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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?

If 100,000 Ukrainians could get rid of Ukraine’s government in 2004, during the Orange Revolution, Levin said, it just takes some extrapolation to figure out that a few hundred thousand people in America can get rid of an uncooperative president in Washington. It wasn’t clear whether Levin meant through revolution or elections.

I pressed Levin for more details on how Russian Jews figured into all this.

It’s all about genetics, he said. With the experience of two world wars, 70 years of Communism and the struggles of pogroms and immigration, Russians are hard-wired to fight for their lives. And if they believe they are threatened by Iran, they will do everything within their power to eliminate that threat. It’s not just Jewish Russians from around the world who could rally to this cause, but the 100 million or so non-Jewish Russians, too, he added.

“These people are used to fighting for their lives, for their kids, for everything,” Levin said. “This is a very powerful genetic trait.”

Levin emphasized that solving the Iran problem isn’t the only, or main, objective of the organization.

“The most important goal,” Levin said, “is to bring the messiah.”

Levin, who is clean-shaven and sports a black, knit yarmulke, is a Lubavitcher.

“Our goal is first of all the Torah, land and people of Israel,” he said of the World Forum. “I want to make Israel live by the law of the Torah, but the people of Israel are not ready yet.”

Levin is hardly the first Russian-speaking Jew to launch an organization with an international-sounding name and grandiose ideas about saving the Jewish people. In the fall of 2010, fellow Ukrainian billionaire Igor Kolomoisky pledged $14 million to the European Council of Jewish Communities -- a low-profile organization founded more than 40 years ago to promote Jewish culture, heritage, education and community – to become its president and refocus the organization on political issues.

But when ECJC board members resigned in protest, Kolomoisky withdrew his bid (and his cash) and decided to start his own organization. This past spring, he and fellow Jewish Ukrainian billionaire Vadim Rabinovitch (a former ECJC vice president) created the European Jewish Union, whose first big project would be the establishment of European Jewish Parliament.

When the list of candidates was announced over the summer, people dismissed the whole thing as a joke. Candidates included soccer star David Beckham, filmmaker Roman Polanski, comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen, fashion designer Diane von Furstenburg and other famous and less-famous European Jews (including a JTA correspondent) who didn’t even know they were in the running -- if they knew anything of the planned parliament at all.

At the same time, however, Rabinovitch and Kolomoisky were making plans to launch a 24/7 Jewish news channel called Jewish News One, which began broadcasting by sattelite last September. The two reportedly have poured $5 million into the project.

If Levin’s idea is to be taken seriously, he’s going to need more than his own cash, a name and determination (he also reportedly has welcome letters from the Israeli prime minister and foreign minister). He’s going to need a real plan.

The more deeply I delved, the more it seemed that that plan doesn't exist yet.

The organization has no projected budget, no executive director, no staff and no office. Levin told the Forward there are plans for 18 offices around the world, but it turns out there are no actual plans, just a desire for 18 offices.

Well, could Levin at least identify the 18 places where he wants to put them?

He hasn’t figured that out yet. All he’s got is the number, which he chose because 18 corresponds with “chai,” the Hebrew word for life.

“If you believe in God, there are two ways to keep the peace,” Levin concluded. “One, is if people are ready and doing everything to bring moshiach. Two, is if the situation is so bad that God send moshiach. We are working towards No. 1.”

Levin said the World Forum is still in an embryonic stage and needs time to nail down its exact goals, plans and strategy.

"We just created it yesterday," he said.

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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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Friday Five: Brangelina, yes Turkey Can (Bonomo), Sheldon Adelson, Jack Lew, Anastassia Michaeli

By JTA Staff · January 13, 2012

Brangelina Goes to Washington

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie decided to swing by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to promote the latter's directorial debut, "In The Land of Blood and Honey." They specifically went to tour the "From Memory to Action" exhibition on genocide, which focuses in part on the massacre in Srebrenica featured in her movie. In the process, they put some major celebrity muscle into the call to transform Holocaust memory into action against modern-day genocide.

