Finally, a story about a former childhood star who wasn’t arrested for holding up a convenience store while high on E. Fred Savage played Kevin on one of our favorite late-80’s TV series, The Wonder Years. As mini-adults trapped by the ravages of puberty ourselves at that time, we completely identified with his suburban angst. Those of you who remember Kevin’s beautiful unrequited neighbor, Winnie, will appreciate the fact that Fred married a girl from his old block in Chicago, the city he left to pursue life as a child actor in L.A. We don’t know if his new wife, Jennifer Stone, is Jewish, but according to Jewhoo, Fred’s a good bar mitzvah’d boy and we wish him all the best.

Something Jewish UK reports that London’s Metropolitan Police is out recruiting Jews, which sounds kind of suspicious to us. But apparently they’re just trying to serve and protect:
“Through employing a diverse workforce we are also able to bring understanding and knowledge to the communities we serve. To achieve this it is imperative that we are truly representative.”
That’s cool. It might be fun to be a cop, right? Car chases, Krispy Kremes, the occasional hit in the bulletproof vest? Since no one in their right mind wants their kid to be a doctor anymore, will the next great Jewish career be law enforcement?

We normally find these kind of lists a hackneyed form of entertainment, but some of them made us snicker:
*You had at least one female relative who penciled on eyebrows which were always asymmetrical.
*You were as tall as your grandmother by the age of seven.
*You were as tall as your grandfather by the age seven and a half.
*You were surprised to discover that wine doesn’t always taste like cranberry sauce.
*Your mother took personal pride when a Jew was noted for some accomplishment (showbiz, medicine, politics, etc.) and was ashamed and embarrassed when a Jew was accused of a crime .. as if they were relatives.

You can read the whole list here.
And even better, you can insert another region or ethnicity and find out about everyone else’s inside jokes.

Al Pacino has started receiving raves for his role as Shylock, Shakespeare’s beleagured moneylender, in Michael Radford‘s Merchant of Venice. (Those of us who majored in English but slept through Shakespeare had to remind ourselves of the plotline.) Shylock, an old, greedy Jew created out of existing stereotypes of the day, demands a “pound of flesh” from a Venetian merchant for an unpaid debt. The merchant cleverly wins in court, and Venice gets a good laugh about tricking the tricky Jew. This leaves us to wonder whether ol’ Will was a bigot like the rest of ’em or if he was shining a light on the ugliness of his society’s anti-Semitism. Radford has chosen the latter; his film, set in 16th century Venice, explores specifically the terrible treatment of Shylock as a reason for his sneakiness– he had to survive. This brings a much more complex, human element to a character perceived as a caricature, and we can’t think of anyone more suited to playing complicated, tragic men than Pacino. Usually we adhere to the adage that “the movie is never as good as the book” but in this case we’re pretty sure The Merchant of Venice will be better than listening to sophomore high school students read it aloud.

We’ll use any excuse to put up a photo of Hugh Jackman (in this case, reporting that he and his wife will accompany Madonna on her Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Israel next week, otherwise known as Kabbalahpalooza.)
We recently glimpsed Jackman drinking hefeweizen at the Ross Valley Brewing Company while he was in NoCal promoting the tanker Van Helsing, and for someone who’s been playing a little light in the loafers on Broadway for the past year, he’s quite the manly specimen. Yum.

What do you do when your weekend is held hostage by a hurricane? Watch DVDs! We discovered this gem from 2002 (Nowhere in Africa) that won the academy award for best foreign film (which is why we gave it a chance) about a Jewish family living in exile in Africa during World War II. The movie is in German and Swahili as you see two tribes (Jews & Africans) come together and exchange cultural influences like when the Jewish women walk around top-less like their African counterparts and when the locals find out that lobster shouldn

Though most Jewish blogs despise the marketing meshugganahs of the Kabbalah Center for their watered-down, milquetoast-y version of Jewish mysticism with a venom that could give you an ulcer, we just can’t get worked up about it, it being a free country and all. The Bergs have twisted their version of Judaism into a tidy revenue source for themselves, how can you begrudge that? (Besides, we’ll admit it. We love the celebrity trash factor.) Jay Michaelson takes a sage look at what the Kabbalah Center actually teaches in this week’s Forward, giving it an attempt at a fair shake: “at least the Kabbalah Centre is selling superficial spirituality; sometimes I feel like the mainstream Jewish community is just pushing bagels.”
In other news of concern to shallow fame whores, uber-skank Paris Hilton has returned to the fold since dumping Plastic Ken Doll Nick Carter (or maybe it was him who called her a psycho nympho) saying that she coped by going straight to the Kabbalah Center in L.A., gabbing with everyone about the break-up and buying herself a dandy new red string bracelet.
It’s pretty obvious from the people who frequent the Kabbalah Center that there is no threat to actual Jewish life. Why all the hatred?

This essay from GOAZCATS.com, the”Totally Unofficial U of A Fansite,” is so much more than some guy’s slobbering ode to college basketball. It’s damn near a cultural tour de force, invoking memories of those evil polyester shorts PE coaches used to wear and quotes from “Revenge of the Nerds,” NJB Zack Selwyn, a singer/songwriter/actor-y type who appeared on ESPN’s “Dream Job” a while back, surely has a future as the sports commentator on The Daily Show. We promise, even those of you for whom basketball is a distant memory of junior high PE class, you’ll find it f*ing hilarious.

We came across http://www.awfulplasticsurgery.com/ for the first time today, and boy, are we sorry. We don’t have a lot of patience for the kind of vanity that makes a woman do this to herself; her plastic surgeon should be arrested. Isn’t there such a thing as an intervention for people like this?
Interestingly enough, we didn’t find many Jewish celebs on this site; mostly it’s bad shixsa boob jobs. Guess our kind knows the best doctors.

Our palms are a bit sweaty as Hurricane Frances barrels its way mainland, since most of Jmerica’s brains and all of its brawn reside in Miami. Many Floridians are evacuating to higher ground (pussies), but we’re too busy choreographing an anti-hurricane voodoo hora to shove Frances off course to some trailer park in Port St. Lucie. If you don’t hear from us, you’ll know it didn’t work.