Judge Goldstone sentenced 28 people to death

More trouble ahead for that champion of human rights, Judge Richard Goldstone.

According to Yediot Achronot, as a judge on the South African court of appeals in the 1980s-90s, he sentenced no less than 28 (!) black people to death, writing in one of his verdicts: "The gallows is the only deterrent for murderers".

He also sentenced four black people to flogging - and let off four white policemen who burst into the house of a white woman who was suspected of having sex with a black man (then a criminal offence).

His defence?

He apparently told Yediot that he was always against the death penalty (although that seems to contradict what he said at the time); that he never discriminated against black people (although the legal system was weighted against them); and that during the apartheid era, he had to obey the law.

Did he really? Was he forced to be a judge?

What his defence essentially amounts to is, 'I was just obeying orders....'

Full story in the weekend edition of Yediot.

(H/t Dani Wassner. See also Jerusalem Central.)

Anyone fancy some Jew's Ear Juice?

You've heard of Yinglish - the mixture of Yiddish and English? Now, courtesy of the New York Times, comes Chinglish - the mixture of Chinese and English:

For English speakers with subpar Chinese skills, daily life in China offers a confounding array of choices. At banks, there are machines for “cash withdrawing” and “cash recycling.” The menus of local restaurants might present such delectables as “fried enema,” “monolithic tree mushroom stem squid” and a mysterious thirst-quencher known as “The Jew’s Ear Juice.”

A quick search on Google shows this stuff actually comes in a can - and is a black fungus juice. What it has to do with Jews still remains unclear, but one blogger ran a review:

It’s a nasty-looking thick semi-transparent cloudy brown liquid. It’s smell is weird, like a mix between the apple vinegar drink and turkey gravy. It’s a little thick and slimy, but the flavor is actually mild. The flavor isn’t anything at all like the cooked wood ear that I’m used to eating.

It’s so strange that it tastes like bland, bad, old apple cider...

Well, what do you expect with a name like 'Jew's Ear Juice'?

Kugel: an expose

Kugel is generally regarded as a 'traditional' Jewish food. But the Conversations in Klal blog is running an exposé: Kugel was not actually that common in the homes of our European ancestors (for those of us who have European ancestors...). The blog explains that it was incredibly difficult to keep food warm over Shabbat and that most food was eaten cold:

Stoves in pre-War Europe were coal fed or wood fed. The more time you spent in cooking, the more fuel you had to feed that stove. Those home stoves could not be fed fuel right before Shabbos and remain hot until after the mid-day meal on Shabbos. Some people, those with more money, would have special niches built into the side of the fireplaces they used for heating their rooms, niches that a pot could go into to stay warm. Those fireplaces were larger and before Shabbos wood could be added and the fire banked so that there would be warmth throughout the night and into the next day. That was during cold weather. When the weather turned warmer, such that the house was not being heated, there was no fireplace niche to keep food warm.

Some people would rely on a local bakery for warm food for Shabbos. The fireplaces in these bakeries were oversized, resulting in large baking slots above the fireplace. Many people would bring their pots of food to the bakery before Shabbos to be inserted in one of these slots to keep warm over night. There was a charge for this bakery use, and not everybody could afford it.

Kugels were not wrapped up in foil paper as many are today--ask your grandmother if she had foil paper at home in Europe. The kugels were placed into the cholent to keep warm, for those who had cholent. They were not the consistency of the kugels we see today.

And yes, another method of keeping things warm was to take a hot pot right before Shabbos started and wrap it up in a feather bed. Also not available to everyone, because a feather bed, certainly an extra feather bed, was a luxury.

So, did our ancestors in Europe eat kugel every Shabbos, and we're just continuing their custom? Not likely. Some may have eaten it on Shabbos during cold weather, or maybe not. The "kugels" that ended up inside of a cholent pot for Shabbos did not resemble what we call kugel today, and many of those cholent kugels were not made with potatoes at all, but with flour. The wealthy or well to do had some options that whole swathes of the rest did not have. And in the hot weather months cold food on Shabbos was the rule and hot the rare exception.

I knew that traditionally chulent was cooked overnight in bakers' ovens but honestly, had never really thought about why households couldn't cook it at home. I am kind of upset to realise that all of those meat and fish delicacies referred to in our shabbat zemirot (and it's astonishing how many of them do actually refer to food) were eaten stone cold...

UN sucks up to Iran

While we're all sitting back, waiting for the UN to impose sanctions on Iran, that august body has elected Iran onto its Commission for the Status of Women, which is supposedly ""dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women".

Meanwhile, in other news this week,

Iran has warned suntanned women and girls who looked like "walking mannequins" will be arrested as part of a new drive to enforce the Islamic dress code...

The announcement came shortly after Ayatollah Kazim Sadighi, a leading cleric, warned that women who dressed immodestly disturbed young men and the consequent agitation caused earthquakes.

At least they didn't elect Cuba, Saudi Arabia and China to the Human Right Council. No, hold on, they've already done that.

Sandra Bullock gives her son a 'bris'

Sandra Bullock - who is not Jewish - has told People magazine that her adopted son Louis had a "bris", soon after he was adopted in January:

A friend of ours helped arrange for a bris at the house, because we couldn't go [to a hospital for the procedure]. The mohel [a person trained in the practice] came to us. You have never seen adults more panicked about what was about to happen to their son, but the celebration and the amount of love we felt and the pride in the little man whom we love so, so much became the greatest moment I have ever had in my life.

Penance, perhaps, for her husband (soon to be ex-husband) Jesse James's Nazi obsession?

UPDATE: I am reminded that a few years ago, there was a trend of non-Jewish kids celebrating 'faux barmitzvahs'. Are we going to witness the rise of 'faux bris celebrations'? Somehow I doubt it.

Goldstone: the UN Human Rights Council is 'hopeless'

The New Republic is running a thorough account of the internal row over Israel at Human Rights Watch, which culminated in founder Robert Bernstein accusing the organisation of being anti-Israel in the New York Times last October.

Most of it has been covered before - and is totally damning. But it included one particularly interesting paragraph, new to me at least:

Bernstein also raised some of his concerns with then-HRW board member Richard Goldstone, who would go on to write the U.N.’s much-maligned report on the Gaza war. There are few more reviled figures in Israel right now than Goldstone, but even he sympathized with Bernstein on certain points, such as the politicized nature of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, after being created in 2006, had directed its first nine condemnations at Israel.

In March 2008, barely a year before he accepted UNHRC’s mandate to investigate the Gaza war, he told Bernstein that he thought the body’s performance had been hopeless and expressed ambivalence as to whether HRW should continue appearing before it. He also agreed with Bernstein that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s increasingly aggressive anti-Israel rhetoric, in combination with his threatening policies, was an issue worthy of HRW’s attention. Goldstone pushed Roth to address it, but to no avail.

If this is true (and I guess we only have Bernstein's word for it), it significantly strengthens the case of those who claim that Judge Goldstone was acting totally cynically, abandoning his true positions on Israel (and according to this, the UN Human Rights Council) in order to advance his own career.

J-Street Europe to launch next week

Next Monday in Brussels, a European group modelling itself on J Street will be launched. The first action of 'J Call' (subtitle: 'European Jewish call for reason') will be to present a petition criticising Israeli government policy to the European Parliament.

You can read the document here. The statement itself does not seem terribly controversial; it calls for Europe to apply pressure to 'both parties' and it calls for an end to settlements in 'Arab districts of East Jerusalem' (presumably, then, they support building in Ramat Shlomo, with its 20,000 Jews?).

I do wonder, though, how the lawmakers presented with these statements will interpret them. I suspect they will jump on the elements critical of Israel and miss the balance.

Just what kind of effect this group will have remains to be seen. But it has enormous potential. First, a much larger percentage of European Jews than American Jews probably support J Street-type positions; there is a big gap in the market for Jews who do not want to support IJV, but are nonetheless left-of-centre and eager for some activism.

In addition, in the US, J Street was meant to counterbalance the powerful Aipac lobby, which is supportive of the Israeli government, and was always going to be the younger, smaller, less influential rival. In Europe, there is no similar lobby to Aipac, certainly not at the EU level, potentially giving J Call quite a lot of influence, quickly, if it is successful.

Will this be good for European Jewry? Presumably, many on the left will feel empowered, while many on the right will feel threatened. You can expect the tone of communal debate surrounding Israel to become even harsher than it currently is.

All eyes on Brussels on Monday then...

Should Israel ban the burka?

According to the Jerusalem Post, MK Marina Solodkin is going to introduce a bill that would ban full-body and and face coverings for women.

