Forgot to link this yesterday, so today it is linked.

The Obama campaign has long taken a tack suggesting that those who don’t support the senator may well be racist. I’ve noted how this has manifested itself in the Jewish community. Sometimes it’s the campaign’s media surrogates who take this tack, sometimes it’s just the usual political organizations.

A week and a half ago the Baltimore Jewish Times looked at the views of Baltimore’s Orthodox community towards Senator Obama and there were two names missing from the article: Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Sen. Joseph Lieberman. What wasn’t missing was the typical “only the ignorant or racist wouldn’t support Sen. Obama comment, delivered by my “representative” State Delegate Sandy Rosenberg.

Mr. Rosenberg stirs his lemonade and chooses his words. He’s heard the bad buzz, too. It sounds like a “typical Republican smear campaign,” he says, carefully crafted to pick up on Jewish fears.

“If they could make John Kerry look like a draft dodger instead of the war hero he was,” Mr. Rosenberg says of the 2004 “Swift Boat” campaign, “imagine what they can do to Obama,” the first black presidential candidate whose middle name is Hussein, to boot.

Well no, the criticisms of Sen. Kerry did not make him look like a draft dodger. They asked whether he betrayed his comrades in arms after he returned stateside. But that’s perhaps too subtle a point.

And what about substantive criticism of Sen. Obama, here’s how the article deals with two:

A woman calls the BALTIMORE JEWISH TIMES to report that a local radio talk show host said there is a mention on Mr. Obama’s official Web site of “Jews and oven,” an obvious allusion to the Holocaust. [We didn't find any.]

A member of the Orthodox community assures this reporter that one of Mr. Obama’s closest advisers publicly said the hindrance to peace in the Mideast lies in New York and Miami, both cities with large Jewish populations.

As far as the first incident, this did indeed happen. Bill Levinson of Israpundit recorded a screenshot of the offending blog. The reason the reporter couldn’t find it is because the Barack Obama website took it down, but it was up.

Sen. Obama’s website allowed users to set up their own blogs on the campaign’s website. And in quite a few instances, those setting up blogs expressed vile antisemitic sentiments.When it became of these blogs, the campaign correctly deleted them quickly. But it still raises the question of why so many people who feel this way, feel that Sen. Obama is the preferred choice for president.

And the adviser who blamed the lack of peace in the Middle East on Jewish voters has a name.

Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, seemed to identify Jewish voters when asked to name the biggest obstacles to Middle East peace. “New York City. Miami. We have a large vote…here in favor of Israel. And no politician wants to run against it,” McPeak said.

But it’s not just McPeak who was problematic among Sen. Obama’s advisers. He was advised by Robert Malley the only member of the American team at Camp David in 2000 who didn’t blame the failure of the talks on Yasser Arafat. And Zbigniew Brzezinski endorsed the opinion of Walt and Mearsheimer.

And let’s not forget that Sen. Obama said himself that he opposed the Likud. If elections are held in Israel, it might very well be that a President Obama will have to deal with PM Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud. And we know that Obama will go into such a relationship with a negative perception.

(I’d also point out that J-Street, a supposedly “pro-Israel, pro-peace” lobbying group is funded by one Alan Solomont, who is also one of Sen. Obama’s financial supporters. J-Street believes that peace will only come when America pressures Israel to make concessions. I’d have to think that Mr. Solomont sees Sen. Obama as the candidate most likely to support this agenda.)

So instead of answering these concerns, those supporting Obama cite the “Barack is a Muslim” e-mails. (These most likely came from his opponents at the time: other Democrats.) I am informed. And my information tells me that Sen. Obama will not be as supportive of Israel as I would like. Israel is an important issue for me, though it isn’t the only one. I can’t think of any major issue where I prefer Sen. Obama’s approach to Sen McCain.

And let’s get to those two glaring omissions. Rev. Wright, who preached anti-White bigotry and antisemitism from the pulpit is an issue that ought not to go away. Rev. Wright didn’t take over a church that Sen. Obama attended. Sen. Obama sought out Rev. Wright as a way of bolstering his radical credentials. That’s not a smear. It’s a praise, written in a glowing profile of the senator appearing last year in Rolling Stone magazine.

And why is Sen. Lieberman’s ties to Sen. McCain not mentioned in the article. I don’t agree with Sen. Lieberman on domestic issues, but in foreign policy I mostly agree with him. Furthermore in a campaign supposedly about the new politics, Sen. Lieberman is Exhibit A of Sen. McCain’s cross-aisle appeal. It stands in stark contrast the partisanship displayed by Sen. Obama during his short senate tenure.

The most honest assessment from a Democratic official in the article came from former State Senator Paula Hollinger:

To Paula Hollinger, the current rhetoric in the Jewish community has a familiar ring. Mrs. Hollinger, the former veteran state senator from the 11th District, says the Orthodox register Democrat in order to vote in the primary elections. “But 99 percent of the time they vote Republican for president,” she says.

In the 11th District, for example, which includes heavily Jewish precincts in Pikesville and Owings Mills, the vote in presidential elections generally splits 50/50 Republicans to Democrats.

If Obama’s supporters want to convince more politically conservative Jews that he’s the right man, they need to explain and not just vilify.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Omri is at the Nefesh b’Nefesh blogger’s conference I couldn’t get to due to tiny little things like closing on my new home. He’s liveblogging it.

Netanyahu speaks:

18:51 - Bibi asserts that the Israeli government needs better public diplomacy - and that this can be done in part through a reasonably written daily blog. This is true. He also asserts that pro-Israel advocates can counter smears and fabrications with “just the truth” and that facts will defeat smears even if they remain “un-embellished.” This is false.

And the earlier liveblogging:

18:03 - Some woman just told Judith and I to “shush.” Despite my strong urging, Judith refuses to “yank that nobody’s hair and scream ‘do you know who I am’” Oh well.

Yes, Omri does tend to egg people on like that. He wouldn’t stop talking at my bat mitzvah about how one of my friends was a witch.

There’s a live webcast. Go look. Bibi’s speaking now.

Our own Snoopy the Goon hosts this week’s Haveil Havalim. Go and read, I suspect more than one post will be about Tisha b’Av, one of the most mournful days in Jewish history.

For the uninitiated, among many other things, both Temples were destroyed on the ninth of Av.

The Carnival of the Jews is ready for you, Mr. DeMille.

