You’ve heard of a podcast, how about a G-dcast? Each week, G-dcast presents a cartoon depicting the story that Jews are reading in the Torah each week (aka the Parsha of the week) Check out a different 4 minute cartoon each week – some tell stories, some sing country songs…and then there’s the hip hoppers, too. New G-dcast episodes drop on Mondays. Created by the designer of the Jews for Jeter and Yo Semite t-shirts, this is the most innovative Jewish site we’ve come by in a long time! Mazel Tov!

All you need is a celebrity or politician to throw a Yiddish word around, and suddenly everyone is a buzz and kibbitzing. NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently quoted a top Democrat as saying “I’m telling you, man, it’s something about our party, the shtetl mentality.”

Of course, most people have no idea what “Shtetl” even means. Thanks to Maureen Dowd “Shtetl,” a Yiddish word meaning “a 19th-century Eastern European Jewish village” is currently the #4 most searched word on the internet! Could you plotz?

Read Maureen Dowd’s entire NY Times article here.

Feel free to kvetch or kvell in the comments section.

We’d like to introduce you all to The Chosen Blog’s new Kvetching Editor-at-Large Chavi Edwards!

Chavi is a nice Jewish girl (by way of conversion!) from Missouri and Nebraska. Her impressive resume includes a Bachelor’s of journalism as well as copy editing gigs at the Denver Post and Washington Post. Currently she’s headed off to the University of Connecticut at Storrs to get her master’s degree in Judaic studies. Her other blogging credits include her personal blog Mamaloshen as well as JewsByChoice.

If you’re a nice Jewish Boy, pay attention! Chavi is an active Twitterer, an ocassional poet who used to do slam poetry, she enjoys photography (check out kvetchingeditor on flickr), and spends as much time reading nonfiction Judaica and the occasional fiction book (she just finished Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon). She’s a middle child and only girl, and her family still lives back in Nebraska. She like dogs, not a huge fan of cats, and considers herself a grammar nut who likes to relax by editing.

Stay tuned! Chavi will be posting periodically here at the Chosen Blog about all things related to Judaism and pop culture. Be sure to read her entertaining first post below on Bar Mitzvah’s Round the World!