The Post makes a persuasive case for supporting the bill - read its editorial here. But it makes too little of the phenomenon of Jewish women (at least 100, not a dozen or two, as it claims) taking on the veil. These sad cases - which I have written about extensively - further illustrate why the burka should be outlawed.

The 'frumkas' - as they became known - were first adopted by a mentally ill woman, Bruria Keren, later convicted of abusing her children. Despite what she said, covering up her face (and wearing multiple layers of clothing) was not a religious issue; it was a mental health issue.

Now, let's be clear - I am not saying this is the case for everyone who takes on the burka. But that was its root in Israel.

The practice was quickly copied by over 100 women who considered Bruria Keren to be a holy woman. Nobody forced them; however, she clearly convinced these gullible and needy women that the ideal for a woman was not to be seen in public (and not even to be heard - she used to stop talking for days on end). Negating themselves, she was telling them, making themselves invisible, was the height of frumkeit, while in fact it has no basis whatsoever in halachah.

Even her imprisonment has not been enough to change the behaviour of her followers, who remain loyal to her, and who knows how many more women have adopted this mode of dress in the meantime (one was arrested a few weeks back when attempting to board a bus; she was mistaken for a terrorist).

Other Charedi women were terrified by this development. They clearly understood two things: that the trend in the Charedi world was increasingly towards 'hyper-modesty' and erasing women from public spaces; and that despite the revulsion expressed by most Charedi men, stringencies tend to spread like wildfire and even crazy things can quickly become the norm.

The Israeli-Jewish experience, then, shows clearly how burkas can be used to entrench the victimisation of poor, vulnerable women. And the majority of women are terrified that they are going to end up coerced, effectively, into wearing one by societal forces greater than themselves.

In Israel this hasn't happened yet. But that is why a public statement that society will not abide either the burka or the frumka would be a good thing, now, before this phenomenon spreads any further.

Hamas's code of ethics

According to this story ,

Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar on Monday night criticized an animated video released by the group’s military wing which depicted Gilad Schalit returning to Israel in a coffin, saying Hamas “would never kill a captured Israeli soldier.”

I love the indignant tone (as I read it). Hamas might blow up innocent civilians in bomb attacks, throw its opponents off roofs, shell entire areas of Israel's south for months and years at end... but kill a captured soldier!? That would be immoral!

That's gangster ethics for you.

Tory plans for schools 'most interesting idea of this election'

Last week I wrote about how the Conservatives' school policy would benefit Jewish schools - specifically, allowing parents and other interested groups to open more schools in areas where there is demand, quickly and with state funding straight away.

The Economist now has a comprehensive piece on the Tory plans for the education system - which it says may be "the most interesting idea in this election":

Labour’s manifesto still talks about parent power. In their version, parental ballots could be held and local-government officials would have to sack head teachers or hand schools over to be run by more successful ones, if that was what parents said they wanted. But it adds up to very little. Real parent-power is what the Tories are proposing, in their plan to let parents set up brand new state-funded schools. (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all run their own schools, so the Tories’ writ would run only in England.)

Will it work? The evidence from other countries is broadly positive. Swedes in general approve of their new schools, and the parents who patronise them are satisfied too: nine in ten say they are happy with their children’s education, compared with under two-thirds of parents with children at state-run schools. Studies have found that they have better results, and also spur improvements in nearby state-run schools. The system as a whole responds better to parents’ wishes, too: if local authorities try to close a much-loved small rural school, parents simply apply to open their own one. When officials realise that the hoped-for efficiency savings will not materialise, they back down...

Many worry that the Tories’ plans, for all their benefits for the middle-class, would offer little to the downtrodden. The Conservatives counter by saying that the new schools would have to abide by the old admissions rules, with no interviewing of applicants and no preference for able students. International evidence is reassuring. A study in Sweden in 2003 found no indication that low-earning parents were less likely to pick free schools than richer ones. America’s charter-schools are mostly in deprived areas, and most of the pupils they teach are black and poor.

Read the whole thing here.

Political correctness gone mad

A letter jaw-dropping in its stupidity, in this week's JC:

Miriam Shaviv, [JC April 9] wrote: "US President Barack Obama has confirmed that he is a bully, responding aggressively to weakness and snubbing allies while kowtowing to dictators and rogues."

I, and many other Jews, have a very different view. We regard President Obama as a reasonable and far sighted man who, because of the weight that he carries in the "Arab street" offers Israel a unique chance of making a peace settlement that might actually stick.

But my argument with Shaviv is not so much what she says as the way she says it. At least one group of people in British society would, I believe, find her remarks almost personally insulting.

I am a Jewish broadcaster working on a radio station which has a largely black management and listenership, I wonder if Shaviv truly appreciates the enormous esteem in which Obama is held in this community. His astonishing rise against the odds has been theirs too.

The JC has an influence much wider than that of its Jewish readership. So, if Jewish/black relations matter, Shaviv might be advised to use more judicious language in future. I am not suggesting that she should not be as critical of American policy as she feels she needs to be. But to be personally insulting is careless and unwise. This is not about censorship; it is about common sense and a sensitivity towards the feelings of others.

Richard Phillips

So, according to Mr Phillips, Jews cannot criticise Barack Obama personally because it will offend black people. Perhaps we should also avoid criticising Mr Brown because it might offend Scots, and Mr Cameron because it might offend toffs? Really.

Unfortunately, Mr Phillips falls into a category which is becoming increasingly common: do-gooders making ridiculous demands on behalf of a minority to which they do not belong, doing more harm than good.

The classic example is of the many liberals, here and in the US, who make it their business to demand that shops do not put up signs wishing customers 'Merry Christmas' in December, because it might offend Jews or Muslims. I can't recall ever hearing from a Jew or Muslim who actually cares.

The American love affair with Jonathan Sacks continues

Lord Sacks's chances of bagging a major post in New York when he chooses to end his term as Chief Rabbi just got a major boost, with a rave review of his latest American trip appearing in this week's NY Jewish Week. The author is the paper's editor, Gary Rosenblatt:

Listening to British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks deliver a positive message of Jewish survival and triumph at Lincoln Square Synagogue on Shabbat, and observing the enthusiastic, attentive overflow crowds at each of his three presentations, helped strengthen the impression for me that he has emerged as the leading voice of Modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism in the world.

Not a leading voice, mind; the leading voice.

Chief Rabbi Sacks is due back in New York next month, his third visit in as many months.

An inappropriate Holocaust memorial?

Two descendants of a woman who survived Auschwitz have decided to commemorate her suffering in an unusual way: by having her camp number tattooed on their own arms.

"The idea to tattoo grandma's number from Auschwitz has been in my mind for a few years," said Daniel Philosof, from Ramat Yishai. "Grandma's stories from the concentration camps were part of my life and always will be. The connection I feel to my grandmother is immense and the tattoo is a way of making that real... The memorial on my body will ensure that we will never forget what happened." (My translation - MS)

He got the tattoo together with his uncle, Oded Rabak from Canada.

Leaving aside halachic questions about tattooing, is this a good idea?

I was initially against. In the first draft of this blog post, I wrote:

Clearly, these gentlemen (and this survivor's son, who did the same thing in 2008) are, in a sense, reclaiming the Auschwitz tattoos and turning them into something they control, even something positive - much as African-Americans reclaimed the 'n-word' and Jews reclaimed the slur 'Yid'. But by putting the number on their arm, it is still something by which they are being defined. Do we really want Hitler to be so utterly central to our identity, his actions to be literally engraved onto our bodies? For how long are we to define ourselves primarily in relation to Hitler, as his victims?

Writing those words, however, it occured to me that for these second- and third-generation survivors, Hitler and his actions are perhaps already "utterly central to [their] identity", in a way that I - who had no direct ancestors killed in the Holocaust (though many more distant relatives) - simply cannot appreciate. What might have been a grotesque and provocative gesture coming from a random Jew takes on a different meaning coming from a child or grandchild of a survivor. Perhaps this is just a physical expression of something they already feel emotionally or mentally, anyway.

What do you think?

FYI - the grandson is yet to tell his grandmother that he has had her number tattooed on his forearm "in order not to upset her".

Funky but not so frum

Some Danish clothing designers have modelled their new collection on the Charedi Jews they spotted on the NY subway:

While produced entirely in Denmark of Danish materials, it draws its inspiration from the traditional styles of various sects of Orthodox Judaism. They claim the collection seeks to "send the wearer on an anachronistic journey [with] essential aesthetic elements of various Judaistic societies" -- elements which lack in yarmulkes and wigs, but selectively interpret big black coats, lengthy black scarves and wraps, clunky black boots, and enormous black hats of both the the furry-cylinder and broad-brimmed variety.

