by Tara Bognar
A.M. New York: Highlights for Lilith Readers
I happened on th
is free city rag on the subway this morning and was impressed by all the items I thought might be of interest to my fellow Lilith fans and thought I’d share the wealth. Unfortunately, none of my favorites are actually on their website so I’m providing other links where they were available:
NYPD “Hercules” teams are guarding synagogues during Passover in response to a newly posted threatening Al Qaida mock movie poster.
Seriously – you don’t often come across this much exciting cross cultural material in a three sentence article. Al Qaida, a fundamentalist Muslim terrorist group that, among other things, would like to purify Islam of outside influences, has prepared an impressively designed poster that could easily be blazoned across a bus to promote a new Hollywood film if it weren’t for the (surely unintentional) sexual double entendre: “Al Quaeda: Coming Soon Again in New York.”
“Hercules,” of course, was an ancient Greek demi-god known for his strength. Some ancient Jews embraced Hellenism (apparently one scribe claimed that two sons of Abraham joined Hercules on his Africa expedition) and others strenuously resisted it, culminating in a bloody civil war – see Hannukah. The cultural resonances of American “Hercules” teams guarding Jewish synagogues during the holiday when we commemorate escaping from Egypt to become a sovereign people in our own land are wonderful to ponder. (Incidentally, the planes used by the IDF in the Entebbe raid were also called Hercules).
80-year-old woman who had never piloted before safely landed her husband’s twin engine Cessna.
After watching her husband collapse at the helm and die in front of her, Helen Collins brought his plane to a safe landing: “she kept her composure and sounded like she had been a pilot for years.” Other sources reveal that she landed the plane on a single engine after the second engine ran out of gas. Wow.
Barack Obama described the Republican budget as “thinly-veiled social Darwinism”
Associating the ‘evolution is only a theory and so is creationism’ Republican party with Darwinism: just brilliant.
Passover is a great time to try NY’s Jewish restaurants, but service can be “old-shul”
Ouch! The phenomenon of being ignored at shul has now been memorialized in a mainstream media restaurant review – we really must get better at making newcomers feel welcome! Also, apparently the going rate for a seder menu in New York is about $75 per person. Ouch.