• An Israeli Facebook group is asking Netanyahu to wait until after Madonna’s May 29 concert in Tel Aviv to attack Iran. [Haaretz]

• Attention Long Islanders: your synagogue’s caterer might have cooked coconut shrimp in the temple’s kosher kitchen. [NYT]

• Major Republican donor Sheldon Adelson’s business, Las Vegas Sands, is under federal investigation. [Reuters]

• A timeline of the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s changing story on the Planned Parenthood funding cut (and an open letter to CEO Nancy Brinker). [ProPublica]

• A Marine sniper team posed with a flag that looked a lot like a Nazi SS flag in Afghanistan. [AP]

It’s Oprah! on Chabad TV!

The song that popped up was “20 Seconds,” a tune for a “disconnected generation” caught up with iPhone apps, Prozac, Internet porn, and cruising for sex: “Twenty seconds, you only get one first impression … I’ve got twenty seconds to sell what I got.” (And you thought Madonna had it tough when she only had 4 minutes to save the world.) It’s upbeat, electronic dance pop, utterly brazen about its use of Auto-Tune. Catchy, but nothing revolutionary. Yet there was something about the melody that was vaguely Middle Eastern, giving it a hint of flavor to distinguish it from its American and European cousins. A bit of musical za’atar.

The video played up the East-West tensions further: There were belly dancers, but they were dancing like club kids on Ecstasy. A group of burka-clad women encircled the two motionless male singers—or maybe they weren’t women at all, once we got a peek behind the veil. What the hell was going on here?

The Young Professionals, I soon discovered after some Googling, is the latest side project from Ivri Lider, one of Israel’s biggest pop stars. I’d liked his earlier work as a singer and songwriter—in Hebrew and English—but it had never been this much fun. “D.I.S.C.O.,” another track from the new band, for example, was all heavy beats and froth, what a former editor of mine might have dubbed “an entertainment,” something not to be taken too seriously. That song’s video, however, proved that the band was taking silliness extremely seriously, mixing in a cross between Robert Palmer’s robotic dancing girls and Kylie Minogue’s headgear-heavy club kids, and costumes seemingly designed by whoever got auf’d any given week from Project Runway. Lider and bandmate Yonatan Goldstein appeared again in their roles as the stiff singers from “20 Seconds.” And the mustachioed man behind the burka (Uriel Yekutiel) was there again, too, only this time he was twirling a glittering hula hoop in slow motion, wearing black spandex right down to his high heels. The video was like the Cliffs Notes to Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on ‘Camp.’”

Lider came out years ago. He’s one of Israel’s highest-profile gay celebrities. But there’s out, and there’s out there. Ivri Lider is out. The Young Professionals are out there.

A lot has changed in Israel since I visited Tel Aviv in 1995, hoping to snag an interview with Dana International, a transgender pop star whose infectious dance song “Layla Tov, Europa” came in second in the race to represent Israel in the Eurovision Song Contest. (This was two years before she’d try again, successfully, with “Diva”—which topped the Israeli competition, arousing all sorts of vitriol from the political right, before going on to win the international contest, bringing the coveted pop prize to Israel for the first time since “Hallelujah” did in 1979.) I had approached Ofer Nissim, the DJ and producer who was handling such requests for Dana, and explained that I was reporting for the Washington Blade, a gay newspaper. “A gay newspaper?” he asked, baffled. My Hebrew was mediocre, but I repeated myself: a newspaper for gay people. “Ah,” he said, “you write about dicks.” The editor of the buttoned-down Blade—the oldest gay paper in America, and strictly PG-rated—would have fainted, hearing something like that. But at the time, it wasn’t even imaginable in Israel that gay culture involved anything but sex, not even to a DJ who hosted huge gay dance parties in Tel Aviv and produced disco music by Israel’s biggest transgender celebrity.

In my dark apartment, the music was doing its job. I had forgotten about my Amazon ranking, and had bought the band’s new album, 9:00 to 17:00, 17:00 to Whenever. While it was downloading, I replayed the video for “D.I.S.C.O.” and danced around in my boxer shorts—very softly, so my downstairs neighbors could foolishly get their sleep.

The rest of the album mixes often-raunchy lyrics with a melancholy take on intimacy. In “Bad Blood,” Lider intones “White skin, white skin/ you don’t know the state I’m in/ red blood, sweet cherry/ and off to Canada to marry.” In “Deserve,” the fierceness yields to something more tender: “You deserve someone stronger than me/ who doesn’t need a drink to tell you that he wants to … And when you’re gone that’s who I wanna be/ but I don’t really know if I can.” And there’s sex, woven into the songs without hesitation or de-gaying. As Lider sings in “Family Value,” “Shame is not something I dance to.”

I listened some more. “With Me” echoed old Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark. “Wake Up” sounded vaguely like Orbital. “Young Professionals” had some Pet Shop Boys pedigree, and “Angry Alone” shared lineage with Madonna in her Mirwais phase, circa American Life. I was in Tel Aviv one minute, Berlin the next. Or New York, very late at night. Which, in fact, was exactly where I was.

