It’s that time of year again — The Jewish Week’s “36 Under 36″ section is up and running. Kudos to fellow staff writer Tamar Snyder for putting this whole thing together.This year’s section is called “Visionaries for a New Era” and features a wide range of young Jewish entrepreneurs, social activists and religious leaders. Enjoy!

(Also posted on Jewlicious!)

My “36ers:”

Micah Bergdale, 28: Web entrepreneur turned Jewish community activist

Alison Laichter, 29, and Yael Shy, 28: Bringing spirituality to Brooklyn — hippies need not apply

Daniel Pincus, 31: Encouraging young Jews to care for the global community

Rachael Neumann, 29: Improving global health

Yoav Sivan, 34: Israeli LGBT rights activist and journalist

(Also posted on Jewlicious.com).

Interesting, though they probably should’ve included Bernie Madoff, considering he really continues to influence people’s financial and personal lives (albeit negatively) all over the world. And why does Elana Kagan come before Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

The 50 most influential Jews in the world

By STEVE LINDE
18/05/2010 16:04

The Jerusalem Post’s first annual list of those who are shaping the future.

If you’re like me, and grew up attending a central New Jersey Reform Hebrew school, you probably never heard more than two sentences about Shavuot during your 10 years of sounding out the Aleph-Bet, memorizing Torah portions and crafting various art projects.

A slab of cheese. Wikimedia Commons.

It was the forgotten holiday — the holiday that occurred after Hebrew school classes were already over and paled in comparison to festivals like Pesach, Rosh HaShanah and dare I say it: Chanukah. Even I, the quintessential high school geek and model Hebrew school student, could not tell you that Shavuot was a commemoration of the day God gave the Ten Commandments to the Jews on Mount Sinai, until I began my reporting position at The Jewish Week.

While I credit my Hebrew school for giving me my fundamental interest in Judaism, I hope that their curriculum has been updated since my years there. And though I personally don’t like cheesecake, I now understand why our traditions encourage us to eat dairy on this day — because God had not yet delivered the laws of kashrut, of properly slaughtering and consuming meat.

For all of you New Yorkers reading this, the 92nd Street Y in Tribeca is hosting an interesting event tomorrow geared toward young people, reminding us why we celebrate this holiday in quite the fun, creative evening.  From 6:30 to 9:30 p.m. on Wednesday, the Y is inviting young people to do a bit of Torah study and exploration, followed by the opportunity to partake in improvisational reenactments of the Shavuot stories and then concluding with a tremendous wine and cheesecake pairing. And the whole night only costs $15.

According to the event website, the menu will include:

Lemoncello paired with Caramel Cheesecake
Coffee Liqueur paired with Chocolate Cheesecake
Beer paired with Nutmeg infused Cheesecake
Matcha tea paired with Lime

…Too bad I don’t like cheesecake…Am I the only one???

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Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. Follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.

When Jason Paul recently graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree in communication, he says he attempted to pursue what he calls a more “convential” writing job — applying to a grand total of 180 publications throughout the country.

Jason Paul, LivingCraigslist

But as J-School grads like myself are all too often aware, journalism jobs are quite few and far between (and yes, I am still quite thankful to the journalism powers-that-be that I’m one of the lucky ones — for now).

So Jason apparently decided to screw it all and go out on his own adventure, which I’m guessing will probably bring him a hefty book contract somewhere in the near future and more publicity than he expected. Jason decided to live his life entirely off Craigslist, the Web site that allows people to post jobs, sell their old wares and find romance, among thousands of other uses.

On his blog,  LivingCraigslist.com — which is cutely designed to look exactly like Craigslist itself —  Jason posts several updates each week about his adventures traveling all over the country, finding jobs, housing, food, friends, dates and other necessities exclusive through Craigslist.

The rules he sets out for himself:

“>    I will start with $2,500 that I’ve saved during college
>    I will have a car, a phone, a computer and cameras to document the trip
>    I am not allowed to live out of my car
>    I am not allowed to live with someone I know for longer than a week at the beginning of each city
>    I am allowed one large bag containing clothes and a few staple foods
>    I am not allowed to initiate contact with someone unless it is through an online interaction”

Oh and by the way, we have confirmation that this guy is, in fact, Jewish, as documented in his first foray into the world of Southern Baptism.

