Unorthodox

Album Review

"I will not touch my shvantz in temple," is the mantra the poor yarmulke-wearing schmuck on the cover of Rob Tannenbaum and Sean Altman's hilarious debut disc, Unorthodox, appears forced to print into perpetuity on a scroll the size of fellow-Jew Madonna's yoga mat. If that's too ribald an image for you, you'll barely get beyond the opening bars of What I Like About Jew's first song without clicking off your CD player in a dither. But oh how you'll miss out. Here's the disc Adam Sandler would have made if he were less concerned about scoring one for the Jews come Christmas time than with cracking people up: "JDate" trolls the online dating site and urges you to sign up and "seal your J-fate" — "if you have a bad time, you can go home and J-m********e"; "Today I Am a Man" tackles the newly bar-mitzvahed ("I've got two pubic hairs and a three-piece suit/Today I am a man"); and "Hot Jewish Chicks," maybe the funniest track on a musical revue that has some real-music moments, surveys a room full of anti-shiksas and observes that one, Sarah, "likes to cook and read the Torah/But watch her dance — she puts the 'w***e' in hora." A bris gets the treatment ("A Little off the Top"), and even reindeers aren't immune ("Reuben the Hook-Nosed Reindeer"; no stereotype is too contemptible to kick around, no slang term too taboo. Matisyahu these guys are not — the New York weisenheimers your Jewish mother warned you about is more like it. But if you can take a joke, Unorthodox outdoes decades' worth of priest-rabbi-and-monk punchlines put together. If you find yourself verklempt, here's your antidote.