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Jewish Journal

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December 22, 2010

What is western society’s place in determining halachah?

Leave a Comment / Opinion /

The Orthodox community is rapidly approaching a moment of truth. The many issues that the Orthodox community is debating internally are rapidly collapsing into one overarching issue, one macro-question, with which it must grapple head-on. And this is: whether the ethical norms of Western society should figure into the process of determining halachah (Jewish law).

Consider the issues that have most roiled Orthodoxy just over the past year or so. There is the controversy over the statement of principles concerning the place of homosexuals within the Orthodox community, a document that while upholding the biblical prohibition on homosexual behavior, mandates that people who are homosexual be afforded full dignity and respect, and that they be included in their Orthodox communities. Signed by 150 Orthodox rabbis and educators, it was flatly rejected by at least as many. There is also the ongoing debate over whether women may serve as synagogue presidents, as well as the sure-to-return debate over women being ordained as rabbis. More recently, we have seen renewed controversy over whether halachah permits us to donate our organs following our brain-stem death, even as it is clear that we are permitted to receive organs from non-Jews who are brain-stem dead. And, most recently, we have witnessed the controversy in Israel as to whether halachah prohibits the sale or lease of apartments to non-Jews in the land of Israel. Each of these issues is complex in its own way, and none can be facilely decided in the absence of rigorous halachic analysis. But over and over again, the wedge issue turns out to be whether consideration of Western ethical norms is relevant to the analysis.

This emerged clearly last week, as the Rabbinical Council of America registered its objection to the ban on renting to non-Jews in Israel, saying that the halachic analysis of this issue demands “special sensitivity to societal realities, widely held ethical principles, and historical injustices.” Which is to say that when we examine our universe of viable halachic alternatives, our choice of alternative can and should be influenced by wider ethical considerations. Yet this is, of course, precisely the point of contention.

The story is the same with regard to the organ donation issue. Here, too, viable and scholarly halachic positions have existed on both sides of this issue for many decades. Last month though, a Rabbinical Council of America report (ironically), which preferred the position that effectively prohibits Jews from donating organs, elicited the following response from Rabbi Dr. Moshe Tendler, a prominent scholar and bio-ethicist (and a longtime proponent of the brain-stem definition of death, which results in the permissibility of organ donation): “Their final conclusion is that a Jew who is in need of a heart transplant can receive a heart from a brain-dead patient but he can’t donate his heart if he is brain dead. Such a ruling defames Judaism and exposes every Jew to the hatred of non-Jews. It is saying that a Jew can take a vital organ from a non-Jew even though Jews consider him still alive — that his life doesn’t count. How could you justify such a ruling?”

The wedge issue is the same when it comes to the place of homosexuals in the Orthodox community. The opening words of the above-referenced Statement of Principles are: “All human beings are created in the image of God and deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.” While it is of course true that the idea that all people are created in the image is biblical, its specific application to homosexuals is a distinctly modern historical development. It is our way of clothing in our religious language the modern, Western ethical assertion that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The relevance of such ideas to our halachic calculus is again what stands at the center of the controversy. Similarly, when rabbinic scholars in pre-State Palestine debated whether women ought to have the right to vote in Yishuv elections, the old/new “image of God” idea was one of the main pivots of the discussion. And it continues to play out in today’s controversies over the position of women in the Orthodox community.

Are the ethical norms of modern Western society essential to halachic discussion or are they irrelevant? Are they to be integrated or to be shunned? This is, in the final analysis, the central issue that the Orthodox community is grappling with. And the answer will determine Orthodoxy’s long-term viability as a positive force in the wider Jewish community, and the wider world.

Yosef Kanefsky is senior rabbi at B’nai David-Judea (bnaidavid.com), a Modern Orthodox congregation in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood.

What is western society’s place in determining halachah? Read More »

The city of lights at its darkest hour

Leave a Comment / Books, Entertainment /

Adolf Hitler may have been bloody in tooth and claw, but he was enough of an aesthete to understand that Paris was the center of gravity for European culture. On the only visit he made to the city during World War II, he went sightseeing like any other tourist, then or now. Still, the open-mindedness that made Paris so appealing to artists, writers and intellectuals from around the world inspired only contempt in the führer.

“Does the spiritual health of the French people matter to you?” he remarked to architect Albert Speer. “Let’s let them degenerate. All the better for us.”

The story is told by Alan Riding, author of the best-selling “Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans” and former cultural correspondent for The New York Times, in “And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris” (Knopf, $28.95), a remarkable cultural history of the City of Lights at its darkest hour. He paints a vivid portrait of the famous figures who found themselves in Paris when the army of Nazi Germany marched under the Arc de Triomphe, and he asks tough questions about what they did and did not do.

“How, I wondered, had artists and intellectuals addressed the city’s worst political moment of the twentieth century?” Riding muses. “Did working under the occupation automatically mean collaboration? Should any writer be sanctioned for the ‘crime’ of an opinion? Do gifted painters, musicians or actors have a duty to provide ethical leadership?”

So Riding puts a whole generation of public intellectuals in the dock and holds them accountable for their words and deeds. “During the occupation, we had two choices: collaborate or resist,” Jean-Paul Sartre said many years after the war, but Riding points out that Sartre was engaging in a self-serving oversimplification. “In truth,” Riding writes, “the options — and dilemmas — faced by individual artists were far more varied, as Sartre himself demonstrated.”

Some artists and intellectuals managed to escape from Nazi-occupied France. Marc Chagall, for example, was one of the beneficiaries of a remarkable American named Vivian Fry, who courageously pried him out of police custody by warning that the collaborationist government of France “would be gravely embarrassed” by the arrest of “one of the world’s greatest painters.” Others tried to but failed — Walter Benjamin famously ended his own life with an overdose of morphine after he was refused entry into Spain. Samuel Beckett actually returned to Paris, “reportedly saying he preferred ‘France at war to Ireland at peace,’ ” and P.G. Wodehouse, interned as an enemy alien, later agreed to participate in propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. Remarkably, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, both Jewish, chose to stay in Paris and managed to survive the occupation, perhaps because Stein wrote a preface for a collection of speeches by the collaborationist French leader Pétain in which she compared him to George Washington.

Riding points out how treacherous it could be for artists who remained behind, whether by choice or by necessity. Maurice Chevalier, for example, agreed to sing for French prisoners of war in a camp near Berlin but declined an invitation to do the same in a German theater. The Nazi press ran photographs of his performance without identifying his audience, and, as a result, “he learned he had been sentenced to death by a special tribunal of de Gaulle’s provisional French government in Algiers.” Fearing both the Gestapo and the French resistance, he went into hiding for the rest of the war.

By contrast, we learn that “the dashing young conductor Herbert von Karajan,” whom Riding describes as “a member of the Nazi Party since 1933,” became an “instant celebrity” in Paris when he presented a program of Wagner operas at the Paris Opera during “a trip sponsored by Hitler himself.” One performance was reserved for Wehrmacht officers, but the other one was open to the public — and it sold out, too. “Madame, what you have done for Isolde,” French writer Jean Cocteau wrote in a revealing fan letter, “was such a marvel that I lack the courage to remain silent.”

Indeed, there are precious few examples of heroic conduct by intellectuals in Riding’s account. Andrè Malraux, for example, “had come to personify the intellectual engagé in the ’30s, but declined to join the resistance until 1944 and “spent much of the war in a quiet corner of the Côte d’Azur.” Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir remained “Left Bank celebrities” whose photos appeared in the Nazi-controlled newspapers, and the occupation did not prevent them (as well as Pablo Picasso and Albert Camus, among others) from attending all-night parties where the only risk was a curfew violation.

Riding does not overlook the less-famous intellectuals who engaged more courageously in the struggle against Nazi Germany. “Many writers chose to sting with words, some did so with armed resistance, a few gave their lives for their beliefs,” he acknowledges. “When the liberation came, the world of letters had its heroes and martyrs, too.” But he concedes that “cultural resistance had a limited reach,” and he quotes the remark of one French writer who dismissed the efforts of the more timid resisters: “Poets who wrote a quatrain about Hitler for a confidential sheet — called clandestine — under a pseudonym believe sincerely that they have saved France.”

“And the Show Went On” is a challenging book in more than one sense.  It’s a work of intellectual history in its purest form, and Riding is as much concerned with ideas and values as with events, deeds and personalities. He refuses to idealize or demonize any of the artists and writers whom he ponders in its pages; rather, he allows us to see a certain fog of war that affects civilians as well as soldiers and casts them in an uncertain light.

Jonathan Kirsch, author and publishing attorney, is the book editor of The Jewish Journal. He blogs at The city of lights at its darkest hour Read More »

Lovitz, lies and Torah

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Film, Television /

“I hate lying,” Jon Lovitz, the comedian, actor and comedy club owner, said without a touch of humor in his voice. “I just can’t stand it. I don’t see the advantage of it. It makes me physically ill.”

It’s the reason, he said, that he has become something of a specialist in portraying characters who are truth-challenged, or, in his words, “sleazy.” He was Tommy Flanagan, president of Pathological Liars Anonymous, on “Saturday Night Live”; the guy on “Seinfeld” who fibs about having cancer, then dies in a car crash; a loudmouth baseball scout who steals scenes from Tom Hanks in “A League of Their Own”; the voice of an obnoxious movie reviewer in the animated series “The Critic”; and the father, in the film “Rat Race,” who tells his family they are on a minivan “vacation” when he is actually trying to win $2 million in a cross-country dash.

In the recently released “Casino Jack,” which tells the story of the disgraced former superlobbyist and Orthodox Jew Jack Abramoff (Kevin Spacey), Lovitz plays Adam Kidan, a shady business associate whose bumbling deals help bring the lobbyist down.

Sitting in his publicist’s office in Larchmont Village, Lovitz, 53, is occasionally funny — such as when he calls his “Casino Jack” co-star Barry Pepper “Dr. Pepper” or laments that people don’t know Jesus was Jewish, because “can you think of a less Jewish name than Jesus Christ?” But, in person, Lovitz most often exudes vulnerability, a kind of naiveté and a quiet anger about the state of ethics in show business.

“When I was on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ a lawyer friend told me my liar character was really popular in Hollywood,” he said. “I soon found out that’s because everyone in Hollywood lies, constantly. And everyone knows everyone else is lying. I’ve seen best friends screw each other over. And [agents] tell you that you have to lie to get what you want. I literally lost track of what’s right and wrong, it was so bad. So I got a book about Jewish morals and laws written by a rabbi.”

The book was Joseph Telushkin’s “The Book of Jewish Values: A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living,” which provided practical advice. Hiding Jews from the Nazis? Trying not to unnecessarily hurting someone’s feelings? Two examples of when lying can be OK, Lovitz said.

“It’s ironic,” he admitted of portraying so many liars, “but as a comic actor, I’m good at making fun of them.”

So good, in fact, that he makes an impression even when his character has only one or two scenes in a production. “Jon Lovitz steals practically every scene that he’s in in the movie,” Spacey said of “Casino Jack.”

“He is a genius at those moments in between, the looks and the sighs and the body language,” Pepper said. “That’s where his classical training [at University of California, Irvine] comes in, and I think that’s what few people appreciate about him.”

Lovitz’s characters also blend a desperate quality with a bombastic flamboyance — a quality he said he inherited from his Jewish grandfather (actually his stepmother’s father), Lou Melman, who grew up on a farm in Nebraska and made loans to Al Capone’s gang in the 1930s. Melman would take the young Lovitz to Canter’s and to the Santa Anita race track.

“My grandfather was larger than life,” Lovitz said. “And he was incredibly accepting of me — he was just crazy about me, and I was crazy about him. I based my character in ‘A League of Their Own’ on him.  He wasn’t mean, but he was funny. In the first scene in the movie, I’m attending a baseball game, someone stands up in front of me and I say, ‘What — are you crazy?” 

The young Lovitz attended Valley Beth Shalom when his family lived in Encino and Temple Judea after they moved to Tarzana; his best friend was David Kudrow, Lisa Kudrow’s older brother, whom he met in fifth grade. When the boys were at Portola Junior High, they saw Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run,” which solidified Lovitz’s ambition to become a comedian. They especially liked the scene in which Allen’s character, paranoid about anti-Semitism, assumes someone has said “Jew” instead of the words “did you.”

“We were just dying,” Lovitz said. “We thought, ‘This is like our own humor. … It was very Jewish, especially the sarcasm. It was like this friend of my father’s who would always look at me and go, ‘Oh, the actor.”

When Lovitz attended the Harvard School (now Harvard-Westlake) in Studio City, starting in ninth grade, he was teased for being Jewish at a time when, he said, the school had few Jewish students. “One guy would say, ‘Look at your nose,’ ” Lovitz recalled. “The abuse was verbal and physical. The school in those days was all boys, and they were just merciless. It got so bad the headmaster called our class together, and he was just livid. He said, ‘I won’t stand for this bullying.’ ”

Like his school years, Lovitz’s career has also had an up-and-down trajectory. He studied drama at UC Irvine and then worked odd jobs, including a stint as a hospital orderly, for years until his work with the improvisational comedy group The Groundlings led to his casting on “Saturday Night Live” in 1985. His response to that job offer — which brought almost overnight success — was, “Are you kidding? They might have equally said I was going to live on Pluto.”

Subsequently, Lovitz starred in Woody Allen’s “Small Time Crooks,” as Billy Crystal’s younger brother in “City Slickers II” and in a number of recognizably Jewish roles — including Randy Pear of “Rat Race,” who, in one hilarious scene, thinks he is taking his daughter to a Barbie doll museum — and ends up in the middle of a neo-Nazi rally at the Klaus Barbie Museum.  His response is to steal Hitler’s car, one of the museum’s displays.

Several years ago, Lovitz said, he began doing stand-up comedy again because his film roles were becoming scarcer; he opened his Jon Lovitz Comedy Club on Universal CityWalk last year, where he often performs, riffing on subjects such as racism, religion and sex. Single and never married, he said his dream role would be to play the title character in a remake of the 1955 Ernest Borgnine film “Marty,” about two lonely-hearts who have resigned themselves to never finding love until they meet each other.

Lovitz relished playing Adam Kidan in “Casino Jack,” a kind of lapsed, depraved Jew who, between outrageously underhanded business deals, becomes almost a truth-sayer in the film. In several scenes, Kidan points out how hypocritical the fictional Abramoff is for claiming piety while engaging in unethical deals.

For the scene in which the two men have an enormous argument as the FBI closes in, Lovitz said, “I improvised the line where I call [Abramoff] a ‘fake Jew.’ ”

“Abramoff in the movie is hiding behind his religion and saying that he was trying to be such a good Jew, but he wasn’t. That’s not what the religion is.” l

Lovitz, lies and Torah Read More »

How the Hai-Bar animals were rescued from fire

Leave a Comment / Israel, Israel's Carmel Fire /

Persian fallow deer now graze peacefully in their enclosures at the Carmel Hai-Bar Nature Reserve as ranger/caretaker Yakoub Makladeh feeds them nutritional pellets from a metal bucket.

Earlier this month, the lives of these rare animals were in jeopardy for four days as flames from Israel’s historic Carmel fire threatened the reserve nestled in the mountains outside Haifa. The vulture cage was destroyed; flames licked the fences of the deer enclosures, and the surrounding terrain is now ashen.

