Iran Turmoil Emboldens Opponents of Obama Outreach
Look at the images carefully. This is a deliberate design by the Jewish Forward to make the Iranian President look like he is reveling in bloodshed. His face is turned left towards the image of the bleeding Iranian and he is smiling. Also look at the background image of the President. There are red patches to make them appear to look like blood.Here is the caption for the image
Tumult in Tehran: Soon after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (right) declared victory, demonstrators protested the election’s results. In a scene from a YouTube video, a dissenter is shown after being shot down by the pro-government Basij militia.
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Push for Nuclear Negotiations Versus Concern About Repression
Washington — Critics of the Obama administration’s call for negotiations with Iran have gained new life with the unrest there following disputed election results.
Among those calling on President Obama to reconsider engagement with Iran are Bush-era neoconservatives and congressional Republicans.
Pro-Israel activists, meanwhile, are maintaining a cautious approach, avoiding the issue of talks with Iran altogether.
But even moderates who back Obama’s outreach policy say the widespread popular protests in the streets of Tehran, the government’s aggressive attempts to suppress them and its efforts to limit media coverage of these events have raised new questions about Obama’s timing and scope for engaging with Iran.
“This will recalibrate the way the Obama administration thinks of moving forward with the Iranian nuclear issue,” said Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation. “There are voices now that say the regime may be in danger and therefore you might want to wait.”
The initial results of Iran’s June 12 presidential elections, giving a significant win for incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, were not seen as a deterrent for American-led engagement with Tehran. The Obama administration had taken into account that hardliner Ahmadinejad could emerge victorious, and had stressed that it would make little if any difference. The plans for engagement, administration officials explained, were aimed at Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader and ultimate decision maker on national security issues.
Along with Israel, the administration’s priority concern is to stem Iran’s drive to advance its nuclear capabilities, part of an illegal effort by Iran, charge Western countries, to manufacture nuclear weapons. Iran denies this, saying its nuclear development activities are civilian in nature.
Notwithstanding this urgent American interest, “the United States should wait until the election has played out domestically before commenting on or reaching out to the Iranian government,” said Karim Sadjapour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “I think we should be clear about what type of regime we are dealing with in Tehran. Just as we talk about Assad’s Syria and Mubarak’s Egypt, I think we are now dealing with Khamenei’s Iran.”
Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, a dovish group, said the outcome of Iran’s elections could have a “crippling effect” on diplomatic outreach attempts, since the United States will now be under increased pressure “for sanctions, and for quick results from the engagement.”
With the continued turmoil in Iran, neoconservatives, who had been engaged in soul-searching and re-grouping since the 2008 elections, are now leading criticism of Obama’s plan to engage with Iran. They warn that the events on the ground confirm their approach, which advocated regime change and zero tolerance for totalitarian regimes in the Middle East. And they are lambasting the administration for failing to speak out forcefully on behalf of those protesting the election results.
They are joined by Republican critics and former Bush administration officials who believe it is time for Obama to reconsider extending his hand to the Iranian regime.
“Engagement without an effort to talk to the “other Iran” would not only be a travesty, but tactically foolish, as well,” argued Dan Senor and Christian Whiton, both former officials with the Bush administration, in a June 17 Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
Others on the right were less gracious toward Obama. Ralph Peters of the New York Post said the brutal crackdown on opposition supporters in Iran was a “clenched fist shoved in Obama’s face.” And in a Washington Post opinion piece, Robert Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute argued that Obama’s strategy toward Iran “places him objectively on the side of the government’s efforts to return to normalcy as quickly as possible, not in league with the opposition’s efforts to prolong the crisis.”
Obama himself had a ready reply to these critics of his so-far low-key public expressions of concern. Alluding to America’s negative profile in Iran due to its long support for the former shah and its participation in the 1953 ousting of a democratic government in Tehran, he told reporters June 16, “It’s not productive, given the history of U.S.-Iran relations, to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections.”
Marshall Breger, a senior Reagan administration aide who acted as the White House liaison to the Jewish community, agreed.
“All of the Iranian pro-democrats [say] it’s a mistake,” said Breger, who has been engaged for several years in quiet interfaith talks with Iranian religious leaders. “The Ahmadinejad people want to say we’re replaying 1953.”
Voices calling for rethinking Obama’s plan for engaging in diplomacy with Iran have not gained much traction with congressional Democrats, Obama’s stronghold on foreign policy issues. While expressing concern over human rights and free speech, Democrats stood by Obama’s diplomatic approach. Howard Berman, the Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement June 16 warning Iran’s regime that “the rest of the world is watching closely.” But, in line with the president’s wishes, he has continued to hold back for now on advancing a new Iran sanctions bill to the House floor that is backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby.
On the Republican side of the aisle, however, criticism was mounting as lawmakers argued that Obama should have spoken out more forcefully in favor of the Iranian reformists.
“The administration’s silence in the face of Iran’s brutal suppression of democratic rights represents a step backwards for homegrown democracy in the Middle East,” said Republican Eric Cantor, minority whip and the only Jewish Republican in the House of Representatives. Independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut called on the administration and Congress to “unambiguously express their solidarity with the brave Iranians.”
Complicating the already tangled situation the administration is in regarding Iran is the sudden move of Obama’s Iran point man to the National Security Council at the White House from the State Department.
Dennis Ross, now special adviser to the secretary of state for Southwest Asia, is expected to move to the White House, where he will continue to advise on Iran and assume more responsibility on Middle East issues. Despite the fact that the move was described as no more than a bureaucratic decision, it sparked rumors in Washington about the reasons for the surprise move and for its timing.
Ross is a veteran Middle East negotiator who, after leaving the administration in 2000, assumed, among other positions, the leadership of a Jewish affairs think-tank associated with the Jewish Agency for Israel.
The administration would not provide official information regarding Ross’s expected move to the White House, but some analysts speculated that it could be a result of his hard-line views regarding engagement with Iran, as presented in a book he recently published. The book, co-authored with David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, expresses a fair amount of skepticism regarding the prospects of diplomatic engagement with Iran. Ross has made clear that he supports engagement, but put the need to pursue this option in the context of proving to the world that America tried its best before moving on toward tough sanctions.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
Iran's Supreme Leader Blames Protests on 'Zionist' Media
By JTA
Published June 19, 2009.
Jerusalem — Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei denied that the country’s recent elections were fixed, called on protesters to stop and blamed the “Zionist” media.
In his first public address since the June 12 elections, Iran’s highest ranking political and religious authority accused the opposition of “challenging democracy after the elections.”
Khamenei delivered a nearly two-hour sermon during Friday prayers at Tehran University, reportedly attended by tens of thousands of worshipers. He called on the opposition to take their protests off of the streets and to instead use legal channels to register their complaints about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory.
Turnout at the ballot box has been officially set at 85 percent, or 40 million voters, with Ahmadinejad winning by a margin of 11 million votes, or 60 percent of the vote. “How one can rig 11 million votes?” he asked. “The Islamic republic state would not cheat and would not betray the vote of the people.”
Khamenei blamed the “media belonging to Zionists, evil media” for fomenting the demonstrations.
He also warned that if street demonstrations don’t end, then “leading politicians will be held accountable for the chaos.”
Hundreds of thousands of protestors again on Thursday night demonstrated in the streets of Tehran, the sixth day of ever-increasing protests in the Islamic Republic’s capital.
“This election was a political earthquake for our enemies and a celebration for its friends,” Khamenei said. “This election showed religious democracy for the whole world to see.”
Reporters representing media from around the world have been barred from covering the demonstrations or opposition news conferences, and have been restricted to one transmission of news per day.
Iran’s Guardian Council, the main oversight body of the country’s constitution, was reportedly planning to convene a meeting of the three losing candidates to discuss their accusations, reportedly as early as Saturday.
Iran: Bomb Plot Linked to Israel Was Foiled
By JTA
Published June 18, 2009.
Jerusalem — Iran claims to have foiled a plot linked to Israel to bomb crowded sites in Tehran on Election Day.
Iran’s intelligence ministry also linked the plot to America and other “foreign enemies” of Iran, in a statement released Thursday, Reuters reported.
A report on Iran state television said the plot, which included planting bombs in at least two prominent mosques in the capital, was foiled on Election Day, June 12.
Posh Prison Parties Just the Latest Act for Satmar Power Broker
By Nathaniel Popper
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Long before he managed to organize a lavish bar mitzvah inside a New York City jail, Rabbi Leib Glanz developed a reputation for making things happen within New York’s ultra-Orthodox Satmar community.
“He’s involved in any and every situation,” said Moshe Indig, a Satmar community leader. “You name it, he’s involved in it.”
Those favors caught up with Glanz when the New York Post published a series of articles about the extras that Glanz had given to Jewish inmates in New York City prisons. The most explosive allegation is that Glanz helped a Satmar inmate hold lavish parties inside the Manhattan Detention Center for his son’s bar mitzvah and his daughter’s engagement.
In the wake of the allegations and with a city investigation under way, Glanz resigned his post as a prison chaplain — but he will not have to give up his numerous positions inside the Satmar community, helping religious agencies win money and good will from elected officials. The case shines a spotlight on the internal workings of the Satmar community and the backroom deals that have turned Glanz into such a revered figure in large segments of his community.
“Your average Hasidic person or business just doesn’t have great tools to deal with the outside world effectively,” said Michael Fragin, a Jewish political consultant in New York. “Here’s a guy who can be a very effective advocate.”
Glanz’s background has been somewhat of a mystery since stories emerged about his work as a prison chaplain. An article in The New York Times quoted many city officials who were aware of Glanz’s influence in the prison system, but the article noted that none of the officials “could say from where such power might emanate.” The intrigue was ramped up when news emerged that Glanz had regular meetings with New York’s deputy mayor, Kevin Sheekey.
In fact, Glanz carried a dizzying array of titles in his Satmar community — the largest ultra-Orthodox community in the world — at the same time that he held the city job of prison chaplain. He has been a manager of one of the biggest Satmar real estate projects, while holding leadership roles in two of the largest Satmar social service organizations and leading fundraisers for city officials.
Gershom Schlesinger, another Satmar leader who is close to Glanz, said, “Everyone knows Rabbi Glanz is the most important person in the community.”
While some dispute that description, in the 1980s Glanz was a big deal, leading the central school system for the Satmar community. Glanz left his position as administrator of Brooklyn’s United Talmudical Academy in 2000, under circumstances that remain murky to many observers and that almost no one wanted to discuss.
“It was inside politics,” Indig said.
Glanz did not respond to e-mails requesting comment.
Glanz’s influence is best understood in terms of the divided politics of the movement. Since the death in 2006 of the Satmar Grand Rebbe, Moses Teitelbaum, the Satmar community has been divided between two of Teitelbaum’s sons who claim to be the new chief rabbi.
Glanz initially was affiliated with the younger of these two sons, Rabbi Zalman Teitelbaum, who has his power base in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. After leaving the United Talmudical Academy, Glanz switched his support to the other son, Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum, whose supporters are based in the upstate New York town of Kiryas Joel.
Some say that Glanz’s affiliation with Aaron Teitelbaum led to trouble for him in his prison chaplain’s job.
“Supposedly, I hear rumors that some of the Zallies were talking against him,” said Isaac Weinberger, an Aaron supporter, using a nickname for Zalman Teitelbaum. “They couldn’t take that he became so powerful on our side, and they wanted to get rid of him.”
Supporters of Zalman vehemently deny this, and reports indicate that the agency that runs the prison chaplaincy was riven by political infighting.
In recent years, though, Glanz has become an increasingly important aide to Aaron Teitelbaum. Schlesinger, a leader in the Aaron faction, said that Glanz has become a Brooklyn emissary for Aaron, who lives upstate.
“He is kind of the ambassador for the rabbi in Williamsburg,” said Schlesinger, who is on the board of a social service organization that is affiliated with Aaron.
Glanz has been central in building up a new infrastructure for Aaron’s community in Brooklyn. At the same time, he has been seen as a political fixer. A number of political insiders said that it was Glanz who arranged last fall for Aaron’s followers to support Daniel Squadron, a young upstart candidate for State Senate who ran against, and eventually beat, a veteran incumbent backed by Zalman’s supporters.
“That was a very shrewd political move on Glanz’s part,” Fragin said. “In the political community, Glanz is a go-to guy. He’s a guy that you want to know — who you gotta know — who will always be helpful.”
But even before his problems as a chaplain, Glanz’s mixture of roles was not working seamlessly. Last year, a new social service organization headed by Glanz and aligned with Aaron won a $205,000 grant from the New York City Council. In the end, the grant was withdrawn because Glanz’s organization had not been set up properly.
Glanz’s position in the midst of these power politics was evident in the scrambling by others to respond to his problems. Most non-Satmar Jewish officials declined to comment on Glanz for fear of offending Satmar leaders. At the same time, the leading ultra-Orthodox umbrella organization, Agudath Israel of America, drafted a letter in support of Glanz.
The draft of the letter, which had not been sent out as of press time, said that Glanz may have crossed lines but that the signatories to the letter “have no doubt that any such improprieties were nothing more than lapses of judgment; and that they emanated from a good place, a heart overflowing with empathy and concern.”
The bar mitzvah that Glanz helped to organize in the Manhattan prison known as the Tombs was for Tuvia Stern, a fellow Satmar adherent who is in jail on charges of bank fraud and fleeing the country.
Glanz was questioned by the New York City Department of Investigation, and his resignation came a day after a longtime Corrections Department chief, Peter Curcio, who was responsible for security in the jails, resigned.
Catered kosher food and silverware were brought into the prison gymnasium, according to press reports, and a popular Hasidic singer performed for the guests. Among Satmar leaders, the bar mitzvah is seen as the highest achievement in a life of helping others.
“It’s the best of the best that any public servant could have done,” Schlesinger said. “The rabbi believes that part of the rehabilitation of an inmate should be a very close family connection — which we all stand for. We are a close-knit community.”
Contact Nathaniel Popper at popper@forward.com
A Polish Priest’s Dream of Aliyah
Note: Aliyah is a totally bankrupt word to describe the seiure of Palestinian lands by European Jewry. How do Ashkenazi Jews return to land they have no other connection other than conversion to Judaism. What a bunch of deceptive peoplw!
Son of Two Mothers: Father Romauld Jakub Wksler-Wasznikel was born a Jew to Batia Weksler, left, but was raised a Catholic by Emilia Waszkinelowa, right.
Adopted To Survive Shoah, Jewish-Born Catholic Struggles
By Donald Snyder
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009
When Romuald Jakub Weksler-Waszkinel applied to immigrate to Israel as a Jew under the Law of Return last October, Israeli authorities delayed responding to his request for months.
Perhaps it was the priest’s white-band collar around his neck that had something to do with this.
COURTESY OF R. J. WEKSLER-WASZKINEL
Son of Two Mothers: Father Romauld Jakub Wksler-Wasznikel was born a Jew to Batia Weksler, left, but was raised a Catholic by Emilia Waszkinelowa, right.
Yet ultimately, Israel’s Interior Ministry did issue the 66-year-old Polish cleric, scholar and professor at Catholic University of Lublin a two-year residency visa. It was, it seems, an imperfect compromise with a priest who insists: “I am Jewish. And my mother and father were Jewish. I feel Jewish.”
Speaking through an interpreter during a phone interview, he said, “Going to Israel would be the return of the Jewish child who took the long way home.”
Born in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Poland, Weksler-Waszkinel did not know that he was Jewish until he was 35 years old, 12 years after he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. Nor did he know that his birth parents, both ardent Zionists, were murdered by the Nazis after entrusting his care to a Polish Catholic family to save his life. It took him 14 years after he learned he was Jewish to find his real name and the names of his parents. “So in a way, it took me 14 years to be born,” the priest said.
“My mother’s dreams went up in the flames of Sobibor,” he explained, referring to the death camp in Poland where some 260,000 Jews were murdered.
Weksler-Waszkinel is not the only one who grapples with a dual identity. Mark Shraberman, chief archivist at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum and research institute, said in an interview in Jerusalem that he receives many letters from Poles who are discovering that they are of Jewish origin. “They find out the truth when one of their parents is dying,” Shraberman said. He added that he recently received a letter from another Polish priest in a small town who just found out that he is Jewish.
But Weksler-Waszkinel, in seeking to rediscover his lost identity by immigrating to Israel, is taking his search for that identity further than most. Though he sought originally to become recognized by the government as a Jew under the Law of Return — the law that grants any Jew immediate Israeli citizenship — he pronounced himself “very satisfied” with his two-year visa.
Weksler-Waszkinel says that he plans to immerse himself in Jewish life. “I don’t know what that means; after all, I am a Catholic priest. But I will find out,” he said. “I thought, perhaps, I could be a volunteer at Yad Vashem as someone who survived the Shoah and who participates in the Christian-Jewish dialogue, which is so important.” He says that the first thing he will do is learn Hebrew.
Weksler-Waszkinel was born in the town of Stare Swjeciary — which was then in Poland but is now known as Svencionys in Lithuania — four years after the Nazi invasion of Poland started World War II. His mother, Batia Weksler, gave him as an infant to a Christian woman to save his life.
Emilia Waszkinel, his Christian mother, initially hesitated to take him because she and her husband, Piotr, risked death for hiding a Jew. Emilia was reportedly convinced to accept the baby in response to his Jewish mother’s plea: “Save my child, a Jewish child, and in the name of the Jesus that you believe in, he will grow up to become a priest.”
The couple raised the boy as their own child in Eastern Poland, where they lived after the war, without telling him that he was Jewish. The boy attended secular schools.
Perhaps because of this, his parents were shocked when, at the age of 17, Weksler-Waszkinel told them he planned to become a priest. His father tried to discourage him, saying he should instead become a doctor, and cried uncontrollably when visiting his son at the seminary. Weksler-Waszkinel felt enormous guilt when his father died shortly after this visit. Briefly, he considered ending his studies.
Even before discovering his Jewish background, Weksler-Waszkinel had harbored doubts about his true identity. The young man had been aware of the fact that he did not have the pronounced Slavic features of his parents. He had been called “a Jew bastard” by town drunks, so he asked his mother if he was Jewish. She assured him that he was Catholic. When he was 35, long after his ordination, he again inquired about his identity, and Emilia, weeping, told him about his Jewish mother.
Emilia told Weksler-Waszkinel that he had wonderful parents who were murdered by the Germans in the Holocaust and that she had saved his life.
“My head spun, and I asked her why she hid this from me,” the shocked priest wrote in a 1994 essay. “My heart was pounding as I thought that I had become a priest, something my mother said I would become.”
The priest had fulfilled the prophecy of his Jewish mother, a woman he had never known.
He felt he needed to confide in someone, so he wrote to Karol Wojtyla, who by then was Pope John Paul II but who had been Weksler-Waszkinel’s professor in Lublin. The pontiff responded, “My beloved brother, I pray so that you can rediscover your roots.”
Weksler-Waszkinel eventually traveled to Israel. There he met his Jewish father’s brother, who showed him a photograph of his parents. He realized that he resembled them. “My mother’s eyes are in me, my father’s mouth and the fears and tears of my brother,” he wrote in the 1994 essay.
Weksler-Waskinel’s uncle embraced him as a long-lost relative, but said that he could not understand how his nephew could be a priest and represent the church that has persecuted Jews for 2,000 years. The priest responded: “To really belong to Jesus means to love Jews. Jesus never betrayed me, and I will not betray him.”
Nevertheless, Weksler-Waskinel grapples with his tangled identity.
“His double identity is a problem for him that he struggles with all the time,” said Zbigniew Nosowski, a friend of the priest and editor of Weiz, a Polish-Catholic intellectual magazine in Krakow.
According to Michael Schudrich, chief rabbi of Poland, “Father Waskinel is incredibly honest in saying that he is Jewish, and he is also honest in not wanting to turn his back on the church.”
Some close friends grasp the enormity of the priest’s conflict. “He has an impossible task to find a place for himself,” said Stanislaw Krajewski who is a friend of the priest and teaches mathematics at the University of Warsaw. Krajewski said the 66-year-old priest has been “an uncomfortable presence” to some Jews and Christians because of his dual religious identity.
“He is very Jewish and very Christian,” said Hanna Krall, a prominent Polish journalist and novelist.
Weksler-Waszkinel says Poland will always be his fatherland and Israel will be his homeland.
The priest has devoted most of his academic life to writing about Jewish-Christian relations. He praises the reforms introduced by the Second Vatican Council, calling them “a radical change, a revolution.”
He is working to further improve ties between Christians and Jews, inspired by Pope John Paul II’s call for greater Catholic respect and understanding for Jews. When asked how Weksler-Waszkinel promotes ecumenism, Schudrich said, “When he gets up in the morning and breathes… his life’s message is that strong.”
According to a number of Polish intellectuals, Weksler-Waszkinel’s story brings Jews and Christians closer. “When he tells his personal story, he has tears in his eyes,” Krajewski said. “And audiences cry with him. It is a very sad story.”
Weksler-Waszkinel’s speeches to churchgoers and lay people point to the Jewish roots of Christianity and the enormous gap dividing the two faiths. He often criticizes the Catholic Church for not closing the gap between Jews and Christians. In our interview, he told me that Pope John Paul once said, “The New Testament finds its roots in the Old Testament,” and that what is significant is the word “finds.” Weksler-Waszkinel added, “Those roots have always been there, according to Pope John Paul, but for 19 centuries they were forgotten, and a Jew was considered the worst enemy.”
Weksler-Waszkinel’s application to go to Israel as a Jew under the Law of Return is clearly heartfelt. It also has a practical aspect. He said that getting Israeli citizenship would entitle him to benefits he needs to supplement his small pension of $900 a month. Under the two-year visa arrangement he has now accepted, those benefits will not be available. The priest is determined to immigrate, nevertheless, even with little money and just a two-year visa.
Experts doubt that the Ministry of the Interior, controlled by the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, would have granted Weksler-Waszkinel citizenship under the Law of Return.
In 1962, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in a 4-1 decision against Jewish-born Oswald Rufeisen, a Carmelite monk known as Brother Daniel, who sought Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return. This was the first narrowing of the statute, which was basic to Israel’s identity from its founding in the wake of the Holocaust. Judge Haim Cohen, the single dissenter, noted that the Nazis sought to kill all those born Jewish, irrespective of their conversion from or rejection of Judaism. But the court ruled that the Law of Return did not apply to Jews who had embraced another religion.
Weksler-Waszkinel’s case for automatic Israeli citizenship seems to be stronger than that of Rufeisen in one respect: He could argue that he never did, in fact, “embrace” another religion. Unlike the Polish-born Carmelite monk, who converted as an adult to Catholicism after finding shelter from the Nazis in a convent, Weksler-Waszkinel never consciously chose to leave Judaism for another faith. He argues that he considers himself a Jew who was raised from infancy as a Catholic without being informed of his true identity.
“The court fight would be lengthy and complicated, and he decided to avoid it,” said Schudrich, who is helping the priest relocate to Israel.
“He wants to be in a place where he can see a full, rich Jewish life,” Schudrich said of Weksler-Waszkinel’s need to fulfill his dream to live in Israel. “He has this inner longing to be in a place that is surrounded by the culture of his ancestors.”
Contact Donald Snyder at feedback@forward.com.
After Bibi’s Speech: A Shift To Quiet Talks
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Washington — The Obama administration now seems poised to ease its public pressure on Israel following Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s acceptance of a two-state solution to his country’s conflict with the Palestinians.
Following Netanyahu’s much awaited June 14 speech addressing America’s concerns about the policies of his new government, Israeli diplomats said they sensed a new willingness within the administration to “find creative solutions” to the issue of Jewish settlement activity in the Israeli occupied West Bank that would allow some limited building to continue.
Former senator George Mitchell, the administration’s special envoy to the Middle East, seemed less confident than his Israeli counterparts that a solution to the dispute was imminent. Speaking at a Washington press conference June 16, Mitchell said he was not aware of an agreement that would allow Israeli building for “natural growth” in established West Bank Jewish settlements, a right upon which Netanyahu insisted in his speech.
But after a long period of public criticism of Israel by Washington, discussions over the settlement issue are now shifting to quiet working-level talks between American and Israeli officials. The main channel for these discussions is expected to be Mitchell’s newly established Israel office. The office will be headed by David Hale, a career diplomat with vast experience in the Arab-Israeli field. From his Jerusalem headquarters, Hale is expected to involve himself deeply in the detailed negotiations surrounding Israel’s demand to continue building in established settlement blocs.
“We intend to bring these discussions to a very early conclusion,” Mitchell said at his press conference, expressing hope that direct Israeli–Palestinian talks will be launched in the near future.
Administration officials have been adamant in demanding that Israel take down illegal settlement outposts, as it has long promised to do, and cease all settlement expansion, including what Israel calls “natural growth” in established settlements regarded as legal under Israeli law, but illegal by most of the rest of the world. The so-called Middle East road map to peace, forged by the Bush administration with international partners in 2002, also prohibits such growth. Israel accepted the road map, but not the section barring natural growth.
In his speech, given at Bar-Ilan University, a bastion of support for the settlements, Netanyahu once again rejected the demand to curb natural growth, even as he formally acceded to another Obama administration demand: the concept of a Palestinian state as a goal of negotiations, as agreed to by earlier Israeli governments.
“I’m sure Bibi’s speech helped,” said Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, in a June 16 interview with the Forward. “Now that we are united about the vision [of a two-state solution] we can focus on the practical issues and work quietly on how to resolve them.”
In his speech, Netanyahu defended his rejection of the American demand for a complete settlement freeze.
“There is a need to enable the residents to live normal lives, to allow mothers and fathers to raise their children, like families elsewhere,” Netanyahu said. “The settlers are neither the enemies of the people nor the enemies of peace.”
GETTY IMAGES
Holding Firm: Obama praised Netanyahu for accepting a two-state solution, but continued to call for a total settlement freeze.
Speaking two days later with reporters at the White House, President Obama flatly rejected Netanyahu’s insistence on a right to “natural growth” in West Bank Jewish settlements. Obama warned that despite the “tendency to try to parse” the exact meaning of “cessation of settlements,” he believed that all parties understand that “if you have a continuation of settlements that, in past agreements, have been categorized as illegal, that’s going to be an impediment to progress.”
Israeli sources who deal closely with the issue say that despite Washington’s unchanged public insistence on a “complete freeze” formula, in recent discussions American officials seemed open to a more nuanced approach. The Israelis argue that the administration understands now that private contracts for building new homes in the settlement blocs are hard to break and that in some cases there is room for leniency.
Israel has suggested the establishment of a “reporting mechanism” in which it would provide, for the first time, full information about all the building going on in the West Bank. This mechanism is expected to serve as a forum in which “extraordinary cases” would be discussed. Israeli officials said they believe that in some cases, such as when there is a need for a new classroom, the Americans will allow a certain amount of flexibility.
“I’m confident that we will be able to reach an agreement in the near future that will enable us to put the settlement issue aside,” Israel’s ambassador-designee to Washington, Michael Oren, said in a June 15 interview with Reuters news agency.
While agreeing to move the settlement debate to private negotiations from the public sphere, the administration was careful not to be seen as forgoing the issue.
Observers on the dovish side, such as former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah of the New America Foundation, believe that maintaining a tough stance on the settlement issue is crucial for success of the process. “The Obama administration needs to stick to its principle of a total freeze, whether in public or private conversation,” they wrote in an analysis of Netanyahu’s speech. “There can be only one place for a discussion of the future of settlements and that is delineating a permanent status border between Israel and Palestine.”
In its early reaction to Netanyahu’s speech, the American administration chose to focus on its positive aspects and showered praise on Netanyahu for what White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called “a big step forward,” referring to the Israelis’ acceptance of the concept of a Palestinian state.
But the administration pointedly declined to adopt two key conditions that Netanyahu attached to recognition of a Palestinian state, at least in advance of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In his speech, the Israeli leader demanded that Palestinians formally accept Israel as a Jewish state as part of any final peace agreement. Obama, like previous American presidents, made a point of mentioning the term “Jewish state” when talking about the two-state solution. But he did not adopt the demand that the Palestinians make this recognition.
Netanyahu’s second condition, that the Palestinian state be demilitarized, also has been accepted in principle by the past three administrations, but is viewed by Obama and his team as an issue that needs to be part of the direct negotiations between the sides, not a precondition.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
Waving Israel’s Rainbow Flag Abroad
Flaunting Their Strengths: Israel feels its GLBT movement is something worth celebrating.
By Nathan Jeffay
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Tel Aviv — In stark contrast to the U.S. Army’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy on homosexuality, the latest edition of the official Israel Defense Force’s magazine B’Machane has a center spread on gay and lesbian officers. A picture shows a new officer getting his stripes, his commander’s hand on one shoulder and his life partner’s hand on the other.
This liberal side of Israeli society is starting to arouse the interest of the hasbarah — Hebrew for public relations — lobby. For what is believed to be the first time, an Israel advocacy group has run a major campaign showcasing the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community to non-Jewish opinion-shapers worldwide in a bid to improve Israel’s image and distract from more contentious geopolitical issues.
In mid-June, the StandWithUs organization, with the support of the foreign ministry, brought 30 GLBT leaders, activists and journalists to Israel from across the world to find out about the country, and specifically its GLBT community.
“GLBT rights are part of human rights, and when you see Israel, you see a country that has come so far in this area,” program organizer Noa Meir said. “When people see that Israel is so progressive on this issue, they realize that it can’t just be on this issue, and realize this must apply to Israel as a whole.”
StandWithUs, an international not-for-profit organization headquartered in the United States, offers scholarships to students to run Israel advocacy schemes. Earlier this year, a group of 20 Tel Aviv University students and scholarship recipients — all of them straight — decided that GLBT rights were the perfect wedge issue to promote Israel to a generally anti-Zionist constituency.
“The idea was partly inspired by reactions to Operation Cast Lead,” group leader Meir recalled — specifically, an incident in San Francisco that saw a gay organization of 20-somethings “identifying with the Palestinian cause and publicly calling to ‘free the gays in Israel.’”
“This was a bit ironic, because you can’t really be gay [without persecution] in the Palestinian territories,” Meir said.
In fact, openly gay Knesset Member Nitzan Horowitz of the dovish Meretz Party has called on the Palestinian Authority to halt the persecution of homosexuals within its territory. He says Israel should provide gay Palestinian refugees with a sanctuary — a demand that the Israeli Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Association has been making for a decade, with success in a handful of cases.
The Tel Aviv students set about organizing iPride, a group to promote their message, and recruited participants from Jordan, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to come and visit. The trip was timed to coincide with the annual Tel Aviv Gay Pride march June 12, which drew 20,000 people. In addition to attending the march, the visitors toured the country, experienced the GLBT social scene and nightlife, and met Israeli GLBT leaders and public figures.
These encounters focused on the state of the GLBT community in Israel, including discussions on the difficulties, such as raucous Orthodox-led protests against the Jerusalem Gay Pride march and attempts to ban it.
Every year, the Jerusalem parade triggers a rare show of unity among religious Jews, Muslims and Christians who try to stop it through protests and appeals to the high court. In 2005, the parade was even banned by the municipality, though the court overturned this. During the parade, an ultra-Orthodox Jew stabbed and wounded three participants and was later jailed for 12 years.
In 2006, organizers downsized the planned parade to a rally in a park after police said that the manpower needed to protect a parade from expected clashes would leave the city wide open to terrorists. In 2007, police arrested stone-throwers and one man with explosives, who was believed to be planning to bomb the parade.
But most of the discussions during the iPride trip focused on the positive.
Italian gay activist Sergio Rovasio said that Israel trumps his country. “Gay rights are more advanced than in Italy,” he told the Forward. “We don’t have a high court that is so open-minded.”
Rovasio, who heads the Certi Diritti gay rights organization, was referring to the fact that in 2006, the high court issued a precedent-setting ruling that the civil marriages of five gay couples wed overseas could be registered as married couples in Israel.
Further legal entitlements that impressed participants included the right for gay and lesbian couples to have the same adoption rights as heterosexual couples. Israel’s recognition in April 2008 — just 20 years after homosexuality was decriminalized — of the overseas adoption of a child by a gay couple and its subsequent granting of citizenship rights to the child was also the source of much discussion. Tour participants also heard about Israel’s strict anti-discrimination laws for the workplace and the army and its granting of pension rights to same-sex partners.
Mike Hamel, chairman of the Israeli GLBT Association, told the Forward that this trip comes on the back of increasing interest in the GLBT scene among visitors to Israel. He said he receives many speaking invitations from a range of visiting groups, from Taglit-Birthright Israel to, recently, a group of visiting American Christian clergy. Discussion of the GLBT community is a chance “to show that unlike [the way] Israel is being portrayed, as a war-torn desert country, it has an active and diverse cultural life of which the GLBT community is part,” Hamel said.
Still, the idea of Israel advocacy organizations highlighting the GLBT issue has its critics.
Horowitz said he had no desire to “join the propaganda campaign of the government.”
And not surprisingly, Orthodox leaders are unimpressed by the idea. It “suggests a certain sense of desperation,” according to Jonathan Rosenblum, who heads the Haredi advocacy organization Jewish Media Resources. He said: “It is true that Israel, unlike Arab countries nearby, is a secular democratic state, and fair to point out the differences. But to sell Israel on this issue takes away from its greatest ‘market value’ to both Jews and non-Jews — that it is the holy land, the land of the Bible.”
Equally critical are some liberal figures that campaign on both gay rights and Palestinian rights. Peter Tatchell, Britain’s best-known gay rights activist, and a proponent since the 1970s of boycotting Israel, told the Forward that he turned down an invitation for the trip “in view of Israel’s abuse of the Palestinian people.”
He said that while he considers Israel’s record on GLBT issues to be “laudable,” the trip “smacks of a fraudulent attempt to talk up Israel’s human rights record by extolling its achievements in the field of gay rights while ignoring Palestinian rights.” He added, “Gay equality does not trump denial of rights to the Palestinians.”
Etai Pinkas, a former Tel Aviv city council member who now heads the GLBT Pride Center, agrees that placing too much emphasis on the GLBT issue would be “like using Advil for a major pathological problem.”
But he said it “would be wise” for Israel advocacy to showcase his community. Citing the 2001 Durban World Conference Against Racism, which featured vitriolic anti-Israel and anti-Zionist rhetoric, he recalled, “The only segment where Israel had any success was in relation to the GLBT world, especially as GLBT rights in the Arab world are violated.”
Contact Nathan Jeffay atjeffay@forward.com
Can someone be too evil to convert?
What Conversion? Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, shown here as a rebel leader headed toward the capital of Monrovia in 1990, has embraced Judaism, according to his wife, Victoria.
That’s one question raised by the reported conversion to Judaism of former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, who is currently awaiting trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in The Hague. Taylor’s wife, Victoria, told the BBC that the accused war criminal is “now a Jew. He’s practicing Judaism.”
What Conversion? Former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor, shown here as a rebel leader headed toward the capital of Monrovia in 1990, has embraced Judaism, according to his wife, Victoria.
The authenticity of Taylor’s conversion is doubtful, to say the least. There is no evidence that he has been studying with a rabbi or that his conversion is anything but self-proclaimed. Victoria Taylor also told the BBC interviewer that her husband still believes in Christ’s divinity, so the former warlord seems to be as unclear on the basic tenets of Judaism as he is on the principles of international human rights.
But what if Taylor sincerely wanted to become Jewish? What if the former dictator — accused of creating an army of child soldiers who went on murderous rampages — actually, genuinely wanted to convert? Would any rabbi take him on as a student? Should they?
The answer: Yes, no or maybe, depending on whom you ask. Questions of good and evil aren’t always as black and white as they seem, and opinions varied widely among religious leaders contacted by the Forward.
“My first reaction is, we have enough natural-born Jewish bums, we don’t have to import one from the outside,” said Rabbi Mitchell Wohlberg of Beth Tfiloh Congregation in Baltimore, the largest Modern Orthodox synagogue in America. It’s true that religion can change people for the better, Wohlberg said, but he added, “The Jewish community is not a recovery house.”
Repentance and forgiveness are important concepts in Judaism, but occasionally a person commits acts so heinous as to disqualify him or her forever from conversion, said Rabbi Robert Levine of Congregation Rodeph Sholom, one of the largest Reform synagogues in New York City.
“You would not permit a Hitler or a Haman or a Charles Taylor to say, ‘Hey, I want to change my ways [and convert],’ when they’ve shown themselves to be a monster,” Levine said. “Judaism is an interlocking system of rituals? and ethics.… There is a small group of people whose total lack of ethics and morality would dismiss them at the outset.”
But not everyone would close the synagogue doors to Taylor.
“The whole idea of conversion is that one is changing radically,” said Rabbi Avi Shafran, director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an ultra-Orthodox umbrella organization. “An intelligent beit din would have to see some evidence of him wanting to change his ways, but crime in and of itself is not a bar to conversion.”
One person who knows firsthand about the spiritual transformation of people with evil pasts is Rabbi Michael Weisser. When he was working in Lincoln, Neb., a white supremacist named Larry Trapp began threatening and harassing him and his family. Trapp, state head of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan, had a long history of terrorizing black, Asian and Jewish families in the area.
Weisser decided to confront Trapp. He called the KKK leader’s racist hot line and left messages, until one day, he finally got Trapp on the phone and managed to strike up a conversation. Eventually, Weisser and his wife met with Trapp and inspired him to renounce racism and antisemitism. Eventually, Trapp converted to Judaism at Weisser’s Reform synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun — the very synagogue that Trapp once had planned to bomb.
Anyone can change, and therefore, anyone can be a candidate for conversion, Weisser told the Forward — even someone as bad as Larry Trapp or Charles Taylor.
“There’s a spark of decency in everybody, no matter how bad they’ve been,” Weisser said. “The truth is, human nature is good, not bad.”
In Trapp’s case, Weisser said, the former KKK Grand Dragon truly repented for his many sins and expressed remorse, asked for forgiveness from those he’d wronged and tried to set things right. Trapp called and met with people he used to harass to apologize and beg their forgiveness, and he spoke publicly to high schools and other groups about how he had repudiated bigotry and hate.
When Trapp first mentioned converting to Judaism, Weisser said he was concerned that guilt was the motivation. But Trapp studied hard, reading about 50 serious books on Judaism, and showed a genuine desire to join the faith for positive reasons.
“If we believe what we say we believe [as Jews], how can you go against it?” Weisser asked. “I think when Larry died, he died a good Jew.”
For someone with an evil past, the process of teshuva, or atonement, should happen before conversion is considered, said Rabbi Morley Feinstein of University Synagogue, a Reform congregation in Los Angeles, who pointed to Trapp’s conversion as an example — but a very rare one.
“I’m happy to study with anyone, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to take that individual on as a candidate for Judaism,” Feinstein said.
Getty Images
An Infamous Conversion: According to the Talmud, Roman Emporer Nero fled Rome and converted to Judaism.
Both sides of the debate can point to precedents in the Talmud. The Roman Emperor Nero, known for his tyranny and debauchery, may be the most infamous convert: While historical sources say he committed suicide after the Roman Senate ordered his execution, the Talmud holds that Nero fled Rome and converted to Judaism.
If Nero did it, Shafran asked, why couldn’t Taylor? “The implication [in the Talmud] was that it was a good and laudable thing,” Shafran said.
But Wohlberg remembered another story in the Talmud, one about King David — himself the descendant of one of Judaism’s most celebrated converts, Ruth — telling a group called the Gibeonites that the Jewish people were compassionate and modest and performed acts of loving kindness. “Only he who cultivates these three characteristics is fit to join this nation,” the Talmud says.
Too bad for Taylor, Wohlberg said: “I think he’s out on three swings.”
Of course, most rabbis don’t have to worry about an international war criminal or a KKK leader showing up for conversion class. But what about everyday criminals, sinners and just-plain-bad people who might want to join the tribe? There’s certainly no background check required for conversion to Judaism. While most rabbis will get a general sense of a candidate’s moral and ethical grounding during the yearlong conversion process, the basic question, “Are you a good person?” is unlikely to be asked.
