I’ve seen footage of the confrontations aboard the flotilla that suggest that the passengers on the ships were ready for an armed attack. @IsraelMFA (on Twitter) is already using this to claim that the IDF was right to board the ships. I’m not so sure. Obviously the passengers knew Israel wasn’t just going to let them through, and while I very much disagree with their decision not to act peacefully upon being boarded (which would have kept this in the realm of peaceful civil disobedience), I do think that Israel deserves the lion’s share of the blame for deciding to board the ships a) in international waters and b) with soldiers instead of riot police – a clear message that they didn’t prioritize peaceful resolution.
Moving forward, I think this is going to be as big or bigger than Cast Lead. The accuracy of the image of Israel as a violent aggressor against peaceful activists is certainly debatable (I think the protesters should have stuck to pacifism if only to increase the accuracy and power of that image), but it’s what the world is going to see. We’re at a turning point.
My father commented to me that if Israel was a person, they’d have been committed to a mental institution by now for acting suicidal. I really can’t understand the thinking that went into Israel’s actions today. There is no plausible way that they’re going to come out on top of this one. So far, I’m not sure whether or not that’s a good thing, but it looks pretty indisputable from here.
Truly disturbing news from the Mediterranean: 10 dead are reported after Israeli commandos boarded six ships assembled by the Free Gaza Movement to break the Gaza seige. (Read Noam Sheizaf for background and liveblogging.)
In addition to the international condemnation for boarding a boat in international waters, guarded statements from the US, and another dramatic recalling of Turkey’s ambassador to Israel, the consequences for the peace process are dire: Prime Minister Netanyahu has canceled his Tuesday meeting with President Obama.
The narratives diverge: Bloggers within Israel are reporting that Israeli news is portraying the IDF commandos as victims of a lynch mob-in-waiting. Yedioth called the flotilla’s response “a brutal ambush at sea.” The IDF released this video (below), showing soldiers outnumbered and beaten with pipes. The Free Gaza Movement official statement claims the IDF began shooting live fire “the instant their feet hit the deck.” The group’s livestream (now offline) claims to have proof.
All of this remains to be seen, and despite some bloggers’ rush to make judgments before the facts are sorted, I await more clarity. And I’m not rushing to absolve any side of total innocence.
While excellently-intentioned, the Freedom Flotilla lost its tenuous innocence for me when they rejected an amazing opportunity to unite two sides: Gilad Shalit’s father offered to advocate on their behalf if the flotilla would bear a message to his son. What a gesture to the Israeli public that would have been, that human rights are not the purview of Palestinian suffering alone, but Israelis too. That the conflict is not between Israelis and Palestinians but between purveyors of violence and innocent civilians. It would mean calling out Hamas as well as the IDF for blame. Despite the vastness between Palestinian losses and Israeli, there are yet Israeli losses the Jewish public deserves acknowledged. And a father misses his son. But the Freedom Flotilla rejected mutual culpability.
Israel’s policy of blockading Gaza makes my skin crawl and my stomach sick. Collective punishment is a fate the Jewish people suffered throughout history, for crimes only imagined. It is an added layer of difficulty that Israel’s collective punishment is for crimes real: the rocketing of Israeli civilians and the kidnapping of Israelis. But these acts by a few do not justify punishment of all. The bottom dropped from my stomach when I read this news this morning. Ten people died, for this?
I hope the Flotilla planners and Netanyhu are happy with their results. The Netanyahu government no doubt appreciates the pause in making concessions to peace. Again, Hamas sits on the sidelines and escapes paying for its part in this dark comedy. The deterioration of Israel’s standing was a goal of the Freedom Flotilla from the outset. And instead of mitigating it, Netanyahu, you have worsened it. A victory on all sides.
My heart goes out to the families of the dead and for the speedy recovery of all those injured, including the soldiers.
As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads to Washington in a much-feted effort to restore damaged ties with the United States, new tensions in East Jerusalem threaten to rekindle a diplomatic row over Jewish building beyond the Green Line in the city.
