What to say about Tim Russert that hasn’t already been said? Not much.

But two separate Jewish-cringe-inducing moments come to mind that help explain why so many people loved (and some hated) his aggressive interviewing style.

Most recently there was the much-discussed Louis Farrakhan question during the February 26 debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Many liberal bloggers and Obama believers cried foul, saying that Russert had crossed the line, even for him. Of course, plenty of Clinton backers and Jewish conservatives thought it was a perfectly fine line of questioning.

As the post-debate debate raged, my memory flashed back to a February 2003 episode of “Meet the Press,” when Richard Perle was the one sitting in Russert’s hot seat, as the Bush administration prepared for war. This time, though, the NBC bulldog was pressing from the opposite political advantage point.

Here’s what I wrote at the time:

The key moment on “Meet the Press” came when host Tim Russert read from a February 14 column by the editor at large of the Washington Times, Arnaud de Borchgrave, who argued that the “strategic objective” of senior Bush administration officials was to secure Israel’s borders by launching a crusade to democratize the Arab world. Next, Russert turned to one of his guests, Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, a key advisory panel to the Pentagon.

“Can you assure American viewers across our country that we’re in this situation against Saddam Hussein and his removal for American security interests?” Russert asked.

“And what would be the link in terms of Israel?”

It was a startling question, especially when directed at Perle, the poster boy — along with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith — for antisemitic critics who insist the United States is being pulled into war by pro-Likud Jewish advisers on orders from Jerusalem. But Russert is no David Duke, nor even a Patrick Buchanan. He is generally regarded as a balanced, first-rate journalist in sync with the zeitgeist of Washington’s media and political elite. If Russert is asking the question on national television, then the toothpaste is out of the tube: The question has entered the discourse in elite Washington circles and is now a legitimate query to be floated in polite company.

Russert asked tough questions. And, yes, once in a while one of them may have been off the mark or inappropriate in someway. But he asked what was on people’s minds — and it didn’t matter which side of the plate his guest swung from, whether it was a Richard Perle or a Barack Obama. One week that could mean giving voice to the world view of Mearsheimer & Walt loyalists, another channeling the anxieties of Commentary readers.

Click here and Jump ahead to 6:18 to hear Russert make the point in his own words (and the words of the show’s founder, Lawrence Spivak).

Baruch Dayan HaEmet.

The New York Times has had several items of interest over the past few days:

• The last Jews of Baghdad have become the fearful few.
• P. W. Singer and Elina Noor argue that the U.S. is making a strategic mistake by describing terrorists as jihadists.
• Organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade wonder why Israelis never seem to turn out.
• Thomas Friedman says Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America.
• A look a The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, that is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
• The U.S. State Dept. reinstated seven Fullbright scholarships awarded to Palestinian students after it had withdrawn them last week citing Israel’s refusal to allow the students to leave the Gaza Strip.
• The public editor of the New York Times discusses how the paper was taken to task over an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Islamic world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that the candidate had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult. (Click here and here for response in the blogosphere).

Mazal Tov to JTA’s director of digital media, Daniel Sieradski, for being picked as one of the Jewish Week’s 36 Jewish innovators under the age of 36. (Who says the competition is always wrong?)

Daniel Sieradski, 29
Founder of Jewschool and Jew It Yourself;
Director of Digital Media for JTA

When Dan Sieradski founded Jewschool.com in 2002, he didn’t quite realize what he was getting himself into.

“We were the accidental roots for progressive Jewish communities,” he says. “We didn’t mean to start a movement. We were creating something that was obviously needed.”
The Web site, a blog with a variety of contributors covering Jewish topics from politics to tradition and culture, had 50,000 monthly readers at its peak and 80 international contributors. As with all variations from the norm, there was opposition, and in the age of the Internet, opposition is ceaseless.

“I’d get phone calls from ardent Zionists at four in the morning,” Sieradski said, recalling those upset by the blog’s critique of Israel policy. He’s had to abandon multiple email addresses due to pointed spam attacks by unappreciative readers. For now, he remains on the board of Jewschool, but has curtailed his blogging.

His new project, Jew It Yourself, an online network providing tools and resources to Jewish individuals and communities to help them engage in Jewish learning on their own, is on hold until it gets a visit from the funding fairy. Among the innovative ideas set for the site is Shul Shopper, a “Zagat meets Wikipedia” for Jews looking for a prayer community to fit their needs. Users would be able to input their criteria and Shul Shopper would match them to a searchable list of possibilities, where they could peruse reviews and ratings as well as a connection to Facebook, which would find other locals with the same preferences. The site would also include an open-source beit midrash, tools for learning how to read Hebrew, and voiceover IP chevruta for the entire spectrum of Jewish communities.

Inspiration: His mom, Jeanette Friedman-Sieradski, a journalist. “Her commitment to pursue justice and fighting for a Judaism that’s inviting, welcoming and authentic has given me a sense of obligation to pursue the same mission.” Strangest job: Working at a golf course as a “garage guy,” loading clubs from car to cart, washing both clubs and cart for the argyle-and-spiked-shoe crowd.
— Randi Sherman

See the full list.

In the current issue of New Voices, the magazine written by and for Jewish college students …

A report on assertions by some students that the threat of anti-Semitism is being exaggerated by outside Jewish groups.

A look at how other ethnic groups are looking to replicate Birthright – and what the implications are for the melting pot.

An interview with Newark Mayor Cory Booker in which he talks about the future of the American city, a politics of hope and Shmuley Boteach.

The publication is also sponsoring a May 28 panel discussion titled “Jews, Blacks, and the Post-Racial Candidate.” Speakers include: Ari Berman (The Nation), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Village Voice and The Atlantic Monthly) and Sam Freedman (Professor of Journalism, Columbia University and New York Times columnist).

The man behind the NPR program “This American Life” believes in stories, not in God. But, in an interview with Beliefnet, he has interesting things to say about his Jewish upbringing and religion generally:

Would you want your kids to bar mitzvah?

I don’t know. Culturally I am a Jew. I don’t have a choice about it. You can’t lose your cultural heritage like luggage at the airport. It’s a part of me. But my kids…it is weird to indoctrinate your child into something that you don’t believe. It violates some sort of golden rule. I don’t think it is bad to raise your child as an atheist, but I say that as someone without children.

I have to say that when I go to synagogue I find it very…if you don’t believe in God, what business do you have being in a synagogue? When I go into a synagogue, I know the songs, I read Hebrew, it is very reassuring to be there. It is a part of my life that hasn’t changed; it is like walking back into my childhood. But at some point you do notice the words and prayers and, as someone who doesn’t believe, it feels weird to use other’s moment of worship as a moment of nostalgia. It feels disrespectful; they are not there to entertain me. It feels strange to be chanting something with everyone else, but not believe it – it feels wrong. …

When you are interviewing religious people, do you think that their belief is just an experience that differs from your own or do think they are delusional?

I have a polite and a not-so-polite answer, and the polite answer is a huge part of what I feel. And that answer is: that is their experience of the world, it is different than mine. And then there is another part of me that is not so charitable which feels that what they are saying is nonsense. There is no big daddy in the sky but they need to tell themselves this story for whatever reason, and I am glad that is not me.

Ten years ago, when I was thinking about religion a lot more because a lot of things were happening at the same time, I did have moments when I really wished that I had faith, that I had the reassurance of that, that I could believe. But I don’t feel that way any more at all–ever. A couple of years ago I read a book by Bertrand Russell called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” And he lays out a thesis for how destructive religion is, and I remember thinking, “Wow, that is not someone who was raised in the United States of America.” Before that, it had not occurred to me that religion was causing a lot of unhappiness for people–people are estranged from each of other, people think there is something wrong with themselves because the faith they were raised in tells them that they are sick, whatever it is. But I wasn’t seeing this part, because the people who I am closest to who have faith, their experiences of it are so positive.

Sunday’s New York Times marks Israel’s 60th birthday with four Op-Eds about the Jewish state.

Thomas Friedman writes that the whispering campaign to stoke Jewish fears about Barack Obama is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of the U.S. president in supporting Israel and promoting a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Jeffrey Goldberg, who recently interviewed Obama for The Atlantic, draws on his conversations with Ehud Olmert for a story in that same magazine to argue that American Jews are the monkey wrench in the peace process. He throws the U.S. Jewish organizational world some bones — “The people of AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning,” he writes — but, echoing the arguments of the new left-wing, pro-Israel lobbying group J Street, Goldberg writes that being pro-Israel sometimes means saying no to Jewish settlement in the West Bank and yes to a Palestinian state.

In her essay, Ruth Gruber recall the stateless Holocaust refugees for whom Israel’s establishment was a godsend.

