On the G train home from the ultra-Orthodox rally at Citifield last night, I talked Zionism with a passel of Hasidim headed for Williamsburg.
A rabbi named Yechiel Meir Katz had drawn an implicit historical parallel in his address earlier in the evening between the rejection of Zionism by the Orthodox and the need to reject the Internet.
Another speaker, Rabbi Ephraim Wachsman, underlined the point, citing Communism and Zionism as historical challenges the Jewish people had been forced overcome.
On the subway headed from Citifield to Williamsburg, I asked a group of mostly Satmar Hasids about the comparison between Zionism and the Internet.
“Everyone who has a Jewish heart knows Zionism is against Judaism,” said one, speaking from the back of the small crowd that had gathered around me.
The sentiment isn’t rare among the Satmar, who remain among the most anti-Zionist of the ultra-Orthodox groups.
What was rare, at least for me, was to have a conversation with a Satmar Hasid about these sorts of controversial ideas.
Though it was the exhortations against the use of the internet by a handful of rabbis on the JumboTron at the that drew headlines, the real action at the anti-Internet rally was in the stairwells and the subways, where ultra-Orthodox of all stripes mixed and chatted with each other, and with me.
How many clichés is it possible to stuff into one soft feature about Tel Aviv?
That was my thought as I was watching Bob Simon’s 60 Minutes segment on the city, which included, in the first three minutes, these good, old chestnuts: “dancing on the Titanic,” “the last days of Pompeii,” and “later-day Sodom.”
Were there any new ways to express this extraordinarily tired idea? How about this stinker? “There are more synagogues than bars in this city of the Jews, and remember Tel Aviv isn’t far from where Moses came down with those commandments…”
There is so much to say about this segment, but my fingers hurt too much from pounding my fist against the wall while I was watching to catalog all the ways in which it ignored reality.
There are basic reporting errors here. The piece is framed as an exploration of the political apathy of the bronzed and beautiful citizens of Tel Aviv (all of them apparently working at start-ups by day and dancing on tables doing vodka shots at night). So how can you tell this story without letting any complicating factors seep in? For one thing, only interview people that give it to you. So the two main people Simon spoke with, who take up most of the face time are Ron Huldai, the mayor of Tel Aviv, and Gideon Levy, the Haaretz writer best known for his searing and unrelenting portraits of Palestinian suffering. Both in their own ways offer confirmation that the city is indeed Titanic/Pompeii/Sodom.
Many of us were grateful that the public editor of The New York Times, Arthur Brisbane, chose to devote his column today on the issue of crediting publications such as ours for the work we do. The case in point concerned The Times’ two-part series on sexual abuse in the ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, and the way communal, religious and political pressure has combined to limit the public’s right to know what exactly is happening to those who commit these awful crimes.
When the series was first published, I wrote to Brisbane, congratulating The Times for its work but suggesting that the reporters violated their own ethical guidelines by not acknowledging stories in The Forward and The Jewish Week that formed the foundation of that work. Gary Rosenblatt, editor of The Jewish Week, signed onto the letter, and wrote about it in his own publication.
It’s rare that an institution as powerful as The Times owns up to its mistakes, and I’m impressed to see the way Brisbane reacted so quickly and authoritatively. That said, I wish his analysis had gone further, to credit The Forward’s work dating back to 2009 and continuing until today. Here’s one example:
The world’s most important sports event of the year is coming on Saturday, May 19.
American Jews may feel a little left out when the UEFA Champions League Final kicks off, even though soccer is this country’s fastest growing team sport and and an increasingly popular draw on TV here.
But they shouldn’t ignore it. Because Chelsea Football Club vs. FC Bayern Munich at the Allianz Arena is really a fight between Jewish present and Jewish history.
On the one hand, the home team, Bayern Munich, are the representatives of south Germany, playing in the city where Hitler felt strong enough, even in 1923, to launch a putsch against the Weimar government. This unpromising context shouldn’t deter those of you who want to support Franck Ribery and the reds of Bayern because, as Raphael Honigstein and David Winner have pointed out in the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle respectively, Bayern Munich was always a Jewish team.
