JustASC

Ha’aretz clears up what Gen. Petraeus said about Israel and U.S. interests, but look how the third paragraph sloppily sows confusion:

Petraeus denies saying Israel endangers lives of U.S. troops

By Amir Oren and Natasha Mozgovaya

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. Military’s Central Command, telephoned Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi Wednesday to deny the reports he had blamed Israeli policy for the failure to reach a regional solution and for endangering the lives of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East.

This was not the first conversation between the two generals. The two had met at Petraeus’ initiative not long ago, but in Israel they were surprised that the commander of CENTCOM broke the news of the conversation yesterday before a lecture in New Hampshire, as here efforts were made to adhere to an American request to keep exchanges under wraps.

Earlier this month, Petraeus warned the Pentagon that “America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers,” in a posting on the Foreign Policy Web site.

The phrase, “America’s relationship with Israel is important, but not as important as the lives of America’s soldiers,” was never a direct quote from Petraeus, but an assertion by the author of the Foreign Policy piece, Mark Perry. Maybe it’s a question of poor translation, but Ha’aretz leaves the impression that Petraeus is withdrawing a remark he never said.

This is a cute e-mail running around the web (the gullible, beware: it’s a parody – either that, or the AP just happens to have a correspondent whose name sounds suspiciously like Hebrew for “Next year…”):

Passover Hagaddah conclusion “Next Year in Jerusalem” deemed “unhelpful” by Obama administration

By The Associated Press

Shana Habbab (AP White House Correspondent)

March 23, 2010

(AP) — An unidentified Israeli official has confirmed that private discussions between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu included a strong request from the President that the upcoming Passover holiday not include the familiar refrain of “next year in Jerusalem”, citing the passage as being provocative and unhelpful for future peace talks.

The Administration suggested replacing it with “next year in peace” or “next year in Israel ”, but leaving the final wording up to both the Israelis and Palestinians.

Netanyahu is said to have balked at the request, indicating that the refrain dates back many years before the UN Partition of 1947. The Prime Minister reportedly attempted to diffuse the situation by noting that the declaration lacks any political significance, adding that most people living outside of Israel just “say the words without having a real desire to live in East Jerusalem”, further explaining that, at most, they would like to come for the Passover holiday, staying at one of the hotels located in Western part of the city.

If this is a hoax, they’ve done a good job at covering their tracks: A new restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn called “Traif,” “celebrating pork, shellfish & globally-inspired soul food.”

 Jason Marcus, “the chef and co-owner of Traif,” explains at this blog:

Traif is a hebrew word that essentially refers to un-kosher foods. I am Jewish, although obviously not great at it. So, Traif is a restaurant that celebrates the foods that I love most, which just so happens to be the foods that I am not supposed to eat. At Traif, we will feature pork and shellfish. Do you like bacon in everything, wish that your bowl of moules-frites would never end? Then, you might be very excited for Traif. 

Or not.

Gen. Petraeus, who took heat from the ADL for purportedly suggesting that U.S. support for Israel hinders America’s military effort in the Mideast, confirms what I wrote in a previous post: His chief remarks on the subject were cherry-picked from a quite lengthy document and distorted.

Here he talks to the American Spectator, the conservative web site:

In addition, he explained that the quote that bloggers attributed to his Senate testimony was actually plucked out of context from a report that Central Command had sent the Armed Services committee.

“There’s a 56-page document that we submitted that has a statement in it that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process,” he said. “We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean, that is a perception. It is there. I don’t think that’s disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly.”

He also noted that there were plenty of other important factors that were mentioned in the report, including “a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which by the way deny Israel’s right to exist. There’s a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place.”

Petraeus continued, “So we have all the factors in there, but this is just one, and it was pulled out of this 56-page document, which was not what I read to the Senate at all.”

Interesting political context for the Spectator piece — as a conservative publication it is fairly hardline on Israel (see here and here). Prior to this, it was left-wing pro-Israel groups, like Americans for Peace Now, who were defending Petraeus. So what gives? It comes down to “the enemy of my enemy”; as the Spectator‘s Philip Klein explains, the idea that U.S. support for Israel engangers Amerians “was quickly seized on by critics of Israel as confirmation of their view that U.S. support for Israel hinders America’s national security interests.”

A few years ago, in a well-received dvar Torah (sermonette) I gave at my synagogue, I brought about a dozen children’s books based on the Noah’s Ark story (when one of your sons is a Noah you tend to collect them). I discussed the various directions in which the authors and the illustrators took the story. Many gave it an environmental spin. Others played the crowded ark for laughs. All wrestled to some degree with how to portray the “wickedness of man” that caused God to wipe out everyone but Noah. And ALL ended before  Noah gets drunk and naked (Genesis 9:21).

I described each of the books as a midrash — a creative interpretation or commentary on classic Jewish texts — and showed how they and classic Jewish commentaries struggled with the same questions.  ”All translation is commentary,” as Leo Baeck supposedly had it. It was a great exercise to see what the authors and illustrators left out, left in, changed, and embellished.

Ilan Stavans picks up this theme in a long essay for Zeek, on the Jewish contriubtion to children’s literature. Writes Stavans:

When my children were little, before tucking them into bed, I frequently read them the Chelm tales from [I.B. Singer's Stories for Children]that I bought after discovering it in the library. My own reading wasn’t passive. What I enjoyed the most was emulating my mother, deliberately changing parts of the story I came across in the book, setting portions of the plot in our home town, including people my kids and I knew well as characters. At first my children would get annoyed by the intrusion, but in the end that’s what they most appreciated. I wanted the oral and the written to converge in me. For I had learned that reading picture books among Jews is an active, creative endeavor in which the reader controls the tale, becoming a full partner in its authorship.

