JustASC

Money quote from a Chicago Tribune retrospective article on Obama and the Jews. This is from Abner Mikva, the former Clinton White House counsel, who the Trib says “was among the first to spot the potential of the skinny young law school graduate with the odd name”:

“If Clinton was our first black president, then Barack Obama is our first Jewish president,” said Mikva.

Adds Rabbi Arnold Wolf, whose KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue is across the street from Obama’s Chicago house: 

“Obama is from nowhere and everywhere—just like the Jews. He’s black, he’s white, he’s American, he’s Asian, he’s African—and so are we,” Wolf said.

Okay class, let’s get all our giggles out now: The Mets have acquired reliever  J.J. Putz to shore up their sorry bullpen.

The thing about the word putz is that it’s a lot filthier in the original Yiddish than in the comic way it it is usually used by English-speakers.  As maven Michael Wex explains in Just Say Nu, his indispensible guide to Yiddish idioms, shvants “actually serves as the somewhat less obscene version” of putz, and shvantz itself is a doozie:

Shvants, the equivalent of “cock” or “prick,” has further extended senses that correspond to “asshole, dick, jerk…”

So in conclusion: Yikes. Poor Mr. Putz is bound to mess up on the mound at some point (which already sounds dirty), at which point you can expect the headline writers at the Daily News and the N.Y. Post to have a field day.

This is extremely sad news: Rabbi Michael “Mickey” Rosen, whose network of Yakar synagogues combined the heady spirituality of neo-hasidic Orthodoxy with a down-to-earth commitment to social activism and political engagement, died yesterday “from injuries sustained three weeks ago in a fall.”

I had the privelege of studying with Mickey when I was living in Jerusalem in the late ’90s. Yakar’s Jerusalem branch had a learning program for adults, and Mickey set up a curriculum where we traced a single concept through all the levels of Jewish text, from Chumash through Midrash through Talmud through Jewish law through hasidic thought. The theme my year was “tochacha,” the ability to rebuke one’s friends and neighbors without destroying a relationship or a community.

Mickey was a role model of tochacha inside and outside the beit midrash — he could gently chide you for sloppy thinking, just as he took his fellow Orthodox and Israelis to task for their own failings (here’s an example from 2006). But you never doubted the wisdom and generosity behind even his toughest words, and never felt worse off for having heard and taken to heart his advice.

Yakar services were wildly theatrical (on the whitewashed walls of the shul there was a sign reading “No banging on the walls”), and there were few more heavenly sounds than Mickey harmonizing at the shtender with one of his sons. But typical of his approach, the davening was divided neatly in two by a study session, where you could choose among a few prominent teachers (including Mickey’s brilliant wife and fellow scholar Gilla) and feed your head as well as your heart.

May his family be comforted among the mourners for Zion and Jerusalem.

Here’s an easy way to spread the holiday joy: the Reform movement is holding a campaign to provide mosquito nets to Third World families at risk of contracting malaria.

The nets only cost $10 a piece. To donate, go here.

Interesting, strange, sad story from the A.P. about how the Mumbai attacks may change the way Chabad does business:

Signs in Hebrew and English are posted outside Chabad houses. The street address of each building can be found through the online global directory the movement developed to attract visitors. Worship and activity schedules at the centers are often just a few more clicks away.

But now the openness of the movement, always a strength, seems like a dangerous vulnerability. Chabad-Lubavitch leaders are struggling with how they can better protect their people without retreating from their mission to welcome and serve Jews worldwide.

What’s only implied in the article is this: It’s not openness that made Chabad “dangerously vulnerable,” but its Jewishness. In other words, it’s dangerous to be a Jew in this world, more dangerous yet to let them know you’re Jewish. And Jews are paranoid? 

It almost makes you feel sorry for Plaxico, who didn’t feel safe unless he was packing.

The front page of the Star-Ledger shows an Associated Press photo of the funeral in Israel for one of the Mumbai terrorist victims, and carries the following caption:

In Jerusalem yesterday, a sea of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men carry the body of Leibish Teitelbaum, 38, who was killed in last week’s terrorist attack on the Mumbai Jewish center. Teitelbaum, a U.S. citizen who lived in Jerusalem, was a member of Satmar, an ultra-Orthodox sect that does not accept Israel as a Jewish state. Throngs of Israeli mourners turned out for the funerals of the six Jews slain in the Indian city. Story, Page 8. [Emphasis added.]

