Nadav Shragai (HA’ARETZ):

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert knows the study hall of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem very well. Up to a few years ago he was the mayor of Jerusalem and a regular guest of honor at the main event organized by the yeshiva, the annual Jerusalem Day celebration.

Olmert would make his crowd-pleasing speeches about the unity of Jerusalem, and a sea of knitted skullcaps carried him on high.

A lot of bad blood has passed between Olmert and his former knitted skullcap-wearing fans since then. The pleasant memories have turned into real bitterness against the man they consider to have betrayed them and converted.

The bloody terror attack on the flagship of the religious Zionism movement will only make their attitude toward Olmert more extreme. …

Bradley Burston (HA’ARETZ):

To the Westerner who “understands” the terrorist:

Spare us the explanations.

Spare us the learned, sociology-drenched justifications.

Spare us the reasons why you “get” Palestinians when they gun Jews down in cold blood.

Spare us the chapter and verse on how the plight of the Palestinians is at the root of Islamic terrorism the world over, and if the Palestinians were to receive full justice, Islamic terrorism would pass from the world.

Spare us. …

Amir Mizroch (JERUSALEM POST)

This attack was aimed specifically for the religious Zionist and settler population, and the terrorists knew that by speaking in this language, to these people, their message could only be interpreted in one way. This will be seen in terms of Ishmael and Isaac. …

Settler radio talk- show hosts are interpreting this prophecy by saying that if the Jews don’t stop Hamas, the Palestinians, Hizbullah and any other Islamic fundamentalists God will force the Jews to do it. The talk-show hosts blame Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and President Shimon Peres, and several callers into the broadcasts are unanimous in their condemnation of the Israeli government and calling on its removal.

Many of the top leadership of the religious Zionist movement, speaking at the funerals, spoke of revenge of the blood. The fact that the Jewish students were killed in a house of God touched the most basic nerve of many Israelis, and especially of the religious Zionist public.

The rabbis called on the students not to carry out acts of revenge, saying that judgment is in God’s realm. …

Calev Ben-David (JERUSALEM POST):

Rarely have terrorists chosen their target with so much malicious care as in Thursday night’s attack on Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav Yeshiva.

In striking the flagship institution of the religious Zionist movement, a Jerusalem landmark whose history is linked with the founding and fulfillment of the Jewish national home in the Land of Israel, the gunman aimed his weapon at the heart of the Zionist enterprise.

If the goal was to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors, then the bullets struck home with deadly and accurate force.

Beyond that, as the first terrorist attack on this scale in nearly two years - since a Tel Aviv suicide bomber killed nine in April 2006 - the impact of this incident will be profound.

This will be a sharp blow for those Israelis, especially Jerusalemites, who have allowed themselves to let their psychological guard down since the second intifada petered out. That the gunman was able to carry out this operation in the heart of a crowded Jerusalem neighborhood, some distance away from the Arab neighborhoods of the capital, will raise serious questions about assumptions made since the construction of the West Bank security barrier. …

Along with the release of “The Other Boleyn Girl” has come several interviews with Natalie Portman.

She touched on a few topics of Jewish interest in her talk with Time magazine:

You take on a period piece in The Other Boleyn Girl. What is your favorite time in history? —Nikki Barrett, York, PA.
I’m really interested in 1920s Berlin. I read this great book by Amos Elon called The Pity of It All. It’s about Jewish life in Berlin right before the war. The whole environment of the salons and all this culture—there was a real openness and freedom. It’s scary to think the response to that was this incredible fascism….

As a native of Israel, what role do you think the U.S. government should play in its affairs? —Amy Lucio, Riverside, Calif.
I would love to see a government that made demands on Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement. Ultimately, it has to come from the people themselves, though. No one is going to like an externally imposed solution.

And then there was her interview with The Sunday Times of London:

I identify very strongly as Jewish, but I could be Indian, Puerto Rican . . . Anything that gives you a cultural identity makes you know who you are and grounds you, even as a young girl trying on identities.” She sighs. “Any time I see something about Britney, I close it. I can’t look at it. I’m usually interested in gossip, but this makes my stomach hurt.” …

And, of course, while Portman is famously Jewish, Johansson is a lesser-known Jew (because of her Scandinavian father, she’s called “the kosher Danish”). When Penelope Cruz and Salma Hayek made a movie together, all the headlines blared “the Hot Tamales”. What should the media label a film starring two Jewish girls? Portman doesn’t miss a beat.

“The Hot Knishes,” she says.

Hat tip: Bintel Blog.

The New Jersey Jewish News breaks the story on the delays at Manischewitz’ new state-of-the-art facility in Newark — and what is shaping up to be the great Tam Tam shortage of 2008.

“It’s been a hiccup,” said David Rossi, vice president of marketing for the company.

The company closed its Jersey City facility after Passover 2007 and built a $15 million facility in Newark. “We have a brand-new, state-of-the-art, computer-controlled production line [or oven]; but as you know if you’ve ever done any construction, there can be delays, and we had delays,” said Rossi.

Manischewitz will also be offering less variety in its matza selection. It will produce unsalted, whole wheat, and egg matzot; but it will not be producing its less popular ones: Passover Thin Tea Matzo, Yolk Free Egg Matzo, White Grape Matzo, Concord Grape Matzo, Thin Unsalted Matzo, Shmura Matzo, and Spelt Matzo.

Prices will not be affected either by the delays or by rising wheat prices, said Rossi, at least for this Passover. As the company renegotiates wheat contracts for after the Passover season, however, the company expects to be affected by rising market prices.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Yossi Klein Halevi tells how continuing Palestinian violence has cured him of being a “guilty Israeli.”

In the early 1990s, while serving as a reservist soldier in Gaza, I became a guilty Israeli. By day, my unit patrolled the refugee camps where sewage flowed in rivulets and old men stared with hatred and children with despair. By night, we entered bedrooms and retrieved suspects whose offenses ranged from membership in terror organizations to failure to pay a water bill. More policemen than soldiers, we found ourselves enforcing an occupation whose threat to Israel’s Jewish and democratic values had become unbearable.

According to Halevi, it’s not just him, thanks to a series of diplomatic betrayals and violent attacks.

The result of all this is that today the guilty Israeli has become nearly extinct. Just as we came to realize during the first intifada that the occupation was untenable, so we have now come to realize that peace is impossible with Palestinian leaders for whom reconciliation is a one-way process.

Now, he says, the true test will be what happens in Gaza.

So long as Gaza refuses to heal itself, Israelis will rightly suspect that the Palestinian goal remains Israel’s destruction. Not even a full withdrawal from the West Bank, they fear, will end the war, any more than the pullout from Gaza stopped the rockets. Israel’s crime isn’t occupying but existing.

And so we move toward the next terrible round of conflict. This time, though, for all our anguish, we will feel a lot less remorse. Because even guilty Israelis realize that, until our neighbors care more about building their state than undermining ours, the misery of Gaza will persist.

On the eve of U.S. Secretary of Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming trip to the Middle East, Glenn Kessler reports in the Washington Post that the prospects for peace have “shifted dramatically” since President Bush held the Annapolis peace conference three months ago. And, now, the White House’s influence on the players in the region appears to be waning.

Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, said that key players in the region are moving beyond the Bush administration. “The feeling is that if you keep the flash points on a lower or somewhat higher flame, it will give you more cards when a new administration comes in,” he said, speaking in a phone interview from Israel. “Everyone is sucking up to the Iranians,” he added.

The signs of American irrelevance are apparent throughout the region. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, hailed as a potential peacemaker by the Bush administration, mused last week to the Jordanian newspaper al-Dustour that in the future it might be necessary to return to armed struggle against Israel. And Syria, which received an unexpected invitation to Annapolis, believes that the peace summit was “an exercise in public relations” and that Bush has no interest in peace, as Syria’s ambassador to Washington, Imad Moustapha put it last week.

The stalled process has added to skepticism in Israel, according to Kessler.

A poll published in the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth last week showed that 69 percent of Israelis surveyed believed the talks would not bring peace, while 78 percent believed the talks were being held only for political reasons.

During a recent visit to Washington, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad charged that Israel has “not done a thing materially on the ground to help my government.” Israeli officials counter that Israel has taken steps to bolster the Abbas government, but that some efforts — such as new restrictions on settlement growth — cannot be publicized because of the tenuous political situation in Israel.”

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Gershom Gorenberg reports on the struggles of American Jews forced to deal with the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. The problem, Gorenberg asserts, is that proving you are Jewish to the Israeli religious establishment has become increasingly difficult — “especially if you came to Israel from the United States.”

In recent years, the state’s Chief Rabbinate and its branches in each Israeli city have adopted an institutional attitude of skepticism toward the Jewish identity of those who enter its doors. And the type of proof that the rabbinate prefers is peculiarly unsuited to Jewish life in the United States. The Israeli government seeks the political and financial support of American Jewry. It welcomes American Jewish immigrants. Yet the rabbinate, one arm of the state, increasingly treats American Jews as doubtful cases: not Jewish until proved so.

More than any other issue, the question of Who is a Jew? has repeatedly roiled relations between Israel and American Jewry. Psychologically, it is an argument over who belongs to the family. In the past, the casus belli was conversion: Would the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew coming to Israel, apply to those converted to Judaism by non-Orthodox rabbis? Now … the status of Jews by birth is in question. Equally important, the dividing line is no longer between Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The rabbinate’s handling of the issue has placed it on one side of an ideological fissure within Orthodox Judaism itself, between those concerned with making sure no stranger enters the gates and those who fear leaving sisters and brothers outside.

According to Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi who helps Israelis navigate the rabbinic bureaucracy, the Chief Rabbinate’s have become so strict that “80 percent of federation leaders probably wouldn’t be able to reach the bar.”