JustASC

I’ll be running a workshop at the National Jewish Student Journalism Conference on May 3rd in New York City.

If you know any aspiring journalists who’d like to take part, have them register here.

The Zionist Organization of America wants you to know that the Somali pirates are not just privateers but “devout Muslims protecting Somalia against the infidel West.” Having sent out a press release to that effect on April 14, it follows up today with an article by Joshua E. London, its co-director for Government Affairs.

London, who wrote a book about America’s 18th-century war with the Barbary pirates, says the booty is being funneled to Qaeda-linked interests on shore, and that “the actions of Muslim pirates off the coast of Somalia help support the larger jihad taking place in East Africa.”

But if Western powers are already in agreement that they want the scourge of piracy to stop, what is ZOA’s  stake in emphasizing the alleged Islamist links? For London, it’s a question of tactics:

This scourge of Muslim piracy cannot be defeated through defensive policing of the Gulf of Aden or the Indian Ocean or precision strikes, soft power, smart sanctions, or carrot and stick approaches, or, really, any other related half-measures. What is needed is the offensive use of brutal, overwhelming force to crush the jihadists at sea and on land, back in their strongholds.

The ADL has retracted a statement it put out yesterday critical of Obama’s remarks folowing his meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah, saying:

The Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) statement issued earlier today on remarks made by President Barack Obama, following a meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan, was based on news reports that proved to be inaccurate.

I thought the original news release was a little strange, especially since it contained direct quotations not contained in the official transcript of the Obama news conference, and because it seemed to be criticizing Obama for remarks couched in the anodyne language of diplomacy.

Here’s what he said:

Well, first of all, I think it is very important to recognize that the Israelis now have had a government for a few weeks and it was a very complicated process for them to put a coalition together. So I think more listening needs to be done. They are going to have to formulate and I think solidify their position. So George Mitchell will continue to listen both to Arab partners, to the Palestinians, as well as the Israelis.

But I agree that we can’t talk forever; that at some point, steps have to be taken so that people can see progress on the ground. And that will be something that we will expect to take place in the coming months and we will help hopefully to drive a process where each side is willing to build confidence.

And here was ADL’s original objection:

We are troubled by the President’s remarks after his meeting with King Abdullah of Jordan where he told the press that the Israelis and Palestinians have done enough talking and that ‘now is the time to take steps.’

We find this comment disturbing because it leaves the impression that Israel has not acted for peace. In fact, in the year 2000 Israel made a generous offer for peace to the Palestinians which, if accepted, would have resulted in a Palestinian state, shared control of Jerusalem, and the dismantling of 80 percent of Israeli settlements. The Palestinians said no and turned to violence and terror.

Then, in 2005, Israel took another major step, unilaterally withdrawing from the Gaza Strip and dismantling all its settlements there. This action was met with a Hamas takeover and the launching of thousands of rockets into Israel.

We believe that both Israelis and Palestinians will have to make concessions for peace. We hope that the President will acknowledge that Israel has already taken significant steps toward peace, and that he urge the Palestinians and the Arab world to take positive steps as well.

So even here, in its original release, ADL acknowledged that both sides will have to make “concessions” — which means it and the president are basically in agreement. They know that the process will never advance if Israel approaches the table saying “look at all we’ve done in the past.” The concessions, the “steps,” the confidence-building measures — whatever you call them — are pretty clear, at least on Israel’s part: perhaps a meaningful settlement freeze, easing of West Bank checkpoints, dismantling of illegal outposts and the like.

As to “news reports that proved to be inaccurate” — what in the actual transcript, except from the direct quotations, differs from the interpretation contained in the ADL’s original release? The ADL’s original summary — that Obama “told the press that the Israelis and Palestinians have done enough talking and that ‘now is the time to take steps’” — is not a bad summary of what he actually said.

So is the ADL backtracking because of the fresh, more “accurate” information it received, or because someone in their orbit felt the original statement was unfair?

