‘Aight, it’s time for the chanukiahs of the world to shine to full capacity.
In spite of being confusingly early this year (next time the 25th of Kislev falls so close to Thanksgiving, El Yenta Man promises to stick candles in a turkey neck), it’s been a Chanukah full of greasy treats and good, good music — props to Prodezra Beats, NCSY & Six13 and the Maccabeats for giving the little Jewish children something to sing besides Adam Sandler’s tired ol’ tune. (OK, fine. Call it a classic, if you will.)
Here’s one more groovin’ gift for y’all from the kosher dubmaster himself, Matisyahu:
May everyone’s holiday season continue joyfully, peacefully and with lots more dancing.
Don’t forget to enter the Yenta’s Gone Nuts Contest—tell me about your worst holiday gift and you could win $25 in chocolate treats. Winner announced Friday!
I know y’all are busy. There’s eleventy billion other websites out there competing for your attention, and I am super grateful you’ve chosen to spend a few moments with me (an average 1.7 minutes, according to Google Analytics.)
Sometimes I even get to run into you local readers in person, like at the JEA when I’ve just finished a sweaty workout and I’m really hoping you don’t stand too close to me because I can’t remember if I actually used the deodorant this morning or just looked at it before Little Yenta Girl ran into the bathroom with a fork entangled in her hair because she wanted to comb it like The Little Mermaid, or, in the parking lot at Publix after I’ve just flipped you the finger for swooping into my parking space (really sorry about that, Miz Bernice, I didn’t realize it was handicapped. Next Thursday, Senior lunch is on me.)
You’re always so nice and gracious, and it really throws me for a loop that there are so many of you out there. I can’t read the Googly Anal report thingies very well, but it seems like there’s more of clicking around in here than just my mother, so I’m kinda flummoxed as to why last week’s Oh Nuts! Chocolate Contest was such a flop. Only a handful of you entered, and of those, NOT ONE of you left an email so I could contact you. Was it too easy? Too contrived? Your snubbing is feeling as bittersweet as old gelt. You’ll click on a ridiculous Facebook ad about winning an iPad, but the idea of free chocolate does not entice you?
So, I’m thinking “do-over.” And this time, let’s make it a little more interesting:
Yo, Yenta!’s Gone Nuts Chanukah Contest
Open a new tab and visit the Oh Nuts! and pick a favorite treat.
In the comments section of THIS POST THAT YOU ARE READING RIGHT NOW, paste the URL (just copy and paste the address) of your treat—look, the Oh Nuts! people need their props!
Then, please entertain me with a few words about the very worst, inappropriate and/or crappiest Chanukah or Christmas present anyone ever gave you. I want to know about six-toed socks, lacy panties from your bubbe and racist fruitcakes. Live animal tales and office holiday “white elephant” horror stories are especially welcome.
Don’t forget to put an email; I promise I am not competent enough to sell it or use it for anything other than alerting you if you’re the winner. On Thursday, Dec. 9, after Yenta Boy’s fifth grade band performance, the entire Yenta Family will pick one entrant to win $25 of Oh Nuts! dollars to spend—thas’ alotta candy.
C’mon, gimme your goodies in the comments below, and may your sixth night of light be sweet and bright!
I gotta say, the 5771 Chanukah spoof offerings are killing it this year! Check out yeshiva heart throbs the Maccabeats and their festive take on the ubiquitous “Dynamite” :
Erp, that sufganiyot accident at 2:33 is giving me flashbacks of last night’s JEA Chanukah Party. Speaking of which, what an amazing turnout—every facet of our complex, colorful community was represented and Prodezra Beats had the house jumpin’! As Savannah’s self-proclaimed kvetchiest Jewish outlaw, I am super stoked to have been a part of such warmth and wonder. You can read El Yenta Man’s decidedly unkosher take on the event in the comments section here.
Also: For the chocophiles who are wondering what’s happening with the Oh Nuts! contest, there will be an update on Monday. Until then, enjoy nights 3,4 & 5, Happy Snerfday to El Yenta Man and our dear amiga Cori in ATL and a deLIGHTful Shabbos to all!