Then I got to the song that hooked me: a coverof Suzanne Vega’s pumping “Blood Makes Noise.” Lider has often been smart about his covers. When he recorded Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” for the 2006 Israeli movie The Bubble, he turned a classic on its head with the greatest of respect. And when he covered Katy Perry’s cheeky, flirty pop song “I Kissed a Girl” a few years ago, morphing it into a wistful, melancholy, acoustic meditation—all while taking a queer song and queering it up a notch, singing, “I kissed a girl and I liked it, hope my boyfriend don’t mind it”—he completely won me over as a fan. (This didn’t work as well with Lady Gaga’s “Telephone,” proving that even a gay man can’t out-gay Gaga.)

But “Blood Makes Noise” was already dear to my heart—and one of the best pop songs ever about AIDS. (It doesn’t particularly matter to me that Vega was vague on what she was talking about in the song; when it came out in 1992, a lot of gay men heard it as an AIDS-inspired song, and that resonance endures for many of us.) In the song, a patient talks to a doctor: “I think that you might want to know the details and the facts/ but there’s something in my blood denies the memory of the acts … Blood makes noise/ it’s ringing in my ear/ and I can’t really hear you in the thickening fear.”

This is heavy stuff for The Young Professionals, but they handle it in a most wonderful way: They turn it into a driving electronic dance song. This isn’t a camp, but it’s not a reverential homage, either. It’s defiant in its insistence on dance-floor legitimacy; yes, it’s a heavy song, but the beat is throbbing and irresistible, so get up and dance, dammit. In a flash, “Blood Makes Noise” becomes something different from what it was before. No longer the cousin to other well-crafted, obliquely referenced pop songs about AIDS—think of Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring” or the Blow Monkeys’ “Digging Your Scene”—this dance tune was more a descendant of “Hit That Perfect Beat,” the only memorable track that gay trailblazers Bronski Beat recorded after the departure of their falsetto-voiced founding vocalist Jimmy Somerville. That 1986 disco anthem touched on AIDS in its lyrics—“boys in the back room/ their house destroyed/ touch and kiss a stranger if all else fails/ hiding from the danger that’s been sent from hell”—but there’s nothing mournful about it. The unrelenting beat was the important thing, as I understood from the single’s rainbow-colored poster, featuring rows of identical boys beating drums, that hung over my bed in high school.

And there, as this new version of “Blood Makes Noise” pushed out of my computer in the middle of the night, I was taken back to that moment 25 years ago. A moment when dance music wasn’t afraid to take up the occasional heavy subject—think of earlier Bronski Beat (with Somerville still at the mike) addressing anti-gay violence in “Why?”—as long as everyone remembered what dance music was all about: staying up late, having a good time, and forgetting your worries—“smiling through our tears,” as Marc Almond once put it, “in these darker times.”

It was after 3 a.m. when I finally decided to turn off the music and try to get some sleep. I almost forgot to check Amazon for sales. Almost, but not quite. My ranking was suddenly up: Some other night owl must have bought a copy. How could I sleep now? I called up The Young Professionals album again and clicked on “Blood Makes Noise” one more time. To help me stay up until 4.

• A State Department spokesperson called “outrageous” the comments of Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s leader in Gaza, condemning the assassination of Osama Bin Laden. [Haaretz]

• Madonna, Malawi, and Kabbalah. [NYMag]

• Former Israeli president and convicted rapist Moshe Katsav will not have to do jail time pending his appeal. [AP/WP]

• This is way old, but I learned today that President Obama has a Jewish half-brother. [WP]

• The Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim participated in a rare performance in Gaza as a show of solidarity. [AP/Haaretz]

Not enough people remember this awesome post-9/11 rant in Spike Lee’s The 25th Hour (caution: Lots of cursing, and equal-opportunity use of racial stereotypes in the Spike Lee manner).

• President Shimon Peres met with President Obama at the White House. In addition to discussing Iran, the peace process, and Gilad Schalit, Peres asked Obama to free convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. [JPost]

• How Kabbalah—or, to be more precise, the sketchy Kabbalah Centre—helped ruin Madonna’s plans for a multimillion-dollar girls’ school in Malawi. [Newsweek]

• A dispatch from the Egypt-Gaza smuggling tunnels. [The Daily]

• The world has one deaf-blind acting troupe, and it’s Israeli. [JPost]

• Somebody sent a pig’s foot and an anti-Semitic note to Rep. Peter King, who recently chaired controversial hearings into homegrown Muslim radicalism and who, despite the surname and Long Island district, isn’t Jewish. [JTA]

Jake Gyllenhaal talking about the afikomen on Shalom Sesame? Jake Gyllenhaal talking about the afikomen on Shalom Sesame.

