Kesher Talk: 12/22/2002

Saturday, December 28, 2002

Dreaming of cute suicide bombers. The NYTimes has just stooped to fawn over the teen author of a novel about Palestinian suicide bombers. Randa Ghazi is an Italian of Egyptian heritage. She has never been to Israel or the Palestinian territories, and never met a Palestinian before her book tour. She was inspired to write her novel when she saw the televised shooting of Mohammed al-Dura, which everyone in the world knows was another dastardly deed of the brutal IDF. (It later came out that Palestinian fire killed the boy but the Palestinian propaganda machine just keeps churning along, producing credulous tools like Ms. Ghazi.)

The Times article makes no mention of the fact that her protagonist (this is a teen novel, remember) glorifies killing Jews and mouths anti-Jewish stereotypes. (I am linking to the LGF post, which has the URL of the Times article, because the commenters do such a great job of fisking the Times and Ms. Ghazi.)

Judith is all over this guy: I actually really liked his essay, but Judith does make a valid point in that not all European Jews went to their deaths as “sheep to a slaughter house”.

I find this whole gun debate perplexing. I am not a kind of person who is nervous about guns. I served in the IDF, and have handled several kinds of rifles quite well long since, although I still have to acquire some basic handgun skills. I was very surprised that guns were even an issue when I first came to the US. Then, after the wave of the school shootings in the 90ies, I was almost ready to concede that private gun ownership should be abolished, but I realized that it would not solve the problem. I am also still under impression that the regulation part of gun ownership has room for improvement, but I could be wrong.

The claim that private gun ownership deters invasion, or even America's own government’s tyranny is unconvincing. By this logic, private citizens should be allowed to own not only guns, but missiles, tanks and WMDs, just like our, and other governments, do. I am also ambivalent about the effectiveness of private gun ownership as a crime deterrent. (I do think, however, that it can often be effective as a means to self-defense).

But the symbolic value of gun ownership should not be underestimated. If attacked by foreign power/own government gone nuts/common criminal, and defeated, many people (including myself) would rather die with a weapon in their hands, trying to defend themselves and their loved ones. This is largely the point that the essay makes. It makes other good points as well. If this symbolic value is taken into account, it might make more sense of the reference to Germany, but I’d still rather leave it out of the gun debate.

Voice of Modern Orthodoxy. I am not Orthodox because strict adherence to halacha pretty much defines Orthodoxy. On issues like kashrut I don't reject the rules and their justifications, but I ain't there yet. On issues like full participation of women in synagogue functions in mixed-gender services, I ain't ever going to be there. But if I decided to live a fully halachic life and aim for more participation of women within that framework (which many Orthodox feminists are doing), I would join these folks:

The mission of EDAH is to give voice to the ideology and values of modern Orthodoxy and to educate and empower the community to address its concerns. Fully committed to Torah, halakhah, and the quest for kedushah, Edah values open intellectual inquiry and expression in both secular and religious arenas; engagement with the social, political and the technological realities of the modern world; the religious significance of the State of Israel; and the unity of Klal Yisrael.

Proselytize: It depends what you mean. If it means disrupting other people’s lives through nagging and intrusion, then Christian missionizing imposes on others the ritual of being a Christian and makes outsiders players in the Christian drama. If it means, should Christians try to embody in their everyday life their religious convictions and to exemplify them, then the answer is, by all means. The knocking on doors is especially obnoxious, because it assumes that other people don’t believe in God or don’t know God, when, in their contexts, they think they do. . . ."

-- Jacob Neusner

What he said.
Via Eve Tushnet.

Friday, December 27, 2002

Disagree x2: I have to disagree with Howard's comments below about Jews celebrating Christmas in Israel. The reason why Jews "celebrate" Christmas in America, be it with Chinese food, movies, dances, whatever, is because of the "Lonely Jew on Christmas" factor. Everyone around them is celebrating, you get the day off from work, why not have some fun, right? Problem is, that as is the case in Israel, if everyone is a lonely Jew, then no one is, in fact, lonely. The people actually celebrating the holiday are in the extreme minority and Israelis don't even get off from work. It is simply an excuse to party, and a bad excuse at that. How quickly we forget that Christmas (and nearly every other Christian holiday) was a time of great travail for Jews throughout the years. Christian mobs would descend on Jewish villages and "avenge" the death of their savior. I see no reason why Jews shouldn't be able to put up lights, dance, drink, and have a good time. Thankfully, we have our own holidays on which to do it.

