Over the years, I’ve had to sit through many such sessions, be it at Teach For America, where new recruits are required to complete a grueling regimen of diversity training, or during my first year at law school. It didn’t take me long to realize that, as a Shia-born Iranian-American in the post-Sept.11 era, I have anecdotes aplenty that, told correctly, can place me right in the sweet spot of the race-gender-class matrix. I could recount how on that dreadful September day a high-school classmate of mine in rural northern Utah yelled out, “Hey, Sohrab, I heard your people bombed New York!” Or I could mention how I’ve learned to preemptively take the tension out of the room when I sense that my Iranian background might be an issue. (“I come from the heart of the axis of evil,” I say.)

In some ways, All-American Muslim, TLC’s new reality-TV show documenting the lives of five families in the Arab enclave of Dearborn, Mich., is this culture-sharing exercise writ large. As the title suggests, the show aims to expose a broad audience to the day-to-day lives of American Muslims who, while assimilated into the culture, must nevertheless balance the various aspects of their identities. The cast of characters includes Fouad, the (literally) all-American coach of the local high-school football team; Jeff, an Irish Catholic preparing to convert to Islam, and Shadia, the heavily tattooed, self-described Muslim redneck engaged to him; Samira, Shadia’s sister, and her husband Ali, who struggle with infertility; Nina, the strong-willed wedding planner who dresses far too provocatively for Dearborn and is fed up with the town’s parochialism; Nawal, the hijab-clad, pregnant newlywed, and her Homer Simpson-esque husband, Nader; and Mike, a policeman, and his wife, Angela, a marketing executive in the auto industry.

The show’s central conceit lies in its use of standard-issue reality-television tropes to frame a community that many viewers might otherwise consider alien. The interplay between the familiar plot developments, musical cues, and confessional interviews—how will Jeff’s mom react to his conversion to Islam? Stay tuned to find out!—and the insular world of American Islam helps normalize the community.

The show deserves praise for capturing at least some of the internal debates within Western Islam, including those on marriage and conversion, head-covering, drinking, and sexuality. “If a girl is going to wear a scarf or a hijab, it is a choice that I think every Muslim woman has the right to make and does make,” Angela, the marketing executive, dressed in a tight-fitting skirt and knee-high boots, argues at one point. Nina, the spunky blond wedding planner, agrees: “Nobody can tell that I’m Muslim. I don’t wear hijab and I don’t wear a T-shirt that says, ‘I am Muslim.’ ” The more devout Nawal—who reminded me of a character straight out of the daytime Islamic guidance shows I had to endure as a child in Iran—clearly doesn’t approve of Angela and Nina opting out. “What about the people that were born into [Islam]?” she asks during a group discussion about Jeff’s conversion. “They don’t have to do it right?” Her sarcastic question is clearly directed at the liberal Nina, suggesting that she is insufficiently pious. Nina shoots her a piercing look in response.

Such exchanges reflect the very lively—and very real—tensions within American Islam, and bringing them to the cultural foreground is a valuable contribution. But the show does not go nearly far enough in terms of exposing American-Muslims’ ethnic, theological, and intellectual diversity. For one thing, most of the show’s characters are Lebanese Shia. And just as The Real Housewives of D.C. intercuts the ladies’ drama with shots of the Capitol and the White House, so does All-American Muslim establish its setting by repeatedly cutting to the Islamic Center of America, a Shi’ite place of worship—in effect implying that the mega-mosque is American Islam’s capital. The clerics who advise the characters on doctrinal matters, too, are invariably Shi’ite.

One could easily forgive this narrow sectarian snapshot of Islam in the United States were it not for the fact that Dearborn is also home to large numbers of Sunni-Arab Muslims. That All-American Muslim eschews showing these divisions could be chalked up to the nature of the medium: Explaining Islam’s centuries-old schisms on a reality TV show is not an easy task. It is nevertheless a troubling move, one that reinforces the notion of a monolithic Islam. (This sort of cultural whitewashing and oversimplification has been a misstep in the work of the Iranian-American writer Reza Aslan—who, along with filmmaker Mahyad Tousi, cofounded Boomgen Studios, which is helping to promote All-American Muslim. Earlier this year, Aslan published Tablet and Pen, a massive anthology of 20th-century Mideast literature that deliberately omitted Jewish authors and modern Israeli literature. (Tablet Magazine’s Adam Kirsch took him to task for this startling omission.)

