JustASC

This is totally cool: The skinniest house in the world is being built in Warsaw, Poland for famed Israeli writer and filmmaker Etgar Keret.

When completed, the “Keret House” will be no wider than four feet. Jakub Szczęsny designed the structure to fit in a wedge between two apartment buildings. Officially an “art installation” (building codes would otherwise make the structure illegal), it will serve as a studio for the author of  The Girl on the Fridge  and other short story collections.

Photos courtesy Central

And I thought my last name was cumbersome:

The Times enlisted a genealogist, Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak, who traced the burial by date…

The Times story is about a “mystery” 1910 headstone found last year on a Lower East Side street, which turned out to belong to a woman some describe as the author of the first Yiddish cookbook in America.

Ms. Smolenyak Smolenyak’s web site insists “yes, that’s her real name,” without further explanation. Was her maiden name Smolenyak, and she married a Smolenyak? (If so, which Smolenyak comes first, hers or her husband’s?) Was she named after the first two partners in a law firm? When spelling her name on the phone, does she do the whole thing twice, or just spell it once and say, “and then repeat”?

I do like the way she handled it on the cover of her book, “Who Do You Think You Are?: The Essential Guide to Tracing Your Family History.” Her name appears as “Megan Smolenyak^2″.

Michelle Goldberg argues why the oft-predicted Jewish political realignment — from Democrat to Republican — ain’t happening. It’s the “growing association between the Republican Party and Christian fundamentalism”:

In the end, American Jews care most about America. They are unwilling to assume a role in their own country that’s in any way analogous to that of Arab citizens of Israel—a people with legal equality who are nonetheless excluded from their nation’s raison d’être. Jews know they can never be full citizens of a Christian nation.

And Republican politics have never been so fully Christianized. The Tea Party was initially mischaracterized as a libertarian movement, but it is deeply imbued with religious fundamentalism, and polls show that a majority of its members believe that the United States is a Christian nation.

I think wariness over evangelicals is only part of Jewish loyalty to the Demorats.  It’s also a question of political ideology: the radical turn of the GOP on its core issues — the no-tax pledge, shrinking governnment, deregulation of private idustry, willful recklessness on climate change, to name a few – far outweighs indicators that show Republicans to be stronger on Israel than Democrats.

Obama certainly riled fence-sitters by referring to the “1967 borders,” but no sooner did he do that than GOP backbenchers scuttled a debt-ceiling deal that would have meant raising taxes on the rich. Which isn’t to say that Jews haven’t grown increasingly conservative, but that their conservatism has limits that fall far short of current Republican orthodoxy. I think it was Jon Stewart who said that the “Rockefeller Wing” of the Republican Party has been closed for renovations since 1972.

Goldberg points out the underlying creepiness of Christian Zionism, which “culminates in a third world war in the Middle East and the consignment of unconverted Jews to hell before the messiah returns.” I think most Jews, and ceratinly most Israelis, regard such nurishkeit with a shrug: We’ll sort it out during the end times; meanwhile, we’ll take their tourist dollars and political support.

But even accepting on faith (literally) that the GOP is stronger on Israel than the Democrats, I don’t think most American Jews are convinced that the Democrats are all that bad. Yes, there’s an anti-Israel wing of (presumably) Democratic voters who support the BDS movement and consider Congress  Zionist Occupied Territory, but their representation in mainstream Democratic politics is confined to a  few marginal figures like former congressowman Cynthia McKinney, or Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York’s 22nd Congressional District. True, 54 Democratic members of Congress signed  a letter to Obama advocating an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The letter angered the pro-Israel mainstream — on the other hand, it was endorsed by Americans for Peace Now and J Street. You can revile those groups’ politics, but they represent mainstream political positions within Israel and the American Jewish conversation. Besides, Obama ignored the letter.

The Republican Jewish Coalition is no doubt preparing its pre-election aids claiming Obama would return Israel to its pre-1967 borders and citing his “disrespect” for Benjamin Netanyahu. Of course, they are going to have to convince Jews, against all evidence, that the U.S.-Israel relationship has fundamentally changed under Obama, and hope voters ignore the evidence that security cooperation between the countries has actually improved.

