by matthue · Monday, June 23rd, 2008
Here’s my new big project, and it’s hard not to just blurt out how psyched I am. This Wednesday, June 25, I’ll be hosting the first Jewish Open Mic at Tea Lounge in Park Slope (the big one, at 837 Union St.). Come at 7:30. (It’s also my birthday, and my anniversary of becoming a vegetarian, so I might be even more jumpy than usual.)
Bring poems, songs, stories, or whatever you’ve got — just don’t make it longer than 1 sheet of paper, or 3 minutes. I’ll be doing a set of my own to kick things off, and then everyone in the universe will be jumping into the world’s most spectacular Jewish variety show.
It’s free, and the stage open to anyone (What makes it Jewish? Pretty much just that the dude running it has horns coming out of his head…but it’s open to anyone, and you can do 3 minutes’ worth of pretty much anything). There are going to be some sort-of-celebrity guests, and anything can happen, and all I can say is you’re going to want to be there when it does. 7:30 pm start. Get there early or register on Facebook if you want to sign up. It’s presented by Shemspeed, Mimaamakim, the letter Q, and whoever else loves good art in the world.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
Haaretz and the NYT report on a local controversy regarding resistance to Westhampton beach Orthodox Jews wanting to put up an eruv.
You would think that wanting to tie some string to a few telephone poles would pretty much be ignored by the rest of the world, but it turns out that putting up an eruv has become a rather problematic venture over the past few years. A number of towns have begun to organize resistance to putting up an eruv.
The strangest part is that the resistance comes from both non-Jews living in the area… and non-Orthodox Jews, including, sometimes, Conservative Jews. It’s not as simple as anti-semiitism. Partly this stems from regions in New York where a few towns have gone from having few to having many Orthodox Jews, and in the process of becoming popular, sometimes the Orthodox community has made itself unpleasant by forcing some non-Jewish businesses out of business. Some of it is ignorance of what an eruv is by the non-Jews. But… you can’t say none of it is anti-semitism. For every five towns area where the Orthodox community has come in and refused to patronize non-shomer Shabbat businesses, are plenty of perfectly nice, normal Orthodox people who are just going about their business.
Ultimately the issue has become that people are protesting having a substantial Orthodox community in their area. The weirdest part for me is having liberal Jews mixed up in this. Okay, I can understand Reform Jews protesting eruvs in their neighborhood: some Reform Jews will stand on principal against any halacha if they are touched by it. (I’ve certainly had to occasionally work in situations where a Reform and Conservative shul will put on a joint program which, for logistical reasons, has to be in a Reform shul. And they will, as a matter of principal, refuse to provide kosher food. (BTW claiming that this is the majority of Reform shuls is as silly as claiming that all Orthodox communities are going to go around closing businesses that aren’t Orthodox owned) It isn’t the usual thing, but at least it isn’t peculiar.) In the case of any Conservative Jews involved in this, it’s downright peculiar, since Conservative Jews need eruvs as much as the Orthodox do: the prohibition against carrying on Shabbat has not been lifted, my Conservative chevre.
But the real story here is that the Orthodox are not always crazy when they start yelling about being picked on. In this case, it’s perfectly true, and in fact, the refusal of townships to put up eruvs because they don’t want the Orthodox to move in is not simple anti-semitism, but is also a form of internalized anti-semitism (I generally detest the use of that term, but it is, very occasionally, warranted). Friends, we need to start getting along better within the Jewish community. Granted, this is not all on one side. The Orthodox need to start working harder to not antagonize liberal Jews over their practices… and ought to be speaking up about Israeli refusal to separate synagogue and state. They could also work to make themselves better neighbors in a more public way. But in most places Orthodox Jews make fine neighbors, and finding ways to keep them out is just wrong, and bad for Am Yisrael, even if the Orthodox can’t meet the non-Orthodox halfway.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Sunday, June 15th, 2008
WaPo reports on a new effort created jointly by the Union for Reform Judaism and the Islamic Society of North America, respectively the USA’s largest Jewish and Muslim organizations. 11 groups nationwide were picked to try this new curriculum, begun last December (WAPo’s local angle is that one of the 11 groups picked is led by Rabbi Steve Weisman of Bowie, Maryland’s Temple Solel and Khalil Shadeed (no title mentioned), a leader of the Islamic Society of Southern Prince George’s County, MD).
