The New York Times has had several items of interest over the past few days:

• The last Jews of Baghdad have become the fearful few.
• P. W. Singer and Elina Noor argue that the U.S. is making a strategic mistake by describing terrorists as jihadists.
• Organizers of the Salute to Israel Parade wonder why Israelis never seem to turn out.
• Thomas Friedman says Mr. Obama would do himself a big favor by shifting his focus from the list of enemy leaders he would talk with to the list of things he would do as president to generate more leverage for America.
• A look a The Journey, a megachurch of mostly younger evangelicals, that is representative of a new generation that refuses to put politics at the center of its faith and rejects identification with the religious right.
• The U.S. State Dept. reinstated seven Fullbright scholarships awarded to Palestinian students after it had withdrawn them last week citing Israel’s refusal to allow the students to leave the Gaza Strip.
• The public editor of the New York Times discusses how the paper was taken to task over an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Islamic world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that the candidate had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult. (Click here and here for response in the blogosphere).

• Popular web technology blog Mashable will be holding a conference in Israel next week.
• Over at Jerusalemite, Michael Yaari has 31 facts to celebrate 41 years of Jerusalem’s reunification.
• The Forward reports on Ivanka Trump’s disappointment in Tel Aviv’s lack of five star accommodations.
• The San Diego Jewish Journal profiles Shoshanah Jacobs, a nice Jewish girl who just so happens to lead Arctic expeditions.
• Rabbi David S. Gruber, an Orthodox rabbi and former RCA member, outs himself as an atheist and secular humanist.
• Jack Wertheimer has a lengthy piece in this month’s issue of Commentary which questions whether Reform Judaism’s tolerance for individualism and pluralism will see to its demise.
• Bahrain has appointed a Jewish woman to be its ambassador to the United States.
• The Denver Post writes on the failure of rabbis and synagogues to integrate interfaith families, and the end result for individuals’ Judaism.
• Matisyahu is on his first trip to Jamaica.
• Newly discovered recordings reveal President Lyndon Johnson’s feelings about Israel.
• Israel Gutman, a research director at Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, has condemned Germany’s new memorial commemorating homosexuals killed during the Holocaust.
• IHT columnist William Pfaff says that Israel’s refusal to end the occupation of the Palestinian territories has insured the nation’s end.
• Diamond magnate Lev Leviev organizes a bris at the grave of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
• And for those who missed it, executives at Bear Stearns find religion.

Here’s an e-mail going around, supposedly from the vice president of Bear Stearns and gabbai of the company’s mincha minyan. Still trying to get my head around whether the e-mail is moving or maddening:

Read the rest of this entry »

In his memo-to-the-next-president column in Friday’s New York Times, David Brooks offers candidates Barack Obama and John McCain some advice about how to deal with Iran. Because it’s unrealistic to expect that the White House has the power to neutralize the Iranian threat, Brooks writes, all the next president really can do is contain and wait for the radical regime in Tehran to fall:

Your job is to restrain Iran’s momentum until the fundamental correlation of forces can shift. For amid all the doleful news, there is a hopeful tide. Opinion is turning slowly against extremism. The über-analyst Dennis Ross says that he has noted it among the Palestinians. Michael Young writes that opinion is shifting against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Peter Bergen, Paul Cruickshank and Lawrence Wright have in their different ways written about the intellectual crisis afflicting Al Qaeda. It may not happen over the next four years, but as Ross has noted, where Islamists rule, they wear out their welcome.

Your job may be to wage rear-guard political battles until the ideological tide can turn. It’s not glamorous work, but governing isn’t campaigning. You volunteered for this.

Unfortunately, this optimism is misplaced. I’m not sure where Brooks or these analysts see Islamism wearing out its welcome. In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s power and political support is growing. Whereas three years ago Gaza was ruled by the Israelis and two years ago by the Palestinian Authority, today it is ruled by an Islamic terrorist group, Hamas, that repeatedly has stymied Israeli and moderate Palestinian efforts to contain it (see: Hamas’ breach of Gaza-Egypt border, Israel’s inability to neutralize Gaza rocket threat, etc.). In Afghanistan, the Taliban is making a comeback. In Pakistan, the Islamists are gaining ground. And in the Middle East, every day sees Iran’s sphere of influence grow. Though Iran’s current president may be stumbling at home due to the country’s faltering economy, the unelected, fundamentalist Shiite clerics that really control things in Iran still have a stranglehold on the country.

Brooks’ analysis is more wishful thinking than “The Reality Situation,” as he calls his column. The Iranian regime may well fall on its own, but hoping that it will happen before Iran becomes a nuclear power is a callous gamble. Attacking Iran may not be the answer, but crossing one’s fingers and waiting for Islamism to recede, rather than actively confronting radical Islamists who seek to spread their brand of fundamentalism through the force of violence, is just plain foolhardy.

With tensions still simmering over an Arabic-language charter school in Brooklyn — a fight that spawned a (heavily Jewish) campaign against it, the resignation of its principal days before the school was due to open amidst charges she sympathizes with terrorists, and at least two lawsuits – news has broken of a Hebrew-language charter school in the same borough of New York City.

Both the Forward and the Jewish Week have stories about the new school, backed my mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt and pushed by his daughter, Sara Berman, who is submitting an application for the school next week.

