JustASC

Here’s another example of a pundit adapting the Israeli swine flu story for his purposes: Journalism maven Roy Peter Clark at the Poynter Institute uses it to warn journalists about “language prejudice”:

If we have to name a disease, let’s come up with a name that defames neither man nor beast, nor is so scientifically technical as to be forgettable. I nominate “The Influenza of 2009,” or simply the “2009 Flu.” The date is accurate, and its feelings can’t be hurt.

Back in 1965, Jewish activist Paul Jacobs wrote a classic essay, “Screw the Jews,” parodying the ways various Jewish organizations would react to anti-Jewish graffiti on a bathroom wall.  The ADL launches a criminal  investigation, the American Jewish Committee funds a study of anti-Semitism in America, and the American Jewish Congress files a brief with the Supreme Court. You get the idea.

Life imitates art in the reaction of various Jewish writers to the swine flu epidemic and especially news that Israel’s de facto Health Ministry head, the ultra-Orthodox Yakov Litzman, says Israel will refer to “swine flu” as “Mexican flu” so as not to offend kosher sensibilities (apparently, offending Mexicans is perfectly kosher).

Watch how the news fits neatly into the agendas of the following.

First, Benjamin L. Hartman, writing for the secular, left-leaning Israeli paper Ha’aretz, who no surprise sees Litman’s statement as a another example of “the dangers of Israel’s lack of separation of synagogue and state,” and “a glaring symptom of the disease of Israeli politics”:

Such is the system that produces a government where a party representing a community whose media cannot print the word sex, airbrushes women out of photos, and binds them into a strict second-class status, can be put in charge of the Health Ministry, a ministry legally bound to protect the well-being of all Israelis, regardless of gender, race or religion. How can a man who comes from a community which views as immodest talking about or referring to genitalia, be in charge of issues like reproductive health and gynecology, where he may have to hear or say the word “vagina?”

Next we have Jeffrey Yoskowitz, writing at the Atlantic’s Web site. Jeff, who has written for us, is an American who has been studying Israel’s pork industry for a number of years. He plugs Litman’s remarks neatly into his thesis:

The Health Ministry’s re-branding effort is the latest in a religious assault on pork consumption in the Holy Land. The raising and selling of pork was largely outlawed in 1962, though committed secularists and pork-eaters exploited the legal loopholes to indulge in the ‘forbidden’ flesh. An underground pork economy developed, and as the rift between secular and religious widened in Israeli society over the years, pork consumption slowly grew.

This has serious health consequences, adds Yoskowitz:

As a result of the government’s failure to officially recognize the legitimacy of many of the country’s pig farms, industrial hog farming goes highly unregulated.

Finally, there’s Richard H. Schwartz, president of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America. Richard is a prolific writer of news releases and a genius at turning the news of the day into a pitch for meat-free diets. We sometimes joke around the office about which of the week’s stories will turn into a JVNA news release (“Scarlett Johansson’s Weight Loss Points to Need for Greater Awareness of Healthy Kosher Vegetarian Eating!”).

He doesn’t disappoint:

The current widespread breakout of swine flu, related to the close confinement of thousands of animals in unsanitary conditions, where their manure piles up and viruses can proliferate and easily spread and mutate, should be the latest wake-up call to the need to consider the many ways that animal-based diets are inconsistent with basic Jewish teachings.

I’m just waiting for the Zionist Organization of America to blame the outbreak on Muslim fundamentalists, the UJA to start an ”emergency appeal” for Israeli flu victims, and J Street to issue a news release urging Obama to provide diplomatic pressure on both Jews and Arabs that will enable them to address the ways their swine-aversion impedes progress towards peace.

Today is Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s 61st birthday, and in honor of the occasion here’s a passage from Amos Oz’s memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, recalling the night in 1947 when the UN voted to partition Mandatory Palestine into two states, in effect giving international legitimacy to a Jewish state:

Oz and his parents, emigres from Eastern Europe, lived in the Kerem Avaraham neighborhood of Jerusalem at the time.

And very late, at a time when this child had never been allowed not to be fast asleep in bed, maybe at three or four o’clock, I crawled under my blanket fully dressed. And after a while Father’s hand lifted my blanket in the dark, not to be angry with me because I’d got into bed with my clothes on, but to get in and to lie down next to me, and he was in his clothes too, that were drenched in sweat from the crush of the crowds, just like mine (and we had an iron rule: you must never, for any reason whatsoever, get between the sheets in your outdoor clothes). My father lay besides me for a few minutes and said nothing, although normally he detested silence and hurried to banish it. But this time he did not touch the silence that was there between us but shared it, with just his hand lightly stroking my head. As though in this darkness my father had turned into my mother.

Then he told me in a whisper, without once calling me Your Highness or Your Honor, what some hooligans did to him and his brother David in Odessa and what some gentile boys did to him at his Polish school in Vilna, and the girls joined in too, and the next day, when his father, Grandpa Alexander, came to the school to register a complaint, the bullies refused to return the torn trousers but attacked his father, Grandpa, in front of his eyes, forced him down on the paving stones and removed his trousers too in the middle of the playground, and the girls laughed and made dirty jokes, saying that Jews were all so-and-sos, while the teachers watched and said nothing, or maybe they were laughing too.

And still in a voice of darkness with his hand still losing its way in my hair (because he was not used to stroking me) my father told me under my blanket in the early hours of November 30, 1947, “Bullies may well bother you in the street or at school some day. They may do it precisely because you are a bit like me. But from now on, from the moment we have our own state, you will never be bullied just because you are a Jew and because Jews are so-and-sos. Not that. Never again. From tonight that’s finished here. Forever.”