Never forget that in order to piss on someone (or someone’s parade) you have to be a person of some, how to say it gently, stature. Otherwise the only thing you produce is a small puddle.

Yeah, and calling British bobbies “fascists” is soooo sixties…

Via David T.

Cross-posted on SimplyJews.

Our very own Soccer Dad is hosting Haveil Havalim, a.k.a. Carnival of the Jews.

If you like this blog, you’ll like the posts in the carnival. Go check it out.

This week’s Carnival of the Jews, in two parts. One. Two. Why two? Why not?

An Israeli researcher told Al-Jazeera (and by proxy, Muslims) exactly what Jewish ties to Jerusalem are compared to the Arabs.

Rayyan opened with the question, “Mr. Mordechai, is this decision meant to constitute another nail in the coffin of the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations?”

The journalist appeared taken aback when Keidar answered, “To tell you the truth I don’t quite understand this. Must Israel ask permission from some other authority in the world? It has been our capital for 3,000 years. We have been there since the time your forefathers used to drink wine, bury their daughters alive, and pray to multiple gods.”

Keidar was referring to a period Arabs call Jahiliyyah (ignorance of divine guidance), which prevailed in the Arab world before the time of the Islam. “So then,” he continued, “why must we speak about this? It has been our city for 3,000 years and will be for eternity.”

Hehehehehehe. That’s a good one. But wait. There’s more.

The stunned Rayyan refused to give up. “Excuse me Mr. Mordechai! If you would like to speak about history let’s talk about the Kuran as well. You cannot deny the existence of Jerusalem in the Kuran! I ask you to refrain from making statements that offend Arabs and Muslims. Let’s please stay with our topic,” he said.

“Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Kuran,” Keidar said.

Rayyan stated the verse that, according to Muslim belief, refers to Jerusalem, but Keidar continued to object. “Jerusalem is not mentioned in the Kuran even once.”

And it isn’t. I believe the phrase is “the furthest mosque.”

Does anyone else think that organizing a conference on interfaith dialogue—from the Saudia Arabian city of Mecca, a place in which only Muslims are allowed to set foot—is a signal that perhaps the Saudis don’t really mean what they say?

Islam must do away with the dangers of extremism and present the religion’s positive message, Saudi King Abdullah said Wednesday as he opened a conference of Muslim figures aimed at launching a dialogue with Christians and Jews.

The three-day gathering in the holy city of Mecca seeks a unified Muslim voice ahead of the interfaith dialogue. In particular, Saudi Arabia hopes to promote reconciliation between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

By the way, there’s something wrong with that modifier in the second paragraph. Let me fix it.

The three-day gathering in the holy only to Muslims city of Mecca seeks a unified Muslim voice ahead of the interfaith dialogue. In particular, Saudi Arabia hopes to promote reconciliation between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.

Boy, are they trying to present a united front or what?

“You have gathered today to tell the whole world that … we are a voice of justice and values and humanity, that we are a voice of coexistence and a just and rational dialogue,” Abdullah told the 500 Muslim delegates from 50 Muslim nations in his opening speech.

Yes, justice. It’s the hammer of justice:

Saudi Arabia is one of a number of countries where courts continue to impose corporal punishment, including amputations of hands and feet for robbery, and lashings for lesser crimes such as “sexual deviance” and drunkenness. The number of lashes is not clearly prescribed by law and is varied according to the discretion of judges, and ranges from dozens of lashes to several thousand, usually applied over a period of weeks or months. In 2002, the United Nations Committee against Torture criticized Saudi Arabia over the amputations and floggings it carries out under its interpretation of Sharia. The Saudi delegation responded defending “legal traditions” held since the inception of Islam 1400 years ago and rejected interference in its legal system.

It’s the bell of freedom:

Saudi women face severe discrimination in many aspects of their lives, including education, employment, and the justice system and are clearly regarded as inferior to men. Although they make up 70% of those enrolled in universities, women make up just 5% of the workforce in Saudi Arabia,[6] the lowest proportion in the world. The treatment of women has been referred to as “gender apartheid.”[7][8][dead link][9] Implementation of a government resolution supporting expanded employment opportunities for women met resistance from within the labor ministry,[10] from the religious police,[11] and from the male citizenry.[12] These institutions and individuals generally claim that according to Sharia a woman’s place is in the home caring for her husband and family. It is a country where culture and religion make women live mostly restricted segregated lives. There is also segregation inside their own homes as some rooms have separate entrances for men and women. [13]

It’s the song about love between the brothers and the sisters, all over this land:

Participants said they hoped the gathering would culminate in an agreement on a global Islamic charter on dialogue with Christians and Jews. They expect Saudi Arabia will launch its formal call for an interfaith dialogue at the conference’s close or soon after.

Abdullah’s message, which has been welcomed by Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders, is significant, though it remains unclear who will participate in the second phase of the initiative; in particular whether Israeli religious leaders would be invited.

Color me skeptical.

This week: The MommyBlogger edition.

Our esteemed, lovely and talented co-blogger Simply Jews hosts this week’s tremendous Haveil Havalim #164 (the no-name edition) with a special emphasis on Yom Hashoa.

I’ve been remiss these past couple of weeks keeping up with my regular carnivals.Last week’s Haveil Havalim #163 was up at Tzipiyah.

And over Pesach Jack had a non-Haveil Havalim roundup a testament (as if any were needed) of his commitment to the J-blogoshphere.

Today is the day that Jews all over the world remember the victims of the Holocaust. Even as we do this, the Palestinians and their Arab and Muslim allies once again try to expropriate the language and images of the murder of Jews, and apply it to Palestinians. The word “Holocaust” is being used a lot to describe Gaza. Well, let’s take a look at the difference between the real Holocaust, and the utter misuse of that word to describe Palestinian deaths in a war with Israel.

The real Holocaust deaths (a partial list):

Country	Jews Killed	% of Country’s Jews Killed
Austria	50,000	36
Belgium	25,000	60
Belorussia	245,000	65
Bohemia/Moravia	80,000	89
Bulgaria	11,400	14
Estonia	1500	35
France	90,000	26
Greece	65,000	80
Hungary	450,000	70
Italy	7500	20
Latvia	70,000	77
Lithuania	220,000	94
Luxembourg	1950	50
The Netherlands	106,000	76
Norway	870	55
Poland	2,900,000	88
Russia	107,000	11
Romania	270,000	33
Slovakia	71,000	80
Ukraine	900,000	60
Yugoslavia	60,000	80

The total number of Palestinians killed in the territories since the start of the second intifada: 4,609.

The Palestinian population today (disputed):

Gaza: 1,482,405
West Bank: 2,611,904

The Palestinian population in 1967:

Gaza:380,800
West Bank: 604,494

Someone else can figure out percentage of population growth and the number of Palestinian deaths. I’m not going to waste the time on an obviously spurious comparison. I’m just going to continue to point out the attempt to expropriate all of the language used to describe the world’s crimes against the Jews by the Palestinians, who would have you believe they are also victims of anti-Semitism. This needs to be stopped.

Never forget. There is no Palestinian “Holocaust.” There was only one Holocaust, that of the Jews by the Nazis, with the willing help of Europeans and Arabs, including the ones who lived in what was then known as Palestine—and whose descendants live in the territories today.

The descendants of the victims of the Holocaust? Well, there are none for the true victims. Only for the survivors.

Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live. Long live the people of Israel.

A happy and kosher Passover to all of my Jewish readers.

“In every generation, they rise up against us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, rescues us from their hands.”

We will recite those words tonight. They have never lost their meaning. I’m afraid they never will.

But we’re still here. And we’ll still be here, when Hamas is as obscure—and dead—as the Hittites.

One of the famous prophetic events discussed is when God shows the prophet Yechezkel (Ezekiel) a valley of dry bones and asks the prophet if those bones could yet live. In the end God re-forms the bones into living men. There is some debate in the Talmud whether this incident happened or whether it was just a prophetic vision. Still it serves as a powerful metaphor that years of exile would not destroy the Jewish people.To some, the rebirth of the Jewish nation in 1948 was an example of dry bones being given new life. And according to an article, On Eve of Passover, Bread Stirs Deep Thoughts in Israel, by Ethan Bronner in the New York Times, more Israelis are taking the Jewish part of their identity more seriously.

Hametz is bread and other leavened products that many Jews do not eat for the eight days of Passover, which starts Saturday night. The Bible says that when God freed the Jews from enslavement in Egypt, they left in such a hurry that there was no time for their bread to rise, and to mark that circumstance, consuming leavened bread during the holiday is forbidden.The focus of the debate here is a ruling by a Jerusalem municipal judge overturning the convictions of four shops and restaurants for having sold pizzas and rolls during the holiday last year despite a law that many thought prohibited businesses from doing so. The judge said the law barred only the public display of hametz, not its sale inside shops.

While most debates about the painstakingly negotiated public role of religion in Israel line up along predictable lines of observant versus secular, this discussion has been different. And it speaks to a palpable anxiety over the need to define and defend the Jewish nature of the state, even as Israel’s 60th anniversary approaches next month.

In opinion articles and informal conversations, some nonreligious Israelis said that they liked the eight-day absence of hametz, and that it was a small but potent symbol of a unique collective identity.

I don’t agree with everything in the article, but Bronner gives a look at the non-religious religion that exists in Israel. This is decidedly different from the Jew-less Israeli who is the hero of Ha’aretz. Or of Shimon Peres. And it’s a (phony) formulation much beloved by Thomas Friedman. As he wrote ten years ago in “The Morning After”

On the morning after being defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel’s 1996 elections, the Labor Party leader, Shimon Peres, was asked what he thought happened. ”The Israelis lost,” said Mr. Peres. ”The Jews won.”What Mr. Peres was referring to was his notion that Israel had become divided between ”Israelis” and ”Jews.” The ”Israelis” tend to be secular, with their primary loyalty to Israel as a state and their own individual and material advancement. They see Israel’s future as being in the peace process and in greater and greater integration with the region and the world at large. The Israelis, though, come in two varieties: the dovish, liberal Israelis (49 percent) and the conservative, security-hawk Israelis (25.5 percent). The dovish Israelis pretty much liked Oslo as it was, and voted for Peres; the security-hawk Israelis wanted a better Oslo, and voted for Bibi to make it happen.

The ”Jews”(25.5 percent), by contrast, come from the traditional and Orthodox communities, the West Bank settlements and the religious-Zionist movements. They are devoted to a traditional conception of Judaism and see the Israeli state as a means to fulfill Judaism’s commandments, not as an end itself. The Jews are skeptical of integration, which they equate with assimilation, and they see Israel as fated to perpetually struggle with its non-Jewish neighbors. They were threatened by Oslo and voted for Bibi in hopes that he would kill it.

In some precincts to be Israeli without the baggage of being Jewish is celebrated. But I think that it’s relegated to a certain strata of the “enlightened.” I also think it’s damaging as Jonathan Rosenblum writes:

Nothing better captures the Palestinian game plan than a story that I have told before, related by Palestinian legislator Selah Temari. While imprisoned in an Israeli jail for security offenses, Temari came to the conclusion that Israel was far too powerful to ever destroy. He decided that when he got out of jail he would devote himself to tending his own olive tree and abandon the struggle against Israel. He even began to study Jewish history to gain insight into the perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of so much adversity.Then one night he was looking through the bars of his cell, and he saw his Jewish jailer eating a pita. “How could you be eating bread?” he asked. “Don’t you know it is Pesach?” The jailer answered him: “Do you really expect me not to eat bread, because of something that happened 3,300 years ago?”

That night, records Temari, he twisted and turned all night. By the morning, he reached the conclusion that the Palestinians could expel the Jews. A people that had lost its sense of connection to its past and to the Land could be defeated.

Fortunately, those who deny their Jewishness are a relatively small minority of Israelis. Who better to illustrate this than Dry Bones cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen. In two sharp recent cartoons, Kirschen mocked the Jerusalem court ruling. As he writes.

I am a secular Jew and I live in a non-religious suburb of Tel Aviv and I am outraged at this attempt to assault our culture and to wreck the Jewishness of the Jewish State. It is precisely the “public display” of leavened bread which I find most offensive.

It is heartening to read that it isn’t just religious Israelis who wish to live in a Jewish state. As Bronner reports and Kirschen protests, the Jewishness of Israel is important to quite a large proportion of the Israeli public, no matter what the out of touch elites wish to believe.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Ynet reports (via memeorandum):

A new survey conducted by a Washington DC-based evangelical organization among American Christians has found that 82% of them believe they have a moral obligation to support the Jews and Israel. The poll, conducted among Catholics and Protestants alike, tested their stance on Jerusalem’s future and ways to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat.

