JustASC

Just got a press release announcing that April is Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month.

Which reminds me: Passover begins at sundown on April 8.

From the Republican Jewish Coalition, which brought you those charming series of anti-Obama ads last year, comes the latest issue of their inFocus magazine, with this image of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad on the cover:

I assume any similarity between it and the famous Obama campaign poster is just coincidental:

A friend sent me a link to this item in the Washington Jewish Week, with the subject line, “talk about burying the lede!” Read all the way to the end:

Guests take a stroll through JPDS event

A private meeting with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew $2,200 for the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital on Sunday, as the District school held its Purim Masquerade Ball & Auction.

The meeting — Rice will give the school’s Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Lecture later this year — was among the dozens of items auctioned at the strolling dinner and sit-down dessert event, held at the National Building Museum in D.C.

The school’s Mordecai and Esther Award went to District residents Caryn Pass, who has done pro bono legal work for JPDS; Ira Forman, who was instrumental in helping the school navigate the city’s bureaucracy its move to its current 16th Street location; and Leah Chanin, who chaired the school’s major gifts fund-raising campaign.

Helaine Greenfield, school president, praised Chanin as a “fierce advocate for Jewish education É and a powerful inspiration for all.”

She called Pass and Forman “role models to us all,” and cited their “deep devotion to JPDS.”

Presented with the evening’s Kol Hakavod Awards were Adina and Bryan Kanefield of D.C., Sharon Bray and Leizer Goldsmith of Chevy Chase and Susan Kornetsky and Mark Meridy of Bethesda.

Naomi Reem, head of school, dedicated the evening to Kay Schattner, who died March 9. Schattner and her husband, Robert, had contributed $2 million that helped the Jewish Primary Day School of the Nation’s Capital establish its permanent home in 2003.

“We remember her with fondness and she has left her mark” on JPDS, Reem said.

Toward the end of the event, Forman suffered a heart attack; he was scheduled for bypass surgery this week.

Joking aside: Rephuah shelaymah, Ira!

Larry Cohler-Esses interviews Charles Freeman in the Forward:

Some in Washington who venture criticism of Israel do so in a tone of critical sympathy that may at once blunt the criticism but also allow it to be heard. Freeman, a self-confessed “non-political” figure, does not choose to do so, and he makes no apologies for that.

One example is the speech he gave at a policy conference in 2006, which some opponents cite as the basis for their saying he blames Israel for 9/11.

“Americans need to be clear about the consequences of continuing our current counterproductive approaches to security in the Middle East,” he told his audience. “We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel’s approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home. We are now paying with the lives of our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines on battlefields in several regions of the realm of Islam, with more said by our government’s neoconservative mentors to be in prospect.”

“You have to be fairly obsessive to read that into it,” Freeman said of the charge that he blames American support of Israel for 9/11. “What it means is that our relationship with Israel, given what Israel has done to the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, has helped to create an atmosphere first in the Arab world and now through all of Islam, in which anti-Americanism flourishes.

“There is a hell of a lot of polling date to sustain this. It’s ridiculous to say it’s cause and effect. But it’s also ridiculous to say there are no consequences. There are consequences.”

Actually, I think you would have to be fairly obsessive to analyze the 9/11 attacks and mention only one root cause: U.S. support for Israel. Even Freeman clarifies that the relationship “helped” to create an atmosphere of anti-Americanism, suggesting that there are other things that contributed to creating that atmosphere. But he doesn’t mention any in his speech, which makes it quite reasonable to assume that he blames 9/11,  and the Iraq war, if not on Israel, then on U.S. support for Israel.

Try this: “The Yankees need to be clear about the consequences of acquiring Alex Rodriguez. Since he joined the team, they have not won a World Series.” Do you need to be “obsessive” to assume that the writer was blaming A-Rod for the Yankees’ woes?

Good stuff in this week’s NJJN:

A Hebrew charter school for Middlesex?