How come they left out the snood?

(Hat tip: Paul Berger)

Signs you're at the White House Yom Ha'atzmaut party

From Bangitout.com - the best items:

10. You were sure the invitation title, "Israel dependence Party" was just a mistype
9. 1600 Gift bags consist of eviction notices and a J-street t-shirt
7. Netanyahu enters with traditional falafel platter and proclaims “We’ve Got Balls!”
6. People boo when asked for their “Undivided” attention
3. All party expenses deducted from Israel Foreign Aid

Read the rest here

Why parents must vote Tory

My column this week:

Over the past couple of weeks, countless families have experienced heartache and stress as the rejection letters from Jewish primaries dropped through their letterboxes. As usual, there are simply not enough places in our faith schools to accommodate all our children. And while some will doubtless find a school place over the coming weeks or months - often after much trauma - many others will be locked out of a Jewish education forever, to the detriment of our entire community.

Each year, rejected parents cry out in anguish (not an exaggeration) at the situation, begging the community's leadership to help establish new primary schools in areas of need; local authorities to approve them; and philanthropists to fund them. Little happens, and the pressure on places is as acute as ever.

This is why the Conservative Party's plans for education deserve our support. More than any other policy in any party manifesto, they could potentially revolutionise our community, changing our Jewish school system for the better almost immediately.

Read the rest here but come back to comment....

South Africans back-pedal furiously on Judge Goldstone

Oh dear. The South African Jewish leadership has apparently only just realised how pressuring Richard Goldstone into missing his grandson's barmitzvah was going to play out in the wider community, and has scrambled into damage-limitation mode. Unfortunately, the letter being circulated by the SA Jewish Board of Deputies just does not do the job:

Dear Community Member

It has been widely reported in the media that Judge Richard Goldstone has been barred from attending his grandson's barmitzvah as a result of pressure from certain sectors of the Jewish leadership. While it has not been involved in this matter, the SA Jewish Board of Deputies was concerned that it would turn into a divisive issue within the Jewish community, and has therefore carefully investigated it to establish the correct facts.

What has emerged is that, contrary to what many media reports alleged, at no time was Judge Goldstone prohibited from, or even requested, not to attend the barmitzvah ceremony by any organisation or individual. Rather, this was a decision voluntarily taken by the Goldstone family and the other respective parties. Certain senior Jewish communal and religious leaders were certainly involved in the discussions around the topic, but in no way did they attempt to dictate to or otherwise pressurize the family into arriving at their decision.

Unfortunately, the matter is being widely misrepresented and misunderstood. To assist us in forestalling any further unpleasantness, we would appreciate it if you could circulate this communiqué to others who you think will be interested.

The SAJBD strongly believes that diversity of opinion in our community needs to be tolerated and respected, whether it emanates from the left, right or centre. At the same time, the right to freedom of expression needs at all times to be exercised with sensitivity, with due regard to the appropriateness of the forum and occasion. Taking into account, with due sensitivity and understanding, the feelings of others goes a long way towards preventing unnecessary conflict.

Wishing you all a Shabbat Shalom.

Zev Krengel

National chairman

Oh, come on. The family didn't just decide that he wouldn't be attending "voluntarily" - why were there "discussions around the topic" if there was no suggestion that he would be made to feel seriously unwelcome? This is completely disingenuous.

On the exclusion of Zeida Goldstone

Judge Goldstone, as everyone now knows, has effectively been barred from attending his grandson's barmitzvah following "negotiations" between the South African Zionist Federation and the Johannesburg shul at which the event was to take place. What pressure, exactly, was brought to bear on the family? Our front-page story raises the possibility that the SAZF was going to demonstrate in front of the shul. Yisrael Medad was told the following:

I understand that all the members of Sandton shul in Johannesburg declared that they would walk out of the shul if Richard Goldstone was given an aliya at his grandson's barmitzvah. As a result of that, the arrangement was made that Richard Goldstone would not attend his grandson's barmitzvah in South Africa.

Perhaps. Either way, everything that needs to be said about this has been said (see also the JC leader this week - not online). Except for this: If the members of my shul decided on masse to walk out when my father was given an aliyah; or if my shul was in any way party to an agreement to have my father excluded from the premesis, I would be saying goodbye to my shul - not my father.

Severely disabled, is she still a mother?

An unprecedented, horrific legal dispute is coming up in LA.

Abbie Cohen Dorn, now 34, and her husband Dan, could not have children. After fertility treatments, she became pregnant with triplets. However, during the birth, she was left severely disabled, with brain damage, apparently unable to communicate except - her parents and therapists claim - by blinking.

A year later her husband, who is bringing up the triplets, divorced her, and has not seen her for many months. She currently lives with her parents and has never seen her children.

Now, a court is preparing to decide issues of custody, visitation, support and property. Abbie's parents claim that Abbie has indicated she wants to see her children; her ex-husband, Dan, refuses to allow them to see her - refuses, in fact, for their grandfather to even refer to her in the children's presence. A battle over visitation rights is brewing.

At a recent pretrial hearing, Superior Court Judge Rudolph Diaz called the case "serious," "complicated" and "novel for me" -- sentiments echoed by family law and child development experts.

The California Supreme Court ruled in 1979 that disabled parents cannot be denied custody simply because of their handicaps. Parenting, the justices wrote, is as much about emotion as it is about physical ability.

"A handicapped parent is a whole person to the child who needs his affection, sympathy and wisdom to deal with the problems of growing up," the justices wrote.

But that case was about custody, not visitation, and concerned a quadriplegic parent who had raised his children alone before his injury and who could talk and drive.

Lisa Helfend Meyer, Abbie's attorney, said, "There is no case in point that addresses Abbie's particular circumstance, whether someone in her condition has a constitutional right to parent or visit her children."

But as she argued in March during a pretrial hearing, "Abbie is alive and wants to see her children. . . . The children need to have a relationship with their mother. The kids need to know the truth."

Meyer points to the California Family Code, which says that the "public policy of this state" is to make sure children have "frequent and continuing contact with both parents." The only exception is if that contact is not "in the best interest of the child"...

Greene says Dan worries that the triplets would feel "terribly guilty" if they see Abbie in her current condition and "know that their childbirth put her in that position."

"He is not opposed to them seeing her when they are older, if they want to," Greene says. "They are too young, and there is no evidence of any ability [by Abbie] to interact with them."

Clearly, it is impossible not to sympathise with all parties in this dispute - all of whom have been to hell and back. But - based only on what I have read - I do hope that the court rules in favour of granting Abbie visitation rights to her children (or rather, the opposite - allowing the children to visit Abbie).

It seems to me that the children's attitude to Abbie will depend entirely on the way she, and her condition, are presented to them. I know several families with severely disabled children, with brain damage at least as severe as Abbie's, who could not be treated more naturally and more normally by their siblings. Their parents made sure that they are part of the family - and so that is how their siblings always accepted them.

There is no reason why Abbie's children could not regard her in the exact same way - provided they are encouraged to.

The father seems to be afraid that she will come across to them as something threatening, frightening, even monstrous - something they need to feel guilty about. Here, the father's concern seems to me to reflect more his own attitude to Abbie than anything to do with his children. I don't blame him for divorcing her; he is a young man and does need to get on with his life. But I am taken back that he has not visited her in months. Do you really stop caring about the woman you married and were building a life with because she is in this tragic state? What happened to 'in sickness and in health'? What if she didn't have parents to look after her?

Her kids need to understand that she is not frightening, not repulsive, not something to be ashamed of; she is a human being, and their mother. This will be far easier to accomplish if she is part of their life from early on, rather than if they suddenly discover she exists as teenagers.

The Nazis' Hebrew-speaking dogs

A bizarre (or should I say barking?) story in Ha'aretz on how the first dogs in the Austrian police and German army spoke.... Hebrew.

[Dog trainer] Rudolphina Menzel's occupation with and love of dogs also had a Zionist bent: Some of the dogs she trained in Austria were sent to the Yishuv (Jewish community) in Palestine. "From the outset we thought about the Land of Israel settlement project," she said years later. "From the start of our work, we considered introducing the use of dogs for the defense of the isolated settlements in the country as our principal mission."

Rabbi Zwi Perez Chajes, who was the chief rabbi of Vienna and a Zionist activist until his death in 1927, visited the Linz dog farm in the 1920s and was very impressed. Dogs who responded to names and words in Hebrew symbolized the revival of both the Jewish language and people, he said. The Menzels agreed....

