When the early Reform Jews of Germany set out to begin their Jewish Reformation, one of the first “arcane rituals” they tossed out was the practice wearing talit. They didn’t just stop a talit katan during the day, but the ceased to wear a talit gadol when they prayed. Tzitzit, in essence, left their lives completely.
The symbolism here is not lost on me. Tzitzit are a meta-mitzvah. The Torah tells us, once in Bamidbar and once in D’varim, to affix fringes to our four-cornered garments. The reason? We should see these fringes and be reminded of all of the other mitzvot that we must follow. And so, as the Reform Jews began their trek into the world of autonomy, abandoning mitzvot left and right, they saw fit to discard the most mitzvah-y of all mitzvot, the mitvah that reminds of all the other mitzvot.
I, however, wear tzitzit. And I am a Reform Jew. More »
Ten days after the ceasefire, and despite promises to permit humanitarian aid to reach Gaza residents, Israel is continuing its deliberate policy of restricting supply of industrial diesel and humanitarian goods to the Gaza Strip.The policy, in place for the past 15 months, is preventing the supply of electricity to humanitarian facilities in Gaza.
As a result of the restrictions on the supply of industrial diesel and the mass devastation caused by the military operation, 1/4 million people have been entirely without electricity for over a month, and more than 200,000 people are denied access to running water. Those who receive electricity — suffer power outages of 16-18 hours per day, on average.
Ihab Abu Zaiter, a 32-year-old father of three, living east of Jabaliya, whose home was partially destroyed in the bombings, has been living entirely without electricity for the past month:“We don’t buy any food that requires refrigeration; it’s like living in the Middle Ages,” he said. “We light a fire inside the house in order to keep the children warm.This is a very cold month, and we can’t sleep without the fire, but I’m afraid that the rest of the house will catch fire or that the children will burn themselves
I hope the implications of this event don’t get buried in other news, because this stands to blow the settlement project’s lies out of the water for good: Haaretz reports it has a copy of the Israeli government’s database of settlement construction — including Palestinian land appropriation, building violations, and illegal settlements. Read the lengthy Haaretz article and a report from the database (Hebrew).
Among the information revealed:
- In about 75 percent of settlements, construction occurred without permits or contrary to the permits that were issued.
- In more than 30 settlements, “extensive construction” — roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas, and even police stations – has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents. (Approx. 120 full settlements exist, plus 12 East Jerusalem settlements, and over 100 outposts, according to Peace Now.)
This contradicts the government’s claims, mainly “Israel’s actions relating to the use and allocation of land under its administration are all taken with strict regard to the rules and norms of international law – Israel does not requisition private land for the establishment of settlements.”
The settlement legitimacy question has changed, and thank God it’s less of a question. More »
The Israeli election is coming up on February 10! Following up on Mah Rabu’s successul March Madness prediction pool for the 2006 election, Jewschool and Mah Rabu are excited to announce FEBRUARY MADNESS 2009!!! All you have to do to enter is predict the number of Knesset seats that each party will win in the election.
The winner will receive a book of his/her choice from Ben-Yehuda Press. Entrance is free, but there is a suggested donation of $10 to the organization of your choice dedicated to making Israel the best it can be. Israeli citizens are encouraged to vote in the actual election as well.
To enter, go to February Madness! The deadline to enter is Monday, February 9, 2009, at 11:59 PM Israel Standard Time (4:59 PM EST).
Here is the official list of parties and candidates. Right now it’s only in Hebrew, but we’ll post a link to the English list when and if they post it. Also, in the next few days we’ll put up a post with descriptions of each of the parties and links to their websites.
The winner will be chosen based on who correctly predicts the greatest number of Knesset seats. For example, if the actual results are Men’s Rights 50, Tzabar 30, Aleh Yarok 20, Leeder 10, and Koach HaKesef 10, and you predicted Men’s Rights 40, Tzabar 40, Aleh Yarok 5, Leeder 5, Koach HaKesef 15, and Lechem 15, then your score would be 90 out of 120 (since you correctly predicted 40 seats for Men’s Rights, 30 for Tzabar, 5 for Aleh Yarok, 5 for Leeder, and 10 for Koach HaKesef). Your predictions must add up to 120 to be a valid entry.
Just for fun, there will be two optional tiebreaker questions:
1. Among the parties that do not meet the threshold for Knesset seats, which one will come the closest?
2. Which party will receive the fewest votes?
The world’s rich and powerful are gathered for another World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland–the military fortified ski resort which has hosted its annual forum for many years. This year there was a panel discussion on Gaza moderated by Washington Post reporter David Ignatius. It featured UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki Moon, PM of Turkey, head of the Arab League and Shimon Peres. Here is a full video of the debate. At the end, the PM of Turkey attempts to respond to Peres’ impassioned speech only to be cut off by the moderator, at which point he storms off the stage and declares he will not return to Davos. Yay diplomatic childishness. It’s also amusing to see how Peres does not clap for the gentlemen from Turkey or the Arab League, and they do not clap for him. This video highlights that Arabs and Israelis are often speaking different languages (figuratively) when it comes to the conflict.
The PresenTense Fellowship begins with an intensive six-week bootcamp for social entrepreneurs in Jerusalem, Israel from June 15 – July 26, 2009—where fellows are trained in the practical skills of social start-up development and are helped by PresenTense and the PresenTense Network to launch their ventures into the world.
During the course of the summer, fellows are introduced to the best and the brightest of Israel’s hi-tech, social and activist circles.
There I was, reading Daily Kos, minding my own business, when a google ad caught my eye. This doesn’t often happen. I had to click the link to see more:
Nice Jewish Guys, the 2009 calendar. It’s not affiliated with an organization or shul; the sisterhood at your Temple didn’t put it out as a way to set up their sons (though that seems as likely an explanation as any).
Twelve months, twelve guys. You see their names, ages, and learn a few things about each guy to help in your choosing process. As the site asks, “who will be your favourite?”
Twelve eligible guys – yours now for the low price of $9.95. (Cheaper than Jdate!)
Every election, Israel’s parliamentary system encourages the creation of small political parties that never manage to garner enough votes to actually win Knesset seats.
This year, the process has resulted in a party so sublime in its improbable Israeliness that it can never be equaled.
Perhaps the most unusual alliance in this year’s election is between the Green Leaf Party, which has no seats in the Knesset, and the Pensioners’ Party, which has six. Renamed the Holocaust Survivors’ and Grown-Up Green Leaf Party, the party’s prime issues are legalizing marijuana and pensioners’ rights, especially… Read More those of Holocaust survivors. One of the party’s TV ads shows party head Gil Kopatch smoking a joint at the grave of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.
A recent article about tthe infamous Nazi doctor’s continuing attempt – and apparently some success- in continuing his appalling work after the fall of the Third Reich. He apparently continued his work on trying to discover how to induce women to bear twins in order to speed up the “aryan” birthrate so that Hitler could create a “master race.”
A small Brazilian town was the focus of his ongoing attempts- originally posing as a veterinarian named Rudolph Weiss, he started artificially inseminating women and cows ( I goggle at the thought of women allowing a veterinarian to artificially inseminate them, and somehow this whole vision also makes me think – and now we know what he thought of women, too – no surprise) and succeeded in creating – and the townspeople claim, without their overt knowledge or consent- a town in which the twin birthrate was one in five.
An initiative of the Edmond de Rothschild Foundation, the Ariane de Rothschild Fellows Program: Dialogue & Social Entrepreneurship is a new, innovative program designed young leaders with an interest in social entrepreneurship and in fostering a culture of mutual respect and dialogue among Jewish and Muslim communities.
Delivered in partnership with Columbia Business School and Cambridge University, this 2-week program blends three educational components:
- An innovative and action-driven social entrepreneurship program
- Training in cross-cultural dialogue and leadership
- Exposure to state-of-the-art scholarship
Benefits of the program
Learn how to be a successful agent of change
Understand the leadership role and its impact on others
Use specific tools, frameworks and diagnostics to identify personal and organizational issues and challenges
Gain knowledge in management, negotiations, accounting, finance, marketing, governance and other fields of business
Become more skilled in building a successful social enterprise
Learn to appreciate and apply cross-cultural dialogue
Experience scholarship and debates across and within participants’ respective communities
Build a deep and far-reaching network
Application Criteria
Acceptance to the program is by application only. Selected Fellows will be invited to the program in New York City in July 2009, inclusive of travel, lodging and some meals. Application criteria include:
* young leaders who are interested in fostering a culture of mutual respect and dialogue among Jewish and Muslim communities and demonstrate their interest in and commitment to sustainable civic engagement
* residence in the US, UK, and/or France, or operation of their venture from these countries.
* young leaders who are interested in developing their social entrepreneurship skills
There will be no specific sector focus.
Applications must be submitted electronically through the Columbia Business School Executive Education Web site by January 30, 2009. The final selection process will be completed by April 30, 2009. Applicants are strongly encouraged to speak with the local program representative in their country about this opportunity during the application process.
The Massachusetts attorney general’s office said on Tuesday that it planned to conduct a detailed review of Brandeis University’s surprise decision to sell off the entire holdings of its Rose Art Museum, one of the most important collections of postwar art in New England.
“I was shocked. I’m still shocked,” Michael Rush, director of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, said about the decision to close the museum.
The decision to close the 48-year-old museum in Waltham, Mass., and disperse the collection as a way to shore up the university’s struggling finances was denounced by the museum’s board, its director and a wide range of art experts, who warned that the university was cannibalizing its cultural heritage to pay its bills.
“This is one of the artistic and cultural legacies of American Jewry,” said Jonathan Lee, the chairman of the museum’s board of overseers, who said that “nobody at the museum — neither the director nor myself nor anyone else — was informed of this or had any idea what was going on.”
Jehuda Reinharz, the university’s president, said in a statement that the decision, made on Monday by the university’s trustees, was agonizing but necessary as Brandeis faces a deepening financial crisis, with its endowment, once $700 million, significantly diminished. “Choosing between and among important and valued university assets is terrible, but our priority in the face of hard choices will always be the university’s core teaching and research mission,” he wrote.
The museum’s collection includes some 6,000 works — among them seminal paintings by artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein — that are believed to be worth $350 million to $400 million, although they could bring less in the current ailing art market.
“It couldn’t be a worse time to sell expensive art,” said Robert Storr, the prominent curator and art historian. “It is not only unprincipled, but bad economics.”
He added: “This sets a terrible precedent. The Rose Art Museum has been known for four decades as a hospitable place to show serious and challenging art in an academic context. They are throwing away one of their prime assets.”
Full story here.
Some of Brandeis’ biggest donors were hit hard by the Madoff scandal. It’s interesting to note that despite all this, though, Brandeis seems to be continuing forward with plans for a $154 million-dollar science center.
The following guest blog is by Nathaniel Berman who is a professor of International Law in New York City.
American Jews have recently been consuming two sets of images about the use of Israeli military, the artistic and the real. On the one hand, we are flocking to see “Waltz with Bashir,” and leave confirmed in our horror at past atrocities, compassion for the soldiers whose leaders placed them in an unbearable situation, and admiration for the Israeli artists who have produced such a deep moral reflection. We stand vicariously with the 400,000 who in 1982 demonstrated to protest the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. On the other hand, we have watched on our screens the all-too-real invasion of Gaza. We have wrought our hands at the civilian deaths, including the hundreds of children, and yet, with very few exceptions, we have raised no voice in protest. It is “more complicated than before,” we think; the “missiles were unacceptable,” we reassure ourselves; “something had to be done,” we conclude – as though “something” always means a maximal military operation against a densely populated region, as though we were not given the exact same justifications in 1982, as though the massive civilian deaths were not fully predictable in each such operation. And we flock to “Waltz with Bashir,” warming ourselves with moral sentiments, exiting with solemn faces and pious hearts.
