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Bris competition: How many foreskins ya got?

By Uriel Heilman · February 3, 2012

Back in August, we ran a news item about a mohel in Ukraine who performed his 4,500th circumcision. According to Chabad, which was the source for the story, the mohel, Chabad-Lubavitch emissary Rabbi Yaacov Gaissinovitch, performed 22 in a single day at a Jewish summer camp in Dnepropetrovsk (on Jewish boys who had never been circumcised as infants).

Initially, I was skeptical that the total number was accurate, and before we ran the brief I engaged in a flurry of back-and-forth emails with Chabad. Eventually, I was convinced (the mohel recorded each bris in a notebook, and I was sent a copy of one of the pages).

Now comes a report from The New York Times that puts the 4,500 number to shame. Philip L. Sherman, a mohel from White Plains, N.Y. who circumcises only infants, says he's cut an estimated 20,000 foreskins.

Wow. That's a hell of a lot of bagel-and-lox breakfasts.

The Times says Sherman's figure is his own estimate, and his daily record is nine. Sherman performed his first bris in 1978, which means that, to reach 20,000, he's had to perform an average of 1.6 brises a day for the last 34 years.

Know anyone out there who can beat that?

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Watch the Super Bowl halftime show of cultural misappropriation online

By Adam Soclof · February 3, 2012

Why in ANY god's name did scandal-ridden Atlanta megachurch bishop Eddie Long get wrapped in a Torah scroll?

And did that guy just say Auschwitz and "Birkendol"?
Read More >>>

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Messianic rabbi orders preacher wrapped in ‘Auschwitz’ Torah

By Ami Eden · February 3, 2012

 It's a safe bet that most JTA readers have never heard of Bishop Eddie Long of theAtlanta-area New Birth Missionary Baptist Church.

Well, that's about to change... thanks to this video of Long -- at the direction of Ralph Messer, a Messianic Jew and self-described rabbi -- being wrapped in a Torah and then lifted up on a chair bar mitzvah-style with scroll in hand . Messer claimed that the Torah was recovered from Auschwitz.

 The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that the ceremony is drawing criticism:

A Torah's use in a ceremony ordaining Long as "a king" is offensive to many Jews, said Bill Nigut, Southeast Regional Director of the Anti-Defamation League. ...

More disturbing was the use of this particular Torah in an inappropriate setting, experts on religion say

“The connection of the Torah scroll to the Holocaust and then to Eddie Long is incomprehensible to me,” said David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. Gushee is a scholar of the Holocaust and has visited Auschwitz several times.

“What was the point? Was it to signal that Eddie Long was suffering persecution like the Jews at Auschwitz?” Gushee asked.

“The connection of the Torah scroll to the Holocaust and then to Eddie Long is incomprehensible to me,” said David P. Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. Gushee is a scholar of the Holocaust and has visited Auschwitz several times.

“What was the point? Was it to signal that Eddie Long was suffering persecution like the Jews at Auschwitz?” Gushee asked.

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Birthright, in the eyes of Israeli satirists

By Uriel Heilman · January 31, 2012

This season of "Eretz Nehederet," Israel's version of "Saturday Night Live," features a running parody of a Birthright trip to Israel that mocks American Jews for their enthusiasm and naivite (and obesity and JAPpiness, of course) and Israelis for their gold-digging and trigger fingers. Chuckle along:

Part 1 (with English subtitles)

Part 2 (Hebrew):

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Comings and Goings

By Danielle Fleischman · January 31, 2012

Dr. David Rubovits has been named Senior Vice President, Planning and Allocations at the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago. He has been working in not-for-profit management, program development and organizational leadership for 23 years.

Rabbi Elliot J. Cosgrove will serve as Rabbinical Advisor in Interfaith Affairs and Co-Chair of the Anti-Defamation League’s National Outreach and Interfaith Committee. He will continue to serve in his position as Senior Rabbi at Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City.  

Robert Leventhal was hired at the United Synagogue to lead leadership development initiatives. He was formally a senior consultant at the Alban Institute of Herndon, Va. 

Dennis Ross is reprising his position as Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors and Professional Guiding Council at the Jewish People Policy Institute. Last month he left his position at the White House as the Obama administration's top Middle East strategist. 

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Alexander Levin’s got a name (and cash), but does he have a plan?

By Uriel Heilman · January 27, 2012

Ukrainian Jewish leader and real estate mogul Alexander L. Levin came to New York this week to launch the latest international Jewish organization with a grandiose name. Called the World Forum for Russian Jewry, this one aims to harness the power of Russian-speaking Jews the world over.

At the launch event Wednesday at the United Nations, Levin, who is the president of the Greater Kiev Jewish Community, talked about the need to bridge East and West and how Russian Jews can mediate between Washington and Moscow by influencing governments to stop Iran’s march toward nuclear weapons.

