JustASC

This month NJJN published the second issue of Nu, our magazine for and by Jewish teens. You can check it out on line. Here’s a bit from Rachel Sacks’s field guide to Israeli males:

I happened to notice two distinctive types of guys in Israel, whom I will henceforth call the Tight Jeans and the Tevas. The Tight Jeans are what we’d call metrosexual, often wearing fitted jeans (hence the name) and tight
shirts, exhibiting a sure awareness of fashion.

With European flair and smooth speech, these were the guys who hit on me and my friends the most, pursuing us in Eilat, and even barging into our rooms uninvited.
These guys are the clubbers.

The Tevas are so named for the shoes on their feet, sport sandals often worn for hikes and water activities, named for the Hebrew word for nature, teva. These guys are the outdoorsy types, the laid-back nature men who will hike in the Negev or up Mount Hermon without breaking a sweat.

They may be the resourceful medics on tours, and may engage in un-self-conscious pursuits like bathing in streams on a moment’s notice (I’m using personal experience for this observation). These guys won’t pursue girls as aggressively as the Tight Jeans. Like their vibe, they tend to be more laid back with girls.

So you’re Barack Obama, fresh off a conference call with Jewish reporters and feeling good about your outreach to the Jews on the eve of the NJ and NY primaries. Then you wake up to this headline in the Wall Street Journal:

Carter Praises Obama Campaign

Carter’s remarks are largely reserved for praise of Obama’s oratory:

Mr. Carter said he has had limited direct contact with Mr. Obama but has been particularly impressed with the candidate’s recent public appearances. “He has an extraordinary oratory…I think that Obama will be almost automatically a healing factor in the animosity now that exists, that relates to our country and its government.”

I can see the Obama press release now:

“Carter has  ’limited direct contact’ with Obama”

Meanwhile, the National Jewish Democratic Council has put out a fact sheet comparing Clinton, Edwards, and Obama’s records on Israel.

NJJN’s Bob Wiener was among the reporters from Jewish news outfits who interviewed Barack Obama today. His report: 

By Robert Wiener, NJJN Staff Writer

Jan. 28 — Speaking to Jewish reporters eight days before the Super Tuesday primaries, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) declared he was an ardent supporter of Israel and a firm opponent of anti-Semitism.

Then, after answering questions for nearly a half hour in a multi-state conference call Jan. 28, Obama added a postscript, saying he wished to answer what he called “a constant and virulent smear campaign” charging that he is a secret Muslim who swore his oath of office on a Koran and refuses to salute the American flag.

“This is a falsehood that has been perpetuated and is distressing to me and to a lot of my Jewish friends… and my strong and deep commitment to the Jewish community should not be questioned,” Obama told NJ Jewish News and reporters from Israeli and other Jewish newspapers.

(more…)

Can we retire forever the journalistic wiggle construction ”is said” or “was said”? By whom? To whom? This is from a New York Times article on reaction to the death of chess great Bobby Fischer:

Bobby attended Erasmus Hall High School on Flatbush Avenue, where he was said to be friendly with Barbra (then spelled “Barbara”) Streisand.

Says who? Did anyone check with Barbra? Here’s Fischer, in a 2004 interview with a Phillipines radio station. Of course with Fischer, you have to control for his mental state:

Anchor: Bobby, is it true that when you were in high school one of your classmates was Barbara Streisand?

Fischer: I’ve heard this. I remember some mousy looking girl. Maybe that was her, I don’t know.

I received this interesting response from a non-Orthodox rabbi  to my column about scandals involving Orthodox Jews and double standards:

I just read your editorial about Orthodox wrongdoing, and while I largely agree with your point as it applies to modern Orthodox Jews, I think you missed a point as the issue applies to at least some Haredi Jews. Part of that world actively teaches that dina d’malkhuta dina, the principle that requires Jews to follow secular law unless it is evil in nature, need not be followed in the United States at least in regard to certain kinds of civil proprieties. Furthermore, part of that world teaches an active contempt for Jews who are not members of their sub-community. These two factors result in at least tacit encouragement of some kinds of fraud.

At its best, halakha should reinforce proper in[ter]-personal conduct (ben adam l’havero), but that requires reinforcement of the moral view underlying the halakha, which has unfortunately been twisted in some corners of the Jewish world. This deserves careful examination for the same reason that there is a world of difference between one rotten apple (e.g. a pedophile priest) and a problematical system (e.g. coverups by large parts of the church that lasted for decades). We expect better from those who profess to respond to a higher authority.

