JustASC

Princeton University students will vote Wednesday on a referendum that would ask campus dining services to provide an alternative to Sabra hummus in university retail locations. The referendum, sponsored by the Princeton Committee on Palestine,

is part of a larger movement to boycott Sabra products on the basis that The Strauss Group, which owns 50 percent of Sabra Dipping Company, supports the Israeli Defense Forces at large and its Golani Brigade in particular. Members of the Golani Brigade have been accused of human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Strauss is the second-largest Israeli food and beverage company in America. According to the Jerusalem Post:

 Until recently, the Strauss Group affirmed its support for the IDF on its website under the banner of “Corporate Responsibility” with a statement that read: “Our connection with soldiers goes as far back as the country, and even further. We see a mission and need to continue to provide our soldiers with support, to enhance their quality of life and service conditions, and to sweeten their special moments. We have adopted the Golani reconnaissance platoon for over 30 years and provide them with an ongoing variety of food products for their training or missions, and provide personal care packages for each soldier that completes the path.”

The Post says Strauss, under pressure from the Boycott Israel groups, has removed such endorsements of the IDF from its English website. Although not entirely: I found this link a moment ago, which takes you to the following under “Corporate Responsibility”:

Israel Defense Forces
 
As part of its donations program, the Sales Division of Strauss Israel has made a contribution to the men and women who serve in the Golani brigade. The funds are designated for welfare, cultural and educational activities, such as pocket money for underprivileged soldiers, sports and recreational equipment, care packages, and books and games for the soldiers’ club. Yotvata, our dairy in the south, contributes likewise to the southern Shualei Shimshon unit.

I suppose if I knew nothing about the BDS movement and assumed their goal was justice for the Palestinians and a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I might have some sympathy for their campaign. If they think the IDF supports an unjust policy, then maybe they’d be justified in shunning a company that provides those soldiers moral and physical support.

But make no mistake: Members of Philly BDS, which is behind the Sabra boycott, are not peaceniks, by any means. Here’s their platform, according to their own web site:

In 2005, Palestinian civil society representatives issued a call for global a [sic] boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel until Israel complies with international law by ending its occupation of Palestine lands, dismantling the “separation barrier” in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, granting full and equal rights to Palestinian citizens of Israel, and recognizing the right of exiled Palestinians to return to their country.

Notice that last line: “recognizing the right of exiled Palestinians to return to their country.” Not “their homes” or “their property.” Philly BDS, like many BDS proponents, supports a one-state solution — one Palestinian entity, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. Under their plan, the Palestinians get the West Bank, Gaza, and full citizenship within any portion of Israel to which they can establish a legal claim.

The “right of return” is a nonstarter when it comes to making peace, and not just because it will inevitably mean the demographic and symbolic end of a Jewish state. The “right of return” undermines the essential assumptions of those seeking peace on both sides: to create two states, side by side, and the separation that will allow each people to flourish without interference from the other.

Maybe Princeton students will want to send a message to Israel that will make it more flexible at the negotiating table. But they’ll be doing so at the behest of a movement that wants Israel to disappear.

How’s that taste?

Nice try from White Castle:

Andrew

With eight nights of giving, it’s easy to run out of gift ideas for that hard-to-buy for person. Let the aroma of steam-grilled-on-a-bed-of-onions fill the house this Hanukkah season by giving White Castle’s Original slider®-scented candle as a quirky, yet distinctive Hanukkah gift.

The nature of Hanukkah lends itself to family, togetherness and light. White Castle’s Original Slider®-scented candles are a fun, attention-getting gift to give during Hanukkah…

To their credit, net proceeds from the sale of the candle benefit Autism Speaks. 

So here’s my idea: Buy nine White Castle Candles and line ‘em up for a unique Hanukkah menorah. Tell your friends they’re smelling latkes.

The Times had a piece on Friday, Bar Mitzvah Studies Take to the Web, about how teens and farflung tutors are finding one another via Skype and other online bar mitzvah tools.

(Isn’t everybody finding everybody and everything on the Web? Stories like these sound newsworthy, until you realize there’s nothing surprising about the fact that any new tool will be quickly adopted by almost any group for whom it’s useful. If the Times had been published 8,000 years ago, you’d probably find an article titled, “Religious groups also finding wheel useful for getting around.” Or if someone invented a technology for digitially retouching photos, they’d probably run a breathless Page One story about how it is being used for school pictures. Oh, wait, that was also in Friday’s paper.)

