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Jewish Journal

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September 9, 2007

It’s not camp, but it’ll do

Leave a Comment / California, Education, Kids & Teens, Teens, United States /

Camp Hess Kramer broke my young and fertile heart. It was an instance of pubescent love that evolved into unrequited passion. For eight years, I frolicked in the crisp Malibu breeze, danced maniacally to Israeli folk songs and celebrated the Sabbath each Friday at dusk. It was eight summers of sheer, unadulterated bliss. Camp was where I discovered my Jewish identity, and it supplied me with religious pride and a newfound zest for Jewish culture. It was a safe haven and a supportive community. Camp comprised my heart and soul.

This summer, Wilshire Boulevard Temple Camps — Camp Hess Kramer among them — instituted a gap year for students going into 11th grade, encouraging students to go to Israel, a common practice among Jewish summer camps.

A summer without camp? The thought was incomprehensible. I had my life ahead to travel and explore the world, yet only childhood for camp. Soon, I would be inundated with the stresses of being an adult, and it felt as if I was being forced away from my youth. I wanted to be in Malibu; I wanted to be a Jewish camper.

With a stance adamantly against the gap year, I argued with everyone in hopes of changing the program. Camp administrators, directors, counselors, campers, anyone who would lend a listening ear would be the victims of my anti-gap-year tirade. But, regardless of my presumptuous hopes, it was to no avail. I was banished from my second home, and my secure identity as a Jew was seemingly obliterated.

I stood at a crossroads, faced with two options, either go to Israel and contradict my initial stand, or just find other summer plans. My inherently obstinate nature would not permit me to choose the former, although I knew the trip ultimately would have been an unforgettable experience. So this summer, I set out on a quest to regain my Jewish sense of self.

I reluctantly joined the workforce. I found a job working as an editorial intern/reporter at the Beverly Hills Courier, and I was initially hesitant. It was my first job, and I was now to be treated like an adult. The daily grind, incessant traffic, 9 to 5 — could I handle it?

My worries dissipated the moment I entered the door. I was writing, earning bylines, and relaying information to a vast readership. I loved my topics, the work environment, the fresh smell of the paper off of the printing press every Friday.

But unbeknownst to me, through my job I was continually performing an act of kindness and righteousness. Each week, as I obtained information and then got it published for those who did not have the same resources, I was performing a good deed, a mitzvah. As acts of justice are imperative in being classified as “a good Jewish person,” I was not solely writing for the betterment of the community, but for myself. As the summer continued, my words inscribed on sheets of paper became symbolic of my progress as a Jewish person.

I worked at the Courier three days a week and also volunteered each Thursday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. I made my weekly trek up to cardiology in my volunteer uniform and assisted the nurses in the department, whether by answering telephones or organizing medical charts. In my hours at the hospital, I gradually became closer to my Jewish enlightenment. I saw that an act of kindness as simple as a smile can improve someone’s day, and I truly felt like a more righteous being when I observed the wonders of the nurses and doctors.

At camp I didn’t really have an opportunity to help those less fortunate, even in the sense of health. Now, I could actually visualize the affects of my deeds and the joy they brought. My heart was steadily increasing with joy, and I could feel the outcome of repairing the world, one act at a time.

My Fridays were devoted to Bet Tzedek, a nonprofit organization that provides less fortunate Los Angeles residents with legal aid. Bet Tzedek, or “House of Justice” in Hebrew, warmed my heart while stimulating my left-brain. A brilliant staff has selflessly abandoned the inflated salaries of corporate law firms in order to help those who are less fortunate. While so much of Los Angeles dwells on monetary income, the best payment that Bet Tzedek receives is the joy of their clients.

Initially, I questioned whether I would ever regain my Jewish identity without Camp Hess Kramer. Yet, through my own path, I discovered that it does not take a camp or a synagogue to classify oneself as an observant Jew. My work this summer has empowered me to feel like a stronger Jewish person than ever. I hadn’t really lost my Jewish identity — I had just failed to recognize it.

Shayna Freisleben is a junior at Harvard-Westlake.

Speak Up!
Tribe, a page by and for teens, appears the first issue of every month in The Jewish Journal. Ninth- to 12th-graders are invited to submit first-person columns, feature articles or news stories of up to 800 words. Deadline for the September issue is Aug. 15; Deadline for the October issue is Sept. 15. Send submissions to julief@jewishjournal.com.

It’s not camp, but it’ll do Read More »

New Shoah pension deal gives survivors ‘recognition of suffering’

Leave a Comment / Family, Finance, Seniors, Worldwide /

For Aviva G., the significance of last week’s announcement that more Holocaust survivors like her will be eligible for pension payments from the German government was not about the money. It was about principle and the notion that a certain degree of justice may now be done.

Aviva, 71, says there is no true compensation for years in ghettos, but she sees the new deal as a “recognition of suffering.” Aviva asked that her family name be withheld.

After extensive negotiations with the Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, Germany eased some eligibility requirements so more low-income survivors like Aviva can receive so-called Article 2 pension payments.

The agreement, which adds $250 million to the pension fund over 10 years, may be one of the last and biggest breakthroughs in the area of reparations to survivors, according to the Claims Conference.

The deal affects survivors whose income levels made them ineligible for payments in the past. Until now, those with annual income above $16,000 were excluded from the payments.

