JustASC

I’m back home after a 10 days in Israel.

Tonight I’ll be speaking after a screening of the Israeli documentary “Blood Relation” at the New Jersey Jewish Film Festival at the JCC in West Orange.  

A synopsis of the film:

When her grandmother dies, Jewish filmmaker Noa Ben Hagai discovers a packet of letters from her grandmother’s sister, Pnina, who left her kibbutz mysteriously at age 14 and never returned. She reemerged 27 years later, a mother of eight, living as a Muslim in a refugee camp in the West Bank. Baffled by the silence shrouding her great-aunt’s life and curious to learn about her, Ben Hagai interviews family and neighbors. As this powerful story unfolds, Noa’s quest stirs up painful, unsettling memories and emotions and shines a harsh light on seven decades of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Go here for time and ticket info.

This is not surprising, but sad nonetheless:

In multicultural South Florida, where the number of foreign language speakers is rising, those speaking Yiddish is down dramatically in the last decade, according to the most recent census surveys.

Also spoken less often at home is Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Thai and Greek. But their losses are dwarfed by Yiddish, which went from about 16,390 speakers in South Florida in 2000 to about 5,880 in 2010.

A former classmate of Aakash Dalal, the 19-year-old charged in the attacks on four synagogues in Northern New Jersey, writes of being taken in by his friend:

The Aakash I knew was intelligent, interesting to talk to and fiercely passionate about his beliefs. I never heard him utter an anti-Semitic remark, although I heard him make disparaging remarks about Muslims. He was a loyal follower of Ron Paul, having volunteered for his campaign throughout the early primary states. His views were noxious, as he was an anarcho-capitalist who argued that President Obama, President Bush–and probably every other American President since 1898–were mass murderers. Certainly, I thought this political beliefs were a little out there, but I also always found his radical idealism (that’s what it seemed like at the time) to be refreshing. Kind of. The Aakash in the mugshot is completely different.  The photo doesn’t show that Dalal is just a small and scrawny kid. If you met him on the street, you would be surprised to learn that such a tiny person could be capable of so much destruction.

Boing Boing offers “10 DIY tips to save money while eating better and healthier,” including:

1) Drink water instead of soda. And drink tap water, not bottled water.

3) Prepare food at home and bring it to work instead of eating lunch out.

6) If you eat meat, consider reducing your intake of meat.

7) If you drink coffee, brew it yourself.

I think I do nine things on the list (we don’t have a vegetable garden, although we grow our own basil). I’m not bragging.

Yes. I am bragging.

Republican candidates and commentators on the right are insisting Obama is too “weak” or feckless to do what has to be done on Iran. Here’s Jonathan Tobin of Commentary:

Obama is at pains to try to assert he doesn’t “bluff” when it comes to threatening the use of force, but after three years of a feckless engagement policy followed by a largely ineffective effort to impose sanctions on Iran, it’s hard to find anyone who really believes he would actually launch a strike to prevent the ayatollahs from getting their hands on a nuclear weapon.

But maybe harping on the president’s “weakness” is sending exactly the wrong message to the ayatollahs, who must figure they have nothing to worry about with the Cowardly Lion in the Oval Office.

Imagine instead were we to paint Obama as another General Jack D. Ripper, his trigger finger itching like mad. Imagine if Netanyahu’s people emerged from their meeting, and, instead of talking about the gaps between the president and the p.m., they said something like this:

How was it? Frightening, if you want to know the truth. Obama kept reaching for the red phone, saying “Just say the word! Just say the word! I will do this thing, so help me!” And Bibi spent most of the time trying to calm Obama down. “No, Mr. President. We can’t bomb Iran right this moment. We have to allow time for sanctions and diplomacy to work. That’s the Jewish way.”

See? Bibi comes out as the voice of reason, America emerges as a crazy state, and Achmadinejad begins packing his bags for a long vacation in an undisclosed location. It’s win, win, lose!

Of course, I’m kidding (I think). But David Horowitz of the Freedom Center doesn’t put that kind of Jiu-Jitsu past the president:

With the Republican nominees for president harping on Obama’s weakness with Iran for several months now, an American strike on Iran may be politically advantageous. Mitt Romney, who recently declared that “if we re-elect Barack Obama, Iran will get nuclear weapons” but “if you elect me as president, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon,” would have a major talking point taken away from him. Likewise for Newt Gingrich, who has said that “Obama is the most dangerous President in modern American history” with regard to foreign policy, and that “he is incapable of defending the United States.”

If Obama were to strike Iran, any debate about him being a weak foreign policy president would immediately be quieted. He would enter the presidential debates with a firm foreign policy record and as a defender of America, with the Republican nominee looking sheepish and out-of-touch in his criticism.

This is oldish news, but priceless nonetheless:

A Polish champion horse entered in an Arizona horse show has offended some local Jewish residents because his name, Pogrom, refers to anti-Jewish attacks.

The 3-year-old colt was entered to compete in the Scottsdale Arabian Horse Show, which ends Sunday. He is being leased from the Polish government to Scottsdale’s Midwest Training Centre and Sloan Arabians, the Arizona Republic reported….

The horse’s name, based on the Polish language interpretation of the word, was meant to mean “an invincible leader; one who fights and wins,” according to the newspaper.

I guess “Cossack” was taken.

From the A.P.:

Prosecutors say an additional arrest has been made in the January firebombings of two synagogues in northern New Jersey. The Bergen County prosecutor’s office says no additional details will be provided until a 4 p.m. news conference Friday.

Nice job, but don’t these cops know from Shabbes? You couldn’t pick  a worse time for informing the observant community about this.

Jewish guy from Marlboro, NJ may be “Israel’s best hope for a medal on the bobsled track at the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, in 2014.”

JTA has breaking news:

A Texas athletic league has reversed course and will reschedule tournament games that will enable a Jewish day school, the Robert M. Beren Academy of Houston, to compete.

A state boys’ basketball tournament semifinal will be played in the afternoon so that the Beren Academy can compete without violating the Sabbath.  The decision came just hours after the team  filed a lawsuit.

American Atheists plans to erect these billboards in “heavily Muslim Paterson, New Jersey and in a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood, immediately after the Williamsburg Bridge”:

 A few questions:

1/ Are religious neighborhoods really the best place to troll for apostates? If you are looking for recruits, wouldn’t you have better luck in lefty, secular neighborhoods?

2/ If you saw the anti-Islam version in an Arab neighborhood, and didn’t know it was an atheist group and they were also going after Jews, wouldn’t you assume it was put there by the usual Muslim bashers?

3/ The president of American Atheists says, “We are not trying to inflame anything.” And I’m sympathetic — who would possibly think that denigrating religions and using the hallowed names of their deities would inflame anything?

4/ Is there a way to be an atheist without being a dick about it?

Actually, there is. Writer Alain de Botton has a terrific TED talk called “Atheism 2.0″ in which he describes the kinds of things atheists could actually learn from religions. He cedes no ground on the existence of a higher power, but acknowledges that unless non-believers understand what religion provides believers –  ”connection, ritual and transcendence” — and provide the same, they will never represent a positive alternative.