Kesher Talk

Bookmark this. Courtesy of Patterico's Pontifications:

Why isn't the President regularly attending military funerals, like his predecessors did? They didn't.
Why do we never see any public show of support by Iraqis for the American presence? We have.

posted by Judith @ 11/29/2003 11:58:00 PM links to this post  

Cutting off your nose to spite your face Dept. Remember clueless creepy British antisemite academic Andrew Wilkie? He's the one who got caught.

If you don't think this will affect you personally, think about what the world will lose if Israelis are excluded from global intellectual endeavor. Remember who fled Nazi Germany after being systematically frozen out of universities and scientific careers, and who won the war.

posted by Judith @ 11/29/2003 07:19:00 PM links to this post  

You go, girl! Dept. Ex-Leftist Julie Burchill is leaving the Guardian.

Not only do I admire the Guardian, I also find it fun to read, which in a way is more of a compliment. But if there is one issue that has made me feel less loyal to my newspaper over the past year, it has been what I, as a non-Jew, perceive to be a quite striking bias against the state of Israel. Which, for all its faults, is the only country in that barren region that you or I, or any feminist, atheist, homosexual or trade unionist, could bear to live under.

Wait - it gets better.

I can't help noticing that, over the years, a disproportionate number of attractive, kind, clever people are drawn to Jews; those who express hostility to them, however, from Hitler to Hamza, are often as not repulsive freaks.

(Not to brag or anything, but I've noticed this myself, along with the general immaturity, lack of social skills and ability to function in mainstream society of your average "Bush=Hitler" type.)

Think of famous anti-Zionist windbags - Redgrave, Highsmith, Galloway - and what dreary, dysfunctional, po-faced vanity confronts us. When we consider famous Jew-lovers, on the other hand - Marilyn, Ava, Liz, Felicity Kendal, me - what a sumptuous banquet of radiant humanity we look upon! How fitting that it was Richard Ingrams - Victor Meldrew without the animal magnetism - who this summer proclaimed in the Observer that he refuses to read letters from Jews about the Middle East . . . is a miserable, bitter, hypocritical cuckold, whose much younger girlfriend has written at length in the public arena of the boredom, misery and alcoholism to which living with him has led her, and whose trademark has long been a loathing for anyone who appears to get a kick out of life: the young, the prole, independent women. The Jews are in good company.

Hmmmm. I think antisemitism as a fashion statement may have hit bottom.

UPDATE: Will wonders never cease? An Italian professor at Oxford says - in the pages of Al-Guardian! - that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. It's an elementary argument that some of us have repeated to the Left since the 1970s, but unfortunately it's still needed, especially in The Guardian. Yup, I do think it's a trend.

posted by Judith @ 11/29/2003 06:48:00 PM links to this post  

A bit late but bookmark it for next year. Judith's squash soup with red pepper aioli, served in Austin TX, Thanksgiving 2003:

This soup can be made meat, dairy, or pareve. The amounts given here makes enough for 10 people to have one bowl each with some left over to freeze or give guests to take home.

Place in the bottom of your soup pot or in a large sautee pan 1/2 stick butter or margarine or olive oil. I prefer butter but use one of the others if you need to keep the soup non-dairy:

Chop into 1" chunks and add:
3 large yellow onions
1 head celery
3 parsnips, peeled
Chop fine and add:
1 large root fresh ginger, peeled
Sautee to soften, allow to mush together as much as you want - all will be pureed eventually.

Take 2-3 medium squash (butternut, delicata, acorn, or something in that family - not zucchini or spagetti squash) and poke 4-5 holes in each one, then microwave for 10-15 minutes to soften. Then cut open, remove fibrous pulp, seeds, and rind, chop into 1" chunks and add to soup pot.

Simmer till mushy, add soup broth to liquify (use chicken or vegetable broth as desired, not beef). This will be a puree so don't make too liquid. You can always add more later.

Season cautiously with soy sauce, Chinese 5-spice, cinnamon, and/or nutmeg. You don't want the soup tasting like a pumpkin pie, and you want the squash, ginger, and parsnip flavor to come through, so be careful.