And as long as I'm disagreeing here, I also take issue with Alisa's post below about Tommy Lapid. The comparison is pretty obvious, to me at least: Shinui are the Dixiecrats and Lapid is Strom Thurmond, circa 1948. The Dixiecrats were anti-civil rights, Shinui is anti-Hareidi. It's a simplistic single issue party that has no place in such a compex political reality such as the one that currently exists in Israel. No matter what your opinion about the politicization of the Hareidim may be (and my opinion might surprise you), I have to question the motives of a person that would vote based on that issue alone, at the expense of all others. I'm sure Lapid has plenty of other ideas about how the government should be run, but I can bet no one ever said "Hot damn! Those Dixiecrats have some fantastic foreign policy. I'll vote for them" and I'm sure few people say the same about Shinui.

And now I will make a generalization because it's so easy. Shinui supporters do not hate the subsidies that Hareidim receive, they simply hate Hareidim. Or more precisely, they hate what Hareidim represent: The religion they have chosen to leave behind. They resent Hareidim and pine for the days when the religious would stay the hell out of politics and remain in the Meah She'arim ghetto where they belong. It hasn't helped that the religious parties act like a bunch of babies and threaten blackmail when they don't get more money, but this issue could be taken care of through intra-party politics on a larger scale (i.e. within Labor or Likud). The fact that an entirely separate party had to be created to deal with this one particular point, to me, indicates something else.

To Alisa: I am NOT calling you a bigot, a racist, a communist, or a porn star. A generalization, by definition, excludes some specifics. No ad hominem attacks at Kesher Talk (also in the charter, *wink*). Welcome aboard.

Israeli rabbi rages against Jews celebrating Christmas: G-d forbid, anyone should have a good time on Christmas, according to Israeli "Chief Rabbi" Meir Lau. Especially a Jew!

And he does not mean that everyone should have their wife's purse stolen. Rabbi Lau simply thinks it is an abomination that Jews should do anything that even hints of celebrating Christmas and New Years.

Rabbi Lau on Tuesday urged Jews in Israel not to celebrate Christmas or New Year's Day, warning that such observances threaten the identity of the Jewish state. He whined that Jewish families should not "be swept into keeping a way of life that is not their own, while obliterating and losing their self-respect."

In recent years, small numbers of Israeli Jews have begun celebrating Christmas, putting up lights in shops and even trees in homes. The trend began with the influx of thousands of Christians - many of them married to Jews - in the early 1990s as part of a wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union. At the same time, New Year's Eve has become a major party night at Tel Aviv hotels, despite threats by local rabbis to punish the establishments by removing their approval to serve kosher food.

How horrible!

Interest in Christmas has grown since fighting with the Palestinians broke out two years ago and Christian foreign workers replaced their Palestinian counterparts in jobs. Israel has also undergone a type of cultural globalization - expressed in a desire among many Israelis to take part in what they view as a world holiday.

"Why should we have anything to do with Christmas or New Year's Eve, in the shade of the Christmas tree?" Lau asked in a statement issued on Christmas Eve. "We never imagined that even in our independent country of the Jewish nation, foreign cultures would threaten our identity as a people and a nation."

This week Israeli radio stations have occasionally played Christmas songs like "Jingle Bells" and "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." Israel's national radio station even played "Silent Night," a carol about the birth of the baby Jesus.

Lau warned that such habits could bring about assimilation between Jews and Christians. Quoting from Psalms 106:35, Lau said; "They mingled with the nations and adopted their customs. They worshipped their idols, which became a snare to them."

According to Israeli government statistics, 142,000 Christians live in Israel, including 115,000 Christian Arabs. The figures do not include the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Rabbi Lau needs to have a drink. No, make that a lot of drinks. Certainly for American Jews, most of whom have the day off from school, university, or work, Christmas is about finding something fun to do while our Christian peers are at least pretending to celebrate their religious holiday. Should we want to dance and sing and hang lights, that is our prerogative. I'm not much for anything actually Christmas-ish, but I would not want to sequester myself for a day just to prove a point. And while I don't think that Jews should be celebrating the holiday, there is nothing wrong with enjoying it. Especially for Jews in Israel, who need all the fun time they can get.

