JustASC

An article about a new “meal prep” establishment in Maplewood, NJ, set off some debate around our newspaper office. How do you write about an establishment that is clearly non-kosher, but goes out of its way to cater to a crowd that keeps a relaxed form of kashrut out of the home? More to the point, how do you write about it without really ticking off rabbinic authorities who demand that clear lines be drawn between what is certified kosher (that is, carries a hechsher from the local va’ad or national agency) and what isn’t?

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This week in the NJJN:

• The Republican Jewish Coalition’s Matt Brooks on why McCain might be good for the Jews.
• Jewish Dems handicap the Clinton-Obama showdown.
• Minor league umpire cries foul on Christian evangelizing in baseball locker rooms.
• And I wonder how a tendentiously argued anti-Obama piece is mass-emailed by so many Jews who should know better:

I don’t blame what the National Jewish Democratic Council calls a “right-wing attack machine” for the [Ed] Lasky piece. I blame the Jews who accept a clearly ideologically driven essay as the “truth” about Obama, and simply hit “forward” on their e-mail. No doubt some of the folks in the e-mail chain share Lasky’s politics, but I wonder about the credulity of those who don’t. To coin a phrase, would you buy a used argument from this man?

Tough and inspirational video on Sderot by filmmaker Yoav Shoam for the JDC:

The ZOA is at it again, playing the role of one-man heksher organization for every other Jewish organization on Israel.

The ZOA wrote in a letter last week that the national Hillel movement should disinvite Univ. of Pennsylvania President Amy Guttman and University of California, Irvine Chancellor Michael Drake to its “Summit on the University and the Jewish Community” March 24-26 in Washington. ZOA  calls them “insensitive” to Jewish concerns.

According to JTA:

Six of the nine pages of the ZOA letter were dedicated to detailing the “anti-Semitic speakers and programs” that are “routinely sponsored at UCI, causing Jewish students to feel threatened, harassed and intimidated.”

Guttman was an inappropriate choice, the ZOA said, because she posed for a photo with a student dressed as a suicide bomber at a Halloween party at her home in 2006.

The first question I must ask — if you are going to hold a summit on Israel and the university, why wouldn’t you invite a president of a campus that pro-Israel activists consider problematic? Isn’t that exactly the person you want to confront, challenge, perhaps convert? What would be the point of holding a “summit” if only one side were to show up?

(Not that Drake or Guttman are necessarily on the “other” side. As Daniel Treiman points out on the Forward’s Bintel Blog,

Guttman and Drake are both signatories to an American Jewish Committee-sponsored statement strongly condemning anti-Israel academic boycotts.)

As for Guttman, after the photo got around, she called it “clearly offensive and I was offended by it” and said the photo was taken “before it was obvious to me that he was dressed as a suicide bomber.” Is there any reason to doubt her word that in the crush of a student Halloween party she didn’t notice the student’s costume? Is there anything to suggest that the Jewish president of one of the most heavily Jewish Ivies is otherwise promoting a culture supportive of suicide bombing?

All that being said, what’s with all the banning? ZOA has done this before, calling for Jewish bans on Desmond Tutu and Thomas L. Friedman (Thomas Friedman!). Why is the ZOA’s default position exactly that of Israel’s worst enemies (academic boycotts, one-sided debates, curbs on free speech)? Why not say, fine, they’re invited — but let’s hope Hillel uses the occasion to ask the attendees some tough questions about the anti-Israel climate on their campuses, to draw them out on the topic, to challenge them if they fall short of the students’ expectations?

 The good news is that’s exactly what Hillel is planning:

Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life rejected a call to disinvite two controversial speakers from its upcoming summit.

Said Hillel Executive Director Wayne Firestone:

Hillel believes that a more constructive approach to Chancellor Drake is to engage him in conversation. The Summit will provide such an opportunity.”

