Britney Spears is Converting to Judaism?

Everybody knows that if you're from North Jersey, you tell people you're from New York and if you're from South Jersey, you tell people you're from Philly (the latter are known of South Jersey losers). So since I'm a sophisticated Jew, essentially form NYC, I have a subscription to the New Yorker. Unlike most Jews though, I don't usually enjoy their Shouts & Murmurs comedy section (AKA the one to two page comedy essay usually written by someone with a Jewish name, sometimes named Woody Allen). Unlike most New Yorker articles, Shouts isn't eighteen pages long, interesting yet overly wordy.

But last week's installment had an decidedly hysterical Jewish tone.


via New Yorker

Entitled Britney's Conversion Diary and based on the idea that Britney was considering converting for a new boyfriend (according to The Sun), this is one of the funnier pieces of humor writing I've read in a long time. Cursing, Jewish jokes, making fun of Rabbis & breaking down Jewish laws into tweets all in first paragraph. Enjoy!

Here's a sample if you're still not convinced, here is the previously described opening paragraph:

Shalom, Diary: I think Rabbi Pearlstein is really pissed at me. Today in Jewish class he was going through the Halakha, which I thought was the Jewish word for Hannah Montana but turns out to be like a whole bunch of boring laws about days of the week and pork and shit, and I was like, “Rabbi P., is there any way you could break this down into a bunch of tweets? I’ll read it on my phone on the way to rehearsal.” He got so mad those curls on the sides of his head started shaking. (I don’t know why he won’t let my stylist snip them off. They’re not a good look for him, K.?) On the plus side, he taught me this awesome Jewish trivia fact: You don’t have to call Jewish people “Jewish people.” It turns out they don’t mind being called plain old “Jews.” LOL.

Nazi Gnomes = Art?

This isn't specifically NJ related but anything Nazi related is of great importance to North Jersey Judaism.

via Time Magazine

What could possibly make someone want to create gnomes giving the Nazi salute? Let the artist speak for himself:

The gnome's creator, German artist Ottmar Hörl, says he never intended to offend anyone, and can't understand what all the fuss is about. He points out that 700 of his saluting gnomes went on show in Ghent, Belgium, at the end of last year to no complaints. "They were part of an exhibition against the far right," he says. "Nobody had a problem with them." Each of the gnomes has the word poisoned inscribed at its base. "People everywhere in the world can be ideologically poisoned, just as Germans were by the Nazis," says Hörl. The artist defends his work as a form of satire — he just wanted to poke fun at the Nazis by depicting them as gnomes. "I would probably have been killed by the Nazis if I'd dared to depict the Aryan 'super race' as gnomes in 1942," he says.

Hörl, 59, says he's fascinated by the symbol of the garden gnome, which has its origins in Germany — many believe the first ceramic garden gnomes were made in the central German town of Gräfenroda in the mid-19th century — and regularly features it in his work. "The garden gnome is an ironic figure," he says. "We don't take it seriously, but it can hold a serious message."

Germany takes this stuff pretty seriously; they are pretty stringent on their Nazi stuff. Prosecutors are currently looking into the case. Oh, what a world.

Read the full article, Nazi Gnomes in Germany.