More troubling still is the show’s overemphasis on theological matters and its overly deferential editorial attitude toward the Shia clerical class. Consider a painful scene in the second episode in which the hitherto unveiled Samira visits two imams seeking spiritual advice on her inability to get pregnant. “Of course there is no physical link between hijab and pregnancy,” the more senior cleric explains. “But according to Islam, when you have hijab … God will cooperate more with you.” The junior cleric chimes in: “So, that’s the goodness of the faith—the spirit and the body and the brain functioning together.”

If these men were, say, Catholic priests, the editors surely would have mocked them endlessly, Luis Buñuel-style. Instead, a soothing melody is heard as the superstitious hokum spills forth from these fonts of clerical wisdom. (Samira, we later learn, cannot afford in vitro fertilization. And since artificial insemination has been prohibited for her by clerical edict, she returns to the hijab in the hope of conceiving a baby.)

All-American Muslim’s drama is set against the larger backdrop of a supposedly rabid, anti-Muslim American culture. Indeed, the show seems to have been conceived as a reaction to rising Islamophobia in the United States “[We’re called] ‘towelheads,’ ” Shadia says in the pilot’s opening sequence. “They say we’re Muslim, we’re barbaric, we’re terrorists,” her brother complains. Later, we see news footage of far-right protesters howling “Muhammad was a pedophile!” at Muslims attending a business conference in Dearborn.

Yet put into a proper perspective, such grievances form less than half the picture. Indeed, perhaps despite itself, All-American Muslim showcases the many ways in which the American experience has allowed Muslims to thrive—a testament to a heritage of religious freedom that has liberated Muslims as never before. In Dearborn, New York, Los Angeles, and beyond, generations of American Muslims—from the pious to the secular-minded—have found safe and open spaces in which to explore and shape their own identities in ways that would be unthinkable for their counterparts trapped in the repressive pressure-cookers of the Mideast.

CORRECTION, Nov. 15: Reza Aslan and Mahyad Tousi’s Boomgen Studios is working on marketing for All-American Muslim. It did not develop or produce the show, as this article initially suggested. The error has been corrected.

Originally a contestant on season 15 of The Bachelor, Hebert was eliminated in the 9th rose ceremony before being selected as this season’s Bachelorette. Mazel Tov to the happy couple—may you be the third couple in the show’s history to actually make it down the aisle.

Ashley Hebert chooses her man on ‘The Bachelorette’ [CNN]
Ashley Hebert, ‘The Bachelorette,’ Chooses JP Rosenbaum As Winner, Gets Engaged [Huffington Post]

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These shows are lousy with Jews, of course, and what these Jews communicate, beyond the fact that they deal with expensive properties and wealthy clients, is a vulgarity and love of money that at times embarrasses me. More than embarrassment, though, I worry that these shows affirm anti-Semitic stereotypes—Jews are good at business, they love money, they’re hustlers. With their aspiration for enduring manicures (I include the men from these shows herewith), the Jews on these shows, along with the likes of Patti Stanger, Jill Zarin, and who knows who else on what else, give lie to the idea that Jews are a “people of the book.” Unless, of course, you’re talking about the kind filled with checks.

Then, thankfully, I got hooked on The Real Housewives of Atlanta, the best franchise in that robust Bravo empire. The cast of mostly African-American women is rounded out by Kim, the show’s only white woman. Not a Jew. Kim is a wig designer, lives in a gated community, has two seemingly normal daughters, a mane of blonde hair (one of her own creations?), and is now pursuing her “passion” to be a singer. She seems to greet nearly everyone with a loud, throaty, “Hello, love!” that screams hard living and dubious affection.

