Curb your Jesus humor
Bill Donohue of the Catholic League is upset over the most recent episode of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" ("The Bare Midriff").
Comedian Larry David is under attack from critics who say he pushed the mocking of religion and Christian belief in miracles over the edge in the latest episode of his HBO series "Curb Your Enthusiasm."
On the show's most recent installment, which aired Sunday, David urinates on a painting of Jesus Christ, causing a woman to believe the painting depicts Jesus crying.
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, responded to the episode, saying David should "quit while he's ahead," and that the show is proof that the comedian's best years are behind him.
"Was Larry David always this crude? Would he think it's comedic if someone urinated on a picture of his mother?" Donohue said in a statement. "This might be fun to watch, but since HBO only likes to dump on Catholics (it was just a couple of weeks ago that Sarah Silverman insulted Catholics on 'Real Time with Bill Maher') and David is Jewish, we'll never know."
Yes and yes. And, as anyone who has ever watch a few minutes of the show knows, Larry David loves to pick on his own. (Just ask conservative radio talkinghead Michael Savage, who also obejcted to the recent episode, but thinks the HBO start is a self-hating Jew.)
That said, does David have Jesus issues? Probably -- there's this episode, and the earlier one where he ate the Baby Jesus cookie. But that's nothing compared to the way Mel Gibson roughed up Jesus in "The Passion of the Christ" -- and, if I recall, Donohue was a big fan of the film. (I know, it's not the same, but still...)
P.S. The L.A. Jewish Journal gave the episode a thumbs up.
5 Comments |
Share This
|
Recapping the Trump-Kushner wedding
Barbara Walters dishes on Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's Jewish wedding (and the bride's conversion to Judaism).
USA Today asks: Ivanka converted, would you?
2 Comments |
Share This
|
Sharansky’s manifesto
Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky shares his views on the shortcomings and truths in the way Diaspora and Israeli Jews look at each other:
In a strange sort of way, Israeli Jewry and Diaspora Jewry had each viewed the other as if it were an unfortunate younger brother in danger of sinking into oblivion at any moment. And, truth to be told, neither attitude was entirely wrong - and each served its purpose...
In seeking to adjust our vision going forward, we need to ask: If building the state and facilitating the aliya of more than 3 million of our brethren from countries of oppression were challenges that defined the last 60 years, what are the challenges that will define the next 60? And as we move toward that next 60, can the Diaspora and Israel forge a new relationship - a relationship based on something more enduring than mutual charity or patronizing beneficence toward the other? And finally: On what basis can Israel and the Diaspora develop a shared way of looking at the future, rather than clinging to the bifurcated vision that has defined their respective pasts?
Full manifesto here.
5 Comments |
Share This
|
News from around the U.S. Jewish world
From around the American Jewish World:
- Jay Michaelson writes in the Forward that of all the responses to his essay "How I'm Losing My Love for Israel," the most troubling have been those from community leaders who said they agreed with him but are afraid to speak out.
- Susie Essman, the foul-mouthed Susie Greene on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," and Forward editor Jane Eisner sit down to talk about how there lives have unraveled 30 years since they both graduated from the high school.
- Has Los Angles trumped New York to become the deli capital of America? The L.A. Jewish Journal has the story.
- A group of nonagenarian baseball fans are transforming a senior citizen's home in Philadelphia into a bastion of Phillies fandom, reports the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.
- Jamie Schanbaum talks to the Texas Jewish Post of her struggle to recover from a life-threatening bout of meningitis and of her goal to return to the dance floor.
- A new book on Milwaukee Jewry tells a family story, discovers Marie Rohde of the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle.
4 Comments |
Share This
|
Tel Aviv subway, where art thou?
How is it that Tel Aviv, which is celebrating its centennial, doesn't have a subway? asks Aluf Benn in Ha'aretz:
More than 3 million people live in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area without an acceptable level of public transportation, while in significantly smaller European cities, subway systems have long been running; in Iran and North Korea, too. In Israel we get talk and promises, but no subway. Only a pathetic PR film can be found on the project's Web site.
The benefits for crowded central Israel, the savings to the economy and the impact on the environment of an electric-powered train filled with passengers instead of masses of polluting cars will be enormous. Also, accident rates will drop if young people have a cheap and easy alternative to driving at night.
But building a light railroad in the greater Tel Aviv area, part of which has been planned as a subway, has not moved forward because of problems involving the entrepreneurs behind it. Now, after a year of empty debate, the state is threatening to quash the project, according to Avi Bar-Eli in yesterday's TheMarker. This will require a new tender and there will be petitions to the Supreme Court. And the result? A child born today will not benefit from a ride to school using modern, quick public transportation immune to bad weather or traffic jams.
The Israeli culture of improvisation has trouble handling large projects; there is no more blatant expression of this than the Tel Aviv subway fiasco.
Full column here.
