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August 11, 2016
The purpose of odd numbers and the obligation to appoint judges
Back when my kids were small, my son asked me to quiz him on identifying odd numbers. As you can imagine, this became rather dull rather quickly, so I asked him after a while, what are odd numbers for? This led to some silence in the back seat. So I tried a more leading question:
“How do we break ties?”
Good point, Mom! The Supreme Court could never decide all those hard cases with an even number of judges. Can we go back to math now?
Since Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February, of course, we have had an even number of Supreme Court justices, leaving the potential for ties on the highest court in the land.
President Obama has nominated Merrick Garland to fill the vacancy. No one disputes that he is exceptionally well qualified. He is the chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which handles some of the most complex appeals in the nation. In the 1990s, he oversaw the investigation and prosecution of the terrorist bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building.
The Republican-controlled Senate, however, has refused to move forward with confirmation hearings. And the official 2016 platform of the Republican Party now unequivocally “salutes” this position, stating that “[t]he confirmation to the Court of additional anti-gun justices would eviscerate the Second Amendment’s fundamental protections.” Judge Garland has now suffered the longest delay that has ever occurred in the Supreme Court confirmation process.
It may not be a disaster to have a Supreme Court case end in a tie once in a while. This can happen in any event if a justice is recused. The decision of the court of appeals stays in place. Those courts have many able judges. The lawyers and parties who spent enormous resources will be frustrated. Divisive legal issues may be unresolved for longer. Lack of uniformity in judicial decisions may continue to fester.
On occasion, good things can come from uncertainty. Settlements may achieve better outcomes for all concerned than litigation. Legislatures can craft nuanced solutions to problems if they function right that can be superior in terms of social problem solving than an up-or-down vote of a court. Often the Supreme Court itself declines to take up a case because it believes that the ultimate decision will benefit from further “perculation” in other courts.
In the long term, though, when disputes about the meaning of the law cannot be resolved, the outcome is often gamesmanship and “forum shopping.” Predictability and planning are frustrated. And if the reason we cannot get disputes resolved is that one political party is seeking a partisan advantage from obstructing the confirmation of exceptionally well qualified judges, we risk seriously undermining the confidence we place in the independence of the federal judiciary and the rule of law itself. I struggle to understand why the Republican Senate’s refusal to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland has not provoked greater outrage. It should.
All of this has made me wonder: What does Jewish law and tradition have to say?
One of the most popularly quoted Torah phrases about justice is“Tzedek, tzedek tirdof,” meaning: Justice, justice shall you pursue.
This is in Deuteronomy 16:20, in a Torah portion called “Shoftim,” meaning “Judges.” Shoftim actually begins two verses earlier, in Deuteronomy 16:18, with a commandment that gets much less attention but that seems every bit as important for people who care about justice: “You shall appoint for you judges and officers in all your gates…”
The obligation to appoint judges doesn’t appear to be optional. We “shall appoint judges.” There is no exception when a president is in his last year of office, or for protecting gun ownership.
In analyzing the text itself, we may take note of the repetition: “youshall appoint judges for you.” The appointment of judges is by us and for us. Do we draw meaning from the fact that the obligation to appoint judges comes two verses before the obligation to pursue justice? Is it that the appointment of judges is a predicate to the pursuit of justice?
What about odd numbers? That, too, is part of Jewish tradition. The Talmud’s teaching on courts (Sanhedrins) provides for different courts with different roles, but they all had an odd number of judges: 3, 23 or 71.
In the U.S. Supreme Court this past term, the results of the Senate’s refusal to move forward with Judge Garland’s nomination were less dire than many predicted, mostly due to Justice Anthony Kennedy joining the more consistently “liberal” justices in major decisions involving abortion and affirmative action. The most significant ties involved cases about union political spending and immigration. The Department of Justice is seeking reconsideration in the immigration case, so that may yet be resolved.
Major cases next year in which ties could prove barriers to legal closure include a case asking whether a city may sue mortgage lenders and housing operators for racial discrimination under the Fair Housing Act, and another asking whether Congress violates equal protection principles in establishing different citizenship rules for children born abroad to unwed citizen mothers as opposed to unwed citizen fathers. The Court will also decide cases involving patent law, redistricting, various criminal law issues, and whether claims against Visa and MasterCard concerning ATM fees adequately allege a violation of antitrust laws.
Whether any of these will result in a tie remains unknown. But what we do know is that the precedent set by the Senate’s refusal to move forward with the confirmation of Merrick Garland has set a precedent for dysfunction.
When our kids come home wanting to understand about checks and balances, rather than odd numbers, it is small comfort that we can point to Deuteronomy, as well as the Constitution, in pronouncing the Republican Senate out of order.