Now that Netanyahu is declining to endorse a two-state solution, and the Israeli consensus is that even if a good idea such a solution is not viable in the short-term, the whole concept is back on the table.

This cause for celebration for those who fundamentally object to a Palestinian state, such as National Council of Young Israel, who wrote Netanyahu: ”[W]e implore you to stand firm and reject any pressure to accede to calls for the creation of a Palestinian state.”

Rabbi Donniel Hartman, representing the Orthodox Left in Israel, finds this worrisome enough that he penned a piece  reasserting why a two-state solution is the only solution on moral grounds. To whit:

1. …The principle of land for peace is that peace is more important than land, and the quality of life a more significant Jewish virtue than the sum total of space in which that life is lived….

2. …The two-state solution is a declaration that we as Jews do not want to politically dominate another people….

3. …Without a two-state solution, the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs will be such that maintaining a Jewish State will only be possible if we become a totalitarian regime….

In sum, Hartman writes:

 What I am arguing, however, is for the continually proud and vocal adoption of the two-state solution as our only political horizon. To do so is to maintain the quality of Jewish values in our political horizon. To fail to do so is to seriously damage the moral and Jewish fiber of Israeli society.

Why the “however”? Because Hartman, like many doves in Israel, is also aware that, with a weak Fatah and a rejectionist Hamas in control of Gaza (and angling for a role in a Palestinian unity government), the time is hardly ripe for a Palestinian state.

Here’s another self-described  member of the “peace camp,” Brigadier General (Ret.) Yossi Ben Ari, who writes that the two-state solution should remain on the political horizon, but that it doesn’t warrant the diplomatic push being given it by the Obama administration:

I am convinced that clinging to the two-state solution as the main strategy won’t achieve a thing, while hiding what we may be able to do: Advancing the Beirut Initiative [the Arab peace initiative, launched in 2002] while postponing the Palestinian component to a later stage, or placing the responsibility for resolving it through compromise on the entire Arab League. It is difficult to believe that the chance for this is great.

Some of my reliably hawkish interlocutors are making much of Rahm Emanuel’s purported comments to an unnamed “Jewish leader,” reported in Yediot Achronot and blogged here by M.J. Rosenberg:

Rahm Emanuel told an (unnamed) Jewish leader; “In the next four years there is going to be a permanent status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians on the basis of two states for two peoples, and it doesn’t matter to us at all who is prime minister.”

He also said that the United States will exert pressure to see that deal is put into place. “Any treatment of the Iranian nuclear problem will be contingent upon progress in the negotiations and an Israeli withdrawal from West Bank territory,” the paper reports Emanuel as saying.

Did he say it? I have my doubts, because Emanuel’s comments mesh a little too perfectly with what an American peacenik would want to hear, and what a hawk would love to denounce.   

Finally, Barry Rubin, no man of the left, calms things down in the Jerusalem Post:

Endorsing a two-state solution isn’t an attack on Israel’s government. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu doesn’t oppose a two-state solution – and hasn’t for 12 years – but emphasizes this would only happen if and when a Palestinian leadership proves its credibility and makes a decent offer. If the Obama administration says it’s going to succeed, so did its last three predecessors.

This issue raises the most important single guideline for Israeli policy, which shouldn’t merely consist of saying, “We want peace and a two-state solution” 10 times a day. It should raise its own demands that the Palestinian Authority keeps its commitments and that any negotiated solution include Palestinian as well as Israeli concessions.

So to sum up: The two-state solution is both the only moral solution and an inevitable one. But too much stands in its way of becoming a reality in the short term. If Obama pushes too hard on this, he’s doomed either to fail or embarrass Israel — but that doesn’t mean Israel shouldn’t continue to make the incremental steps that could one day resurrect a Palestinian state as a desireable goal.

