Jonathan Mark misplays the Father Coughlin card

by Reb Yudel

Over at the blog of the Jewish Week, Jonathan Mark recently asked, "When Father Charles Coughlin, the most incendiary anti-Semitic preacher of the 1930s, supported Huey Long, do you think Jewish Democrats rolled over and charged that there some unpleasant preachers supporting Alf Landon, too, or do you think Jews in the 1930s had more dignity than that?"

Actually, it turns out that Jews indeed had more dignity back then: Rabbi Walter Peiser of Baton Rouge, according to the Institute of Southern Jewish Life, "refused to say an invocation to the state legislature in 1929 in protest of Governor Huey Long’s political corruption. Peiser explained to Time Magazine that his prayers would have been 'coarsened and cheapened…by a Chief Executive…unworthy of high office.'"

Know of any rabbis who declined an invitation to the White House lately?

My 10 minutes of googling around the internets didn't find much more of a Jewish response to Long, other than Wikipedia entries on the individuals Seymour Weiss, a close Long confidante, and Dr. Carl Weiss, Long's apparent assassin.

News roundup

by Reb Yudel

I should be working, but haven't yet licked my blog addiction. News of note:

• Aish HaTorah angle to today's story of twenty-something arms dealer? (Talking Points Memo)

• You know how we keep hearing that Iran's drive for nuclear power must mean it wants to build nuclear bombs? Apparently, the U.S. is working with Iranian neighbor Bahrain to support a civilian nuclear program. Double speak or US-support proliferation race? (AbuAardvark)

• Satmar funding pro-Yiddish, anti-Ben Yehuda propaganda in Israel (Ha'aretz)
  
• Nancy Sinkoff reminds us that sometimes a Mussar sefer is just Benjamin Franklin translated into Hebrew. (the Seforim blog)

• Yesterday marked the 33rd anniversary of America's first gay marriage.

• Return of Jewish terror? 15-year-old loses leg to explosive-filled Purim gift, apparently because of his family's Messianic Jewish beliefs. (Ynet)
  
• Will Bush attack Iran before November? Chris Floyd reads the tea leaves and says yes. Arthur Silber, who has been calling for mobilization against war with Iran for over a year, asks whether our silence is Enabling Evil? (Remember: If the bombs start falling on Iran, you can't say that the American Jewish community hadn't been working for that goal for years).
  
• Saudis to retrain 40,000 clerics to encourage moderation and tolerance. Yeshiva University's Richard Joel might want to try a similar program. (BBC)
  

Finally, from earlier this month: How Bush's delusional incompetence brought Hamas to power in Gaza (Vanity Fair)

Jewish Week: Leading Rabbi Apologizes For Shocking Statement

by Reb Yudel

Wasn't Samantha Powers fired for less?

The Jewish Week reports:

Rabbi Hershel Schachter, Rosh Yeshiva of Yeshiva University's rabbinical school, issued an apology today for a statement he made that appeared to advocate shooting the Prime Minister of Israel should the government "give away Jerusalem."

The statement, part of a 39-second clip posted on YouTube this week, is from a discussion the rabbi had in Israel with American students learning at Yeshivat HaKotel in Jerusalem. It is not known when the statement was made.

In what appears to be a response to a question about serving in the Israeli army, the rabbi, a leading decisor in the Orthodox community, says: "First you have to know what the army is going to do. If the army is going to destroy Gush Katif, there's no mitzvah to destroy Eretz Yisrael.

"If the army is going to give away Yerushalyim [Jerusalem], then I would tell everyone to resign from the army - I'd tell them to shoot the Rosh Hamemshalah [Prime Minister]," which prompted laughter from his audience.

"No one should go to the army if they [the army] are doing aveirus [sins," the rabbi continued. "We're talking if the army is seeing to it that the country is secure, if they're doing the right thing.

"I'm not sure if the army is doing the right thing," he added, "we have to look into that."