“Thursday, Dec. 2, around 11 a.m., we saw smoke coming from the direction of Isfiya, a Druze village south of our Hai-Bar location,” Makladeh remembers. “The animals already sensed something was wrong and were acting nervous.”

More than 100 rangers and volunteers, including Eli Amitay, director-general of Israel’s Nature and National Parks Authority, raced to the Hai-Bar to help. Minister of Environmental Protection Gilad Erdan also came to assess the situation.

Rare griffon vultures, whose cage overlooked a scenic green wadi, and other birds in their breeding cages — Egyptian vultures, Lanner falcons, Bonelli’s eagles — were evacuated immediately.

“By noon, the smoke was much stronger,” Makladeh said, “and we decided to move the rare fallow deer into a different and safer large enclosure built for this purpose.”

A heated discussion took place about whether to immobilize the deer and evacuate them to a zoo, but Makladeh, who has spent many years as the animals’ psychologist, companion and caretaker, argued vehemently against this, saying further stress from the immobilization procedure would increase the likelihood the animals might die.

“Some wanted us to leave the enclosure gates open and hope the deer would find their way to ‘safer pastures,’ but the deer wouldn’t have been likely to go,” Makladeh said.

So he asked everyone to clear the area, and then, “with friendly persuasion and a bucket full of their favorite feed,” led them to safe enclosures at the Hai-Bar.

“No one but Yakoub, whom the animals love and trust, could do this,” said Avinoam Lourie, a zoologist and former head of the Carmel Hai-Bar. Makladeh deferred all thanks to the Nature Reserve Authority rangers and volunteers, who “fought the fire with their bare hands,” cutting trees, building firebreaks with hoes, spraying water from tanks on their backs; and stopping the fire right at the fences.

While the fire was raging and communications were sparse, the outside world had waited nervously to hear whether the animals, let alone the people, had survived.  

“We fought continuously for more than 70 hours,” Makladeh said.

“People slept on the ground and lived on coffee and sandwiches. When I finally took a break, I realized that my clothes were totally torn and burnt, I was bleeding, and my boots were completely destroyed.”

On Dec. 6, when Lourie went to the Hai-Bar to speak with Makladeh, he found they had already brought back the birds of prey to some of the safe cages and had begun to rebuild the main burned vulture cage and repair the deer enclosures.

“We even put all the roe deer together in one pen,” Makladeh said, “normally a no-no, as males are naturally aggressive toward one another; but they had just shed their antlers, so they couldn’t hurt each other.”

Lourie noted that “ample numbers of fallow deer had already been released back into the wild, in the Galilee, near Jerusalem, and in a few reserves elsewhere in Israel.”

“We are, however, still near the beginning of the reintroduction process for the roe deer,” Lourie said, “and now is the season for griffon vultures to mate and build nests and lay eggs, which I hope they will do because their status in the wild is very bad.”

After the fire was out, Lourie took a walk around the Carmel Mountain area. “It was very sad for me to identify large numbers of porcupines, jackals, foxes, wild boars, songbirds, snakes and other animals that had burned to death. We need to preserve and protect every specimen to strengthen the population of our endangered animals,” Lourie concluded.

For more information and ways to help, visit parks.org.il.

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SoCal soccer stars bound for Aussie Maccabi Games

Leave a Comment / Sports /

They are united by country, religion and their love of the beautiful game. Four young men from Southern California will represent the United States as members of the open men’s soccer team at the second Maccabi Australia International Games in Sydney, Dec. 26 through Jan. 2.

And they will take the soccer pitch together, along with teammates from across the country, to challenge for the gold medal and national pride.

They have taken divergent paths to the field.

Charlie Paris, a junior forward at Yale, started playing soccer with and against his twin brother, Robbie. But by high school, Robbie had switched his focus to track.

“Being twins, we were always grouped together,” Paris said. “We started going down different roads, but we always supported each other. Looking back, that was one of the defining moments on my path to becoming an individual — Charlie Paris — rather than being [one of] ‘the Paris brothers.’ ”

Paris, who led the California state champion Santa Monica High School soccer team in scoring as a senior in 2008, relishes the chance to represent his country and religion by indulging in one of his biggest passions.

Maccabi open men’s soccer coach Preston Goldfarb is counting on Paris’ ability to score.

“He’s going to be a big and strong presence up front,” Goldfarb said of the 6-foot-5 scorer. “As a striker, he’s going to deal our opponents’ defenses fits.”

With three solid Southland defenders among its ranks, defense should be a strength of the U.S. team.

Daniel Kohen, a sophomore defender at San Diego State University, and Michael Pourat, who is looking to transfer to a Division I university next fall, will make their second starts as Maccabi players in Australia.

A Beverly Hills High School graduate, Kohen helped the Aztecs to their first double-digit win season in more than a decade.

Kohen, who played with the 2008 Maccabi youth team in Israel, is one of the most experienced players on the Maccabi roster when it comes to playing internationally. His club team competed at the 2008 Milk Cup in Northern Ireland, the first U.S. club team to make the finals, losing to the Manchester United youth team.