Under the new deal, income received from other pension sources, including governmental pensions, disability payments, retirement plans and the like, or a spouse’s income, will not be counted toward the $16,000 total.

The change effectively enables thousands more low-income survivors to collect pension payments from Germany. The funds will be distributed starting Oct. 1 and continue for 10 years.

“It’s a huge thing,” Gideon Taylor, executive vice president of the Claims Conference, said in a telephone interview with JTA. “It will make a big difference for a lot of people worldwide.”

Taylor said it took “a long battle” and months of negotiations to reach the agreement.

The Claims Conference will be launching a major advertising campaign to reach those who might be eligible, he said. Information about how to apply is available at Claims Conference offices and on its Web site, www.claimscon.org. There is no deadline for applications, according to Taylor.

The decision to lower the bar for eligibility comes just as Germany has enacted a law granting pensions to victims of the German Communist regime. For these victims, too, pensions and income from spouses will not count against eligibility.

The Law for Support of Victims of the Socialist German Dictatorship, the third post-reunification law aimed at compensating victims of World War II, was enacted Aug. 29. Low-income applicants who were imprisoned under the Communist regime for at least six months may receive 250 euro per month.

The additional payments for Holocaust survivors will be from the Claims Conference Article 2 Fund pension program, which currently distributes pensions to 51,000 survivors. The new rules will lead to a 10 percent increase in those who qualify for payments, or about 6,000 people, the Claims Conference estimated.

Aviva might be among the younger ones. Born in 1938 in Boryslaw, then part of Poland, she was a small child when German troops wrested the region from Soviet control in the summer of 1941. Most of the town’s Jews were killed, but Aviva’s mother managed to hide her in the ghetto while most other children were deported.

“When my mother found out that all the women and children and nonworking old men would be deported, we left the ghetto and hid in the woods, and then in the home of a Ukrainian woman who had worked for us,” Aviva said.

Her brother, who later was killed, gave the woman money to hide them. For a while, Aviva and her mother lived in the space behind a wardrobe pushed against a corner.

The woman “slipped the food to us from below,” Aviva recalled. “I could not be loud. I could not laugh, cry or shout. And afterward, for months I could only whisper.”

They were liberated by Russian troops at the end of 1944.

Aviva met her husband, Juergen, an engineer, in Israel, and returned with him to his native Germany in 1958. They had two daughters and now have five grandchildren who live in Israel.

For decades, Aviva was a social worker for the Frankfurt Jewish community. She and her husband are retired.

She said she received a small reparations payment from Germany of 5,000 Deutschmark in the 1950s — that’s worth about $3,500 today — “but that is nothing for the fact that I basically lost my childhood.”

She applied for Article 2 payments in 2000 but was told her income was slightly over the limit.

“That disappointed me a lot,” she said. “Thank God, I am financially not so dependent. It is more a moral issue. This suffering I experienced as a child was never recognized.”

New Shoah pension deal gives survivors ‘recognition of suffering’ Read More »

Briefs: Separation fence must be moved, court says; Olmert expands Fatah amnesty; Jewish woman eyes

Leave a Comment / Worldwide /

Bil’in Fence to be Rerouted

Israel’s High Court of Justice ordered a controversial section of the West Bank security fence rerouted. A three-justice panel under High Court President Dorit Beinisch on Tuesday ordered the Defense Ministry to come up with a new plan for Bil’in, a Palestinian village currently slated to lose swaths of farmland to the fence.

Finding in favor of a petition filed by Palestinian activists two years ago, Beinisch wrote that the fence threatens to cause “significant hardship” to Bil’in’s residents and should therefore circumvent the village. Bil’in has seen almost weekly clashes between pro-Palestinian protestors and Israeli security forces, becoming a focus of international opposition to the West Bank fence.

Israel Plans New Fatah Amnesty

Israel may free more imprisoned Fatah members as a goodwill gesture toward the Palestinian Authority. Jerusalem officials said Tuesday that there is a plan to release 100 members of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ faction who are serving prison sentences for low-level security offenses. If approved by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the releases will take place during the Muslim fast month of Ramadan, which begins next week.

Israel freed 250 jailed Palestinians, most of them from Fatah, in July after Olmert revived rapprochement with Abbas. Israel wants to bolster Fatah in face of Hamas after the Islamist group overran the Gaza Strip in June, prompting Abbas to dismiss it from the Palestinian Authority government.

Sderot Mayor Suspends Himself Amid Probe

Sderot Mayor Eli Moyal is suspending himself from his position indefinitely as his office is investigated for corruption. Moyal made the announcement Tuesday, a day after fraud investigators raided his office for evidence of corruption at City Hall extending to the mayor himself. Rabbi Oran Malka will serve as interim mayor, according to the Jerusalem Post, which reported the self-imposed suspension.

“I’m glad there is an investigation,” Moyal said, explaining that the probe would prove he has “nothing to hide,” the Post reported.

Moyal has been under investigation for several months following complaints that he and cronies have been bilking the city of money sent to help Sderot and its residents cope with the constant Palestinian rocket fire from the nearby Gaza Strip.

Israel Lifts Visa Requirement For FSU Citizens

Russian citizens will be able to visit Israel without obtaining a visa. A special Israeli governmental commission announced the visa waiver decision after Internal Security Minister Avi Dichter, who initially warned the visa waiver would “flood Israel with thousands of prostitutes and illegal immigrants,” withdrew his objections last week.

The commission voted unanimously for the draft bill to be forwarded to the government. Tourism Minister Isaak Aranovich, who proposed the initiative in July, predicted that the influx of Russian tourists would create up to 10,000 jobs in Israel. He said he expects 250,000 Russian tourists per year to visit Israel.

Ernst & Young analysts say the number of Russian visitors to Israel in the first half of 2007 shot up 54 percent over last year. In the first half of the year, more than 11,000 Israelis visited Russia. Fourteen scheduled flights per week now connect Moscow and Tel Aviv. That number may increase to 21 flights a week by the end of 2007, officials said.

The Israeli commission expects Moscow to issue a similar visa waiver for Israeli citizens.

A bilateral agreement on the issue may be signed as early as October when Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov will be in Israel. However, some experts in Moscow are warning against overly optimistic expectations.

Sergei Shpilko, the president of Russia’s tourism union, told Expert magazine that Russia’s Interior and Defense ministries likely will object to waiving the visa requirement for Israelis.

Wiesenthal Center Slams Croatia

The Simon Wiesenthal Center condemned Croatia for failing to prosecute a World War II official suspected of deporting thousands to concentration camps.

“Croatia’s failure to prosecute Ivo Rojnica, the Ustashe governor of Dubrovnik, currently residing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is one of the most disappointing results of the period under review,” Efraim Zuroff, Israel director of the Wiesenthal Center, said in a statement.

Croatia’s fascist Ustashe government was allied with Hitler during the war and was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews, Serbs and gypsies.

“Despite the explicit promise of attorney general [Mladen] Bajic that the Rojnica case would be decided in early 2007 at the latest, there still has been no decision in the case, which only brings Rojnica closer to eluding justice,” the Wiesenthal Center said in a statement.

Jewish Woman Eyes Moroccan Parliament

Maggie Cacoun, a centrist politician known for her work on women’s rights, is considered among the front-runners in an election for the Moroccan Rabat assembly to be held later this week. Since details on her ethnic background emerged, Cacoun, 54, has been at pains to stress her patriotism as a Moroccan.

“I do not want to be treated as a Jew,” Cacoun said in one interview. “I did not seek permission to run from the Jewish community. The only person I consulted with was my husband, and he gave me his blessing.”

Most of Morocco’s Jews left decades ago, mainly for Israel or Europe, but the 5,000 or so who remained tend to voice satisfaction about living in the moderate Muslim Arab country.

Ancient Honey Farm Found in Israel

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced this week that its archeologists had uncovered an apiary, or man-made beehive colony, dating from the 10th to early ninth century B.C.E.

The discovery was made during a summer dig at the site of the ancient Israelite community of Tel Rehov in the Beit She’an valley. It is believed to be the earliest evidence of honey being harvested by humans in the Middle East.

The find consisted of three ties of hives with access points for bees and for removing honey. Experts who visited the site estimated that the apiary might have produced as much as half a ton of honey a year.

Briefs courtesy Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Briefs: Separation fence must be moved, court says; Olmert expands Fatah amnesty; Jewish woman eyes Read More »

New Conservative seminary leader outlines goals

Leave a Comment / California, Israel, Judaism, Worldwide /

Long before he emerged as a leading scholar of American Jewry, and decades before he would be looked to as the potential savior of the Conservative movement, Arnold Eisen was gunning for a journalism internship at the Washington Post.

As an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Eisen was in the running for editor of the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian — the position brought with it an automatic summer job at the Post.

Eisen lost the election in what he says was then the greatest disappointment of his life.

That election diverted Eisen’s career path from journalism to academia and initiated a journey that culminated Wednesday when he was inaugurated as the seventh chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (JTS), the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism.

But even as he settles into his new post as head of the movement’s chief academic institution, it is the values of the profession he did not pursue more than those of the academy that are figuring prominently in his plans.

In describing his vision for the coming year, Eisen speaks of dialogue rather than direction. He intends to spark conversations within the movement, facilitated by JTS, in place of “canned lectures.” And he believes being a Conservative Jew is largely about what journalists — and Jews — love most: talking.

“To be a Conservative Jew is in large part to want to be part of a certain conversation in word and in deed,” Eisen said recently in a wide-ranging discussion in his JTS office.

As workers made final preparations for the inauguration seminary in the courtyard below, Eisen described Conservative Judaism not as an ironclad ethos or series of principles, but as “a constellation of attitudes and behaviors and commitments that are coherent and that distinguish this movement from others.”

Eisen takes the JTS helm at a time when the Conservative movement is being seen by many as floundering, its numbers in decline and its ideological clarity muddled.

His predecessor, Rabbi Ismar Schorsh, in his parting message said the movement suffered from a “grievous failure of nerve.”

Once the largest synagogue denomination in America, Conservative Judaism has fallen into second place behind the Reform, and it has become routine to speak of the movement’s lack of direction and coherence.

All those challenges were awaiting Eisen when he arrived at his new office on Broadway and 122nd Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But what concerns the incoming chancellor most is not the supposed apathy within the movement — a notion he says is “nothing less than absurd” — or even the decline in its numbers.