Laura W. Brill is a media law and appellate litigator who writes frequently on legal issues. She served as a law clerk to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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For her directorial debut, Natalie Portman mines her inner Israeli and what it means to be Jewish
A security detail opens the doors to the Beverly Wilshire’s Royal Suite, where Natalie Portman looks up from the middle of a grand, high-ceilinged hallway. She is huddling with one of her handlers, but their conversation doesn’t register above a whisper, as if secrets are being exchanged. The setting is pointedly opulent — a large, corner apartment on the hotel’s eighth floor, with grand, sun-drenched spaces — but the mood is staged, ceremonial, as if a play is about to begin.
When I approach Portman, she smiles, introducing herself with a light handshake. Her hair is pulled back in a bun, her lovely face unflashy in the natural light, yet her look is inscrutable. Almost instantly she conveys an uncanny resemblance to the character I had just seen her play — a bit remote; fragile like fine porcelain, her interior somehow off-limits and unknowable.
Portman’s mutability is her gift as an actress, a calling she’s pursued since age 11. She can canvass emotions with a subtlety and ease that makes it seem she isn’t doing much of anything at all. But, for the first time, I suspect, she has taken on a role — an entire film, actually — that reveals more of her real self than she has ever exposed on screen.
For her directorial debut, Portman chose Israeli writer Amos Oz’s celebrated memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness.” Set in the 1940s during the British Mandate of Palestine, Oz’s coming-of-age tale — “Sipour Al Ahava Vehoshekh” — pivots around the relationship between young Amos and his enigmatic, melancholy mother, Fania (played by Portman), who commits suicide at 38. It is the first time in Portman’s career she has served as writer, director and star, and she labored more than a decade to bring Oz’s heartrending elegy from page to screen.
Natalie Portman and Amir Tessler play mother and son in her adaptation of Amos Oz’s “A Tale Of Love and Darkness.” Photo by Ran Mendelson/Focus World
“I read [the book] when it first came out in translation, and I was so moved right away,” Portman said, sitting at the edge of a large leather divan. She appears even more delicate in person, draped in an oversized navy shirtdress, hands clasped in her lap. She speaks in a voice almost childlike in its softness. “I was so moved by the language and the story, the relationship between Amos and his mother. … It was the first thing I really felt I wanted to direct.”
It makes sense that the Jerusalem-born actress would fall under the spell of Oz’s story, which is as much the story of one boy and his family as it is a historical account of their nascent country. Against the backdrop of the emerging Jewish state, a country full of traumatized, rejected immigrants tries to forge a future in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Oz’s recollection is universal in its evocation of Jewish memory, history and nationhood, and could just as easily be a story of Portman’s own relatives.
“The story of Oz’s family at the dawn of the state of Israel is remarkably close to all the stories I heard growing up about my father’s family,” she wrote in an email correspondence with novelist Jonathan Safran Foer published in The New York Times. “[T]he worship of everything European, refugees confronted by the desert, the atmosphere of constant violence, the political debates, the obsession with books and storytelling and language, womanhood in a religious/military/socialist amalgam, the dark fantasy of building a utopian community when all the parents have been killed, the mythology of the pioneer and the new Israeli man. The themes are endlessly interesting to me, as is the question of how much of the mythology is an accurate reflection of history, and how much is storytelling cemented by repetition.”
Creating a film adaptation of “A Tale of Love and Darkness” offered Portman a rare chance to revisit the roots of her identity, to indulge creatively in the mythologies that shaped her, and to put her own artistic stamp on the complex set of conditions that preceded the birth of modern Israel.
“That time period is so unique, [and] I feel like we don’t talk that much about the uniqueness of the situation; that it was essentially all these orphans descending from Europe to this desert, with these utopian ideas,” Portman said. “They just experienced the worst horror of the 20th century, but then they have a dream of creating, like, this socialist experiment. And then, of course, they’re going into a political situation that has ramifications, we know now, for the next hundred years. It’s just a fascinating moment, all of those dynamics.”
When the book was released in Israel in 2003, it quickly became one of the best-selling books in Israeli history. “What made ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’ an event,” David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker in 2004, when Nicholas de Lange’s English translation came out, “is the power with which it entwines the history of an immigrant family — a lonely, depressed mother, a distant father, and their son — with the larger historical story; Europe’s rejection, the frantic search for refuge among the Arabs in Palestine, the idealism and the disappointments, the establishment of Israel and the war that followed.” Portman read de Lange’s translation and was transfixed. She asked her agents to reach out to Oz and soon flew to Israel to meet him. “He was so kind immediately,” Portman recalled, “and he gave me the permission to make the film, which was crazy. He was very easy about it. And patient, too, because it took a while for me to do.”
