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Jewish Journal

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March 28, 2012

My Dad’s an Asian Male Model

Leave a Comment / Culture, Is Featured?, Mobile Sections, News /

My dad is Marc Steingart, a Jewish guy from Pittsburgh, PA turned Asian male model.

Photographers take his picture with Asian women and children. They nor the casting agents know his secret past as member of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity at Penn State or captain of the JCC Squash team. He does not reveal his true self. They think he is a wise Asian grandfather. He does not say otherwise and accepts pay.

It is a mystery when he began looking like an Asian man. I did not know him as one. He was just a good locking dude, and kind of a D.I.L.F.

As a boy raised in a modest non Asian residence, my father groomed me to be like him; someone who used hair gel and cared way too much about phyiscal appearance. I always wanted to look more like my father and my sister. They had fair skin and dark hair. I looked like Jerry Seinfeld.

My mom thinks there was Mongoloid blood in our family. If my mother is correct, long ago a Steingart sojourned to the South Pacific to search for a happy ending. Unable to deal with the guilt of not returning such favor and also because he had no money, this Steingart made love to a mysterious Mongoloid in the fields of Laos never to be heard from again.

Centuries passed and Steingarts looked like Jews until the late 1990’s in which Marc from years of squash and social work transformed into a man of few words, a man whose corny jokes would speak for themselves. His present and future would be dictacted by his salt and pepper hair and slanted eyes.

My father gets paid an hourly rate and then images are circulated internationally. I see the picture with his new wife and two little children, the main image on My Dad’s an Asian Male Model Read More »

Embattled but resolute, Beinart responds to his critics

Leave a Comment / Cover Story, News, United States /

In the last two years, the ideas of Jewish journalist Peter Beinart have been at the center of the conversation over how American Jews should relate to Israel today.

In his 2010 essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” Beinart argued that leading American Jewish groups, by demanding that Israeli government policies be supported and not questioned, have made it increasingly difficult for liberal American Jews to also be Zionists.

That essay was, for those on the left, a rallying call. Last year, college-age members of the dovish lobby J Street put the writer’s face on T-shirts that proclaimed, “We are Beinart’s Army.”

Now, in the days leading up to the release this week of his new book, “The Crisis of Zionism,” Beinart has shown that his 2010 essay was just the opening salvo. On March 19, The New York Times published as an op-ed an excerpt from the book’s most controversial section, its straightforward message summed up in the headline: “To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements.”

In 2010, the right-leaning “establishment” alone felt attacked and compelled to counter Beinart’s criticisms. This time, both the right and the left are rejecting Beinart’s proposal, each for its own reasons.

“Jews boycott other Jews all the time,” Beinart said in an interview last week, responding to those who took issue with his call for a boycott of Jews by Jews. “Many synagogues, if you’ve left your wife an agunah, if you haven’t given her a get [Jewish writ of divorce], you wouldn’t be able to get an aliyah,” he said, referring to a long-standing tradition of denying to such men the honor of being called to the Torah.

Beinart spoke from his office at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he is an associate professor, at the end of a week during which he was frequently responding to critics on Zion Square, a new blog he edits for The Daily Beast, where he is senior political writer.

“Another argument is that this is a slippery slope to BDS,” Beinart said, referring to the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which targets the whole of Israel, not just the areas beyond the country’s pre-1967 borders that Beinart plans to boycott. He calls his settlement-boycott proposal “Zionist BDS.”
“I believe that one of the things that fuels the BDS movement is the creation on the ground of a one-state reality and the despair that we could ever partition the land,” he said.  “Whatever steps we could take toward keeping that possibility alive is a kind of mechanism against full BDS.”

In the op-ed, Beinart summed up this distinction — between Israel within its pre-1967 borders (also known as the green line) and the areas outside those borders that the Jewish state has been occupying in the four decades since — by calling the areas within the boundaries “democratic Israel.” The area beyond the green line is usually called the West Bank; many on the right call it Judea and Samaria. Beinart wishes to dub it “nondemocratic Israel.”

“The phrase suggests that there are today two Israels: a flawed but genuine democracy within the green line and an ethnically based nondemocracy beyond it,” Beinart wrote in The Times, and advocated for, along with a boycott of settlement products, “an equally vigorous embrace of democratic Israel.”

If Beinart’s analysis of the situation in Israel still had appeal for many on the left, his boycott proposal did not.

An editorial in the Forward published days after Beinart’s op-ed called it “an empty gesture,” even as it acknowledged Beinart had succeeded in giving expression to “a deep frustration and confusion on the part of many Jews who want to stop the peace process from unraveling and see the occupation end with Israel’s security intact, who want to help reclaim the high moral ground in the struggle for Israel’s democratic soul.”

Jeremy Ben-Ami, founder and president of the J Street lobbying group, whose dovish position has appealed to liberal Zionists most likely to share Beinart’s views, also criticized Beinart’s argument in a statement published on his group’s Web site on the day Beinart’s op-ed appeared in print.

“I don’t think that it makes any sense to put negative pressure on people whose behavior you hope to change,” Ben-Ami said in an interview with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic on March 23. “I think that the way that Israelis will feel comfortable making the compromises and the sacrifices — and Israel as a whole, not just the settlers — is when they really feel that not only American Jews, but the United States, is going to be there for them.

“I think if you begin to do things that say, ‘We’re not really with you, we’re against you, we’re putting pressure on you,’ ” Ben-Ami continued, “I think that causes people to pull more into a shell and pull back.”

For his part, Beinart — who has spoken at J Street events in the past and was one of the featured speakers at this year’s J Street annual conference in Washington, D.C., on March 25 – told The Journal he hadn’t considered what Ben-Ami’s reaction might be before publishing the op-ed, and suggested that organizational concerns might have guided Ben-Ami’s reaction.

