January 8, 2008

Despite Barack Obama’s decisive victory in Iowa last week, and double-digit leads for tonight’s primary in New Hampshire, and maybe because the Republican landscape remains so unclear, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg continues to play the will-he-or-won’t-he game.

Onto this crowded and rejuvenated political stage now comes Michael Bloomberg, our skilled and uncommonly non-neurotic mayor, engaged in a different variety of the electoral enterprise—a prolonged game of Presidential footsie. Even as he has issued denials of interest to everyone from the press corps at City Hall to Ryan Seacrest on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Eve broadcast, Bloomberg has deputized some of his leading aides to draw up scenarios for a third-party candidacy and to keep the interest of the press well fluffed. The press, titillated by access, has coöperated with front-page “would-he, could-he” stories. This week, Bloomberg will attend a meeting of Unity08, in Oklahoma, to discuss third-party options, and in recent weeks he has displayed a vague yet imperious disdain for the assembled candidates, while privately hustling from one policy consultant and policy grandee to the next, to ask, “What chance does a five-foot-seven billionaire Jew who’s divorced really have of becoming President?”

The reason that Bloomberg’s coy exploratory venture has earned him such attention is obvious. “There are two things that are important in politics,” Mark Hanna, the Ohio industrialist and senator who ran William McKinley’s campaign, in 1896, said. “The first is money and I can’t remember what the second one is.” All the front-runners except Mike Huckabee are millionaires to one degree or another—Obama is the poorest, with a net worth of just over a million dollars, Mitt Romney the richest, with two hundred million—but Bloomberg is wealthier by an order of magnitude. According to Forbes, he is worth more than eleven billion dollars. Bloomberg owns an estate in Bermuda, a horse farm in Westchester County, a condominium in Vail, a ten-million-dollar town house in London, and a thirteen-and-a-half-million-dollar town house on East Seventy-ninth Street. To commute among them, he takes his private jet, a Falcon 9. He isn’t stingy, though; he’s one of the leading philanthropists in the United States and has said that at some point he hopes to give away as much as four hundred million dollars a year.

Still, running for President is not cheap.

The biggest question, obviously, is whether a third-party candidate—Bloomberg is a nominal Independent—can really compete in a two-party system. I know a lot of Republican Jews who remain excited about the possibility of voting for someone they agree with not just fiscally but socially, but most observers have so far said Bloomberg couldn’t overcome the outsider handicap.

New New York Times columnist Bill Kristol—liberals didn’t exactly role out the welcome mat—used his first paid column to pom-pom Mike Huckabee. This surprised me because, aside from the clear religious and social differences between the two, Huckabee seems to be among the least globally aware of the Republican presidential candidates, and I always thought foreign policy was what neocons prided themselves on.

Then again, with statements like this, maybe Kristol and Huckabee have the same knowledge of what’s going on in the Middle East.

Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

Who knew we were winning the war in Iraq? At this point, is it accurate to even call the situation over there a “war?” Or is it better to refer to it as a colossal screw-up in reconstruction (though, yes, some progress has been measurable)?

This is good news:

A Roman Catholic newspaper has reported the Malaysian government has reversed its decision to ban the publication over its use of the word Allah, easing tensions that had strained racial harmony in the multiethnic country.

In a surprising turnabout, the government renewed The Herald weekly’s 2008 permit without any conditions, said its editor Rev. Lawrence Andrew. Internal security officials declined to comment. All publications in Malaysia require a government permit, which is renewed annually.

The government had said that Allah, an Arabic word for God, can only be used by Muslims. Officials feared that using Allah in Christian literature would confuse the Malays and draw them to Christianity.

Malaysian Christians said that Allah that was used by Christians before Islam was established. Even in Malaysia, Malay-speaking Christians have used the word Allah for generations. Allah also means God in Bahasa Melayu, the language of Malays.

Though Muslims, Christians and Jews all worship the God of Abraham, there are clearly differences in how members of those faiths understand Him, which I would say actually means they believe in different representations of the same One God. Other amateur theologians argue that members of the Abrahamic faiths believe in a different Creator. Assuming the former is true, should Christians call God “Allah?”

Those who came to Oba Ernesto Pichardo’s fall semester course at Florida International University’s Biscayne Bay campus expecting chicken heads, seashells and drum circles probably left disappointed.

The controversial, charismatic and enterprising Pichardo, a Yoruba priest and the country’s leading expert on Santeria, spent hours talking about the transatlantic slave trade, paraded in cultural anthropology professors and expected both Powerpoint presentations and 12-page research papers at semester’s end.

It was a different side of a man best known for having spent the last few decades fighting lawmakers and Santeria detractors. His most notorious tussle: with the city of Hialeah over sanctioning animal sacrifices in religious ceremonies. He won, earning the U.S. Supreme Court’s blessing.