“We will push them to listen to us,” he said.

I wanted to understand more about how he planned on doing this, so I met with Levin on Thursday in a nondescript conference room he was borrowing in midtown Manhattan. Would he be meeting with high-level government officials? I asked him. Sending Russian Jews into the streets to stage demonstrations?

Levin was vague on the details -- not intentionally so, it seemed, but rather because he hadn’t decided on them yet.

The most important thing to get Moscow to change its positions on Iran, Levin said, is for the United States to take a more compromising stance vis-à-vis the Kremlin. And if the U.S. administration won’t compromise, he suggested, the government of the United States could be overthrown.

Huh?

Heschel on Heschel

By Ben Harris · January 23, 2012

Susanna Heschel talks with radio host Tavis Smiley about her sabbatical year in Berlin and her father, the late rabbi and civil rights activist Abraham Joshua Heschel. 

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Netanyahu doth protest too much?

By Uriel Heilman · January 19, 2012

Well, did he or didn't he?

For those of you who have been following, JTA's story about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu telling Jerusalem Post editor Steve Linde "We have two main enemies…. The New York Times and Haaretz” has caused quite a stir.

Our news item was based on a recording we obtained of a speech Linde gave Wednesday in Tel Aviv. By the time we reported it on Wednesday evening in New York, it was too late to get response from Jerusalem. But as soon as Israel woke up Thursday morning, our phones began ringing off the hook with calls from the Prime Minister's Office denying the report, and Netanyahu reiterated his denial in a meeting Thursday with the Dutch Parliament’s Foreign Affairs committee.

Linde quickly backtracked a bit -- saying part of his remarks were an interpretation of his conversation weeks earlier with the prime minister and that they were taken out of context -- but in interviews Thursday with me and others he stood by the most damning part of the quote.

At Haaretz, the news was taken as a badge of honor. Columnist (and former Knesset member) Yossi Sarid wrote, "Were [Netanyahu] not in the habit of denying so much - not a day goes by without clarifications and denials - we might have believed him more. With so many ducks in the pond, it's hard not to hear them quacking from the prime minister's office." Carlo Strenger wrote a tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that Netanyahu's commitment to democracy isn't as strong as his personal predilections.

As of Thursday evening the Times still hadn't weighed in, but bloggers from The Atlantic's John Hudson to Shmuel Rosner of the L.A. Jewish Journal were busy dissecting what the remark says about the inner workings of the prime minister's mind.

Here's the original, full quote from Linde's speech to the Women's International Zionist Organization conference in Tel Aviv on Wednesday:

"Let me share with you something that Prime Minister Netanyahu said to me in a meeting a couple of weeks ago. I hope he won't be mad at me because it may have been off the record. I walked in at his office in Tel Aviv, and he said, 'You know, Steve, we have two main enemies.' And I thought he was going to talk about, you know, Iran, maybe Hamas. He said, 'It’s The New York Times and Haaretz.' He said they set the agenda for an anti-Israel campaign all over the world. Journalists read them every morning and base their news stories, as Irwin [Cotler, a former Canadian justice minister who was part of the WIZO panel with Linde] said, on what they read in The New York Times or Haaretz. And we said to him, Prime Minister, do you really think the media has that strong a role in shaping [inaudible] opinion about Israel? And he said, 'Absolutely.'"

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Times travel writer on Israel: ‘A politically iffy burden’

By Daniel Treiman · January 17, 2012

Matt Gross, the former Frugal Traveler for The New York Times, went to Jerusalem and reported for the paper's Travel section on his stay. He seemed to have had a pretty nice time there, but the way he prefaced his article was more than a little bit off-putting:

In fact, of all the world’s roughly 200 nations, there was only one — besides Afghanistan and Iraq (which my wife has deemed too dangerous) — that I had absolutely zero interest in ever visiting: Israel.

This surprised friends and mildly annoyed my parents, who had visited quite happily. As a Jew, especially one who travels constantly, I was expected at least to have the Jewish state on my radar, if not to be planning a pilgrimage in the very near future. Tel Aviv, they’d say, has wonderful food!

But to me, a deeply secular Jew, Israel has always felt less like a country than a politically iffy burden. For decades I’d tried to put as much distance between myself and Judaism as possible, and the idea that I was supposed to feel some connection to my ostensible homeland seemed ridiculous. Give me Montenegro, Chiapas, Iran even. But Israel was like Christmas: something I’d never do.

The American Jewish Committee’s David Harris had a few thoughts in response:

I am Jewish

By Ben Harris · January 17, 2012

Andrew Lustig wrote and performed a poem entitled "I Am Jewish," which has already garnered more than 90,000 views and been widely shared through social media. 

Check it out here. 

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