This week, Sy Syms, a tenacious NYC based retailer passed away. Known for selling name brand business apparel at deeply discount prices, and his tag line, that “An Educated Consumer is our Best Customer,” he brought discount retailing to Manhattan, took his chain public, and just recently purchased the Filene’s Basement chain. He even once sued U.S. Steel in a real estate dispute. Syms, 83, was born Seymour Merinsky, but the mishpacha changed their name to Merns, and Sy, after a legal dispute with his own brother, changed his name to Syms. So… why do I mention him on Jewlicious? Cuz he was an equal opportunity giver. He gave to the local Catholic archidiocese, he was a member of and giver to Temple Emanu-el, the largest Reform movement congregation in the area, and he endowed the Sy Syms School of Business at that bastion of Morethodoxy, Yeshiva University.

I have enjoyed now for the second time in a week the most delicious breakfast: Eggs and Bacon.

Now hold a second, Rabbi, bacon is trief! Or so I thought.

Jewlicious Festival veteran, and supervisor of culinary arts at the Festival’s VIP wine tasting, Chaim Davids, delivered to me as a house warming gift a package of his home-made Lamb Bacon. LAMB BACON!

Davids is the chef behind The Kitchen Table in Mountain View, CA:

The Kitchen Table serves California Artisinal cuisine with a twist: We are the only certified glatt Kosher restaurant in northern California. We dairy-free and peanut-free, and use only the freshest ingredients. All breads are baked on premises, and the pastrami and corned beef are cured and smoked in-house.

I have not made the pilgrimage to TKT, but those who have – including many of the guests I met at Herzog Wine Cellar’s Tierra Sur Resturant for the Lorne Mackillop & Tomintoul Whisky Dinner last week – rave in superlatives about TKT.

I came across a quote by Anthony Bourdain: “If you want to make people happy, give them bacon.” I get it now. The umami alone is enough to beg for more.

Thank you Chaim Davids, thank you TKT, thank you Rachel. Good Shabbos.

by Ruth Andrew Ellenson

When I was little, my father would begin every Shabbat by having each person in my family donate money to the bright blue and white tzedakah box we kept in our dining room. We would collect coins and deposit them into the little metal slot one by one, listening to each one drop with a satisfying metal clink.

I wish I could say that I was pious enough as a child to have truly enjoyed this act of charity – this small bit of tikkun olam foisted upon me in a valiant attempt to form my good character. But I did not. Instead, with each dropping coin, I lamented in my heart the money that was going to strangers instead of my candy supply. With each quarter that vanished into the void, visions of chocolate, sugar and other tasty treats filled my head with longing and despair.

It’s tough to want things and have to give away what you have. As a kid, sugar was my idea of perfect happiness (and really, has that changed?) and it was being forced out of my hands to help people I didn’t even know.

Our whole society is geared towards acquisition. The idea of owning that one thing that will bring us perfect happiness – be it candy when you’re six, or a car when you’re 60 – is something we are programmed for from birth. The idea that material things can bring satisfaction is a fantasy that’s hard to let go.

And yet sooner or later (hopefully sooner) we learn the lesson that getting everything you want, and keeping everything you have, doesn’t really make you happy. You realize that wealth really has no meaning unless you go out into the world and share it with others.

As an adult, I’m grateful for the lesson my dad taught us at the Shabbat table. Now when I give tzedakah, I get so much more satisfaction than I ever did from my candy supply – even chocolate doesn’t compare with the sweetness of giving.

Ruth Andrew Ellenson won the National Jewish Book Award for her anthology “The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt” and lectures regularly on Jewish women’s identity issues. Learn more at www.guiltguide.com. Ruthie is also a past speaker at the Jewlicious Festival.

This article first appeared in TOGETHER: Jewish Giving Today, published by The Jewish Federations of North America. And then I saw it on eJewishPhilanthropy. Reprinted with totally without any permission at all. But like, Shabbat is in 20 minutes and I just don’t have time. Besides, how can I resist having two Spawn of 6 5 posts in a row? Now maybe Rabbi Ellenson will start reading blogs? Oh and if I have violated any copyrights or whatever, talk to my lawyer. As for Ruthie, it is my opinion that she still owes me 72 Shekels for the worst Matzah brei ever. I consider this a deposit!

Shabbat Shalom.

