While attending services Friday night for the first time since we’ve paid our own car insurance, we found out that the Shema is a perfect haiku. Count the 5-7-5 syllable pattern for yourself:
She-ma Yis-ra-el
A-do-nay El-o-hei-nu
A-do-nay E-chad

Is it a coincidence that the most powerful yet simplest Jewish prayer fits the Japanese form of poetic perfection? It must be, but then Adonai works in mysterious ways.
(Check out some other less holy Haikus For Jews by David Bader.)

Michael and Maria Sklar, an Orthodox Jewish couple in L.A., have taken the IRS to court to convince a tax judge to let them deduct their children’s religious school tuition, an illegal practice which has earned them several audits. Michael Sklar (an accountant, are you suprised?) centers their case around a secret agreement between the U.S. government and the Church of Scientology that allows Scientologists to deduct their “spiritual counseling” costs from their taxable income (hmm…charging money for spiritual counseling. Uh, wouldn’t that be the difference between a religion and a cult?)
Of course it’s outrageous that the celebrity “religion” gets exempted while others do not, but if the Sklars win their case, the IRS will have to allow everyone to claim deductions for all religious instruction. Yes, even the parents of Madonna’s Kabbalah midgets. This means less money for public schools, not to mention a small, fallen-by-the-wayside thing called “separation between church and state.” We know we live in Jesusland now, but only a couple of Jewish parents would have the chutzpah to take on the IRS. Let the judge repeal the Scientology clause and tell the Sklars to suffer from taxes like the rest of us.

With the intention of upping the membership of San Francisco State University‘s most unpopular club the day after the election, the vice-prez of the College Republicans found his information table in Malcolm X plaza surrounded by an unfriendly group of female Palestinian students and their angry cohorts. After throwing food and beverages and bitch-slapping the Republican (as if he were soley responsible for their disenfranchisement and bad manners), the women declared the College Republicans “bigots and racists” and a mini-riot ensued. Police encouraged the Republicans to leave rather than arresting their attackers. Campus President Robert Corrigan seems to encourage this psychotic behavior by the General Union of Palestinian Students, who were barely disciplined for an attack on Jewish students earlier in the year.
Sheesh. Get to class, kids.

Page Six reports that Tony award-winning playwright/actor Harvey Fierstein (we love his voice; he sounds like he was sired by a five-pack-a-day-smoker and piece of sandpaper) will replace Alfred Molina as Tevye in the revival of “Fiddler on the Roof.” We like Molina (Catholic) and all, but if your production’s Tevye ain’t Jewish, it’s amateur night.

The Forward has published its list of the 50 most influential people in Judaism today…guess who’s #51? Is this the traditional Jewish media’s way of accepting Maddonesther as a quasi-Jew with more power over the masses than any rabbi? D’ya think her next step will actually to become a rabbi? That would simply rock.
Good Shabbos, Jmericans. Eat well, sleep deep and peace out.

Just in case you’ve missed the far-reaching influence of FOX’s over-hyped teen drama The O.C., an interfaith couple out of Montana has launched a line of holiday cards inspired by the fictional concept of Chrismukkah. With nearly half of all newly-married Jews hitched to non-Jewish spouses, such fitzing with tradition is borne of necessity, though Chrismukkah.com’s founders say it’s not meant to replace either holiday:
“One of Chrismukkah.com’s goals is to encourage awareness of Jewish identity and embracing of Jewish holiday traditions within interfaith families and among half-Jews.”
Jewish purists will certainly blanche at Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer wearing a menorah on his antlers, but really, isn’t hay better than nun?

The man who showed the world how terrorism is an effective way to achieve fame, fortune and power has finally expired. The official cause of death is brain hemorrhage, but some speculate AIDS, leukemia and/or poisoning by stealthy Jewish ninjas. To our frightened disgust, some American newspapers are touting Arafat as some kind of ‘heroic leader of an oppressed people,’ but we’ll always remember him as the sociopathic, murderous scumbag he was.
The 72 virgins can have his toad ass. Let us pray that by removing his sad sack of bones from the planet, the obstacles to peace he created will disappear as well.

The New York Daily News reports one of the more bizarre tragedies of the day:
“A cross-dressing, bearded Hasidic man wearing blue eye shadow and pink pumps was busted on charges of killing a 75-year-old rabbi who had taken him into his home.”
The poor rabbi had recently lost his wife to brain cancer and had taken the man as a boarder to help with the rent, but after he didn’t show up to the senior center for a few days, a friend stopped by and noticed the smell. The cross-dressing killer “had a full face of makeup on – with a beard,” according to a source, but had only previously been seen by his neighbors dressed in traditional Hasidic garb.

We’ve been receiving e-mails galore from some of our favorite females concerning President Bush’s appointment of one Dr. W. David Hager to the FDA, so apparently many of you already know that the author of As Jesus Cared for Women: Restoring Women Then and Now is not a huge fan of reproductive rights. It seems ridiculous that a man who refuses to prescribe birth control to unmarried women and suggests that those suffering from premenstrual syndrome should seek help from the Scriptures would be in charge of the crucial decisions made by the FDA’s Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee, but according to urban myth detectives Snopes.com, all the worry is for good reason. While some sites decry the e-mail, circulating since 2002, as “outdated”, Snopes reports that it’s been given new life since Bush’s re-election. Hager has been serving on the FDA since 2003 and was reappointed in June of this year, but not as chairman.
Still, it could’t hurt to e-mail President Bush and say “I oppose the appointment of Dr. Hager to the FDA Reproductive Health Drugs Advisory Committee. Mixing religion and medicine is unacceptable. Using the FDA to promote a political agenda is inappropriate and seriously threatens all women’s health.”
Feel free to add “This guy’s a schmuck. Get us a real doctor.” And some Midol, ASAP.

Delving further into the Jewish/Krispy Kreme connection: the organizers of a Jewish celebration trade show in Issaquah, WA (near Seattle, sounds like a nice place!) constructed a pyramid of donuts, roughly with the dimensions of a zaftig bride (5’3″ and yay wide), and pronounced it the world’s largest donut wedding cake. The Guinness Book of World Records has yet to deem it so, since no one’s ever had the chutzpah to try it, let alone actually serve it at their wedding. That could change, though: Donut cakes are cheap, kosher and finger lickin’ tasty. We can get over the tackiness of this new trend, as long as the groom doesn’t crush a Styrofoam coffee cup on the bima.