In this podcast, JTA German correspondent Toby Axelrod interviews Ronen Eidelman, an Israeli artist studying abroad in Weimar, Germany, whose senior thesis project — seeking the establishment of a Jewish state in Germany — which launches this coming Sunday, is already ruffling some feathers in Germany and abroad. You can read Ms. Axelrod’s full story on the subject here.

(Full disclosure: I am a friend of Mr. Eidelman’s and an adviser on this project. I also accidentally named this initiative.)

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To subscribe to JTA’s Behind the News podcast, click here.

As always, couple items to note ….

• The Uri L’tzedek boycott of Agriprocessors has gone into effect. The self-described Orthodox social justice group (which doesn’t like the word boycott) said it would refrain from purchasing Agriprocessors’ products on June 15 if the company didn’t agree to establish a transparent mechanism to ensure compliance with Jewish and U.S. labor law. A meeting took place last week, but the group is still waiting for assurances that the company has turned a corner. There’s more on this here.
• Meanwhile, another Jewish group is jumping into the fray. In keeping with its historic roots, Ameinu, the American wing of the World Labor Zionist movement, has issued a statement urging Jewish groups not to patronize Agri. We’ve also heard that another summer camp, the Conservative Ramah Darom in Georgia, turned away a shipment from Agri. Our gut here is that this is likely to further convince the company’s defenders that Jewish outrage over this issue is simply an opportunistic pile-on for liberal groups.
• Meanwhile, some of the most damning evidence of an impending shortage emerged last week when we discovered that FreshDirect, the popular Internet retailer that gets all its kosher meat from Agri, has some 40 kosher meat products listed as currently unavailable. No worries if you’re planning to serve glatt kosher beef neck bones this Shabbos, the supply of which seems to be holding. (NOTE: If you follow that link, you need to type in a NYC zip code to see the page. If you’re outside the city, use mine: 11215). However, there does seem to be enough meat for the company to have donated 1,000 pounds to flood relief in Iowa, a Chabad website reported.
• Finally, an email was circulated this week by a Lubavitch rabbi in Connecticut describing a recent meeting local rabbis had with Rabbi Seth Mandel, the OU’s head of meat supervision. More on that, after the jump.

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• NBC’s David Gregory says no to lashon hara.
• Hamas practices/glorifies kidnapping of Israeli soldier.
• The Leader-Post reports on a Quebec rabbi who beats speeding ticket with the old “circumcision emergency” story.
• Cartoonist Eli Valley does “The Incredible Hulk” — at the expense of right-wing Jews.
• Messianic Jews perform in Jamaica.
• British documentary looks at the life of Chasidic ex-con.
• The NYT takes us back to when the telegraph was the wave of the future (some things never change).

On the eve of an apparent cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that rules Gaza, the chatter in Israel already has moved onto another subject: Israel’s other threatening neighbor, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The New York Times reports that Israel is willing to engage in peace talks with Lebanon about “all issues,” including a disputed piece of land on the Israel-Lebanon border called Shebaa Farms. But what Israel is most interested in is the return of its two captive soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, who were kidnapped by Hezbollah in the deadly incident that sparked the 2006 Lebanon war.

The families of the two soldiers met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s negotiations chief on Wednesday, and Israel reportedly is discussing the outline of a prisoner swap deal with Hezbollah. A deal likely would include the return to Lebanon of Samir Kuntar, a Lebanese Druse man who snuck into Israel in 1979 and murdered an Israeli man and his 4-year-old daughter, along with two Israeli policemen. This release of Kuntar is a cause celebre among many Lebanese, Palestinians and others who mistake the murder of a little girl and her young father for an act of heroism.

Nevertheless, Ha’aretz’s Uzi Benziman says repatriating Kuntar for Goldwasser and Regev would be a price worth paying, even if politically unpopular. Echoing that sentiment, Ynet’s Sima Kadmon says waiting might result in the Regev-Goldwasser captivity turning into that of Ron Arad, the Israeli airman who went down over Lebanon in 1986. Arad survived the fall and was captured, but he has not been heard from in some 20 years. His whereabouts remain unknown, and Israeli intelligence officials privately say it is highly unlikely he is still alive.

