Jewish World Watch discusses state of humanity; Panel discusses Iranian
Jewish World Watch Discusses State of Humanity, Screens Documentaries
For every 100,000 babies born, 6,500 mothers die in the Badakhshan region of Afghanistan due to unavailable or inadequate medical care. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, violent conflicts over control of its rich mineral deposits have killed more people than the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Darfur combined.
And in Burma, the lives of innocent civilians are plagued with malaria, torture and forced labor.
Images depicting these horrific conditions comprised Jewish World Watch’s (JWW) third State of Humanity Forum at Creative Artists Agency on Dec. 3., where JWW Executive Director Tzivia Schwartz-Getzug and President Janice Kamenir-Reznik welcomed more than 100 people to a screening of documentary films followed by a panel discussion.
The documentaries screened included “Losing Hope — Women in Afghanistan” (2007), “War Against Women — The Use of Rape as a Weapon in Congo’s Civil War” (2008), a “60 Minutes” report by Anderson Cooper and “Fueling Abuse: Foreign Investment and Terror in Burma” (2002).
Each of the three panelists underscored the lifeblood of foreign investments enabling these dangerous situations.
“You have to ask yourself: Who is buying these minerals?” urged Ernestine Mwanasali from Friends of Congo. She explained that the global market for Congo’s reserves of diamonds, gold, copper and manganese (a mineral found in many electronics, including cellphones and iPods) is directly arming the militias that orchestrate mass rape and genocide. “If we don’t get to the source, this conflict continues,” she said, insinuating that China, the United Kingdom and the United States play primary roles.
The conflict in the Congo began when thousands of Hutu militias fled Rwanda after participating in the 1994 genocide there, which killed more than 500,000 Tutsis. Mwanasali accused Rwandan President Paul Kagame, who was welcomed to President Bush’s White House at least twice, of refusing to recapture the loose militias unless he can gain access to Congo’s mineral resources.
“These bloody histories are fueled and funded by foreign contributions — the U.S. chief among them,” said Sonali Kolhatkar, co-director of the Afghan Women’s Mission. Kolhatkar focused her address on the reversal of women’s rights since the 1970s, when progressive views of women took root in the capital of Kabul.
She blamed U.S. troops for widespread civilian killings and disagreed with President-elect Barack Obama’s plan to send more troops to the region.
Geoffrey Cowan, former dean of USC’s Annenberg School for Communication, moderated the discussion, which at times lacked interplay among the panelists, and instead allowed each advocate to speak out.
Since its inception in 2004, JWW has administered more than $2 million in direct aid to Darfur/Chad in the form of water wells and medical clinics. And although humanitarian crises around the world continue to escalate and JWW needs funds to pursue its global mission, Kamenir-Reznik said JWW is “mindful of the economic times” but asked the Jewish community to prioritize its giving in the service of human rights.
Panel of Experts Discusses Dynamic Growth of Iranian Jewish Community
 Nahid Pirnazar, Jimmy Delshad, Gina Nahai, Rabbi David Wolpe and Sam Nazarian. Photo by Jon Vidar</i></p>
<p>Nearly 200 local Iranian Jews, academic scholars and community leaders packed a Sinai Temple banquet hall on Nov. 17 to hear a panel of experts discuss the dynamic 30-year growth of Southern California’s Iranian Jewry. The gathering at the Westwood synagogue was one of nearly a dozen during Integrating Sephardi and Mizrachi Studies: Research and Practice, a three-day academic conference that focused on the current state of Sephardic studies and was organized by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR).</p>
<p>Moderated by Sinai Rabbi David Wolpe, panelists included author and Journal columnist Gina Nahai; Jewish UCLA professor of Judeo-Persian literature Nahid Pirnazar; Beverly Hills City Councilman Jimmy Delshad; and film producer, hotelier and nightclub entrepreneur Sam Nazarian. The panelists discussed sensitive topics, including gossip, differing levels of religious observance and the challenges of money and marriage that many in the community wrestle with but rarely discuss in public. </p>
<p>“We were incredibly pleased with the response we received from the community, and I don’t think we quite expected it to hit the nerve it hit,” said Mark Kligman, conference director and professor of Jewish musicology at HUC-JIR in New York. </p>
<p>“One reason we had this conference in Los Angeles was to feature a living Sephardic community like the Iranian Jewish community,” he said. <br />
Many attendees said they came to hear Nazarian, the successful 33-year-old businessman, who speaks infrequently at public forums. </p>
<p>“I think it’s important to celebrate how the first set of Persian Jewish immigrants hit the ground running here,” Nazarian said. “I bring another perspective, which is from the entertainment and hospitality industry, and I was honored to be asked to speak along with Mayor Delshad and Rabbi Wolpe.” </p>
<p><i>— Karmel Melamed, Contributing Writer <br />
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National Association of Evangelicals VP resigns over view on same-sex marriage
Richard Cizik, the National Association of Evangelicals long-time vice president for government affairs, resigned today. Cizik has been an enlightened voice of conscience, unafraid to stick to his guns, and his politics haven’t always played well with some evangelicals. That was definitely the case when Cizik told NPR’s Terry Gross that his views on same-sex marriage were “shifting.”