(While I’m at it — I don’t like the unqualified use of the word “controversial” in JTA’s lede. Drake and Guttman are controversial in this sense only because ZOA says so. If I were to issue a press release condeming, say, JTA for anti-Israel bias, that doesn’t make them controversial. It only means that I consider them controversial, unless I can show that a critical mass agrees with me. Here’s my (admittedly wordy) alternative:  

Organizers of a national Hillel conference on Israel and the university rejected the ZOA’s call to disinvite two speakers the right-wing advocacy group considers ”insensitive” to Jews.

Do yourself a favor and get a copy of Michael Wex’s book Just Say Nu: Yiddish for Every Occasion (When English Just Won’t Do). Better yet, get the audiobook: not only do you benefit from Wex’s pronunciation of the Yiddish phrases he explicates, but his delivery is eccentric and hilarious.

And smart. When Wex defines a Yiddish term, he also manages to define a civilization. It’s somewhere between archeaology and psychoanalysis, uncovering layers of meaning and nuance to explain Jews to themselves. Here he is on me ken laibm, ober meh lozt nisht– you could live if they let you:

Most Jews are not Buddhists, let alone students of Zen. While virtually any Yiddish-speaker would subscribe to the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – the idea that to live is to suffer — they would differ with him on the final cause of that suffering.

ME’ KEN LAIBM,

as we’ll see later in this book; life in the fullest sense of the word is indeed possible in this sublunary, material world:

ME KEN LAIBM, Ober MEH LOZT NISHT

You could live if they let you

It isn’t life that’s to blame, it’s the living. Just about all of them. There are a lot of them, they’re all out to get you — and worse, as far as they’re concerned, it’s your fault..

The redesigned New Jersey Jewish News launches this week! (See above.) Here’s what it used to look like:

I explain the changes in my column this week:

In our efforts to deliver readers a fresher, cleaner, and friendlier newspaper, we first took a long hard look at our logo. We felt the initials made a strong graphic statement, and a mission statement as well. We’ve always been delighted that the initials are a palindrome, suggesting our mirror identities as Jews and residents of the Garden State. The new logo proudly incorporates the “NJ,” but we’ve highlighted the second “J” to suggest Judaism’s centrality to our identity, as a newspaper and a community.

Also in this week’s issue:

• Did the Obama rumors sway Jewish voters?
• Meretz USA prez is burdened and hopeful.
• Reparations attorney may lose law license.
• Muslim immigration leaves Danes in a dither.

JTA is linking to the MSNBC exit polls:

Hillary Clinton won the Jewish vote in New Jersey, but the exit polls say her margin was slightly smaller than her win in New York. In N.J., Clinton won 63 percent of Jewish Democrats compared to 37 percent for Barack Obama.

Jews made up 9 percent of N.J.’s Democratic electorate.

NY:

According to the polling, conducted by Edison/Mitofsky, Clinton took 65 percent of Jewish Democrats in NY, compared to 33 percent for Barack Obama. That’s a wider gap than in Florida, where Clinton beat Obama 58 percent to 26 percent, with John Edwards pulling 13 percent.

In New York, Jews made up 16 percent of the Democratic electorate - about double the percentage of Jews in the Empire State’s overall population.

Elsewhere:

Despite losing overall in Massachusetts, Obama won the Jewish vote in the Bay State, 52 percent to 48 percent for Clinton. In Connecticut, which Obama won, he took 61 percent of the Jewish vote to 38 percent for Clinton.

Jewish turnout was disproportionately high: Jews comprised 16 percent of the Democratic electorate in New York, 10 percent in Connecticut, 9 percent in New Jersey, 6 percent in Massachusetts and 5 percent in California.

From JTA:

The United Jewish Communities has condemned a speaker who told the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County that U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is an anti-Semite.

So a New Jersey pol who happens to be Jewish and a Clinton supporter (who for the present shall go nameless) is giving us flak for running an interview with Obama so close to the primary election and not having a similar story on the “opposition” (never mind that the same issue of the Jewish News included a full page of statements from supporters of each of the candidates; an article on campus activism featuring separate interviews with a supporters of Clinton, Obama, and a still undecided Republican campus activist; an article quoting average voters expressing a range of preferences; and yet another article talking about the Clinton and Obama camps’ strategies for courting the Jewish vote.)