Kim is trashy. Before her friend’s wedding, on this week’s season finale, she gets her “titties” redone, invites her personal assistant to see how soft they are and then, hobbles into her dressing room where she uses a curling iron on her Rapunzle-like tresses while a cigarette dangles from her mouth. After her gum-chewing football-playing boyfriend picks her up, they make their way to the party, where she asks a waiter to hide a bottle of wine they’ve brought for their exclusive consumption, assuming the booze on hand will be inferior. Classy broad.

And I love her. Not because she’s affable. Not because she’s smart (though she does convincingly offer information on pregnancy, supporting her assertion that she studied nursing). I love Kim because she made me realize that Jews on reality television have no monopoly on garishness. They are not the only ones invoking stereotypes. Other peoples can and do, happily, deliciously, elicit my cry of: Oh! The Humanity!

She’s a great role model—she’s funny (she calls “hootie-hoo,” like an owl when she loses her husband in a grocery store), self-aware (she ruefully called her undercooked quinoa “un-duntay” instead of “al dente”), and sane in times of crisis. In the last episode, she accidentally cut off half her fingernail in a chopping-knife mishap, but unlike a certain other drama-queeny contestant who ran to the hospital with a lesser injury, she told the medic to bandage her up, then put on a rubber glove and kept cooking. … When other chefs derided her desire to make an African ground-nut soup for a challenge at the U.S. Open (saying it wasn’t “elevated” enough for a fine-dining experience), Hall politely stuck to her guns, and went on to win. Again: a great lesson for kids.

For Real

You heard me. Rest assured I do have standards in boobtube-itude. I will not, for example, let my kids watch live-action Disney TV. But I enthusiastically encourage them to watch Top Chef and Project Runway, shows that contain a host of moral lessons.

This season, for example, we’re watching Top Chef All-Stars, in which promising but eliminated contestants from past seasons get another shot. The chefs’ very first elimination challenge involved having to once again cook the dish that got them booted during their first appearances. One woman made the exact same dish and defiantly insisted there was nothing wrong with it. But other chefs tweaked and recalibrated, learning from their mistakes. They weren’t combative with the judges but rather accepted what they’d done wrong the first time and showed that they could do better. Isn’t that how we want our kids to learn from criticism?

My favorite character so far this season is Carla Hall. The kids love her, too. She’s a great role model—she’s funny (she calls “hootie-hoo,” like an owl when she loses her husband in a grocery store), self-aware (she ruefully called her undercooked quinoa “un-duntay” instead of “al dente”), and sane in times of crisis. In the last episode, she accidentally cut off half her fingernail in a chopping-knife mishap, but unlike a certain other drama-queeny contestant who ran to the hospital with a lesser injury, she told the medic to bandage her up, then put on a rubber glove and kept cooking. In her first appearance on the show, she kept professing the importance of cooking “with love,” blending classic French technique and culinary education with soulful, joyful unpretentiousness. At first I was suspicious—irksome hippie!—but it turned out she had all the good aspects of hippie-dom without the annoying self-righteousness. When other chefs derided her desire to make an African ground-nut soup for a challenge at the U.S. Open (saying it wasn’t “elevated” enough for a fine-dining experience), Hall politely stuck to her guns, and went on to win. Again: a great lesson for kids.

The last season of the show, as Tablet Magazine’s Marc Tracy noted, was not good for the Jews. But it was very good for Jewish parenting: As we watched Jewish contestants steal, lie, and use cooking sherry in a lunch meant for children, we had many lessons to offer our children on how not to behave.

Then there’s Top Chef Just Desserts, in which a humble, heroic baker held his own, challenge after challenge, against schmancy pastry chefs. Not only did The Baker approach cooking challenges he’d never faced before, surrounded by people with far more pastry experience, he kept making simple, homey, comforting desserts—some the judges loved, some they didn’t. The Baker’s epic journey really resonated with Josie, my 8-year-old, who tends to be afraid to attempt anything she can’t be great at right away; he taught her it’s OK not to win. And there was Morgan, the guy with tons of technique but a sour, domineering attitude. He spewed homophobic insults at another contestant and treated a far more established pastry chef, Claudia Fleming, with sexist condescension. Sadly, he taught my daughters the disparaging use of the word “fairy.” (When you’re 5, fairies tend to be viewed as awesome.) Moral lessons galore!

