May 28, 2010

A prominent cohort of American Jews were at the White House yesterday for President Obama’s Jewish Heritage celebration—and the L.A. contingent was well represented by some of the city’s most accomplished Jews, including Rabbis David Wolpe and Sharon Brous, Jumpstart co-founder Shawn Landres, J-Dub records CEO Aaron Bisman, Challah for Hunger founder Eli Winkelman and Lou Cove, the executive director of Reboot.

Much has been made of this inaugural event given its timing (Obama’s Jewish approval rating is at its lowest ever) and the growing perception that the relationship between the U.S. and Israel is imperiled. But really, L.A. attendees report, it was just fun.

Landres praised the White House for bringing together a diverse group representing both the past and future of Jewish life in America.

“The best part of being there was being with producers of contemporary Jewish American heritage,” Landres said. He was referring, of course, to many of his fellow Angelenos—including Brous, Bisman and Winkelman and their relatively young contributions to American Jewish life. “Ten years ago none of this existed,” he said of IKAR, J-Dub Records and Challah for Hunger. “That the White House recognized that is a testimony to their accomplishments and a recognition that Jewish life in America is not only about that past, it’s also about the future.”

For Brous, it was President Obama’s address that made an impression. “What moved me was when he said something about how Jews who have experienced a history replete with tragedy and oppression have responded to life not with cynicism, despair and indifference, but with a positive and a firm commitment to building a better future for the Jewish people and for all people.”

Brous interpreted Obama’s message as praise for the Jewish imperative to respond to injustice with moral obligation. “He said that the Jewish people have pioneered extraordinary advances in art, medicine, science and business, but that the most extraordinary thing about the American Jewish contribution is not those things, but the way the Jewish people have this dedication to opening the eyes of the world to injustice, and engaging in the struggle for human dignity, and how that’s not only shaped the ethos of the Jewish community but has had a profound affect on the ethos of America as a nation.”

Wolpe limned his thoughts on the event for the Huffington Post:

The White House continues its campaign to sell both the genuineness of its sympathy with Israel and its approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the nuclearization of Iran. This was the ‘soft sell’; reminding us of the President’s deep ties to Jews and the Jewish community.

The reception brought together an impressively wide array of personalities. In addition to the usual farrago of Rabbis and Jewish leaders and professionals, there were Washington insiders like David Brooks, Nina Totenberg, Roger Cohen, Diane Sawyer, Carl Bernstein and government officials like David Axelrod and Peter Orszag, a group of Senators and congressmen (including the easily spotted Al Franken.) Supreme court justices—and Elena Kagan, the nominee—added to the august feel of leather bound books on the shelves and Presidential seals on everything from the carpet to the paper hand towels. Several non-Jews active in politics and supportive of Israel, including the Director of research for the Southern Baptist convention, Barrett Duke, were present; and of course, Israel’s Ambassador Michael Oren. To reinforce the connection of the administration with Israel, the President made a point to remind us that Rahm Emanuel was in Israel for the Bar Mitzvah of his son.

…

[Obama’s] words were brief and focused on the Jewish struggle through history which has turned us to a more compassionate people, and an extraordinarily accomplished one. He spoke of the symbiosis between America and the Jews. And in the line the assembly was waiting for, the President reinforced the unbreakable bond between America and Israel.

…

A reception will not change anyone’s mind. The undeniable grace and charm of the President and First Lady will not either. The divides on policy are deep. But for a moment, the politics of the event slipped away; the people in the room represented the range of political views, left to right. For most there was the enduring wonder of the instant: as Alysa Stanton, America’s first female, African-American Rabbi read Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” and singer Regina Spektor performed, there endured the miraculous reality of Jewish Americans gathering in the White House. Together this group represented a stunning range of achievement and a fair return for America’s deep blessing of freedom.

…From literature to music to the pitcher’s mound, you cannot tell the story of America without telling the story of our people. On the steps of the White House we spoke about the museum near Constitution Hall. At the fraught founding of this great nation, who knew that when the cracked bell first tolled, it was playing our song?

Read JTA’s report on the White House reception here.

The new Sean Penn/Naomi Watts movie “Fair Game” is a dramatic retelling of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame.  Now we all know Plame as the one-time CIA agent whom Bush administration officials outed as a way to get back at her husband, Iraq War whistleblower Joseph C. Wilson.  But how’s this for outing #2:  Plame one-quarter Jewish.  That’s right, Plame is as Jewish as Harrison Ford.  (Which, by the way, was Jewish enough to get you rounded up in Nazi Germany).

As she reveals in her book Fair Game, Plame’s paternal great-grandfather was a rabbi who emigrated from Ukraine; the original family surname was “Plamevotski.” 

His son, her Jewish grandfather, Samuel Plame, Jr., married a non-Jewish descendent of President Andrew Jackson.  The family sat shiva for him, and Valerie’s father, Sam Plame III, raised his daughter as a Protestant.  In 2003, when the scandal broke, Leon, a relative from the Plamevotski side of the family, made contact with Valerie, and that spring Valerie and Joe celebrated their first seder with family.

Plame revealed her Jewish roots here in LA in an incident that we like to call, L’Affair Plame, Part Deux.  The statuesque, brilliant ex-spy was invited by a woman’s division of the local Jewish Federation to speak at a high-end fundraiser.  At the last minute, her invite was rescinded.  One Federation donor, a Democratic party stalwart, suspected that political pressure was to blame, and told Federation leaders she wouldn’t attend the luncheon, and would revoke her substantial gift.  Plame was re-invited (we’re not certain whether she re-accepted), though the donor refused to make her gift.

In a letter to the donor. Plame explained her Jewish roots, and expressed her appreciation for the solidarity.

I haven’t seen the movie, but I’m going to assume the seder scene didn’t make the final cut.

Even though, you know, Sean Penn is Jewish..

I was going to make the first ever Pakistan blogger awards the lede today when a source of mine called at 7:30pm. They had been giving the Sunni action committee a hard time, he said. Things had been ‘garbar’ or unsettled.
When this source calls me, I listen. He is so tight with the mullahs that he knew when Umm-e Hasan, the wife of the Red Mosque cleric, paid a secret visit to Karachi. He used to be a reporter for a two-bit rag but it was guys like him who had their eyes and ears open. They knew when something was going down. Today, at The Express Tribune, where no one with less than a BA can qualify for the desk, if they give me the choice, I’ll go with an Urdu reporter rather than an English one.
He said he was going to a rally by the ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat (The Sunni Party) at Nagan Chowrangi. We have a good understanding. I’ll call him up and get the story on the phone. I’ve worked with him so long that he understands how I’ll structure each paragraph and when I’ll ask for a quote.
A little bit about the ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat. It is actually the Sippah-i-Sahaba dressed up with another name. A little after the Twin Towers fell, Pakistani president General Pervez Musharraf banned militant outfits in Pakistan. The Sippah-i-Sahaba was one of them. They just re-emerged, however, under a new name. Ahle Sunnat wal Jamaat is pronounced eH lay soon nat w’l jum’maat. There are some pretty good explanations of how the split between them and the Shias took place. They are ahle Sunnat, the Sunnis, and the ahle Tasheeh are Shias, in a rough explanation.
At a little after 8pm one of my sub-editors called the source up and got the story from him. There had indeed been violence. The Sippah had held its rally at a place called Nagan Chowrangi near its central mosque Masjid Siddique-i-Akbar. The rally or protest was being called against the target killings of the ‘party’ workers. It lasted for three hours and clerics from all over the country came to attend.
After the protest, a procession of the SSP men headed out. They were stopped by the police at Islam Chowk because a Shia neighbourhood lay ahead. The police told the men to take some other route but they were bull-headed about it. ‘Why should we divert our procession,’ they are reported to have said.
An argument ensued and it got so ugly that the police had to fire in the air to scare them off. This was, I think, a rather stupid thing to do as the procession included the Sippah’s own ‘security’ force, a small army of volunteers who were armed to the teeth themselves. They had been protecting the protest on their own. The police and paramilitary Pakistan Rangers men were also at the site and on the rooftops.
When the police fired in the air, men in the Shia neighbourhood heard the fire, couldn’t tell where it was coming from, thought they were being attacked and fired out in response. This is quite common in certain Karachi neighbourhoods that are marked by an identity – either religious, ethnic or political. What happened in the middle is not clear, but all hell seems to have broken loose and the Sippah men also opened fire. It was in this crossfire from the police, the procession and the neighbourhood that one Shia man, a 25-year-old initially identified as Shahzad, was killed.
Sippah men also torched a bus and two of its passengers were badly burnt in the ensuing violence. By the time I was putting this copy to bed, there were reports one of them had died. But I’ll follow up on that tomorrow morning.
So the bloggers went down to the anchor and the Sippah protest became the lede. This incident was symbolic of so many different themes that run through Karachi. Violence, trigger-happy young men, a sense of biradari or brotherhood and belonging to one group, a turf war, the law-enforcement agencies, mobs and their innocent victims. The groups may change or the actors may be different, but as I’ve long felt, the story is always the same.

Venus Williams Read More »