JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Ariel Sharon’s brain

By Uriel Heilman · July 1, 2008

An article in Tuesday’s Science Times sheds light on the dilemma faced by Ariel Sharon’s doctors when he suffered a minor stroke shortly before his major, incapacitating stroke two and a half years ago. Microbleeds, which likely caused Sharon’s massive stroke on Jan. 4, 2006, continue to raise questions for about how to treat patients at risk for strokes.

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Some things aren’t relative: Einstein was an atheist

By Ami Eden · June 18, 2008

Michael Weiss argues in Slate that “the temptation to lure Einstein posthumously into the theistic fold is understandable” – but off the mark:

Einstein underwent a brief elective immersion in Judaism as a boy, but his parents were secular; his father thought the Abrahamic rituals “ancient superstitions.” Einstein later told New York Rabbi Herbert Goldstein that he believed in “Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men.” (In the 17th century, philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from Judaism on suspicion of atheism—allegations that Rebecca Goldstein argues in Betraying Spinoza were, in fact, correct.) When a rumor was circulated in 1945 that a Jesuit priest had converted him, Einstein thundered back: “I have never talked to a Jesuit priest in my life and I am astonished by the audacity to tell such lies about me. From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.”

[F]rom the viewpoint of a layman, Einstein frequently denied being an atheist, though he seemed more at odds with the “militant” style of godlessness than with its core substance. It’s impossible to imagine him volunteering even to moderate a Hitchens-Dawkins-Dennett colloquium on secularism. He wrote to a Navy ensign, “I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.”

In his best-selling biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, Walter Isaacson writes, “[W]e should do him the honor of taking him at his word when he insists, repeatedly, that these oft-used phrases were not merely a semantic way of disguising that he was actually an atheist.” It’s a generous assessment, but one that encompasses the physicist’s more milquetoast pronouncements on the matter and conveniently ignores what Isaacson elsewhere concedes was Einstein’s maddening tendency to be purposefully gnomic or oblique. Another biographer, Ronald W. Clark, observed that when Einstein talked about religion, “he tended to adopt the belief of Alice’s Red Queen that ‘words mean what you want them to mean.’ “ That comes closer to the mark and is best evidenced in the famous quotation, “I cannot believe that God plays dice with the cosmos.” Only a literal mind would see here a prime mover at a celestial craps table. ...

Most believers have long given up trying to legitimize the supernatural in microscopes or cyclotrons. That scientists like Einstein resorted to a numinous vocabulary is not the “gotcha” some wishful thinkers would like it to be. Faith has had impressive minds on its side in the past, but it will have to work without the assumption that the greatest of the 20th century was one of them.

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The Time 100’s Eco-Israeli

By Daniel Sieradski · June 2, 2008

In the following podcast, JTA staff writer Dina Kraft speaks with Isaac Berzin, the Israeli founder of an algae fuel company called GreenFuel, which, for its work in advancing alternative energy resources, earned Berzin the honor of being listed among Time magazine’s top 100 people of 2008.  Though his company is based in Boston, Berzin recently moved back to Israel to start an institute on alternative energy policy at the IDC-Herzilya, a private Israeli college.

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

0 Comments | Share This | Environment, Israel, Podcast, Science

ADL chimes in on Stein’s anti-evolution film

By Daniel Sieradski · April 29, 2008

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman has spoken out against Ben Stein’s new anti-evolution film, Expelled.  In a press release issued just moments ago, Foxman writes:

The film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed misappropriates the Holocaust and its imagery as a part of its political effort to discredit the scientific community which rejects so-called intelligent design theory.

Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people and Darwin and evolutionary theory cannot explain Hitler’s genocidal madness.

Using the Holocaust in order to tarnish those who promote the theory of evolution is outrageous and trivializes the complex factors that led to the mass extermination of European Jewry.

While Foxman’s views may resonate with members of the scientific community who are outraged by Stein’s film, as an adamant defendant of church-state separation, Foxman has earned himself a reputation as a political foe of religious conservatives. Thus while his criticism may be apt, don’t expect him to be changing any minds in the anti-evolution community.

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Jew vs. Jew in debate over sex-change operations for children

By Ami Eden · April 23, 2008

The Boston Globe’s report Q & A on with a doctor, Norman Spack, who offers sex-change operations to children struggling with “cross-gender feelings,” takes a Jewish turn.

In the interview, Spack discussed how his Jewish faith informs his work. His response: “My own rabbi said it best: The transgendered are also created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of God.”

The comment drew a rebuke from a conservative activist, Brian Camenker:

Camenker takes personal affront to that response. “Being Jewish myself, it’s a tremendous embarrassment that he would try to claim that Judaism has any connection at all to this kind of demonic and lunatic behavior – because it doesn’t,” he states.

UPDATE: In my rush to get this post up, I mixed up the links, leaving people with the – incorrect – impression that I was siding with Camenker. My only aim was to note that the doctor’s comment about his rabbi was irking a Jewish conservative who opposes his work. Sorry about the initial screw-up, but I disagree with those out there who think that there was something wrong with citing the exchange.

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Ben Stein’s anti-evolution film raises hackles

By Daniel Sieradski · April 22, 2008

Did Darwin’s theory of evolution provoke the Holocaust?  That’s the claim being advanced by actor/economist Ben Stein in his new film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

Called “one of the sleaziest documentaries to arrive in a very long time” by the New York Times, the film, which debuted last week to dismal modest* box office response, proposes a direct correlation between evolutionary science, Social Darwinism, “godlessness,” and Nazism.

Stein’s assertions about the evil intentions of evolutionary biologists have some in the scientific community crying foul.

“Unfortunately," John Rennie wrote recently in Scientific American, ”Expelled is a movie not quite harmless enough to be ignored. Shrugging off most of the film’s attacks—all recycled from previous pro-[Intelligent Design] works—would be easy, but its heavy-handed linkage of modern biology to the Holocaust demands a response for the sake of simple human decency.”

Indeed, by Stein’s logic, Reb Gedalia Nadel z"tl, an esteemed pupil of the Hazon Ish who advocated reconciling Torah with modern scientific knowledge – particularly on the subject of creation and evolution, would have been a Nazi sympathizer.

Such absurdities aren’t preventing Jews from taking the bait, however.  On Friday, April 18, the day of Expelled’s premier, Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine and a vocal opponent of Intelligent Design theory, received a hostile email from a Jewish viewer of Stein’s film, stating: “You people believe that it was okay for my great-grandparents to die in the Holocaust! How disgusting. [...] We Jews will fight to keep people like you out of the United States!”

Shermer forwarded the email to famed geneticist and author of the 2006 atheist manifesto The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, who penned a public response to the email, refuting Expelled’s claims and informing the email’s angry author that “you have been cruelly duped by Ben Stein and his unscrupulous colleagues. It is a wicked, evil thing they have done to you, and potentially to many others.”

Likewise, in an op-ed published by MSNBC, Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, called the film “immoral,” adding that,

To lay blame for the Holocaust upon Charles Darwin is to engage in a form of Holocaust denial that should forever make Ben Stein the subject of scorn not because of his nudnik concern that evolution somehow undermines morality but because in this contemptible movie he is willing to subvert the key reason why the Holocaust took place — racism — to serve his own ideological end.

*[Update] The article I had cited for box office figures has been updated since my initial writing of this entry and now shows that the film performed better than originally anticipated.

14 Comments | Share This | Religion, Science, Shoah