Portman was born Neta-Lee Hershlag in 1981 to an Israeli father and American mother, who were then living in Jerusalem. By the time Portman was 4, her family had decamped to the United States, where her father would practice medicine as a gynecologist and fertility specialist. Portman grew up between Washington, D.C., and New York, attending Solomon Schechter Day School of Nassau County, where she said she received much of her Jewish education. At 12, she scored her first film role, playing an orphan who befriends a hitman in Luc Besson’s 1994 film, “Léon: The Professional.”
Almost instantly, she won the attention and interest of Hollywood, landing roles in Woody Allen’s “Everyone Says I Love You,” the “Star Wars” franchise and a long list of critically acclaimed independent dramas. She also starred on Broadway as Anne Frank in a 1997 production of “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Two years later, she announced that she would take a break from acting to attend Harvard University, where she studied psychology and served as assistant to lawyer and professor Alan Dershowitz.
Just before her graduation, Rolling Stone interviewed Portman for a cover story — she was 20 — and she spoke in depth about her family’s Jewish history: the grandparents and great-grandparents from Poland and Romania; the great-grandmother who served as a British spy; the relatives who died at Auschwitz. Asked about her post-graduation plans and where she might live next, she said, “I really love the States, but my heart’s in Jerusalem. That’s where I feel at home.”
“A Tale of Love and Darkness” represents a homecoming. Now 35, with a 20-year career already, Portman said she worked on the screenplay in fits and starts for years, while simultaneously pursuing other projects.
Early on, she had difficulty getting financing for the $4 million film, until she agreed to star in it. Portman wouldn’t say whether investors were squeamish about the fact that she was a first-time director, a first-time director who is also a woman, or if the subject matter — the establishment of Israel — was too problematic.
Nevertheless, Portman pressed on, and in the decade since she began penning the script, she met and married dance choreographer Benjamin Millepied, won an Oscar in 2011 for “Black Swan” and gave birth to a son, Aleph. Becoming a mother was a seismic event, she said, and intensified her relationship to the project, which is very much a love story between a boy and his mother.
Portman and husband Benjamin Millepied appear at the opening ceremony of the 68th Cannes Film Festival in France in 2015. Photo by Featureflash Photo Agency/Shutterstock.com
Having a child “absolutely affected my understanding of the story,” Portman said. “I think, a lot of the expectations that you have with certain roles in your life that are sort of talked about from the time you’re young — whether it’s marriage, having children, getting jobs, moving, all of those things — [are] just so different than what you have in your head. The real experience of what those things are like [makes you realize] the distance between the two. I felt it in the way I think about Israel, being away from it, and then going there; it’s not the same thing at all. So I feel like the way you project onto things and then when you’re in the reality, there’s such a divide. And that was what I felt like I understood better, aging with the material.”
As writer and director, Portman could easily empathize with the young Amos, who struggles to find his footing between alienation at home and the promise and chaos of pre-state Jerusalem out in the streets. But as an actress, Portman had to understand the character of Fania, who takes her own life, even as her only child depends on her. “I think [becoming a mother] helped me understand that you wouldn’t be thinking about your child,” she said of Fania’s suicide. “You couldn’t be thinking about your child. You would have to be so in your own pain that it’s not where your brain is, because that’s the thing that would stop you. That’s the only thing that would stop you, when you’re in that amount of pain.”
In the film, Fania serves as a kind of cautionary symbol. Portman’s script suggests that perhaps, having come from a comfortable upbringing in Rovno, Ukraine, Fania couldn’t handle the constant struggle of life in a burgeoning country; that she hated the poverty, the violence, the uncertainty, the desperation. Fania is filled with fantasies, and she shares her fantastical, often tragic stories with her son, who sees his mother as the heroine of a corrupted fairy tale. In a sense, Fania becomes a stand-in for Israel, the country ever on the brink, imperiled by a thousand dark forces, assailed by an inability to realize her own promise.
“I realized how much Judaism for me was connected to yearning — to wanting what you don’t have — which is maybe why Israel is so complicated emotionally for Jews: It’s built into the emotional structure of our religion to yearn for a homeland we don’t have,” Portman wrote in the Times.
“So then, if we have it, what do we yearn for? We say ‘next year in Jerusalem’ as if we are still in exile. But maybe Jerusalem as an idea is never attainable — so we can keep longing for it, even when we have it.”