“I was stunned when I heard it. I was momentarily speechless, and for me, that’s quite a feat,” Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, told Christianity Today “[As spokesmen], we’re not hired to express our personal opinions,” Land said. “Clearly, under Rich’s leadership in Washington, the NAE has increasingly taken positions that have been nontraditional positions for the NAE.”
After hearing of Cizik’s resignation—that’s what they’re calling it—CT spoke with NAE interim President Leith Anderson:
Was Cizik asked to resign?
There was a discussion and a consensus that his credibility as spokesperson for the NAE was irreparably compromised. It was out of reporting that discussion to Richard Cizik that he and I discussed together and mutually concluded that his resignation was appropriate.
What exactly in NPR’s Fresh Air interview caused concern?
His role as a spokesperson is to advocate for NAE’s values and positions, and that did not appropriately come through in what he said or the way he said it, and it was on several fronts.
Cizik said in the interview, “I’m shifting, I have to admit. In other words, I would willingly say that I believe in civil unions. I don’t officially support redefining marriage from its traditional definition, I don’t think.” Is that the part that caused concern?
What you’re asking for is specifics, and I don’t think that our discussion was primarily parsing words. It was whether or not he in this interview adequately was a representative for NAE and our constituency, and the conclusion was that he was not. The NAE’s position on gay marriage is not shifting. And we are not advocates for civil unions, although many evangelicals recognize the reality that civil unions have become law in many states. But we’re not advocating for them.
Most of the interview was about the environment.
It was not the part about the environment. As far as the environment is concerned, NAE, in its “For the Health of the Nation” statement, clearly says that creation care is one of the values that we do espouse.
Cizik has also been criticized for telling NPR that he voted for Barack Obama in the primary. Was that also a concern for the NAE?
Generally in America, people don’t say whom they vote for. I think in listening to the interview, it seemed to me that [Fresh Air host] Terry Gross was surprised that he said whom he voted for. And he declined to say whom he voted for in the general election. But for NAE and all of us who seek to be a bipartisan voice, it’s generally not in our best interests to declare whom we vote for.
Did he say something in that interview that NAE doesn’t support? For instance, is there anywhere in the NAE documents that says the NAE doesn’t support civil unions?
I don’t know off the top of my head, because [civil unions are] a relatively recent phenomenon. We have had resolutions passed that have clearly declared that our understanding of biblical marriage is one man to one woman. I think … that the role of an NAE spokesperson is primarily on behalf of what we have said, not on behalf of what we have not said. It’s also to represent our constituency, and our constituency does not favor civil unions.
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Huckabee talks about gay marriage on ‘The Daily Show’
If you missed Mike Huckabee‘s appearance on “The Daily Show” Tuesday night, the above clip shows him talking about the definition of marriage. We know what Jon Stewart thinks—“it seems like a fundamental human right.” Huckabee, who shed weight and got famously thin, looks likes he’s put a few pounds back on and, in arguing against changing the definition of marriage, he gets, um, anatomical.
