Donald Trump’s top advisor on Israel and Jewish-related issues, Jason Dov Greenblatt, recently met with a group of Rabbis and Jewish community leaders in Brooklyn, according to a Thursday news release by the Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition (FJCC).
Greenblatt, who was outed as Trump’s advisor during a meeting with Jewish media representatives in April, met with several rabbis and with community leaders, including leaders of Agudath Israel of America, Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zweibel, Sol Werdiger, and Chaskel Bennett.
Photo courtesy of Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition
“A wide range of important topics were discussed, with a significant focus on the US-Israel relationship,” according to FJCC’s Josh Mehlman. “Mr. Greenblatt, who articulated his Torah background as essential to his activities, expressed appreciation for the important dialogue. The Rabbonim and communal leaders praised Mr. Greenblatt for his ongoing efforts to raise awareness on issues of deep concern to the Orthodox Jewish Community.”
Trump lost the Orthodox Jewish vote to his former rival Ted Cruz in the Republican New York primary. A recent poll showed that Trump’s image among Jewish voters is underwater by 58 percent. Only 19 percent view the father of Ivanka Trump and former Grand Marshal at the Israel Day Parade favorably. A whopping 77 percent have an unfavorable view of him.
Florida police charged a man for the murder of Dan Markel, a Jewish law professor shot outside his home in 2014.
Tallahassee police on Thursday arrested Sigfredo Garcia, 34, and charged him with first-degree murder, the Tallahassee Democrat reported. Garcia has been arrested at least 22 times in Florida, with first-degree murder.
Markel’s death is being investigated as a murder-for-hire.
Markel was a popular 41-year-old professor at Florida State University at the time of his death. He was a well-known criminal law scholar and had been published in The New York Times and The Atlantic.
According to the Tallahassee Democrat, Garcia’s previous arrests were for assaulting a police officer, aggravated assault with a weapon and car burglary among other charges.
Bonfires lit up Israel during the Jewish holiday of Lag B’Omer, resulting in hundreds of injuries and possibly igniting a blaze in Jerusalem that forced the evacuation of dozens of residents.
Tens of thousands of revelers flocked to the north of Israel Wednesday to dance around towers of flames. Magen David Adom, an Israeli emergency service, reported over 150 injuries, 17 of which required hospitalization. An Orthodox Jewish emergency response organization, Hatzalah, said it had treated 577 people for mostly light injuries at two clinics set up outside the grave of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai on Mount Meron, a popular pilgrimage site for the holiday.
The Times of Israel reported that hundreds of emergency teams were on standby with ambulances, emergency motorbikes and Segways for the all-night celebrations, anticipating burns, alcohol poisoning and dehydration, which have become as much rituals of the holiday as the first haircuts of three-year-old boys.
Police rescued five kittens from being tossed into the flames as well, according to The Times of Israel.
Also on Wednesday, forest fires broke out at two locations near Jerusalem in the Ramot Forest and Cedar Valley and were thought to have been sparked by Lag B’Omer celebratory fires, reported The Jerusalem Post. Eighteen fire-fighting and rescue teams and four water-dropping air teams were dispatched to battle the blazes.
Residents in several neighborhoods near the fires were asked to evacuate their homes as the flames spread but by Thursday evening firefighters had the blazes under control.
Residents were given permission to return to their homes, with instructions to keep windows closed due to poor air quality.
Bar Yochai was a 2nd century disciple of the sage Rabbi Akiva and was revered for his teachings on Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Lag B’Omer commemorates Bar Yochai’s death and the revelation of the Zohar, a spiritual text. The bonfires are meant to symbolize the light of those teachings.
Science has finally provided evidence of what Jewish “Star Wars” fans long suspected: Yoda is a member of the tribe — or at least he speaks like one.
The bad news is the science has been widely dismissed as junk.
The Yoda reference appears in a video in which a a 36-year-old Israeli linguist at Sheffield University in England argues that Ashkenazi Jews and the Yiddish language originated in Turkey.
The study joins a number of others published in the past 15 years that challenge the prevailing theory that Jews originated in the Mediterranean Middle East and that Yiddish was developed among Jews in Europe. The research is controversial not only because its critics say it is scientifically weak, but also because it is seen by some to weaken Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel — and is used to this end by some who oppose the Jewish state.
In a video released in April, geneticist Eran Elhaik explains that Yoda, like Yiddish speakers, uses words from one language, but follows the grammar rules of another. The little green guru speaks strangely constructed English the same way that Yiddish uses German and Hebrew words, but Slavic grammar.
