"Elaine" on SEINFELD [was:IS ELAINE JEWISH?]

From: Michelle Shabazz Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 22:51:36 -0400

Elaine could not be Jewish, she did'nt know what a moile was....(A person who circumsizes babies in the Jewish faith)..

Michelle S

From: B Storch Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 23:43:29 -0700

Elaine is not Jewish. In one of the episodes she tells a Rabbi that she is not of his faith.

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Elaine is a *character*.....on *television*. However, in fact, Elaine, the *character* is a non-jew. The actress who portrays Elaine, *is* jewish.

*great-heaving-sigh*

Elaine is not jewish. This was [futilely to my best attempts] a topic on ats *years* ago [MKaufman r u still out there? *smile*].

At the time of the original debate [rtff: read the ****'g FAQ's], i was all steamed that Julia Louis-Dreyfus, a beautiful, effusive, hilarious comedianne, was the only cast-member who wasnt [c]overtly jewish on the show. She filled the obligatoury roll of "perky-shiksah".

And since the *only* difference b/tween her and an actual "perky- shiksah" was not that she was dryer, stoopider, uglier, less/more interesting, sexual, intellectual, etc, etc, etc was surely that the *men* who cast suffer some basic stereotypic prejudices against jewish women. ....As appearantly do the readers of Usenet.

To note that jewish persons and males are disproportionately represented within both samples, is even more disheartening.

b who u feel, love who[m] u need,

R00Paul [email]

			"Make them Flags as they desire"
					-g0d

, [email] writes:

Michelle, Why did you change the name of this thread? I had put the old name into my killfile so that I wouldn't be bothered with this nonsence. Jewish culture is not defined by Jewish characters in T.V. shows nor by Jewish actors in same.

Moshe Schorr

It is a tremendous Mitzvah to always be happy! - Reb Nachman of Breslov

In article , [email] writes:

person who circumsizes

    With all due respect, if you can read the subject line, you can tell
that this is a post that you would not enjoy reading.  No one is forcing
you to read anything against your will.  In fact, as you would no doubt
agree, we all have free will.
     While Jewish culture is certainly not, as you say, defined by Jewish
characters on TV shows, if people enjoy discussing that, and it doesn't
hurt anyone, then let them.  Nothing says you need to get involved.

L.J. Weiner It is also a tremendous happiness to always be doing Mitzvot!

[email] wrote:

Michelle, the most important thing to know is: Never buy gribens from a moile!

In article , [email] (Josef Schwartz) wrote:

Wouldn't that be a mohel?

There was another episode where Elaine visits the gossipy Rabbi...and she says straight-out that she is not Jewish. Regards,

In

person who circumsizes

I heard Robin Williams say that ("never buy..." on an old Sat. Night Live. Is it a joke anywhere else? I think it is so FUNNY!!

In soc.culture.jewish on 5 Jun 1996 01:29:28 GMT [email] (Susan H. Golden ) posted:

With all the skinned chicken for sale in this world, including Empire, there should be a surfeit of gribenes. Perhaps someone wants to go into business with be selling frozen gribenes, in the frozen onion ring section of the freezer. We could get rich.

BTW, they are delicious, chicken skin fried in chicken fat. BTW, it is pronounced with the stress on grib; gribenahs with a short . a like in "the", or from my neck of the woods around Vilna, gribenies, which rhymes with tease and if it were singular with pushke, kishke, polke, fligele, shikse, challe, tushie, latke, and lots of other words.

Shalom

[email] also not a posek

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth. Taher libanu l'ovdecho b'emes. "

I miss many posts so please e-mail comments also if you want to be sure that I see it.

BTW -- gribenes is fried chicken FAT, not chicken skin...big difference! (For those of you who think this is weird..it's similar to fried pork rinds. If you like to eat healthy, skip it!) --Susan

	The way I understood it, the gribenes is the (combination of)
	chicken skin AND the browned onion, while the chicken fat IS
	the schmaltz ... and then it is melted and NOT fried.

Shaqeeqa

For those of you who even CARE about this subject, there are two types of fat...the kind you find on the animal which is solid, and RENDERED fat, which is the drippings of cooked fat (such as what you'd find in a frying pan after frying up a greasy burger...which is probably a lot healthier than eating gribenes!).