The poll reveals a number of other common sense findings. By 32 to 24 percent those surveyed figure that a Palestinian state will be a terrorist state. 65 percent of those surveyed believe that Iran is developing nuclear weapons with which to attack Israel. And by 45 to 9 percent those surveyed said that they wouldn’t support a President who pressured Israel to concede issues that endangered its security.

Meryl’s celebrating:

And how refreshing it is to have Jews and Christians on the same side of an issue for a change. Here. Have a virtual handshake, folks.

Israel Matzav is fretting:

I wonder if 82% of American Jews believe that they have a moral obligation to support Israel. Given the number of moonbats among American Jews, I doubt it.

(And yes, historically, Americans, not just Jewish Americans, favor Israel by a wide margin. Support for Israel is not just a Jewish issue, it’s an American issue.)

A report in the Washington Post confirms Israel Matzav’s fears, Jewish Liberals to Launch A Counterpoint to AIPAC

Some of the country’s most prominent Jewish liberals are forming a political action committee and lobbying group aimed at dislodging what they consider the excessive hold of neoconservatives and evangelical Christians on U.S. policy toward Israel.The group is planning to channel political contributions to favored candidates in perhaps a half-dozen campaigns this fall, the first time an organization focused on Israel has tried to play such a direct role in the political process, according to its organizers.

Organizers said they hope those efforts, coupled with a separate lobbying group that will focus on promoting an Arab-Israeli peace settlement, will fill a void left by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and other Jewish groups that they contend have tilted to the right in recent years.

The obliviousness of these people is amazing. No American President was more invested in the kind of peacemaking they want than Bill Clinton. He shunned Binyamin Netanyahu while welcoming Yasser Arafat. And did he get a peace treaty at the end of his term?

“The definition of what it means to be pro-Israel has come to diverge from pursuing a peace settlement,” said Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser involved in the initiative. In recent years, he said, “We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard.”Solomont is a top fundraiser for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), but the organizers include supporters and fundraisers for both Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.). Many prominent figures in the American Jewish left, former lawmakers and U.S. government officials, and several prominent Israeli figures, as well as activists who have raised money for the Democracy Alliance and MoveOn.org, are also involved.

A peace settlement to be pro-Israel must not endanger Israel. Israel is markedly less secure now than it was in 1993. So promoting the kind of process that Israel’s been involved in over the past 15 years is not pro-Israel. That’s because those who feel that their primary goal is to support peace, means ignoring Palestinians violations of agreements.

“The genesis of this is really the frustration on the part of a very substantial portion of the American Jewish community that despite the fact that there is broad support for a peace-oriented policy in the Middle East, there doesn’t seem to be the political will to actually carry it out,” Ben-Ami said. “We have not been effective at transmitting the message that there is political support for these positions in the American Jewish community and their allies.”

I really don’t think that it’s a substantial part of the American Jewish community. It might be a substantial part of the wealthy, liberal, American Jewish community, but qualifying it like that would make the “J-street” initiative looks rather narrow.

As far as the “political will” is concerned, it’s lacking because any mildly perceptive observer realizes that the Palestinians have used their newfound benefits (land, money, weapons) not to build a functioning society but to build a a terror infrastructure with which to attack Israel. The lack of “political will” that Ben Ami observes is simply an observation that the peace process hasn’t worked.

Take away all of the qualifications and this paragraph pretty much sums up the problem:

Some veteran Middle East experts said the new group faces the political reality that many American Jews have become disillusioned over the years with the peace process and what they consider to be the intransigence, hostility and–in some cases–terrorism of would-be Palestinian partners. While Bush early on in his administration grew skeptical of the peacemaking efforts of President Clinton, he received very little push-back from organized American Jewry.

Well it’s not just what we “consider,” it’s what we’ve observed. And frankly, President Bush was correct. The more American Presidents push for peace, the more Palestinians demand and the less Israel gets credit for its sacrifices.

Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the group “has a very steep hill to climb because peacemaking has acquired a bad reputation over the years in the Jewish community, and there is a widespread fear that U.S. intervention on behalf of peace will lead to pressure on Israel.”

Again it’s not just a “widespread fear,” it’s exactly what we’ve seen from the first Bush administration and, as noted above, from the Clinton administration too.

But here’s the kicker:

The initial efforts will be relatively modest: Ben-Ami said the group aims to try to raise at least $50,000 or more for a handful of campaigns this fall as a “test case.” But the group intends to raise its profile in future campaign cycles, and some major liberal fundraisers have already committed to the venture, including Solomont, high-tech entrepreneur Davidi Gilo and former New York City corporation counsel Victor Kovner, a supporter of Clinton’s presidential bid.

Given the high powered nature of the organizers of this group, $50,000 is pretty small change. I think it reflects that these folks represent pretty much themselves. I also think that it’s telling that no Republicans are publicly associated with this effort yet, reflecting the stronger commitment to Israel in the Republican Party at present.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Remember how smug, insufferable, know-it-all David Ignatius informed us that the NIE showed that our policies towards Iran were all wrong? Here’s how he put it in a Post-Global forum:

Sometimes events create space for diplomacy where none existed before. I want to think that this might be the case with the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. What matters about the NIE is less the details than the atmospherics. The details themselves are hard to parse: Yes, we now believe that in 2003 Iran halted a previously unknown covert military program to build a bomb; but no, that doesn’t mean Iran has stopped its threatening nuclear activity or that it has given up its ambition to be a nuclear power. When you boil it all down, the United States has aimed its intelligence rifle at Tehran–and shot itself in the foot. It has undercut its old policy and embarrassed itself and its allies. So what’s the advantage in that, you ask? Simply this: The NIE creates a way for both parties to come to the negotiating table without losing face. Both sides can start a new narrative, in place of the old one that led to an impasse. It is this serendipitous aspect–this unexpected reversal of the parameters of the game–that interests me most.

Shortly after its release my Watcher’s Council colleague Wolf Howling wrote:

Our intelligence agencies have done our nation a tremendous disservice. It will, inn the long run, likely cost us bitterly since it puts off any reckoning with the single most destabilizing force in this world. Every day that reckoning is put off will increase the cost we will pay and gold and blood. And if Iran achieves a nuclear arsenal, that cost we will pay will rise exponentially.

Charles Krauthammer points out in today’s column, the Holocaust Declaration (or here) that this week’s announcement that Iran was installing 6000 new centrifuges demonstrates that we have reached a point of no return.

It is time to admit the truth: The Bush administration’s attempt to halt Iran’s nuclear program has failed. Utterly. The latest round of U.N. Security Council sanctions, which took a year to achieve, is comically weak. It represents the end of the sanctions road.At home, the president’s efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program were irreparably undermined by November’s National Intelligence Estimate, whose “moderate confidence” that Iran has not restarted nuclear weaponization — the least important of three elements of any nuclear program — has promoted the illusion that Iran has given up the pursuit of nuclear weapons. Yet uranium enrichment, the most difficult step, proceeds apace, as does the development of nuclear-capable ballistic missiles.

The president is going to hand over to his successor an Iran on the verge of going nuclear. This will deeply destabilize the Middle East, threaten the moderate Arabs with Iranian hegemony and leave Israel on hair-trigger alert.

This failure can, however, be mitigated. Since there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by pre-emption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence to prevent the mullahs, some of whom are apocalyptic and messianic, from using nuclear weapons.

(Keep in mind the second paragraph when you read Ignatius’s praise for Thomas Fingar from a couple of years ago. What Fingar and those involved in the NIE exercised was not caution. It was recklessness to create an illusion of complacency.)

At this point then, what does Krauthammer counsel?

How to create deterrence? The way John Kennedy did during the Cuban missile crisis. President Bush’s greatest contribution to nuclear peace would be to issue the following declaration, adopting Kennedy’s language while changing the names of the miscreants:“It shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear attack upon Israel by Iran, or originating in Iran, as an attack by Iran on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon Iran.”

This should be followed with a simple explanation: “As a beacon of tolerance and as leader of the free world, the United States will not permit a second Holocaust to be perpetrated upon the Jewish people.”

This policy — the Holocaust Declaration — would establish a firm benchmark that would outlive this administration. Every future president — and every serious presidential candidate — would have to publicly state whether or not he supports the Holocaust Declaration.

Krauthammer then acknowledges that such a policy may not deter the likes of Ahmadinejad, but it would likely (or maybe just hopefully) spur rational actors in Iran to take charge and restrain or depose him.

Krauthammer further argues that such a policy isn’t just necessary to save the Jews of the world (see his 10 year old essay At Last Zion for a fuller treatment of this topic), but to confirm America’s role in the world as a beacon of freedom.

For the first time since the time of Jesus, Israel is the home of the world’s largest Jewish community. An implacable enemy has openly declared genocidal intentions against it — in clear violation of the U.N. charter — and is pursuing the means to carry out that intent. The world does nothing. Some, like the Russians, are literally providing fuel for the fire.For those who believe that America stands for something in the world — that the nation that has liberated more peoples than any other has even the most minimal moral vocation — there can be no more pressing cause than preventing the nuclear annihilation of an allied democracy, the last refuge and hope of an ancient people openly threatened with the final Final Solution.

UPDATE: If this report in the Times of London is accurate, the recklessness of the NIE is even more apparent.

A previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230km southeast of Tehran, and the link with Iran’s long-range programme, was revealed by Jane’s Intelligence Review after a study of the imagery by a former Iraq weapons inspector. A close examination of the photographs has indicated that the Iranians are following the same path as North Korea, pursuing a space programme that enables Tehran to acquire expertise in long-range missile technology.Geoffrey Forden, a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that there was a recently constructed building on the site, about 40 metres in length, which was similar in form and size to the Taepodong long-range missile assembly facility in North Korea.

Avital Johanan, the editor of Jane’s Proliferation, said that the analysis of the Iranian site indicated that Tehran may be about five years away from developing a 6,000km ballistic missile. This would tie in with American intelligence estimates and underlines why President Bush wants the Polish and Czech components of the US missile defence system to be up and running by 2013.

So as Tehran reaches the point of completing its quest for the requisite fuel, it is working on a delivery system too. Not exactly the pause that the NIE proclaimed in its summary.

Jihad Watch mentions that this isn’t just about “filthy bacteria,” it’s also about “corrupt powers.”

Note the resonance that this kind of talk will have with the American Left, which sees the U.S. as the chief of the “corrupt powers.” And remember: this man was applauded at Columbia University.”Iran: President wants to ‘annihilate corrupt powers,’” from AKI (thanks to Insubria).

Israel Matzav cautions:

Will this wake the world up to the fact that Iran’s nuclear aspirations are not just Israel’s problem? Don’t hold your breath. In the meantime, expect countries like Germany to continue to undermine sanctions in the pursuit of the Almighty Euro.

Gina Cobb reminds us that this emphasizes the importance of missile defense, a position that I imagine with which Poligazette wholeheartedly agrees.(via memeorandum)
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Haveil Havalim #160 is up at Life In Israel with an excellent sampling of the best of the Jewish/Israel blogosphere of the past week. Of note are posts about the “burqa babes,” the seven samurai and how Judaism is like the movies. I have a hard time seeing how “The Matrix” has anything to do with Judaism.

Oldest - Mikve Israel in Curacao

In the Caribbean, Curacao is home to the oldest synagogue - Mikve Israel - in continuous use in the Western Hemisphere; it was founded in 1651.

Second oldest (?) (Though not in continuous use) - Synagogue of Bridgetown, Barbados

The first synagogue on the site was built about 1651 by Jews from Recife, Brazil, fleeing Portuguese lands to English territories during the Inquisition. The original building was destroyed in a hurricane in 1831, and rebuilt two years later. (Curacao’s synagogue, built in the 1660’s, is the oldest continually operating synagogue in the hemisphere.) The Bridgetown synagogue, deconsecrated early in the century, was seized by the Barbados Government about five years ago and scheduled for demolition. But through the tenacity of the island’s tiny Jewish community, it is now a Barbados National Trust property and is undergoing a $1 million restoration. The building, a short walk from the main shopping district, is to be rededicated as a synagogue when the restoration is finished by next winter. It will remain a National Trust property.Today, the building’s exterior, with its balustraded roofline, lancet-shaped windows and thick walls with rounded corners, appears much as it did in the 1830’s, the prosperous days of Barbados’s Jewish community, which led the island’s sugar industry.