“Numbers don’t keep me up at night; Israel keeps me up at night,” Eisen said. “I’m worried about the security of Israel, and I’m worried about the apparent decline in attachment on the part of American Jews to Israel. This literally, from time to time, keeps me up at night.”

In the coming year, Eisen plans to focus his efforts on building stronger ties between American Jews and the State of Israel. It is part of a commitment by JTS to the Jewish people, one of three constituencies — along with the Conservative movement and the broader North American society — that Eisen wants the seminary to serve.

He also plans to promote dialogue between Jews and Muslims similar to the Jewish-Christian dialogue begun by Louis Finkelstein, the seminary’s legendary leader from 1940 to 1972.

It is the third constituency, the Conservative movement, where expectations for Eisen’s tenure are the greatest. In addition to declining numbers, the movement has been through a bruising year in which a controversial decision to ordain gay clergy polarized the rabbinic leadership and sparked fears that the denomination in the center of the ideological spectrum could not hold.

Eisen has said that the movement’s historic commitment to religious pluralism — the notion that competing views of halacha (Jewish law) can peacefully coexist — is not enough to hold Conservative Judaism together.

Instead, he wants Conservative Jews to think more deeply about the notion of mitzvah — a term normally described as a “good deed” or “commandment,” but which Eisen says is really a much richer idea. He has urged rabbis to talk about the concept in their High Holy Days sermons, and he intends to pilot a mitzvah project in 10 congregations to get Jews talking about what they feel obligates them.

It is a task, Eisen says, that is urgent for a movement that has struggled to straddle the gap between fidelity to traditional Jewish law and principled adaptation to modernity.

“To bring Jews closer to mitzvah, one has to enrich the conception they’re walking around with,” Eisen said. “And that’s part of the task.”

Eisen’s emphasis on the concept of mitzvah could end up further muddying the theological line between Reform and Conservative Judaism.

Rabbi Eric Yoffie, the president of the Union of Reform Judaism, has been firm in insisting that his movement is best understood as mitzvah-oriented, not halachic-oriented — a distinction aimed at explaining that even as the Reform movement increases its embrace of ancient practices and rituals, it rejects the traditional Orthodox and Conservative notion of Jews being bound by an overarching system of religious law.

Eisen shows no indication of wanting to follow Yoffie’s lead in affirmatively severing the direct relationship between mitzvah and halacha. Yet he clearly sees the Conservative predicament in sociological terms, as a conflict between the traditional sense of commandedness and the modern ideology of the “sovereign self,” the notion that each person is lord and ruler of their own lives and practice.

In other words, Eisen’s opening of a discussion on mitzvah could be understood as an attempt to address the challenge of how to inculcate a sense of obligation among followers without their feeling from the start that they are being told what they must do.

Since being tapped for the chancellorship, Eisen has traveled the country on a “listening tour,” and what he found has made him optimistic. Conservative Jews want greater JTS involvement in their lives, he said. They want a clear message about what their movement stands for. They want improved quality and greater cooperation across the various arms of the movement. And on the eve of his inauguration, Eisen says he is poised to give it all to them.

New Conservative seminary leader outlines goals Read More »

Olmert won’t take the American approach to prop up Israeli governmental structure

Leave a Comment / Israel, Politics /

Under pressure from a key coalition partner, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has promised to pass legislation for a stronger and more stable government. But Israel will remain a parliamentary democracy and will not adopt the American-style presidential system some reformers have been advocating.

The general consensus in Israel is that the current system of proportional representation and large, unwieldy governing coalitions is not working. The proposed reforms are designed to promote stability, strengthen the executive and legislative branches and reinforce the separation of powers, but without abandoning the European-style parliamentary system.

The inherent instability of the Israeli body politic is underlined by the fact that the country has had no less than 31 governments in 59 years of statehood. The past eight years have seen six defense ministers, seven foreign ministers and eight finance ministers. The new system would make it more difficult to topple a sitting government in midterm.

Well-intentioned efforts to refine the system in the past have come to naught because political will was lacking. This time, though, the prognosis for change looks good: There is a Knesset majority for many of the proposed reforms and, more importantly, Olmert knows his government will likely fall if he fails to push through the promised package.

The urgency for change gathered steam last week when Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the hawkish Yisrael Beiteinu party, gave Olmert an ultimatum: Change the system or Yisrael Beiteinu will bolt the coalition, triggering a process that almost certainly will lead to a government collapse and early elections.

In a meeting at the prime minister’s office last week, Lieberman argued that the Olmert administration had failed to make any lasting imprint on Israeli life, but if it strengthened the ailing system of government that would be an achievement of historic significance.

Lieberman for years has been advocating the introduction of a full-fledged presidential system along American lines. That was one of the main options considered by a special commission of experts established by former President Moshe Katzav in 2005 to analyze the failings of the Israeli system and recommend reforms.

In the end, however, a commission wary of radical change opted for a measured amendment of the current system rather than the adoption of something different and untried in Israel. The Knesset’s Law, Constitution and Justice Committee, which has also been debating reform for years, concurred.

Both committees were influenced by the resounding failure of Israel’s last electoral experiment: the direct election of the prime minister, which contrary to expectations led to a strengthening of the smaller parties.