In other words, for most American Jews, upset over Obama’s Mideast rhetoric is not going to outweigh their rejection of the GOP’s domestic agenda anytime soon. The former would have to get a lot worse, and the latter would have to get a lot better, for the realignment to take place.

Ynet reports:

Rightwing US broadcaster Glenn Beck has come under proverbial fire again, this time for comparing the Labor party camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya, where dozens of youths were gunned down Friday, to Hitler’s infamous Hitler Youth.

“There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing,” Beck stated in his radio show Monday.

Someone should tell Israel’s new best friend that political youth movements –and associated summer camping — have been a staple of Zionism even before the founding of the state and ever since. There’s Betar, Habonim Dror, and Hashomer Hatzair, to name just a few. They include a range of ideologies.

Beck’s obsession with “liberal fascism” leads him down these bizarre, hallucinatory, and even slanderous backroads.

The Zionist Organization of America hates boycotts — except when it doesn’t.

Yesterday the ZOA issued a release saying it is “sympathetic” to Israel’s new anti-boycott law, which many Left Wing and not-so-Left-Wing critics say is an affront to free speech. According to the ZOA release:

ZOA now sees that the enacted Law has eliminated any criminal penalties for boycotting Israeli products or institutions, and allows only civil remedies such as fines and eliminating government funding to violators; the ZOA now is more sympathetic with the Israeli Knesset’s actions even though the Law is not perfect, e.g. the wording of the Law is vague, therefore could be interpreted to apply to any boycott of an Israeli citizen or anybody for almost any violation and as such could cause a “chilling effect on all boycotts.”

That last phrase — “chilling effect on all boycotts” — is telling. The ZOA is is “firmly opposed to boycotting Israeli goods, services, cultural and sporting events anywhere in the world.” And yet it also recognizes the political and tactical usefulness of a boycott — after all, it has called for more than a few. Here’s a ZOA release from 2010:

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has urged donors to make no contributions to the University of California, Irvine, and has also urged students to not apply there, because the university has for years enabled bigotry, discrimination and the violation of civil rights by failing to condemn longstanding anti-Semitic and Israel-bashing speech and conduct on campus, and failing to enforce its own policies against the perpetrators.

Here’s another, from 2009:

ZOA Supports Israeli MKs’ Petition To Boycott British Goods Unless Britain Rescinds Labelling Products From Judea/Samaria & Golan

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) is supporting a petition signed by 39 Members of the Knesset calling upon the Israeli public to reconsider availing themselves of British goods and services in response to a recent British government initiative to recommend to all U.K. retail chains the placing of prominent labels indicating products imported from Jewish enterprises and factories operating in Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights.

(That last one is particularly rich — the ZOA proposes a boycott of British goods because labeling products from the West Bank “simply facilitates the agenda of those who would boycott Israel.)

And one more, from 2009:

ZOA Condemns Coca-Cola and Renews
Call to Boycott Coke Products

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) condemns the Coca-Cola Company for continuing to engage in immoral behavior and refusing to rectify the wrong it has been perpetrating against a Jewish family, the Bigios. The ZOA calls on the public to boycott Coca-Cola products, and for Jewish members of the public to boycott the company’s kosher-for-Passover products during this Passover holiday.

I acgree with ZOA that “[anti-Israel] Boycott advocates are generally not simply against a specific Israeli policy but are waging a racist economic war against the entire state of Israel and against its very existence as a Jewish state.”

But boycotts in and of themselves are not immoral – and it is a very fine legal line to place limits on which targets one can legally boycott and which ones you can’t.

One of my readers warns that an Israeli who boycotts other Israelis “paves the way for enemies of Israel/Jews to say–’well, if Jews boycott Jews, why can’t we do so without being accused of either anti-semitism or being anti-Israel.’” 

By the same logic, a BDS activist can ask, “If a Jewish organization can boycott Great Britain or UC-Irvine, why can’t we boycott Israel?”