I’d hoped that Top Chef would help turn my kids into less picky eaters. It didn’t. Still, viewing these shows as a family has been a great way for me to convey my values, and the values of our people. Family therapists often say that talking shoulder-to-shoulder, as opposed to face-to-face, allows conversation to flower in a low-pressure way. What we talk about when we talk about cooking isn’t really about cooking. It’s about treating others well, being able to recover after a setback, holding yourself to a high but not paralyzingly impossible standard.

Do I think every reality series offers such lessons? Of course not. Many are exploitative, stupid, venal. My kids will not soon be watching any Kate Plus 8, Bachelorette, or Real Housewives (sorry, Alana). But Project Runway? Bring it on. We’ve watched every season, ordered in crazed binges from Netflix. We love the show’s most creative, out-there challenges: Design an ensemble for $50 using only things you can buy in a grocery store! Make an outfit using parts of a car! Whip up a functional costume for a female wrestler! Create a garment inspired by a work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

There’s opportunity for art education there, of course, as well as the chance to admire creativity and resourcefulness in action. But the interpersonal dramas create teachable moments, too. One contestant was kicked off for having pattern books in his room, which sparked an animated conversation: Was it right for another contestant to tell the producers about the books hidden under the bed? Is that being a tattletale? Should the contestant have been kicked off if, as he claimed, he didn’t actually know the rules?

We loved to loathe Season 5’s villain, the petulant, uptalking Kenley Collins, who was later arrested for throwing a cat at her boyfriend’s face. She was disrespectful to the show’s beloved educator/mentor, Tim Gunn; she laughed openly at other contestants on the runway; she refused to take any criticism or advice from fashion designers or editors; she had a persecution complex as big as Bryant Park. For a while, the catchphrase in our house was “I wasn’t going for elegance, Heidi!,” Kenley’s snotty retort to judge Heidi Klum. From then on, whenever Josie or Maxie kvetched Kenleyishly, the rest of us would snap, “I wasn’t going for elegance, Heidi!” (Josie turned the saying into a welcome sign on our door. It meant take responsibility and don’t whine.)

Reality shows can depict the choices we all face: whether to be collaborative and generous or whether to hide ingredients under the table so no one else can use them. They can encourage us to stand up to bullying and show us the distastefulness of being a mean girl. Reality shows prove that talent comes in all ages, races, religions, body types, and economic backgrounds, and that loving your work is more important than being irresistible to the opposite sex. These are emphatically not lessons one learns from the Disney Channel.

Of course, reality TV isn’t all blessings. We recently passed a newspaper box containing our community paper, a picture of Bill Clinton on the front cover. Maxine ran to the box, yelling, “Tim! Tim Gunn!” Oops. So, I’ll teach morality first, politics later. Reality TV is often more moral than politics anyway.

Watching the Israeli reality TV series Connected, I can’t help recalling those sumptuous meals in my brother’s hole-in-the-wall kitchen. On paper, Connected looks like just another reality show for commercial TV, but the nearly megalomaniacal artistic ambitions of its exploding-with-talent creators and participants have produced something different. They have managed to take the shallow mush doled out by standard reality shows, and, while not eliminating the mush, they have placed it in a much more complex, clever, and reflexive concept. Similar to the food in my brother’s kitchen, I can’t claim that it’s the best television I’ve ever tasted, but it is definitely a unique blend of reality TV—in my view, the most insincere and artificial television genre there is—and a genuine, impressive attempt by the creators and participants to offer up some kind of truth, not only about themselves, but about humanity in general.

The show’s concept is far from original: Five participants document their lives by filming and narrating with the utmost honesty the most intimate events they experience. In Connected’s second season, the men are between the ages of 18 and 45. The show has been a smash hit not only because of the participants’ impressive storytelling abilities and their off-beat stories but because they, unlike in other shows such as Survivor and Big Brother, live in their natural surroundings and not in an isolated environment, and because the episodes are aired almost immediately after they’re filmed. This creates multilayered reflexivity, a sort of rich, sometimes nauseating layer cake of reality in which the participants in each episode have already seen the previous installment—and reacted to it.