Changes to the link list: New to the Jewish blog list is Tonecluster. New to the Science and Technology blogs is Alex Chernavsky. New to the theological blogs is Gideon Strauss.

There are also a bunch of new Warbloggers: Cold Fury, Ocean Guy, Plum Crazy, Pundit Tree, Rumination, Sic Semper Tyrannis, and Who Dares Wins.

The following blogs have either retired or have not posted in many months and are being removed. If they should ever reactivate, they will be back on the link list:
- Dodge Blog
- Hublog
- Indepundit
- More Than Zero
- MuslimPundit
- Next Right
- Norah Vincent
- Osama's Bin Bloggin
- Plastic Words
- Privateer

Update: Also retired is Justin Weitz's American Kaiser.

And I forgot to note the new link to new Kesher Talk contributor Alisa's blog

Great uses for forensic anthropology. I always figured Jesus looked like Ben Stiller, but this is close enough.

With friends like these Dept. Mike links with great awe and approval to some new blogger who writes a long screed promoting gun ownership. Fine. I agree that private citizens should be able to own firearms, although they aren't fetish objects for me. However, I can't overlook his massive misunderstanding of the situation of Jews in Nazi Germany, and his ignorant appropriation of my parents' history for his polemical purposes.

The great failure and staggering tragedy of European Jews is that they could not accept that some of their neighbors were not as decent, humane and educated as they were. A culture that learned to survive by turning inward simply never was willing to face the reality of what they were up against; namely, that hoping for compassion and humanity from the likes of the Nazis was akin to reading poetry to a hurricane. This denial --- and that is the only word for it --- is, in the final horrible analysis, a form of unconscious arrogance, a refusal to see things for what they are. A people of astonishing internal beauty simply could not look into the face of such ugliness without turning away. And now they are dead.

Whittle is very sympathetic, but he's either ignorant or incredibly naive, or both. He's also simplistic and condescending, leaving out a hell of a lot of facts so he can make his point (such as: all the Jews who tried desperately to leave but were rejected by other countries - including ours, or the years of repeated warnings of what was happening, or the steady stream of Jews leaving throughout the 30s, or a hundred concentration camp victims guarded by 5 Nazis are starved, sick, and have nowhere to run even if they did overpower the guards, and some did anyway, or the massive retaliation by the Nazis for every rebellion, such as Kristallnacht, or the existance and fate of the White Rose, or if the Jews were so "inward," how come they were so well-integrated into the professional classes in Germany that some were totally assimilated, or - well, I could go on, but it's late and the kinds of conclusions people like Mr. Whittle come to about Germany and America and Jews have been effectively challenged elsewhere, so I'm not going to waste any more time on them).

I suggest Mr. Whittle begin to get a clue by taking his "denial" and "people of astonishing internal beauty" and shoving them up his ass. Then he can read this, and go on to Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and related commentaries.Then he can ask himself whether it could or could not happen here, and whether widespread gun ownership by citizens would have anything to do with the results. Then he can write his next polemic for gun ownership without propping it up with insulting and false victim-blaming stereotypes.

I've read this kind of crap before, always by some martial artist or gun collector with (presumably) great fighting skills but zero understanding of organizational behavior or social systems. Which means they don't get that the battle for a free tolerant society is won or lost way before the secret police show up at your front door to take away your armory.

UPDATE: Yowzah! Meryl, Haggai, and Alisa pile on, critiquing other sections of Whittle's lengthy thesis.

UPDATE: This discussion is continued here.

Thursday, December 26, 2002

Thank you, Howard, for the invitation - it is an honor. I have been a fan of Kesher for a long time now, and I am glad to see it grow. Hi, Yehudit!

About me: I was born in the USSR 42 years ago. When I was 14 I moved to Israel, and lived there until 1990. Then I met my future husband, and together we went to Missouri, where we lived for 9 years. Our son, who is now 9, was born there. We now live in one of the many suburbs of this great country. I have been mostly staying at home all these years in the US, except for teaching Hebrew part time at MU for several years. I miss Israel and my friends and family there. We have been planning to move back for a couple of years now, but so far it did not work out. We are trying to make it happen this coming summer - we'll see how that goes.

