Dueling Passover Parodies: Six 13 vs. Aish HaTorah

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Head Yenta

To some, Passover might mean long seders and matztapation (I thought I made that up, but apparently not.) But bring on the boils, ’cause this Yenta only cares about one thing: It’s parody season!

Pesach 5775 brings us the miracle of not one but TWO fabulous Talmudic interpretations of Bruno Mars’ tushy shpilkiss-inducing “Uptown Funk”

First, those nice yeshiva boys Six 13 with the lovely a cappella skillz trotted out their version a few weeks ago.The breakdown of the plagues is super clever, and how rad is that matzah beach ball?

Then the boyz at Aish HaTorah slid in with their sizzling historical adaptation. Honestly, is there anything hotter than breakdancing tzitzit? Also, now I want a limo driver named Yankele.

So which one’s your favorite? Plenty of time to stew on it. Speaking of which, try the stewed apricots for that matzapation.

Manischewitz announces Non-GMO Matzo!

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Head Yenta

On all other nights, most Reform Jews eat whatever the hell they want.

But on Passover, we abstain from fluffy breadish products and suffer with matzo not only to honor our ancestors, but perhaps to lend a bit of consciousness to our consuming to the rest of the year.

While the Yenta family does not keep strictly kosher (El Yenta Man has to cook his shrimp on the grill), we do try to keep our food as local and non-Monsanto-stained as possible, so I’m very excited at that this news:

Massive mazto maker Manischewitz has announced a whole line of non-GMO Project Verified foods for our Passover tables this spring. The list includes pretty much everything but the gefilte fish:

Matzos
Matzos Thin Tea
Matzo Meals
Matzo Farfel
Matzo Cake Meal
Organic Matzo
Organic Spelt Matzo
Whole Grain Matzo Farfel
Whole Grain Matzo Meal
Whole Wheat Matzos
Unsalted Matzo

If you’re not familiar with the debate over genetically-modified ingredients–aka GMOs–have a look here.

It seems to me that ALL food that is genetically modified–and we’re not talking about old-fashioned cross-breeding–ought to be considered unkosher for its insidious dicking with God’s perfect genome, but hey, I’m no rabbi.

But I do know that come April El Yenta Man is going to soooo happy about his non-GMO organic spelt mazto brie!

Earworms = #EleventhPlague

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Head Yenta

Oy, remember those cute yeshiva boys with the nice voices who brought us this catchy Pesach ditty to the tune of Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop” last year?

C’mon, sing it: “Changin’ my pots and pans…gotta have Manischewitz for my prophet…I got haggadehs, lookin’ for the chametz…we’ll be munchin’ matzah…”

Well, the men of Six13 are baacccccck, this time changing up the lyrics to everyone’s favorite animated Oscar-winning animated movie (though personally, I didn’t think it lived up to the hype.)

Here’s your “Chozen” mash-up:

Little Yenta Girl is already driving us batty caterwauling “Let It Go” and “Do You Want to Build A Snowman” a hundred times a day, so I guess she can entertain the seder guests with the kosher versions.

DIY pantry pride

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Head Yenta

You know how some people are into other people’s kitchens or looking in medicine cabinets that aren’t theirs?

I’m a little obsessed with pantries.

Maybe it’s the fear of scarcity embedded in my Eastern European DNA, but having extra stock on hand brings a certain security to my domestic dream life. To me, there’s nothing more breathtaking than color-coded dry goods and cereals arranged alphabetically, extra ketchups at the ready and the dog food in its own special plastic bin.

If I come to your house, I will pretend to be looking for the bathroom just so I can catch a glimpse of your spaghetti shelf. When I am not pretending to work while shopping for shoes, I am looking at pantry porn.

I peek into other people’s pantries so often that my cousin Charles calls me “Larder Girl.”

That’s why this is a total embarrassment:

Ugly, sad pantry

That cluttery hot mess is my pantry, my very first real one after living in college dorms and crappy apartments and leeeetle tiiiiiny houses in Northern California that barely had enough cupboard space to hold a bag of rice and two dishes.

When we moved to Savannah, my very own pantry was a non-negotiable point for the realtor. But life got super busy real fast, and I never got a chance to paint it. Or remove the hideous shelf paper from 1978.

Before every Passover, when I make a pass at removing the extra pasta, cereal and other chametz-y items from my pantry, I swear to the Almighty that next year, I will clean it out and make it a shrine of gratitude to the bounty that is my life but right now God will just have to be cool with me throwing out the half-eaten bag of stale pretzels.

Well, the Lord Up Above must be just thrilled, ’cause this is the year I make good on my promise.

If I had known it would take three hours just to get everything out, I would have gone to the beach. Instead, I made some important discoveries:

1. Several cans of tomatoes that expired in 2009

2. Hideous flowered shelf paper from 1952 underneath the gross white shelf paper from 1978. Shelf paper has no shelf life. Who knew?

3. That I am a shopping bag hoarder. My bubbie would be so, so proud.

An abundance of shopping bags

Next, I cleaned and prepped to paint. You can see the layers of history. And also Clarabell’s tushy:

Empty, sad pantry

One of the things that shocked me was just how much dang food I’d stuffed in there over the years and forgotten about. Honestly, how many surplus bags of sundried tomatoes does a family really need? I decided to make a couple of boxes of the Second Harvest Food Bank.

Hoping these beans, soup and sundried tomatoes make someone a pretty good feast

Then it was time for the makeover. I chose a bright yellow called “Goldenrod” for the paint, thinking that such a sunny color would cheer me up on the evenings when I would rather trim my cuticles with pinking shears instead of making dinner. El Yenta Man says I should have picked a different shade for the ceiling and the baseboards, but I was all, “Dude, it’s a pantry, not a dining room at our weekend ski chalet and besides don’t you have some laundry to do?”

The selection of shelf paper does not appear to have improved in the past several decades, but I found a fake walnut wood print that reminded me of a Martha Stewart magazine spread I saw while I was getting my last mammogram. If you are not aware, contact paper was actually developed by Joseph Goebbels and really ought to be illegal for its ability to incite massive amounts of suffering. Little Yenta Girl was enormously helpful in unwrapping my face from the sticky sides before I suffocated to death.

Together we watched the paint dry and arranged everything just so, leaving out some empty boxes for whatever chametz remains come Sunday evening. (On a related note, there will be cereal for dinner all week, folks!)

Now look at my pretty pantry!

Happiness is an extra bottle mustard

Are you not impressed? Here’s another view:

The shopping bag drawer now only contains enough shopping bags for a small army instead of the entire battalion of those Chinese Terracotta soldiers.

Maybe no one will go meshuggneh on Pintrest about it, but a grand improvement, no? I even installed hooks for the broom and everything. (Fine. They were stick-on kind. But STILL.)

And next year, I’ll get around to putting the dog food in its own container. Promise.

Passover panic

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Head Yenta

Ummm I think I just agreed to hosting the seder this year at my house.

All these years, I’ve managed to duck that responsibility by visiting my parents in Arizona or getting ourselves invited elsewhere. Even though El Yenta Man and I planned and cooked the Passover meal in Savannah a couple of years ago, the deed was actually done at my in-law’s house a few blocks away.

This year, with my mother-in-law barely breathing yet still hanging on to life from her adjustable bed in the back room, I think it’s just too much for my father-in-law logistically and emotionally to host. So it’s our turn to be the grown-ups, even if we don’t own a set of matching dishes.

You’d think after attending 40-something seders in my life, I would have a handle on what all this entails. And I do, mostly: There’s the cleaning of the chametz and the brisket and buying both colors of horseradish and digging out the recipe for that marvelous pea paté “faux gras” everyone likes until they find out what’s in it.

But something’s eluding me. Oh yes. That would be my EVER-LOVING SANITY. Even in the non-holiday times, I am barely hanging on with the full-time job and the full-time wife-ing and mothering and the neverending laundry and unrealized ambitions and remembering to take my Graves’ disease medication. (Errm, actually, forgetting it several times this week may be contributing to my mental confusion. Add that to the list.)

