Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis were representin’ at the Cannes Film Festival this week with their mitzvah mobile, allowing Jewish movie moguls to observe Shabbat on the beach.
This was the real thing, not the silly celebrity Judaism that’s been taking over Hollywood, so Demi and Ashton were not in attendance. But we’re wondering, does tefillin go with a Brazilian-cut bikini?

If you brought comdian Sarah Silverman home to meet your folks, they’d probably wish you’d hook up with some nice, quiet shiksa instead. Girlfriend is foul-mouthed, nasty and prone to bedwetting, but we love her! This interview is G-rated compared to her stand-up routine, which is guaranteed to offend absolutely everybody.

We here at Jmerica love sports, and there’s nothing that makes us cheer louder than Jewish athletes kicking ass. Undefeated welterweight boxer Dmitriy “The Star of David” Salita is poised to take his place on the list of “Jewish People We Root For” next to Sasha Cohen and Jay Fiedler.

As if you needed a reason to vote W outta the White House, it turns out the Democratic candidate is one of ours. Digging through the Czech branch of John Kerry’s family tree, a staff member found that Kerry’s grandfather, Fritz Kohn, was born Jewish in the tiny village of Horni Benesov, then called Bennisch, on the Polish border. Fritz became Frederick Kere the Catholic after moving to the United States at the turn of the century.
“The repudiation of Jewish roots was common practice in the late 19th and early 20th century, according to Sarah Stein, an assistant history professor and specialist in modern European Jewish history at the University of Washington. ‘Converting from Judaism often created more business and social opportunities in those days,’ says Stein.”
Well, now it comes full circle, don’t it, Johnny? You’re gonna need every Jewish vote you can get in November…We look forward to seeing you at High Holiday services.

We’ve been counting down the days for the release of Shrek 2, and not just because the four-year-old Jmerica contingency has been nudging us for months. The first Shrek was peppered with Yiddish witticisms (the name alone is an allusion!) and we can’t wait to see what orthodox screenwriter David Weiss has in store for the ogre this time. It may take a few showings to catch all the references (ogres do have many layers, ya know, like an onion…) but that should please the four year-old in us all.

No, this is not yet another article about some moron celebrity gone Kabbalah. Jay-Z’s latest (and possibly last) video-99 Problems is a striking, sparse, black and white tribute to the Marcy projects in Brooklyn where he was raised. He tromps these Brooklyn streets with none other than Rick Rubin (MOT) who produced the song. The video is also interspersed with a school bus with Hebrew writing and a close-up of an Orthodox man. Jay-Z has hinted that he will retire, but resurface as rapper Sean Carter (his real name). Bets are that because contractual obligations prevent him from rapping as Jay-Z on another label, he will retire the name in order to follow longtime friend Lyor Cohen (MOT) who left his current label Def Jam for Warner music.

Following the thread that Kabbalah is the Scientology of the new millenium, the UK’s Mirror reports that Spice Girl Victoria Beckham now sports a red string bracelet to show her devotion to celebrity Judaism. The London Kabbalah Center teaches that the Zohar’s “unfathomable complexities” (for centuries thought to be too intense for even the most seasoned scholars) can be distilled merely by running one’s hands over the text, or maybe just by purchasing a bottle of holy water.
Rabbi Marcus of the Central London Synagogue isn’t surprised Kabbalah has so many celebrity followers. “If I’m being kind, I’ll say that most of them have probably done well in their field and have everything that money can buy. But they don’t have the one thing money can’t buy and that’s inner peace, serenity and stability. So they go searching and they can afford to….If I’m not being kind, I’d say that the celebrities I’ve come into contact with are the most insecure people I’ve ever met in my life.”
We at Jmerica would never sneer at another’s quest for inner peace, but it doesn’t seem fair that celebrities get to skip memorizing the haftorah portion.

Gene Simmons reportedly has used that famous tongue to do more than wow the ladies: He is quoted by Fox News as making nasty, anti-Islamic remarks on Melbourne, Australia’s 3AW radio last Thursday. A sample:
“This is a vile culture and if you think for a second that it’s willing to just live in the sands of God’s armpit, you’ve got another thing coming…They want to come and live right where you live and they think that you’re evil”
Also:
“You can send your dog to school to learn tricks, sit, beg, do all that stuff

Lenny Kravitz’s upcoming film debut, Barbecues and Bar Mitzvahs is a semi-autobiographical tale of a half Jewish/half black musician’s loves and woes. We’re thinking Purple Rain minus Appolonia’s cleavage, right? Monsieur Kravitz, however, identifies less with Prince than another short, neurotic icon: Woody Allen “It’s about someone in my particular position growing up between two cultures. It’s like ‘Annie Hall’ or ‘Manhattan,’ says Kravitz.
Wow, we’re looking forward to watching Lenny Kravitz bungling a cocaine party and nervously pushing up his glasses around pretty women. Maybe that’s not what he meant, but it takes a lot of gas to compare oneself to Woody Allen before the first movie even comes out.

Fashion darling and Nice Jewish Boy Zac Posen (shown here with Nice Jewish Girl Natalie Portman) has a new sugar daddy: P. Diddy. The rapper mogul’s Sean Jean clothing label has invested in Posen’s dress and accessory lines, which will surely make truckloads of money and aid P. Diddy’s undisguised effort to take over the world.