I have my own blog, and I also occasionally post here and here. My e-mail is alisainwonderland-at-adelphia.net (it is also on my blog). That's about it. Good to be here!

Imshin discussed this article in Haaretz by Ari Shavit extensively. (Scroll up for a follow-up). The article is about Yosef (Tomy) Lapid. If you don’t know who Lapid is, the article and Imshin’s comments are a good primer, although I agree with Imshin that Shavit is biased against Lapid. Also, for the record, I have been Lapid’s fan for years – not that I think that he is without fault.

Anyway, all this got me thinking again about something I wrote a while back, and that is the role religion plays in Israeli society, especially in its politics. I wrote then that the biggest second problem Israel faces is the conflict that exists between the secular and the ultra-orthodox segments of its population. When I wrote this, I was talking about Israel I knew for 16 years, until 12 years ago. What I failed to take into account is something that mostly happened after I left. What happened is that the demographics of the ultra-orthodox (“haredi”) community have changed significantly. While some 15-20 years ago most “haredim” were ashkenazi, i.e. Jews of European descent, this is becoming less and less true.

Mizrahim, i.e. Jews of Middle-Eastern descent, have always been more religiously observant than ashkenazim. Many of them also have been in a cultural, and thus economical disadvantage in a country founded and initially developed by European Jews. Naturally, there were people clever enough to realize a political gold mine when they saw one. Thus Tami was born in the 80ies, to be later replaced by Shas, which has since held all Israeli governments by its balls, just like their ashkenazi predecessors used to do, beginning with Ben-Gurion’s first government.

The way it works is very simple. Shas appeals to people who are poor and poorly educated. Many of them are religious anyway, or their parents are, so they “find God again” quite easily, and with God they also find the solutions to their problems. You know this scenario well from the US. The big difference is that here the churches get their money from donations by private citizens and organizations. In Israel the yeshivas run by Shas and its rabbis are financed by Israeli taxpayers, most of whom are secular. One of the ways they do this is by demanding from the government support for families with many children (yeah, “Think Of The Children” – yet again), while on the other hand encouraging those same families to have even more children, because the Torah says so. Talk about a demographic bomb.

Now, the interesting twist in all this is that historically there were two major conflicts within the Israeli society (in addition to Left vs. Right, vis-à-vis Arab aggression): Religious vs. Secular, and Ashkenazi vs. Sefaradi. The Shas phenomenon merged the two. What we actually see now is West vs. East in its larger context: Modernity vs. Backwardness. Now, before Mr. Paine jumps in and says: “Aha, I told you so!”, let me just say that I can in no way equate Judaism with Islam, not even with its most peaceful form. Farthermore, this is not so much about religion, as is about culture, of which religion is only a part.

All the usual attributes of backwardness are there: subjugation of women, lack of work ethic, rejection of any secular education - even a vocational one – come to mind. On the bright side: no inherent violence, imperialism, or tribal feuding. But still, not the kind of culture I want to live in.

So, it turns out, Israel has to fight this war on two fronts. On one of them it has to fight not only on its own behalf, but also on behalf of the entire Western world, although with very little support from it. On the other it has to fight only for itself, and entirely on its own. And it has to win on both fronts to survive.

Thank you all: Speaking of charity, thank you to all the many people who responded to my pleas for help yesterday in warding off any identity theft after our Christmas eve robbery. Particularly Elliot Zaret for his detailed advice, and to Charles of Little Green Footballs for pointing everyone to my post.

Judaism and charity: Many American Jews take up volunteer work on Christmas day while their Christian brethren are celebrating. Had it not been for the Christmas Eve theft of my wife's purse, and the subsequent concerns and work I explained yesterday, I would have been in a more charitable mood, and we would have been one of those volunteers. And we could have gone out with our friends for Chinese afterwards, the second big tradition of a Jewish Christmas!

In Hebrew, charity is called "Tzedakah." But it means more than mere charity. It refers to righteous behavior. According to AskMoses.com, "if you have a couple of coins for a beggar, that’s charity. But if you don’t, and you give him a smile and a boost instead… now, that’s tzedakah."