There is just something about being responsible for the continuation of the Jewish people’s epic five thousand seven hundred something year history that I find VERY OVERWHELMING. While no Orthodox rabbi would ever approve of my unkashered kitchen, it’s still important to try and do things as correctly and meaningfully as I can, even if it means I end up rocking in the corner of the pantry trying to remember if kidney beans are kitniyot. (They are, and I’m not sure I care.)

Anyway, I was quite glad to run across this lovely article, 10 Steps to a More Serene Passover by Rivka Caroline on chabad.org. Rivka is a rabbi’s wife and has seven children, so if she can stay sane during Passover, surely I can figure this out.

First thing I’m going to do is make good on my yearly promise to clean out–really clean out–the pantry. (More on that DIY project to come next week.)

Then, I’m gonna pack up my in-laws’ gathering-dust-in-the-cabinent china and shlep it over. For the better prepared, Passover (aka “Pesach” with an “acch”) requires its own set of special dishes.

The least I can do is borrow some matching ones.

*coveting this gorgeous hamsa seder plate at Moderntribe.com!

Watch “The Story of the Jews” on PBS or Your Mother Will Plotz

Posted on March 24, 2014 by Head Yenta

In the last week, I have received numerous e-mails from BOTH of my parents expressing great concern that the Yenta family watch Simon Schama’s Story of the Jews.

Parts one and two of the five-part miniseries premiere tomorrow Tuesday, March 25 on PBS (check your local affiliate) and apparently if I don’t put our tushies on the couch for it, there will be hell to pay.

Well, not Hell, since Jews don’t believe in all that. (Unless, of course, they want to.) But my folks only noodge when it’s something fairly important, and I don’t like to disappoint them.

“I know it’s a weeknight, but maybe you’ll let the children watch a few minutes…” writes my mother in a style the rest of the family refers to as her Power of Suggestion tone.

Dad goes for more a direct tactic, as in “Your dead grandparents would be very happy, if in fact there is an afterlife and they could know of such things.”

Actually, I don’t need any guilt trips at all to defer my Parks & Rec Netflix viewing for this epic documentary, although some people I’m related to (*cough cough*) might consider it the T.V.-viewing equivalent of a museum full of Torah pointers.

Lushly filmed at archaeological sites, medieval synagogues, Venetian ghettoes and Palestinian neighborhoods, it promises to present Jewish history in relate-able, relevant terms as well as in the context of modern culture itself.

“What ties us together is a story, the story kept in our heads and hearts,” says Simon Schama in the preview. “We told our story to survive. We are our story.”

It’s a salient timing as we’re readying ourselves and our homes for our Passover seders on Monday, April 14, when we will tell one of the most important parts of the Jewish story over five courses, four cups of wine, several songs in Hebrew AND Yiddish and still have to do the dishes. Maybe this will bring a little clarity to the table.

If you need more intellectual coercion, check out Adam Kirsch’s lengthy but insightful review on Tablet.com. He makes the case just upon the visuals alone—even as he points out that as a religion without icons but plenty of tsuris, there aren’t that many grand edifices to revere:

“There is no Jewish Notre Dame,” Kirsch writes wryly.

He is also clear that the series does not “ignore” the Holocaust nor does it let it “dominate” this narrative, which may be a relief for those who are learning—with great respect—to define their Jewish identity as more than Hitler’s victims. Our story—and whether you’re Jew, Christian or Muslim, this is indeed your story, too—is bigger, bolder and more beautiful than that. Plus, it’s nowhere near finished yet.

So, yes, Mom and Dad, we’ll be parking it on the faux leather sofa tomorrow night under the Harry Potter throw blanket. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty excited about it.

And not just because it makes me feel less guilty about abbreviating the seder.

Yo, Yenta!

From the edge of the Diaspora rises a new generation of Jewish mother

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