“I’m a writer, so I take positions based on what I think makes sense,” Beinart said, “and someone who runs an organization has to think about the needs of the organization.”

Beinart dismisses claims his boycott would be ineffectual, pointing to the success of the Palestinian Authority’s boycott of settlement goods in spurring more than a dozen Israeli companies that once did business in the West Bank to move back across the green line.

“There have been some significant examples of companies that have moved back within the green line as a result of pressure,” he said. “The Swedish Mul-T-Lock company did. Barkan wine did.”

Beinart couldn’t say when he last purchased goods made in the West Bank, but he said he intended to put his boycott into practice.

“I am going to do my best to abide by what I write,” he said.

If the criticism of Beinart from voices on the left focuses on the practicability of his proposal, the American Jewish establishment is still taking him to task over his basic assessment of the situation in Israel.

Embattled but resolute, Beinart responds to his critics Read More »

Former J. editor needs kidney transplant

Leave a Comment / Health, News /

Marc Klein needs a kidney. Suffering from polycystic renal disease, the former editor of j. will have to undergo dialysis soon unless a kidney transplant becomes available. That’s why he is going public with an outreach effort launched through the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation.

“I’m in stage 5 of renal failure,” Klein said from his Alameda home. “There is no stage 6, which means the next step is dialysis. I’ve exhausted my whole family. Nobody can donate, so I decided to reach out.”

The federation issued an email blast on March 8, detailing Klein’s medical circumstances and appealing to community members. Klein has Type O+ blood.

Klein is on the transplant list, but says people often wait up to eight years for a suitable match.

Last October, Klein stepped down as j.’s editor and publisher, a post he held for 28 years. He said his kidney disease has left him feeling exhausted much of the time.

So far he is not suffering other symptoms, though that may change as his kidneys continue to deteriorate.

“I’m at the point now where the kidneys have pretty much failed,” noted Klein, who is undergoing treatment while he waits. “After reading so much and finding out about the benefits of doing a transplant before dialysis, it made me want to contact as many people as I can.”

Klein got the idea for the outreach after reading a similar federation email sent out last month on behalf of Simon Meyer, 17, a Brandeis Hillel Day School graduate also in need of a kidney donation.

Though cadaver kidneys often are used in transplants, kidneys from live donors offer a better outcome. Klein says he understands that donating a kidney is a big decision, but he hopes someone will answer the call.

“I really appreciate the federation being so supportive,” he says. “This gives you the warm feeling that there’s a bigger Jewish community out there.”

Former J. editor needs kidney transplant Read More »

Opinion: Amos Oz inspires J Street conference in Washington, D.C.

Leave a Comment / Blogs, News, Opinion /

“The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a pure tragedy of Greek proportions…because it is a clash between right and right…between two nations who have never known another homeland.”

So said Amos Oz this week at the opening of the 3rd annual J Street Conference in Washington, D.C. His message resonated powerfully among the 2500 activists who converged on Washington from all over America, Canada, the UK, and Israel, among whom were 750 college students from 43 college campuses. Members of the Knesset joined with members of Congress and Ambassadors from around the world to affirm both Israel as a Jewish state and a democracy, and to affirm the principle of two states for two peoples, a state of Israel and a state of Palestine.

Oz noted the necessity for a “divorce” to take place between Israel and the Palestinians because of the toxicity of the relationship. It is like two spouses sharing the same apartment who cannot find a way to leave or divide equitably the property and move on with their lives. This is a time, he said, for painful compromise and noted this truth: “Where there is life there is compromise. The opposite of compromise is fanaticism and death.”

There is good news and bad news, he said. The good news is that the majority of Palestinians and Israeli Jews accept the 2-state solution and are ready for partition of the land. But the bad news is that the “patient is unhappy and in serious need of surgery, but the doctors are cowards.” Thus, he said that the two parties need help because they cannot effect a divorce themselves.

“Nations,” he reminded us, “make peace with clenched teeth.” But the future can be bright. Who would have thought that of all the nations in the European Union that Germany would be Israel’s closest ally today, that Anwar Sadat would ever have come to Jerusalem, or that Menachem Begin would ever have given up the entire Sinai for peace with Israel? One day, it is very likely that Israel and the Palestinians will be living and thriving side by side. 

In conclusion, the Israeli writer affirmed that J Street offers the best path to help Israeli Jews and Palestinians resolve their conflict. Then he said, “J Street – I have been waiting for you my whole adult life!”

That was all I needed to carry on.

Rabbi John Rosove is a member of J Street’s Rabbinic Cabinet, and the Senior Rabbi of Temple Israel of Hollywood

Opinion: Amos Oz inspires J Street conference in Washington, D.C. Read More »

Sheldon Adelson on Newt: ‘He’s at the end of his line’

Leave a Comment / Is Featured?, Lead Story, News, United States /

Sheldon Adelson, who with wife Miri, has given more than $15 million to the Newt Gingrich Super PAC Winning Our Future, said Monday he believes Gingrich is “at the end of his line” regarding the race for the Republican presidential nomination. 

Adelson was speaking informally to a small group at his Las Vegas hotel and casino, The Venetian, which hosted The Jewish Federations of North America’s second annual TribeFest, a three-day leadership and networking retreat that attracted more than 1,400 Jewish professionals.

The casino magnate, sporting a button that read “Obama…Oy Vey,” visited a TribeFest session focused on the potential 2012 Jewish vote. As he exited the session, about a dozen participants followed Adelson into the hallway.

Story continues after the jump.