My parents have given me so much; it\’s now time to start giving back to them. I\’m referring to guilt in this case. Specifically, guilt about not living up to one\’s potential, about not keeping up with the Joneses\’ children, about not providing ammunition for bragging rights over Shabbat dinner with friends.
The column of armored SUVs waited, engines humming, as a phalanx of bodyguards ushered Prime Minister Ariel Sharon into the third truck from the end. As the convoy cleared the main gate of the Israeli government head\’s residence, a set of decoy vehicles turned north, toward Jerusalem, while the remaining units proceeded south toward the Negev, where Sharon planned to tour absorption sites being built for hundreds of Israeli families soon to be evacuated from their Gaza Strip homes.
For Sharon, the site inspections this spring were a welcome excursion beyond his Jerusalem office compound or his Negev ranch. But for officers charged with protective security, the outing rivaled an elite combat operation.
Usually I only respond to fair and thoughtful criticism, but I\’ll make an exception in this case, because people I respect tell me that Rob Eshman, the editor-in-chief of this publication, is both a smart and decent guy.
Recently, he wrote a column on July 29 about my new book — \”100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (and Al Franken is \’37),\” and this is how the column began: \”Jewish Americans are only 2 percent of the nation\’s population, but they are 25 percent of its problem.\”
Of course, he doesn\’t believe that. The point was that I supposedly believe that. Why? It seems that Eshman actually counted up all the Jewish people on the list, came up with 25, and, well, you do the math.
Good thing my name is Goldberg and not something WASPy or the column might have begun, \”This is a book written by a Jew-hating bigot.\”
A federal court trial, alleging that the Orthodox Jewish owners of a Pico-Robertson building evicted a tenant because he shared his apartment with a non-Jew, is scheduled to open in Los Angeles next week.
The suit by Lawrence \”Chaim\” Stein alleges that he was evicted in 2004 by the board of Torat Hayim, a nonprofit that is best known for its Pico-Robertson school and synagogue, but that also manages a handful of apartments.
Stein\’s central piece of evidence in the suit is a voice mail left on his phone answering machine by Michael Braum, one of the suit\’s defendants and the pro bono manager of the apartment in the 8800 block of Alcott Street.
\”I can\’t believe you rented to a goy,\” says the voice on the tape, which Braum has acknowledged as his in a deposition.
\”Two days after that, we get an eviction notice,\” Stein said.
Rejecting tenants based on religion is illegal. Braum noted in an interview that Torah Hayim\’s tenants include non-Jews. He insisted that the issue was not religion, but that Stein unilaterally changed terms of the lease.
The idea of one Jew killing another is shocking. Most of us think it never happens — but the truth is that it does. It happens this week in the Torah with Pinchas. After seeing a Jew apparently enticed by a Midianite prostitute, Pinchas runs them both through with his spear.
It happened when the Macabbees saw a Jew publicly bowing down to a statue of Zeus in the town of Modin. It happened during the American Civil War, World War I and when the State of Israel was founded. Most recently, as most of us painfully recall, it happened when a young, deranged Orthodox Jew named Yigal Amir assassinated then Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. Ironically, it was this week\’s Torah portion and the character of Pinchas that some of the most extreme Jews used as a justification for the assassination
The age of terror, it seems, has sprouted an era of dialogue. A host of conferences designed to bring together East and West are cropping up everywhere.
Never before, perhaps, have so many talked so optimistically about so serious a problem. But behind all the words is one unspoken disagreement that may imperil any chance for progress.
My direct encounter with this optimism took place at a high-profile get-together, the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, in mid-April. Organized by the Qatar government and the Brookings Institution, the conference was packed with more than 150 scholars and leaders from all sides who diligently discussed both the needs and the means for achieving democracy, reforms and renaissance in the Muslim world. Strikingly, there was hardly a Muslim speaker who did not tie the implementation of such reforms to progress toward settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A former FBI agent who outed himself as the \”Deep Throat\” of the Watergate scandal is not Jewish, though Nixon and his aides believed he was. Mark Felt, 91, revealed himself to Vanity Fair this week as the best-known anonymous source of the last century.
In the promising pilot — which one critic called \”\’Frasier\’ with boobs\” — Elon Gold proved a hilarious comic foil for the vacuous yet surprisingly insightful Pamela Anderson.
At a time when faith is a substitute for knowledge, when the faithful assert their ignorance with pride and even try to foist it on the public schools, the pope was a model of spirituality melded to a fierce, probing intellect. He spoke several languages, read deeply in philosophy and religion, and understood that secular knowledge informs, rather than undermines, belief.
It\’s got to be one of the toughest marketing problems of all time: selling Orthodox Judaism. You gotta hand it to Chabad. They\’re making amazing progress, especially when you think about what an unmarketable name they have to deal with: Orthodox Judaism.
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