Ever seen the Menorah that stands outside the Knesset in Jerusalem? It was made by sculptor Benno Elkan, who was one of 17 founders of Bayern in 1900. Known as a Jewish club in the 1930s, and having a Jewish president and manager, it became a target for Nazi abuse, which the players, officials and, to some degree supporters, resisted. Winner explains the invaluable contributions of Walther Bensemann and Kurt Landauer to Bayern in particular and German soccer in general, while Hoenigstein outlines the history that made German Jewish football invisible in the wake of the Holocaust.
We’ve been thinking here a lot about the Israeli national anthem these days, and experimenting with some alternatives. But it’s also useful to be reminded why an anthem means so much to its citizens on a visceral, emotional level. And reminded we were when sent this feelgood of feelgood stories today.
A wheel-chair bound Israeli woman, Moran Samuel, who is also a star athlete in the paralympic world, recently won a rowing competition in Italy. When she stood in front of the crowd to receive her prize, an anthem that was not the Hatikvah came blasting over the loudspeakers (something, in fact, that sounded a bit like disco). Unfazed, Samuel quickly asked for the microphone and…Well, watch it.
Emergency Committee for Israel board member Bill Kristol told an Upper West Side audience last night that President Obama has “moved back to the center” on Israel.
The statement, one of a number of kind words Kristol had for Obama, came just two months after ECI released a video calling the president’s Israel policy “dangerous.”
“Barack Obama promised to be an unwavering friend and defender of Israel,” the ECI said. “It is deeply unfortunate and dangerous that he has failed to keep this promise.”
Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a board member of a number of right-wing advocacy groups, including the hawkish Emergency Committee for Israel, praised the president during a debate with Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of the dovish pro-Israel group J Street. Forward editor Jane Eisner moderated the discussion.
Kristol’s group ECI is known for its bombastic criticism of the president. The group raised $700,000 during its 2011 fiscal year, and has spent heavily on high-profile newspaper and billboard advertisements condemning Obama’s Israel policy.
But Kristol repeatedly praised the president during the Upper West Side debate.
“I am happy to agree with Obama to a considerable degree,” Kristol said, according to Chemi Shalev in Haaretz.
Is Egypt Palestine?
It is a tired (and discredited) claim that Jordan is Palestine. But now there is a new one: that Egypt is.
I inadvertently pushed a button I didn’t mean to push earlier this week in a conversation in Gaza City with a group of Islamists, mostly Hamas officials and their supporters. I asked if their frustration with the peace process and unification talks would lead them to look toward Egypt instead of the West Bank, from which it is so isolated. They said such idea was treason.
My question did not come out of the blue. I had come to Gaza as a journalist — on my third trip — at the invitation of a Hamas official, but with no restrictions on my movement or who I could talk to, and had spoken the previous day to a few young enterprising Gazans for whom the West Bank is terra incognito. One, a 25-year old blogger, Jehan Al Farr, had never been to the West Bank until a few weeks before when she went to the American Consulate in East Jerusalem for a visa. She went by official bus and was not allowed off the bus except to go into the consulate and then quickly re-board the bus back to Gaza. She and her friends worry about this. (Israeli amuta Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement—www.gisha.org—reports on the impediments to travel between Gaza and the West Bank.) In a recent “tweet-up,” Jihan and her friends hotly discussed “Rafah” (shorthand for looking towards Egypt for solutions) versus “Erez,” looking towards the West Bank. Many of her friends, she said, call themselves Gazans and not Palestinians, and that too is a subject for debate. (This sweet-faced young woman told me that the party that most closely reflects her political views is Islamic Jihad.)
When Neshama Carlebach recently recorded for us a slightly different, more inclusive version of Hatikvah (one first suggested by our language columnist, Philologos), the reaction from some was predictably pretty negative. As one commenter succinctly put it, “Israel is not a binational state. It is the national homeland of the Jewish people. I’d rather Israel be a Jewish state than a democratic one, if a choice must be made. Leave Hatikvah alone. Leave the Israeli flag alone.”