Portman’s eloquence on Israel is decidedly uncharacteristic of most of Jewish Hollywood. In good times and bad, Israel is a subject Jewish celebrities tend to avoid, lest they be seen as too tribal, or worse, unsympathetic to the Palestinian cause. But Portman is an exception, and, over the years, she has become a kind of a de facto defender of Israel (when I use this label with her, she laughs), especially in the face of public misconception or outright hostility toward Israel or the Jews. When a video surfaced in February 2011 of Dior chief fashion designer John Galliano spouting anti-Semitic comments in a Paris bar, Portman, then the face of a Dior fragrance, was quick to condemn him.
“I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano’s comments,” she said in a statement at the time. “In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way. I hope at the very least, these terrible comments remind us to reflect and act upon combating these still-existing prejudices that are the opposite of all that is beautiful.”
Galliano was subsequently suspended from Dior. Four years later, when The Hollywood Reporter questioned her about the incident, she said she could forgive him, but not his comments. In the same story, she was equally unforgiving of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom she condemned for “racist comments,” which she said she was “very much against.”
Weighing in on Israel comes naturally to her: “I don’t know that it’s that conscious,” she told me. “Everyone has their opinions.” She wrote to Foer that she sometimes wishes she were from someplace “inoffensive … neutral, unproblematic,” but in the end, it is the one place that most ignites her imagination.
“It is funny, though,” she added of the fraught nature of even mentioning Israel. “It’s like that Jon Stewart thing. … I remember he did this, like, Israel-Palestine [segment], you literally get, like, a word out and it’s, like, ‘Nanana you’re WRONG!’ You kind of, like, can’t win.
“But it’s not really about winning,” she continued. “It’s about humanizing the situation. And it has to be done over and over and over again. And that’s why, hopefully, storytelling can be a powerful tool, because at the end of the day, it’s, like, people live there in every part of the conflicted area — they’re human beings and there’s a variety. There’s good and bad people; there’s strong and weak people; people who are succeeding and people who are suffering; and it’s human. And the more human stories that can be told, the more people can understand it.”
Portman is fascinated by the role storytelling plays in shaping identity, and she’s talked about it often over the years, even writing a paper at Harvard on the subject. When I asked how Jewish identity has influenced her creatively, she said: “It’s definitely related to reading and language. I’m definitely a word and language person, and I’m sure that’s been influenced by having Hebrew early on and Jewish teaching early on that was so book-centric.”
What appealed most to Portman about “A Tale of Love and Darkness” was Oz’s sparkling prose. Oz himself has described writing in Hebrew as an almost transcendent experience: “It’s my musical instrument,” he told Charlie Rose in 2011. “I’m a great chauvinist for the language. I’m not a chauvinist for the country. Modern Hebrew is in many ways like Elizabethan English: It’s an erupting volcano, a lusting earthquake. The language is [constantly] absorbing new idioms and new forms, and a writer of Hebrew or a poet of Hebrew may take daring liberties [by] legislating [experience] into the language.”
Portman recalled one little piece of trivia Oz shared with her: “His uncle was one of the members of the academy that creates new words to update modern Hebrew, so he came up with words for, like, ‘pencil’ and ‘shirt.’ And [Amos] was, like, ‘If my uncle didn’t come up with the word shirt, would I put on my coat of many colors every day?’ Because if you don’t have the word, you’re gonna have to find the closest thing in the Bible to express it. And I found that so magical and beautiful,” Portman said.
Words … language … stories — these are the things that spark her; little meteorites exploding in the Jewish soul of a woman whose theatrical destiny was in some way ancestrally ordained.
“The centrality of storytelling in identity is a very Jewish thing,” she continued. In the Torah, she pointed out, “the world is created through words: ‘Let there be light, and there [was] light.’ The words create the reality. The story we tell creates who we are. And Jews have been a people because of the story they tell, not because of a state they have.”
The Jewish story is what Portman hopes to pass on to her now 4-year-old son, Aleph — a name symbolic of words and language if ever there were one. Between homes in Los Angeles and Paris, where her husband just stepped down as director of dance for the Paris Opera Ballet, the family has been making an effort of late to observe Shabbat.
“It’s hard,” Portman admits, with everyone’s erratic schedules. “But whenever we do it, it’s so wonderful, and just nice having a connection to who you are. It’s nice to give your kid something that they’re free to reject, but it’s not like they have to search for ‘Who am I?’ It’s like, ‘Look. This is where you come from, take it or leave it. But this is who you are; these are your roots; these are you rituals; these are the stories we tell.’ ”
If it were totally up to her, what would Portman want her son to inherit from her Judaism?
“I think it’s so personal for every person,” she said, “what [Judaism] means to them. And I think it’s so beautiful to have the name of ‘the people Israel,’ to be, like, fighting with God, you know? That you’re arguing with God, you’re wrestling with it. I think that’s one of the most interesting things in the culture. Everything is a question. And there aren’t necessarily answers. And I think that’s a great way to go into the world.”
Raisman earns sweet redemption in Rio
For American gymnast Aly Raisman, a silver medal in Thursday's all-around event was a moment of redemption after the heartbreak of 2012 when she was on the wrong side of a tiebreak and bumped from the podium.
It was also a validation that a 22-year-old can still rock in the world of gymnastics, despite an army of naysayers who didn't think she could compete in a sport made for teens.
Raisman rose to the podium alongside compatriot and gold medal winner Simone Biles and bronze medallist Aliya Mustafina, the Russian rival that had prevailed in the tiebreak for the bronze in London.
“After the tiebreak of 2012, it was very heartbreaking,” saidRaisman.
But Thursday's silver, she said, “shows you should never let anyone tell you that you can't do anything, and you should never give up just because you fail in something.”
In 2012, Mustafina and Raisman finished with the same total score and the tie was broken by using their three highest apparatus scores. Mustafina came out a hair higher, leavingRaisman in fourth.
Raisman said she had to stare down the skeptics when she came back too the national team in 2014 after a series of injuries.
“When I first came back, all the media and everyone looked at me like I was crazy that I was really going to come back,” said Raisman.
Her coach, Mihai Brestyan, told her “'just said ignore everyone,'” she said. “'When you are 21 or 22, that will be your best age.' And he was right.”
But at the 2015 world championships, she finished a disappointing fifth.
“I wouldn't call fifth in the world a failure,” she said.
“But sometimes when you make mistakes,” she added, “it's the best thing for you.”
After their one-two finish Thursday, Raisman and Biles, 19, walked around the Rio Olympic Arena, as if they were one. The two are very close and Raisman said “the whole time we have been here together, that's been our goal to go one-two.”
Biles, who many call the best gymnast of all time, was ebullient about her team mate's accomplishment.
“I was more proud for Aly getting silver than me gold,” Biles said. “She just worked so hard in gym and for it to finally pay off, it amazes me.”
Raisman returned the compliment by saying that she never thought she could beat Biles.
“No one goes in thinking they can beat Simone,” Raismansaid. “People don't go in thinking they can beat Usain Bolt either. It's kind of the same thing.”
The two plan to take a beach vacation in Belize, the homeland of Biles' mother Nellie, and ponder their futures.
“I feel really good at 22 and I can't wait to see what is to come,” Raisman said.
Biles chirped “2020?,” hoping her friend will be coming along for the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 2020.
Raisman earns sweet redemption in Rio Read More »
Trump calls Obama, Clinton Islamic State ‘co-founders’
Republican Donald Trump called President Barack Obama and Democrat Hillary Clinton the “co-founders” of Islamic State, ratcheting up his assertion that they are responsible for the rise of the militant group and sparking renewed criticism of his leadership ability.
Clinton's White House campaign on Thursday called the remarks a “false claim,” in her latest response to a series of attacks by Trump in which he has sought to portray America as less safe, blame Democrats and depict himself as the only one who can restore security.
Democrats, in turn, have used Trump's often hyperbolic statements ahead of the Nov. 8 election to argue he is unfit to be president and lacks the temperament to be trusted with matters of national security.
“This is another example of Donald Trump trash-talking the United States,” senior policy adviser Jake Sullivan said in a statement.
“What's remarkable about Trump's comments is that once again, he's echoing the talking points of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin and our adversaries to attack American leaders and American interests, while failing to offer any serious plans to confront terrorism or make this country more secure,” Sullivan said.
For Republicans uncertain about whether Trump has the discipline to stick to an attack against Clinton, the latest comments were concerning. Many see the New York real estate mogul as spending too much time fighting within his own party and have called on him to refocus his campaign message on Clinton.
“ISIS is a solid GOP message to show contrast with Hillary Clinton and the failures of the Obama-Clinton administration,” said Alice Stewart, a Republican strategist who remains undecided about the nominee, using acronyms for Islamic State and the Republican Party.
But, she added, “Trump should have simply said that the Obama administration's decision to pull all troops out of Iraq, with no stay-behind agreement, created a vacuum and allowed ISIS to metastasize. It's absurd for him to say that Obama and Clinton are founders of ISIS – and he can't blame the media for this.”
A group of about 70 Republicans, including five former members of Congress, called on the Republican National Committee to stop helping Trump in the wake of his recent remarks and instead focus on getting members of Congress re-elected.
“Trump's divisive and dangerous actions are not only a threat to our other candidates, but to our party and the nation,” the letter stated.
Some Republicans see a small silver lining in Trump talking more about Clinton.