Kohen’s forte is fighting for 50-50 balls — when two players from opposing teams both have an equal opportunity to get the ball.

“I’m not a normal soccer player,” he admits. “Most people talk about how they love to score, but I’d rather get an assist than score a goal.”

Kohen’s college coach, Lev Kirschner, calls him “a fierce competitor.”

“I am proud to have Daniel representing our heritage and beautiful game,” Kirschner said.

Pourat may not have the experience of Kohen, but he has an excellent soccer background, Goldfarb says. “Certainly he brings ability and credence.”

Pourat was part of the 1998 Amateur Athletic Union Junior Olympic champion club team from Encino, and helped Taft High School to the city semifinals in 2008.

“As a player, I always try to find the next level,” said Pourat, who played at the 2007 Pan American Maccabi Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina. “Just knowing I can play internationally at my age really got me excited.”

Noah Rothstein is among the oldest of the U.S. soccer contingent and will celebrate his 28th birthday in Sydney. Rothstein’s soccer career had an inauspicious start.

“I was awful at [soccer],” he admitted. That is until his parents sent him to “Jewish sleep-away camp” for eight weeks when he was 7. “For some reason, I decided that for my three activities I would play soccer, soccer, soccer every day. So when I came back, I went from being the worst to the best on the team, and from then on, [soccer] was something I always enjoyed.”

He was recruited to George Washington University but instead focused on academics.

Of the Southern California foursome, Rothstein is the only non-native, having moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to pursue a master’s degree at the American Film Institute.

The players represent varying degrees of Jewish adherence, from Pourat, who attends Chabad services and keeps kosher, to Rothstein, who, despite not being active in the Jewish community, says he has a deep appreciation for his religion. But they all agree that their faith is important in their lives and they value the opportunity to meet Jews from the world over.

“It’s noteworthy when you meet someone who shares the same interests as you who’s also Jewish,” said Paris, who was raised in a Conservative household and has bonded with a Jewish teammate on the Yale soccer squad.

Paris looks forward to building friendships with his teammates and says that he thinks their similar passion for the sport will help them gel as a team.

All are looking forward to the Maccabi Games.

“Maccabi is a great way to see the world playing soccer,” Pourat said.

Kohen, who was limited by injury this past NCAA season, views the Maccabi experience as an opportunity to improve during the off-season.

“I’m looking to play as much soccer as I can, and this is the perfect opportunity for me to do what I love and represent what I love,” he said.

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A lawyer’s personal investment in Mideast peace

Leave a Comment / Community /

Josef Avesar is a soft-spoken lawyer with a wife and four children, but for the past six years he has spent most of his time and a considerable amount of his own money on an all-consuming project: to establish an Israeli-Palestinian Confederation (IPC) and break the interminable impasse between the two groups.

Unlike another dreamer, Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Zionism who in 1897 foresaw, amid widespread derision, that in 50 years there would be a Jewish state, Avesar is more circumspect in his predictions.

In 2006, speaking before a UCLA audience, Avesar asserted that his vision had a 5 percent chance of becoming reality in his lifetime, but he was more optimistic in a recent interview.

“I am 57 years old, and I believe that there’s now a 50 percent chance of realizing my goal in my lifetime,” he said. “In 100 years, the chances of success are 100 percent.”

Meanwhile, Avesar is taking some concrete steps. Following an initial convention in 2008, he has scheduled another convention in Jerusalem in 2011 in the run-up to an election of the IPC president, vice president and legislature.

Election day is set for Dec. 12, 2012, about a month after a similar election in the United States.

To the numerous skeptics and scoffers of his idea, Avesar responds, “What have we got to lose? For more than 60 years, every other plan has failed. You don’t go back to the same surgeon if all his previous patients have died.

Avesar has drawn up a lengthy constitution for the planned confederation, which draws heavily on the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights and whose key elements include:

• Israel and the Palestinian territories (or state) are to be divided into 300 districts, with each district sending one delegate to the legislature. In each district, Jews can vote for an Arab candidate, and vice versa.
• To pass a law will require approval of 55 percent of the Israeli legislators and 55 percent of the Arab representatives. If neither the established Israeli nor Palestinian government exercises its veto power, the legislation will become law.
• Both the two top executives and the legislators will run for four-year terms. If the president is an Israeli, the vice president must be Palestinian, and the two will rotate after two years.

Given all the limitations and safeguards, what could a confederation actually accomplish?

One of Avesar’s basic premises is that Israelis and Palestinians, working together within a parliamentary framework, can eventually develop a sense of trust and learn to disagree without resorting to violence.

In practice, IPC would serve as a mechanism for establishing mutually beneficial infrastructure projects, hospitals, airports, monetary systems and so forth.

For instance, the confederation plan calls for joint construction of utility grids for water, electricity, trains and highways connecting Israel, Gaza and the West Bank.

Last June, Avesar and his allies started calling for future presidential and parliamentary candidates to register, mainly through the Internet. He hopes to have some 1,500 candidates, about five in each of the 300 districts, ready to compete by the December 2012 election date.

As of mid-December 2010, some 221 men and women had thrown their hats into the ring, with Palestinian candidates outnumbering Israeli hopefuls by about 3-to-1.

The imbalance comes as something of a surprise to Avesar. He speculates that Arabs are more disillusioned with the status quo, as well as with Hamas and Fatah, than are Jews, who feel that there is no great need to fix the present situation.

Most notable among the Palestinian candidates for the IPC presidency is Hanna Siniora, publisher of the Jerusalem Times and a member of the Palestinian National Council.

It is fairly easy to punch holes in Avesar’s vision and to dismiss the whole enterprise as quixotic. One of the most likely stumbling blocks would be the attitudes of the current Israeli and Palestinian leaders, who would just as soon do without a “third government.”

In one of his pamphlets, Avesar writes, “What happens if the Israeli or Palestinian governments object to the [IPC] elections?” To which he answers, in part:

“If we are able to achieve the voting of both the Israelis and Palestinians and to get international support, we will be able to pass legislation of an important nature. We believe that the Israeli and Palestinian governments will understand the great service and opportunity we can provide to their people and eventually will support our government.”

Others are less optimistic. During the UCLA panel discussion, Gen. Shlomo Gazit, former head of military intelligence, argued that “the Oslo agreement failed because we postponed the political issues. Dealing with economic or environmental issues first is putting the cart before the horse.”

Professor Nancy Gallagher, who chairs the Middle East history program at University of California, Santa Barbara, took a middle ground. “This plan is not yet ready for prime time,” she said, “ but bold and radical ideas are always welcome, even if they seem naïve.”

Gallagher recalled that the various iterations of the confederation idea have a lengthy history; one was proposed by India in a minority report to the 1947 United Nations partition plan for Palestine.

Most positive toward the idea was Saleem H. Ali, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont and a professional mediator. A native of Pakistan, Ali urged putting economic before political problems, suggesting that there are “different ways to climb a mountain.”

Avesar was born in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan into an Iraqi Jewish family that had immigrated in 1936. His father, who worked for the British authorities in both Iraq and Palestine, had been farsighted enough to buy some land in Tel Aviv during a previous visit, in 1929.

One of Josef Avesar’s formative experiences as a 9-year-old boy was the rescue of his sister from drowning by an Arab fisherman and then bringing some chocolate to the rescuer as a way to thank him.

“That was a very emotional experience for me,” Avesar recounted. “I came to realize that the Palestinians were people like us.”

He thinks that Jews like himself, whose families came from Arab countries, have a “special relationship” with Palestinians, which is missing in the mainly Ashkenazi Israeli government.

If family background has shaped Avesar’s attitude toward the Mideast conflict, so has his professional experience.

“In my work in personal injury litigation, I see that the parties in the dispute get so involved emotionally in their points of difference that they can’t see the larger picture,” he said.

“What I try to do is to have one side give some indication of trust, and then the other side will usually reciprocate.”

Avesar lacks the resources for a full-fledged campaign, and he is spreading the word mainly through media interviews and the Internet, where he has set up a Web site, ipconfederation.com, and a second one, ipconfederation.org, for the 2012 election.

During the last three years, his dream has become his chief occupation, and he estimates that he would be $750,000 richer today if he had instead devoted similar time and effort to his law practice.

He doesn’t have to look beyond his family and circle of friends for critics. His German-born wife, Gilda, whom he met while both were serving in the Israeli army, not infrequently comments about her husband’s “crazy idea.”

Two prominent academicians, asked for their comments last month, were also critical, though in more reserved language.

Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who had initially seen some merit in Avesar’s idea, wrote in an e-mail, “Why try to federate countries that are so different? A more logical federation would be the West Bank and Jordan, or Gaza with Egypt.

“Has any comparable federation ever worked? It’s merely a gimmick leading to a one-state solution, which would mark the end of Israel.”

Political scientist Steven L. Spiegel, director of the UCLA Center for Middle East Development, wrote, in part, “I do not believe an Israeli/Palestinian confederation would be viable.

“Having two states, and then a “third government … would only confuse the efforts to achieve a viable peace, bureaucratically, ideologically and politically.

“However, the possibility of cooperation on the economic and social fronts between Israel, a future Palestinian state, and also possibly Jordan has long been discussed and would be desirable after a final settlement between Israel and Palestine.”

But Avesar also can point to some prominent supporters. He cited an enthusiastic endorsement from former presidential candidate Michael Dukakis and encouraging words from former President Bill Clinton.

In addition, he has engaged in discussions with a long list of American, Israeli and Palestinian thinkers, spanning the political spectrum.

In any case, nothing is likely to deter Avesar from his quest. “Some of my friends spend their money and time on golf, or buying a Ferrari,” he said. “I might as well put that into something I enjoy doing.”

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Schools go to war with Nazi-insignia clothing company

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Will T-shirts and other items bearing logos and designs resembling World War II Nazi insignia become the latest fashion trend in an Inland Empire school district?

Clothes by the Irvine company Metal Mulisha are currently banned by the Murrieta Valley Unified School District, but the company wants back in.

This won’t happen if Rabbi Barry Ulrych, a child of Holocaust survivors, can prevent it. His 80-family synagogue, B’nai Chaim of Murrieta, was founded in the 1970s by Jews living near Murrieta Hot Springs, many of them Holocaust survivors. The congregation is located in the middle of the school district, and many of the congregation’s children attend district schools.