But think of the music Sachs leaves out. What do we do with George Gershwin and Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, with the songs belted out by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies or Lou Reed at Max’s Kansas City—the whole messy sprawl of 20th-century American pop music history, which, from I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” to I’ve Gotta Be Me” to “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” has been inflected by the Jewish genius for passing and pastiche? And where, for that matter, does it leave Serge Gainsbourg, Israeli techno, Jonathan Richman, Yo La Tengo, or Ofra Haza? Or ”Hanukkah in Santa Monica”?

Perhaps a better answer to the Jewish musical conundrum is a famous quip. The story goes that the composer Jerome Kern and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were discussing the possibility of a musical based on the life of Marco Polo. Hammerstein said to Kern, “Here is a story laid in China about an Italian and told by Irishman. What kind of music are you going to write?” Kern replied, “It’ll be good Jewish music.”

Here, then, is our list of the 100 Greatest Jewish Songs. Some were created by Jews, as Jews, for Jews. Some are by Jews pretending to be gentiles—or by gentiles pretending to be Jews. If history has taught us anything, it’s that Jewish music is a dizzyingly broad and fluid category, encompassing an extraordinary range of sounds and styles and ideas and themes, from the sacred to the secular—from the normatively Jewish to the Jew-ish to the seemingly not-at-all-Jewish. Our list includes a bit of everything: sacred songs and synagogue staples and Yiddish ballads and Broadway showstoppers. There’s even some disco and hip-hop. All of them are great songs—and good Jewish music.

CLICK HERE TO SEE A LIST OF THE 100 SONGS ON ONE PAGE.

1. “Over the Rainbow” (1939)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote a strange, 259-page novel about a Kansas farm girl who travels to a magical land. Critics couldn’t help reading it as a Gilded Age political allegory, but Baum insisted it was simply a children’s fairytale. Thirty-nine years later, a movie mogul hired a pair of Tin Pan Alley pros—a cantor’s son from Buffalo and a Lower East Side lefty—to write a theme song for the novel’s film adaptation. The result was a grandly orchestrated echt-Hollywood ballad, crooned by the movie’s 16-year-old starlet to a little black doggie on a barnyard set filled with clucking chickens.

And it was the most beautiful Jewish exilic prayer ever set to music.

In formal terms, “Over the Rainbow” is flawless, lit up by Harold Arlen’s luscious chromaticism and startling octave leaps. Yip Harburg’s lyrics are a triumph of artful artlessness: “Somewhere over the rainbow/ Way up high/ There’s a land that I heard of/ Once in a lullaby.” Call that land Oz, if you’d like. Or call it Israel. (For that matter, call it Miami Beach or Shaker Heights or the Upper West Side.) Any way you slice it, the story “Over the Rainbow” tells is the oldest Jewish story of them all: There’s no place like home. (JR)

2. “Hava Nagila” (1918)

Harry Belafonte has sung it. So has Chubby Checker and the Boss. Dick Dale shredded it; Lionel Hampton swung it. It’s been Latinized, technoized, and Bollywoodized. It’s the Little Freylekh That Could—the Jewish party song that belongs to the world.

The history of “Hava Nagila” is shadowy. The tune is thought to have originated in 18th- or 19th-century Eastern Europe as a niggun, or mystical musical prayer, possibly among the Sadigorer Hasidic sect. By 1915, the melody had migrated to Palestine, where it was transcribed by the musicologist and folklorist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who was then serving as a bandmaster in the Ottoman Army. Three years later, he played the song in a concert commemorating the British victory over the Turks. Idelsohn added a Hebrew text based on some biblical verses, and “Hava Nagila” was born.

To millions who know no better, “Hava Nagila” is Jewish music. Of course no musical culture, particularly one as rich and variegated as ours, can be represented by a single tune. Still, it’s hard to imagine another song doing the job so well. Like all great dance music, “Hava Nagila” puts the emphasis on joy and community—on the ecstatic fellowship forged by an infectious tune and insistent beat. “Hava nagila, hava nagila/ Hava nagila ve-nismeha/ Hava neranena, hava neranena/ Hava neranena ve-nismeha” (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice/ Let us rejoice and be glad/ Let us sing, let us sing/ Let us sing and be glad).” That’s not a half-bad philosophy of music or, for that matter, of life. (JR)

3. “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965)

U.S. Highway 61, wrote Bob Dylan in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, “begins about where I came from,” stretching from southern Minnesota, near Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, to New Orleans. “Highway 61 Revisited” begins a bit further afield. “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on,’ ” Dylan sings in the opening measures, as the song settles into a bluesy lope.

As always with Dylan, it’s impossible to untangle the strands of autobiography, mythology, and carnival barker gibberish. Many commentators have pointed out that Dylan’s own father was an Abraham—Abe Zimmerman—and that the songwriter’s retelling of the binding of Isaac may have personal resonance. But what is a Dylanologist to make of Georgia Sam, Mack the Finger, Louie the King, and the other cartoon characters that populate the song? And what about the burst of biblical mumbo-jumbo in the song’s fourth verse?:

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61

As always with Dylan, the meaning is blowing in the wind. What’s unmistakable in “Highway 61 Revisited” is the tone. Delivering Old Testament imagery and cosmic jokes in his most exaggerated nasal drawl, Dylan is part-prophet, part-provocateur, part-badchen, and full-time blabbermouth. In other words: He’s just so Jewish. (JR)

4. “Kol Nidre” (13th century)

It’s the “Stairway to Heaven” of Jewish liturgical music; just about anyone who has ever recorded a Jewish album or led a congregation in prayer has toyed with the idea of recording his or her own version of the annual Yom Kippur eve negation of vows.

