Kesher Talk: 10/13/2002

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Reformer Madness: When President Bush made his landmark speech demanding new leadership for the Palestinian people, Yasser Arafat responded by making some changes in his cabinet. Most significant was the installation of Abdel Razek Yahya as the new Interior Minister. Yahya was seen as a reformer and a moderate, and proved more accomodating than most Palestinian officals by outwardly and courageously calling for an end to all suicide attacks against Israel. Well, so much for concessions to the US; Arafat is firing Yahya and replacing him with the West Bank Fatah chief. In the same article, the JPost reports:

"Other ministers in Arafat's cabinet, among them Finance Minister Salaam Fayad, Saeb Erekat and Nabil Sha'ath, will remain in power, the report said."

Didn't Erekat retire?

Hide-and-seek on the Web. Justin Raimondo tries to swim with the Shark. Not a good idea, when the whole world can watch the Shark fact-check your ass.

Rainbow Arabs. I got into an argument on an email list which led me to look up what's actually going on with gays in the Arab world. The Gay and Lesbian Arab Society (GLAS) has a blog. KELMA (Arabic for " free speech" ), is the first French Gay and Lesbian Arab Association. "They fix as their objective to "federate the cultural and social activities of gay and lesbian franco-arabs." Bint el Nas ("Daughter of the People") is a site for Arab lesbians. Gay Egypt, Gay Morocco, LEGAL (Lebanon), and HOMAN (Iran) report on news in their respective countries.

Islamofacism around the globe. Someone emailed this to me sometime last year, and I dug it out of my archives while looking for something else. No, no attribution. Please let me know if anything needs to be revised. Please cut and paste when someone tells you Jews are behind all the troubles in the world.

Religious conflicts Muslims are currently engaged in:
1. Afghanistan...............Christians
2. Bosnia....................Serbian christians
3. Cote D'Ivoire.............Christians
4. Cyprus....................Christians
5. India.....................Hindus
6. Indonesia/Ambor Prov......Christians
7. Indonesia/East Timor......Christians
8. Indonesia/Halmahera.......Christians
9. Kashmir...................Hindus
10. Kosovo....................Serb Christians
11. Kurdistan.................Christians
12. Macedonia.................Christians
13. Middle East...............Jews
14. Nigeria...................Christians
15. Pakistan..................Suni>16. Phillipines...............Catholics
17. Russia/Chechnya...........Christians
18. Sudan.....................Christians

Two more hot spots that could erupt;
1, Thailand/Pattini Province... Buddhists
2. Tajikistan.................Intra

Keep your knees to yourself. I'm glad someone is complaining about this in a national forum. Seriously, it's creepy. I always puff myself up in my seat and squirm around a bit when I sit next to one of these guys, and sometimes they get the message. Sometimes, they refuse to. It's a male/female power struggle. Often, on the NYC subway, it's a black male/white female power struggle. The NY subways are full of posters smarmily admonishing us to take off our backpacks, move all the way into the car, not put our stuff on the seat next to us, not to run on the platform, and not to lean against the doors, but they haven't tackled the "male crotch spread" problem yet.

Another liberal dismayed by campus PC. Nat Hentoff has always combined the best qualities of an old-style liberal - an uncompromising devotion to both the 1st Amendment and to social justice. When Hentoff, a regular columnist in the Village Voice for decades and a mainstay of the "progressive" community, bemoans "The twilight of free speech at colleges," you know things have gotten really bad on campus. (via Ranting Screeds.)

One Million Cookies for Israel. My apologies for tardiness on this one, but it's not too late to support Israel's Emergency Solidarity Fund by ordering kosher chocolate-chip cookies, hand-baked by scads of volunteers (including yours truly) at the new Manhattan JCC, under the intimidating supervision of Levanah Kirschenbaum, proprietor of the ritziest kosher restaurant in Manhattan. (It was actually fun, kind of like being in a girl's boarding school with an irascible but lovable headmistress.) The High Holy Day season may be over, but remember, Hanukkah is early this year!

Rock Stars For War. Henry Rollins says:

. . . . a full 100-percent daylight, lights on, everything known, inspection needs to be had, if not, then it needs to be leveled. 'Let's just say, anywhere you don't allow us to check we just drop a bomb on it. How 'bout that?' I am so down with that. 'Well, I'll put women and children in it.' Well, then you can tell the world that you killed them because we told you what we're going to do. And now it's up to you to put the women and children in that mosque or take them out. [via lgf comments.]