We cannot wait another quarter century for “Waltz with Hamas.” The time has come for all supporters of Israel to firmly and publicly express their views about the morality of military operations like Lebanon 1982, Lebanon 2006, and Gaza 2009. We cannot continue to hide behind the need to “rally behind the nation at war” and wait for calmer times for sentimental moral piety. We need to take responsibility for the content of the “something” that “needs to be done,” and not plead that we “had no idea” that so many children would be killed. We need to examine the full range of options available to Israel to deal with a threat like Hamas rockets, including diplomacy, negotiation, economic and political cooperation, and more limited military operations. Those of us still hold to moral and legal norms governing warfare must make our views known now, before another round in which the “nation at war” makes many reluctant to speak out, and renders inaudible those who do. Those of us who maintain the unacceptability of any operation that produces dead, wounded, and traumatized children in their hundreds must act now – long before any new such operation is planned, let alone executed. It will by then be too late. This kind of action must never again take place. Not in our name.
Sunday night’s Hallmark Hall of Fame made-for-tv movie, Loving Leah, combined many of my favorite things – Lauren Ambrose (of Six Feet Under), Michael Buble songs (Everything!), cheesy stories of improbable love, and Jews. The basic plot of Leah, based on the play by Pnenah Goldstein, is that a young Lubavitch woman in Brooklyn loses her rabbi husband and ends up marrying his brother, a secular unaffiliated Jew (but he’s a cardiologist, so….). Throw in Ricki Lake as the Reform rabbi who counsels them both, Tonye Patano (of Weeds fame) as the wise and sassy housekeeper and you’ve got yourself a Hallmark movie.
Unlike some movies and TV shows (I’m looking at you Seventh Heaven), I’d say this one actually did a relatively good job on the Jewish content. We got a nice shabbos: motzi in a Reform synagogue, candlelighting, baking challah; home life: kashering the oven (“a man is coming to use a blow torch on your oven today” was one line that had me in stitches), head & hair covering; and funeral customs: rending garments, funeral and unveiling, with a dash of yibum (levirate marriage) featuring the halitza shoe!
The women’s fashion, in my opinion, was spot-on. (Though apparently Susie Essman didn’t think so!) Leah transitions from ultra-frum with a sheitel to modern orthodox with a hippy head scarf. Even her choices when dipping her toe into the waters of below-the-knee-but-above-the-ankle length skirts seemed totally believable.
I only caught a few missteps in their portrayal of Jewish practices. Since they were so heavy handed with explaining the other customs, I gasped when they ordered in and ate out Chinese food. I had expected them to make a point of mentioning that the restaurant had to have a hekhsher, or turning it into another moment of conflict – “I can’t eat those egg rolls! Vey Zmir!” Rabbi Ricki also gave a strange attempt at explaining the afterlife, which no rabbi should ever try to do in the greeting line.
The elephant in the room, however, was named Yibum. This biblical commandment is where the movie gets its romantic underpinnings. What!?! A custom in which a childless widow must marry her deceased husband’s brother-in-law in order to carry on his family’s name was troublesome even for characters in the Torah. These days, as Loving Leah’s gloriously bearded rabbi appropriately explained, it is pretty much a foregone conclusion that halitza will occur and they will both be released from this obligation. The romanticizing of this ritual was particularly irksome. Jake and Leah could have found themselves in some pretty dangerous, abusive territory. Trapping your sister-in-law into a sham marriage because you feel guilt about the fact that you lost touch with your brother when he became religious doesn’t end up a smoothly soundtracked romantic comedy for most folks.
But above all, I was irritated because, like in so many movies that have come before it, there was a distinct message: “people would be happier if they weren’t so darn religious!”