The text is vexing, saying basically that one is not responsible for the vows one makes. Not surprisingly, it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic speculation about the shiftiness and general untrustworthiness of Jews in business. Jewish tradition suggests that it was written for Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity who might be looking for a legal loophole through which they could reclaim their connection to Judaism. Still, it’s a strange way to begin the Day of Atonement, when one is supposed to take serious stock of one’s shortcomings, not try to explain away one’s inability to make good on promises.

But it’s the music that really matters. Anti-Semites and Conversos aside, nobody comes to synagogue on Yom Kippur because they believe in those words—they come to hear that unmistakable opening cadence. Unlike much of liturgical music, Kol Nidre has no single known author. Musicologists suggest that Kol Nidre is less a proper composition than a mashup cobbled together from a number of different Jewish liturgical and folk motifs. Nevertheless, the melody of that first line is as heart-aching and moving as any melody in any liturgical tradition. Ever. (AYK)

5. “Hatikvah” (1888)

The Jewish national anthem was in wide circulation well before it unofficially became the Israeli national anthem in 1948. Part of a much longer poem written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, the text was shortened and adapted a few different times by early Zionist settlers before it became the anthem of political Zionism, concluding with the line: “To be a free nation in our land/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The melody, however, took a slightly more roundabout route on its way to Jerusalem. Samuel Cohen, its composer, said that he adapted the melody from a Romanian folk song, “Carul cu boi.” The song’s central motif can be heard there, and it can also be heard in the Italian madrigal “La Mantovana,” and again in Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” his ode to Bohemia.

The song’s resonance lies somewhere between the obvious folk roots of the melody and the haughty and explicitly Jewish political aspirations of the lyrics: Critics hear Zionism-as-colonialism in the non-Jewish folk roots of the melody; Zionists hear the in-gathering of Jewish exiles echoing in the combination of notes.

Everyone else might just hear the unreconciled struggle between the two. It’s still an anthem, but one of a different kind—in some ways, it’s an anthem that captures the contradictions of modern nationalism rather than the bombastic heroism of rockets red glare. (AYK)

6. “My Mammy” (1918)

Before Frank Sinatra, before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson, the 20th century’s first pan-media “rock star.” With his dynamic stage act and rafter-rattling voice, he was for millions of fans the embodiment of pop modernity—the poster boy for ragtime, which was unmooring America from its Victorian past one raucous song at a time. But Jolson was not just a New American; he was vividly, unapologetically a Jewish American, with a fearless devotion to schmaltz and a “tear in a voice,” his birthright as a cantor’s son.

He was also, infamously, history’s most famous practitioner of blackface minstrelsy. Today, we are rightly repulsed by Jolson’s blackface act. But to shunt Jolson to history’s margins is to betray history. Listening to his signature song, “My Mammy”—the 1918 hit that he reprised in the landmark first film talkie, The Jazz Singer—we confront the sheer weirdness of pop music’s early days, when beauty and vulgarity, Jewish immigrant striving and primordial American racism were inextricably enmeshed. Jolson was a pop vocal genius whose art most majestically took flight when he slathered his white skin with burnt cork, affected a broad “darky” accent, and belted out an Oedipal ode to his little old Jewish mother. It’s not a comfortable story, but it’s a true one. (JR)

7. “Shema Yisrael” (19th century)

“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The English translation of this central prayer leeches the deep spirituality of the original Hebrew—which powerfully asserts that all is unified, connected, related, intertwined, one. It’s about as close to a theo-national pledge of allegiance as we get.

It’s been crammed into mezuzot and tefilin, and—apart from Tzvika Pik’s 1972 uptempo version (shunned by many for being too poppy for prayer)—it has, to Ashkenazic Jews, only one melody.

Many treat that melody as if it had been handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai along with the lyrics. In fact, written grandly in 3/4 time by the Austrian cantor Salomon Sulzer, it’s from the early 19th century. Sulzer is credited with helping to modernize Jewish worship by introducing a choir and a handful of other updates to suit his Viennese congregation.