“It is helpful – at least to the rest of the ticket – that he is focusing a little more on Clinton than on other Republicans, whether defeated primary opponents or other elected officials who are on the ballot, for a change,” said former New Hampshire Republican Chairman Fergus Cullen, who is not supporting Trump.
“But tomorrow, or later today, he could blame (Republican Senator) Jeff Flake for A-Rod's retirement,” Cullen said, referring to Yankees player Alexander Rodriguez's decision to leave professional baseball. “I have zero confidence in Trump's ability to stay on one message or to drive one message for any length of time longer than about 10 seconds.”
CRITICISM OF IRAQ WAR
Trump has previously criticized Clinton for supporting the Iraq War in 2003 while she was a U.S. senator. Trump frequently says, in contrasting himself with Clinton, that he opposed the war – but in interviews before the invasion he did voice support.
Now, Trump is arguing that in trying to end the war and withdrawing U.S. troops in 2011, Clinton, who was secretary of state at the time, and Obama created Islamic State.
Republicans frequently trace the birth of Islamic State to the Obama administration's decision to withdraw the last U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.
But many analysts argue its roots lie in the decision of George W. Bush's Republican administration to invade Iraq in 2003 without a plan to fill the vacuum created by Saddam Hussein's ouster. It was Bush's administration, not Obama's, that negotiated the 2009 agreement that called for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011.
Clinton posted on social media website Twitter that Trump's comments are disqualifying.
“Anyone willing to sink so low, so often should never be allowed to serve as our commander-in-chief,” she wrote.
The White House declined to comment on Trump's claim.
Appearing in Miami Beach, Florida, on Thursday morning, Trump repeated his attack for the third time, saying the U.S. government “has unleashed ISIS.”
“In fact, I think we'll give Hillary Clinton … most valuable player,” Trump said. “ISIS will hand her the most valuable player award. Her only competition is President Barack Obama.”
Trump first made the assertion in a speech on Wednesday night in Florida, saying, “I call them co-founders” of Islamic State.
In an interview on Thursday morning, Trump defended the remarks.
“Is there something wrong with saying that?” Trump told CNBC. “Why – are people complaining that I said he was the founder of ISIS? All I do is tell the truth, I'm a truth teller.”
Trump was also asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt if he “meant that (Obama) created the vacuum, he lost the peace.”
“No,” Trump responded. “I meant he's the founder of ISIS. I do.”
The Democratic National Committee lambasted Trump's remarks. “Donald Trump should apologize for his outrageous, unhinged and patently false suggestions on the founding of ISIS,” the DNC said in a statement. “This is yet another out of control statement by a candidate who is unraveling before our very eyes.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani defended Trump on CNN, saying his remarks were “legitimate political commentary.”
Trump calls Obama, Clinton Islamic State ‘co-founders’ Read More »
BDS bill headed to California Senate floor next week
As early as late next week, the California Senate could vote on a bill signaling the California legislature’s disapproval of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, according to Guy Strahl, the legislative director for Assemblyman Richard Bloom of Santa Monica, who wrote the bill.
A 6-0 vote on Aug. 11 by the seven-member Senate’s Appropriations Committee cleared the way for the bill to go to the floor. Sen. Jim Beall was absent for the vote.
Though Strahl said Bloom is still looking for a Senate floor manager, the legislator intends to put the measure before the upper chamber as soon as possible. Because of procedural time limits, Aug. 18 is the first day it could see a vote, he said.
The bill mandates that companies contracting with the state certify that any policy they might have boycotting a nation recognized by the U.S., including but not limited to Israel, does not violate state and federal civil rights law.
Prior to the Aug. 11 vote, the committee determined the bill would cost upwards of $370,000 to implement in its first year on the books, a price tag that sent it to the so-called “suspense file,” a waiting list of bills deemed expensive enough to merit further review. Since that determination, an amendment made at Bloom’s request significantly reduced the projected cost of the measure, Strahl said.
In its previous form, the bill forwarded complaints about boycott policies directly to the attorney general. Bloom’s amendment drops that mandatory review and allows civil rights complaints to be vetted through relevant state agencies, such as the Department of General Services (DGS), which overseas contractors.
The measure has faced a long and winding road through various committees in both houses of the legislature. Consideration on the Senate floor would be among the final steps to passage. If the Senate approves the bill, it will head back to the Assembly, where it has already passed once, to be considered again.
BDS bill headed to California Senate floor next week Read More »
Dancing ‘til the end of music
When I was in my late teens, I listened to the second side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, pretty much every day for three weeks in a forest about an hour north of Montreal. I was living in a tent with other Jewish wannabe hippies at Camp Bnai Brith, and the camp leaders allowed us to have a turn table outside our tent, where we could spin our vinyls at will.