I recognize it’s an extremely touchy subject — whether a communal ethos in some portions of the Haredi world leads to disdain for “outside” law and individuals. That’s certainly part of the discussion of the Spinka rebbe case (L.A.-based Rabbi Naftali Tzi Weisz, one of the Grand Rabbis of the Spinka hasidic movement, faces a 37-count federal indictment for conspiracy, mail fraud and money laundering). The case is based on tips from a Spinka insider, an act of mesira – the injunction against informing on Jewish misbehavior to gentile authorities — that has apparently scandalized the L.A. Orthodox community as much if not more than the allegations themselves (see here and here and here.) From the Forward:

The issue of mesira, or informing, has prompted a round of collective soul-searching in segments of Los Angeles’s Jewish community.

“People are very shell-shocked about the whole thing on many levels,” said Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, a West Coast representative of the Orthodox Union. “Number one, that our neighbors and friends are implicated, and number two, that an act of mesira on this level was perpetrated by one of our own.”

By contrast, some Orthodox Jews are warning against haredi insularity — and say that it’s time the fervently Orthodox recognize that 21st century America is not 19th-century Russia. At the blog Cross-Currents, written by Orthodox rabbis and activists, Yitzchok Adlerstein, Director of Interfaith Affairs for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, says this:

Insularity has its merits, but it seems to come at a price as well. Part of that price is living in a time warp, where little has changed from hundreds of years ago, and all non-Jews are assumed to be cut of the same cloth. Those who promote insularity as a hedge against dilution of spiritual energy had better come up with a way of injecting a bit of an update in attitudes towards non-Jews and non-Jewish governments, or scandals such as the present one will continue to plague the community. If anything, we can expect to see an increase in them, as the secular authorities have trained their sights on what they see as pockets of corruption….

The bottom line is that if your children are absorbing inappropriate conceptions about the worthlessness of everything in the non-Jewish world, you had better modify their instruction. If not, you may be visiting them in prison some day.
 

The anti-Obama stuff is entering Phase Two:

Phase One: The Bad Cop phase, where you spread a series of scurrilous rumors and innuendoes intended to scare Jewish voters away from a candidate (and, I suspect, from a party);

Phase Two: The Good Cop phase, where you hope more mainstream, presumably more “moderate” voices begin to work over the pummeled body, offering balm (”it’s unfair to call Mr. Obama a terrorist”) but with a quieter form of pressure that picks up on the Bad Cop’s themes (”and yet it remains disturbing that his pastor once had something nice to say about Louis Farrakhan, and he’s gotten support from George Soros, and once said the US should take a more active role in Israeli-Palestinian affairs, and urges diplomacy in containing Iran. Now, these aren’t the actions of a terrorist [did I mention that I don't think he's a terrorist?], but they should give any good friend of Israel pause. “)

Phase Three: The Republican Jewish Coalition ad campaign: “Do you really want to be voting for the party of Sharpton, Soros, Farrakhan, and Obama?”

This week in the New Jersey Jewish News:

• A local Orthodox rabbi issues a warning about the high risk behaviors of some students who spend the so-called yeshiva week vacation in Florida.
• A day school runs a half-off sale: The Solomon Schechter Day School of Essex and Union is offering 50 percent tuition breaks for first-time enrollees at its lower school in Cranford.
• Everybody’s an expert? Synagogues go corporate by hiring long-range planning consultants.
• Boy, interrupted: A bipolar child faces his bar mitzva day.

For my column this week, I turned my posts about two recent scandals involving Orthodox Jews into a rumination about Orthodox-bashing and double standards. It includes this aside on religion and the press:

Despite the best efforts of the New Atheists, the most potent charge you can level at believers is not that they are irrational or intolerant, but that they are hypocritical. Conservatives get it wrong when they call the “liberal” media anti-religious for the salacious way they cover religious scandals. In fact, religion usually becomes a front page, top-of-the-hour story when the reporter can explore the gap between the ideal and the real. “Troubling news tonight, Jim,” says the reporter, standing in front of St. Whatever. “A priest who pledged to uphold the word of God is instead in custody for….”

In other words, the media is never so happy than when they can play the role of defender of the faith. But a good friend in Israel, a TV reporter, disagrees:

you have this all wrong, as surveys of journalists have shown over and over. the general liberal media IS anti-religion. in your example, they are not defending the faith, they are portraying the supposed irony, which is superb for tv.

I disagree, and if anything, I find mainstream media extremely solicitous to religion.  I’ll explain why. (more…)

I got a call today from a reader in Monmouth County saying we shouldn’t include any coverage of Barack Obama “because he was sworn into the Senate while holding a Koran.” I explained that he had Obama confused with Keith Ellison of Minnesota. I didn’t bother to ask why it mattered either way, because clearly he had been a recipient of the vicious smears about Obama that continue to race around the Internet,  despite the best efforts of Jewish organizations to denounce them as the scurrilous and bigoted lies that they are.

If you have a listserv or a large email list that you regularly forward to and care about the truth , you might consider passing on the letter denouncing the rumors that was signed by leaders of nine top Jewish organizations. It appears after the jump. (more…)