Following the Wendy’s extravaganza (see this and this), yet another company is using our offices to film a commercial, this one for a midwestern department store chain I never heard of.
One day historians will wonder why the most photographed backdrops for 2009 television commercials were the Pacific Coast Highway, Monument Valley National Park, and our lunchroom.
Two alternative — or perhaps complementary — views on Obama and the Jews from The Jewish Week. Asking Jews how they feel about Obama and Israel is a bit like the blind man and the elephant – it depends on which Jews you ask.
First, editor Gary Rosenblatt:
Leaders of American Jewish organizations note an unease among mainstream supporters of Israel and Jewish causes - we’re not talking about marginal “Obama is a Muslim” critics here - who say they voted for and admire Barack Obama and support many of his policies, but feel he is being overly critical of Israel and too soft on the Palestinians and on an Iranian regime bent on developing nuclear weapons that could end up aimed at the Jewish state.
As one leader put it: “Moderate people come up to me and ask, ‘Should I be worried?’
Next, Jewish Week reporter Jim Besser:
Jewish leaders see nothing but concern among their colleagues and among the pro-Israel activist core. But there’s no evidence that concern has trickled down to the broader Jewish electorate
Also, that broader electorate isn’t much interested in or supportive of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and it’s probably not overly enamored of Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Go through an Orthodox neighborhood in New York, and almost everybody has friends and relatives living in settlements; go to a suburban Reform shul in Chicago, and you’ll find few.
I remain convinced Obama administration officials have an unusually sophisticated understanding of these political realities.
They realize they can push Israel on settlements pretty hard, as long as they wrap their pressure in strong statements of support for Israel and a vibrant U.S.-Israel relationship, without much risk of a backlash…
A Stage for Social Ego to Battle Anguished Id
– Headline for a New York Times appreciation of the late choreographer Pina Bausch
This is the kind of New York Times headline that makes me both a/ gratified that there’s an institution willing to engage in this sort of rarified conversation on a daily basis and b/ eager to punch an English major in the face.
My column this week is an interview with Ruth Messinger, the president of AJWS, who had asked to see me about the previous column I had written about her speech to graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In the speech, Messinger, whose organization provides humanitarian assistance to the developing world, urged the seminary graduates to apply their Jewish learning “to help those most in need, both at home and abroad.” My column, I thought, was mostly admiring of her call to action, although toward the end I suggested she had gone too far in favoring universal (okay, non-Jewish) causes over challenges closer to home.
It was the last point that she thought needed clarification. We spoke in the midtown offices of AJWS for over an hour, throughout most of which Messinger held the floor and emphasized the points she felt I had either overlooked or mischaracterized in her JTS speech.
Below is a transcript of most of our conversation, conducted in the presence of Joshua Berkman of the organization’s press department.
Read the transcript after the jump.
Everytime this guy writes a book or gives an interview, I get calls asking if he is me.
So for the record: If you owe money to someone named Andrew Carroll, send it to me c/o the New Jersey Jewish News.
J.J,. Goldberg tends to ask some of the most difficult questions about Jewish life, and does so again in an essay on Madoff, in the latest issue of Contact magazine:
When we examine Jewish behavior, we usually focus narrowly on how closely Jews adhere to the community’s ideals. We survey Jewish ritual behavior, but not Jewish economic behavior. We’re afraid that would lead to anti-Semitic stereotyping. Accordingly, Jewish discussions of Madoff include endless talk about how Judaism expects Jews to behave, but we never get around to discussing why Bernie Madoff - or others who have acted egregiously - behaved differently. And so when an incident blows up, we are caught flat-footed, groping for a way to understand.
From the Associated Press:
Eli Raz was peering into a narrow hole in the Dead Sea shore when the earth opened up and swallowed him. Fearing he would never be found alive in the 30-foot- deep pit, he scribbled his will on an old postcard.