“I never expected to sit in the front row of an all-black Baptist church, but I just couldn’t say no,” he writes. “I should say, I have never been to church—not unless you count touristy experiences or the one time I played my violin at someone’s wedding. I am Jewish and proud of my religion.”

I look forward to speaking to Jason further and intend to write a more detailed article about his project in an upcoming issue of The Jewish Week. Stay tuned!

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Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. Follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.

Herbert Lagin stands before his 9/11 memorial. Inset: Abstract painting suggests the Holocaust. Sharon Udasin

Hidden behind rows of shoddy warehouses, auto-repair junkyards and single-room-occupancy tenements, the Museum of the People of the World is largely invisible to the sporadic passersby in its gritty Bronx location, just east of the Grand Concourse and down the hill from the jagged bedrock of Tremont’s Echo Park.

The museum of what, you say? Where?

In a city of museums — from one on sex to one on biblical art — you won’t find this one in any museum index or listing, in print or online.

The quirky, intensely personal museum, which carries the New Age-y subtitle “A Sanctuary for All Who Enter” and only recently opened to the public, is a testament to one man’s creativity, vision and, perhaps, obsession. It houses hundreds of works, in a dizzying array of media, all made by the hands of 91-year-old Herbert Lagin — a tinkerer, inventor and self-taught “outsider” artist. In a huge storage space adjacent to the lamp-manufacturing facility Lagin has owned and operated for the past 60 years, the works memorialize the Holocaust, 9/11 and religious refugees.

A nondescript door marked “4269” leads inside the facility, which occupies the rear of the bright-orange Western Beef factory outlet. Once inside, past the pastel blue corridor, its paint peeling, a sun-filled and brightly lamp-lit section of the warehouse contains tri-fold screens filled with abstract paintings, chain links dangling from the ceiling and original glasswork scattered here and there. Admission is free, and any donations go to various causes around the world, most recently Haiti.

“He actually redesigned the space with all sorts of machinery and everything — it’s really amazing he did this on his own,” says Lagin’s daughter, Robin Langsam, who is one of five children and is a teacher in Armonk. “He created the vision of it and really followed through.”

A widower, Lagin lives in Great Neck, L.I., but drives in to Tremont several days a week to work in his factory-turned-museum. He says he conceptualized this museum just in the past few years, has been creating artwork since the third grade, when he’d reproduce pictures from classroom textbooks. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Lagin graduated from Long Island University while working in a lamp factory and was poised to head to medical school when the Great Depression struck. Foregoing medical school in an effort to support his parents, Lagin continued working at the lamp-manufacturing facility and eventually opened his own factory in the 1950s and purchased other Tremont properties. In addition to his artwork, Lagin has been something of an inventor, acquiring patents for a lamp-mounting tool, a recovery pillow for open-heart surgery patients and forge-proof traveler’s checks, among other items, although never actually marketing these products.

“He’s always been ingenious and creative, even doing something as simple as taking out his little pocketknife and making handles on boxes,” Langsam says. She then maps her father’s artistic trajectory from mixed media to watercolors to copper to etched glass and today, to markers, Cray-Pas and collages.

“You find people who late in their life, when they finish what they’ve had to do for a living, really take on this amazing outburst of original and quite extraordinary artistic expression,” says Selig Sacks, a trustee of the American Folk Art Museum who in 2009 was named one of the top 250 collectors in Art & Antiques Magazine. Sacks examined 40 photos of Lagin’s work, at the request of The Jewish Week.

Near the entrance to the museum, a panel of photographs features twilight snapshots from Lagin’s Great Neck, L.I., backyard of what appears to be the Star of Bethlehem, the star that revealed the birth of Jesus to the magi in Christian tradition. Nearby is a wall spread of framed black-and-white photographs from the U.S. government’s Holocaust archives, to which Lagin has added color and replaced some of the victims’ heads with those of figures like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Islamic terrorists. “That’s [Ahmadinejad] — him as a Jew,” said Lagin, who may well be the only Jewish regular in the largely Hispanic and African-American Tremont neighborhood. “Everybody’s a Jew based on history.”