2 Comments |
Share This
|
Jews in Palestine
A columnist for Lebanon's Daily Star proposes an Israeli-Palestinian agreement in which Jews who refuse to leave the West Bank would become citizens of Palestine, with the right to leave and immigrate to Israel whenever they choose. Bill Glucroft writes:
An ultimatum to settlers would force them to choose between the modern state of Israel and its biblical promise, possibly encouraging many to acquiesce without major incident. Those who remain could retain their Israeli citizenship, with an open invitation to return, but would become Palestinian citizens. Living no differently from other diaspora Jews, they would be subject to the laws and values of their state.At first blush, a Palestinian Jew may sound like an oxymoron, but no more than Israeli Arabs; Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, who comprise more than 20 percent of the Jewish state’s population. Since Palestine would have to resemble a democracy, as Israel does, there is no reason minorities could not live there. In fact, it might help Palestine feel like a normal country.The idea of withdrawing Israel but leaving Israelis has yet to go mainstream, but there have been hints. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said as much at the Aspen Ideas Festival last July, when he declared that Jews would be welcomed in a future Palestinian state.
Full column here.
11 Comments |
Share This
|
Ariel Sharon’s twilight zone
in The Daily Beast:
The old soldier’s eyes are open. Sometimes he’s propped up in front of a TV, where images of nature and animals, especially cows, flicker across the screen. His family tells him the day’s news, the goings on at his beloved farm. They read to him, alternating between two books at a time, just as he used to do for himself. They play classical music. When his white hair grows long, they trim it. And once in a while, when someone tells him to move a toe, he does.
Whether Ariel Sharon takes in any of this activity, no one knows for sure. Because Israel’s once-robust prime minister and legendary battlefield hero—the decorated warrior, the controversial hawk and finally, beginning in 2001, the centrist prime minister who transformed the political landscape—has been in a coma for nearly four years, felled by a massive stroke. While not brain-dead, the 81 year old exists in a persistent vegetative state. He generally breathes on his own, but must be fed by a tube. He cannot speak, walk, or think. Probably.
Read full story here.
1 Comment |
Share This
|
Human Rights Watch responds
Human Rights Watch responds to HRW founder Robert Bernstein's critique in The New York Times of the group's treatment of Israel:
Human Rights Watch does not devote more time and energy to Israel than to other countries in the region, or in the world. We've produced more than 1,700 reports, letters, news releases, and other commentaries on the Middle East and North Africa since January 2000, and the vast majority of these were about countries other than Israel. Furthermore, our Middle East division is only one of 16 research programs at Human Rights Watch. The work on Israel is a tiny fraction of Human Rights Watch's work as a whole.
Full statement here.
3 Comments |
Share This
|
Rush, Rudy, Sharpton and Crown Heights (let’s not do the time warp again)
New York appears to be caught in some sort of time warp, as old racial feuds from the early 1990s are suddenly erupting.
1) Angry over essentially being rejected in his bid to become a part-owner of the St. Louis Rams football team, Rush Limbaugh took to The Wall Street Journal last week to defend himself and blast his opponents. At one point, he took direct aim at one of his most vocal critics, Al Sharpton:
It didn't take long before my name was selectively leaked to the media as part of the Checketts investment group. Shortly thereafter, the media elicited comments from the likes of Al Sharpton. In 1998 Mr. Sharpton was found guilty of defamation and ordered to pay $65,000 for falsely accusing a New York prosecutor of rape in the 1987 Tawana Brawley case. He also played a leading role in the 1991 Crown Heights riot (he called neighborhood Jews "diamond merchants") and 1995 Freddie's Fashion Mart riot.
Sharpton has threatened to sue for defamation. But at least one person has Rush's back: Norman Rosenbaum, the brother of the yeshiva student killed in the Crown Heights riots:
Norman Rosenbaum, whose 29-year-old brother was killed during the riot, pledged to do "whatever I can" to help Limbaugh if Sharpton goes through with his threat to sue. ... "He was a divisive, old-fashioned, racist bigot," Rosenbaum said from his home in Australia, while at the same time admitting that he didn't "spark the riots."
2) If all that weren't enough ... Rudy Giuliani sparked controversy Sunday when he warned Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn that crime would return if Michael Bloomberg is not re-elected:
"I worried daily that the city might be turned back to the way it was before 1993 -- and you know exactly what I'm talking about," he told the Boro Park Jewish Community Council.
"This community remembers the fears, the worries and the crimes -- and the great fear of going out at night and walking the streets."
Giuliani is being accused of playing the race card.
Bloomberg, meanwhile, played the Detroit card: "Detroit went from a great city with lots of good-paying jobs to a city that's basically holding on for dear life," the mayor said.
The comment drew a rebuke from Giuliani biographer Fred Siegel: "If this isn’t a rude, racial invocation, then you don’t mention Detroit."
11 Comments |
Share This
|
Defending Israel at the U.N.
Col. Richard Kemp, former commander of British troops in Afghanistan, declares in front of the United Nations Human Rights Council that Israel "did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare."
8 Comments |
Share This
|
Recent Comments
Blog Roll
