Well, basically this is all of Jew-ish.com’s favorite things –facebook, sarcasm, Jewish holidays – all wrapped up in one nice, neat little package.

It begins thusly:

Experience the joy here. My favorite part is when Bernie Madoff comments on Pharaoh’s pyramid photo album.

This is the thing I like best about Twitter. Honestly, I’m not all that interested in the daily (or even hourly) activities of people I know. If I cared, I’d call them on the telephone (or look on Facebook). But for some people, Twitter is more of an art project than a social networking tool. This automated e-mail alone was enough to crack me up this morning.

See, it’s funny (and of course, also in tremendously poor taste) because Ariel Sharon is in a coma. So he can’t Twitter.

Last week’s New Yorker includes a piece called “Madoff and his Models” about the schemers and dealers who have proceeded Madoff in the business of big fraud. The article focuses on the inventor of the Ponzi scheme, Mr. Ponzi himself, as well as a fellow by the name of Kreuger who took hundreds of European and American investors for a ride in the 1920s. You can read part of it here.

The article draws similarities between the three men (Ponzi, Kreuger, and Madoff) with regard to personality and temperament, specifically an understandable proclivity for privacy (they were committing crimes, after all). The interesting thing about this is that, in all three cases, each man’s inaccessibility and lack of transparency to their investors was in no way seen as suspicious. Instead, if anything, it made them more desirable—as if investing with them was an elite privileged, a secret club of sorts. In the case of Kreuger, who swindled not only private citizens, but also whole countries, the author, Ron Chenow, notes that even his closest associates and employees were so enamored of his money-making abilities that they never questioned his methods. Of an account auditor whose firm represented Kreuger, A.D. Berning, he writes:

Berning wasn’t disposed to question shocking discrepancies that surfaced in the ledgers, especially after the Kreuger account led to his making partner…Berning gradually became complicit in the fraud without ever quite realizing that he had strayed across the line.

Yikes. The moral of the story here—much like the take-away from the subprime lending implosion—is, if you don’t understand how something works, you probably shouldn’t stick your money into it, no matter how good the returns seem. This is why my grandpa kept his life savings in a hole in the wall.

There’s no other word for it: This is Jew-larious.

In its relatively short history, Israel hasn’t developed a melting-pot reputation akin to that of, say, the United States, but immigration is obviously a big part of what makes the country work. The phenomenon of aliyah keeps alive the dream of Israel as a place that any Jew can call home, yet inevitably Jews from different national and regional cultures, from different corners of the planet, may experience more conflict than harmony. And immigrants to Israel who aren’t Jewish, and may not even be legal, prompt similar questions to those faced by the U.S., nominally a more immigration-friendly place. Unfortunately, my knowledge of Israeli immigration law leaves a lot to be desired. I may want to put together a Kibbutz event on the subject at some point in the future.

I’m thinking of these things because of the last two films in the Kibbutz’s Jewish Film Series, Noodle—which features an illegal Chinese immigrant and her born-in-Israel son—and Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi, one of whose characters is a Jewish woman who married a philandering Moroccan Jew and thus hates Moroccans, Jewish and otherwise. While the former film makes it hard to avoid the theme of immigration (the boy’s mother is deported in a raid by immigration police), the latter deals with the subject more subtly, illustrating via a series of seriocomic scenes that Jewishness alone does not harmonious Israeli life make. I’d be interested in programming more films, Israeli or not, on the subject of immigration and the Jewish experience, so if anyone has suggestions for me, please share.