Rabbi Daniel Brenner

…in the Jewish Week. Graphic novels etc. in this new piece in The Jewish Week But as Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, nears this year, observers are debating the uses of irreverence to memorialize the event, especially when it comes to passing the lessons of the Shoah on to a younger, Facebook generation. After years of Holocaust farces like Mel Brooks’ hit Broadway play “The Producers,” Holocaust comedy films like Roberto Benigni’s “Life is Beautiful,” after Seinfeld’s “Soup Nazi”…

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Seder for Sderot by Justin Bieber It’s a Zenga Zenga Pesach by Muhamar Qadaffi Four More Cups by Snooki Search for the Afikomen- Hawaiian Edition by Donald Trump The Prison Tweet Haggadah by Lindsay Lohan The Moosemeat Seder by Sarah Palin Ten New Plagues by British Petroleum The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies Seder by Julianne Assange Rock Star Seder From Mars by Charlie Sheen

Hot off the press! Check this out — a great article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about the program for teen boys that I am working on.

PANDER WITH DIGNITY IN A KARZAI TALLIS! Forgive my cultural insensitivities here, but as I was daydreaming the other day in synagogue I started to look at the many colorful tallisim around the room and I had the thought that Hamid Karzai could walk into this place and not a single person would look twice at his shawl. In fact, the only thing that people would say would be “nice tallis.” I google searched and found that the vision I…

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And now, a moment of zen…. “Devise a solution to Jerusalem that will bring lasting peace and does not slice the city in half as if it were a pizza” – Jennifer Laszlo Mirachi   writing in an op-ed on the JTA.  http://www.jta.org/trackback/2742935

Jew-fro? Yes. Jew? Not-so-much. Last night I thought that I would have a much needed break from the Jewish world that occupies my thoughts on a daily basis. No Jewish football players on either team, I thought. No Jewish coaches or prominent owners. The game is in Dallas. How Jewish could it be? But the gods of televised sports had other ideas. First up, Glee starlet Lea Michele sings America the Beautiful. Then Joan Rivers is in a Go Daddy spot,…

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Reading an elevator TV news blurb — that’s how I learned that one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century had passed. I was somewhat shocked that the Jewish press seems to have missed the death of one of America’s most innovative and socially conscious artists — Milton Rogovin. An optometrist, he developed a photo bug in the 1950s and began to document the social conditions of those who live on the edge in Buffalo, New York. He was…

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