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.

The Jewish culture folks over at Nextbook are putting on the latest installment of their Festivals of Ideas series Sunday in New York. Among the literati lined up to talk about Jews and Power: Cynthia Ozick, Shalom Auslander, Ruth Wisse, and Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg.

Nowhere on the Web page, however, is it noted the irony of the festival venue — The Times Center, the event space on the ground floor of the gleaming new headquarters of the New York Times. Whether you see the Times as the citadel of American Jewish power or as the symbol of Diaspora Jewish weakness, it’s an interesting choice.

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with Academy Award winning actor Jon Voight who is in Israel for the state’s 60th anniversary festivities. While here, Voight joined Chabad-Lubavitch in welcoming children evacuated from the devastated Chernobyl region of the Former Soviet Union to Israel. I spoke to Mr. Voight about his relationship to the Jewish community, his involvement with Chabad’s Children of Chernobyl campaign, and his affinity for the state of Israel.

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[Update] Here’s video of Jon Voight dancing on the Chabad telethon:

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.

Nathan Englander today at the President’s Conference

JTA’s Israel correspondent Dina Kraft speaks with author Nathan Englander who participated in a panel discussion on Jewish literature today at the President’s Conference in Jerusalem.

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Some highlights from Heeb’s Hollywood issue:

Remember all the hoopla about two Orthodox Jews being on the Apprentice a few years back? Well, recently, BBC reports, one team lost a competition in the British version of the show because it failed in its quest to buy a kosher chicken:

As insults were traded among contestants on the losing team in this week’s Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar berated the contestants for not knowing what a kosher chicken was.

It had to rank as one of the most peculiar spectacles in the history of the BBC reality game show, The Apprentice - a full-blown barney about what is and isn’t kosher. Contestants in this week’s episode had been flown to Marrakech in Morocco and instructed to bargain for a number of items on a shopping list, including a kosher chicken.

Last night, JTA staffers Ben Harris and Uriel Heilman attended different events here in NYC, celebrating the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding. Having had to turn down an opportunity to attend last night’s big concert at Radio City, I sat down with them both to find out what I missed.

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One of the most captivating New York premieres at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which ended yesterday, was Strangers, a powerful film about a chance romance between an Israeli man and a Palestinian woman who meet on a subway in Berlin. Their relationship is rocked not only by their jarring cultural differences, but by the disturbing events of the 2006 war in Lebanon, scenes of which are incorporated into the film.

Despite the fact that New York, like Los Angeles and Miami, has an entire festival devoted to films from Israel, Tribeca has been a major showcase for such Israeli films as The Bubble, Encounter Point, Yossi & Jagger and Ushpizin. Also screened at Tribeca this year was a short film called Roads, about the relationship between a traumatized Israeli ex-soldier and a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who works for a drug dealer.

After Sunday Levo spoke to the enthusiastic audience about how the film, which was nominated for best world drama at the Sundance Film Festival in January, came together and was put together. He said he was asked if he would be interested in the role just two weeks before filming began. Very few of the lines were scripted, and filming of scenes in the Berlin and Paris subways, and at the World Cup finals, was done surreptitiously, without going through official channels.

Levo said the movie, which was screened at the Jerusalem Film Festival and arrives at theaters in Israel on May 29, will apparently be shown this summer at the Ramallah Film Festival, in the West Bank. It will be interesting to see if it is as popular there as it was here.

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).