Third oldest - St. Thomas Synagogue Virgin Islands

The third oldest synagogue in the Western Hemisphere, this gracious building has a sand floor. This signifies the time during the Spanish Inquisition when practicing Judaism was punishable by death. Jews would worship in cellars with sand on the floors to absorb the sound.

Oldest synagogue - non-continuous use: Kahal Zur Israel, Recife Brazil.

Flanked by bustling cafes in downtown Recife on Brazil’s northeastern coast is a little-known treasure of Jewish history in the New World - the oldest synagogue in the Americas.Sephardic Jews built the two-story Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue before 1641 - most likely in 1636 - when they enjoyed religious freedom under the Dutch, who ruled part of the northeast region from 1630 to 1654 to control sugar production.

The Mikve Israel Congregation in Curacao, a Dutch Antilles island in the Carribean, was considered by some to have been the first congregation in the Americas. But it was founded only in 1651, also by Sephardic Jews from Holland.

Oldest synagogue in North America - Touro Synagogue, Newport Rhode Island

For over two centuries, the small synagogue standing on top of a hill on a quiet street in the New England seaport community of Newport, R.I., has occupied a unique place in American history — not only as a part of the American Jewish experience but also as a symbol of religious freedom for all Americans. It is her “that the right of the individual freely and without governmental restraint to follow the dictate of his own conscience in religious worship could be exercised without danger to the state”

UPDATE: Life at full volume visited Mikve Israel and has an account as well as a link to a set of photos of the Shul.

Well it turns out that Larry and I visited the oldest, Mikvé Israel-Emanuel, while we were on our honeymoon in Curaçao.We were there in June of 1992 and it was absolutely gorgeous.After a bit of digging I found a roll from our trip and I’ll share a few of the pictures we took of the synagogue and the Jewish Cultural Museum. First up is a picture of the organ and some of the chandeliers inside the sanctuary.

It was beautiful inside the building. My pictures really don’t do it justice, the dark mahogany wood, the bright sunlight streaming in and the white paint conspired to confound my film. But I did get a few good shots and if you click through the picture it will lead you to the picture set. I don’t remember much, other than the building being very cool and airy inside.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

There’s a famous story about the great sage Hillel the Elder.

Hillel used to earn a trepik a day, half of which he gave to the guard at the house of study and half he used to support himself and his family. One day he earned nothing and the guard would not let him in. He climbed up and sat on the skylight so that he could hear the words of the living God from Shemayah and Avtalyon. It happened that it was a Friday in the winter and the snow from the sky fell upon him. At the break of dawn, Shemaya said to Avtalyon: “My brother. Usually it is light but today it is dark. Perhaps the day is cloudy.” They looked up and saw the shape of a man against the window, and they found three cubits of snow upon him. They took off the snow, washed him, anointed him and put him by the fire. They said: “He is worthy for shabbat to be profaned for his sake.” (Yoma 35b)

When I heard this story about Doron Mahareta (the oldest student killed at Merkaz Harav last week) from Rabbi Hauer, I couldn’t help thinking about Hillel’s dedication to Torah study. When Doron originally went to Merkaz Harav he couldn’t pass the entrance exam. Instead of despairing, he asked if he could work at the Yeshiva and was given a job as a dishwasher. Doron, wasn’t just a dishwasher. With his foot in the door, he took advantage of his opportunity to ask the students about what they were learning. When he had spare time, he’d go to the Bais Medrash (study hall) and study. A year and a half later he approached the Rosh Yeshiva (the head of the Yeshiva) and asked if he could now enter the Yeshiva. After being rebuffed, he proceeded to show the Rosh Yeshiva how much he learned in his year and a half as a “dishwasher.”

The story would be incredible enough on its own if it ended there. But it didn’t.

He forced the Rosh Yeshiva into a Torah discussion; the next day, he was no longer a dish washer but a full-fledged “yeshiva bachur”.On weekends, when Doron would come home to visit his family in Ashdod, he’d spend the entire Shabbat either in the Melitzer Shul or the neighboring Gerrer shtiebel learning Shulchan Aruch and its commentaries. Three weeks ago, he finished the entire Shulchan Aruch and principle commentaries. Doron achieved in his tender 26 years what others don’t attain in 88 years.

For some perspective, the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law) is a massive work. The average Orthodox rabbi doesn’t have to know the complete Shulchan Aruch to earn ordination.

It’s like a student who hadn’t taken pre-calculus in high school went to MIT, worked as a dishwasher and then 7 years later emerged with a Phd in Math. It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and perseverance to accomplish what Doron did. He stands as one more example of the tremendous loss suffered ten days ago when a murderer started shooting innocent young men studying.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

My Shrapnel hosted an excellent Haveil Havalim #157 (The Jewish and Israel related blogging carnvial) covering topics such as Sderot, the massacre at Merkaz Harav and culture, with all the attitude you’ve come to expect from Gila.

Esser Agaroth puts a lot more than 2 cents worth of effort into this week’s Haveil Havalim #154, the Jewish/Israel blogging carnival. Check it out! (I was surprised to learn that Esser Agaroth is a waffler!)

I just received an e-mail about a Sefer Torah (Torah scroll) that was rescued from Lithuania and is now being used aboard the USS Truman.

Truman Sailors listen to Sen. Carl Levin as he speaks during the Torah Dedication Ceremony in the hangar bay of Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75). The United Jewish Federation of Tidewater presented the Jewish Torah to Truman to be displayed for 41 years. The Torah is one of the few holy scrolls from Lithuania to survive the Holocaust. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Arturo Chavez (RELEASED)

USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) Commanding Officer, Capt. Herman Shelanski, left, and Michigan Senator Carl Levin (D), Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, bow their heads in prayer at the commencement of the Torah dedication ceremony in the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier’s hangar bay. The holy Jewish Torah in the background, one of the few scrolls from Lithuania to survive the Holocaust, was presented to Truman by the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater, and will be on loan to Truman and displayed for 41 years, or the duration of the ship’s life. The smaller Torah in the foreground, known as the Truman Torah, was presented to President Harry S. Truman by Israel’s first President, Chaim Weizmann in gratitude for America’s diplomatic recognition of the state of Israel in 1948. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kristopher Wilson (RELEASED)

Aboard USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) Nov. 20, 2003 — Rabbi Michael A. Oppenheimer carries a 300-year-old Torah that was presented to the Navy’s newest nuclear powered aircraft carrier by the Oppenheimer family. The family heirloom is one of only 300 Torahs that survived the Holocaust during World War II. The ship will safeguard it during its 50-plus year life span, when it will then be returned to Oppenheimer’s grandchildren, who were in attendance and witnessed the ceremony. U.S. Navy photo by Photographer’s Mate 2nd Class Anthony Walker. (RELEASED)

It’s not clear if these Torahs will be used or just displayed. (The 50 year lifespan mentioned in the above caption is the ship’s expected lifespan.)

