Happy Armed Jews Week

Hannukah/Chanukah/Hanukah starts this week, so here's some fun links.

Dave Kopel wrote this a few years back:

Tonight is the fourth night of Armed Jews Week, or as it is more popularly known, Hanukkah. Hanukkah is an eight-day celebration of the Jewish revolution against Syria in the second century B.C. The Syrian government (a remnant of Alexander the Great’s empire) attempted to wipe out the Jewish religion by forcing the Jews to conform to Greek culture. Some of them refused, and a tiny militia, led by Judah the Maccabee (“the hammer”) began a guerilla war.

The Jewish militia grew in force, and repeatedly destroyed much larger Syrian armies which were sent to smash the revolution. Syria’s King Antiochus decided that the Jewish people were so much trouble that he would just get rid of them entirely—slaughtering as many as necessary, and selling all the rest into slavery. But his wicked plans failed, and after years of war, the Jews won their independence.

During the years of Syrian tyranny, Syrian officers enjoyed the droit du seigneur—the authority to deflower virgin Jewish brides on their wedding nights, before they could join their husbands. So some stories which Jewish families retell at Hanukkah, such as the Book of Judith, extol brave Jewish women who went to the tent of enemy officers who were expecting sex—but who instead met their deaths as the hands of lone Jewish women.

Read more about Jewish armed resistance to tyranny here (second post down).



Along those lines, make your own Israeli Defense Force Dreidels:


Via.





For a lighter tone, there's Lemony Snicket's illustrated The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming: A Christmas Story. It's laugh out loud funny. (Desktop wallpaper made using illustrations found here.)



There's Adam Sandler's classic Chanukah Song:






From South Park, It's Hard To Be Jew On Christmas (don't play the second song in the video at work):





Here's three recipes for Sweet Potato Latkes.



Hanukah arts and crafts projects including a Menorah made using dried pasta and lentils.



And here's some Hanukah oddities:


Menorah Papercraft



Hannukah, Extended
Originally uploaded by oybay

Chanukah, Hanukah
Originally uploaded by oybay

LED Menorah



Matchstick Menorah



Cactus Menorah



Menorah Hat



Moose Menorah



Menorah Man



Menorah Man Costume



Sports Menorah

Map: The Sovity Union as an octopus, threatening the world

Click through for a desktop wallpaper sized version. Via.

Video: Are the Japanese descended from a lost tribe of Israel?

Zionfestival
Uploaded by oniazuma

More information here. My understanding is that Jews use guilt, while the Japanese use shame. Via.

Edvard Munch was known as the “handsomest man in Norway,”

Yesterday , I linked to some articles about Picasso and Klimt. Whatshername reminded me of an article I'd read about Munch:

Munch’s behavior, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly erratic, particularly with respect to women and drink. His relationship to women — or rather Woman with a capital W, as he put it in his journal — was complicated, to say the least. Known as the “handsomest man in Norway,” and well-mannered to boot, he attracted women as catnip does cats, but preferred to keep them at arm’s length. A couple of early affairs had gone wrong, and the antics of his friends had given him a warped sense of women. And he never wanted children, as he feared they would become insane. The classic Madonna/whore view of women is apparent in his paintings of what he called “vampire women” with “nutcracker muscles in their thighs.”

In a quarrel with his Norwegian mistress, Tulla Larsen, who stalked him all over Europe, he ended up shooting himself in a finger, which for the rest of his life remained sheathed in black leather. This slight injury he blew up to mythical proportions, painting himself stark naked on an operating table lying in a huge pool of blood. The motif was given an extra twist when he rendered himself as a revolutionary Marat with Miss Larsen as Charlotte Corday. Elsewhere he depicted his British mistress, the violinist Eva Mudocci, as Salome, with his own bedraggled features supplying John the Baptist’s severed head. It goes without saying that he also portrayed himself as a crucified Christ.

There were other regrettable incidents scattered throughout his life: He threatened a Dutchman with a pistol in a spa hotel in Kosen; through the window of his studio in Norway, he fired a shotgun after a fellow artist whose portrait he was painting. And, as Prideaux notes, his train journeys are the stuff of legend. On one occasion, he couldn’t find his compartment and believed the painting he had brought with him had been stolen. He presented himself to the conductor as a member of the British aristocracy and astonished the man by ordering him to find the painting immediately or “it might bring about war.” Fortunately, the conductor managed to locate Munch’s compartment, with the painting in it, for him. On another trip he fancied he was being watched by detectives who had been hired to spy on him and beset by people speaking Esperanto to trick him. His journal records the following meeting on a train: “A strange man with a birds head, spindly birds legs and a cloak flew into the carriage. ‘What is your metier?’ ‘A psychiatrist from Vienna.’”

Read more, it's fascinating.

Understatement: Klimt and Picasso didn't treat women very nicely

Klimt was a painter of shimmering landscapes and three of them are among the eight paintings in the Neue Galerie show. But sex is at the core of his work: women were his preoccupation.

