JustASC

In follow-up to the Dwek case, a federal judge refuses a chasidic charity’s efforts to recover assets from a gmach, or fund, that the feds say a Dwek associate used to launder money. The Star-Ledger explains:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has charged the fund was used to cash $357,500 in checks for Solomon Dwek, a Monmouth County real estate developer who began working for the FBI as an undercover informant after he was charged in a $50 million bank fraud.

According to criminal complaints filed in the case, Moshe Altman, a real estate developer from Monsey, N.Y., had access to the gmach, and cashed Dwek’s checks through the charity’s bank accounts. A gmach, an acronym of Hebrew letters that translates to “acts of kindness,” is essentially a fund in many Orthodox Jewish communities that may be formed for any number of charitable services — from interest-free loans to the lending of bride’s dresses.

An interfaith event in South Orange:

Congregation Beth-El of South Orange produced the event, which featured representatives of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Despite sunny skies that coaxed the winter-weary outside on the “first nice weekend,” a standing-room-only audience (even the sponsors seemed surprised) gathered indoors to hear a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, and a Christian pastor take turns explaining nuances of a story about which most attendees knew only one third.

Ha’aretz reports on the Oscars, and how the Argentinean film “The Secret in Their Eyes” bested the Israeli entry, “Ajami”:

The producer of Israeli Oscar hopeful Ajami on Monday expressed no surprise at being pipped to the ‘best foreign film’ award by Argentina’s The Secret in Their Eyes, saying the judges were bound to favor the more ‘American-oriented’ entry.

“We mainly just feel relieved,” Moshe Danon told Army Radio. “As usual, everyone knew in advance what would happen and we had every expectation the Argentinean film would win.”

What the hell does ”pipped to” mean? Turns out it’s a Britishism meaning “to be beaten in a competition or race by a very small amount.” As in this headline from the Times of London:

How US was nearly pipped to first moon rock samples 

In the Times, Sam Freedman writes how the recent snowstorms knocked down eruvim all over the northeast (an eruv is circuit of wires, strings and natural boundaries that form an unbroken border around a neighborhood — within its symbolic confines an observant Jew is able to carry objects outside the home on Shabbat, and push a baby carriage).

Freedman writes about the recent boom in eruv construction, and the opposition:

With the boom has come some opposition — not, as Jews once feared, from intolerant gentiles, but from fellow Jews. Some ultra-Orthodox leaders maintain that urban eruvim are too large and populous to be legitimate. Less-observant Jews in Tenafly, N.J., and Westhampton Beach, N.Y., have fought against their installation, under the erroneous assumption that an eruv would coerce them in some way.

I think he is being generous to the less-observant. A big part of the opposition to the eruv is fear that its erection will attract Orthodox homebuyers to the neighborhood, and the community will “flip.” As the Baltimore Jewish Times once wrote, in describing an eruv dispute in 2001:

“At the crux of the animosity was resistance by longtime secular residents to a perceived onslaught of Orthodox families about to move in and take over their upscale neighborhood – reconfiguring houses for their large families, destroying quality public schools and introducing a brand of Judaism they had little affinity for.”

Pesach is coming, and the New Jersey Jewish News want to know: Which Haggada do you use?

Do you return to a time-honored version, like Maxwell House or ArtScroll? Does yours reflect a particular passion or viewpoint? Perhaps you chose a Haggada that has exceptionally beautiful or unusual illustrations – or you have created your own.

Let us know — in about 300 words or less — what family and friends will find on your seder table this Passover and why. We’ll publish the results in our March 25  issue.

Send your message to akanter@njjewishnews.com, with “Haggada tales” in the subject line, by March 19.

Here’s a piece I wrote on the Haggada that became our family’s favorite.

Maureen Dowd’s column today, about how the Saudis are “chipping away at gender apartheid and cultural repression,” is a maddening example of false analogies in service of insanely unfounded moral equivalencies.

Here she quotes Prince Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, which she correctly describes as “an absolute Muslim monarchy ruling over one of the most religiously and socially intolerant places on earth”:  

“We are breaking away from the shackles of the past,” the prince said, sitting in his sprawling, glinting ranch house with its stable of Arabian horses and one oversized white bunny. “We are moving in the direction of a liberal society. What is happening in Israel is the opposite; you are moving into a more religiously oriented culture and into a more religiously determined politics and to a very extreme sense of nationhood,” which was coming “to a boiling point.”

(Funny “you” in that sentence, but never mind).

The prince goes on to say, “The religious institutions in Israel are stymieing every effort at peace.”

At this point a fair-minded observer might interject that comparing Israel and Saudi Arabia on gender equality, civil rights, and religious freedom is a little like comparing North and South Korea on food delivery, democratic governance, and technological innovation, or the Cleveland Cavaliers and New Jersey Nets on basketball prowess.    Read the rest of this entry »

Not to beat a dead horse (or scalp a dead  Nazi), I really don’t  get all  this Jewish infatuation with “Inglorious Basterds.” But we’re  hardly the first generation of Jews to have revenge fantasies. Here’s Rabbi Mark S. Diamond in the L.A.Jewish Journal, quoted at BlackBook:

“For me, “Inglourious Basterds” is a modern-day Midrash on the Purim story. With apologies to my traditional friends, I see the Biblical Book of Esther as an ancient Jewish fable of justice and revenge. To wit, what would happen if the tables were turned and we had power over our enemies? With all the merrymaking and child-centered focus of the Purim holiday, we tend to forget that the Jews of Shushan kill 75,000 of their foes toward the end of the narrative (Esther 9:16). Then they go out and have a big party to celebrate their success.”

Yeah, maybe. I see “Esther” as pitiful revenge fantasy that has long provided succor to an historically powerless people. I can understand why we embraced its Grand Guignol table-turning over the years, but with the establishment of the state of Israel, which shows the Jews can and will wield power in their own self-defense, I don’t get why I need Quentin Tarantino to make me feel more manly.

The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen defends Israel during “Israel Apartheid Week”:

The Israel of today and the South Africa of yesterday have almost nothing in common. In South Africa, the minority white population harshly ruled the majority black population. Nonwhites were denied civil rights, and in 1958, they were even deprived of citizenship. In contrast, Israeli Arabs, about one-fifth of the country, have the same civil and political rights as do Israeli Jews. Arabs sit in the Knesset and serve in the military, although most are exempt from the draft. Whatever this is — and it looks suspiciously like a liberal democracy — it cannot be apartheid.

The West Bank, more or less under Israeli military rule, is a different matter. But it is not part of Israel proper, and under every conceivable peace plan — including those proposed by Israeli governments — almost all of it will revert to the Palestinian Authority and become the heartland of a Palestinian state.

Cohen is critical of a recent op-ed on Israel in the Financial Times by Henry Siegman, the former executive director of the American Jewish Congress, who uses the apartheid label. Here’s Siegman:

The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.

Siegman and Cohen appear to be arguing over two different time frames. Siegman is looking to the near future and, under the assumption that it is all but too late for a two-state solution, does not see how Israel continues to rule over a majority Arab population without it looking indistinguishable from apartheid. Cohen is arguing from the present and near past, in which Israel’s conflict over the future of West Bank and Gaza is rooted in security issues, not race, and in which the two-state solution is both alive and points to a better future.

Cohen is right about the current dynamic: Because Israel’s worst critics have already painted Israel with the apartheid brush, and refuse to grant Israel its legitimate security concerns orto find fault with its adversaries, Israel has become “tone-deaf to legitimate criticism and exasperated with any attempt to find fault.”  Siegman may think he is giving Israel “tough love” in issuing his apartheid warning, but by placing the blame for the current stalemate exclusively on Israel’s shoulders, he only reinforces the legitimate sense of siege that makes any thinking Israeli wary of making further concessions. 

(And Siegman’s parenthetical “mostly” above is just tendentious –a way to scoot past the inconvenient fact that one-fifth of Israel’s citizens are not Jewish. That would muddy his “apartheid” argument, and he seems to know it.)

Over at Commentary, Jack Wertheimer discusses the “High Cost of Jewish Living”, a perennial staple of punditry up there with “the death of Broadway,” “where are the single Jewish men?” and “network television’s flawed Olympics coverage.” (See here, here and here.)

Read it closely, and you’ll see it’s really about the “high cost of Jewish day school education”:

Adding things up, an actively engaged Jewish family that keeps kosher and sends its three school-age children to the most intensive Jewish educational institutions can expect to spend somewhere between $50,000 and $110,000 a year at minimum just to live a Jewish life.

[You only get to that enormous minimum if you throw in day schools for three kids. Using Wertheimer's figures, you can join a synagogue (say, $2,000, which is high), belong to a JCC ($1,500 or so), and send those same kids to a month of Jewish summer camp (at $800 a week), and the bill would come to under $20,000 a year. That's not chump change, and you can probably even double the figure factoring in kosher food, tzedakah, Hebrew or youth group activity fees, an Israel trip or another month of camp, but is that considerably more than non-Jewish or non-affiliated middle-income families spend on church donations, voluntary associations, club memberships, restaurant meals, and summer camps in a year?]

There’s an unaddressed subtext to Wertheimer’s piece: day schooling at what price? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a day late (blame the snowstorm) but here’s our annual Purim News Quiz. Each item below contains a correct answer, based on an actual news event. Send your answers to editorial@njjewishnews.com for a chance to win a nifty NJJN water bottle.

1. In September, the Israeli beach town of Bat Yam made headlines after tourists reportedly spotted:

a) A whale swallowing a self-styled holy man

b) A mermaid

c) An attentive Israeli waiter

2. What’s a “Coastie”?

a) An affluent Jewish girl attending a Midwestern university

b) A member of the Israeli Olympic bobsled team

c) A new kosher snack cracker

3. In December, Hamas complained about plans for what?

a) Bingo night at Gaza’s Great Mosque

b) A Miss Palestine beauty contest

c) A Nablus nightclub called “Gaza Strippers”

4. What was the unusual proviso in the last will and testament of Chicago dentist Max Feinberg?

a) Any grandchild who married a non-Jew would be disinherited

b) He endowed a Halitosis Research Institute at Tel Aviv University

c) His gravestone should read, “Max Feinberg is filling his last cavity”

5. In July, U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), one of New York City’s most eligible Jewish bachelors, raised eyebrows by doing what?

a) Using the JDate alias “RedHotHebrew”

b) Filibustering a prospect at a Speed Dating event

c) Announcing his engagement to a Muslim woman

6. In July, why was a Dresden politician fined?

a) For playing loud klezmer music outside City Hall to disturb a neo-Nazi march

b) For carrying an unlicensed clarinet at a city-sponsored klezmer festival

c) For interrupting a city council session with an impromptu performance of “Rumania, Rumania”

7. What modern-day bar and bat mitzva ritual did a Scarsdale, NY, middle school seek to curb?

a) Invitations being delivered to students by scantily-clad celebrity impersonators

b) Sunday-night parties that caused young guests to nod off the next day in class

c) The wearing to school of personalized sweatshirts guests received as party favors

8. Who said the following: “I’m still the funky white Jewish boy from Richmond,Va.”?

a) Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House Republican whip

b) Singer Elliott Yamin, who rose to fame on season five of American Idol

c) Seth Greenberg, Virginia Tech’s head men’s basketball coach

9) Which of the following stories is not true?

a) The head of Israel’s Health Ministry announced that Israel will refer to “swine flu” as “Mexican flu” so as not to offend kosher sensibilities

b) A group of 50 rabbis took a plane flight over Israel, offering prayers to ward off swine flu

c) To prevent the spread of swine flu, a doctor at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center recommended that people refrain from kissing mezuzot in public places

I’ll post the answers tomorrow.

[UPDATE: Here are the answers: 1: B, 2: A, 3: B, 4: A, 5: C, 6: A, 7: C, 8: B, 9: trick question — all three stories are true.]