Jewish – Media Shower

Heritage Month Double Feature

Every single sliver of the Gregorian calendar, it seems, has some sort of theme. I’ll open a social media app, and 17 accounts I don’t even follow will clog my homepage with posts about, like, National Pizza Day, or International Sock Day, or Milky Way Galaxy Pizza Sock Day.

While I mostly ignore novelty holidays, I appreciate the month-long observances that honor the contributions of the many cultures comprising the modern United States. Even if acknowledgments in the media are largely performative, I usually end up learning something new.

Let Bicons Be Bicons: A Bi Visibility Day Manifesto

It’s time to set the record straight—I’m not.

Some of you already knew that, but if you don’t know me personally, or haven’t seen much of me since my boy-crazy teen years, it might come as a bit of a surprise. I wasn’t faking my attraction to guys, though; I was just repressing my other crushes.

It almost makes too much sense. Of course someone of my background wouldn’t have a simple sexual orientation. Given my mixed ethnoreligious origin, I’m used to navigating between worlds, celebrating those periodic moments of synchronicity. But it wasn’t until college that I examined myself closely enough to realize the signs of queerness had been there all along. In hindsight, I guess it wasn’t very heterosexual of me to feel so excited while hugging pretty girls in my older brother’s class.

The Curly Shuffle: A Stooge’s Unexpected Influence on Modern Dance

Harry, Hermione, and Ron. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. Alvin, Simon, and Theodore. Few trios are as iconic as Moe, Larry, and Curly—and even fewer have a third member so beloved it’s easy to forget they weren’t part of the original line-up.

Jerome Lester Horwitz, better known as Curly Howard, joined the Three Stooges in 1932 as a favor to his brother Moses (Moe), replacing his other brother Samuel (Shemp). Little did any of them know just how rapidly Curly would eclipse Shemp in the popular consciousness. His impressive athleticism, combined with his goofy vocalizations, elevated much of the act’s oeuvre from mere silliness to comedic gold. And, as some modern viewers have noticed, at least one of Curly’s signature moves may have contributed to the evolution of dance as a whole.

Why I Started Writing Jewxicans

They say—whoever “they” are—to write what you know. This poses a challenge in genre fiction, since most of us don’t have personal experience time-traveling, riding dragons, or navigating a romance with a 3,000-year age gap. Still, creators of all stripes incorporate aspects of their lives into their stories.

As a half-Jewish, half-Mexican woman, I encounter the world in a particular way. It’s not always a smooth ride, but my mixed background is instrumental to my cultural awareness, open-mindedness, and sense of humor. During my childhood, though, I was a lot less conscious of my identity, and I tended to default to implicitly WASPish characters in my works of fiction.