HEY JEWS

which is to say that basically any religious text is like any other, full of a lot of bullshit and occasional practical advice. rooting for the home team as being more 'intellectual' or whatever is just chauvinism coming out sideways.

xpost

i mean i'd like to think i treasure the traditions yadda yadda yadda but whenever i do manage to get myself invited to a seder or something it's about fifteen minutes before i start fidgeting and looking at the door.

i like some of the stories about animals in the torah.

which is to say that basically any religious text is like any other, full of a lot of bullshit and occasional practical advice

I don't think this is really true fwiw. there are vastly different approaches, to say nothing of actual content, between, say, the Rig Veda and Maimonides

whenever i do manage to get myself invited to a seder or something it's about fifteen minutes before i start fidgeting and looking at the door

can't wait to greet Elijah eh

we usually pass one another as i'm leaving and he's just showing up.

amateurist, with all due respect, it doesn't sound like you maybe have a lot of experience with the texts you're discussing? like, "full of a lot of bullshit and occasional practical advice" doesn't describe the Talmud at all which is pretty skimpy on practical advice but rich with deliberations into the nature of obscure tort laws punctuated by surreal and strange stories.

yeah i know, i'm being contrarian. i just get irked by secular jews who make claims for the supposed intellectual superiority of their religious texts which they aren't even that invested in.

also most of what i have learnt in my life has made me more discomforted by morality, more anxious about my place and role in life, not relieved and certainly not anesthesticized, which is how i imagine u imagine the intended effect

fair enough, tho i take these texts very seriously and am pretty invested

p sure Buddhism has a place at the table of Spiritual Traditions That Think Baout Thangs

super interesting interview w/ a guy becoming a kabbalist (a for "real" kabbalist, not a kabbalah center one):
http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/an-aspiring-mekubal-an-interview-part-i/

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/106729/responding-to-readers

tbh i think that just writing an article that mentions breaking bad + the holocaust is trivializing and offensive from the get go. what a paucity of feeling to think that an amc drama is relevant at all.

here's the original article: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/105853/breaking-bad-karma

Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live. My father’s parents were Holocaust survivors, and in grade school I received the de rigueur exposure to the horror—visiting geriatric men and women with numbers tattooed on their arms, completing assigned reading like The Diary of Anne Frank and Night. But the more information I received, the less sympathy the survivors elicited from me. Each time we clapped for the old Hungarian lady who spoke about Dachau, each time Elie Wiesel threw another anonymous anecdote of betrayal onto a page, I eyed it askance, thinking What did you do that you’re not talking about? I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit.”

I wondered if anyone had alerted Hitler that in the event that the final solution didn’t pan out, only the handful of Jews who actually fulfilled the stereotype of the Judenscheisse (because every group has a few) would remain to carry on the Jewish race—conniving, indestructible, taking and taking. My grandparents were not excluded from this suspicion. The same year, during a family dinner conversation about Terri Schiavo, my father made the serious request that should he fall into a vegetative state, he would like for us to keep him on life support indefinitely. Today he and I are estranged for a number of other reasons that are all somehow the same reason.

tbh, might belong on the anti-semitism thread instead.

yikes. that piece is so...weirdly glib? about all of it. I expect something longer, some kind of conclusion but it really just kind of '"holocaust survivors and Walter White...hand-wave, et cetera...and fin."

yeah I don't know what to make of the tone of that

the article is almost so offensive to all basic human sentiments as to be inoffensive because it's clearly the rantings of an unsettled mind. like maybe the only offense is that Tablet thought that a clearly unwell human being was just a courageous idiosyncratic writer.

dunno why the Holocaust is mentioned at all tbh

xp

Right! Like...the line she thinks she's drawing between Breaking Bad and the holocaust is really unclear, to the point of not even being existent.

And the things she's saying about the Holocaust in general, I just... I don't know why you'd try to express that without being a good enough writer to explain yourself afterwards.

