The Israeli press is all atwitter about whether or not Israel should launch a major military operation to curb Palestinian rocket fire from the Gaza Strip on Israeli communities down south. (Read about JTA’s Jacob Berkman dodging Palestinian rockets last week here.)

The consensus, it seems, is against an operation.

“It didn’t work before, and it won’t work this time either. It is merely an attempt to buy time that won’t lead us anywhere,” writes Ariella Ringel-Hoffman in Ynet:

The proposal for one decisive blow should be replaced with creative ideas that would bring Gilad Shalit back home and expand the lull agreement, so it will have the potential of creating dramatic change in the region.

In an editorial Wednesday, Ha’aretz advises pursuing an Egyptian-mediated ceasefire with Hamas rather than launching a war Israel cannot win:

There is no persuasive reason for a military action, except the fact that we cannot accept continued firing on Israel, and Hamas’ continued arming. In contrast, there are a number of reasons for a cease-fire, however temporary. The main reason is that Hamas can no more be eradicated than could Hezbollah.

The Jerusalem Post’s reliably hawkish Caroline Glick finds the idea of a ceasefire politically expedient but strategically disastrous:

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The Jewish Transcript in Seattle profiles Joel Blatt, a twice-married consultant who invented a new dating site with the goal of meeting a nice Jewish girl. Plus, click here to listen to Blatt’s interview with ABC News Radio.

Here’s the opening of the Transcript article:

Getting by — and dating — with a little help from your friends may have just gotten easier, thanks to a local entrepreneur’s spin on matchmaking.

In March, fed up with the online dating world, Joel Blatt created Sparkbliss.com, a Web site that he describes as “LinkedIn, for dating.”

Blatt, 42, who works for a Bellevue consulting firm, has been married twice — both times to non-Jewish women. While Sparkbliss is not specifically a Jewish dating site, Blatt said he did create it with the goal of meeting a Jewish woman.

“I’ve tried JDate, I’ve tried other online dating sites, and they don’t work very well,” Blatt said. “I couldn’t take anymore of those awful dates. I wanted to meet the right people.”

The trouble with most online dating sites, he contends, is simple: profiles can be viewed — and judged — based on search criteria entered by site users, but those profiles are not always true representations of the singles on the site. Blatt said that he wanted that possibility eliminated from the equation.

The Associated Press reports that the Jewish Quarter in Paris is losing its je(wish) ne sais quoi:

The kosher pizzeria on the rue des Rosiers smelled like hot cheese, and Jewish teens leaned skullcap-covered heads into the doorway, hoping to order one of Moshe Benjamin Engelberg’s thin-crusted pizzas.

But Engelberg shook his head. After 27 years, he has lost faith in his neighborhood, home to French Jews since the Middle Ages, and is shutting down, depriving the rue des Rosiers district of one of its remaining Old World-style kosher restaurants.

The disappearance of a dingy pizzeria, its faded portraits of rabbis hanging crooked on brown-stained walls, where men recently swayed back and forth under prayer shawls between pizza courses, was a blow to those fearing the area has become a lifeless, polished museum.

The district has been losing a vital chunk of its Jewish character to high-end designer labels in a slow transformation that residents say is reaching a turning point. Local officials estimate that as many as 20 Jewish shops in the compact quarter have given way to clothing stores in the past four years.

After Israeli Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz opened his mouth last week to warn that an Israeli bombing run against Iran was inevitable, oil prices had their biggest single-day jump in history while global markets tanked.

On Wednesday, the Jerusalem Post’s Michael Freund offered some advice to Mofaz and the countless Israeli politicians who mistake speech for virtue: Shut up!

Meanwhile, Ynet’s Amos Carmel deconstructs the oil jump and finds Mofaz’s remarks were not the cause.

Rabbi Morris Allen, project director of the Conservative movement’s hekhsher tzedek initiative, made a quiet visit to Postville two weeks ago to talk to some of the workers he’d met on his previous visits in 2007 and ’06.

He went with his 19-year-old daughter, not as a representative of his movement, but just to show those arrested in the May 12 immigration raid that a rabbi cares about them.

So far, 300 workers have been convicted, he says. Some are wearing electronic ankle bracelets, to make sure they don’t report to work or flee. Allen visited one woman who said she couldn’t pay her $750 June 1 rent because she was now out of work. As she was talking, Allen saw her ankle bracelet plugged into the wall for recharging. “How much more indignity can be imposed on these people?” he asks.

Allen spoke to a 16-year-old boy from Guatemala who has been working at the plant for a year. The boy doesn’t go to school. “The sad thing is, if he’s deported, he will probably have reached the highest salary level he’ll ever have in his lifetime,” Allen says.

A local church, St. Bridget’s, is trying to help out by distributing money and food to those most severely affected. “Sister Mary is running as much of a social service agency as possible, taking care of several hundred people,” he reports. “It’s unbelievable to see these people walking around with GPS monitors on their legs.”

Allen’s synagogue, Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, MN, is collecting money to send to the church, to help relief efforts.

