A month or so back, JTA’s Jacob Berkman reported on one Jewish organization’s plan (later dropped) to auction off a subscription to Playboy and a trip to the mansion. What we missed (yes, I know this is old) was the bigger scandal: the magazine’s anti-Israel bias.

Just when you thought it was safe to read the articles, Heff’s mag runs a piece by Jonathan Tasini slamming Israel. Among other things, he insisted that Jimmy Carter was right to describe “the control over Palestinians’ movements as similar to South Africa’s apartheid system” and criticized politicians for pandering to Jewish voters.

(Hat tip: CAMERA)

Barack Obama and Chuck Hagel have both come out in the past week calling for wide-ranging negotiations between Iran and the United States as an alternative to the stick-only sanctions-focused approach of the Bush administration.

Jewish organizations have been major proponents of tightening the economic screws on Tehran in an effort to get the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear program. Will any of the key groups move to embrace an equally robust diplomatic offensive along the lines proposed by Obama and Hagel?

I caught up with Likud leader and prime ministerial frontrunner Benjamin Netanyahu last Friday at a speech to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. Bibi did not object to sweeping talks between Iran and the U.S., but dismissed the notion that anything but an “increase of pressure” would work. The executive vice-chairman of the Conference, Malcolm Hoenlein, was more critical, arguing that Iran had previously used negotiations as a tool for playing the Europeans, and suggesting that talks at this point would serve to undercut internal opponents of the regime.

Also last week, at the ADL’s national convention, the organization adopted a new resolution on Iran that simply calls for tougher international sanctions.

Here’s a thoughtful response from the editor of the New Jersey Jewish News, Andrew Silow-Carroll, to my post on the New York Times Magazine.

My standard joke on Larry King is that he could have Adolf Hitler on for two hours and the Holocaust would not come up. But Jerry Seinfeld may have outdone me…

All that said, maybe Jerry needs to lighten up.

For those of you who read through my entire Q & A with Abe Foxman, this will be hard to believe: There was actually some stuff that didn’t make it in. One line was his claim that James Traub and The New York Times Magazine had tried to undercut his credibility by comparing him to Al Sharpton.

“It’s tempting to compare Abe Foxman with Al Sharpton, another portly, bellicose, melodramatizing defender of ethnic ramparts,” Traub wrote in his profile of Foxman last January. “But you never feel that Foxman is admiring his own performance, as you do with Sharpton.”

The P.S./punch line to all of this? Foxman and Sharpton issued a joint statement last week “regarding the series of recent displays of nooses and swastikas in our community”:

The recent epidemic of nooses and swastikas appearing in various places in our communities are acts of hate and are intended to intimidate and instill fear. Such acts are despicable, and we call upon all people of good will – of all races, religions and ethnicities – to stand up and say such acts will not be tolerated.

Together we call for swift passage of proposed legislation to modify the existing New York state law which prohibits the depiction of a swastika on someone’s property, to similarly prohibit the public display of a noose with the intent to threaten or harrass. Nooses, like swastikas, are remnants from a tragic period of history, and the impact of their display still resonates deeply in our souls and in our communities. They cry to their intended targets, “You still do not belong!”

We must encourage an open and honest examination of the underlying hatred and potential for violence that these recent rash of incidents represent. They are attacks against not just a person or a group but against democracy and pluralism. We must use these incidents to educate people—especially our youth—about the consequences of racism, anti-Semitism, and all forms of bigotry and prejudice.

Earlier this year Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Union for Reform Judaism, talked a little smack about Chabad’s willingness to sign kids up for Bar Mitzvahs without requiring them to attend a ton of classes or forcing their parents to start showing up to shul:

Chabad, however, is often the address for those who wish to avoid serious requirements for the child or family. It is the place that you go when you do not want to join a synagogue or subject your child to a meaningful course of study. The rationale offered is that no child should be denied a Bar Mitzvah, and even with little serious training, the child and family – who are probably unaffiliated – may later be drawn into Jewish life. Perhaps.

More likely, the lesson that is absorbed is that Judaism is not a serious endeavor and that even the most significant milestones require only a modicum of work and preparation. Let me be clear: no family should ever be denied membership in a synagogue because of inability to pay. But we should protest when Chabad, or anyone else, becomes a voice of Jewish minimalism that lowers educational standards in our communities.

Now Chabad is firing back. Here’s a snippet from the recently posted reply from Chana Silberstein, the educational director at Chabad at Cornell:

What Yoffie fails to consider is that Chabad’s willingness to offer all children a bar mitzvah stems not from lowering of religious standards, but from a refusal to make children the pawns in a game of institutional extortion.

The reason most temples demand certain requirements be met before allowing children to be bar mitzvahed has nothing to do with standards—and everything to do with increasing synagogue revenue. The present system of front-loading fees such as synagogue membership and building fund, while creating an economic base for synagogue operations, discourages many Jews from getting involved.

Thus, many American Jews affiliate with synagogues only because they believe that if they do not, their child will not be able to become a bar mitzvah. In effect, the children are forced to pay the price for the failure of congregations to give their members a reason to want to join of their own volition. And so the kids become hostages. Parents are told that unless they ante up, their children will be denied this most significant of milestones. Some parents pay the ransom. Others leave the temple in disgust.