The antechamber to the artist's studio is recreated in the exhibition. Along its far wall, next to the studio doors, is “Hope II”, pregnant with breasts exposed. Klimt never had his own home: he lived with his mother and two sisters. Nevertheless, he was a womaniser with uncalculated conquests and seven known children. No wonder Vienna buzzed with gossip about what, besides painting, went on in the studio beyond. Yet among all the photographs of the rather pudding-faced artist in the exhibition, not one captures what made him such a lady-killer.

More about Klimt.

Rome was also where Picasso met and pursued Olga Khokhlova, one of Diaghilev's Russian dancers, whom he would marry in 1918. Their respectable, middle-class marriage and its gradual disintegration, against a background of Olga's declining health and increasing anxiety at her husband's infidelity, dominate Mr Richardson's story. The relationship inspired some of Picasso's most disturbing portraits, such as “Large Nude in a Red Armchair” (1929) and “Seated Bather” (1930), in which his wife's by now scrawny body undergoes either distortion or radical dismemberment and reconstruction. If there is one criticism to be made of Mr Richardson's analysis of these paintings, it is that he plays down the influence of surrealism on Picasso.

No trace of anger or misogyny can be found in Picasso's portraits of his curvaceous, nubile lover, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who entered his life aged 17 in 1927 and “saved him from the psychic stress of his marriage and the bourgeois restraints it imposed.”

More about Picasso.

Via.

An excellent explanation for why Romanians don't try to make money off of Dracula

It wasn't hard to see their point. To Romanians Vlad was a national figure, not a vampire. Imagine foreigners coming to visit the Lincoln Memorial by the thousands -- wearing stovepipe hats, false beards . . . and plastic fangs. They love Lincoln. They love how he can turn himself into a bat. How he freed the slaves and rises at night to suck the blood of the living. Imagine you know you could make major bucks off these freaks if you chiseled a pair of wicked-looking teeth on Lincoln's statue.

That's from Paul Bibeau's Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man's Quest to Live in the World of the Undead.

Spotted at Volokh.

Why are pirates depicted with a parrot on their shoulder?

A bunch of interesting stuff about pirates. Via Geekpress.

Nice summary of the history of the Knights Templar (and similar orders)

Link.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Publisher's Weekly says:

In 1976, graduate student Ulrich asserted in an obscure scholarly article that well-behaved women seldom make history. But Ulrich, now at Harvard, made history, winning the Pulitzer and the Bancroft Prizes for A Midwife's Tale—and her slogan did, too: it began popping up on T-shirts, greeting cards and buttons. Why the appeal, Ulrich wondered? And what makes a woman qualify as well-behaved or rebellious? Several chapters of this accessible and beautifully written study are brilliant. In one, Ulrich follows the lead of Virginia Woolf (who invented an ill-fated fictional sister of Shakespeare) by digging into what we know—and don't know—about the women in the Bard's family. In another, she offers a piercing analysis of four 19th-century Harriets—ex-slaves Tubman, Jacobs and Powell, and novelist Stowe—to uncover the interplay of race and gender in questions of liberation. And in a third, richly illustrated chapter, she utilizes a medieval book of days as a window into women's labor through the ages. If other chapters, such as a wide-ranging exploration of the Amazon myth and a rumination on second-wave feminism, don't cohere as tightly or showcase Ulrich's strengths as an extraordinary interpreter of ordinary records, this can be forgiven in a work that is so often sharp and insightful.

Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History

Free graphic novel biography of Ronald Reagan

Very long free biography at Slate. Via Your Daily Awesome.

Photo: U.S. Soldiers through history

Link.

Best Threadless T-Shirt Designs Posted Today

And without a screengrab:

The secret history of the Nazi mascot

Alex Kurzem came to Australia in 1949 carrying just a small brown briefcase, but weighed down by some harrowing psychological and emotional baggage.

[snip]

In 1997, after raising a family in Melbourne with his Australian bride, he finally revealed himself. He told how, at the age of five, he had been adopted by the SS and became a Nazi mascot.

[snip]

In newsreels, he was paraded as 'the Reich's youngest Nazi' and he witnessed some unspeakable atrocities.

But his SS masters never discovered the most essential detail about his life: their little Nazi mascot was Jewish.

Read on.

Video: History of Religion, History of War

Spare a total of 180 seconds to educate yourself...

Obituary of the Day: Yeltsin was like "a retarded nephew...

"Boris Yeltsin was always good for a laugh, which is probably why on the occasion of his death people outside of Russia are not calling him words like scum and monster, but instead recalling him fondly, with a smile, as one would a retarded nephew who could always be counted on to pull his pants down at Thanksgiving dinner."

Read the rest, this first paragraph is mild.

*Buy KGB collectibles at eBay.

"[Herbert] Matthews was the first American reporter to interview Fidel Castro..,

...and the last to recognize the man as a ruthless and slightly mad totalitarian murderer."

Read the rest of "Fidel's Favorite Propagandist"