To know her is to love her....

My friend Dvora Meyers has a brilliant meditation on the Jewishness of the hot mess that is one Amy Winehouse in Tablet.

I never quite saw Winehouse in Jewish terms... More, in Janis Joplin-burning-bright-and-not-long-for-this-world terms. But Dvora makes a convincing case.

If you take nothing else from this article, it will give you a chance to appreciate just how tender a singer Winehouse can be -- especially when she sings a sweet, simple long song like "To Know Him Is To Love Him" -- written by that other Jewish hot mess.

Plugs and kisses

In a modest attempt to get myself to blog more, I'm going to make this a week of plugging things for my friends. (Calm down, calm down... nothing I'm recommending isn't something I wouldn't read myself.)

First up, I'd like to mention my friend Dvora Meyers' site Unorthodox Gymnastics. (Dvora is a writer, a recovering Orthodox Jew and a gymnastics nut.)

Her article today is about how the Orthodox Union is approaching sex ed through a new web site -- namely, they favor an abstinence approach.

The sex ed stuff is more or less what you'd expect. (Crapola along the lines of, "condoms can break"; "you could have suicidal thoughts after sex"; "men prefer virgins", etc.) But Dvora has an interesting tidbit at the end of the article:

"As much as I mock this site (and believe me, I've only scraped the tip of the iceberg), it is still more than what I was offered in high school, which was nothing. In the sixth grade, we learned about menstruation and there endeth the lesson."

Fascinating.

OK, stay tuned for a plug for my godfather's new web site tomorrow.