JustASC

In South Park‘s recent “Jersey Shore” episode, Kyle’s Jewish family came out as New Jerseyans — from Newark, yet!

The recappers at TV Squad explored the sociology of New Jersey Jewish News readers:

It’s very consistent for the character of Sheila Broflovski to be from New Jersey, even though her accent seems more Brooklyn (which is where I figured she was from until now). The only vague mention of her place of origin was in ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,’ when she gave her reasons for moving to Colorado in song.

The following is from a New Jersey resident: Given that Gerald is an attorney (and presumably a decent one), it seems unlikely that they would have lived in Newark. They would have lived more likely in a Jewish-friendly suburb nearby like Montclair, Livingston or Short Hills. However, if they did actually live in Newark, I could see why they’d want to get the hell out and move west as quickly as possible before Kyle was born. Some of Sheila’s song lyrics in the ‘South Park’ movie were “the world is such a rotten place and city life is a complete disgrace.” Yup, that’s Newark.

Huge news for the West Orange Schechter day school: A $15 million gift that will change its name to the Golda Och Academy, in honor of the mother of the donor, investor Daniel Och.

Read our story here.

I am particulaly proud of the headline.

Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of the New York Jewish Week, comments on the Teaneck same-sex wedding announcement story. I admit I was looking forward to his comments — Gary is the dean of Jewish journalism, is Orthodox, and lives in Teaneck.

Unfortunately, Gary doesn’t say what he would have done were he heading the Standard — but let’s hear him out first.

Gary, like me, thinks the Jewish Standard — in publishing and then immediately “retracting” a same-sex announcement — “mishandled this communal hot-button issue every step of the way.”

He also eloquently lays out the dilemma:  

When it comes to the role of a Jewish newspaper, in addition to practicing quality journalism, there are two principles here. One is to be as inclusive as possible, building community and seeking out and appealing to all types of Jews, strengthening bonds between them. The other principle is to uphold and transmit Jewish values and traditions.

But what happens when those two admirable goals clash? Is it the primary duty of the paper to reflect the community as it is, or to set standards for it?

But he sees the debate over same-sex announcements as different than past debates over accepting advertising from non-kosher restaurants or even interfaith wedding announcements:

[What's'] different about the same-sex commitment announcements is that it reveals a level of fear, even repulsion, among some elements of the Orthodox community, and a failure among liberal Jews to appreciate why listing a gay union as a simcha — a cause for communal celebration — is seen as particularly offensive to traditionalists because it seems to flaunt the very behavior that is proscribed by Jewish law.

He includes a plea to treat “the other” with compassion. 

As to whether a Jewish newspaper should publish the announcements, he quotes a “leading rabbi”:

“[I]t comes down to community standards” of appropriate and acceptable norms. In San Francisco, same-sex unions are standard fare for J., the local Jewish publication; not so, as seen, in northern New Jersey.

I might have written, “not so, as seen, among the Orthodox community in northern New Jersey.”  The non-Orthodox community in northern NJ has come to terms with same-sex marriage. Which raises, I realize, a key question I’m not sure any of us can answer: How do you measure communal norms? Is it a numbers game? A matter of engagement or cultural influence? Or maybe it is pure economics –  if a paper is in synch with its readership, that will be reflected in its bottom line.

Gary’s essay ends, disappointingly, on a non-committal note:

Where does that leave us? Only with the thought that the answers lie within.

Well, yes and no. The answers “lie within” only if you’re not the editor and publisher of a Jewish newspaper, and you don’t have to make a very public decision one way or another. The Standard did not have that luxury.

I would love to read what Gary would have done were he running the Standard (he knows the community and has edited Jewish newspapers for 40 years), or what he would do or how he would have gone about it at the Jewish Week (which doesn’t print lifecycle announcements of any kind).

To be fair, the great unkown here is what any of us would have done in the Standard’s place. I’d like to think I would have done the right thing and published the announcement — because I think a Jewish newspaper should reflect a normative practice of the Reform and Reconstructionist movement and I believe the great majority of Jews accept same-sex commitments (just as I think those who are offended by such things can, well, turn the page).

And yet, because no one is really saying, I don’t know the pressures that were brought to bear on the Standard, financial or otherwise, and whether I would have risked the livelihoods of my staff in defense of principle.

And forget business for a second, and let’s imagine that the only risk The Standard ran is that it would stop being read in hundreds if not thousands of Orthodox homes. The goal of any newspaper is not just to make money, but to be relevant — to be part of and spark a communal conversation. It’s easy to say “good riddance” when someone cancels a subscription, but it’s also painful to be written off.

In the latest twist of the Teaneck Standard, same-sex wedding announcements story, the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County has issued a statement denying that it or any Orthodox rabbi representing it had “issued any threat whatsoever or impl[ied] anything about ‘consequences,’ financial or otherwise” had the Standard not reversed its policy.

According to the release:

One single RCBC rabbi, who has been consulted by the Jewish Standard on a number of occasions in the past about issues relating to the religious sensibilities of the Orthodox community, did go to meet with the executive staff of the Jewish Standard, with whom he has a personal relationship. The meeting was characterized by calm, civility and mutual respect. The rabbi communicated that there were a significant number of Orthodox Jews who felt that the Standard had crossed a line by publishing this particular announcement, and that if the leaders of the paper are concerned about the opinions of these members of our community, they should reconsider their position on this issue for the future.

New Voices, the student publication, succinctly lays out the unanswered questions:

So now the issue is, who do we believe? The Standard clearly stated that they spoke with a group of area Orthodox rabbis. It’s possible, as JDR suggests, that those rabbis weren’t under the “official” aegis of the RCBC but still made the threats.

Either way, it seems to me that we have no definitive, or even substantiated, evidence that these threats happened, so I would humbly suggest that Jewish publications, blogs or not, stop accusing people of extortion before verifying their reporting.

What happened with the Jewish Standard is bad enough. There’s no need to conduct bad journalism in order to make it seem worse.

At this point, the only party we haven’t heard from is The Jewish Standard itself, and they’re not talking. Too bad — in the absence of clarity, rumors will fly. 

As I wrote at the outset of the controversy, I don’t know why the critics of the announcement — who apparently had enough suasion, moral or otherwise, to change the newspaper’s mind — deserve their anonymity. Who are they and whom did they represent? Unless they are embarrassed about their position, why not clearly and respectfully lay it out, take credit for it, and add their perspective to the communal conversation?

Either this headline is a typo or someone thinks Russians in Israel sound like cartoon organ grinders:

Why a Russiansa in Israel dona t want peace

Sad news: Carla Cohen, co-founder of the legendary Washington, D.C. bookstore-cum-salon Politics & Prose, has died at age 74.

I got to know Carla through her husband, David, who was president of Americans for Peace Now when I was editor of the Washington Jewish Week. We also belonged to the same congregation, Tifereth Israel on 16th Street NW.

Hundreds if not thousands of Washingtonians past and present will be writing and saying similar things today, but for me P&P represented everything that made Washington such a great place to live in the early 1990s. Like the city itself, it had a small town feel, a sense of place, and a devotion to ideas.

The Cohens were also archetypes of that seemingly endangered species: Jewish Liberals.  Carla and David were to be honored later this month with the Abraham Joshua Heschel Award from Jews United for Justice — David for his work as organizer and lobbyist  and as co-founder of the Advocacy Institute, Carla for establishing a “gathering place for people to discuss the world as it is and as it should be.”

Hamakom yinachem…

Because, you know, Israel has a great track record for resolving conflicts:

Hollywood power couple Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher are in Israel reportedly to work on their marriage.

Amid media reports that Kutcher had been unfaithful, Britain’s Daily Mail wrote that the couple would renew their wedding vows in Israel five years after they were married at The Kabbalah Center in Los Angeles.

“Sharing Love & Light while in Israel. Asking 4 the energy 2 forge bonds with our similarities & find compromise in our differences,” Kutcher wrote on his Twitter account Sunday.

What is it with Jews and Turkish boats? From JTA:

The Jewish organizational leader said to be detained on a Turkish sex yacht denied being arrested in the breakup of an alleged prostitution ring aboard the boat.

A spokesman for Alexander Mashkevich, head of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, said Mashkevich was neither charged nor arrested in the incident, when several businessmen and young women were detained aboard a Turkish yacht in late September. The boat allegedly was rented out regularly as part of a sex-trade scheme in which passengers would pay several thousand dollars for a night of sexual escapades aboard the yacht, which once belonged to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

The spokesman, Roman Spektor, said it is not clear whether or not Mashkevich was even aboard the yacht in question. Mashkevich could not be reached for comment. 

The New York Times had an endless profile of the wildly and proudly Islamophobic blogger Pamela Geller, whose bigotry has gone mainstream thanks to pols like Newt Gingrich and Rick Lazio.

Despite the length of the piece, and brief mention of her having grown up fairly non-observant in a ”heavily Jewish enclave” on Long Island,  there’s no discussion of what her hate-filled punditry means for relations between Jews and Muslims.

Imagine, for example, if there were an identifiably Muslim blogger with a mirror-image anti-Jewish animus (and I mean anti-Jewish, not anti-Israel — Geller makes it quote plain that her beef is with Islam as a religion, not its political or nation-state manifestations). Imagine if this hypothetical Muslim had  similar reach and clout, getting invited to appear on the cable chat shows and cozying up to figures like Gingrich. 

We Jews would be demanding that Muslim leaders denounce her, that the cable shows stop inviting her, that the blogs and Internet outlets that partner with her sever their ties.  

We would do this not just out of self-interest (although there is that), but because we have long recognized that bigotry unchecked, no matter its target, is bigotry condoned.

I wouldn’t blame Muslim leaders for seeking a similar denunciation of Geller from Jewish leaders (just as we keep asking black leaders to denounce Farrakhan), nor would I blame them if they take the silence of  defense groups as a sign that they consider Geller’s blanket hatred of Islam a defensible position.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Abe Foxman of the ADL has denounced Geller, in an interview with the Washington Post about a rally being planned by Geller that would include Holland’s fiercely anti-Islamic MP Geert Wilders.

According to Post blogger Greg Sargent, “Foxman had some harsh words regarding the presence of Wilders, as well as for conservative blogger Pamela Geller and her group Stop Islamization of America, which is organizing the protest.”

Here’s the Foxman quote:

[Wilders] is a bigot, he’s an anti-Muslim bigot, and one of the demonstrations being called for is being headed by someone who has an anti-Muslim agenda, often under the guise of fighting ‘radical Islam.’ The group vilifies Islamic faith and is engaged in [claiming] there’s a conspiracy to destroy American values, which is nonsense. The organizer in fact has stated that part of her agenda is to help garner support for Wilders, who is a bigot, who has a long record of anti-Muslim bigotry.

A calendar description of an upcoming lecture at a Conservative synagogue in Montville, NJ:

Muslim Shi’ites or Sunnis: Which are the Greater Threat to Israel and Jews?