Yes, this is serious.

Via the good people at Gawker, an article by Rabbi Gellman at Newsweek:

And for this we dumped Joe? It just makes no sense to me and it ought to be a huge embarrassment to all card-carrying Jews whether they agreed with Joe or not…

I learned this distinction from the men of the Western Shvitz. One day a tribal Jewish friend took me to a shvitz on Western Avenue in Chicago. A shvitz (there are hardly any of them left) is a place where heterosexual Jewish men used to go to sit in a searingly hot steam room, get hit with soapy oak-leaf clusters called pleitzas, eat herring and black bread with red pop, play cards and tell jokes. I was really beaten down that day. I had been unsuccessfully trying to raise money for Israel from an assortment of cosmopolitan university Jews, each of whom had some phony but articulate reason why they would be intellectually compromised if they gave me a dollar for Israel.

True fact: if you stab a Jewish person in the heart, I hear spiders come out (or at least from Rabbi Gellman’s mouth).