There’s been much ado in the press recently about Shyne, the hiphop artist who served an eight year prison sentence after his involvement in 1999’s infamous New York Sean Combs/J.Lo nightclub shooting. The former gangster managed to keep his career alive while in lockdown, but the real news has been about his religious conversion while on the inside—to Orthodox Judaism. Black coat, black hat, tefillin, the works.
Black Orthodox Jewish rappers—something of a rare breed, nu? Aside from Shyne (born Jamal Michael Barrow, now known to his rabbi as Moses Michael Levi) there’s the wonderful Y-Love, who rhymes in English, Yiddish, Hebrew and Aramaic out of Brooklyn’s Flatbush neighborhood. And then there’s Reuben Formey, who raps and produces instrumental tracks under the name Prodezra Beats.
The odds of one of the three known Jewish African-American hiphop artists living in your neighborhood are pretty slim. Less than being born with extra thumbs, even. Yet once again, Savannah, GA proves itself to be a strange and magical place. Blessed even, some might say.
I first met Reuben along with his lovely wife, Liora, and their two adorable daughters at last year’s JEA Purim festival, and he generously shared some tracks with Yo, Yenta! readers. In advance of what’s bound to be a soulful performance at the JEA Community Chanukah Party Thursday, Dec. 2, I found myself chilling with Prodezra yesterday afternoon at the new kosher frozen yogurt place on Eisenhower to discuss music, mitzvot and how this town could really use a vegetarian pizza joint.
First, the background. I didn’t want to seem insensitive, but I was dying to know how a Savannah-raised, dark-skinned young man becomes an Orthodox Jew. Fortunately, Reuben set me at ease by filling me in right away on his family’s gravitation to Judaism in the late 80’s and 90’s. Though his grandfather was a well-known Baptist preacher, his father encountered a group of friendly rabbis at a Chabad house while at college in Minnesota and began to study Torah in that no-pressure, do-what-comes-naturally setting. Reuben’s mother began to study as well, bringing him and his sister along. Over time they realized this was their path, and in 1993 they converted as a family.
After moving to Savannah, Reuben’s formative years resemble every other Jewish kid’s: Chai Day School (the predecessor to Rambam), a bar mitzvah at B’nai B’rith Jacob, tooling around on a Casio keyboard trying to recreate Cypress Hill songs (more on that later), graduation from Beach High School and a nice business management degree from Georgia Tech. After college, perhaps more eager at that point to pursue life’s deeper questions than join the family’s successful safety supply business, he jumped straight to Jerusalem and the Mayanot yeshiva.
The baal teshuva returned (that could be considered a bad pun, sorry) to Savannah a few years ago with a family of his own, ready to take a place in his father’s company—and to make music.
Ah, yes: The music. Created late at night, in half-hour snatches while the baby sleeps and whenever else the life of a working father allows, Prodezra Beats manifests as grooving loops of electronic reverb and percussion overlaid with positive, spiritually-influenced lyrics about faith, redemption and plenty of Torah references.
Here, listen to “Faith” while you read the rest of this post:
Dig it. Anyway, back at Beach High, young Reuben listened from everything from jazz to Public Enemy to Phil Collins and admits to having gone through a hardcore Metallica phase. Influenced by Bone Thugs N’ Harmony and Atlanta’s Outkast, he liked to play around with samples on his cousin’s Casio, and came up with beats for other artists to rap over. Eventually, he wanted more control of what message was going out with the music and began to write his own rhymes, replacing the the sexism and violence of traditional rap music with the inspiration he finds by doing mitzvot and studying Torah.
“I’ve always loved the beat of hiphop and producing, but the message isn’t anything I want to hear anymore,” he explained over a bowl of mango sorbet. “I want to keep producing a distinctive, Southern hiphop sound that has a universal positive message. People, whether they realize it or not, are sick of negativity.”