It would be interesting if the new technology challenged any central tenets of the religion in question. But distance learning is no big deal — tutoring is tutoring, whether it’s face to face or through Skype. In fact, it was Orthodox groups that largely pioneered all sorts of digital technology for Torah’s sake, from whole libraries put on searchable CD-ROMs to Mp3 downloads of sermons to iPhone apps for Talmud study.

The interesting tension raised but not fully explored in the Times peice was not the technology per se, but how it is being used to distance the families and learners even further from a sense of face-to-face Jewish community:

Many of the families who turn to the Web have been only loosely affiliated with organized Judaism before their children hit bar or bat mitzvah age, when they find that a bricks-and-mortar synagogue will require years of membership and religious school attendance. Typically, the e-rabbis work with children for nine months to a year, often meeting in person for a run-through only the night before the ceremony.

[snip]

Taking the online route, according to those who’ve done it, is especially good for children with learning disabilities who might have trouble in a conventional classroom. It is also more convenient and flexible, better attuned to the hectic schedules of contemporary family life (no carpooling!). “Joining a synagogue? I looked at it, and there would have been no bat mitzvah,” said Shari Steele, whose daughters’ double bat mitzvah was led by Rabbi Korngold in August. “It would not have happened for my family.”

A sign of the times, sure. Old news, really. But the question I have for Ms. Steele and some of the other parents is this: If you don’t really want to be part of a Jewish community, if you don’t want to belong to anything, why bother with a bar mitzvah in the first place?

The piece suggests something, if not new, then certainly worth a few follow-up questions: the bar mitzvah divorced from any notion of Jewish belonging. I’m not judging these parents (okay, I am). I’m just curious how they view the bar or bat mitzva itself. As a Jewish swearing-in ceremony? As a gift for nervous grandparents? As a ritual to be endured to justify the party afterwards?

Or maybe there’s something more profund at work here — maybe the family hasn’t found a use for Jewish community or institutions, but they want to make sure the kid understands who she is and where she comes from, so that when and if she does decide to affiliate, she’ll have the proper credentials (even though there’s nothing you have to do to become a bar or bat mitzvah except come of age).

It’s too bad that these families have no use for the synagogue, or that the synagogues haven’t made themselves more compelling to families like these. But the idea that a few months of learning of any kind will lead to a life-long sense of belonging or identity is a gamble with very long odds.

Joel Daner, a longtime member of our board and champion of the newspaper, passed away over the weekend. Joel was a dedicated Jewish communal professional who left his mark on institutions around the state and the country, including vice presidencies at Jewish federations in New York and Baltimore and directorships in planned giving, leadership development, and Jewish education at United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ. 

Amy Cooper, then president of the New Jersey Association of Jewish Communal Service, said it all when the association presented Joel with its Saul Schwartz Distinguished Service Award in 2006. “It was an easy decision because he was so deserving of it,” she said. “I’ve known him and worked on committees with him over the years. He’s a mensch, and that’s the best thing you can say about anyone.”

May his wife and daughters be  comforted among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem.

I totally agree with the ADL on the Beck-Soros thing, but I don’t think it’s useful for them to police inappropriate uses of the Nazi analogy. From Politico:

Icky details in a JTA report on a defamation lawsuit brought by Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former foreign policy chief, against his former employer:

Much of the material in Rosen’s deposition had to do with his viewing pornography on an office computer. Rosen countered that he knew [ Howard Kohr, AIPAC’s executive director] and others at AIPAC also viewed pornography on AIPAC computers.

-snip-

Rosen, who is suing AIPAC for $20 million, said Tuesday that his lawyers would file a counter motion by Dec. 2 with fuller excerpts and more material.

“We’re going to show in our brief most of the reasons they’re giving in this thing played no role in my firing,” he said, noting as an example that his bosses were made aware of the pornography on his hard drive months before he was fired.

