JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Walt & Mearshimer take on “The Lobby” in Israel

By Daniel Sieradski · June 18, 2008

Stephen Walt, at the podium, with "Israel Lobby" co-author John Mearshimer and Israel activist Uri Avnery at a speaking engagement in Tel Aviv on June 12, 2008. Photo by Dina Kraft.

In the following podcast, JTA's Israel correspondent Dina Kraft speaks with Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, co-author of the controversial book "The Israel Lobby" who, with his co-author John Mearshimer of the University of Chicago, visited Israel last week on a speaking tour sponsored by the Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom. Walt said he welcomed the dynamic and lively debate in the Jewish State and said he hoped their book might prompt discussion about the policies of the Israel lobby among Israelis themselves. You can read Ms. Kraft's full story on the subject here.

[audio:/images/archive/061808_kraft_walt.mp3] Audio sound funny? Upgrade your Flash player.

To subscribe to JTA's Behind the News podcast, click here.

1 Comment | Share This | Israel, Podcast, Politics |

Artist envisions new state for Jewish discontents

By Daniel Sieradski · June 18, 2008

In this podcast, JTA German correspondent Toby Axelrod interviews Ronen Eidelman, an Israeli artist studying abroad in Weimar, Germany, whose senior thesis project – seeking the establishment of a Jewish state in Germany – which launches this coming Sunday, is already ruffling some feathers in Germany and abroad. You can read Ms. Axelrod's full story on the subject here.

(Full disclosure: I am a friend of Mr. Eidelman's and an adviser on this project. I also accidentally named this initiative.)

[audio:/images/archive/061808_axelrod_eidelman.mp3] Audio sound funny? Upgrade your Flash player.

To subscribe to JTA's Behind the News podcast, click here.

1 Comment | Share This | Art, Podcast, Politics |

This Week in Postville: What the OU is telling rabbis

By Ben Harris · June 18, 2008

As always, couple items to note ....

• The Uri L'tzedek boycott of Agriprocessors has gone into effect. The self-described Orthodox social justice group (which doesn't like the word boycott) said it would refrain from purchasing Agriprocessors' products on June 15 if the company didn't agree to establish a transparent mechanism to ensure compliance with Jewish and U.S. labor law. A meeting took place last week, but the group is still waiting for assurances that the company has turned a corner. There's more on this here.
• Meanwhile, another Jewish group is jumping into the fray. In keeping with its historic roots, Ameinu, the American wing of the World Labor Zionist movement, has issued a statement urging Jewish groups not to patronize Agri. We've also heard that another summer camp, the Conservative Ramah Darom in Georgia, turned away a shipment from Agri. Our gut here is that this is likely to further convince the company's defenders that Jewish outrage over this issue is simply an opportunistic pile-on for liberal groups.
• Meanwhile, some of the most damning evidence of an impending shortage emerged last week when we discovered that FreshDirect, the popular Internet retailer that gets all its kosher meat from Agri, has some 40 kosher meat products listed as currently unavailable. No worries if you're planning to serve glatt kosher beef neck bones this Shabbos, the supply of which seems to be holding. (NOTE: If you follow that link, you need to type in a NYC zip code to see the page. If you're outside the city, use mine: 11215). However, there does seem to be enough meat for the company to have donated 1,000 pounds to flood relief in Iowa, a Chabad website reported.
• Finally, an email was circulated this week by a Lubavitch rabbi in Connecticut describing a recent meeting local rabbis had with Rabbi Seth Mandel, the OU's head of meat supervision. More on that, after the jump.

Rabbi Mendel Samuels writes:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank Rabbi Yitzchok Adler for taking the initiative by bringing Rabbi Seth Mandell of the OU, to our community, to clear up any and all issues regarding Rubashkin Meat. Rabbi Mandell assured us that the many articles were "Loshen Harah" by people who are looking, for personal reasons, to hurt and damage the Rubashkin Name, and that the OU stands by and maintains that they continue to have the highest standards of Kashrus.

The OU's Menachem Genack says the "people" Mandel was probably referring to is PETA, which first drew unwanted attention to the company in 2004 with an undercover video shot in the plant, and the food workers' union, which has waged a long and still unsuccessful campaign to organizers Agri's workers. As for the "any and all issues" comment, Genack says that's not the OU's position. He declined to be more specific on the record about the OU's outstanding issues with the way the plant has been run, though he said, as he has repeatedly throughout, that the kashrut of the meat is not in question.

In any case, the impression Mandel appears to have left, and that Samuels is pushing, is that there's no reason to be concerned about Rubashkin's – the meat is kosher, the allegations are unproven, and, anyway, those folks who are making them have an agenda. (Interestingly, Adler, the head of the Hartford Kashrut Commission, said his Orthodox synagogue had stopped serving Agri meat a while ago, in part because of allegations about the company. He wouldn't discuss what Mandel had to say, but said his own position is essentially what the RCA said two weeks ago.)

We'd love to ask Mandel himself what impression he had hoped to convey, but he hasn't returned our call yet.

UPDATE (June 20): In an email yesterday, Mandel writes that his conversation in Hartford was private and that the rabbis assured him his comments would not be publicized. The Samuels email "did not represent what I said," he wrote. Mandel says he never said that "any and all" of the allegations are slanderous, merely that people should reserve judgment until the facts are established.

7 Comments | Share This | Agriprocessors, Kashrut |

The News Shticker: Does NBC have a no ‘lashon hara’ zone?

By Ami Eden · June 18, 2008

• NBC's David Gregory says no to lashon hara.
• Hamas practices/glorifies kidnapping of Israeli soldier.
• The Leader-Post reports on a Quebec rabbi who beats speeding ticket with the old "circumcision emergency" story.
• Cartoonist Eli Valley does "The Incredible Hulk" – at the expense of right-wing Jews.
• Messianic Jews perform in Jamaica.
• British documentary looks at the life of Chasidic ex-con.
• The NYT takes us back to when the telegraph was the wave of the future (some things never change).

3 Comments | Share This | Shticker |

Cease-fire ho-hum

By Uriel Heilman · June 18, 2008

On the eve of an apparent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza, the chatter in Israel already has moved onto another subject: Israel's other threatening neighbor, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The New York Times reports that Israel is willing to engage in peace talks with Lebanon about "all issues," including a disputed piece of land on the Israel-Lebanon border called Shebaa Farms. But what Israel is most interested in is the return of its two captive soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in the deadly incident that sparked the 2006 Lebanon war.

The families of the two soldiers met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's negotiations chief on Wednesday, and Israel reportedly is discussing the outline of a prisoner swap deal with Hezbollah. A deal likely would include the return to Lebanon of Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druse man who snuck into Israel in 1979 and murdered an Israeli man and his 4-year-old daughter, along with two Israeli policemen. This release of Kuntar is a cause celebre among many Lebanese, Palestinians and others who mistake the murder of a little girl and her young father for an act of heroism.

Nevertheless, Ha'aretz's Uzi Benziman says repatriating Kuntar for Goldwasser and Regev would be a price worth paying, even if politically unpopular. Echoing that sentiment, Ynet's Sima Kadmon says waiting might result in the Regev-Goldwasser captivity turning into that of Ron Arad, the Israeli airman who went down over Lebanon in 1986. Arad survived the fall and was captured, but he has not been heard from in some 20 years. His whereabouts remain unknown, and Israeli intelligence officials privately say it is highly unlikely he is still alive.

Arad's family, however, say such a deal is not worthwhile.

On the Gaza front, Israel and Hamas continued to trade fire on Wednesday, with some two dozen rockets fired into Israel from the Palestinian strip.

Ynet's Alex Fishman writes that the Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal

is taking shape for one reason: The two weak governments on both sides of the Gaza fence have an interest in seeing the deal succeed. Only one element has an interest in sabotaging this deal: The Iranians. They will make an effort to unravel it through the Islamic Jihad organization. This is where Hamas will be tested: Is it indeed an Iranian satellite, or does it only exploit Tehran for its own needs?

So everything that has happened and will happen in the day before the truce is a game: Who will emerge as "the man," who will deliver the last blow, and who will fight to the last moment for its truce terms? This is what Hamas is doing, and this is what we're doing as well.

2 Comments | Share This | Arab-Israeli Conflict, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict |

Needed: Attitude adjustment

By Ami Eden · June 18, 2008

Arieh Eldad, a Knesset member belonging to National Union-NRP, asserts in a piece posted on Ynet that the Israeli military needs a new attitude:

One after the other we hear the shameful reports of the IDF evacuating new recruits and administrative soldiers from bases at the front lines. In some cases the army is completely deserting bases and leaving the area open for hostile takeover.

The latest reports had to do with the evacuation of administrative soldiers from the liaison office at the Erez Crossing and the decision to evacuate new recruits from the Zikim base. Earlier, we saw the IDF evacuate its based in northern Samaria, even though this was not required by the Disengagement Law. The army also deserted bases in the Jordan Rift Valley, while removing, among others, all new recruit bases from Judea and Samaria.

Each one of these shameful moves came against a specific backdrop, and came with a reason and a pile of excuses. At times it was about "diplomatic reasons" – evacuating territory in favor of the Arabs. On occasion it was about administrative reasons – transferring new recruit bases to more proper sites.

The worst excuses were the ones about "security" – the bases are situated in a hostile environment and transporting troops to them and from them entails a logistical and security burden as well as the need to designate soldiers for guarding the bases instead of performing other security missions.

Recently, we heard the most terrible excuses: New recruits and administrative soldiers are not designated to fight, and therefore they must be removed from any location that presents danger. ...

Shame covers our face. We knew, and said so, that those who run away from the terror in Gaza will have terror chase them. Yet even we didn't know that the IDF won't stop its retreat and would run away from Erez and Zikim too. Even in our worst nightmares we never imagined a situation whereby the people are staying in Sderot, Nir Oz, and Ashkelon, while the IDF is evacuating its troops to a safer place.

0 Comments | Share This | Israel |

Some things aren’t relative: Einstein was an atheist

By Ami Eden · June 18, 2008

Michael Weiss argues in Slate that "the temptation to lure Einstein posthumously into the theistic fold is understandable" – but off the mark:

Einstein underwent a brief elective immersion in Judaism as a boy, but his parents were secular; his father thought the Abrahamic rituals "ancient superstitions." Einstein later told New York Rabbi Herbert Goldstein that he believed in "Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men." (In the 17th century, philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism on suspicion of atheism—allegations that Rebecca Goldstein argues in Betraying Spinoza were, in fact, correct.) When a rumor was circulated in 1945 that a Jesuit priest had converted him, Einstein thundered back: "I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist."

[F]rom the viewpoint of a layman, Einstein frequently denied being an atheist, though he seemed more at odds with the "militant" style of godlessness than with its core substance. It's impossible to imagine him volunteering even to moderate a Hitchens-Dawkins-Dennett colloquium on secularism. He wrote to a Navy ensign, "I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth."

In his best-selling biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson writes, "[W]e should do him the honor of taking him at his word when he insists, repeatedly, that these oft-used phrases were not merely a semantic way of disguising that he was actually an atheist." It's a generous assessment, but one that encompasses the physicist's more milquetoast pronouncements on the matter and conveniently ignores what Isaacson elsewhere concedes was Einstein's maddening tendency to be purposefully gnomic or oblique. Another biographer, Ronald W. Clark, observed that when Einstein talked about religion, "he tended to adopt the belief of Alice's Red Queen that 'words mean what you want them to mean.' " That comes closer to the mark and is best evidenced in the famous quotation, "I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos." Only a literal mind would see here a prime mover at a celestial craps table. ...

Most believers have long given up trying to legitimize the supernatural in microscopes or cyclotrons. That scientists like Einstein resorted to a numinous vocabulary is not the "gotcha" some wishful thinkers would like it to be. Faith has had impressive minds on its side in the past, but it will have to work without the assumption that the greatest of the 20th century was one of them.

4 Comments | Share This | Religion, Science |