Snoop Dogg is going to perform a concert at Ramat Gan Stadium in
Israel in September, Ha’aretz reports.

The Boston Globe reports on one local synagogue’s controversial plan to revitalize its Hebrew school: (more…)

Nextbook’s Jonathan Rosen has an op-ed in the NY Times on the hoopoe. Also, here’s more on kosher giraffe milk.

The Onion reports,

In an unexpected act that Israeli president Shimon Peres called “thoughtful,” al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sent a belated threat to Israel Monday in honor of the Jewish state’s 60th birthday. “Old fart!” read the front of the card in a font designed to look like ancient stone tablets. “Did you actually think I would forget my favorite infidels on their special day? Celebrate while you still can, dirty Zionist dogs!” bin Laden wrote under a caricature of a grinning al-Qaeda member wearing a birthday hat and a suicide belt, preparing to board a bus full of Israeli citizens. A visibly moved Peres told reporters he would return the gesture by sending a bouquet of a dozen F-15Is fighter jets to Lebanon next week.

When my heavy-metal friends disclosed their secret pasts, it was a series of revelations: although they were muscly, pierced and dark-alley-nightmare-looking, when they told stories of their childhoods, each was nerdier than the last. Now, Spin Magazine reporter Mordechai Shinefield uncovers the newest of the nü-metal fans’ deep dark secrets: they’re ex-yeshiva boys.

Elie Hassan and Brian Brown, both 21, graduated from Baltimore’s Ner Israel, where kids in their dorm sometimes snitched on the pair for indulging their nonkosher music habits. “I would say that 30 to 40 percent of our class knew about [lead singer] Draiman and had heard Disturbed,” says Brown. Now college roommates at the more liberal Yeshiva University in New York, they’re free to enjoy the band in relative peace.

That’s right: David Draiman, the lead singer of Disturbed, grew up in the yeshiva system — he attended five schools, and was kicked out of three of them. It’s no surprise to the band’s fans (or rubberneckers) — Draiman has repeatedly thrown Hebrew words, Jewish concepts, and knowing winks to the haredi subset of his audience — but writing lyrics like “Elokai, bury me tonight” is probably not what got Draiman ejected. (Blowing up the rosh yeshiva’s car, on the other hand, might have.)

Brooks Arthur started his career as an audio engineer in the 60s, working on “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “The Locomotion,” and “Leader of the Pack” before building up to producing albums for the likes of Liza Minelli and Carole King. He struck up a friendship with a young breakaway comic named Adam Sandler led him to produce Sandler’s ubiquitous “Chanuka Song,” after which they co-wrote possibly the most scatological Chanukah movie ever, Sandler’s “Eight Crazy Nights.”

Arthur’s latest venture is The Jewish Songbook, a CD filled with new and veteran performers doing renditions of Jewish songs. Most hearken back to the Borscht Belt melodies of the 1940s and 50s, but there is also the liturgical (Barbra Streisand doing “Avinu Malkeinu”), the modern Israeli patriotic (”Hatikvah”), and the unexpected—Adam Sandler doing a version of “Hinei Ma Tov” that not only isn’t a joke song, but also manages to showcase his competent classical tenor. JTA spoke to Brooks Arthur the day before the CD’s release about the record, the performers, and how it felt to sing alongside Barbra Streisand.

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June will be exciting for Jewish arts on both coasts.

San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum opens June 8th. JTA’s Sue Fishkoff has already written about its unique mission, and here is an article from the San Francisco Chronicle about architect Daniel Liebeskind’s visit and thoughts on his latest architectural masterpiece.

Meanwhile, in New York City, many Jewish museums are hosting exhibits and concerts, from “Warhol’s Jews: Ten Portraits Reconsidered,” (at the Jewish Museum through Aug. 3) to “Spirit of Sepharad: From Casbah to Caliphate, a 500 Year Journey” at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on June 25. See the New York Times’ take on these and other New York Jewish arts events this summer

In the following podcast, JTA staff writer Dina Kraft speaks with Isaac Berzin, the Israeli founder of an algae fuel company called GreenFuel, which, for its work in advancing alternative energy resources, earned Berzin the honor of being listed among Time magazine’s top 100 people of 2008. Though his company is based in Boston, Berzin recently moved back to Israel to start an institute on alternative energy policy at the IDC-Herzilya, a private Israeli college.

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The New York Times has had several items of interest over the past few days:

• The last Jews of Baghdad have become the fearful few.
• P. W. Singer and Elina Noor argue that the U.S. is making a strategic mistake by describing terrorists as jihadists.
• Organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade wonder why Israelis never seem to turn out.
• Thomas Friedman says Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America.
• A look a The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, that is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
• The U.S. State Dept. reinstated seven Fullbright scholarships awarded to Palestinian students after it had withdrawn them last week citing Israel’s refusal to allow the students to leave the Gaza Strip.
• The public editor of the New York Times discusses how the paper was taken to task over an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Islamic world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that the candidate had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult. (Click here and here for response in the blogosphere).

With tensions still simmering over an Arabic-language charter school in Brooklyn — a fight that spawned a (heavily Jewish) campaign against it, the resignation of its principal days before the school was due to open amidst charges she sympathizes with terrorists, and at least two lawsuits – news has broken of a Hebrew-language charter school in the same borough of New York City.

Both the Forward and the Jewish Week have stories about the new school, backed my mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt and pushed by his daughter, Sara Berman, who is submitting an application for the school next week.

If adopted, it would become the second Hebrew-language charter school in the country. Ben Gamla in Hollywood, Fla. was the first, opening its doors this past fall. Like the Brooklyn Arabic school, and another Arabic school in Minnesota, Ben Gamla has had its troubles. Critics — including some Jews — have charged that it’s little more than a front for religious instruction and blurs the line between church and state.

But at least one commentator thinks the new school is protected under the Constitution. Check out Thomas Carroll’s take in today’s New York Post.