Connected’s creators, Doron Tsabari and Ram Landes, are somewhat atypical to the Israeli television scene. Tsabari is one of the country’s most gifted and crusading makers of social documentaries. His last film, Guide to Revolution, is a brilliant record of his uncompromising, years-long fight against the politicization of Israeli public television. Landes was, for years, the editor of commercial television’s major nightly news broadcast, until he left to create a soap opera called Hasufim (“Exposed”), about TV news shows and their manipulative methods. If there is a common denominator in the work of these two essentially different, creative people, it is that they both deal with the same issue: the exploitative use of television and the possibility of striving for truth within the medium’s limitations.

Four out of the five subjects the creators hired for this season of Connected are no strangers to media exposure. Shai Golden, a 40-year-old former TV critic, is the editor of the weekly magazine supplement to Haaretz; Ron Sarig, also 40, writes the most successful sitcom in Israel, Ramzor (“Stop Light”); Dudu Busi, 45, who flirted with the medium in the past as an actor, is an established and well-respected writer; and Ishai Green is a 30-year-old tech whiz who retired with millions at 25 only to discover two years later that he’d spent all his money. He has now put together a thriving new startup. In Andy Warhol terms, those four have already had their 15 minutes of fame. They are very savvy, atypical reality stars.

Watching the program, you have a strong sense that the five documenters feel they are engaged in a sacred mission. Their need to be honest and open seems almost pathological.

This pathology seems heightened by the show’s immediacy. Because the episodes have such a quick turnaround, it is possible to see one of the participants lie his way out of a family dinner only to hear, in the next episode, his mother’s reaction when her friends called to tell her that they saw her son lying on TV. In another episode, the participants and their wives and girlfriends reacted to viewers who commented online about their relationship. The fact that hundreds of people plead online for Ishai, the broke tech millionaire, to leave his wife develops into a marital crisis, when the wife accuses Ishai of putting her in a bad light in his self-documentary. In another surprising moment, the sitcom writer’s mother confesses that although she is suffering because of the show and the exposure, it has also caused her son, hungry for a bit of conflict and drama in his drab life, to visit her more often.

The show’s intervention in the lives of the characters can have a curative effect as well. The youngest participant in the show, Louis Edry, 18, who has a difficult relationship with his father, uses the camera to drag his dad into soul-searching conversations. In one such conversation, which would probably not have occurred under other circumstances, Louis realizes that he has never really understood his father’s ambitions for him. This discovery brings about a reconciliation and a significant change in their lives. On the other hand, Ron uses the camera in a selfish and aggressive manner, to confess how frustrated he is in his marriage and, later, to make the viewers privy to his infidelity, which of course leads to the painful destruction of the marriage.

And so this extreme reflexivity creates the effect of an Escher painting. Sometimes the painting is the hand painting itself and sometimes, as in Ron’s case, of the snake swallowing its tail. At any rate, the very narcissistic and disturbing result is also touching and poignant, reflecting the creators’ boundless ambition to leave a piece of raw, bleeding honesty on the viewer’s plate.

Translated by Sondra Silverston

Kirshtein, currently cooking at Solo, a kosher restaurant in midtown Manhattan, took the challenge head-on, brushed up on his Mishnah, and made us a dish as scrumptious as it is symbolic. Such studious cooking, he says, is what life is like outside of the mercurial environment of reality television.

“I think the main thing you got to remember about Top Chef is that it’s more Top Cook,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about food cost, labor cost…. A New York City kitchen is a really difficult thing, because the clientele is so demanding and the food public really knows what’s quality versus what’s gimmick.”

Click below to watch Kirshtein ply his craft, and scroll down for the recipe.

Eli Kirshtein’s Tu B’Shevat Persimmon Salad

2 Fuyu persimmons
1 can ginger ale
2 tablespoons marcona almonds
2 tablespoons cocoa nibs
5 leaves Belgian endive
10 leaves tarragon
1 tablespoon honey
1 tablespoon yuzo juice
1 tablespoon white truffle oil
Sea salt, to taste

1. Peel persimmons and punch out with a ring-cutter. Place the remaining scraps in a blender and add ginger ale as needed, until the puree is smooth. Slice the punched-out persimmons into rounds.