We never intended the recording to be an endorsement of a change in the national anthem. It was meant as a challenge of sorts, an intellectual exercise that might provide an entry point for a conversation about how representative the Hatikvah actually is or should be. Setting this alteration of the anthem to music seemed fitting also because, as a song, Hatikvah has been fairly mutable, with lyrics shifting and changing at various points in history (and I’ll offer a few examples after the jump).
Carlebach herself found herself attacked for having made the recording and she has now issued a statement explaining her decision to participate in this exercise:
President Obama raised a reported $12 million for his reelection campaign at a Hollywood fundraiser at George Clooney’s home co-hosted by top Obama donor Jeffrey Katzenbeg.
The May 10 fundraiser came days after Obama announced his personal support of legal recognition for gay marriage.
Though the president stopped well short of calling for federal legislation, the shift on gay marriage was seen by some observers as helpful in his campaign’s broad effort to reassure Hollywood Democrats, who have given less than expected so far in 2012.
Those efforts seem to have paid off. The $12 million raised at the $40,000 per plate dinner is reportedly the largest sum ever gathered at fundraiser for a presidential election.
President Obama’s announcement on same-sex marriage is good for the Jews. Why? Here are three reasons.
First is the “who.” Obama’s support of same-sex marriage signals that he’s not going to let a noisy religious minority dictate public policy. This is important for all religious minorities, including the Jewish one, because that same group of angry fundamentalists wants to Christianize America, support the radical settler-fringe in Israel against Israel’s own best interests (as reflected by the mainstream of Israeli public opinion), and erode the separation of church and state.
Read the Forward’s news story about Jewish groups supporting Obama’s statement on gay marriage.
There are those in the Orthodox Jewish community who have made deals with this same fundamentalist devil on issues concerning women, contraception, LGBT people, Israel, “intelligent design,” and the funding of religious schools and institutions. Often, they agree with the fundamentalists substantively (as on same-sex marriage), and other times it’s just a marriage of convenience. But in both cases, such alliances are deeply short-sighted. If American Jews care about maintaining our religious freedom, we must not allow sectarian religious values to dictate public policy. Period.
Second is the “what.” Obama’s statement brings him in line not just with 55% of the American public, as revealed in a recent Gallup poll, but with the overwhelming majority of non-fundamentalist religious people as well.
Supporters of jailed kosher meat CEO Sholom Rubashkin received a boost this week in the form of a blog post by a senior editor for the online magazine Slate.
The post, by Slate’s Emily Bazelon, provides rare secular media backing for Rubashkin, who enjoys overwhelming sympathy among Orthodox Jews.
A former top executive of the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking concern, Rubashkin was convicted of scores of counts of financial fraud in 2009 and is currently serving a 27-year jail sentence. The charges came in the wake of a massive immigration raid on the Agriprocessors facility.
The Forward was the first newspaper to report on employee and animal welfare problems at Agriprocessor’s Postville, Iowa plant.
In her Slate post, Bazelon pointed to two longstanding concerns about Rubashkin’s conviction and sentencing. Bazelon noted that his 27-year sentence is relatively long for a bank fraud conviction. She also cited concerns that the judge who heard the case, Linda Reade, was prejudiced by her involvement in planning the raid on the Agriprocessors plant.
Bazelon wrote that a number of attorneys — including Bazelon’s own sister — have filed amicus curiae briefs asking the Supreme Court to review a request for a retrial.
The Likud-Kadima agreement to form a unity government and cancel the early election makes all the sense in the world for Kadima. It’s arguably the smartest move by any Israeli peace advocate in a long time.
Newly minted Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz, who ousted Tzipi Livni in a primary upset just two weeks ago, inherited a party with 28 seats Knesset seats. It’s the largest bloc in the current house - one seat more than the Likud in the 120-seat legislature. But Kadima was headed for a crash in the coming snap elections. Polls showed Mofaz winning just 11 seats in September, the same as center-liberal newcomer Yair Lapid. Labor Party leader Sheli Yacimovich was polling at 18 seats (up from the 13 Labor won in the last election, which dropped to 8 after Ehud Barak’s defection). Thus the total center-left bloc was headed for 40 seats. Netanyahu was polling at a commanding 30 seats, and with Avigdor Lieberman pulling 15, plus assorted religious and far-right factions, Bibi was headed for a second term that would take him through 2016 essentially unchallenged.
By joining a unity coalition, Mofaz gives himself another year to build up a following and establish himself as an alternative to Bibi. From his perspective, his two rivals for leadership of the center-left, Yacimovich and Lapid, are not serious candidates. Both are former television journalists with little to no leadership experience and only the fuzziest familiarity with foreign and security policy. Mofaz is a former army chief of staff and former defense minister, active in civilian politics since 2003, highly regarded as a team leader, manager and policy wonk on domestic and security affairs. There have been talks in recent days about bringing the three together to form a joint list to oppose Bibi, but no agreement as to who would lead.
What specifically does tonight’s deal gain for Mofaz and Kadima?
The Second Aliyah, though necessitated by the resumption of hostilities by the Slavic populace against Russian Jewry, was carried on a wave of ideological fervor. In addition to establishing Tel Aviv and aiding the revival of the Hebrew language, those imbibed with the new European collectivist ideologies sought to establish a more equitable form of living in the Yishuv.
This was to be accomplished via the foundation of a series of communal farming villages, the kibbutzim, where labor and its fruits were apportioned evenhandedly. It is on one of these settlements — Ein Ha’Shofet, in the north of Israel, about 18 miles southeast of Haifa on the Plain of Manasseh — that I now find myself. (I was reminded of this nugget of history, incidentally, because of my current reading material: Leon Uris’ Exodus. After all, what better to read on a kibbutz than the quintessential American Zionist novel?)
When I enlisted in Tel Aviv, the administrator in the volunteers’ office in offering me my current residence said, “This is a serious kibbutz — you seem like a serious person.” (For the record, I rejected offers to work in a meat packing factory in Beersheba, and a couple of kibbutzim bordering the Gaza Strip, for reasons that I’m sure are apparent). It was mentioned that there was a possibility of working outside as part of the gardening team, and I accepted, thinking foolishly in retrospect that like the Jews of the Second Aliyah, I could be transformed and made better through toil in the fields, turning these soft writers’ hands into those of an honest laborer.
It was day three when I realized that this metamorphosis was destined to fail. The first couple of days were exhausting, but in a way that left me fulfilled. On those occasions, the climate had been temperate, but the air that Wednesday was thick and heavy, and the atmosphere humid and muggy. The mercury climbed north of 90, as we cleared the grassland of brush and other waste, in preparation of that evening’s memorial for Yom Ha’Shoah. It was not necessarily the mindless repetitive nature of the task at hand — hoisting unwanted nature into a ‘piler’ and flinging it onto a flatbed truck — since when your normal occupation consists of putting one’s mind to use, jobs without thought can relax. Rather, I was flustered and worn down by the physical strain of the activity, in combination with the energy sapping heat.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s decision to call early elections in September followed a “discreet” meeting with leaders of AIPAC, who told him that polls show President Obama heading for reelection in November—so writes Maariv chief diplomatic correspondent Ben Caspit, as reported by Noam Sheizaf on the left-wing, English-language Israeli site 972mag.com blog.
Here’s Caspit, as translated by Sheizaf:
Netanyahu’s surprising announcement on the early primaries in the Likud, which fell on his party’s senior member like thunder on a cloudless day, came three days after a discrete meeting he held with the chiefs of AIPAC, that estimated, based on polls, that Barack Obama would also be the next president.
Bibi knew he can’t campaign when Obama is in his second term. This [would be] a dangerous gamble. Sheizaf goes on to note that the September 4 Knesset elections will come during the Democratic National Convention, which means that “Instead of the U.S. president possibly playing a role—deliberately or not – in the Israeli elections, Netanyahu will get a chance to play a part in the American one.” No, Noam, it’s not a coincidence.
Speaking of Israeli elections, two new political parties are forming on the right:
Being managing editor is a singular job in journalism, requiring the organizational skills of an MBA, the fortitude of a prize fighter and the patience of a pastor. For three and a half years, Lil Swanson has occupied that position at the Forward, and now, sadly, she is saying farewell.
Her appointment in the fall of 2008 was something of a leap of faith for all concerned, since she is not Jewish and had never worked in New York. But she was exactly the right kind of person to help me guide The Forward.
She had been a managing editor elsewhere, oversaw huge departments when we worked together at The Philadelphia Inquirer, ran a national training program for newspaper editors, and cut her journalistic teeth at the Associated Press. Yeah, she could handle a brilliant, slightly manic bunch of New York Jews.
Not only did she help steer the ship magnificently, she left her imprint everywhere. A managing editor’s work is invaluable to the staff and largely unnoticed by the public, but occasionally the reader was treated to the full power of Lil’s journalism. She created and edited a series of award-winning special sections: celebrating the 150th birthday of our founder, Ab Cahan; commemorating the 100th anniversary of the the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire; and then, just recently, our terrific section on the Titanic. All along, she protected our journalism with fierce devotion.
And she kept the old-fashioned treasure chest in her office constantly filled with irresistible candy.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is not the first public servant to run into trouble trying to end an occupation and remove Jews from their homes. Way back in 1962, Officers Gunther Toody and Francis Muldoon faced just that problem in their efforts to remove sweet old Mrs. Bronson (played brilliantly by the great Yiddish stage diva Molly Picon) from her apartment in one of the best loved subplots of the classic situation comedy “Car 54, Where Are You?”
The saga of Mrs. Bronson ran over four episodes from October 1961 to August 1962. In the first episode, titled “I Won’t Go,” Mrs. Bronson refuses to move out of her apartment in a tenement slated for demolition to make way for urban renewal. In the final episode, titled “Occupancy” (eerily foreshadowing today’s news) she has stealthily moved into the shell of her new high-rise apartment while the building is still under construction. In art as in life, the settler ends up running rings around the authorities and getting what she wants.
There’s some debate whether the Mrs. Bronson story is based on the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which caused furious debates during the 1950s and ended up destroying whole neighborhoods (many say it destroyed the Bronx) and dislocated some 60,000 people, perhaps half of them Jews (oddly enough, about equal to the number of Jews who would be forced to move from the West Bank in the event of a final-status peace agreement) — or, alternatively, whether it’s based on the building of Coop City. Given the timing and emotions, I lean toward the former interpretation.
Here’s the final episode, “Occupancy.” It runs through four separate clips, total 22 minutes. You owe it to yourself to watch. Besides being a laugh riot and a zany fun-house mirror on today’s news, it’s a wonderful bit of American Jewish culture. Watch for the scene where she has half the hierarchy of New York City sitting around her kitchen table eating honey cake and singing “Afn Pripetshek.”
Occupancy, Part 1:
Continue to Parts 2, 3 and 4:
A new Israeli social media meme caught my eye yesterday. Although it was in Hebrew, I felt as though I had seen a version of it in English at some point. It reminded me of the “Unimpressed Native American” meme. You, too, may have come across this meme in your Facebook feed recently. It’s the close up black and white photo of an elderly Native American man in traditional dress. Superimposed on it are cynical and ironic messages like, “The banks take away your home and land from you? That must be tough.”
Instead of a Native American, the Israeli meme has an elderly keffiyeh-wearing Palestinian man staring at the camera saying the same kind of things, only in the Israeli context. It became apparent once I did some digging, that the similarities are not coincidental. “It was the result of an idea by Eli Levin to create an Israeli version for the ‘Unimpressed Native American’ meme,” Shahar Even-Dar Mandel wrote me in an email from Tel Aviv. “After some brainstorming in a ‘secret’ Facebook group, named Oumipo, that included other Israeli meme creators Amir and Shlomit Mahlab Schiby, Itamar Sha’altiel, Ido Kenan and Avgad Yavor, as well as Eli and myself, the concept and the particular photo to be used were chosen,” the 40-year-old physicist explained.
The “Cynical Palestinian” says things like:
I got a chance to go to the Peter Beinart-Daniel Gordis debate last night at Columbia (you can still watch it here) and walked away with a few impressions I thought I’d share.
It’s much harder to be mean to someone to their face. The tone of the Beinart book reviews have been strangely personal. I don’t know if it’s something about Beinart himself that is inspiring this kind of out-of-proportion animus, but it has many otherwise levelheaded analysts turning to a kind of sniping that distracts from the content of the book. That was not the case last night. Gordis, who wrote one of the harshest takedowns, going so far as to wonder why Beinart “hates” Israel so, was respectful and gracious, saying that that though the book made him “sad” that he absolutely thought Beinart had a right to say what he was saying. Beinart was friendly as well, at one point offering Gordis the compliment that — with the exception of his positions on the conflict — he’s the kind of man Beinart would want to have as a rabbi.
I found all this very hopeful.
Not that much divides them. It become quickly clear that there is a very thin line dividing Beinart and Gordis. They are both in agreement about how corrosive the settlement enterprise is and the need to halt any expansion. They both worry about threats to Israel’s democratic nature. And they both believe, as Beinart put it, that the Jewish state “should not be a secular democracy like the United States. Israel is a mix of the tribal and the universal.” What separates them is the question of who should bear the onus of making the first move toward upending the current dismal status quo. Beinart thinks pressure should be applied on Israel to end, at the very least, the settlement project, if not the military presence in the West Bank. Gordis thinks this is not the right place for pressure. It should be applied instead to the Palestinians who, he insists, have not shown their willingness to accept a Jewish state. Until they do, said Gordis, Israel shouldn’t touch the existing settlements because it might appear like a concession.
This seems like more of a tactical difference. Not a small one, but still a tactical difference.
What separates them ultimately is a question of appearances. Gordis doesn’t think America Jews should give the impression that they or anyone else is “turning the screws” on Israel, as he put it, because it would provide aid and comfort to the Palestinians, prolonging their refusal to accept peace. Beinart thinks that making it clear to Israel in the most dramatic way possible (i.e. a mostly symbolic boycott) that it is losing its soul is the only way to stop a slide toward an apartheid state.
Remember this guy? The one who stood in front of Occupy Wall Street protests with the sign “Google: Zionists Control Wall St.”?
Well, he’s back, and he may have moved on from anti-Semitic canards to pop culture. Now he wants us to Google: “Lady Gaga Demonic.”
You read that right. Your guess is as good as mine.
The placard-bearer, who identified himself as Dave Smith in an October interview with Salon, was no joke last fall. His “Zionists Control Wall St.” sign was a key exhibit in the argument that the Occupy movement was rife with anti-Semitism. He was featured in at least half of the clips of purported anti-Semites at Occupy Wall Street in a video produced by the Emergency Committee for Israel that slammed key Democrats for professing their support for Occupy activists. Pictures of him turned up everywhere, and his sign was the subject of news coverage.
Occupy activists took to standing next to Smith with signs disavowing his message, and on at least one occasion in September actually chased him out of their protest.
On the fringes of the Occupy movement’s May 1 rally in Manhattan’s Union Square, a group of older Jewish activists gathered under the yellow banner of a leftist Jewish summer camp and prepared to march.
“We have to be here,” said Judee Rosenbaum, longtime staffer of the unremittingly progressive Camp Kinderland. “It’s what we do. It’s what we are for. It’s what we support.”
Rosenbaum, whose days as a Kinderland camper are 64 years behind her, was one of a handful of Kinderlanders who had come out for what activists hope will be the reawakening of the anti-corporate Occupy movement, which has been largely dormant since protesters camping in a park in downtown Manhattan were evicted in November.
Occupy activists had called for a “general strike” on May 1, culminating in the afternoon rally at Union Square and a subsequent march to Wall Street. Thousands turned out to the rally and march, though claims made in the days before the event that the protests would effectively shut down the city proved to be vastly overblown.
Founded in 1923 by Jewish Communists, Kinderland is perhaps unique in the degree to which it has maintained its activist traditions. Its theme this summer? “Occupy.”
Asked why she had come to the protest, current Kinderland camper Bonnie, 11, answered: “My mom.” Bonnie’s mother, Catherine Fitz, explained: “I think this is an important moment…I don’t think I would forgive myself if I let my kid miss it.”
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