He also won over his sixteen undergraduate students this year. The class included several religious studies majors, a Peruvian-American Broward school teacher, a 61-year-old auditor and a grandfather-grandson duo. Many of them came to get in touch with their Afro-Caribbean roots.

Four months ago he concluded FIU’s first three-credit Santeria class, with a grand prediction: “You are making history here today.’‘

‘‘This is not some fringe movement,’’ Pichardo told his students. “If you can get a Ph.D. in Judaism or Christianity, you should at least be able to take a course in Santeria.’‘

Santeria is not a religion I suspect many Americans are familiar with. The only place most people my age have probably even heard that word was on KROQ about 10 years ago. I don’t think the above article from the Miami Herald does much to explain the belief practices associated with it either. It’s roots lie in the Yoruba people of Nigeria, and the most controversial element is that of animal sacrifice. I find more interesting the Santeria understanding of God and of good and evil.

The Yoruba believe in a creator who is called Olofi (god). There is no specific belief in a devil since the Yoruba belief system is not a dualistic philosophy — good versus evil, God versus a devil. Instead the universe is seen as containing forces of expansion and forces of contraction. These forces interact in complex ways to create the universe. All things are seen to have positive aspects, or Iré, and negative aspects, or Ibi. Nothing is seen as completely good or completely evil but all things are seen as having different proportions of both. Similarly no action is seen as universally as wrong or right, but rather can only be judged with the context and circumstances in which it takes place.

I mentioned this summer that Santeria is a popular religion among Major League Baseball’s Latin American players, though few are willing to talk about it.

(Hat tip: GetReligion)

Speaking of Germany, the Economist has a story about the reborn Jewish community there. and how its resulting from an influx of Soviet immigrants is causing a totally different crisis.

German Jews who survived in Germany, or in exile, had a deeply ambivalent relationship with their homeland. Apart from guilt—that they had survived, and even stayed in the killers’ country—many felt an almost physical revulsion when they came into close contact with Germans. So they retreated to live in yet another form of ghetto.

By the time the Berlin Wall fell, Germany’s Jewish community had only 30,000 ageing members and was dwindling rapidly. Today it is the third-largest, and the fastest-growing, Jewish population in western Europe, after France and Britain. Between 1991, when the country was unified and immigration rules relaxed, and 2005, more than 200,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union emigrated to Germany. (At the same time, more than a million emigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel and about 350,000 to America, leaving only about 800,000 behind.) In some parts of Germany, immigrants—usually referred to as “the Russians”—make up 90% of the local Jewish population.

A few of the so-called established Jews—those who lived in Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall—are enthusiastic about the new arrivals. Hermann Simon, director of the Centrum Judaicum, a museum and research centre in Berlin, was born in 1949 of German parents, and grew up in East Berlin. He says that without the immigration of Russian Jews, the future for Germany’s Jews would be dark.

Yet most established Jews disagree. The dapper Mr Schoeps, now director of the Moses-Mendelssohn Centre for European-Jewish Studies in Potsdam, near Berlin, argues that Germany’s old Jewish heritage is gone. Its so-called “memory landscape”—memorial sites, commemorative plaques, cultural centres and museums—is now being guarded by gentiles who are merely interested in things Jewish; the sort of people who crowd to the Chanukkah market at Berlin’s Jewish Museum to sample latkes and sufganiot (doughnuts) and to sip kosher mulled wine.

As for the immigrants from the former Soviet Union, most neither know nor care about Jewish rituals and traditions. Few of the newcomers keep a kosher home. Many men are not circumcised. When they arrive in Germany, they focus on the practicalities of life—jobs, flats, social security and health insurance. They play chess rather than Skat, a popular card game in Germany. Their cultural icons are Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky, not Goethe and Beethoven, let alone Mendelssohn or Heine, who were German Jews.

Established Jews find the newcomers anders (different from us), suspect that they are not “real” Jews and think they are mainly coming in search of prosperity and material help from the state and the community. “They take whatever they can get,” sniffs one.

It’s not so much eerie as it is reinforcing how familiar this story is. Immigrant Jews have often been at odds with their more refined second- and third-generation co-religionists. In fact, Stanley Gold, the new chair of the Jewish Federation of Greater LA, told me his father was born in El Paso because his grandfather had been forced to immigrate through a port in Texas by New York’s German Jews, those elite publishers and bankers with names like Schiff and Sulzberger (though not necessarily those men), who had succeeded in redirecting Yiddish-speaking Hebrews from Central and Eastern Europe.

Here in Los Angeles, there has certainly been a delay, if unintentional, in breaking down the barriers between the former Soviet Jews and the more-established Jewish community. Not to mention the overdue acceptance of tens of thousands of Persian Jews.

(Hat tip: Bintel Blog)