JustASC

Ah, the Giants. I only feel sad because there’s no game to look forward to next week. Big Blue’s improbable march to the championship was a great excuse to spend Sunday afternoons with the family (good luck getting the kids to agree to watch anything else I’m interested in).  Now what will distract me from Iran, Syria, the moribund peace process, and the New York Mets?

That was my semi-serious point in a response to a reader who objected to our cover story in last week’s paper (at right). The reader wrote:

With all the horrors in the world today – bombed synagogues, Israel ready to attack Iran, unemployment, PACs – I was astounded to see the super bowl “Jews for Giants” on your front page. I stopped reading the Newark Star Ledger because of it’s inane articles. Now that you have descended to this type of nonsensical reporting I will have to add this paper to my don’t read in spite of my appreciation for the Andrew Silow-Carroll columns.  

I responded:

I appreciate your response to last week’s cover package and your praise for my columns. But in fact, with all the horrors in the world today, isn’t it important also to take a moment occasionally to focus on the fun and, yes, frivolous side of Jewish life? (more…)

Having seen and enjoyed “The Artist” this weekend, I am happy to share this piece of synchronicity, from Page Six:

Silent black-and-white film “The Artist,” an Oscar front-runner, began as a true passion project for producer Thomas Langmann and director Michel Hazanavicius. Langmann — son of French director Claude Berri — had to finance the project with his own money after no one would take a risk on it. He even sold a home and borrowed from relatives. “People would make weird faces,” Langmann has said about pitching the film, which has 10 Oscar nominations and won a best picture award at the Golden Globes. The producer and Hazanavicius found they shared an emotional connection when they met: Langmann’s father’s first movie, “The Two of Us,” told the story of a French-Jewish boy sent to the country to hide with an elderly couple. Hazanavicius’ parents were “hidden children” in France during World War II.

NJJN‘s Responsive Reading newsletter continues with debates over Newt’s ‘dog whistle’; the single-issue voter; and Orthodoxy’s rules for women. Subscribe here.

It’s time U.S. Jews spoke up about what’s important – and it’s not just Israel 
By Yael Miller (Ha’aretz)

“Jewish Americans whose vote only depends on the candidate’s policies on Israel are doing the whole of the Jewish community grave harm,” writes Miller, a graduate student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Single-issue Jewish votes block discussion of important domestic issues, fulfill a “dangerous stereotype,” and sacrifice the community’s voice on other, non-Israel causes.

 The Emerging Debate about “the Jewish Vote”
By Steven Windmueller (Jewish Journal)

 It’s simply not true that American Jews are single-issue voters; Jewish voters “arrive at their decision based on an array of issues and political interests.” Polls show that Jews vote according to their interests in church-state issues, health policy, and economic matters. “If we are to truly understand voting behavior, we need to appreciate the various cohorts that define our community’s political base,” writes Windmueller. (more…)

MSNBC updates the story about synagogue attacks in NJ:

A man accused of firebombing three New Jersey synagogues may have been influenced by violent Xbox video games that aggravated his mental issues, his attorney said Tuesday.

The man, Anthony M. Graziano, 19, of Lodi, N.J., has pleaded not guilty to first-degree attempted murder, bias intimidation and aggravated arson, among other charges, for two attacks on synagogues. Graziano was in court Tuesday to seeking a reduction in his $5 million bail, which Superior Court Judge Liliana DeAvila-Silebi cut in half because Graziano is destitute….

Graziano’s attorney, Robert Kalisch, speaking outside court after the hearing Tuesday morning, described Graziano as a young man with mental health issues who had few friends and played violent games on his Xbox. Kalisch didn’t say which games Graziano played. 

“This is someone who may (have been), with their own problems they have within their own head, taken over by these games that young people play now — lots of violence, lots of meanness,” Kalisch said, NBC station WNBC of New York reported.

Ariel Kaminer, the Times‘ Ethicist columnist, takes a question about the search for a new rabbi. Having just served on my synagogue’s rabbi search committee, I have opinions. First, the question and response:

My synagogue is interviewing four rabbis. One, who lives nearby, comes every Saturday to pray and glad-hand. The other three can’t, because they don’t travel on the Sabbath. Isn’t it unethical of him to take advantage of his proximity? NAME WITHHELD

Attending those services isn’t unethical; it’s sensible. If you applied for a job at a bookstore, would you refuse on principle to visit until they made their choice? But if you find the rabbi’s behavior in the synagogue to be inappropriate (if, say, he hands out $50 bills during the mourner’s prayer), then cast your vote accordingly.

Terrible answer. A good search committee goes out of its way to level the playing field among candidates, especially finalists (I presume Name Withheld was talking about finalists). We introduced our candidates to the congregation in audition weekends designed to be as identical as possible, so that the candidates would have similar opportunities to make their impressions. Had one of the candidates begun showing up on other days, I hope we would have said, “So as not to unduly prejudice the outcome, we politely request that you refrain from visiting the synagogue during the search process.”

The difference between a bookstore job and a pulpit is that you rarely if ever put the bookstore job to a vote of the store’s staff or customers. Most rabbinical searches are democratic in one way or the other — the congregation has some kind of say, even if it is an up and down vote at the end of the process (that’s one reason why the Conservative movement has a policy that interim rabbis cannot be considered for the eventual full-time position — their access to the congregation would give them an unfair advantage over other candidates). One rabbi’s glad-handling would, like political activity within 50 feet of a polling station, distort the process.