It’s hard to imagine living my life without the second side of Abbey Road.
On my way to visit my son at Camp Ramah the other day, I played it in my car, a few times over. Every note is like an old friend. You have to hear the whole side to get the full effect. The songs flow in and out of each other. Happy and silly mixes with deep and lyrical. There’s always a delightful surprise around the corner. No matter how often I hear it, it’s like opening a whole bunch of amazing Chanukah gifts in one sitting.
If you ever told me I would never hear Abbey Road again, I think I would sit shivah.
I feel that way about a lot of music– I can’t imagine my life without this or that piece of music. As much as I love art in all forms, music gets me like nothing else. I’m not sure I can even explain it. Maybe that’s why music reaches me so deeply—because I can’t explain it. If I could, then I would control it, own it, understand it, file it away.
There is no “controlling” music. When I hear music I love, all I can do is surrender. Hearing the band Beirut play “Nantes” makes me forget the Middle East or when I have to pick up my kids. An old Elton John ballad like “Sixty Years On” makes me count the seconds until John sings “Senorita plays guitar, plays it just for me.”
Great songs offer delights within delights. The instrumental opening of “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones increases the pulse to dangerous levels. Carlos Santana’s guitar on “Samaba Pa Ti” sounds like a voice crying. Lyrics can also offer deep pleasure. When I hear the singer-poet Leonard Cohen sing, “Dance me ‘til the end of love,” I’m in awe that someone could string those words together: Aren’t you supposed to dance with someone, and until the end of time?
A Chassidic niggun around a Shabbat table— chanting with no words—can send my soul spinning as much as a blues song from B.B. King. One of my favorite albums is an old CD of a Sephardic chazzan singing Askenazic melodies with a Sephardic twist. It’s so unifying that if enough people played it simultaneously, the Messiah might show up.
When I met Michael Jackson at his ranch many years ago, and we started talking about melodies, he asked me what my favorite melody was. I couldn’t lie. I told him it was a Sephardic melody we sing only during the High Holidays, to commemorate the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. I sang it to him. Whoever wrote that melody a few centuries ago in Morocco is probably related to Paul McCartney.
Music has such a hold on me that I have found it extremely difficult to boycott Roger Waters, the world’s most vocal promoter of boycotts against Israel. I hate his anti-Israel stance, but I’m crazy about his band, Pink Floyd. I grew up on “Dark Side of the Moon.” When I hear the opening of “Wish you were here,” I’m transported to some other planet where everyone is a poet. What can a diehard Zionist do in front of such sublime perfection? Maybe my quiet revenge is that every time I hear Hatikva, I can’t imagine a more beautiful national anthem.
Music doesn’t only own souls, it owns time. It owns memories. I hear “La Vida Loca” from Coldplay and I’m now in the summer of 2011 picking up my daughter Eva from surf camp and taking her for frozen yogurt at Penguins. I hear “Ma Cherie Amore” from Stevie Wonder and I’m in the summer of 1973 in a blue Rambler driving down to the Jersey shore with my family, with my father telling us how much he loves the song.
It’s true that some music plays better at certain times. You won’t impress anyone by playing a dark, moody Leonard Cohen song on a sunny spring afternoon. That stuff plays better under the stars, just like the greatest moonlight song ever written, “Moondance,” by Van Morrison. For some odd reason, I used to blast that song when I would drive alone at night with my oldest daughter Tova when she was an infant. We would open the windows and make loud sounds. What was I thinking? Music makes you do weird things.
I’ve had some passionate love affairs with certain singers, John Lennon among them. I remember where I was the day he was shot in December 1980. I was getting coffee in the kitchen of an advertising agency in Montreal where I was working. One memory I have is how the head of the company, an older gentleman, was baffled by the incredibly intense reaction from his employees. No one could talk about anything else. We were walking around, shell-shocked. John Lennon and his music owned us.
It’s a sign of how single-minded I could get when it comes to music that, in grieving Lennon’s passing, I couldn’t help thinking: How many “Hey Judes” and “Instant Karmas” and “Imagines” are now buried with him?
Music often intrudes in my professional life, as when I speak and write about the challenge of attracting the new generation to the ancient Jewish tradition. Well, guess what I have found can make all the difference in enhancing the Jewish experience? That’s right, music. Melodies. Chanting. Communal singing. Whether it’s the old-school charm of a magnificent cantor or the Woodstock vibe of a spiritual community, it’s music, as Don McLean told us in “American Pie,” that can save our mortal souls.