Can Bonomo Sings Turkey

Can Bonomo, a 24-year-old Jewish recording artist from Izmir, Turkey, was selected to represent his country at Eurovision. The fan site EuroVisionary describes the 24-year-old singer/songwriter's style as "Istanbulian music that works with tunes from Alaturca to international indie style," with the Shins, Wax Poetic, the Kinks, the Libertines and the Beatles as influences. Whoa! Not sure what that produces, but Bonomo, whether he knows it or not, picks up on a lovely Turkish Jewish tradition of mixing musical styles. Sephardic Jewish singers in Ladino were famed among Turks of all persuasions in the 1920s and 1930s, rendering their foreparents' winsome tales of love lost to jazzy arrangements in Istanbul's cafes. There's also a political element to Bonomo's selection by the state-owned Turkish Radio and Television Corp.Read More >>>

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AP throws ‘Bark Mitzvah’ maestro a bone

By Ami Eden · January 12, 2012

The Associated Press says the "Bark Mitzvah" is now a "craze" and "booming multi-million dollar industry." Not sure I'm buying it, but for now I'm more interested in this quote from Lee Day, the master of ceremonies at the BM in question:

I perform Bark Mitzvahs because it's a blessing for the animals. And I really believe that the animals have a right to have a party and a religion.

Really? The right to have a religion? OK, fine, I'll play. What if the dog isn't down with Judaism -- shouldn't it also have the right to choose a different religion?

Oh, wait. My bad, Day also performs barktisms.

Perhaps more canines would be exercising their religious rights if Day hadn't trademarked all of these ceremonies.

If only Mordechai Kaplan had thought of that when he got the bat mitzvah ball rolling -- just imagine how big the Reconstructionist movement's endowment would be!

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S** Christians say to Jews

By Ben Harris · January 11, 2012

Maybe you've heard about Sh*t Girls Say? Well, if you liked that, be sure to check out the Jewish version.

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Friday Five: Haredi child star, Harry Houdini, King of Peace, Cantor’s griller, Jewish time traveler

By JTA Staff · January 6, 2012

Haredi kid plays the Holocaust card

The haredi Israeli kid who was photographed with his yellow concentration-camp star in a classic hands-up Holocaust pose managed to take the culture wars between haredi and non-haredi Israelis to new levels of enmity. Now it’s not just Israeli media, secular Israelis and the Modern Orthodox who are outraged; it's Holocaust survivors, too.

Harry Houdini escapes to Broadway

As a general rule, The Friday Five does not include dead people, especially ones who died nearly a century ago. But the members of a top-secret JTA committee agreed that the announcement of a Broadway musical dedicated to Harry Houdini deserved a mention. They were divided, however, over whether to honor Hugh Jackman for taking on the leading role (he’s so handsome, but is he Jewish enough?) or Aaron Sorkin for writing the book (we love him, but will we be able to follow his trademark fast-talking set to song?). And then there’s Stephen Schwartz, who's writing the music, and Jack O’Brien, who's set to direct. So we’re going with the master himself: Harry Houdini, the world’s most legendary escape artist -- and owner of the coolest immigrant-son-of-a-rabbi story. Evah!Read More >>>

0 Comments | Share This | Aaron Sorkin, Beit Shemesh, Eric Cantor, Friday Five, Harry Houdini, Hugh Jackman, King Abdullah, Lesley Stahl, Max Lapushin, Samoa |

UPenn BDS conference: Act of warfare or free expression?

By Daniel Treiman · January 5, 2012

Hillel is criticizing the University of Pennsylvania for allowing a boycott, divestment and sanctions conference to be held on its campus.

In a statement Hillel’s president, Wayne Firestone, says that BDS campaigns “have no place on campus because they are blatantly anti-Israel and amount to acts of political and economic warfare.”

The statement concludes:

We join Hillel of Greater Philadelphia… in objecting to the University of Pennsylvania allowing the BDS movement to hold its upcoming annual conference on campus.

The University of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, stated last month that it is not sponsoring the conference and does not support divestment or boycotts (a point that was applauded in the Hillel statement.) “The event is being sponsored by a registered student group, as is permitted of any student group on campus,” the university said in its statement.

The university’s statement concludes:

Penn has always supported free expression and the free exchange of ideas.  These are essential elements of a great university. These principles apply to this event, as they would any other student event, whether or not we agree with or condone the message BDS seeks to communicate.

For its part, the student group sponsoring the conference, Penn BDS, says that it has reached out to the campus Hillel and liberal pro-Israel groups “to gauge their interest in participating in the conference as dissenting voices.”

The full university and Hillel statements are after the jump: