The day after posting this I remembered that Italian-American actor John Atkinson very compellingly portrayed a Jew with the weight of the world on his shoulders in Jazz Christmas. Wow, that seems like a long time ago…

Please enjoy the haunting Leonard’s Theme, performed by John and inspired by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (MP3).

Flying back from Honduras last night (oh yeah, that happened) I watched this show Numb3rs where JEWS…FIGHT…CRIME.

I didn’t have headphones and I didn’t need them. I just watched in total delight. As Whitney put it, “Look at all those noses!”

(And what noses. The show’s got the kid from Addams Family Values, Judd Hirsch, that hilarious guy from Ghostbusters 2, PLUS Rob Morrow. Morrow played Dick Goodwin in Quiz Show and Goodwin is the basis for Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint, though he’s also sorta Philip Roth - meaning I might just love one Jewish man - an overrighteous oversexed nerd.)

And the best part: they fight crime using Math. My favorite moment, and I bet this happens every episode, is the scene where the gentile criminals are explained the math that’s ensnared them! Oh man. I just couldn’t be happier.

But if I love Jews so much on TV (and in the Kennedy era)…why don’t I like them that much in real life? My phone’s got 140 contacts and of them, only 27 are Jews, mostly from Big A Little a.

Maybe that’s impressive if you live somewhere else, but for a Jewish Columbia grad living in Brooklyn 27 is pretty shabby. I mean that includes my family! And why do I find Jewish-hipness: HEEB Magazine, J-Date, later Seth Cohen, so utterly, disproportionately repulsive?

I guess I am only now realizing a famous and obvious thing. So-called Jewish “self-loathing” and “pride” aren’t opposites - they’re best friends. (Dag. I saw that movie THE BELIEVER twice and it still didn’t sink in.)

Anywayz, on the plane, I made Whitney promise that we’d find ourselves a Jewish male actor soon. I’m fine fetishizing blondes and blonde-ness for another year or two, but then we’re spending some time on olive-skinned thick haired people with nasal voices and the world on their back. And we are objectifying the fuck out of them.

They deserve it.
L

P.S. And it’s not just me. Did you know that my sister pronounces her great TV-crush David Duchovny’s name with a guttural “ch”? What is that but a protest against the teasingly never-stated Jewishness of our sexiest TV Jew? It’s not enough that we _know_ Fox Mulder is Jewish - that you can literally see it on his face. We want you to hear it too.

P.P.S. I especially love it when non-Jews go out of their way to have awesome Jewish characters. Wes Anderson’s doing G-d’s work.

Last night Whitney re-edited our utilitarian BLONDES IN THE JUNGLE camera-tests into a transcendent music video. Of it she wrote, “if i was winona ryder in reality bites this is a video i probably would have made.”
Riiight?

(Read So X, II for more on our generation vs. Generation X.)

Not a Girl? Not Yet A Woman?

Lately we’ve been very aware that as much as we admire under-18s like Greyson Fletcher, Cory Kennedy and Lil’ Mama, they are clearly part of a new generation - one that experienced being too young for Myspace, and who watched 9/11 from elementary school classrooms.

This made us think a lot about what defines OUR generation, which led us to Wikipedia’s very helpful “Generation X” entry. Reading it, we realizes that while we LOVE Paul Rudd, Ethan Hawke, Parker Posey, Bret Easton Ellis and Barak Obama, they are obviously not of our generation either. So who are we?

We think of our generation as people between 20 and 30. We straddle the older MTV Generation and the younger Internet Generation. As such, our central figure is clearly Britney Spears. We might as well all have her exact birthday.

BDI-friend Karen F has suggested the name “Generation Toxic” as a nod to Britney’s unifying anthem. But as our membership includes Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and ‘Last Night’s Party’, Whitney thinks “Generation Skank” might be more appropriate. At any rate, our MVPs include Lil’ Wayne, Roger Federer and Amanda Byrnes.

In a transparent maneuver to snatch John Mayer from us, Wikipedia includes people born in 1981 in Generation X. To settle such arguments, we suggest a Dave Chappelle-style Generation Draft. X-ers, our first proposed trade is your Wes Anderson for our Andy Samberg. Y’all think he’s hilarious, right?

L + W (Shit, we’ll throw in The Arcade Fire for free)