It was not long before the Austrian authorities heard about the Menzels' prestigious private institution. As a result, the first dogs to serve in the Austrian police were trained at the Menzels' farm - obeying orders in Hebrew and responding only to their Hebrew names. Clad in the Austrian police uniform, Rudolphina Menzel trained the force's dogs. In an old, crumbling photograph held at the Central Zionist Archives, she can be seen calling the attack dog Maggie Bat Hasatan (Maggie the Devil's Daughter) to rush to the aid of her owner - after a supposed attack by a stranger - during a police training session.

Menzel also spent time in Berlin in the service of the German army, setting up courses to train dogs to attack, defend, track and guard. In Germany, too, the dogs were trained to obey orders in Hebrew - responding to "shev" (sit), "artza" (down) and "kum" (up). A few years later, when the Nazis rose to power, the dog trainers in the German army discovered that the dogs would not respond to commands given in any other language. By order from above they had to continue speaking to them in Hebrew, however difficult and burdensome it might be. "The pair of Zionist researchers is indirectly but deliberately forcing the Germans to speak Hebrew," wrote one German newspaper published during that time.

Hearing that the dogs she had trained were later used to attack Jews weighed heavily on Menzel. "During World War II, I suffered a great deal from the reports that pupils of mine in Austria and Germany were exploiting the knowledge they had acquired from me in order to use dogs to help exterminate people from my nation and from other nations," she said in an interview about 10 years before her death in 1973.

So I guess that Miky, the Hebrew-speaking dog belonging to a police force in Montana, is not so original after all....

Distasteful

Tomorrow, Brooklyn will have a new restaurant, called Traif.

The owner writes:

I am Jewish, although obviously not great at it. So, Traif is a restaurant that celebrates the foods that I love most, which just so happens to be the foods that I am not supposed to eat. At Traif, we will feature pork and shellfish. Do you like bacon in everything, wish that your bowl of moules-frites would never end? Then, you might be very excited for Traif.

Now, I know this is supposed to be a joke - and I don't want to be the party-pooper. But I have to say, this kind of thing makes me groan. You want to eat treif? Go ahead - it's a free world. But the idea that it is somehow 'cool' to eat treif, that it's a thrill, that it's something Jews should take particular delight in - that's just adolescent.

This sad restaurant is going to be packed full of Jews thinking how clever they are to be eating a piece of pork. Guys, grow up.

Anat Kam: Heroine or opportunist?

Some initial thoughts on the Anat Kam episode:

1. Much of the commentary over the Anat Kam affair is based on the story as it was known earlier in the week - while the gag order was still in place. It is, therefore, based on inaccurate and partial information, in particular the notion that Kam was being held under house arrest because she had leaked information implicating the chief-of-staff in illegal assassinations. We now know much more (not everything): that she did not merely expose this one story, but that she allegedly took up to 2,000 classified army documents and passed them on to a reporter. This changes the way we should look at the story.

2. Had Kam just been a whistleblower fighting to expose the army's assassination practises, it would have been possible to see her as a heroine and the authorities trying to cover up the story as the villains. But she is not. She stole thousands of sensitive documents, which included information on military operations, intelligence practises, weapons usage, and much more besides; information which has no public interest whatsoever. The whereabouts of these documents (all but around 50 of them, returned by the Haaretz reporter to the Shabak) is now unknown. She has put Israeli citizens and soldiers at risk with her theft, pure and simple. The authorities have every right - more than that, a duty - to go after her. This incidentally would be true whether she took one document or 2,000; either way, you steal classified documents, you have to be prepared to pay the price.

3. The left is wrong: this is not, let's be utterly clear, an issue of freedom of the press, as initial reports and commentary tried to paint this. The news story on the assassinations policy was cleared by the censors for publication. The press was not prevented from reporting this massive and important scoop, no matter how it was obtained and no matter how much damage it did to the army, the government and Israel in general. The journalist, Uri Blau, was right to want and to publish this story; it was in the public's interest to know. But can he reasonably expect to hold on to thousands of other documents with classified information - information presumably showing nothing illegal, but rather very concrete information about the way the army operates - and be left alone by the authorities? If you believe the answer to this question is yes, then you must say that the army has no right to classify any document - that it must all be open to the public and that all army documents should be scanned by curious journalists. Clearly, this is ludicrous.

4. The gag-order was clearly, from a public relations point of view, a mistake, counter-productive in the long-run. It created the perception that Ms Kam was being 'punished' for leaking damaging information about the army, while in reality she is being held to account for giving away 2,000 classified documents and essentially losing them. And here I agree entirely with Amir; the gag order makes perfect sense from a security point of view. Letting the world know that some random journalist has in his possession up to 2,000 secret documents about the IDF's methods of fighting, plans, personnel etc. is insane.

5. The right may be wrong; this is not necessarily about ideology. A recurring theme on the right has been that Anat Kam was acting out of left-wing motives in order to destroy the army and that she is essentially a traitor (the left, I suppose, employs the mirror-image argument: that she acted out of ideology and is therefore a heroine). However, we simply don't know enough at this point about what motivated her. She didn't - it appears - fight tooth-and-nail to expose one story which particularly enraged her; she stole 2,000 documents, some more important, some probably not very important at all - everything she happened across, in other words, including one explosive story. According to Haaretz's profile of her, she was interested in journalism from her teens onwards. It is entirely possible that she was not fighting for a cause, but simply an ambitious young lady trying to kick-start a career. An opportunist rather than a heroine.

6. Haaretz is right on one thing: all of this does not mean that the army should be let off the hook if it approved assassinations which were illegal.

An ominous address

The residents of building #9 on Av Street* in Modiin have successfully petitioned to get their street name changed....

(Via Baila, a little belatedly)

Mr Obama, the devil's in the details

Two stories appeared this week indicating the President Obama is considering 'imposing' his own settlement on the Israelis and Palestinians: one by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and another in the NYT.

The proposed settlement would, apparently, follow the same old outline now being worked on for close to two decades: no right of return for Palestinian refugees, a divided Jerusalem, a return to close-to-the-1967-borders with some minor border adjustments and territorial swaps, and recognition of Israel by the Arab states.

“It’s not rocket science,” said Robert Malley, director of the Middle East Program at the International Crisis Group, the Brussels-based organization that seeks to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts.

Actually, answers Elliot Abrahams in the Weekly Standard, it is:

First, if indeed everyone has known the terms for nearly 20 years (since Oslo) yet agreement has never been reached, is it not obvious that neither Israelis nor Palestinians are willing and able to accept those terms? Does their embrace by an ambitious American president make them any more palatable to the people who will have to live with them?

Second, the conclusion that all the terms are known is quite wrong. Is the fate of Jerusalem’s Old City agreed? Do Palestinians accept that Israel will keep every major settlement bloc? Do Israelis and Palestinians agree on the terms needed to guarantee Israel’s security once the IDF must leave the West Bank? (Examples: Is it agreed that Israel will control the air space and electromagnetic spectrum? Is it agreed that Israel can keep troops in the West Bank for some years? Do Palestinians accept that Israel can control the Jordan Valley and patrol the border with Jordan?)

This is nonsense. One of Ignatius’s sources says the Obama plan will “take on the absolute requirements of Israeli security.” After 14 months of harassment by Obama and his team, will any Israeli risk his nation’s safety on that assurance?

His blow-by-blow fisking of Ignatius's column is masterly. I suggest you read the whole thing.

One point he left out: when this imposed settlement refers the 'Palestinians', it seems to address solely to the Palestinians on the West Bank. What exactly does the administration propose to do with Hamas in Gaza - who are unlikely to accept any American settlement (or any settlement at all)? It's all very well talking about 'solving the Palestinian-Israeli problem', but as long as there is a hostile regime in Gaza, the conflict goes on.

Anat Kam and the newspaper wars

Oh, what fun The Jerusalem Post is having with the Anat Kam story. The paper is currently splashing the following headline across the top of its website: 'Cancel Haaretz subscriptions 'til military docs returned' (quoting MK Yisrael Hasson, former deputy head of the internal security service). Could they be less subtle?

Coincidentally, Hasson's reaction is nowhere to be found on the Haaretz site....

Israeli 'Taliban mothers': still with us

A couple of years back, the Orthodox world was roiled by the story of the 'Taliban mother' - a Charedi woman living in Beit Shemesh, who had taken to dressing head-to-toe in a cloak, and covering her face in a veil, burka-style. She had amassed, it emerged, more than 100 followers, who adopted a similar mode of dress, frightening a good number of Charedi women who became afraid that this chmurah, or stringency, would soon be demanded of them too. Many Charedi leaders were, indeed, appalled and denounced her as 'crazy'.