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Muslim pilgrims chant ‘Death to America’ and ‘Death to Israel’
A recent study found that participating in “the hajj may be helpful in curbing the spread of extremism in the Islamic world.”
The annual Muslim pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca—an act that every able Muslim is expected to perform at least once in their life (and that Hamas prevented Palestinians in Gaza from partaking in this year)—reached its climax with the celebration of Eid Monday. Before it was over, they got to hear this not-so-uncommon rant
Despite a ban on political activities at haj, a senior Iranian cleric gave a speech at Arafat to a group of pilgrims, who chanted “Death to America” and “Death to Israel”, Iran’s state television showed.
Ayatollah Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri, head of Iran’s haj mission, told the pilgrims some Muslims had despaired “in the face of Western civilization’s onslaught” but that today there was a “resurgence of Islam”.
Amazing how political agents have no shame in hijacking religious ceremonies to prop up their agenda. Most how been awkward for the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of American Muslims on hajj.
(Hat tip: Mere Rhetoric)
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Anti-Semitism in Pakistan — hate on a sliding scale
This is the second of two parts on Pakistan and terror. Previously: Pakistan Reaction: Something dark is growing in our own backyard
Right in the middle of Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, stands one of the most recognized symbols of Judaism: the Star of David. It adorns, in relief, Merewether Tower, one of the city’s best-known landmarks, a 112-foot-tall clock tower built by Sir Evans James in 1892. Today, a busy transit intersection has developed around the tower, which hundreds of thousands of Muslims pass each day 
on their way to work.
Nadeem Ahmed, a broker at the Karachi Stock Exchange located just across the street, points to some old graffiti at the base of the tower that reads “Israel na manzoor” (Israel is not acceptable).
“These marks show the anger of some fanatics for the brutality of Israelis against the Muslims of Palestine and Lebanon,” he says. “Frankly speaking, I’m neither happy nor sad about the Jews who were killed in Mumbai.”
Ahmed’s apathy falls right in the middle of the spectrum of Pakistani attitudes toward Jews. At one end are the virulently anti-Semitic beliefs held by people such as the members of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba (LeT), Army of the Pure, a banned terrorist outfit operating in Kashmir. The LeT is suspected of being behind the attack on the Chabad House in Mumbai and the murder of the five Jews, including Rabbi Gabriel Holtzberg and his wife, Rivkah.
At the other end of the spectrum are Pakistanis such as Maria (not her real name), a Shia who converted to Judaism, married a Jewish professor whom she met during her studies in the United States and with whom she has two children.
Unfortunately, tragedies such as what took place in Mumbai last month, in New York in 2001 and in London in 2005, as well as the 2002 murder in Karachi of Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Daniel Pearl, throw the spotlight on only one end of the spectrum in Pakistan and give the worst impression of Muslims. The other end lies in the dark — the many other variations of how Pakistani Muslims perceive Jews are left out of the picture.
Merewether Tower
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2009
I’ve been reading a lot of Ralph Waldo Emerson lately. I recommend him when times get tough.
“People wish to be settled,” Emerson wrote. “It is only as far as they are unsettled that there is any hope for them.”
Well, there is hope for us. A lot of hope — it’s been a very unsettling week.
Any Monday that begins with news that the Los Angeles Times’ parent company is filing for bankruptcy protection, The New York Times is putting its headquarters in hock, General Motors is gong to be run by a government nanny, NBC is going to start cutting its programming hours, unemployment is at record levels and laid-off workers are beginning to protest the fact that Bank of America gets $25 billion and they don’t even get bus fare home — this isn’t the dawn of a new week, but of a new era.
A month ago my Shabbat dinner companion was an investment analyst who pulled all his clients out of the markets in October — October of 2007. He said his company ran sophisticated mathematical models that showed the financial markets were — hmm, what’s the polite word here? — doomed.
“This isn’t the end of the beginning,” he told me. “This is the beginning of the beginning.”
The pain will continue to spread around the world.