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Eicha – The most difficult of questions
On Tisha B’Av, we read Lamentations, one of the most difficult books in the biblical canon. I once read that the opening of the book of Lamentations, or Eicha in Hebrew, is pronounced with a catch of the throat to convey the breath-stopping shock in face of the destruction it describes. One might argue that the lasting impact of the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 586 BCE reaches us all they way to the 21st century, as our generation is still engaged in a fight over the legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state with Jerusalem as its capital. But when I read the book, I am not thinking about politics or history. I feel the wounds of the present, absorbed in the intricate details of pain.
Biblical scholar, Kathleen O’Connor, describes Lamentations as a powerful work of ancient poetry that tells the truth about what it takes to survive trauma and “testifies to the human requirement to speak the unspeakable, to find speech in traumatized numbness…” One of the most distressing experiences for trauma survivors is that there is an inner conflict between needing to release their angst and finding it difficult to articulate it. What we know from the study of the experience of Holocaust survivors is that many of them spent years in silence about their tragic inner world. Rachel Yehuda, a scientist who researched the epigenetic effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, asked Holocaust survivors why many of them didn’t seek psychological support for the flashbacks and nightmares from which they often suffered. The response she received was that they felt that no one would understand.
Lamentations offers language that lifts the veil of silence and forces us to stare into the wreckage of the shattered heart. The book’s poet pokes at the indifference of our sheltered existence “Is it nothing to you, all you that pass by?” (1:12) “They have heard that I sigh; there is none to comfort me.” (1:21) The book acts as a reflection of our own pain and brings solace to those who recognize their deepest fears in its words. Alan Mintz, a scholar on Biblical poetry, calls the book of Lamentations a “house of sorrow” where tears flow safely. For those readers who have experienced trauma, the book’s shifting voices become witness to the most senseless of human experiences, letting the reader know they are not alone.
In my chaplaincy work with people confronting a crisis, I have heard the bewildered question “Why? Why me?” There is no answer, of course. Eicha, begins with a similar question “how?!” “How lonely sits the city once great with people!” (1:1). It is likened to a funeral dirge and is repeated throughout the book. “How has G-d covered the daughter of Zion with a cloud in his anger?” (2:1) “How has the gold become dim?” (4:1)
Laments are more than mere complaints and arguments. They are the demonstration of vulnerability and humility before G-d. The grieving poetry of Lamentations is written in various alphabetical acrostic forms. Most of the chapters begin each stanza with an aleph, then bet, and so on. The last chapter is not an alphabetic acrostic, but has 22 lines that correspond to the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. It is as if the poet, whose life and everything around him was out of control, using the order provided by the acrostic, attempted to make order out of chaos. If the world was created through language, so it is also destroyed through language, from the first letter to the last. These are not hysterical outbursts of a lost soul, but carefully composed containers for pain. The poet gave form to the formless, making sure it speaks of unspeakable truths without spilling over into the abyss.
The voice of the last chapter shifts to the communal “we” and describes the shared loss of land, famine, and streets without joy or music. As the city of Jerusalem is desolate, filled with prowling scavengers, the communal question addressed to G-d is “Why have you forgotten us and forsaken us for so long?” There is, of course, no answer.
Our tradition leaves room for the most difficult questions. In becoming witness to the pain of our ancestors, we begin to articulate our own pain and heal our own wounds. We cannot always make sense of human suffering, but we can be sure that we are not alone in it.
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Joe Lieberman says he will vote for Hillary Clinton
Joseph Lieberman said he would vote for Hillary Clinton days after leaving open the possibility he would vote for Donald Trump.
“I’m an independent Democrat, I never changed parties, and I’m going to vote for Hillary Clinton,” the former senator from Connecticut said Wednesday on the Fox Business channel, as quoted by the Washington Examiner.
Lieberman noted that he has known Clinton, the Democratic nominee, since he studied with her and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, at Yale Law School in the early 1970s.
“I worked with her closely in the Senate for eight years,” he said. Clinton was the senator from New York from 2001-09. “She’s strong, she’s smart, she understands national security. What I was most impressed with in our years in the Senate together was she reached across party lines to try to build coalitions to get something done.”
Lieberman last week said he was not yet settled on a candidate, leaving open the prospect that he could vote for Trump, the Republican nominee.
“I’m one of those people, and there’re a lot of us I think, who can’t feel quite comfortable either way yet,” he said then on Fox Business Channel.
He attributed his indecision in part to a group he founded with former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, a Republican, called No Labels, which seeks conciliation between the parties.
Lieberman was the first Jewish candidate on a major ticket when he was Al Gore’s pick for vice president in the 2000 elections.
Elected to the Senate as a Democrat in 1988, he lost the party primary in 2006, in part because of his enthusiastic backing for the Iraq War. He went on to win a fourth term as an Independent, and backed Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee in the 2008 election, but left politics in 2012.
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