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Jewish Journal

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January 23, 2015

Admitting Our Faults Out Loud

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By Rabbi Mark Borovitz

I am thinking about life, as usual. The difference is I am not obsessed with my life, rather, I am thinking about the lives of others and the world. I was reading David Brooks in the New York Times this week and he was talking about how we either find solutions to problems or we don’t. In speaking about President Obama's Community College Initiative, he rightly pointed out that most students receive some assistance in the form of Pell Grants, etc. What they need is living expenses. The Federal Student Loan Program is very costly to pay back, and almost impossible without a substantial income. Private loans are out of the question for the people who need assistance most. Yet, we continue to look for “sound bite,” “simplistic” solutions to complex problems.

It doesn't matter if it is our children, the poor, an enemy, we just want to throw money at it and have it go away. In Iran, we are talking about easing more sanctions—they don't give full access and we have no idea how to deal with the people who attacked our embassy. They have not changed, yet if we throw money at them, they will like us. I am so enraged over this thinking because it is the thinking that led me down the wrong path over 50 years ago. We don't have to pay anyone to like us. We don't have to compromise our principles for someone to like us. NO, we have to be honorable and true to principles like caring for the widow, the stranger, the poor and the orphan. We have to treat each other with decency and love.

We have to stop buying lies. We are so used to being deceived, that we have become immune to the words of others. Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu is wrong to go over the President's head. John Boehner is using him (and Bibi is using John) for political purposes. The Christian Right wants Armageddon, they want to convert the Jews— is this really friendship? No, this is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” We live in a situational world not a principled world. Bibi participating in this smells again of his need to meddle, as in the last presidential election. However, President Obama did not hold it against Israel in supplying the Iron Dome. Is it a principle of Judaism to embarrass someone who has protected you for your entire existence? I must have missed that one, in Rabbinical School.

What am I getting at? We are in a crisis that says “find a quick fix” and “make it simplistic” instead of simply dealing with all the complexities of each and every facet of human existence.  There is not loyalty to principles, only loyalty to personalities in the moment, and onto the next personality, in the next moment… and our world is falling apart.

I challenge John Boehner to do a Chesbon HaNefesh, an accounting of his soul, and publicly admit where he has missed the mark and where he has hit the bull’s-eye. I challenge President Obama to do the same and make the State of the Union a speech that truly reflects the entire state, including the errors. I say to Bibi—Don't do to others what is hateful to you, as Rabbi Hillel taught. You would be enraged if someone invited a head of state to address the Knesset without your approval and invitation. All this is done by people who are on the public dole; they take money from the U.S. taxpayers and call it wages or foreign aid. Bibi takes money from American Jews and doesn't want my opinions nor do his allies want to call me Rabbi. I challenge all of us to engage in this same Chesbon HaNefesh as well.

The deceptions we put up with in others are the same deceptions that we put onto others. We live a fear-based life, the fear of being real, imperfect and living our principles. We are afraid of being real so we continue to buy the lies of others and tell our own. We talk the talk of recovery and transparency yet we hide from all, including ourselves. We know we make mistakes, everyone does, yet we blame others, the Democrats, the Republicans, etc. We all want to say WE HAVE THE ANSWER, follow us, yet we are not even asking the right questions. We know that God is perfect, yet it is rare for a leader to take responsibility for errors, companies pay fines and don't admit guilt. If, in a free society, some are guilty and all are responsible, as Rabbi Heschel teaches, then with the blame game that is going on, maybe we are not a free society.
Here is the point of this blog (whew, finally figured it out:)) When we have to deceive ourselves and others, when we live situational ethics, when we don't live a principled life, we are slaves! We have gone from the unalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence to prejudice, willful blindness, blaming others, “solutions” that rob others of their humanity and serving only the elite. This is the society that produces destruction, not creativity. We need to go back to the root of humanity— we are not meant to be alone— and realize that we have to become a society that works together for the good of all. We have to go back to being a country that welcomes “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” as Lady Liberty says.

