JustASC

“Now, as we move forward and deal with law of war issues, Christmas Day bomber, where were you at on Christmas Day?”

– Sen. Lindsey Graham questioning
Elena Kagan during Senate Confirmation Hearings

An unnamed source close to Graham leaked these following questions, which Graham intended to ask during the confirmation hearings:

1/ Now I’d like to talk about terrorism detainees. Do you know what Easter is?

2/ On the war on terror, you could, in my view, if confirmed, provide the court with some real-world experience about what this country’s facing. Is Larry David funny to you? He just makes me uncomfortable.

3/ The question is: Can you make sure that you’re not channeling your political agenda, your political leanings when it comes time to render decisions? Another question is: Do you know where I can get a good bagel in Washington? I thought you might know.

4/   You’re going to have a lot of explaining to do to me about why you picked Judge Barak as your hero because when I read his writings, it’s a bit disturbing about his view of what a judge is supposed to do for society as a whole. Or maybe some folks just like to stick together. Are you one of those folks who likes to stick together?

5/ You come with no judicial record, but you’re not the first person to come before the committee without having been a judge. There’s Warren Burger, of course. Funny name, “Burger.” What do you think of that name, “Burger”? Kind of funny, right?

6/ You argued against expanding habeas rights to Bagram detainees held in Afghanistan, is that correct? Hanukka is what, like eight days? Do you give presents on all eight days?  

Every news account on the Kagan hearings is quoting this exchange and Kagan’s great quip — but no one seems to be explaining, or even asking, why Sen. Graham wanted to know where she spent Christmas:

GRAHAM: Now, as we move forward and deal with law of war issues, Christmas Day bomber, where were you at on Christmas Day?

KAGAN: Senator Graham, that is an undecided legal issue, which — the — well, I suppose I should ask exactly what you mean by that. I’m assuming that the question you mean is whether a person who is apprehended in the United States is…

GRAHAM: No, I just asked you where you were at on Christmas.

KAGAN: You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.

GRAHAM: All right. Great answer.

To a weird question.

An excerpt from Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor And Richard Burton And The Marriage Of The Century by Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger:

Friends noted how she and Richard enjoyed heaping insults upon each other. Richard was fond of calling Elizabeth ‘my little Jewish tart’ (because she had converted to Judaism to marry Mike Todd), while Elizabeth ridiculed his pockmarked skin, which had been scarred by acne during his teens.

A clue in today’s New York Times crossword puzzle:

Curly ethnic hairstyle, colloquially

Answer:

JEWFRO  

 Times’ puzzle blogger Patrick Merrell comments:

JEWFRO! Really? Is that something we can say? It’s funny, I like it and I can remember hearing it a time or two but, not being Jewish, I’d be kind of afraid to use it. Should I be? I guess that would make my brother’s hairdo back in the ’60s a WASPfro, a massive heap that earned the nickname Zoo Hair in college.

Don’t worry, Mr. Merrell — this (straight-haired) Jew approves.

(I think it’s the use of “Jew” as an adjective that makes people antsy, a la Archie Bunker talking about “Jew lawyers.” Which reminds me of a favorite Israeli memory: In Hebrew “yehudi,” the word for Jew, can be both a noun and an adjective. Which is why I’d sometimes hear Israeli tour guides talking about the “Jew army” or Jerusalem’s “Jew quarter.”)

This is the greatest thing: The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is on line. According to the home page:

The only resource of its kind, this encyclopedia provides the most complete picture of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present. This Web site makes accurate, reliable, scholarly information about East European Jewish life accessible to everyone.

Just for fun and in honor of the World Cup, I searched “soccer” and got links to a photo of the Kaunas branch of Betar soccer team from the 1930s and a Yiddish poster advertising a match between Maccabi Baranowicz and Ha-Koaḥ Pinsk.  (Go Pinsk!)

In an entry on Morgnshtern, the sport organization of the leftist Jewish Labor Bund in Poland, you  learn that its leaders proposed new rules to “oppose the escalating violence and competitiveness of ‘bourgeois’ soccer”:

According to this proposal, soccer should be played according to humanist and socialist principles: the winning team would be decided not only on the basis of goals scored but also through a system of points rewarding “aesthetic and fair play” and “artful combinations.”

Can you imagine? The proposal failed, and soccer remained popular among Morgnshtern members.

Meanwhile, the Czech journalist and novelist Karel Poláček wrote a popular novel Muži v offsidu (Men Offside; 1931), “in which the passions of soccer fans temporarily eclipse their religious differences.”

This is truly an amazing resource — an entire world, much of it disappeared, available with a few keystrokes.

In Sam Freedman’s article on The American Council for Judaism, he writes that Michael Chabon’s  The Yiddish Policemen’s Union  “parodied  Zionism.”

Did it really? That’s not how I read it. And this isn’t the first time I’ve seen Chabon’s book used as evidence of a strain of American anti-Zionism. As Commentary‘s Jonathan Tobin wrote a few weeks ago:

Novelist Michael Chabon is generally coy about his position on the Jewish state. Unlike his wife, writer Ayelet Waldman, Chabon tends to refrain from open anti-Zionism, although as the author of a bestselling novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, whose premise was the destruction of the state of Israel soon after its birth and the fanaticism of those who wished to bring it back into existence, it’s not as if his views are much of a mystery.

Which is a little like saying that 1984 is a manifesto urging a fascist takeover of Europe,  or that Fahrenhei 451 was an endorsement of censorship.