As it’s sung by millions of Jews across the world, it sounds a little uptight, even when belted with big gusts of meditation-y breaths punctuating the text. But the irony is that what now sounds uptight was once considered both radical and modern, an exalted sentiment set to a Viennese waltz. In this way Pik’s 1972 version was just doing what Sulzer did 150 years earlier, giving the “watchword of our faith” a little sonic makeover. And what’s so bad about a little syncopation in the face of the unity of everything? (AYK)

8. “White Christmas” (1942)

“Not only is it the best song I ever wrote,” said Irving Berlin when he finished writing “White Christmas,” “it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.” There’s certainly a lot in it. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’ wintry landscapes and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The melodicism is pure Broadway and Hollywood sophistication, but the maudlin sentiments—that vision of snow-blanketed yuletides “just like the ones I used to know”—has deeper, homelier roots, drawing on Stephen Foster’s antebellum nostalgia and Victorian parlor ballads, and ladling some Jewish schmaltz over the top.

“White Christmas” was released in the middle of World War II, in November 1942, the first Christmas season that American troops spent overseas. It stirred such homesickness that it became the definitive pop hit of the war—a “why we fight” song that never mentioned the fight. And that was just the beginning of its success. It’s doubtful any song has generated more total record sales. Bing Crosby’s definitive version stood as the top-selling pop single for more than a half-century.

Tonally “White Christmas” stands apart from the cheeriness of most Christmas songs: It’s as dark and blue as it is “merry and bright.” Some have attributed this plaintive quality to Berlin’s Jewishness—to the seasonal melancholy of a man doomed to view the holiday from a distance. But “White Christmas” is sneakier than that. “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin … ‘White Christmas,’ ” wrote Philip Roth in Operation Shylock. “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” (JR)

9. “Be My Baby” (1963)

It starts, literally, with a bang: the thunderclap rumble of Hal Blaine’s drumbeat, among the most famous opening salvos in rock ‘n’ roll. That’s just the beginning of the bombast, as hand claps, castanets, swooping strings, braying brass, and background vocals pile on, inflating the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” into something like pop Wagner.

Of course, it isn’t Wagnerian—it’s Spectorian. Phil Spector, a diminutive studio geek from the Bronx, was 23 years old in 1963 when he co-composed “Be My Baby” with two Jews from Brooklyn, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. To realize Spector’s “Wall of Sound” vision took weeks of rehearsal, 42 studio takes, and saintly patience on the part of lead singer Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, who would marry Spector later that year. On paper, the song’s sentiments are insipid: “Won’t you please/ Be my little baby?/ Say you’ll be my darlin’/ Be my baby now.” But bolstered by a rousing melody and the full fathom force of Spector’s production, they become sublime, proof that a 3-minute-long declaration of puppy love can be as overwhelming—sonically, emotionally, spiritually—as any symphony. (JR)

10. “I Got Rhythm” (1930)

As American credos go, the Gershwin brothers’ most famous chorus is hard to top: “I got rhythm/ I got music/ I got my girl/ Who could ask for anything more?” For declarative brashness, it’s right up there with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And it’s got a more danceable beat.

Composed in 1928, “I Got Rhythm” became a hit in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, thanks in no small part to the performance by Ethel Merman, just 22 years old but already a human wind turbine. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics are a study in compression and pithy interior rhymes. (“Ol’ Man Trouble/ I don’t mind him/ You won’t find him/ ’Round my door.”) But it was George’s chord progression, soon to be known simply as “rhythm changes,” that made the song musical holy writ, the basis of countless jazz songs in the swing and bebop eras. (JR)

“Everything comes down to Buffy or Madonna,” she explained to me. “One of them said something smart about something. God speaks to you in the language you understand. Sometimes he speaks to me in Buffyverse and sometimes in Madonna language.” In fact, she used the singer’s songs’ names to title all of her chapters.

Not that Shanker was planning to listen to her iPod or sit at home watching Buffy DVDs the following days. She would be attending services at the East End Temple, listening to the sermons of Rabbi David Adelson, who according to her expansive definition of the term is also one of her gurus. “To me, a guru is a teacher,” she said. “A guru is somebody who takes you from a place of darkness to a place of light. You didn’t understand something and now you get it. Definitely, rabbis are gurus.”

Though Rabbi Adelson was likely preparing for the upcoming High Holidays, some of Shanker’s other teachers were present, including the astrologist featured in the memoir, Jenny Lynch, who was offering free readings. Since most of those present were writers of varying degrees of success, ranging from David Goodwillie, who recently received a good review from the New York Times for his novel American Subversive, to Shapiro’s New School students, I imagine that at least a few were asking Lynch to divine their publishing prospects.

It seemed that Madonna herself (the pop star, not the Christian saint) blessed the party. Mere hours before, Shanker’s close friend, Sam, was entering her office in Williamsburg when a large entourage approached her position. It was Madonna ‘n’ staff, scouting locations for a film. They asked to enter the building and have a look around. Sam sprung into action, racing up to her office and printing out the cover and first few pages of the book to give to her Madgesty, who thanked her and meticulously folded the.

Shanker, who had met her idol while working as Madonna’s talent liason at MTV, took the whole incident as an auspicious sign. Though Madonna tunes played through the evening, Shanker has yet to embrace her guru’s favored Kabbalah. “You know I have to wait one and a half more years until I’m 40,” she said. “I’m still a little too immature to study Kabbalah, but I have been doing some reading so I’ll be ready on my 40th birthday to write a check.” “Listen,” she added, “if you’re going to support something spiritual and strange it might as well be from your own.”