And the Tablet explanation of it is like..."okay so that happened. Anyway.."

she does not seem to understand the difference between doing things to survive (ie, Holocaust survivors) and doing things that are wrong because you know you're going to die (breaking bad). these are not the same thing.

yeah. I think that's exactly it

like, Walt is not doing evil shit to survive (at least, not as far as I've watched in the show lol)

and that intro. This is really bad: I had the gut instinct that these were villains masquerading as victims who, solely by virtue of surviving (very likely by any means necessary), felt that they had earned the right to be heroes, their basic, animal self-interest dressed up with glorified phrases like “triumph of the human spirit

...

surely she meant to say "triumph of the will" there lol

this is an interesting documentary that, among other things, addresses the popular myth that there had to have been something remarkable about the people who survived (more cunning, smarter, more self-interested, more vicious, or w/e):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1479963/

That's a demented article. Commenters, for once, OTM.

I mean that's kind of a secondary point as far as the doc, but it's addressed in an interesting way vis a vis the myth that there were significant numbers of jewish "comfort women" (i.e. the fantasy women who survived the holocaust must have offered themselves to the nazis)

i remember reading a great piece about that in the voice (i don't know if it came out with the movie - i think hoberman wrote it?) but never saw the documentary. i'm really interested in seeing it

any idea where it can be seen?

I saw it at film forum. It must be on DVD somewhere but I don't know how easy it is to find.

Guess what Anne Breslaw went as for halloween:

http://heebmagazine.com/i-was-anne-frank-for-halloween/20467

Ooh, sorry! Spoiler in the url!

ugh, heeb magazine

Even I have laughed at the occasional tasteless Anne Frank joke. But there's a big difference between whispering these things among close friends and reifying them in public. That goes for her article as well. Ok, so she had paranoid thoughts about her holocaust survivor grandfather. She's probably not the first Jewish person to have such thoughts. She could forget about them. Or talk to a therapist or someone close to her. But instead she decides that they make a great foundational premise for an article. I mean that kind of defines the difference between a person who is mentally healthy and one who isn't in my book.

A great foundational premise for an article... about BREAKING BAD.

It's classic holocaust survivor guilt, there's nothing really to see here. She can't deal with the notion that her family somehow survived, and those conflicted feelings get expressed as guilt and self-loathing.

what tablet editor let that get through!

Since I was 12 I’ve had an unappealing, didactic distrust of people with the extreme will to live.

for god's sake, what did she think she was doing with the word "didactic" here

http://mindymeyer4senate.com/

what

http://mindymeyer4senate.com/issues.html

"Diva of the District"

"We endorsed her," said Jerry Kassar, chairman of Brooklyn's Conservative party.

Pink elephants, huh.

I'm not even Jewish but I am fighting my knee-jerk response that she is Making Jews Look Bad so she should Knock It the Fuck Off.

^^^which response itself may be antisemetic, yes? I srsly struggle with that.

See also my feelings about David Brooks.

quincie, I am fighting my "girl, lay off the heavy makeup/self tanner" response because I don't really want the discussion about a female politician to be primarily about her looks. But on the other hand, oh honey, no.

It isn't her looks that are getting me defensive; it is the Web site as a whole! Her picture could be totally absent; it would have me cringing at the same level. You could even obliterate the pink and replace her with a dude and blue--I will still be all "please do not bring the Jews into this."

it has been my experience that kids who move away from frum (esp chassidic brooklyn) world to secular world tend to gravitate towards low culture stuff - popular radio, reality shows, kinda tacky clothing, etc. i'm sure there's some way to unpack this re performance of class + accessibility (gateway to classier stuff requires education, acculturation, etc that frum community doesn't provide). i'm making big generalizations obv, but i remember frum kids getting into hard drugs, serious drinking problems, etc while "bad" modern orthodox kids idk go to business school or show up to class stoned.