JustASC

Awful coincidence: two weeks after professors from Israel’s Sapir College were at Rutgers talking about the security situation in the Western Negev, a 47-year-old student at the college and father of four was killed in a Kassam barrage.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, issued the following statement:

We call on the international community to condemn the rocket attacks on Sderot, for which Hamas has claimed credit, and join in worldwide pressure on Gaza’s leaders to end this campaign of violence.

In the United States, we look forward to the upcoming House vote on H.Res. 951 contributing the United States’s voice to those nations that repudiate the bloodshed aimed at the civilian population of Sderot. The Reform Movement strongly supports this legislation, and will be mobilizing its activists in advance of next week’s expected vote.

A collective, international outcry of condemnation and firm, clear demands to Hamas for an immediate cessation of these attacks will make it clear that the world will no longer accept the humanitarian tragedy the people of Sderot have been forced to endure for far too long.

This week in the NJJN:

•  NJ Jews with Cuban roots consider Cuba “after” Castro.
• Johanna Ginsberg interviews a Jewish roller derby queen.
• Was Shakespeare a black Jewish woman?
• My column: Obama and the “Kishkes Factor”:

Maybe they’ve grown spoiled, but you hear in the pro-Israel, anti-Obama rhetoric the notion that Obama’s spotless Senate voting record on Israel and meat-and-potatoes speeches to AIPAC are not quite enough. “Window dressing,” as someone dismissively described it to me. A certain kind of pro-Israel voter wants to know that candidates feel for Israel in their guts - their kishkes - and not just in their heads.

NJJN reporter Johanna Ginsberg is reporting a crisis in the kosher world:

Manischewitz runs short on matza and Tam Tams
Newark plant delays mean tough times for favored cracker

Johanna Ginsberg
NJJN Staff Writer

Aficionados of Tam Tams and other Manischewitz kosher-for-Passover products may have to find a different snack food this year. They are among the products Manischewitz will not be producing this year due to engineering and construction delays at its new Newark facility.

“It’s been a hiccup,” said David Rossi, vice president of marketing for the company.

(more…)

From JTA:

E-mail article Share on Facebook Digg this Tell the Editors What bloggers are saying Published: 02/26/2008 The Jewish Council for Public Affairs endorsed for the first time a two-station solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Here’s how crazy this election has become: Republican Jews are beginning to take Ralph Nader at his word.

A Republican Jewish Coalition email titled “Nader Calls Out Obama’s ‘Pro-Palestinian’ Past” quotes the Pinto-phobic election spoiler from Sunday’s “Meet the Press” appearance. Here’s what Nader told Tim Russert, referring to Obama:

He’s run a brilliant tactical campaign. But his better instincts and his knowledge have been censored by himself. And I give you the example, the Palestinian-Israeli issue, which is a real off the table issue for the candidates. So don’t touch that, even though it’s central to our security and to, to the situation in the Middle East. He was pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state Senate, during he ran–during the state Senate. Now he’s, he’s supporting the Israeli destruction of the tiny section called Gaza with a million and a half people. He doesn’t have any sympathy for a civilian death ratio of about 300-to-1; 300 Palestinians to one Israeli.

Here’s how RJC executive director Matt Brooks spins Nader’s (unsubstantiated) assertion that Obama “was pro-Palestinian” before he ran for the state Senate:  

“Ralph Nader added to the debate on Senator Obama’s views on Israel and the Middle East and raised serious doubts and questions about the true leanings of Senator Obama on these important issues….

People should be very skeptical of Barack Obama’s shaky Middle East policies. When a long-time political activist like Ralph Nader, with a well-documented, anti-Israel bias, claims that Senator Obama shares this anti-Israel bias, that is alarming,” said Matt Brooks. “If Senator Obama supports Ralph Nader’s policies, which consistently condemn Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism, and if Sen. Obama has only reversed his positions to run for president, it once again raises serious questions about his grasp of the geo-political realities of the Middle East and puts into doubt his commitment to the safety and security of Israel. These are important questions we in the community will be asking.”

Here’s another question: Since when did the ”pro-Israel” community start relying on Ralph Nader to vet presidential candidates? (more…)

JTA reports:

“Jerusalem, Israel” created problems for the makers of Monopoly.

Hasbro removed country names from an online contest to select cities for an international version after receiving complaints about “Jerusalem, Israel.”

The company is asking fans to vote on the cities to appear in the “World Edition” as well as on their placement on the board.

After pro-Palestinian groups complained about the inclusion of “Jerusalem, Israel,” a staffer pulled “Israel” from the Web site, The Associated Press reported. Complaints then came in, however, from people who noted that Jerusalem was the only city not attached to a country.

