He used to be such a hottie. Funny what time and 30+years of bitter, gutwrenching hostility can do to a man, habibi.

[Sidenote: for a COMPLETE list of Middle Eastern hottie/dead leaders, see this link.]

I am concerned. Muammar Gaddafi doesn’t have a place to sleep during his stay in the United States, having been denied by the Dirty Zionist town of Englewood, New Jersey,possibly denied by Jewish conspirator Donald Trump, and turned down at a number of major New York hotels.

To help him feel a little more at home in his Bedouin tent cum traveling Ringling Brothers Flying High Top as he continues to bring the Haterade on America (and Israel), I’ve graciously come up with a list of locations should feel free to use.  You can thank me later, Mo Mo.  Preferably by giving me my own AK-47.

1.  Newark, New Jersey-Its crime rate has plummeted to only 60% shootings every day!
2.  My home hood near Susquehannah Univesity, Pennsylvania, where there’s only a slight chance he’ll get cancer
3.  Clearfield, Pennsylvania, where he could possibly choke to death/die of cholesterol poisoning from a 5 lb burger
4. Some place in New York where there is a very small chance he could get run over by an epliplectic lorry driver (WTF is a lorry?)
5.  And the most obvious place?  An actual Bedouin Tent! Granted, it’s a restaurant and probably they could stick him near the sink or something, but still.  Duh, MoMo.  Think on your feet.  How did you ever stay in power so long.  You should just hire me to do all your major decisions for you.  First decision Ouiki would make? (yes, that’s right.  There’s no V in Arabic, so you have to substitute with a U.  No wonder Lybia never got anywhere.  How retarded is that? Oueri.)

A while ago, I revealed that Mr. B and I would be going on a mini-Birthright for him.  Except it wasn’t free.  Because it’s kind of awkward for married people to go on Birthright.  Since I’ve already been, and I’m not a big fan of him walking drunk down Ben Yehuda Street asking Israeli girls to “show him their weapons.”  Plus, married people are lepers and we, like, aren’t really supposed to mingle with single people. Is there a Birthright for married people? Beshertright?  (Note: I’ve never called Mr. B my beshert in all my life.  Usually just my tsuris.)

Anyway, long story short, I gave him the Birthright rundown of Israel over the past two weeks.

Here is us, jetlagged to hell in historic Yafo with the historic Tel Aviv behind us and some historic German tourists (meaning they were old as hell) taking our picture.   What you don’t know is that we have also just taken 5 doses of acid in order to smile after landing at 5:00 am and hitting the ground running.  Zionism is hard, people.

Here’s us, stirring up some bidness at the Dome of the Rock, which Mr. B noted was “not as shiny as I expected,” and “was highly disappointed in the whole thing.”

And here’s me with some guy that was roaming the mean streets of Jerusalem that knows the best humusiyot in on every Jerusalem hill.  You can never be too careful out there.

]]> http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/09/back-from-israel-quick-taglitfortwo-sponsor-our-next-flight/feed/ 6 http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/08/jews-back-in-ukraine/ http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/08/jews-back-in-ukraine/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:14:28 +0000 vicki http://www.jewlicious.com/?p=9969

I bet you’ve been wondering where I was.  Well, I’ll give you a hint.

No.  Not with Amy Winehouse.   I was at a Russian Jew wedding.  Eight hours away.  So, I’ve been all discombobulated, especially since we are leaving next week for Eretz Nehederet.  So, I’m cheating a little bit.

Here’s a post about Ukraine or something.

So, you know how ck recently had a post about the UJC Community Heroes?   I’m over it.  You know why?  A certain Genia Brin.  Not only is she the mother of Sergey Brin, who I totally could have married and now been Beemin’ up and down Mountain View, but also she decided to spearhead HIAS’s MyStory project, which is a social network for ex-Soviet Jews to share their immigration story.

She does not know that she has led me to drink and despair (and Nutella binges)

This network totally ruins my chances of writing the Great American Novel about how Hard it is to be all Russian Jewish and immigranty and angsty, when thousands of other people have had the same experience, and can now chronicle it ON A SOCIAL NETWORK.  They are giving away all my trade secrets of immigrant sorrow. I mean, it’s true that there’s Gary Shteyngart and Emil Draitser and Eugene Mirman and Sana Krasikov and Mark Budman , but whatevs!  If I wrote a book, wouldn’t you be shocked to know that, for example, my earliest memory is of my mom breaking my shovel on a frozen lake in Yaroslavl, Russia?  I cried for at least forty minutes.  Well, that’s touching and all, but HOW CAN I TOP BEING IN A GHETTO IN MINSK?  I can’t.