I reached out sleepily to touch his face, just below his high forehead, and all of a sudden instead of his glasses my fingers met tears. Never in my life, before or after that night, not even when my mother died, did I see my father cry. And in fact I didn’t see him cry that night either: it was too dark. Only my left hand saw. 

From A Tale of Love and Darkness, Harvest Books, 2005, pages 358-359.  

I was listening to a podcast of the NPR quiz show “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me” this morning (actually the April 18 broadcast, not the most recent one), and one of the listener call-in contestants was Demarest, NJ rabbi and psychologist Dennis Shulman. Host Peter Sagal was apparently unaware that Shulman lost in a credible race for NJ’s fifth Congressional district, and Shulman didn’t mention the fact.

Shulman also didn’t mention that he is legally blind — which might have embarrassed his hosts. He was playing the ”Bluff the Listener” game, which included a lengthy jokey bluff about a legally blind umpire who hoped to work a major league game. Shulman, a class act, could have scored big laughs but took the classy route.  And won the prize, incidentally.

Ha’aretz is reporting as fact that historian Michael Oren is Netanyahu’s pick for ambassador to Washington (other reports are more tentative).

Oren is a West Orange native. As the NJJN reported in 2007, when his book  Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present was released:

He spent his formative years in both America and the Middle East – he began going to Israel summers when he was 15 but returned to the United States for school and college. His parents, Marilyn and Lester Bornstein, still live in West Orange. His mother is herself an author (Hold Fast the Time, a romantic novel about a suburban Jewish widow who travels to Israel, was published in 2004). The family belonged to B’nai Shalom in West Orange, where Michael attended religious school and became a bar mitzva.

The newsletter of the Jewish Historical Scoiety of MetroWest (NJ) fills out some local details here:

Michael Oren acquired the professional historical qualifications that he uses to test his father, first at Mountain High School in West Orange, at Columbia College in New
York, and at Princeton, where he earned a PhD….

Lester forged an incredible family standard. He won two
Bronze Stars for valor in combat in World War II. Michael continued the tradition when he served with Israeli paratroopers in combat in Lebanon.

Oren retells his father’s war stories in his first novel, Reunion, about a “fictionalized reunion of former American servicemen in the village of St. Vith in Belgium’s Ardennes forest, 55 years after the fighting ended,” according to the Princeton alumni mag: 

The novel is based “about 95 percent” on actual events that Oren gleaned from his father’s reunions with fellow World War II G.I.s. In 1944, 19-year-old Lester M. Bornstein, Oren’s father, fought with the U.S. Army’s 168th Battalion at the Battle of the Bulge, helping hold – despite great losses – a ridge for six days against a fierce Nazi offensive. Years later, Bornstein was so assiduous about telling his son stories of his unit’s combat that Oren came to know the stories almost as well as his father did. Talking about his experiences, Oren believes, helped his father come to terms with what he had experienced.

New Voices, the magazine of the Jewish Student Press Service, has an article by Jeremy Gillick on a topic that flew under the radar of the rest of the Jewish media: “would-be rabbinical students [who] question the ban on intermarried students at the Reform and Conservative seminaries.”

Even Reform’s Hebrew Union College, representing the most liberal and welcoming attitude toward interfaith faimilies among the denominations, bans students in relationships with non-Jews:

“Because we believe in the importance of Jewish family modeling,” reads the policy at HUC, the network of seminaries for America’s largest Jewish denomination, “applicants who are married to or in committed relationships with non-Jews will not be considered for acceptance to this program.” (more…)

I caught Born Yesterday again on TCM last night, and as ever stand in awe of the brilliant Judy Holliday. How often can you say of a performance that every line reading is special, unexpected, and absolutely perfect?

Here’s a biographical sketch on the quintessential “dumb blonde” (who not surprisingly scored “172 on an IQ test when she was ten”) from the Jewish Women’s Archives.

My Dear Heloise tip of the day:

Most days my lunch is a tossed salad plus protein: a can of tuna, sliced turkey breast, tofu. But I like to keep the dressing separate so the greens don’t get soggy before lunchitme. Usually I mix a little dressing in a small Gladware container, but they always leak.

So this time I mixed the dressing in a Zip-Lock baggie, and just tossed that in  the salad container. All I need to do is empty the bag into the salad, and I am good to go. 

Of course, my wife wonders why I just don’t buy or mix a bottle of dressing and keep it in the office fridge. This seems like a good idea on the surface, but given enough time and intellectual dishonesty, I will demonstrate why it isn’t.

From a lung association’s press release, a great subject line:

George Washington Bridge Walk For Lung Diseases

Isn’t that a little like a “Hudson River Swim for Water-Borne Diseases”? An “NJ Turnpike Road Rally for Global Warming Awareness”?

Sure enough, the invitation says:

 NEW THIS YEAR! For those who would like to avoid car exhaust an alternate route will be along the loop of Fort Lee’s Historical Park. 

But I kid — and regularly pedal across the bridge on bike. For more info, try here.

Just when you thought prospects for a Mideast peace could not get any dimmer, The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan explains why groups like the Palestinians might not want a state after all, so long as statelessness is their source of power:

[T]he most tempting aspect of statelessness is that it permits a people to savor the pleasures of religious zeal, extremist ideologies, and moral absolutes, without having to make the kinds of messy, mundane compromises that accompany the work of looking after a geographical space.

Kaplan actually draws on this piece by Jakub Grygiel at Johns Hopkins.