Entries from September 2007 ↓

Article Title: The Ever-Expanding Blogosphere
Written by Ginger Haycox

It’s funny how I came upon this realization – it was through my treadmill. Okay, not literally through my treadmill, but because I was ready for my daily tread on it and had pretty much exhausted everything I wanted to listen to on my iPod. So I snapped on the TV for something to watch while spending an hour walking nowhere. News being what it is today, I decided I couldn’t walk fast enough to get away from anything they were airing and quickly switched to the next channel. As it happened, the show was Daily Café on Retirement Living TV. I didn’t even know this channel existed, I’m ashamed to say.

They were talking about keeping elderly parents or grandparents vital and active once they moved into retirement.
This day they had a wonderful grandmother cooking up something in what was obviously her own kitchen, so I just had to watch more. As it turned out, it was a podcast done by Bubbe’s grandson Avrom and featured her at home in her kitchen cooking kosher. Feed Me, Bubbe. What fun! This was followed by various celebrities who related their stories of getting their older family members active on the computer.

For most of the people past 65, just the thought of buying a new computer gives them hives. But to actually start something like a blog or to join a message board or chat room was, to quote them, way too hard to do. “Something for young people, but not them.” They had learned how to bank online and shop online – why not enter the world of blogging? Why were they intimidated by this aspect of computer use? Have we perpetuated those feelings?

So I took it upon myself to seek out some of the more adventuresome post-65-year-olds who had leaped into the fray so to speak, and was amazed at just how many there are. And how damn good they are too! No longer is blogging a world completely dominated by gossip mongers or people with axes to grind. We are now joined by people of experience. People who aren’t drawing from books to talk about what happened 50 years ago, but instead were actually there when it happened and lived it. Blogs like Welcome to Katalusis by Virginia Bergman, a wonderful site filled with warmth and insight.

To further my enjoyment of these focused blogs, they hadn’t yet become splogs. By that I mean so loaded down with ads and click-me banners that you can no longer find the blog itself right away. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not that making pin money from blogs is a bad idea. But when the ads take up more of the blog space than the writing does, it’s no longer a blog; it’s mainstream media with some token commentary. I actually visited one site where the entire day’s post was a plea for readers to click on the ads there!

Then too, there are the social sites such as MySpace and Twitter which are further eroding the sense of community that blogs originally fostered. These “social media sites” look more like newspaper inserts for Wal-Mart, Sears or Kohl’s. Further, as bloggers work toward that professional blog status, we lose that whole essence of blogging that attracted us “amateurs and personal journalists” in the first place. Seeing these sites, is it any wonder the storytelling people and people with histories among us shy away from blogging?

I so welcome the day when we can expand back to that. I wish I still had a grandmother to get hooked. I know she would have embraced the whole concept and been the best blogger this side of 70.

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Article Title: Feed Me Bubbe!

I don’t know about you but I LOVE watching cooking shows, especially homemade ones – the type you see on recipe blogs or on YouTube. To see people making real life recipes full of ‘normal’ ingredients just spurs me on to get in the kitchen myself and start cooking!

While trawling for new recipes this morning I came across a great video series called ‘Feed Me Bubbe‘. It’s a home ‘vlog’ of a Jewish grandmother making traditional Jewish food (YUM!) in her kitchen and showing us all how it’s done. Take a look!

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Article Title: Featured Site: Feed Me Bubbe
By: Rebecca Halpin

In late May 2006, the then twenty-two year old Avrom Honig started Chalutz Productions. The company aims to be involved with the production of new media, hoping to fund various projects that meet the board’s quality standards.

So far, Honig and Chalutz have commissioned Honig’s adorable grandmother – Bayla Scher, who prefers to go simply by Bubbe (the Yiddish word for Grandmother) – to host her own Jewish cooking show, Feed Me Bubbe.

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As any good Jew knows, the best home cooking comes from your grandmother, and since most of them never write down their recipes, the only way to obtain these little treasures is to get your Bubbe to show you how to make the meals herself. Feed Me Bubbe does just that, with a “wholesome, family-oriented” show designed to entertain while teaching the joys of Jewish cooking.

Read more at Feed Me Bubbe’s Tilzy.TV page.

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Title of Article: The Essence of Tradition

Earlier today, I came across Feed Me Bubbe, a collection of podcasts on Jewish cooking. I enjoyed watching their stuff, and I’m absolutely certain that all concerned with the production mean to faithfully represent their culinary tradition. Further, when Bubbe enthuses about the flavor of her preparation, I know that she and her brood have taken great enjoyment from her cooking. I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit when I hear Bubbe talk about the joy of passing along her traditions, of seeing her way of life enjoyed, learned and appreciated by young people and their even younger children.

