Mishegas

Too much to blog, not enough time

  • “Four large U.S. Jewish groups have lent support to Turkey’s position in opposing the passage of two resolutions pending in Congress that call for official recognition of World War I-era killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide.” When Jews deny other people’s holocausts for the sake of Israel’s foreign relations, something is truly awry.
  • Psychology Today: “We tend to believe our political views have evolved by a process of rational thought, as we consider arguments, weigh evidence, and draw conclusions. But the truth is more complicated. Our political preferences are equally the result of factors we’re not aware of—such as how educated we are, how scary the world seems at a given moment, and personality traits that are first apparent in early childhood. Among the most potent motivators, it turns out, is fear.”
  • “Hadassah national president June Walker said this week that her recent appointment to head the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations marks a new era for the status of women within Jewish organizations. ‘Women have finally arrived in the Jewish world where their intelligence and activities are regarded in the same light as men,’ she said. ‘Equality [within Jewish organizations] is now based on capability and not sex.'”
  • “A Jewish caucus has been set up within Germany’s centre-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), the first Jewish organization within a major German party since the Nazi takeover in 1933, a report Thursday said.”
  • “Tel Aviv hopes to set up a ‘walk of fame’ similar to that in Hollywood on one of the city’s main streets in time for its 100th anniversary in 2009, the Ma’ariv daily reported Thursday.”
  • So hareidim aren’t the only ones: “A protest by two opposing groups of Cambodian Buddhist monks has ended in a fist fight on the streets of the Cambodian capital, leaving at least one monk hurt.”
  • “With threats to the Jewish people emanating from so many directions – a nuclear Iran, the demographic challenges of American Jewry, the rise in anti-Semitic attacks around the world – a succession of leaders has warned that Jews face as much peril today as on the eve of the Holocaust. But when the Center for Jewish Studies at Queens College in New York City convened a conference this week on the state of world Jewry – ominously titled ‘Is it 1938 again?’ – the consensus was a resounding ‘No.'”

3 thoughts on “Too much to blog, not enough time

  1. Monk fight!
    Somehow, I dunno, maybe it’s my cultural bias— I bet the monks fighting is more elegant than the charedim! Unless their Kung Fu has been made illegal. In which case it’s back to shoving and pinching, such like our primitive ancestors.
    Otherwise– can you imagine? six trained shaolin warriors, standing in front of the temple, mocking the hundred other monks as they come, challenging them to battle? where’s youtube when you REALLY need it?
    I KNEW we should have installed surveillabce cameras in every public square in the world– JUST IN CASE something like this happened!

  2. About the Turkey resolution. My own great grandparents lived through the massacres perpetrated by armenians against Turks. Maybe you shouldn’t always let emotion decide foreign policy.

  3. SNORK!
    “Hadassah national president June Walker said this week that her recent appointment to head the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations marks a new era for the status of women within Jewish organizations. ‘Women have finally arrived in the Jewish world where their intelligence and activities are regarded in the same light as men,’ she said. ‘Equality [within Jewish organizations] is now based on capability and not sex.’”
    BOy has she jumped the gun. Her appointment is proof of this? Sorry to burst your bubble, sister. Didn’t you catch the recent news that women start earning less on the dollar as compared to men within one year after college? WOmen are still not being hired at equal numbers to men in any field, and as for Jews, the COnservative movement’s study last year was pretty clear that women are less likely to be hired, whe they are hired get paid less, and are less likely to get benefits, and have very few opportunities (even assuming they were wanted) of taking the larger more prestigious rabbinic positions – honey, don’t even getme started. Teh absolute ridiculousness of this statement is beyond belief.

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