President Bush’s approval may be low, but he sure has a pretty big honorary entourage for his trip to Israel: (more…)

Gideon Levy of Ha’aretz uses the Olmert-Talansky scandal to raise concerns about the role of Diaspora money in Israel:

Revealing the identity of the primary witness, Morris Talansky, in the lastest Ehud Olmert affair raises questions that go beyond the prime minister. Serious questions need to be asked about the relationship between American Jewry and Israel.

Granted, Talansky is a mere individual, but he is not the only one. Jerusalem is full of wheeler-dealers, functionaries, lobbyists, donors and philanthropists. There are rich men and middlemen, envoys and delegations, many of them with good intentions, but some without.

They wheedle and schnorr and contribute to various causes. It’s the kind of schnorring that begins with Shaare Zedek Medical Center and could end in court. The question here is why did Talansky, or any other Jewish American, invest, allegedly, in Olmert? What do they receive in exchange for this pot stirring?

His conclusion:

No thank you, we’re doing all right. No thank you, some of you are causing us great damage. If you want to wield influence, do it in your own country. You have a lot of power and influence there. Perhaps too much; it’s none of our business. You are American, not Israeli citizens, and no amount of money can or should change this fact. War and peace, social justice and government, education and religion in Israel are a matter for its citizens alone.

In his Ehud Olmert analysis today, Ha’aretz writer Yossi Verter cites an Israeli government minister as saying the Israeli prime minister’s handwriting in recent days betrays that of a “battered, haunted man.”

But you don’t need to read the prime minister’s notes to see that Olmert appears weighed down by defeat. In video greetings to New York’s Israel 60 celebration Wednesday night at Radio City Music Hall, Olmert looked lost and confused, staring vapidly at the camera and muttering something about a Jewish state for the Jewish people. Looking gaunt and sitting somewhat slumped over, Olmert seemed to be speaking without notes — or deliberation — and the video editing made clear that the prime minister couldn’t even get it all in one take. It was painful to watch.

By contrast, in the video greeting President Bush sent to the Radio City event, he managed — despite a host of problems and historically low poll numbers — to look like he did a decade ago, albeit with more gray hair. He had an impish grin, spoke of the similarities between Israel and America and the importance of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and concluded his little speech with a hearty “Mazal toff!” Audience members burst into applause several times during Bush’s recorded greeting.

Mark Twain (or whomever really deserves credit) was pretty much on the money when he quipped: “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always twenty years behind the times.”

But there’s always an exception to the rule.

Today it would be a cool day to be in Cincinnati because the Jewish community there is right on time — and offering up an interesting multi-cultural take on celebrating Israel’s 60th birthday.

Here’s the full press release: (more…)

The day after reporters flocked to a courtroom in downtown Manhattan to catch a glimpse of the 84-year-old New Jersey retiree arrested this week for spying for Israel, reporters converged on the man’s hometown of Monroe, N.J. to talk to friends, neighbors and anyone else willing to spill what they knew of the alleged spy, Ben-Ami Kadish.

“You can know people for years and just not know them,” a woman named Anita told The New York Times. “Nobody ever said anything bad about them,” a “shocked” neighbor told the New York Jewish Week. The spy story has been a boon to the New Jersey Jewish News, which scooped them all with a 2006 profile of Kadish and his wife, Doris. That story showed the couple hosting a charity event in their sukkah, portraying them as pillars of their Jewish community. Who knew?

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Gershom Gorenberg reports on the struggles of American Jews forced to deal with the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. The problem, Gorenberg asserts, is that proving you are Jewish to the Israeli religious establishment has become increasingly difficult — “especially if you came to Israel from the United States.”

In recent years, the state’s Chief Rabbinate and its branches in each Israeli city have adopted an institutional attitude of skepticism toward the Jewish identity of those who enter its doors. And the type of proof that the rabbinate prefers is peculiarly unsuited to Jewish life in the United States. The Israeli government seeks the political and financial support of American Jewry. It welcomes American Jewish immigrants. Yet the rabbinate, one arm of the state, increasingly treats American Jews as doubtful cases: not Jewish until proved so.

More than any other issue, the question of Who is a Jew? has repeatedly roiled relations between Israel and American Jewry. Psychologically, it is an argument over who belongs to the family. In the past, the casus belli was conversion: Would the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew coming to Israel, apply to those converted to Judaism by non-Orthodox rabbis? Now … the status of Jews by birth is in question. Equally important, the dividing line is no longer between Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The rabbinate’s handling of the issue has placed it on one side of an ideological fissure within Orthodox Judaism itself, between those concerned with making sure no stranger enters the gates and those who fear leaving sisters and brothers outside.

According to Seth Farber, an American-born Orthodox rabbi who helps Israelis navigate the rabbinic bureaucracy, the Chief Rabbinate’s have become so strict that “80 percent of federation leaders probably wouldn’t be able to reach the bar.”

The celebrity gossip Web site TMZ has a video segment on the latest wave of Jews to invade Hollywood: Israeli commandos.

The Jerusalem Post has an editorial Friday voicing skepticism over reports that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is set to “commit Israel to a much more intensive engagement with the Jewish communities of the Diaspora.”

Nothing that has leaked out of the first discussion on the issue, held at the Prime Minister’s Office on Wednesday, and nothing in the record of this government or its predecessors, suggests that Israel understands the complexity and immensity of the challenge posed by the Israel-Diaspora relationship. Thus, while Olmert’s initiative deserves praise, it also needs urgent direction.

The first important step, the Post’s editors argue, is to understand the difference between Jewish existence in America and Israel. (more…)