Team Ketubah had a vote this morning: which is the sweetest Ketubah of them all?

I’ll jump to the answer The Romantic Ketubah — but first let me explain why we mean by the “sweetest.”

First, it must be called a Ketubah: A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, Shakespeare said (“but not if it’s called a ‘stink blossom’,” Bart Simpson added) — but with a Ketubah, it must — first and foremost — be a Ketubah!

Secondly, it must be cheesy enough. The only way to be sweet without being cheesy is by being subtle — but if it’s subtle, then it’s almost always lost on everyone! Confession: here at Ketubah HQ, we love cheesiness!

Third, it can’t be too cheesy. Then we’d have a cheese-bomb! We want red roses, but not bouquets and bouquets of red roses!

Fourth, it needs to represent you two as a couple — it can’t be too abstract. The sweetest Ketubahs are the ones showing the couple in love, in our opinion: capturing forever the moment when both of you are at the happiest moment in your life!

In our opinion, The Romantic Ketubah satisfies all of these criteria. You want a sweet Ketubah? Go for this one! :)

Want any other Ketubah recommendations? Just ask!

Morgan
Team Ketubah

Now this is our sort of wedding:

Now we only need such super-modern Ketubahs…!

Hat tip

Sanskrit, Sanskrit — how beautiful you are!

Jews and Indians have a long history — and one very personal for our founder, a Jew who used to live in Maharashtra.

The Bene Israel have been in Bombay since long before our memory begins, when the Jewish Persian traders settled around the world, and used Maharashtra as their center for the subcontinent, long before it had that name. Dozens of centuries before the Jewish hippies of the ’60s adopted the superficial symbols of India as their own symbols!

Inspired by our ancient connections, we’ve created some Ketubahs inspired by the Ketubot of the ancient Jews in India, such as the Konkan Indian Ketubah.

Any Hindu-Jewish couple that is interested in exploring the connections between the religions and regions in the form of a Ketubah or otherwise — give us a call! We’d love to talk to you :)

Morgan
Team Ketubah

Today’s fun Monday-morning reading: A great article in the Times of Israel on… The Jewish sides of Rothko, Mondrian and Pollock.

Note that these three are three of our most popular artists on This is not a Ketubah! Especially our Rothko-inspired Ketubot! It’s powerful to see how these artists have deep and interesting Jewish connections and inspirations — even when they’re not Jewish themselves — on multiple levels.

Super exciting news: a wonderful couple has just asked us to work with them to create… a Ketubah in Japanese!!!

We haven’t created a Ketubah in Japanese before, so this is exciting for us. We’re working on the Japanese translation as we speak!

We’ve created ketubahs recently in a variety of languages, from Chinese and German to Swedish and Spanish! We’re aiming to create a Ketubah in every language. Okay, maybe not Phonecian, but every modern language :)

Having goals, like creating ketubahs in lots of languages, is fun!

Some artists are inspired by the sublime statues and awe-inspiring architecture of Athens and Rome of antiquity; some artists are inspired by the humanized portraits of Rembrandt and the other great Dutch artists. Some artists are inspired by literature and Biblical anecdotes, and others by the simple work of the common American pastoral man. Other artists are inspired by the works of Nature, and still others by the ancient Mesopotamian art of our ancestors. The art which inspired us never represents God in an image, of course.

But here at Ketubah HQ, we in Team Ketubah are inspired by a modern work of art that may or may not be remembered by posterity forever alongside Michelangelo, Chagall, Picasso and Van Gogh. We are inspired by the TV show Princesses: Long Island.

It would be our pleasure to create a Ketubah for Erica Gimbel, Casey Cohen, Chanel Omari, Amanda Bertoncini (are you Jewish by the way?), Joey Lauren or Ashlee White. You are all awesome. We debate you Monday mornings in Ketubah HQ the way some teams debate verses from the Mishna or Gomorrah. But we all love you.

We want you all to find the perfect match and get married, so we can create your Ketubahs!

What is it about Princesses: Long Island that captures our imagination and desires so much, and fills us with excitement at the thought of creating a Ketubah for any of these young women?

First of all, it would be misleading not to admit one point: one of us here on Team Ketubah, without naming names, is from the same town where half the cast is from and much of the show takes place, the big GN. This member of our team, being about a decade older than the girls doesn’t know them personally, although his cousins (ten years younger and also from the same town do).

This show is a documentary of his life growing up. It brings back the heeby-jeebies just watching it. It’s helps him imagine: I escaped, but this is how life turns out for those who don’t! It’s like reliving high school, but with the wisdom that we lacked then — and, standing afar, the ability to laugh at it!

But the whole charm is, we’re not laughing “at” them, but “with” them because they’re laughing throughout. They have enough detachment to know what they’re doing, to enjoy it. The first episode ends with one of them declaring, “This is why we’re still single” — they understand the consequences of the behavior, and this gives it a level of self-consciousness and sophistication that we’re just not used to on Television. This wins us over.

Every episode has one line that’s so fantastic, it makes every moment worth it. In the first episode, it was Ashlee’s freaking out when driving in Freeport — although you really need to be from Longuyland to understand all the implications there. In the third episode, the line was…. we had a “Shabbatcalypse”! This is my new favorite word and I want to start using it all the time. Don’t have a Shabbatcalypse this weekend! This has instantly joined the pantheon of phrases that we use around the office! We love you!

Girls, we hope you get married and we would love to create Ketubahs for you. We have a policy of not doing discounts (we pride ourselves on giving the awesomest prices always to everyone, we don’t really have room to reduce it more!) but I think I would pay out of my own pocket for a discount to create your Ketubah for you!

-morgan
Team Ketubah

Here at Ketubah HQ, we few, we happy few, we members of Team Ketubah will proudly show our sleeves to the world and announce, We Are Nerds. We are nerds and we make nerdy Ketubahs; we are geeks, and we make geeky ketubahs. But above all, we are proud to be Nerds and in particular, proud to be Ketubah Nerds! Go Ketubah Nerds!

Of course, as nerds, making such declarations is fraught with subtle implications that we need to talk about, for the nerd leaves nothing left unsaid unless it is unthought.

The first question this brings up is, what, indeed, is a nerd and, in particular, what is a nerd in the context of ketubah-making?

A nerd, I — a very proud nerd! and a Jewish nerd (someone not from Long Island would thing these two words might be redundant!) — would define it as, is someone whose inner-life is so rich that he doesn’t have a sense of social conventions that other people (at least, people other than our close cousins with autism!) have.

Our disregard for social convention is a key part of what inspires our creativity. Key Ketubah references here: while the entire Ketubah world followed the convention of making Ketubot that look like our grandmother’s art, we — being nerds and thus lacking our understanding of the conventions! — started creating out there, over the top art for Ketubahs. The ultimate chutzpah: we are indeed Jewish after all!

Our nerdiness, in other words, drives our creativity.

Now here is where it gets particularly interesting: nerds tend to be interested in broadly similar topics. Topics that usually involve, getting to the bottom of things, figuring out how things work.

We’ve definitely been doing this for the Ketubah world. We even use Ancient Aramaic in our studio! V’Keninah, anyone? :)

As a result, we tend to create ketubot on what are often nerdy themes: our subway ketubahs, for example. And no comment on our unicorn Ketubah! (That was a commissioned one originally! I promise!).

But this begs the question: nerd or geek? As you can tell from reading the above, we have a preference for seeing ourselves as nerds. Nina might see herself as a geek (she spends a disproportionate amount of her non-work, non-shabbas time figuring out cool technological everything with her husband; want more information? Ask her!). The geek is probably similar to the nerd with this difference: the nerd just doesn’t “get” accepted social conventions or skills; the geek does–and he explicitly rejects them.

Not quite the schlemiel and the schlamazal (the first spills his soup; the second gets soup spilled on him), but something like that. But we promise not to spill any soup onto your Ketubah!