Proponents of a proposed Hebrew-language charter school in East Brunswick say it will provide a top-notch, dual-language education. Opponents contend it will drain students away from the local Jewish day schools and synagogue schools and skimp on Jewish education. Debra Rubin reports ahead of a March 31 application deadline.

Complex edifice

A multi-million-dollar synagogue renovation is daunting enough. But for Congregation B’nai Israel in Millburn, the task is complicated by the grim economy, and a challenge from a congregant who says the designers are tampering with a modernist gem by one of the 20th century’s best-known synagogue architects. Johanna Ginsberg writes on the delicate balance between preserving the past and planning for the future.

How to respond to novelist Ben Ehrenreich’s maddening oped in the Los Angeles Times (”Zionism is the problem“), arguing that the very idea of Israel is fundamentally flawed and inevitably oppressive because it is based “on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse”?

I’d start with Gadi Taub’s  2007 piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Liberalism, Democracy, and the Jewish State,” which neatly undermines the liberal anti-Zionists’ assault on Jewish nationalism.

Taub wonders why the Jewish brand of nationalism is considered exceptional and what is it that makes the “idea of a Jewish democratic state seem more contradictory to so many critics today than an English democratic state.”

Is it religion? Israel is a hybrid of secular institutions and religious influence, but England, Denmark, and Norway all have state churches, and the Poles and Greeks have a clearly religious national character.

Does secularism guarantee “democracy”? While militantly secular France denies basic religious rights to Muslims, for instance, Israel has an Arab-language school system and state-sponsored Muslim family courts.

What about the Law of Return, granting automatic citizenship to Jewish immigrants? Finland, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, and Poland have similar laws for their citizens.

Or is it “ethnicity”? “Despite repeated usage,” writes Taub, “it is still not clear why the term “ethnic” is useful for describing Israel, which is far less ethnically homogeneous than, say, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Poland, or Sweden. In what sense does “ethnic” describe the common identity of Israeli Jews from Argentina, England, Ethiopia, Germany, Morocco, Russia, and Yemen?”

Is it the existence of a national minority (Israeli Arabs) within Israel’s boundaries? Writes Taub:

Other nation-states also have national minorities that want to preserve their separate identities: the Basques in Spain and the Germans in Poland, say. Few observers, however, make that grounds for denying the rights of the majority in Poland or Spain to national self-determination.

No, writes Taub, the problem is that the anti-Zionists want to impose an American brand of nationalism that they only confuse with liberal deomocracy. He concludes:

Imposing America’s model of one liberal state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea would mean suppressing the aspirations of both Jews and Palestinians to self-determination. [According to Israel's critics,] American notions of democracy are what count, not what Iraqis, or Palestinians, or Israeli Jews want. A peaceful future will be tied to national self-determination. It will have to rely on stable nation-states. Transcending nationalism would be, in this case, promoting civil war.

If you have a few minutes, do me a favor and take the New Jersey Jewish News Survey here.

It’s fast, it’s anonymous, and it will help us put out a better newspaper.

My newspaper’s board of trustees had its annual half-day “retreat” yesterday (or as 30 Rock had it last week in its parody of such events, a “Retreat to Go Forward”). We invited Sam Freedman of the New York Times and Columbia U. journalism school to brief us on the state of the industry, and it wasn’t quite as depressing as you might expect.

While planning the event I shared with Sam my morbid joke that I sometimes feel our paper’s motto should be “a dying medium for a dying people,” which he quickly amended to “an ever-dying medium for an ever-dying people.” That’s a reference to the Jewish historian Simon Rawidowicz, who coined “ever-dying people” to describe the Jews’ propensity for always thinking their generation is the last.

 ”Ever-dying” implies  ”ever-living,” which suggests the Jewish genius for survival. But before we dared talk yesterday of the newspaper industry’s survival, we had to consider the bad news.

