Oops, forgot to credit Phil Spector’s laughable locks photos as AP. And while we trolling around for musical Jew industry info, we came upon the Jewsrock.org blog, whose title for the Spector item is similar to ours, and we just wanna say it’s a coincidence. Chalk it up to 100th monkey syndrome or sumpin’.
The Jewsrock.org site, btw, simply rocks. These are the same dudes who were slapped with a copyright lawsuit by the plainly humorless Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame Museum for trying to launch a Jewish Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame web site earlier this year (the URL still exists, but doesn’t redirect to jewsrock.org.) Rather than fight the Museum’s battalion of lawyers, they surfed the loads of free publicity and came up with a new name. There’s some real gems: Dropping the Baum: The Real Names of Jewish Rockers and an interview with Maroon 5’s Adam Levine—oh, and some photos of Bono’s mogen david armband. And they’ve linked Jmerica, which means they like us, too. Feelin’ the love.

From JTA:
In yet another example of a group using Holocaust imagery to make a point and having it backfire (see Wal-Mart campaign post), the Church of Scientology is using death camp photos to illustrate their campaign against the “psuedo science” of psychiatry. In a German traveling exhibit that decrys Sigmund Freud “a drug-abusing promoter of promiscuity,” the suggestion is that the Holocaust was somehow caused by psychiatrists, which hardly suprises Anti-Defamation League Abraham Foxman.
It doesn’t surprise us either, but when are p.r. people going to realize using the Shoah as a benchmark and comparing their cause only hurts their credibility? Lord knows, Scientology needs all the help it can get.
(Photo of Scientologist Tom Cruise goin’ apesh*t on Oprah c/o MSNBC Media.

Critics are taking Cinderella Man director Ron Howard to task for downplaying the significance of Jewish boxer Max Baer in the film. Craig Bierko portrays Baer as a clownish wrecking ball with fists who shows no remorse for killing a man in the ring, but Hollywood has it all wrong. Shocking, we know.
Baer’s son, Max Jr., (who played hunky hick Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies) says they “distorted his [father’s] character” and discredit Baer’s entire career by dismissing how in 1933, he lead a Jewish pride revolution by sporting a huge mogen david on his trunks and pounding Nazi darling Max Schmeling into the floor for ten rounds.
Granted, Cinderella Man focuses on the life of Jimmy Braddock, and a director has only so many minutes to tell a story before sugar-addled American audiences get distracted. But when does Baer get his own movie? Weinstein brothers, where art thou?

photo c/o Slate.

We were quite embarrassed to be contacted by IsraelInsider.com for using their map of the British Mandate in last week’s blog post about the 1917 Balfour Agreement. According to A Blogger’s Code of Ethics at CyberJournalist.net, bloggers should “admit mistakes and correct them promptly” so we were all ready to eat crow until we discovered we did not, in fact, lift the map from IsraelInsider’s “Israel’s Story In Maps”, an awesome collection of high-resolution maps charting the history of the Jewish people.
No, we screwed up even worse than that: We got it from FocusOnJerusalem, an online Christian ministry touting the return of their Savior. Ooops.
So from now on, we promise to credit our photo sources (and not just ’cause we’re afraid of getting caught; it’s the right thing to do.) We also promise to use Jewish sources whenever possible. And next time we need a map, we’ll pay for the good stuff rather rely on schlock graphics.

(“Eat Crow” image from Pete-Online.us. See, it’s easy.)

From JTA: For over 70 years, women suffering from a form of hearing loss called otosclerosis have been told having babies would make the condition worse. But hearing expert Dr. William Lippy has found no connection between hearing loss and the number of children a woman bears. Furthermore, Dr. Lippy has traced the “science” behind the “link” between pregnancy and progressive deafness as a ridiculous Nazi plot to eliminate otosclerosis from the gene pool.
Frightening to think modern medicine is still operating under myths inspired by monsters! What other commonly accepted wisdom could the Nazis be responsible for— “swimming immediately after lunch causes cramps” in order to eliminate Jews from from the town pool? (ooh, bad one…)

Thanks to Weird Jews who directed us to this Washington Times article about another tribe of Israel that once was lost and now is found: The B’nei Menashe, descendants of Joseph’s son Manasseh, live in Northeast India between Myanmar and Bangladesh and have returned to a Jewish way of life after been in exile for over 2700 years. Many of them would like to return to Israel, actually, but they’d better get in line: there’s still a whole lotta Falash Mura still in Ethiopia.
We grew up thinking all Jews were either Ashkenazic Eastern Europeans like us or Sephardic Middle Easterners. We always understood that there were ten other tribes that dispersed throughout the world, but we figured they’d assimilated with the locals and that was that. Each time new information surfaces about Judaism kept alive in crazy places like Burma (which makes ghetto Warsaw look like…well, maybe not Disneyland, but perhaps only the fifth circle of hell as opposed the first) the flame in our hearts gets bigger.
(Photo by Kulanu, Inc.)

We can’t decide if this article from Ynet News is the most chauvinistic tripe we’ve ever come across or if it’s a sarcastic take on Jewish female stereotypes. The writer is Israeli, y’know, so could be both.

If you support her financially and maintain an esthetic appearance, she will hold back most of her evil nature. Jewish princesses are practical, and their evil has a certain logic.

Yes, but vengeful as hell. Watch out, beeotch.

(You may remember Amanda Peet, pictured here, as the most psychotic girlfriend ever in Saving Silverman. Would you rescue your best friend from a woman like this?)

The JPost reports that Israeli researchers have discovered how the human brain comprehends sarcasm, that elusive concept where one understands the meaning of, say, “nice outfit” in the context of this woman to mean “Lady, you’re a fashion victim.”
Yeah, we’re sooo surprised a bunch of Jewish psychologists (who were aided in their study by patients with frontal lobe damage who have lost all sense of irony and cannot process the complex subtext of literal meaning versus intention) have found the origins of sarcasm. Like, didn’t we invent it?
If our frontal lobe was in better shape, we could figure out how to use the Sarcastic Font to communicate what a vital contribution to humankind we feel this study to be!

According to a press release (which we all know are always true– see post below), the new Kabbalah Energy Drink, with its “light citrus flavor” and patriotic packaging, beats Red Bull nine out ten times in taste tests. Hawked by celebrity “Kabbalist” Ashton Kutcher and infused with water deemed “holy” by the Kabbalah Center, the new drink is being marketed to groups that need it most:
There’s a huge bus for tourists in Las Vegas emblazoned with the Kabbalah Energy Drink logo and colors that drives up and down the strip twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
Kabbalah Party Bus…in Vegas. Not even Shabbat off.
So wrong. On so many levels.
And: The official Kabbalah Energy Drink site with its glitzy sound effects and oscillating images of people riding motorcross and drinking enourmous Kabbalah martinis is so frightening that it froze our computer.

When the British Government decided after WWII that the dusty piece of desert they’d been sitting on should be made the Jewish homeland, Lord Arthur James Balfour penned a letter to the world that has become known as the 1917 Balfour Declaration. But Lord Arty didn’t compose it all by himself; two drafts by early English Zionist leaders (one handwritten on hotel stationery, no less) will be on the auction block at Sotheby’s next month as part of the estate of Leon Simon. The documents are part of lot of 175 papers and bidding is expected to start at half million dollars.
We hope these end up in a Jewish museum rather than molding away in the files of someone’s private collection. Since the subject deals with a homeland for all Jews, don’t they belong in a home where all Jews can appreciate them?