According to Maimonides, there are eight levels of tzedakah:

Giving financial stability to someone who’s down and out: a loan, or a job, so that he doesn’t need to rely on others.

Giving where neither the donor nor the recipient know each other’s identity.
Giving where the donor knows who the recipient is, but the recipient doesn’t know who the donor is.
Giving where the donor doesn’t know who the recipient is, but the recipient knows who the donor is.
Giving before the poor guy says, “Please give me!”
Giving after the poor guy says, “Please give me!”
Giving less than needed… but with a pleasant, all-smiles attitude.
Giving begrudgingly or with a scowling attitude.

My wife has a general rule about the minimum amount of money one should give to charitable causes each year... which she has to harangue me about sometimes, to spur me to action, because I am the check writer. And before any femminists get upset, it is part of the division of labor in our household. I make sure the bills are paid on time, my wife looks after all our investments, etc. There will be more crossover eventually, but for now, this system works alright.

Anyhow, the point is, over my first few years in the job market, I rarely gave squat to charities. I know too much about how nonprofit organizations squander and waste money to trust most of them with my money and that cynicism just left me indolent. So my wife and I have to vigorously debate who should get donations, and I feel we are doing right by this. The Jewish Ethicist would disagree, but I am not convinced by his argument.

Update: The Acton Institute offers its Samaritan Awards as a guide to effective charity.

Welcome a new blogger to Kesher Talk's team: Alisa has joined the team at Kesher Talk. I don't know diddly about her, but I liked what I was reading on her blog and made the invitation. Hopefully, she will let us know more about herself in due course. Please enjoy her posts.

Oh little town of Beit Lehem. I mentioned the by-now-familiar parade (or would charade be a better word?) of "Israel the Grinch steals Christmas" stories - Lynn shows us the set-up. Interesting data on Christian emigration from the birthplace of Jesus and its causes. (Beit Lehem - trans. "house of bread" - is the original Hebrew name for the town, which shows up in several narratives in the Tanakh, beginning with the death of Rachel.)

White Christmas. It was sleeting when we entered the theater at 2:30 PM to see "The Two Towers." It was snowing hard when we left at 6:00. We were in Battery Park City and had to walk about eight blocks before we could hail an empty cab to take us to Chinatown. The snow would have been a lot of fun but for the gusty cold wind. We met two more at the dimsum place, drank lots of hot tea and wonton soup, and dissected the movie.

It was still coming down, a bit more slowly, at 10:00, when I left the East Village after catching the first set of Patrick's band; as far as I can tell I was the only blogger in the audience.

I was pleased by how frequent the buses and subway were on a snowy holiday night. New York works - at least in this way, at least so far.

PS: Secret diaries of all the Lord of the Ring protagonists (including Ringwraith #5), providing me the most helplessly gasping laughter of the month, also Gollum weighs the pros and cons of the movie, (via Andrea, who - in response to several clueless critiques - also unearths a review of the 3rd book by W. H. Auden, NYTimes, 1956. Enjoy.)

Christmas poetry at LGF. Charles seeded the thread with T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and others have added poems, psalms, sayings for the season.

Canada gives Jews another poke in the eye. The Montreal YMCA is selling a t-shirt which lists all the countries in which there are YMCAs. Except Israel. There is a YMCA in Israel, across from the King David Hotel. The t-shirt does list Palestine, a country which does not exist.

Typically weasely response from Y staff:

“We’re not trying to make a political statement, except to say we are trying to promote peace, not conflict,” Anania said. She expressed surprise that people were offended. “This is the first time we have had someone question this,” she said. The list simply represents countries with YMCA organizations, she said.

Earth to Anania: There is a YMCA in Israel. You know there is. So cut the crap.

(Why am I not surprised this is happening in Montreal?)

The international YMCA has not been a friend to Israel, producing a very biased report on the conflict. The YMCA of the USA has distanced itself from the report.

Wednesday, December 25, 2002

Thugs to us: "Merry F*()&%$ Christmas": So the Gefilte Fish Ball was a great hit. We saw bunch of people we knew whom we'd not seen in a long while, and got to dance up a storm -- something we've not really done since our wedding back in October.

Then, as we returned to our friends' car, we discovered a window smashed in. And my wife's purse stolen from underneath the front seat.

The DC cop who responded was very business-like and no help whatsoever.

