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Saturday, June 12

He's Dead, Jim: DeForest Kelley, Dr. Leonard McCoy on 'Star Trek'; at 79 (AP)

See also: brief obit with stills (CBCNews) and the official Star Trek obit and bio

Hikind's empire: COJO Official Gets 2 Years (JWeek)

"A senior official of what was Brooklyn’s largest Jewish community council was sentenced to two years in jail and fined $25,000 last week for misappropriating more than $300,000 in government funds."

Yudel's Line: What's with Orthodox Jews and their frauds? As the grandson of an economist and the son of a business school professor, I'm inclined to go with the economic analysis: The black-hat Orthodox world, with its antipathy toward secular education, demand for years of economically non-productive Talmud study, and large families, is playing a Ponzi game with history. It may be cute for your ten kids to be in kollel; but like tribbles, all geometric progressions lose their cuteness rather quickly.

That said, maybe the fraud is a question of perception. Here are the possibilities:

• Orthodox Jews live up to their ideals and commit less fraud, but are singled out (for publicity and, possibly, prosecution) because of their implicit claim to possess God's truth.
• Orthodox Jews are the same as you and me when it comes to rate of committing fraud, but are singled out (see above).
• Orthodox Jews commit more fraud, because in their belief system it is their study of Torah that maintains the world, and therefore anything they do is justified by the greater good of pikuach nefesh, saving lives. In other words, Eternal Law trumps temporal law.

What do you think?

Friday, June 11

Torah funds? 'Haredi Robin Hood' denies fraud charges (Ha'aretz)

"Yosef Proshinovsky denies charges that he set up dummy companies in order to defraud banks in Israel and abroad of tens of millions of dollars from 1990 to 1998.

He is suspected of distributing this money to various ultra-Orthodox communities and individuals, earning the nickname of the "Haredi Robin Hood."

Swimming Across Picket Lines: Three more drown over the weekend (Ha'aretz)

"The incidents brought the number of drowning deaths since the start of the strike last month to 9, with some 20 others injured."

Secrets Messages (1): Scientists Code Words into DNA (Wired News)

"Researchers at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York have combined DNA technology with encryption."

Secrets Messages (2): Torvalds: Preserve the 'F Word' (Wired News)

"This particular vulgarity surfaces in notes and comments left by programmers to explain a certain function."

Coalition Balks: Haredim said balking at draft deal (Ha'aretz)

"UTJ representatives claim they want a bill on the issue passed, but demand that it entirely mirror the current situation, in which every Haredi man declaring that he wishes to study in a yeshiva automatically receives a deferral from military service."

Thursday, June 10

Political Science? Talking Politics with Nostradamus

A conversation with my friend Nos about the Israeli election quickly turned into a discussion about a new model of political ideology. Instead of the usual left-right line, we came up with a cube with three axes:

• An economic axis that runs from socialism to laissez faire.
• A [name?] axis that runs from nationalism to laissez faire.
• And a religious axis that runs from fundamentalism to laissez faire. .

As it happens, Nos beat me to the keyboard, so you get to read his account of the theory.

Annals of Pop Culture (1): Hey, hey, they're the monkeys (San Francisco Examiner)

"There is a weird kind of beauty and a right kind of justice in the fact that a show called "The Chimp Channel" debuts at the end of the TV season. In a surreal way, watching chimpanzees and orangutans in costume, spoofing such show biz as "The Larry Sanders Show," just makes sense."

Annals of Pop Culture (2) Radio Disney's Listeners Aren't Small Fry to Pop Acts--They're Giants (LATimes)

"Radio Disney, the network launched by Disney owner ABC about two years ago to target preteens, has found itself on the leading edge of the pop wave that crested last week with the record-breaking first-week sales of the Backstreet Boys' "Millennium" album"

Playing the protest card Iranian spy charges 'due to internal struggles' (Ha'aretz)

"The assessment in Israel is that Khamenei's men, of the conservative branch of the Iranian regime, are using the affair to embarrass the comparatively moderate President Mohammed Khatami. According to the sources, harming the Jews of Iran will tarnish Khatami's image in the eyes of the United States and Europe, and thereby undermine his efforts to tighten Iran's ties with the West."

Sending the protest cards: The Iranian 13 (JCN)

Meanwhile, in Moscow: Russian Immigration To Israel Up Sharply In 1999 (Reuters)

"The Jewish Agency said 7,933 Russian Jews had immigrated to Israel in the first quarter of 1999, a 116 percent increase on the same period a year earlier."

Wednesday, June 9

Two Views on Jew in News:

Washington Post: Ex-Mob Lawyer Is Elected Mayor of Las Vegas

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Former synagogue president is elected mayor of Las Vegas

Leave it to the "global news agency of the Jewish people" to inform us that the mayor-elect of Las Vegas not only represented "the legendary Meyer Lansky, Philadelphia's Phil Leonetti, Chicago's Tony ``The Ant" Spilotro, Boston's J.R. Russo and John Gotti-adviser Natale Richichi," but also "has visited Israel four times, and accompanied each of his three sons as they celebrated their Bar Mitzvahs at the Western Wall."

Reform 1999: J.J. Goldberg: Eric Yoffie responds to Reform's reforms.