Michael Chabon had a piece this week in The Telegraph (not my blog, the British newspaper), discussing his discarded plan to name his new book “Jews With Swords.” Bet he wouldn’t mind taking a stab at Alexander Nazaryan, who ripped the book (actual title: “Gentlemen of the Road”) in the Village Voice:

Chabon’s heavy-handed Hebrew pride might be excusable in an otherwise brisk narrative, but this slim volume packs considerable flab. Hemingway could summon Spain in a single sentence; Chabon spends 200 pages kicking around the Central Asian plain without digging beneath the sun-baked surface. The real culprit here is not Biljan but unabashed logorrhea, with clunkers like “the migraine blaze of day” and the “honeyed hand of a dream” turning every page into a sort of verbal ambush. It’s not unfair to wonder if Chabon, like his Victorian predecessors, was being paid by the word.

But stylistic indiscretions, however irritating, are secondary to Chabon’s inability to treat Jews with the humanity that has so often been denied to them. In Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the oversexed Alexander Portnoy sears unease into the page with prolonged riffs on masturbation. He may not shed light on the Holocaust, but Portnoy is far closer to flesh than any of the tortured abstractions peddled by the Jewish New Wave. Despite lofty intentions, the likes of Chabon and [Jonathan Safran Foer] are unwilling to examine history on its own harsh terms, parading the Jews as little more than evidence of their own nuanced sensitivity or refined moral palate. As such, their project is no less self-serving than Madonna’s public flaunting of the Kabbalah. But hey, at least the girl can sing.

Hey, Chabon, you going to take that? As you would put it: What are you — a Maccabee or a Motel Kamzoil?

At the Democratic debate Tuesday night, John Edwards led the charge against frontrunner Hillary Clinton, accusing her of double talk and saber rattling on Iran, especially with regards to her vote for a resolution backing U.S. sanctions against the Revolutionary Guard.

On both counts, however, Edwards might as well have been talking about himself.

Last January, at an annual gathering of top members of the Israeli security establishment, Edwards gave a Rudy-sounding speech on Iran (click here and scroll to the right to find the text). It contained more saber rattling than anything Clinton has said in recent weeks, and certainly sounded a strong note for tougher sanctions. Here are a few of the highlights:

* “Let me be clear: Under no circumstances can Iran be allowed to have nuclear weapons.”

* “Iran must know that the world won’t back down. The recent UN resolution ordering Iran to halt the enrichment of uranium was not enough. We need meaningful political and economic sanctions. We have muddled along for far too long. To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep ALL options on the table, Let me reiterate – ALL options must remain on the table.”

* “My analysis of Iran is if you start with the President of Iran coming to the UN in New York denouncing America and his extraordinary and nasty statements about the Holocaust and goal of wiping Israel off map, married with his attempts to obtain nuclear weapons over a long period of time, they are buying time. They are the foremost state sponsors of terrorism. If they have nuclear weapons, other states in the area will want them, and this is unacceptable.”

Compare all that to what he had to say just a few weeks later on “Meet The Press.” When asked if President Edwards would allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon, he said: “I — there’s no answer to that question at this moment….I think — I think the — we don’t know, and you have to make a judgment as you go along, and that’s what I would do as president.”

Say what you want about Clinton’s recent vote or her general approach to Iran, but she’s pushed a consistent message: tough sanctions and robust diplomacy, while refusing to take the military option off of the table.

She stressed all sides of the equation during a speech to an AIPAC gathering in January. That same month, during his speech in Israel, Edwards was so busy talking tough that he forgot to issue a call for stepped up diplomacy, until he was asked about the issue during the question and answer session.

If the National Jewish Democratic Council is so steamed over Ann Coulter’s saying that Jews need to be perfected by embracing Christianity, then why has it released a cartoon mocking the religious views of GOP presidential hopeful and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee?

Yes, as the NJDC notes in its accompanying press release, back at a debate in May, Huckabee raised his hand when the candidates were asked if any of them did not believe in evolution.

So what?

Huckabee was asked a question and he answered. It’s not as if he said it in the context of advancing legislation that would ban the teaching of evolution or require the teaching of Creationism.

Is the mere belief in something other than evolution now grounds for disqualifying a person from the White House?

Even if you think the answer to that question should be yes, why is it kosher to mock the guy’s religious beliefs?

If all that weren’t enough, as it turns out, the NJDC is not only mocking his religious beliefs — it’s distorting them. On at least two occasions, Huckabee has clarified that by answering no to evolution, he was rejecting the idea of a Godless creation process (see two clips below). Is the Earth billions of years old? Are human beings descended from primates? Maybe, but then God was directing the process, he says. And, either way, he asked, what does that have to do with being president?

One can certainly quibble with a view of evolution that puts God in the driver’s seat, but then you’re quibbling with what I suspect is a mainstream view among Americans of various political and religious stripes.

Laura Kaufman, the voice of ‘Obama Girl,’ gets all Jewey in her takedown of Ann Coulter.