Dude, Where’s My Chutzpah?

Sporting a blue t-shirt emblazoned with a Star of David, Jessie Kahnweiler walks across a bridge with a guy who's also dressed as a Super Jew. They've been flitting about LA bestowing fortune on average citizens—culminating in a goofy scene in which their light sabers magically spark some guy's cigarette.

Welcome to Dude, Where's My Chutzpah, Kahnweiler's comedic web series about her quest to discover Judaism. The premise is simple: Jessie's bubbie died and left her money, under one condition: that she must "live Jewish" for one year. But Jessie doesn't know what this means, and she flounders, trying everything from buying hummus to hawking kosher pickles to waxing her mustache.

It's not until Super Jew teaches Jessie about tikkun olam that Judaism starts making sense to her. But when Jessie turns to share her enthusiasm and finds him missing, she starts to wonder if Super Jew was never there in the first place. Perhaps she had her own connection to the faith all along.

Is Jessie going to find an authentic Jewish identity on the way to scoring her inheritance? We'll probably have to wait till the end of the season to find out.

- Jenny Levison

First Jewess in Space

Stereotypes of Jewish women abound—overbearing Jewish mothers, JAPs, wizened bubbes from the old country—but nothing pokes holes in these stereotypes like Judith Resnik: engineer, astronaut, and first Jewish woman in space.

Resnik, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, was working on her PhD in engineering when she was recruited by Star Trek star Nichelle Nichols to enter into NASA's space program. Six years later she became the first Jewish woman in space (and only the second Jew in space) on the maiden voyage of the Discovery in 1984. Resnik had the puff of dark curly locks most associated with Jewish women, and in iconic photos from that mission, her hair floats weightlessly around her head like a liberated Semitic halo.
But Resnik's story has a tragic ending. She was one of the astronauts aboard the doomed Challenger, which exploded shortly after launch, killing all aboard, on January 28th, 1986. Transcripts of the final minutes before the Challenger exploded have recently been released, so now you can read Resnik's last words, before—in the words of John Gillespie Magee that Reagan immortalized on that sad day—she "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

- Tamar Fox

How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire

Until finding his grandmother Maroussia Zorokovich's diaries, Daniel Edelstyn didn't know much about his family history. But as soon as he delved into the handwritten pages, he grew intrigued by Maroussia's descriptions of the family's sugar factory and set out on a journey to the remote Ukrainian village in which she was born.

What he finds is a shuttered factory and, to his surprise, a distillery his family once operated. After toasts with the locals, Edelstyn decides to import their vodka to his native U.K.—and to make a film based on his experience, aptly titled How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire.

Stop-motion animation and silent reenactments dramatize selections from Maroussia's diary and draw parallels between her journey and Edelstyn's. Early in the film, Edelstyn markets the vodka by staging a struggle between his grandfather and a Bolshevik at a spirits conference. "You can't just use the iconography of Soviet Russia to sell vodka," a consultant advises him afterward. By the film's end, Edelstyn has refined his approach—and names his vodka Zorokovich, after his grandmother.

- Leah Falk

To stay afloat, shuls merging across denominational divide

The Jews of Corpus Christi knew a decade ago they had to act fast to save their two synagogues.

With at most 1,000 Jews left in the Texas town and only 60 families making up its membership, the 60-year-old Conservative synagogue was in shaky financial shape. So in 2005, B’nai Israel Synagogue merged with Temple Beth El, a Reform shul, to form Congregation Beth Israel, combining customs and sharing sacred spaces to preserve Jewish life in an area that saw its heyday around World War II.

The combined synagogue, and a small but growing number of others like it, makes a concerted effort to be inclusive despite denominational differences in liturgy and theology. Friday night services are tailored to Reform-minded members, while Saturday morning is conducted in the more traditional Conservative style, according to Kenneth Roseman, Beth Israel’s Reform-ordained rabbi.

Families marking a bar or bat mitzvah can choose which day and denomination they want for their celebration. Members even used furnishings from the old Conservative synagogue in a small chapel and put up some of the old building’s stained glass in the new congregation’s social hall.
“It’s not perfect,” said Roseman, “but it works.”

Across the country, scores of synagogues have overcome denominational differences to merge formally, share space or otherwise collaborate, often due to financial hardships wrought by shrinking Jewish populations. Shifting demographics and a challenging economic environment have led synagogues to consider remedies that previously were unthinkable, said Rabbi David Fine, the rabbinic director of the Union for Reform Judaism’s small congregations network.

“Many congregations worked hard for years to distinguish themselves,” Fine said. “It wasn’t so much ‘who are we’ but ‘who are we not?’– looking at the other place across town. Now it’s more ‘what do we have in common?’ ”
That kind of thinking was evident in the merger of the Reform Temple Beth El with Congregation Eilat, a Conservative synagogue in Southern California that was struggling with a significantly reduced membership. In 2010, the congregations merged formally with about 80 percent of Eilat’s 120 families joining the 650-family Beth El. Eilat members were granted board positions, one of Beth El’s kitchens was brought up to Conservative kosher standards and differences on issues such as music on Shabbat and patrilineal descent were followed in each denomination’s services.

Today, the congregation’s three rabbis — two Reform and one Conservative — run educational programming for the congregation at large and, on the High Holidays, deliver sermons to both the Reform and Conservative services.

“I think the success of it is measured by the fact that the lines are totally blurred now,” Welland said. “We’re one congregation; we’re one community.”