And in the obligatory “Nakba” piece, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury ponders the “catastrophe” of Israel’s existence for the Palestinian Arabs. While an eloquent expression of Arab sentiment about Israel, Khoury ignores the nakba of the last 60 years: the Arab world’s insistence on keeping the Palestinian refugees from the 1948 war homeless and disenfranchised, outsiders even after it became obvious they would never return to their homes in the Jewish state.

The Times’ coverage Sunday also included an insightful, amusing and depressing Reporter’s Notebook by Sheryl Gay Stolberg about President Bush’s Middle East tour. Turns out he doesn’t quite understand why Arabs and Jews don’t dance together.

On Monday, the Times added another a feature about how Israeli artists are undergoing a rare flowering, gaining international recognition for works that make universal statements about very Israeli phenomena.

Several recent stories shine a light on the challenges and opportunities of the new YouTube-era environment that Israel and its advocates are operating in.

Ha’aretz has a report today on the Israeli Consulate in New York arranging to have videos played on the jumbo screens in Times Square of celebrities sending Independence Day greetings.

“We’re aware of the influence that [the celebrities] filmed in the clip have on so many people around the world,” said Asi Shariv, Israel’s Consul General in New York. “Their connection with Israel is an important part of our efforts to tell the Israeli story to a young, Western audience that does not take an interest in the [Mideast] conflict.”

Of course, all sides have access to video and the means to distribute it on the Internet. For example, Ha’aretz also is reporting that on Tuesday the human rights group B’Tselem unveiled video footage showing an Israeli soldier “firing a rubber-coated bullet at an Israeli protester at close range, during a protest against the separation fence in Bil’in two months ago.”

“The shooting,” according to Ha’aretz, “appears to violate IDF regulations, which state that rubber bullets may be fired from no closer than 40 meters.”

And, of course, plenty of video of the incident in question is up on YouTube.

This video has a quick shot at the end of the wounded Israeli protester on a stretcher…

And then there are user-generated Web sites like Wikipedia, where a well-coordinated stealth campaign can tilt seemingly unbiased information one way or the other. The problem is that Internet-based campaigns coordinated via e-mail leave a paper trail — a point hammered home by Gershom Gorenberg’s recent column in the American Prospect about pro-Palestinian activists exposing an alleged attempt by CAMERA to train supporters to infiltrate and influence the Wikipedia editing process.

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).

Zev Chafets says Israel shouldn’t be counting on the United States to take care of Iran.

Daphne Merkin visits the Kabbalah Center.

Peter Steinfels takes a look at the Haggadah.

The boom in Passover food products.

The Ethicist weighs in on whether someone should rat out a fellow employee who makes up fake Jewish holidays to get off of work.

A profile of comedian Irwin Corey’s journey from the Brooklyn Hebrew Orphan Asylum to the Friars Club.

Happy 75th birthday Mr. Roth.

A look at what has gone wrong with Sheldon Adleson’s plan to help the Republicans win in 2008.

Al Jazeera English’s respected Jewish American anchor tells the Columbia Journalism Review why he quit the network:

It’s been a gradual process, and defining it all, is that with corporate encouragement, over the first two years of the channel’s existence, I have made myself effectively the American face of the channel and vouched for its credibility and value. And over the last seventeen months there have been several changes at the channel which put things on the air that, frankly, I could not vouch for. If I had just been another employee I might have just dropped my head and let it all wash over, because it is the nature of our business that every place you workoccasionally does things that embarrass you. But I felt an extra measure of responsibility.

Now, as anchor, I was in position to vouch for at least half of the material that went on air because I got to speak it and I could edit it on the fly if I felt that there were any inaccuracies or imbalances in it. But when the proposal was made that I leave the anchor chair [he was informed of this in December and his last day as anchor was March 13] and become a sort of heavy correspondent, I knew that I would never be able to have the kind of editorial input or control that would put me in a position to honestly vouch for anything. Furthermore, when I was taken off that meant that there were zero American accents in any of the presenter roles at Al Jazeera. And it occurred to me that this was just one part of a series of decisions that diminished editorial input from the United States. It got to the point where I feel that in a globe where Al Jazeera sets a very, very high reporting standard, and a very, very high standard for both numerical and qualitative and authentic staffing, that the United States was becoming a serious exception to their role, and a place where the journalism did not measure up to the standards that were set almost everywhere else by Al Jazeera English’s very fine reporting.