Some may poo-poo our review of the CW’s new teen angstfest, “_Gossip Girl_.”:http://cwtv.com/shows/gossip-girl True, many TV critics came out with their reviews even before the show aired, but how many of them consulted with actual Upper East Side teens about what they thought? Not too damn many we imagine, but then, very few of our...

Many observers on the Israel scene were wringing their hands when “Burger King”:http://www.jerusalem.muni.il/jer_sys/picture/atarim/site_form_atar_eng.asp?site_id=1010&pic_cat=4&icon_cat=6&york_cat=9&type_id=153 and Pizza Hut began opening up in Israel, wondering how far this sort of “normalization” of the Jewish state would go. Pretty darn far, it seems, since Israel can now add to its menu of Western vices its very own nascent “Neo-Nazi...

Every now and then, a moment of pure kismet takes place that leaves Jewdar feeling all giddy: like Smurfette at a Smurf prom with all the Smurfs asking her to dance (except for those two Smurfs that share a mushroom cottage over by the stream, the ones who never go to the Smurfball games but...

Back when we reported on “Lauren Gottlieb”:http://heebmagazine.com/blog/view/159 a few weeks ago, we had stratospherically high hopes that she would make it all the way to the top of the _So You Think You Can Dance_ ladder. Although she was dropped from the competition last night, we at Jewdar are nonetheless pleased as “Poncherello”:http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=26492268 that Gottlieb...

At a time when our beloved army is forced to resort to ever more “desperate”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20205033/ means to maintain a force which is increasingly “corpulent”:http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2006/02/20/struggling_for_recruits_army_relaxes_its_rules/, “uneducated”:http://www.slate.com/id/2133908/nav/tap1/, “insane,”:http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/37/10811 and just plain “evil”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2006/10/01/ING42LCIGK1.DTL, something must be done. And we here at Jewdar, already having established ourselves as the most discerning purveyor of Jewish pop cultural esoterica, have got...

In a cyberworld populated with “pedophiles,”:http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/strollerderby/archive/2007/07/31/pedophile-s-blog-angers-parents.aspx “white supremacists”:http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php/geico-cavemen-gay-390306.html and “_Napoleon Dynamite_ fans”:http://www.bebo.com/Profile.jsp?MemberId=4383031787, it’s nice to know there is still some wholesome family programming out there. NJB Avram Honig has pimped his bubbe, Bayla Sher, but in the best way possible! In “_Feed Me, Bubbe_,”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-s1bkr8iPM the gregarious grandmother imparts her wisdom, culinary and otherwise, and in...

As the airwaves are flooded with ads for “Brett Ratner’s”:http://defamer.com/hollywood/brett-ratner/ latest “meisterwerk,”:http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/rush_hour/news/1648729/ we at Jewdar feel like the one character in a horror movie who can see that another character is really an alien/vampire/evil mandroid, but for the life of him, can’t get anybody else to see the truth. Despite that, we will continue to...

We confess to not having been big fans of Martin Buber when we read him in grad school. But the other night, we had a super-moving “I-Thou”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou moment. Flashback to a month ago, when _Heeb_ publisher “Joshua Neuman”:http://www.joshuaneuman.com/ showed us a scene from Rob Zombie’s “_The Devil’s Rejects_”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395584/ featuring “Robert Trebor”:http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0871636/ (pictured above) as a...

It is not our desire to venture out of the warm, nurturing embrace of the entertainment world, but “David Brooks’”:http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/opinion/27brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=login piece in the _Times_ today reminded us that there are more important things than the fall lineup (aww, who are we kidding, but there are more important things than the summer lineup). We at Jewdar...

After the last few thousand years, it’s a nice change of pace for something good to happen on “Tisha b’Av”:http://www.ou.org/yerushalayim/tishabav/tishabav.html: “Ward Churchill”:http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D55A03F2-F986-471C-B7A5-C380A20F8362.htm has finally lost his job. For those who don’t recall, Churchill first received attention for his essay some years back that suggested that those who died on 9/11 were “Little Eichmanns”:http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=2739 who merited...

While we don’t think its likely to act as methadone for our unhealthy addiction to “Rise of Nations”:http://www.microsoft.com/games/riseofnations/, we at Jewdar are tickled pink to hear about the new “video game”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19792794/ developed by Iran’s Union of Students Islamic Association. The premise involves an Iranian scientist and his wife taken prisoner by the Americans and, of...

Sometimes, fate drops in our laps a lesson about the facts of life of veritably “Thickean”:http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/televisiontvthemelyrics-80s90s/thefactsoflife.htm proportions. Yesterday brought us news of the bad, by which I mean NBC’s bold new fall “lineup”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/17/arts/television/17nbc.html. And what do these budding young Sammy Glicks think constitutes entertainment? The return of trollish fraud Donald Trump, the expansion of _Biggest...