The six session group appears to be something of a break from the usual dialogues in that it is not seeking to avoid the difficult topics. Too often, Jewish-Muslim dialogues attempt to keep the peace by focusing away from differences and difficulties. The result being that, while individuals may get to know one another better, or even get to know one another’s religions better, no real progress is made in the area which need to be discussed in order for the members of each faith to really understand the motivations behind one another’s religious differences, political differences and views of those conflicts.
Still, while they are attempting to discuss more difficult topics, there are still some problems to work out about format:
At the meeting last month when Zionism came up, almost no one spoke. Sarah Crim, a 58-year-old editor and writer, said later that the six sessions offered too little time to go into detail and challenge people but enough to listen, learn and create relationships that could produce joint social justice work, her real passion.
“Sure, there are things people said here that bother me, but I try to keep my eye on the ball. If you’re trying to find a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis and hope you’re going to come up with something from six sessions of dialogue, you’re not going to do that,” she said.
Still, any effort is a good effort in this arena. Good luck to them!
by Aryeh Cohen · Friday, June 13th, 2008
I spent the first week of June lodging on Jesus Lane at Westcott House in Cambridge, England. (For those for whom the point might be too subtle, there is also a Jesus College, a Christ’s College, a Corpus Christi College, an Emmanuel College and a Trinity College.) 
I was, along with about twenty other scholars, the guest of the Cambridge Interfaith Program of the Faculty of Divinity. CIP is the gracious host and home of the Scriptural Reasoning-University conference. Scriptural Reasoning is the brainchild of Peter Ochs and Dan Hardy (obm), along with Bob Gibbs, Steve Kepnes, David Ford and other fine folk. SR is an offspring of Textual Reasoning (which, back in the days when communication consisted of hammer, chisel and bitnet was called the “Post-modern Jewish Philosophy Bitnetwork”). TR, also founded by Ochs, Kepnes and Gibbs was started in the early 90s (back when everybody was deconstructing some binary or another) by Jewish philosophers frustrated by the canon and canonical thinking in the field of Jewish philosophy, and by text scholars (Talmudists, Midrashists, Kabbalists, etc.) frustrated by the perceived straitjacket of the historical-critical method which mostly still defined the field. I was one of the latter folks, along with Shaul Magid, Elliot Wolfson, Charlotte Fonrobert and others. We met once a year at the American Academy of Religion conference, drank beer, studied texts and crossed disciplinary boundaries.
The main move, to my mind, was disrespecting the territorial claims of academic fields. 
When we studied a Talmudic text, for example, the Talmudist(s) in the room had no greater privilege to define the discourse (beyond, perhaps, defining actual words in the old fashioned dictionary sense) than the philosophers did.
At a certain point some Christian theologians wanted to join the party, followed by some Moslem scholars. Still the main move remained the same. No one was allowed to claim privilege of interpretation over “their” text. This simple move demands an enormous amount of faith, since everybody’s cherished reading of their texts, grounded in centuries of tradition, is up for grabs when someone is invited into the conversation who “doesn’t know the rules.” When it works, the process (which is the point) is amazing. Texts that are usually separated by walls of tradition, and sometimes by actual walls and borders, reverberate with each other. Moslems suggest readings of Rashi’s understanding of the Hagar story and Jews argue about John 4. Razi’s commentary on Sura 4 is used to illuminate Jacob’s relationship with Leah.
SR defies both tradition, which demands its territorial integrity, and academe, which demands that conferences and research be about product. SR is about what happens in the room, around the table, with the texts.
Nicholas Adams, a long time participant in the Cambridge group, describes one of the characteristics of Scriptural Reasoning as follows.
One of the features of scriptural reasoning that make it interesting is the constant surprises that it holds, even for experienced participants.…
Scriptural Reasoning practises a different relation of the past and future, and a different model of causality. To be open to surprises is to deny that the past causes the future in a strong sense. To describe something as a surprise is precisely to deny a narrow conception of causality. In some ways surprises are descriptions of events that give the future priority over the past. … With respect to a politically sensitive practice like scriptural reasoning, where the histories of the three traditions have each other’s blood on their hands, and bones underfoot, this is a significant matter. If there are surprises then the past is allowed to be the past, but it cannot wholly cause the future. … Friendship is made possible not only by repairing the past, if that is even possible, but by being open to the future. (Nicholas Adams, “Making Deep Reasonings Public,” in The Promise of Scriptural Reasoning 47-49)
We seven or eight or nine men and women, from the US and Canada and England and Pakistan and Turkey, are sitting around this table studying these sacred texts in their original languages and in translation, and we are creating the future.
