JustASC

Rabbi Brad Hirschfield doesn’t think Charlie Sheen was being anti-Semitic when he referred to his boss, Chuck Lorre, as “Chaim Levine.” But I think Brad works a lot harder at clearing Sheen’s name than Sheen’s critics did in finding his remarks out of bounds. But first let’s look at what Sheen said to radio host Alex Jones:

“I’m tired of being told ‘You can’t talk about that, you can’t talk about that.’ Bull S-H-I-T. There’s something this side of deplorable that a certain Chaim Levine — yeah, that’s Chuck’s real name — mistook this rock star for his own selfish exit strategy, bro. Check it, Alex: I embarrassed him in front of his children and the world by healing at a pace that his unevolved mind cannot process. Last I checked, Chaim, I spent close to the last decade effortlessly and magically converting your tin cans into pure gold. And the gratitude I get is this charlatan chose not to do his job, which is to write. Clearly someone who believes he’s above the law.”

Here’s Brad’s (partial) response:

For starters, Lorre’s name at birth was in fact, Levine! And while I do not know his Hebrew name, or even if he has one, Chaim could well be the chosen Hebrew parallel for Charles or Chuck. As my great-grandparents would have said, “we should be so lucky to live in a world where using someone’s Hebrew name counts as anti-Semitism.” In other words, in a world in which there is genuine hatred of Jews, labeling Sheen’s words, anti-Semitic, is probably absurd and certainly a gross over-statement.

If anything, Sheen feels that he was personally attacked – that his integrity was called into question, so he called out the integrity of his so-called attacker by attacking Lorre’s decision to change his name. It was a stupid move on Sheen’s part because there is no evidence that a change in name represents a lack of integrity. And if it does, then Sheen should be speaking with his father, Martin Sheen, who changed his name from Esetvez.

Brad is only guessing that Sheen, by using Lorre’s real name, was just “call[ing]out the integrity of his so-called attacker.” Besides, it would be an odd gambit, since Sheen also uses a stage name: Like his dad, he was born an Estevez, first name Carlos.

Second, Lorre’s real name is Charles Levine, not Chaim. (In one of his signature vanity cards, seen here, Lorre suggests his Hebrew name is Chaim.) If Sheen wanted to call him out on integrity, why reach past his actual given English name to “Chaim”?

It sounds to me that Sheen is cutting Lorre down to size, suggesting the vaunted “Chuck Lorre” is a mere “Chaim Levine” — a Jew boy. If that sounds harsh, reverse the situation: Imagine if Lorre were ranting about Sheen, and apropos of nothing started referring to him as “Carlos Estevez.” Last I checked, Carlos, I spent close to the last decade effortlessly and magically converting your tin cans into pure gold. Would we really be debating whether such a remark is bigoted?

I don’t have any reason to think Charlie Sheen is our new Mel Gibson, but I know a cheap ethnic shot when I hear one. It’s exactly what I hear when someone rants about “Barack Hussein Obama” — yeah, that’s his real name, but I’m pretty sure the ranter isn’t celebrating Obama’s rich ethnic background.

Besides, all this talk about Sheen’s anti-Semitism is a diversion. As David Carr writes today, Sheen should have been fired and ostracized years ago for the way he treats women. I don’t think there’s much to debate there at all.

As if the New York Mets don’t have enough problems, they still have to deal with this:  

A federal judge in New York is dealing with a case of rabbinical law — whether a vendor can sell kosher food during Mets games on the Jewish Sabbath.

Kosher Sports Inc. says its contract allows it to offer its food at [Citifield] every game, the New York Daily News reported. The New Jersey-based company blames Mets’ management for the ban on sales between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday.

The great twist here is that it’s the big corporate entity that’s being more machpid (religiously scrupulous) than the company supplying the kosher food.

The story also has a great sociological subtext; namely, the kind of person who attends a ball game on Shabbat but still wants to buy kosher food.

Two time-honored ways of drawing attention to your cause is 1/ to exaggerate the problem you’re addressing and 2/ claim no one else is doing anything about it.

A casebook example comes from a group called Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a Boston-based group that aims to combat Islamic extremism. Its founder is Charles Jacobs, who co-founded the Boston branch of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America and the American Anti-Slavery Group, which lobbied against slavery in Sudan.

In an oped in the Boston Jewish Advocate titled “Why the Jews are losing the battle for the campus,” Jacobs asserts:

Across the country too many Jewish and pro-Israel students are patronized, mocked, intimidated and sometimes physically attacked, while anti-Israel professors poison the minds of America’s future leaders. Yet Jewish leaders have by and large not responded effectively….

Jewish students and Jewish buildings attacked and intimidated are not a hoax, yet Jewish leaders sit on their hands. No one calls for sensitivity training for Muslim and leftist students about the use of blood libels and anti-Semitism. No one demands students be taught about proper behavior in a civil society or about principles of free speech and academic inquiry. More and more, the ugly aspects of the “Arab street” are coming to campus. With the commendable exception of the Zionist Organization of America – which won civil rights protection for California students under Title 6 – Jewish leaders have remained mostly silent. Without their protest, why should university administrations care?

If Jewish leaders are remaining silent, this is the loudest silence I’ve ever heard. Here’s a partial list of organizations that have been organizing and raising funds around the issue of anti-Israel activism on campus: the Anti-Defamation League, the Israel on Campus Coalition (“a partnership of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, in cooperation with a network of national organizations”), StandWithUs, Hasbara Fellowships, AIPAC, Chabad, Jewish National Fund’s Caravan for Democracy, and the JFNA/JCPA Israel Advocacy Initiative.

Among the anti-Israel incidents listed by Jacobs was last month’s pro-Palestinian event at Rutgers University, whose title and panel made the Zionism=Nazism analogy. The campus Hillel and local and state Jewish groups were so silent on this issue that 500 pro-Israel counter-demonstrators turned out, the federations pledged $10,000 for pro-Isael efforts, and groups held a pro-Israel training session three days later for 23 campus leaders. Their silence continued Feb. 16 at a meeting on the issue organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Middlesex County and a number of local synagogues. Some 250 people attended the gathering.

Nevertheless, in an email he sent along with his column, Jacobs writes, “Jewish leaders refuse to inform the Jewish community of the nature, extent and source of the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic campaigns on American campuses.”

In truth, I haven’t seen an issue galvanize Jewish organizations like this in years. Jacobs, whose David Project is in direct competition for resources with the many similar groups doing the same kind campus pro-Israel work, has to know this.

Allan Nadler of Drew University remembers Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the great Newark scholar, civil rights leader and Zionist whose

charismatic personality and his distinctly un-theological and nationalistic understanding of the essence of Judaism proved as attractive to the nervously Americanizing Jews of mid-20th-century New Jersey as it had been to the deeply assimilated and newly imperiled Jews of early Nazi Germany.

Warning — there’s a little more about Prinz’s sex life than you probably want to know, althought, to be fair, it comes straight from the rabbi’s racy memoirs. And Nadler ends with a shot at the current rabbinate:

Alas, rabbis of Prinz’s intellectual caliber, clarity of vision, and courage survive today almost only in the world of fiction. 

NJ Sen. Robert Menendez is hearing footsteps, and is gearing up to fight the pro-Christie tide in 2012, with some help from the West Coast:

While Democrats lost six seats in the Senate last fall, Mr. Menendez was credited by his Senate colleagues with helping the party maintain its majority during what turned out to be a brutal season in which Democrats lost control of the House.

More than that, though, Mr. Menendez managed to earn good will among senators he worked behind the scenes to re-elect, including Barbara Boxer of California, who said he kept close tabs on her during the campaign and dispatched money and other resources when needed.

“I’m going to be there for him,” she said in an interview, referring to his race next year. “I told him I would go to New Jersey if it helped him; I would go to the Jewish community and the women’s community. I told him I would raise funds.” 

I’m the host of “With the Editors” on The Jewish Channel. Here’s a promo:

Some protestors in Wisconsin over Governor Scott Walker’s plan to end union bargaining rights for public employees have resorted to that old standby, the innappropriate Nazi analogy:

I like how they couldn’t even find an actual picture of Hitler, but rather what is clearly someone dressed up in a Hitler costume. C’mon, Cheeseheads — just because you lack all sense of historical proportion, that doesn’t mean you can’t do a better job using Google!

Writing in the Forward, a Georgia rabbi throws down a challenge to his fellow Reform Jews:

L.A. Times reports on the destruction of a Nevada cottonwood tree that became a tourist attraction after people began decorating it with their discarded shoes:

The shoe tree was something in the middle of nothing, and perhaps that’s why its destruction has been so deeply felt.

On Dec. 30, under an inky sky, one vandal, or maybe more, downed the tree with a chainsaw. The roughly 80-year-old cottonwood toppled into a gully, its branches jutting out like arms trying to flag down help.

Ken Jennings on Watson’s mechanical advantage:

It plays its game coldly, implacably, always offering a perfectly timed buzz when it’s confident about an answer. Jeopardy! devotees know that buzzer skill is crucial—games between humans are more often won by the fastest thumb than the fastest brain. This advantage is only magnified when one of the “thumbs” is an electromagnetic solenoid trigged by a microsecond-precise jolt of current. I knew it would take some lucky breaks to keep up with the computer, since it couldn’t be beaten on speed.