religions and other ethnic groups, and sounded alarm bells among communal leaders on the need to increase the Jewish birthrate and boost immigration.”

You hear that Canadian Jews? Time to start shaking up; post your profile on Jmerica and get busy, your community is counting on you.

No, we didn’t join the Sith throng this weekends, but we thoroughly enjoyed this tongue-in-cheek treatment by Adam Wills, republished in J. Weekly. Wills lays a Jewish lens on the whole Star Wars bubbeminza and shows us just how much we don’t know, like the fact that the Hebrew on Dark Vader’s chestplate may (or may not) mean something and that Yoda’s name translates to “one who knows” in our ancestral language. Add in ass-kickin’ Jewesses and C3PO’s chair-lifted hora, and you’ve got enough material for a Jewish geek convention.
Says Wills: Even if the “Star Wars” saga wasn’t written specifically with Jews in mind, the theme of good versus evil set in an alien universe speaks to the American Jewish experience.
When we finally do see the last three (or first three, whatever) films we’ll be looking for more clues that George Lucas secretly wishes he were one of the Tribe.

As if Hitler didn’t do enough for Western civilization, an Italian newspaper now says that he is the creator of the inflatable sex doll. YNet reports that the Fuhrer commissioned a Danish doctor to develop a five-foot nine blonde, blue-eyed plastic female likeness with “large breasts and lips” and holes in all the right places in order “to serve the sexual needs of the German fighting man” who might otherwise go break down and find some foreign booty, thereby polluting the Aryan race. Hitler never got his dream girl off the assembly line, however, since the Dresden factory where the surrogate sex slaves were to be produced was bombed by the Allies.

Honestly, this story is just so nasty we don’t even know where to begin. It may not even be true, but the damage on our psyche has been done.
Tip o’ the cowboy hat to News For Members Of The Tribe.

Our favorite rebel rabbi takes on Batman Begins and bashes the commonly-believed notion all it takes to dissolve evil is a little love.
Simply put, our society is one that has a big problem with hating evil, believing that those who hate — even if its murderers and terrorists that they hate — will inevitably be corrupted by their hatred. Hatred is always a bad thing, even when directed at the cruel, the wicked and the truly evil. But will society really muster the determination to fight evil if it doesn’t hate it?
The full article explains why hating your neighbor ’cause he likes to play with power tools on Sunday morning is wrong, but hating motherf*ckers like Osama and the pervert with the notebook isn’t just okay, it’s necessary. Food for thought.
Hat tip to Jewschool.

We haven’t made on the Revenge of the Sith train as of yet, in spite of the facts that the film and all its hype were dreamed up a mere eleven miles from our front door and Lord Lucas himself lives a few neighborhoods over. (We see him in town sometimes eating eggs at the Koffee Klatch. Our friends in the service industry say he tips ten percent. Every time.)
It’s not that we won’t see it eventually in the privacy of our own livingroom (if only to muse how much our bubbie has started to look and sound like Yoda in the past five years), but we’re just, shall we say, not that into it. Certainly not enough to have a “Star Wars Shabbat” like these geeks. But to each his or her own.
Shabbat Shalom!

It’s been quite a month for Jewish genetics: First, scientists have found chromosomal proof that we’re smarter, which your mother already knew. Then European Jewish women may be denied access to health care because of their genetic predeliction for breast cancer.
And today we came across a study that suggests that our genes are responsible for how we handle our strong drink. It seems Jews have a higher prevalence of the gene ADH2*2,
a variation of ADH2, which produces a more active form of alcohol dehydrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the first step in alcohol metabolism. However, explains lead author Deborah Hasin, Ph.D., from Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, “the exact reason why ADH2*2 tends to discourage heavier drinking isn’t known.”
We’ve always heard that “our people” don’t develop alcoholism, but maybe that’s because those with alcohol issues are better at keeping secrets. And of course, getting drunk is pretty much built into Judaism.
But perhaps our little mutated ADH2 is responsible for our inablity to smell Southern Comfort without projectile vomiting.

Look, it’s not like we want to hate Wal-Mart, but they just make it so easy.
(Originally posted at WeirdJews2.)

Holocaust survivor Ludwik Wrona, an 85 year old Polish man imprisoned at Auschwitz the very day it opened for business in June 1940 (the Nazis gave him the number 457,) died last week on a train trip meant to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the death camp. “The Train of Remembrance” was to take survivors and their families to the site of the concentration camp where as many as four million Jews and non-Jews were murdered during Hitler’s reign. The Polish Press Agency reported that Wrona was “overcome by the emotion of the trip” and died en route.
Certainly for some people, returning to the site of such trauma can be cathartic and vital to the commitment that the world must never forget what happened in Europe, but anyone who survived the Holocaust is old enough now to be excused from such dramatic exercises in remembrance, don’t you think?
Our sympathies go out to Wrona’s family and may he rest in peace.
(Photo c/o http://www.tertiomillennioseminar.org.