We learned from a Metro worker who was leaving her post that she had seen the window broken shortly after we left the car. So we believe that the perpetrators saw the purse being stashed and went to work as soon as we were around the corner.

While we have been able to cancel one of the credit cards, the other one had no one available last night, or today, to talk to. As soon as we get in touch with them, that card will be cancelled permanently.

My wife's bank for her checking account not only has no one available to speak with but their automated phone banking system is offline as well. We will be withdrawing all money and our business from them tomorrow.

The change-of-address card was in her wallet as well, so the perps know our address. Luckily, her actual ID card was in my wallet.

Also stolen were 87 dollars and the keys to her office, her car, my car, and our house. And some work-related odds-and-ends.

When we got home, we phoned our local police, who were as helpful as the DC ones. We tried to explain we were vulnerable and worried and they replied there was nothing they could do.

"You want us to post an officer outside your house? We can't do that."

So we barricaded the door, hid a car, found all our household weaponry and went to bed. Merry f#$%^&* Christmas.

If anyone out there in the blogosphere is knowledgeable about identity theft, we would be grateful to hear from you. At this point, we are quite concerned with preventing it from happening. Changing of locks we can do, but the ID theft potential has us a tad paranoid.

Tuesday, December 24, 2002

Christmas in Jewish NYC. While Howard is at the Gefilte Fish Ball, I will be at Oy to the World, a downtown party sponsored by a Jewish theater group and inspired by many different mythologies. (I could also be here or here.)

Tomorrow a group from one of my minyans is going to see LOTR in Tribeca (our leader who lives in the neighborhood assures us this theater will not be overcrowded) and then on to Dim Sum.

I spent yesterday and today studying at Drisha's Winter Week of Learning, which continues tomorrow while I am at the movies. I could go see LOTR any time, but seeing it with a group and then out to dinner is too convivial to pass up. Drisha was great - very complex multi-level interpretations, engaging teachers and hevruta study, I was just about able to keep up but some things went over my head, and good mix of English instruction with both Hebrew text and English translations, which is a great mix for me.

In the blogosphere I run across simplistic negative comments on "religion" and "God," basically knocking down straw men with a great deal of self-satisfaction by the knockers at their own sophistication. I wish I could plonk all those folks down in the middle of these classes. They would get more philosophically ambiguous existential life-or-death issues, thorny metaphor-crammed referential pun-filled texts to chew on, and razor-sharp knowledgeable discussion (in two languages!) from religiously observant people than they would know what to do with.

Tonight is the Gefilte Fish ball at Polyester's dance club. Hundreds of people and three floors of dancing, drinking, shmoozing and noshing. Most of the DC Jewish community (and some from out of town) will be there dancing the night away tonight -- an urban Jewish way to celebrate Christmas Eve.

I'll be going for the first time tonight, joining my wife and tons of our friends. If you're there, you will surely not be able to miss me. I'll be the dancing Jew :)

Iraq planned bioterror attack on Israel: It appears that Saddam had a plan to use biological weapons against Israel early in the Gulf War, but couldn't carry out the scheme.

This according to a secret 1992 CIA dispatch made public over the weekend by the National Security Archive, a research organization.

The document says that Iraq sent three MiG-21 planes to bomb Israeli targets with regular bombs to check whether they were able to penetrate the Israeli air defense system. At the second stage, three more MiGs armed with conventional weaponry were to be sent to Israel as a diversion, together with a Sukhoi airplane armed with biological weapons. But the operation failed during the first stage, when the three MiGs were downed over the Persian Gulf a short time after takeoff.

Tough luck, Saddam!

Monday, December 23, 2002

Do tell.

The Lebanese parliament angered human rights organisations when it passed a law a year ago banning Palestinians from acquiring property in Lebanon. The 376,000 Palestinian refugees living in wretched conditions in a dozen camps across Lebanon are subject to severe discrimination by the authorities, for fear that if they settle in the country they will upset its delicate religious balance. [emphasis mine] They are also barred from practising some 60 jobs, bringing construction materials into their camps or having hospital treatment without advance payment or a guarantee from the UN Palestinian refugee agency that it will cover the cost.

I'm waiting with baited breath for the cries of racism, the demonstrations, the academic boycotts . . . .