The new reform package contains the following elements:

  • After an election, the leader of the largest party automatically becomes prime minister. This will encourage voting for larger parties with realistic candidates for prime minister such as Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, Ehud Barak’s Labor or Olmert’s Kadima. Secondly, since the prime minister would have been elected, wheeler-dealer smaller parties could not play one candidate against another in coalition negotiations.
  • “Constructive no confidence.” To unseat an incumbent prime minister, at least 66 Knesset members would have to vote against him or her and agree on a successor. This would make it harder to topple a government in midterm, since the chances of opposition members from left and right coalescing around the same alternative candidate are not high. It also would make it more difficult for coalition partners to hold a prime minister to ransom by threatening to bring him or her down. As things stand, 61 Knesset members can unseat a prime minister without having to unite around a successor.
  • Raising the threshold for election to the Knesset from 2 percent to 3 percent. This would eliminate very small parties or force them to merge with like-minded larger groupings.

The president’s commission made another major recommendation: That the country be divided into 17 constituencies and that 60 of the Knesset members be elected in regional elections and 60 according to party slates. Now all 120 Knesset members are elected on party slates in a system of pure proportional representation.

This amendment also would have tended to strengthen the larger parties, as well as make the constituency-elected Knesset members directly accountable to their constituents.

The problem is that the proposal, which has been around since the mid-1950s, is it still does not have a Knesset majority. The smaller parties, fearing they stand to lose the most, are adamantly against any such change.

Ironically the change is being spurred by the very coalition pressures it seeks to eliminate. Olmert’s coalition has 77 supporters in the Knesset, but if Lieberman pulls out his 11 Yisrael Beiteinu legislators, the ultra-Orthodox Shas is likely to withdraw its 11 as well — a move that almost certainly would spark new elections.

As for Lieberman, he needs to show voters why he has remained in a coalition that is talking peace with the Palestinians on the basis of the 1967 borders.

High-profile amendments of the system that make for stronger government would provide a convincing answer.

Ever since Lieberman joined the relatively dovish coalition, he has been losing support. The question he and Olmert will have to ask themselves, though, is whether the changes they are advocating will strengthen them in an election or play into the hands of key rivals such as Netanyahu, who might sweep to power on the coattails of a system favoring larger parties like Likud and provide the new incumbent with a stronger power base from which to govern as he sees fit.

Leslie Susser is the diplomatic correspondent of the Jerusalem report

Olmert won’t take the American approach to prop up Israeli governmental structure Read More »

Jews should oppose Senator Craig’s ouster

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Politics /

Long before Sen. Larry Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct, American Jewish groups harbored serious doubts about the Idaho Republican. In June 1990, when Craig, then a congressman, was running for an open Senate seat, the Jerusalem Post bemoaned his “miserable” record on Israel. Pro-Israel political action committees raised more than $55,000 for Craig’s Democratic opponent in the race.

Now Craig, who over the weekend announced that he will step down later this month, is a man with very few friends.

One of his few outspoken defenders in recent days has been a gay, pro-Israel Jewish Democrat from Massachusetts, Rep. Barney Frank. While acknowledging that Craig’s conduct was “hypocritical,” given the Idahoan’s anti-gay rights record, Frank said his crime was “not an abuse of office” and does not warrant resignation.

Frank seemed to be speaking from his experience as an openly gay man, not from his experience as a Jew. But the American Jewish community as a whole should be upset over the Republican rush to drive Craig from office, and not just because as a senator he ended up being a pleasant surprise for pro-Israel activists.

As the late Yale historian John Boswell showed, where there is homophobia, anti-Semitism very often lurks around the corner.

“The same laws which oppressed Jews oppressed gay people; the same groups bent on eliminating Jews tried to wipe out homosexuality,” Boswell wrote.

While his study was based on medieval Europe, his words ring true in modern America. Jews may disagree about the status of homosexuals within our own religious communities, but when there is an upsurge of homophobia in society at large, all Jews should take note.

Craig, even though he insists he is not gay, appears to be a victim of homophobia.

Republicans in the Senate and the House of Representatives have long tolerated members in their midst who carried on extramarital affairs – with women. Craig’s crime in the court of law is that he allegedly sought to have sex in an airport bathroom, but his sentence in the court of public opinion is so severe because he allegedly sought to have sex with a man.

A double standard is being invoked here, and Jews, as the historical victims of double standards, have a duty to speak up.

The National Jewish Democratic Council is fulfilling that duty, at least in part. In an Aug. 30 statement, the council noted the discrepancy between the GOP’s lenient treatment of Republican Sen. David Vitter, the first-term Louisianan whose name appeared in a female prostitute’s Rolodex, and its swift punishment of Craig, who lost his major committee assignments after the sex scandal surfaced and was pressured into announcing his resignation.

Yet it is one thing to assail the Republican leadership and quite another to put in a good word for Craig himself. We may condemn Craig’s apparent attempt at adultery; we may disagree with Craig’s views on almost every topic; we may support the idea of a Democrat winning his Senate seat in 2008. But the fact remains that in the first year after his election to the Senate, Craig underwent a remarkable evolution from isolationist to Israel supporter. While his colleagues condemn Craig’s “conduct unbecoming a senator,” American Jews should remember Craig’s conduct on becoming a senator.

By 1990, Idaho’s senior senator, the Republican James McClure, had amassed, in the words of the Jerusalem Post, “one of the most anti-Israel records.” Craig, who voted in the House against aid to Israel, seemed likely to follow in the retiring McClure’s footsteps.

As a freshman senator, however, Craig reconsidered his views. He visited Israel and spoke out on the Senate floor in favor of a $10 billion package of loan guarantees to pay for the absorption of Soviet and Ethiopian immigrants. Though he is unlikely to appear on any list of the “most pro-Israel senators,” Craig has consistently cautioned his colleagues about the threats posed to Israel’s security by global jihadists and a nuclear-armed Iran.

The Book of Proverbs instructs us: “Do not forsake your friend.” Craig has been forsaken by his own party, but as Craig has shown concern for the fate of the Jews, we should likewise show concern for him.

Of course, Craig’s pro-Israel stance is not the only reason why American Jews ought to oppose Craig’s ouster. We ought to oppose his ouster because it would signal a victory for forces of hate within the Republican Party.

Seventeen years ago, American Jews tried to prevent Craig from becoming a senator, but now we should be outraged over how he lost his job.

Daniel Hemel is a 2007 Marshall Scholar and is studying international relations at the Oxford University.

Jews should oppose Senator Craig’s ouster Read More »

Time has come to stress Islam’s positive side

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

The following is an excerpt from a speech Rabbi Eric Yoffie delivered Aug. 3 to the Islamic Society of North America’s 44th annual convention in Chicago. Yoffie is president of the Union for Reform Judaism, the largest Jewish religious movement in North America, consisting of more than 900 congregations and 1.5 million Jews.

There exists in this country among all Americans — whether Jews, Christians or nonbelievers — a huge and profound ignorance about Islam. It is not that stories about Islam are missing from our media. There is no shortage of voices prepared to tell us that fanaticism and intolerance are fundamental to Islamic religion and that violence and even suicide bombing have deep Quranic roots.

There is no lack of so-called experts who are eager to seize on any troubling statement by any Muslim thinker and pin it on Islam as a whole. Thus, it has been far too easy to spread the image of Islam as enemy, as terrorist, as the frightening unknown.

How did this happen?

How did it happen that Christian fundamentalists, such as Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, make vicious and public attacks against your religious tradition?

How did it happen that when a Muslim congressman takes his oath of office while holding the Quran, Dennis Prager suggests that the congressman is more dangerous to America than the terrorists of Sept. 11?

How did it happen that a member of Congress, Tom Tancredo, now running for president, calls for the bombing of Mecca and Medina?

Even more important, how did it happen that law-abiding Muslims in this country can find themselves condemned for dual loyalty and blamed for the crimes of terrorists they abhor?

And how did it happen that in the name of security, Muslim detainees and inmates are exposed to abusive and discriminatory treatment that violates the most fundamental principles of our Constitution?

One reason that all of this happens is the profound ignorance to which I referred. We know nothing of Islam — nothing. That is why we must educate our members, and we need your help. And we hope in doing so we will set an example for all Americans.

Because the time has come to put aside what the media says is wrong with Islam and to hear from Muslims themselves what is right with Islam.

The time has come to listen to our Muslim neighbors speak from their heart and in their own words about the spiritual power of Islam and their love for their religion.

The time has come for Americans to learn how far removed Islam is from the perverse distortions of the terrorists who too often dominate the media, subverting Islam’s image by professing to speak in its name.

The time has come to stand up to the opportunists in our midst — the media figures, religious leaders and politicians who demonize Muslims and bash Islam, exploiting the fears of their fellow citizens for their own purposes.

And finally this: The time has come to end racial profiling and legal discrimination of any kind against Muslim Americans. Yes, we must assure the security of our country; this is absolutely our government’s first obligation. But let’s not breach the Constitution in ways we will later regret. After all, civil liberties are America’s strength, not our weakness….

….The dialogue will not be one way, of course. You will teach us about Islam, and we will teach you about Judaism. We will help you to overcome stereotyping of Muslims, and you will help us to overcome stereotyping of Jews.

We are especially worried now about anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Anti-Semitism is not native to Islamic tradition, but a virulent form of it is found today in a number of Islamic societies, and we urgently require your assistance in mobilizing Muslims here and abroad to delegitimize and combat it.

A measure of our success will be our ability, each of us, to discuss and confront extremism in our midst. As a Jew, I know that our sacred texts, including the Hebrew Bible, are filled with contradictory propositions, and these include passages that appear to promote violence, and thus offend our ethical sensibilities. Such texts are to be found in all religions, including Christianity and Islam.

The overwhelming majority of Jews reject violence by interpreting these texts in a constructive way, but a tiny, extremist minority chooses destructive interpretations instead, finding in the sacred words a vengeful, hateful God. Especially disturbing is the fact that the moderate majority, at least some of the time, decides to cower in the face of the fanatic minority — perhaps because they seem more authentic or appear to have greater faith and greater commitment.

When this happens, my task as a rabbi is to rally that reasonable, often-silent majority and encourage them to assert the moderate principles that define their beliefs and Judaism’s highest ideals. My Christian and Muslim friends tell me that precisely the same dynamic operates in their traditions, and from what I can see, that is manifestly so.

Surely, as we know from the headlines, you have what I know must be for you, as well as for us, an alarming number of extremists of your own — those who kill in the name of God and hijack Islam in the process. It is therefore our collective task to strengthen and inspire one another as we fight the fanatics and work to promote the values of justice and love that are common to both our faiths.