Are You My Guru? [Amazon]

Her camp, like mine back in the day, offers t’filah (prayer), omanut (art), sports, chofesh (free time), swimming, weekly sending of Shabbat-o-grams and attendant social anxiety: How many will I get? If I send one to That Cute Boy, will he think I like him That Way? Do I want him to? What is the encoded meaning of this particular Shabbat-o-gram? Could I possibly parse it more if it were the Talmud?

For many of us, sleepaway camp is the first sizeable chunk of time away from parents. It’s a taste of adulthood. Nikayon, daily cleaning time, was the first time I really scrubbed a sink or swept an entire floor. Because camp means building a society in miniature, in which kids have more independence and power than they do back home, friendships there seem more vivid, more intense–a lifetime poured into a concentrated month or two.

But some things have changed. My parents sent in a two-page form and bam, I was a camper. I, on the other hand, filled out some 60 pages of documents about Josie, including a “social media policy” in which our entire family had to pledge not to defame the camp on Facebook or Twitter. Today’s camps ask so many questions about our children’s mental health, it’s as if our tweens are applying for jobs with the CIA. And as I wrote a few weeks ago, the world outside of camp is far more connected today. When kids head for the machaneh, they leave behind a million ways to chat, extensive online universes and multi-player games, gazillions of TV channels. Writing and receiving letters rather than email feels quaint now.

But I chose the camp I did because the kids and the camp’s values seemed like throwbacks in the best way. I want the feeling of a bungalow colony, not a country club. I want Jo to have the experience I did. Of course, every generation is a little different…

	Me: Walkman the size of a brick		Josie: iPod Nano
	Me: On the Walkman, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by Journey		Josie: On the iPod, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” by the cast of Glee
	Me: Flowers in the Attic (Goth-y vaguely Victorian trashy lit)		Josie: A Series of Unfortunate Events (Goth-y vaguely Victorian decent lit)
	Me: Asthma inhaler		Josie: Asthma inhaler
	Me: Bug repellent with enough chemicals to defoliate a small island		Josie: Hippie herbal insect repellent with organic catnip oil, organic rosemary, and organic lemongrass
	Me: Shabbat outfits consisting of flowered Gunne Sax dresses		Josie: Shabbat outfits consisting of flowered Hanna Andersson dresses
	Me: armfuls of rubber Madonna “Goomie” bracelets		Josie: armfuls of silicone Silly Bandz (modeled by Maxie because Josie is away at camp)

When Josie’s generation enters a sylvan, bunk-dotted landscape, they’re entering a more retro world than we did. But I think they need it even more.

We thought it might be a good time to do a round-up of some of the finest Jewish parodies of the songstress. Think Schlock Rock, but way schlockier.

You know you want to sing along:

There is even one for Yiddishists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxfm2b6Q29w

An Orthodox Version, natch:

And we can’t forget about Israel’s version of Miss Israel:

“Sorry-Grateful,” by Stephen Sondheim: When it comes to relationships, Sondheim tells us, we’re always sorry-grateful and regretful-happy. “Why look for answers when none occur?” he asks. “You always are what you always were, which has nothing to do with, all to do with her.”

“Sorry Angel,” by Serge Gainsbourg: “It’s me who suicided you,” apologizes the French poet of the obscene. “Now you’re with the angels.” That’s Gainsbourg’s idea of a love song.

“Famous Blue Raincoat,” Leonard Cohen: “And what can I tell you, my brother, my killer, what can I possible say? I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you, I’m glad you stood in my way.” Apology accepted was never quite so poetic.

“Carbona Not Glue,” The Ramones: Some Jews just can’t get into the Yom Kippur vibe. Like Joey Ramone. “I’m not sorry for the things I do,” he yelped. In his defense, he did have a pretty good reason for his lack of repentance: “My brain is stuck from shooting glue.”

“Sorry,” Madonna: She’s not really Jewish. And she’s not really sorry. Yom Kippur or not, she asks her lover not to beg for her forgiveness. “I’ve seen it all before,” she states, “and I can’t take it anymore.” Maybe next Yom Kippur.

“Endlessly Jealous,” Lou Reed: Not usually one for heartfelt emotions, Lou Reed tries his best to repent. He’s sorry for what he said, sorry for what he did, sorry for beating up his lover. At least he’s apologetic.

But a leading kabbalah-related rabbi, Yitzchak Batzri, is not pleased that Israelis “put out the red carpet” (and the red bracelets) for the star; as he reminds us, she is a non-Jewish, non-converting, sexual innuendo-making woman who therefore shouldn’t even be studying kabbalah, and on top of it all sings live in front of men—a major no-no. Presumably he doesn’t agree with Sarah Silverman, who says that kabbalah is only “the tiniest slice Jewish, but without big noses.”