When all ingredients are soft and cooked, let cool. Puree in blender or food processor with 1 brick soft tofu until creamy with no lumps. Add soup broth as needed. Ideally, let sit in the fridge for a day or two. Before serving, add seasoning if needed.

Make the aioli the day you will be serving the soup:
Put through garlic press or peel and chop fine 1/3 - 1/2 head of garlic.
Sautee in 1/4 cup olive oil until soft but not brown
Puree in blender or food processor with:
4-5 roasted sweet red peppers, either fresh or from a jar (do not add the juice from the jar)
fresh ground black pepper to taste
add olive oil to taste and for creamy consistency and balance of flavors
Refrigerate if you will not be serving it within 2 hours.

The final soup should be creamy pale orange, and the aioli should be bright red-orange.

Serve soup either hot or cold, depending on the season. Serve aioli at room temperature in a separate bowl for guests to swirl into their soup to taste, or you can swirl the aioli into each bowl ahead of time, in a pretty pattern.

Spicy Southwestern variation: Slice open 1-2 chipotle peppers, discard seeds. Sautee in butter or olive oil until very soft and the butter has taken the chipotle flavor. Scrape remaining flesh from skins and discard skins. Add chipotle butter to soup. WARNING: A little chipotle goes a long way; you just want to add a smoky background note, not overwhelm the other ingredients.

I have served this soup on a number of occasions, both hot and cold, and the flavor and presentation always get raves. Tune in at Hanukkah for my borscht recipe.

posted by Judith @ 11/28/2003 11:59:00 AM links to this post  

The New Anti-Semitism: An article in Foreign Policy lists a number of reasons that might explain why anti-Semitism is resurging again now, so soon after it seemed finally to be dying. Author Mark Strauss suggests that in part it's because Jew-hatred is often cyclic, tied to the boom-and-bust of the business cycle. He quotes French Jewish leader Roger Cukierman as talking about the new, unholy brown-green-red alliance, with nouveau brownshirts, Green Party anti-globalists, and forlorn communists converging at some anti-Semitic crossroad and goosestepping on together.

The question of anti-Semitism was also addressed on Monday night, in the grim gray dankness of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (and what a disappointment that was! The huge dungeon-like space ate sound and spit out echoes; it dulled and vulgarized color; it dwarfed what was really a fairly large audience into pathetic inadequacy), a panel debated the disease. Among the speakers (as if he could ever be "among the speakers" — rather, dominating the speakers) was Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg.

Hertzberg said -- and in his new book, The Fate of Zionism — A Secular Future for Israel and Palestine," he writes — that the world was far more comfortable with Jews when Jews were victims. We are victims no longer, he roared. "Now, we have power, and I am not ashamed of that. I am proud that we are a power in the world."

The left, and liberals, Hertzberg thundered — so clearly and so loudly that even the echoes of that word-eating space stilled themselves — particularly European leftists and liberals, and even some Jewish leftists and liberals, are still ashamed of their silence during the Holocaust. Until they find some way of expiating that guilt — of making teshuva — they will continue to feel it. Once they can equate Israelis with Nazis, then of course their guilt is quickly eased, and they can resume the feeling of moral superiority with which they are so familiar and so comfortable. As they indulge in this new round of anti-Semitism they are playing out their own psychodrama, disastrously.

Of course, Hertzberg said, he always has been a leftist, a Roosevelt leftist, and he is one still. At other times and in other places he has rejected labels entirely, or said that he has become a wary centrist. In truth, he is sui generis.

posted by Joanne @ 11/27/2003 10:15:00 PM links to this post  

Shouting in the rain When Judith sent me a link to Phyllis Chesler's recent and entirely characteristic article in the Front Page, I was overcome by the same awe that I felt when I interviewed Phyllis last summer. To say that woman is brave is to say that rain is wet. To talk to her even over the phone is to feel her intensity pulsing over the wire at you (and to write about her, I'm afraid, seems to demand imitating her style, right for her, lush and positively overripe for me).

But to plunge ahead:
Phyllis is to me the absolute personification of courage. From her early work, the 1972 feminist classic Women and Madness, she established herself as a voice of truth; if the truth were coincidentally popular, she'd deal with it, but it it were not, then tough. (On everyone else, that is.)