2. In a separate bowl, mix the yuzu juice, truffle oil, and honey, stirring until the vinaigrette is unified.

3. Using a spoon, smear a stripe of the puree onto a large plate. Place fresh marcona almonds and cocoa nibs on top of the stripe, and add two or three leaves of endive, and four or five leaves of tarragon on top. Line the sliced persimmons on the plate, and dress with the vinaigrette. Season with salt.

Serves two.

Confused? You must be among the fortunate few who’ve managed to miss the pop-culture leviathan known as Jersey Shore, a reality show that follows a tribe of young, libidinal coxcombs and slatterns as they lounge on the seaside strip.

The media reacted to the show much as a flock of cockatiels might react to the sudden appearance of a fresh field of millet, pecking away at its every bit. In Snooki, J-Woww, Pauly D and the show’s other protagonists, printer-toner stained wretches everywhere found greater meaning by the pound. For most pundits, all it took were a few hours watching MTV to collectively bemoan the imminent passing of Western Civilization, asphyxiated, presumably, by a cloud of hormones and hair product.

Western Civilization, you may be relieved to hear, is alive and well, and the legacy of the Enlightenment is firmer even than the muscles on Ronnie’s chest. But Jersey Shore does raise some worthwhile philosophical conundrums, all of which, it seems, are embodied in The Situation.

For the uninitiated among you, The Situation is the nickname Mike Sorrentino, the show’s inimitable star, has given himself, or, more accurately, his meticulously sculpted abs. So emblematic is Mr. Sorrentino’s midriff, that, in his mind, it has come to represent his entire being. This, as critics have noted humorlessly, is known as synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part of something is used to refer to the thing as a whole: think “Washington” for the federal government, “wheels” for a car, or “Facebook” for three hours spent doing absolutely nothing but checking out photos of people you hated in fourth grade on an inane ski trip to Vermont.

The Situation is, perhaps, the first man in a long time to make synecdoche sexy: by designating his abs as a stand-in for his self, he declares head, heart, and all other organs superfluous. In so doing, The Situation presents a more formidable challenge to the spirit of the Enlightenment than his critics give him credit for. Forget cogito ergo sum; on the Jersey Shore, it’s I tan therefore I am.

As we have recently spent so much time enumerating the most notable things about the past decade, allow me to nominate The Situation as the emblem of the decade to come. We may be barely a month into the 2010s, but the tides emanating from Seaside Heights, N.J., carry with them a message we mustn’t ignore: welcome, it says, to the age of no consequence.

Nothing captures the essence of The Situation more aptly than his cheerful obliviousness to the idea that the things he says and does have outcomes. One moment he’s holding hands with Sammi, aka Sweetheart, in what seems like the sweet prelude to romance, and the next he’s dipping in the Jacuzzi with a gaggle of pantsless girls he has picked up in a bar. When Sammi distances herself the following morning, The Situation is baffled, so difficult is it for him to comprehend the mechanics of cause and effect.

It’s easy to pick on the hapless he-man as a boorish know-nothing, but take a closer look and you see that there are two, three, many Situations. There’s John “The Situation” Edwards, for example, the campaign trail Casanova who was shocked—shocked!—when his extramarital indiscretions derailed his presidential run. Or Bernie “The Situation” Madoff, who screwed pretty much everybody and never imagined he’d be caught. Edwards may be able to afford much better hair care than Sorrentino, and Madoff’s beachfront digs are far nicer, but, deep down, they’re surprisingly alike, ravenous men who are not about to let tomorrow get in the way of today.

Luckily for them, and for us, this week’s haftorah provides some required reading for Situations of all sorts. With Babylonian troops surrounding Jerusalem, the people of Israel look up to Egypt for support. No way, divines Ezekiel: Egypt, he prophesies, will abandon Israel in its time of need, a betrayal for which the Lord will punish the mighty kingdom with suffering and dispersal.

“And it shall be no more the confidence of the house of Israel,” Ezekiel roars, “bringing iniquity to remembrance, when they turn after them; and they shall know that I am the Lord God.”

Ezekiel’s message is as pertinent to the Promised Land as it is to the Garden State. Actions, he reminds us, have consequences, and ignoring these consequences won’t make them go away. Betray Sammi, and watch her affections dwindle and die. Betray God’s chosen people, and risk putting the Almighty in a smiting mood.

It’s a simple lesson, yet it’s one so many of us fail to learn time and again. Before we truly turn our society into a hellish, heedless mess, let’s chase that pint of pop culture down with a shot of Ezekiel. Otherwise, we may have an indescribable situation on our hands.

PD: Let’s try a happy topic. What are your plans for Halloween and Thanksgiving with the kids?
JG: Thanksgiving is tough. Kate has custody on Thanksgiving, but I will stop by to see my kids. Halloween I don’t have custody. Hailey [Gosselin’s post-Kate love interest] handles my schedule. It’s kinda weird, but I can confide in her. She’s my best friend. I lost a lot of friends; people burned me left and right.

PD: And Christmas?
JG: Christmas, yeah. This is the first year I will celebrate Chanukah. Hailey is Jewish. Everyone in my life is Jewish now, my attorney. I love it. I’m now half Jewish and half Korean. The family values are great. On Christmas, I’ll see my kids during the day for a couple of hours. …

PD: Tell me more about your interest in Judaism.
JG: I just went through Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur and learned about the new year and every Friday is the Shabbat dinner. I love challah bread. I’m learning about Jewish food, going to Zabar’s. I love that place. I’m learning about kosher and when not to order a bacon, egg and cheese and make an ass of myself. …

PD: Are we going to see you converting to Judaism?
JG: I talked to Rabbi Shmuley a couple of times. He has nine kids.

Jon Gosselin Loves His Kids, His Girlfriend and the Jews [ParentDish]

Top Chef [Bravotv.com]

Sabato—whose impeccable abs prompted the late New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp to invoke comparisons to Michelangelo’s David—comes by his Jewishness via his maternal grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who concealed her background in Communist postwar Czechoslovakia. “When I tell people I’m an Italian Jew, they’re very amused by it,” he said in a recent telephone interview about his dating show, My Antonio, which premieres this weekend on VH1. “But obviously by blood I’m Jewish, because my mother is.”

His mother, Yvonne, is the reason Sabato was speaking for the first time about his Jewish roots. Her heritage isn’t really a feature of My Antonio, which presents Yvonne instead as a stereotypical Italian mother—which, granted, is more or less the same thing as a stereotypical Jewish mother—but Sabato told Tablet he hopes the show can turn his mother, a singer who gave up her career in Europe when her children were born, into a star. “My mother is an international woman,” said her 37-year-old son. “She is not the typical Italian, behind the pots and pans.”

Yvonne Sabato was born in Prague in 1947. Her mother, a dancer, was the only one of her family to escape the Nazis; after the war, she’d married an aristocrat who refused to join the Communist Party. The government forced the family to join the circus, where Yvonne and her father had an acrobatic act involving a unicycle. Yvonne’s mother hid her Jewish background, sending the young girl to Catholic school. Over the years, Yvonne said, she wondered why she didn’t have any relatives on her mother’s side, but never had the courage to ask about the past. “You start thinking, and over the years you get older and say, ‘What is wrong with this picture?’” Yvonne said in an interview. “But in those days parents did not talk about certain things.”