No, despite all this, our complainant says running the Obama interview is tantamount to an “endorsement.”

I don’t know how my colleagues in the Jewish press played it, but it seems to me Hillary was not subject to the kind of attack that Obama faced from an individual or group that specifically meant to drive a wedge between him and the Jewish community.  I felt a Jewish newspaper, and Jewish community, that cares about the truth and the community’s integrity should provide a platform for someone maligned the way Obama was on religious grounds. What I hear in the pol’s complaint is this: “Opponents of Obama had succeeded in spreading rumors that were hurting his candidacy. The Jewish News should not have given him an opportunity to dispel those rumors.” I find that troubling.

In addition, what Jewish newspaper, or any newspaper in the world, would not have jumped at a chance to question a candidate directly on the eve of the primary? We have repeatedly sought interviews with Mrs. Clinton and her supporters in NJ (including our complainant) and quite frankly have not made much headway. 

So what do readers think? Did we give Obama an unfair platform? Is “fairness” defined by a 50-50 split of stories? Were we “played” by the Obama campaign?

I thought this New York Times article about the Jewish vote on Super Tuesday was particularly weak in capturing the Obama dynamic within the community — and two commentators quoted were IMHO a little sanguine about the pernicious effect of the anti-Obama emails:  

 The American Jewish Committee and other Jewish groups have criticized an e-mail campaign that made false claims that Senator Obama was, among other things, disguising a devotion to the Muslim religion. (He is a Christian who has attended Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago since the 1980s.)

“I think Obama has dealt effectively with those rumors that he is really a secret agent,” said Mr. [Gary] Rosenblatt, of Jewish Week.

And Rabbi [Ammiel] Hirsch said that “most Jews are too sophisticated to fall for that garbage” and added, “It’s almost embarrassing that there would be an attempt to sway us in that manner.”

I’ve had conversations with a few “sophisticated” Jews in the past few days, and was saddened when they asked me if there is any truth to the Manchurian Muslim slurs. And I’ve seen the email passed on by listservers who should have known better. Happily, other recipients quickly recognized the emails for the garbage they were, and noted Obama’s strong ratings on Israel.

But as I wrote in a previous post, the purpose of Swift Boating, like industry attacks on the science behind global warming and the dangers of tobacco, is not to “win” a debate but to sow enough doubt to soften the target.  From the famous memo from the tobacco company Brown and Williamson:

“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

(See “Doubt Is Their Product: Industry groups are fighting government regulation by fomenting scientific uncertainty, in the June 2005 Scientific American).

The static about Obama, like the 2006 Republican Jewish Coalition ads attacking the Democrats on Israel, obscures what Hirsch captures nicely: 

The situation is “almost an embarrassment of riches for the Jewish voter,” said Ammiel Hirsch, senior rabbi of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“Perhaps there is a certain amount of distress that they have to choose between the two,” Rabbi Hirsch said, “because they are both enormously appealing to the Jewish community.”

That “embarrassment of riches” extends, of course, to the Republican  Party as well. In fact, some have suggested, the strength of both parties on Israel accounts for polls showing that Israel is no longer among the top considerations Jewish voters are citing in explaining their vote. 

I did think this quote nailed a trend, at least among the non-Orthodox:

Sid Davidoff, a lobbyist who has been involved in New York government and politics since the 1960s, said: “I think there is going to be a split between established older voters in the Jewish community, with whom Hillary will do well, and younger and more liberal Jews who see Obama as an agent of change.”

[UPDATE: Obama’s office is sending around this email from Rudi Shenk, New York State Director of
Obama for America:

Even if you do not plan to endorse Senator Obama, please counter these false rumors that have been specifically targeted at our community. As former presidential nominee and Senator John F. Kerry wrote recently:

“If lies can be spread virally, let’s prove to the cynics that the truth can be every bit as persuasive as it is powerful.”]