After prayer and punch, Foreman takes Jewish victory lap
Yuri Foreman used his time wisely between rounds of his super welterweight world championship bout against titleholder Daniel Santos. Not only did he take liquids and instruction from his corner, the Orthodox rabbinical student sought some divine assistance in the last 10 seconds of each 60-second break of the 12-rounder.
“God, please give me strength,” was his simple invocation.
Foreman related this tidbit at a reception in his honor Thursday at a posh kosher steakhouse on New York’s East Side. The night before he was the guest of honor at a Jewish National Fund gala.
Think of it as an ethnic-themed victory lap for Foreman, 29, who found enough strength to win a unanimous decision the night of Nov. 14 in Las Vegas for the World Boxing Association crown. The Brooklyn boxer, via Belarus and then Israel, moved to 28-0 since turning pro seven years ago, even though most prognosticators figured he would fall to Santos.
He says in the ring he turns very spiritual, gets “very close to God,” because “another guy wants to take your head off.”
Santos didn’t take off Foreman’s head, but the new champ, clad all in black for the Prime Grill fete featuring some sumptuous steak and chicken, did need 18 stitches (of course it was 18) to close a cut over his left eye.
The new champ’s spiritual mentor, Rabbi DovBer Pinson, says no other fighter can “balance spirituality and physicality” like Foreman, who he praised as a “gentle lion” breaking a lot of stereotypes about boxers and Jews.
What’s next for Foreman? He said he’d have to consult with his “second rabbi” and promoter, Top Rank’s Bob Arum (Hebrew name: Reuven Moshe ben Shlomo, we found out).
And should Foreman ever fight in Israel, Arum already has the bout named: “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
Attendees at the JNFuture's 3rd annual gala event didn’t have to wait that long to hang out with the new champ. He was the guest of honor at the event, held at a club in New York’s Soho district.
Organizers of the gathering, aimed at raising money for environmental causes in Israel, had booked Foreman well in advance of his title fight and were thrilled to have him there on one of his first public appearances since his victory in Vegas.
"It's amazing to have him here," said Gabrielle Carlan, one of the JNFuture promoters. "We've got a good turnout of 200-plus people, more than we had last year."
Foreman's wife, Leyla, told JTA at the event that she remained unusually calm during her husband's fight.
"Most fights I'm very tense," the Hungrian-born former model said. "But this time I had a good feeling. He had done all the training and all the praying right, what more could he do?"
Now eyes are on another observant Orthodox Jewish boxer with a shot at claiming a world champion boxing title, as Brooklyn's Dmitriy Salita prepares to square off against champion Amir Khan in London on Dec. 3.
If Salita manages to defeat the heavily favored Khan in his own backyard, it would make an already great year for Jewish boxing even better.
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Who’s to blame for Abbas’ resignation?
Mahmoud Abbas wants to resign as Palestinian Authority president. Who's to blame?
Is it:
- Benjamin Netanyahu, for refusing to agree to a full settlement freeze in the West Bank as a precondition for restarting negotiations, and for refusing to offer concessions on dividing Jerusalem and allowing Palestinian refugees from 1948 to settle in Israel.
- The Obama administration, for first demanding Israel impose a full settlement freeze and then backpeddling on that demand and calling for the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table immediately.
- Hamas, for taking over Gaza and refusing to join in national unity government with Abbas' Fatah faction, and for refusing to allow Fatah to run candidates in the Gaza Strip.
- Abbas, for failing to root out corruption in the Palestinian Authority and make his party, Fatah, a popular alternative to Hamas.
- All of the above.
In The New Republic, Shmuel Rosner goes with No. 4. He writes of Abbas:
He largely has himself to blame. While the Americans and Israelis were finally reaching an agreement on a partial settlement freeze at the trilateral meeting this past September in New York, Abbas refused to admit that a total freeze was no longer a viable option. He continued his intransigence in a meeting with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton two weeks ago in Abu Dhabi. And this past Wednesday, in a public appearance marking the five years that have passed since the death of Yasser Arafat, Abbas vowed, yet again, that he will not go back to negotiating with Israel "without a full cessation of settlement construction, including Jerusalem and natural growth."
