• Kenneth Cole features what is probably the first hasidic Jew in a Kenneth Cole ad:
  
• Oy gevalt, you should only know how many Yiddish and Hebrew influences have found their way into American English already, writes the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a piece on the upcoming Survey of North American Jewish Language by linguist Sarah Bunin Benor sociologist Steven M. Cohen, faculty members at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.
• On JTA Election Central, Eric Fingerhut asks whether a typo in an Associated Press report on vice presidential speculation unconsciously channels the feelings of many Democrats about Joe Lieberman, the 2000 Democratic VP pick.
• Australia’s The Age newspaper discovers the “double mitzvah” of Friday night.
• The Jerusalem Post ran a story about how the haredi followers of Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman say the fighting in Georgia stopped as soon as Georgia’s prime minister got a blessing by phone from the rabbi.
• U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice wants to see Saudi women compete in the Olympic Games. Those burkas might make it a bit difficult in the pool and on the uneven bars, however.
• Linday Lohan’s dad confirmed his daughter is considering converting to Judaism. “She’s exploring right now. She’s explored the Church of Scientology, she tried Kabbalah, and now this,” said Michael Lohan. “I think it’s just another phase. But either way, she’s involving God in her life, and I’m happy about that.”
• The Press-Enterprise of San Bernardino, Calif., reports on the uncertain future of a local synagogue.

Yesterday we flagged Tom Shales’ review of the new HBO short on Helen Thomas, the dean of the White House press corps. Most notably, he knocked the film for dodging Thomas’ criticisms of Israel and America’s pro-Jerusalem policies.

Well, today, Greg Mitchell, editor of Editor & Publisher, slams Shales and defends Thomas:

In suggesting that the Rory Kennedy HBO documentary on Helen Thomas performed “cosmetic surgery” on the legendary reporter’s alleged major “flaw” – a rabid anti-Israel bias — Tom Shales of The Washington Post revealed, instead, what the Thomases of the world are up against in the media. To criticize Israel at all in the U.S. media generally provokes this kind of outraged and outrageous response. Of course, in Israel itself, Israelis criticize their own government and policies all the time.

Shales accuses Thomas of “stridency in criticizing Israel and defending its enemies” but offers no evidence. There might well be a few quotes out there that would make my head explode, but I’d like to see them.

Mitchell proceeds with a point-by-point rebuttal to Shales’ piece. In the end, though, what he seems to be saying is that Thomas stood out in her criticisms of Israel, but in a good way — reflecting not ideological zealotry but the general “persistence, tenacity and guts” that she demonstrates in her job (and was praised by Shales in his review).

“One reason” Thomas is such a good example of these stellar journalistic traits, Mitchell argues, is that “she dares to criticize Israel, just like her colleagues — in the Israeli press.”

After reading JTA’s column by a Bear Stearns “refugee” that includes a story about a mincha minyan at Bear Stearns moving over to J.P. Morgan when Bear collapsed, the editorialists at The New York Sun note the irony of the once-anti-Semitic “House of Morgan” hosting a daily Jewish prayer service.

Andrew Neff’s piece in JTA, the Sun’s editorialists write,

…sent us scurrying to our bookshelf to retrieve a copy of Ron Chernow’s book, “The House of Morgan,” which speaks of a “strain of anti-Semitism running through the Morgan story” and quotes an early biographer of J. Pierpont Morgan as writing that “He had a deep-seated anti-Semitic prejudice and on more than one occasion needlessly antagonized great Jewish banking firms.” The Chernow book goes on to report that as late as the 1970s, Arab oil potentates prized Morgan Guaranty’s “resolutely Christian past (the bank had no high-ranking Jewish officer until the 1980s).”

Count this latest turn as one of the many ways that capitalism is conducive to overcoming prejudice. And an example of how New York derives its energy and success from the way it has functioned as a place where minority groups can participate in great institutions without surrendering their identities or their faith.

With Israel’s chances of taking home an Olympic medal dwindling rapidly — their best remaining chances are in various water sports — Israelis are thinking about what it means to lose.

A Top Ten list about losing by 10 Israeli Olympians, compiled in Ha’aretz by Nir Wolf, doesn’t exactly portray Israeli athletes as gracious in defeat.

Maybe Israelis just don’t know how to lose because the national ethos is that the Jewish state cannot afford defeat, writes former CNN correspondent Jerrold Kessel in Ha’aretz. He writes: “Rather than decrying ‘another failure’ and ‘medals down the drain,’ shouldn’t we be awfully proud when an Israeli shooter or swimmer places 12th in the world - the 12th best of more than six billion?”

The Jerusalem Post offers this tribute to Israeli sailors Nike Kornicki and Vered Buskila, who finished in fourth place in the 470 Class competition at Beijing.

Roving Rabbis, a 65-year-old Chabad summer program that sends rabbinical students out to service remote Jewish communities, has joined the Internet age. This summer, readers can offer the 400 rabbis tips about where to find Jews in the far-flung spots they’ll be visiting. You can also follow their exploits on their blog, which keeps the public appraised of every hung mezuzah, kashered kitchen, and wrapped tefillin. Some of the entries are pretty wild, like visiting a Jewish inmate in a maximum security mental hospital in Connecticut, or finding a Yiddish speaker in Cartagena.

HBO’s short bio on longtime UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas — “Thank You, Mr. President” — premiers Monday night at 9 p.m. Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s TV critic, seems happy enough with the flick, except for its failure to tackle her harsh criticisms of Israel:

What’s disappointing about Thomas, and troubling about the film, is her stridency in criticizing Israel and defending its enemies. Other than a passing reference to Thomas’s parents as having been Syrian immigrants, the film never hints at Thomas’s anti-Israeli rhetoric. In her writings, she’s already dismissed both John McCain and Barack Obama as being friendly to Israel and hostile to the Palestinians, “so the Israelis have no worries about the November election.”