The video is an effort by Elhaik to explain and publicize his study on the origins of Yiddish and Ashkenazi Jews, coauthored by Tel Aviv University linguist Paul Wexler and others and published in March in Oxford University Press’ prestigious journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
According to their theory, the original Ashkenazi Jews lived in a “Slavo-Iranian confederation” and over time developed Yiddish as a secret language to “gain an advantage in trade.” Though they used German and Hebrew words, they kept the Slavic grammar.
As evidence, Elhaik’s study cites a genetic analysis tracing Ashkenazi Jewish lineage to ancient trade routes in northeastern Turkey.
Along the routes were villages with names that “may be derived from [the word] ‘Ashkenaz,'” according to the study.
The findings made headlines around the world, including in The Independent, Language Magazine and Science Daily.
But some of the world’s most prominent scholars in the fields of both Yiddish and on Jewish genetics quickly rejected the study and condemned its outsized claims as reflective of deteriorating scientific standards and the politicization of research questions about Jewish history.
Shaul Stampfer, a professor of Soviet and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University, said of Elhaik’s research in an email to JTA: “It is basically nonsense.”
Prof. Dovid Katz, founder of Vilnius University’s Yiddish Institute and an author of several books on the language, savaged the study’s linguistic analysis.
“The authors have melded accurate but contextually meaningless genetic correlations with laughable linguistic theories that now proliferate, sadly, as a consequence of a much weakened Yiddish academic environment internationally,” he told JTA. “There is not a single word or sound in Yiddish that comes from Iranian or Turkish.”
A dialect of Yiddish “thrived before there even was a single Slavic-derived word in the language,” he added. “The paper is a fine example of genetics as smokescreen for off-the-wall linguistics.”
In response, Wexler called Katz’s criticism “totally false” and ignorant — and “more of an emotional tirade than a scholarly statement” by someone he said made research breakthroughs in the 1980s “but did not live up to his promise.” Yiddish features “hundreds and maybe even thousands of covert and overt Iranianisms,” Wexler said.
Sergio DellaPergola, a Hebrew University professor who is among the most prominent demographers of the Jewish people, called the study a “falsification” and “one of the big canards of the 21st century.” He criticized its “exceedingly small” sample size and non-inclusion of Sephardi Jewish genes, which he said would have undermined the findings.
A 2014 analysis by Bennett Greenspan, the American founder of a genetic testing company, compared the profiles of nearly 15,000 Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jewish men to non-Jews in the Middle East and Europe. He found a “nearly perfect genetic match” between 75 percent of the Jews and the non-Jewish Middle Easterners.
Had a Sephardic-Ashkenazi analysis been included in Elhaik’s study, it would have shown greater similarity between the two groups of Jews than between Ashkenazi Jews and Turkish non-Jews, DellaPergola predicted. Like most scholars, DellaPergola believes Ashkenazi Jews descend from those who migrated from the Middle East to Europe hundreds of years ago.
“Studying the DNA of non-Ashkenazic Jews would not change the DNA of Ashkenazic Jews nor the predicted origin of their DNA,” Elhaik told JTA. He said his study is “the largest genomic study on Ashkenazic Jews tovdate and the first of its kind on Yiddish speakers.”
Elhaik has ruffled academic feathers before by challenging the accepted notion that Jews originated in the Middle East. In 2013, he published another poorly received study in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution that supported the theory that the Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars — an extinct multi-ethnic kingdom of Iranians, Turks, Slavs and Circassians — who converted en masse in the eighth century.
Popularized in the 1970s by Hungarian-British author Arthur Koestler in his book “The Thirteenth Tribe,” the Khazari theory was championed again in 2008 by Shlomo Sand, a Tel Aviv University historian specializing in cinema, in “The Invention of the Jewish People.”
The theory has little genetic evidence to support it and is regarded as a myth by most scholars.
Whereas Sand and Koestler’s use of science to sell books hardly required a rebuttal, Elhaik is a geneticist being published in prestigious journals, DellaPergola said. He accused Genome Biology and Evolution of failing to critically review the study ahead of publication.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, William Martin, said he “cannot agree to any allegations that the authors … approached the data or the analysis with any element of dishonesty.”
The last word, it turns out, may belong to Yoda. “Many of the truths that we cling to depend on our point of view,” the Jedi master said — in perfect English.
When the new 365 by Whole Foods Market — a more affordable outpost of the luxury grocery chain — opened the morning of May 25 in Silver Lake, the atmosphere in the parking lot was palpably upbeat: pedestrians hustled around clutching reusable totes and a DJ was blasting classic rock and soul.