That is one tall tree he has climbed. Abbas is now committed to a stance that cannot be acceptable to an American administration that prides itself on engagement with friend and foe, and dialogue without preconditions. If Obama is willing to negotiate with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, how can Abbas get away with refusing to talk to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu? On the other hand, with every bombastic statement, Abbas seems to be limiting his domestic options. How can he go back to negotiations while saving face with his own people after repeatedly promising not to do so unless Israel freezes all settlement construction?
Steven A. Cook warns in The New Republic that the Palestinians may turn to a third intifada to get their way:
The dynamics of Palestinian politics indicate that a third intifada is likely to erupt in the near future. If history is any guide, the Palestinian leadership of the West Bank--whether it includes Mahmoud Abbas or not--may again look to a violence to improve its sagging domestic popularity.
Throughout contemporary Palestinian history, spilling Israeli blood has often been the best way for competing political factions to burnish their nationalist credentials.
David Ignatius of the Washington Post looks beyond Abbas:
Follow the lead of Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority and the man who's largely responsible for Ramallah's turnaround. He has drawn up a plan for a two-year transition to statehood. The United States should endorse this goal, explicitly, and call for an immediate start to negotiations about the details.
"Fayyad is the only game in town, but his plan isn't sustainable without a political process," says Martin Indyk, who heads the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution and organized a three-day conference in Jerusalem to discuss U.S.-Israeli issues.
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British TV on the pro-Israel lobby
Earlier this week, "Dispatches," a program on Britain’s Channel 4 TV, ran an hourlong show on the country's pro-Israel lobby.
Filled with sinister music and conspiratorial insinuations, including constant shots of the Israeli flag superimposed on the Union Jack, this one-sided broadside (watch it here) portrays supporters of Israel in the United Kingdom as a shady, moneyed lobby manipulating members of Parliament and the media at will. (“Has the BBC been compromised by the pro-Israel lobby?” the program asks at one point.)
Nowhere does the program note that the pro-Israel lobby in Britain acts no differently from the auto industry lobby, the pensioners' lobby or any other lobby in Britain. Nor is there any mention of the influence of Arab oil money in British politics. Rather, the program's host and reporter, Daily Mail columnist Peter Oborne, begins by asking, "Are British policies influenced by supporters of a foreign power?" He goes on to describe the pro-Israel lobby as "the most effective lobby working inside British political parties."
David Cesarani zeroes in on this problem in an opinion piece in The Guardian, writing:
Oborne showed beyond doubt that there are well-resourced pro-Israel advocacy groups operating in the UK. Like other campaigning organisations they mobilise financial support for political allies and cultivate friends in parliament. Both the Conservative Friends of Israel and the Labour Friends of Israel wine and dine MPs at party conferences and fly them in batches to Israel for PR tours. But this is standard operating procedure for lobbying.
Indeed, Oborne repeatedly states that: "The pro-Israel lobby does nothing wrong, or illegal." So what is Oborne's beef about the pro-Israel activists? First, he complains that they operate semi-covertly. Although he disavows any imputation of a conspiracy, that is what his charge amounts to. The pro-Israel lobby "needs to be far more open about how it is funded and what it does". But the same can be said about Michael Ashcroft, Rupert Murdoch, the arms industry, the Saudi Arabians, and the list can go on.
Oborne's problem isn't just with the actions of pro-Israel lobbyists, but with their success and the notion that one can be pro-Israel at all. Reporting on a speech by Conservative Party leader David Cameron at a Conservative Friends of Israel event, Oborne declares himself "astonished" that Cameron makes no note in his speech to the "widespread killing of innocent civilians" in Gaza; Oborne then ominously notes the “surprisingly soft line the Conservative Party takes toward the foreign policy of the Israeli state."
Much of the report is about "the Israel lobby’s bankrolling of British politicians," but the piece also charges Israel supporters with stifling criticism of Israel in British media. The Jewish Leadership Council, the Zionist Federation of Britain, and the Board of Deputies of British Jews all get mention, and Camera (the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting) and Honest Reporting are portrayed as twin forces keeping news outlets like the BBC and The Guardian newspaper in line when it comes to Israel. Supporters of Israel might be shocked to learn that these news outlets' coverage of Israel could be considered as soft.
But in Oborne's view, “The lobby keeps them under constant attack." He says, “Calling critics of Israel’s foreign policy anti-Semitic has become a deliberate tactic among some of Israel’s more strident lobbyists.”