The way out of this trap is not to ban boycotts, but to expose the under-handed motives and hypocritical agendas of the BDS movement — and defend the right of Israelis to express their distaste of their own government’s policies.    

NY Post reports: 

Judy and David Wax of Lakewood, NJ, could face life in prison if convicted of coordinating the Oct. 17, 2010, kidnapping and assault of Yisrael Briskman, who prosecutors said was targeted after he failed to honor wife Chaya Dina Briskman’s request for a “get” — a divorce document recognized under Jewish law. Instead of granting the “get,” Briskman fled Israel for Brooklyn.
 

Great scoop in the Forward: New Jersey Y Camps is going to allow energy companies to look for natural gas on its sites in the Poconos:

Fracking, the controversial technique for extracting natural gas that energy companies are promoting as America’s path to energy independence, has come to the sunny, idyllic world of Jewish camping.

Four Jewish summer camps have signed leases with gas exploration companies which could allow the deep bore drilling technique — criticized by many experts as damaging to the environment — at their campgrounds by this fall.

-snip-

“This thing is so much bigger than we are,” said Leonard Robinson, executive director of the New Jersey YMHA-YWHA Camps. His organization received $400,000 upon signing an oil and gas lease with Hess in 2009 on a property that houses two summer camps. “We realized this is way beyond us,” Robinson said.

Solomon Dwek, the rabbi’s son and informant at the center of  NJ’s massive federal corruption sting, surfaces (and quickly goes under) in the Baltimore area. The Baltimore Sun reports that Dwek

has been living in Pikesville while waiting to testify in the cases.

The information first came to light late last month in New Jersey, when Solomon Dwek, 38, was unable to take the stand in the trial of the former mayor of Secaucus, N.J. because of an arrest here. Dwek, who turned informant after being implicated in a $400 million Ponzi scheme, was charged in Baltimore with failure to return a rental car, triggering a federal judge to revoke his bail.

On Thursday, the car theft charges were dropped in Baltimore District Court. Defense attorney Marc Zayon called the case a “financial oversight with no criminal intent.” He said the car had been returned to Hertz Rent-a-Car, where Dwek is a “gold” member, and all payments had been made.

But Dwek’s troubles are far from over. His bail was revoked after the FBI said he lied in an affidavit when quizzed about the car theft, and a federal judge ordered him jailed over recommendations from prosecutors that he be placed on home monitoring. A $12,500 monthly stipend he was receiving from a federal bankruptcy trustee has been revoked, along with a $100-an-hour private security team.

Joe Berger of the Times reports on the the fire that severely damaged Manhattan’s landmark Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun on Monday:

The synagogue was where generations of congregants gathered to pray — and schmooze — on the Sabbath, the place where they married their beloved, bar mitzvahed their young, bade farewell to a dead parent.

It’s a sweet sentence, but I am especially taken with the use of “bar mitzvahed” as a verb. We avoid it at my paper, instead using the long and probably over-fastidious phrase “celebrate becoming a bar mitzva.” Bar mitzva is actually a noun — literally “son [or if bat, "daughter"] of the commandment.” Technically, saying a girl was “bat mitzvahed” is like saying a young woman was “brided.” (In English the noun form has been extended to the name of the event itself.)

The Times tends to go with “became a bar/bat mitzvah.” When it uses “bar mitzvahed” as a verb, it is usually in casual pieces or direct quotes. For example, two sentences from the same story, in 2007:

”We try to get people talking about the issues in a safe environment,” Rabbi Epstein said. ”These are such complex negotiations. Two rabbis. Two cantors. Two boards of directors, two buildings have to become one. And these are not just ‘buildings.’ They are places where people are named, bar mitzvahed, married.”

Eileen Lamban, 69, became a bat mitzvah and later married at the Farmingdale Jewish Center.

I still like the “becoming” phrase, since it honors the Hebrew meaning. But as Joe demonstrated, breaking the rules can lead to some fine, evocative prose.

A lede that will probably never appear in the New Jersey Jewish News:

A prominent Long Island Jewish leader was caught with his dreidel out in a string of sordid sex tapes, according to sensational Manhattan court records.

The New York Post  (of course) has the whole story.