Short Takes

Some people get ready for Shavuot by making blintzes. Some draft notes on the text to be taught or learned in the wee hours of the morning at one of the all-night sessions during which the giving of the Torah at Sinai is celebrated through study.

And some congregate on Twitter, the micro-blogging website on which posts can be no longer than 140 characters, composing their own tweets of Torah, reading others’ efforts and furiously re-tweeting.

Last Friday after sunset, Jewish worshipers recited the traditional prayer over the counting of the Omer, the seven-week period between the second day of Passover and Shavuot. The count that night was 42. Or it could have been Jackie Robinson, Ronnie Lott or Connie Hawkins, depending on if you were a baseball, football or basketball fan.

When Yeshivat Maharat, the school that trains Orthodox women as spiritual and halachic leaders, started last fall to plan its first public symposium, Dean Rabba Sara Hurwitz planned to call the event “Menstruation, Sexuality and Modesty,” but was persuaded to drop the idea.

“We thought nobody would turn up for that,” she said.

The central character in the newest novel by Thane Rosenbaum — lawyer, law professor, author, moderator of an annual discussion series at the 92nd Street Y — is a 12-year-old daughter of divorced parents who shuttles between mother and father via the Brooklyn Bridge. The granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, she learns about her grandmother’s wartime experiences while juggling such issues as homelessness and 9/11, divorce and fashion.

A mother’s offhand comment here about the need for a place for Jewish children with autism has, 15 years later, spurred an international research center.

In 1997, the mother of two young special-needs children who lives in the New York area told Joshua Weinstein, a veteran educator with a Ph.D. in special education who was serving as CEO of a local health care agency, that no major program for Jewish children with various forms of autism existed.

Given the cost of a national advertising campaign or product placement, a mention on one of the most-talked about shows on cable is a pretty nice gift if it comes gratis.

But the folks at Camp Ramah, a network of facilities run by the Conservative movement, may not be kvelling over their inclusion in this week’s episode of HBO’s “Girls,” the chock-full-of-Jewish comedy about angst-ridden women in their early 20s trying to get a life in contemporary Manhattan.

At last, the Jewish community has its very own version of TED — sort of.

Getting information out of the much-touted contemporary ballet choreographer Alonzo King, based in San Francisco, is a bit like prying teeth. He likes to keep things abstract, speak about universal truths, and give primacy to the viewer’s perspective. 

Looking for a Mother’s Day gift that is thoughtful, timely — and free?

A publishing company called Sinai Live is offering a small book entitled “More Precious Than Pearls,” a collection of 10 essays reflecting on Eishet Chayil (A Woman of Valor), the chapter from the Book of Proverbs traditionally sung to the woman of the house before the Friday night Shabbat meal.

When the 138th running of the Kentucky Derby is broadcast May 5 on NBC, you can lay a pretty sure bet that there will be pre-race feature stories showing the Derby hopefuls working out in the pre-dawn mist, flecks of light peeking through the darkness.

You can thank Maximilian Justice Hirsch for that.

Hirsch bore an outsized Texas name and went on to an outsized career as a racehorse trainer.