Around the space hang black chain links symbolic of wartime bondage, and behind the photographs mixed colors of paint trickle down the wall like blood. In a corner hangs a wooden cutout of a man, dangling from the ceiling on a hangman’s noose.  Continue reading…

**Also re-posted on Jewlicious.com

Snapshot from The Jewish Week’s homepage:

It’s now over 7.5 years since my unabashedly glorious days  as a marching band geek, but I have to share the most impressive shot from the Israeli army’s marching performance at this year’s  official Yom Ha’atzmaut military ceremony at Har Herzl:

How the hell did they do that? Somehow I can’t imagine the East Brunswick High School marching band successfully forming the head of Theodore Herzl. Then again, these guys aren’t trying to play instruments at the same time as they’re marching. But still, wow. And HAPPY 62nd BIRTHDAY, ISRAEL! Wish I could be there to celebrate with you.

Just one complaint was enough for Britain’s Advertising Standard Agency to decide that the kotel should no longer be part of Israel tourism advertisements circulated in the United Kingdom.

The contentious ad shows a photograph of the Western Wall with the Dome of the Rock in background, alongside a photo of Tel Aviv-Yafo, as part of a “Day 3″ in Israel suggested itinerary from ThinkIsrael.com (Israel’s Ministry of Tourism).

“The status of the occupied territory of the West Bank was the subject of much international dispute, and because we considered that the ad implied that the part of east Jerusalem featured in the image was part of the State of Israel, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead,” the ruling reads, as reported in The Jerusalem Post, London’s The Jewish Chronicle and other news sources.

Jerusalem’s mayor, Nir Barkat, is irate, calling the Western Wall “the heart and soul of the Jewish people and the State of Israel” determining that the ASA has made a “shameful accusation showing a complete ignorance of history,” according to a Reuters report. The Israeli Tourism Ministry, he continues, will continue to run ads showing images of the Kotel.

I couldn’t agree more with Barkat (not that my humble opinion has any significance), and it is absolutely absurd to suggest that the Kotel is not part of Israeli soil. The last time I checked, it was the Israeli government controlling entrance and exit to the holy grounds and an Israeli flag waving proudly over the heads of visitors in prayer here. The Western Wall is perhaps the holiest site of the Jewish people — especially while Judaism’s truly holiest site, the Temple Mount, continues to be under the stringent management of the Muslim Waqf.

Meanwhile, my Jewish friends in England inform me that in today’s Jewish Telegraph letters page, an Israeli woman notes that the day following the UK’s decision to ban the kotel ad, the enormous cloud generated from the Icelandic volcanic eruption grounded all non-emergency flights into and out of Britain. Perhaps the hand of God, the writer suggests? An eleventh plague?

I didn’t believe it at first, but it seems that Israel really has banned the iPad, due to WiFi incompatibility (security?) issues, and has ordered all customs officials to confiscate the devices brought into Ben Gurion International Aiport .

(Original photo taken from Apple.com homepage).

This weekend, while visiting a friend in D.C., I ventured for the first time to the Newseum, a 250,000-square-foot colossus that offers a window into hundreds of years of news headlines, news history and of course, the people behind the news. For a journalist, visiting this place is like unleashing a wide-eyed child in Disney World. Among other exhibits was a floor-to-ceiling wall of front pages following 9/11, a transplanted memorial version of Tim Russert’s office and the News Corporation News History Gallery — which features front pages from major events that occurred anywhere from 1455 to the present day.

Front page of The Westerly Sun, 1948. I apologize for the poor quality of the image. The room was dark, the newspaper was behind glass, using flash was prohibited and I only had my point and shoot camera.

As far as Jewish things go — because this is a Jewish blog of course — I was particularly impressed by one choice made my museum curators. In that News Corp New History exhibit, the front page chosen for 1948 was thankfully a commemoration of Israel’s statehood. However, the page chosen wasn’t from The New York Times, or The Washington Post or any other major world news outlet. Rather, it was from The Westerly Sun, a regional daily based in the southern tip of Rhode Island.

