Shabbat Shalom! Hey!
And a special tip of the Kippah to 2024! As The Grateful Dead would say, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!” But, we will keep on truckin, hopefully without the help of reds, vitamin C and cocaine, although admittedly, I could use a few rations of each to help me capture the essence of the year in this post and help with my Oy Vey predictions for 2025.
Once again, as I did last year, and as tradition dictates, I turned to Artificial Intelligence to help me face the daunting task of summarizing the year. This year, I was rewarded by ChatGPT with the following: “2024: A Year of Resilience and Reckoning”.
Ok, I can work with that! Let’s start with Resilience.
I think most would agree that Israelis and Ukrainians have helped to define the Resilience category, with their ability to hang tough in the face of real existential threats. In the case of Israel, after suffering their worst blow since the country was established, they almost single-handedly and quite literally blew away Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, consequently enabling the downfall of the murderous Assad regime as a bonus. The much maligned Israeli Mossad organization pulled off the exploding pager operation, a terrorist killing caper that will surely inspire a new season of Fauda! And while Ukraine can’t claim to be winning against Putin’s agression, they have held steady in a war of attrition against a superior sourced enemy, and with the help of NATO countries, have survived another year. And then, let’s hand it to the orange man. He survived a few assassination attempts and returned to power, this time in an undisputed election, and begins his vengeance and retribution tour in a few weeks. Poor us. The question is, of course, will Democracy be resilient in the face of Donny-dumb-fuck’s clown show and his total disregard for our democratic institutions? Will we join the many other liberal democracies around the globe trending toward authoritarianism? Democracy may be heading into 2025 bloodied, but not bowed. I’m rooting for Democracy.
Moving on to the Reckoning category, we start once again with the orange man. A majority of this country voted for a treasonous, rapist for President. Writing that sentence is unbelievable. How do we reckon with that reality? We have already lived through four years of the orange turd. Can the country come to grips and manage through four more years of Donny-dumb-fuck and his sycophantic side-kicks? Will we go to war over Greenland, the Panama Canal, and annex Canada as our 51st state? Or will we all be dead before that happens due to Bobby Brainworm Jr’s stance against vaccines or his recommendation to toss back a glass of fresh bacteria in raw milk? Will there be a reckoning in America for a Medicare for All program before there are copy cat hits on the CEO’s of all our major private health insurance companies? With the rise of AI in 2024, people began to question the motivations of their digital assistants. Does Alexa have evil intentions? If she start’s asking you, “how was your day?”, should you be worried? Is there an AI reckoning coming in 2025? Record-breaking climate disasters highlighted the urgency for nations to meet carbon reduction goals and address systemic environmental neglect. Are we literally baked? Will wild fires in California and South America signal a climate reckoning? Or is it too late?
Perhaps “Resilience” and “Reckoning” summarize 2024 appropriately, or good enough for an AI algorithm. Or maybe Norm Jewison got it right, and like the Jewish people, we are teetering on the edge, like a fiddler on the roof, adapting the best we can in the midst of cultural change and adversity. And how do we keep our balance amidst this barrage of change and adversity? Tradition, tradition!
One such tradition is the JNR year end predictions for the coming new year, otherwise known as The Oy Vey List, which is published every year in the Jewish Farmer’s Almanac right next to those of Nostradamus and Baba Vanga. For those of you new to the JNR, The Oy Vey List is my best guess predictions of things to come in the new year that will elicit dismay, frustration, grief or just a good ole “Oy”. My 2024 prognostications were mostly a bust going 1 for 6, but remember, as the great philosopher Pumbaa once said, “you got to put your behind in the past”. So with that bit of wisdom now behind us, I am proud to present the annual JNR Oy Vey List for 2025:
- Oy Vey #1: Moo Deng and Pesto make a movie – Moo Deng, a bouncy baby pygmy hippo from eastern Thailand’s Khao Kheow Open Zoo, became 2024 pop culture’s fascination with her exceptionally sassy attitude, adorable chubby face and many antics caught on camera. Then came Pesto, the exceptionally robust penguin chickhatched at the Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium in Melbourne, Australia. Towering over the adult penguins and his own adoptive parents as the biggest baby ever born to the Sea Life, people could not get enough of the larger-than-life ball of chubby and fuzzy brown feathers. In 2025, Marvel and Warner Bros get into a bidding war for movie rights on the two cute fatties. Warner Bros wins the bid, and produces “My Dinner with Pesto”, a remake of “My Dinner with Andre”, where Moo and Pesto sit across from each other in a Manhattan restaurant and reflect on the meaning of a chubby life or whether or not they should go on a regimen of Ozempic.