Madonna to Meet with PM and Livni [JPost]
‘Madonna Forbidden to Sing in Israel’ says Top Kabbalah Rabbi [Arutz 7]
Jewish Without the Big-Noseness [Killing the Buddha]

Madonna Explains Gypsy Comments [BBC]
Gypsy Trio Criticizes Crowd for Booing Madonna [AP]

So, yeah. Kinda wacky, mostly harmless. Pretty much what you’d expect.

I Found An Answer [ynet]

Truth be told, we’re puzzled. Sure, Palin and Prejean were beauty queens, as was Esther, but beyond that, the parallels start to break down. Let’s start with politics. In the presidential campaign, the McCain-Palin ticket was against dialogue with autocratic regimes. Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t just in favor of engagement with a Persian despot—she married one! And while Palin and Prejean are proud of their outsiderness, convinced they’re being persecuted by elites, Esther was the product of a prominent political family. Her uncle Mordechai was a royal adviser—an inside-the-Beltway figure if there ever was one, the Rahm Emanuel of his day. And talk about family values! Esther’s Persia was about as louche a place as they come. When the whole megillah starts, the king, entertaining some friends, summons Esther’s predecessor, Vashti, to come join the party wearing the royal crown—the crown and nothing else, commentators say.

And so maybe the Christian conservatives should cut it out with the Esther comparisons and leave the name to a worthier heiress, someone who embodies the queen’s spirit in all its worldliness and complexity.

Palin Joins Miss California in the Queen Esther Pageant [USA Today]

Maybe she’s preparing for her potential role in an upcoming Holocaust flick, but even if she’s following in Madonna’s footsteps, all that means is she may become Bracha Spears sometime soon, and the name change hasn’t exactly made the material girl any more kosher.

Is Britney a New Jew? [Daily Blabber]
Is Britney Putting the Jew in Jewelry? [Beliefnet]

Alana Newhouse grew up in a Modern Orthodox community in Lawrence, Long Island. She studied Torah and Talmud in high school, but in her free time supplemented that with whatever she could get her hands on—Shakespeare, General Hospital, and Top 40.

Back then, it never occurred to her that these two worlds—the Jewish world and the world of popular culture—would someday collide. But collide they did, and she traces that meeting to a single afternoon in high school when she was home alone, and ventured to open the door to a bearded man who came knocking. Later that day, she was faced with a choice—Madonna or Kabbalah. It’s a choice that’s become more complicated with the passage of time.

At least once a year, my mother sends a clunker to my children, usually as a Hanukkah or Passover gift: Shmulik and the Kvetching Tallis; Mrs. Gabinsky’s Talking Kneidlach. Needless to say, my kids don’t enjoy these books. They try, especially my oldest, Sophie, whose defensive Jewish posture rivals that of her grandmother, a woman who made Joseph Trumpeldor seem like a member of Peace Now. But these self-conscious tales of shtetl life or Bible history are never read more than once through in our house. My kids seem instinctively to grasp that there is something reproachful about them, a kind of sanctimonious finger-wagging: “You should be a nice, well-behaved Jewish child,” they drone. “Now finish your food.”

In my own house, the clutter of such tomes has expanded—and not merely because they are impossible to dispose of. (“Did you lose that book I gave you about the Japanese consul in Lithuania who saved Jews during the Holocaust? I’ll get you another copy.”) Madonna’s three books for children have been added to the pile. They have that familiar hectoring tone, although hers is cloaked in a kind of studied whimsy: her characters dance the “tickety boo” and are named Tittlebottom. My children do not react well to this kind of ham-fisted sermonizing. My kids demand a bit more magic in their stories, and the learning of lessons is not a big priority. Still, that’s what books like these are all about, so it only makes sense to evaluate them on those terms.

Madonna’s three books—Mr. Peabody’s Apples, The English Roses, and the latest, Yakov and the Seven Thieves—are based, she writes, on Baal Shem Tov stories told to her by her “Kabbalah” teacher.¹ I can vaguely recall the story behind the Mr. Peabody book, as I’m sure anybody who wasn’t entirely comatose in Hebrew school can. You remember: Once you’ve spread evil gossip about someone, retracting your words is as difficult as gathering all the feathers from a pillow burst into the wind. The Yakov story I sort of remember too, although Madonna’s stated moral is unsatisfying and somehow ill-constructed. It’s about the prayers of evil men unlocking the gates of heaven, but it feels half-baked.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out the point of The English Roses. I honestly think that the instruction this story gives is to be nice to pretty girls because their lives might be harder than ours. Did the Baal Shem Tov really say this? I know I’m altogether too influenced in this as in all things by the horror that was George Washington Junior High School in Ridgewood, New Jersey, but it never seemed to me that those flaxen-haired lovelies had any problems making friends. On the contrary; they very contentedly made the lives of the rest of us a living hell.²

The books are gorgeous, more beautiful than the norm for Jewish storybooks. Your basic Purim tale comes in two versions: poorly-drawn bubble people in primary colors, and ornate paintings with a vaguely Mitteleuropean flavor, the colors so faded as to give the impression of having been dug up from the dirt beneath a ruined Latvian synagogue. Jeffrey Fulvimari, Loren Long, and Gennady Spirin have illustrated magnificently, far better than Madonna’s clunky prose deserves. It’s dispiriting that these talented artists don’t have their names on the covers of the books, as illustrators of children’s books usually do. I can only assume they were well-compensated for this small sacrifice.