I am optimistic that we can do this. After all, there is much that we share. As small minorities here, we worry how we will fare and if we will survive in the great American melting pot. As committed God-seekers in an age of moral relativism, we are distressed by the trends that pollute our children’s lives: incredibly trashy television, high divorce rates and media images that demean and objectify women.

At the same time and without contradiction, we are both beneficiaries of the blessings bestowed by this great and wonderful country. For all of its problems, America provides us with a secure sanctuary that safeguards our right to be different. And despite the prejudice that we still confront, America offers a measure of diversity and tolerance unmatched in any place or time in history.

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Elegy for a Dream

Leave a Comment / Gina Nahai, Opinion, Power, United States, Worldwide /

I came to America 30 years ago last month. I arrived in Los Angeles the night Elvis died. I was 16 years old, fresh out of a Swiss boarding school, about to
start my first year of college.

This was two years before the Islamic Revolution, yet I had left Iran willingly and without regret, certain that I would never go back except to visit. I did love the country, and most of its people. To this day, I think it’s the most beautiful place I have seen, and that its people, by and large, are among the smartest, most hospitable, most capable in the world.

But even in 1977, when the Shah was still firmly in power and his kingdom was, in the fateful words of President Carter, “an island of stability,” Iran was a place of great injustice and vast intolerance — a land of the mighty where the rich, the well-connected wielded nearly absolute power over the weak. And though I came from a well-to-do family, at a time when the Jews had thrived and prospered thanks to the Shah, I was acutely aware of the small and large cruelties — the devastating limitations imposed on the poor, the meek and women by religion and geography and thousand-year-old traditions.

The first two years in Los Angeles were a time of great loneliness for me: I had lost touch with my Iranian friends when I left for boarding school, and I lost my boarding school friends when I left for America. Back then, most Americans had not heard of Iran and couldn’t imagine what kind of place it was. When I told them it’s somewhere in the Middle East, near some Arab countries, and that we had oil, they asked, without malice or sarcasm, if I could belly-dance and if we had paved roads and cars or if we rode camels to work and school. When I told them that Iranians are not Arabs, that Iran is the old Persia, they looked at me suspiciously and asked why, then, had I claimed I was Iranian, and not Persian.

Still, there was something about being cut loose from the past, existing in a vacuum of tradition and identity so dissimilar to the rigid structure that would have stifled me in Iran, having possibilities I wouldn’t have dared contemplate as a woman or a Jew back there, that gave me a sense of exhilaration and optimism.

When the Shah fell in early ’79, and tens of thousands of other Iranians began to settle in Los Angeles, I thought I had been granted two blessings at once: I could live in the proximity of my Iranian family and friends, without having to submit to the inequities of Iranian society. I found it strange that other Iranian Jews, even women my age, lamented the fall of the Shah and their own subsequent exile with such great passion, that they spent months, even years, glued to American television and Farsi language radio, waiting for news of the coup they were sure the Shah, and later his son, would stage. I could understand the sense of loss and disorientation, the nostalgia for home and country that many of my fellow Iranian Jews suffered from in those days, but I didn’t see how any of us would want to return to the place we had been, in my mind at least, liberated from. How we could, in good conscience, pray to return to life in a dictatorship when we could live in a democratic country; how we could wish to be ruled by one man’s whims and wishes when we could opt for a set of laws that transcended the individual?

Once the Shah died and his crown prince assumed the role of “monarch in exile,” I watched with wonder as Iranians rallied around him in hopes that he would unseat the mullahs and bring them all back home. I had seen him — Crown Prince Reza — when I was a child in Iran. He was about my age. In official photographs and on the television news, he looked lost in his surroundings, uncomfortable in the French suits and military uniforms he was made to wear, uneasy before the grown men who bowed before him and kissed his hand, the jewel-clad women who were moved to tears by the honor of having permission to curtsy before him.

Three decades later, in the gatherings hosted by Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles, he was tall, graying, and still, to my mind, a bit lost. He spoke about his imminent return to Iran, how he was going to save the country and its people, rule as a constitutional monarch. To me, he sounded tentative — as if he were playing a role he had assumed for lack of another option, chasing a destiny that, try as he might, he knew he wasn’t going to catch. But all around me people sat glued to his words, praising his speeches, rushing to applaud.

I could understand the adoration most Jews had for him and his father: The Shah had been good to us. He had given us freedom and opportunity and a sense of safety we hadn’t known for more than 1,000 years of living in Shiite Iran. But he had also ruled as a tyrant who claimed he was God’s personal envoy on Earth, who insisted that his portrait be displayed in every house and business establishment in the country, that his anthem — not the national anthem, but the one created to worship him — be played in every movie theater before every showing of every film. That schoolchildren everywhere in the country begin their day with a prayer for his health and well-being. His appetite for power was endless; the consequences for disobeying were unthinkable. Is this, I wondered, what people were wishing to return to?