Rabbi Schachter, much revered by his many students and highly respected throughout the community as a Talmudic scholar, has been known to make blunt, politically incorrect statements in the past. In 2004, his remarks seemed to compare women to animals in expounding on the issue of reading from a ketubah at a marriage ceremony. He said the marriage would be valid "even if a parrot or a monkey would read the ketubah."

Prior to that incident, the rabbi described Jews as superior to other people, noting that "Jews and non-Jews "have different genes, DNA and instincts." His defenders say he is naïve, not mean-spirited, in part because he has little dealing with the community at large, cloistered within the study halls of Yeshiva. They say he speaks casually in class, unaware of the larger ramifications of his remarks.

Critics agree, but note that such a person, despite his brilliance, should not be in such a position of prominence.

For example, Rabbi Schachter was just named as one of two American rabbis to oversee the conversion process for the Rabbinical Council of America in its agreement with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

In a statement issued today, Rabbi Schachter said: "Statements I made informally have been publicly excerpted this week. I deeply regret such statements and apologize for them. They were uttered spontaneously, off the cuff, and were not meant seriously. And, they do not, God forbid, represent my views. Jewish law demands respect for representatives of the Jewish government and the state of Israel."

Richard Joel, president of Yeshiva University, said: "Rav Schacter has apologized for his off the cuff statements that certainly do not represent his views. Let me make it clear that Yeshiva University repudiates any such statements or any such sentiments."

Friends of Dorothy Epstein in the New York Times

by Reb Yudel

Activist Dorothy Epstein led a high-power life -- so it's no surprise that two people close to her appeared in The New York Times earlier this month.

Henry Foner, who edited her memoir A Song of Social Significance (Ben Yehuda Press, 2007) was in the hospital for hip replacement surgery. This is the story he told the Metropolitan Diary:

Dear Diary:

The morning after I underwent hip replacement surgery at Lenox Hill Hospital, I was visited in my room by the surgeon. I expected the routine inquiry about my condition and almost fell out of my bed when he asked me, as though he were talking to my body, ''Which side are you on?''

Since this is the title of one of the great songs in our country's labor history (''My daddy was a miner, and I'm a miner's son.''), I recovered my senses long enough to point to my left side.

Meanwhile, Marilyn Gelber -- companion of Dorothy's son Robert -- showed up in a Jan. 22 article on the petty vindictiveness of Rudy Guliani:

“There were constant loyalty tests: ‘Will you shoot your brother?’ ” said Marilyn Gelber, who served as environmental commissioner under Mr. Giuliani. “People were marked for destruction for disloyal jokes.”

(Gelber was fired by Guliani, apparently for attacting too much personal publicity for her landmark work in negotiating a landmark agreement with upstate governments to preserve the watershed that drains into New York City's water supply.)

A week later she appeared in a happier report: The story of how a kid from the projects of Brooklyn made it to an upstate, small-town college -- thanks to the foundation that Gelber directs.

Dorothy Epstein, who never relaxed her gratitude for the free public education she received at Hunter College during the Great Depression, would be very proud.

A drug & alcohol policy that can save lives

by Reb Yudel

Writing in The American Interest, Mark Kleinman offers suggestions on how to treat intoxicants to minimze harm:

Deny alcohol to problem drinkers. When someone gets caught drinking and driving, we take away his license: his driving license, that is. The “license” to drink—legal permission to buy and consume alcohol in unlimited quantities—is presumed to be irrevocable. But why? We know that someone who drinks and drives is a bad citizen when drunk, but not that he is a bad driver when sober.

If someone is convicted of drunken driving, or drunken assault, or drunken vandalism, or repeatedly of drunk and disorderly conduct—if, that is, someone demonstrates that he is either a menace or a major public nuisance when drunk—then why not revoke his (or, much more rarely, her) drinking license?

Of course, in a country whose citizens believe that the Creator of the Universe will send them to Gulag Everlasting for imbibing alcohol or even caffeine, we're more likely to see President Huckabee declare a War on Cola to assuage the Utah electorate than anything like common-sense.

