And there are so many places to look, I barely know where to tell you to go.

This one is on the New York Times being awarded the Self-Hating Jew Lifetime Achievement Award, and you have to see the award to believe it. Funny and disgusting at the same time.

Jews of the Caribbean—but not pirates.

Why Apartheid doesn’t fit the Israel model.

Funny. Very funny.

CAIR makes more incursions into the Democratic party.

Okay. I will link again to Yid With Lid, especially because I like the title of that post, but then I’m going to link to my rant about reverse type. Substitute crappy color schemes and you get my drift. That’s me, still working to save the eyes of the middle-aged blogosphere.

Benjamin Kerstein has no sympathy for poor, oppressed billionaires. Shame on you, Ben!

Don’t buy Whole Foods or Peet’s Coffee. JoshuaPundit tells you why. (Hint: Terror-supporting compinkosymps.)

I was going to write about thousands of Arabs surrounding a few dozen Jews on Independence Day. Now I don’t have to.

YouTube shuts down a pro-Israel videoblogger. Color me unsurprised.

All right. Now those links are ALL from this edition of Haveil Havalim. Go look at the rest of the links, and click on them. That’s what they’re there for.

Do I have to do everything for you?

Long-time readers will doubtless remember that this is the time of year that I am driven absolutely crazy by my Daled class students. Spring hits Richmond very early each year, but we have class through the end of May. By this time of year, I have gotten nearly through our curriculum, my students have finished or nearly finished their mastery skills, and the sun is bright and warm and there are bugs and birds and trees and flowers to distract my nine- and ten-year-olds.

In short, this time of year is really tough if you’re a Hebrew school teacher trying to impart knowledge into young, impressionable minds. It’s an uphill battle when it isn’t gorgeous out. Add springtime to the mix, and if my students get out of class having learned only one piece of new information, I consider it a victory.

Which is why I try to do things outside the curriculum in late spring. This is the time of year that I scour the internet for something that I can bring in that will keep my students’ interest and yet still teach them about being Jews. Today, I brought in my laptop to take advantage of the synagogue office WiFi. I showed my class the Miri Ben-Ari video that’s been making the rounds. I asked them to tell me if they recognized the music—it’s the Uzi Chitman version of Adon Olam that the rabbi taught them this year (my favorite!). I also asked them to watch the video and tell me what it was about. They caught on to both immediately. Of course, then I had to explain interpretetive dance to them. (”Weird” and “silly” were the words most used most frequently to describe the dance.) And then I had to tell them no, the dancers were not naked, those were flesh-colored bodysuits.

Some of the students were watching more Miri Ben-Ari videos while I worked on a mastery skill with the others. One told me that a box had popped up and was saying something. Turns out that Rahel was IM’ing me. I told her I was in class and asked her to connect her microphone, and then “called” her with Google Talk. I asked her to please tell my students where she was calling from. When they heard “Jerusalem, Israel,” they were awestruck. So, since we had Rahel on Google Talk, and we had just finished listening to my class’ favorite version of Adon Olam, we proceeded to have a sing-along with Rahel. My students sang the first verse, then I asked Rahel if she would sing a verse. The kids got even more awestruck, because if you haven’t heard Rahel sing, you are missing out on something wonderful.

We finished the song, and thanked Rahel, said goobye and went on with our lessons.

It was a wonderful, wonderful lesson. My students all loved it, and even the madrich was impressed. Best of all, I had my camera today. So Rahel, here they are, singing along with you, 6,000 miles away.

Oh, and the kids all think you have a shot as a professional singer and should pursue that. (Yes, after they said that, I reminded them that I’d already brought in your CD for them.)

I really have to figure out a way to get Rahel to my Bat Mitzvah in November. I do believe there will be a fundraiser for her airfare before long.

I have borrowed this headline from a remarkable (aren’t they all?) article by Ami Isseroff. In the article Ami states and proves the main point: that in many, if not all, cases the boycott initiative has a hidden goal - cheap advertisement, and in most situations this goal is reached.

Vote to spend more money on hospital missions in Africa and you might merit a back page notice in the religion section of a newspaper. Vote to ask for better pension plans for your members and your union might get a notice in a trade newspaper. Vote to boycott Israel and you are instantly an international celebrity. You and your union are front page news.

There is more proof there in the article, and it is an excellent reading anyway, so do yourself a favor. Without going into psychology (or psychiatry) of the various initiators of all these boycotts, which is a separate issue and clearly a subject for the experts, I would say that my personal attitude to these cases was more or less the same. I have even tried, in my own humble way, to coin a term “doing a Gibson” for cases and people like these boycotters.

However lately I have started to feel that we dismiss the boycott flare-ups too easily. Indeed, in most cases a boycott is a result of a micro-putsch organized in the best tradition of the genre. In most cases the result does not reflect the opinion of majority of the members in whose name the voting was undertaken, and in majority of the cases the practical side of the matter is close to nil.

The final push that changed my opinion was a remark made by Jon Ihle, quoted below:

Don’t be fooled, Snoopy. These guys are playing a long game and they are making incremental progress on the boycott front, which serves to normalise and institutionalise a characterisation of Israel as uniquely disgraceful.

I think that Jon hit the bull’s eye here. It is not an individual boycott as such that matters, it is the whole picture of slow, gradual erosion of public opinion, having its ultimate goal to delegitimize everything Israel stands for. And we should be wary of the whole business, even if it is being carried out by small groups of Israel-haters, even if they are more shrill and hysterical than significant.

And now I can easily agree with the closing paragraph of Ami’s post:

Pro-active vigilance can stop the boycotters however. It has nipped a few of them in the bud, before they got started. It is only necessary in most cases to be attentive, to note the published agenda of board meetings and to marshal the forces needed to quash the initiatives before it is too late.

That too…

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.