Schmaltz is rendered fat. It is solid when cold, it melts when it gets warmer, just like BUTTER! Gribenes as it know it is made from chicken fat (not schmaltz) fried up in a pan with a little salt. --Susan

In [email]

to

_..-.._..-.._..-.._..-.._..

Mahmoud

Literature)

Arafat ('74)

In article , [email] (Susan H. Golden ) writes:

Sorry, Susan, but the original poster was correct. Think about it - heat up (i.e., render) fat and it melts, leaving no solids. I have no personal experience with pork rinds, but the word "rind" implies skin, too.

With a cholesterol level in the 165 range, I need all the gribbies I can get to prevent it from dropping any lower. :-)

In [email] (Rick Turkel) writes:

Sorry again! I learned to make gribenes from my grandmother. She would take the fat out from under the chicken skin (after all, making chicken soup without using the skin was anathema). She would then fry small pieces of the fat with chopped onions.

The rendered liquid from the fat became schmaltz and was used for cooking and spreading on bread. The remainder, small hard pieces of the fat and the onions, became the gribbenes or Jewish popcorn. To this day I use schmaltz twice a year. In my potato latkes at Channukah and in my matzoh balls for Pesach. YUM!

April Grunspan

In soc.culture.jewish on Thu, 13 Jun 96 13:06:54 GMT [email] (Avie Grunspan) posted:

Thanks for the details April . This group is making hungry. My I will be almost done with my diet in 10 weeks, and since I generally eat so much less and snack not at all anymore, and bike ride more, I will be trying all your recipes. I still say with all the skinned chicken in the world, we should be able to get rich selling frozen gribenes with skin and onions.+

Shalom

[email] also not a posek

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth. Taher libanu l'ovdecho b'emes. "

Posting from %newsgroups% I miss many posts so please e-mail comments also if you want to be sure that I see it.

[email] (Rick Turkel) wrote:

With a cholesterol level in the 130 range, I stay as far away from that crap as I can get.

Low is G-O-O-D.

Mac

[email] (Rick Turkel) wrote:

Perhaps I'm the only Southern boy around here(and I just found this group). Trust me, pork "rinds" are nothing but fried fat.

Hollis

OK, so you're a Ph.D. Just don't touch anything

In article [email] writes:

	I guess the "rind" is an inappropriate name then.  I suppose
	they deep fry the fat instead of melting it.  You're right
	about the South and it's 1001 uses of pig flesh, fat, bones,
	and skin.  B-L-E-C-H!!!

Shaqeeqa

In article , [email] writes:

[stuff deleted]

I beg to differ. No one in Vilna (or anywhere else in Northeastern Europe, for that matter) would use such a pronunciation. The proper (literary) Yiddish pronunciation is /'gribenis/, with the two "i" sounds identical to the "i" in English "it." Pronunciations like challee, kishkee, etc., are Americanisms, possibly based on Southeastern (Ukrainian/Rumanian) Yiddish.

In soc.culture.jewish on 11 Jun 1996 14:49:18 GMT [email] (Rick Turkel) posted:

I didn't say we used the proper or the literary pronunciation.  We
were po' folk.    I will look into this some more, but I find it very
unlikely that my grandparents who were already 20 years old when they
arrived, changed their pronunciation (esp. when my gramma couldn['t
even get English right)   My mother, brother, and uncle all learned
directly from gramma.     My experience has been that few people use
this pronunciation and if so, there would not be enough to change my
family from their European pronunciation.  Also over the years I have
inquired and more people who pronounced the language like I do came
from Vilna than did from Indiana.

Does anyone else have an opinion.???

BTW , for other readers of this post, I would spell the Yiddish word 'mohel' or 'moihel' or 'moyel' or 'moiyel'. I think I like the last one. The Hebrew word is mohel.

Shalom

[email] also not a posek

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth. Taher libanu l'ovdecho b'emes. "

I miss many posts so please e-mail comments also if you want to be sure that I see it.