Hasbro apologized for that oversight last week and pulled all country names.

I asked Joel Magalnick, editor of the JT News of Seattle, to discuss his paper’s decision to run the above ad (which had been rejected by the daily newspaper, The Seattle Times). Joel’s reply:

Though it ultimately wasn’t my decision to publish the ad - that was left to my publisher - it was her decision to be a sponsor of the production and to support it. It got interesting in our mostly female office after one caller was upset enough about the ad to cancel his subscription. I hadn’t heard so much talk about female genitalia since my wife and I took a birthing class. Not that that’s a bad thing, though I was a bit uncomfortable, since I felt I was hanging around in the women’s locker room, privy to conversation that men are generally shut out from.
The ad that we did run, which was more or less the same version rejected by the Seattle Times wasn’t, in my opinion, distasteful. Yes we (and the Times) are family newspapers, but if we’re talking about a titillating image, this one isn’t it. There’s no context (i.e., other parts of the body attached) that makes you think what you’re looking at is a vagina unless you know what an actual vagina looks like. The same just can’t be said for the male anatomy - a penis (or an insinuation of one) is usually quite obvious. This, to me, is much more subtle than that. I just don’t see any 13-year-old boys getting excited about the ad unless someone points out to them what it is they’re looking at. That’s pretty much what it comes down to, isn’t it?

I was on vacation in Florida, and late in getting to Gary Rosenblatt’s column in the Jewish Week, answering the time-honored question, “which presidential candidate would be best for Israel”:

My point is that it all depends on how much you want to convince yourself that the person you oppose for president would be a disaster for Israel. But the reality is that each of the three remaining frontrunners would approach the Mideast conflict with essentially the same outlook and intention, and with the premise that Israel-Palestinian negotiations should be encouraged and supported, much along the lines of the Clinton and now Bush efforts.

This is the kind of column that should be mass-emailed, not the smear tactics. But somehow I doubt it will, because it is too reasonable. As I responded to yet another writer who “warned” me about Obama, have we gotten so jaded that even an unimpeachable legislative record is not enough?

To quote ADL National Director Abraham Foxman:

“I don’t understand why our community is making Israel an issue at this point. None of the candidates has made it an issue; their public statements have all been very good. So why are we shadowboxing and making this an issue?”

This week in the New Jersey Jewish News:

• Leaders of interfaith dialogue call a newly revised Good Friday prayer “a step backward” for Jewish-Catholic relations.
• Four teens plead guilty to destroying gravestones at a Jewish cemetery in New Brunswick.
• Timesman Nicholas Kristof keynotes a conference on Darfur at Kean University.
• Ron Kaplan profiles Rob Edelman, a film scholar who writes about Jewish stereotypes in sports films:

“In a lot of the stereotypical [movie] portrayals, you might have a Jewish athlete, but he’s not really athletic,” said Edelman. “If he gets injured and can’t play in the important game, what does he care? It’s only athletics. So he’ll sit on the sideline and laugh and joke while the real hero, the real athlete comes in and takes his place and wins the game. Of course, any athlete who’s been training, if you get injured right before the big game, you’re going to be angry, disappointed. But if these characters are Jewish, they don’t take it very seriously.

“There was a 1930s film titled Hot Curves where you have a character named Goldberg who was playing for a professional team, and he was a jokester. You see him in spring training; balls are being hit to him and he’s ducking instead of catching the ball. Jewish characters are not supposed to be physical.”

Above is an advertisement that’s running in the Monmouth County edition of our newspaper. Having had our own office discussion about the ad, for a forthcoming production of “The Vagina Monologues” (which I’ll get to in a bit), I was intrigued to read in the The Seattle Weekly that the local daily, The Seattle Times, refused to run a racy ad for a production of “The Vagina Monologues” co-sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women’s Seattle office. Says the Times‘ VP of advertising, Mei-Mei Chan:

 ”The artwork was something we didn’t feel was appropriate for our audience.”

Interestingly enough, the ad did run in the JT News, the local Jewish paper (and another of the event’s sponsors), and Temple B’nai Torah and several area synagogues  prominently displayed a poster of the artwork in question, a heart whose center forms the shape of labia majora complete with a circular depiction of a clitoris.

“The artwork was created by a member of my congregation,” says Rabbi Yohanna Kinberg of B’nai Torah, which is located in Bellevue. “We have it hanging in several places in our Temple. I was just very disappointed that the Times didn’t share our appreciation for what I consider to be tasteful and beautiful artwork. It’s okay for a house of worship — I know it’s hanging in many other synagogues and Jewish institutions. I have a lot of respect for the Seattle Times, so it was really surprising.”

So would the New Jersey Jewish News run the Seattle ad? Absolutely (more…)