JustASC

My column this week, on the Time magazine cover. My main point: Get past the obnoxious cover headline, and you’ll find a story that paints a sympathetic, accurate, and even helpful portrait of a skeptical Israel enjoying its prosperity (despite, and perhaps in troubling insouciance about, some looming threats).

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, responds to Time in the Los Angeles Times. But note how, in seeming to refute the Time headline, he essentially confirms the Time article. Note how in paragraph after paragraph, Oren and Time’s Karl Vick make virtually the same points.

Oren:

Yes, many Israelis are skeptical about peace, and who wouldn’t be? [Israel] withdrew our troops from Lebanon and the Gaza Strip in order to generate peace, and instead received thousands of missiles crashing into our homes. We negotiated with the Palestinians for 17 years and twice offered them an independent state, only to have those offers rejected. Over the last decade, we saw more than 1,000 Israelis — proportionally the equivalent of about 43,000 Americans — killed by suicide bombers, and tens of thousands maimed. We watched bereaved mothers on Israeli television urging our leaders to persist in their peace efforts, while Palestinian mothers praised their martyred children and wished to sacrifice others for jihad.

Vick:

“‘There is no sense of urgency,’ about the peace process, says Tamar Hermann, a political scientist who has measured the Israeli public’s appetite for a negotiated settlement every month since 1994, the year after the Oslo accords seemed to bring peace so close, Israelis thought they could touch it. They couldn’t. It flew farther away in 2000, when Yasser Arafat turned down a striking package of Israeli concessions at Camp David. What came next was the second intifadeh, a watershed of terror for an Israeli majority who, watching and suffering waves of suicide bombings, saw no reason to keep hope alive.”

Oren:

It’s true that Israel is a success story. The country has six world-class universities, more scientific papers and Nobel Prizes per capita than any other nation and the most advanced high-tech sector outside of Silicon Valley. The economy is flourishing, tourism is at an all-time high and our citizen army selflessly protects our borders. In the face of unrelenting pressures, we have preserved a democratic system in which both Jews and Arabs can serve in our parliament and sit on our Supreme Court. We have accomplished this without knowing a nanosecond of peace.

Vick:

“It’s not just real estate that serves as a measure of economic success. Israel avoided the debt traps that dragged the U.S. and Europe into recession. Its renown as a start-up nation – second only to the U.S. in companies listed on the Nasdaq exchange – is deserved. A restless culture of innovation coupled with the number of braniacs among the 1 million immigrants who arrived from the Soviet Union in the 1990s has made Israel a locus for high-tech research and development, its whiz kids leapfrogging the difficult geography to thrive in virtual community with Silicon Valley.”

And yet what Oren adds and Time misses, as I suggest in my column, is how Israel’s seeming apathy about peace with the Palestinians can turn on a dime, should an Arab leader offer the kind of startling public gesture that led to peace agreements with Egypt, Jordan, and even Arafat. Writes Oren:

Indeed, Israelis have always grasped at opportunities for peace. When Arab leaders such as Egyptian President Anwar Sadat or King Hussein of Jordan offered genuine peace to Israel, our people passionately responded and even made painful concessions. That most Israelis are still willing to take incalculable risks for peace — the proposed Palestinian state would border their biggest cities — and are still willing to share their ancestral homeland with a people that has repeatedly tried to destroy them is nothing short of miraculous.

The Tea Party is hoping to recruit more Jews.

I think they should use this photo in their ads:

Here’s my winning entry in this month’s Moment magazine cartoon caption contest. See here for details.

In 2006, I wrote a parody, Mad Libs-style, of newspaper and magazine articles reporting on the “Last Jews of…” this or that far-flung country.  My version began:

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.

Here’s the opening from “Letter from Burma,” in the current Moment magazine:

As the sun sets in Burma, now known as Myanmar, a small group of Jews descends on the Park Royal Hotel in downtown Yangon, formerly Rangoon. I arrive unfashionably early, hoping to steal some private time with Sammy Samuels, the debonair Burmese-American host of the third annual Myanmar Jewish Community Dinner Reception. But apparently it is fashionable for Burmese Jews to arrive late, and Sammy is nowhere to be found. At 6:30, tuxedoed caterers begin distributing glasses of Israeli and French wines to guests socializing in the lobby. I chat briefly with Cho, the daughter of Myanmar’s foreign minister, who professes her love for Israel, and then with an impeccably dressed British diplomat who is superb at making small talk. When I ask if I should be concerned about reporting from such a public location, he points to secret police lurking in the corners and suggests steering clear of discussing politics. “Once you’ve lived here a while, they’re easy to spot,” he says.

Is nothing sacred — literally? Ynet reports a rash of mezuzah thefts in Israel, a scandal uncovered by Chabad Youth’s “mezuzah patrol”:

Almost two thirds of the mezuzot affixed to doors around Israel are unfit, according to the “mezuzot patrol.” Empty mezuzah cases were found in hundreds of homes after the parchment in them was stolen.

Apparently, the thieves are fencing the pricey kosher scrolls inside the mezuzah: 

“It’s very easy to rob a mezuzah,” explains Chabad Rabbi Moni Ender, “All you need is a screwdriver, and the profit is big. The price of a parchment can reach NIS 600 (more than $150).

Ender points to a wave of theft and forged mezuzot, and says this is a relatively new trend.

 ”There was a time when such things weren’t stolen. We have carried out many mezuzah inspection operations over the years, but even we are surprised by the scope of the trend uncovered in this current inspection operation.”