On Saturday lawyers served eviction notices to two Palestinian families in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, a focus of clashes between Arab residents and settlers.
The families were ordered to vacate their properties within 45 days.
Personally, I find the struggle in Sheikh Jarrah to be the best thing that happened to the Israeli left in years. The number of the people present there doesn’t seem that impressive, but the crowd grows each week, and it is clear that the police and the municipality will find new evacuations very hard to carry out. More »
Daoud Nasser is one of my heroes. His family owns a plot on top of a hill between the village of Nahalin and the illegal settlement of Neve Daniel. When you enter the land, there is a stone which reads “We Refuse to Be Enemies.” I’ve been there many times, and I know few other Palestinian families who encourage visiting Jewish groups (I’ve visited the Nasser’s most often with Encounter) to sing and pray, and who take such joy from the expression of all faiths in their home.
Their story is a both typical and unique. The land has been in the family’s hands since the Ottoman times, but beginning in the early 1990s, the Israeli military has sought to confiscate the property. Undaunted, the Nassar family have developed their land and established the ‘Tent of Nations‘ project, whose activities include “educating local children from the refugee camps about rural Palestine, hosting young people for camps and activities such as open-air theatre, and acting as a forum for internationals and Palestinians to get to know each other”. The Nassars have also grown strong links with international supporters, including in Germany, the USA and UK.
Daoud sent out the following e-mail on Thursday:
Today at 2.00 pm in the afternoon, 2 officers form the Israeli Civil Administration guarded by Israeli soldiers came to our farm and gave us NINE demolishing orders for nine ( structures) we built in the last years without a building permit from the Israeli Military Authority. The demolishing orders are for: tents, animals shelters, metal roof in front of both old houses, the restrooms (Shelters) , a water cistern, a metal container and 2 underground renovated cave structures. One officer was writing the demolishing orders and the other was taking pictures with two cameras, Israeli soldiers were following them everywhere and pointing their guns on us. More »
Thursday May 27th is a typical DC summer day: hot, humid as a sauna, and threatening rain.
What wasn’t typical were the 200 or so Jewish guests of the White House. Although President George W. Bush established May as Jewish Heritage Month in 2007, this was the first time the White House hosted an event to honor it. Jewschool was honored to be apparently the only Jewish blog invited (as press, anyhow. The basement of the White House is really quite basement-y. In any case, there may have been others, but we were the only ones attending, as far as I could tell…)
A curious mix of guests included an odd emphasis on sports figures, including Dara Torres and Zoe Taylor (youngest member of the national telemark team)… and the great Sandy Koufax, still mentioned whenever there is need of a model Jewish sports figure, perhaps because unfortunately, in these days, few Jewish sports figures will distinguish themselves by refusing to play on Yom Kippur – as Rabbi Brad Hirschfield of CLAL (also present) commented to me, Koufax was perhaps one of the greatest rabbis in America for that act. A thought worth considering. More »
Anshey Shlomenu! There has been a mild buzz lately about just how attractive the settlements are to low-income Israelis. Looking for land on the cheap, haredim are especially attracted to life in the West Bank. Yet, one particular settlement, Emmanuel has such a low public image that no one really wants to move there. A while back, the press heard that a local Haredi school had started to segregate Ashkenazi and Sephardi/Mizrahi students, arguing that each community cared deeply about preserving their unique Hebrew accents and minhagim, and that educating Sephardi students to pray and learn in loshn-koydesh (Ashkenazi Hebrew) contradicted centuries of cultural autonomy and constituted nothing more than a zealous defense of traditional Ashkenazi custom . Call it a radical critique of Zionist culture or blunt Racism, I’m torn.
Nathan Jeffay writes in The Jewish Chronicle
Happily, the days are long gone when Israel’s ruling secular-Ashkenazi elite imposed its ways on everybody else, stripping Sephardi and Oriental immigrants of their traditions. Today, almost every public figure makes a point of visiting the Moroccan community during Mimouna, its spring festival. And, in November for the first time, there was an official state reception to mark the Sigd festival of Ethiopian Jews, a newly declared national holiday.