My column this week, in the participatory journalism tradition of The Year of Living Biblically and My Jesus Year:

Lotsa Matza: A Year Without Hametz — It’s tough enough to go without bread for the eight days of Passover – imagine 12 months eating shamelessly overpriced foods that contain not a whiff of leavened products, rice, corn, or anything else that brings pleasure to life. In Lotsa Matza, I will ingest matza brei for breakfast, matza ball soup for lunch, and gallons of Pepto-Bismol at dinner. (Possible marketing tie-in: April is Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month.) On the serious side, I will investigate the kosher food business, and get to the bottom of such burning questions as, Is there any difference between eating a bowl of Manischewitz Fruity Magic breakfast cereal and injecting a half-cup of maple syrup directly into your veins?

Read the whole thing.

I barely blogged during Passover — despite the holiday, we still had to put out newspapers, and we squeezed the work into the few days that weren’t hagim or Shabbat.

I used the forced down time to catch up on Amos Oz. The great Israeli novelist, who turns 70 this year, has a new novella, Rhyming Life and Death, and a collection that brings together excerpts from his fiction and nonfiction, The Amos Oz Reader.

Rhyming Life and Death is a slim but rewarding read: An unnamed “Author” prepares for a literary reading and spins biographies and stories out of the people he meets there and along the way.  It’s a book about how writers create stories, but which plays with readers’ expectations of what it means to read a novel. Is this episode “real,” or is it merely taking place in the “Author’s” head? But since every novel takes place in an author’s head, is the distinction meaningful? (Oz makes these Philip Rothian mindgames go down a lot easier than it sounds.)

And Oz being Oz, there  is no avoiding politics even in his seemingly “nonpolitical” fiction. As he said when accccepting the German Goethe Prize in 2005:

I believe that imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred. I believe that books that make us imagine the other may make us more immune to the ploys of the devil, including the inner devil, the Mephisto of the heart.

Imagining the other is not only an aesthetic tool. It is in my view, also a major moral imperative.

“Imagining the other” is also a tool that has allowed Oz, better than most, to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Palestinian perspective, and work toward a moral solution to the conflict.

The full Goethe speech is also in The Amos Oz Reader, where I also found an excerpt from his autobiography, A Tale of Love and Darkness. That led me to find a copy and read the whole thing. It is a riveting memoir, a story about both Oz’s astoundingly literate and polyglot relatives, and about Israel’s founding generation, whose intellectual leaders, like his great uncle Joseph Klausner, step out of the pages of history books into Oz’s own memories. As Oz told the New York Times last week:

Being an Israeli at 70, he noted, is like being an American who is 250 years old. He was there for his country’s birth 61 years ago.

“I saw the Boston Tea Party with my own eyes,” he said with a twinkle. “I personally knew George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.”

There’s also an intensely personal and painful story of his own immediate family, although the first half of the book leans more toward a national tale than a personal one. But again, this is Oz: the personal and the political, the familial and historical, are often impossible to tease apart.

I loved Ariel Sabar’s book, MY FATHER’S PARADISE: A Son’s Search for his Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq, and made it the topic of my column this week. With Passover fast approaching, I share a quote that speaks to the real point behind the seder:

“Jews had carried a flame into the hills of Kurdistan, and they carried it out, still burning, 2,700 years later. My father touched another candle to it and brought it across continents. I didn’t want it to die with me. If my children ever feel adrift, unsure of who they are, I want that candle to still be burning.”

A zissen Pesach to all.

More signs of the apocalypse, this from a New York Times article on attempts at a Scarsdale middle school to curb bullying and encourage “empathy”:

And to combat feelings of exclusion, the Parent Teacher Association is trying to curtail a longstanding tradition of seventh graders and eighth graders showing up en masse Monday morning wearing the personalized sweatshirts handed out to the popular crowd at the weekend’s bar or bat mitzvahs….

