JustASC

The Jerusalem Post has an article on the state of Jewish newspapering. Bottom line: We’re suffering, but unlike some bigger players in the industry, our affluent niche audience is keeping us alive and slightly more confident in the future.  Sounds about right.

(One  perspective missing from the story, which focused on independently owned publications like the L.A. Jewish Journal, the Forward, and the Washington Jewish Week: The status of federation-owned newspapers like my own, which make up maybe half of the Jewish weeklies in the country.  I would have said that our circulation strategy [the bulk of the paper's subscribers are donors to the federation] is doubly vulnerable, what with a grim economy and the federation movement’s struggles to define itself for a new generation. We’ll have to develop new circulation strategies if we’re to outlive our loyal but aging readers.)

In my column last week, I tried to explain U.S.-Israel relations in terms of the Henry Louis Gates brewhaha. Now The Root, the African-American magazine site, tries explaining “the argument between conservative and progressive Jews” in terms of black notions of ethnic disloyalty and authenticity. It’s sort of a complicated thesis, but here’s the gist:

In the eyes of those who support all of Israel’s actions uncritically, left-wing Jews who criticize Israel are “House Jews”: Jews whose positions on Israel are motivated by their internalizing longstanding anti-Semitic myths and identifying with those who seek to oppress the Jewish people…. 

[Those who support all of Israel's actions uncritically] envision themselves as “Field Jews” — those with the best interests of the community in mind.

Like I said, it’s sort of complicated. But for a primer on House Slaves and Field Slaves, go here.

The ADL is upset with Rush Limbaugh for invoking Nazi comparisons in deriding the Obama health care plan. Limbaugh compared Organizing for America’s health care logo to a swastika (it’s actually a caduceus, the snakes-wrapped-around-a-staff thing that’s a universal symbolof the medical arts. Check out the U.S. Army Medical Corps logo at the top of this page). 

But there’s an even weirder Limbaugh formula, if that’s possible,  in his statement about Democrats and Nazism last Thursday:

Now, what are the similarities between the Democrat Party of today and the Nazi Party in Germany? Well, the Nazis were against big business — they hated big business. And of course we all know that they were opposed to Jewish capitalism. They were insanely, irrationally against pollution. They were for two years mandatory voluntary service to Germany. They had a whole bunch of make-work projects to keep people working, one of which was the Autobahn….

Whoa, whoa — the Nazis were opposed to “Jewish capitalism”? This must be unpacked.

True, the Nazis blamed — actually, scapegoated — Jewish capitalists for Germany’s economic  woes. (They also blamed Jewish communists, Bolsheviks, and socialists, but never mind.) But is Limbaugh saying that capitalism is itself “Jewish”? Or that there is a specific branch of capitalism that is “Jewish”?

Limbaugh’s defenders might say he meant this: the Nazis considered capitalism Jewish, and hated it because of that. In that case, for his charge to make sense, it must follow that the Democrats also consider capitalism to be “Jewish,”  which is why they supposedly oppose it. He really wants to go that far? Or is he saying that opposing capitalism is the same as anti-Semitism? (That would be news to these guys.)

What he probably means to say is this: “The Nazis opposed capitalism; so do the Democrats.” Throwing in “Jewish” is creepily reductive, suggesting at the very least that Limbaugh thinks the Final Solution was an attack on capitalist scapegoats, instead of the totality of ethnic and racial Jewishness.  At worst, it suggests that Limbaugh thinks “Judaism” and “capitalism” are one and the same.

Perhaps most disturbing is that Limbaugh assumes his listeners would know exactly what he is talking about.

I’m off to Florida for a few days. May be too hot to blog.

Drew University prof J. Terry Todd has news about Promise Keepers, the Christian ministry famous for attracting hordes of men to its stadium revivals. The group is going after Jews in a big way, he writes:

Another major change was the prominence of Messianic Jewish speakers and entertainers at [last week's] rally [at Folsom Field at the University of Colorado in Boulder]. On Friday evening July 31st, Promise Keeper President Raleigh Washington offered a welcome to those he called “our special guests, Jewish believers.”

“Shabbat Shalom!” he yelled, and the crowd gave it up with gusto. Over the course of the two-day event, a parade of Messianic Jewish speakers and entertainers joined veteran movement personalities – Coach Mac, Raleigh Washington, and Tony Evans – on the stage before the largely white, middle-aged (and presumably Gentile) audience. They included Rabbis Jonathan Bernis and Joel Chernoff, Dan Juster, and musicians Paul Wilbur and Marty Goetz. The Folsom Field rally was, in some sense, a coming out party for Messianic Judaism, a movement almost completely unknown to most American Christians.

This ain’t your daddy’s Jews for Jesus, the rally seemed to be saying.

Hamas is getting into the movie business, with a biopic about a terrorist that they hope to enter in the Cannes Film Festival.

Reuters reports:

An audience in the Gaza Strip clapped and cheered during the premiere of Imad Aqel when an actor delivered the film’s most memorable line: “To kill Israeli soldiers is to worship God.”

My friend and former Forward colleague Alana Newhouse has written a piece for New York on Madoff, the NJ Rabbis Scandal, and the price of Jewish exceptionalism:

Even liberal, assimilated Jews can’t help but believe that there is something special-better, smarter-about their people. Except when their people show up in handcuffs on the news  — at which point the arguments turn to Jewish ordinariness: Every group has its criminals, we are no better or worse than anyone else, to think any different is to hold Jews to a higher standard than other groups are held, etc.

Well, you can’t have it both ways. The fact is that Jews are exceptional. There can be no debate that various historical factors — including a communal reverence for intellectual acuity, along with centuries of marginalization — primed Jews for, first, survival, and then uncommon achievement. The rub is that those very same factors might have predisposed them to distinction in less-savory domains. Maybe we can’t have Philip Roth and Leonard Bernstein without Bernie Madoff and the informant behind the Jersey busts, Solomon Dwek. 

I don’t like to use wire service photos (people should pay for the privilege) but I feel like making an exception in the case of some powerful and fascinating photos of the funerals of those killed in yesterday’s attack on a LGBT community center in Tel Aviv.

According to the caption, the photo shows Chen Katz placing a rainbow flag on the grave of her brother Nir during his funeral in Modiin.  Note especially the “Tzahal” banner (indicating Nir served in the IDF) and the fervently Orthodox men standing near the grave.