Especially during the current administration, her “questions” at press briefings have been more like tirades, on one occasion prompting Tony Snow, the late journalist who was then press secretary, to respond, “Well, thank you for the Hezbollah view.” This would have been a pertinent and amusing clip to include in the film. Not for nothing was Thomas recently hailed as “the epitome of journalistic integrity for over 57 years” — by the Arab American News.

When controversies are a large part of a person’s career, it’s reasonable to expect even an adulatory documentary at least to mention them. “Thank You, Mr. President” could easily have included both sides — Thomas attacked and Thomas defended. Even attacking the attackers would have been more honest than ignoring the matter altogether.

The lead editorial in today’s New York Times calls on Ehud Olmert to freeze all Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and ease Palestinian movement obstructed by Israeli roadblocks.

It also calls on the Israeli prime minister’s likely successors to “behave responsibly” and negotiate a two-state solution with the Palestinians. And it says “A way must be found to help turn Hamas into a legitimate and acceptable negotiating partner.”

Israeli politicians must work with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to strengthen his hand vis-a-vis Hamas and other extremists, Arab countries must press Hamas to be more responsible, and President Bush must press Israel and the Palestinian Authority to do what’s necessary to secure a peace deal, the editorial says.

Why do the N.Y. Times editorialists put the onus for action on all parties except for the Palestinians?

Why should yeshiva boys need to know the multiplication tables or that the Earth revolves around the sun?

In an 11th-hour measure, the Knesset passed a law last month preserving public funding for haredi schools whose students study nothing other than Jewish studies. No math, no science, no English. The L.A. Times has a decent backgrounder on the debate over state funding of yeshivas.

This reminds me of two revealing conversations I had with Israeli haredim in recent years that evinced their lack of basic knowledge of how the world works. In one, a haredi was surprised to learn that the sun was a star. In the other, a haredi man patiently explained to me that after the sun sets, it warms the waters of the earth because it heats them from below-ground upward.

Four Israeli Olympic swimmers (Itai Chammah, Guy Barnea, Tom Beera and Gal Nevo), the Israeli Ambassador to China, the President of Israel’s National Swimming Association and a slew of Chinese and Israeli reporters visited the Shi Jia Primary School on Monday, Aug. 18. This school was assigned Israel as part of a Beijing-wide program of partnerships between schools and Olympic countries. The Shi Jia school put on events over the last two years to teach the students about Israel, how to say “Shalom,” even had its students Skype with a school in Jerusalem. Of course, the school was following the progress of Israeli athletes along with China’s.

Hidden inside a neighborhood maze of alleyways, this 2000-student school is anything but small. The school was founded in 1939, but this site (which used to be a single-story temple style house) was newly constructed in 2004 and only serves the third through sixth grade.

And what service indeed. There was a room filled with rows of electric pianos, next to the hallway of individual music practice rooms that were nicer than the ones at my university. Of course, these were all on the bottom floor right next to the underground parking lot entrance, which reminded me of a United States mall. We also saw a beautiful theater with a superior tech booth, a whole science area that looked more like a kid’s playtime museum exhibit, plus a row of small table-saws that looked rusty and dangerous in comparison, for over 20 students at a time to make wood carvings.

The highlight of the tour for the Israeli Olympians was clearly the visit to the school’s unbelievable sports facilities. An outdoor track was surrounded by green landscaping, windmills and a dormitory with solar panels on the roof. Descending into the gymnasium, which had more equipment than a Bally’s Fitness Club, the fencing lesson seemed to be teaching the well-outfitted youngsters as much about shouting as technique.

Finally, the Israeli men were in their element at the pool, which was pumping various Beijing Olympic theme songs over the loudspeaker. An assorted crowd of boys and girls shivered outside the pool for the athletes’ millionth photo-op of the day, underneath towering photos with the Speedo logo printed on them of swimmers like Michael Phelps.

The kids looked a little lackluster as they posed in their swimsuits, but two of them perked up when someone told them the Chinese names of the Israeli athletes that were standing by their side. The kids’ faces lit up- “We heard of them!” they cried.

His voice had the slightest rasp to it, but that was probably from cheering on Team USA during the athletics competition at the Bird’s Nest the previous night. Isaac Shapiro did a remarkable job with his maftir and haftarah portion during his “American bar mitzvah in Beijing” on Saturday, Aug. 16. His family also sponsored the lunch afterwards at Dini’s Kosher Restaurant, complete with groups of five Olympic ring-colored cupcakes (arranged just so, three on top of two) and a Bird’s Nest miniature cake.

Saturday night, after conquering the bimah, Isaac went to what was for him the highlight sporting event of his trip: back-to-back basketball. First China beat Germany in a heart-poundingly close match led by Yao Ming, and then the United States trounced Spain in what was supposed to be a fairly close match. Isaac even learned the ubiquitous Chinese cheer “Let’s Go!” “JIA YOU!”

From the bimah to the basketball game.

His family says despite attending team and individual gymnastics competitions, tennis, handball and basketball events among others, this was surely the highlight of their trip to China.

“Everyone has their bar mitzvah photos taken by the Wall,” dad Sam said, referring to the Kotel in Jerusalem. “But instead we took photos by the Great Wall.” Isaac’s mom, Marjie, who arranged the whole trip, added that “Israel certainly has a big role in our life, and I go there at least once a year. But this trip can show our kids the rising superpower of the future, and show them that there is community everywhere.”