Yoffie, head of the Reform congregational arm, agrees with the goal of increasing religious observance and commitment -- but fears that the formal platform debate will spark a backlash.

"My view was, the best way to do it is to do it," Yoffie says. "Perform the acts and build the theology around it. The rabbinate took a different approach."

Flashback 1988:Reform Judaism moving toward tradition (Long Island Jewish World)

" Welcome to the new Reform Judaism, committed to reclaiming Jewish tradition--but on its own, defiantly unorthodox, terms.

This decade, a return to traditional forms of worship, holiday observance and study has been quietly underway in Reform synagogues, schools and homes, even as the movement's radical decisions on patrilineal descent and soliciting converts were being loudly debated by the broader Jewish community."

Yudel's Line: I wrote this piece more than a decade ago. The new Statement of Principles echoes 1987's Call to Commitment. To many Reform Jews, this isn't news. Then again, the controversy over the principles brought stories in the New York Times, Salon, and almost everywhere else. While Eric Yoffie has a point that the way to increase observance is in the synagogue, not the rabbinical convention, the way to increase Jewish awareness is through the New York Times, not the Long Island Jewish World.

Sunday, June 6

What Ever Became of Ehud? One Israel finding it hard to please all in coalition talks (Ha'aretz)

"The policy guidelines at this point are taking an open and sharp turn in the direction of the National Religious Party and the settlers, and we cannot agree with this," said MK Ran Cohen, the head of Meretz' coalition negotiations team.

Where No Men Had Gone Before: 1492: The Prequel (NYTimes Magazine)

"Decades before Columbus, Zheng He sailed from China with 300 ships and 28,000 men. His fleet got as far as Africa and could have easily reached America, but the Chinese turned back. What happened?"

This is an amazing article about the biggest fleet assembled before World War I, about the coming and passing of a historical moment where one could imagine the whole world speaking Chinese.

"...one can argue that it was the virtuous, incorruptible Confucian scholars who in the mid-15th century set China on its disastrous course."

God Knows: Columbine Students Seek Answers in Their Faith (NYTimes)

"God gathered up his army of angels and protected as many people as he could," said Sara Martin, a graduating senior who belonged to the youth group at West Bowles Community Church, part of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, where Cassie Bernall was a member. "The whole school was meant to blow up. Good always overpowers evil."

Run for Your Life!Sir George Martin gets back 6 of 7 stolen scores (JPost)

"In an incident that Israel Festival organizers would soon like to forget, famed Beatle's producer Sir George Martin had seven original scores stolen during his first concert at the Jerusalem International Convention Center. The original orchestrations were the only copies Martin brought with him, and their absence put his second performance of the festival in jeopardy."

The Cost of Politics? What did Democrats sacrifice to win gun control? (Slate)

"The Republicans got a Draconian juvenile justice bill liberals had been determined -- until last month -- to defeat. Pprovisions include creating a new death penalty for animal-rights activists and eco-terrorists who kill....establishing mandatory minimums for young criminals."

Also in the bill was a provision to repeal a law requiring states to investigate racial disparities in their penal systems, such as those cited in the following paragraph:

"According to statistics from the Department of Justice, black kids between the ages of 10 and 17 constitute 15 percent of the U.S. population, 26 percent of juvenile arrests, 32 percent of the referrals to juvenile court, 41 percent of those kids detained in delinquency cases, 46 percent of the juveniles secured in correctional facilities and 52 percent of the juveniles transferred to adult criminal courts. Minority kids on the whole constitute 68 percent of the kids in juvenile detention facilities -- a percentage that far exceeds that of minority kids at the beginning of the process, when they're first arrested."

God Squad Strikes Back: An organization devoted to assisting ultra-Orthodox who decide to "cross over" to secular society discovered on Wednesday that the telephones in its Jerusalem office were tapped. (Ha'aretz)

"Jerusalem police are investigating whether the sophisticated wiretapping device was planted by an extreme ultra-Orthodox group that seeks to intercept those considering "defection" from Haredi society, or if it was the work of members of the so-called "modesty patrol," based in Bnei Brak."

Closing the Border: No go, say Bat Yam Haredim to secular women (Ha'aretz)

"The Association for Civil Rights in Israel demanded yesterday that Bat Yam mayor Yehoshua Sagi take immediate action to remove a gate that ultra-Orthodox residents closed to prevent secular residents from passing through their neighborhood. The Haredim claim that their sensitivities are hurt by the use of the passage by immodestly dressed secular women."

Black-Hat Flack Attacked: Who has the keys to the kingdom? (Naomi Ragen, JPost)

"Years ago, straight out of a haredi women's seminary in Borough Park, Brooklyn, I used to think that only those who wore the right outfits, and had the proper wigs and beards, had the keys to the kingdom of heaven. And why not? That's basically what we were taught.

That, and that all the other kinds of Jews out there were mistaken, misguided, even dangerous. Not to mention the non-Jews.

Now I read the very polite, seemingly reasonable column of a haredi apologist and the dark head of prejudice and narrow-mindedness pokes through the educated prose, revealing that heart of darkness I put behind me so many years ago.

(Cf. THE HAREDI VIEW: It ain't easy being 'black' (JPost) for Jonathan Rosenblum's offensive apologetics)

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