Then it turned out that the 'Taliban mother' was abusive to her own children, and she was convicted of aggrevated assault on six of them. It seemed clear that there was much more to this woman's dress code than mere 'modesty' - as she had claimed - and the issue of burka-clad Charedim seemed to disappear from the public agenda. Who, after all, would continue to dress this way, when the cult leader was exposed as disturbed?

Well, here is one case. On Tuesday, police shot at a woman dressed in a veil who was attempting to board a bus. They thought she was a terrorist. She turned out to be a religious woman dressing this way for reasons of 'modesty'. The picture, from YNet, shows her being driven away by the police.

The Taliban mother might be rotting in jail; but this trend she has unleashed, in which Charedi women voluntarily clad their bodies in bags and cover their faces, is apparently far harder to contain. Even as her personal credibility crumbled, the concept of hyper-tzniut took on a life of its own. And - here I'm guessing - her followers probably never really accepted that the woman they had revered as saintly was really guilty of the things of which she was convicted, anyway.

The fact is that the Charedi trends which were a catalyst for the original Taliban Mother - the ever-increasing emphasis on women's modesty and the moves to eradicate women from public space - have not gone away. Is it any wonder that the burkas are still with us too?

10 things I love about the United Synagogue

Sitting in shul over yomtov has been a rather difficult experience. And not only because it was crowded, long and the children's service turns my brain to mush - but because just a few weeks ago, I was publicly branded an enemy of the United Synagogue by none other than its president, Simon Hochhauser.

Amongst the JC columnists, he told a US council meeting, “we find there is an antipathy towards what we stand for in Orthodoxy” (that is, he explained, modern Orthodoxy).

Columnists such as Miriam Shaviv, Geoffrey Alderman and Jonathan Freedland - he said - engage in a “constant attack on everything we stand for“.

“We feel a little bit like the Jewish community generally does with the Guardian. It’s almost like a delegitimisation of the United Synagogue going on. We have a case, we have a strong case… We do feel we are being given a particularly rough deal.”

Now, I can’t answer for Messrs Alderman and Freedland - who are in any case both perfectly capable of defending themselves. But when it comes to me, Mr Hochhauser, you couldn't be more wrong.

There are plenty of things I love about the United Synagogue. Here are my top 10:

1 Fishballs at Kiddush. Genius invention (practically unknown beyond these shores) which ensures that members keep returning again and again, no matter how bad the rabbis’ sermons. (Plus, my kids love them. Means I don’t have to feed them Shabbat lunch).

2 Burial included in membership. Cemeteries well-kept and landscaped (the fish at Bushey are a particularly nice touch). Regrettably, beneficiaries may not appreciate this fully at the time.

3 Board of Deputies included in my fees. And where would Anglo-Jewry be without the Board of Deputies?

4 Chief rabbi is very handsome. Little-mentioned secret to his success.

5 The pom poms on top of the chazans’ hats (now an endangered species). Very retro.

6 Canonicals. Another seriously bold fashion statement. Why oh why did they get rid of them?

7 Disastrous decisions by the dayanim provides me with half a livelihood. My good friend Rabbi Schochet provides the other half…

8 London Beth Din certifies pet food as kosher. Chicken, ham and vegetable dog food made by Applaws is apparently Kosher for Pesach and is presumably better for their digestion than shemurah matzah. Do not serve at Kiddush!

9 London Beth Din is the gold standard for conversions. Ensures that the Jewish population remains confined to N16 and a few select streets in NW11 (NW4 now suspect).

10 Women can't be presidents of synagogues - leaves us with more time to make cakes.

Happy April 1...

The unintended, and dangerous, consequences for Israel in east Jerusalem

Leon Wieselthier - in a piece that deserves to be read in its entirety - explains why the Israelis trying to reclaim properties that used to belong to Jews in Arab east Jerusalem, pre-state, are opening a can of worms:

Since the Palestinian right of return, and its premise that restoration is preferable to reconciliation, would undo the Jewish state, Israel is right to deny it. But if, in the name of moral realism, and so that they do not delude themselves with catastrophic fantasies of starting over, Palestinians are not to be granted a right to return to what was theirs before 1948, then neither should such a right be granted to Jews.

When Jews fled Sheikh Jarrah, they fled to a Jewish state, which should have been worth the loss of their property; and the same would have been true of the Palestinians, if their Arab brethren had allowed the state of Palestine to come into being. But the lunatic Jews who insist that a Jew must live anywhere a Jew ever lived do not see that they, too, are re-opening 1948 and the legitimacy of what it established.

What, in short, can Israelis say to Arabs who wish to reclaim their properties in Katamon, when they are busy reclaiming properties in Sheikh Jarrah?

(Via)

The long arm of the Mossad

The last paragraph of the NYT report on the UK-Israel passports crisis notes, by-the-by:

Officials in South Africa have said that several members of the Israeli hit team left Dubai for Johannesburg on a direct flight by Emirates Airline, the Dubai flag carrier, then flew back to various destinations in Europe before catching connecting flights back to Israel.

South African news reports have quoted South African officials as saying that they were unable to comply with Dubai’s request for closed-circuit video recordings taken as the men transited through Oliver Tambo International airport in Johannesburg because the recordings had been mysteriously wiped before the Dubai request was made.

[Insert creepy Twilight Zone music here...]

(Via)

British-Israel crisis: timing is everything

The speculation that an Israeli diplomat is to be expelled from the UK (or perhaps has been expelled already?) has taken everyone by surprise.

When the passports scandal first broke, Mr Prosor was invited to the Foreign Office - and emerged, all smiles. The Brits sent investigators to Israel interview the British nationals whose identities were allegedly stolen - but this was widely assumed to be a formality (and perhaps a fun perk for the investigators). That seemed to be the end of the affair, from the British point of view.

The question is, then, why this drastic British action now - weeks after the scandal seemed to have blown over? Miliband could have made his anti-Israeli statement at any point and would have chosen his moment carefully. What is the significance of the timing?

One strong possibility is that the British move is connected to the mammoth row between the Israelis and Americans over building in east (actually, northeast) Jerusalem last week. Political observers will want to know: Have the Americans asked their British counterparts to apply pressure on the Israelis - to squeeze Bibi just a little more, to make it a bit harder for him to resist the Americans' demands? (Even if it turns out this was not the intention, it will surely be the result).

It also seems extraordinary for Mr Miliband to address parliament on this issue at the very moment - 15.30 - when he was due to be the guest of honour at the Israeli embassy's housewarming party. When it was first announced that he would be attending the reception - a week after the Dubai passport scandal erupted - it was interpreted as a strong sign that the Brits wanted to keep things friendly with the Israelis. For Miliband to withdraw, now, in order to issue a strong statement against Israel instead, cannot be a coincidence; what a slap in the face.

Enough Pesach recipes to keep you going until Shavuot... and beyond

Consider this a public service announcement. Since I'm doing the research anyway - here are the Pesach recipes from some of my favourite food blogs...

-- Chef Levana Kirschenbaum's Seder night menu - with a heavy Moroccan influence . Yum, I think I might try some of those.

-- Baroness Tapuzina's recipes - this year and last.

-- Mom in Israel/Cooking Manager - includes tips for preparing for Pesach and staying gluten-free

-- Israeli Kitchen - lots of good stuff here - including recipes (with the promise of more to come) and two lovely posts on the Seder customs of Jews from different parts of the world.

-- The Jew and the Carrot - Passover guide for vegetarians and vegans, quinoa, seasonal thoughts from my distant relative Rabbi Eliav Bock and much more.

-- For those of you aiming high, Epicurious has an incredible archive of Pesach recipes. I made this a couple of years ago and it was a definite hit.

-- Leora W - here and lots of other links here.

-- Pesach/Passover 'cookbooks' from Recipezaar.

-- Pesach recipes from The Savoy (NY).

-- And last but not least, a tour of the factory containing the world's largest matzah oven. Happy cooking!

No-drama-Obama's 'rage' against Israel

The Economist report on the current Israeli-US spat explains:

Since becoming prime minister for a second time in 2009, Mr Netanyahu has struggled to befriend Mr Obama and enlist his help against Iran while presiding over a coalition dominated by ultranationalist and religious parties. One school of thought holds that Mr Obama and Mrs Clinton escalated their reaction to the Biden insult in order to make Mr Netanyahu abandon his rightist allies and tread the American path to peace; some say the president was waiting for a chance to destabilise him to force his replacement by someone more emollient. A rival theory is that there is no plan: Ramat Shlomo simply ignited the rage that has smouldered in Mr Obama’s breast since Mr Netanyahu refused his call last year for a total freeze on settlements, forcing Mr Mitchell to waste nearly a year niggling for a temporary compromise.