Ultimately this is a bet midrash whose short term goal is to find a certain comfort in the company of texts that are supposedly not one’s own, in the company of scholars who are supposedly Other. The long term goal is the radical transformation of the role of religion in the world, as a broad highway of hope and peace rather than a cudgel of cruelty and divisiveness.
One of the more exciting aspects of SR in Cambridge is its outreach in civic engagement. Towards the end of the week that I was there, a group of thirty or so Londoners (non-academic Jews, Christians and Moslems) made the trek to Cambridge for a two day intensive on how to do Scriptural Reasoning. They were then going back to London to start SR groups-many of which are already up and running throughout London. Scriptural Reasoning is one of the modes of interfaith work employed at St. Ethelberga’s, an amazing home of peace and reconciliation.
SR now has a website, and a dream for SR groups to be started in one thousand North American cities. Join the party.
by Aryeh Cohen · Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Pop on over to South Jerusalem
to check out Gershom Gorenberg’s latest tale of civility. In the midst of the insanity that is the occupation, Gorenberg has become one third of a team of friends that has been occasionally venturing forth to commit acts of kindness in the wake of this or that insidious act of quotidian cruelty committed by the Israeli forces of occupation.
The first outing (involving a washing machine and an abuse of power) can be found here. The latest chapter is here.
Three men in a battered station wagon do not a revolution make. And yet… it is the blatant crossing of boundaries and the acceptance of responsibility for evils which one did not commit—yet were perpetrated in one’s name—which will, in the aggregate, undermine the ability to wage endless war.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Week Six, day Six
Yesod of Yesod
Week Six, day Seven
Malchut of Yesod
Reported all over the place, but the WaPo doesn’t have that annoying registration thingy. As pretty much everyone knows, Obama has had a lot of political problems with his church. First there was the out of context Wright quote, which was taken to mean that Wright hated every white person, but especially Jews. Apparently the latest hitch has been (Roman Catholic) Rev. Michael Pfleger slamming Clinton in a sermon and implying that she’s a white supremacist.
I have to admit, I have some mixed feelings about this. Now, y’all know that I’m pretty annoyed about the misogyny behind a significant amount of the anti-Clinton activity, from speechifying, to musing about her personal life and sartorial choices, and don’t even get me into the various objects intended to deride (nutcrackers and the like). Let me just say, I don’t think that Obama himself is a misogynist.
But let’s get away fro this most recent thing, which I think Obama shouldn’t have to answer for, either, and get back to Wright. I think that Wright may well be saying something that we ought to be listening to. If you’re an African American, your experience of racism is quite different than any other group of color’s in this country. Unlike (Ashkenazi) Jews and Italians whose move up the economic ladder has allowed us to assimilate and blend in, and the Japanese and Chinese whose model minority status is moving them in that direction as well (along with extremely high exogamy rates), if you’re African American, your class has to get pretty outstandingly high before you - as an individual- are exempted from some of the worst of the bigotry. Even then, go someplace where your name isn’t recognized, and you can wear silk and rubies and it’s not going to help you much.
SO, while I don’t necessarily love Wright, I think we need to listen to him a little more carefully, because he can tell us a lot about what we don’t normally hear. and so, I respected Obama for sticking to his church and not resigning. Especially since it is often true that when you cut yourself off from someone who is angry, you’ve lost your chance to talk to them and help them see a different way out. Obama was a trusted friend, insofar as a clergyperson can unbend among congregants, and Obama might have led him to a more nuanced way of speaking. Who will do that now?
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Thursday, May 29th, 2008
A new internet startup called G.ho.st (pronounced like the spook, and an acronym for “Global Hosted Operating System”) offering “free web-based virtual computing for every human being” wants to give users a free,way to access their desktop and files from any computer with an Internet connection. To do so, g.ho.st uses services like Google Docs, Zoho and Flickr.
It has a Palestinian office in Ramallah, with about 35 software developers, and a smaller Israeli team in the Israeli town of Modiin. The CEO, Dr. Zvi Schreiber, said “he wanted to create G.ho.st after seeing the power of software running on the Web. He said he thought it was time to merge his technological and commercial ambitions with his social ones and create a business with Palestinians.”
G.ho.st also has a philanthropic component: a foundation that aims to establish community computer centers in Ramallah and in mixed Jewish-Arab towns in Israel. The foundation is headed by Noa Rothman, the granddaughter of Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister slain in 1995.
“It’s the first time I met Palestinians of my generation face to face,†said Ms. Rothman, 31, of her work with G.ho.st. She said she was moved by how easily everyone got along. “It shows how on the people-to-people level you can really get things done.â€
Investors have put $2.5 million into the company so far, a modest amount. Employing Palestinians means the money goes farther; salaries for Palestinian programmers are about a third of what they are in Israel.
But Dr. Schreiber, who initially teamed up with Tareq Maayah, a Palestinian businessman, to start the Ramallah office, insists this is not just another example of outsourcing.
“We are one team, employed by the same company, and everyone has shares in the company,†he said.
NYT article
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Monday, May 19th, 2008
Week Five, Day two
Gevurah of Hod
According to the latest news, yes, there’s more, if you can stand it. The Des Moines Register reports that there was sexual abuse and an expectation of sexual favors, according to the workers,
If a worker wanted, say, a promotion or a shift change, “they’d be brought into a room with three or four men and it was like, ‘Which one do you want? Which one are you going to serve?’†said McCauley in an interview today with Des Moines Register editors and reporters.
To be fair, it should have been obvious that somethignlike this would be revealed - with all the other garbage going on behindthe scenes, this particular form of abusing the powerless should have been an obvious add-on feature.
RadioIowa mentions that America’s Voice, a group pushing for immigration reform, is asking Congress to investigate the owners of the Postville plant.
Mark Lauritsen, international vice president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) says reading the information on the Postville raid shows “shameful” action by the plant’s owners. Lauritsen says what’s ultimately shameful is that nearly 400 “hardworking men and women” are in detention, while the people who exploited them are free to roam the streets and start the cycle over again.
Lauriston says Agriproccessors has gotten away with the labor violations for too long. Lauritsen says: “There is not one other meatpacker operator in this country that has the same sustained long record of law violations as Agriprocessors, not one. They’re acting like a renegade in an already tough industry. It’s not good for the industry, it’s not good for the workers who work in it.” Sharry and Lauritson say the national strategy of ‘attrition through enforcement’ remains an ineffective solution to the immigration issue.
I hope they’re successful, but after all this time, who knows - it’s not like there haven’t already been tons of investigation worthy crimes over the past several years, with a pattern of disregard for the law. Again, our only quesiotn should be, where the hell is the Jewish community, and why didn’t we insist on OU’s hashgachah (supervision) being pulled with much greater force. Our lack of courage and refusal to go without meat is a chillul hashem - an embarrassment to God’s name.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Saturday, May 17th, 2008
Week Four, Day Six
Yesod of netzach
Week Four, Day Seven
Malchut of Netzach
Last week a group of rabbis - including two from Israel met in Qatar when that country opened its first scholarly center for interfaith interfaith dialogue as part of a broader push for interfaith relations throughout that region.
Ynet reports
Efforts at interfaith dialogue got one of their biggest boosts when Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah met with Pope Benedict XVI last November at the Vatican.
In March, the Saudi king then made an impassioned plea for dialogue among Muslims, Christians and Jews  the first such proposal from a nation with no diplomatic ties to Israel and a ban on non-Muslim religious services and symbols.
But someone tell the right not to let it affect their opinion of Islam as inherently a religion of all bad things.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Today, May 14, 60 years since the founding of the State of Israel, Rabbis for Human Rights – North America (RHR-NA), placed an ad on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times in support of the rights of Israelis and Palestinian and launching a year long campaign, In Pursuit of Justice, to support the work of Rabbis for Human Rights in Israel .
The ad begins, “On this day, 60 years ago, the founders of Israel declared the State of Israel …will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel “, a quote from Israel ’s Declaration of Independence . More »
by BZ · Thursday, May 8th, 2008
60 years ago this week, the State of Israel declared independence. Here is the full text of Israel’s Declaration of Independence. It contains many ideals that Israel can work towards as it enters its next 60 years. Some of those ideals are going to get Jewschool labeled as anti-Israel for publishing them. So be it.
ERETZ-ISRAEL was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped. Here they first attained to statehood, created cultural values of national and universal significance and gave to the world the eternal Book of Books.
More »
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
Week Three, Day three:
Tiferet of Tiferet
I originally was going to blog this as a “wow, some good news for a change” post, but as I realized exactly where this all was taking place, that pretty quickly slid away. Ynet reports about a new green(er) energy production site for Jerusalem. Using methane produced by a local garbage dump, electricity will be produced for Jerusalem municipality. And this is good news, of course; it’s a far greener process than coal produced electricity.
But I can’t help but sigh over the whole thing anyway. The Abu Dis dump is actually one of the first places where i was involved with Israeli activism because of the Jahalin Bedouin living there.
Why, you may ask are the Jahalin living in a garbage dump?
As one can read at the Bustan website, “The Jahalin were settled by the Israeli government on lands of Abu Dis, after their dispossession from the Negev in the 1950s. This land was later declared ‘state land,’ and in 1975, the Ma’ale Adumim settlement in the West Bank was founded on the expropriated Palestinian lands of Abu Dis, Azzariya, Issawiya, A-tur and Anata.”
Although it was due to government forcible relocation that the Bedouin were living in Abu Dis to begin with, it took many years of a court case to get the government to even being to live up to its responsibilities. Well, all right, at least to recognize them, even if not to follow through. YOu know, little things, like providing water and electricity.
In the meantime, Maale Adumim continues to expand so that the Bedouin can see just over the hill beautiful houses with great city services, clean streets, and the other accoutrements of Jewish life in Israel.
I can’t begin to say how sad it was for me to see people living in shipping containers and struggling to maintain their way of life and their dignity under some very trying circumstances.
Due to the encroachment of Ma’ale Adumim, the Jahalin were forcefully evicted from their homes a second time. In addition to losing their homes, they lost their land, their animals, and their ability to farm or graze the lands. Subsequently the Jahalin were uprooted from their traditional sustenance and forced to find work without benefits as day laborers in low-income fields, often in one of the neighboring Jewish settlements. They are living in corrugated tin shacks without basic amenities, without health care, without electricity.
Ma’ale Adumim begins on the neighboring hill, replete with beautiful villas to house 35,000 settlers that receive tax breaks and other government subsidies to live there. There are new educational and cultural institutions; widely paved, fine-landscaped roads and traffic lights in and around the settlement; public gardens; swimming pools, restaurants; shops; and even a Meretz chapter. Juxtaposed with this suburban expanse, the Jahalin have been transplanted into a cramped corner of Azzariya, sandwiched between settlements and living next to Jerusalem’s municipal waste dump.
Well, I’m just so glad the residents of Jerusalem can be greener in their use of electricity. Maybe they can share some of it with the Bedouin now.
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
Day 14, week two, day seven
Malchut of Gevurah
Good news or bad? Hard to say. Methodists overwhelmingly defeated measures calling for divestment from companies that allegedly enable Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.
Divestment doesn’t strike me in this case as the most precise tool, especially given the supersessionist theology background grumbling that goes along with this movement, apparently. But OTOH, we don’t seem to hold the evangelicals to such a measurement when they say they will “support” Israel in any action they take.
SO when we have allies who disagree with Israel’s policies, what can they do to show it without being labelled as haters?
Well, There’s always J-street, now!
Day 13, week two, day six
Yesod of Gevurah
Ynet reports on the lastest mishegas:
Rabbi Shlomi Aviner has ruled that God disapproves of pants on women even when women are alone(!) Apparently the fact that God is not male and does not lust after women has been lost sight of somewhere. You should not even sleep in pajama pants since sleeping is a grand opportunity to show off your filthy, sinful bodies, ladies. Cover them up!!!
Aviner, Beit El’s rabbi and one of Religious Zionism’s most prominent leaders, was asked in a cellular Q&A session published in the “Small World” bulletin, “When a girl goes to relieve herself at night, is she allowed to say the ‘Asher Yatzar’ (’he who formed’) prayer while wearing a short-sleeved shirt and trousers?”
The rabbi replied that it is permitted to say the prayer in such a case, but added that “in general, a woman must always wear modest clothes even when she is alone and in the dark, because the Holy one blessed be he is everywhere. And yes, trousers are a self-prohibition even when a woman is alone.”
However, Tsomet seems to have gotten the point that was made a few months ago when it came out that Hareidi women had begun taking upon themselves the modesty wrappings as seriously as Rabbi Aviner does and wrapping themselves in Burqas and more.
