June 15, 2011

German court rejects Demjanjuk extradition request

Leave a Comment / Worldwide / Jewish Journal

A German court denied a request to extradite John Demjanjuk to Spain to stand trial on charges of being an accessory to genocide and crimes against humanity.

In denying the extradition request on June 9, the Munich court questioned Spain’s jurisdiction in the case and also noted that the evidence presented against Demjanjuk was incomplete.

The Supreme Court of Spain had indicted Demjanjuk, 91, in January and requested an international arrest warrant for the former Cleveland-area autoworker.

Demjanjuk was accused of being responsible for the deaths of 50 of 155 Spanish prisoners in the German concentration camp Flossenburg. He was charged in Spain under the country’s legal doctrine of universal jurisdiction, which allows Spain to try human rights crimes even if they did not take place on Spanish soil.

In May, Demjanjuk was found guilty in a Munich court of being an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews in the Sobibor concentration camp. He was sentenced to five years in prison but remains free in a nursing home facility as his appeal moves forward.

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Overcrowded prisons fail inmates and society alike

Leave a Comment / News, Opinion / Jewish Journal

“It is known that a wide open living space widens one’s mind, and thus the opposite, a crowded living space and lots of people together, degrades one’s mind. Pharaoh strove to degrade the minds of the Israelites, and so he would press them in one place.” —Netziv (Shemot 2:25)

Jewish tradition highly values the principle of teshuvah (turning away from wrongdoing). But how can people who have run afoul of our criminal justice system turn their

lives around if they don’t even have the space to turn around in their cells?

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court confronted severe overcrowding in California prisons, ruling that existing conditions constitute cruel and unusual punishment. This important victory offers an opportunity to reform a broken system that crowds out the possibility of restorative justice.

Since 2005, there has been, on average, one preventable death a week in California prisons. The Supreme Court determined that “needless suffering and death have been the well-documented result” of overcrowding. Earlier, the lower court heard copious testimony, finding that “[a]s many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium [and] as many as 54 prisoners may share a single toilet.” “Wait times for mental health care range as high as 12 months.” Prison infirmaries were operating at twice their capacity, with only half the needed clinical space. At times, “up to 50 inmates may be held together in a 12-by 20-foot cage for up to five hours awaiting treatment.”

Substandard conditions were found in every category, including cleanliness, quality of medical personnel and responsiveness. One prisoner suffering from severe abdominal pain waited five weeks to see a specialist, and died. Another, with “constant and extreme” chest pain, died after not being seen for eight hours. In several cases, cancers were not diagnosed or properly treated for more than a year.

These severe outcomes serve no valid punishment goals and demonstrate an abdication of basic ethical and constitutional duties. The Court agreed, affirming an order to trim prison rolls to 137.5 percent of capacity. This reduction should permit greater access to services, rehabilitation and voluntary religious ministry (which have demonstrably contributed to personal recovery of many offenders). Nevertheless, greater reforms are needed.

The California prison system has evolved into the opposite of what “corrections” and “rehabilitation” should mean. Though the criminal justice system removes people from society for specified time periods, the overwhelming majority of inmates will be returned to the general population. The purpose of the separation is to allow a process of repairing and learning to take place in preparation for resuming membership in society according to the social compact. This would logically entail rehabilitation, education, social services and/or religious ministry, all designed to produce a smooth path to reintegration after incarceration.

But because of severe overcrowding, California fails to afford prisoners opportunities to engage in the requisite mental and physical activities and achieve the desired outcomes of imprisonment. Instead, at a cost of approximately $50,000 a year per prisoner, California is maintaining an extravagant revolving door, forgoing services that would reduce the astronomical recidivism rate.

Moreover, since U.S. incarceration rates have quadrupled in recent decades, we are jamming additional people into a system that was already failing to provide basic care and services necessary to sustain its inhabitants and ready them for return to society. As a consequence of these conditions, we are fostering the very criminality we seek to control. We can’t (nor would we want to) imprison everyone forever, so we have a compelling interest in making sure that people come out better, not worse, and more able to contribute to society.

Jews, with our history of enslavement and alienation, should be especially sensitive to forced deprivations of liberty under inhumane conditions. Indeed, in the Jewish tradition, even persons convicted of crimes are created in the Divine image. The Talmud seeks to protect the humanity of those facing capital punishment as well as lesser sentences. Dangerous overcrowding and unsafe conditions are an assault on a person’s humanity and, by extension, his/her Divine image. Even when society deems conduct criminal, Judaism calls for justice and compassion, and prophets like Amos, Micah and Isaiah taught that everyone must be treated fairly and equally.

In considering the current state of prisons in California, an urgent question is whether we are willing to perpetuate a system that forces people — largely the young, people of color and our most vulnerable — into unproductive and irretrievably negative paths. The Court has done its duty by ruling that the Constitution cannot allow overcrowding when the results are death, infection and inhumane conditions.
Now it is our duty to design and implement the necessary reforms to ensure true teshuvah, of individuals and the system.

Stephen Rohde, a constitutional lawyer and author, is vice chair of the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA)/Jewish Funds for Justice and represented a man on California’s death row. Hanna Liebman Dershowitz, an attorney who has specialized in criminal justice reform, serves on PJA’s Los Angeles regional council. PJA was a signatory to an amicus brief in the overcrowding case in the Supreme Court with various Christian, Muslim and Jewish groups.

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Letters to the Editor: Jewish credo, day schools, circumcision

Leave a Comment / Circumcision, Letters to the Editor, News, Opinion / Jewish Journal

Challenging God, Politics of ‘Credo’

Of all the items on Dennis Prager’s list of his basic Jewish beliefs, item No. 7 repels me the most (“My Jewish Credo,” June 10). He quotes G.K. Chesteron, “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” He then goes on to draw the conclusion, “Therefore, the secular West has produced a plethora of foolish, often dangerous, substitutes for God-based religion. These include substitute religions such as socialism, feminism and environmentalism, and evils such as communism and Nazism.”

When people believe in God, they too will believe in anything. They will believe in the idolatrous worship of capitalism as perfect and self-regulating. They will believe in Bible-based second-class treatment of women and gays. They will deny the science of global warming.

And while I agree with Dennis about the evils of communism and Nazism, fundamentalists will believe in the foolishness of thinking that they alone know what God wants, thinks and feels; that God is on their side alone; that nothing they do can be wrong because God is on their side — which leads to all sorts of evil.

Dennis is trying to make the case for conservative religion. He dislikes liberal religion almost as much as he dislikes secularism. Being a liberal religionist, and therefore in the middle between secularism and conservative religion, I find equal amounts of nonsense believed by both the secular left and the religions right, for which Dennis is a primary spokesman and proponent.

Michael Asher
North Hollywood

Dennis Prager’s 15 core beliefs allowed for much pontification and pedantic punditry while offering little room or tolerance for countervailing and more factually truthful positions.

Two beliefs stand out for their red-flagged myopia and egregious falsehoods: Conservative Christians, Wall Street Journal journalists and the retinue of extreme right-wing talk radio hosts are Israel’s best friends, while the Israel-Arab conflict is the morally clearest dispute in our time.

Friends tell friends the whole truth: the good, the bad and the ugly. Self-aggrandizers tell friends what they want to hear for the former’s ultimate benefit. The conservative tsunami of evangelical Christians, Wall Street Journal columnists and the hallelujah chorus of fringe, right-wing talk hosts thus definitely fall and fit seamlessly into the category of self-aggrandizers.

The Israel-Arab conflict, drawn with the only two colors in Dennis Prager’s quiver — black and white — takes the world’s most intractable geopolitical problem and makes a yes-or-no decision on its probity and rectitude, negating in the process the cornucopia of colors that both peoples paint their worldview from.

It appears that Mr. Prager’s demagoguery and lemming-like political catechism has lost none of its steam, while losing the goodwill and gratitude of those — yes, liberals — who see a palette that can and should be painted with hundreds of other colors.

Mr. Prager’s “Jewish Credo” will thus be the bane, and not the boon, of a Jewish revival.

Marc Rogers
Sherman Oaks

The Case for Day Schools

The editorial (“I’m a Believer,” June 10) touting the benefits of Jewish day schools comes as no surprise to Jewish Journal readers. It’s not just Jewish schools that generate extraordinary results. Parochial schools are consistently more successful in educating and inspiring students than government-operated entities. For example, Catholic schools throughout major U.S. cities boast graduation rates exceeding 98 percent. Compare that to the dismal performance of the LAUSD, with a graduation rate of barely more than 40 percent in 2010.

If our government is serious about preventing the United States from becoming a second-rate country, it must act outside the box. The time has come to provide parents with real options in the form of school vouchers. With strict rules that vouchers may fund only secular courses, there will be no First Amendment issues. Our children will be the ultimate beneficiaries, and America will retain its position as the world leader.

Leonard M. Solomon
Los Angeles

I’m the social media manager at PEJE [Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education]. I’m writing because I was moved by your “I’m a Believer” piece. Like you, I also went from skeptic to believer. Your pride in your son, and your son’s schooling, was nicely articulated. Thanks for going public with it.

Ken Gordon
via e-mail

Fight for Rights, but Don’t Impose Opinion

As a woman, a mother, a Jew and a health care provider, I found Jena Troutman’s crusade an abomination, imposing her own beliefs on the public (“Circumcision Opponent Abandons Santa Monica Ballot Initiative,” June 10). It is her responsibility as a “children’s rights advocate” to provide information and fight for those rights based upon research, studies and facts, and not on frivolous personal opinion. I am relieved she chose to abandon her cause, even if it is for all the wrong reasons.

Leslye Adelman
Sherman Oaks

Challenging God, Politics of ‘Credo’

Mr. Prager, space limits me from discussing all 15 points of your Jewish credo, so let me just comment on Nos. 13 and 14 (“My Jewish Credo,” June 10).

In No. 14 you say at the present time conservative Christians and conservatives generally — such as Wall Street Journal columnist and talk radio hosts — are Israel’s, and therefore Jews’, best friends. As a liberal Jew and one of Israel’s best friends, I resent your libelous statement about me. You also state that “universities throughout the Western world are centers of Israel hate.” With a broad brush and without any proof, you libel all these centers of learning, but this Wild West manner of yours, wherein you make outlandish statements without any proof, is common to most of your writings.

Now as to the 13th point of your Jewish credo where you proclaim, “God, not human beings, is the author of the Torah,” how do you explain to your conservative Christian friends that one of God’s commandments in Exodus 20 says, “Thou shall have no other gods before Me” and that by worshipping Jesus as God’s son they must be as evil as the homosexuals that many of them despise because the Bible forbids such acts?

In conclusion, Mr. Prager, any credo of yours has no credibility.

Leon M. Salter
Los Angeles

So feminism and environmentalism are often “dangerous substitutes for God-based religion.” Therefore if you fervently believe in women’s rights and the crucial need to protect our environment, you obviously can’t believe in a God-based religion. It seems to me that just the opposite is true: that if you believe in the God of the Torah, you would surely support feminism and environmentalism.

Norman Pell
Los Angeles

Pretty Women: How Much Do Looks Matter?

Marty Kaplan’s “If Bachmann and Palin Weren’t Pretty” (June 3) was a refreshing trip down memory lane to back in the day when a woman’s opinion would be ignored rather than refuted on substance by focusing attention on her appearance. As usual, Kaplan’s extreme leftist, intolerant hate spam spits out claims of their “verbal foulness,” “evil or stupid”…“wingnut views,” and how “doggie” is their talk due to his disagreement with their policies without ever addressing the substance of his disagreement. This is his usual juvenile approach, probably because when it comes down to substance, Kaplan will lose most arguments. If you doubt this, just ignore Kaplan’s hateful vitriol and read Bachmann’s economic policies (which most Americans agree with) and Obama’s economic policies (which most Americans disagree with). When will progressive women recognize and call out extreme leftists like Kaplan (see also the behavior of Bill Clinton, David Letterman, Anthony Weiner, etc.) when they exhibit egregious sexist behavior or write juvenile sexist whines (hard to call it an article when it so lacks in journalistic integrity) like this one?

CJ Wright
via e-mail

I find it interesting and typical that of the letters to The Journal about Marty Kaplan’s column on prettiness and Palin, that all the women would be supportive of his foolish column and the one male writer was in dissent. Would these women support a column that made fun of, let’s say, Barbara Boxer? That the only reason anyone takes her seriously is because of her looks? Hopefully, we will soon find out.

Richard Levine
via e-mail

Just wanted you to know that I agree with Marty Kaplan’s column on pretty women and current politics. I figure you may have gotten some flak on this column so I wanted to let you know there is at least one feminist who agrees with it.

Bonnie Pastor
via e-mail

Too Much Bloodshed

God knows, we live in a world full of sorrow. David Suissa’s “Cheap Blood” (June 10) though, reminded me of the horror of the Holocaust, when millions of Jews were slaughtered and the world did not say a word.

It ignored all the signs. The disappearance of countless people, the emptying of the ghettos, the animal trains packed with Jews going towards the death camps, the wholesale stealing of Jewish property and then the actual ashes coming out of the chimneys in the butcher houses.

All the big papers in the United States found better things to write about. The Jews in the United States were too afraid to raise their voices because anti-Semitism was widespread and loud. Only toward the end of the war the Bergson group (a grandson of Rav Kook) got an ear in the White House and about a quarter of a million Jews were saved.

Silence kills. We know that. We saw it with our own eyes. Now silence kills Darfurians in Sudan. The subject is off the radar. There is a Holocaust going on and our president is worried about Palestinians who live relatively good lives. What they want is to take another people’s homeland. And the world is making an awful lot of noise about justifying this particular goal. What goes on in Darfur is plain killing, genocide, for no good or bad reason. How can we expect justice from this world regarding Israel when the smell of blood from Sudan does not bother it?

“Never again” is a fine caption but it does not speak for the world. This world wants to do it again and again and it is up to us to stop it.

Batya Dagan
Los Angeles

The Question to Ask: Is It Good for the Jews?

The article “California’s 2011 Redistricting: Good for the Jews?” (June 9, jewishjournal.com) evoked nostalgia. I haven’t heard “Is it good or bad for the Jews?” for many years. It used to be that was the first and most important question — no matter what the issue.

Certainly we should be asking this question as events unfold in the turbulent Middle East.

Dan Davis
Santa Maria

Israel and Palestine: Talk Is Cheap

Does Israel really believe that the Muslim countries surrounding her will ever truly accept Israel’s right to exist, even if these countries verbally accept Israel’s legitimacy?

Words are cheap, only actions and true belief’s matter. The surrounding country’s will never accept Israel’s right to exist until they realize that Israel will only become stronger, wiser, more inventive, and more democratic than they will ever achieve. That will not happen while these country’s are in a constant state of denial. If their citizens can’t comprehend the differences in their lives compared to those of Israeli citizens, and if Muslim children are indoctrinated from birth that Israel is the “Evil Empire,” we might as well admit that the emperor wears no clothes.

I for one hope that we never hear the Muslims accept Israel’s legitimacy. It won’t bring peace and it could cause Israel to let her guard down.

CORRECTION

The article “L.A. Synagogues to Take Part in Federation Israel Trip” (June 10) should have said that David Ben-Gurion lived in the Negev; he was born in Poland.

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In praise of circumcision: Curbing male barbarism

Leave a Comment / Education, Graduation / Danielle Berrin

Men may soon complain that they’re being objectified.

In recent weeks, national public discourse has steadily focused on the male sex organ. First, California ballot measures advocating for the ban of male circumcision caught national attention, sparking intense debate between proponents of the religious ritual (“It has health benefits!”) and those who oppose it (“It’s genital mutilation!”). And then, in a discomfiting display of his own Semitic snip, Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) injudiciously Tweeted a picture of his package to an online coquette, unleashing a flurry of online-liaison confessionals and prompting calls for him to resign from Congress.

Before that, the spotlight shone squarely on Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dominique Strauss-Kahn, whose stunning sexual appetites led to emasculating consequences.

How ironic, then, that tales of male sexual deviance are met with reminders of religious restraint. God can be so calculating. All these “peccant peckers,” as Christopher Hitchens calls them, have men, in general, in a pickle.

Naturally, a first line of defense is to protect one’s private part.

During a friendly Tweetin’ tussle last week with his producer Eli Roth, actor Russell Crowe expressed his contempt for cutting: “Circumcision is barbaric and stupid,” he direct-tweeted to the “Inglourious Basterds” star.

“Who are you to correct nature? Is it real that God requires a donation of foreskin? Babies are perfect. [I have] many Jewish friends, I love my Jewish friends, I love the apples and the honey and the funny little hats but stop cutting yr [your] babies.”

That Crowe, who won stardom (and an Oscar) for playing a Roman gladiator, is unable to distinguish between real barbarism and a religious ritual that profits health is mildly dispiriting, especially when one of circumcision’s central aims is to curb male barbarism. Men are supposed to be reminded of God and, one could argue, moral behavior, in the very place they are most likely to betray religious ideals.

“Circumcision is the indelible symbol that a man can be more than just an animal,” Rabbi Ed Feinstein, senior rabbi at Valley Beth Shalom, said. “The fact that you seal your connection with God and with tradition into that organ makes it incredibly difficult for that organ to be used as a weapon of manipulation or destruction. For men, this is the center of being: Is masculinity to be defined in terms of power and violence, or control and strength? What you see in the news is what happens when men make the wrong choice.”

All the hullabaloo over men behaving badly has proved an opportune moment for women, who are foisting their feminist critiques about different gendered approaches to power.

“[M]aybe feminists have learned that male development stops at power,” New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about a string of prominent men — Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, John Edwards, Eliot Spitzer, et al — involved in high-profile sex scandals.

On ABC’s “This Week With Christiane Amanpour,” a roundtable discussion on sex and politics became an exercise in female moral superiority.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a sex scandal involving a female politician these days,” Amanpour began, “which begs the question: What if there were more women in politics and in positions of power? Would they change the way business is done from Washington to Wall Street and beyond?”

The panel included a former Bush administration official and, strangely, Cécilia Attias, the former first lady of France and Nicolas Sarkozy’s second wife, who ran off with her lover during their marriage. But the discussion resorted to clichés: Women don’t cheat “because we don’t have the time”; “the perils of too much testosterone”; “women are attracted to [men in] power,” etc. By contast, an essay in Sunday’s New York Times suggested that while women enter politics more nobly to “do something” with their power, the seemingly shallower sex does so to “become something.”

“Women run because there is some public issue that they care about, some change they want to make, some issue that is a priority for them, and men tend to run for office because they see this as a career path,” Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, told The Times.

Women are seizing upon this man-down moment to vent long-held beliefs and assert hard-won power. Soon, they have learned, all will be forgotten; men will be forgiven their transgressions (see: Clinton, Spitzer) while their female co-conspirators languish in disgrace (see: Monica Lewinsky, Tiger Woods’ mistresses, call girls, porn stars, college students and housekeepers).

The double standard endures, and women are fed up.

“In five decades, we’ve moved from the pre-feminist mantra about the sexual peccadilloes of married men — Boys will be boys — to post-feminist resignation: Men are dogs,” Dowd wrote last week.

Leave it to men, then, to enlarge ideas about the nature of their desires. The actor Alec Baldwin, whose own animal-ish impulses qualify him to comment, defended Weiner on The Huffington Post: “[H]e probably spends a great deal of time going to meetings, raising campaign funds and seizing upon every opportunity to remind people of how great he is as a public servant and a human being. It’s exhausting,” Baldwin wrote. “He exists under a constant pressure cooker of self-analysis and public appraisal. Like other politicians, he needs something to take the edge off.”

What powerful and public men crave may not be merely sex but a release from responsibility. Sometimes the only way to feel like a man is to act like one. Properly understood, circumcision is the sole barrier between instinct and utter ruin, and men could use a pointed reminder that sometimes inertia is more intelligent than impulse.

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Womens’ Life – What Do You Expect?

Leave a Comment / Uncategorized / Pini Herman

Life expectancy rising has been a staple of past public health reports in the U.S., and overall women in the U.S. are still living longer, but many counties in are showing decreasing life expectancy of a year or two in womens lives, primarily in areas where poverty and poor health have increased. A recent Los Angeles Times article pointed out smoking, obesity and the polarization of incomes which has contributed to this reverse in health trends.

Jewish women’s life expectancy in the U.S. is not studied closely, but the assumption is that may be similar to Israeli women, though not necessarily, as health care in Israel is universal and participation in a medical insurance plan is compulsory.

Fourteen years ago, in 1997, the Los Angeles Jewish Population Survey found 40,300 or 16 percent of Jewish households reporting at least one health need unfulfilled in the past year. 9,000 households (3.6 percent) reported that a member needed medical care or surgery and did not receive it and more than twice that, 24,000 households reported that they delayed medical care because of cost. 16,800 LA Jewish households reported that they needed medicines or eyeglasses but did without in the preceding year. Currently, with higher insurance premiums, deductibles and out-of-pocket payments the Jews of LA might be worse off. Its hard to know, because its not being studied.

Pini Herman serves as President of the Movable Minyan a lay-lead independent congregation in the 3rd Street area.

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The pro-Israel divide

Leave a Comment / News, Opinion, Rob Eshman / Rob Eshman

Every week, an e-mail circulates among hundreds of Jews in Los Angeles calling for my immediate firing. The subject line of a recent one was, “The L.A. Jewish paper needs a new Editor-in-Chief.”

I know when this happens, because the author is always kind enough to copy me on the campaign.

The author is usually one of a group of people who reads my editorials, or another essay or headline in the paper and decides that the fate of the State of Israel depends on ridding the Jewish community of what another anti-me organizer called my “über-left anti-Israel perspective.”

“Aren’t you upset?” a friend asked me.

Nope — more like bemused. The e-mails are so strident and convincing I feel bad not climbing on the bandwagon. “Yeah,” I want to write back, “this guy sounds terrible! Get rid of the bastard!”

The problem is, the person the e-mails attack doesn’t at all sound like me. Either I do a terrible job of explaining my positions here, or many in the pro-Israel community have a terrible time accepting and understanding opinions that differ from their own.

That was the crux of a discussion I had last Sunday on stage at the Pico Playhouse with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The mayor was part of a panel I moderated called “How to Talk to Progressives About Israel,” sponsored by Democrats for Israel (DFI), that also included former City Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, DFI-LA President Andrew Lachman and Councilman Paul Koretz.

The panelists identified two major challenges they face as progressive supporters of Israel. One is strengthening support for Israel in those parts of the left where it is flat or has declined. Among Democrats, support for Israel has held steady for years at about 60 percent. Among Republicans, it has grown 25 percent in a decade, to 85 percent.

“I don’t understand it,” Villaraigosa said of the flat-lining of progressive support. “From my vantage point, it’s the only democracy in that part of the world. I know Arab Spring is a hope, but we’ll see if the hope is realized.”

The other challenge the panelists identified is finding a way to defend liberal values in Israel and America without being denounced as “anti-Israel.” Goldberg was especially strident on this point.

“Being pro-Israel leaves no room for any criticism of Israel,” she said. “There are many areas where [right-wing pro-Israel activists and I] agree, but we don’t even get that far to have that conversation, because people ask me why I’m anti-Israel,” Goldberg said. “I’ve never been anti-Israel, not a moment in my life.”

The discussion came almost exactly one year after journalist Peter Beinart published his essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” in The New York Review of Books.

That essay set off a firestorm of controversy and handwringing, as Beinart accused the pro-Israel Jewish establishment of exactly what Goldberg described: alienating self-identified progressive Jews by suppressing criticism of Israel and supporting Israel “at any price” — even by sacrificing liberal values.

Beinart’s argument was just a tad East Coast-centric — after all, he ignores the role of groups like Americans for Peace Now, the New Israel Fund and the open debate that takes place every week in “mainstream” publications like this. But his central point remains dead-on. The vast majority of American Jews and Americans support Israel because it is a democratic Jewish state that reflects American values. Lose liberal support, and you lose Israel.

“Saving liberal Zionism in the United States — so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism in Israel — is the great American Jewish challenge of our age,” Beinart wrote.

Last Sunday’s panel offered a way to at least do the former. Villaraigosa said when he addresses audiences that are less warm toward Israel, he can proudly stand behind Israel’s trade unions, its defense of a free press, gay rights and women’s rights.

“It’s a vibrant democracy,” he said.

I asked the mayor whether that meant he would reject any attempts here in Los Angeles to publicly acknowledge a United Nations vote for Palestinian statehood in September.

The mayor said that as long as Hamas, which calls for Israel’s destruction, is part of a Palestinian government, he would refuse any official sanction of a U.N. statehood resolution.

“I would look [supporters of Palestinian statehood] in the eye and say, ‘No,’ ” he said to applause. “It’s just as simple as that. How can we have a conversation about democracy in that context? We’re talking about Hamas.”

Villaraigosa said two things are crucial to reaching out to build, or rebuild, Israel’s support among progressives. One is establishing personal relationships, especially across ethnic and cultural divides, like the ones he has enjoyed with Jews throughout his life. The other is allowing for debate and criticism.

“Anyone who says you can’t question the policies of a government, that’s nonsensical,” the mayor said. “It’s alien to what democracies are supposed to be about.”

About 100 people filled the theater to hear the panel. Across town, at the same time, some 500 people were supporting Israel in their way at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting.

Anyone who has looked at the history of the Middle East conflict long enough would have to say neither audience is privy to all the answers. But since we all care about Israel and its future, we’d all do well to heed the mayor’s last words of advice: “You’ve got to be willing to talk to people you disagree with.”

Or at least e-mail them, politely.

Rob Eshman is the Editor-in-Chief of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.

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What to look for, where to find help

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, Health, News / Jewish Journal

As a loving and concerned parent, you may notice that when your daughter enters puberty she will gain weight. Most of this gain is due to her body developing and preparing her to grow taller; the weight usually precedes the growth spurt. A healthy adolescent may gain anywhere from 20 to 50 pounds. Because there is so much focus on weight and body size in our culture, however, adolescents are not given the opportunity to go through these changes with the weight fluctuations that are necessary for normal development. This is the time that most eating disorders start. Over the years, I have heard my clients say that they started their eating disorder between the ages of 11 and 15 years old. Most started with a diet or over-exercising.

It is very hard to tell if your daughter is going through normal changes or has the beginning stages of an eating disorder. Research reports that 50 percent of girls between the ages of 12 and 14 say they are unhappy because they “feel fat,” 45 percent of elementary-school-age children report wanting to be thinner, and 40 to 60 percent of high-school girls in the United States are on a diet.

Here are some eating disorder signs to look for:

• Uses food when upset or stressed.

• Has lost a significant amount of weight in a short period of time.

• Uses laxatives, diuretics and/or appetite suppressants .

• Must exercise or goes to the bathroom during or following meals.

• Has a preoccupation with body, weight, diets and/or food.

You cannot tell if someone has an eating disorder just by looking at them. The eating disorder is used as a way of coping with the stresses of life. It is a way to avoid feelings or some traumatic event that a person does not want to face. Left untreated, the eating disorder can cause disruptions in emotional and physical development, including osteoporosis and infertility later in life.

Many people ask me, “What are the best ways to avoid an eating disorder?” One of the most important factors is role modeling and dieting. We now have generations of women brought up with dieting and not liking their body. A child sees Mom looking in a mirror and being upset about her weight. She sees her going on one diet after another. She thinks Mom is beautiful and wants to be just like her.

Research is showing that 35 percent of “normal dieters” progress to disordered eating that may last a lifetime. Alterations occur in brain chemistry from restricting food then binging. People start using food to feel better. Food uses the same reward system as mind-altering substances. This is one of the reasons for cravings and obsessive thoughts about food. Also, some foods are addictive to some people.

Currently, 11 million people in the United States have eating disorders. Disordered eating is not entirely about what we eat. Most people with disordered eating could write books about nutrition. They know the calories, fat grams and carbohydrate contents of the foods they eat. They know what they should eat and how much; they just cannot put that into practice. The real problem is that food or the compulsive thoughts are being used to avoid some part of our life. Usually they do not know what feelings they are avoiding.

In our treatment center, we see so many people who are not only disconnected from their feelings, but also from their appetite and themselves. When dieting, they may be hungry, but they tell themselves, “I am doing well, because I am sticking to my diet.” They are not listening to their body signals. Over time, they do not even know when they are hungry or full. They search for an external source (the diet) to regulate their food intake. With each failed diet, they lose a little more self-esteem, because they did not stay with their diet. Yo-yo dieting or other forms of external control only work temporarily. The real issues need to be dealt with so that there is no need to use food to shove these issues down. Only an internal shift can produce lifelong changes.

Many people have followed the steps outlined in my book, “Diets Don’t Work” (ReBu, 2009), so that they can once again eat when hungry and stop when full and make healthy choices.

Obviously, there is a continuum of eating disorder behaviors, but if disordered eating is causing a problem in your life, relationships or self-esteem, you should consult a professional who specializes in eating disorders. Eating disorders and disordered eating do not go away on their own; they require professional help. There is no simple cause of eating disorders, nor is there a simple cure.

It is usually a good idea to start treatment with a team of experienced eating disorder professionals. The collaborative approach — including a medical doctor, registered dietitian, exercise physiologist and therapist, along with group therapy — is necessary to facilitate dealing with the core issues and build a solid foundation for long-term recovery. The dialogue among these professionals is indispensable in planning the best treatment for each individual. An eating disorder treatment program will help the person deal with the underlying reasons why he or she has been using the eating disorder, and create the foundation for lasting recovery.

Rebecca Cooper is a licensed therapist, certified eating disorder specialist, the author of “Diets Don’t Work” and the founder of Rebecca’s House Eating Disorders Treatment Program in Laguna Hills.

For more information about Cooper’s work, visit www.DietsDontWork.org and www.Rebeccashouse.org, or call (800) 711-2062.

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My anorexia: How I became a survivor

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About seven of us have gathered for group therapy in a large room scattered with chairs. A woman with frizzy red hair and a head that looks several sizes too big for her emaciated body sits across from me. Next to her, a statuesque blonde has a polished demeanor that belies the fact that, after lunch, staff members will try to keep her from going to the bathroom to vomit.

It’s just weeks before my 16th birthday, and I’ve been deposited here in the eating disorders unit of the Waltham-Weston Hospital in Massachusetts because, after a year and a half of starvation, my vital signs have dropped dangerously low. With my knees tucked under me to guard against the chill, though, I feel fine, and the fact that I’m the youngest person in the room gives me a smug sense of accomplishment.

This moment stands out to me now, 15 years later, because I credit what happened next with saving my life: Looking around at the ghosts of my future that bright September morning, a voice shot into my head, replacing my self-satisfaction and shocking me with the following epiphany: “I don’t want to die.”

And with that, I became one of the lucky ones.

My battle with anorexia began when I was 14. I was wrapping up my first year at a private school and at the same time coming out of an adolescent rebellion that involved a lot of dark eye makeup and short skirts. If I was going to fit in with my new Polo-wearing classmates, I figured that I would have to change my look, starting with dropping the extra 20 or so pounds of baby fat that stuck stubbornly around my middle.

One afternoon in the spring, I mentioned my diet to a delicate, ethereal-looking girl who was one year younger than me.

“All you have to do,” she said breathlessly, “is just not eat.”

It was both brilliant and incredibly obvious. Almost immediately, the gears in my mind that carry whatever glitch causes eating disorders were sent into overdrive. All of my mental energy stopped, pivoted and turned toward her suggestion, becoming completely focused on ridding my body of unwanted, excess pounds.

I weighed and balanced calories with the precision of a molecular chemist. I went from eating three meals and two snacks a day to eating one meal a day and nothing else.

As soon as summer rolled around, I convinced a friend to spend every afternoon doing hours of workout videos with me in the basement of her house. Once the sun went down, I would jog the two miles back home through the sweltering New England humidity.

When I went back to school in the fall, though, the ride came screeching to a halt. My now-bony body caught the eye of the class ballerina, who was experienced enough in such matters to notice when the flesh covering a girl’s rib or hipbone was stretched just a bit too much. She tipped off a teacher, who in turn notified my parents.

The news was met on their end with palpable fear, and within weeks I was set up with a psychiatrist. He was the best of the best, the head of the eating disorders program at Massachusetts General Hospital, and for one hour every Tuesday night, in the basement office of his imposing gray mansion in Newton, I would sit silently as he worked his magic, peppering me with questions for which

I didn’t have any answers.

Two afternoons a week, my mother would drive me to my pediatrician’s office in Weston, where I would strip down and don a plastic gown, remove all my jewelry and empty my bladder, and then watch with delight as the numbers on the scale continued to drop.

On the way home, I never knew whether my mother’s silence meant she wanted to scream or cry.

As the year wore on, despite my continually plummeting weight, the eating disorder lost its thrill. I began to get exhausted, and my rituals became obligations that I could no longer comprehend. Food had turned into an obsession that drove me to think up ways to eat without eating. When I knew I was alone, I would take out snacks or leftovers, smell them and put them away. Other times I would chew them up and then spit them out.

But I couldn’t stop; the sicker I became, the more successful I felt.

My psychiatrist was the one who broke the news that my bags were being packed for Waltham-Weston. After getting an EKG and blood work done, I landed in his office, where he informed me from underneath his bushy gray mustache that I was going to be taken directly to the hospital.

“Like, to stay?”

“Yes.”

It was another year or two before my weight became stable, but after that, I shut the door on what I viewed as a one-time episode. I didn’t want to think or talk about my anorexia; I didn’t understand it, and it seemed no one else did either. The details also seemed unsavory at best — I was certain that they would repulse normal people.

When I was assigned to write an article for The Jewish Journal about eating disorders several months ago by my unsuspecting editor, I took it on thinking that I was far enough removed from the topic that I would be unfazed.

I was wrong. It took shockingly little to jog the memory of the flesh on my body feeling almost parasitic, and how satisfying it once was to starve it off. But as I’ve been telling people that I’m writing this, a surprising number of women have confided that they have battled eating disorders, too. Many of them are Jewish. Many still struggle, every second of every day.

And I suppose that’s the point: to expose my thoughts and feelings and secrets to the light of day, for myself and for anyone else who might be affected. I am one of the lucky ones. But I don’t want to sit by silently anymore.

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Eating disorders: Still on the path to understanding

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For nearly 40 years, Sharon Pikus hid what she calls her “dirty little secret”: After an adolescent case of whooping cough caused her to vomit everything she ate, she turned the experience into a trick to lose weight.

“I was always a chubbette as a kid, so I said to myself, ‘This is terrific — I can eat whatever I want and throw it up,’ ” recalled Pikus, now 60.

She kept up the habit for decades, eventually having to hide it from her husband and children. Even as other parts of her life were in place — her family was happy, her business was successful — her bulimia lurked under the surface, an overwhelming compulsion.

“It is an obsession, like an addiction to food,” she said. “You can just go eat [and] eat, but you have to throw up, and then you have to mask it.”

For Nancy Malvin, problems with eating began when she was 13. She came home from school one day devastated by unexpected teasing from her classmates. The incident sent her on a downward emotional spiral, which she later recognized as the onset of her lifelong battle with anorexia.

“She began losing massive quantities of weight and lying about how much food she was eating,” her sister Jennifer Malvin, now 53, remembered.

For the next four decades, Nancy tried every treatment she could find, battling her disorder ferociously.

Eventually, her weight plummeted to a terrifying 60 pounds, and her body began to fail. In the last few years of her life, Jennifer says, Nancy needed a pacemaker. With no fat cushioning the soles of her feet, even climbing stairs became painful. Her teeth fell out, Jennifer said, and “she lost her beautiful hair.”

Nancy was not at a loss for information about her eating disorder. She understood what had triggered it, had been through massive amounts of therapy in an attempt to get well, and was brilliantly analytical and insightful. “She worked on herself all the time,” her sister said. “But she used to say, ‘At the plate, I can’t follow what my brain is telling me.’ ”

By the time Nancy died as a result of complications from her disease at 51, her liver had failed. Her husband came home to find her unresponsive on the floor, and paramedics were unable to revive her.

Doctors remain baffled by the psychological causes that make people like Sharon and Nancy turn outside events into rituals of starvation or binging and purging, but it’s a question that is in dire need of an answer — anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychological disorder, with anywhere from 4 to 8 percent of people who struggle with the disease dying as a result of it. Bulimia is not far behind; just fewer than 4 percent of those with the disease eventually die from complications.

There is, however, some good news: Researchers are making headway in understanding the roots of the disease. Eating disorders, they’ve discovered, likely begin with a certain gene or combination of genes. From there, external factors like family dynamics and cultural pressure trigger those genes into action.

In other words, said Lynn Grefe, president and chief executive officer of the National Eating Disorders Association, “You are born with the gun, and life pulls the trigger.”

It’s taken researchers many iterations of theory to get to this point. Years ago, for instance, it was widely believed that parents were the cause of eating disorders. Given that symptoms are most likely to appear during the throes of adolescence, experts believed that budding teenagers in families with exceedingly high expectations were cracking under the pressure of overbearing parents or societal pressures.

“In the olden days, we used to say that perfectionistic families, those that dealt poorly with conflict and those that weren’t willing to address disputes, were the families that anorexia would show up in,” said Dr. David Rosen, the chief of the teenage and young adult health section at the University of Michigan Health System. “There is less sense now that those family dynamics are as important — they play a role, but more in how [the disease] gets perpetuated over time than how it develops.”

Anorexia and bulimia were also once believed to be the sole province of successful, high-achieving affluent white girls — a prototype that easily applies to many Jewish girls. And while young women with those characteristics are not unusual patients to see, Rosen said, now “we see boys and people of color and of every socioeconomic background; eating disorders have become equal-opportunity illnesses.”

Another myth is that eating disorders are a byproduct of unrelenting advertisements and entertainment featuring impossibly thin women. While those images certainly aren’t a positive influence on girls, they also don’t single-handedly cause disease, said Cynthia Bulik, director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“It’s so convenient to have these face-value explanations; it makes sense [to people] that the media shows skinny people, and that must cause eating disorders,” she said. “It’s a simple explanation, but it’s an inaccurate explanation.”

The fact that eating disorders have genetic underpinnings has been accepted in the medical community for more than 10 years, after a number of studies were published that demonstrated a familial tendency toward the disease. One such study was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2000. Researchers looked at 2,163 female twins, and by examining the women who were found to have anorexia, concluded that when it comes to the likelihood that someone will develop the eating disorder, genes play about a 58 percent role.

In the same year, researchers at UCLA and the University of Pittsburgh compared the likelihood that a relative of someone with anorexia or bulimia would also develop the disorder, compared to relatives of people without either disease. They found that among family members of participants with anorexia, the rate of the disease was 11.3 times as high as it was among relatives of healthy participants. For relatives of bulimic participants, the rate of bulimia was 4.3 times as high.

Researchers are using this information to guide them in their studies; many are now trying to pinpoint a specific gene or group of genes that these families have in common.

In the meantime, experts have been able to identify certain personality traits that might make people more susceptible to anorexia or bulimia. Individuals with both disorders tend to be obsessive or perfectionists, and many steer unusually clear of risk. Bulimics often have an added tendency toward impulsivity.

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