In the late 1960s, the family toured Italy; once there, Yvonne refused to return to Prague and remained in Rome, where she married Antonio Sabato, a spaghetti Western star who had appeared in John Frankenheimer’s 1966 car-racing epic Grand Prix. In 1987, Yvonne and Antonio, with their two children, moved to Los Angeles, where, eventually, she discovered her background. The Red Cross tracing service informed Yvonne that her grandparents and uncle had been deported to Auschwitz—a place she had visited with her mother as a teenager, never realizing it was her own family’s graveyard. She was interested in her Jewish roots, but she never became religiously observant. “You grow up with something for that many years—Christmas, trees—it’s hard to let it go, when you don’t know anything about this other religion,” she said

Her son wasn’t raised Jewish, either. Antonio, who has occasionally been photographed wearing a large cross around his neck, described his religious upbringing as “very liberal, Judaism, Catholicism.” (“I appreciate every type of religion,” he added.) “We were educated, we knew about the Holocaust—I remember seeing the ovens and the showers,” he explained. Now, as a parent—he has two children, ages 15 and six—and said he was waiting for the kids to start asking questions. “I don’t want to impose it, but I think it’s important for them to know things that happened in our past,” he said. He hopes he and his mother can visit Israel together. “People have to know that cultures—there have been many over the years, that have been through a lot,” he said. “Jewish people are tough people, they believe in something and believe it really strong, and I find it fascinating that a small country like Israel is as powerful as it is.”

For now, though, they contented themselves with a trip to Hawaii, where My Antonio was shot. Yvonne said she had initially hoped her son would leave the family business, especially after watching his father struggle to get parts. “I wanted him to be anything but this—a dentist, a doctor, anything,” Yvonne said. But she relished talking about the show—which features Sabato’s ex-wife, model Tully Jensen (of both Vogue and Playboy fame), competing alongside a bevy of saccharine women for his heart. Yvonne appears about halfway through the first episode, decked out in a floppy wide-brimmed black hat and form-fitting dress, muttering to her son in a sonorous mix of Italian and English to get rid of “that one with the boobs.” In short order, she sends an apparently aimless 28-year-old girl squealing off camera in tears after asking, “Don’t you have any ambitions?” Sabato chides Yvonne to go easy on the women, but, in an aside, he acknowledges she was probably right: “I know my mother will tell me what’s best for me.”

The premise is simple: teams of two dash around the world, completing tasks in a quest for $1 million. At each stop the producers make a somewhat cheesy attempt to infuse the tasks with some element of local culture: rowing a Viking ship in Oslo, gorging on caviar in St. Petersburg.

This week, the show opened in Senegal on Goreé Island, the last stop for millions of Africans sold into slavery, where contestants took time to say a prayer and shed a tear. Next stop Berlin, where the first clue was found in front of a section of the dismantled wall. This clue led teams past a bombed-out church and to the Broken Chain sculpture to, in host Phil Keoghan’s words, “commemorate the devastation of World War Two.”

I felt like my TiVo must have skipped. If the contestants had flown in from sheep herding in New Zealand to revisit the Bauhaus or partake in Oktoberfest, fine by me. Maybe the producers felt it would be rude to bring up the Holocaust in Germany, like insulting the host’s cooking at a dinner party. Maybe Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum was too far out of the way. But going from the memorial ceremony at an African slave port to a casual jog around genocide left me feeling cheated.

“It’s nice sometimes when the show slows down to acknowledge history,” Phil says on the CBS website. “Those moments are really good because, you know, they just make you think.” Clearly Phil and friends didn’t want anyone to think too hard on this leg.

Sure enough, Ann Marie drags her already exhausted, staunchly liberal new family all over Washington looking for a Bush-Cheney T-shirt. Though she does lecture John Egly about teaching his daughters about “purity,” I didn’t expect her to be so likable, projecting more good will than missionary zeal. Instead, it’s Stephanie Egly who came off as closed-minded and unpleasant, as she “suffers through” the Doverspike family trip to a Colonial theme park and a morning prayer circle. As much as the editors of Trading Spouses try to keep things balanced, it’s hard to come away not feeling like Stephanie’s the villain, or that the Eglys are dysfunctional because they’re Jewish.

The show never got half as inflammatory as the preview promised. No one tried to convert anyone, religiously or politically, but no one learned anything, either. The closest anyone comes to cross-cultural dialogue is when Stephanie Egly prepares a traditional feast for the Doverspikes’ neighbors. If Red and Blue America are going to reconcile their differences on television, we’ll all have to do better than bagels and lox—and reality shows.