Oborne also offers a heavy dose of gruesome footage from war zones in Gaza and Lebanon, and contrasts shots of the Jewish West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim with Palestinian Bedouin shacks and shepherds.
What the program doesn't offer is virtually any contrarian viewpoints or context.
Oborne concludes: “In making this program we haven’t found anything even faintly resembling a conspiracy, but we have found a worrying lack of transparency," but the conspiracies Oborne sees everywhere with regard to the Israel lobby belies that.
Robin Shepherd of The Wall Street Journal calls the program breathtakingly amateurish and offers some refutations of its key points, concluding:
Given the paucity of the arguments, it would be tempting to dismiss the whole thing as unimportant. Would that we could. The documentary has already provoked a torrent of abuse against British Jews, not least on Channel 4's widely read Web site, whose moderators have seen fit to approve dozens of postings about the Zionist lobby's "seditious behavior," its "disgusting attack on British democracy," "the hand of global Zionism at work," and several along the lines of the following, which said flatly: "We want our country back. The agents of a foreign power embedded at all levels of our government and politics need flushing out."
If this sort of language takes hold, a bad situation in Britain may be about to get a whole lot worse.
Watch the program and decide for yourself, here.
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What do H & H and B & H have in common?
You think Woody Allen and Larry David have Jewish identity issues? Try putting The New York Times on the couch.
The paper of record has long exhibited a split personality when it comes to the Jews, vacillating between obsession and avoidance.
In the avoidance department, check out its coverage of the legal troubles facing two of New York’s iconic (and Jewey) stores: H & H Bagels and B & H, the electronics mega store.
Hemler Toro, the owner of the best-tasting (and kosher) bagel shop, is facing more than a $1 million in penalties and 15 years in prison for allegedly pocketing state and federal payroll withholding taxes. B & H, meanwhile, is being sued by three women who allege that they were denied promotions after their Chasidic supervisors told them that women were religiously prohibited from holding sales jobs.
The owners of both stories deny the allegations.
Years of training have left me predisposed to see the Jewish angle in any story or stories – so it’s probably no surprise when seeing separate reports in The New York Post on the two cases, a “blog post alert” flashed through my head. But before I could write up an item tying the together, I noticed that the Times had beaten me to the punch.
Except where I saw two Jewish stories, the Times saw ampersands. As in the following headline: “It Was Some Day in Court for Ampersands.”
Look, as I said, the fact that my mind instantly linked these two stories along Jewish lines probably means I’ve been doing this for too long. But I think it’s even stranger to lump these two stories together – and then make no reference to Jewish, kosher or Chasidim.
If it was just H & H, I’d get it. Yes, the Post did allude to the store’s place in the city’s ethnic landscape, noting that its bagels have “received screen shout-outs from Woody Allen … and Jerry Seinfeld’s sidekick Kramer." But it wasn’t a must. After all, the place is owned by a Hispanic, it doesn’t scream kosher and plenty of non-Jewish New Yorkers love the bagels.
But how do you write a story that is half about allegations of religious discrimination at B & H, but not mention that the place is run by Chasidim? Well, here’s how the Times managed to do it:
In the lawsuit against B & H, filed in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, one current and three former female employees claim that they were denied sales positions because they are women. According to the lawsuit, this was a common practice at B & H.
Nakisha Cushnie, the lead plaintiff in the case, was “advised that these positions were not open to her due to ‘religious reasons,’ ” the lawsuit says.
Richard B. Ancowitz, the women’s lawyer, said there were no religious exemptions in antidiscrimination laws.“It’s an upsetting thing, in this day and age especially, to not be able to get a job because of your gender,” Mr. Ancowitz said in an interview. “I thought we were beyond that.”
Although no managers expressly told the women that they were denied promotion because of their sex, Mr. Ancowitz said that the company had no saleswomen and had turned down other female applicants for sales jobs.
It's not quite the same as playing down the Holocaust. But still...
For those looking for a few more details on the B & H story, here's the Post's take:
"I asked to work in sales and make more money, but was told that no women were allowed in sales for 'religious reasons,' " said Naskinsha Cushnie, who worked at the Hasidic-run store for more than a year.
Cushnie and three other women who were denied jobs at the photo store yesterday filed a $7 million lawsuit in The Bronx. claiming sexual discrimination in the workplace.
“It's not a question of women being relegated to back-of-the-bus status; they are not even being let on the bus," said Richard Ancowitz, an attorney for the women. "They are just not being hired at this store. It's really a shame."
Ancowitz said that under the law, B&H has no First Amendment-religious freedom to discriminate against women. He also said that they also have no right under the Torah to discriminate.
"I have consulted with leading authorities, and it is quite clear that there are no tenets of Jewish law that require the sales force to be male-only," Ancowitz said. "In fact, the Torah itself teaches, 'Justice, justice, you shall seek.' "
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Born in Berlin, figthing for U.S.
CNN interviews JTA contributor Tom Tugend about the experience of being a child in Nazi Germany and subsequently fighting as soldier in the U.S. army.
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Secular studies
From Eric Herschthal of The New York Jewish Week:
The latest skirmish in the halls of Jewish academia has, surprisingly, nothing to do with Israel. But the new discord over academic grants made by the Posen Foundation concerns a charged topic just the same -- the growing trend of teaching about Jewish culture through an exclusively secular lens.
Six years ago, the British energy magnate Felix Posen created a foundation to fund, at universities worldwide, courses that focused solely on secular Jewish culture. The mission of the Posen Foundation was to engage secular Jews, who represent about half of the Jewish population, by explicitly teaching about the 400-year history of the Jewish people’s entry into the modern world -- which is to say, their history.
The academy, Posen felt, was ignoring that history.
This fall, the foundation added four new American universities to its roster, including The New School in New York and one prominent Jewish school, Brandeis University.
But as the foundation’s reach grows -- it will award grants to about 25 American universities this year, up from five in 2003 -- also likely to grow is the debate about the foundation’s mission, its potential for skewing the teaching of Jewish studies and whether Jewish studies departments should even take grants with such ideological strings attached. ...
Read the full story.
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A night with Eli Valley
In the "events I'm sorry I missed but now it's on YouTube" department ... “Eli Valley vs the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self Hatred.”
For the uninitiated, Eli Valley is a provocative cartoonist who specializes in skewering Jewish organizational sacred cows (here, here, here and here).
Take a look at the comics, and then -- if you want some insight into what makes him tick -- watch the video:
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NIF on defense for ‘rape’ poster demonizing Israel
The New Israel Fund is defending its sponsorship of three Arab groups behind a poster suggesting that IDF soldiers sexually violate Arab women (see the poster here).
The poster, in which an Israeli soldier is seen with his hand reaching for the breast of a woman in Palestinian garb, says, "Her husband needs a permit to touch her. The occupation penetrates her life everyday.” It's part of a campaign titled "My Land, Space, Body and Sexuality: Palestinians in the Shadow of the Wall" and organized by the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies.
Here's what the coalition says was the purpose of its 11-country day of awareness, held Nov. 9:
We are seeking to break the “walls” of silence on daily violations of our sexual and bodily rights in the Palestinian society. We are principally highlighting the Israeli structural and legal violations of sexual, bodily, psychological, social and economic rights of Palestinians that intersect with the patriarchal social context, which restrain individual freedoms, perpetuates women’s inferior status and imposes silence on physical, psychological and sexual violations committed against women.
No word on the treatment of women by Arab countries (which, among other things, punish women for sexual activity outside of marriage and, in at least one case, outlaw women driving).
Three groups behind the Nov. 9 conference received some $340,000 from the NIF last year. Women Against Violence got $217,000, Mada Al-Carmel got $100,000 and the Arab Forum for Sexuality got $23,000.
NIF-UK chairman Nicholas Saphir defended the conference in the London Jewish Chronicle:
NIF chairman Nicholas Saphir defended the conference, saying there is a “real humanitarian problem” in Israel, where it is illegal to grant citizenship to Palestinians married to Israeli citizens.
“NIF supports free expression of the various views of our broad spectrum of grantees — whether we agree with all their positions or not,” he said. “As long as the work is within the framework of Israel’s charity law and other Israeli laws, NIF will continue to support them in the interests of sustaining its vibrant democracy.”
Conference organisers insisted that they were not claiming that IDF soldiers rape or sexually violate Palestinians.
Read the full story here.
UPDATE: NIF Communications Director Naomi Paiss told me: "While we certainly defend the conference as appropriate – and as always, may disagree with our grantees on some key issues but see no reason to force them into ideological lockstep -- there’s no question that the poster in question is unnecessarily provocative and misleading."
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Controversy, crime and color
Controversy, crime and color from from around these Jewish United States:
Controversy
- Within the span of a little more than a week, the Hillel of Greater Philadelphia first declined to host a speech by a staunch critic of Israeli policy, then featured a lecture by a controversial politician from the ranks of the Jewish state's pro-settlement movement. That pair of decisions -- and the minor flap they created -- highlights a conundrum that Hillel chapters consistently face nationwide. (Philadelphia Jewish Exponent)
- Is Chicago’s Columbia College targeting Prof. Zafra Lerman because she’s Israeli, because she’s Jewish or because she’s too independent for the increasingly conservative institution? (Chicago Jewish News)
- Did anti-Semitism play a role in the University of Central Missouri’s decision to let its president go? (Kansas City Jewish Chronicle)
- A pathway used by many Jewish institutions to bring foreign religious and educational workers into the United States is tightening due to increased scrutiny from immigration authorities, leading to a shortage of religious staffers. One Jewish educational official cites tension. (Forward)
Crime
- Authorities are still looking for answers in the murder of a 23-year-old Jewish student in Centennial, Colo. (Intermountain Jewish News)
- Arnold Zaler, the former Denver kosher meat entrepreneur, was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on a long list of fraud charges. (Intermountain Jewish News)
Color
- The Jewish dating scene is tough in Cleveland. (Cleveland Jewish News)
- One San Francisco Bay Area family sent its three sons to serve in the IDF. (J)
- Transplanted Manhattanite, now 103, attributes her longevity to walking a lot. (Florida Jewish Journal)
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Goldman Sachs did what? Maureen Dowd said what?
A few weeks back Maureen Dowd dedicated a column to slamming the leadership of the Catholic Church, sparking a fiery response from New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan.
Now some of the Jews are angry, accusing the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist of employing anti-Semitic imagery in a subsquent column lambasting bankers.
Here's how she got things rolling:
The Great Vampire Squid has gotten religion.
In an interview with The Sunday Times of London, the cocky chief of Goldman Sachs said he understands that a lot of people are “mad and bent out of shape” at blood-sucking banks.
“I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer,” Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O., told the reporter John Arlidge.
But the little people who are boiling simply don’t understand. And Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, who unforgettably labeled Goldman “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” doesn’t understand.
Writing in The New Jersey Jewish News, Menachem Rosensaft and Jason H. Dolinsky slammed Dowd for putting "blood-sucking" and a Jewish banker in the same sentence:
We have heard these terms far too often to let them pass. Anti-Semitic tracts and Web sites are replete with references to “blood-sucking Jews.” And Ms. Dowd is too intelligent not to have realized that the depiction of Jews as greedy money-lenders has resulted in persecution and pogroms over the course of the past two millennia. Ms. Dowd has given new life to such ancient anti-Semitic incitements. ...
We dread the prospect of swastikas smeared outside Goldman Sachs offices, or of learning that some street hood, inspired by Ms. Dowd’s column, broke an observant Jew's leg shouting "let Goldman Sachs buy you a new leg."
At a time when a virulent Judaeophobia is on the rise, especially in Europe and throughout much of the Muslim world, politicians, journalists and columnists have a responsibility to refrain from using inflammatory anti-Semitic code words. Our constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech does not bestow on any of us a license to incite to bigotry or violence.
Other were upset with the final line of the column, in which Dowd fired off a parting shot at Blankfein's assertion that bankers are "doing God's work."
"And as far as doing God’s work," Dowd wrote, "I think the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple."
Robert Sugarman, the ADL's national chairman, sent this letter to the Times:
While one can agree or disagree with Maureen Dowd’s portrayal of Goldman Sachs and other bankers (column, Nov. 11), her statement that “the bankers who took government money and then gave out obscene bonuses are the same self-interested sorts Jesus threw out of the temple” potentially raises one of the classic themes of anti-Semitism linking Jews and abhorrent money-lending practices.
However unintentional, Ms. Dowd’s invoking the New Testament story to illustrate our current financial mess conjures up old prejudices against Jews.
Here's the Saturday Night Live sketch that inspired the headline of Dowd's missive, if not the column itself:
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