Kosher Salt

If you haven’t watched the CBS show 2 Broke Girls, you’re not missing much. This week’s “And the Kosher Cupcakes” episode was a poor attempt at humorously taking on the Hasidic Jews of South Williamsburg. Max and Caroline, the two broke girls themselves who are waitresses/aspiring cupcake bakers, are hired to bake kosher cupcakes for a bar mitzvah.

For the record, I don’t regularly watch 2 Broke Girls, mostly because anything TV-related that Whitney Cummings (Broke Girls co-creator and EP) touches unfortunately feels contrived and wince-worthy. So, while I found the episode mostly offensive, it was less a result of the painful, forced Yiddish dialogue alongside the 13-year old pais-clad “pimps,” and much more a result of the episode being just so terribly unfunny.

Given that the show is designed to take a comedic look at Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I suppose acknowledging the area’s Jewish community was inevitable. The complete lack of humor and awkward use of dialogue, however, was not a great approach.

At one point, two bar mitzvah-age boys appear obedient in front of their parents and turn into foul-mouthed “pimps” once left alone with the two broke girls. To have young actors speak about “filling women’s mouths” with anything is just a poor attempt at humor. (Unless of course it’s a Comedy Central Roast, or a Will Ferrell movie. Those jokes are hilarious). To have child actors portraying lewd Hasidic Jewish boys for the sake of a few dirty bar mitzvah jokes is really just unappealing all around.

The A.V. Club nails the show’s style of humor saying, “The most irritating and prolonged [problem of the show] is that, like a fifth grader giving a book report, the writers just don’t seem to trust in the ability of the audience to retain information or get a joke that isn’t highlighted, starred, and given to you with 10 exclamation points.” And each one of the episode’s kugel euphemisms (i.e. “a pasta and a dessert”) does just that.

Comedy has tremendous value in society. As free speech goes, satire is the best form of it. Therefore, if you are going to attempt to shed some light on the idiosyncrasies of any religious group, race, or even neighborhood, please at least make sure it’s laugh-worthy.

Thankfully, Sylvia Fine from The Nanny (aka Renee Taylor) always makes things better.

Doron Petersan, Cupcake Wars champ and founder of vegan cafe Sticky Fingers Sweets & Eats in Columbia Heights, sat down with Kosher Salt to chat about her new new cookbook, the dirty secret behind cake pops, and what it takes to win a Food Network competition.

Petersan will be at Sixth & I to discuss her new cookbook, Sticky Fingers’ Sweets! 100 Super-Secret Vegan Recipes, on Thursday, March 1 at 7:00 pm.  And yes, there will be samples. 

A Wet Hot American Summer sequel is “100%” happening, according to Michael Showalter who broke the greatest news ever to Andy Cohen Wednesday night on Watch What Happens Live.

If you’ve never seen Wet Hot American Summer—presumably because you’ve been living in an Amish village with no access to modern technology for the last decade—then you’ve missed out on the scatterbrained, yet sentimental comedy that takes place on the last day at Camp Firewood in 1981.

Filmed in 2001, WHAS invented the ensemble comedy long before Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Eve,and the movie’s IMDB page lists just as many A-listers that fill the credits of the Garry Marshall vehicles. But when Wet Hot American Summer was made, Paul Rudd was most known for Clueless and The Object of My Affection, Amy Poehler was just another member of the Upright Citizens’ Brigade, and Bradley Cooper was missing his graduation from New York City’s Actors Studio Drama School to film a very intimate scene with Michael Ian Black.

Wet Hot American Summer cost just under $2 million to make and grossed about $300,000 when it was released in theaters. It was panned by critics, but found a cult following mostly because of its “before they were famous” cast list and brilliantly bizarre plotlines that begin pretty predictably, but wander off into illogical montages.

WHAS was Sixth & I’s Dive-In Movie last year, Showalter has come to the ‘gogue a record-holding five times, and Black will try to tie that number when he speaks about his newest book You’re Not Doing It Right on March 8^th.

Sixth & I’s obsession with anything and everything to do with Michael and Michael might be what a therapist classifies as “unhealthy.” But, it still won’t stop us from imagining what a Wet Hot American Sequel will look like.

Even though WHAS’s director, David Wain, said in June the sequel would take place the same summer as the original film, we think the sequel should jump ahead 10 years later after the last day of Camp, that is, if McKinley (Michael Ian Black) can make it.

Of course, Beth (Janeane Garofalo) would still be camp director, but Camp Firewood is even more decrepit than it was in 1981. Now, it’s serves as a juvenile halfway house where arson runs rampant and craft time means turning everyday objects into weapons. It’s up to the former counselors to restore Camp Firewood to its former glory! Talent show, anyone?