Yet while many Angelenos couldn’t wait to hit the carefully orchestrated organic salad bar, a handful of activists set up on the sidewalk to remind shoppers of a more controversial side to Whole Foods. They were protesting the company and its co-founder/co-CEO, John Mackey — specifically, his relationship to Marc Gafni, a former rabbi who has jumped from one spiritual movement to another, leaving a trail of sexual assault allegations in his wake.
Until March of this year, Mackey served as the co-chairman of the board of directors for Gafni’s newest venture, an “activist think tank” based in the Bay Area called the Center for Integral Wisdom. Mackey also reportedly hosted board meetings at his personal ranch in Texas.
Neither Gafni nor Whole Foods responded to the Journal’s email request for comment .
“It’s important for people like John Mackey to break the silence,” Rabbi Jill Zimmerman, founder of The Jewish Mindfulness Network, told the Journal. “There were lots of people who didn’t speak up who were able to speak up.”
Zimmerman was one of the leaders of Wednesday’s protest, which coincided with a parallel demonstration at a Whole Foods in New York. In Los Angeles, Zimmerman was joined by a few sexual abuse activists who propped up posters along Glendale Boulevard that read “Stand Up, Speak Out,” and schooled passersby on Mackey’s corporate responsibility and Gafni’s history of alleged sexual abuse.
Gafni, born Mordechai Winiarz, grew up in an Orthodox home, became ordained as a rabbi and went on to teach at a youth outreach program in New York. Two women came forward to say Gafni had sexually assaulted them as teenagers, and he later had his ordination revoked. Gafni has been married and divorced three times, accused of plagiarism and tried to start multiple mystical and spiritual movements in the U.S. and Israel, only to have them fall apart at the seams because of lingering distrust and continued accusations.
Some have alleged Gafni has managed to dodge criminal charges because it’s common for victims to report abuse years after it occurs, and by then there is often no legal recourse due to the statute of limitations. Just because Gafni was never arrested doesn’t mean he’s innocent, said Nancy Levine, volunteer protest coordinator for the National Association of Adult Survivors of Child Abuse (NAASCA).
“The argument of ‘Oh, I was never charged,’ is not a great argument,” Levine said.
In December 2015, some members of the Jewish community took matters into their own hands. New York-based Rabbi David Ingber — who knew Gafni personally and said he saw him seduce several students first-hand — launched an online petition calling for Mackey, Whole Foods and other Gafni supporters to cut “financial and institutional ties” with the former rabbi. The petition stated that the many allegations made against Gafni “violate the ethical standards and sacred responsibility which governs the relationship between religious teacher and student.”
The petition garnered more than 3,500 signatures in less than six months, and since its debut, Mackey and Whole Foods seem to be quietly distancing themselves from Gafni. But that’s not enough for activists like Bill Murray, founder of NAASCA.
“They’ve just decided to say, ‘No comment,’ ” he said.
In May, Mackey removed a seven-part video series that he recorded with Gafni from the Whole Foods blog. He replaced it with a statement about his relationship with the former rabbi, claiming it was “conducted strictly” in his personal life and that his connection to Gafni “does not represent an endorsement or support for either Mr. Gafni or the Center for Integral Wisdom by Whole Foods Market.”
However, a link to the videos, available on the Center for Integral Wisdom’s website, remains on Whole Foods’ blog. And Mackey’s headshot and endorsing testimonial — he calls Gafni a “bold visionary and catalytic voice” — is still featured on the homepage of Gafni’s personal website.
The Center for Integral Wisdom posted a lengthy online public statement in response to “the current attacks” on Gafni.
“Based on our careful review of extensive documentary evidence, numerous professional evaluations, and our collective experiences with Dr. Gafni, we fully trust that the claims of sexual harassment and abuse are false, and that other claims against him are maliciously exaggerated,” it says.
The statement goes on to explain that Gafni’s lawyer has advised him not to comment on the issues “given the defamatory nature of the false accusations.” It encourages readers to visit Gafni’s personal website or read one of his books to get a deeper sense of his character.
If Mackey and Whole Foods won’t take a stand against Gafni for ethical reasons, Murray hopes they’ll consider their stockholders and the prospective financial damages of being associated with an alleged sexual abuser. After all, Whole Foods has plans to open these “quality-meets-value” 365 markets throughout California and the rest of the country — and protesters hope to be right there with them along the way.
“They would like to have that middle class demographic group as their customer base, and they’re risking not only not acquiring it, but damaging what they already got,” Murray said.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Sunni Muslim countries are ready to normalize ties with Israel should Israel negotiate a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority on the basis of the Arab Peace Initiative.
The Arab Peace Initiative, first proposed in 2002 and reaffirmed in recent years, calls for full normalization between Israel and the Arab world in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Golan Heights. It would include land swaps, the establishment of a Palestinian state and a negotiated agreement on Palestinian refugees. Israel has never formally responded to the proposal.
Blair’s comments follow statements by Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi calling for a restarted peace process.
Until last year, Blair served as an envoy for the Quartet, an alliance of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia that seeks Israeli-Palestinian peace. In recent weeks, he had unsuccessfully worked with the ruling Israeli Likud party and opposition Zionist Union party to form a unity government that would advance the peace process, according to Haaretz. He also worked with Sisi to support the talks.
“Provided the Israeli government is ready to commit to a discussion around the Arab peace initiative … it would be possible to have some steps of normalization along the way to give confidence to this process,” Blair said, according to Haaretz. “With the new leadership in the region today that is possible. A lot will depend on the response of the Israeli government to President Sissi’s initiative and to the Arab Peace Initiative, and to whatever steps the Israelis are ready to take.”
Non-nuclear U.S. sanctions against Iran and its allies have led to Hezbollah being in “its worst financial shape in decades,” the top sanctions enforcement official told Congress.
“After many years of sanctions targeting Hezbollah, today the group is in its worst financial shape in decades,” Adam Szubin, the acting Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence told the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday. “And I can assure you that, alongside our international partners, we are working hard to put them out of business.”
Szubin described sanctions introduced in recent months to further isolate Hezbollah, a Lebanese militia that in 2006 fought a war against Israel and that Israeli intelligence believes has tens of thousands of missiles in place for the next war.
The House committee asked Szubin and two other top officials handling the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal to testify. Congressional Republicans and a number of Democrats have expressed concerns about reports that the U.S. is going out of its way to accommodate Iran in the sanctions relief for nuclear rollback deal.
Stephen Mull, the top U.S. official charged with implementing the deal, acknowledged that the United States was making it clear to third parties that some sanctions are no longer in place.
“In an effort to provide greater clarity to the public and private sectors on what sanctions were lifted and what non-nuclear sanctions remain in place, the Departments of State and Treasury have been participating in extensive outreach with the public and private sectors, mostly at the request of other governments, in order to explain U.S. commitments,” he said.
Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the committee, lacerated the sanctions officials for what he said was “the length the Obama administration has gone to accommodate Iran.”
“The administration told us that sanctions on Iran’s terrorism, human rights and ballistic missiles would be fully enforced after the agreement,” he said. “Yet, it now says that non-nuclear sanctions would undermine the Iran agreement. The White House’s Iran policy amounts to walking on eggshells.”
Szubin rejected the claim. “We have not lifted any of our sanctions designed to counter Iran’s destabilizing activities outside the nuclear file,” he said. “These sanctions are not just words on paper. We are vigorously enforcing them.”
Szubin also rejected reports that the Obama administration is contemplating implementing a system to allow Iran to trade in dollars. He outlined a number of areas where the United States is blocking Iranian non-nuclear activities that are otherwise subject to sanction, including its backing for Hezbollah, Iran’s chief proxy in the civil war in Syria.
Thomas Countryman, an assistant secretary of state, revealed that the U.S. assisted Israel in intercepting a Panamanian flagged vessel in the Red Sea that was bearing Iranian weapons. Previous reports on the March 2014 interception by the Israel Defense Forces did not mention U.S. involvement.
Countryman also discounted claims that the U.S. was not doing enough to keep Iran from testing ballistic missiles.
“Our policy on Iran’s ballistic missile program has not changed – Iran must cease this work, including ballistic missile launches,” he said.
Feeling the heat over her clashes with Bernie Sanders, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is at the center of a debate among Democratic lawmakers over whether to push for her ouster as party chair.
The Hill reported Tuesday that about 12 senators have been discussing what to do about Wasserman Schultz, a Florida congresswoman and one of the most prominent Jewish members of the party.
The senators, none of whom spoke for quotation, said Wasserman Schultz’s clashes with Sen. Sanders, I-Vt., in his bid to defeat Hillary Clinton, the front-runner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, could lead to tensions at this summer’s convention. They worry that could distract from the effort to defeat the likely Republican nominee, Donald Trump.