The Truman Torah was rescued by Project Judaica.

It seems that Project Judaica is similar in focus to Rabbi Menachem Youlus who has devoted himself to rescuing Torahs, especially from Europe.

(h/t Cousin Steven)

Not.

And amid all this hype, Winehouse’s representatives said late Friday that she won’t attend tonight’s Grammys in Los Angeles. Although she resolved her visa issues with the U.S. Embassy, she’ll still appear via satellite from London. Winehouse apparently decided not to stray too far from the very place she sang about never entering: rehab.

The New York Times tells the story of
a new principal at a troubled high school. (h/t Shalom USA.)

On his first visit, in October 2004, he found a police officer arresting a student and calling for backup to handle the swelling crowd. Students roamed the hallways with abandon; in one class of 30, only 5 students had bothered to show up.

Who is he?

Junior High School 22, in the South Bronx, had run through six principals in just over two years when Shimon Waronker was named the seventh.. . . “It was chaos,” Mr. Waronker recalled. “I was like, this can’t be real.”

Teachers, parents and students at the school, which is mostly Hispanic and black, were equally taken aback by the sight of their new leader: A member of the Chabad-Lubavitch sect of Hasidic Judaism with a beard, a black hat and a velvet yarmulke.

“The talk was, ‘You’re not going to believe who’s running the show,’ ” said Lisa DeBonis, now an assistant principal.

Not surprisingly, not everyone has accepted him, though it seems that most of the critics are no longer with the school, so it might just be that they have an ax to grind.

When an etiquette expert, Lyudmila Bloch, first approached principals about training sessions she runs at a Manhattan restaurant, most declined to send students. Mr. Waronker, who happened to be reading her book, “The Golden Rules of Etiquette at the Plaza,” to his own children (he has six), has since dispatched most of the school for training at a cost of $40 a head.Flipper Bautista, 10, loved the trip, saying, “It’s this place where you go and eat, and they teach you how to be first-class.”

In a school where many children lack basic reading and math skills, though, such programs are not universally applauded. When Mr. Waronker spent $8,000 in school money to give students a copy of “The Code: The 5 Secrets of Teen Success” and to invite the writer to give a motivational speech, it outraged Marietta Synodis, a teacher who has since left.

“My kids could much better benefit from math workbooks,” Ms. Synodis said.

Mr. Waronker counters that key elements of his leadership are dreaming big and offering children a taste of worlds beyond their own. “Those experiences can be life-transforming,” he said.

One of the themes in the report is that Mr. Waronker has a personal touch. For example:

So when Emmanuel Bruntson, 14, a cut-up in whom Mr. Waronker saw potential, started getting into fights, he met with him daily and gave him a copy of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”“I wanted to get him out of his environment so he could see a different world,” Mr. Waronker said.

My guess is that despite the problems, Mr. Waronker is having some success. And it comes from his seeming religious commitment to the school.

Back in Crown Heights, Mr. Waronker says he occasionally finds himself on the other side of a quizzical look, with his Hasidic neighbors wondering why he is devoting himself to a Bronx public school instead of a Brooklyn yeshiva.“We’re all connected,” he responds.

Gesturing in his school at a class full of students, he said, “I feel the hand of the Lord here all the time.”

* Yiddishe Nachas could be translated as “Jewish Pride.” It’s something I get when I read of someone like Shimon Waronker, but not a spoiled, self-destructive pop-singer.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

Calling all Hebrew scholars who read this blog: I would like, once and for all, to know what the word “rabbi” means. Some people say it means “teacher,” but I have been told by more than one person that that isn’t accurate.

Could my learned readers and Hebrew scholars give me a little help here?

Haveil Havalim #150 is UP!

Here are this week’s topics.

Post of the Week
Israel
Judaism
Politics
Abuse of Power
History
Antisemitism
Personal
Torah
Phoning it in
Humor

And I forgot to post last week that Haveil Havalim #149 is UP too!

Carry this story with you for Shabbat. It made me smile.

A Jewish man who had no wife, no children, no family, and almost no connection to Judaism but his birth, left his fortune to Israel, and he is helping to make the desert bloom.

Mack Ness, a Jewish farmer and recluse, who lived his life in deprived circumstances in Watchung, New Jersey, willed a fortune to Israel when he died in January 2004. As a result, Ness is helping to make the Negev bloom posthumously.

In his 90s when he died, Ness never married or had children and had no connection to the local Jewish community until a short time before his death.

A non-Jewish attorney took care of his affairs, and never took a cent for his trouble. The lawyer had lived on the Ness farm as a student, but ran out of money and couldn’t pay the rent. He was about to leave when Ness offered him a deal that lasted for well over half a century. He told the young man that he could stay on the farm free of charge and continue with his studies, but that after he became a lawyer, he would have to give his services to Ness free of charge.

[...] Ness left more than $15 million to the Federation, with two provisions - that the money go to Israel and that a memorial be established for himself, his mother, Ann, and his brother Sanford.

The upshot is the Ness Loan Fund for the Negev, which in Hebrew is called Keren Ness, which translates back into English as the Miracle Cornucopia.

And indeed that’s what it is. According to the fund’s chairman, Gerald Flanzbaum, who lives with his wife, Marilyn, in Givat Olga, more than 85 business loans have been disbursed, mostly to people who were unable to get loans from a bank. The Flanzbaums travel to Beersheba every month to meet loan applicants. Some of the ventures have been so successful that they are repaying the loans ahead of time.

May Mack Ness’ name be long remembered. His memory is already a blessing.

via memeorandum

Chess champion Bobby Fischer died

Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who became a Cold War hero by dethroning the Soviet world champion in 1972 and later renounced his American citizenship, has died. He was 64.