This reminded me of an incident from the 1990s, as reported by Lloyd Grove in the Washington Post on June 13, 1991:

In 1987, AIPAC’s then-communications director, Barbara Amouyal, argued that this press-shy attitude was counterproductive to the lobby’s aims. During her tenure, however, she often found herself trying to keep stories out of the news. Once, she pleaded with two Jewish newspapers not to print an item about a birthday party for Steven Rosen, during which a stripper performed on AIPAC premises.

I was editor of the Washington Jewish Week, one of the two Jewish newspapers in question,  but I think the stripper incident predated me  (I had my own mishegoss with Rosen and AIPAC). But I do remember the birthday party was legendary around the office.

The ZOA’s Morton Klein defends Glenn Beck, saying it is “deeply chilling” that George Soros did not feel guilt for having accompanied the gentile man who served as his protector during the Holocaust and, as Steve Kroft put it on “60 Minutes,” helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.” (When Soros was a 13-year-old boy, mind you.)

Klein, trained as a biostatistician, is apparantly an amateur psychologist as well. Here’s his diagnosis of Soros:

I, myself, am the son of Holocaust survivors who met in a German Displaced Persons camp, where I was born. I know from personal knowledge that my father, whose parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and all eight siblings were murdered by the Nazis, felt constant pangs of guilt about having survived while his family, friends, Jewish neighbors and Jewish brethren were murdered by the millions. Obviously, he bore no moral responsibility at all but, like other survivors, could not escape feelings of guilt, for being the sole survivor, which haunted and plagued my father to end of his life. As attested to many times by clinicians who have studied Holocaust survivors, it is a normal, understandable reaction of those in such situations. It is deeply chilling that Mr. Soros never felt any grief, horror, or guilt over the loss of so much of his Jewish brethren and comfortably proclaims such.

First of all, Klein has no way of knowing that Soros never felt any “any grief, horror, or guilt over the loss of so much of his Jewish brethren.” Soros was asked a specific question about a specific incident — whether he felt guilt for having accompanied his protector as he catalogued Jewish property for confiscation.

Second of all, it’s the height of chutzpah to declare what another person must feel in the face or aftermath of the unthinkable. You’re 13, you’re taken from your family home and left with a neighbor. Your world is turned upside down, death is everywhere, and you’re afraid you might be next. Oh, and you’re 13.

Beck and Klein are playing a nasty game. Maybe they’d like to cull the testimonies at the Shoah Foundation and single out for ridicule the survivors who don’t feel guilty for what they did to survive.

Tourists are detouring to Ramle, Israel, to visit the grave of a real-life Harry Potter.

Several of the rabbis accused of money laundering in NJ’s largest corruption sting have been allowed to travel back and forth to Israel since their arrests.

 The U.S. Attorney’s office disapproves, calling them flight risks, but the courts said yes so the defendants could “perform religious services, attend family weddings or visit ailing relatives.”

A.P. has the story.

The Fourth Annual Other Israel Film Festival is under way in New York this week. It’s goal is to

promote awareness and appreciation of the diversity of the state of Israel, provide a dynamic and inclusive forum for exploration of, and dialogue about populations in margins of Israeli society, and encourage cinematic expression and creativity dealing with these themes.

Considering the honest and self-critical nature of Israeli filmmakers, I’m not sure how this is any different from your average Jewish or Israeli film festival, where tolerance for films about Israel’s underbelly is surprisingly high.

Here’s a quiz: Which of the following films are being shown at the Other Israel Festival, and which have been or will be shown at the Rutgers New Jersey Jewish Film Festival?

A/ Ajami : “This powerful crime drama explores the themes of revenge, loyalty, hope, and despair as they play out within Jaffa’s multicultural Ajami neighborhood.”

B/ Father’s Footsteps: “When Felix Maimon relocates his tight-knit Tunisian family from Israel to Paris, he soon falls in with a local Jewish gangster.”

C/ To See If I’m Smiling: “In this award-winning documentary, six female Israeli soldiers share shocking moments of negligence, flippancy, immaturity and power-tripping as they describe atrocities they witnessed and participated in.”

D/ The Office:  “In the Israeli adaptation of the world famous comedy, the office is a microcosm of Israeli society, where an orthodox woman, Arab man, Russian immigrant, and gay man work under one roof with a useless, non-pc boss.”

Answer: A: Both; B: Rutgers; C: Rutgers; D: Other Israel