Wasserman Schultz has also lost the support of liberal groups that support Sanders, including Credo, Moveon.org and RootsAction.
In the same article, however, a raft of Democratic senators went on record to reject talk of ousting Wasserman Schultz as chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, a post she’s held since 2011. Her defenders included Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Bill Nelson of Florida and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, as well as House minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Sanders and his team have accused Wasserman Schultz of “rigging” the nomination process to favor Clinton, with whom she is close. Sanders has endorsed a primary challenger to Wasserman Schultz in her district.
Wasserman Schultz, who says she remains neutral between Clinton and Sanders, has adamantly denied charges of bias. She notes that the primary and caucus rules are a matter for the states and that the national party rules were in place before Sanders declared his candidacy. The DNC has added debates at the behest of Sanders, who said the initial schedule prevented him from getting national exposure.
One concession Wasserman Schultz has made to Sanders was to ask him to name five members to the 15-member committee drafting the party platform. DNC chairs usually name the lion’s share of the committee, but Wasserman Schultz, in an apparent peace offering, allocated five names to Sanders, six to Clinton and four for herself.
Luis Miranda, the DNC spokesman, pointedly noted to The Hill that Wasserman Schultz’s defenders were ready to go on the record while her critics remained anonymous. He said Wasserman Schultz wasn’t going anywhere. “She’s going to continue to focus on uniting Democrats and on being an asset to help elect them up and down the ballot in November, just as she’s done for many in both chambers,” he said.
On the other hand, party leaders like Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the minority leader; Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Reid’s likely successor; and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the highest ranking woman senator in the party, dodged comment when asked by Politico whether Wasserman Schultz should stay. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., told Politico removing Wasserman Schultz would be a mistake.
One former DNC official said Wasserman Schultz is being blamed for campaign woes not of her making.
“Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz is an easy scapegoat for each campaign who has complaints about how their own campaigns are being run or the traction that they’re not getting,” Holly Shulman, a former DNC spokeswoman, told The Hill.
Sanders’ appointees to the platform committee, meanwhile, have drawn scrutiny from the pro-Israel community for their past criticism of Israel.
In an interview with Foreign Policy, one of the Sanders appointees, James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, said the Middle East would be on the agenda, and said he hoped to modify language that has until now been overwhelmingly pro-Israel to recognize Palestinian suffering. One change, he said, would be to explicitly describe Israel’s control in the West Bank as an “occupation.”
A New York Times editor who has received a deluge of anti-Semitic tweets from supporters of Donald Trump is calling on the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to denounce the invective and support its targets.
In an article published in the paper’s Sunday edition, Jonathan Weisman summarizes the deluge of tweets he has received from writers identifying themselves with handles like “Trump God Emperor,” “CyberTrump” and “@DonaldTrumpLA.”
Their tweets have insulted his “Ashkenazi intelligence,” included a doctored image of the gates of Auschwitz and featured a menorah made of the number 6 million.
Others show Weisman as a concentration camp inmate being guarded by an image of Trump in a Nazi uniform, a grotesque caricature of a Jew labeled “The Holocaustinator” and a Nazi-era cartoon of an Aryan roughing up a stereotypical Jew.
“And still, we have heard nothing from Mr. Trump, no denunciation, no broad renouncing of racist, anti-Semitic support, no expressions of sympathy for its victims,” writes Weisman, an editor in the Times’ Washington bureau. Weisman is also critical of a statement by the Republican Jewish Committee, issued Tuesday, that criticized “anti-Semitic invective” in the presidential race but without singling out the actions of Trump supporters.
— Naughty Raspberry (@HelloRaspberry) May 19, 2016
Weisman describes the RJC statement — which abhorred abuse of journalists “whether it be from Sanders, Clinton or Trump supporters” — as “equivocation as an art form.”
He says he is preserving the anti-Semitic tweets – rather than blocking them, as Twitter administrators advised him — as “a research tool of sorts, a database of hate, and a shrine to 2016.”
He acknowledges in the article that he had “become largely disconnected from Jewish life and faith over the years.”
But as a result of the Twitter attacks, he writes, “I found myself staring down a social-media timeline filled with the raw hate and anti-Semitic tropes.”
I work at a day center for developmentally disabled people. I hang out with them, we do arts and crafts. I feed them lunch. Sometimes I change diapers. I help them throughout the day. It definitely takes a lot of patience and is pretty taxing, but all in all is very rewarding as well. Sometimes they have bad days and sometimes they have pretty good days, like any of your friends, and these are my friends.
Photo courtesy of Flatbush Jewish Community Coalition