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Screenshot from Twitter via JTA; John Mulaney by Dominick D is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)

Israel’s official state Twitter account plays matchmaker on Singles Day Israel’s Foreign Ministry took on the role of the “shadchan,” or traditional Jewish matchmaker, on Nov. 11, offering to help set up social media users in honor of Singles Day. Posting on the official @Israel Twitter account, the ministry reached out to singles and “Jewish mothers everywhere,” urging people to post their age, location and hobbies, and promising to retweet the information to its more than 665,000 followers in order to help them “find that special someone to bring home for the holidays.” The @Israel account started things off, stating that it was 72 years old, its gender was “neutral” and that it enjoyed “long walks on the beach, archeology, anything tech related & @FaudaOfficial” — a reference to the popular Israeli TV series. Singles Day, an unofficial festival started in China in the early 1990s to celebrate the romantically uninvolved, has evolved in recent years into a social media sensation and a major commercial holiday rivaling Black Friday. Retweeting one single follower from Germany, the ministry asserted that Israel was “the perfect honeymoon destination,” prompting another user to comment that he

would “invite my ex-wife for the Honeymoon we never had to Haifa.” “You sure you want to do that?” the ministry replied. “Jewish mother here with a gorgeous 26 year old daughter, above all no meshugenas please,” another user retweeted by the ministry wrote, using the Yiddish term for crazy person in a nod to the hit-or-miss nature of online dating. Tamar Schwarzbard, the Israeli ministry’s head of new media, explained that her goal was to reach “as many people as possible,” and “if that means connecting to internet trends and appealing to a younger generation that spends most of its time online, we adapt to that role.” Even the most innocuous tweets can be contentious when it comes to the Middle East, however, and numerous users tweeted comments highly critical of Israel, many of them relating to the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. “Occupation: Palestine,” one user tweeted. “Location: doesn’t exist,” another replied. “Hobbies: committing war crimes,” a third said. @Israel isn’t the only Israeli government account to embrace internet memes and snark. Last year, the Israel

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Defense Forces trolled then-British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for sharing a happy Passover message featuring an image of a loaf of bread — a food specifically prohibited on the holiday. One IDF tweet, which was retweeted nearly 900 times, contained a video riffing on Facebook’s auto-generated Happy Birthday messages. In the IDF version, members of several terrorist groups wish Qasem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force who was assassinated earlier this year, many happy returns. At the end of the clip, the cake explodes. — Sam Sokol

John Mulaney talks about dybbuks of RBG and Ed Koch with Seth Meyers If you’re a fan of the comedian John Mulaney, you probably know he is not Jewish but has a Jewish wife, whom he loves to talk about. So it might not surprise those fans that he got into a comedic conversation about dybbuks, or possessed souls mentioned in Jewish theology, on “Late Night with Seth Meyers.” Meyers mentioned how some people are giving the ghosts of John McCain and John Lewis credit for helping Joe Biden win Arizona and Georgia in the presidential election,

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and he welcomed Mulaney, who he introduced as a “ghost enthusiast,” onto the stage. Meyers also played a news clip of Sen. Chris Coons mentioning that the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg is probably looking down and smiling at the election results. That’s when Mulaney showed off his Jewish knowledge. “You see in Judaism, there is no defined afterlife, so Ruth Bader Ghostburg would therefore have to be what we call a EDITORIAL Editor | David Holzel 301-230-6685 | dholzel@midatlanticmedia.com Senior Writer | Rachel Kohn 301-230-6695 | rkohn@midatlanticmedia.com

dybbuk, which is a much more dangerous spirit, who can possess a human being and can terrorize the living. I would keep an eye on people like Susie Essman and see if they have lace collars all of a sudden,” he said, mentioning the Jewish actress famous for her role on Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Mulaney didn’t stop there, theorizing that “another Jewish phantasm,” that of former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, played a prank on Rudy Giuliani, and made a reference to Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat 2.” The screen featured a chyron that said “Dead Koch Dybbuk.” — Gabe Friedman

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