 Bar mitzvah sweatshirts emblazoned with the name of the honoree, the date and occasionally even the guest list are still commonly worn, if not on the Monday after, then on a Tuesday or Wednesday a month later.Otherwise, “what’s the point in getting them?” asked Jess Calamari, 13, an eighth grader who gave out blue hooded sweatshirts to more than 150 guests at her bat mitzvah last year. “I don’t want to offend people, but I like sweatshirts.”

But some kids are getting the message:

On the bar mitzvah circuit, students have started handing out alternatives like water bottles and pajama pants. Jason Thurm, 13, collected more than 200 of the personalized sweatshirts from his friends and donated them to a church; for his own party in November, Jason did not have favors, and planned to donate the money his parents would have spent on them to a charity.

This rather charming and even hilarious article, which appeared in the New York Times in 1897, is making its viral way around the Jewish community. It reports on the arrest of a rabbi in “Tompkins Square” who attempted to hold a ceremony to recite Birkat HaChammah, the blessing of the sun that comes around only once every 28 years (and will again on Wednesday morning).  The Times reports:

The celebration is rather a complicated matter to explain to anybody. Rabbi Klein’s knowledge of English is slight, while [Officer] Foley’s faculties of comprehension of matters outside of police and park regulations and local events are not acute. The attempt of a foreign citizen to explain to an American Irishman an astronomical situation and a tradition of the Talmud was a dismal failure.

The normally measured Avi Shafran, columnist and spokesman for the fervently Orthodox group Agudath Israel, writes a bizarro oped for JTA praising Bernie Madoff and dissing hero pilot “Sully” Sullenberger. Madoff is admirable, writes Shafran, because he fessed up to his crime and apologized to his victims. Writes Shafran:  

No one can know if those words reflect the feelings in his heart, but I don’t claim any right to doubt that they do. And facing one’s sins and regretting them is the essence of the Jewish concept of teshuvah, repentance — something we are all enjoined to do for our personal transgressions, however small or large.

As for Sully:

No such sublimity of spirit, though, was in evidence in any of the public acts or words of Mr. Sullenberger. He saved 155 lives, no doubt about it, and is certainly owed the gratitude of those he saved, and of their families and friends. And he executed tremendous skill.

But no moral choice was involved in his act. He was on the plane, too, after all; his own life depended on undertaking his feat no less than the lives of others. He did what anyone in terrible circumstances would do: try to stay alive.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, head of the Reform movement, slams this slow pitch out of the park in a dueling oped:

Shafran’s views demonstrate stunning ignorance of Jewish tradition. His ideas do not represent religious Judaism of any variety, Orthodoxy included. Indeed, they are a fundamental distortion of Judaism’s most sacred teachings.

Shafran seems to have gotten the message, emailing an apology to the editors who carry his column:

 My recent Am Echad Resources essay “Bernie, Sully and Me” has generated substantial criticism from many readers, including people whose opinions I deeply respect. I have come to the conclusion that that there were errors in both the content and tone of the essay, for which I apologize.

My main goal in publishing these essays is to help people understand eternal Jewish truths. Unfortunately, here I chose unsuitable examples for the concepts I sought to impart, failing to accomplish that goal and offending many people in the process.

I am grateful, as always, for the constructive comments and feedback I received from my readership, whose confidence I hope to retain going forward.

The mystery here is why Shafran chose to distribute as a column the kind of thing best left said (or rather unsaid) at the Shabbos table. He’s angered readers before, with biting attacks on Conservative Judaism and an angry defense of the charmers who ran the scandal-ridden Agriprocessors kosher plant. But at least those pieces seemed to serve the agenda of his organization — discrediting the competition and defending the faithful.

Here he plays the contrarian — the Jewish, nay, global, consensus, is that Madoff was a scoundrel and Sully was a hero — but to what end? What did he think he or the haredi world would gain by heading off in a different direction when it comes to Madoff and Sullenberger?

UPDATE: JTA has announced that Shafran has retracted his oped.