But there are two sides to every issue, he adds. Downtown there’s a new community center that the Rubashkins help build. And a local minister told him none of his parishioners wants AgriProcessors to close. They depend on it for their livelihood. “He said, we certainly want to see the workers treated differently, but the success of the plant is beneficial for all of us in Postville,” Allen reports.

As Allen was leaving, he saw some Chassidic boys playing baseball, their tzitzit flying. He thought about the Guatemalan boy their same age living a few blocks away, who has spent the last year working in the slaughterhouse. “Two different versions of the American dream,” he muses.

JTA (and our blogs) are closed for Shavuot on June 9 and June 10. Enjoy the holiday (which commemorates the Jewish people’s receiving the Torah at Mount Sinai).

With the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy upon us, former AIPAC and Israeli embassy official Lenny Ben-David is highlighting a series of dispatches that RFK wrote during his 1948 visit to Israel.

Click here to read the actual dispatches, which appeared in the now-defunct Boston Post.

The Jewish people in Palestine who believe in and have been working toward this national state have become an immensely proud and determined people. It is already a truly great modern example of the birth of a nation with the primary ingredients of dignity and self-respect.

Ben-David has an essay in the Jerusalem Post arguing that RFK was a genuine friend of Israel, who paid for this support of the Jewish state with his life.

And this from Sasha Issenberg in the Boston Globe:

The shooting of Robert F. Kennedy is widely remembered as part of the wrenching domestic turbulence of the 1960s. But some scholars are beginning to see it as something quite different yet no less significant: America’s first taste of the political violence of the Middle East.

Marty Peretz offers an amen on his blog.

And over at the Forward, Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, writes:

Kennedy’s assassin was a Palestinian resident of Silwan in East Jerusalem, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. He chose to kill Kennedy on that exact date because it coincided with the first anniversary of Israel’s stunning victory during the Six-Day War. Sirhan hated Kennedy because he had supported Israel; in fact, that was exactly what Sirhan said when he testified at his own trial. He remains in prison, serving a life sentence for the murder.

Why is it important that we remember this barely-remembered historical tidbit about the death of Kennedy? Because one man’s hatred of Israel utterly re-directed American political life and the story of the presidency.

The Onion reports,

In an unexpected act that Israeli president Shimon Peres called “thoughtful,” al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden sent a belated threat to Israel Monday in honor of the Jewish state’s 60th birthday. “Old fart!” read the front of the card in a font designed to look like ancient stone tablets. “Did you actually think I would forget my favorite infidels on their special day? Celebrate while you still can, dirty Zionist dogs!” bin Laden wrote under a caricature of a grinning al-Qaeda member wearing a birthday hat and a suicide belt, preparing to board a bus full of Israeli citizens. A visibly moved Peres told reporters he would return the gesture by sending a bouquet of a dozen F-15Is fighter jets to Lebanon next week.

When my heavy-metal friends disclosed their secret pasts, it was a series of revelations: although they were muscly, pierced and dark-alley-nightmare-looking, when they told stories of their childhoods, each was nerdier than the last. Now, Spin Magazine reporter Mordechai Shinefield uncovers the newest of the nü-metal fans’ deep dark secrets: they’re ex-yeshiva boys.

Elie Hassan and Brian Brown, both 21, graduated from Baltimore’s Ner Israel, where kids in their dorm sometimes snitched on the pair for indulging their nonkosher music habits. “I would say that 30 to 40 percent of our class knew about [lead singer] Draiman and had heard Disturbed,” says Brown. Now college roommates at the more liberal Yeshiva University in New York, they’re free to enjoy the band in relative peace.

That’s right: David Draiman, the lead singer of Disturbed, grew up in the yeshiva system — he attended five schools, and was kicked out of three of them. It’s no surprise to the band’s fans (or rubberneckers) — Draiman has repeatedly thrown Hebrew words, Jewish concepts, and knowing winks to the haredi subset of his audience — but writing lyrics like “Elokai, bury me tonight” is probably not what got Draiman ejected. (Blowing up the rosh yeshiva’s car, on the other hand, might have.)

Just got this announcement from Agriprocessors’ spokesperson:

As part of the ongoing effort to enhance compliance with immigration and employment law, Agriprocessors has retained Jim Martin and his compliance specialty group, The Prevene Group, as the company’s outside Corporate Compliance Officer. Martin, a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, will begin his efforts immediately.

“My job is to ensure the company operates in compliance with all applicable laws,” Martin said. “Agriprocessors’ 800 jobs are important to Postville and northern Iowa, along with the observant Jewish community across the country that relies on them for their kosher meat and poultry. Agriprocessors can meet the needs of those who depend on the company and operate in compliance with all laws, and I intend to see that happen.”

After spending more than 20 years with the United States Attorney’s Office, Mr. Martin has spent the past several years helping companies strengthen and enhance their compliance programs. He was recently recognized in Best Lawyers in America for corporate governance and compliance law.

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