JustASC

This week in the New Jersey Jewish News:

New Jerseyan Alisa Flatow died in a terrorist bombing in Israel a decade ago. Now her little brother is joining the Israeli army.

A Montclair mom sings hip songs for Jewish kids.

Menachem Rosensaft sees racism at work in Obamaphobia.

And I’m inspired by some idealistic Israeli college students:

The student village at Moshav Yahini looks every bit like the controversial settlements thrown up quickly by the “hilltop youth,” the radical wing of the settler movement. But there’s a big difference: Yahini is in the western Negev, not far from the Gaza border but well within the “green line” that separates Israel from the disputed territories. And the residents who built this village are not settlers intent on holding on to the territories, but college students who want to help expand the Jewish presence in the largely uncontested Negev and Galilee.

Great headline on this JTA brief:

Iowa Jews minimally affected by flooding

Which reminds me of a joke I once heard Fran Drescher tell:

A Jewish American, um, young lady is visiting Florence and stops in to see Michelango’s David statue. She’s alone in the gallery, and as she draws near the giant marble, she brushes a speck from its big toe. At that moment, the statue creaks, tilts, and crashes to the ground, breaking into a thousand pieces. As the guards come running, the woman declares, “Don’t worry, I’m all right! I’m all right!”

I’m reading Michael Pollan’s book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, whose message he summarizes in seven words:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Seven being a nice significant Jewish number, it got me thinking: Can the message of Judaism be summarized in seven words (the Shema, by the way, is six words in Hebrew, 11 in English)?

How about:

Study Torah. Marry Jewish. Do Good Deeds.

(which is a telegraphed version of the traditional blessing for a child, for whom we wish Torah, u-le-chuppah, u-le-ma’asim tovim).

Or maybe:

Eat food. Not pigs. Eat more food.

Jesus Christ? Yeah hey. (No offense intended.)

Work, rest, spawn. The rest is commentary.

I am the Lord your God. Discuss.

Now it’s your turn. Summarize the message of Judaism, or your Jewish beliefs (or disbelief), in exactly seven words. Leave your suggestion/s in the comments section or send them to me at asc@njjewishnews.com. Winning entries will be published in the New Jersey Jewish News.

My friend Larry Yudelson is seeking contributors for a book he hopes to edit and publish, How Would God REALLY Vote: A Jewish Response to David Klinghoffer.

Klinghoffer’s new book is called How Would God Vote: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative.  

Larry has suggestions for would-be contributors:

You can rip tearing holes into Klinghoffer’s logic
You can show where Klinghoffer misunderstands Torah
You can show how Torah addresses a policy area that Klinghoffer doesn’t deal with

Deadline is July 7. Publication date is planned for August 15.

The A.P. reports that McCain is opening campaign headquarters in NJ, a “sign that John McCain thinks he can win here.”

The story runs down the reasons for McCain’s optimism: supporters say he is a “moderate,” Hillary “handily defeated” Obama in the state’s primary election, and encouraging polls.  McCain is also focusing on NJ towns, like Pemberton, with blue-collar populations: “the sort of voters who supported Clinton in the primary and may not be inclined to vote for Obama in the general election.” 

McCain’s other New Jersey stops this year have been in Hamilton, Lakewood and Jersey City _ all places with some blue-collar character.

Notable omission is any mention of the Jewish vote — and let’s face it, just as Lakewood has as many black hats as blue collars, the Jewish vote is not an insignificant slice of the NJ electorate. Interesting to see if the McCain campaign ventures out of places like Pemberton and visits places like Livingston and Marlboro.
 

About 7,500 young people gathered near Jerusalem last week for Birthright Israel’s mega-event, and I flew home from Israel last Thursday on a flight containing about 7,200 of them.

Earlier in the week, Rob Eshman, editor of the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A., reminded me of a column he had written a year earlier about the not-so-secret secret of Birthright’s success. Wrote Rob:

But let’s be honest about what accounts for a good part of the program’s runaway success — hormones.

“No one tells you it’s about hooking up with other Jews,” one 20-something participant told me, “but there’s plenty there to make it happen.”

There is no curfew, chaperones who are in some cases only a couple of years older than the visitors and lots of booze.

“What happens among the Diaspora,” one happy birthrighter from Pittsburgh told me, “stays among the Diaspora.”

Rob took flak for comparing Birthrighters to spawning grunions (maybe he should have compared them to herring or white fish), but I can personally attest to the concupiscence of my fellow passengers. Before the kids fell asleep (about six minutes into the flight, and as heavily as cows struck with a stun baton), the chatter all around me was a medley of sexual banter, come-ons, and innuendoes.

Eshman said it best:

Like most Jews in a generation that missed out on the birthright junket, I’m jealous, but supportive. I understand that, as my friend Jon Drucker is fond of saying, Jewish survival is not in the genes, but in the jeans.

The New Jersey Jewish News editorializes on Michael Steinhardt’s plans for a Jewish charter school:

The charter schools are proposing to tease out religion from culture, in part to qualify for public funding and in part to promote their founders’ own Jewish self-understanding. But considering the complexity of the Jewish tapestry, it is hard to see how they would succeed – and what exactly would be gained in the attempt.

Read the whole thing: (more…)

The Baltimore Sun reports on Semites on Bikes, a Jewish motorcycle club, which released a fundraising calendar featuring nude male members using strategically placed cats to hide their, um, nude male members.

The whole thing is a fundraiser for the Humane Society of Baltimore County’s new cat shelter. 

More snapshots from my Sderot trip:

“There is no safe place in the neighborhood,” said Talia Levanon, director of the UJC-backed Israel Trauma Coalition, which brings together some 45 NGOs. “Therapists and patient can run for shelter three times in a session.”

At the Alon Madaaim elementary school, a JDC-funded “Havens of Calm” program leads kids through daily stress reduction exercises that can include yoga and pet care, held behind the blue doors of one of the school’s safe rooms. Six- and seven-year-olds talk with uncanny fluency in the language of self-help, fully aware that the fun and games are techniques to reduce stress before the next siren interrupts their lessons.

At the Sderot community center, Nitai Schreiber, a self-described “social entrepreneur” who helps organize local empowerment projects, showed off the art projects submitted as final exams by his twin, 17-year-old daughters. Nitzan’s shows a typical teen’s room shattered into fragments out of a Dali landscape. Shaked’s depicts a bright globe, full of light, threatened from all directions by black shards. Shaked once asked him, “If I get wounded, will we leave? And if the answer is yes, what are we waiting for?” (more…)

My old pal Elli Wohlgelernter (at right in photo above, with his cameraman Dennis Zinn) interviewed me and my colleagues for a segment on last night’s English-language broadcast of IBA News in Israel. The report is here, at about the 6-minute mark.