JustASC

In September, NJJN’s Bob Wiener reported on the seemingly far-fetched claim by NJ racist Internet radio host Hal Turner that he was actually a government mole, “paid by the FBI to make violent anti-Jewish and anti-black statements.” His lawyer told Bob:

…between 2002 and 2007, the FBI paid Turner “cash in the tens of thousands of dollars.” The attorney insisted there is “tangible evidence” of their relationship. But he said such proof is “under seal by the courts because it is the file of an intelligence operative. The evidence is incontrovertible, and it is accurate, 100 percent accurate.”

Well, the Bergen Record dug a little deeper, got a look at those sealed documents, and sure enough:

…an investigation by The Record — based on government documents, e-mails, court records and almost 20 hours of jailhouse interviews with Turner — shows that federal authorities made frequent use of Turner in its battle against domestic terrorism.

As Turner took to his radio show and blog to say that those who opposed his extremist views deserve to die, he received thousands of dollars from the FBI to report on such groups as the Aryan Nations and the white supremacist National Alliance, and even a member of the Blue Eyed Devils skinhead punk band. Later, he was sent undercover to Brazil where he reported a plot to send non-military supplies to anti-American Iraqi resistance fighters. Sometimes he signed “Valhalla” on his FBI payment receipts instead of his own name.

From last year, a haggadah for doing Thanksgiving like a member of the tribe:

Welcoming the Guests: As the guests gather in the front hall, the youngest child no longer in diapers is asked to take their coats and put them in an upstairs bedroom. Parents are to recite the age-old admonition, “And place them nicely — don’t just throw them.”

The Blessing: Before the meal, two toasts are recited: The first, by the teenagers, is mocking and inappropriate; the second, thanking God, is self-conscious and slightly uncomfortable for everyone at the table. (This is in contrast to the closing blessing, said with deep feeling by the host and hostess: “Thank God we don’t have to do this again for another year.”)

The Bitter Herb: No one knows the origins of this ancient custom, but it involves keeping the liquor away from your angriest guest. In some families he is named “Herb”; in others it is Morris or Aunt Faye.

The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen takes down a new book which claims the modern-day Jews are not descended from the Judeans of the First and Second Temple period, but are descendants of various converts who reverse engineered their links to the Holy Land.

Cohen clearly signals to the reader that Shlomo Sand, the author of The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso Books), is pushing an agenda, and that his book is a polemic, not a careful or serious piece of scholarship.

Cohen calls out Sand on his use of “dubious theories” (as opposed to “theories some have called dubious,” which invites the benefit of the doubt) and she remains similarly skeptical throughout. She highlights Sand’s agenda: “Professor Sand’s mission is to discredit Jews’ historical claims to the territory,” which guides the reader to take his theorizing with a grain of salt. She shows no sign in waffling or wiggling in quoting someone who says “experts who specialize in the subject have repeatedly rejected the theory.”

This paragraph is especially damning of Sand and his methodology:

Professor Sand accuses Zionist historians from the 19th century onward — the very same scholars on whose work he bases his case — of hiding the truth and creating a myth of shared roots to strengthen their nationalist agenda. He explains that he has uncovered no new information, but has “organized the knowledge differently.” In other words, he is doing precisely what he accuses the Zionists of — shaping the material to fit a narrative.

The debate – and the Jews – are well served by Cohen’s piece, which eschews “objective” news reporting for analysis. If done as a straight-forward news story, the reporter would have been obligated to offer “equal time” to the other side of the argument – X says this, but Y says this. The Times did this in covering the “intelligent design” debate – in trying to appear objective, they put ID “experts” on an equal footing with genuine biologists and “balanced” the overwhelming evidence of the scientific method with folklore.

I think we should thank Cohen for not bowing to the false god of objectivity.

Former White House Jewish liaison (and Champlain Colony alumnus) Tevi Troy is the latest to try to make hay out of the fact that the Obama administration has trimmed the guest list for the White House Chanuka celebration by half.

The White House said it was doing so to trim costs and leave room for the administration to expand the list over the next few years to accomodate a changing roster of friends and petitioners.

Troy has his doubts:

Yet one wonders if there is more to this reduction than the reasons given by the administration, such as the high cost of kosher food and a desire to allow the list to grow over time.

Over the past year, the Obama administration has given the Jewish community a number of reasons to fear that it takes its votes for granted. For instance, there is the administration’s pressure on the Israeli government over settlements. And many Jews are concerned with the selection of Mary Robinson — a leader of the Durban conference boycotted by both Israel and the United States for its anti-Israel bias — to win a Medal of Freedom. In addition, the administration attempted — but eventually backed away from — to put Israel critic Charles Freeman at the head of the National Intelligence Council.

The administration’s move, as Politico noted, “comes on the heels of Obama’s cancellation of an appearance before the General Assembly of North American Jewish Federations.” (This was one instance where the president deserves the benefit of the doubt, having made the understandable decision to attend a memorial service for the victims at Fort Hood instead. Nonetheless, it has fueled the concerns of some who see it as part of a string of slights.)

The last point is interesting — any reasonable person would agree that the Ft. Hood funeral took emergency precedence over a gathering of Jewish fundraising leaders. Troy gets to have it both ways — take the high road by giving Obama a pass, but include the criticism anyway, attribute the concern to an unnamed “some,”  and keep the empty complaint alive. 

He does the same thing with the party kerfuffle. In talking about the party, Troy essentially concedes, from experience, the administration’s main points — namely, that the pressure on the White House staff to keep expanding the list becomes enormous, that it will only be harder on a Democratic president who enjoyed a huge Jewish majority in the 2008 election, and that in these belt-tightening times kosher food is considerably more expensive than non-.

In fact, half the essay reads as a defense of the administration from a former Jewish liaison who understands the process better than most. But that would deny Obama’s critics a chance to pile on, and deny Troy his partisan point, so he adds this:

For these reasons, while the size of the party may not be a big deal in the grand scheme of things, even some of Obama’s supporters may see it in the context of this longer train of politically tone-deaf decisions.

Thee’s that “some” again. Troy gets to take the high road (“some — maybe not me — may find this objectionable”) while still scoring his partisan point and keeping this non-controversy alive. C’mon, Tevi — you were an advisor to a president. Give it to us straight: If you were Obama’s Jewish liaison, would you have trimmed the guest list? 

Commenting in the Jerusalem Post, Nathan Diament of the Orthodox Union takes the highest road of all — although a critic of some of the moves Troy outlines above, he won’t take the bait:

“As we know from Biblical times, we Jews are very good at complaining,” he said. “People shouldn’t complain. It’s very nice that President Obama is having a Hanukka party.

“People can choose to gripe about the guest list or any other aspect of it, but the fact is this White House is going to continue this practice, which is a lovely thing.”

 Sarah Palin tells Barbara Walters:

I disagree with the Obama administration on [a settlement freeze]. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon, because that population of Israel is, is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

I won’t comment on her politics (Americans for Peace Now was first out of the gate with a mighty jeer from the left; I’ll post the ZOA’s inevitable huzzah when they send it). But it’s hard to know what she means by Jews “flocking to Israel.” There’s no big refusenik population out there about to be set free. No big aliyot are anticipated (unless she knows something we don’t). Perhaps she’s thinking apocalyptically, as some are suggesting — some strains of Evangelical Christianity believe in the ingathering of the Jews in Israel as a harbinger of End Times.

Or perhaps she has a dated and even romantic view of Israel and the Diaspora attachment to it.

My guess is she was briefed on this and had the two key talking points: “natural growth of the settlements” and the idea that the U.S. has no right to dictate policy to Israel. But in between those two points she went rogue, and added some unnecessary and inaccurate color.

Back from Florida. Mitch Perry, a reporter and blogger for the local alternative weekly Creative Loafing, covered my speech there last night (quite well, I might add):

Despite claims by critics on the right and the left to the contrary , the New York Times continues to remain one of the most (if not the most) powerful media organizations in the U.S. And their op-ed columnists continue to have a major influence on political opinion and on our culture.

According to Andrew Silow-Carroll, the editor in chief of New Jersey Jewish News, several of the paper’s Jewish columnists also are representative of the different Jewish perspectives on political discourse regarding U.S. and Israel policies in 2009.

(more…)

HaZamir, the Jewish youth choir featuring kids from NJ and NY, performed with Debbie Friedman at Central Synagogue last Thursday in a fundraiser for  Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and its School of Sacred Music. 

And yes, that’s my daughter. She’s in the white shirt.

I’m off to Tampa tomorrow and Wednesday for a speech. Please don’t rob my house.

I get to stay in a hotel by the airport. Meanwhile, Ron Kaplan, our features editor and sports blogger, is also in Tampa, attending a weeklong kosher Yankees Fantasy Camp (which I think means participants get to work out with current and former Yankees and eat kosher food [at least I hope that's what it means -- if their fantasy involves Derek Jeter, a jar of shmaltz, and the soundtack of Yentl, I don't want to know about it]).

You can follow Ron’s adventures here.

Check out our latest NJJN video — that’s me talking about a new study on language by Hebrew Union College. I was going for a mellow, NPR vibe, but somehow come out sounding like Linus from Peanuts.

The Begin-Sadat Center For Strategic Studies at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University (BESA)  has distributed two articles on J Street, one critical by David Weinberg, and now a defense of the group by Dov Waxman. Weinberg called J Street a “new form of Jewish apostasy.” Waxman writes that J Street is “enlarging the pro-Israel tent, allowing more American Jews to identify themselves as being pro-Israel without having to be uncritical knee-jerk supporters of Israeli governments.”

I think it is pretty rare for one Jewish think tank to offer a forum for such divergent views. Every think tank in the Jewish world likes to call itself non-partisan and non-ideological, but each tends to be fairly predictable, consistent, and one-sided in the kinds of analysis it produces, right or left (proving “knee-jerk” is not just a symptom of the left).

Good for BESA for airing an internal disagreement, and adding to the wider debate in the Jewish community.