We do this by being Addicted to Redemption. Not just our redemption, but the redemption of all. Last Sunday night, Beit T'Shuvah honored a man who took Rabbi Heschel's words so much to heart, that he, along with Lucas Benitez and Greg Asbed, changed the Tomato Farm Workers lives in South Florida. Jon Esformes made a difference because he participated in his own redemption and lives a life of principle, purpose and passion. There are many others who do the same. I propose a new federal holiday—Yom Kippur—where all lawmakers and all citizens have to do inventory, make amends and honor the good they have done in the past year. For our politicians, they have to do it out loud, toot their horn and do T'Shuvah for their errors. Then, the United States, like the Israelite People of Old, will be a nation of principles, a nation of change, a nation of God.

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Why I don’t want to watch the (white) Oscars this year

Leave a Comment / Entertainment, Hollywood, Is Featured?, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News, Oscars /

In my family, the Academy Awards are an annual event celebrated with the kind of specific rituals more often associated with major cultural events: the days of predictions beforehand; the festive spread of Fritos, onion dip and enough nosherei to feed a small army; the red-carpet gossipfest; even the inevitable boredom — all are part of our family’s life cycle, as ingrained as the Fourth of July. Even as our children grow up and move out of town, we watch the Oscars in virtual togetherness, texting feverishly: “Can you believe what she’s wearing?” “Adele Dazeem?!”

But this year I won’t be breaking out the onion dip. I can’t. The almost-complete shutout of any artist of color in any category is too nauseating. To hoist a glass and laugh along with the jokes will feel like enjoying a party at a whites-only country club.  

There may be a million reasons why “Selma” was shut out almost entirely from awards, starting with the inaccurate representation of LBJ’s conversations with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “Selma” got nods only for best picture and best song, notably bypassing director Ava DuVernay and actor David Oyelowo; as a comparison, Oliver Stone’s conspiracy-theory movie, “JFK,” which took far more liberties with the truth, was nominated for eight Oscars, including best director, best supporting actor and best screenplay. Even this year, “The Imitation Game,” whose director was nominated, has been widely criticized for exaggerating Alan Turing’s role in cracking the Nazi codes; “Foxcatcher,” whose director was also nominated, bears so little resemblance to actual events that it is astonishing that the DuPont family has not sued for defamation.

But for me, it’s not only that the near-shutout of “Selma” feels particularly galling in the context of Ferguson, Eric Garner and marches in the street to remind America that #blacklivesmatter. It’s not only that DuVernay, however you may feel about her interpretation of LBJ, has made a powerful portrait of a movement whose work is still not finished, nor that Oyelowo has given a stunning portrayal of King, nor that Carmen Ejogo is luminous in her portrayal of Coretta Scott King.  

It’s that there are no other African-American nominees from any other movie at all. In a roster of dozens of nominees, there is only one single person of color — Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu — and he is not American, so, in fact, there is not a single American person of color.  

To contextualize this whitewash, remember that the Oscars are taking place in Los Angeles, a city whose population, according to the latest U.S. Census, is less than 50 percent white — 48.5 percent of people living here are Latino; 9.6 percent are African-American. More than 11 percent are Asian, and the rest are mixed race, American Indian or Pacific Islander. These minoritized groups, taken together, are, in fact, the majority of Angelenos. Am I crazy if I feel sick celebrating an industry that, despite being based in one of the most vibrantly multicultural cities in the world, almost exclusively tells stories by and about white people? Am I crazy when I bristle at the word “minority” when used to refer to a majority of our population?

We can dismiss all of this by saying that the Academy is made up a bunch of old, out-of-touch white men, but these awards are a pretty accurate reflection of the movies that Hollywood green-lights. The Writers Guild of America reports that 95 percent of screenwriting jobs in 2014 were taken by white people. According to a recent UCLA report, film directors of color make only 12.2 percent of movies, while actors of color play only 10.5 percent of leading roles. Of the 90 percent of movies with white leads, half of them featured a cast that was over 90 percent white.  

This gross underrepresentation speaks to the entrenchment of Hollywood’s white bubble, but the problem goes far deeper; it goes to lack of access in the entertainment business to internships and job opportunities, which in turn goes to the lack of educational equality for children of color, who are far more likely than white children to grow up in poverty. Latino-American children are twice as likely to grow up in poverty than whites. African-American children are three times as likely to grow up in poverty. In turn, children growing up in high-poverty communities are being educated in a system that has been decimated by slashes in funding that have eliminated arts education and even libraries from low-income neighborhoods.  

When I taught in a high school in South Central Los Angeles, I was stunned to find that many of my students could not sing a single note on key. Why? They’d never had a music class. Ever. High schools are required to offer students one arts class during their entire four years; many offer only that, and some offer none at all, despite the requirement. In a city with so much talent, where the entertainment business is the fifth-largest income producer, why have no companies reached out to low-income communities to offer any arts education for children?  Where is the bridge between the glitter of the red carpet and the hundreds of thousands of children living in poverty only a few miles away?  

So, forgive me if I skip the party in front of the TV this year. I can’t have fun celebrating an industry that, so many years after the civil-rights heroes were beaten down in the streets in their quest for justice, remains starkly segregated. I can hope, as King said, that the arc of our moral universe bends toward justice. And I will shut my eyes and try as hard as I can to believe it. 

Ellie Herman is a writer, teacher and life coach.

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Five years in the making, ‘The Return’ takes new look at Polish Jewish revival

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On the crumbling wall of a former Polish synagogue, adjacent to a one-time Jewish ritual bath converted into a car wash, a graffiti artist has painted “Jews, We Miss You” in Polish and German.

The message, scrawled on the wall in the Polish town of Dabrowno, is an apt message in contemporary Poland, which has seen a surprising revival of Jewish life in a land that nearly saw its Jewish community eradicated, first by the Holocaust and then under decades of communist rule.

The story of that revival is the subject of the new documentary “The Return.” Adam Zucker, a 57-year-old New Yorker, does triple duty as the film’s director, producer and writer. He tells his tale through the eyes of four women.

Adam Zucker is the writer, producer and director of the new documentary “The Return.” (Courtesy of Longnook Pictures)

Zucker estimates that there are now 20,000 people in Poland who formally identify as members of the Jewish community — a number that doesn’t include those who have some Jewish ancestry, often recently discovered, or the legions of non-Jews who have become enamored of Jewish culture.

“Poland was the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry, where Hasidism started and Yiddish developed,” writer Konstanty Gebert declares in the film, adding defiantly, “And this is where it did not end.”

The continuation of Polish Jewish life rests in large part on the profound interest in all things Jewish among Polish Catholics, many of whom participate in the annual Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow. At the city’s Jewish community center, they play in klezmer bands, dance while juggling bottles on their heads, act in Jewish dramas and affirm that having a Jewish friend is cool.

There are different explanations for this unlikely philo-Semitism, including a general nostalgia for prewar Polish life. But Zucker suggests that after the tribulations of decades of communist rule, the citizenry welcomes the color and enthusiasm of Jewish life.

Zucker discovered the phenomenon of Polish non-Jews spearheading a revival of Jewish culture in a 2008 New York Times article, which intrigued him enough to chance an exploratory trip to Poland.

While the quality of performances at Jewish cultural festivals in Warsaw and Krakow exceeded his expectations, what really fascinated him were the stories of young Jews “trying to define their identities and discover who they were, without access to their past heritage in the place which was once the most Jewish in the world,” he said.

Before embarking on the film, Zucker had no clear idea how many characters to feature or that his subjects would all wind up being women. Once introduced to the country’s Jewish communities, he encountered some interesting and involved men, but the women really stood out.

“I though that since Judaism, like most institutions, tends to be a bit patriarchal, focusing on women would be a somewhat different way into the story which I found appealing,” Zucker said. “Each of the women wrestled with her Jewish and female identity.”

Zucker grew up in New York City, the great-grandson of Jews from Poland, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia. He has been making movies all his life, most recently the 2007 film “Greensboro: Closer to the Truth,” which documents the first Truth and Reconciliation commission formed to re-examine the 1979 Greensboro Massacre in North Carolina.

But he pays the rent as a film editor, including work on such award-winning documentaries as “Homestead Steel Strike,” “Broadway: The American Musical,” “Richard Wright: Black Boy” and “The West.”

Between editing stints, his filming of “The Return” stretched over five years, shooting in five cities and on three continents, covering two weddings, the arrival of two babies and one conversion ritual.

Zucker raised one-third of the film’s $150,000 budget through a campaign on the website Kickstarter, with the National Center for Jewish Film as the fiscal sponsor.