That's refreshing, especially in contrast to these ignoramuses. (Ignorami?)

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

How can you tell if a UN conference is worth anything? The usefulness of the conference (in terms of actually accomplishing anything in the real world as opposed to generating rhetoric) is in inverse proportion to the amount of discussion of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But you knew that.

Another 9-11 hero. Allyn Kilsheimer is the construction engineer who rebuilt the Pentagon in half the time and with half the budget the experts projected. He was also raised an Orthodox Jew by Holocaust refugees who were saved from the camps by an American journalist. A lifelong rebel, Kilsheimer told the Pentagon brass

". . . I don't play by the rules, so the only rules will be my rules," and most importantly, "I told them that I will not deal with any bureaucrat. I simply won't talk to anyone with a white shirt and a suit." At first, the top Pentagon officials refused, but after a while they realized that he really meant it, and just let him run the show on his terms . . . . when safety officials insisted that he wear a hard-hat, he chose a pink helmet, which he decorated with Mary Kay and Barbie-doll stickers.

Hurt by the status-conscious community his poor refugee family grew up in, he doesn't go to shul, but is proud to be a Jew.

His first wife was Catholic and so is his second wife, but they both have helped him celebrate Jewish holidays and "we never bring treyf [non-kosher food] into the house." And Kilsheimer said he makes sure that people know he's Jewish. "Particularly in the Arab world, I wear this on the outside of my shirt," he said, shaking a golden mezuza that he wears on a thick golden chain around his neck.

Iranian students say no to anti-Israel terrorism. The (take a deep breath) Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran (or SMCCDI for short) has been churning out position papers, press releases, staging demonstrations, and in general acting like, well, like a student movement protesting an oppressive regime. The kind of student movement that makes American campus politicos look self-indulgent and self-deluded. We hope SMCCDI activists will not be run over by tanks, subjected to torture, imprisoned without trial, deported, disappeared, or any of the other nasty things that happen to dissidents under genuinely oppressive regimes.

Recently they took a stand against their government's support of Palestinian terror. (via lgf comments, which incidentally have been kick-ass for the last few weeks, as sober intelligent people have flocked to the site, outnumbering the neanderthals.) How refreshing, and what a contrast to American campus politics, which may be moving Iranian students in the opposite direction. The recent attack of Iranian Muslims against Iranian Jews in Los Angeles shocked the large Iranian immigrant community there:

People on both sides insist that Iranian Muslims and Jews get along well in the Los Angeles area, home to one of the largest Iranian Jewish communities in the United States. Some added that the unfortunate incident occurred as Iranian Jews and Muslims appeared to be mixing freely, a sign of their relative comfort with each other.

and some blamed the beating on the influence of American campus politics:

Jimmy Delshad, an Iranian Jew and former president of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles . . . said. "Youth — especially at universities, who are very much against Israel and Jews — are very influenced and take things upon themselves," said Delshad, who added that he believes these misguided youth were not targeting Iranian Jews specifically, but Jews in general.

A bit of historical perspective: The Jewish connection to the country now known as Iran dates to the 6th c. BCE, when Cyrus of Persia conquered the Babylonians (now Iraq) and allowed the Jews who had been captured and exiled there to return home to rebuild their Temple (an event commemorated in Psalm 126, which many Jews know by heart because it is often sung as a prologue to the full Blessing After Meals).

The Jews who stayed in Persia and Babylonia developed strong communities which persisted until the re-establishment of the State of Israel (when most Islamic countries either kicked out their Jewish populations or persecuted them with such vigor that they fled to Israel or the USA). The Babylonian community established academies of Jewish law and learning which produced the definitive version of the Talmud by the 7th century CE ("Talmud" in Hebrew means "the Learning"), which made post-Temple Judaism what it is today.

Bukharan Jews (so many of whom have settled in a borough of New York that people jokingly refer to it as "Queensistan") also trace their roots to the Persian conquest. (I heard this group play traditional Persian court music last spring - very cool. If you like ethnic music check them out.)

I would like to think that Iranian activists are sympathetic to Israel, not only to oppose any position taken by the Islamic regime, but because of their ancient ties to Jews and the free and close relationships of Jewish and Muslim Iranians in the US.

UPDATE: While rocking to the Shashmaqam CD, cook up some Jewish Iraqi dishes.

Monday, October 14, 2002

Why Israel is not Iraq. Are you at a loss when anti-Israel activists ask why UN resolutions should be enforced against Iraq but not Israel, or why Saddam building atomic weapons is a casus belli, but not Israel's (rumored) nuclear development? The Economist lays out the differences for us.

Although The Economist has maintained a persistent bias against Israel in a refined subtle upper-class twit sort of way, in the course of educating us on different types of UN Security Council resolutions this article manages a grudging acknowledgement that the "occupation"

. . . is not solely Israel's fault. In 1967, it was the Arabs who rejected Resolution 242. They certainly did not accept Israel's new post-war borders, but nor did they recognise its pre-war borders. They did not, in fact, acknowledge Israel's right to exist at all. This posture persisted for a dozen years after 1967, until Egypt alone made peace. The Palestinians, pledging still to “liberate” all Palestine and dissolve the Jewish state, waited longer. Not until the late 1980s, some 40 years after Israel's birth and 20 years after the 1967 war, did Mr Arafat's PLO indicate an interest in a two-state solution. Under the rules of “belligerent occupation”, Israel should not have mucked about during those 20 years with the status of the captured lands. But it is not wholly surprising, given the continuing rejection and siege, that it did.

When the Palestinians decided that they were no longer bent on its extirpation, Israel responded. In 1993 it signed an agreement with the PLO under which the two sides undertook to implement Resolution 242 by negotiation, thus putting all the contentious issues—Jerusalem, the settlements and the refugees—on the bargaining table. Two years ago the talks failed, to be followed by a new Palestinian intifada and the election of the unyielding Mr Sharon.

This is as good as you're going to get from the Economist on UN resolutions against Israel. At least they put "belligerent occupation" in quotes. Now the nukes:

In 1981, Resolution 487 scolded Israel for sending its aircraft to destroy Iraq's Osiraq reactor, which Israel said was being used to manufacture a nuclear weapon, despite having been given a clean bill of health by inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency. Noting that Israel had not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), as Iraq had, the UN called on Israel to put its own nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards, as the NPT requires.

Two decades on, Israel has still not signed the NPT. This infuriates the treaty's supporters, who have been striving to make it “universal”. But, as with any other treaty, governments are free not to sign. What they are not free to do is sign, receive the foreign (civilian) nuclear help to which signing entitles them, and then try to build a bomb secretly. This, it is now ruefully accepted, is what Iraq tried to do, and may still be trying to do. Israel is thought to possess a large nuclear arsenal, about which it is not being open and honest, and this is provoking to its neighbours. But it is not evidence of “double standards”. Being a nuclear-armed power is not, by itself, a breach of international law.

Read the whole thing and take the argument to whichever lefty web forums you like to annoy.

Back on the Chain Gang. I promised I would resume blogging after the holiday-stuffed month of Tishrei ended. Well, In addition to general exhaustion and blog-burnout, my only uncle died of cancer a few weeks ago, so I am a bit tardy off the starting block. The family held one shiva minyan the evening of the funeral, and I held two subsequently at my apartment until Shabbat. (It was also my first opportunity to lead a ma'ariv service.) I'll probably just say kaddish for shloshim, but we'll see.

Work is winding down at my temp job, my gracious blog host Howard is off getting married, the forces of idiotarianism are yet to be defeated, and I have lots of blog posts in draft. It's good to be back.

On Rosh Hashanah it is written, and on Yom Kippur it is sealed. In Elul my uncle Al was diagnosed with melanoma, and in Tishrei he precipitously declined and died. It all happened incredibly fast. In July when my aunt and uncle and I shared Shabbat dinner at their home in a New Jersey suburb, we joked about having a mega-birthday celebration in February when Al would have turned 80 and I will turn 50. I went to shul with Al the next morning, and later we hung out in their back yard and watched a bad movie. After it became clear his illness was terminal, but he was still ambulatory, the cousins flew in, my brother and I got the bus out from Manhattan, and we hung out for a bittersweet aimless sunny 2nd day of Rosh Hashanah together. He never went into the hospital - there wasn't any point. I last saw him 2 days before he died - shrivelled, unconscious, breathing every half-minute or so.