How is the tidbit about Satmar’s non-Zionist ideology germane in a caption about a terrorist victim’s funeral? Granted, the caption-writer picked up the sentence verbatim from the full A.P. story, but it’s not clear what it’s doing in that context either.

This is sort of like captioning a photograph of a Catholic priest’s funeral by saying, “who belongs to a religious order that believe that Mary remained a Virgin her entire life.” I mean, it’s certainly true and does distinguish Catholics from, say, many Protestants. But unless disputes about Mary’s virginity were central to whatever made him newsworthy to begin with, it doesn’t belong in the caption.

Terry Mattingly, who critiques religion reporting at the GetReligion blog, asks, even more forcefully than most Jewish sites I’ve read, why the media seems reluctant to acknowledge the deliberateness with which the Mumbai terrorists targeted a Jewish center:

The killers targeted Jews in a unique manner. It appears that they may have singled out Jews for torture. And, as Julia Duin just noted in a blog post over at the Washington Times, it does not appear that the leaders of American newsrooms are as willing to report many of these hellish facts as journalists in Europe and, yes, Israel.

As for the torture question, one reason may be that the reports of torture are attributed to unnamed doctors and morticians. The primary source for the reports was a November 30 article on the Rediff Indian news portal, quoting an unnamed doctor, from an unspecified hospital. Mattingly links to Arutz Sheva’s second-hand report on the Rediff account. 

That doesn’t absolve the press from digging deeper, but does raise warning flags. Indeed, the Jerusalem Post quotes a Mumbai physician, by name, who “has cast doubt on a report claiming that signs of torture were apparent on the bodies of the victims.”

Dr. Gajanan Chawan [of Mumbai's JJ Hospital], who saw the bodies, told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday he did not believe the wounds he observed suggested the hostages had been tortured prior to their deaths.

Asked if he saw any evidence of torture on the bodies, Chawan replied, “No, I don’t think so.” He added that the majority of the wounds he could identify had been caused by firearms.

Ron Rosenbaum thinks the latest gossip about Hitler’s genitalia is a hoax, and explains why it matters:

There’s no excuse now for this incessant dwelling on Hitler’s sexuality, as if it tells us anything about the true nature of his evil. No, all the obsession can tell us about is the way the culture as a whole exhibits a refusal to face the profundity and complexity of evil and instead-with some honorable exceptions-prefers to escape responsibility for Hitler and the Holocaust by blaming it all on ludicrously unserious and ahistorical sexual mythologies, and the Freudian-influenced notion that all behavior has a sexual explanation at heart.

Back after a Thanksgiving trip to Montreal, where we checked out McGill University for our high school senior son.

Bone-headed discovery: The Quebecois are serious about this whole French thing. Not that we had any trouble in banks or restaurants — and McGill is an English-language institution (kids have the option of submitting exams in French). But this is only my second visit as an adult, and I guess I’d forgotten that French is the default.

Other discovery: The drinking age is 18! We learned this at Shabbat dinner at the Ghetto Shul, the rollicking, Carlebachian synagogue in the heart of the student ghetto. Beautiful service, lovely dinner for dozens and dozens of kids and visiting families. And after the benchers are put away, out comes the alcohol!

I asked an American student if there is any less binge drinking at McGill than in the States, where some brave college presidents have floated the idea of lowering the drinking age and getting themselves out of the Keg Police business. “Oh, students binge,” she said. “But drinking becomes part of the culture. When a prof wants to discuss your grades, they’ll do it over a drink. And it’s a lot safer and mellower to drink at a synagogue than in a bar.”

I’ll drink to that.

For you, a Thanksgiving treat: Excerpts from my never to be published opus, “Company’s Coming: A Thanksgiving Haggadah for Gentiles and Other Non-Jews.” Now people of all faiths can turn Turkey Day into a Jewish holiday, and join us in our misery joy!