I think so, too. It’s a real gift to be able to play genuine hiphop around the Yenta house that’s kid-appropriate—not since 2004’s “Hip Hop Shabbat” has there been Jewish rap on such constant rotation. And in the car, on the iPod and on the ‘puter as I write this. (It’s actually kind of hilarious to hear Yenta Boy spitting out the chorus of “Proud to Be” looking like a little Mormon in his school uniform on our daily bike ride.)
I don’t think it’ll be too long before this star shines far beyond Savannah—he’s already well-known in music circles in spite of hanging around on the sleepy Georgia coast. Prodezra provided the beats for Y-Love and Describe’s superdubtastic “Change”, and his new album, “Connection Revealed,” (due out March 2011, or before if his daughters sleep extra well) features Kindgroove flutist Chana Laila.
But can the Jewish community accept hiphop as its new sound? He shrugged. “In every generation music changes. Jewish music used to mean shtetl music—accordion, violin—and now we’re coming to a different stage. What’s important is that young people are using their passion and talent to create something holy.”
As we finished our froyo, it occurred to me that a black Jewish rapper may be a rare find, but encountering a person comfortable in his own skin, untroubled by the dichotomies of being black and Jewish, of loving hiphop and Torah, even of the palpable tensions of Savannah’s Jewish community, must be at least as exceptional.
“We’ve created all these divisions, but we’re all one soul, together. That’s where I’m coming from. ”
Prodezra Beats’ current EP, “Until When”, is available at CDBaby.com, so go there and download it, ’cause you need some nice Jewish music for the holidays.
After you watch this superfab Chanukah mash-up from NCSY and a cappela man band Six13, you’ll never sing the words “dreidel, dreidel, dreidel” the same way again…
“Eat, Pray, Kvetch”—surely there are several people on your Chanukah list who would wear this shmata with pride. Sheesh, now I gotta think of a new title for my autobiography…From RotemGear.com.
During the course of my mother-in-law’s slow, quiet slide into the abyss of dementia, I’ve become the ersatz matriarch of the family.
Mostly, it’s fine, pulling together a few Shabbos dinners a month and making sure everyone remembers each other’s birthdays. But for some reason, I’m not feeling it this Thanksgiving. I haven’t even been to the grocery store yet—just the thought of climbing around the aisles grabbing for the one unbruised potato is causing my intestines to entwine.
Surely losing my job has contributed to the ambivalence over two days worth of cooking that gets snarfed in 20 minutes, but the thing that’s been bothering me the most is that a threshold has been crossed: My mother-in-law no longer remembers me. She hasn’t said my name since the beginning of the summer, but her eyes would still spark when she heard my voice. The family singsong phrase “I love you love you love you…” could always evoke a response, though she hasn’t spoken any real words in months. Even if it took a few seconds, I could watch her face go from suspicion to scrunched confusion as her poor mind tried to latch onto something that matched. I could tell the second the synapse clicked: She would smile, the mystery of this person in front of her singing and waving solved.
Last week, though, the click never came. Her wonderful caregiver, Iris (whose nephew happens to be Auburn quarterback Cam Newton, a lil’ tidbit for all you SEC football fans) got her all fapitzed (that’s Yiddish for gussied up) in red for the JEA senior Thanksgiving lunch, complete with a spritz of the Chanel perfume that’s been collecting dust on the vanity for the last few years.
El Yenta Man’s eyes teared up when he smelled his mama. “She smells like Mom again,” he choked, placing his cheek against her neck for one more breath.
I knelt in front of her wheelchair (her ability to walk diminished right around the same time as her speech) for our usual ritual, but when I looked into her eyes and cooed our “love you” song, she looked back and shrugged. I tried a few more times, but the curtain of confusion never parted even a sliver, and that’s the first time in the five years she’s been diagnosed that I couldn’t get through.