On Aug. 24, I was clearing out my junk e-mail when I came upon an e-mail sent by one of the many Iranian-American groups active on the Web. Perhaps because it was the anniversary of my arrival in the United States, because I was already amazed and stunned at the speed with which time had passed, I opened the e-mail. It was a grainy, black-and-white, home video shot by an unsteady hand and posted on You Tube. It showed images of Tehran on the morning of the Shah’s official coronation: Empty, barricaded streets; the Shah and his family inside a palace, walking down a velvet rug, up to a bejeweled throne where he placed a crown on his queen’s head, and another on his own. Afterward, thousands of people lined up behind barricades on the sides of the streets, an endless police motorcade, two carriages — one for the Shah and his queen, the other for the crown prince — pulled by white horses. It was an unreal sight — the young prince, so small that his feet, I imagined, didn’t reach the floor of the carriage, sitting behind the window with the solid gold frame, waving his little hand at his father’s subjects, traversing a street, a city, a country that, he has been told all his life, will one day be his.

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Jew-Baiting

Leave a Comment / Opinion, Rob Eshman /

Five years ago, before the start of the Iraq War, I wrote an editorial titled “The Jewish War.” If the Iraq War is a disaster, I wrote, mainstream voices will start blaming the Jews.

Far-right pundits like Pat Buchanan had long pointed at Israel and the Jews for America’s problems abroad. But my finely tweaked Jew-dar had picked up signals that far more moderate pundits, like CNBC’s Chris Matthews, were now echoing the Buchanan trope. They pointed out how many of the war’s neoconservative boosters were pro-Israel Jews, and wondered aloud if these people weren’t pushing a reluctant nation toward war to benefit the Zionist enterprise.

“If the war against Iraq goes well, the conspiracy theorists will remain on the fringe,” I wrote. “But should America get sucked into a debilitating conflict, if Israel appears to have gained strategic ground at the expense of large numbers of American lives, the fringe will move onto center stage, and the calls to label Bush’s policy a Jewish war will rouse us, sharply and painfully, from our couches.”

Guess what? It’s time to get off the couch.

“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt came out this week, a mainstream book by mainstream professors that will no doubt climb the mainstream charts.

Its core argument is that the pro-Israel lobby has hijacked American foreign policy. That lobby puts Israel’s interests above America’s own, and has led to any number of foreign policy blunders, and one bona fide disaster: the Iraq War.

Part II of the book — which is a padded-out companion to the sloppily argued academic paper of the same title — is titled, “The Lobby in Action.”

And the crowning chapter of this section — certainly one of the most interest to average Americans who couldn’t find Palestine on a map — is, “Iraq and Dreams of Transforming the Middle East.” This chapter blames the “Israel lobby” and, by extension, the Jews, for the debacle of the Iraq War.

America’s seeming military invulnerability, its desire to strike back at all enemies after Sept. 11, and its deep insecurity that another Sept. 11 was on the horizon all turned policymakers’ heads toward Iraq, Walt and Mearsheimer write.

“But there was another variable in the equation,” they go on, “and the war certainly would not have occurred had it been absent. That element was the Israel lobby … Israeli officials and former Israeli leaders supported these efforts….”

“Pressure from Israel and the lobby was not the only factor behind the Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element.”

Told you so.

So far the controversy surrounding this book has focused on its unbalanced approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (It is not an exaggeration to say that in the view of the authors, the whole thing is Israel’s fault, aided and abetted by the American Jewish Israel lobby and their puppets in the Congress and the White House. Five decades of Arab rejectionism and Palestinian terror, Yasser Arafat’s torpedoing of the Oslo accords, a majority American and Israeli Jewish support for land-for-peace deals — none of this matters.)

But the truly insidious and lasting impact of the book is to shift the blame for one of America’s biggest foreign policy disasters onto history’s favorite scapegoat.

The authors take pains — well, four pages — to note that Jews are loyal Americans and that their lobbying is legal, like that of other special interest groups. “The Israel lobby is the antithesis of a cabal or conspiracy; it operates out in the open and proudly advertises its own clout…. What sets it apart, in short, is its extraordinary effectiveness.”

But these pages, which may as well have been titled, “Hey, Some of Our Best Friends Are Jewish,” are contradicted time and again in the authors’ selective re-telling of the events leading up the Iraq War.

A Jew, Douglas Feith, then at the Department of Defense, secretly manipulated intelligence. The Office of Special Plans, headed by neocon Abram Shulsky, forged close ties with Israeli sources to funnel faulty intelligence to government decisionmakers. In other words, all that stuff we said about those America-first, nonconspiratorial Jews? Just kidding: they really are a sneaky bunch.

Government officials, scholars and polemicists from all sides of the political spectrum — from David Gergen to Noam Chomsky — have found the Walt-Mearsheimer charges concerning America’s Middle East policy and the Iraq War naive, wrong-headed and unsupported by the facts.

Perhaps the authors advanced their arguments because they deeply believe the Iraq War was a Jewish war.

Or perhaps they figure the best way to draw attention to America’s policy vis-a- vis Israel is to drag in an issue that average Americans read and care about far more — the war. Or perhaps the whole incendiary mess is just a bit of highly remunerative Jew-baiting — nothing seems to stoke outrage and sell books more than getting the Jews riled up. There were lines around the block when Jimmy Carter came to Los Angeles to sign copies of “Israel: Peace or Apartheid.”

Walt and Mearsheimer will appear at the Hammer Museum in Westwood Sept. 18, and I suppose they’ll move a few books.

My suggestion is that you read the book as scholars will read it decades from now: not for its insights into American foreign policy, but for how respectable scholars can twist facts and spurn logic to lead societies down darkening corridors of hate.

Jew-Baiting Read More »