Time to accidentally hike into Iran or something. I gotta up my game.

As you may be aware, living in Israel can have serious consequences.  That’s because the State of Israel commits horrible crimes against humanity every day. These manifest themselves in the form of hideous Israeli wedding dresses.  Since we are knee-deep in wedding season, I thought I’d take a moment to remind you that tomorrow is Hideous Israeli Wedding Dress Awareness Day (HIWDAD), a day that was made up by me just about fifteen minutes ago as I was going through Facebook pictures of Israeli weddings.   To be fair, Benji Lovitt has been valiantly fighting this troubling trend for years.

If you are familiar with Israeli weddings, you know this dress has been popular for the past five years or so.  You know, the one with the barely-there middle that seems the be reenacting the parting of the Sea that exists between the bride’s upper chestal region and her navel.  (yes, chestal.)

The 11th plague. Whorrible.

I’ve heard from several sources in Israel that this look seems to be dying out.  Is it true?

Sleepless in Seeattle

Please spread the word.  HIWDAD is a serious day, for a serious cause.

Every time I am in a majority-Jewish setting, such as in a synagogue, an Israel event, or TJ MaXX when they are having their 50% off sale, I get the feeling that other people don’t think that I’m Jewish.  I usually get this feeling because people tell me they don’t think I look Jewish.  In one particularly harrowing incident at Holy Land Restaurant in Northeast Philadelphia about two years ago, I spoke to the waitress in Hebrew.

פלאפל שלכם טוב מאוד.  מתגעגעת אותו מארץ.  קשה למצות אותו בחול” , I said, smiling at her.
(Translation: Your falafel is most excellent.  Oh, how I pine for falafel from Eretz Israel.  It is hard to find such sustenance in the New World.)

She started.  “You Jewiiish,”  Bracha (Or maybe it was  Vered) asked me.

“Ken,” I replied, a bit flustered.

“Bat you don look Jewiiish!  Nat even a little beet!”

I burrowed down into my thinah pool of shame.  Just because I looked like an Aryan poster child didn’t mean I had to go through this kind of discrimination.

This portrait of me is from when I was in the seventh grade. In 1942.

What is my point in telling this story, except to show off that I can spell mitgaga’at in Hebrew?  Now, blonde Russian Jews are becoming more accepted in Israeli society, going so far as to being hot in the Knesset!  Ok, so the blonde in this story, Anastasiya Michaeli Samuelson, is actually an ethnically Russian convert to Judaism.  But  it’s a start.

Hottie with a lobby.

The Forward writes about her,

A Russian-born convert to Judaism, former beauty queen and celebrated TV personality, Michaeli is, in many ways, the perfect bright and sunny face for Lieberman’s highly controversial political party, one often accused of advancing a racist agenda. Michaeli, a kind of younger Sigourney Weaver look-alike, adamantly rejects the charge. “I am not a racist,” she insisted.

The pixie-haired blonde immigrated to Israel from St. Petersburg in 1997 and converted to Judaism in 2000. She wed her husband, Yossi Samuelson, a Latvian-born Israeli Jew 10 years her senior, twice: once in a Russian civil ceremony after the birth of their first child, when Samuelson was employed in Moscow by Tadiran, an Israeli electrical supplier, and a second time after her conversion, when she and Samuelson already had three children and were living in Israel.

Influenced by her Soviet upbringing with its emphasis on “patriotism” and “loyalty,” and its view of Judaism as a nationality, Michaeli doesn’t distinguish between being a good Jew and an Israeli patriot. “Judaism is at the basis of why we have this country to begin with. It’s not just a religion,” she said.

So inspired was I by her story, that I decided to see if I could follow in her footsteps (minus the part where the Forward says that she’s a lot like Sarah Palin, because that’s just crazy.)

What’s that?  No?  Don’t quit your day job?  Ok, ok.I’ll just live vicariously through Anastasiya  for now.