Rabbi Israel Rosen, head of the Tsomet Institute, has claimed an article published in synagogues over the weekend that “too much modesty leads women to the opposite direction, from abstinence to immorality.”
Rabbi Rosen also slammed the haredi norm to omit names of women from newspapers and from invitations, comparing it to the veil phenomenon in Muslim countries.
“For so-called modesty reasons, the woman is only presented as ‘his wife’, nameless, veiled, and my heart twitches,” he wrote in a weekly column published in synagogues over the weekend. “Is there no psychological connection between the hypocrisy of concealing the name and hiding the face under the ‘Taliban-style’ veil?”
You don’t think?
by Kol Ra'ash Gadol · Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
Just a warning: I doubt I’ll actually succeed at this. Even just actually getting every night counted isn’t the easiest task, so actually having something to say, is going to be tough. But I’m going to give it a try, especially since there’s no requirement that I actually succeed at doing it every night… like tonight, I’m going to make up for starting late, with days 1, 2 & 3, since I couldn’t very well blog the first day on chag, and the second day was a little complicated with late sunset and all that. So, we’ll start tonight, and hopefully continue.
So: Omer night #1
Week Chesed, day chesed
Since the first day of Omer occurs on the day of a seder, I thought I write about Geraldine Brooks’ new book People of the Book. This is a wonderful book about the history - fictional in detail, although well researched in broad outlines, as she says in the afterword, ” While some of the facts are true to the haggadah’s known history, most of the plot and all of the characters are imaginary.”- of the famous Sarajevo Haggadah.
Towards todays’ omer topic chesed of chesed, the book gazes at the interrelationships - complicated, painful, loving and hating between Jews, Christians and Muslims, and also between parents and children, in all their difficulty and complexity, and acknowledging that sometimes there are no happy endings. Setting aside the fine writing, the well-drawn characters and the plot (who among us could not love a story -a mystery- about a book?) the doubling of the story makes for fine reading, and the ending is hopeful, mirroring the real history of the book, which of course includes the survival of a people, and the bravery of a Muslim librarian in saving the book of a people not his own- well, depending on how you look at it- and perhaps of a Catholic priest who saved it from destruction as well.
Day 2: Gevurah of Chesed
More »
by Josh Frankel · Tuesday, April 15th, 2008
So, here’s a different source for a news story on this blog. HaTzofeh, the national religious newspaper in Israel, reports on extensive abuse of the few remaining Jews in Yemen. The newspaper reports that recently many Jews have been attacked, including the Rabbi of the community whose home was recently destroyed. The article also mentions ongoing human rights abuse, including forced conversions, and a law that makes marrying a Jew punishable by death. Strangest though, the article reports that the only organization working to help these Jews is Satmar. The flat-hatted chassidim want them to emigrate, not to Israel of course, but to the UK and America.
Yikes. That’s scary stuff, happening to our own brothers and sisters, and I had no idea. I don’t know what to do to stop this, but the first step must be making sure that people know. It’s a shame that I heard about it first from a religious rag which I usually only read for laughs.
Update: I found a Christian Science Monitor article about the abuse.
by Josh Frankel · Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I got this e-mail from a good fried of mine this morning. Tyson Herberger is a well-travelled, multilingual, Orthodox Jew. He’s married, lives in Jerusalem, and is pretty hard to pin down politically. You must read
Some of you may already now from reading the morning papers, but I am under house arrest for being a journalist.
Earlier this week Israel’s communications ministry and israeli police raided the Jerusalem studios of the radio station I work at. They seized all of the equipment in the studio itself, though left the rest of the offices intact. Everyone present at the time of the raid was taken into police custody for questioning. They released the secreatary after about 7 or 8 hours, and took the other 7 of us to
jail for the night as we were being detained.
More »
by Chorus of Apes · Sunday, April 6th, 2008
Listen to Avraham Burg talk about how Israel is like baklava.
More specifically, he explains how the notion that Israel is a Jewish democratic state is like baklava. When you first taste it, its feels sweet, but after a few minutes, things get sticky, and you are left with a lump in your stomach.
Burg says a lot more than that. The interview is 90 mins long. He talks about love conquering hate, the place of the holocaust in the Israeli psyche, the place of minorities in Israel, and the end of the zionist myth.
Its well worth a listen.
(link courtesy of JTA)
