The Forward has published an impassioned plea for immigration reform and a call to action for American Jews.

Sadly, it went unheeded.

to Saaan Francisco, for the annual meeting of Jewish newspaper editors and publishers to lament the sorry state of newspaper publishing and figure out what we can do to get those younger readers into our papers. There’s a story about it here, but if you’re reading this, you’ve already found Seattle’s answer to the question. The story doesn’t mention us, since at this point in a lot of ways Jew-ish.com is still under the radar (oh yeah, if you’re reading this, tell your friends about us!), but what I will present to my colleagues and what I’m hoping some of my colleagues will help me in presenting to our other colleagues, is that the future is in the Web, and all media companies, even those with small readerships and a customer base that averages just the other side of 100 years old, need to jump onboard, and do it right.

Today was Seattle’s Gay Pride Parade. I attended, complete with my wedding ring and kippah. I believe it’s important to be present, as a married, religious member of the community.

That said, I struggle so much with many aspects of the gay community, including its ego-driven, body-image obsessed, over-sexualized, corporate-influenced set of values. Not really anything different from the general society, but I wish that the gay community could focus more on celebrating our diverse identities, and less on looking physically attractive, getting laid, and buying the latest in-fashions. The parts of the community I like are overshadowed by these more dominant, negative ones.

On a heart-warming level, I received a lot of curious glances and warm smiles beause of my kippah. Many people loved it, because it has characters from The Simpsons on it. Others were impressed that someone was visibly Jewish at the festival. One German woman asked me if I was Polish, and what Polish city I was from. I kindly laughed, saying I was not Polish, my mother is from Ireland, and I was raised in Seattle. She laughed, telling me I had a nice beard, and beautiful, smiling eyes - the kind she had only seen in Poland and Germany before.

How curious.

Apart from a lot of hatred that exists out there for Jews, there are also those folks that respond quite warmly to someone visibly Jewish. There is something that seems to pique people’s interest. When I am wearing a kippah, more people approach me to ask for directions, comment on what I am wearing, or make any other approached toward me.

It makes me wonder what positive aspects and traits people project onto Jewish folks. If they do not have hateful assumptions, I wonder why they assume good. Is it guilt from history? Is it personal, positive experiences? Or is it just me?

Who knows. Every time I wear a yamulke in public, the reacton is generally positive and striking. Maybe the difference is with how I take the world in.

Jspot, a progressive Jewish blog on social and economic justice, criticizes the New York Sun for an editorial it published that chastised the N.Y. State Assembly for passing a same-sex marriage bill without consulting New York’s “religious communities.” Jspot rightly calls them on creating a false dichotomy, one that is often repeated in the media, in which “religious communities” are portrayed as consistently conservative and opposed to gay marriage. Jspot points out that there are plenty of Jewish communities in New York that are proponents of same-sex marriage and many secular organizations that oppose it.

This is also certainly true in Washington State. The domestic-partnership bill that passed this year, which granted a handful of rights to same-sex couples as well as heterosexual couples over 62 who have cohabitated, enjoyed support from many organizations within the Jewish community. And while the Orthodox community generally opposes gay marriage, it isn’t an issue that mobilizes them.

What is also absurd is that same-sex marriage bills threaten any religious communities at all. The national position of the Anti-Defamation League is to support gay-marriage within civil law and to stay out of it within Jewish law. Whether various religious communities support gay marriage is up to them, and within the Jewish community there are a variety of positions. No clergy will be forced to officiate at gay weddings if they don’t want to. Orthodox communities can still proudly look down on gay couples if they choose. This is a civil issue not a religious one. In fact, many Jews are rightfully nervous about the state restricting the definition of marriage between two consenting adults at all, seeing as Jews have often been the victims of such laws in the past.

The story of journalist Daniel Pearl’s kidnapping and execution in Pakistan in 2002 is now a feature-length film staring Angelina Jolie. Slate’s Dana Stevens praises Jolie’s acting, but says her fame “gets in the way…of our ability to suspend disbelief and watch it.” The Forward examines Pearl’s complicated and contradictory legacy and asks, “Can a single person’s memory bear the weight of so much significance?”  The New York Times calls the movie “a precision-tooled Hollywood machine,” but says that is no reason to “snigger” at this “effectively fashioned…insistently political work of commercial art.” Salon praises the movie’s director, Michael Winterbottom, for capturing the personal in the political and says of Jolie’s acting: “a sure-footed, iron-willed performance.”

Check back on Tuesday for Jew-ish‘s take on A Mighty Heart