• Ten members of the so-called Irvine 11, who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’s speech at the University of California-Davis, were found guilty by a jury of two misdemeanors. [JTA]

• More (since we first linked Wednesday) on how John J. Mearsheimer, of The Israel Lobby fame, has blurbed a book by an honest-to-God, self-proclaimed self-hating Jew who has some particularly troubling things to say about the Holocaust. [Adam Holland]

• Meet Shelly Yachimovich, the new leader of Labor, who has her work cut out for her. [NYT]

• Prompted in part by the Emergency Committee for Israel’s campaign, several Jewish leaders have cautioned that Israel ought not to be turned into a partisan wedge issue. [Forward]

• Last year, at his press availability in New York, President Ahmadinejad served bagels and lox. [The New Yorker News Desk]

• President Clinton major-league disses Prime Minister Netanyahu. [FP The Cable]

• Peggy Noonan praises President Obama on Israel and chastises Gov. Perry. Wait, what? [WSJ]

• A new study found that younger Conservative rabbis may be more politically left than their elders, but are still staunchly pro-Israel. [Forward]

• Prominent Jewish journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber was honored by the government of Poland. [JTA]

• Israel has pledged $1 million to Auschwitz’s upkeep. Which, read the wrong way, comes off sounding pretty ironic. [AP/WP]

• The German fashion company Hugo Boss has formally apologized for its onetime ties to the Nazis. [Imprint]

• What are you doing next Wednesday? You’re watching Rush Hashanah on VH1, of course. [The Daily Swarm]

• Did Germany’s reunification in part lead to a neo-Nazi resurgence? [Jewish Chronicle]

Happy 62nd birthday to a man who is frequently mistaken for a Jew but is always accurately captured when deemed the Boss.

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.”

Conceived by singer Rob Tannenbaum, it’s basically a pat-ourselves-on-the-back look at how Jewish things have gotten, and how very hot Jews are just now.

I give you So Jewtastic for Dummies (which is, arguably, redundant): Look!! There’s Rick Rubin. He proves Jews are down with black people! Good for us. Over here! Adam Brody from The OC is cute, and way cool too! Wow! We’re cute and cool and on TV, where we talk about being Jewish…but don’t worry, it’s only with a wink. Did you hear Seth’s dad say the word “mensch?!” Aren’t we so lovable!!! Hey, everyone, even Madge is Jewish now, but how about we reduce Kabbalah to a one-liner, ’cause two lines might require an actual explanation and nobody wants that! Too. Much. Thinking. Okay, gang, that’s a wrap. See you at Passover, when we tap-dance about bread cravings and mistake Exodus for a Bob Marley song.

The two speakers with a modicum of insight who don’t trade on empty clichés are Scott Ian (a personal fav) and Ben Lee. The rest of the moronic enterprise is a strange, up-with-people parade of interchangeable pundits that isn’t about anything at all.

It’s not that I’m against the notion of Jews being hip or being on TV or being proud. But stop the yammering already: calling yourself hip is hardly that.

Maybe it’s no coincidence this flurry of attention is happening at Christmastime, when many Jews feel excluded from the mainstream and need, I guess, to counter that with empty expressions of pride and ostentatious parties. My posse walked out of one in Chelsea in horror and dejection. It wasn’t a Torah lesson we were after, believe me. We just wanted something beyond the bad jokes about ugly bat mitzvah dresses and the difficulty of pronouncing certain Hebrew letters that represent the essence of identity for so many of our peers.

His reference point for the legendary story? Metallica, who wrote “Creeping Death” while watching the rain of hail, vermin, and frogs befall Yul Brynner and his posse in The Ten Commandments. Later, Ian, whose collaboration on “Bring the Noise” with Chuck D. was seen in the metal community as “sacrilege,” shares the moment of his own personal liberation: He saw Kiss perform at Madison Square Garden when he was a teenager and realized any path other than rock would be nothing short of enslavement.

I paraphrase. But the spirit of the metaphor is applied throughout this kaffeeklatsch of mostly endearing musical has-beens, which includes too JJ French, also of Twisted, as they knowingly call it, and Leslie West, a Hebrew school dropout from Forest Hills who wears a shirt embroidered with guitars and insists, as if challenged, that his band, Mountain, had more than one hit (“Mississippi Queen,” if you must know). But it is Snider who is the ceremony’s driving force, noting the imperative to invite those who have, like him, nowhere to go to join in the proceedings. Addled like a fifth grader at recess, he plays somewhat guileless as the least identified participant, prodding, Why matzo? Wherefore parsley? What is it you cherish about Pantera?

The answers may not be wholly satisfying, and the Seder, rife with Manischewitz product placement (macaroon tins, wine bottles), is far from complete; except for West’s bluesy guitar interpretation of the blessing over the wine, not a single song is sung. Still, the queries provoke somewhat entertaining discussion about rocking and rolling with a few educative elements thrown in: Saltwater equals tears of bitterness. Egg means rebirth.

But the recitation of the Ten Plagues is not followed by iteration of Rabbi Yehuda’s mnemonic—it would assuredly detract from the Behind the Music vibe that yields such nuggets as Snider boasting improbably that he’s a trained countertenor. We learn that Ian used his bar mitzvah money to go skateboarding, that West dropped acid the first time he saw Eric Clapton, and that French’s tattooist spoke Yiddish—from which he infers that there’s no prohibition against getting a tattoo, only against being buried in a Jewish cemetery if you have one.

I had the misguided hope that Snider, who reveals himself to be the grandson of a Russian Jew, would cheer the semantic parsing by suddenly yelling, “Rashi, eat your heart out. Then, let’s get the lead out!” Instead, the gang of four reflected on what it was like to play Germany where metal is much more menacing, sent Ian to search for the afikomen, and rigorously protested misconceptions that metalheads are just hard-partying dummies. Moses too had his Waterloo.