“Dubai is going to look like a ghost town,” he said. “It’s overbuilt, there are no buyers and the price of oil is going to go through the floor.”
The image of oil sheiks lighting campfires to keep warm beside their indoor ski slopes comforted me for only an instant. The truth is, their pain and our pain are interconnected, as it is with the fate of those striking Chicago factory workers, the college grads unable to find decent jobs and, of course, our own Jewish community.
“A lot of money has been sucked out of the system,” a lawyer who is active in several Jewish institutions told me Monday. “We’ll make it through this year, but ’09 will be very tough.”
What’s happening in the L.A. Jewish community is, to paraphrase Sam Zell, our ersatz Citizen Kane, a perfect storm.
Endowments invested in the markets are down. As we’ve reported here, some organizations, out raising thousands, saw millions sucked from their endowments overnight.
Donations are trending down among big donors and small. Most institutions receive 80 percent of their donations from 20 percent of their supporters. But it’s the wealthiest among that 20 percent who give the most, and that crust has gotten thinner. Real estate, financial services, and media and entertainment are vulnerable industries now, and Jews are over-represented in all of them.
The Los Angeles Business Journal reported this week that some 300 to 400 Iranian Jewish families face severe financial setbacks or even bankruptcy after real estate ventures run by Ezri Namvar, a leader in the Persian Jewish community, tanked, leaving investors owed an estimated $400 million.
Meanwhile, needs are up. One report out of San Francisco — where the worst of the calamity hasn’t even hit yet — has demand for Jewish Vocational Services up 100 percent. Personnel cutbacks, inevitable as they are, will only strain already stressed service providers more.
Monday night, Larry King had preacher Joel Osteen on CNN to offer spiritual advice to help us through these times. This, too, shall pass, he said. Be the change you want to see in the world.
No offense, but when people are wondering how to keep their homes, that strikes me as useless pap.
(Again Emerson: “I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic…. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word?”)
But then, what do we do? As I walked to my car after Monday’s lunch, the lawyer — who had just spent an hour describing the calamitous state of the community — said, “Hey, don’t worry so much.”
When the money is sucked from a community, what’s left is community. Sure, there is less for now to sustain services it provides, but the bonds of acquaintance, friendship and family abide. When your real estate business skids, when Zell’s L.A. Times defers your buyout payments indefinitely, when a trusted friend loses your millions, there are still friends to go to for support, for commiseration. Stripped of its financial successes, the community Jews have built here is revealed for what it is: bonds among people, not among donors.
“But this is an old custom on the East Side,” wrote Michael Gold in “Jews Without Money,” about growing up impoverished in the Lower Manhattan, “whenever a family is to be evicted, the neighboring mothers put on their shawls and beg from door to door.”
Of course, we are a long way from those dire straits, but the idea that help comes from our neighbors rings true. Relationships with others, with our teachers, with fellow Jews — those relationships are like meat and money in times like these.
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, Emerson wrote. I suppose we’ll learn the richness of community now that much of its wealth is gone.
Man of Joy
Craig Taubman is a very happy guy, but on Yom HaAtzmaut last spring, as Jewish communities around the world were celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary, hewasn’t a happy camper.
Which in itself was unusual, since on that day he was doing what he loves to do best — playing music and producing events. As part of his popular Faith Jam series, which, as he says, “brings together music of all traditions to sing songs of praise, and not differences,” he was rocking and rolling with Jewish bands, gospel choirs, Sufi chant masters and other musicians.
Taubman’s problem, though, was that one thing was missing from his party: Any reference to Israel’s birthday.
This was the third year of the Faith Jam festival, and Taubman had tried to include a celebration of Israel’s 60th as part of the festivities. Unfortunately, his Muslim partners in Faith Jam disagreed with that idea.
If we celebrate Israel, they said, then we should also celebrate Palestine.
Taubman had a ready answer for that: When the Palestinians get their own state, I will gladly include them, he told the Muslim organization with whom he was working.
But they wouldn’t budge, so Taubman accommodated. He wanted to keep peace, he said. But then, when the day arrived, and he saw that his was the only Jewish-connected event in town that wasn’t celebrating Israel’s anniversary, it made him sick. He said he lost sleep for many months.
As he was telling me all this the other day over lunch at Jeff’s Gourmet on Pico Boulevard, you could see that the episode still weighed on him.
“I knew that I had compromised my joy, my values,” he said. “I wasn’t strong enough to say, ‘I understand, but I can’t compromise on this issue.’ I was more interested in maintaining my good relationships.”
This latter point shouldn’t be too surprising, because if there’s one thing that has defined this musical impresario for the past two decades in our community, it is the quality of his relationships.
I first met Taubman in the mid 1980s, when he was looking for help promoting a new musical venture called Yad B’Yad. Since then, every time I’ve seen him around town, his hair has gotten a little grayer, but absolutely nothing else has changed — he’s still always looking to promote another musical venture.
Catch him at any moment, and he’s likely to be working on a major project — events like the annual “Let My People Sing” festival, the “Hallelu” concert series or the “Jewels of Elul” booklet and online compilations. Although he continues to do non-Jewish work — he’s composed and directed music for companies like FOX television, HBO and Paramount Pictures — it’s clear that his heart and soul is with the Jewish community.
One of his proudest achievements is that many thousands of Jews have been turned on to Judaism thanks to “Friday Night Live,” the musical Shabbat service at Sinai Temple he started with Rabbi David Wolpe more than 10 years ago. Held on the second Friday of every month, the service regularly attracts more than 1,000 Jewish young adults, many of whom had been estranged from Jewish life.
These days, his big thing is a Chanukah-themed PBS Pledge Drive Special, which will air nationwide over the next few weeks and in Los Angeles on Dec. 21. Of course, he produced the whole event and performed in it, too.
All of which makes me glad for any Jewish community in the world that has a Craig Taubman in its midst. What would we do without these musical warriors? They are portable joy machines. While most of us easily can get consumed with frustrating things like the state of the economy or Israeli politics or an annoying family member, the Taubmans of the world are consumed with giving us spiritual-joy breaks from the daily stresses of life.
I spoke to him on the phone last week after he had just returned from a concert tour in Turkey and Israel. In between all the excited talk of his musical projects, I couldn’t resist asking him how a naturally happy person like him reacted to the horrible tragedy in Mumbai. He paused for a long time, and then did the Jewish thing and asked for my reaction first. I didn’t pause. I told him I was angry. Angry at the cowardly murderers who could so brazenly destroy precious and sweet human lives.
He told me he felt deep sadness. He has trouble feeling anger, he says, because it makes him feel helpless and despairing. So he mourns in sadness, and puts on a happy face when he has to perform.
Taubman is relentlessly enthusiastic about life and music, but he has no illusions. He doesn’t pretend that music can fix the world’s problems, and he’s hardly naïve about the terrorist threats to Israel and to America and to the world. It’s just that while being a musical and spiritual guy, Taubman is also a very practical guy. He worries about the things he can influence.
And his influence is in music, not politics.
Of course, when the two meet, it can cause a little stress, like it did at Faith Jam on Yom HaAtzmaut this year, when he chose “peace with the Muslims” over his desire to celebrate the birthday of his beloved Israel.
I’m not sure why Taubman volunteered to tell me about his Zionistic faux pas. For a Jewish man of joy, this wouldn’t seem like a good career move. Maybe he figured we’d give him some slack after all he’s done over the years to elevate our community.
But here’s another possible explanation for his candor: Right before we left Jeff’s Gourmet, he insisted that I mention that at the next Faith Jam festival, he will indeed celebrate Israel’s 61st birthday.
“Whether my partners like it or not,” he said, without a trace of anger.
David Suissa, an advertising executive, is founder of OLAM magazine and Ads4Israel.com. He can be reached at dsuissa@olam.org.
All’s well that ends Zell
Los Angeles Times owner Sam Zell didn’t file for bankruptcy because the newspaper business is being battered by the recession or by online competition. He went into Chapter 11 because of the irresponsible and boneheaded deal he made to take over Tribune Co. in the first place.