But there was some good news too:

[I]t seems that at least in the field of forgeries, there has been a decline. The number of forged mezuzot found in homes was relatively low. “In recent years the public is no longer tempted to buy photocopied parchments or parchments printed on paper, and this trend has almost completely vanished. The forged mezuzot that we find in inspections are usually old,” said Rabbi Yerachmiel Gorelik, director of the Chabad school in Holon.

Jay Leno:

Big story — President Obama is now trying for peace in the Middle East using a two-state solution. I believe the two states are Denial and Delusion.

JTA has a piece about the second day of Rosh Hashana, and its “red-headed stepchild” status among Jews: Non-Orthodox synagogues report a huge drop-off in attendance from day one to day two, congregants say it’s just too much, and rabbis struggle to make the second day meaningful to those who come.

I’ll be in shul both days, but the repetion has always bothered me. It’s not a question of sitzfleisch: Wagner’s Ring Cycle and other artistic marathons suggest people will put in the time and effort when the theatrics make it seem worthwhile. All the double holy days leave me not with a sense of deja vu, but the actual thing — I did just go through this, didn’t I? Whatever joy and meaning I experienced the first day is diluted by having to do it all — and I mean all — over again the second.

Good, then, for Rabbi Isaac Jeret of Los Angeles, who tries to have “different offerings” on each of the days:

With the drop-off rate in synagogue attendance from the first to the second day at approximately 75 percent, Rabbi Isaac Jeret of Congregation Ner Tamid in Los Angeles says that, “As a rabbi, what to do on the second day of Rosh Hashanah is a fascinating question, and I look at it as very important to have different offerings” the first day and the second day.

On the first day, when he expects some 2,000 attendees — many not even belonging to the Conservative synagogue — the service has musical accompaniment and Jeret gives a longer sermon. On the second day, “it is shul-goers day,” he says, and the service reflects that.

“There’s no choir and no piano,” he says. “We take out the Torah and study text as a community. It’s a much more intimate service.”

Whoops! In my column this week, I misattributed the provenance of the term “bagelling,” which actually belongs to Doodie Miller, who maintains a web site devoted to the concept. Here’s how he explains the term:

It all started when I was back in university in Montreal, sitting in a large theatre styled classroom when a previously-unknown young woman sat down next to me, intoduced herself and said “Oye Gevult, I just had a bagel and gefilte fish for lunch”.

You see I am an orthodox Jew and was wearing my kippah but my new [friend], who was Jewish, knew that she did not “look” Jewish, nor did she wear any identifying signs like a Magen David or a Chai necklace. The nuanced way that she announced her Jewishness to me was through what I called “bageling” and that incident launched the bagel theory.

Christopher Hitchens calls the Glenn Beck rally the latest example of “white self-pity,” an expression of the fears of an old majority “that it will be submerged by an influx from beyond the borders and that it will be challenged in its traditional ways and faiths by an alien and largely Third World religion.”

He writes:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It’s not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

The Wall Street Journal wonders, Just how Jewish is Michael Bloomberg? According to the paper’s own summary of the article:

Mayor Bloomberg was raised Jewish, but hasn’t been known for wearing his religion on his sleeve. His defense of the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque near Ground Zero shows that he’s more passionate defending freedom of religion, than he has been in displaying his religiosity.

The article is a version of the kinds of discussions we’d have in “rap groups” back in Hebrew school, namely, What does it mean to be a “good Jew”?

Here’s a checklist, based on the criteria mentioned in the article. See how you do compared to Bloomberg:

• believes in God
• eschews many of the traditions and customs of Judaism
• believes strongly that your values and how they influence you to make the world a better place are the key parts of Judaism and every other religion
• believes freedom of religion is more important to him than the practicing of it
• belongs to Reform synagogue
• rarely attends synagogue
• goes to services for the High Holidays
• attends Passover seder
• gives generously to Jewish organizations
• thinks God will judge you on what you do and how you help others, as opposed to how you worship and what the customs and ceremonies that your particular religion has
• supportive of the state of Israel
• had a bar mitzvah
• longtime companion is not Jewish
• visited Israel as a private citizen
• children raised with Christian and Jewish traditions

How would Bloomberg score in one of the frequent surveys of Jewish identity conducted by various Jewish think tanks and sociologists? Here are some comparisons from the 2001 American Jewish Identity Survey, conducted by the Center for Jewish Studies at CUNY:

The majority (73 percent) of America’s [Jewish] adults … believe that God exists. But nearly half of this population regards itself as secular or somewhat secular in outlook.

About one million American households report affiliation with a Jewish congregation (synagogue, temple, or an independent havurah). That number represents an increase of some 15 percent over the 880,000 households reporting congregational affiliation in 1990.

About 44 percent [of Jewish adults] report membership in a Jewish congregation (synagogue, temple, or an independent havurah).

The Reform branch of Judaism is the largest in terms of the number of adult adherents: about 1.1 million out of a total of 2.9 million of America’s Jewish-by-religion adults.

Of all [Jewish] adults married since 1990, …just 40 percent are married to a spouse who is also of Jewish origins; 51 percent are married to a spouse who is not of Jewish origins and an additional 9 percent are married to a spouse who is a convert to Judaism.

Of all cohabiting [Jewish] adults …, 81 percent are living with a partner who is not of Jewish origins.

The article gives the impression that Bloomberg is sort of distant from Judaism, especially its religous expressions. But if you look at his Jewish behaviors, and compare him to most of America’s 5 million-plus Jews, he’s what a sociologist like Steven M. Cohen might call a ”highly engaged” Jew.