Purim

Purim 2014 begins in the evening of Saturday, March 15 and ends in the evening of Sunday, March 16

Purim is celebrated with a public reading—usually in the synagogue—of the Scroll of Esther (Megillat Esther), which tells the story of the holiday. Under the rule of King Ahashverosh, Haman, the king's prime minister, plots to exterminate all of the Jews of Persia. His plan is foiled by Queen Esther and her cousin Mordechai, who ultimately save the Jews of Persia from destruction. The reading of the megillah typically is a rowdy affair, punctuated by booing and noise-making when Haman's name is read aloud.

Purim is an unusual holiday in many respects. First, Esther is the only biblical book in which God is not mentioned. Second, Purim, like Hanukkah, traditionally is viewed as a minor festival, but elevated to a major holiday as a result of the Jewish historical experience. Over the centuries, Haman became the embodiment of every anti-Semite in every land where Jews were oppressed. The significance of Purim lies not so much in how it began, but in what it has become: a thankful and joyous affirmation of Jewish survival against all odds.

For more information on Purim, see our Holiday Spotlight Kit. If you're a JVN website, find out how you can carry our Holiday Spotlight Kit on your own website. If not, go to our website to see it. 



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Sigmund Freud’s Sicko Grandson: Cruel Lover, Terrible Father, One Hell of a Painter

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

By Vladislav Davidzon for Tablet Magazine

When the previous record for the world’s most expensive painting was blown away by the price paid at auction for Francis Bacon’s 1969 triptych “Three Studies of Lucian Freud” this past November, two widely held art-world intuitions were verified. First, that the art world is an annex of the Bourse, and second, the critical ascendancy of Freud, whose second-hand presence, as the subject of a painting by another famous artist, was a major reason for the fierce bidding.

Behind Freud’s triumphant moment is the fact that the English do not produce more than a few great artists every century, and so they embrace them with patriotic glee. Which also means that the enigmatic and reclusive grandson of the founder of psychoanalysis must now endure a degree of scrutiny of the sort that he never tolerated while living among mere mortals. A pair of newly published biographical studies, the affectionate and scabrously judgmental Breakfast With Lucian: A Portrait of the Artist, by journalist Geordie Greig and the beautifully ruminative Man With a Blue Scarf, by art critic Martin Gayford offer up a rounded view of an extraordinary and closely guarded life: Born in 1922, into the family of architect Ernest Freud—the youngest son of Sigmund—in the upscale Tiergarten district of Berlin, he was taken to London at the age of 10 by his family in 1933, as the death knell of the Weimar Republic rang. (Sigmund joined the family there in 1938, only to die a year later.) There exists a general consensus among critics that Lucian would have been too young, and too sequestered by his bourgeois family, to absorb Berlin’s avant-garde developments such as the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity); his mature style was genealogically, even inexorably linked to developments in modernist Vienna. Effusing about the recently closed retrospective at the Kunsthistorisches, the Viennese press made the obvious comparisons between his works and the limb-contorting figuration and sallow coloring of Hodler, the frigid eroticism of Klimt, Kokoschka’s macabre portraiture, and Schiele’s appreciation of the pliable female form.

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Jewish Comedy Turns Sane

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

Once an institutionalized mental patient, the comic Moshe Kasher unleashes his psychological self-abuse in the new memoir Kasher in the Rye

By Josh Lambert for Tablet Magazine

Moshe Kasher introduces one bit on his 2009 debut comedy CD, Everyone You Know Is Going to Die, And Then You Are, by saying the words, “I went to college.” Which, given that Kasher is a 32-year-old American Jew, would seem a little like his saying that he breathes oxygen.

Except that for Kasher, picking up a bachelor’s degree was anything but inevitable. In Kasher in the Rye, his new misery-lit memoir, the comedian explains that he was, for most of his teenage years, headed in a very different direction. His father, a deaf baal teshuva who found his place among the Satmar Hasidim in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, would have preferred him to train as a Talmud scholar, but even before his bar mitzvah, Moshe had discovered a passion for illegal drugs. “I was 12 years old and I found my calling,” he recalls. “Stay high, stay drunk, at all costs.” He fulfilled this program throughout his adolescence in Oakland, Calif., during which—according to his literary testimony—he was drunk or high every day, stole from grocery stores and from his mother, hung around with homeless junkies, racked up thousands of dollars in phone-sex charges, and was booted from one therapist and teenage rehab program after another. He robbed kids on the street, wrote graffiti, urinated all over the floor of his bedroom, and, at one particularly low point, was accused along with his friends of gang-raping a teenage girl.

Kasher grew up in the home of his divorced mother, who, being deaf like his father, could not hear him sneaking out of the house at night, or blasting Too $hort on her car’s stereo, even when she was sitting in the seat right next to him. But he doesn’t blame his troubles on growing up in a family doubly destabilized by divorce and deafness. How could he, when his older brother sailed through a fancy liberal arts college and onward to a progressive Orthodox rabbinical school so as to return to his hometown and serve as the senior Jewish educator at the U.C. Berkeley Hillel?

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How Josh Gad Almost Missed Out on the Chance to Voice Olaf the Snowman for Disney's Frozen

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

By Jim Hill for The Blog on Huffington Post

To be asked to participate in the first reading of a brand-new Disney animated feature was like a dream come true for Josh Gad.

"You have to understand that -- when I was growing up -- I was absolutely obsessed with the animated films of Disney's Second Golden Age," Gad explained during a recent phone interview. "I mean, I recall going to see The Little Mermaid in theaters no less than 20 times. My poor mother had to send me with various aunts and uncles and nephews & nieces who were old enough to take me. We almost ran out of relatives."

"And then when Aladdin was released to theaters in 1992, I remember watching Robin Williams tearing it up up there onscreen," Josh continued. "And I remember turning to my Mother and saying prophetically 'I'm going to do that one day.' So to then get that phone call and be asked to come take part in a reading for Anna and the Snow Queen was a complete thrill for me."

Now please note that the title which I mentioned above was Anna and the Snow Queen. Not Frozen, the new Disney animated feature that opened in theaters on November 27th, wracking up an estimated $93 million in ticket sales during its first five days in domestic release. That's because this was an earlier attempt by Walt Disney Animation Studios to turn Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairytale into a full-length animated feature.

"This was about three years ago before I went off to do Book of Mormon. This version of the movie was supposed to be done in 2D and featured songs by Alan Menken. And at the reading that I took part in, Megan Mullally read the part of Elsa the Snow Queen. And she was brilliant, by the way," Gad enthused. "But this movie, it was a completely different thing than Frozen. It had a storyline that stuck a lot closer to the original source material. And at this reading, Olaf was an entirely different character."

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The Most Interesting Jew in the World

With no Jewish holidays coming up immediately, we bring you profiles of some well known and some not so well known Jews. Enjoy.

Dos Equis’ pitchman is Jewish actor living in Marina del Rey.

By Adam Wills for JewishJournal.com

“He once had an awkward moment just to see how it feels. He lives vicariously through himself,” a disembodied voice states.

“He is the Most Interesting Man in the World.”

Seated at a table, surrounded by beautiful women, a bearded man with salt-and-pepper hair looks into the camera: “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. Stay thirsty, my friends.”

At a time when many viewers use DVRs to skip over TV commercials, Dos Equis gets people to stop and watch its ads for their potent blend of machismo and absurdist humor. The debonair Latin pitchman, a creation of Euro RSCG, appears one part Earnest Hemingway, one part Baron Munchausen. We learn his “beard alone has experienced more than a lesser man’s entire body.”

But the actor who portrays the Most Interesting Man in the World is more likely to attend a bar mitzvah than a Quinceañera. Jonathan Goldsmith, 72, whose face and voice are now inexorably linked with one of Mexico’s top-selling beers, is a New York-born Jew who lives with his wife on a 50-foot Beneteau sailboat in Marina del Rey.

“It’s 47.3 feet,” he corrected during a recent phone interview. “It had a bris … it was 53 feet.”

Goldsmith says he had a nice career as a character actor before his Dos Equis stint, which began in 2007. He appeared in films, like “Go Tell the Spartans,” and television shows such as “The A-Team,” “Knight Rider” and “MacGyver.” “But I’ve never gotten the accolades that I’ve gotten since this wonderful campaign started,” he said.

Given the campaign’s popularity, Goldsmith says he can’t venture outside without being recognized.

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Planting from the Remains

This year Tu B'Shevat 2014 begins in the evening of Wednesday, January 15
and ends in the evening of Thursday, January 16

by Larry Domnitch for jewishmag.com

It is common knowledge that the holiday of Tu BiShvat is associated with the planting of trees in Israel. Throughout the centuries, trees have been planted in Israel on Tu BiShvat as a celebration of the special qualities of the land, as well as its connection to the Jewish people. Prior to the scorching of the land by Roman legions following the Judean revolts over 1,800 years ago, Israel was adorned with lush forests and bountiful produce.

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks ruled the land, the first waves of Zionist immigrants began to arrive with the goal of developing the land and restoring some of its former splendor. When Tu BiShvat arrived, they would assemble to mark the day with tree planting ceremonies. Clusters of young saplings were soon transformed into forests. Each forest that was planted brought the dream of a Jewish state a little closer -- a dream that seemed distant while the land was under the harsh rule of the anti-Zionist Turks. Just as every forest was precious, so too was each tree. The story of one particular tree symbolized the plight of Zionism in its earliest days and proved that adversity might be an obstacle, but not a deterrent. No impediments would prevent the development of the land of Israel.

While visiting Israel in 1898, Theodore Herzl sought an audience with the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was also in the Holy Land. After visiting the coastal settlements of Mikve Yisrael and Rishon LeTzion, Herzl traveled toward Jerusalem. As he passed through the Judean hills, he noticed its splendor as well as its barrenness due to neglect over the centuries. However, he noticed an island of green amidst the desolation. It was a small Jewish settlement, the only one in the area. The settlement, named Motza, possessed a population of 200 and was located a few miles west of Jerusalem. Its abundance of Olive, Date and Apricot Trees along with clusters of grapevines, gave it its fertile appearance.

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Tu Bishvat 101

This year Tu B'Shevat 2014 begins in the evening of Wednesday, January 15
and ends in the evening of Thursday, January 16

Tu Bishvat is a holiday intimately connected to the agricultural cycle of the Land of Israel.

Falling in the middle of the Jewish month of Shvat, the 15th day of the month is the New Year of Trees. Today, this holiday is often celebrated by planting saplings and also by participating in a seder-meal that echoes the Passover seder, in which the produce of trees, including fruits and nuts, are eaten.

Ideas and Beliefs

The Bible expresses a great reverence for fruit trees as symbols of God's bounty and beneficence. Special laws were formulated to protect fruit trees in times of war and ensure that the produce of trees would not be picked until the trees were mature enough and tithes were given from them. In order to calculate the age of trees, both for determining when they could be harvested and when they were to be tithed for the Temple, the Talmudic Rabbis established the 15th day (Tu) of the month of Shvat as the official "birthday" of trees.

Subsequent to the destruction of the Temple, Tu Bishvat lost much of its relevance, but in the middle ages it was rediscovered by Jewish mystics. In the modern period it has enjoyed another revival as a holiday that links Jews with the land of Israel and as a Jewish celebration of the environment.

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