The “Guidelines for Rabbis Working With Prospective Gerim,” created by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 2001, is silent on evaluating the moral and ethical history of would-be Jews, said Rabbi Jeff Goldwasser of Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform synagogue in the northwest Massachusetts town of North Adams.
In his experience with converts, Goldwasser said, “I feel confident in saying that the candidates who make it all the way through the process are those with a strong understanding of Jewish beliefs and ideals and who wish to apply those standards to themselves.” Still, he said, it might be a good idea for future guidelines to include something explicit about considering the character of potential converts.
Even if that happens, rabbis still will have to consult their own consciences for guidance if a Charles Taylor type knocks on their doors, seeking to join Judaism.
“Agreeing to bring someone into the covenant is not just a matter of checking off boxes,” Levine said. “It’s a question of, is this person really ready to stand at Sinai?”
Contact Rebecca Dube at dube@forward.com
A Murder Highlights Holocaust Museum’s Value
Cathedral of Memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
Essay
By Michael Berenbaum
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Los Angeles — From its inception, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has regarded itself — and been regarded by others — as a high-priority target, and for good reason. Though not a Jewish institution but a government institution, it is one of the most visible manifestations of the prominence of American Jewry — its creators — and is the cathedral of American Holocaust memory.
Getty Images
Cathedral of Memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.
For the past 15 years, the museum has spent significant resources on security and held itself to the highest standards. Its security staff is very professional, well trained and armed. These high standards were evident on June 10 in the swiftness of the security guards’ response when a gunman determined to kill entered the museum’s main hall. Lives were saved. There may have been as many as 2,000 people in the museum that day. We deeply mourn the death of Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, a six-year veteran of the museum’s security staff, and salute his colleagues for their immediate and effective response.
The alleged shooter, an 88-year-old white supremacist — let us not give him the dignity of a name — reminds us that danger lurks in many places and that hatred takes many forms. He hated Jews, but not only Jews. Racists seem unable to confine their hatred to only one group, and this often generates solidarity among the subjects of their hatred, for the safety of one group is inextricably linked to the safety of another, and to the effectiveness of law enforcement groups and the rule of law. He proclaimed his hatred on the Web. His heinous act is the loudest proclamation of that hatred.
We should genuinely fear a copycat killer, and other institutions must take appropriate precautions. A lone gunman willing to risk his own death seldom can be stopped. Homegrown terrorists are dangerous, as we saw in a Kansas church on May 31, when an anti-abortion rights activist murdered Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider.
There is, right now in America, an almost perfect storm to create a climate of hatred. Economic uncertainty, loss of jobs, the erosion of economic security for the middle class and the amplification of hatred in our media, especially talk radio and cable television. In this climate Jews, but surely not only Jews — have been recently targeted: a student murdered at Wesleyan University, an alleged plot to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, N.Y. and now the USHMM.
The attack also reminds us of the sheer power of the events of the Holocaust; the power to plead for dignity and decency, for tolerance and pluralism, and for an effective response to other genocides, and for the condemnation of antisemitism, past and present. And the power to attract those very forces the Museum seeks to combat.
The killer may have been on Holocaust overload. This is not to excuse his action, nor to suggest that the emphasis on the Holocaust is not appropriate, but merely to emphasize our contemporary reality.
Pope Benedict XVI recently visited Yad Vashem and forcibly condemned Holocaust denial and antisemitism. And while most Jews regarded his words somewhat disappointedly — they were overly intellectual, somewhat cold and devoid of autobiographic detail, especially when contrasted with those of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II — such subtlety was likely lost on the killer.
President Obama also may have been on his mind. An African-American man who is clearly brilliant and articulate accepted by the American people as their president may have been too much for a white supremacist to handle. It shatters his perception of the world, the certainty of his own twisted vision. Obama’s appointments of his female opponent as secretary of state and a female justice of Hispanic origin to the Supreme Court may fuel the perception that the America the killer embraced is swiftly disappearing. The times they are a-changin’.
The president’s forceful condemnation of Holocaust denial in Cairo was unambiguous and authoritative. So welcome to many of us, it may have been raw meat for such a man of hate. And the president’s visit to Buchenwald in the presence of the president of Germany and the chancellor of Germany, with Elie Wiesel, the most prominent survivor of Buchenwald, as their guide, was a direct refutation of his worldview. New leaders had arisen in Germany; they do not deny the past, they condemn it. The skeletonlike figure who once slept in the barracks of Buchenwald had become a world spokesman for human dignity and for embracing the diversity of God’s creations. This, too, must shatter the worldview of a man filled with hatred.
The president’s visit was America at its best. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is also America at its best — open; diverse; pluralistic; fighting for human dignity and decency; confronting the hatreds that resulted in the Holocaust, the hatreds that would invite its repetition.
Those who visit the museum in the aftermath of this horrendous attack should view their visit as an act of defiance, denying white supremacists and other haters their victory. The death of Johns should renew our determination to advance the causes of the museum, for which he gave his life.
Both the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish Committee have established funds to honor officer Stephen Tyrone Johns and benefit his family. All proceeds will go to this family. The address of tbe Museum is 100 Raoul Walllenberg Place, SW Washington, DC 20024. The American Jewish Committee is at 165 East 56th Street, New York, New York 10022.
Michael Berenbaum was project director during the creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is a professor of Jewish studies and director of the Sigi Ziering Institute at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles.
Hoenlein Hits Obama On Speech, Then Retreats
By Nathan Guttman
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Washington — A top Jewish leader whose coalition speaks on behalf of organized Jewry is again under fire after being quoted as saying Jews were “very concerned” about President Obama’s recent speech reaching out to the Muslim world.
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, American Jewry’s umbrella group on policy issues involving Israel, said the quotes were taken out of context, but that did little to stop the criticism.
In an interview with the conservative Web site Newsmax, Hoenlein was quoted as saying that Jewish leaders “are expressing concern about what was said” in Obama’s June 4 speech in Cairo to the Muslim world. According to another quote, Hoenlein said: “I’ve heard it from some of his strongest supporters. It’s expected from his detractors. Even people close to him have said to us that there were parts of the speech that bothered them.” Hoenlein, according to the article, said he was expressing his personal views.
The interview, presented as an exclusive, was written by Ronald Kessler, the Web site’s chief Washington correspondent, who was among those leading the charges about ties between Obama and the controversial minister the Rev. Jeremiah Wright during the election campaign.
Hoenlein’s quotes, which seemed to indicate a widespread concern within the Jewish community over Obama’s policies, drew immediate criticism from Jewish activists. The National Jewish Democratic Council, a Democratic Party support group, issued a statement saying Hoenlein’s comments represented a mistaken reading of Jewish public opinion.
The Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish membership organization represented in the Presidents Conference, sent a letter to Alan Solow, its chairman, criticizing Hoenlein’s remarks, according to sources who saw the letter’s contents. Solow is one of Obama’s top supporters in the Jewish community.
Hoenlein did not return calls requesting his comment.
In an interview with JTA, Hoenlein said his answers in the interview were presented out of context and that all he was trying to say was that the Jewish community “is not monolithic.”
This is not the first time that Hoenlein — whose job duties include publicly representing the communal consensus on critical issues — has been accused of going beyond communal consensus to criticize Obama. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Hoenlein was among the organizers of a rally against Iran, at which then vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin was invited to speak. She was disinvited, after activists learned there would not be a senior Democratic counterpart speaking at the event. Later, he came under fire for helping to organize a conference call with Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
In June, in an interview with the 5 Towns Jewish Times, Hoenlein was quoted as saying that J Street and Americans for Peace Now, two dovish-leaning Jewish groups, are distorting Obama’s message and trying “to rattle Prime Minister Netanyahu” and “to do what they can to unseat him.” APN is itself a member agency of the Presidents Conference.
APN spokesman Ori Nir said the group sent Hoenlein a letter denying the allegations in the article and demanding an apology. Hoenlein replied in a letter to leaders of APN that he had not mentioned any group’s name in the interview. He added that he had contacted the paper and was assured it would publish a correction.
Contact Nathan Guttman at guttman@forward.com
How Iran’s Hardliners Shot Themselves in the Foot
Don't lose sight of the fact that the Jewish forward is very Jewish! This image again is to portrary the Iranian government in bad light.
Opinion
By Shaul Bakhash
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
When Iran’s presidential campaign began two months ago, few expected much excitement or voter interest. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s first four-year term had been characterized by increasing repression and an expanded role for the state’s security agencies. The major institutions of the state were firmly in the hands of conservatives and hardliners. The main opposition party initially even had a hard time finding a plausible candidate willing to challenge the incumbent. Yet the election took a surprising turn, and has ended up shaking the very foundations of the Islamic Republic.
The contest pitted Ahmadinejad against three members-in-good-standing of Iran’s power elite: former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who led Iran during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war; Mehdi Karroubi, a former speaker of parliament and one of the country’s leading political clerics, and former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezai.
Rezai is best described as a pragmatic conservative. Karroubi was associated with the reformist movement launched by former president Mohammad Khatami, but he had long since shed his more leftist leanings and, as parliament speaker, remained silent during the 2001 crackdown on the press, which proved a severe setback to the reform movement. Mousavi, for his part, had been out of the political loop for 20 years by the time of this election, and he had never articulated the kind of vision of a system based on the rule of law and a vigorous civil society championed by Khatami.
In the final weeks of the election, however, something remarkable happened. As expected, Mousavi and Karroubi criticized Ahmadinejad for mishandling of the economy. But they also attacked the president’s truculent foreign policy posture and Iran’s resulting international isolation; they called for greater freedoms, and for an end to the harassment of women and the young by the morals police; they championed the cause of women’s rights; they even criticized Ahmadinejad’s repeated denials of the Holocaust.
These issues were discussed with a candor foreign to Iran’s previous presidential campaigns. For the first time, presidential candidates debated face-to-face on national television, exchanging charge and counter-charge, and leaving viewers mesmerized. Mousavi campaigned with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a writer and former university president, at his side — another first in a country where politicians’ wives remain in the background — and she endorsed demands for legal reform and women’s rights that have landed other women’s advocates in prison.
The election unexpectedly became a contest between the champions of the status quo and the proponents of change. While Mousavi lacked Khatami’s charisma, the themes he took up led millions of Iranians to invest in him their hopes for freedom and for a more responsive government.
Four years ago, during the previous presidential election, middle-class voters and the young, dismayed by the failure of Khatami’s reform movement, stayed away from the polls in large numbers. This time, Iranians, particularly women and the young, turned up at Mousavi’s political rallies in droves and enlisted en masse in his campaign.
The enthusiasm for Mousavi as an agent of change clearly alarmed conservatives and hardliners, including Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. As supreme leader, Khamenei has always resisted political liberalization, as he did at the height of the reform movement. It was Khamenei who initiated the 2001 crackdown that led to the closure of dozens of reformist newspapers and magazines. Khamenei fears that liberalization, once underway, will spin out of control. And he knows that reformists have, in the past, called for a curb on the supreme leader’s almost unlimited powers.
Khamenei is also skeptical of calls to engage America — a skepticism that is shared by the powerful Revolutionary Guards and the security agencies upon which the supreme leader relies for his continued hold on power. Hostility to America and standing up to “the Great Satan” have become pillars of hardliner ideology; any normalization of relations would rob hardliners of a convenient bogeyman. They fear that the trade, investment and tourism that would follow restoration of diplomatic ties would result in unwelcome changes at home.
If there is engagement with America, Khamenei wants to control it. In Ahmadinejad, he has a willing collaborator. In Mousavi, he might have had a president with a mind of his own.
These considerations may explain the decision to manipulate the election results — and the available evidence points to the conclusion that the results were, indeed, falsified — in order to give Ahmadinejad an undeserved victory.
Khamenei initially endorsed these results and described them as a “divine blessing.” He and his advisers, evidently, did not anticipate the outrage of Iranians who believe the election was hijacked.
Now, in the face of the outpouring of popular protest, Khamenei has called on the Council of Guardians, a body of senior clerics and jurists, to review allegations of election irregularities. This is vintage Khamenei: He pretends to stand above the fray as an honest broker between the political factions. But his interventions during political disagreements in the past were designed to mollify the opposition, even as he delivered victories to the hardliners.
On this occasion, too, Khamenei may be playing for time, anticipating that the protests will die down in a few days, allowing the Council of Guardians, hardly a neutral body, to tweak the vote count while still declaring the re-election of Ahmadinejad legitimate and binding.
Such an outcome, however, will not assuage Mousavi’s supporters. Their chant is “Where is my vote?” And they will not be satisfied until they get an answer.
The irony of all this is that Mousavi actually did not necessarily pose a fundamental threat to the status quo. Certainly, he would have softened the tone of Iranian foreign policy, reverting to the type of presidential rhetoric that preceded Ahmadinejad’s term in office. And even Khamenei himself has not ruled out engaging America, so long as it is done on his terms. In any case, Iran’s nuclear policy is set by the supreme leader, not by the president. Moreover, easing of social, press and political controls of the kind envisaged by Mousavi would have been limited in scope. Yet the hardliners persisted in the belief that any relaxing of controls would be the thin edge of the wedge that would destabilize the whole system.
As a result of the anger unleashed since election day, Khamenei now faces a serious dilemma: If he allows peaceful demonstrations to continue, they could escalate, making demands for change unstoppable. If, on the other hand, he and the security forces decide on a crackdown, as is likely, it could prove bloody and cost the regime both domestic and international legitimacy. Either way Khamenei and the forces of the status quo will have suffered a serious, and self-inflicted, blow.