So far so good. But then I run into this – the food I saw Bubbe prepare did not seem traditional to me. Am I right? Does this make her wrong? What do these questions even mean?

What is the essential meaning of traditional cooking?

If one of your elders does things a certain way, if your family has done it thus for many years – how can this not be tradition? To you of course it is. And for Bubbe’s family, I am certain the question of authenticity has not been an issue.

But still, it might be the case that some such family tradition is demonstrably not representative of the broader cultural heritage from which it nominally springs. With a bit of culinary archeology, it might be possible to definitively pin down where things diverged and so on.

Is the distinction between a family tradition and the essential underlying tradition that forms the shared basis for myriad family variations important? To me it is. Does this mean that Bubbe should be enjoined from passing her traditions along? Certainly not – the more the merrier. But still – I’m troubled.

I admit, I’m grasping for the right formulation here. How about this – there’s fundamentally two kinds of information available on food traditions – Anecdotal info such as Bubbe’s (or anyone else’s recipe); and Researched info (for lack of a better term) which codifies that which one must know to properly understand the entire spectrum of individual variations. Hmm – getting pretty thick.

How ’bout an example – Feed a food-savvy man a Peking Duck and he’s had a good meal. Take that same man on a walk through China Town (for a month or so) where he can see, smell and taste 100 different Peking Ducks side by side – and you might end up with an expert on Peking Duck. The important part of the difference for this discussion is not expertise – it’s the capacity to understand the relative importance of the many individual pieces of information contained in a recipe.

And so, perhaps finally that’s what I think distinguishes tradition from practice – it is that essence of what people do – The part which is important.

In Big Night, I think Primo says the tympano has “all the most important things in the world inside”.

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Oy vey. Jackie Mason is back, and he doesn’t like the iPhone (http://www.apple.com/iphone/). After his smash Broadway performances and a command performance for the queen (http://tinyurl.com/e2bjv), Mason now rants on politics in his inimitable style on his own radio talk show (http://tinyurl.com/3735v5). And now, he even has a “vlog” – a video blog – in which he will give you his two cents on everything from politics to Hula Hoops – to iPhones.

And where can you partake of Mason’s collected wisdom on modern life, getting your own on-line “command performance?” At the Yideoz Jewish video site (http://www.yideoz.com), that’s where. Mason’s vlogs, as well as many of the videos posted on Yideoz, can also be found on other video sites, like the mother of them all, YouTube (http://youtube.com). And while you can seek out the Jewish videos on other video sites, why bother? Most of them – and many more Jewish-themed videos – end up at Yideoz, or at the smaller and newer Jewtube (http://jewtube.com).

Jackie Mason isn’t the only celebrity to grace the Web pages of Yideoz; there’s hassidic rapper Matisyahu, singing stars Mordechai Ben-David, Sarit Hadad, Avraham Freed, etc., and, of course, many of the “new breed” of Web celebrity – like Jimmy Justice, who goes around New York City recording abuses by traffic cops (http://tinyurl.com/2td6bp). In one scary video on Yideoz, JJ catches a racist traffic cop talking about how she does her duty, by targeting Jews for tickets.

There are, of course, plenty of issue-oriented videos about the major issues affecting Jewish and Israeli life, from Islamic terrorism to politics to Torah and Jewish philosophy lectures on both sites. But one usually goes to video sites for a little rest and relaxation, and both Yideoz and Jewtube provide plenty of such naches to visitors.

There are funny videos, like the Jewish way to open a garage door (http://tinyurl.com/yr4f25 ), Israeli TV clips (http://tinyurl.com/yrdzvs) and cooking with the Jewish world’s own Julia Child, in the form of Bubbe (http://tinyurl.com/23k6up). There are a number of videos, like “the rabbi” (http://tinyurl.com/2geows) that can be seen on both Yideoz and Jewtube, but Yideoz, which is about a year and a half old, as opposed to Jewtube’s six months, has a greater variety. Note that, as on other video sites, both Jewish-oriented ones stream their content in real time, and some of the videos can be slow.

And then there are the Jewish “self-help” videos at the 5Min “Life Videopedia” site (http://www.5min.com/), which has great instructional videos to instruct you on performing all of life’s important tasks, like how to make a salad, how to give a foot massage – and, on the Jewish page (http://www.5min.com/Tag/jewish), how to put up a mezuza and how to put on tefillin. Who knew TV could be so heimishe?

http://www.newzgeek.com

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