What did the Forward mean when it crowned Tim Kaine the “Jewiest” Vice President Pick?

On Friday, after Hillary announced via txt that Tim Kaine would join her on the Democratic ticket, the Forward published an article boldly titled “5 Reasons Tim Kaine Will Be the Jewiest Vice President Pick for Hillary Clinton“. Those five reasons (spoiler alert): He supports the two-state solution “even when others don’t”, is a religious Catholic, helped Sabra attract a factory to Virginia, has hosted several Passover seders, and once set up a Rabbi’s daughter.

Without getting into whether even one of these five things suffices to make someone — politician or otherwise — “Jewy” to any degree (or, as in the case of #2, seemingly rules that possibility out entirely), let’s consider something the article sorely lacks: context. After all, the ‘iest’ in “Jewiest” implies Kaine is “Jewy” compared to at least one someone else. So we shall proceed by process of elimination.

What Obama’s last-minute decision to visit Saudi Arabia tells us about his Presidency

Barack Obama just threw a cow’s worth of red meat to his critics (probably not the wisest thing to do in India).

A few weeks ago, his administration explained that the President could not participate in France’s Unity March on such short notice out of of security concerns. Today, he announced an imminent visit to Saudi Arabia in order to “offer his condolences on behalf of the American people”* on the death of dearly-departed King Abdullah.** It would seem there are fewer security concerns in ISIS’ backyard than in Paris; I wonder how much of Riyadh is a no-go zone.

Why can’t every religious conference have drone panoramas?

Thousands of rabbis gathered this past weekend in Brooklyn for the 31st International Conference of Chabad-Lubavitch Emissaries. Naturally, the occasion called for the help of a drone:

The most curious-est Synagogue in New Haven

I typed “Church” into Google maps in an effort to identify which house of worship is responsible for the noontime bells that have — on occasion — proven far more effective than my (much earlier) alarm at rousing me from my slumber. The results were not all that interesting. I identified a couple of likely candidates, and that was it.

But because I was curious (and possess a claw), I then decided to run another, similar search — for “Synagogue”.

Here’s what turned up (click to embiggen):

Aish.com tried to derive theological meaning from Star Wars. It went about as well as you might expect.

In a shocking departure from its usually-substantive coverage, Aish.com did its best to celebrate May the Fourth with an article titled simply, Star Wars’ Jewish Themes? The author has clearly never heard of Betteridge’s law of headlines, as he appears to have, at first, taken the assignment quite seriously.

There’s plenty to pick on here, but I’m going to skip ahead to the part where he describes the primary parallel between Judaism and the Force:

In the end, the battle between good and evil is played out within each of us.

In the end! But not a moment before. (I suppose that’s why Darth Vader… never mind, spoilers!)

But while the author-who-shall-not-be-named (sorry, wrong franchise) (but seriously, I can’t name him because his name is absent from the article) manages to play it mostly straight for most of the article, flaws begin to show towards the end (well, about three paragraphs beforehand, and I hope you weren’t surprised to discover the evil lurking a drop too early).

First, he allows us to understand why he views the battle between good and evil as a uniquely Judaic concept — because he knows next to nothing about any other religions aside from what they are called:

The smartest joke on John Oliver’s brand new show got no laughs — just like he planned

Thanks to his alleged success filling in for Jon Stewart this past summer, John Oliver landed himself a brand new The Daily Show-style show on HBO. Last Week Tonight lasts half an hour — just like The Daily Show — but thanks to the business model of its corporate host, it doesn’t need to pause to pay the bills.

Even though Oliver gets the benefit of thirty minutes uninterrupted, trying to fit a full week’s-worth of news into that slot can be challenging. Oliver devoted the first few minutes of his show — viewable in its entirety here — to the usual suspects, like Cliven Bundy and Donald Sterling (although that pair probably has an altogether different conception of “the usual suspects”), before — somewhat unexpectedly — proceeding to a detailed dissection of India’s ongoing Presidential elections.

Oliver focused on the candidacy of Narendra Modi, and particularly on allegations that he bears some share of responsibility for religious riots that killed approximately 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, over ten years ago. Oliver made an earnest case for why Americans and their media “should care about this story”:

Indian treasure hunt going according to plan; gold-diggers don’t realize it yet

A few weeks ago, I wrote about a treasure hunt just getting underway in India. In place of the traditional “X marks the spot approach” to treasure-hunting, Indian authorities had undertaken an enormous dig in the hope of finding 1,100 tons of buried gold only on the basis of a Hindu holy man’s dream.

As I noted at the time, “If you will, it is no dream”:

One thousand and one… Indian nights?

The world is a big place, and archaeologists don’t typically run around shoveling dirt just anywhere; usually, they have a pretty good idea of what they hope to find.

The dig that began late last week beneath the Raja Rao Ram Bux Singh fort in Uttar Pradesh, India, is no exception. The archaeologists knew exactly what it is they were looking for: gold. 1,100 tons of it, to be precise. And what makes them think there’s a chance in Naraka they’ll find it?  A guru dreamt it was located there, of course. Per Newser:

So you want to go to Nepal (or Thailand)?

Applications for the Fall 2013 session of Tevel B’Tzedek are now open. And even though this year’s flyer doesn’t use any of my photography*, I’m more than happy to pass it along in case you’re interested [click to enlarge]:

Come on, Youtube – I would much prefer your worst

You may have noticed that Youtube is full of comments. You may have also noticed that those comments are generally a “treat”. But you probably did not notice that some of those comments are mine.

Not mine, in the sense that I wrote them. Mine, in the sense that they were posted in response to my videos.

You see, at around the time I started writing this blog, I also created a brand new Youtube account to go with it. So now, every time someone comments on a video uploaded through that account, I get an email alert. Granted, not a lot of them; I’ve used the account to post only six clips — none of them Gangnam Style — but they do pile up after long enough.

Those emails have given me a minor sense of entitlement. At the risk of stating the tautological, my comments are mine.

And until recently, those comments lived up to my expectations (particularly, the anti-Semitic ones chronicled in The Youtube comments I chose to censor). Until, that is, I uploaded this advertisement featuring Drew Brees: