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Portman references Agriprocessors raid in Oscar presentation

By Daniel Sieradski · February 23, 2009

For those who missed last night's Academy Awards, one of the highlights of the evening came when Jewish actors Natalie Portman and Ben Stiller took the stage to present the award for cinematography. Stiller, who was lampooing Joaquin Phoenix's bewildering appearance on David Letterman last week, came out sporting a shaggy beard and a wild hairdo while acting both despondent and distracted. To this, Portman remarked, "You look like you work in a Hasidic meth lab."

Portman was likely referring to the May 2008 federal raid on the Hasidic-owned and operated Agriprocessors meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa, in which federal agents alleged to have discovered, among other infractions, a facility for producing methamphetamines. Though federal prosecutors have yet to prove this charge, it appears to have nonetheless entered into the popular imagination.

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Dept. of the creepily prophetic

By Ron Kampeas · February 23, 2009

From a Ricky Gervais sit-com, Kate Winslet predicts why exactly she will finally pick up an Oscar for a Holocaust era role:

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Naive on Iran

By Uriel Heilman · February 23, 2009

Roger Cohen strikes again. Last time we considered this venerated New York Times columnist, Cohen was urging Hillary Clinton to show Israel some tough love.

Now he weighs in with a column describing life for Iran's Jews as hunky dory. While declaring "The Arab Jew has perished. The Persian Jew has fared better," Cohen writes:

A mystery hovers over Iran’s Jews. It’s important to decide what’s more significant: the annihilationist anti-Israel ranting, the Holocaust denial and other Iranian provocations — or the fact of a Jewish community living, working and worshipping in relative tranquillity.

Perhaps I have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civility toward Jews tells us more about Iran — its sophistication and culture — than all the inflammatory rhetoric.

That may be because I’m a Jew and have seldom been treated with such consistent warmth as in Iran. Or perhaps I was impressed that the fury over Gaza, trumpeted on posters and Iranian TV, never spilled over into insults or violence toward Jews. Or perhaps it’s because I’m convinced the “Mad Mullah” caricature of Iran and likening of any compromise with it to Munich 1938 — a position popular in some American Jewish circles — is misleading and dangerous.

Cohen draws a different conclusion about Iran's anti-Israel threats:

Double standards don’t work anymore; the Middle East has become too sophisticated. One way to look at Iran’s scurrilous anti-Israel tirades is as a provocation to focus people on Israel’s bomb, its 41-year occupation of the West Bank, its Hamas denial, its repetitive use of overwhelming force. Iranian language can be vile, but any Middle East peace — and engagement with Tehran — will have to take account of these points.

I'll make two limited points here:

1. Cohen says he has a bias for facts over words, but he doesn't seem to consider the possibility that Jews in Iran may be holding back when they talk to him for fear of the regime's long arm. This is a place where 13 Jews from Shiraz were charged with spying for Israel in a trumped-up trial that resulted in multiyear prison sentences for Jewish innocents (which Cohen mentions in passing). This is a community living in fear of a president who never misses an opportunity to talk about the destruction of the Jewish state or argue that the Holocaust is an exagerration.

By all accounts, things have gotten worse for Iran's remaining Jews under the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There is a reason the vast majority of Iran's Jews have fled since the Islamic revolution of 1979. There is a reason Iran's Jewish emigres from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv, where Iranian Jews can speek freely, advocate taking a harsh line toward the regime in Tehran. There is a reason recent immigrants to Israel from Iran must obscure their faces when talking to the news media. To say that Iran's Jews enjoy tranquility is dangerously naive. Iran is a place where Jews are punished for expressing the fundamental Jewish value of yearning for Zion. It is a place where the specter of random arrest and imprisonment by a fundamentalist Islamic regime always hangs over the community.

The "consistent warmth" with which Cohen, a Jew, was treated in Iran is not indicative of the security of Iranian Jews. Cohen was treated warmly because the Persians have a long tradition of honoring guests, and because the people of Iran have little antipathy toward Jews. But the regime is another animal entirely, and it continues to do all it can to rally the Iranian people -- and Muslims around the world -- against the Jews and the Jewish state.