If adopted, it would become the second Hebrew-language charter school in the country. Ben Gamla in Hollywood, Fla. was the first, opening its doors this past fall. Like the Brooklyn Arabic school, and another Arabic school in Minnesota, Ben Gamla has had its troubles. Critics — including some Jews — have charged that it’s little more than a front for religious instruction and blurs the line between church and state.

But at least one commentator thinks the new school is protected under the Constitution. Check out Thomas Carroll’s take in today’s New York Post.

The heat is rising on Ehud Olmert to resign. Since U.S. Jewish businessman Morris Talansky testified Tuesday in an Israeli court that he handed over some $150,00 to Olmert over the course of 13 years, and not all of it was accounted for, Defense Minister Ehud Barak joined the chorus of voices calling for Olmert’s head and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said the Kadima party, of which she and Olmert are members, should prepare for new elections.

On Thursday, the Israeli dailies Ha’aretz and the Jerusalem Post led with editorials calling on the prime minister to step down. Ma’ariv columnist Ben Caspit, who describes the public outcry for Olmert’s head as a “lynching,” writes that the governmental purge should extend beyond Olmert to an entire generation of “leaders” who have lost their way. A self-described furious Yigal Sarna writes in Ynet that Talansky’s testimony on Olmert prompts

the same sense of nausea when lifting an old sewage lid and discovering a world filled with insects and rats and everything that is hidden from view right under our feet – we guess that it exists, but it’s not the same as seeing it with our own eyes.

So who would lead Israel after Olmert’s gone? In a profile Thursday, The New York Post calls Kadima’s Livni “Mrs. Clean” and pronounces her “likely the next prime minister,” but Israeli polls show her only narrowly edging out the Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Livni does have one big advantage over Bibi and the other major-party PM hopeful, Labor’s Barak: In a country disgusted with its failed leaders, Livni is the only one of the three who has not yet been prime minister. The New York Times ran this profile of Livni a year ago.

Of course, none of this means Olmert’s actually on his way out. He has promised to step down if indicted, but that hasn’t happened so far, and Olmert has survived other major corruption probes before — and calls for his resignation by Livni and Barak. Never a dull moment in Israel, though plenty of dispiriting ones of late.

Courtesy of Modular Moods Records, The Telegraph is pleased to present the new collaboration between Jewish hip-hop artists Y-Love and Kosha Dillz.

Y-Love, who is currently touring internationally, jumping from Jewish conferences to secular hip-hop events, released his debut album This is Babylon earlier this year to rave reviews from mainstream hip-hop publications like XXL, XLR8R and URB, several of which described his music as “revolutionary.”

Kosha Dillz, the latest addition to the Modular family, is an Israeli-American emcee who has been cited by URB as “a universal voice” and “a rarely seen culture clash in music.” Dillz has performed with the likes of Matisyahu, Pharcyde and Jurassic 5, and will see his first Modular recording, a collaboration with rapper C Rayz Walz, released later this summer.

You can listen to Y-Love and Kosha Dillz’s collaboration below.

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

• The NY Mets will celebrate Israel’s 60th anniversary tonight with a pre-game show featuring Israeli music and dancing plus glatt kosher diggs. I hope the hot dogs aren’t from Agriprocessors…
• Renowned British artist Stephen Wiltshire has a completed an aerial drawing of Jerusalem. More here.
• Dunkin’ Donuts pulled a television ad from the airwaves that featured Rachel Ray sporting a rather fashionable keffiyeh after the company received complaints from right-wing activists. No word yet as to whether John McCain will pull his daughter, who has also been seen wearing a keffiyeh, from public view as well.
• Hydrox, the kosher alternative to the formerly trayfe Oreo cookies, has been resurrected from the dead (via MJL).
• Scientific American takes a look at the evolutionary basis for religiosity.
• Former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton dodged a citizen’s arrest for alleged war crimes last night after a speaking gig in England.
• Information Week reports that “the Internet has recently experienced the largest increase in online hate activity in 10 years.”
• Harvard professor Niall Ferguson asks in the UK’s Times Online whether Henry Kissinger is as vilified as he is because he is Jewish.
• The British University and College Union will once again vote on divestment from Israel.
• Finally, we inadvertently had the wrong link in yesterday’s Daily Briefing email for yesterday’s News Shticker. So for those who missed it, here it is.

Now visiting the Western Wall as part of Migdal Ohr’s NBA Legends Goodwill Tour to Israel, from the University of Massachusetts, at 6′6, number 6, Dr. J, Julius Errrrrrrrrrrrrrving…

That’s what the Jewish Star is claiming:

It is at the insistence of the Orthodox Union that Sholom Rubashkin is to be replaced as chief executive officer of Agriprocessors, the kosher meatpacking giant his father, Aaron Rubashkin, founded, The Jewish Starhas learned.

“We have said that if there were criminal culpability that we would withdraw our supervision,” said Rabbinic Administrator Rabbi Menachem Genack in an interview Tuesday. “The OU spoke to the company to say that we would suggest –– for lots of reasons –– that they should look for professional management.”

It’s not entirely clear from the quote whether Genack himself is taking credit for ousting Sholom, or whether that’s the Jewish Star’s assertion. But the real question is whether Sholom Rubashkin is still “having a great time.”