Among the four women featured in the film is Tusia, whose Polish grandmother denied all her life that she was Jewish before finally acknowledging her roots on her deathbed. Tusia was raised in New York but returned to Warsaw to be part of the revival and wants to restore Dabrowno’s former Jewish center.

The other characters include Katka, a Catholic-born redhead who left her native Prague to study in Warsaw and, somewhat to her own amazement, fell in love with a young Orthodox Jewish man and converted.

“It is a big responsibility to be Jewish,” Katka said.

Kasia is an outspoken feminist and doctoral candidate in women’s studies. She grew up Catholic and didn’t discover until her teens that she was half Jewish. Now she is determined to be a secular Jew but yearns for Jewish community life.

And finally there’s Maria, a single mother and the only one of the women who grew up knowing she was Jewish, though it didn’t much matter to her. She also marries an Orthodox Jew and learns to run a kosher home.

Both Kasia and Maria follow their husbands as they move to Israel — not necessarily to settle permanently, but to try out life in a different place, a fairly common practice among mobile young Europeans.

Many Diaspora Jews moving to Israel find life there too intense and confrontational for their tastes. But Kasia and Maria are relieved to be in a country where they no longer have to wrestle with their Jewish identities.

“In Israel, I stopped thinking about being Jewish,” Kasia said. “It’s a holiday from my Jewishness.”

Tusia, who splits her time between Warsaw and New York, acknowledges similar emotions.

“When I’m in Brooklyn, I’m a Pole living in the United States and feel hardly Jewish at all,” she said But in Warsaw or Krakow, she feels a deep responsibility to “save the crumbling remnants of Jewish history.”

In the coming months, “The Return” will screen at Jewish film festivals in New York, Atlanta and Washington, with additional venues to be announced.

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Silver’s arrest a 2nd strike for N.Y. Orthodox power brokers

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To critics of Albany’s culture of political corruption, the sight of the powerful longtime speaker of New York’s State Assembly, Sheldon Silver, getting arrested Thursday may have been a sign that even the state’s most powerful politicians are not immune from the long hand of the law.

For New York Jews, the arrest marked the second time in less than 18 months that one of the state’s most visible and well-connected Orthodox Jews was taken into custody on corruption charges.

In fact, the two figures are deeply connected.

The first, William Rapfogel, the longtime CEO of New York’s Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, was arrested in September 2013 for involvement in a kickbacks scheme. He pleaded guilty to helping fleece more than $9 million from the charity, including $1 million that he pocketed himself, and was sentenced last July to 3 ½ years in prison and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution.

Rapfogel’s wife, Judy Rapfogel, is Silver’s chief of staff. After her husband’s arrest, Judy Rapfogel claimed she had no knowledge of her husband’s criminal malfeasance, and she remained on Silver’s staff.

Silver and William Rapfogel lived in the same neighborhood and went to the same shul, the Bialystoker Synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The two men often sat together in the sanctuary on Shabbat morning, though in recent years Silver began going to the early minyan on Saturday mornings, a neighborhood insider who declined to be identified told JTA.

Rapfogel’s eldest son, Michael Rapfogel, works for real estate developer Bruce Ratner, who has been on the receiving end of numerous favorable decisions by the Public Authorities Control Board, over which Silver has significant control. In 2006, Silver’s intervention helped secure a lucrative tax break for Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, even though that tax break actually was being phased out, The New York Times reported.

The criminal complaint filed this week against Silver by the U.S. Attorney’s Office alleges that Silver was “on retainer to a mammoth real estate developer” while his office was passing legislation affecting that developer’s business, meeting with lobbyists paid for by the developer and “deliberately keeping secret from the public any information about this lucrative side-deal, in violation of the law.” The complaint does not identify the real estate developer by name.

The heart of the charge against Silver is that he received nearly $4 million in bribes and kickbacks in exchange for his official acts – especially in matters relating to real estate and health care funding — and that he hid the money by disguising it as income from a law practice focused on personal injury matters.

Silver amassed a tremendous personal fortune through the abuse of political power, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

“As today’s charges make clear, the show-me-the-money culture of Albany has been perpetuated and promoted at the very top of the political food chain,” Bharara said.

“And as the charges also show, the greedy art of secret self-reward was practiced with particular cleverness and cynicism by the speaker himself,” he said. “Politicians are supposed to be on the people’s payroll, not on secret retainer to wealthy special interests they do favors for.”

Silver, 70, faces two counts of honest services fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit honest services fraud, one count of extortion under color of official right and one count of conspiracy to commit extortion under color of official right. Each of the five counts carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Honest services fraud refers to the failure to provide the public with honest services, usually due to bribes or kickbacks.

Silver denied the allegations, saying, “I hope I’ll be vindicated,” before surrendering to authorities Thursday morning, according to The New York Times. His lawyers called the criminal charges “meritless.”

Silver has been honored by Jewish federations, the Council of Jewish Organizations and a host of organizations associated with various ethnic groups in New York City, hospitals and lower Manhattan, where Silver lives. Silver also received an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University, from which he graduated college in 1965.

Silver also was a mainstay of New York legislative missions to Israel. The Facebook page of the National Association of Jewish Legislators features of a photo from last August of Silver flanked by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in front of Jerusalem’s Big Apple Pizza shop. In the shot, the salt-and-pepper-haired Silver wears a big smile. Around New York, the speaker is better known for his heavy jowls, deep baritone, laconic speech and hard stares.

This is not the first time Silver has found himself caught up in a scandal. But, as with the Rapfogel scheme, Silver has been more of a peripheral figure to scandal rather than the main act.

Twice, Silver came under heavy fire for mishandling of allegations of sexual misbehavior against associates.

In 2012, Silver paid more than $100,000 to settle with two women who claimed they were sexually harassed by State Assemblyman Vito Lopez of Brooklyn. Silver never disclosed the payments or the allegations to the assembly’s ethics committee. Then, later that year, two additional women came forward with public allegations that Lopez groped, intimidated and manipulated them. That prompted disclosures about Silver’s secret settlement with the first two women.

Silver stripped Lopez of several senior positions and acknowledged that “mistakes were made” in failing to disclose the initial allegations to the ethics committee, but, as he had many times over the years, ignored calls that he step down. Lopez resigned the following year.

In 2001, one of Silver’s staffers, Elizabeth Crothers, came to him claiming that she had been raped by Silver’s top legal aide, Michael Boxley. Silver’s response was to put out a statement support Boxley. Crothers never filed a criminal charge, and internal assembly investigation was inconclusive. But in 2003 Boxley was charged with rape by another female staffer, and eventually pleaded guilty to a sexual misdemeanor charge. And in 2006, Silver and assembly leaders paid $500,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by an unnamed woman who accused Silver of bungling the Crothers allegations and abiding a culture of sexual harassment in the assembly.

After Silver apologized for making mistakes in the Lopez case, Crothers told the N.Y. Daily News that Silver needed to do more than apologize.

“People are saying he apologized and admitted he made a mistake,” Crothers said to the newspaper in May 2013. “How many times do you get to do it? When is the tipping point? We all make mistakes and there are consequences to them. Silver hasn’t gotten any of the consequences.”

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Israeli scribes restore 200-year-old Iraqi scroll

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Israeli scribes restored a 200-year old Iraqi Torah scroll that arrived in Israel under mysterious circumstances.

The Associated Press reported Thursday that the scroll, written in northern Iraq by two scribes using pomegranate ink, was delivered, water-damaged, to the Israeli embassy in Jordan in 2007, and was transferred to Israel in 2011 when riots were sweeping the Arab world.

Otherwise, its provenance is unclear, although The Associated Press quotes Foreign Ministry officials as saying that it now the property of the Jewish state.

The scroll was restored by a group of scribes in Jerusalem led by Akiva Garber, AP reported, and dedicated at a ceremony Thursday at the Foreign Ministry.

U.S. troops uncovered a trove of Iraqi Jewish relics in the Iraqi secret service headquarters in Baghdad in 2003, much of it waterlogged.

The U.S. National Archive restored much of what has become known as the Iraqi Jewish Archive, and it remains for the time being in the United States, although Iraq claims it as property.

Much of Iraq’s 2,500-year-old Jewish community emigrated to Israel after riots before and during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The remainder fled after persecutions led by Saddam Hussein in 1968 and 1969.

 

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Invitation to Netanyahu to address U.S. Congress: When bipartisan means partisan

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When U.S. House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, jolted Washington this week by inviting Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress, his office said it had been done “on behalf of the bipartisan leadership.”

In reality, it was among the most partisan moves so far by America's newly Republican-controlled Congress. Fuming Democratic leaders in Congress have said they were not consulted, raising questions over whether Boehner had accurately characterized the nature of his invitation.

The invitation was worded that way, a Boehner spokesman said on Friday, because “Boehner is the Speaker of the whole House, elected by the whole House.” Boehner was re-elected as the chamber's leader on Jan. 6 with 216 votes, all from Republicans, out of the 435 voting members of the House of Representatives.

Harry Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, his counterpart in the House, said they had not been told in advance of Boehner's plan to invite Netanyahu. The White House also said that President Barack Obama, a Democrat, had not been told ahead of time.

“The Speaker of the House has awesome power. I know that. I've been there,” Pelosi told her weekly news conference on Thursday. “The fact, though, is that power is not to be squandered.”

In announcing the invitation on Wednesday, Boehner called Netanyahu “a great friend of our country.”

“In this time of challenge, I am asking the Prime Minister to address Congress on the grave threats radical Islam and Iran pose to our security and way of life,” he said.

Democratic congressional staffers called Boehner's action a blatant political ploy.

Netanyahu is expected to back Republican moves to pressure Obama to take a tougher line in talks on a nuclear deal with Iran.

The prime minister is due to address Congress two weeks before Israel's general election on March 17 in which he is vying for a fourth term.

The flap added to a growing perception that Netanyahu's government has become a partisan Republican player in U.S. politics, despite historically close ties to lawmakers in both parties.

Republicans were unapologetic.

Arizona Republican John McCain said the party was giving Obama a taste of his own medicine. In a hallway interview at the Capitol, he termed the invitation “a great idea” after Obama's announcement that he would push ahead on policy without waiting to compromise with Congress.

“He basically said, 'I'm going to do my thing, you do your thing.' We got it, we got the message,” McCain said.

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Argentina suspects rogue agents were behind death of prosecutor

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 Argentina suspects rogue agents from its own intelligence services were behind the death of a state prosecutor investigating the deadly 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

Alberto Nisman was found dead in his apartment late on Sunday, a gunshot wound to his head and a 22 caliber pistol by his side along with a single shell casing.

He had been scheduled to appear before Congress on Monday to answer questions about his allegation that President Cristina Fernandez conspired to derail his investigation of the attack.

His death and a blizzard of conspiracy theories around it have rocked Argentina.

The government says Nisman's allegations and his death were linked to a power struggle at Argentina's intelligence agency and agents who had recently been fired.

It says they deliberately misled Nisman and may have had a hand in writing parts of his 350-page complaint.

“When he was alive they needed him to present the charges against the president. Then, undoubtedly, it was useful to have him dead,” the president's chief of staff, Anibal Fernandez, said on Friday.

Argentine courts have accused a group of Iranians of planting the 1994 bomb, which killed 85 people.

Nisman claimed last week that President Fernandez opened a secret back channel to Iran to cover up Tehran's alleged involvement in the bombing and gain access to Iranian oil needed to help close Argentina's $7 billion per year energy deficit.

Fernandez's government called the accusation absurd.

Iran has repeatedly denied any link to the bomb attack.

The Argentine government's chief of staff said on Friday that he didn't believe Nisman even wrote his own report.

“I have worked quite a bit with prosecutor Nisman. I know he was a well qualified expert in the law. He could not have written this nonsense,” he said. “It is totally clear he had nothing to do with it, but there were people around him who had a different agenda.”

Although the government says there was a conspiracy to falsely accuse the president and then do away with Nisman, no one has been arrested in the case so far.

On Friday afternoon, the lead investigator in the case said the man who lent Nisman the gun that was by his side when he was found dead was now banned from leaving the country. The man gave the gun to Nisman the day before his death.

Diego Lagomarsino had turned himself in for questioning after the news broke but has not been taken into custody.

Officials initially said Nisman's death looked like suicide, but the lead investigator says it is suspicious and that all leads are being followed.

The head of Argentine intelligence was replaced in December, resulting in the firing of agents who had been helping with Nisman's investigation. Nisman had accused agents from another faction within the state intelligence apparatus of being part of Fernandez's alleged plot to clear the Iranian suspects.