(more…)

Here’s one way to break the glass ceiling (from a hedline from News 10 in Rochester, NY):

Slaughter recognized by The National Council of Jewish Women

Oh wait — NCJW honored local congresswoman Louise Slaughter. Never mind. 

When I wrote a column last week about my feelings toward intermarriage, I thought I would hear criticism mostly from the “right” — that is, those who may have thought I was soft on the subject because I urged a kinder and gentler approach to Jews who choose to marry non-Jews.

Instead, almost all of the comment came from the “left” — that is, those who feel that I, despite being more empathetic than most, still single out the intermarried as a “challenge” to the Jewish community.

This week we print a response from Paul Golin of the Jewish Outreach Institute. Writes Paul:

Communal expressions of the traditional view – in-marriage “best,” intermarriage “harder” –  is no longer helpful when half of our married households are already intermarried….

There are often very real challenges for intermarried couples, which can certainly be part of the dialogue and I hope will be. But the column doesn’t mention any. Does that imply that the challenge is the marriage itself? Such an oversimplification would contradict the column’s other nuanced views on intermarriage.

Do I believe that intermarried families in general have a harder time than inmarried families raising Jewish kids to do Jewish? I do. The statistics support this, unequivocally.  That doesn’t mean that intermarried families can’t be successful in transmitting Jewish identity to the next generation. But with each generation, the gap in success rates for inmarrieds and intermarrieds grows. 

And I’ll say this unapologetically: I want my kids to do their part in keeping Judaism alive. And I know they’ll have a much better chance — chance, no guarantees, but a chance — if they marry Jews.

First, their decision to marry a Jew would suggest the centrality of Judaism in their lives. Second, they and their spouses will share, from day one,  a web of Jewish ethnic and cultural signifiers, implicit and explicit. They’re more likely to share a wider web of Jewish relatives, each a transmitter of some sort of Jewish cultural or religious meme, history and/or narrative. Third, their children will not be facing a choice — or dissonance — between mommy’s religion and daddy’s, or between bubbe’s and granny’s. Fourth (and this argues for greater inclusion, I acknowledge), they’ll find greater ease and acceptance in Jewish communities for whom certain barriers are a given, from Orthodox synagogues to the state of Israel.

Having already been “front-loaded”  with a Jewish education and a real and consistent commitment to Jewish practice in our home, their marriage to a Jew — and one hopes, a similarly committed one — would not only be a signal of the success of the enterprise (raising Jewish kids to become caring and committed Jews) but would improve the odds that the enterprise will continue at least another generation. 

None of this is a sure thing — but it’s wishful thinking to pretend it doesn’t improve the odds.  I sometimes use a medical analogy in discussing this issue. Medicine treats the individual, and a doctor treats each patient as unique and uniquely valuable — “to keep,” as the Hippocratic Oath has it, “the good of the patient as the highest priority.” That is the approach taken by JOI and Interfaithfamily.com and other groups who are encouraging a more “inclusive” approach to interfaith families. It’s important work. I know interfaith families who have been welcomed by their Jewish communities, and see them raising committed Jewish kids, and I would have lamented being part of a community that bars them at the gates of the synagogue or day school or denigrates them or their choices.

But then there is the public health approach to medical care. Public health officials care about individuals, but have to make honest and sometimes painful choices about what happens to a population as whole. They know that by introducing a certain kind of treatment or health measure, some individuals may not benefit and some may actually be harmed. They are not indifferent to the pain of individuals, but their goal, as the OMB has put it,  is the “greatest public health improvement for the resources available.”

If you were to analyze intermarriage through the lens of public health (”public” in this case meaning Jewish, “health” meaning continuity), you’d have to agree that inmarriage is both a marker of the community’s well-being and an effective strategy for its continued hardiness.

I know that sounds cold — but in the interest of sensitivity, should we deny the obvious?

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t debate the costs and benefits of inclusiveness. And I am inclined to weigh in on the side of more inclusiveness than less. But I wasn’t addressing that in my column. I was talking about my individual feelings about intermarriage and my hopes for my kids.