Many in the education ministry, the law and the media regard the Charedim who are pushing for segregation in schools as, at best, dinosaurs or, at worst, racists. But these strictly Orthodox rabbis and others quite reasonably argue that, if their distinctive Hebrew pronunciations are compromised, a valuable part of their heritage is in danger of being lost. Just because many of us in Israel are happy with our hybrid pronunciation called Modern Hebrew, that does not give us the right to impose it on others.
I’ve been sitting on this copy of Siddur Sha’ar Zahav, kindly sent to me for review by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav months ago. With my apologies for the tardiness of the review, here it is.
As a Reform gay shul, we should expect a siddur that does not shy away from playing with the liturgy and rushes straight in to right perceived liturgical wrongs. Reform siddurim are adept at this and, if Siddur B’chol L’vavcha is anything to go by, so are siddurim created by LGBTXYZETC (LGBTQIQ, according to this siddur) communities. That’s exactly the kind of eclectic siddur we get here.
As with any thoughtfully constructed congregational siddur, SSZ is full of references to the history of the synagogue, unique minhagim and character. In terms of liturgical structure, it follows recent Reform liturgies such as Mishkan T’filah quite closely, while delving further into the gender politics of the liturgy than mainstream Reform siddurim do. At the same time, some of their theological gender posturing falls short, perhaps defeating the purpose of the liturgists. And as for the size and ease of use of the siddur, it is the largest, most unwieldy siddur I have ever seen.
Let’s deal with the physical nature of SSZ first. Like I said, it’s gigantic. I’ve heard older congregants complain till kingdom come about the size of Gates of Prayer or MT. I can’t imagine what they would say about this tome. It’s large enough to prevent me from using it. Praying the Amidah with this thing might send you to a chiropractor. As you can see in the image below, it is thicker than its Manhattan gay siddur counterpart (a Friday night volume anyway) by far and even noticeably thicker than the not-so-inconsiderably girthy GOP and Plaut Torah commentary. More »
Have you ever wanted to see how the newly-founded State of Israel looked in colour? Now you can.
During the first few decades of the State, Fred Monosson, a well-healed American Zionist, attempted to capture the everyday life in the newly minted State of Israel and the joie de vivre of the early pioneers on colour film stock. The footage (sampled in this video) also includes images from the ruins of post-war Europe.
The recent recovery of this rare footage—very nearly trashed after being discovered in the attic of the deceased Monosson’s Boston home—constitutes a story in its own right. Thanks to Israeli filmmakers Avishai Kfir and Itzik Rubin, the film and the story of its recovery has been immortalized in a fascinating documentary,אני הייתי שם בצבע, I Was There in Color, which premiered this April in the US.
As producer Itzik Rubin suggests in the video, it is always fascinating how our collective memory of a particular historic period is irrevocably coloured and shaped by the media with which we associate it. We tend to imagine certain periods in the past as eternally “black and white,” with the somber, formal quality of standard history textbook illustrations. Part of the shock and beauty of this footage is precisely the everydayness of the images it offers.
On the other hand, these images are not exactly random or everyday: we see some of the state’s most celebrated political and military figures gracing Monosson’s lens, and the crowd scenes he captures are exuberantly happy—all this during a period of great suffering and struggle.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this clip happens at about 11 minutes in, as current Israeli President Shimon Peres recalls a warmer, less materialistic Israel of a bygone era. Peres’ bittersweet comment about the old mentality, while it may also gloss on the social realities of the times, at least nods to what is not being said elsewhere here, namely, the shifting of attitudes and values in today’s Israel.
Does Monosson’s footage then filter early Israel through rose-coloured glasses?
Perhaps, but this is still some rather remarkable footage certainly worth watching.
“…makes you think all the world’s a sunny day”
(Hat tip to Dr. Grace Cohen Grossman, who brought this footage to my attention.)
