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High Holy Dazed

By Ben Harris · September 26, 2008

The Jewish Channel is producing a VH1-style series about the High Holidays. You know the drill – a bunch of media types whose names you sort of recognize talk smack about something. Yeah, I don’t watch them either.

Anyway, there are a coupla clips on their site. I’ve watched them all (yes, my job rules) and hereby declare this one the best:

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Defending Helen Thomas

By Ami Eden · August 19, 2008

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.”

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What about Helen Thomas is too racy for HBO?

By Ami Eden · August 18, 2008

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.

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The latest ‘Dreyfus affair?’

By Lisa Hostein · August 4, 2008

First the al-Dura affair, now a to-do about the firing of a French columnist for his purported anti-Semitic rantings. The French media has been filled with self-examination this summer, much of it related to Jewish affairs.

In the al-Dura affair, the French press questioned its role after a court ruled in favor of a media watchdog who had challenged the authenticity of a French TV broadcast of an alleged Israeli shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy.

Now, a French columnist has become the new cause celebre after he was fired for a series of writings that started with an offensive piece about Nicolas Sarkozy’s son’s engagement to a Jewish heiress.

NYTimes columnist Roger Cohen says the issue could be shaping up to be another Dreyfus Affair, which has become the code word to describe a Jew being unjustly accused of something.

Here’s how Cohen describes it:

It’s not quite the Dreyfus Affair, at least not yet. But France is divided again over power and the Jews.

While the United States has been debating The New Yorker’s caricature of Barack Obama as a Muslim, France has gone off the deep end over a brief item in the country’s leading satirical magazine portraying the relationship between President Nicolas Sarkozy’s fast-rising son, Jean, and his Jewish fiancée.

The offending piece in Charlie Hebdo, a pillar of the left-libertarian media establishment, was penned last month by a 79-year-old columnist-cartoonist who goes by the name of Bob Siné. He described the plans — since denied — of Jean Sarkozy, 21, to convert to Judaism before marrying Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, an heiress to the fortune of the Darty electrical goods retailing chain.

“He’ll go far in life, this little fellow!” Siné wrote of Sarkozy Jr.

He added, in a separate item on whether Muslims should abandon their traditions, that: “Honestly, between a Muslim in a chador and a shaved Jewess, my choice is made!”

Elie Wiesel and Bernard-Henri Lévy have weighed in on the case, which appears to be reverberating across Europe.

Cohen comes out staunchly against Sine’s firing, opting for free speech over martyrdom. Read his whole column.

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Jews fit to print

By Uriel Heilman · July 28, 2008

Several Jewish-related items appeared over the weekend in The New York Times:

• Former workers at Agriprocessors, the nation’s largest kosher meat plant, detailed alleged abuses at the Postville, Iowa plant. Sunday saw competing rallies between activists protesting working conditions at the plant and activists opposed to illegal immigration.
• Gaza is getting its first museum of archeology.
  
• Who’s the Israeli media powerhouse “everyone and nobody knows,” Vivi Nevo?
• Tom Friedman picks up on the undercurrent reported in two recent JTA pieces (here and here) and gushes about Israel’s electric car.
• An Orthodox Jewish couple from Brooklyn prepare to shutter a clothing store on 43rd St. and Fifth Ave., Judy’s Better Dresses, that is more Lower East Side than the fixture it has been for 40-plus years in Midtown Manhattan.

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Russert and the Jewish questions

By Ami Eden · June 16, 2008

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.

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Jews Fit to Print: The last Jews of Baghdad

By Ami Eden · June 2, 2008

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).

0 Comments | Share This | Israel, Jews Fit to Print, Media, Terrorism

JTA’s Daniel Sieradski: A pisher to watch

By Ami Eden · May 22, 2008

Mazal Tov to JTA’s director of digital media, Daniel Sieradski, for being picked as one of the Jewish Week’s 36 Jewish innovators under the age of 36. (Who says the competition is always wrong?)

Daniel Sieradski, 29
Founder of Jewschool and Jew It Yourself;
Director of Digital Media for JTA

When Dan Sieradski founded Jewschool.com in 2002, he didn’t quite realize what he was getting himself into.

“We were the accidental roots for progressive Jewish communities,” he says. “We didn’t mean to start a movement. We were creating something that was obviously needed.”
The Web site, a blog with a variety of contributors covering Jewish topics from politics to tradition and culture, had 50,000 monthly readers at its peak and 80 international contributors. As with all variations from the norm, there was opposition, and in the age of the Internet, opposition is ceaseless.

