JustASC

Tragic news: Rabbi Jim Diamond, former director of Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life, was killed Thursday in a triple-car accident in Princeton. He was 74.

Former NJJN reporter Marilyn Silverstein profiled Rabbi Diamond when he announced his retirement in 2003:

Rabbi Diamond to retire after nine years
as head of Princeton U’s Jewish ‘experiment’

by Marilyn Silverstein
NJJN PMB Correspondent

If he had to write the want ad for his successor as executive director of Princeton University’s Center for Jewish Life, said Rabbi James Diamond, “energy” would be high on his list.

“I would say a high-energy multi-tasker, with a capacity for detail,” he said, “but most important, possessed of a vision of the qualitative and creative Jewish life on this campus.”
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m being interviewed tonight by WNYC about the president’s trip to Israel. Segment will air at 5:20 p.m., I think.

Why does this remind me of my father and me? Is it because all Jewish men begin to look alike at a certain age? Is it because of the obvious affection between the two men?

Or is it because my father has never once let me do a chore without him “supervising” and explaining how he might do it better!?!?

The Forward is out with a list of “America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis,” presumably a response to the much-discussed (and disputed) “Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s Top 50 Rabbis” list.

I thought the JTA’s lede on this story was a little disrespectful:

ROME (JTA) – Pope Francis gave a shout-out to Jews during the open-air Mass that formally installed him as pontiff.

But then I read the pope’s actual remarks:

“Ite, missa est…. Yo, yo, yo — I’mma finish. but first I wanna thank so many people. I didn’t know I was going to win ’cause I literally, I was so excited to be in a category with Cardinal Scola. I’m sorry, I love that guy. I think he’s awesome. I have mad love for Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana. Cardinal Francis Arinze of Nigeria — I don’t know who the hell you are, but we need to pray together, dawg.  Anyway, they’re blinking the light, but thank you so much, friends, family, my diocese, my manager. I did not think I was going to win.

“And finally, thank you to my Jewish bros and sistahs, they really helped get it in there. And Moses, he made the name.  Deo gràtias– peace out!”

Oops, never mind:

Prospect Park officials are urging Jews to stop throwing bread into the green space’s massive lake as a Passover rite, but religious Brooklynites insist that’s not even part of their holiday tradition.

The Prospect Park Alliance sent out a press release earlier this month warning Jews that waterfowl suffer when the observant use the park’s 60-acre lake as a place to toss chametz — leavened breads that cannot be consumed or kept in the house during the eight-day holiday.

“For many years people have brought chametz to Prospect Park to throw into the lake to feed the waterfowl,” the release reads. “While this is done with the best of intentions, feeding the waterfowl can be very harmful to them.”

But Jewish community leaders across the borough say they have never heard of anyone disposing chametz into a body of water — instead they say that on March 25, the morning of the first Passover seder, Jews will take part in a thousand-year-old tradition by symbolically and communally burning their leftover chametz outside either their homes or synagogues.

Schlesinger and other Jewish leaders suspect that the Prospect Park Alliance is mistaking Passover with the Jewish ritual of tashlich — a custom in which Jews gather by bodies of water to toss bread crusts in a symbolic cleansing ceremony.

But tashlich is generally performed on the first day of Rosh Hashanah before Yom Kippur in the early fall — roughly six months from now.

I love how the parks alliance got the term “chametz” right, but confused the holidays.   

You don’t have to read Jami Attenberg’s novel, The Middlesteins, as an allegory about the rise and decline of American Jewry. It is, after all, an intimate family drama about a grotesquely overweight mother and former lawyer, Edie; the husband who leaves her when (or is it merely as) a lifetime of obsessive eating threatens to kill her; and their children and grandchildren, circling around the wreck of Edie’s life with no clear idea how to save her.

The book’s central theme is love — how we earn it, why we need it, how and why we throw it away. So you can regard Edie’s food addiction as an attempt to fill a hollow left by a loveless marriage; her husband’s abandonment as a last-ditch bid for love by a man facing his own mortality; their children’s selfishness and self-involvement as a form of self-love (or self-loathing, the other side of the same coin). All these missed connections make one of the book’s final chapters — about a family outsider who resurrects the possibility of love — al the more effective, an antidote to the poisonous relationships of the rest of the book.

So does it matter that the Middlesteins are Jewish? Read the rest of this entry »

Excellent response by the Forward‘s Jane Eisner to Sunday’s New York Times Magazine piece about “non-violence” in the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh.

First, she directs readers to Chemi Shalev’s takedown of the piece’s author, who blames Zionism itself for the Palestinians’ woes.

Then she notes the gaping flaw in a piece purportedly celebrating non-violence:

It is not until well into the story that Ehrenreich acknowledges that the “unarmed” resisters routinely throw stones at the Israel security forces. “We see stones as our message,” Bassem Tamimi, the story’s protagonist, is quoted as saying. We’re told that Tamimi got annoyed when asked if stone-throwing counted as violence, arguing that Israel uses greater and more lethal force on a regular basis.

That may be true. But that logic doesn’t excuse the original fault here. Throwing stones — not little pebbles, but at times stones that can damage or even kill — is a violent act. Gandhi didn’t do it. The courageous African Americans who stood at the bridge in Selma didn’t do it. It takes great determination, character and patience to engage in such protest, and I can understand how, after decades of occupation, it may be difficult for the villagers of Nabi Saleh to restrain themselves. But that’s unarmed resistance. Anything else is a misnomer.

The fact that Ehrenreich only glancingly raised this point and just as quickly dismissed it can only be explained by the bias with which he approached the story. Too bad his editors didn’t ask more probing questions.

And too bad the villagers — and their international enablers — don’t understand the moral power of actual non-violent resistance.

My friend Larry Yudelson pointed me to this site, featuring the work of an artist named Nina Katchadourian, who arranges book titles to create found poetry.

I looked at the bookshelves in my own office to see if I could arrange the various titles to make coherent poems or statements. It’s pretty addictive.

Here’s one I call “To-Do List”

This one I call “Why We Need Jewish Newspapers”:

And finally, “Explanation”:

The Forward has a confusing update on an admittedly confusing story. It boils down to this: An appeals court agreed that a vendor who wanted to sell kosher food during Mets games can’t do so on the Jewish Sabbath.

In a case first brought in 2010, Kosher Sports Inc. says its contract “allowed it to offer its food at Citifield every game, including Friday nights and Saturday” – a no-no according to some kosher authorities and, as it turns out, Queens Ballpark, Co., the company that runs Citi Field. KSI filed a breach-of contract suit against Queens Ballpark in 2010 for preventing it “from selling its kosher hot dogs, sausages and other products on Shabbat” — and lost. 

On Tuesday, the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals  court backed that ruling, rejecting the kosher vendor’s appeal.

As I wrote in 2011, the case was loaded with irony: It’s the big corporate entity that’s being more religiously scrupulous than the company supplying the kosher food!

Or as the Forward puts it: