Candlelighting: Week of October 28, 2011
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October 28, 2011
Obama to speak at Union for Reform Judaism biennial
O-ba-ma! … O-ba-ma! The ” title=”from JTA”>from JTA:
The Union for Reform Judaism said Thursday that Obama would address the Dec. 14-18 policymaking conference at a location in the greater Washington area, and the White House confirmed that the speech would take place.
Rabbi David Saperstein, the director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, has advised Obama’s White House on a number of issues, particularly those related to the intersection of faith and public policy.
Obama has had a hit-and-miss relationship with the American Jewish community, largely due to differing sentiments on his treatment of Israel. With his reelection campaign getting rolling, I’d assume that this is a strategic move to shore up his support.
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George Costanza’s two-state comedy solution for Israel
If someone thinks that ” title=”AP”>AP:
Alexander said, that through comedy and humor, he hopes to help advance the idea of two states for two people.
Peres playfully asked the actor if he could call him “George.” Alexander laughed, and pointing to a crowd of reporters, said: “You can. Not them.”
Alexander was on a OneVoice delegation. Something tells me that his “plan” isn’t going to work. Just a hunch.
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Bernie and Ruth Madoff reportedly attempted suicide
” title=”his empire crumbled”>his empire crumbled, Bernard Madoff and his wife Ruth contemplated suicide, or maybe even tried it. That’s what Ruth Madoff told the ” title=”didn’t kill himself”>didn’t kill himself and now he’s a Bernie and Ruth Madoff reportedly attempted suicide Read More »
Occupy the Language
“>OWS and its many many offshoots in all major American cities and many cities around the world). There is an expected, almost ritual nature to American political discourse. There are critiques, followed by demands, supported by emotional anecdotes and statistics, followed by the suggestion of legislative remedies. The chattering class then gets to work vetting these remedies on two levels. First, and most important, is the “horse race” analysis. The political climate will not allow this or the votes are there but only if the opposing party will compromise on this. And so on and so forth. Somewhere farther down, or on the inside pages, the wonks get to work dissecting the numbers. Within a week at most (usually a news cycle), its all old news. Nothing has changed. Perhaps a catch phrase has been added to the stump speech of this or that candidate.
It is very frustrating when a large group of Americans peacefully assemble to air their grievances without participating in these tried and true rituals. When they do not attempt to position themselves behind a candidate or leverage a powerful constituency, but, rather display their disaffection without feeling the need to issue bullet points which any politician or pundit could easily digest and regurgitate. And then they stick around. For a long time. And they do not feel the pressure of the news cycle to make decisions or appoint telegenic spokespeople. They just put up tents, hold long meetings which need to reach a consensus for a decision, put themselves in danger by reclaiming public space and using non-violence as a trigger and a weapon to reveal the repressive reflexes of the financial and political elites. It is maddening. …
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UNESCO to vote on Monday on Palestinian entry
U.N. cultural agency UNESCO will vote on Monday on a Palestinian request for membership, part of a wider Palestinian campaign for recognition as a state within the wider United Nations system.
UNESCO’s executive board decided on October 6 to allow the 193 member countries vote on the application, angering Israel and the United States, which provides 22 percent of the funding of the U.N. subsidiary and could cut that lifeline as a result.
A UNESCO spokeswoman said the vote was likely to take place late on Monday morning at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, during an annual gathering that runs from October 25 to November 15.
UNESCO is the first U.N. agency the Palestinians have sought to join as a full member since applying for membership of the United Nations on September 23.
The bid for a full U.N. seat, which can be granted only by the Security Council, is destined to fail because Washington has vowed to use its veto in the forum if it comes to a vote.
Washington views the Palestinian quest for U.N. recognition of statehood as a unilateral move unhelpful to U.S. efforts to revive stalled peace negotiations with Israel, which it says are the only way forward.
The Palestinians say talks with Israel, which also opposes the Palestinian U.N. initiative, have brought them no closer to their goal of independence in the two decades since such negotiations began.
(Reporting By Vicky Buffery; Editing by Brian Love and Alistair Lyon)
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Dovish J Street undecided on ADL-AJC Israel “Unity Pledge”
UPDATED: The headline of this post has been changed from an earlier version (“J Street rejects ‘Unity Pledge’ on Israel, joining Right-wing groups”) at the request of J Street staff. According to J Street Director of Media and Communications Jessica Rosenblum, the organization has not yet decided whether to sign the pledge. When a decision is made, I will report it. -jl
When the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) put out a call for “bipartisan consensus on Israel” on Oct. 19, conservative groups critical of the Obama administration’s policies towards Israel were the first to object to what they saw as an attempt to silence them.
Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), said in a statement that the AJC-ADL “National Pledge for Unity on Israel,” amounted to an “effort to stifle debate on U.S. policy toward Israel.” The Emergency Committee for Israel dismissed the pledge on similar grounds.
Count J Street, the “pro-Israel, pro-Peace” lobbying group that has frequently supported the Obama administration policies towards Israel, among those national Jewish organizations who
won’t be signing
may not sign the new pledge.
“I’ve signed the pledge for civility,” Jeremy Ben-Ami, the group’s founder and president said in an interview on Oct. 26. He was referring not to the recent ADL-AJC pledge for “unity” but to an earlier pledge, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs’ “Statement on Civility,” which was first circulated in November 2010 and has since been signed by over 1,000 American Jewish leaders, including the RJC’s Brooks.
But while he supports that earlier call for civil discourse among American Jews about Israel, Ben-Ami isn’t interested in downplaying any disagreement within the community of how to best show support for the Jewish state.
“You can have a unified support for Israel—for the state of Israel, for the concept of Israel, for its future and for its security—but a vehement disagreement about how you get there,” he said, “and that’s what we have.”
The RJC and the Emergency Committee, Ben-Ami said, align themselves with the Israeli settler movement, while J Street is charting a course that that is “grounded in a two state solution, grounded in the notion that security rests on a peace agreement.”
“It’s a totally different view,” Ben-Ami said, “but we both care deeply about Israel and we hope that there will be unified American support for the State of Israel.”
The ADL-AJC pledge, according to the Forward, has so far only been signed by a handful of Jewish leaders.
Responding to the conservative groups’ criticism, ADL National Director Abe Foxman said in a press release on Oct. 25 that the pledge was intended as a request that “participants in the political discourse … avoid harsh and personal rhetoric or tactics in the form of attacks on political opponents’ positions on Israel.”
Foxman’s clarification didn’t appease the conservative critics, though. Jonathan Tobin wrote in Commentary that the pledge “should be amended to remove the line about ‘wedge’ issues or scrapped entirely.” In a posting on Twitter, the Emergency Committee said it “welcomes the ADL & AJC retraction of ‘unity pledge’ call to refrain from criticizing Obama admin’s Israel policy.” The pledge, as of Friday morning, was still featured on the ADL website.
But Foxman’s apparent backtracking was enough to mollify Ben-Ami’s reaction.
“You can disagree and still have civility, and as Abe Foxman clarified, they’re not asking that people don’t express their political disagreements,” Ben-Ami said. “But they’re asking that they do it in a way that reflects unified support for Israel—and that I have no problem with.”
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Annual Chest X-Rays Not Useful for Lung Cancer Screening
It’s been a disappointing month for proponents of screening.
You remember what screening is? Screening is testing someone for a disease who does not have any signs or symptoms of that disease. In general it means testing a wide population for a specific disease. So if I have a chronic bloody cough and unintentional weight loss, my doctor isn’t screening me for lung cancer. He’s doing tests to diagnose or rule out lung cancer because I have suggestive symptoms for that disease. Got it?
Lung cancer has long been the number one cancer killer in the US. So a screening test that would help save lives from lung cancer is much in demand. In the 1970s studies tested screening for lung cancer with annual chest X-rays. The trials did not find any benefit.
Apparently those 1970s studies had some procedural flaws that made them unconvincing. And X-ray technology has improved in the last 30 years. So it was conceivable that chest X-rays got a bum rap and were actually a valuable screening tool. This prompted the National Cancer Institute to retest chest X-ray screening as part of its ” target=”_blank”>published in this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Over 154,000 people were randomized to either receiving annual chest X-rays or to usual care by their physicians. There was no difference between the two groups in deaths from lung cancer.
So that settles a question I thought was already settled. Healthy people don’t benefit from periodic screening chest X-rays.
This finding comes on the heels of other negative news about screening. The ovarian cancer branch of PLCO has also demonstrated that the blood test CA125 is not valuable for ovarian cancer screening. And just two weeks ago the ” target=”_blank”>in a selected population of high-risk smokers screening with spiral CT scans saved lives.
Avoiding unproven tests isn’t just a matter of avoiding expense. Unproven tests (or tests proven not to help) cause more harm than good by leading to other invasive unnecessary tests. The informed patient doesn’t want to be screened for “everything”. He wants only what has been proven to help.
Learn more:
” target=”_blank”> X-Rays No Help Against Lung Cancer (Wall Street Journal)
” target=”_blank”>Screening by Chest Radiograph and Lung Cancer Mortality (Journal of the American Medical Association)
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Madoff says he is happier in prison than free
Financial swindler Bernard Madoff said that he is happier in prison than he was on the outside because he no longer lives in fear of being arrested and knows he will die in prison, TV journalist Barbara Walters said on Thursday.
Walters, who spent two hours at the prison with Madoff two weeks ago, also told ABC’s “Good Morning America” program that Madoff said that while he had contemplated suicide during his early days behind bars, he lacked the courage and never thinks about killing himself now.
Madoff is serving a 150-year prison term for bilking investors out of billions of dollars in a decades-long Ponzi scheme that is considered the biggest financial fraud in U.S. history.