Her leftist credentials have been solidly established over the course of her career.
But, as she made clear in her new book, "The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It," she's also Jewish. Fashionable as anti-Semitism now is, she faces it and stares it down. She knows the loathing she will evoke but she knows she must invoke it. Her arguments are not particularly new, but the passion and conviction with which she argues them, and the position from which she argues them, make them matter.
(She also has an authenticity that's hard to beat. Among her other exploits, she married an Afghani man when they both were young, and together they moved back to his family home in Afghanistan. She survived the experience, she writes, but barely.)

I hope people start listening to her; I hope she's able to keep talking.

posted by Joanne @ 11/26/2003 10:04:00 PM links to this post  

I told you so Dept. I know you are all really tired of hearing me say this, but Baghdad 2003 = Prague 1990.

posted by Judith @ 11/26/2003 08:14:00 PM links to this post  

Global chessboard Dept. If al Queda's trategy is to alienate any Muslim to the right of it, it's doing a great job.

This was Istanbul's September 11. They thought they were safe from the war on terror because they thought all Muslims were brothers. Now they know otherwise, and are unified in their condemnation of the terrorists, who cannot be "true Muslims". The fact that the terrorists staged this attack in the last days of Ramadan has added to their outrage. But no one is in any doubt why the city has become a terrorist target. How its residents respond to their new status depends very much on how much support they get (or fail to get) from the allies who dragged them into this. As one shopkeeper put it, "Surely, now that we have suffered this, the EU must open its arms to us." If it doesn't, or if the US gives the impression, as it has sometimes done in the past, that it is taking Turkey's "sacrifice" for granted, the sense of betrayal could be huge.

The black-or-white neanderthals get mad at George Bush for reaching out to moderate Muslims: there aren't any, they say, he's just pandering, or he's being hoodwinked. This is just one of many examples of how wrong they are. More about Istanbul, from the same article:

. . . Istanbul is not another Riyadh, where foreigners jet in for two or three years to service foreign interests, to live in separate compounds. It has been the opposite of Riyadh since the days of Byzantium. There were large and commercially significant European concessions - Venetian, Genoese, British, and French - and many of their descendants remained in the city throughout the Ottoman Empire. There were 100,000 Greeks in the city right up until the Cyprus crisis in 1964. About a third of the girls in my secondary school were Greek, Armenian, and Jewish. The last time I went to my sister's (Catholic) church I heard a service in which children sang Christmas carols in 17 languages. . . . Millions have either worked in Germany and other parts of Europe and still have families there. Any family that can afford it makes sure that they give their children a chance to spend time studying abroad. Since the earthquake, eased relations with Greece have opened the way to an array of cultural and educational exchange programmes. The economic links between the two countries are also growing, as have the links with countries in the former eastern bloc.

. . . my brother has difficulty keeping up the front. No matter how hard he tries, his memories of the first and nearest bomb keep crowding into his mind. The worst part was seeing the dead in the street and recognising their faces. He tells me about the disembodied hand he saw sticking out of a mound of broken glass. He can't help wondering if this was the hand that detonated the bomb that killed his neighbourhood. "It's not just politics," he says. "They're attacking our way of life."

posted by Judith @ 11/26/2003 07:40:00 PM links to this post  

Greetings from Austin TX. I am enjoying free wifi at a pleasant coffee house in South Austin, with detroit soul and french chansons on the stereo and electrical outlets under every seat. I run into an old friend from HerDomain on the back patio (all Austin coffeehouses have back patios - I think it's a zoning requirement). Here for the holiday weekend. Meeting Adina tonight for dinner. Thanksgiving is at my usual Austin haunt (I already made my famous squash soup when I arrived on Monday), then a pie party and Shabbat dinner with other friends on Friday, schmoozing with shul friends on Saturday . . . . Blogging will be intermittant etc.

posted by Judith @ 11/26/2003 07:17:00 PM links to this post  

Back to one's roots. Christopher Hitchens admits he goes to shul. Sometimes. For a visit. For historical purposes. It's okay, Chris, many of us feel like frauds in synagogue - everyone else there is a better Jew than us: better Hebrew skills, singing voices, kavannah, more well-behaved children, better dressed. But welcome back anyway. Now find someone to study Talmud with - you might like it.