Being the Zionist I am, I was of course instantly filled with pride the moment I saw that headline, “New Jewish State Proclaimed in Tel Aviv.” But after giving the yellowing newsprint a second glance, what was even more meaningful to me was the choice of that specific Rhode Island paper. Selecting a small paper from a town in the smallest state of America shows just how omnipresent Israel’s independence was in 1948. At that moment, people everywhere, from major cities to rural towns, were recognizing the sovereignty of that tiny democratic Middle Eastern Nation — that Jewish nation. Jews throughout the Diaspora, from those in Tel Aviv to those in Rhode Island, had reason to celebrate.

And hey, Rhode Island is home to Touro Synagogue, the oldest American synagogue still standing (erected 1763), so the choice might be that much more significant.

(I know I live in New York, but today I need to comment on an issue surfacing across the Atlantic Ocean — in the United Kingdom.)

If a new bill passes next month in the United Kingdom, British same-sex couples will soon be crushing glasses and signing ketubahs with the official blessings of their rabbis and families.

A group of Liberal Jewish rabbis and Anglican ministers have come together in favor of an amendment to the country’s 2010 Equality Bill, which would allow same-sex civil partnerships to take place in British synagogues and other religious institutions, writes Jessica Elgot, a reporter at The Jewish Chronicle in London. The Equality Bill, she continues, will be up for debate in the House of Lords next month, and currently has the support of Liberal Jews, Unitarians and Quakers. You can read through Parliament’s discussion of the bill here, by scrolling down to the paragraph just above sub-head “25 Jan 2010 : Column 1199.”

“[The amendment's] intention is to remove the prohibition against civil partnerships taking place in religious buildings,” the document reads. “I shall repeat that: it is to remove the prohibition against civil partnerships taking place in religious organisations. It is a straightforward amendment. It does not seek to force religious institutions to host civil partnerships and I would not intend it to. It simply has to be a matter for them to decide whether or not they wish to do so.”

As in most of the United States, gay marriages are still not recognized by law in the United Kingdom. But in Britain, where church is not separate from state, the government can take this prohibition one step further. Civil unions may be permitted throughout the country, but at the moment, these same-sex partnerships cannot occur within the boundaries of a house of worship.  That’s right, it’s currently illegal for a rabbi to unite two men or two women under a chuppah in England.

And now, at the behest of some forward-thinking Quakers, the House of Lords is aiming to repeal this ban.

While same-sex marriages are only legal in a few select states here in America, all religious institutions have the power to conduct same-sex civil unions if they so choose, and many have been doing so for quite some time. Synagogues all over the US perform same-sex marriages, like Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, where marriages went from being not recognized by law, to being recognized, to now unfortunately not being recognized by law once again. In New York, Congregation Beth Simchat Torah performs many marriage ceremonies, even though gay marriage has never ever yet been legal in New York State. Even in Israel, where laws are strongly influenced by an Orthodox rabbinate, is doing a very good job welcoming theLGBT community into its fold.

Although the laws should certainly be changed to make same-sex marriage legal both here and in the United Kingdom, a religious institution should always be a place of refuge for every congregant it serves — no matterwhat the law says.  I hope that when the House of Lords takes this bill to the floor next month, the British government does decide to allow for marriages to occur within the synagogues, whether or not they are officially recognized by the country.

And in yet another progressive move for Britain, Schools Secretary Ed Balls recently decided that all secondary schools, including parochial schools, will be forced to teach “full, broad, balanced curriculum on sex and relationship education” — which includes topics like sexually-transmitted diseases, contraception, pregnancy, abortion and homosexuality, The Telegraph reported today. This means that religious schools — even Orthodox Jewish schools — will need to address topics like civil unions and same-sex parenting without any homophobia whatsoever.

I wonder how Britain’s haredi communities are going to respond to this…

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Sharon Udasin is a staff writer at The Jewish Week. Follow her on Twitter or e-mail her at sharon@sharonudasin.com.

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I also posted a lengthy comment in response to Jessica Elgot’s article here, on The Jewish Chronicle’s Web site.