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.

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.

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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.

Did Darwin’s theory of evolution provoke the Holocaust? That’s the claim being advanced by actor/economist Ben Stein in his new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Called “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time” by the New York Times, the film, which debuted last week to dismal modest* box office response, proposes a direct correlation between evolutionary science, Social Darwinism, “godlessness,” and Nazism.

Stein’s assertions about the evil intentions of evolutionary biologists have some in the scientific community crying foul.

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According to ContactMusic, late Playboy pinup and B-movie starlet Anna Nicole Smith embraced Jewish mourning rites after her son Daniel died from a drug overdose in 2006.

In a new book called Anna Nicole Smith: Portrait Of An Icon, the tragic star’s stylist pals Pol Atteu and Patrik Simpson reveal the actress found great comfort in Judaism after her son’s death in September 2006. They even feature photographs of the late star posing in front of a mirror that has been covered in accordance with Jewish mourning rites. Atteu and Simpson write, “Anna embraced all religions, and followed the Jewish tradition out of respect for (companion) Howard K. Stern by covering all the mirrors in the house because she was in mourning.”

ESPN looks back at the almost-successful attempt to get the United States to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics:

Seventy-two years ago this summer, Hitler’s Germany played host to the Games of the Eleventh Olympiad in Berlin.

The games are now best remembered for the brilliance of Jesse Owens — who won four gold medals — and the success of the Nazis’ propaganda machine. For the first time in the history of the modern Olympics, the Games were held hostage by the political goals of the host nation.

What’s largely forgotten is the fact that a powerful American movement to boycott the Nazi Olympics nearly succeeded. The final vote of the AAU’s delegates was 58.25 to 55.75 in favor of participation. If three more delegates had voted to boycott the Games, the Nazis would have presided at a meaningless event.

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.

An interview in The Independent with actor Jeff Goldblum takes a Jewish turn:

I nudge him on to the firmer ground of Adam Resurrected. “It was intense,” he says of his role as Adam Stein, a Jewish former circus performer forced by a concentration-camp guard to pretend to be a German shepherd dog. “Paul [Schrader, the director] likes to describe the film as a man who was once a dog who meets a dog who was once a boy. That’s a little cryptic though. I had a year to prepare for it, thank goodness, and I immersed myself in it, I did as much work as I could. I went to a concentration camp in Poland, the one that’s said to be the most intact – it was a very powerful experience. I went to Israel for the first time a couple of times and talked to some survivors in Los Angeles.”

This is the first time that Goldblum, who is Jewish, has done a part where his Jewishness is part of the character. Is that why he took the part? “Oh, it was a creative project. I’ve never done a movie about this subject, so there were Jewish things about it, you know. Yes. Mmmm.”

Is he observant about his religion? Does he celebrate Passover, for example? “Oooooh, you know,” he says, his giant hands wafting about in the air, eyes rolling in their sockets. “I celebrate it in my own way, nothing traditional or traditionally observant.” Does he believe in God? “Uhhm, not in the way I think people… ssss… uhh, do I believe in a figure outside myself, a being, who lives somewhere… where we can’t see them who, you know, umm, sends you to heaven or hell… I’m not sure I believe in that bit of it. I, I, I, err, ahh you know… I believe in stillness and spaciousness.”

It’s a mesmerising display of stammering and obfuscation. And all the while his head is rolling and his hands are drifting about and his rubbery face is performing acrobatics as he rolls his eyes back into his head, works his jaw and flutters his eyelashes. Then he jerks his chin up and his eyes twinkle. “Do you like Japanese food?”

From some place else in the world, JTA globe-trotting correspondent Michael J. Jordan noticed this fun, puzzling piece of news:

Indiana freshman guard Eric Gordon is leaving the Hoosiers for the NBA, according to a report from the Indianapolis Star.

The Big Ten’s leading scorer and conference freshman of the year will become the fifth of Indiana’s regular starters to leave the program, handing new coach Tom Crean a clean slate heading into his inaugural season with the Hoosiers.

Gordon will make the announcement at 4:30 p.m. Monday at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis, the school said Friday.

The JCC!?! As Jordan put it: “What, the Marriott was booked?”

We’re on it. For now, here what a Google search turned up …

His mother says: “When he was very young, his dad would take him to the JCC and it was dribble, dribble, dribble.”

And this from a commenter to another article: “You questioned a kid’s heart, which by proxy means his effort, his drive, and his will. Not his ability. I’ve sat in the gym at the Jewish Community Center in Indianapolis and watched him shoot 200 3-pointers while running sprints in between.”