You’re Chai-ered!: You may remember the potential for DC’s Old Post Office pavilion to become the National Museum of the Jewish People, adjacent to a spiffy new Hyatt Hotel. Unfortunately, the Donald wins again. The space is set to become a 250-room Trump hotel. This way, if he pretends to run for President again, he’ll have a place to stay in the Capital.

Sonogram superstitions: Jewish folklore when it comes to pregnancy includes things like not stepping on cut toenails for fear of miscarriage and biting an etrog to ensure easy delivery. Tablet’s Allison Hoffman has pre-natal superstition covered in her latest piece.

Never forget: Comedians Rachel Bloom and Adam Glasser released a new Funny or Die video promoting the Holocaust Museum of New Mexico because in the words of Bloom, “The Nazis? Yeah, they killed like everybody.” (Warning: It’s super un-PC but admittedly hilarious).

Allegations: Hadassah is investigating whether two of its top board executive committee members misused charitable funds. The Forward writes of problems in the organization’s management structure.

Leaf-ing differences behind: Tu B’Shvat is in the air (or is that tree pollen?) in the West Bank today. School children from the Efrat settlement and Palestinians of nearby Jurat al-Shama came together to plant trees aiming to block hazardous dust from a nearby processing plant.

Saturday Night Tribe: Lastly, if you missed Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg together on Jimmy Fallon, you missed an adorable man-fest of multi-era SNL laughs. Watch it here.

Anyone who read Freakonomics remembers the chapter on how a person’s name can pre-determine their future. If that frightening piece of incredible parental pressure got you thinking about the name game, Susan Weidman Schneider, editor of Lilith magazine has plenty more to say on what’s in a name and the latest issue of the mag.

KS: What’s the greatest perk/biggest obstacle in working as editor of an independent, Jewish and frankly feminist magazine?

SWS: Editing Lilith magazine, now celebrating its 35^th year, is a treat. The writers are wonderful, the ideas new and stimulating, and the end product is, I hope, insightful and always a good read—whether it’s in print, on the web via our soon-to-appear digital edition, or on the lively Lilith blog.

KS: What do you think is the most impactful topic that Lilith has covered?

SWS: That’s a tough one. The major issues Lilith has opened up (and we have a file at the office labeled “Lilith Did it First”) have been topics like violence in Jewish families; Jewish women’s philanthropy and our relationship to money; Jewish hair—a sellout issue by the way; rabbinic sexual misconduct; new rituals and celebrations for the Jewish calendar and for the landmarks of our lives.

The last couple of Lilith salons at Sixth & I were really dynamite, and they dealt with cover stories that, like the what-we-call-ourselves story in Lilith’s current issue, resonate in our lives. One salon had to do with an article on breaking up over food. We spent about three hours in spirited discussion about what we eat, why it can sometimes be schismatic, what food represents in a relationship, and more. The second salon focused on what we wear. You can imagine! The talk ranged from our favorite garments to how we want to present ourselves to the world as feminists, as Jews, as professionals. Clothing is a powerful signifier, and we really mined that territory in our conversation.

So, I would say that every issue of the magazine has topics that impact both our own lives and the community at large. It’s hard to choose just one or two.

KS: Do you think that something is lost when women choose to take their husbands’ names and give up their maiden names?

SWS: Of course. Let’s take Facebook as an example. Ever tried to find your high school buddy Suzanne Cohen, when she’s now on there only as Suzanne Kaminsky? You get the idea.

Now that women are marrying later—after they’ve already established themselves in careers and have a professional identity—there’s confusion of identities with changing your surname.

Other women say that they like the simplicity of having all family members bearing the same last name. Perhaps this is why a rather public woman made a different choice. New York Times reporter Jodi Wilgoren, who, though she’d had front-page bylines under her birth name, decided when she married a fellow whose last name was Ruderman that she and he would have a new last name altogether: Rudoren.

KS: On February 8, you’ll lead What’s in a Hyphen?, a salon about naming practices for women. Why do you think some women are reluctant to hyphenate their children’s names?

SWS: Well, the first reason everyone mentions is the clumsiness they predict will happen when a “hyphenate” marries another “hyphenate.” Does the child of this union have to carry around Jennifer Goldberg-Schwartz-Lipkin-Myerson? That’s one reason why the Lilith article is so appealing to readers: it posits a whole new way of dealing with the children-of-hyphenates worry.

Unless the parents also use hyphenated surnames, there is the general feeling of oddness when parents and children do not have the same last name. I think many Jews carry a certain degree of post-traumatic stress following the Holocaust when we’re asked to separate ourselves out–say in a customs and immigration queue for an international flight—and the children have to sort themselves into a different line from the parents. Of course, this is an uneasiness that could happen also when a woman keeps her birth name (I hate to say “maiden” name) while the children have their father’s last name.

KS: How do you think a name affects a woman’s Jewish identity?

SWS: This is a fascinating question. I’m sure many of us know of interfaith marriages where a Jewish woman with a typically Jewish surname takes her husband’s seemingly non-Jewish surname. What do people assume when they first meet her? And then there are Jewish women with first names that are usually associated with non-Jews: Christina, Mary.

The opposite happens, too. A family intermarried for several generations who still bear the surname Cohen, though they identify with other religions and would not be considered Jewish.

Names do play a role in Jewish identity. Many surnames started out as something linked with either being Jewish or associated with “foreignness.” The classic case would be the New York financier who, in the 19^th century, went from Schoenburg to Belmont–a direct translation. There are people named Klein who became Small, Gross who became Large, and so on. Then there are the names given at Ellis Island, when “Old Country” names were deemed too difficult for the processing agent to pronounce or spell. Of course, some people were happy to unload their Jewish names, but we’ve also seen a resurgence of interest in those original names. Children or grandchildren want to revert, surprising their older relatives who got rid of those family names to better assimilate into American society.

Susan Weidman Schneider facilitates a discussion on the influence of naming practices on our identities as women and Jews at the Wednesday, February 8^th event, What’s in a Hyphen?. Part of Not Your Bubbe’s Sisterhood: For women in their 20s and 30s.

Read the Lilith articles on naming practices here. 

It’s only four episodes into this season of The Bachelor, and I’m already in love. No, not with the poorly-coiffed Bachelor himself. I’m in love with the train wreck of a TV show where the contestants are fluent in euphemisms like “journey,” “true love,” and “fantasy suite.”

Watching the ladies of The Bachelor so willingly buy into the show’s delusional premise and fall in love with a man they’ve only known for a week gives a whole new meaning to the expression, “Love is blind.”

I don’t really care who wins or loses in the end—The Bachelor really is a game—but I love the pure absurdity that ensues when 25 desperate women are told that this is their last chance at love. Overall, it makes for incredibly entertaining television where the women trade vitriolic barbs like, “On a scale of one to ten, I feel like I’m going to throw up,” and “I want to rip her head off and verbally assault her.”

Image via Reality Tea

Still, why do these women (and probably a good number of non-reality TV contestants) believe that being single before you’ve reached the age of 30 is essentially a death sentence? Why do we as women tend to use relationship statuses as a barometer to compare how successful one’s life is to another?

Kate Bolick addresses these questions, among many others, in The Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies” (which she will be discussing at Sixth & I on February 9^th).  In her mini-thesis, Bolick takes off the blinders, much like in Plato’s The Cave, and proposes that the concept of traditional marriage is no longer relevant. Bolick uses herself as a case study; an intelligent, attractive woman who hasn’t been lucky enough to find the ideal husband, and is so comfortable in her own skin that she doesn’t care how society judges her for it.

At one point, Bolick interviews a flock of co-eds, “denizens of hookup culture,” about their marriage plans. The conversation goes like this:

I asked if they wanted to get married when they grew up, and if so, at what age…they answered “yes” and “27 or 28.”

“That’s only five or six years from now,” I pointed out. “Doesn’t that seem – not far off?”

They nodded.

“Take a look at me,” I said. “I’ve never been married, and I have no idea if I ever will be. There’s a good chance that this will be your reality, too. Does that freak you out?”

Again they nodded.

“I don’t think I can bear doing this for that long!” whispered one, with undisgusted alarm.

If Bolick had this conversation with one of the ladies of The Bachelor, she no doubt would’ve been greeted with a similar reaction, only one involving more tears and a questioning of whether she was there for the “right reasons.”

But what’s more troubling about the picture Bolick paints is how women still cling to their childhood fantasies.  There comes an age when we no longer think we’re going to be famous actresses, pop stars or presidents. So why do we still believe in the Disney-fied fairy tale that someday our princes will come?

In the end, I don’t think I can completely say that I wish my life would turn out like Bolick’s or like those women on The Bachelor.  What I’ve learned from “All the Single Ladies” and the ladies of the The Bachelor is that we need to stop planning out our lives like it’s a Meg Ryan movie. You shouldn’t let the fact that you’re a Ms. and not a Mrs. dictate your happiness.  Otherwise, you’ll only be disappointed when Tom Hanks doesn’t meet you on top of the Empire State building, save you from a volcano, or turn out to be the man you’ve been anonymously emailing.

Hasbro/Getty Images via The Hollywood Reporter

Because Chutes and Ladders turns out to be painfully boring when played after the age of seven, and Mousetrap takes way too long for anyone working the daily grind to actually set up, here is a digestible version of Candy Land that may be tolerable for all ages. Adam Sandler, who seemingly only makes terrible movies (read: Jack and Jill) these days, is in final talks with Sony and Hasbro to make a film based on the classic children’s board game. The candy-themed movie is set to be directed by Kevin Lima.