To nullify the elections and hold a new ballot, as Mousavi and Karroubi demand, would be almost unthinkable for Khamenei and the hardliners, as it would constitute an admission of massive fraud by the government. Yet the regime must now reckon with a galvanized public demanding change. It can, once again, try to silence this demand. But successful repression will mean a younger generation of men and women disillusioned with politics and shorn of the belief that they can bring about peaceful change by participation in the political process.
For Iran’s leaders, the long-term costs of such dashed hopes could prove to be considerable.
Shaul Bakhash is a Clarence Robinson Professor of History at George Mason University. He is the author of several books and articles on Iran.
To Remove Settlers, Call the Goyim
The Strategic Interest
By Yossi Alpher
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
As the Obama administration contemplates what is required to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it had best take into account that reaching an agreement between the parties may not turn out to be the most difficult part. Indeed, it will almost certainly be easier for an Israeli government — any government, left or right — to negotiate a two-state agreement with the Palestinians than it will be to physically remove the 80,000 or so settlers who would have to be relocated in order to implement any agreement.
Ehud Olmert, who preceded Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, made considerable progress toward an agreement with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. But Olmert was barely able to remove six structures from a single illegal outpost without endangering his governing coalition. Netanyahu’s own current dilemma regarding the Obama administration’s demand to remove outposts and freeze settlement expansion clearly reflects not only his ideological inclinations but, perhaps more importantly, the huge influence of the settlers within the Israeli political system.
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True, Ariel Sharon successfully removed settlements from Gaza, using Israeli army and police forces. But that was Sharon, a uniquely determined and capable leader the likes of whom Israel can’t seem to find anymore. And Gaza was a settlement backwater with little religious or historic Jewish significance where only 8,000 settlers lived.
What Israeli leader would be capable of removing at least 10 times as many settlers — roughly the number likely to find themselves on the Palestinian side of a final-status border — from the biblical heartland of the Jewish people in the West Bank: Hebron, Shiloh, Bet El, Elon Moreh? The ridiculously undermanned Israeli police, all 25,000 of them, would not be up to this task. The army, increasingly staffed at the officer and operational level by religious Jews from the settlements who themselves reject a two-state solution, would evade the task in every way possible. And this time around, extremist settlers would be prepared to shed blood to prevent their removal.
One alternative frequently discussed is simply to leave recalcitrant settlers behind and abandon them to their fate inside a Palestinian state. But settler extremists would like nothing better than to rampage against their Arab neighbors, inviting Palestinian forces to attack them and perhaps prompting the Israeli army to return to protect them, thereby destabilizing the nascent two-state solution. No responsible Israeli or Palestinian government could agree to this situation.
If Israel can’t remove the settlers on its own, but can’t leave them behind either, what can be done? Enter the international security force.
The idea of deploying an international security force to support and stabilize an Israeli-Palestinian peace process has long been bandied about. Thus far, however, neither Israelis nor Palestinians have shown much enthusiasm for such a deployment.
Israeli security thinkers, while increasingly willing to accept an international role in dealing with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, have generally argued that an international security force inserted into the West Bank to prevent rocket and suicide attacks against Israel would prove unwilling to fight armed Palestinian terrorists. Instead, they fear it would end up confronting Israeli soldiers if they had to return to the West Bank to stamp out terrorism. Palestinians also tend to reject the idea of an international deployment. They insist that their nascent state must be allowed to maintain order on its own.
Nevertheless, the potential usefulness of an international force should not be dismissed out of hand. Such a force could effectively monitor West Bank demilitarization arrangements and help ensure the smooth operation of Palestinian-Israeli border crossings. But the task that may ultimately end up justifying its deployment is the removal of Israeli settlers.
Certainly, many of the settlers slated for removal under an Israeli-Palestinian agreement would leave peacefully or offer only passive resistance. Surveys show that some could be persuaded to leave today in return for adequate compensation.
But the hard-core of West Bank settlers numbers in the many thousands — and perhaps tens of thousands — and is fanatically messianic. The most extreme elements would fight their fellow Jews rather than abandon what they believe to be theirs by the will of God. And their fellow Jews, whatever their ideological persuasion, would not want to spill their blood, lest “Jewish wars” bring down the whole house.
This would be a sad moment for Jewish sovereignty, brought on by 40 years of willful negligence and at times open encouragement of settler fanaticism by the Israeli mainstream. The hard-core of the settlement movement today endangers Israel as a Jewish state. It prolongs an occupation that has already eroded Israel’s sovereign capacity to deal with the problem.
That’s why the goyim may have to do it for us.
Yossi Alpher is co-editor of the bitterlemons.org family of Internet publications. He is former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.
The Netanyahu Speech: A Primer
The Hour
By Leonard Fein
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Q: Prime Minister Netanyahu promised that his speech of June 14 would provide a detailed response to President Obama’s recent statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Did it?
A: Yes and no.
Q: Can you be more specific?
A: Alright, first the “yes.” He began by saying, “Let’s begin negotiations immediately without preconditions.” And it is true, as has been widely reported, that Netanyahu used the term “Palestinian state,” twice explicitly and once by implication. The explicit statements: First, “It is impossible to expect us to agree in advance to the principle of a Palestinian state without assurances that this state will be demilitarized.” And then, “If we receive this guarantee” — a guarantee from “the international community, led by the United States” of Palestine’s total demilitarization — “and if the Palestinians recognize Israel as the State of the Jewish people, then we will be ready in a future peace agreement to reach a solution where a demilitarized Palestinian state exists alongside the Jewish state.” Finally, by implication: “In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government.”
Q: That’s a real breakthrough, coming from Netanyahu, isn’t it?
A: Hardly. The first mention is cast in the negative. The second suggests that a peace agreement awaits at some indeterminate future time. And the third, with its reference to mutual respect — well, mutual respect between a nuclear power with a mighty army and a radically demilitarized state next door is almost surely wishful thinking — or, more likely, formulaic speaking.
Q: Isn’t the international guarantee of Palestine’s demilitarization a “precondition” to negotiation?
A: Maybe. Here and elsewhere in the speech, it’s not clear whether he is talking about agreements that have to be reached before there can be meaningful negotiations or demands that Israel would bring to the negotiating table. The fact is that the importance of Palestine’s demilitarization has been widely assumed ever since the notion of a two-state solution was first put forward. The two ideas are intimately linked; it is clear that each is contingent on the other. Yet the prime minister did not say, “In principle, we accept the idea of a two-state solution, so long as Palestine accepts that it will be demilitarized.” Instead, he asserts that “On a matter so critical to the existence of Israel, we must first have our security needs addressed.” So he wants the Palestinians to say “uncle” before Israel says “cousin.”
Q: Alright, then, his endorsement of a two-state solution seems choked. What psychological need does Israel have for a “public, binding and unequivocal Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people”? Doesn’t most of the world already accept that?
A: Indeed it does. Israel wants it not for psychological reasons but for legal reasons. That’s why the word “binding” is there. What such recognition binds the Palestinians to, as Netanyahu says, is a very practical consequence: It implies “a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel’s borders. For it is clear that any demand for resettling Palestinian refugees within Israel undermines Israel’s continued existence as the state of the Jewish people.”
Q: Israel’s quarrel with America hinges on the settlement question. What did Netanyahu have to say about that?
A: What he chose not to say turns out to be as revealing as what he did say. What he said was “we have no intention of building new settlements or of expropriating additional land for existing settlements.” That is largely meaningless, since many if not most of the existing settlements have large tracts of land, much of it expropriated from Palestinians, that have yet to be developed. So there can be very substantial construction within existing settlements. And what he didn’t say is anything at all about the hundred or so illegal outposts that Israel long-since promised to remove but that have yet, with a handful of exceptions, to be touched.
The “natural growth” controversy is a separate matter, though it is worth noting that somewhere between a third and two-fifths of the growth in settlement population during the last decade hasn’t been “natural” at all. It has been the result of heavily subsidized in-migration, not family expansion. The problem here is that Israel has grown so accustomed to doing what it wants to do in the settlements, no matter what it has publicly promised, begetting only an occasional “tsk tsk” from the Americans, that it cannot easily deal with the fact that the Obama administration means to insist that its promises be kept.
Q: Anything else?
A: Lots more, but the day is short. Best to leave the parsing for others and take the speech as a whole. As a whole, it accomplished what Netanyahu evidently wanted to accomplish: To lay down so many markers, attach so many poison pills to his call for peace, that nothing has changed, peace is no closer.
None of which is to say that the Palestinians have, for their part, dealt wisely or honorably with the issue of peace. They have in fact made it easy for Israelis to be skeptical, if not downright cynical, about living side-by-side in two states. They cannot and will not be taken as a serious partner until they manage to halt the incitement that has long infected them. But in the meantime, there is a proposal on the table, the Arab League/Saudi proposal, that offers a useful starting point for serious negotiation. What a shame that Netanyahu didn’t shock his audience by giving a speech one sentence long: “We welcome the Saudi proposal, and are ready to begin negotiations around it tomorrow morning.” That would have changed everything.
Blessed are the peacemakers, we’re told — not those who drape themselves in the language of peace while dancing on its grave.
On the March in Iran
Editorial
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
The images coming out of Iran are nothing short of horrifying: Peaceful protesters savagely beaten by black-clad police. University dormitories ransacked by the regimes’ thugs. Demonstrators shot and killed by Basij militiamen.
Other images, though, have been heartening: Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Iranians taking to the streets, at genuine personal risk, to demand, “Where is my vote?” Denied democracy on election day, Iranians are now voting with their feet, indeed with their entire bodies.
It remains to be seen which images will carry the day: Will we witness a Velvet Revolution? Will the streets of Tehran be the next Tiananmen? Or will the outcome be more ambiguous?
Yet for all the uncertainty, this is also a moment of clarity: By brazenly stealing an election, the Iranian regime has removed its republican mask. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, whose apologetics for the Islamic Republic have drawn no small amount of Jewish ire, conceded, “I erred in underestimating the brutality and cynicism of a regime that understands the uses of ruthlessness.”
But it is not only the wishful thinkers who misread the situation on the ground. Some of those who have been most outspoken about Iran’s nuclear menace argued that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election would actually be the preferred electoral outcome. They noted that any Iranian president would play second fiddle to the country’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A win by challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi, therefore, would simply have served to diminish international concern about the Iranian threat, without lessening the threat itself. At least with Ahmadinejad, a scary regime was presenting a correspondingly scary face to the world.
These arguments are not without logic. There is no reason to believe that a President Mousavi could have stilled Iran’s centrifuges, even if he had wanted to — the nuclear portfolio being the purview of the supreme leader. And Mousavi himself is no liberal. He was a protégé of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — no humanist he — and publicly backed Khomeini’s barbaric 1989 fatwa against novelist Salman Rushdie.
But the notion that a Mousavi presidency would have been nothing more than a convenient cover for the hardliners is belied by the great lengths to which Iran’s actual hardliners have gone to deny him the office. There is something to be said for the notion that the enemy of our enemy is, if not exactly our friend, at least the enemy of our enemy.
Moreover, the brave Iranians taking to the streets of Tehran and Isfahan are not, first or foremost, marching for Mousavi. They are marching for a freer Iran — Mousavi’s candidacy having emerged as the unlikely vehicle for their hopes and dreams.
With its nuclear ambitions and support for Hezbollah and Hamas, Iran’s current regime is a danger not only to Israel but to the entire region. That is today’s harsh reality. Ultimately, however, a more open and democratic Iran is the best hope for a safer tomorrow. The demonstrators facing down the guns and goons of Khamenei, Ahmadinejad and Co. are putting their lives on the line in pursuit of that goal. Amid the uncertainty, one thing is crystal clear: They deserve our sympathy, and our solidarity.
Bibi’s Missed Opportunity
Editorial
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009
There’s a saying that Israel has no foreign policy, only a domestic one. In a sense, the observation reflects the existential question that has hung over Israel since the moment of its birth — a foreign policy distinct from domestic concerns is the kind of luxury enjoyed by nations old enough and secure enough not to have to fight for their very identity. In another sense, the saying reflects the raw reality of Israeli politics, dominated by the need to build and maintain coalitions with smaller parties often guided by even smaller fields of vision.
Against that backdrop, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s major address on foreign policy was a domestic success. His grudging acceptance of a demilitarized Palestinian state, his ringing call for Palestinians to accept Israel as a Jewish homeland and his implicit endorsement of growth within settlements matches the broad outlines of Israeli public opinion. He opened the speech on June 14 by greeting the “citizens of Israel,” and they apparently returned the favor — 71% supported the speech according to the latest Haaretz poll.
Perhaps this was all that could be expected of Netanyahu. But while he shrewdly was able to shore up his shaky domestic base, he missed the opportunity to become the statesman Israel needs and deserves.
Much has been made of his first-ever acknowledgment of a Palestinian state: “In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government. Neither will threaten the security or survival of the other.” Yet this lovely statement only puts Netanyahu on par with his predecessors, only echoes Israel’s past commitments and America’s firm policy. It doesn’t even signal a bold move within his own right-wing party — the Haaretz survey showed that 90% of Likud voters agreed with the speech. No risk there.
The caveats Netanyahu attached to his support of a Palestinian state were well within mainstream Israeli discourse, and his call upon Arab leaders to work together in regional negotiations is fast becoming the new mantra in the Middle East. But while he was busy insisting upon what everyone else must do, Netanyahu didn’t once acknowledge Israel’s own role in making the attainment of peace — even a cold peace — so difficult.
“Why has this conflict continued for more than 60 years?” he asked. His answer: The refusal to recognize Israel as the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
True. But by so adamantly directing blame in only one direction, Netanyahu missed the opportunity to acknowledge Israel’s role in Palestinian suffering — which is real and ongoing, even if one believes that it is an unintentional byproduct of regional intransigence. His presentation of history assigns not a single failure to Israel, as if it were a superhuman state, bearing no responsibility for the ills surrounding and, increasingly, within.
Such rhetoric may appease a domestic base, but in the context of the Middle East, it leads to only more of the same. Leaders from each side claim the superiority of their positions and the validity of their grievances, leaving no room for discussion or compromise.
Contrast that with the statesmanlike words spoken by President Obama in Cairo, as he sought to validate Muslim concerns about America and the West, while at the same time forcefully challenging the Muslim world to drop its own prejudices and destructive behaviors.
In fact, there is no comparison. Obama outlined a vision of the future; Netanyahu merely clung to the present. It may have been as much as he could give, but sadly, it may not be enough.
Triumphalists’ Don’t Have ‘Heavy Hearts’
June 26, 2009
Letters
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
Predicting the future of the Jewish community can be a dangerous exercise, as historian Jonathan Sarna correctly points out (“Saying Kaddish Too Soon,” June 5).
However, when you look at the intermarriage statistics and the resulting loss of Jews, and then apply these numbers to future generations, it’s hard to argue with Rabbi Norman Lamm’s suggestion that “we will soon say Kaddish on the Reform and Conservative movements.” Time will tell whether or not he is right.
In addition, I take exception to Sarna characterization of Rabbi Lamm’s statement as “triumphalism.” Those who engage in triumphalism do not do so “with a heavy heart,” which are the words that preceded Lamm’s prediction. Lamm also has a long history of cooperating with the leaders of other denominations, which does not reflect a triumphalist approach at all.
While Rabbi Lamm’s statement may not have been politically correct — and others in the Orthodox community may have prematurely used it to boast about their own future — it certainly was not triumphalist in either tone or content.
Michael Feldstein
Stamford, Conn.
Among five major challenges Jonathan Sarna enumerates, he avers that “American Orthodoxy is experiencing a significant brain drain. It sends its best and its brightest to Israel for long periods of yeshiva study, and unsurprisingly, many of them never return.”
Let’s analyze that. It is true that a significant percentage of graduates from Orthodox high schools go to study in Israel for a year or two after graduation. It is also true that the year or two in Israel has an impact on aliyah. That, however, does not make for a “significant brain drain.”
According to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, during the 21-year period of 1988 to 2008, the average annual number of olim from the United States was 1,762. If we estimate on the high side and suggest that as many as 90% of those olim were Orthodox, that means that 1,586 American Orthodox Jews — adults and children — per year made aliyah. Since there are about 700,000 Orthodox Jews in the United States, that means, on an annual basis, about two-tenths of 1% made aliyah.
Even if we were to assume that all of them would have otherwise ended up making significant contributions to the American Orthodox community — which is clearly not the case — the numbers hardly appear to be a “significant brain drain.” In addition, a conservative estimate would be that, for a variety of reasons, about 10% of the olim return to live in the United States, so the number of long-term American olim is actually even lower.
Moreover, many of those with leadership skills continue to have an impact on American Orthodoxy after their aliyah. The “best and brightest” continually travel back and forth between Israel and America, where they contribute to the Orthodox communities in both countries. And, in this era of global communications, they don’t even have to be in America physically to have impact.
American Orthodoxy does have serious problems, some of which are succinctly indicated by Sarna. Those problems, however, are not the result of a “significant brain drain” caused by aliyah. They are problems that are “made in the USA.”
Chaim I. Waxman
Jerusalem, Israel
The writer is a professor emeritus of sociology and Jewish studies at Rutgers University.
Will Jean-Luc Godard Tackle the Holocaust?
By Nathan Burstein
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009
egendary French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard may be gearing up for a drama about the Holocaust.
Getty Images
Godard: Rumor has it that the director might film an adap-tation of a best-selling memoir.
The groundbreaking filmmaker behind “Breathless” and “A Woman Is a Woman” is considering an adaptation of the 2006 memoir “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” Daniel Mendelsohn’s account of his research into the wartime fate of relatives from Bolechow, Poland.
A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Jewish Book Award, “The Lost” would be Mendelsohn’s first work adapted for the screen.
In an e-mail sent from a literary festival in France, the author told The Shmooze that he had “no comment at present” about the Godard story, first published by The Hollywood Reporter on June 3. “[I]f and when there is a film,” he added, it will be publicized in an “appropriate fashion.”
For Godard, a movie version of “The Lost” would mark his first cinematic foray into the Holocaust. The filmmaker, born in Paris in 1930, is currently at work on “Socialisme,” his first feature-length drama since 2004’s “Our Music.”
Known for incorporating Marxist and other political messages into his films, Godard was scheduled to attend a student film festival in Tel Aviv last year, but pulled out after becoming the target of an open letter by activists advocating a boycott of Israel. The filmmaker declined public comment at the time, but an unnamed source speaking with Reuters attributed the decision to political pressure.
The Art Of Memory
A Bright New Judaica Museum Opens in Riverdale
By Malka Percal
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009
The sparkling glass walls of the new Derfner Judaica Museum look out across the Hudson River by way of a sculpture garden on a rolling green lawn. Look back, and you see the impressive contemporary art collection of the Hebrew Home at Riverdale. The museum’s clean, modern design, by architect Louise Braverman, looks to the future as it displays the historic pieces of the inaugural exhibition, Tradition and Remembrance: Treasures of the Derfner Judaica Museum. The theme — the importance of collective and individual memory — is reinforced throughout the exhibition by both showing the rare objects alongside their stories, and by the associations they trigger in viewers.
DERFNER JUDAICA MUSEUM
On display are 250 ritual objects from communities around the world. The first section is “Bezalel.” The Jerusalem-based school, founded in 1906 by Boris Schatz to create a Jewish national arts movement in Palestine, melded biblical images and motifs with Eastern techniques and Western arts and crafts influences. The first object in the exhibit, an early Bezalel Hanukkah lamp, shows Judah Maccabee purifying the Temple. Others incorporate Hebrew text from Psalm 137, adjuring Jews to remember: “If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither; let my tongue stick to my palate if I cease to think of you, if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory even in my happiest hour.”
The New Bezalel School for Arts and Crafts, as the school was called when, in 1935, it elevated modernism over the earlier eclectic style. A Hanukkah oil lamp by Ludwig Yehuda Wolpert, a New Bezalel instructor, reflects the influence of the Vienna Werkstätte (Workshop) and the Bauhaus on the German-born and -trained artist, who later taught in New York at the Jewish Museum’s Tobe Pascher silver workshop. In Wolpert’s design, the Hebrew text becomes the actual structure of the lamp.
DERFNER JUDAICA MUSEUM
“Wolpert was the first silversmith to bring modern style into Judaica,” said Bernie Bernstein, who studied with Wolpert at the Jewish Museum. Bernstein’s modernist rosewood, silver and partially gold-plated Torah shield is included in the exhibit’s “Torah” section, which features synagogue objects from many communities and periods, including a 19th-century wooden Decalogue with rampant lions. Made for the original Hebrew Home for the Aged in Harlem, the piece was also shown at the American Folk Art Museum in a 2007 exhibition highlighting the ritual craftsmen who carved America’s carousel animals.
In “Shabbat and the Holidays,” an exquisite late 19th-century velvet matzo bag is embroidered in fish scales and metallic thread, made by residents of the Girls Orphan Home in Jerusalem. The recently restored object is “beautifully put together, a major work of art,” said noted textile artist Ita Aber. A matzo bag that Aber made in the 1960s recalls the Holocaust with a fist, an outstretched hand and the word “Zkhor” (Remember) boldly embroidered on muslin.
The Judaica collection was largely donated in 1982 by Ralph and Leuba Baum, who are remembered in a section titled “The Baum Legacy.” In pride of place is the singed Torah scroll Ralph found in 1953, when he visited Elmshorn, Germany, the town he had fled in 1936. It is one of the few Torahs to have survived Kristallnacht.
A collection of Torah ornaments from Meerholz, Germany, recently drew Meerholz historian Hans Kreutzer to the Hebrew Home to give a talk on the history of the Jews in his town. “It was a touching thing for residents who live here. They were all talking German to each other,” said Susan Chevlowe, chief curator and museum director, who is in charge of the Hebrew Home’s vast contemporary collection, much of which is on permanent display throughout the 19-acre campus.
The collection is impressively extensive, important and open to the public. Among the nearly 5,000 works in the contemporary and modern collection are Andy Warhol’s “Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century” and William Wegman’s Cinderella series, as well as works by Louise Nevelson, Richard Serra, Christian Boltansky, Frank Stella, Alex Katz, Amy Cutler and Diego Rivera, to name a few. The expansive sculpture garden features works by Menashe Kadishman, Reuben Nakian, Joel Perlman, Zigi Ben-Haim and Herbert Ferber.
In addition to the pleasure it brings residents, art is “a remarkable inroad, like IM’ing the brain,” said Robin Dessel, director of memory care services. “Looking at or doing art engages both hemispheres of the brain. The creative part isn’t held back by reservations of someone who has cognitive ability.” Nearly 60% of the Home’s 875 residents have some form of memory disorder. “They make associations with past experiences — with a Torah, or a painting of a Cohen and a boy,” Dessel said, referring to the museum’s Zygmunt Menkes painting, “Cohanim Blessing.” “It brings back vivid recall that they’re able to express. Art is an external trigger; if not prompted, there’s no retrieval mechanism.”
According to Dessel, because people react in accordance with their surroundings, a cultured environment is beneficial. “Art creates life and becomes a template for living,” said Daniel Reingold, president and CEO of the Hebrew Home. “When residents debate the appropriateness of a piece of art, it’s controversial. People come to me saying, ‘That shouldn’t be here.’ Art gets people to feel impassioned, because it captures beauty or violence. Art evokes emotions, and emotions are what tell us we are alive.”
The art on display also serves as a focal point for visitors, artists, guest lecturers and intergenerational groups, with the Derfner museum as its bright center. “For years, when we knew this would be coming,” Reingold said, “we asked, what would be the right theme? Susan hit right on it with ‘memory,’ which not only portrays the challenge of preserving individual memory, but also preserving the memory of a tradition and a people.”
Malka Percal is based in New York and writes about art and culture.
Eliot’s Zionism Before Zionism
Books
By Lawrence Grossman
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot
By Gertrude Himmelfarb
Encounter Books, 180 pages, $25.95.
George Eliot
In the recent speech he delivered in Cairo to the Muslim world, President Obama declared that “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.” Is the legitimacy of Zionism based primarily on past Jewish suffering? Historian Gertrude Himmelfarb thinks not, and her new book brilliantly elucidates the intellectual origins of a far more positive justification: that Judaism can reach its full potential only in a sovereign Jewish state.
Despite belonging to a family of prominent, identified Jewish intellectuals, Himmelfarb has established her reputation as a pre-eminent authority on the intellectual history of Victorian England without addressing Jewish themes. Only now, as a retired octogenarian, has she done so by studying what another, earlier female writer of prodigious intellect thought about Jews — the non-Jewish Mary Anne Evans, far better known as George Eliot, who was arguably the greatest British novelist of the late 19th century.
Eliot, like Himmelfarb, turned her literary attention to Jews late in life, publishing what turned out to be her last work of fiction, “Daniel Deronda,” in 1876. Several years prior to the first Zionist settlements in Palestine, and two decades before Theodor Herzl launched political Zionism, the book’s title character discovers his Jewish identity and ultimately abandons the life of a British gentleman in order to travel to “the East” and work toward the establishment of a Jewish state. Eliot returned to proto-Zionism once more in a nonfiction piece that appeared as the final essay in her last book, which appeared in 1879, the year before her death.
Why did the lionized author of “Adam Bede,” “The Mill on the Floss,” “Silas Marner” and “Middlemarch,” all of which probe universal questions of morality and individual responsibility, follow them up with a treatment of the parochial “Jewish question”? That the choice of topic had deep meaning for Eliot is clear from her diaries and notebooks, which show that she studied Hebrew and read extensively about Jewish religion, customs and history in preparation for writing “Deronda.”
The critics, however, were not impressed by all the research, Himmelfarb notes, and largely disliked the novel’s Jewish content. Their assessments often rest on literary grounds — the great 20th-century critic F.R. Leavis actually prepared a version of the book, never published, with the Jewish plot excised — but sometimes also on objections to the subject matter. The late Edward Said and his disciples saw the book as a blatant case of what Said called Orientalism, Western imperialism’s assumption of the right to colonize the East and rule over its people, in this case the Palestinians.
In her investigation of the author’s purpose in writing “Deronda,” Himmelfarb astutely points out that in the mid-1870s, when Eliot was working on the novel, hatred of European Jews was at its low point, and so the ill-treatment of Jews could furnish no plausible justification for creation of a Jewish state. Despite residual social prejudice, emancipation had been achieved in England with the admittance of Jews to Parliament, and Benjamin Disraeli, a born Jew proud of his ancestry, was prime minister. On the continent, Jews were enfranchised virtually everywhere in Western and Central Europe, and optimistically assumed that lingering gentile hostility would soon disappear. What lay just around the corner — the new, virulent, racially tinged antisemitism (a term invented in 1879), the Russian pogroms, the Dreyfus Affair and, of course, the Holocaust — was unimaginable.
Nor did Eliot agree with the evangelical Christian view that Jews should return to the Holy Land as a necessary prelude to the Second Coming of Jesus. Long past her youthful evangelical leanings, Eliot was by this time an agnostic, and upon her death would be denied burial in Westminster Abbey for violating Christianity by living with a married man.
Devoid of evangelical enthusiasm and writing when Jews seemed poised to take their places as citizens of the world, Eliot derived her Zionism from elsewhere. The post-Christian Eliot, Himmelfarb writes, in “something of a return to an Old Testament,” developed a fascination with Judaism, derived both through her reading and through friendship with a particular Jew, the scholarly Emanuel Deutsch, a librarian at the British Museum who taught her Hebrew.
Awed by the religious history of the Jewish people, Eliot ascribed the deficiencies of contemporary Jewish life — the distorted occupational structure, the sometimes questionable financial practices and occasional uncouthness — to the condition of living for centuries as a repressed minority within Christian society. Return to a restored Jewish homeland — the groundwork prepared by future Daniel Derondas — would bring a new flowering of Judaism and the Jewish people, a nation forged by combining ancient spiritual truths with the best of modern culture.
Eliot’s version of Zionism has few adherents today. If Obama understands Israel as a response to “a tragic history,” many Western intellectuals, Jews among them, go even further and, following Sartre, view antisemitism, not positive Jewish identity, as the basis for Jewish distinctiveness. Postmodernists, meanwhile, cast doubt on the historic validity of “nations,” especially the resurrected Jewish one. Meanwhile, for ordinary Israelis — despite enjoying a vibrant cultural life — mundane security, political and economic concerns crowd out Eliot’s noble vision of a renewed Jewish religious civilization on ancestral soil.
Himmelfarb nevertheless believes that the message of “Daniel Deronda” deserves a rehearing, “that Israel is not merely a refuge for desperate people, that the history of Judaism is more than the bitter annals of persecution and catastrophe…. It was not the anti-Semite who ‘creates the Jew.’ It was Judaism, the religion and the people, that created the Jew.”
Lawrence Grossman is editor of the American Jewish Year Book.
Moroccan Tradition
Oh, oh! Watch out Arabs! Here they come!
A Pilgrimage to the Tomb of a ‘Righteous Man’
Holy Trip: Around 75 people traveled to the Dra’a area for the yearly ritual.
By Alison Klayman
Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009.
As our rundown Mercedes puttered past the olive groves and wheat fields of Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, our taxi driver, Mohammed, pulled off the dirt road to ask a shepherd for directions.
“Do you know how to find David Dra’a?”
I was skeptical that the Arab shepherd would be able to lead us to the tomb of an obscure kabbalist rabbi, but he knowingly pointed us forward, higher into the peaks.
Rabbi David Halevy, from the Dra’a area 60 miles northeast of Marrakech, is one of more than 600 tzadikim (righteous men) buried in Morocco who are recognized by local Jews as saints. My brother and I were looking for Halevy’s grave because this June weekend was his hiloula, when Moroccan Jews visit a tzadik’s grave to light candles and pray for health and prosperity, usually on the anniversary of his death.
Morocco lost more than 95% of its Jewish population to immigration in the past half-century. But many who have moved abroad return for hiloulas, like 32-year-old David Ruimy, a meat seller from Jerusalem who visits Morocco once a year to pray at Halevy’s tomb.
“The tzadik can perform miracles,” Ruimy told us when we arrived. Ruimy had an encyclopedic knowledge of the wonders Halevy had performed from beyond the grave. He said that the tzadik once visited a man’s dream to tell him to look in his cupboard. In the morning, the man found $200 there, exactly the amount needed to open his business. Another story was about a baby who was accidentally smothered under a pile of blankets. Her family rested her lifeless body on the tzadik’s grave, shut the door to the tomb and prayed. Minutes later, they heard her cries.
“That baby was my Aunt Bida,” Ruimy said.
Ruimy’s entire extended family was in attendance at this hiloula, continuing a 65-year-old tradition that began with his grandmother, who lived in Marrakech. His parents’ generation, the 14 brothers and sisters of the Sebbag clan who still live in Morocco, have been coming their whole lives.
“Many Jews have left Morocco, but my family stayed,” Ruimy said. “Now we probably make up around 90% of the people at this hiloula, but in the past we were just a small fraction. Twenty-five, 30 years ago, there would be almost five or six hundred people.”
The Sebbags’ success in Morocco is evident in the way they are investing in the hiloula site, turning the crumbling shacks into newly renovated vacation homes with fresh pink paint, flower planters and, most important, indoor plumbing. Unlike the Arab homes in the adjacent village, the rooftops here are crowned with Moroccan flags, an extra display of loyalty to the kingdom. The Moroccan Jewish community owns this land, which used to be occupied year-round by Jewish families and by a yeshiva just a few decades ago.
In the hours before the hiloula began, it felt like we were crashing a family reunion. Cousins ran in bathing suits down the path to the river, parents played cards and instructed Arab employees brought from Casablanca to help prepare the food. Hired local policeman watched over the group.
After the sunset, the air was electric with anticipation. People disappeared into the houses to change clothes. Ruimy returned, dressed in a brown djellaba, a traditional Moroccan loose robe with full sleeves and an oversized pointed hood. Many of his aunts and uncles were dressed similarly.
Jacky Kadoch, the usually severe-looking president of the Marrakech Jewish community, grabbed the microphone at the end of a 30-foot chord and transformed into the evening’s jaunty master of ceremonies. The hiloula head count grew to around 75 people, and latecomers who drove more than three hours from Casablanca filed into the plastic chairs in the front.
The hiloula began with an auction, first for the honor of opening the tomb and then for decorative candles to burn. The money goes toward the upkeep of the tomb, and a blessing was recited for the winner of each item. One at a time, Kadoch auctioned off 30 candles in French. “La première bougie! La deuxième bougie!” Each started with an opening bid of no less than 1,000 dirham ($125).
Wallets loosened with the nonstop flow of whiskey, and interludes of synthesized music in Hebrew and Arabic were broadcast over the mini public address system. Not surprisingly, most of the top bids came from members of the Sebbag family.
At one point, Daniel Sebbag, another of Ruimy’s uncles, created a ruckus on the sidelines when he whipped out his cell phone and all the children crowded around to look at the screen. He recently came on a private visit to the tomb and said the tzadik showed him an image, in the ashes of the fireplace, of an old man holding a baby. He took a photograph of the vision with his cell phone. His sister Bida, the woman revived by the tzadik as a baby, was particularly interested in seeing the picture.
“La dernière bougie,” the last candle, was finally sold after 1 a.m. The mood was a bit muted after everyone sat through the tiresome auction, but the gathering began to stir as people moved toward the reverberating sounds of singing, clapping and rhythmic drumming coming from those already inside the tomb.
The tzadik’s grave is at the top of the tomb stairs, covered by a dark-green marble slab. Behind that, a palm tree grows into a skylight. To the left is a small square fireplace carved into the wall. Young and old seemed practiced in the proper tomb-worshipping etiquette. The people all kneeled and pressed their foreheads to the marble, taking turns to solemnly toss their candles into the fireplace’s blaze. Many took pictures of the flames with cameras and cell phones.
Bida was one of the most enthusiastic participants. She whirled around in a shiny djellaba, banging on tables with henna-covered hands, and led the crowd in song.
“To your health,” she wished me in French. “May you be married, and have lots of babies, and have everything good come to you!”
Armed with simple white Sabbath candles, my brother and I took our turns at the fireplace to feed the flames. I came to the hiloula more out of curiosity than out of faith in the tzadik, but my gaze lingered for just a moment longer on the glowing fireplace, just in case he wanted to send me a message.
Alison Klayman is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker in Beijing.
Israel's Iran Timetable in State of Constant Flux
By Yossi Melman (Haaretz)
Published June 17, 2009.
For 15 years the Military Intelligence has been changing its assessment on when Iran’s nuclear program becomes operational. The deadline has been constantly pushed back, from the late 1990s, to the beginning then the middle of this decade, and finally 2009-2010. That changed this week.
On Tuesday, Mossad chief Meir Dagan suddenly came along and dismissed the assessment of the agency officially in charge of intelligence strategy. In saying that the deadline for an Iranian bomb is 2014, Dagan aligned himself with the CIA, that has repeatedly determined that Iran will reach the point of no return in 2015.
These frequent fluctuations damage the reputation of Israel’s intelligence agencies. They, in turn, can always say in their defense the assessments are changed in light of the new information that becomes available, but these inconsistencies nonetheless confuse the public.
If the date of the completion of Iran’s nuclear program is not that critical, there was no reason to spend so much time on it in the first place.
And if Iran will only be able to enrich uranium in 2014, it will be after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had left office, provided that the recent turmoil in the country does not scupper his re-election.
On top of the blow to his prestige delivered by the current protests, Iran’s spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s physical condition is shaky. By 2014, there may well be a new president and a new spiritual leader. In short — everything is open.
Orthodox Organization Defends Chaplain Accused of Favoring Jewish Inmates
By Nathaniel Popper
Published June 16, 2009.
The nation’s leading ultra-Orthodox umbrella organization is preparing to go to bat for a disgraced prison chaplain who is accused of giving favors to Jewish inmates.
Agudath Israel of America has drafted a letter to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg expressing support for Rabbi Leib Glanz, a rabbi affiliated with the Satmar Hasidic movement who is a chaplain in New York City jails. News reports over the last week have indicated that Glanz gave favors to Jewish prisoners and allowed a wealthy Jewish inmate to hold lavish catered parties in the prison for his son’s bar mitzvah and his daughter’s engagement.
A draft of the letter—which has not yet been sent—says that the groups signing onto it are concerned with “the tenor of media reports about Rabbi Leib Glanz.”
“The reports in the media pillory Rabbi Glanz, in the most cynical and derogatory fashion imaginable, for his role in accommodating Jewish prisoners’ religious requirements and helping them participate, personally or vicariously, in milestone family celebrations,” the draft letter says.
While Glanz’s action’s may have crossed lines, the draft letter states, “We also have no doubt that any such improprieties were nothing more than lapses of judgment; and that they emanated from a good place, a heart overflowing with empathy and concern.”
Rabbi David Zwiebel, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel, said that he drafted the letter, but he added that it was still being refined.
“It is not inconceivable at the end of the day that the letter won’t go,” Zwiebel said.
An email listing the organizations that have signed onto the letter included a number of ultra-Orthodox organizations based in Brooklyn. The list also included the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Officials at both organizations said that they had not, in fact, signed onto the letter and did not plan to.
A top official of New York City’s Department of Corrections has resigned over the scandal. But thus far, Glanz has only been suspended from his job for two weeks.
Excerpt: Sam Apple's 'American Parent'
Circumcision: In Search of my Foreskin
By Sam Apple
Published June 16, 2009.
Unlike most people writing about circumcision, I wasn’t especially interested in the medical debates surrounding the procedure. It was the strangeness of the ritual that captivated me. Plenty of the Jewish rituals sometimes feel odd in the context of my otherwise modern life, but no other ritual seemed as archaic or mysterious as circumcision. I planned to learn about the origins of the ritual and about how circumcision had found its way into so many diverse religious cultures. But while I was most interested in the history, my plan was to extend the discussion to my own feelings about circumcision—my working title was “In Search of My Foreskin”—and, in the process, explore my own Jewish identity. And if I was going to write a personal book about circumcision, I thought that the scene of my own cutting might be a logical place to start.
I asked my relatives what they recalled about my circumcision, but to my frustration, the single clear recollection came from my grandmother, who remembered that my great-grandfather, Rachmiel, had led a celebratory conga line. I was amazed to learn that the removal of my foreskin had gen erated so much enthusiasm.
But I was looking for a more complete picture of my eighth day, and if my relatives couldn’t remember the event, there was still one person who might: my mohel. A mohel, or Jewish ritual circumciser, is sometimes but not always a rabbi. My mohel was an orthodontist. I learned this from my father, who said that he had been friendly with my mohel at our synagogue in Houston, where I grew up. My father recalled that my mohel had worn a cowboy hat and boots whenever he did a circumcision and that he had circumcised the sons of so many East Coast transplants that he became known as the Yankee Clipper.
Raising Kids Today: Sam Apple’s new memoir, “American Parent.”
It took only a quick Google search to find my mohel’s phone number, but making the call wasn’t as easy. I wasn’t sure how to explain what I wanted without sounding like a lunatic. I picked up the phone, put the phone down, paced around the apartment, and picked up the phone again. Then, I dialed my mohel’s number.
My mohel said hello with a slight Texas twang, and I introduced myself as someone he had circumcised a long time ago. My mohel seemed entirely, astonishingly, unfazed by my announcement.
“Great to hear from you,” he said. It was almost as though he had been waiting for my call for the last thirty years.
“So I guess you’re wondering why I’ve called you,” I said.
“No,” my mohel said. “You can call me anytime you want.”
The response put me at ease. My mohel and I chatted about a few people we knew in common from Houston and then, even before I had begun to ask him about the scene of my circumcision, he invited me to visit him at his home in Howard, Colorado, where he was spending his retirement with his second wife. Four months later, I was standing in the passenger pickup lane of the Colorado Springs airport, where my mohel and I had arranged to meet. I didn’t know what my mohel looked like and for several minutes I peered through the windows of the idlingcars, wondering if one of the drivers might have circumcised me. Then a Ford Explorer pulled up with a handwritten sign bearing my name taped to the window. Inside the car, the Yankee Clipper waved excitedly. I opened the car door and shook his hand. He wore a gray polo shirt almost identical to my own, a black baseball cap, and a money pack around his waist. We began the two-hour drive to my mohel’s home in Howard, a small mountain town 150 miles south of Denver. My mohel did most of the talking. He was the type of guy who had acquired a lot of interesting information in his life, and he was not afraid to share it. He told me stories about his army years and about doing circumcisions in Beaumont, Texas. He had a full white mustache and boyish, darting eyes that came to life as he spoke. I noticed a cut-up cereal box on the floor of the car. “Postcards,” my mohel said, picking up on my interest. He explained that he rarely uses regular paper. Next to the postcards was a small pile of envelopes made from newspapers. Later, I learned that he mails about twenty of these homemade letters a week, not including his three or four daily sweepstakes entries.
After a few minutes, we stopped for lunch at an empty restaurant. We both ordered black bean soup and small organic salads. Between spoonfuls of soup, I inquired about my circumcision. Had there been anything unique about the event? My mohel couldn’t remember but didn’t think so. Did he remember my family’s conga line? No. Anything special about the food, perhaps?
No. “Unless there was some sort of medical problem it’s hard for me to remember much,” he said.
I wasn’t ready to give up. I had read that the foreskin is typically buried after a Jewish circumcision, and before my trip I’d wondered if my mohel might be able to recall what he had done with them after the ceremonies. Had he thrown them out? Tossed them into a Dumpster behind a Taco Bell like so many enchilada wrappers? Or was there a secret foreskin cemetery somewhere in Houston, perhaps in a public park, where every day the good people of Texas unknowingly picnicked atop the flesh of a thousand Jewish penises? I wanted to think that there was such a cemetery, but I wasn’t sure what I would do if I found the spot. If, like some anticircumcision activists, I had been convinced that the removal of my foreskin had caused profound physical and mental anguish, then the journey to the grave would naturally lend itself to drama. I could fall to my knees Platoon-style, pound the earth, and weep for my lost lubrication. But, having no mixed feelings about my circumcision, the journey would inevitably be anticlimactic.
Still, my foreskin had been a part of me, and I wondered where it had ended up.
“So what did you do with all the foreskins?” I asked.
My mohel shrugged. “I would just drop them anywhere and stomp them into the dirt,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
Within a half hour, I was out of questions. “Sorry I can’t be of more help,” my mohel said.
I told him I understood, and I did. It was ridiculous to have thought that he might remember me among the thousands of babies he had circumcised.
Our salads arrived and our conversation drifted to the historical origins of circumcision. An hour came and went. When my mohel and I exhausted everything we could think to say about foreskins, our conversation somehow shifted to the history of gazpacho soup in America, a subject my mohel seemed to know a lot about.
At the end of lunch, I still had twenty-three hours left in Colorado. I got back into the Explorer and we rode into the pale brown mountains.
At one point during the drive, my mohel turned to me. It seemed something important was coming. “Did I mention that I circumcised the sons of Michael Dell?” he asked, referring to the computer mogul from Houston.
When we arrived at my mohel’s two-story ranch-style home, I met his wife and then retreated to the guest bedroom to take a nap. An hour later, my mohel tapped softly on the bedroom door. He said that he had something he wanted to show me and led me upstairs to a closet at the back of his office. I took a deep breath. I didn’t know what it would be, but I knew that something inside that closet was going to make the trip worth the trouble. My mohel looked at me and smiled. “Do you want some financial advice that will change your life forever?” he asked, opening the closet door to reveal a row of shelves lined with dozens of binders. I hid my disappointment and said that I did, and for the next hour we pored over his investment portfolio.
“Dividend reinvestment is the key,” my mohel said as we reviewed handwritten records of his holdings in the Coca-Cola Company over the last decade. “You can start with almost nothing.” He urged me to buy a subscription to an investment strategies newsletter called The Money Paper.
We still had a few hours before dinner. My mohel produced two floppy white sun hats. He put one on his bald crown and gave me the other. Then he grabbed a ski pole, his walking stick, and we hiked around his nine acres. The mountain air was hot and dry. My mohel wore a tube of ChapStick on a string around his neck and he applied it liberally. The next morning, I tried to jog his memory one more time. I had come too far to give up so easily. I took out a baby photo I had brought with me.
“Anything?”
“Nope.”
My mohel’s wife and I had oatmeal for breakfast. The Clipper ate his own concoction of grains, beans, and buckwheat groats. It looked like cat vomit.
As I packed my bags, my mohel gave me his extra copy of Menachem Begin’s biography and some blank circumcision certificates he used to fill out after he completed a ceremony. Then he and his wife drove me to Canon City, where I would catch a cab to take me the rest of the way to the airport.
We waited for the cab at a picnic table in a small park, and when it arrived I was surprised by how sad I felt to be leaving. “I feel like the boys I circumcised are part of my family,” my mohel said.
“I’m really glad I came here,” I said. Then I hugged my mohel and his wife and stepped into the cab.
Poll Shows Dip in American Voters’ Supporting Israel
By JTA
Published June 16, 2009.
American voters’ support for Israel has dropped 20 percent in the past nine months, a new survey found.
Some 49 percent of American voters call themselves supporters of Israel, down from 69 percent last September, according to the poll conducted for The Israel Project.
The number of voters who called themselves undecided rose during that same period, and the number of Palestinian supporters remained steady at 7 percent. The number of Israel supporters hit a low of 38 percent immediately following the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, with an equal rise in undecided voters.
The poll was conducted among 800 registered voters on June 2 and 3 by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. It has not been officially released by The Israel Project, but was leaked to the media by someone who received the numbers the day after the poll was completed on Thursday.
According to the poll, some 44 percent of voters believe the United States should support Israel, down from 69 percent a year ago. Some 5 percent of voters believe the United States should support the Palestinians, with 32 percent undecided.
Some 23 percent of voters believed that Israel should return all lands captured in 1967, with 57 percent saying some should be retained for security.
Some 66 percent of those polled do not believe that Israeli support of a two-state solution – including establishing an independent Palestinian state and stopping the expansion of settlements – will bring lasting peace to the region, with 22 percent saying it will. In addition, 48 percent believe the Israeli support would not end Palestinian terrorism; 39 percent said it would.
Some 85 percent of respondents believe that Iran is a serious threat to Israel, with only 7 percent saying it is not – figures that have remained virtually unchanged over the past year.
Conservative Judaism Searches for Identity
By Alison Cies
Published June 15, 2009.
Conservative Judaism, struggling with decades of declining membership and an abrupt, sweeping change in its senior leadership, heard a call in early June from three prominent rabbis for a rethinking of its mission.
The three rabbis, New York-based and all under 45, launched their broadsides from the stage of a packed auditorium at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, in an evening program titled “Conservative Judaism: The Next Generation.” They called for new directions in the religious approach and practice of their denomination, the centrist movement that once dominated the American Jewish landscape.
The seminary’s newly minted chancellor, Arnold Eisen, introduced the presentation as “the culmination” of a smaller forum of several dozen Conservative leaders brought together by the seminary to reexamine the movement’s future. It was intended, Eisen said, as a response to the “enormous concern among Jews at the decline” of the once-dominant centrist Jewish denomination.
“We found a new universal desire to get the movement back to its strength and vitality, looking at structure, quality and message,” Eisen told his audience.
The panelists were sharply divided, however, on what new directions to take. One participant, Rabbi Johanna Samuels, a writer and former rabbi of Congregation Habonim on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West Side, called for a greater emphasis on social justice and activism. “We need to do something bigger than ourselves,” she told the audience. “My goal is for us to get people out in the world to help heal the world. That’s the best kind of Conservative practice.” “We need to get out of this institutional malaise and self-focused mentality and get out into the world and do work,” Samuels said. “Build houses, work for justice. We’ll come back to our institutions invigorated.”
By contrast, Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky of Congregation Ansche Chesed, also on the Upper West Side, urged greater emphasis on prayer and observance of ritual. “Conservative Judaism offers a deep, religious path,” he declared emphatically. “The goal is for all synagogues to experience its depth.”
“We need to fix the soul and fix the body,” Kalmanofsky said. “These deeds will sanctify us and make the world a better world.”
The third panelist, Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove of Park Avenue Synagogue on the affluent Upper East Side, argued that the separate denominations of American Judaism are losing their relevance among younger Jews. “Denominations are changing,” Cosgrove said. “Lines aren’t black and white. These lines are very slippery.”
In the early years of Conservative Judaism a century ago, Cosgrove said, “Americans were seeking to make sense of their lives as immigrants.” Now, he said, “This story is over. We’ve arrived. We’re here.” The question Jews ask today, he said, is not “how to arrive in a secular culture, but how to cross back over to tradition.”
Conservative Judaism arose early in the 20th century as a centrist bloc, between the staunch traditionalism of Orthodox Judaism, which preached full observance of rabbinic law, and the more permissive Reform movement, which viewed the laws as guidelines for the individual. Conservative Judaism preached observance of the law but claimed rules had evolved through history and could continue to evolve. During the boom years of postwar suburban Jewish life it was the dominant wing of American Judaism. Surveys showed it claiming the loyalty of more than 40 percent of the community, with the rest divided between Reform, Orthodox and non-identified. During the last several decades the Conservative movement has been in decline, and it now shows up in surveys second in numbers to Reform Judaism.
Eisen, 58, seminary chancellor since July 2008, is one of three new chief executives who have taken the reins of the Conservative movement’s three main institutions in the past year. In October 2008 the Rabbinical Assembly, the union of Conservative rabbis, selected Rabbi Julie Schoenfeld, 43, as its new executive vice-president. This past spring the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, serving the movement’s 780 congregations, chose Rabbi Steven Wernick, 41, as its executive vice-president. All three replaced incumbents who had been in their posts since the 1980s.
Interviewed by the Forward after the session, Rabbi Cosgrove said that the message of Conservative Judaism remains “strong, true, and relevant.” However, he said “the movement needs to do a better job at communicating this message to American Jewry as a whole.” The June 3 symposium, participants said, was not aimed at reaching that larger audience but at advancing the internal discussion within Conservative Judaism about how best to approach the community at large. Rabbi Kalmanofsky expressed his doubts that anyone outside of Conservative Judaism had even been in attendance.
Individual rabbis, Samuels told the Forward, have begun the work in their pulpits. “In our own ways we’re reaching a broader audience,” she said. What remains is for the movement as a whole to develop a coordinated approach.
J.J. Goldberg contributed reporting.
Netanyahu Backs Concept of Demilitarized Palestinian State
By Haaretz Service
Published June 14, 2009.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called on Palestinian leaders to restart Middle East peace negotiations without preconditions, in a highly anticipated foreign policy address at Bar-Ilan University.
“I call on you, our Palestinian neighbors, and to the leadership of the Palestinian Authority: Let us begin peace negotiations immediately, without preconditions,” he said. “Israel is committed to international agreements and expects all the other parties to fulfill their obligations as well.”
In an apparent reversal of Israeli policy, Netanyahu also declared that he was prepared to see the creation of a Palestinian state, so long as the international community can guarantee that it not have any military capabilities.
“Israel cannot agree to a Palestinian state unless it gets guarantees it is demilitarized,” Netanyahu said. He also said that Jerusalem must remain the unified capital of Israel.
The address at Bar-Ilan came in the wake of the Obama administration’s insistence that Israel impose a complete freeze on West Bank settlement construction and recognize the two-state solution.
During the speech, Netanyahu vowed that Israel would not build any new settlements and would refrain from expanding existing Israeli communities in the West Bank. Still, he said the government must be allowed to accommodate natural growth in these settlements.
Netanyahu has until now been adamant that a settlement freeze is unfeasible and that he would concentrate on strengthening the Palestinian economy, rather than agreeing to their statehood.
The prime minister said he was prepared to meet with the leaders of neighboring Arab countries at any time, to promote regional peace and to gain their contribution to the Palestinian economy.
Netanyahu reiterated that Israel has no desire to control the Palestinian people, and declared that both nations should be able to live side byside in peace.
“We want both Israeli and Palestinian children to live without war,” Netanyahu said, but added: “We must ask ourselves — why has peace not yet arrived after 60 years?”
Israel would not accept any situation in which it was forced to exist beside a terrorist state. Every withdrawal from settlement territories would contribute to such terror, said Netanyahu.
The prime minister also said that Palestinians must accept Israel as a Jewish state, and attributed the root of the regional conflict to “even moderate” Palestinian elements’ refusal to do so.
“When Palestinians are ready to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, we will be ready for a true final settlement,” the prime minister said.
He emphasized that the Jewish people have been linked to the land of Israel for over 3,000 years and ruled out the option of granting Palestinians refugees the right to settle within Israeli borders.
Netanyahu said that Israel would not negotiate with terrorists who wish to destroy it, and said that Palestinians must choose between the path of peace and Hamas.
The prime minister opened his address by saying that he had formed his new government earlier this year with three major challenges facing Israel: the economic crisis, the Iranian threat, and the Middle East peace process.
He stressed that the greatest threat to the world today was the link between Islamist extremism and nuclear weapons.
Netanyahu, who until now had not endorsed U.S. President Barack Obama’s goal of Palestinian statehood, used this policy speech as an opportunity to reverse course and try to narrow a rare rift between Israel and its closest ally.
The prime minister met with Defense Minister Ehud Barak and President Shimon Peres over the weekend for consultations about his speech.
Peres and Barak reportedly pressed Netanyahu to announce in the speech his acceptance of the road map and willingness to recognize a Palestinian state with security limitations.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, himself at loggerheads with Hamas, has said talks with Israel cannot resume until Netanyahu halts settlement and accepts a two-state solution.