Stupid Jews Watch: How Jeff Zucker destroyed TV news

by Reb Yudel

Former NPR and Dateline reporter John Hockenberry offers a post-mortem on network television news (MIT Technology Review):

I can say with confidence that Murrow would be outraged not so much by the networks' greed (Murrow was one of the first news personalities to hire a talent agent) as by the missed opportunity to use technology to help create a nation of engaged citizens bent on preserving their freedom and their connections to the broader world.

Torah-True party snack or stomach-churning plague?

by Reb Yudel

Aaron Freeman moves from comic Torah to parsha performance art in his latest video.

Note: Sensitive souls should consult with rabbinic guidance before replicating this stunt at home. (crossposted to JewSchool

Bayme's Newest Big Blowhardery

by Reb Yudel

Baymes piece purports to help Jewish schools through the defeat of a strawman.

He neglects the fact that 80 area students and their parents wanted to go to a Jewish high school -- but couldn't get the chance.

It had nothing to do with some abstraict fear of Jewish high schools.

It had everything to do with people running those schools - who had no idea of they were doing.

And this "lay leadership" included ______, X of the United Synagogue, and ____ of JTS.

My daughter's school closed down two weeks before it should have started because of Jewish professionals who meant well, but acted incompetently.

Stop using nameless "they"s as scapegoats of all your problems. Maybe the problems are the way you're going about your business. How hard would it be to have a real investigation, a questioning of what sort of service board members provided by their presence on the board? If they could damage one school badly, I wonder what other damage they're wreaking in Jewish communal life?

We're still following orders!

by Reb Yudel

Stanley Milgram's (in)famous conformity experiment which is usually always described as being 'too unethical to perform today' has been replicated., this time ensuring that no unethical stress was put on the subjects.

The good news came from the experimenter:

Although each of these safeguards came with a methodological price (e.g., the potential effect of screening out certain individuals, the effect of emphasizing that participants could leave at any time), I wanted to take every reasonable measure to ensure that our participants were treated in a humane and ethical manner.

The bad news was the results:

The study found that levels of obedience were about the same now, as they were in the early 1960s when the original experiment was first run.

Remind me again why Holocaust education matters?

Why I hate America

by Reb Yudel

Glenn Greenwald nails what's wrong with the America today:

And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences. While exempting themselves, these same figures impose increasingly Draconian "law and order" solutions on the masses to ensure that even small infractions of the law prompt vigorous prosecution and inflexible, lengthy prison terms.

As Matt Stoller recently noted in an excellent post on the bipartisan orthodoxies that are untouchable in political debates, "there are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done" (buying and consuming illegal drugs) and "2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world." It's almost impossible for the non-rich to defend themselves effectively against government accusations of criminality, and judges have increasingly less sentencing discretion to avoid imposing harsh jail terms. Punishment for crimes is for the masses only, not for members in good standing of our political and corporate establishment.

Where our political elite break the law, our leading media stars and pundits fulfill their central purpose by dutifully arguing that establishment figures who have broken the law have done nothing wrong and deserve protection, even our gratitude, when they do so. In the view of our establishment, even mere civil liability -- never mind criminal punishment -- is deeply unfair when imposed on lawbreaking corporations, as we see in the "debate" over telecom immunity.

This same warped principle is also expressed in how our establishment scorns the work John Edwards did in representing maimed or dead individuals against the corporations which, through recklessness or negligence, destroyed their lives. From a letter from Theodore Frank of the American Enterprise Institute to the New York Times today (h/t Jay Diamond):

There is a critical distinction between Mitt Romney's and John Edwards's wealth. Mr. Romney, as a businessman, made investments that created wealth. Mr. Edwards, as a trial lawyer, made his money through lawsuits that merely took from one pocket and gave to another, and probably destroyed wealth in the process. (Mr. Edwards's multimillion-dollar medical malpractice verdicts almost certainly hurt the quality of health care in North Carolina.)

Little wonder that Mr. Romney understands that to improve the economy, one needs to expand the pie, while Mr. Edwards's policy proposals focus entirely on the redistribution of the existing pie without thought for the future adverse consequences to the size of the pie.

Anything that results in accountability for our largest corporations is inherently bad, even when they're found under our legal system to have broken the law or acted recklessly. Thus, John Edwards' self-made wealth is deeply dishonorable and shameful because it came at the expense of our largest corporations and on behalf of the poor and dirty masses, while Mitt Romeny's wealth, spawned by his CEO-father's connections, is to be honored and praised because it benefited our establishment and was on behalf of our glorious elite.

How the Writers Strike made me a better parent... alas!

by Reb Yudel

After decades of thinking about going to watch a TV show being taped, and six months after applying on the Daily Show web site, we were scheduled Wednesday to watch the Daily Show being taped. It was the same night as our kids' parent-teacher conferences, but really: What's more important? Hearing good news about our kids, or bad news about our political leaders?

So our course was clear.

But then along came the Writers Strike.

Really, though, the Writers Strike is about more than just good parenting. Watch this clip, in which the writers for the Daily Show explain it all in the manner we've come to expect from America's finest news source:

The Jewish Week likes our poet

by Reb Yudel

Everyone says that publishing poetry is bad business. But what could we do? We loved Isidore Century's poems!

So it's particularly gratifying that the Jewish Week seem to love him too. From their guide to fall books:

Open “From the Coffee House of Jewish Dreamers” (Ben Yehuda Press) in one direction, and you can read Isidore Century’s “Poems of Wonder and Wandering”; from the other, “Poems of the Weekly Torah Portions.” On one side of the cover, the author is drinking coffee with the Cyclone behind him; on the flip side, he’s got his coffee at the same table, with the Kotel behind.

Isidore Century is a wonderful poet. He writes of traveling to Coney Island; visiting Israel and returning there to the land of Yiddish in which he grew up; his father, who escaped from Poland and made his way illegally to the U.S., where he became an official in the Painter’s Union; and about his own reluctant and penetrating faith, “I keep running from a God/in whom I do not believe/hoping he catches me.”

His poems are brief stories: they’re funny, deeply observed, without pretension, written with a knowingness and rhythm of things old and new. Those related to Torah readings are poetic, original midrashim. He brings the figures of the Bible to Central Park, or places the poet in Egypt and service as Joseph’s valet and butler, adding his distinctive accent to the text.

Would you trade Agnon for Zimmerman and Zuckerman?

by Reb Yudel

A provocative list of winners of The Nobel Prize in Literature from an Alternative Universe omits S.Y. Agnon... but includes Bob Dylan and Philip Roth. Personally, I'd also miss Heinrich Hesse. Perl Buck: Not so much.

What do you think?

Bob Dylan Yom Kippur sighting, 2007

by Reb Yudel

An email I received today:

Since you have a web page on the subject, here’s a sighting if you’re interested -

Bob Dylan on Yom Kippur/Shabbat 5768 (Sep. 22 2007) in Atlanta, GA -

He had a show that night at an arena just outside of town and ours was the Chabad shul most convenient to his hotel.

He had the 5th Aliyah (he had asked for one) and left after Yizkor.

His Rabbi in California called my Rabbi the day before to make arrangements and was very specific.  He said, and I quote verbatim what I was told by one who was present during the call, that “he hates people” and wanted to be left utterly alone.  He didn't want anyone coming up to him and saying anything... not "Welcome," not "Shabbat Shalom," nothing.  Not even the Rabbi was to come up and say hello.  He wanted 3 reserved seats out of the way in the back for himself, his road manager and personal manager (though some say one was a bodyguard).

But he asked for the Aliyah nonetheless and wore a large black knit ski/pimp hat instead of a kippah.  There was no way the cat didn't stand out in the crowd.  When he had his Aliyah you could hear a pin drop, but he muttered so softly that only the guys on the bima could hear him.

Some details that only a Jewish Dylan fan would appreciate:

    •    He was seated in the midst of Israelis, none of whom had a clue who he was.

    •    Dylan’s Hebrew name as he gave it on the bima is Zushia ben
Avraham, not Shabtai Zisel.  Why the difference, I don’t know... either the latter has been wrong all these years or he changed it, but what he said was absolutely clear to everyone who heard him.

    •    When a Mi Sheberach was made after his Aliyah, he gave the names of four kids.  The Gabai asked, “Any other children?”  He said, “I have a lot of kids, just go ahead.”

I told my Rabbi, “If he ever comes on a different Shabbat or Yom Tov and you invite him for a meal without inviting me as well, you and I are through.”  He laughed and said, “I’m told he only comes to shul on Yom Kippur, so don’t hold your breath.”

My kid is a propaganda prop for the Cheney administration... but it could be worse!

by Reb Yudel

So Jews are answering Malcolm Hoenlein's charge and bussing kids (including my 11th grader) to protest the Iranian leader. This would be a bit more meaningful if Hoenlein et al weren't unrepentant enablers of Iran's de facto major Middle East ally, President Bush. Because while the death of 3,500 American soldiers and tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iraqis will soon fade away, Iran's success in filling the vacuum created by George Bush will endure for some time.

As Peter Galbraith observes:

George W. Bush had from the first facilitated the very event he
warned would be a disastrous consequence of a US withdrawal from Iraq:
the takeover of a large part of the country by an Iranian-backed
militia. And while the President contrasts the promise of democracy in
Iraq with the tyranny in Iran, there is now substantially more personal
freedom in Iran than in southern Iraq.


Iran's role in Iraq is pervasive, but also subtle. When Iraq drafted
its permanent constitution in 2005, the American ambassador
energetically engaged in all parts of the process. But behind the
scenes, the Iranian ambassador intervened to block provisions that
Tehran did not like. As it happened, both the Americans and the
Iranians wanted to strengthen Iraq's central government. While the Bush
administration clung to the mirage of a single Iraqi people, Tehran
worked to give its proxies, the pro-Iranian Iraqis it
supported—by then established as the government of Iraq—as
much power as possible. (Thanks to Kurdish obstinacy, neither the US
nor Iran succeeded in its goal, but even now both the US and Iran want
to see the central government strengthened.)


Since 2005, Iraq's Shiite-led government has concluded numerous
economic, political, and military agreements with Iran. The most
important would link the two countries' strategic oil reserves by
building a pipeline from southern Iraq to Iran, while another commits
Iran to providing extensive military assistance to the Iraqi
government. According to a senior official in Iraq's Oil Ministry,
smugglers divert at least 150,000 barrels of Iraq's daily oil exports
through Iran, a figure that approaches 10 percent of Iraq's production.
Iran has yet to provide the military support it promised to the Iraqi
army. With the US supplying 160,000 troops and hundreds of billions of
dollars to support a pro-Iranian Iraqi government, Iran has no reason
to invest its own resources.

You really should take the time to read the rest of this dispiriting piece.

Anyway, I don't think demonstrations do much good. But hats off to those who, however vainly, tried to protest this folly years ago.

How George Bush became the new Saddam: The view from Canada

by Reb Yudel

Patrick Graham reports from Iraq for the Canadian newsweekly Maclean's:

Arriving in Baghdad has always been a little weird. Under Saddam
Hussein it was like going into an orderly morgue; when he ran off after
the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003 put an end to his Baathist party
regime, the city became a chaotic mess. I lived in Iraq for almost two
years, but after three years away I wasn’t quite ready for just how
deserted and worn down the place seemed in the early evening. It was as
if some kind of mildew was slowly rotting away at the edges of things,
breaking down the city into urban compost.


Since 2003, more than 3,775 U.S. troops have been killed in Iraq, while
nearly 7,500 Iraqi policemen and soldiers have died. For Iraq’s
civilian population, the carnage has been almost incalculable. Last
year alone, the UN estimated that 34,500 civilians were killed and more
than 36,000 wounded; other estimates are much higher. As the country’s
ethnic divisions widen, especially between Iraq’s Arab Shia and Arab
Sunni Muslims (the Kurds are the third major group), some two million
people have been internally displaced, with another two million fleeing
their homeland altogether. Entering Baghdad I could tell the Sunni
neighbourhoods, ghettos really, by the blasts in the walls and the
emptiness, courtesy of sectarian cleansing by the majority Shias. The
side streets of the Shia districts seemed to have a little more life to
them.....

One of the terrifying aspects of the war is the monumental failure of
analysis and action on the part of America’s political, military,
journalistic and even business elites.

That problem may be systemic—the result of a “fact-based” America
confronting a society it did not understand and simply making up an
alternate reality, guns ablaze.

So far, the Republicans have done an
impressive job at failing in Iraq. Soon it may be the Democrats’ turn
to fail, albeit in a different way. It’s a shame because Iraqi
political parties are perfectly capable of doing that on their own.
Indeed, they seem to be going out of their way to compete with the
Americans on that score.

Read it all

Publishers Weekly: reviews Life in the Present Tense: "a treasure trove of wisdom"

by Reb Yudel

Publishers Weekly reviews Life in the Present Tense: Reflections on Family and Faith by Rifka Rosenwein

Before her life was cut short by cancer at age 42 in 2003, Modern
Orthodox writer and editor Rosenwein had been a beloved columnist for
seven years for the New York Jewish Week, reflecting once a
month on child-rearing, careers, love, holiness and Jewish tradition.


With equal parts humor and heartache leaping from the page in the
columns written after her cancer diagnosis, Rosenwein deals with aging
parents, challenging modern schedules, timeless holy days and the joys
of raising her three children. The columns address the quotidian
concerns of a suburban Jewish family as well as more global issues: the
fear and sadness after 9/11 and the sense of anxiety that some American
Jews have about Israel....

...this is a treasure trove of
wisdom from one of American Judaism's most beloved and lamented voices.
Rosenwein's husband, Barry Lichtenberg, provides a touching afterword,
and novelist Tova Mirvis (a former intern of hers) the foreword.

Senate voting against political speech: A betrayal of trust

by Reb Yudel

Half the Democrats joining the Republicans in condemning citizens for coming out against the war in a newspaper advertisement? Thanks for reminding me why I almost voted for Nader. Rather than helping the Democrats, I donated to MoveOn.org Political Action: Democracy in Action. Herewith the next MoveOn television ad:

Krauthammer & the NeoCon Mind

by Reb Yudel

Matthew Yglesias (September 08, 2007) - Looting Then And Now (Foreign Policy) reads Krauthammer today, and in 2003, and concludes:

Such is the war in Iraq as seen through neocon lenses. Mistakes are always in the past. The current policy is always working. When the mistakes are being made, those who point out the mistakes are tarred as near-treasonous. Then, after another year or two of pointless, futile bloodshed, it's conceded that mistakes were made in the past. But now we're right on track. And the liberals, once again, just don't get it

My Podhoretz Problem (and ours)

by Reb Yudel

Andy Sullivan links to what may be the key paragraphs in the New York Review of Books takedown of Podhoretz:

When Podhoretz grew up in Brooklyn, the common assumption was that Jews were rich and Negroes were persecuted. This was not how things looked to Podhoretz on the playground of his local public school, where poor Jewish boys like him were regularly being beaten up by Negroes: "There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first experience of cowardice." Negroes, he goes on, "made one feel inadequate. But most important of all, they were tough, beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything.... This is what I envied and feared in the Negro...." And then there were the effete snobs, "the writers and intellectuals and artists who romanticize the Negroes, and pander to them," and "all the white liberals who permit the Negroes to blackmail them into adopting a double standard of moral judgment...."

The key to Podhoretz's politics seems to me to lie right there: the longing for power, for toughness, for the Shtarker who doesn't give a damn about anyone or anything, and hatred of the contemptible, cowardly liberals with their pandering ways and their double standards. Since Podhoretz, himself a bookish man, can never be a Shtarker, his government must fill that role, and not give a damn about anyone or anything. And not only the US government, but Israel too.

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