After 14 hours a search party pulled him from the hole unhurt, and five years later the 69-year-old geologist is working to save others from a similar fate, leading an effort to map the sinkholes that are spreading on the banks of the fabled saltwater lake.
These underground craters can open up in an instant, sucking in whatever lies above and leaving the surrounding area looking like an earthquake zone.
New York Times crosswords puzzle editor Will Shortz responded to my query — and apparently, Elie Wiesel’s complaint — about a clue that referred to Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir as a “novel.”
This is from the Times puzzle blog:
Editing Crossword Puzzles
Do clues and answers in crossword puzzles really matter? Much of the discussion here at Wordplay is because the answer is yes. I think it’s fair to say they especially matter in New York Times puzzles. Sometimes we quibble about whether the cobbler crust can be on the bottom but sometimes much more important issues are at stake.
The June 17 puzzle included this clue for 47 Across: “Night” novelist. The answer is the Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie WIESEL. Several readers objected, including Professor Wiesel himself, who contacted The Times through his Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity. Novel implies fiction, and for someone constantly dealing with Holocaust denial, this is understandably objectionable.
Is this an error worthy of correction? Perhaps, but the answer is not quite so simple.
The blog quotes the Wikipedia entry on “Night,” which discusses the difficulty some scholars and reviewers have in categorizing the literary genre of “Night” — novel? Memoir? “Nonfiction novel”?
The blog continues:
Still, there is accuracy and then there is avoiding unnecessary conflict. Here’s what Will Shortz had to say: “In retrospect, my feeling is … if Mr. Wiesel says the book is not a novel, then I respect that. I will do my best never to refer to the book as a novel again.”
I’m off to Chicago tomorrow for the annual convention of the American Jewish Press Association. I took the picture at left during my first and only other trip to Chicago — which happened to be last week, for a bar mitzva. Go figure.
I’ll leave you with a Chicago reading recommendation: Crossing California, by Adam Langer. In his thick 2004 novel, Langer brings a fanatical sense of place and time to a story about teens growing up in the heavily Jewish West Rogers Park neighborhood on the cusp of the Reagan era. I found the unrelenting satire a little exhausting (among the delusional and largely un-self-aware main characters, the only one who is close to being what my 8th-grade English teacher would call “normative” is the only non-Jew, the African-American son of a single mom), but Langer deftly handles the cross-cuts between a few dozen intersecting plots, and how could you not like a novel that includes a would-be Jewish rocker who writes songs like “It’s Not the Meat, it’s the Moshe”?
The book it most brought to mind was Jeffrey Eugenides’ “Middlesex,” a similarly ambitious recreation of time and place in a big Midwestern city (Detroit) among a distinct suburban ethnic group (Greeks).
The Zionist Organization of America has high praise for NJ Senator Bob Menendez’ recent speech on Israel. But note how they take it a touch farther than the senator surely intended:
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein, National Chairman of the Board Dr. Michael Goldblatt & Executive Director Gary Ratner said, “We applaud Senator Menendez for making an eloquent speech, based on moral clarity and historical accuracy, that rebuts so many of the hostile presumptions about Israel and Zionism that emerge frequently in public discourse and in the universities.
“ZOA had reason to note that President Barak Obama, in his recent Cairo speech, worryingly echoed some of the fallacies that Senator Menendez has rebutted, in particular, the idea that Israel is some sort of recompense for the Holocaust, paid for by innocent Arabs, thus implying that Jews had no other legitimate claim to independence in the land of Israel.
”We would note further that, inasmuch as the Palestinian leadership of the day under Haj Amin el Husseini actively collaborated with Nazism, helped form Bosnian Muslim SS units, assisted deportation to the death camps of Jews and otherwise did their best to prevent Jews escaping the Holocaust, that Palestinian Arabs are in fact implicated in the horrors of Nazism.” [Emphasis added.]
Mark the date: June 18, 2009. The ZOA just declared the Israeli-Palestinian conflict the last battle of World War II.
JustASC is written by Andrew Silow-Carroll, Editor-in-Chief of the