(The article is about the Turkish synagogue bombings, and it's worth reading for its original purpose, not just my satisfaction at seeing an estanged Jew dipping his toe into his heritage.)

posted by Judith @ 11/26/2003 06:59:00 PM links to this post  

To the Class of '04. The permalink isn't working for this post, but scroll down to To the Class of '47.

My father was in the Merchant Marines in the 1940s. He died a few years ago and I got a stackof magazines he kept in the attic. It's interesting to read what people were saying in the late 40s.

To the Class of '47
By O. Istris
June 1947 Vol 1, No 4
47 - The Magazine of the Year
published by Associated Magazine Contributors, Inc

It is almost impossible, is it not, for you to play with the possibility that, for some ages to come, yours may be the last generation of civilized Western man. Yet unless you play with that possibility and incorporate it into your thinking, you are unprepared for life. Unless you realize that you are part of a civilization, which during your own time must either change or die, you are unprepared for life.

Here, as some see it, is one possible future, sketchily outlined in three general statements:
1. A fairly large proportion of the world's children, women and men, including particularly those who by accident inhabit the planetary area roughly 30N by 50N latitude, 70W by 125W longitude, will during the next decade or two die premature and unnatural deaths.
2. The technical and industrial base on which 'advanced' people like ourselves rest will be gravely and perhaps fatally disrupted.
3. The system of ideas and incentives (call it Western Civilization) which is what really sustains us will be wrecked, to be replaced by a new system. This new system - which is as old as the Egypt of the Pharaohs, for it is merely tyranny in modern clothes - will offer the richest nourishment to two extreme types of living organisms: near paranoiacs and human automata.

Toward these three statements - actually they are indivisible - you may adopt one of three attitudes, each involving a particular line of conduct. First, you may reject them as absurd. Second, you may accept them with resignation or approval. Third, you may investigate them. . . .

Read the whole thing.

posted by Judith @ 11/26/2003 02:08:00 PM links to this post  

Rally for Iraq - December 10th. Let's get the blogburst rolling for this one, folks - a day of world wide rallies in support of the ordinary people of Iraq, and against the mercenaries and jihadis who are threatening their fragile recovery.

One sign has already been proposed: "Hitler is Hitler, you morons." I like it.

posted by Judith @ 11/25/2003 03:30:00 AM links to this post  

Watching Hezbollah TV: Watch some disturbing clips of anti-semitic Arab television shows.

posted by William @ 11/24/2003 09:39:00 AM links to this post  

Campus idiocy Dept. Erin O'Connor, scourge of campus PC run amok, is one of my regular reads. So I thought that nothing could shock me anymore about enforced ideological corformity in the one place that should be truly a haven for unfettered examination of ideas. But read this and this and tell me you aren't at least a bit worried.

posted by Judith @ 11/23/2003 10:28:00 PM links to this post  

It's an LGF world - we just live in it. Some of the regulars defend LGF over at Tal G. I've posted at LGF occasionally since the average thread had about 20 comments (post 9-11 but pre-Iraq war), and I would agree with this seat of the pants breakdown of comment thread sentiments:

Posters seem to divide themselves as follows:

1. Islam is a Death Cult - about 55% is my guess - see camel prophet (The Nuke Mecca School)
2. Islamists are the enemy, but 'moderate moslems' are not - about 45% - see BenF (The Pipes School)
3. Regular contrarians - 2% - See VFI & Gordon (The Idiot School)
4. Trolls - 3% (The hit me with a Cluebat School)

Meanwhile here's an invigorating discussion on the true nature of the Crusades. Enjoy.

posted by Judith @ 11/23/2003 01:34:00 PM links to this post  

Billionaire apologists Dept. Matthew Stinson fisks George Soros's article in the Atlantic Monthly. I'm going to take a page from Vodkapundit and tell you that Stinson's response to Soros is today's Required Reading.

posted by Judith @ 11/23/2003 10:55:00 AM links to this post