One of those fired in the December shakeup was Antonio Stiusso, a senior spy who had helped Nisman with the probe.

The government says Stiusso falsely told Nisman that two men implicated in the case against the president were state intelligence agents. Wire tapped phone conversations of the two were key to Nisman's accusation that the government was trying to whitewash the 1994 car bombing.

President Fernandez said on Thursday that she did not believe Nisman took his own life.

“Nisman's accusation never was, in itself, the true operation against the government … The true operation against the government was his death, after accusing the government,” she said in a post on Facebook.

Those close to the late prosecutor have doubted from the beginning that he killed himself. Friends described him as upbeat ahead of his scheduled appearance before Congress on Monday.

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Kobe Bryant has torn rotator cuff, likely out for season

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Five-time NBA champion Kobe Bryant has a torn rotator cuff, according to preliminary results of an MRI exam, the Los Angeles Lakers said on Thursday.

Bryant, who hurt his right shoulder on a dunk in the second half of Wednesday's game against the New Orleans Pelicans, will return to Los Angeles later on Thursday and be examined by team doctors on Friday, the team said in a statement.

The high-scoring guard will miss Thursday's game against the defending NBA champion San Antonio Spurs and the rest of his season could be in jeopardy depending on the severity of the tear.

Bryant, a former league most valuable player, twice an NBA scoring leader and a two-time MVP of the NBA Finals, had sat out eight of the previous 16 games for “rest” reasons and had complained about an achy shoulder.

Asked Thursday before results of the MRI were known if an injury might encourage the team to shut Bryant down for the rest of the season, coach Byron Scott said a lot depended on how Bryant felt.

“He knows his body pretty well,” Scott told the Orange County Register. “He's probably one of the toughest guys in this league as far as playing through injury and through pain.”

The 36-year-old, a 16-time All-Star, is averaging 22.3 points from 35 games this season and is signed through next season after inking a two-year extension in 2013 for $48.5 million.

Bryant, who is fourth on the NBA's all-time scoring list, played in only six games last season due to knee and Achilles tendon injuries as the Lakers struggled to a 27-55 record.

This season, after losing Pau Gasol to free agency and another season to injury for veteran point guard Steve Nash, the Lakers are 12-31, second from last in the Western Conference.

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‘Magic Kippa’ designed for attack-wary observant Jews

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The Associated Press reported today that, in response to the increasing numbers of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe, an Israeli barber has designed yarmulkes that blend in with the wearer’s hair.

Called the “Magic Kippa,” the head coverings, made of synthetic hair, are washable, brushable and dyeable. Inventor Shalom Koresh told the AP he invented them so that observant Jewish men “could feel comfortable going to places where they are afraid to go, or places where they can’t wear it and feel secure.”

He noted that the yarmulkes, which sell online for $56 and up, are particularly popular with French and Belgian buyers.

Koresh may also want to consider marketing in Malmo, Switzerland. In a sort-of riff on the viral “Walking Around New York City While Female” video, a Swedish reporter recently walked around the heavily Muslim city while wearing a kippah and secretly recorded the reactions he received. In footage that aired on Swedish television this week, he was hit once and cursed at by numerous passersby.

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What does the International Criminal Court action mean for Israel?

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On Jan. 16, the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, launched a “preliminary examination into the situation in Palestine.”

Here is a review of what that means based on interviews with experts on international law and statements by the ICC and Israeli and U.S. officials.

Has the International Criminal Court launched a criminal case against Israel or Israeli officials?

No.

On Jan. 16, Bensouda said she was opening a “preliminary examination” into events that transpired in the period following June 13, 2014.

Bensouda, who is Gambian, did not specify that she would examine military actions, but the period encompasses last summer’s war in the Gaza Strip as well as Israel’s actions in the West Bank following the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teenagers on June 12.

Preliminary examinations are not criminal investigations, though they may consider evidence and solicit testimony. Instead, they establish whether there is probable cause to conduct a full criminal investigation and whether the court has jurisdiction. They may be followed by criminal investigations of individuals. Cases involving states are the province of the International Court of Justice. Both courts are based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Preliminary examinations may be closed without charges filed. Indeed, the court shut down an earlier preliminary examination arising out of the 2009 Gaza War, determining that it did not have jurisdiction, in part because Palestine at the time did not have statehood status.