In article , [email] writes:

I believe the source of the changed pronunciation lies in the transmission from gramma to the next generation. People who aren't native speakers of a language tend to substitute familiar sounds for unfamiliar ones, and a final "-ee" is much more common in English than a schwa.

What can I tell you? My late in-laws and their extended family, also from the Vilna area, and a dear friend who came here in the 1970's from Moscow but who grew up in Latvia and attended Yiddish-language schools through eighth grade, all said "gribenis" and not "gribenies," and snickered whenever they heard "chollie" or "kishkie."

In soc.culture.jewish on 12 Jun 1996 22:30:13 GMT [email] (Rick Turkel) posted:

I appreciate the input, but I need more. Latvia is not Vilna, I shoud have said Eyshushuk which is near Vilna. There is north of Vilna and South of Vilna, that could easily be a significant difference.

My mother is a native speaker of Yiddish. In fact she didn't speak
anything else until she was 6 years old, although she was born in
Indiana.    And my ear is as good as anyone's.  I often get
compliments on my ability to pronounce foreign words, esp. names that
no one they meet can seem to pronounce.  My gramma used these words in
front of me, and I don't believe I got it wrong.   Even if I had , I
would not then have been surprised to hear the same pronunciation as
you speculate she used, to hear that at a later time and notice it.
It is because it was differernt from anything I had heard that made me
notice it.

Shalom

[email] also not a posek

"Purify our hearts to serve You in truth. Taher libanu l'ovdecho b'emes. "

I miss many posts so please e-mail comments also if you want to be sure that I see it.

In article , [email] writes:

Rich or poor is irrelevant; where they came from is what's important.

[stuff deleted]

It's not - there's little difference between Latvian and Lithuanian Yiddish, and north or south of Vilna matters not a whit. We're talking about a _very_ small area, after all. My in-laws were from Delyatits, also not far from Vilna if I'm not mistaken, and they used the pronunciation I described. But thanks for the geography lesson. :-)

That doesn't mean that her Yiddish (as an adult) wasn't affected by her later-acquired English, or by the Yiddish of others (from other locales in Europe) around her. It seems to me that it must have been.

Ditto.

Ditto again. How does fluency in five languages (at least to the degree that I'm not laughed at by native speakers), including Yiddish, (and partial competency in two others) sound to you?

Sounds reasonable to me.

Best regards.

This is from a fellow who lives smack, dab on top of a major U.S. dialect line, separating Southern Ohio Appalachian from Northern Ohio Great Lakes dialects. I've been told by those who map dialect lines, they are mapped out in the same detail as fault lines in California. :^)

In any event. I had always though that "challee" and "motzee" were Chicagoese and Challah mad Motzoh were everywhere else :^)

And they have about the same effect on the ears, IMNSHO... after living in Massachusetts for 14 years, I moved to just south of Cleveland, and then four years later to Columbus...I had dropped my "pahk my cah in Hahvahd Yahd" accent just in time for my ears to be assaulted by "y'all", "warsh", and "IN-shurince"!...

gramma??? who says gramma? It's Nana..(remember Jerry's Nana?) That's what they say in East Vilna....

In article , [email] (Art

Quite right, Art, but just because there's such a thing as a dialect boundary doesn't mean that any particlular line you draw on a map will represent one. Dialect boundaries usually develop because a lack of interaction between speakers on either side, and historically that wasn't the case in this area. In the grand scheme of things (i.e., relative to Litvak vs. Poylisher vs. Galitzyaner vs. Western Yiddish), there's very little difference between Lithuanian and Latvian Yiddish - both are recognizably Litvak. Drop over some time and take a look at my copy of the _Linguistic Atlas of Ashkenazi Jewry_ for verification.

Interesting. I'm originally from New York City, and the first time I ever heard "challee" was when I moved to Boston, where it seemed to be the preferred pronunciation - even in the bakeries.

Shabbat shalom.

My family came from the Kiev area (father), and the Vilna area (mother),
and both sides say 'gribenis'.   But why should anyone expect that all
words in Yiddish be pronounced the same way by all people?   Would you
expect people from Boston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Toronto or London
England to pronounce all words in their native tongue alike?

Sylvia