Late-breaking addition: Jewschool will be at the party!
Unless you’ve been living under a rock–or you don’t read Jewish blogs and news as obsessively as we do–you know that the first ever White House Jewish Heritage Month Party Thing is tomorrow (in honor of my mother’s birthday). Of great concern to nosy Jews all over this great nation is the guest list. Every article on the subject so far notes that Sandy Koufax has been invited, though no one seems to know if he’s actually coming.
Others on the list:
Dara Torres, Olympic swimmer
Aaron Bisman, honcho of JDub Records
Aliza Gazek, president of Reform high school youth org NFTY
Josh Block, president of Conservative high school youth org USY
Shawn Landres, head of Jewish org “thinkubator” Jumpstart and friend of Jewschool
Regina Spektor is performing
Gail Reimer, executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive
Writer Jeffrey Goldberg, who has written about having been invited and why he isn’t going to the party here
Perhaps more interestingly, others not on the list:
Any beltway types, aside from the Jewish congresspersons who invented Jewish Heritage Month.
On the Jewschool contributors email list, there was some discussion of why there will be no political types. Ostensibly, this is because Jewish Heritage Month is about cultural contributions to America from/by American Jews. Hence the musicians, athletes etc. That leaves me wondering why the youth group presidents, but there’s nothing wrong with them going. I know the prez of NFTY and it couldn’t have happened to a nicer girl, so I hope they have fun and don’t lurk in corners and actually take advantage of the amazing people they’ll be in a room with.
As often happens on the email list, the conversation went in some unexpected, if interesting directions. Here are some comments from our email conversation this morning/afternoon. Jewschoolers, claim your comments in the comments if you wish to be named. More »
The Rabbinical Assembly is having their annual convention RIGHT NOW at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York City. And you can watch the action online as a selection of events are live-streamed (and then archived for future viewing). I am too busy to actually check in on the proceedings, so I can’t guarantee that anything interesting will be happening, but I believe in about an hour they’ll be dedicating the new Conservative Machzor, so maybe some of our liturgy geeks will want to check that out.
Here’s a sample from Sunday’s discussion with Rabbi David Wolpe and Rabbi Harold Kushner:
I know they’re not streaming the entire conference, and I’m having a hard time locating a conference schedule, so maybe one of our readers can jump in with suggestions of when to tune in in our comments section.
I am antagonistic towards the Jewish establishment. Reiterating my evaluation of their leadership in my prior post, they offer no compelling vision beyond raising money to feed a bloated infrastructure dedicated to fighting yesterday’s battles.
Which is why attending tonight’s benefit for Avodah: The Jewish Service Corps was so important for refreshing my faith in Jewry. Tonight several hundred Jews of all ages honored not just a special leader, their founder Rabbi David Rosenn, but a burgeoning community that is fun, deep, and committed to values I powerfully share. Rosenn has moved on after 13 years to become COO for the New Israel Fund, and the bittersweet appreciation for and from him was tear jerking.
In his remarks, Rosenn touched on the strains of thought at war in the American Jewish psyche: It is an interesting time in our community, he said, where old institutions are giving way; what will emerge in their place is uncertain. People don’t just wind up with good values, they are taught them, and not just in the classroom — they learn when their community lives out those values. Ultimately, justice is not only important for the continuity of Judaism but for democratic societies as a whole.
Noting the passion present, I could only echo the sentiments of Avodah alum Cara Herbitter upon introducing Rosenn, “I wish the establishment would adopt the values of Avodah.”
I spent plenty time lampooning and harpooning the organized Jewish community. I lambast because I care. I care that Jews and Judaism stand for something, that we represent something to the world other than our own existence. I hunger for leaders who see the same visions for a Jewish role in creating right relationships globally. If that room is any indication of where the Jewish community is headed, then we are redeemed of all our predecessors’ selfish failures.
In the room I saw Jewish continuity of a wholly healthier paradigm. Attendees discussed the obvious lesson of a pillar of the social justice world taking his credibility to a begging frontier: social justice in Israel. And in the territories. Same-sex couples lauded their acceptance here. A speaker of intermarried background made us all laugh by integrating Irish influence into her Yiddish vocabulary. The values here were far more than just direct service or structural justice.
The event took the occasion to announce the launch of Pursue, the renamed AJWS-Avodah Partnership, taglined “Action for a just world.” Already the central address for Jewish change-makers in New York City, San Francisco and DC, the community it represents also holds keys to a leadership with a modern vision. Interim director Ilanit Gerblich Kalir concluded this evening by saying, “We work for the day when every Jew can turn to another and ask, ‘Where did you do your service?’” In order for that day to come, we must first have a day when Jewish leaders can role model the answer. This is a start. We need more, the world needs more. But this is a beautiful start.
Last night I went to the JCC for a book launch event. Fresh from the printers, Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires is a new anthology by and about Orthodox queer women (including those on the transgender spectrum who were raised as women or now identify as women).
A half dozen authors read excerpts from their contributions to the book (or related publications), to a sold-out room. (Ok, ok, it wasn’t sold-out, because it was a free event. But there were chairs set up for maybe 50 people, and there were easily 150 there last night.) We heard stories of struggle and triumph, sadness and humour.
I was especially happy to hear another chapter from Leah Lax; she was an Artist-in-Residence at the NHC Summer Institute in 2007 and brought an entire room to tears with her story of births and abortion struggles as a still-closeted, married to a man, frummie.
What can I say? I was persuaded enough by those few excerpts to pick up a copy of the book for myself. If you’re interested in the intersection of orthodoxy and sexuality, check it out.
I’m writing this post because Peter Beinart took my song and dance of the past five years and dropped it like a non-existant Israeli nuke on the Ahmadinejad-like belligerence of the Jewish establishment. He said what I say, and I’m happy to watch its effects burn across the intertubes. Amen, hallelujah, selah.
So instead and speaking of establishment types, the Jewish National Fund is wading to suppliment The David Project and AIPAC on Campus as protectors of Jewish college students’ fragile links to Israel: “Moms – Are Your Arming Your Children?” The solicitation raises money for high school Israel advocacy training.
Let me get this straight: the land-holding authority of Israel, ostensibly marketed in the Diaspora as a guardian of Israeli environmentalism (hyuk), has a high school advocacy program? Why? First, this is obvious mission creep. The JNF offers no core competancy to the field of education or advocacy. Second, this program is horribly redundant. As if every other federation and major Jewish youth group doesn’t already have campus-focused activism training.
Indeed, this is what Peter Beinart wrote about: the community’s “don’t question Israel” message so poorly prepared young Jews for the reality of the conflict that their heads explode when they encounter the Palestinian side. Despite anti-Semitism on the left and real threats of Ahmadinejad, there is yet a core of blame to the Israeli-Palestinian that lies with Israel, Jews and American support. This core of truth, small as the right-wing thinks it is, so disrupts the spoon-fed comfort with the occupation that the result is ingrained distrust, distaste, and disinterest. Goodbye, organized Jewish community.
But this JNF clue offers us the bigger subtext of the Beinart peice, if you care to look. The establishment isn’t just right-wing and morally pegged to odious Israeli policies. It’s lost. It has no moral compass, no calling, no grand mission statement. Raising money to feed a bloated infrastructure dedicated to fighting yesterday’s battles is the only motivation it seems to offer us.
I regard the organized Jewish community with distrust, distaste and disinterest because I have values. Powerful, commanding, universal values that I feel come from Judaism, via my family. It’s a shame those universal values aren’t shared by the previous Jewish leadership.
Today I was introduced to this video, which is by a lovely person who works with me. Mazal tov, Stacy, on your delightfully rhymed spoof!
I think it’s fantastic. The matching track suits! The poodles! The fancy cars! It’s a lovely portrayal of my home, Jew York.
I bet you’re offended by her video, because of some of the salacious lyrics and imagery, and her statement about who is a Jew. Feel free to snark in the comments, and definitely share it with your friends.
If you are a facebook user, you’ve likely received some sort of hack invitation recently to join or ‘like’ a page entitled Fact, all girls tell these 10 lies to men when they are cheating. (Note: the males are men while the females are girls.) Even if you have not seen this page on the internet, you still have an opportunity to engage in cultural myth-making vis-à-vis women’s chastity with this week’s Torah portion.
In biblical times, there was a different kind of over-the-top forum for humiliating public disclosure, equally intrusive, but with much higher stakes: the Temple in Jerusalem. Indeed, if you skip ahead to Chapter 5 of Numbers, you can read first-hand of the kind invasive intimidation tactics routinely used to “deal with” women whose husband’s suspected them of marital infidelity.
Because such a spectacle is better seen than described, I have taken the liberty to sketch out this rather involved procedure (see below). Interestingly, the text does not include any kind of formal questioning about the suspected woman’s partner(s). Considering how terrifying and demeaning this whole ritual must have been to the accused woman, one can rather safely assume that the desired effect was that she buckled under pressure and disclosed her tawdry secrets, if, indeed, such secrets existed.
The isha sota (or ‘deviant woman’) episode is disturbing on so many counts; one barely knows where to start working through these issues. If the woman proves innocent, she must resume her marital life with a man who has caused her such shame (if this is the case, the man is expected to give an offering as well—but this is only a gesture to God, not to his wife whom he falsely accused). If she is guilty of the charges, her “stomach distends and her thighs sag.”
Fast-forwarding to the Haftorah (Judges 13:2-25) which accompanies this week’s Torah portion, where we read of Manoach who, interestingly, appears suspicious of his wife when she comes to him and reports that an unnamed man appeared before her when she was out in the field all by herself and announced that she would soon become pregnant. While Manoah’s suspicions do not appear to reach the level of jealousy described in the Torah portion, he does insist on seeing the “man” himself. Particularly interesting with regard to this tale is that the son born to this couple as a result of the aforementioned annunciation is a strapping young fellow whose thunderous passion for the wrong woman leads him to his undoing.
What is to be learned here? One should exercise restrain not only in one’s actions, but also in one’s judgments of others.
Click on thumbnails for full-sized images, a step-by-step instruction on testing your woman:
Last week, Georgia Gov. Sunny Perdue signed into law House Bill 1345, which fixed the Kosher Food Labeling Act (KFLA) of Georgia, which required that any food sold as kosher had to meet the guidelines of the “Orthodox Hebrew religious rules and requirements.” This law was ruled unconstitutional because it had the government mandating whose standards qualified as acceptably kosher – not a good position for our government to find itself in, and mirrored a similar problem found in New York’s Kosher Law Protection act of 2004. Apparently this problem was later fixed, as New York adopted a law that set them on the same path that Georgia is now treading .
The new law in Georgia requires rather that consumers are informed about the standards under which any kosher food product was certified. I will be interested to see if Georgia can do well imitate New York didn’t‘s path in a matter regarding religion. I’m not really sure how helpful all this will be to the kosher consumer, but I suppose that I would be pleased to know the standards set by any given hashgacha. I wonder, though, if it will really help solve the “this rabbi is rumored to never show up and check” problem
In his May 6, 2010 Op-ed “Fighting the new divestment effort on campus,” Hillel CEO Wayne Firestone puts forth a plan that continues to ignore any sort of reality that might allow local student groups to beat back the ever growing Israel divestment movements.
The Firestone Plan outlines three steps to address the divestment movement. First student groups should address their needs locally, without outside help which is interesting coming from the CEO of Hillel International. Then students should build coalitions (again without outside help) by bringing student government officials to AIPAC events and other such “get to know Israel” programs. And finally, student groups should remain on the branding message that Israel is a high-tech leader that shares Western values. As a former student senator and Jewish activist at the University of California, Davis, I can tell you without any shadow of a doubt that the Firestone Plan is fatally flawed. More »
Last night I went to the 
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