Preliminary examinations can go on for years. In addition to the one just launched, eight others are underway that have neither been closed nor advanced to the criminal investigation stage. Some date back to 2006.

One hurdle for the Palestinians seems to have been cleared in this case, however. In her announcement, Bensouda said that the U.N. General Assembly recognition of Palestine in 2012 as a non-member observer state, together with the Palestinian accession to the ICC treaty, made crimes that may have been committed on its territory eligible for consideration by the court.

Does the launching of the preliminary examination trigger U.S. sanctions against the Palestinians or the United Nations?

Not yet against the Palestinians and not at all against the United Nations.

The ICC is independent of the United Nations, so American laws triggering sanctions against U.N. agencies for accepting Palestinian statehood status would not apply. Like Israel, the United States never acceded to the 1998 treaty that led to the court’s establishment and has little influence over it.

However, the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, does hold some sway over the court by determining whether applicants qualify to accede to the ICC. In Palestine’s case, he gave the green light on Jan. 6. It’s not clear whether U.S. officials have conveyed to Ban any unhappiness over his role in the matter.

Regarding the Palestinians, language inserted at the last minute into an omnibus spending bill passed in the final days of the last Congress says funding cuts would be triggered if “the Palestinians initiate an International Criminal Court judicially authorized investigation, or actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.”

The wording suggests that the approximately $500 million in annual U.S. assistance to the Palestinians is safe for now — first because the proceedings may be years away from a “judicially authorized investigation,” and second because the prosecutor, not the Palestinians, appears to have initiated the proceedings.

Congress seems ready to close those loopholes, however. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) introduced legislation on the first day of the new Congress that would sever assistance to the Palestinian Authority unless it withdraws from the ICC. Other lawmakers, including Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), have hinted that they are considering similar legislation.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has yet to back any specific legislation, but an official for the lobby told JTA that it believes that P.A. funding should be “immediately suspended” because of its ICC moves.

Eugene Kontorovich, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and an expert on international law who has blogged about the issue for the Washington Post, says there may be legal room to pull U.S. funding for the Palestinians. Palestinian acceptance of the ICC’s jurisdiction in Palestinian areas after June 13, 2014, which set the stage for the preliminary examination, might in itself be construed as “initiating” an investigation, he told JTA.

The Obama administration does not accept that reading. Its officials are resisting calls from Congress to cut funding to the Palestinians, in part because they see Palestinian security cooperation with Israel — which is funded in part by the United States — as a critical element in keeping the region quiet.

What is Israel’s position on the ICC examination?

Israel rejects the jurisdiction of the court. It has cut off a monthly $125 million tax transfer to the Palestinians, and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman this week is lobbying countries that support the ICC to end funding, including Germany, Canada, Australia and Japan. Experts say his effort is likely to be unsuccessful, particularly with Germany, which invested heavily in the court’s establishment following the atrocities committed in the 1990 Yugoslav wars.

What is the Obama administration’s position on the ICC examination?

The Obama administration strongly rejects ICC jurisdiction in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. “As we have said repeatedly, we do not believe that Palestine is a state and therefore we do not believe that it is eligible to join the ICC,” the State Department said in a Jan. 16 statement. “It is a tragic irony that Israel, which has withstood thousands of terrorist rockets fired at its civilians and its neighborhoods, is now being scrutinized by the ICC.”

However, administration officials also oppose cutting funding to the Palestinians, and the State Department has criticized Israel for withholding the tax transfers.

Are Palestinian officials also potentially liable for criminal investigation?

Yes. Bensouda’s brief is open-ended. The “situation in Palestine” it describes could encompass rockets launched from Gaza into civilian areas of Israel.

What risk do Israeli officials face?

Should the examination advance to a criminal investigation, Israeli officials could face warrants for their arrest. This could limit their travel, although in its short existence, a de facto hierarchy of ICC-wanted officials has emerged. Charged officials with few allies in the international community — for instance, Congolese rebel leaders — have been arrested. Charged officials who do have allies — most prominently, much of theSudanese leadership — have traveled with impunity, as friendly nations have refused to act on warrants.

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