Spirin’s paintings in particular are splendid.³ His illustrations for Yakov and the Seven Thieves are complex and multilayered; some pages look like illuminated manuscripts, others like Renaissance paintings, still others have a cartoonish appearance. What they aren’t is Jewish. Despite the fact that the story is supposed to take place in a “very small village” (a shtetl, I assume), the illustrations give us a beautifully rendered Tudor town. There isn’t a yarmulke or a set of payes to be seen, and the heroes are suspiciously blond. Don’t get me wrong, my two youngest kids are towheads, Jews come in all shapes and sizes, blah blah blah. But this particular literary genre—stultifying sanctimonious shtetl tale—usually requires at least a few grizzled beards and the odd hooked nose. And the women are not generally attired in hoop skirts.

I could be wrong in assuming that Yakov and the Seven Thieves is supposed to be Jewish, despite its Hasidic roots. Perhaps only some of us—those of us who have compelled entire classrooms of children to listen as we read them Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins yet again, injecting enough “diversity” to justify another year’s worth of Christmas carols and gingerbread houses—would even think the book is Jewish at all. Oddly, The English Roses is more Jewish. The poor little pretty girl is named Binah, and she spends her time chopping onions, peeling potatoes, and scaling fish. She also calls her father Papa and wears a shmatte on her head.

I doubt, however, that The English Roses will be added to the list of approved reading material kept by the world’s Jewish grandmothers. Neither will Mr. Peabody’s Apples, although arguably it has the simplest and clearest of Jewish morals, and that feather pillow is a nice metaphor. I wouldn’t be surprised, however, if Yakov and the Seven Thieves becomes a staple of Hanukkah gift-giving. It’s a muddled and simplistic story (“when we turn away from our naughty behavior and embrace good deeds, as the thieves did with their prayers, we are turning the key and unlocking the gates of heaven”) but the illustrations are lovely and the title sounds like those of all the other boring Jewish storybooks. It might even be sold in synagogue bookstores and at Jewish book fairs every November. Bubbe will wrap it in navy blue paper stamped with silver stars of David, and little Hannah and Zachary will tear open their package with eager anticipation. They’ll read the book once, and toss it onto the shelf with all the others she’s given them over the years. In a little while, their mother will donate it to the library. At which point Bubbe will say, “Did you lose that Madonna book I gave you? Don’t worry, I bought you another copy. Happy Hanukkah.”

¹I won’t pretend to know much about Kabbalah, either the Los Angeles version or the one that only married, male scholars of Torah and Talmud over the age of 40 are permitted to study. I don’t know from Gershom Scholem or from Rabbi Philip Berg, so I’ve got some nerve, really, being judgmental enough to slap those quotation marks around the word. But when the Kabbalah Centre website is flogging anti-stress candles and online Zohar classes it’s hard not to feel like Margaret Cho might have had a point when she referred to it as “Scientology with yoga.”

²I imagine that the moral Madonna wanted to get across was that you should be kind and generous because you can never know the circumstances of another’s life. Why she thought the story of a girl ostracized because of her beauty might accomplish this probably has something to do with the bizarre circumstances of being fabulously successful and famous, yet nonetheless in very close touch with one’s capacity for pain. It’s hard to be rich. Trust her, she knows.

³Although what’s with the biographical note about having been born on Christmas Day?

Everywhere I turn these days, somebody is wearing a red thread. At first its ubiquity on the wrists of famous, influential non-Jews—from Madonna to Lindsay Lohan—perplexed me. Then, this week, I got an email foretelling of good luck if I sent it on to another 15 people and bad luck, terrible in fact, if I did not. How could I put myself on the line like that? Was I willing to forfeit the potential buona fortuna that might smile upon me?

Absolutely not.

I was raised, I thought, in an unsuperstitious home. In my youth, red strings were used for nothing more than sewing hems on trousers. Certainly I knew my astrological sign but nobody else’s. Still, somehow as a child, I took care not to step on a sidewalk crack lest I break my poor mother’s back. And, to ward off the evil eye that same, strong-backed mama told me to pull my ear three times and spit over my shoulder, as her grandmother had taught her. Unknowingly, a fear that preventable ill could come upon me took root. Even writing this, the thought occurs that I may, hereafter, face a terrible doom.

The good luck-bad luck email is a kind of amulet, like the red string. I haven’t yet deleted that kind of message when my equally fearful friends (they are legion and smart—you would not suspect them) have sent them my way. But, kinehora, the good luck the email promised didn’t arrive and my camera’s nakedness has not yet stopped it—or me—from good health.