Besides, you can’t tell everything about a rabbi by the way she shmoozes during kiddush. That’s why congregations delegate much of the screening to a committee. Sometimes, because of confidentiality, the search commitee is privy to things — a bad recommendation, an unreasonable compensation or work-related request, a tendency to drop f-bombs during the interview — that a congregation could not and should not possibly know. Pity the committee that rejects an inappropriate candidate who has managed to ingratiate himself to congregants during frequent visits to shul.

No doubt a candidate could figure out a way to do some politicking on his or her own. Hell, it would be “sensible” for a candidate to sit in the front row during a rival’s audition sermon and challenge her to a debate(think how far that has gotten Newt). But I think it was clear to the rabbis in our search, if not across the Conservative movement, that campaigning is bad form, if not disqualifying.

Is this the most Jewish name for a cookie ever? The girl in the commercial looks like she was coached (badly) by Fyvush Finkel.

Last night a friend asked me for the definition of “meta” and I gave the usual answer about a thing that references itself, or should be understood at a level above (or perhaps below) its surface understanding. I hadn’t yet seen the New Yorker cartoon below, but it’s as good an example as any:

“Marvin! Is that a thought balloon
or a hedge above your head?”

The example I did give was this one: A few months ago a production company came to film a commercial in our office lunchroom. Wendy’s did this a few years back, and I guess we’re the go-to place if you need a fairly drab, generic-looking office space. Apparently, the lunchroom wasn’t sufficiently drab or generic-looking for the latest commercial company, so they redecorated. They put up a number of “office-y” signs, including an inspirational poster, a Spanish-language listing of workmen’s compensation benefits, and a sign warning people not to jam the shredder.

So that’s sort of meta already — a fictional representation of our actual office space made to look even more authentically office-like.

But here’s the bonus level: After they wrapped, the filmmakers left the signs up in the lunchroom — and nobody has ever bothered to take them down. So now all my actual co-workers work in an office space that looks more like an office than it did before, thanks to the make-believe of an advertiser.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is the kind of teacher you wish you had for all your classes. Lively, avuncular, engaging, he can make a lot of constitutional legal theory go down easily in witty and enlightening chunks. He packed the Jewish Theological Seminary last night for a talk based on his latest book, Making Our Democracy Work, A Judge’s View. (I came an hour early and was still relegated to one of two overflow rooms. On the plus side, the video gave me a close-up view I wouldn’t have had in the main hall.)

The first half of the talk was his justification for the court’s role in American law-making. He spoke movingly of a few key moments when the court’s authority was challenged and even ignored, including by the federal government itself, as when Andrew Jackson ignored a court decision and drove the Cherokee nation out of Georgia. But Breyer finds the American story infinitely more inspiring than disheartening, Remembering how Ike sent members of  the 101st Airborne into Little Rock, Breyer said “I still get kind of a shiver” when he thinks about it.

The second half of the lecture, on the Constitution as a “flexible, living document,” was red meat for the rabbis and scholars at the Seminary and the Conservative movement, whose official history is called Tradition and Change. Clearly Breyer’s book is meant as a challenge to Scalia and the “originalists” on the Court. He understands their impulse to keep decisions free of judge’s subjective impulses. Breyer’s approach is not to ask what founding fathers would do in a particular case. Instead, he asks what values underlie the Constitution, and applies these to changing circumstances. Times may change, the law may change, but “you’re taking a value that doesn’t change.”

(That’s essentially the m.o. of the Conservative movement. I imagine, however, that there might have been some rabbinic firebrands in the room who are restless over the pace of change within their movement and impatient with Breyer’s somewhat deliberate approach to jurisprudence.)

If there was something missing from the evening it was any acknowledgement of Breyer’s own Judaism and how it may or may not have shaped his own legal thinking and career. Moderator Ariela Dubler of Columbia Law School didn’t bring this up in the short q and a that followed the talk.   

“Patriotism” has come to mean football-field size flags, Navy flyovers, and country-western songs, but I never felt as patriotic as I did in listening to Breyer. In a small aside he mentioned that he had recently hosted a delegation of law students from Tunisia, explaining to them how America came to respect and enforce even the court’s most unpopular decisions. (“You can turn on the television and see what’s happening in countries who decide their major problems in the streets and with guns,” he said.) Sometimes you need a reminder that for all the polarization and hard feeling in this country, there remains respect for the law.

I was Googling the Israeli filmmaker Ami Drozd and received the following message with my results:

The word “ami” has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.

Police nab a teen in two of the Nothern Jersey synagogue attacks:

Police arrested a Lodi teen in the firebombing of a Rutherford synagogue and an arson at a Paramus temple, Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli announced Tuesday.

Anthony M. Graziano, 19, was charged with nine counts of attempted murder and one count each of bias intimidation and aggravated arson in connection with the Rutherford incident. He was also charged with aggravated arson, arson and bias intimidation in the Paramus incident, Molinelli said.

As I wrote last week, if in our fear of anti-Semitism we ignore all the “signs of Jewish acceptance and privilege, we end up handing tremendous power to a malicious teen with a spray can” — or in this case, a book of matches.