A few weeks ago, a NY Times article about the Annapolis conference contained this gem:
The long buildup to Annapolis, together with Ms. Rice's many trips to the region, have given birth to a new verb in Israeli government circles: ''lecondel,'' meaning, to come and go for meetings that produce few results. The word is based on Ms. Rice's first name.I love Hebrew.
Tonight they lit the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center. The press is making a big deal about the fact that this year it's a "green" tree that is less environmentally wasteful. It uses less electricity to light, and its powered by solar panels, and the tree's wood won't be wasted. As the AP reports:
Organizers are planning to recycle the tree by using it as lumber for Habitat For Humanity projects in New York, the Gulf Coast, India and Brazil.No word on the amount of fossil fuel required to ship lumber from a giant Christmas tree from New York to India and Brazil.
I don't know Rabbi Yosef Kanfesky, the rabbi of B'nai David Judea (just down the street from me), but he's pretty well respected by Jews of all denominations in this town. From what I hear, members of his congregation think he's just the bees knees.
So I was pretty fascinated by his article in this week's Jewish Journal, entitled, "An Orthodox rabbi's plea: consider a divided Jerusalem." He writes:
To be sure, I would be horrified and sick if the worst-case division-of-Jerusalem scenario were to materialize. The possibility that the Kotel, the Jewish Quarter or the Temple Mount would return to their former states of Arab sovereignty is unfathomable to me, and I suspect to nearly everyone inside the Israeli government. At the same time though, to insist that the government not talk about Jerusalem at all (including the possibility, for example, of Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods) is to insist that Israel come to the negotiating table telling a dishonest story -- a story in which our side has made no mistakes and no miscalculations, a story in which there is no moral ambiguity in the way we have chosen to rule the people we conquered, a story in which we don't owe anything to anyone. Cries of protest, in particular from organizations that oppose Israel's relinquishing anything at all between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, and which have never offered any alternative solutions to the ones they are protesting against, are rooted in the refusal to read history honestly. And I -- for one -- cannot lend my support to that.Wow.
A few months ago, Rabbi Jack Riemer decided that Islamo-Fascists are an incarnation of Amalek.
Last week, Rabbi Marc Gellman made a similar declaration in his Newsweek column. It turns out, according to Gellman, that Amalek utilized the same tactics as Hezbollah:
What made Amalek so dastardly was that unlike any other enemy who attacked the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt from the front, Amalek attacked the rear. This meant that his soldiers could kill women and children, the elderly and the infirm and in so doing avoid engagement with the soldiers at the front. In this way he could produce maximum carnage and maximum terror.
Of course Deut. 25:17-19 instructs us to remember Amalek for a good reason. Sayeth Gellman:
I believe this is because the planned and plotted slaughter of innocents even during wartime cannot be condoned and must be remembered as a bright moral line which can never be crossed.
Sorry. I have a bullshit meter that buzzes whenever someone uses the Torah to score political points. But maybe that's just me. Perhaps the Amalek label is appropriate here.
[Don't worry. Newsweek's erudite readers bash Gellman plenty in this week's Letters to the Editor.]
Cross-posted on Jewschool.
If there was ever any doubt that Barack Obama should be the next president of the United States, his recent speech on religion in politics should be proof enough. An excerpt:
Moreover, given the increasing diversity of America's population, the dangers of sectarianism have never been greater. Whatever we once were, we are no longer just a Christian nation; we are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson's, or Al Sharpton's? Which passages of Scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is ok and that eating shellfish is abomination? How about Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount - a passage that is so radical that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application? So before we get carried away, let's read our bibles. Folks haven't been reading their bibles.
You can find the full speech here.
At Beekse Bergen Safari Park in Amsterdam, some bears and monkeys coexist in the same enclosed habitat. On Sunday, as visitors looked on, some of the bears grabbed a monkey (technically, a Barbary macaque), killed it, and ate it.
This wasn't intentional. This is the first time one animal at Beekse Bergen Safari Park attacked another.
While I'm sure this was disturbing for the many visitors present, they got a first-class education in the laws of nature. The zoo, embracing this for the public relations boon it is, posted pictures on their website.
I think they should do this at all zoos. Let the big animals hunt for their food. People would come, Ray... People would come.
A lot of people are up-in-arms about a paper recently published by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
Walt, a professor at Harvard, and Mearsheimer, a professor at the University of Chicago, argue that "a vast network of journalists, think tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq." They explain that
...the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country - in this case, Israel - are essentially identical.
Since the publication of the paper, it has drawn praise from David Duke and the ire of the pro-Israel lobby, who are understandably defensive in response to an attack on their very existence. Harvard, possibly under pressure from donors, has cautiously backed away from the paper.
Having read the paper, I think their main point isn't totally off-base (I agree that AIPAC is a bit too vocal), but I also think they make some problematic assumptions. Of these, the most bothersome is their continued reference to "the Lobby," a mostly unconnected group of organizations and individuals that work tirelessly to represent Jewish/Israeli causes in American politics and within the American national conscience. Their characterization of this group sounds a lot like a thinly-veiled attack on par with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Mearsheimer and Walt address this critique early on:
There is nothing improper about American Jews and their Christian allies attempting to sway US policy: the Lobby’s activities are not a conspiracy of the sort depicted in tracts like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. For the most part, the individuals and groups that comprise it are only doing what other special interest groups do, but doing it very much better.
Then they spend the rest of the paper disproving themselves, making vast generalizations about "the Lobby," discussing "the Lobby's" goals and citing unnamed "prominent Lobby figures."
The best response I've read thus far is Christopher Hitchens' piece in Slate, entitled "Overstating Jewish Power."
Hitchens dismantles Mearsheimer and Walt's piece on a number of levels. He points out a number of their false assumptions, takes them to task for ignoring evidence that doesn't support their claims, and explains how many of their conclusions are based on fallacious logic. He doesn't call them anti-Semitic, accuse them of "having an axe to grind," or suggest that their work is on par with that of neo-Nazis. Rather, he takes them on point-by-point and explains why they're wrong. It's an inspired piece of writing.
In the middle of it, Hitchens makes an interesting point. He writes,
Almost everybody also concedes that the Israeli occupation has been a moral and political catastrophe and has implicated the United States in a sordid and costly morass. I would have gone further than Mearsheimer and Walt and pointed up the role of Israel in supporting apartheid in South Africa, in providing arms and training for dictators in Congo and Guatemala, and helping reactionary circles in America do their dirty work—most notably during the Iran-Contra assault on the Constitution and in the emergence of the alliance between Likud and the Christian right. Counterarguments concerning Israel's help in the Cold War and in the region do not really outweigh these points.
Remember, this is Hitchens talking. He's taking Mearsheimer and Walt to task for being unfair and overly critical of Israel and the American pro-Israel lobby.
It's about time for American Jews to remember that reasonable people (who are not anti-Israel) accept as a given that Israel has done some crappy things. To these people -- the very thoughtful types whose opinions matter -- ardent defenses of Israel that paint the country as one that can, and has, done no wrong must sound totally ridiculous. Instead of insisting on Israel's innocence in everything it has ever been accused of, maybe its time to admit, "Hey, Israel has done some things wrong. But it's ready to move forward, and America needs to continue to be at its side."
And that's the real reason AIPAC is so dangerous.
It turns out that the lack of male school librarians is detrimental to boys' reading habits. As Emily Bazelon writes,
According to Eden Ross Lipson, the author of The New York Times Parent's Guide to the Best Books for Children, boys read on a need-to-know basis: To generalize wildly, "They don't set out looking for story and relationship. They set out looking for information."Why then do a lot of boys get turned off from reading sometime in elementary or middle school? The blame partly lies with librarians. They are mostly women, they tend to love stories, and they also have a thing for books that teach moral lessons. (Take a look at this list of the winners of the Newbery Medal for children's literature awarded by the American Library Association.) Librarians also play a hugely important role in children's book publishing. "You don't get a walloping success without that institutional support," says Lipson, who is the former editor of the children's section of the New York Times Book Review.
Librarians and teachers often look down on boy humor or nonfiction, and their disdain seeps through to the boys who crave those things.
We need more male teachers. Period.
If JTS decides to reverse its ban on gay ordination, how many HUC rabbinical students will consider transferring?
Just wondering.
Recently, on the 700 Club, Pat Robertson suggested that Ariel Sharon's stroke is divine retribution for the Gaza pullout:
"God considers this land to be his. You read the Bible and he says "This is my land," and for any prime minister of Israel who decides he is going to carve it up and give it away, God says, "No, this is mine." He was dividing God's land and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations, or the United States of America. God says, "This land belongs to me. You better leave it alone."
Pat Robertson is a despicable human being.
