Taking a mid-afternoon break from running his busy Williamsburg restaurant, David Lowey hustled over to a new Bushwick gym and hopped on an elliptical machine, pedaling vigorously in his full Satmar regalia.

Tzitzit dangling from his black pants and payes swinging over his ears, the 290-pound 26-year-old breathed heavily, as he scrolled through the day’s Daf Yomi Talmud page online, from a touch-screen computer panel in front of him.

When he began working out three months ago, Lowey was the lone Satmar member of Green Fitness Studio, an eco-friendly gym that opened in December and serves a primarily hipster clientele.

But with Lowey, who has already lost 60 pounds, leading the way, more than 100 members of his community now work out at Green Fitness, some in their three-piece formal wear, others sampling the gym’s complimentary sweats.

“I pushed them a lot because I feel there’s a need in the chasidic community for [exercise] — the obesity problem is overwhelming,” Lowey said.

Green Fitness Studio is not the only Williamsburg-area gym where chasidic Jews now exercise alongside hipsters. Soma in Williamsburg also has a chasidic clientele. And fitness-minded Satmars and hipsters also interact over a shared interest in cycling, at Baruch Herzfeld’s Treif Bike Gesheft bike shop in Williamsburg.

With hipsters and chasidim living within blocks of each other, “there’s a much greater intermingling of cultures and interests than we’ve been trained to expect,” Herzfeld said. “There are chasidim who do triathlons. There are many chasidim who have outside interests that would surprise us.”

While Green Fitness Studio’s owners Allan Lewis and Barry Borgen are both Jewish, outreach to the chasidic community was not part of the initial business plan. Instead, the focus for the new venture, which joins just a few other trendy new locales a couple blocks from the Morgan Avenue L-train

Allan Lewis, Lowey's personal trainer and co-owner of Green Fitness.

stop, was on eco-friendliness.

Aside from its regular LifeFitness treadmills — which are actually refurbished secondhand units — Lewis said that Green Fitness’ other equipment is entirely self-powered, and the spinning studio features flooring made of bamboo, which grows much faster than most wood and is considered a more renewable resource.

While chasidic Jews were initially below the owners’ radar, when Lowey rented the gym’s outdoor atrium to host a benefit and his fascinated party guests ventured into the empty gym, shedding their fedoras and testing out the bodybuilding equipment for themselves, Lewis and Borgen had an idea — why not invite these guys to join the gym?

There were a few stumbling blocks, however.

“Men and women don’t like to work out together,” Lewis told The Jewish Week last Thursday, sporting a tank top over his multitude of tattoos.  Continue reading…

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A female robot with the acronym I.S.R.A.E.L. that marauds a middle-class suburban neighborhood killing children — over-the-top satire or below-the-belt anti-Semitism?

That question was on the minds of Jewish activists and commentators this week after Comedy Central launched its online video game, “I.S.R.A.E.L. Attack!,” to accompany the new movie spin-off of its popularly offensive cartoon reality series, “Drawn Together.”

In the original version of the game, a demonic network executive shouts to a curly-haired producer with a loudspeaker for a face, “You lied to me, Jew producer!” The exec is angry that the characters are still alive despite the show being canceled.

In response, the executive decides to unleash a robot he calls “I.S.R.A.E.L.” (“The Intelligent, Smart, Robot, Animation, Eraser, Lady”) to do the dirty work, deeming that “she will erase them all, forever!” From there, the player can use the keyboard and mouse to kill characters like little girls (700 points), older men (400 points) and defecating cows (500 points).   Continue reading…

What’s a Girl Scout troop that doesn’t sell Girl Scout cookies — even Thin Mints with the OU seal of kosher approval?

A frum troop run by Chabad.

Girl Scout Troop 3131, on the Upper West Side, is currently the only all-Jewish girls troop currently serving Manhattan and the first-ever Chabad-sponsored Girl Scout troop, as far as its leaders are aware.

And while the young girls in the troop can’t sell the iconic cookies (they don’t have Chalav Yisrael certification observed by Chabad leaders), they’ll be doing kayaking and camping just like other Girl Scouts — and earning merit badges.

The troop officially formed in September, under the joint leadership of Sarah Alevsky, youth director at Chabad of the Upper West Side, and Keren Blum, Chabad emissary to Columbia University. In addition to Alevsky and Blum’s daughters, nearly 25 girls have joined the troop, and they hail from a mix of public and Jewish day schools.

“We’re doing it all through a Jewish lens, but we’re getting the badges,” Alevsky said.

For Tzipora Cohen, whose 9-year-old daughter Orli is a troop member, joining the Girl Scouts wasn’t an obvious choice.

“The truth is at first, I wasn’t sure about it,” she said. “My past connection to Girl Scouts was just the clichéd representation of it in cookies. But we’ve had really good experiences with all programs of Chabad of the Upper West Side. I was intrigued that they were taking on this mainstream USA idea.”  Continue reading…