Madoff’s wife, Ruth, said in an interview to be aired on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program on Sunday that the couple actually tried to kill themselves by taking pills on Christmas Eve 2008 after the fraud was exposed.
“I don’t know whose idea it was, but we decided to kill ourselves because it was so horrendous what was happening,” Ruth Madoff said of the failed attempt.
Walters did not address the subject of suicide on Thursday. She said Madoff and his wife are now estranged.
The couple’s elder son, Mark, 46, hanged himself in his New York apartment on Dec. 11, the second anniversary of his father’s arrest. Mark and Andrew Madoff turned in their father to authorities a day after he confessed to them.
Walters said Madoff, 73, was distraught over his son’s suicide, and that his wife wanted to stop visiting him in prison after that and he agreed. He has not seen her since, Walters said.
“Ruth does not hate me. She has no one, and this is not fair to her,” Walters quoted Madoff as saying.
“He has terrible remorse, he says he knows that he ruined his family,” Walters said, adding that Madoff told her that with the help of therapy he does not think about what he has done, but “at night he says he has horrible nightmares.”
The interview, one of several involving the Madoff family to surface in the past week, was not filmed because cameras are not allowed in the North Carolina facility where Madoff is serving time.
Walters said Madoff speaks of being happier now because for the first time in 20 years he has no fear of being arrested.
“I feel safer here than outside,” Madoff told Walters.
“I have people to talk to, no decisions to make … now I have no fear because I’m no longer in control” and “know that I will die in prison,” she said he told her.
As for his crimes, Madoff said, “the average person thinks I robbed widows and orphans. I made wealthy people wealthier.”
Walters said Madoff told her, “every once in a while I find myself smiling, and I’m horrified.”
Mark Madoff’s widow Stephanie said in interviews ahead of the publication of her book that Madoff had boasted in a letter to her of being treated like a celebrity, and Walters corroborated this, saying that he told her the prisoners, “especially the younger ones,” treat him with respect.
Reporting by Chris Michaud; editing by Greg McCune
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Rumor mill: 3 reasons why Paul McCartney is probably NOT converting to Judaism
This morning my inbox contained an email from Heeb magazine declaring: “Paul McCartney to convert.” In light of his recent marriage to Jewess Nancy Shevell, a blog post on the magazine’s Website boasts, “Word on the street is that he promised the missus he’d become a Member of the Tribe, and is preparing himself for the big day.”
Nevermind that this is specious hearsay (what won’t the struggling Heeb do for attention?), it is also highly unlikely.
3 reasons why Paul McCartney is probably not converting:
1) According to the National Enquirer, esteemed truth-teller and origin of this rumor, Shevell “takes her religion seriously” and so McCartney is “studying Judaism and promised his new bride he’ll convert.” Fact: Shevell takes Judaism seriously enough that she attended Yom Kippur services the day before her wedding, and McCartney accompanied her. Fact: The couple was married in a civil ceremony at a London register office and no firsthand reports of the occasion mentioned the inclusion of any Jewish wedding rituals (that means, no chupah, no rabbi, no glass-stomp, no Hebrew). Even if we were to give them the benefit of the doubt, what is the likelihood that a woman who takes her Judaism so seriously would marry a non-Jewish man and then insist he convert after the wedding?
2) McCartney was married to a Jewish woman before—his first wife, Linda ‘Eastman’ when they met, was Jewish—and McCartney did not feel compelled to convert then.
3) McCartney was born Roman Catholic but grew up in a secular environment. I surmise that religious impulses probably do not stream through his blood, and that his artistic inclinations may satisfy his spiritual appetite. In fact, he said as much in a 2006 interview with BBC News.
“Every time I come to write a song there’s this sort of magic little thing where I go, “Ooh, ooh, it’s happening again. Ooh, ooh, ooh.” I’m just thrilling myself with this sort of thing. And I do it all the time. I just sort of sit down at the piano and go, “Oh, my God. I don’t know this one.” And suddenly there’s like a song there. It’s something I love. And, like I say, I find the magic in it so—it’s a faith thing….With creativity, I just have a faith. It’s not a faith of any particular religion because I worry that religions start wars. It’s a great spiritual belief that there is something really great there that I probably refer to as a spirit of goodness.”
Even if McCartney were to take an interest in Judaism and begin a study practice, that does not mean a conversion will follow. Chelsea Clinton, for instance, married the Jewish Marc Mezvinsky, included several Jewish rituals in her wedding, was partly married by a rabbi, but did not convert. (Ivanka Trump, however, did.)
People join religions for various reasons: community, spiritual connection, structure, study, you name it. At 64, it is doubtful McCartney will suddenly feel some huge void in his life that can only be filled by religion. His community needs, I’m guessing, have been met; he is already a giver, a believer and probably finds spiritual discipline in his work. That’s not to say Judaism has nothing to offer McCartney, but what it could offer to someone who is already culturally and spiritually sophisticated would take another 64 years and lots of hard work to find out.
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