I first learned of Bobby Fischer when I was about 9 or 10 and someone bought me “The Jew in American Sport” that featured profiles of 3 chess players: Emanual Lasker, Sammy Reshevsky and Bobby Fischer. Given that Bobby Fischer first gained notice as a chess player when he was only a few years older than I was at the time, he became something of an idol. Of course my chess playing abilities were never championship caliber. But I don’t think that I comprehended that at the time. (See Just One Minute too.)

(It did happen that I had the opportunity to play Sammy Reshevsky at a demonstration as a freshman at YU. He played 30 students at once and won 29 games and drew one. Needless to say he beat me with ease. Bill Jempty, though, got a chance to get drubbed by Fischer. Of course, he’s also a more serious chess player than I am.)

In the Mad Genius of Bobby Fischer Bill Ordine writes about the state of sports and, I guess, detente at that time:

I was there for Fischer-Spassky. I was in the Navy, stationed at the NATO base in Keflavik doing pretty much what I still do. I was a Navy journalist. In between my normal duties, I occasionally got to go to the big city down the road. One of those days, I covered the chess match. I recall it went on forever and the hot dogs were made of lamb. And even with the confrontation being what it was — the young, brash American genius from Brooklyn against the established Soviet champion — it became increasingly difficult to root for Fischer as his eccentricities overwhelmed even an overwhelming sense of nationalism many of us felt at the height of the Cold War.

In short, Fischer was a jerk complaining about everything, making incessant demands. Spassky was gracious and urbane. Imagining what might happen to the Soviet back home if he lost, you could almost have some sympathy for him. In the end, Fischer prevailed and it was a great triumph for the U.S. But at the same time, the Summer Olympics were going on in Germany. The United States lost that controversial basketball game to the Soviets. And, of course, the Munich Massacre, where members of the Israeli delegation were killed, stunned the world and obliterated everything else going on in sports.

It’s funny that he was there. We flew over Iceland one of the days the match was going on; though I don’t know if a match was going at the time or if we even flew over Reykjavik. We were on our way back from Israel at the time.

A few years ago, amateur chess player and (one time) professional psychiatrist, Charles Krauthammer asked “Did Chess make him crazy?”

Why such proximity between genius and madness in chess? There are three possible explanations. One is that chess is a monomania. You study it intensively day and night from childhood if you are going to rise to the ranks of the greats, and that kind of singular focus constricts your reality and makes you more vulnerable to distortions of it. “A chess genius,” wrote George Steiner, “is a human being who focuses vast, little understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality.” Plausible, perhaps, but there are lots of folks who are monomaniacal in other “trivial” spheres and who come out psychically intact. Tiger Woods was raised from infancy to be a great golfer and is not just intact but graceful and charming. The ranks of great golfers, swimmers and Dominican shortstops are not more noticeably skewed to the deranged than the general population.

Well, then, this must be monomania of a certain sort. Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity. It’s not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connections to the real world outside–a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say, volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly. As Stefan Zweig put it in his classic novella The Royal Game, chess is “thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance.”

But chess has a third–and unique–characteristic that is particularly fatal. It is not just monomaniacal and abstract, but its arena is a playing field on which the other guy really is after you. The essence of the game is constant struggle against an adversary who, by whatever means of deception and disguise, is entirely, relentlessly, unfailingly dedicated to your destruction. It is only a board, but it is a field of dreams for paranoia.

However in Bobby Fischer’s perfect death Gabriel Schoenfeld concludes not:

And while there have been several deranged grandmasters, whether the frequency of mental illness in this group is higher than the average rate among geniuses is doubtful.

But not before he recalls the contents of a disturbing letter that Fischer wrote to the Encyclopedia Judaica.

Two years later, he wrote to the Encylopedia Judaica asking for his entry to be removed (the underlinings are as in the original): Gentlemen:Knowing what I do about Judaism, I was naturally distressed to see that you have erroneously featured me as a Jew in ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA. Please do not make this mistake again in any future editions of your voluminous, pseudo-authoritative publication. I am not today, nor have I ever been a Jew, and as a matter of fact, I am uncircumcised.I suggest rather than fraudulently misrepresenting me to be a Jew, and dishonestly abusing my name and reputation as a kind of advertising gimmick to improve the image of your religion (Judaism), you try to promote your religion on its own merits — if indeed it has any!In closing, I trust that I am not being unrealistically optimistic, in thanking you in advance for your anticipated cooperation in this matter.

Truly yours,
Bobby Fischer
The World Chess Champion

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

A passionate hatred of Jews was to stay with Fischer for the rest of his life.

Whatever the source of his madness, Bobby Fischer was once the best in his field.

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.

Well Haveil Havalim #145 is UP!

Given that it’s the 3rd anniversary edition you might be interested in some past milestones.

Here’s what the 1st edition looked like.
Here’s the 1st anniversary edition.
Here’s the second anniversary edition

The categories this time include

Channukah
Politics
Israel
Judaism
History
Torah
Humor
Misc
Media

And it features posts on:

The inquisition in the new world

Reporting from enemy territory

Returning to Shechem

Perspectives on Channukah

Criticizing Tutu

Another work accident

and much, much more.

Rabbi Weber wants to encourage Jews to marry Jews.

Rabbi Donald Weber is far from the first rabbi to call for single Jews in his congregation to marry other Jews.Such pulpit calls have become commonplace in an age of high Jewish intermarriage rates and fears the Jewish population will fall sharply in coming generations. But the Reform rabbi’s recent appeal came with a novel twist.

Six weeks ago, in his Yom Kippur sermon at Temple Rodeph Torah, Weber offered to personally pay for six-month memberships to JDate, the popular Jewish online dating service, for any singles in the congregation who asked.

What concerned Rabbi Weber was this:

The need is there, he said, be cause the American Jewish population has declined in recent decades, with about half of American Jews marrying outside the religion, according to widely reported national surveys. Weber punctuated his sermon by citing a recent study from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion indicating that fewer than 10% of grandchildren of intermarried parents identify as Jews.

Despite the fact that this puts Rabbi Weber in opposition to some of his congregants - Reform Temples accept non-Jewish spouses as full members - he is persisting.

I’m impressed.

(h/t Mrs. Soccer Dad)

Crossposted at Soccer Dad.