]]> http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/07/hot-russians-invade-the-knesset/feed/ 12 http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/07/happy-5th-anniversary-jewlicious/ http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/07/happy-5th-anniversary-jewlicious/#comments Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:47:21 +0000 ck http://www.jewlicious.com/?p=9399

A Self Congratulatory Post and another Jewlicious Prank!
Jewlicious began 5 years ago on July 2004. In that time we have written nearly 5,000 posts and generated nearly 70,000 comments. We’ve also run 5 Jewlicious Festivals, the last of which attracted nearly 1000 participants, much to the consternation of the Long Beach Fire Department I’m sure. I’ve been blessed to be associated with some of the coolest people I know as fellow writers, including The Middle and Muffti who were here right from the get go. Running Jewlicious is often a thankless task. Unlike others, we never got fancy shmancy funding for offices in New York equipped with a wet bar, ping pong and fooz ball tables. But I did get to meet and befriend some awesome people, like the army of volunteers that make the Jewlicious Festival happen and most notably Rachel Bookstein, her husband Rabbi Yonah, and their totally edible children.

There are other things that make working on Jewlicious so rewarding, like running into people that know me from the blog in Jerusalem and being told the role we played in their decision to attend Hebrew University or some Yeshiva or a MASA program. One message I got the other day totally made me smile as well. An ex’s niece sent me a message on facebook wondering about the provenance of all the notes I wrote. Turns out Renée had no idea what Jewlicious was but “I really enjoyed the ones I had read! Seriously, I found all of them to be well written and pretty interesting! (The one about JDate was very amusing, as was “Dear Hamas, Take Me!”)” She later added that “Oh! I forgot to mention that some of my friends where reading the stories from jewlicious.com ! They really enjoyed them!” Renée is an unaffiliated Jewish student at McGill and exactly the sort of smart, talented kind of Jew we always wanted to reach. Also appreciated are kind words from colleagues I deeply respect like Matthue Roth over at My Jewish Learning and Dan Brown at eJewish Philanthropy.

Less fun is some of the bile and invective I’ve attracted from members of the doucheoisie over the years. One former blogger is still telling anyone who will listen to stay away from Jewlicious and from me, years after I have had any interaction with him. This has been cutting into my bottom line and despite all my efforts to just stay out of his way, he doesn’t seem to know how to stop. So the gloves are off asshole. Expect repercussions.

Speaking of repercussions, and this is where the fun “prank” part of the post comes in, there’s a current blogger who has jumped at any opportunity to talk trash about me, accusing me of being a cyber bully, an utterer of anti-gay slurs and a thief. He wrote a typically shoddy Birthright related post the other day about Momo Lifshitz of Oranim and used an image that I created to illustrate it. When informed by one of his readers that I held the copyright on that image, rather than give credit where credit is due, he merely switched the photo to another one of Momo.

But that’s where the dolt fucked up. Not only did he not acknowledge the source of the image, he linked directly to the image thus not only violating Oranim’s copyright, but also stealing their bandwidth! Thus, much in the vein of previous Jewlicious pranks (see this one against Nazis and this one against an anti Israel douchebag), the staff at Oranim gave me and everyone at Jewlicious a much appreciated 5th anniversary gift:

I’m not mentioning this thief’s name nor linking directly to his site (though feel free to use this URL) so that we can at least derive some compensation by laughing at him for as long as possible. Once he figures out what an idiot he is, then I will link away. In the meantime, thanks to everyone for everything. You all rock!

With so much craziness going on in the world, we have to stick together and show solidarity for Israel. Jewlicious has joined the largest Israel Festival in the USA to help bring you an amazing show by MOSHAV. Join us for an afternoon of fun, music, and friends. Vendors, food, Israel vibe everywhere – there will be 10-20,000 people there. ONLY $5 Check out the Jewlicious Booth where we will have a free gift! This is going to be a huge party and we look forward to seeing you!

MOSHAV play at 4pm so you want to be there by 3 to get parking and make your way to the stage.
Join the Jewlicious Facebook Event here
Israel Festival
Sunday, May 3, 2009 10 am – 7 pm
At Woodley Park Admission $5
All day fun for adults, kids and families — Rides, food, and a variety of booths and more….
For more info: www.israelfestival,com or 818-757-0123

REPEAT! Moshav @ 4pm on the main stage….don’t miss this show for Israel!

THAT JEWLICIOUS FEELING!

On stage in the final hour of the record breaking 2009 Festival, BEN PERLSTEIN (LA), Festival Production Manager, and long time Tour Manager for MATISYAHU, steps in on guitar. REB LEIBISH, Montreal’s Ghetto Shul Rabbi on Sax. ADAM WEINBERG (Miami), Matisyahu’s acoustic accompaniment of choice, and Jewlicious Festival’s National Music Director. Filmed by Scott Drucker.

Three days of non-stop fun, music, food, films, workshops, and games. You have to experience Jewlicious to know what its about.

Four more videos and updated YouTube Channel – check it out.