JustASC

More snapshots from my Sderot trip:

“There is no safe place in the neighborhood,” said Talia Levanon, director of the UJC-backed Israel Trauma Coalition, which brings together some 45 NGOs. “Therapists and patient can run for shelter three times in a session.”

At the Alon Madaaim elementary school, a JDC-funded “Havens of Calm” program leads kids through daily stress reduction exercises that can include yoga and pet care, held behind the blue doors of one of the school’s safe rooms. Six- and seven-year-olds talk with uncanny fluency in the language of self-help, fully aware that the fun and games are techniques to reduce stress before the next siren interrupts their lessons.

At the Sderot community center, Nitai Schreiber, a self-described “social entrepreneur” who helps organize local empowerment projects, showed off the art projects submitted as final exams by his twin, 17-year-old daughters. Nitzan’s shows a typical teen’s room shattered into fragments out of a Dali landscape. Shaked’s depicts a bright globe, full of light, threatened from all directions by black shards. Shaked once asked him, “If I get wounded, will we leave? And if the answer is yes, what are we waiting for?” Read the rest of this entry »

My old pal Elli Wohlgelernter (at right in photo above, with his cameraman Dennis Zinn) interviewed me and my colleagues for a segment on last night’s English-language broadcast of IBA News in Israel. The report is here, at about the 6-minute mark.

Just back from a three-day fact-finding mission in Sderot and Ashkelon. Some quick thoughts:

Quiet streets at noon. Damaged buildings. Residents living as emotional refugees.

The crisis in Sderot is a slow motion Katrina, playing out over seven years and thousands of missiles.

Read the rest of this entry »

Chapter One: Fox News commentator and right-of-Attila blogger Michelle Malkin complains that  celebrity food maven Rachael Ray appears in a Dunkin’ Donut Ad wearing a scarf that looks like a keffiyeh, the traditional headdress worn by Arab men. The keffiyeh “has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad,” she writes.

Chapter Two: Dunkin’ Donuts cancels the ad,  releasing a statement:

In a recent online ad, Rachael Ray is wearing a black-and-white silk scarf with a paisley design. It was selected by her stylist for the advertising shoot. Absolutely no symbolism was intended. However, given the possibility of misperception, we are no longer using the commercial.

Chapter Three: “An interfaith group that includes rabbis blasted Dunkin’ Donuts for yielding to pressure to pull an ad featuring a keffiyeh”:

“Enough already,” Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, [The Interfaith Alliance] president, said in a statement. “Have we really reached the point where we are associating wearing a scarf of Middle Eastern origin with terrorist sympathies? Should we apply this standard to everything that comes from the Middle East? Or are we only applying this standard to our wardrobe?”

My two cents: We’re stuck between two imponderables: If Rachael Ray wears a faux keffiyeh, do the terrorists win? If Dunkin’ Donuts caves to bloggers, does Michelle Malkin win?

DD made a business decision: If enough people read the scarf Malkin’s way, that’s bad for business. And truth be told, Rev. Gaddy, I don’t think it’s bloggers alone who have made the keffiyeh a symbol of terrorism. Noble Arab tradition it may be, but Arafat and company are certainly implicated in turning an item of “Middle East origin” into a symbol of Palestinian nationalism — and in turn making suicide bombing the signature tactic of that movement.  

But here’s aquestion of context: What if DD ran an ad featuring people all over the world drinking their coffee, and one of them happens to be a Semitic-lookng guy in a keffiyeh, or a woman in a Hijab? If Malkin complained, that’s just bigotry. What’s her message then: “To portray an Arab is to suport terrorism”?

But the Ray thing is different — wrapped around an obvious non-Arab, a piece of indigenous dress is more easily interpreted as a gesture of solidarity. If a nobody like me wears a yarmulke on TV, viewers think “Jew.” If Russell Simmons wears one, viewers think, “Hip hop mogul who is making a statement in support of Jews.”

And if an Arab blogger complained? If it were a big crocheted kippah with the words  ”Hebron Forever” on the side, they’d have a point. In Israel, the pie-sized knitted kippah can be interpreted as a symbol of the settler movement. But the semiotics of kippot is understood only within a fairly small set of Jews and some Arabs, and hasn’t any traction in popular culture.

In conclusion: Malkin’s an alarmist, but DD and Ray made a mistake in picking wardrobe that could be read as a political statement. Especially if you’re just flacking coffee.

Oh yeah: this will help their cause:

Philip Walotsky, who said that he works at a company that produces “healthy foods with a dash of Israeli-Palestinian relations,” said that he appreciated Obama’s nuance on questions about the Middle East.

“It’s called Jewance,” [Jeremy] Goldberg [chairman of Generation Obama]  said. “That’s a joke we made up in one of our Jewish-community meetings. But, if you like Obama, it’s because he’s someone who really knows what he’s talking about.”

Goldberg recommended that young Jewish Obama supporters use the same approach when talking to their older relatives. He admitted, “I’m still working on my own grandmother. This is someone who’s been politically active. She still reads the Cleveland Jewish News, even though she’s living in Houston. She voted for Jimmy Carter, and she regrets it, so she uses a Jimmy Carter sponge to wring out when she gets really mad.” He said that she had been a Hillary supporter but was beginning to waver. “Our grandmothers trust us,” he said. “She’s starting to say, ‘Well, if you like him that much. . . .’ “

Rabbi Daniel M. Zucker, Chairman of Americans for Democracy in the Middle-East, responds to my column asking for solutions in solving the Iran crisis. He proposes a Third Option:

The Third Option is the empowerment of the Iranian people itself, aided by the Iranian people’s oldest, best organized, and most popular opposition groups-the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK)-to rise up and change the regime. Iranians are fed up with the theocratic government of the fundamentalists and want to create a secular democracy. If free and fair elections were held in Iran today, some 90+% would vote to throw the clerics and their supporters out of office permanently. So why has this not happened yet?

This week in the NJJN:

• NJ Dems see ‘work to do’ if Obama is nominee
• Is Agriprocessors the victim of Orthodox-bashing?
• Hall of Fame plans celebration of Hammerin’ Hank
• My column on McCain and Hagee:

The assumption here is that religious certainty is a sign of strength, and secularism and pluralism are signs of weakness or drift. But there is also strength in a lack of certainty. Humility about one’s ideas and convictions makes it easier to listen to someone else’s ideas and possibly learn something new. Hagee’s sermon was offensive because his certainty led him to ignore how his own words might be heard by the victims and survivors who don’t share his theology - and how bad ideas, however well intended, can be used to justify worse actions.

From the “this is news?” category:

Pope to officiate at cathedral event

– The Sydney Morning Herald.

A.P. reports:

Bahrain’s king appoints Jewish woman as ambassador to Washington

‘It is a great honor to have been appointed as the first female ambassador to the United States,’ 43-year-old lawmaker Houda Nonoo says.

Aaron Rubashkin, the owner of the troubled Agriprocessors kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, announced today that the company will hire a new chief executive officer “who can help us meet the needs of Agriprocessors today and in the future.”

The release doesn’t mention that the current CEO is Sholom Rubashkin, Aaron’s son.

Meanwhile, the press release sent me and other journalists included this interesting header, presumably by accident:

PREPARED AT REQUEST OF COUNSEL IN ANTICIPATION OF LITIGATION
DRAFT - FOR CLIENT REVIEW ONLY