Aaron David Miller, a veteran State Department negotiator now at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, is one of those who suspect the administration has been driven more by anger than calculation and that its war of words could misfire.

Frankly, I'm not sure which of these two schools of thought is more disturbing. It's bad enough that the administration should take a cool and calculated decision to try and force Mr Netanyahu from office - blatantly interfering in the Israeli nation's democratic right to choose its own representatives, according to its own democratic rules.

But talk of 'the rage that has smouldered in Mr Obama's breast' is perhaps even more troubling. We're talking here about no-drama-Obama; part of his appeal in the election was the claim that he does not make decisions based on emotion but on rational consideration. A year into his administration, some of his supporters have come to the conclusion that his utterly cool temperament is actually a minus - but I've yet to hear anyone claim he really does have strong emotions.

Against this background, the idea that Israel and Netanyahu drive him to 'rage' and to lash out in anger - that these are the issues which he has been quietly stewing over for months - is frightening.

Not Ahmadinejad. Not Kim Jong Il. Not Hamas. Not Hugo Chavez. Israel and Netanyahu.

It is completely irrational, and it does not bode well. Let's hope he was merely trying to interfere in Israeli democracy....

Where matzahs come from

Food writer Leah Koenig goes back into the mists of time to explore the origins of matzah:

The Israelites’ earliest breads were unleavened flatbreads or cakes made of roasted barley. The word “matzo,” Joan Nathan writes in “The Foods of Israel Today” (Knopf, 2001), is likely derived from the Babylonian ma-as-sa-ar-tum, meaning “barley.” “The barley was ground with a flat stone; the stone was then heated with a flint stone until it was hot enough to cook the bread,” she writes. For centuries, these flat, rather tasteless cakes were the only “bread” the Israelites consumed. It was not until the Israelis encountered the ancient Egyptians that they learned about leavening.

The original matzahs were of course all soft and bendy, not hard like ours - and in some communities, such as the Yemenite community, they still are. This is why Hillel, in the Haggadah, makes a 'Hillel sandwich' with his matzah. While we struggle to put pieces of horseradish between two crumbly matzahs, he simply rolled up his soft matzah around his marror, just like a laffa.

Mr Obama, stay out of internal Israeli affairs

The inimitable Jeffrey Goldberg, over at the Atlantic, writes:

I've been on the phone with many of the usual suspects (White House and otherwise), and I think it's fair to say that Obama is not trying to destroy America's relations with Israel; he's trying to organize Tzipi Livni's campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government. I'm not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's clear to everyone -- at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog -- that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman's far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai's fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu's surpassingly fragile coalition.

So what is the goal? The goal is force a rupture in the governing coalition that will make it necessary for Netanyahu to take into his government Livni's centrist Kadima Party (he has already tried to do this, but too much on his terms) and form a broad, 68-seat majority in Knesset that does not have to rely on gangsters, messianists and medievalists for votes. It's up to Livni, of course, to recognize that it is in Israel's best interests to join a government with Netanyahu and Barak, and I, for one, hope she puts the interests of Israel ahead of her own ambitions.

1. The White House may not be "directly" meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's doing a helluva job indirectly meddling in internal Israeli politics. There is an enormous difference between trying to change the regime in a dictatorship, where the population's will is trampled on and ignored - and in a democracy, a democratic ally no less, where the population expresses its will effectively through a functioning Parliament. Interesting the Obama was against regime change in Iraq - the dictatorship - but seems to be pro in Israel - the democracy.

2. The idea of Obama trying to shape Israeli politics while support for him, personally, and for his own party crumbles around him back home, is laughable. He should worry about his own domestic politics first.

3. The real proof of Obama's utter folly and ignorance in this affair is the attempt to "make" Bibi bring in Kadima to the coalition. Bibi tried hard to bring in Tzippi Livni to his coalition - the refusal was all on her part. She does not want to be number two to Bibi's number one. Yet again, Obama seems to be pressuring the wrong party in the Middle East... sound familiar, anyone?

'Worst US-Israel crisis in 30 years': A self-fulfilling prophecy?

So who is really to blame for the depth of the current crisis between Israel and America?

I received an original and smart answer today from none other than Rabbi Avraham Pinter, principal of Yesodei Hatorah school in Stamford Hill.

He suggested that at least part of the blame must be shouldered by the Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren.

Oren was quoted as telling Israeli consuls general on a conference call that the crisis was the worst breakdown in US-Israeli relations since 1975, when Kissinger and Rabin fought over an American demand for a partial withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula.

The line was, in typical and 100 per cent predictable fashion, leaked to the media - and has been widely quoted, used in headlines across the world over the past few days.

But in a sense - his argument goes - Oren's characterisation of the spat made it into the mammoth crisis it is today, rather than reflected a reality. By bigging it up, Oren essentially 'made it so'; once the words were out there (or rather, out here, there and everywhere) that's how everyone began to relate to the crisis - as the largest in 30 years - whether he was right or not.

It seems to me there is an element of truth here. Not that the crisis would have disappeared without Oren - this was a biggie either way - but his words do seem to have defined this moment in an entirely unhelpful way, making it harder for everyone to play things down. When all this is done and dusted, this week will still be remembered as 'the worst crisis in 30 years', even if that is (imho) a vast exaggeration.

Did Oren say it deliberately, in order to stir things up? Rabbi Pinter suggested there must have been some kind of trouble-making agenda. I doubt it, particularly as he was talking to Israel's own diplomatic staff. But it was certainly a silly thing to say and I bet he regrets it now.

And there you have it; the political view from the other Hill.

Iran: the nightmare scenario

The indispensible Coteret.com has translated part of Nahum Barnea's column from last Friday's Yediot - itself a summary of a study dealing with the possible scenarios that might follow an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities, currently doing the rounds on the internet. The original paper - available in Hebrew here - is by Dr Moshe Vered of Bar Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. Some of the more frightening possibilities:

“The war could be long,” Vered warns, “its length could be measured in years.” The cost that the war will exact from Israel raises a question mark as to the decision to go to war.

The relatively light scenario speaks about an Israeli bombing, after which Iran will fire several volleys of surface-to-surface missiles at Israel. Due to the limited number of missiles and their high cost, the war will end within a short time. The missiles may run out, the study states, but the war will only be getting started.

“The means that may be most effective for the Iranians is war by proxies—Syria, Hizbullah and Hamas,” Vered writes. “(There will be) ongoing and massive rocket fire (and in the Syrian case, also various types of Scud missiles), which will cover most of the area of the country, disrupt the course of everyday life and cause casualties and property damage. The effect of such fire will greatly increase if the enemy fires chemical, biological or radiological ordnance… massive Iranian support, by money and weapons, will help the organizations continue the fire over a period of indeterminate length… due to the long range of the rockets held by Hizbullah, Israel will have to occupy most of the territory of Lebanon, and hold the territory for a long time. But then the IDF will enter a guerrilla war, a war the end of which is hard to predict, unless we evacuate the territory, and then the rocket fire will return…”.....

Vered bases his assessment mainly on the regime’s ideology and on the lessons of the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988. He writes: “Half a million dead, a million wounded, two million refugees and displaced persons, economic damage estimated by the Iranian government at about USD 1,000 billion—more than twice the value of all Iranian oil production in 70 years of pumping oil—none of this was sufficient to persuade Iran to stop the war. Only the fear of the regime’s fall led the leadership to accept the cease-fire.

“The ramifications are clear and harsh—like the war against Iraq, the war against Israel will also be perceived by the Iranians as a war intended to right a wrong and bring justice to the world by destroying the State of Israel. Only a threat to the regime will be able to make the Iranian leadership stop. It is difficult to see how Israel could create such a threat.”

Read more here - if you can bear to. But before you get too frightened, keep in mind that the cost of allowing Iran to actually gain the nuclear weapons might be even worse.

Theodor Herzl, early photoshopper

Here is a fabulous historical footnote I came across today.

In 1898, Theodor Herzl travelled to Palestine to meet German Kaiser Wilhelm II, where he showed him round a Jewish settlement (Mikveh Yisrael). On the day, David Wolfson - later Herzl's successor as the leader of the Zionist movement - was trusted with the camera, and indeed there is a famous photo of Herzl, holding his hat, greeting the Kaiser on a horse.

According to Motti Friedman, manager of the Herzl Museum, however, Wolfson was so excited that his hand actually slipped, and the picture only captured Wilhelm - and Herzl's leg.

So the two men later took a photo of Herzl standing on a Jaffa rooftop, by himself, cut out the image and stuck it onto another photo of Wilhelm.

You can see another shot from the two men's photoshoot here.

Of course, when you take another look at the picture it's obvious; Herzl is staring straight ahead instead of looking up at the Kaiser. Just think what they could have done with a Mac and a good computer program...

Arafat's eating habits

Here is one of the more disturbing images I've come across. Ever.

In an interview with Yediot this weekend, Ehud Ya'ari, Israeli Channel 2's highly respected analyst for Arab Affairs, describes his last meeting with Yassir Arafat, three months before Arafat's death. Yaari went to visit him in the Muqata, and says (translation mine):

"We met for dinner. He didn't know he was ill, and I didn't know. He approached me through a middle man, and asked that I come to visit him to see what's going on. He didn't let anyone into the room. Me, him and the man in whose car I came.... So we ate, we talked. He talked and talked, was very friendly. He knew how to open the tap of personal charm when he wanted to. He had a habit of feeding you with his hand into your mouth. So the whole evening, he fed me."

Thanks Ehud. That will take me quite a while to get rid of.

But wait. It gets better. The interviewer, Uri Misgav, has a killer follow-up question: "Was it tasty?"

Yaari continues:

"We ate makloubeh. It wasn't great. Listen, there was no woman in the muqata, it was very obvious. There was no one to supervise. His clothes were not clean, I got the impression he wasn't taken care of the way you need to..."

I really hope he made sure Arafat washed his hands before he hand-fed him supper....

The future looks bright for Orthodox women rabbis

Hope you will forgive me yet another post on the subject of Orthodox women rabbis, but here goes.

On Friday, Rabbi Avi Weiss announced that the graduates of his women's ordination programme in New York will not, after all, be called 'Rabbas'.

For the past few weeks, he seems to have come under some pressure from other Orthodox rabbis following his decision to change the title of the first woman he ordained, Sara Hurwitz, from Maharat (leader in Jewish law, spirituality and Torah) to Rabba. It is still unclear whether Hurwitz will keep her newly acquired title, but either way there will be no more American rabbas - for the foreseeable future, at least.

This is being seen as a major cave-in by Rabbi Weiss. So does this mean that the Orthodox are not ready for female rabbis?

Not at all.

The fact is that Rabba/Maharat Hurwitz received her ordination almost exactly a year ago. For almost an entire year, she fulfilled her rabbinic duties in Rabbi Weiss's congregation with very little comment from most of the American Orthodox establishment. It seems clear that she was not universally accepted on a day-to-day level by some people she encountered, but the silence from the other rabbis and indeed from the majority of the Orthodox commentators etc which greeted her ordination was absolutely remarkable. They seemed prepared to let a de-facto Orthodox woman rabbi pass almost without comment......... until he changed her title.

'Maharat' - yes. 'Rabba' - no. It simply sounded too close to 'rabbi' and made it impossible for the majority of the American Orthodox world to continue pretending Maharat Hurwitz was not, in fact, a full-fledged rabbi.

The fact is, though, that Rabbi Weiss is going to continue ordaining Orthodox women rabbis (called Maharats). Sara Hurwitz is going to continue functioning as a rabbi (even if she is called Maharat). And the Orthodox world is not going to say much about either of these things - because the problem doesn't seem to be with the job description but with the title. The main principle, this row over wording shows only too clearly, has been accepted.

Should Orthodox feminists care what clergywomen are called? I'm tempted to say yes. I personally find it very offensive and alienating that Orthodox rabbis play these silly semantic games, refusing to acknowledge - G-d forbid - that women are, in reality, holding these leadership positions (perhaps this is the place to mention how much I admire Avi Weiss, on the other hand, for taking up this cause?). But ultimately, the reality on the ground is more important.

A decade or two down the line, with Maharats serving congregations, schools and university campuses across the American continent, people will be unable to remember what all the fuss was about. And if one of them then decides to call herself 'Rabba', well, I'd be surprised if anyone even notices.

On Judaism and C-Sections

The Forward on the exceptional status of c-sections in Judaism:

Jewish law is straightforward about cesarean births: permissible to save the lives of mother and child. And yet, the product of that birth is somehow perceived as less natural. A bris of a cesarean-born boy, for example, does not supersede the Sabbath, unlike that of his vaginally born brother. A Pidyon HaBen, which is the firstborn son’s “redemption,” does not take place for cesarean-born boys, because the child, in effect, is not the firstborn of his mother’s womb. Rabbis seem to have taken a “Macbeth”-like approach: In Shakespeare, a C-section makes a child “not of woman born.” This was not the way we were meant to birth. The Mishnaic term for C-section was “yotzei dofen,” meaning “out of the wall [of the abdomen].” It’s a phrase that modern Hebrew linguists use as synonymous with “unusual” or “exceptional.”

As the mother of a daughter born by C-Section, I'd like to note that in modern Hebrew it can mean 'exceptional' in an entirely positive sense as well....

Do young American Jews understand the Middle East?

A perceptive piece in the Boston Globe about why American-Jewish support for Israel is seen to be 'dropping'. Jesse Singal argues that it isn't dropping - rather, what it means to be 'pro-Israel' is changing:

There are still plenty of young American Jews who take pride in wholeheartedly supporting the Israeli government. But this view isn’t nearly as dominant as it once was, and research by Steven M. Cohen of Hebrew Union College helps show why. Cohen found that younger Jewish professional and religious leaders tend to be less likely to see Israel as threatened by its neighbors, and therefore less worried about Israel’s security.

The idea that being an American Jew doesn’t necessitate lockstep support for Israel, and that Israel is strong enough to withstand criticism from the outside world, were on full display last week at Harvard’s Hillel House, which hosted a talk by J Street’s head, Jeremy Ben-Ami.

In an interview before the event, Ben-Ami talked about the changing experience of being an American Jew.

“If you’ve had personal experience - if not you [then] at least your parents - with the destruction of your people, you’re more likely to take it as a possibility that it could happen again," he said. “If you have grown up here in complete comfort and safety and no one you know in an immediate sense has been through that, I do think [you’re] going to have a very fundamental[ly] different view, a different take, on how you view the Iran threat.’’

As I understand it, Ben-Ami is saying that the Holocaust generation and their children were overly anxious; we, today, know better. But you can read his words quite the opposite way, and to my mind, the truer way. The Holocaust generation knew what they were talking about because they knew how dangerous the world could be; our younger generation today is completely naive, stupidly understanding the complex Israeli reality through the prism of their own, safe experience.

If this analysis is right, it shows a fundamental lack of imagination on the part of the younger generation. No country today, including Iran, threatens America existentially; this does not mean it is not true for Israel. Yes, the notion of any country wanting to completely annihiliate another seems ludicrous if you live in the peaceful West; but this doesn't mean that this goal can't seem perfectly normal elsewhere.

Unfortunately, it's not just American Jews who misunderstand the Middle East because they imagine all people share the same basic desires. It is true for many in the West.

We can't understand that suicide bombers would have any other motive other than 'desperation' - because in our own culture, there wouldn't be any other explanation. We can't understand that some people would sacrifice their own national aspirations in order to achieve a larger goal of destroying another people - because this order of priorities, in the individualistic West, seems practically insane. Most of all, we can't understand how deep the hatred is for Israel in the Middle East - because we don't hate any other nation that way. We don't do hatred, we do cultural relativism, multiculturalism, pluralism and tolerance.

The root of it all is that as an increasingly secular society, we just don't get religion - and hence cannot understand how religious beliefs can make people prioritise war, death, land and destruction of the other over an easy and comfortable life.

Successive surveys show that American Jews are one of, if not the, most secular religious groups out there. Does this help explain why so many of them (and so many equivalent British Jews) just don't 'get' the Middle East any more?

Sorting out the 'Livni law' chaos

So, who are you going to believe?

Depending on which national newspaper you read today, you will come out with a very different impression of what's going on with the universal jurisdiction law - the law which gives individuals in Britain the ability to secure arrest warrants for visiting foreign officials accused of war crimes, and which forced Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni to cancel a visit here a few months back.

From the Telegraph:

The Government is to announce plans to stop politically-motivated campaign groups using British courts to secure arrest warrants for visiting foreign officials.

Under the proposals, the Crown Prosecution Service will take over responsibility for prosecuting war crimes and other violations of international law.

It will end the current system in which magistrates are obliged to consider a case for an arrest warrant presented by any individual.

Writing for the The Daily Telegraph, Gordon Brown says he will set out proposals to put the CPS in sole charge of judging the merits of any case brought under international law.

Labour MPs have been told the changes will be set out to the Justice Select Committee today and the government will legislate after consultation.

Sound exciting, huh?

Then there's the Times:

Britain risks a showdown with Israel today when the Government signals it is in no hurry to ease the threat of arrest for visiting politicians and generals.

Ministers will announce a consultation on the principle of universal jurisdiction, under which private citizens can secure arrest warrants for offences such as war crimes committed abroad... The issue caused embarrassment for the Government, which promised to remedy the matter quickly.Today’s announcement, however, means that the issue will not be resolved until well after the election, expected in May...

The delay is a victory for Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, who has argued that the legal point at stake is too important to rush.

Rather more pessimistic.

How do make sense of all of this? Put these two reports together and you have Gordon Brown coming up with a real solution - which will take a hell of a long time to sort out, and with elections coming up, might never happen. Typical Brown big announcement, then.

The JC this week explains why Brown's change might take so long (link to come later in the day):

The latest compromise now being discussed by the Ministry of Justice will allow the Justice Select Committee to scrutinise the proposed legislative change in advance. This would allay fears that taking away the power to grant arrest warrants from local magistrates would undermine judicial independence.

However, it is unlikely that the committee will have time to do the necessary work before the end of the parliamentary term.

In other words, delay tactics by Justice Minister Jack Straw, who has been the stumbling block all along.

But wait. There is perhaps a temporary solution at hand:

Meanwhile, Hendon MP Andrew Dismore, backed by fellow Labour MPs John Mann and Denis MacShane, has tabled a Private Member’s Bill, due to receive a second reading on Friday.

His bill would require the consent of the Attorney General before magistrates issue any arrest warrant for suspected war crimes.

Mr Dismore said: "While it might not provide a complete solution to the problem of universal jurisdiction, I believe that this reform would prevent the abuse of the law for political purposes by those intent on disrupting progress towards peace in the Middle East."

He added that his bill was "a long shot, but there’s no harm in trying. This is a sticking plaster, not a long-term solution and the prospects are pretty slim. If the bill runs out of time, I will bring it straight back at the next parliament. Whoever wins, I put them on notice."

With Tory support, it could, possibly, pass. And we all know that the temporary has a funny way of becoming permanent, so let's keep our fingers crossed.

Anglo-Israeli ties will survive Dubai

I've started a new regular column in the Forward, called 'Across the Pond'. My first piece appears this week, and addresses the question of why the Brits seemed to react so mildly to the Dubai passport forgeries:

It has become conventional wisdom that Israel cannot get a fair hearing in Britain. There is strong hostility toward Israel in British academia and trade unions. There have been mounting efforts by pro-Palestinian activists to push boycotts, divestment and sanctions efforts against the Jewish state. And British public opinion as a whole reacted strongly against last winter’s Israeli military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.

Against this backdrop, the revelation that the killers of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai had used forged British passports (as well as fake passports from several other countries) was widely expected to send British-Israeli relations into a tailspin. If the killers were indeed Mossad operatives, commentators across the political spectrum argued, Britain would be within its rights to recall its ambassador and to take other punitive diplomatic measures against Israel.

Instead, Britain reacted with remarkable restraint. Indeed, rather than exposing the fault lines of the Anglo-Israeli relationship, the Dubai issue actually shows just how sympathetic the current Labour government is to the Jewish state and its war on terror, to an extent rarely appreciated even by Britain’s Jewish community.

Read the rest here.

Will the British Chief Rabbi end up in America?

There has been speculation in the community for some time that the Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks, is approaching the final years of his tenure, now that he has been in post for almost 20 years and taken up his position in the House of Lords.

But what will he do afterwards?

In 2002, rumour was rife both here and in New York that he was being strongly considered for the position of president of Yeshiva University. At the time, sources suggested he had been sounded out for the job, but did not want to leave the chief rabbinate. Many agree, though, that he is extremely suited to life in academia and his lecture tours of the US have always proved extremely popular.

Now comes the news that Yeshiva University is going to award its inaugural Lamm Prize (commemorating its chancellor, Norman Lamm) to Lord Sacks this month.

According to the YU website, Lamm Scholars Prize winners will become visiting scholars at YU, and

contribute richly to our academic life by giving lectures, teaching courses, and leading discussions within the YU community.

Is it only a matter of time before we hear the Chief Rabbi is making the move permanent? Remember, you read it here first....

'Blogs have become part of serious conversation in the Orthodox community'

More on the increasing influence of blogging in the religious world today.

Gil Student, author of the highly successful Orthodox blog Hirhurim, writes:

In the old days, before blogs became more mainstream, you could express your opinions freely. If I thought a rabbi wrote an article demonstrating ignorance and dishonesty with sources, I showed that it was the case (albeit with nicer words). I can't do that anymore. The old blog crowd had thick skins. The new blog crowd includes people who are highly sensitive and will complain.

Instead of criticizing ill-conceived articles, I usually just ignore them because otherwise I will get an angry e-mail from the author or one of his students. Then I will get an e-mail from one of his colleagues asking me to reconsider his arguments with a more open mind. Who has time for those discussions? Even if I am wrong, people are allowed to be incorrect every once in a while.

While I could ignore the e-mails, sometimes they come from people who are too important to ignore -- people I respect highly for one reason or another. And some people even call me at home or at work, trying to make me squirm until I change my post. Who wants that? (For the record, I find those calls so off-putting that I usually become entrenched and refuse to budge. A phone call is the best way to get me to refuse your blog-related request.)

But what are we complaining about? The success of blogs in general and our blogs in particular. What all this really means is that blogs have become a part of serious conversation in the community and we have to reflect that new circumstance. If people are complaining about your writing, it is because they are reading it and taking it seriously.

...and know that other people are reading it and taking it seriously too.

The other passport scandal

An interesting piece in YNet about assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud al Mabhouh's travel arrangements.

First, according to a Hamas spokesman from Damascus, Talal Nasser,

"He would take the bodyguards with him anywhere he went, but there was no room for them on the flight," said Talal Nasser, a spokesman for Hamas in Damascus. "Therefore he traveled alone, and the security guards were slated to join him the next day."

Sounds unlikely. No serious security team would let the man they are defending go it alone simply because they couldn't get plane tickets - they would stop him going. (And surely there are other flights to Dubai anyway.)

But then he adds,

Despite previous reports, the Hamas man said Mabhouh visited the emirate under his real identity. "He had five passports, one with his real name and the rest with different names, but this time he traveled under his real identity," said Nasser. "He had traveled to Dubai many times in the past in the same way, without any problems."

Were these other passports Palestinian Authority travel documents? Or did this terrorist travel on passports belonging to other countries as well?

If they can spare a minute during their investigation of Israel, perhaps it's something the international community should be looking into...

How blogs are influencing Orthodox debate

A few weeks ago I posted about the enormous influence the internet is having on the Charedi community. But what about its influence on the modern Orthodox community?

The NY Jewish Week is reporting that the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest Orthodox rabbinical group in the US, may consider kicking out Rabbi Avi Weiss for ordaining a woman and giving her the title of "Rabba" (discussed on this blog here).

According to one source in Rabbi Weiss’ yeshivas, the ordaining of Rabba Hurwitz (first as something called “maharat,” then more explicitly as “rabba”) has created a situation in which “we are being absolutely killed on the Internet,” in Orthodox blogs. “Where are the moderate and moderating voices in the Orthodox community?” the source asked.

Interesting that the discussion on the blogs (by a few thousand individuals) is clearly being felt in the real Orthodox world and is considered a central, influential forum.

(Via)

Doubts about Dubai

Was Israel responsible for the Dubai hit? The Washington Times raises a couple of questions:

[S]ome details have emerged that do not track with traditional Israeli intelligence tradecraft. The Dubai authorities this week said two of the operatives fled to Iran.

Michael Ross, a retired officer for the Mossad's covert-operations division, said it would be a breach of Israeli protocol for an operative to flee to another target country like that after an operation.

He also said that it was unlikely that Israel would use 26 people for a job that would require far fewer people. "The Mossad believes if two people can do something instead of three people, then send two."

Here is one answer that would settle both of these points. Isn't it possible that Dubai has simply identified way too many suspects? That not everyone is claims is a suspect is actually part of the operation? Perhaps the police are now getting a little carried away. Or, perhaps, it is in Dubai's interests to keep this story going with a drip-drip-drip of information and to make the plot seem even larger and more threatening than it actually was.