Frequently Asked Questions
Who the heck are you people?
We're Scott Ganz and Brooke Schreier Ganz, maybe better known by our online handles of Doctor Suarez and Asparagirl. We're both 25 and live in Los Angeles with our two cats, Sammy and Malka.
We met during our junior year at the University of Pennsylvania and have been together ever since. This proved to be a bit tough in the years after graduation, since Scott lived and worked in his hometown of Los Angeles and Brooke lived and worked in her secondary hometown of New York City. (Her primary hometown was, for many years, the lovely suburb of Scarsdale, New York, but she still finds that to be a source of embarassment.)
After alternately subsidizing American Airlines to enable our transcontinental nookie and missing each other dreadfully, we got married in Manhattan in November, 2003 and Brooke and the cats moved out to LA for good.
What's with the title of the blog?
It's a parody of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion", the title of a notorious anti-Semitic book published in Russia circa 1919. The book purports to be the minutes of a meeting of a sinister cabal of rich Jewish guys who are secretly controlling the whole world. Needless to say, the book is a total fake and was actually based on a piece of satire published in Geneva in 1864.
Unfortunately, a whole bunch of people took it very seriously--everyone from an American car manufacturer named Henry Ford to an Austrian ex-con painter named Adolf Hitler. And despite being unmasked as a forgery, some people still take it very seriously--Egypt recently turned it into a thirty-part miniseries on state-run television, starring a cast of 400, and displayed a copy of the book alongside a Torah in a library exhibit of "holy books".
We'd like to think that we're doing our part to mock anti-semites. And if there's any sinister cabal secretly controlling the world, we think we're as good candidates for the job as anyone else.
So you guys are Jewish?
Yep. Scott is Reform and mostly-observant and Brooke is Conservative and not-very-observant. The cats haven't mentioned their affiliations, but they don't seem to like bacon much.
And Zionists?
That too. Brooke wrote about becoming more actively Zionist here. We support Israel not on religious grounds, but on democratic and humanistic ones.
It's not the main focus of this blog--that would be the boring day-to-day stuff and personal minutae that you find on 90% of most blogs. But the recent rise in anti-semitism in Europe, the Middle East, and elsewhere--whether active events like the firebombing of Jewish schools and synagogues in France or more passive events like the EU's refusal to release reports that they themselves commissioned about the sharp rise in attacks on Jews--concern us, and we do write about it quite a bit. There's lots more in the archives if you're interested in our views. Use the search box or the date-based archives to poke around.
And politically your're on opposite sides of the fence from one another...
Yeah. Scott is a Democrat from a family of archetypal liberal Hollywood Democrats. Brooke is a Republican from a family of mostly Democrats with a few gun-owning conservatives and a few apathetic Independents. We both support the war on terror and strongly supported overthrowing Saddam and installing democracy in Iraq. But we'll probably vote our separate ways in the November presidential election, unless Kerry turns out to be too much of a weenie on national defense or Bush turns out to be too much of a schmuck on gay marriage.
There's this other blog called something similar...
That would be Protocols, a group blog with a specialty focus on Jewish issues with a name apparently derived from the same idea we had. We didn't realize that they existed until we'd already registered our domain name. But their abbreviated name is plain ole "Protocols" while ours is "Yuppies of Zion". And we've got that pretty blue background going on. Hopefully people won't mix us up too much.
Some of these blog entries seem awfully familiar.
We each had our own blogs for about two years. Brooke wrote asparagirl lives here, published via Blogger Pro, stored on her own site, and with comments powered by YACCS. Scott wrote Captain Scott's Electric Love Bunker, published via Blogger Pro, stored on Blogspot, and also with coments powered by YACCS.
After we got married, we decided that we should share our online life as well as our offline, so we took all our blog entries and about 95% of our blogs' comments (some got lost in the move due to technical problems) and combined them into the uber-blog which you are now reading. We use Movable Type as our CMS and Dreamhost as our hosting provider.
Content on this blog after about February, 2004 is new and unique to this site. It may not always be interesting, but hey, it's free!