Reuters has the (ice cream) scoop on the film deal:

In a statement, Columbia Pictures President Doug Belgrad called “Candy Land” more than just a game — “it is a brand that children, parents and grandparents know and love.” He said that it offers a larger than life part for Sandler.

Candy Land, created in 1949, is a game for young children. In it, players make their way through the Peppermint Forest, the Gum Drop Mountains and the Lollypop Woods. As they do, they encounter Princess Frostine, Lord Licorice, Mr. Mint and King Candy.

Hasbro’s president and CEO, Brian Goldner, is producing, along with the company’s senior VP and managing director of motion pictures, Bennett Schneir, and Happy Madison Productions.

Although the project was originally set up by Universal, switching hands to our favorite You Don’t Mess with the Zohan star (that’s right, I went with Zohan over Happy Gilmore) could mean that Kosherland, a film based on the “beginner’s game for a Jewish child,” is that much more possible. Sweet.

Out of the corner of my eye earlier today, I noticed my cell phone light up. Without reaching to dim the backlight, I knew it was displaying a monthly reminder to “pay rent,” a polite but painful recurring cue that it’s time to contribute my portion of dues for the apartment I share with my roommate.

For a 23-year-old, living with a roommate is fairly common.  For a young woman in a relationship of nearly four years, living with a roommate, rather than my partner, seems much rarer. The number of opposite sex couples cohabiting in the US is 7.5 million. Anecdotally, 100% of the couples’ whose weddings I have attended in the past year alone (totaling eight) have lived together before they said their official vows. While they vary in race, religion, and socioeconomic status, all of the aforementioned couples are college educated. Yet, according to the Pew Research Center, college-educated partners are two times less likely to cohabit than those that are not college educated.

As a result of the trend, quite often people ask me why I don’t live with my long-term “manfriend.” (It is a well-known fact you can’t write about modern relationships without at least one Sex and the City reference. So there you have it, Carrie, take your royalties and go buy Manolo’s!)

According to the New York Times, a study released in March 2010 showed that only about 23 percent of women and 18 percent of men married without having lived together. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development says:

“Cohabitation, once rare, is now the norm: The researchers found that more than half (54 percent) of all first marriages between 1990 and 1994 began with unmarried cohabitation. They estimate that a majority of young men and women of marriageable age today will spend some time in a cohabiting relationship.”

So, given the stats, why don’t I live with my boyfriend? When I receive that monthly rent reminder I almost always ask myself this question. Inside, I’m 14-years-old again stomping my feet while whining to my mother that “Everybody else is doing it,” but the standard rebuttal of “If everybody else was jumping off a bridge would you?” isn’t my mother’s this time. Instead, a combination of factors lead me to believe it’s not the right choice for me yet, namely newness, feeling too young, and, as a DC resident since 2010, the desire to establish my own distinct life before joining so much of my life with another person.

Too often people note that when you’ve lived together before marriage, marriage feels essentially no different. My partner and I are committed to having each phase of our relationship feel as new, as exciting, and as different as possible.

In part because of the statistics showing that cohabitation is either harmful to a relationship or has no effect at all, and in part because I have a low tolerance for negativity in love (If a loving relationship can’t motivate positivity, what can?), I scoff at the counter-arguments. “You need to test the waters,” “You’re going to fight often in the beginning, you need to make sure you can handle it together,” “You’ll discover things you can’t possibly know before you live together,” and of course the “It’s harder to divorce than to move out” argument, are amongst the most common. But I’m not so convinced that cynicism simply trumps confidence in a healthy, fulfilling relationship.

Not to be mistaken for naiveté, I know that living together takes work, as do so many aspects of successful relationships, but each of the aforementioned arguments assumes the worst and neglects to consider how things like long vacations together, spending significant portions of time in each other’s spaces, and addressing potential obstacles in advance can significantly reduce the chance of failure. Plus, waiting to move in together until after marriage offers the chance for post-nuptial highs and temporary euphoria to surface just long enough to cover the adjustment period.

Is the (admittedly somewhat romanticized) nature of preserving new experiences enough to justify spending hundreds of dollars per month in rent and utility costs? Here is where my convictions waver, but I nearly always arrive at the same conclusion. I believe the notion of cohabiting and potentially sacrificing the opportunity to begin an exciting new chapter from a truly new vantage point, should not simply be a financial solution. Women have made such enormous strides in establishing financial independence in the US, that to again reduce heterosexual relationships to mere financial arrangements (regardless of how mutually beneficial) is a bit frustrating. I do, however, recognize that financial need can be a highly important factor in decision-making, and each individual has to do what is right for them.

So, I will obey the reminder and begrudgingly pay my rent, but at least I do so with the peace of mind that there will be new, exciting things to come.