“I’d get phone calls from ardent Zionists at four in the morning,” Sieradski said, recalling those upset by the blog’s critique of Israel policy. He’s had to abandon multiple email addresses due to pointed spam attacks by unappreciative readers. For now, he remains on the board of Jewschool, but has curtailed his blogging.

His new project, Jew It Yourself, an online network providing tools and resources to Jewish individuals and communities to help them engage in Jewish learning on their own, is on hold until it gets a visit from the funding fairy. Among the innovative ideas set for the site is Shul Shopper, a “Zagat meets Wikipedia” for Jews looking for a prayer community to fit their needs. Users would be able to input their criteria and Shul Shopper would match them to a searchable list of possibilities, where they could peruse reviews and ratings as well as a connection to Facebook, which would find other locals with the same preferences. The site would also include an open-source beit midrash, tools for learning how to read Hebrew, and voiceover IP chevruta for the entire spectrum of Jewish communities.

Inspiration: His mom, Jeanette Friedman-Sieradski, a journalist. “Her commitment to pursue justice and fighting for a Judaism that’s inviting, welcoming and authentic has given me a sense of obligation to pursue the same mission.” Strangest job: Working at a golf course as a “garage guy,” loading clubs from car to cart, washing both clubs and cart for the argyle-and-spiked-shoe crowd.
— Randi Sherman

See the full list.

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New Voices: Hyping anti-Semitism, non-Jewish birthrights and Cory Booker

By Ami Eden · May 21, 2008

In the current issue of New Voices, the magazine written by and for Jewish college students …

A report on assertions by some students that the threat of anti-Semitism is being exaggerated by outside Jewish groups.

A look at how other ethnic groups are looking to replicate Birthright – and what the implications are for the melting pot.

An interview with Newark Mayor Cory Booker in which he talks about the future of the American city, a politics of hope and Shmuley Boteach.

The publication is also sponsoring a May 28 panel discussion titled “Jews, Blacks, and the Post-Racial Candidate.” Speakers include: Ari Berman (The Nation), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Village Voice and The Atlantic Monthly) and Sam Freedman (Professor of Journalism, Columbia University and New York Times columnist).

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Ira Glass speaks

By Ami Eden · May 19, 2008

The man behind the NPR program “This American Life” believes in stories, not in God. But, in an interview with Beliefnet, he has interesting things to say about his Jewish upbringing and religion generally:

Would you want your kids to bar mitzvah?

I don’t know. Culturally I am a Jew. I don’t have a choice about it. You can’t lose your cultural heritage like luggage at the airport. It’s a part of me. But my kids...it is weird to indoctrinate your child into something that you don’t believe. It violates some sort of golden rule. I don’t think it is bad to raise your child as an atheist, but I say that as someone without children.

I have to say that when I go to synagogue I find it very…if you don’t believe in God, what business do you have being in a synagogue? When I go into a synagogue, I know the songs, I read Hebrew, it is very reassuring to be there. It is a part of my life that hasn’t changed; it is like walking back into my childhood. But at some point you do notice the words and prayers and, as someone who doesn’t believe, it feels weird to use other’s moment of worship as a moment of nostalgia. It feels disrespectful; they are not there to entertain me. It feels strange to be chanting something with everyone else, but not believe it – it feels wrong. ...

When you are interviewing religious people, do you think that their belief is just an experience that differs from your own or do think they are delusional?

I have a polite and a not-so-polite answer, and the polite answer is a huge part of what I feel. And that answer is: that is their experience of the world, it is different than mine. And then there is another part of me that is not so charitable which feels that what they are saying is nonsense. There is no big daddy in the sky but they need to tell themselves this story for whatever reason, and I am glad that is not me.

Ten years ago, when I was thinking about religion a lot more because a lot of things were happening at the same time, I did have moments when I really wished that I had faith, that I had the reassurance of that, that I could believe. But I don’t feel that way any more at all–ever. A couple of years ago I read a book by Bertrand Russell called “Why I Am Not a Christian.” And he lays out a thesis for how destructive religion is, and I remember thinking, “Wow, that is not someone who was raised in the United States of America.” Before that, it had not occurred to me that religion was causing a lot of unhappiness for people–people are estranged from each of other, people think there is something wrong with themselves because the faith they were raised in tells them that they are sick, whatever it is. But I wasn’t seeing this part, because the people who I am closest to who have faith, their experiences of it are so positive.

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