Palestinian Democracy: The Washington Post reports that "The Palestinian cabinet today canceled presidential and parliamentary elections scheduled for next month, saying that Israel's continuing military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip made it logistically and politically impossible to hold free and unimpeded balloting."

The Palestinian information minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, said that "it will be impossible to hold elections as long as the Israeli army keeps occupying the Palestinian territories."

Not that elections would have been any improvement in the Palestinian Authority. They need real reform -- the fetish that confuses elections with democracy obscures the deep-seated corruption in Arafat's regime.

Update: Mike Sultan's latest on this subject:

Yassir Arafat is now refusing to hold elections until Israeli forces withdraw from disputed areas ...

Arafat said it is impossible to fake an election while Israeli soldiers remain in the area ...

"We will use the skulls of Zion's sons to build a bridge to Heaven.": That is "militant group" Hamas' latest slogan.

Turning of the Tide, Part II. Imshin says this is "a realistic description of the Palestinians/Israel situation." Mostly. I'm amazed that anyone at the Guardian is willing to hold Arafat responsible for anything. Maybe the tide really is turning. . . .

Death of a Troublemaker. Granted, Irv Rubin - ideological heir of Meir Kahane - was an Al-Sharpton-sized embarassment to the Jewish people. (It is to our credit that he was not a Louis-Farrakhan-sized embarassment.) Kinky Friedman, who wears political incorrectness like a comfortably broken-in pair of cowboy boots, delivers a hesped for Rubin in the Forward.

(My previous encounters with the Kinkster here.

PS I've used that link to "hesped" three or four times now. It's a Jewish vocabulary word I learned when my dad died and I delivered one at the funeral. (And you don't have to be Jewish or a lawyer to find the Jewish Law site interesting.)

Bah. Humbug. Pt II. Oh Lord. The "nasty Israeli's have stolen Christmas" stories are starting again.

"At Christmas time we used to sell 10 cribs a week to tourists," he says. But tourists are a thing of the past here - no more gleaming coaches choking the narrow stone streets - only Israeli troops on patrol. The last crib David sold was to a journalist, and that was over a month ago.

So get rid of Arafat and Hamas already, you whiners. If you're afraid you'll be killed as collaborators for refusing to go along with the totally unproductive and immoral suicide-bomber campaign, then band together in a large group with your Peace Now friends. I hear you're at least a third of the Palestinian population, so get off your ass and do something about the antediluvian preening revolutionary posers who are ruining your lives. (HINT: When the US officially starts the war, don't side with Saddam.) If you work really hard at it, maybe you can have Israeli troops out of there and tourists back in by next Christmas.

Sunday, December 22, 2002

Israeli gifts. I wish Howard's elegant dissection of a loaded estimate of what Israel "costs" the US had included some examples of Israeli innovation in science and technology, or Israeli branches of US hi-tech companies. BTW - did you know that Instant Messaging (ICQ) and the first commercial firewall (Checkpoint) were developed in Israel? (via Tal G)

Gay Rabbis: The Conservative movement takes another look at ordaining openly gay rabbis. Currently the Jewish Theological Seminary has sort of a "don't ask, don't tell" policy (which no one is happy about), which resulted from wanting to avoid bigotry yet not having found a way to fully include gays that is consistant with halacha. (It's that pesky verse in Leviticus. Which happens to be in the exact center of the Torah. And the portion in which it nests is traditionally read aloud on Yom Kippur when the most Jews are actually in the synagogue. So it's hard to ignore.) Word on the street is that all JTS rabbinical students of the past few years have favored full inclusion of gays in the Conservative movement, although they support the painstaking process of making a halachically defensible case. The Rabbinical Assembly is a bit more resistant.

I am proud to say that some pressure to reopen the issue came from the first female president of United Synagogue (the Conservative umbrella organization), Judy Yudof, who is a former long-time member of my beloved and deeply missed congregation in Austin, TX.

The movement went through the same grind before it ordained women in 1985. Some congregations and rabbis left as a result, but 18 years later the vast majority of Conservative-affiliated synagogues are egalitarian and the movement is robust. Full inclusion of gays and lesbians is only a matter of time.

I previously wrote about gays in Judaism here and here.

Kesher Talk

Saturday, December 28, 2002

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