Al was an introverted techie-geek newshound with a sunny smile interrupted by frequent grumpiness, who practiced an American suburban version of the shtetl Judaism he was raised with in Berlin. At the funeral the rabbi commented how he would run into Al in the locker room of the swim club and discuss Torah and politics. Year after year their house was the center of the family's Pesach seder, where he and my dad would compete in davening the service in their Old World accents. Al met my aunt, also an immigrant, shortly after our family arrived in the States during the war. They raised 2 intelligent, handsome, successful sons, travelled all over the world, skiied, played tennis, biked and hiked well into their 70s, always enjoying each other's company. They were married 54 years.

My mother had no siblings. My father had one sibling. Both my grandfathers died before I was born. I have one brother and 2 first cousins (Al's sons). All grandparents are gone, both parents, and now my only uncle. An entire generation, which grew up under Nazi persecution and managed through wit and luck to flee to America, is passing into history, and because they often reacted to questions about their past with discomfort, and because my generation was reluctant to push and felt we had a lot of time, we have less of their history than we could have. We have lots of stories and old photographs and second and third cousins, which is more than many people get to keep of their parents' generation. But it isn't enough.

When did the naked anti-Jewish slurs begin from your public school teachers in Berlin? How was your first-generation Warsaw family treated by German Jews? How long did it take to decide you had to leave, and whose decision was it? How did you, a teenager, choose what to put into that one suitcase, when the family left for Paris in 1936 on a one-week visa, knowing they would probably never return again? How did you find a place to stay as illegal aliens in Paris, and how did you find work? What was it like to walk from Paris to Marseilles, sleeping by the side of the road and begging food from farmers, dodging bombs from German planes? During the long months after you had contacted the distant relative in Houston, TX, did you ever despair that the papers to emigrate to the United States would come through? If the Nazis hadn't arisen as a political force in Germany, would you have come to the States anyway, do you think? Was your father still religious during this time, and did you try to observe any Judaism, or did you put it all to one side until you were safe again?

When did you first hear about the extermination camps, and what did you believe? When did you see your first direct evidence of what you had escaped?

Did your ship actually get fired on in the Atlantic, or did you lay over in Trinidad on the strength of reports of mid-Atlantic fighting? Did you ever think about settling there, or were you determined to make it to New York? Did you come in at Ellis Island? What did you think when you first saw the Statue of Liberty? What did you think of American Jews? Were you worried about the cousins still in Paris? As an American soldier back in Europe with the Occupation forces, how did you feel about the people you had escaped and then helped conquer? Did it bother you that you never got to see any fighting, or did you feel you got enough action as a kid? Did it bother you that huge chunks of your childhood and youth were stolen by persecution and war?

What went through your mind when - as a prosperous American tourist long after the war - you travelled through checkpoints to see your old apartment block in what had become East Berlin?

During my father's illness 2 years before, and for some time after his death, I kept Leon Weiseltier's memoir, Kaddish, by my bedside and dipped into it at random (which may be the best way to approach that dense and ornery journal). I'll let Weiseltier, whose father was also a Holocaust refugee of Polish Jewry, have the last words:

An elderly gentleman with a fine mustache was called up to the Torah. He uttered the blessing in a thick Galicianer accent. It was exactly my father's accent. These accents have a kind of talismanic effect on me: they whisk me to another time and place, they mark my distance. These accents are a shorthand for displacement and destruction, for resilience and a multiplicity of resources, for the span of the Jewish journey. I cannot imagine Jewish life without the music of these accents. But soon they will be gone. Soon we will be entirely on our own. Then we will see.

[Weiseltier visits his father's grave for the unveiling.] It was not the sight of my father's grave that caused me to lose control of my sadness. it was the sight of the old men huddled against the wind, the old men in their caps and coats, who had come to bury one more of their own, to hearken to one more prayer for one more dead, the firm, selfless old men with the accents and the histories, my exhausted and inexhaustible elders, unmoved agains by the gusts. They are getting to their end, I thought, and I loved them, and I wept.

Alfred Weiss, Aryeh ben Moshe v'Pesha, zichrono livrachah.

Kesher Talk

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

Tuesday, October 15, 2002

Monday, October 14, 2002

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