November 27, 2007

Well, apparently American cultural phenomenons arrive in Poland quite late. But it’s still comical to think of a half-naked irreverent Jewish comedian flaunting it on a billboard above an old Communist building.

I plugged the text into InterTran and it came up with this: “wherebyprzez co ubaw, this when armpits.”

Thanks to David A. Lehrer, father of Jonah and president of Community Advocates Inc., for snapping the photo.

The Philadelphia Weekly messed up on this cover image for it’s holiday gift guide.

The only rodent in the entire spread is the critter on the cover.

Tim Whitaker, editor of PW, said that “it never occurred to us” that the front page could have been seen as offensive. Originally, he said, the idea was to use the dog on the sleigh as the lead image—that is, until the hamster one was presented.

That animal is the pet of Liz Spikol, the newspaper’s senior contributing editor.

Spikol said that once it was decided to have “cuteness” as the theme for this year’s guide, cute animals came to mind. She immediately thought of her male hamster, whose name is, coincidentally, Tinsel, and whom she described as “super cute.”

But why dress him as an Orthodox Jew? Why the overtly Jewish symbols to highlight the least religious of the religion’s holidays?

Spikol said that the paper’s art director created the “hat ensemble” for Tinsel to wear; it was geared to be “more graphically appealing” and “to make it readable as a Jewish observance.”

She added that, as a Jew herself, she doesn’t find the image offensive, and she doesn’t “understand why Orthodoxy would be offensive.”

“I just thought it was a fun image in context of our theme,” said Spikol.

A rodent as a symbol for the Jew has a long and notorious history, which becomes apparent even if you do a rudimentary search on the Internet.

Nazi propaganda throughout the 1930s—films, posters and other images—depicted Jews as rats and other vermin; the point was to portray Jews as subhuman creatures who were unclean and in need of extermination.

The rodent family is a large and varied class of animals, replied Spikol. There is a huge difference, she added, between a rat and a hamster—and hamsters, she said, were never used in Nazi propaganda.

Despite Spikol’s reasoning, some are upset with the cover.

“Where did your art director receive her training?” wrote Solomon Moses in an angry letter he sent to PW and then forwarded to the Exponent. “At the Heinrich Himmler Academy of Design?”

 

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)

Gary Wills, whose book “Head and Heart: American Christianities” was just published, recently had an opinion piece in the LA Times arguing that “abortion isn’t a religious issue.”

But is abortion murder? Most people think not. Evangelicals may argue that most people in Germany thought it was all right to kill Jews. But the parallel is not valid. Killing Jews was killing persons. It is not demonstrable that killing fetuses is killing persons. Not even evangelicals act as if it were. If so, a woman seeking an abortion would be the most culpable person. She is killing her own child. But the evangelical community does not call for her execution.

About 10% of evangelicals, according to polls, allow for abortion in the case of rape or incest. But the circumstances of conception should not change the nature of the thing conceived. If it is a human person, killing it is punishing it for something it had nothing to do with. We do not kill people because they had a criminal parent.

Nor did the Catholic Church treat abortion as murder in the past. If it had, late-term abortions and miscarriages would have called for treatment of the well-formed fetus as a person, which would require baptism and a Christian burial. That was never the practice. And no wonder. The subject of abortion is not scriptural. For those who make it so central to religion, this seems an odd omission. Abortion is not treated in the Ten Commandments—or anywhere in Jewish Scripture. It is not treated in the Sermon on the Mount—or anywhere in the New Testament. It is not treated in the early creeds. It is not treated in the early ecumenical councils.

What surprises me is not that Wills, who is Catholic, believes abortion doesn’t constitute murder, but that the LA Times would publish such an ancient argument and couch it as a fresh opinion. Wills’ position is one of two long held on abortion: either life begins at conception and abortion is murder or fetuses are not yet people so it’s permissable.

Also just because the church had a history of doing things one way or because 10 percent of evangelicals would allow abortion under certain circumstances doesn’t mean they are in line or out of line with Christian teaching.

Wills is certainly an accomplished author and historian (I can only hope to be so lucky one day); it’s just that I find this argument so weak and the topic so stale. For a more compelling read on choice, look to Dan Neil.

And let me know not whether you think abortion is a religious issue, but whether it should be.

(Hat tip: DMN religion blog)

No joke.

Regarding the Annapolis peace summit, which will be held tomorrow, Time magazine reports:

When Middle East adversaries meet in Annapolis this week, will it be a peace conference, or rather a conference that ends all peace? Nearly 60 years since the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict, that may well be the stark choice that awaits the conference’s participants.

Doomsday predictions, of course, have long been a staple of Middle East commentary. Every negotiation seems to be the “last chance” for peace. Every crisis seems to threaten the outbreak of a major war, if not the great apocalypse. But there’s reason to pay attention to the warnings this time. The 1979 Camp David peace treaty between Egypt and Israel planted the seed for resolving the core of the conflict: the creation of an independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab territories seized by Israel in the 1967 war. But if the Annapolis conference fails to provide urgently needed nourishment, the two-state solution and its hope of peace may die forever.