2. Oy Vey #2: Musk’s new AI product wins a Nobel Prize – Move over Bard, Gemini and ChatGPT. A new version of AI makes headlines by solving the climate crisis. The new product, developed by Elon Musk to compete with Open AI’s ChatGPT, is called EGO, and the platform develops a solution to climate change but then immediately patents it, leaving humanity to pay subscription fees to use clean air. Musk then becomes the first Trillionaire on the planet, and uses the proceeds to buy the planet Mars, the only venue large enough to house his EGO Head Quarters.
3. Oy Vey #3: Trump appoints Ye Ambassador to Israel – Ye, who last year converted to Judaism and changed his name to EY to reflect the Hebrew right-to-left spelling, also announced he will resume his latest concert tour, renamed “The Star of David Concert Tour” which features a 100 foot statue of Ey wearing blue and white Yeezees emblazoned, of course, with the Star of David. Trump, in typical fashion, praised Ey and his appointment, “Nobody brings people together like Ey. He’s a genius, folks—everyone says so. Plus, have you seen his sneakers? Fantastic. The best sneakers.” Ey later proposes replacing traditional diplomatic documents with NFTs, claiming, “Paper is outdated, and peace needs to be on the blockchain.” Critics, of course, question the decision, but Trump defends it with a post on X, “Ambassador Ey is doing BIG things in Israel. Never before has the Holy Land been this hip. Liberals hate it because they hate SUCCESS!!!” Meanwhile, Ye’s tenure concludes when he attempts to install a giant golden statue of himself in Tel Aviv, calling it “a symbol of unity.”
4. Oy Vey #4: JNR recognized as “Substack of the Year” – In yet another milestone for the Jew News Review, the JNR was notified last week that it has received top honors in the “Sharon, MA and Staunton, VA Jewish Blog” category, a very crowded and competitive category for sure. Editor and CEO Brad Goverman was thankful for the recognition and had this to say in response: “I am humbled at this milestone, and thankful to my thousands of followers. This means a lot to the brand and our SEO and offers many opportunities for link-building. I have once again been approached by several marketers of home lift chairs, erectile dysfunction devices, and Judaica.”
5. Oy Vey #5: Hollywood Announces “Wicked Pissah”: The Wizard of Oz Gets a New England Makeover – 2024 ended on a gravity-defying high note with the theatrical release of “Wicked.” The long-awaited movie adaptation of the Tony Award-winning show starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo pulled in $114 million on its opening weekend alone as millions flocked to see the first of the two-act series. My prediction for 2025: The second act is released in 2025, and it’s “Wicked Pissah”. The sequel to Wicked moves from the Emerald City to Boston, where Elphaba trades her broomstick for a Dunkin’ iced coffee and Glinda tries to bring sparkle to Fenway Park. The plot centers around Elphaba trying to “reverse the curse”—not the one on her, but on the Red Sox after another heartbreaking season. She becomes a legend when she flies over the Green Monster during the World Series. Musical numbers include “Popular (But Only in My Hometown)”, and of course, “No One Mourns the Wicked Bruins Fan.” Matt Damon makes a cameo, playing a talking clam who gives life advice in a thick Boston accent. “You can’t change the world if ya park the cah too fah from the bah, kid!”. Boston Globe critic Kevin Kelly called it a “wicked fun time” for Boston locals, but New Yorkers roll their eyes, claiming, “We already have Hamilton.”
Oy. That’s all for this year! If any of this nonsense should come true, remember, you read it here first on the JNR.
May all your predictions and resolutions come true in 2025 and may the new year be a healthy and prosperous one for you all! And as usual, let’s be careful out there!
Brad out.
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