In Loving Leah, like in Renee Zellweger’s Price Above Rubies and a Melanie Griffith’s A Stranger Among Us, the orthodox world is insular, stifling, and ultimately, wrong for the heroine. The Hassidic woman, we learn, is secretly yearning to break out of her prison so she can let her hair down, wear brighter colors and date sexy non-rabbis. I do know some folks who did feel repressed and imprisoned and are much happier since they have left that world, but I also know people who have become their best selves since they took on more mitzvot and became part of a religious community. Aren’t there movies that don’t present religious women in this way?
Eretz Nehederet, Israel’s equivalent of lampoon-all-sides Saturday Night Live, defied the 90% of Israeli popular opinion for the Gaza incursion (interestingly enough, the same percentage was sure the mission wouldn’t improve security…oh wait, it didn’t…hmm…) and lampooned the government narrative via this hip hop skit:
Firstly, it’s funny. Secondly, it’s correct. It’s a shame that the talking points regurgitators of mainstream Jewry eat the government’s talking points without considering that governments hedge their bets and spin their misinformation just as much as anyone. The “real” reasons for the war are up for debate and the reality of mutual ceasefire violations and negotiation offers by Hamas are ignored. Israel’s innocence is necessary, which is never, ever ever the whole story. Israel is not a diplomatic victim, and is quite frequently the military aggressor.
There is never “no choice”. And to those of us with a shred of connection to the vibrancy of Israeli politics in-country, it’s a shame to see American Jews dance and sing like puppets to the government beat. Only the American Jews aren’t parodying – they are the parody.
Well, I think the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away. And George Mitchell is somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals.
And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating — in the past on some of these issues — and we don’t always know all the factors that are involved. So let’s listen. He’s going to be speaking to all the major parties involved. And he will then report back to me. From there we will formulate a specific response.
Ultimately, we cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them. They’re going to have to make some decisions. But I do believe that the moment is ripe for both sides to realize that the path that they are on is one that is not going to result in prosperity and security for their people. And that instead, it’s time to return to the negotiating table.
A team of Swedish and Danish researchers tracked coffee consumption in a group of 1,409 middle-age men and women for an average of 21 years. During that time, 61 participants developed dementia, 48 with Alzheimer’s disease.
After controlling for numerous socioeconomic and health factors, including high cholesterol and high blood pressure, the scientists found that the subjects who had reported drinking three to five cups of coffee daily were 65 percent less likely to have developed dementia, compared with those who drank two cups or less. People who drank more than five cups a day also were at reduced risk of dementia, the researchers said, but there were not enough people in this group to draw statistically significant conclusions.
Below is an editorial from last week’s Ha’aretz - sorry that it lost the shuffle due to the inauguration. I think it’s a succinct way of looking at the whole situation, and certainly the most hopeful thing I’ve read all week.
Editor’s note: Alex Sinclair is a lecturer in Jewish Education at the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies, Jerusalem, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York. p.s. and also shamir is one of his biggest fans.
Killing lots of Palestinians is not going to magically turn them into Zionists. When the war is over, they will still be there. Our neighbors. We will still need to live next door to them. We will still need to come to a modus vivendi.
…
Here are some carrots that Israel needs to offer the Palestinians, even as we continue to deal with Gaza via the stick.
1. Israel needs to start work on the safe passage between Gaza and the West Bank.
…
2. Israel needs to come to an agreement with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on borders. We can do this tomorrow as well.
…
3. Israel needs to make a gesture on the fate of Jerusalem. Yes, we all know deep down that in the end, whether we like it or not, we are going to have to share Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is a different country, and most Israelis never go there. It’s not ours. It’s not us. And that’s okay.
…
We can do these three things without harming Israeli security one iota, and we can do these three things while we are justifiably seeking to destroy Hamas.
The basic plot of Leah, based on the play by Pnenah Goldstein, is that a young Lubavitch woman in Brooklyn loses her rabbi husband and ends up marrying 
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