Zell’s own financial chickens are coming home to roost. Unfortunately, the people who are paying the price for his recklessness are the citizens of Los Angeles and the staff of their premier paper.
Sam Zell only put up $315 million of his own money to buy the Times’ owner, Tribune Co. The rest — $8.2 billion — was highly leveraged debt; the deal, which nearly tripled Tribune’s debt load, turned on a fancy maneuver creating an Employee Stock Ownership Plan executed behind the backs of Tribune’s actual employees. The sorry result: a debt service of $1 billion a year.
Even if advertising were not dropping, even if subscriptions were not falling, Zell would have had no chance to cover his monthly nut without the waves of cutbacks he ordered, which have devastated Times morale and decimated its content. And even with those cutbacks, the bankruptcy is now proof of how misbegotten his strategy was in the first place.
The economic meltdown the nation is now living through offers plenty of evidence of how the American people are at the mercy of casino gamblers posing as capitalism’s finest. The billionaires who got us into this mess turn out to be not heroic entrepreneurs contributing to the country’s prosperity, but unaccountable buccaneers who could care less about jobs and communities. Sam Zell’s megalomania isn’t unique; it’s just our misfortune that Los Angeles’ civic life has to bear the consequences of his financial swagger.
So what’s next? The prospect of Zell’s dumping Tribune assets at fire-sale prices has renewed speculation about the Los Angeles Times being returned to local ownership.
As a strictly business proposition, it’s hard to imagine a price low enough to make sense to a buyer, but maybe the bankruptcy will force Zell’s hand. It’s also hard to imagine a new owner taking over the Times, at any price, with illusions about acquiring a financial gusher. The paper has been profitable, but buying any newspaper at this moment in the history of journalism would be more of a statement about what a great city needs than a bet on making an easy buck.
Maybe David Geffen or Eli Broad or Dick Riordan still thinks that the Los Angeles Times brand is too good not to own at the right price (all three made overtures to buy the paper before Zell sealed his deal). But chances are, there is no business plan for the future of the Times that makes sense unless serving the public interest is considered to be as much a reward as a revenue stream. That’s why it’s tempting to think of what an unconventional ownership model would look like — reorganizing the Times as a nonprofit entity, for example, either free-standing, or perhaps as part of another nonprofit, like a university or foundation.
It’s also worth imagining Los Angeles without a newspaper of the Times’ journalistic resources. Maybe the notion of delivering a product made of dead trees to people’s driveways early each morning is obsolete in an era when news is made and reported around the clock, and when digital delivery is cheap and immediate. Maybe the available sources of news are so abundant that the idea of a single authoritative source is hopelessly archaic. Maybe the fractionated megalopolis that Los Angeles has become makes it absurd to think that one paper can meet the needs of so many geographically far-flung and ethnically diverse subcommunities.
But if the Times doesn’t make the effort to look for a common culture and to create a shared public space to fight about what a common culture is, what will? Blogs and Web sites are swell, but they’re silos, not connective tissue. Local television news believes that thoughtful coverage of local politics and public affairs is ratings poison. Community and special-interest and alternative papers perform a crucial service, but size matters; a million people sharing the same information every day makes a deeper impact than 10 readerships of a 100,000 once a week, no matter how ecumenical the content. Budgets matter, too: investigative journalism takes time and dough that smaller outlets, and local public television, don’t have. The Times may be an imperfect mirror of what Los Angeles is, but without it, it’s hard to know where the region goes to see itself whole, or even why people will think that’s an effort worth making.
Sam Zell didn’t cause the crisis in modern journalism, but he did turn a superb and profitable institution into a basket case. The people who work there, and the people who read it, deserve way better. Even the people who don’t read the Times deserve a city that never stops searching for its soul. Sam Zell doesn’t get that a great newspaper can give its community a public space to do that. Maybe it’s time for him to sell it to someone who does.
Marty Kaplan is the Norman Lear professor of entertainment, media and society at the USC Annenberg School. His column appears here weekly. He can be reached at martyk@jewishjournal.com.
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