In Haaretz, Yehuda Ben Meir (research fellow at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies and co-founder of the left-wing religious Zionist party Meimad) reports on two different polls finding between 41 percent and 46 percent of Israelis believe Israel should stop building in East Jerusalem until the end of negotiations with the Palestinians. Writes Ben Meir:

The Israeli public knows the difference between historical Jerusalem and those Arab neighborhoods that have never been part of the city. Therefore, the entire Jewish people, and the U.S. government as well, fully supported the restoration of the Hurva Synagogue in the Old City because this was justified. It embodies the revival of the Jewish people in their land, as well as their connection to the sites of their heritage and their right to possess them. Dispossessing Arabs of their homes and attempts to take over clearly Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem are not accepted by the world, including most American Jews, and according to the poll results, not even by a large part of Israel’s Jewish population.

Is there a statute of limitations on reports that “kosher wine has come of age”?  Let’s start with a current article in the Chicago Tribune and work backwards, oh, a quarter century:

Kosher wine, beyond sweet red, Chicago Tribune, March 24, 2010

PASSOVER WINES GO BEYOND THE SWEET, Cape Cod Times, April 1, 2009

Dry and colorful, not syrupy sweet, Israeli wines come of age, JTA, September 25, 2008

MAZEL TOV! KOSHER WINE LOSES ITS ‘TERRIBLE’ REP, Roanoke Times & World News, March 28, 2007

Excellent kosher wine no longer a pipe dream, Colorado Springs Gazette,  March 29, 2006

Kosher wines have evolved beyond sweet beginnings, South Florida Sun Sentinel,  April 1, 2004

Once Sweet and Heavy, Now Dry and Desirable, New York Times, April 16, 2003

Not Your Grandmother’s Kosher Wine, New York Times, January 2, 2000

SAY `L’CHAIM’ TO GOOD KOSHER WINE, Albany Times Union, October 26, 1997 

Manischewitz Only Sweet? Not Anymore, New York Times, March 23, 1994

Wine Talk, New York Times, March 8, 1989:

“In the last decade, kosher wines in America have broken out of their traditional mold…”

WINE TALK, New York Times, March 11, 1987

Suddenly, kosher wines have become chic. Now that sweet is out, they are not for Jews alone.

NEW WAVE’ KOSHER, The New York Times, April 13, 1986:

WAS 5744 A GOOD YEAR FOR GOLAN HEIGHTS sauvignon blanc? Any Beaujolais-Villages left? Champagne? Such questions, relevant at the Passover table, reflect growing interest in what a Manhattan merchant calls ”the new wave” in kosher wines. The old wave – heavy syrupy sweet red – is not spent. But …

Leon Wieseltier has a powerful and logical answer to anyone who insists that Jews have a “right” to live anywhere in Jerusalem, including predominately Arab sections like Skeikh Jarrah:

Since the Palestinian right of return, and its premise that restoration is preferable to reconciliation, would undo the Jewish state, Israel is right to deny it. But if, in the name of moral realism, and so that they do not delude themselves with catastrophic fantasies of starting over, Palestinians are not to be granted a right to return to what was theirs before 1948, then neither should such a right be granted to Jews.

When Jews fled Sheikh Jarrah, they fled to a Jewish state, which should have been worth the loss of their property; and the same would have been true of the Palestinians, if their Arab brethren had allowed the state of Palestine to come into being. But the lunatic Jews who insist that a Jew must live anywhere a Jew ever lived do not see that they, too, are re-opening 1948 and the legitimacy of what it established. Why does the Israeli government allow the argument for a unified Jerusalem to be mistaken for the heartless revanchism of these settlers?

Whatever arrangements about Jerusalem are eventually made in a peace agreement, and I no longer expect to see one in my lifetime, Jerusalem will remain both the capital of Israel and a demographically mottled city. It makes no sense to show contempt for the people with whom you are destined to live. It is not only cruel, it is stupid.

So where, when it came time to comment on the health care legislation, were the kinds of Jewish groups who are seldom slow in issuing news releases? JTA explains:

Some supporters of the bill say partisan politics may explain the silence of several large organizations that at various points over the past year have pushed for the bill or portions of it.

The [Jewish Federations of North America], which raises close to $2 billion per year through its more than 150 federations — and lobbies the federal government for hundreds of millions more to help care for the elderly — has been silent since the House vote, even though the federations and the Jewish Family Service organizations that they potentially have much to gain.

“We will not be issuing any statements on this issue,” the spokesman for Jewish Federations wrote in an e-mail.

Outside observers are saying that the federations, like some other large organizations, are now stuck in a position where they may be happy that the bill passed, but cannot publicly say so for fear of upsetting major donors who side with the Republicans on the issue.

The highly charged, bitterly partisan fight that the world observed on Capital Hill over the past week has spilled into the board rooms of many Jewish organizations, making it harder for some to take very public stances on the bill, backers said.

“It’s amazing how few Jewish groups got into this fight,” the RAC’s executive director, Rabbi David Saperstein, told JTA. “The Conservative movement and a few others co-sponsored a call with the president in which they brought this up. The Orthodox didn’t do anything. The federation system was nominally supportive of it.”

A couple of years back, I don’t remember where, I read a story about  images that “rhyme” — real photos that fortuitously echo famous paintings, or photos separated by time or space that share a strong resemblance.

I had a similar sensation of rhyming over the past three days, as I stumbled across three different artistic creations that share a gimmick.

First, a video from Penguin Books. Be patient, it has a great payoff:

Next, the New York Times Book Review reviewed The Upside-Down World Of Gustave Verbeek, about a 100-year-old Sunday comic strip “whose every episode could be flipped upside down to show the second half of its narrative.” (Click here for a larger image.)

Finally Pat Merrell’s puzzle blog, which I looked at today for the first time ever, had this palindrome poem: