Adam Dickter's blog

Trying to keep up with the sessions here at TribeFest can make your head spin, and it has proven difficult to pop in and out of the breakaway groups as I planned. The session on Obama and the Jewish vote seemed a pretty good one for extensive coverage, given the intensity of feelings Jews seem to have for or against the president. It would have been great to get some sense of the political orientation of the people in the room and how they viewed the administration's approach to the peace process.

No down time here at TribeFest even at lunch, and as we nosh on tuna, turkey or vegetarian wraps, it's all about Jews and football; two topics everyone knows are joined at the hip.

I'm sitting in a ballroom at the Mandalay Bay Resort in Las Vegas, where more than 1,100 young Jews from across North America have gathered for three days of networking, engagement and fun.

The idea, as a I reported last week, is to reach people in their 20s, 30s and 40s in a new way, rather than just forming junior fundraising groups, and make it cool to not only be Jewish but to do Jewish, taking a role in the course of their communities.

UPDATED 3 PM, MARCH 4

When you’re on the Jewish beat, it’s always a treat when the celebrity story everyone is consumed with across the country or globe turns out to have the coveted Jewish Angle.

The Oscars? Forget about it. Even the WASPiest movie ever made, "The King's Speech," had a Jewish writer. Almost anything Hollywood related has some Jewish angle. As Adam Sandler sang, “So many Jews are in the show biz; Tom Cruise isn’t Jewish, but I hear his agent is.”

From bungalow baseball to the yeshiva basketball league, there are plenty of all-Jewish sports teams around, but it's hard to imagine taking MOT-only to the extreme of  London's Maccabi Southern Football  League, who actually went on a hunt to root out the goyim when one team snuck in a few ringers.

Misdemeanor charges have been filed against 11 members of a Muslim student group who disrupted a speech by Israel's U.S. ambassador at the University of California at Irvine last February. The defendants face six months in jail, probation or community service if convicted of one count each of conspiracy to disturb a meeting and one count each of disturbing the meeting. This will be an interesting case that will explore the legal line between the right to protest and an act of coordinated, criminal disruption of a lawful assembly.

Ever hear the old joke about the Jewish mother who watches her son marching out of formation in a parade, and asks the person next to her "Why are all those other boys going the wrong way?"

We should adopt some of that spirit after Christina Aguilera's, er, creative rendition of our national anthem at the Super Bowl. Maybe we've been singing it wrong all these years. I mean, the song is hundreds of years old. And what about creative interpretation?

The afternoon went on for hours, or at least it seemed that way. I met my mother in Manhattan for a long overdue lunch. We shared memories, stories and bad jokes over Chinese food, including egg rolls that reminded me of the days she used to wheel me in a stroller down 86th Street in Bensonhurst and stop at the Chinese place there, before we were kosher.

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