Though one never knows with dementia, it appears that our family is nearing the end of having this dear lady around. I know what I need to do is step up and make this the best Thanksgiving ever—assign kitchen tasks to keep my father-in-law busy and out of the clutches of despair, make pies from scratch, encourage the children to learn a few new songs on the piano and have Iris put my mother-in-law in something fine, with a little spritz of Chanel behind her ears. Except all I want to do is scream at everyone to go out for Chinese and then zone in front of the TV, even if I have watch football all day. I’m making a lousy matriarch, more like Joan Crawford than Martha Stewart.
If my mother-in-law had her druthers, she’d let me spill my sadness and nod without saying anything for a while. She was the kind of matriarch who let everyone be who they were and do their thing while she quietly and without complaint shouldered the brunt of the shopping, the cooking, the napkin-folding, the wine uncorking, so it hardly looked like any work at all. Of course, as a good Southern Jewish girl, she somehow missed the entire women’s liberation movement of her generation, though when we discussed the feminism, she waved her hand and said she had always done everything she wanted to do.
If she could, she would tell me it’s very understandable that I should be feeling down about things and not so motivated to make a big fuss over a meal. She’d give me some simple shortcuts to make things easier, like buying instant stuffing (which is gross, but listen, though she is a fantastic and talented lady, between you and me, she was never much of a gourmet cook.) She’d also remind me how important I am to my family, and if I need help, I should ask for it. And finally, without guilt-tripping me or making me feel like an a**hole, she’d list off twenty or so amazing things in my life for which I can be grateful.
And what do you know? My father-in-law just called to volunteer to make the turkey. El Yenta Man said he’d make the stuffing. I’m still saddled with the shopping, the green beans and the pies, but if I treat myself to a carmel macchiato before I brave the florescent-lit purgatory of Publix, I can manage.
This may not be a Thanksgiving to remember, and maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And I may end up being the kind of matriarch who makes reservations at Wang’s Chinese next year.
Yo, Geltdiggers! Remember last Purim when the meshuggenehs at Oh Nuts! helped the Yenta host a supersweet giveaway at their online store? Well, mah friends, since a game of dreidel is pretty lame without chocolate coins, it is ON again for Chanukah!
All you need to do win $25 to spend on serious nom noms is this:
Go to the Oh Nuts! Chanukah page. Find the tasty item that incites the most drooling. Come back to THIS POST on Yo, Yenta! and leave a comment in the comments section with the name and the URL of said tasty item. Got that? Pick it, tell me about it here.
Social media maniacs can also go to the Oh Nuts! Facebook Page and become a fan. Post on the wall your tasty item, the URL and be sure to tell them Yo, Yenta! sent you. You can also follow @ohnuts on Twitter and tweet your little heart out with something like: “Geltdiggers! Win Chanukah gelt from http://www.yoyenta.com/?p=3373 RT @ohnuts.”
Winner will be announced Dec. 1 before the sun goes down and the candles are lit!
Have any of you had the pleasure of being screened in the naked machine at airport security? I did a few weeks back on our way to San Francisco from the Jacksonville airport; the little booth reminded me of something at a hi-tech spa. The whole thing wasn’t so bad, although it would have been nicer if the process included a free spray tan.
I’m not a particularly modest lady, having logged plenty of afternoons in the nudey section of Muir Beach in my 20s as well as also having given birth in a room full of curious med students. I don’t really care if the person checking my electronic image for dangerous materials took a nice long gander at my fillings and the copper IUD hanging out in my Fallopian tubes.
However, apparently I was deemed extra suspicious that day because I also got my boobs patted down by a female TSA officer and that’s when I started thinking there really has to be a better way to protect the skies from shoe bombers and underpants terrorists. Wouldn’t it just be easier to ask me, point blank, if I planned to blow up the plane today? If my eyes got shifty and I started to sweat, then it might be prudent to take me aside and start touching me, but being felt up, in public, in front of my children, made me think we’re already living in a police state where any of us could be denied due process in a flash.
Seeing as I wanted to get to San Francisco, and my family was pacing around like I was being detained by KGB agents, I remained calm and cooperative with the lady with the plastic gloves, hoping that El Yenta Man’s snarky sexual comments would not get me hauled off to a Siberian work camp for an anal probe.
John Tyner gave no such acquiescence. He’s the guy in San Diego last weekend who refused his airport scan and recorded the consequences on his cell phone. Instead of submitting to the alternative method for determining his danger to other passengers (which basically includes everything but an anal probe), he turned around and went home. You can listen to the full exchange (in which Tyner famously warns the TSA agent not to touch his “junk”) here.
All week long people have spouted on about how the scanners and patdowns are “a necessary evil” of the times in which we live, while others are revolting against the breach in privacy and civil rights. CBSNews posted today that nobody even knows if the scanners even work since the information is highly classified. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of clusterf*ck ensues next week as the entire country crisscrosses itself in order to eat turkey with their loved ones.
We Americans talk so tough about our rights to own guns and vote in morons to Congress—why are we so willing to give up the right to be treated with dignity in the name of fear? Yet another mystifying paradox.
You know who’s watching all this nonsense and shaking their heads? The Israelis. This Toronto Star interview with Rafi Sela, who set up Tel Aviv International Airport’s highly efficient, six-tiered security system that keeps passengers moving and the bad guys out, is a must-read—especially the part about what would actually happen if a bomb was discovered in any major American airport and the entire place had to be evacuated.
The brunt of Israeli airport (and other types of) security relies on the individual screeners’ willingness to look a person in the eye and discern whether he or she is acting suspicious—none of this American faux-politeness (“Sir, please step to the side and submit to a search…”) Somehow as Americans we’ve come to believe that this “behavioral profiling” is discriminatory, when it so many cases it is a poisonous form of political correctness. According to Sela, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his exploding underwear would have never found his way onto a plane last Christmas if he’d gone through Israel.
“Israelification” shows us what we lack when it comes to vetting out possibly security threats from massive crowds: Balls. The very junk that John Tyner didn’t want that government TSA agent touching.
Just when you thought things couldn’t get more absurd, that ignorance-luvin’ element of our society that rejects evolution and dinosaurs has now turned its dull Cyclops eye on Einstein.
University of Virginia physics professor Paul Fishbane writes in yesterday’s Tablet of Conservapedia.com‘s re-labeling of the theory of relativity a “liberal conspiracy,” and geez, it is a mindbender. Not just because it’s challenging to absorb an AP Physics review before I’ve had a second cup of tea in spite of Dr. Fishbane’s generous simplifications, but that people actually believe the example of Jesus walking on water is a valid refutation of space-time curvature.
Conservapedia is a crowd-source “encyclopedia” founded by Andrew Schlafly (son of pursey-faced anti-feminist Phyllis) and patterned after Wikipedia, though it appears that most of its contributors were homeschooled in Waco, Texas.
Its entry on the “counterexamples to relativity” describes the Einstein’s findings on the nature of mass and speed and light are “heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world” and cites the following as Reason #20 why the theory of relativity is bunk:
“The lack of useful devices developed based on any insights provided by the theory; no lives have been saved or helped, and the theory has not led to other useful theories and may have interfered with scientific progress.”
Huh. While the atom-smashing that led to the nuclear bomb doesn’t count as fun times for humanity, surely the implication that relativity is “just a theory” that’s had no impact on the world is asinine. Nuclear power might not be perfect, but it is a viable power source. And how many lives have been saved—and helped— by PET scans that detect cancer and who would have found themselves wandering around in circles if not for their GPS device?
Though there is no overt anti-Semitism, Dr. Fishbane susses that the rejection of Einstein’s work smacks of the Nazi political tactic of rejecting science that doesn’t jive with the agenda. He writes that the Conservapedians believe that “Einstein is at the root of a Great Liberal Conspiracy. His work is not science but a foundation for radicalism; relativity is not a scientific theory but the advance guard for an all-out assault on the edifice of fundamental conservatism and, by extension, on absolute authority.”
We’re up against people who are using Genesis and the New Testament as their physics textbooks, folks. How do you argue with that kind of crazy? Read Dr. Fishbane’s entire article here.
