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Don’t throw away your NYT!

By Ami Eden · April 30, 2008

The New York Times had a touching article Wednesday about the story of how a Torah made it from Auschwitz to the Central Synagogue on 55th & Lex. Only one problem: In the photo of the scroll, God's name (that's the "Tetragrammaton," for all you academic types) is clearly visible – which, according to Jewish law, means that people can't throw away their Metro sections. Recycling is also out. Check with the local rabbi for the closest Genizah.

So much for making fun of the photo from the recent NYT travel story about nude vacations (check out the woman, back-left).

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News shticker

By Daniel Sieradski · April 30, 2008

• The popular esoteric Jewish magazine Zeek has merged with new Jew media venture Jewcy.
• Ted Riley Floyd, aka Nathaniel James Levi, the 28 year-old Jewish convert who insinuated himself into the Jewish community of Lakewood, NJ, has confessed to stealing his identity from a dead Navy veteran.
• Time magazine examines the Jews' affinity for Harry Potter.
• Tony Zirkle, a GOP congressional candidate from Indiana, spoke at a neo-Nazi event on Adolph Hitler's birthday (April 20) and made, um, rather unusual remarks about Jewish involvement in the pornography industry.
• In an interview with Iran's official English-language television network, PressTV, Francis A. Boyle, a professor of international law at U. of Illinois and former legal advisor to the PLO, called on the Iranian government to sue Israel for committing genocide against Palestinians.
• Israel snubbed British Formula 1 racing chief Max Mosley after revelations about his Nazi sex fetish came to light. Ironic, considering Israel's own Nazi sex fetish.
• A philosemitic neo-Nazi(?!) imprisoned in St. Louis won a federal lawsuit entitling him to receive kosher meals.
• The British Board of Deputies has launched a campaign charging the British National Party with inciting racism and anti-Semitism. The BNP has denied the Board's claims.

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Stewart talks Hamas with Jimmy Carter

By Daniel Sieradski · April 29, 2008

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ADL chimes in on Stein’s anti-evolution film

By Daniel Sieradski · April 29, 2008

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman has spoken out against Ben Stein's new anti-evolution film, Expelled. In a press release issued just moments ago, Foxman writes:

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler's genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

While Foxman's views may resonate with members of the scientific community who are outraged by Stein's film, as an adamant defendant of church-state separation, Foxman has earned himself a reputation as a political foe of religious conservatives. Thus while his criticism may be apt, don't expect him to be changing any minds in the anti-evolution community.

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No peace at Columbia

By Ben Harris · April 29, 2008

With all the hubbub in the Jewish world these days surrounding Israel's 60th anniversary, it was perhaps inevitable that Israel's critics would want their own commemoration. As JTA reported yesterday, this week has been branded "Nakba Week" at Columbia University, with a whole host of events planned around what Palestinians see as the "catastrophe" of Israel's creation.

Several campus groups are participating. Two that are not – surprise! – are Hillel and the Progressive Jewish Alliance, a Hillel subgroup. Apparently, Hillel and PJA declined to co-sponsor an April 14 event that had the word "Nakba" in its description. According to Columbia senior David Judd, who assailed both groups in a piece in the Columbia student newspaper, the Spectator, Hillel cannot acknowledge the Nakba because of its stated commitment to a Jewish democratic Israel.

He writes:

In the case of the April 14 event, I'm told this policy was cited against any Hillel association with the claim that Palestinians suffered a historical wrong in 1948. Whatever happened that year, it cannot be labeled a "catastrophe." Harm done to Palestinians cannot, apparently, be acknowledged in this framework as an ethical offense. Where it cannot plausibly be denied nor justified, absolute silence on the subject must suffice.

This implication may seem a stretch from the formal wording of Hillel policy—and indeed, it is unlikely that, should Hillel or PJA have cosponsored, either would have suffered any direct sanction. But deriving an imperative from the Hillel formula for the exclusion of Palestinians from ethical consideration does not require too strained a reading.

A stretch indeed.

Judd continues:

A fundamental illiberality to Zionism's traditional understanding of the essential nature of Israel is made clear by its inability to encompass al-Nakba. We do not normally grant anyone the right to run a nation-state under the control and in the exclusive interest of one race, ethnicity, or religion—a basic principle not of some utopian internationalism but of liberal democracy. This privilege is incompatible with the egalitarian recognition of an intrinsic human dignity.

But isn't it precisely that concern, that Israel remain a democratic state of all its citizens, precisely what has led a plurality of its citizens to support a two-state solution, an objective Hillel expressly supports? Isn't it exactly the desire to NOT treat Palestinians as second-class citizens what has led the Israeli government to pursue, as a matter of official policy, the creation of an independent Palestinian state?

Hillel President Emily Steinberger defended her group in another Spectator piece. Her point: branding events with the Nakba label precludes dialogue.

However, events labeled with "Al Nakba" are not models that will successfully engage in dialogue if a discussion of the Arab-Israeli conflict has to be based on the premise that Israel's creation was a catastrophe. Labeling the week-long initiative with the term makes it very difficult for any supporter of the state of Israel, regardless of his or her opinions of Israeli policies, to engage in this dialogue, since it is predicated on delegitimizing their opinions.

Well, if that's true, Israel is probably going to have a difficult time ever engaging in dialogue with Palestinians, who more or less have internalized the notion of Nakba is an integral part of their national consciousness.

But what's really likely to inflame the critics, is Steinberger final line:

"The five-letter word Nakba, like some other inflammatory four-and-five-letter words, is not the beginning of dialogue."

Besides having some trouble counting, branding a Nakba as a cuss isn't likely to open much dialogue either. Perhaps that's not surprising, given that making peace between Israelis and Palestinians is probably easier than making peace between academics.

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Meanwhile, at the U.N. anti-racism prep conference in Geneva

By Michael J. Jordan · April 25, 2008

Another day, another tongue lashing from Anne Bayefsky. Bayefsky, the director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, has become a Jewish gadfly here in Geneva, as speechifying diplomats wrapped the first week of a two-week "preparatory" session for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism. A common theme here is for Arab, Islamic and African nations to they're racist, then point their fingers at Israel for racism. So for a fourth straight day, Bayfesky weighed in. "I wasn't planning to say anything," she said, after singling out Iran, Syria, Senegal and Algeria for hypocrisy. "But their words strained credulity, so I couldn't let it go unanswered." She's become such an irritant for Arab anti-Israel sentiment that the Egyptian ambassador couldn't help but express his frustration with her on Thursday. "This has become a daily show," he said, "and we are sick and tired of it."

While Israel boycotts the forum because of its distinctly anti-Israel vibe, one quasi-Israeli mills about – "kind of undercover," as he puts it. Khazriel Ben Yehuda isn't actually a citizen, but a permanent resident of Israel for 30 years. You wouldn't guess it from his dapper African-looking garb. Ben Yehuda hails from Israel's small Black Israelite community. "I don't really announce I'm from Israel, like a Malian wouldn't announce 'I'm from Mali!,'" says Ben Yehuda, who spoke on behalf of the African Hebrew Israelite Development Agency, based in Ghana and in his Israeli hometown of Dimona. Still, he sees the forum like an Israeli would: "When you get down to it, the Arab and Islamic countries tend to dominate."

0 Comments | Share This | Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Israel, U.N. |

Prepping in Geneva for U.N. “anti-racism” conference

By Michael J. Jordan · April 24, 2008

Noel Hidalgo/Creative Commons

JTA correspondent Michael J. Jordan visits with the diplomats in Geneva preparing for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism as they seek to widen the definition of anti-Semitism to include Islamophobia – Arabs are Semites, after all – and talk of the importance of focusing on "state racism." Guess which state?

Parsing U.N. diplo-speak

Parsing United Nations diplo-speak requires an attuned ear and a capacity to read between the lines. On Thursday in Geneva, at a preparatory conference for the 2009 World Conference Against Racism, the Syrian ambassador drew a line between "individual racism" and "state racism." State racism? Do you mean – maybe – Israel? Crusaders against racism must study where those with a "cultural superiority complex" deny the "right of millions to self-determination," he said. "Thank you to the distinguished delegate," the Libyan chairwoman said.

Depends on how you define "anti-Semitism"

Just when you thought you knew all about anti-Semitism – turns out it means Arabs too, at least according to Algeria's ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva.

When the Algerian diplomat, Idriss Jazairy, argues that anti-Semitism's definition should be expanded to include Arabs, who are a Semitic people, the director of the Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust at Touro College, Anne Bayefsky, shot back. The greatest source of anti-Semitism today operates "under the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-racism activities," epitomized by the U.N. Human Rights Council's disproportionate focus on criticizing Israel, she said.

When Bayefsky spoke, Jazairy immediately raised his hands to form a T – as in "time-out" – and the forum's chairwoman, Libyan Najat Al-Hajjaji, began tapping her gavel, cutting off Bayefsky to permit Jazairy to respond. Bayefsky was allowed to resume, but was interrupted twice more by Al-Hajjaji's gavel and Jazairy's interjections.

The 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic States are "feigning an interest in anti-Semitism only to pervert and emasculate the meaning, which is why they have no problem condemning it," Bayefsky said after the session.

Some observers were confused by the entire exchange. A watchdog for India's "untouchables" caste, the Dalits, shyly conceded his ignorance of the matter to JTA: "It's somebody against something, yes?"

Arafat on Display

Lining the tungsten-lit hallway in the basement of the U.N. complex in Geneva, a 10-panel exhibit on the Palestinians gets plenty of foot traffic because it's next to the main cafeteria here. The exhibit contains four photos of Yasser Arafat, including a wide-angle shot of the standing ovation Arafat famously received from the U.N. General Assembly in November 1974. This week, a U.N. staffer and U.N. security guard – both Africans – were reading the French-language exhibit. Asked why he thought it was the only permanent exhibit in the building, the staffer replied, "Because it's the oldest conflict." As for Arafat, I ventured, some might view him as a terrorist. "You Europeans," the security guard snapped at me, an American journalist. "You're responsible for all that's happened there."

Click here to tune into the Durban Review Conference Preparatory Committee's live webcast, Friday, April 25, 2008, 10:00-18:00 CEST.

2 Comments | Share This | Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism, Israel, U.N. |

The man behind the spy charges

By Uriel Heilman · April 24, 2008

The day after reporters flocked to a courtroom in downtown Manhattan to catch a glimpse of the 84-year-old New Jersey retiree arrested this week for spying for Israel, reporters converged on the man's hometown of Monroe, N.J. to talk to friends, neighbors and anyone else willing to spill what they knew of the alleged spy, Ben-Ami Kadish.

"You can know people for years and just not know them," a woman named Anita told The New York Times. "Nobody ever said anything bad about them," a "shocked" neighbor told the New York Jewish Week. The spy story has been a boon to the New Jersey Jewish News, which scooped them all with a 2006 profile of Kadish and his wife, Doris. That story showed the couple hosting a charity event in their sukkah, portraying them as pillars of their Jewish community. Who knew?

7 Comments | Share This | International, Israel, Israel-Diaspora, Politics |

Babs: I’m not snubbing Bush

By Ami Eden · April 23, 2008

Barbara Streisand denies to Page Six that her decision to bow out of the Israel 60 celebration next month in Jerusalem had anything to do with her antipathy toward another high-profile participant: President Bush...

Streisand's publicist, Dick Gutman, denied Bush had anything to do with her cancellation: "However she feels about our current president, that would not have precluded her attendance," he told us. "And, besides, it's a three-day event, so simultaneous participation would have been easily avoided." Streisand has long been a strident critic of Bush, often bashing him on her Web site.

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Jew vs. Jew in debate over sex-change operations for children

By Ami Eden · April 23, 2008

The Boston Globe's report Q & A on with a doctor, Norman Spack, who offers sex-change operations to children struggling with "cross-gender feelings," takes a Jewish turn. In the interview, Spack discussed how his Jewish faith informs his work. His response: "My own rabbi said it best: The transgendered are also created b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of God."

The comment drew a rebuke from a conservative activist, Brian Camenker:

Camenker takes personal affront to that response. "Being Jewish myself, it's a tremendous embarrassment that he would try to claim that Judaism has any connection at all to this kind of demonic and lunatic behavior – because it doesn't," he states.

UPDATE: In my rush to get this post up, I mixed up the links, leaving people with the – incorrect – impression that I was siding with Camenker. My only aim was to note that the doctor's comment about his rabbi was irking a Jewish conservative who opposes his work. Sorry about the initial screw-up, but I disagree with those out there who think that there was something wrong with citing the exchange.

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