2. Only Roger Cohen could turn a column from Iran into an opportunity to thump Israel. Absent is discussion of Iran's nuclear program, its support and training of terrorist groups in Lebanon and Gaza, and its threats to its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf (In Saturday's Wall Street Journal, the former head of Israel's Missile Defense Organization, Uzi Rubin, finds another cause for concern in Iran's recent launch of its Omid satellite). Instead, "Iran's scurrilousanti-Israel tirades" are an opportunity to focus people on Israel's "Hamas denial" -- a clever but ultimately disgusting alliteration that alludes to some sort of equivalence with Holocaust denial.

This is not the place to defend Israel's targeting of a terrorist group, or a military strategy that seeks to defeat the enemy rather than engaging in some twisted notion of fair play. But surely Iran is not the place for Cohen to level yet another attack on the Jewish state. Don't we have enough anti-Israel rhetoric coming out of Iran already?

Elsewhere on the Times' Op-Ed page, a former newspaper editor from Iran, Ali Reza Eshraghi, argues that the Obama administration should not wait to engage with Tehran until after presidential elections that could result in the end of Ahmadinejad's tenure. Ahmadinejad has been making overtures to the new U.S. president, and Washington would be foolish to ignore them, Eshraghi writes:

Mr. Obama has expressed interest in engaging in dialogue with Iran, and there is no time to waste. Over the next few months he should initiate negotiations without preconditions and establish formal diplomatic ties with Iran. Mr. Ahmadinejad, for all his faults, has taken unprecedented steps to reach out to the United States. Iran’s next leader may not be able to do the same. Mr. Obama must seize the opportunity to shake the Iranian president’s outstretched hand.

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The News Shticker: Autographed yarmulkes, anti-Aipac group threatens punk

By Ami Eden · February 23, 2009

In China, the association of Jews and money has long been considered a good thing. But, Ynet reports, a relatively new book called "Currency Wars" threatens to change all that.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jonathan Chalett doesn't wear kippahs, but he carries them in his car, along with Sharpies -- among the names in his signed yarmulkes collection: Barack Obama, Magic Johnson, David Lee Roth and Uma Thurman.
The New York Jewish Week takes a look at "Being Erica," a nightime soap about a Jewish 30-something woman who gets to revisit her disastrous bat mitzvah and a sinful Yom Kippur.
JTA's Ron Kampes lists the reasons to be offended by a new anti-Aipac group whose members were arrested for blocking a Manhattan fundraiser for the pro-Israel lobby. But his biggest concern is that they could end up ruining punk.
The Sportsman Daily imagines that Dubai has banned the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue because the cover is clad by the barley clad Israeli supermodel Bar Refaeli (it's a parody).

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Uphill at the U.N.

By Ami Eden · February 23, 2009

The Washington Post reports that rivals and harsh critics of the United States hold several key U.N. posts, posing a serious challenge to several of the Obama administration's goals at the world body:

President Obama's U.N. envoy, Susan E. Rice, has pledged to "refresh and renew American leadership" at the United Nations. But U.S. rivals with a long history of opposing American aims now hold some of the most influential posts at the world body, a testament to the diminished power of American diplomacy to shape the organization.

The General Assembly is headed by a leftist Nicaraguan priest, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, who routinely rails against the evils of American imperialism. Cuba chairs the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), an influential Third World political bloc. Libya serves on the Security Council and next year will preside over the 192-member General Assembly.

Even Iran and Sudan, which are subject to U.S.-backed U.N. sanctions, have made their way back to international respectability, securing leadership positions on the board of the United Nations' top development agency and at the head of the Group of 77 and China, a group that coordinates social policies for Third World countries.

The alignment of these leaders has the potential to restrain U.S. ambitions to pursue initiatives, including stepping up international pressure on Sudan to stem the bloodshed in Darfur, strengthening U.N. oversight of its multibillion-dollar field operations and normalizing the United Nations' relationship with Israel.