In the spirit of those and other dystopian novels, Chabon asked us to imagine a world without Israel not as an exercise in wishful thinking, but to demonstrate its historical necessity and the price we’d all pay without it. 

The Jewish autonomous region granted Jews in his novel is the anti-Altneuland — grim, soggy, where Jews are once again robbed of their dignity and autonomy, subject to the caprices of a world that cares little about either.  It’s a novel lamenting, not endorsing, Jewish powerless. 

Chabon’s Alaskan Jewish homeland is a “parody” of Zionism the way Philip Roth’s America under Lindbergh was, in The Plot Against America,  a “parody” of America: Both novels demonstrate the absurdities and horrors that would have come about if the Jews’ enemies were given further victories in the 20th century.

But here’s Chabon speaking for himself, if that matters:

“I strongly believe in Israel’s right to exist; but even more, I fear that it is necessary. I have no doubt whatsoever that there is only one regime, one government in the world that can be trusted not to turn its back on Jews.” He adds: “On the other hand, the unreasoning, knee-jerk support for any country, including Israel — the ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude — is utterly alien to me.” 

In exploring the topic of American Jewish alienation from Israel, the New York Times has twice gone to relative outliers as a focus of articles. In May, Paul Vitello interviewed members of a secular humanistic congregation in  Farmington Hills, Mich., who were described as “more or less inactive” by their rabbi.  

On Saturday, Sam Freedman focused on the extremely marginal American Council for Judaism in order to discuss the ”intense criticism of Israel now growing among a number of American Jews.” Even Sam acknowledges that new members aren’t exactly “flocking” to the ACJ:

The group’s mailing list is only in the low thousands, and its Web site received a modest 10,000 unique visitors in the last year. Its budget is a mere $55,000. As [president Stephen] Naman acknowledges, the council’s history of opposition to Zionism renders it “radioactive” for even liberal American Jewish groups, like J Street and Peace Now.

So why bestow such visibility on a group that essentially lost the argument more than 60 years ago when the Reform movement, from which it sprang, embraced Zionism?

Because, writes Sam, “the arguments that the council has consistently levied against Zionism and Israel have shot back into prominence over the last decade.” Brandeis prof Jonathan Sarna articulates those arguments as ”dual loyalty, nationalism being evil” and  ”the point that Zionism is no panacea” for the problems of Jewish life in the diaspora. 

In other words, ACJ doesn’t represent the argument over the right of Jews to critcize Israeli policy,  à la J Street or Peace Now. Rather, it operates in the spirit of Tony Judt and Philip Weiss, who question Israel’s very legitimacy and suggest its brand of religio-ethno-nationalism (as opposed to its neighbors’) is an anachronism that dooms it to constant conflict.

Except I don’t think that’s what the ACJ is really about either. In its statement of principles,  the ACJ doesn’t question Israel’s legitimacy — in fact, “as a refuge for many Jews who have suffered persecution and oppression in other places,” they wish Israel and its citizens well. The chief concern for the ACJ is asserting the American identity of its members. To wit:

As American Jews, we believe that our nationality is American. We are tied both geographically and emotionally to the United States and to its values of democracy, freedom, liberty and justice. We believe we can be Jews and Americans.

Their quibble does not appear to be with Zionism, or with Israeli policies, but with those who believe they can be Jews, Americans, and passionate supporters of Israel. ACJ wants the Israeli flag removed from synagogues, not from Israeli soil.

If ACJ represents anybody, it is the Jews who are comfortable in their Jewishness but disengaged from the idea and reality of Israel. Some of those are merely apathetic, or had parents who didn’t emphasize Israel as a component in Jewish identity (see Marjorie Ingall’s much discussed article). I am sure there is a cohort of those who, like ACJ, actively promote or identify with the notion of a distinctly American Jewish identity, either because they are fed up with Israel politically or are philosphically committed to the notion of exile as the peak Jewish condition. I’m sure they are out there.

But where are those folks, exactly? The Times articles don’t provide the data or anecdotes to nail down the notion that such peoople exist beyond the few and exceptional examples they selected.

“White swans imposing naval blockade on black-feathered cousins” at an Israeli zoo, according to a headline in Ha’aretz.

In recent weeks, a pair of white European swans at Ramat Gan’s Safari Park have been refusing to let the black Australian swans enter the safari’s pond and swim there.

The “blockade” launched by the white swans has been particularly hard on the black swans as the mercury climbed over the past few days.

 …[E]ach morning the male and female white swans can be seen patrolling back and forth near the entrance to the pond and each time a black swan tries to find relief from the heat in the cool pond waters, they are immediately chased away.

“They have left the black swans a very small swath of land,” said the head of the Safari’s avian department, Dr. Gilad Goldstein….

 ”If this doesn’t stop soon,” Goldstein said, “we’ll have to find a solution for the black swans in order to restore tranquility to their lives. In the meantime we are trying all sorts of intermediary solutions to open the water channels to them. It’s funny to say, but the caretakers are using peace activists to deal with this.”

Israeli archaeologist Amihai Mazar of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem says that Israelites imported bees from Turkey as far back as 1000 BCE.

“The Syrian bees native to Israel are aggressive and uncooperative,” according to the Discover blog. “Turkish bees, by contrast, are more docile and much more efficient at honey-making.”

Cute headline on a story about a veterinarian who earned his master’s degree in Jewish education:

From dogs to dogma: Veterinarian now teaching Jewish studies

How about “from tails to Talmud”? “Mutts to mitzvot”? “‘Arf arf’ to aufruff“?