Designs on the clothing line, including shirts, caps and belts, show, among other things, a human skull wearing a helmet resembling those worn by German soldiers during World War II.

On the company’s logo, the “S” in “Mulisha is represented graphically by a lightning bolt that resembles the double lighting bolts insignia of the German Schutzstaffel, the “SS.”

“People say it’s just a fashion — it’s more than that — it’s an identity,” Ulyrch said. “These symbols are not as neutral as one might think. Symbols can hurt, and some symbols are intimidating.

“With this symbolism, they are glorifying the Nazi past. You can’t go through life being ignorant of symbols,” he added.

According to Karen Parris, a school district representative, in September the district received a letter threatening a lawsuit from lawyers representing MM Compound Inc., the licensee for Metal Mulisha.

In the letter, the company claims the ban to be a violation of its Constitutional rights of freedom of speech and expression and strongly urges the “schools to revoke the applicable provision of the dress code.”

The letter goes on to say that on an individual level, “Metal Mulish founders and riders are devout Christians, espousing those values prized in the religious community … Metal Mulisha members and apparel stand as positive reinforcement to students interested in motocross …”

However, Parris cited the district’s responsibility to create a “safe place for students to learn” as the rationale for Murrieta’s dress code policy.

The district’s policy covers “clothes that have any offensive content, hate or defiance, and garments that students may find intimidating or offensive, including Nazi or neo-Nazi symbols,” Parris said.

“Even if a student is unaware that what they are wearing is Nazi or neo-Nazi, it could still cause a fight,” she added.

Metal Mulisha officials did not respond to multiple attempts for comment. The company’s legal representatives maintain in their letter that the district’s “implied association” of their name with “neo-Nazism or racism” is “unfounded and defamatory.”

According to the First Amendment Center’s Web site, “Many school districts have turned to dress codes and uniforms to promote a better learning environment. They argue that these policies decrease tensions, reduce socio-economic differences and enhance safety.”

The company’s letter presented that Metal Mulisha’s apparel “does not interfere with the schools’ work or the rights of other students to be secure and to be left alone.”

“The district should be able to ban certain fashions or dress that could hurt feelings,” Ulrych said. “There are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors in the school district.” 

The apparel line got its start in 1999, inspired by a free-style motocross team, some of whose members have medaled in the X Games; it describes itself on its Web site as speaking “the language of nonconformity with distinctive apparel.”

The clothing and licensed products are sold at PacSun, Sport Chalet and Toys R Us, including locations in Los Angeles.

Since the story was reported in the Los Angeles Times, Parris said, the district “has received e-mails and phone calls in support of its position.”

Nevertheless, Parris said, “Faced with a potentially expensive lawsuit, the district lawyers are now negotiating with the manufacturer in an attempt to resolve the issue.”

At a time when the district is facing major budget cuts, “It could cost hundreds of thousands to defend this in court,” she said. 

“Some of the images might touch a nerve,” said Joanna Mendelson, California investigative researcher for the Anti-Defamation League, who has seen Metal Mulisha’s line. “The images are not replicas, though they are edgy, and one might perceive them as promoting Nazi imagery.”

Adding to the sensitivity toward the imagery is the area’s recent history.

“Murrieta has had a history of white supremacist activities,” Mendelson said, “and the Inland Empire in general is a hotbed for hate.”

“We see references to Metal Mulisha online on white supremacist message boards, as well as tattoos,” she said.

Ulrych noted the good quality of the area’s school system and the increasing number of young families who have moved to the area in recent years.

“A school should not take lightly the symbols that walk its grounds,” he added.

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Early bird deadline for LimmudLA

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Israeli reggae/rock, the New Testament taught by a Jewish Orthodox scholar, Reform social action, art, cooking, dance, yoga, technology, archaeology, literature and film — all this may sound unrelated, a little too something-for-everyone — but these all will be among the offerings at the upcoming LimmudLA taking place over President’s Day weekend in February. It’s all part of what makes the four-day conference so powerful, organizers say.

“There is a whole universe of people who have decided Judaism is X, and there is no better place to kind of get an eye-opener of what the wider potential is than at this conference,” said Caroline Kelly, chair of LimmudLA.

This will be Los Angeles’ fourth year hosting a Limmud conference, a Jewish learning and cultural initiative that began in the United Kingdom more than 30 years ago and in the last few decades has spread to 50 locations on six continents. Last year, 750 people attended LimmudLA at the Costa Mesa Hilton, where it will be held again in 2011.

The conference is planned and run almost entirely by volunteers, and all but a few presenters are drawn form the ranks of participants who pay their own registration to take part in nearly round-the-clock sessions — usually there are at least 10 going simultaneously.

This year’s program is still in the works, as participant-presenters continue to register, but some guests are already lined up.

LimmudLA is responding to calls for greater Reform participation with David Saperstein, head of Reform’s Religions Action Center in Washington. Amy-Jill Levine, a professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University, is an Orthodox scholar who has described herself as a “Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Christian divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt.”

Rabbi Arthur Kurzweil — scholar, magician, genealogist and entertainer — represents Limmud’s eclecticism, as does Yavilah McCoy, an Orthodox, African American Jewish educator and founder of Ayecha, a nonprofit organization focusing on multi-dimensional Jewish identity.

Longtime Limmud favorite Clive Lawton will teach his eclectic Torah, and instructors from Israel’s Pardes Institute and Shalom Hartman Institute will bring scholarly weight.

The music scene — late-night concerts, jam sessions and small discussion groups — will be headlined by Israeli songwriter Nurit Hirsch and Aharit Hayamim, an Israeli band that has dominated the festival circuit in recent years with a funk/ethnic/reggae/rock sound that includes the shofar, the Irish flute and African drums. Five comedians are on the presenter lists so far, and Kelly says programming will stretch late into the night with films, poker tournaments, networking sessions, and music and dance.

LimmudLA’s teen population has tripled since the first conference, and teens at Jewish high schools in Los Angeles have been training throughout the year to lead sessions. For the first time this year, LimmudLA has hired a youth director to create a mini-conference for children.

The cost of the conference is $500 per adult until Dec. 31, and $600 thereafter. Children and teens are less, and scholarships from a $25,000 pool are available through Dec. 31. A limited number of two-day passes for Sunday and Monday are available, but there are no single-day passes.

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The Brothers Wolpe talk bioethics at Sinai Temple

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On Sunday morning, Dec. 12, near the end of his weekend-long stay as a scholar-in-residence at Sinai Temple, bioethicist Dr. Paul Root Wolpe was asked by Rabbi David Wolpe to give a few quick responses to some of the most challenging contemporary bioethical dilemmas.

“No,” Dr. Wolpe replied, provoking laughter from the nearly 300 people in attendance. “I can’t give quick responses; I’m a Wolpe.”

Dr. Wolpe is professor of bioethics and Jewish bioethics at Emory University as well as senior bioethicist for NASA and the first national bioethics adviser to Planned Parenthood of America. He had already delivered two talks to his brother’s congregation on Shabbat, so one highlight of Sunday’s breakfast was a picture-heavy PowerPoint presentation, which included quite a few photographs of genetically and otherwise engineered animals. He started with hybrids like the beefalo, the zorse (zebra-horse), the cama (camel-lama), the geep (sheep-goat) and, much to the delight of fans of “Napoleon Dynamite,” the liger (lion-tiger). Later, he showed pictures of mice, kittens, pigs, puppies and monkeys that, thanks to some genetic material from jellyfish and deep-sea coral, had been engineered to glow in the dark.

“The only reason to create a kitten that glows in the dark,” Dr. Wolpe said, “is to create a kitten that glows in the dark.” Rapid scientific advances like these raise ethical questions — which is, of course, is why the world needs bioethicists like Dr. Wolpe.

Despite his jocular demurral, the doctor eventually did offer a few concise observations on hot topics. Abortion: “No one has the right to tell me that my body has to be at the service of another body.” The degree to which health care is disproportionately allocated to the elderly: “We spend an enormous amount of money dying in this culture.” Embryonic stem cells: The way to infuriate scientists who advocate for the ethical use of embryonic stem cells is to ask them to name an experiment that would be too frivolous a use for such cells. “Should we use them to study male pattern baldness?” Dr. Wolpe asked, rhetorically.

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Israeli firefighters, underfunded heroes

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Amir Levy, fire chief of the Western Galilee, remembers encountering a little girl in an elevator while he was training in the United States a year ago. She looked at him admiringly, commenting to her mother how firefighters are heroes.

“That’s not the reaction we were used to getting in Israel,” Levy told an audience of 250, including Los Angeles city officials and the morning shift of the Beverly Hills Fire Department, at an executive breakfast meeting of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) on Dec. 14 at the Beverly Hilton.

Following the inferno in the Carmel forests earlier this month that left 44 dead, Israel’s firefighters are now getting recognition as heroes — but heroes whose skill and bravery are undermined by insufficient resources.

“The supplies have been depleted, the equipment has been used,” said Mark Egerman, a former mayor of Beverly Hills and the Western regional director of JNF’s Friends of Israel Firefighters. “They are in dire need of restocking, resupplying and building the organization to the next step.”

Israel’s fire departments are funded publicly at the municipal level, leaving them shortchanged, Egerman said. The ratio of firefighters to residents is 1 to 8,000, compared to the average of 1 to 1,000 in the Western world. Since the fire broke out on Dec. 2, JNF has raised more than $3 million. 

Levy expressed gratitude for the dedicated backup from around the world of firefighting forces who offered help.

“All firefighters around the world are one big family,” Levy said in a speech translated from the Hebrew, acknowledging his Beverly Hills counterparts in the audience.

“Really, the best family that God ever gave me was the fire department,” he said, relating his own personal story of growing up as a foster child with the dream of becoming a firefighter.

Levy made his home as a teen at the Akko fire station, where the firefighters adopted him and encouraged him to finish school. At 36, he is the youngest fire chief in Israel’s history.

In a gesture of solidarity, Capt. Dennis Andrews, president of the Beverly Hills Firemen’s Association, pledged $2,500 to Friends of Israel Firefighters and declared his interest in exchanging expertise.

“Hopefully this is the beginning of a long-term relationship.”

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