JustASC

Matt Berger, who used to write for JTA and report for NBC News, writes about New Jersey hate crimes statistics at Sphere, AOL’s news site. Berger says statistics showing NJ to be the hate crimes capital of the country are misleading:

But while the old adage is that numbers don’t lie, New Jersey officials say the FBI statistics reveal something very different about their state. They claim the reason the state’s numbers are so high (second only to much-larger California’s) is that it is so unusually committed to monitoring and reporting such offenses, which they refer to as “bias crimes.”

“I think the numbers are so skewed because we in New Jersey take this issue so seriously,” said Detective David D’Amico of the Monmouth County prosecutor’s office.

We posted a new video, tied into my column this week. Sorry about the sound quality at the beginning and the end — we’re working on getting better equipment.

An influx of East Coast students to Midwestern colleges like the University of Wisconsin-Madison has added a new bit of slang – ”coastie” — and some charges of anti-Semitism.

The A.P. explains:

The “Coastie Song,” featuring students Quincy Harrison and Cliff Grefe rapping about the coastie girls wearing tights, Ugg boots and North Face jackets, quickly became an Internet hit this fall. Tens of thousands of people heard the song on MySpace and saw the video on YouTube and it’s even available on iTunes….

 Some Jewish students object to the song’s references to a “Jewish American Princess” and “My east coast Jewish honey” who wastes her father’s money. Greg Steinberger, executive director of Hillel at UW-Madison, a Jewish group, said it was unseemly for Harrison and Grefe to profit from a song “made to purposely make fun of and hurt their neighbors.”

Harrison and Grefe, known on campus as Quincy and Beef, say the song was not meant to insult Jews. Harrison said in the song he is flirting with a good-looking coastie that he wants to get to know better.

“If anything, it’s complimentary,” said the 21-year-old from Bloomington, Ind.

Judge for yourself:

Jonathan Chait, at The New Republic , offers a Grand Unifying Theory as to why Joe Lieberman keeps “saying these wrong, uninformed things”: he’s not all that bright. Explains Chait:

I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it’s not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it’s part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He’s the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn’t have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it’s big government and he should oppose it. I think it’s basically that simple.

More pseudo-exotic Jew-spotting, courtesy of Jack Shafer: The Los Angeles Times profiles Eddie Goldstein, one of the last Jews left in the city’s now largely Latino Boyle Heights neighborhood.

Slate’s Jack Shafer dissects a recent New York Times story on Montana’s sparse Jewish population, calling it the latest example of the paper’s penchant for “pseudo-exotic Jewspotting.” 

Shafer complains:

Jewspotting stories appear to be about something when they’re really about nothing. Then why such enthusiasm for them at the Times? Because journalists love to write about holdouts—the guy who refuses to sell his home, the Papua New Guinea tribe that won’t become “civilized,” the last blacksmith in town, the last survivor of World War I, even the last Oldsmobile. Rarity stories are easy to write, and their sappiness makes them even easier to read.

I suspect that the relative stability of Jewish populations—outside a drop in inhospitable countries—is the real story. But things staying the same is the opposite of a story, right?

I think Shafer may have underestimated the popularity of these stories among Jewish readers. The day the Montana story appeared in the Times, it was the buzz of my New Jersey synagogue. We excerpted it in our paper’s round-up of the week’s lighter news.

Tha being said, the “The Last Jews of _____” stories are a cliche, so much so that I wrote a parody of them a few years back:

The last Jews of [Blank]

It’s Friday evening, and the sun is going down in this [mountain/ desert/ jungle] village in the far reaches of [Europe/ Asia/ Arkansas]. In the pews sit [nine elderly men/ three elderly men and six Peace Corps volunteers/ eight elderly men and a reporter with a severe head cold]. They are waiting for a 10th man to complete the minyan, the prayer quorum.

“You should have been here 20 years ago,” says [Isaac/ Yitzchok/ Ygplyx] Cohen, the aging gabbai. “On a Friday night, we had 500 people. Even the [king/ imam/ local sheriff] would pay his respects.”

But that was before [insert global tragedy]. After that, most of the community moved to [Israel/ America/ the suburbs]. Those who remained are now led by [a Lubavitcher emissary/ a Greek Orthodox plumber who speaks broken Hebrew/ a Reform rabbinical student who lost her Eurail pass].

But this week there is hope, and the once grand synagogue will host its first bar mitzva in decades. The bar mitzva boy is [Ethan/ Josh/ Ari] [family name of prominent philanthropist], whose parents have come to the place where [his great-grandfather grew up/ his grandparents owned the local butcher shop/ his father’s company is now outsourcing its customer-service department].

“It’s a mitzva to remember the past,” said [Ethan/ Josh/ Ari]. “And as part of my bar mitzva project, I have collected [prayer books/ warm socks/ one-way airfare] for the community members.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United States Michael Oren  blasts J Street:

Addressing a breakfast session at the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism’s biennial convention December 7, Ambassador Michael Oren described J Street as “a unique problem in that it not only opposes one policy of one Israeli government, it opposes all policies of all Israeli governments. It’s significantly out of the mainstream.”

After a speech that touched on the spiritual basis for and the threats to the state of Israel, Oren issued an unscripted condemnation of J Street.

“This is not a matter of settlements here [or] there. We understand there are differences of opinion,” Oren said. “But when it comes to the survival of the Jewish state, there should be no differences of opinion. You are fooling around with the lives of 7 million people. This is no joke.”

Read the comments from readers that follow the Forward story, which capture the range and tone of the debate over J Street. A sampling:

* Ambassador Oren’s are but one more example of the extent to which Israel, over 42 years, if not more, has dammed up the democratic stream and the human rights stream. In its place, the “mainstream” that Israel has created is actually a stagnant pond of Occupation, ongoing violations of human rights and international law, extremism and paranoia.

* Was this before or after J Street started accepting significant amounts of money from Arab individuals and organizations?

* As a proud J Street supporter, a young Jewish professional, and a former resident of Israel with two Israeli sisters, as well as countless friends and family there, I can’t help but feel that Mr. Oren’s remarks are not merely an attack on J Street, but an attack on my entire community of family, friends and colleagues who share with J Street its desire for a negotiated two state solution and a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Iranian conflicts.

* What’s the big deal? JStreet is anti-Israel. If it was anti-Mongolia I’m sure the Mongolian ambassador would speak out against it. Oren is the Israeli ambassador so he is merely doing his job.

* its all again the same story the less affiliated jews claim that they care about israel when they have no connection to the jewish people and the jewish state and the more observant jews are against the j street anti israel because they feel a connection to the jewish people and the state of israel.

* The larger issue here is greater than J St. (I am a supporter and proudly participated in the October conference.) Oren, and his allies, are waging an all-out effort to de-legitimize all criticism in the USA of basic Netanyahu policy that will never get us to a two-state solution.

The National Jewish Democratic Council is challenging the Quinnipiac poll that suggests declining Jewish support for Obama (see previous post). The NJDC says the poll has an unacceptably high margin of error and too few Jewish respondents to be reliable. 

“This is the latest in a long stream of examples in which the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) leans on polls with truly tiny Jewish subsamples, yielding unacceptably high margins of error. In this case, the wild fluctuation from month to month in Quinnipiac’s Jewish approval rating — swinging more than 20 percent in three weeks — shows how unreliable this sample is, and how desperate and over-reaching the RJC are in their efforts,” said David A. Harris, NJDC’s President. “I know the RJC and their friends continue to hope for their Chanukah miracle, but this flawed polling result isn’t it.”

JTA’s Eric Fingerhut has more on the poll:

Quinnipiac says that just 71 Jews were surveyed for the poll, for a margin of error of plus or minus 11.6 percent. And pollsters continually say that such a sample is way too small to be reliable.

If you believe two new polls, Obama is getting more popular among Israelis and less popular among American Jews.

Accaording to a poll of Israelis by the Washington-based New America Foundation:

Overall, Obama has a 41 percent favorable / 37 percent unfavorable rating among Israelis, which is notably stronger than opinion toward the Israeli Defense and Foreign Ministers, and his unfavorable rating is only four points higher than the unfavorable rating for George W. Bush, who is routinely characterized as very popular among Israelis.  A majority (55 percent) believes Obama is honest and trustworthy – considerably higher than the 36 percent who believe the same of Prime Minister Netanyahu – and 52 percent believe Obama will strengthen America’s standing in the world.

The pollsters say the results paint “a very different picture from the narrative that has taken hold regarding Israeli attitudes toward President Obama and American efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Meanwhile, the Republican Jewish Coalition trumpets a Quinnipiac poll about Obama’s approval rating back home:

According to a Quinnipiac poll released today, Jewish support for President Obama has tumbled to 52%. In January, Obama’s approval rating among Jews was 83%; by September it had fallen to 64%, according to a Gallup poll.

The Quinnipiac poll asked respondents whether they approved of President Obama’s handling of specific issues. Only 52% of Jewish respondents approved of the way President Obama is handling the economy, and 49% approved of his handling of health care.

Among Jewish respondents, only 36% were satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. today.

Of course, one key here is that Obama’s ratings are dipping among Americans in general, and Jews are Americans.

What’s wrong with this picture (literally, can you spot the “mistake”?):

Before I give you the answer, some background: This is a piece of stock art used by one of our advertisers in a recent Hanukka ad. A nice ecumenical gesture on the part of a non-Jewish company, right?  

But the advertiser now tells us that a few customers called to complain that there is a mistake in the picture — and as the recipient of similar calls on similar mistakes, I can guess the attitude of the complainants: Not, “I thought you might want to know that there is an amusing error in something you published” but “How could you do such a thing!? It’s an insult!”

Yeah, we should have caught it. But newspapers are staffed by human beings, and you have to do a double-take to notice the blooper in this one. I can understand why people are sticklers for accuracy, especially when it comes to ritual, but why the attitude?

If you haven’t figured it out, the photo depicts someone using the eighth candle to light the shamash, or helper candle, not the other way around. Technically, I suppose, the person could be lighting the ninth candle off of the shamash, which could have been lit first, which sounds kosher to me. But that also sounds pedantic.

(Another mistake: The custom is to add candles each night from right to left, and to light the candles left to right [the 'newest' candle goes first]. In this case, the menora has been lit right to left, assuming, which you don’t have to do, that the photograph is taken from the lighter’s perspective.)

Anyway, if you need a primer on the right way to light a Hanukka menora, go here.

And in the spirit of Hanukka, chill.