Arad’s family, however, say such a deal is not worthwhile.

On the Gaza front, Israel and Hamas continued to trade fire on Wednesday, with some two dozen rockets fired into Israel from the Palestinian strip.

Ynet’s Alex Fishman writes that the Hamas-Israel cease-fire deal

is taking shape for one reason: The two weak governments on both sides of the Gaza fence have an interest in seeing the deal succeed. Only one element has an interest in sabotaging this deal: The Iranians. They will make an effort to unravel it through the Islamic Jihad organization. This is where Hamas will be tested: Is it indeed an Iranian satellite, or does it only exploit Tehran for its own needs?

So everything that has happened and will happen in the day before the truce is a game: Who will emerge as “the man,” who will deliver the last blow, and who will fight to the last moment for its truce terms? This is what Hamas is doing, and this is what we’re doing as well.

Arieh Eldad, a Knesset member belonging to National Union-NRP, asserts in a piece posted on Ynet that the Israeli military needs a new attitude:

One after the other we hear the shameful reports of the IDF evacuating new recruits and administrative soldiers from bases at the front lines. In some cases the army is completely deserting bases and leaving the area open for hostile takeover.

The latest reports had to do with the evacuation of administrative soldiers from the liaison office at the Erez Crossing and the decision to evacuate new recruits from the Zikim base. Earlier, we saw the IDF evacuate its based in northern Samaria, even though this was not required by the Disengagement Law. The army also deserted bases in the Jordan Rift Valley, while removing, among others, all new recruit bases from Judea and Samaria.

Each one of these shameful moves came against a specific backdrop, and came with a reason and a pile of excuses. At times it was about “diplomatic reasons” – evacuating territory in favor of the Arabs. On occasion it was about administrative reasons – transferring new recruit bases to more proper sites.

The worst excuses were the ones about “security” – the bases are situated in a hostile environment and transporting troops to them and from them entails a logistical and security burden as well as the need to designate soldiers for guarding the bases instead of performing other security missions.

Recently, we heard the most terrible excuses: New recruits and administrative soldiers are not designated to fight, and therefore they must be removed from any location that presents danger. …

Shame covers our face. We knew, and said so, that those who run away from the terror in Gaza will have terror chase them. Yet even we didn’t know that the IDF won’t stop its retreat and would run away from Erez and Zikim too. Even in our worst nightmares we never imagined a situation whereby the people are staying in Sderot, Nir Oz, and Ashkelon, while the IDF is evacuating its troops to a safer place.

Michael Weiss argues in Slate that “the temptation to lure Einstein posthumously into the theistic fold is understandable” — but off the mark:

Einstein underwent a brief elective immersion in Judaism as a boy, but his parents were secular; his father thought the Abrahamic rituals “ancient superstitions.” Einstein later told New York Rabbi Herbert Goldstein that he believed in “Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.” (In the 17th century, philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism on suspicion of atheism—allegations that Rebecca Goldstein argues in Betraying Spinoza were, in fact, correct.) When a rumor was circulated in 1945 that a Jesuit priest had converted him, Einstein thundered back: “I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.”

[F]rom the viewpoint of a layman, Einstein frequently denied being an atheist, though he seemed more at odds with the “militant” style of godlessness than with its core substance. It’s impossible to imagine him volunteering even to moderate a Hitchens-Dawkins-Dennett colloquium on secularism. He wrote to a Navy ensign, “I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.”

In his best-selling biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson writes, “[W]e should do him the honor of taking him at his word when he insists, repeatedly, that these oft-used phrases were not merely a semantic way of disguising that he was actually an atheist.” It’s a generous assessment, but one that encompasses the physicist’s more milquetoast pronouncements on the matter and conveniently ignores what Isaacson elsewhere concedes was Einstein’s maddening tendency to be purposefully gnomic or oblique. Another biographer, Ronald W. Clark, observed that when Einstein talked about religion, “he tended to adopt the belief of Alice’s Red Queen that ‘words mean what you want them to mean.’ ” That comes closer to the mark and is best evidenced in the famous quotation, “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.” Only a literal mind would see here a prime mover at a celestial craps table. …

Most believers have long given up trying to legitimize the supernatural in microscopes or cyclotrons. That scientists like Einstein resorted to a numinous vocabulary is not the “gotcha” some wishful thinkers would like it to be. Faith has had impressive minds on its side in the past, but it will have to work without the assumption that the greatest of the 20th century was one of them.

• The N.Y. Times profiles Yosef Abrahamson, the black chasidic Crown Heights teen who won an essay contest a couple of weeks ago, suggesting he may be Brooklyn’s perfect representative.
• Over at Jewschool, Y-Love takes an axe to the Times’ suggestion in the aformentioned story that John McCain, who Abrahamson supports, is a “post-racial” candidate.
• See also: My interview with Y-Love over at Jewcy.
• The Independent reports, “The Israeli military has come under renewed pressure to explain why its tank shells killed a Reuters cameraman and eight other Palestinians on a road in Gaza two months ago.”
• The N.Y. Times’ Philip Galanes tells a non-Jewish reader who joined JDate — and who still hasn’t told the guy she met on the site that she’s not a member of the tribe — to come clean.
• Former Pantera vocalist Phil Anselmo is heading to Israel to perform with his band Down next month. Alarmingly, when a blogger (my sister, incidentally) pointed out the fact that Anselmo has connections to the White Nationalist movement and a history of making racist remarks, furthermore suggesting that he shouldn’t be welcomed to Israel, the show’s promoter Lior Kamali responded by threatening to “smash [her] face.” What a mentsch!
• And finally, two rich Jews make another shonde for the goyim.

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles reports on a lesbian couple’s long road to the chupah:

Amid a crush of photographers, a handful of largely drowned-out protesters, and hundreds of supporters tossing rose petals, Diane Olson and Robin Tyler stood under a chuppah on the Beverly Hills Courthouse steps on Monday evening to become one of the first lesbian couples to legally marry in California.

The couple had been among the original plaintiffs to sue the state for discrimination in the lawsuit that eventually led the California Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage. In recognition of that, the County of Los Angeles arranged for the Olson and Tyler to receive their marriage license at 5:01 Monday, just after the courthouse closed for regular business, ahead of the hundreds of same-gender couples who would flood the courthouse the next day.

The moment was an electrical mix of the spiritual, personal and political.

In the Huffington Post last week, Tyler wrote about the challenges posed not only by marrying her same-sex partner, but also by the fact that her partner is not Jewish:

[A] reporter for a mainstream Jewish newspaper asked me last week[,] “What do you think of intermarriage?” I replied: “If women want to marry men, it’s perfectly okay with me!” But when the reporter phoned to interview me, she said she meant “interfaith marriage.”

Ha’aretz has an article on how B’Tselem’s decision to distribute cameras to Palestinians may end up landing several Jewish settlers in jail for a recent attack on Arab shepherds.

Three months ago, the B’Tselem human rights organization gave Muna al-Nawaja a video camera. Nawaja, 24, lives near the Israeli settlement of Sussya, in the southern West Bank. Between caring for her young son and tending the family’s sheep, she learned to use the camera, fell in love with it and now carries it with her everywhere.

But its “baptism of fire” occurred last week, on Sunday afternoon. Most Israelis were busy preparing for the Shavuot holiday. But some had a different priority: savagely beating Nawaja’s relatives. She managed to capture a few seconds of the beating - in which her 57-year-old aunt was severely injured, and two uncles, age 60 and 33 were hurt - on film. But she never dreamed that it would prove to be the main, and possibly only, evidence available to the police investigating the assault.

B’Tselem has posted video clips from the incident in question.

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.