In honor of the new Jewish month of Kislev, I joined my mom at Women of the Wall this morning. Women of the Wall is an organization that has existed for more than twenty years and meets monthly on Rosh Hodesh, the start of each Jewish month. Traditionally, Rosh Hodesh has been a time for women to gather to celebrate their womanhood around the lunar cycle (Hello Red Tent). WOW was founded in reaction to the present reality of the Western Wall in Jerusalem — the women’s section is significantly smaller than the men’s and there is not a place for women to sing or read the Torah out loud, unlike the men’s side. At their monthly meetings, WOW members and various guests gather in the back of the women’s section and pray in a huddle. Women will put on their tallitot, their prayer shawls, and a few even dare to wear kippot.

I’ve been to WOW before. It’s always a moving experience for me. I do not feel spiritually or religiously connected to the Wall because I see it as a symbol of how the conservative right dominates religion and politics in Israel; when I’m with WOW, though, I see my presence as part of a continued struggle that fights for egalitarianism in Jewish, Israeli society. I have every right to be a fully participatory member of the Jewish community. Usually, WOW does the beginning of morning prayers, called shaharit, and the special Rosh Hodesh prayers, called Hallel, at the Wall, and then the group moves to another area at the Southern Wall to read Torah and finish up. This is because by the time we reach Hallel, we have usually caused a commotion. Other women will start yelling at us to be quiet, how what we’re doing is disrespectful, and that we’re bothering the men on the other side. Today, though, things were different.

We prayed Hallel and no one had said anything. There weren’t any old ladies who were telling us to quiet down; no police officers had come by to tell us to move. It was the loudest I had ever heard this group of women. We finished hallel with barely a talking-to and then we reached the Torah service. Given that no one was paying us any attention, there was a quick conversation amongst the board members: should we dare to read the Torah here? After a few minutes, they all agreed to it.

As we unrolled the Torah, the people who patrol the Wall area came over and started to bother us. It’s still unclear to me who they are exactly — they go by the name “Guards of the Western Wall.” Are they appointed by the state or have they taken this ‘holy’ duty upon themselves? Because they were being so aggressive and we were doing something that is considered provocative, we decided to move as we had originally planned to the Southern Wall. At that point, another so-called security guard came up and started harassing one of the members, Nofrat Frenkel. He asked why she was wearing a tallit, to which she responded, “It’s a mitzvah. Where’s yours?” I guess that was the wrong thing to say because at that point, he asked for her identification. He started to walk away with it, so she followed him (still holding the Torah, by the way), and we followed her – about forty women running behind this pseudo-police officer. Nofrat was subsequently taken in for questioning and then arrested. She was held for about two hours in the jail in the Old City. We waited outside, singing and calling every potential connection to news reporters that we had. When she triumphantly emerged, she was shaking. Needless to say, the event was beyond upsetting. I found myself missing the simple yelling of days of yore. My mom and I had to spend a few hours engaging in some good old retail therapy to feel better.

It was the first time that a woman had ever been arrested for wearing a tallit. What does it mean when a Jewish state doesn’t let Jews practice their religion in the way that they want to? (Also, since I’m sure someone will bring it up — I’m well aware that there are a plethora of issues in Israel regarding civil rights, but this post is not about that.) If Israel is in theory a democratic society, how does the restriction of religious practice fit into that? Women — and everyone — should have the right to practice any sort of religion in any way that they want. Women of the Wall is not about equal rights because the founders consider themselves to be Orthodox Jews; it is, however, about equal access. As a woman, I want the right to step forward and claim that I have a religious space at the Western Wall, too. Right now, sadly, I’m not sure that I can even do that.

From the JTA: Woman wearing tallit arrested at Western Wall

From the JPost: Woman wearing talit at Kotel detained

From Haaretz: Police arrest woman for wearing prayer shawl at Western Wall

From ArutzSheva: Police Arrest, Release Woman with Prayer Shawl at Kotel.

In fact the articles are completely different — JPost says a woman was detained after trying to read from a Torah near the Kotel. The JTA, that she was arrested for wearing a Tallit.

The prayer shawl was not the reason she was detained. She was not arrested, obviously, because she was immediately released. I am not judging what should happen there — I advocate some kind of compromise — I am judging the sensational headlines, and the damage they do to the Jewish people, by our own news sources.

Forget the whole CNN vs FOX vs MSNBC debate. We have our own headline battles, though more subtle.

The woman detained was interviewed by the Jpost:

Frenkel said that as the women unrolled the Torah scroll and began to prepare to read, officials from the Kotel Foundation arrived and demanded that they leave the premises.

Frenkel said that the women agreed to roll up the Torah scroll and take it to the Robinsons Arch. But on their way out Frenkel, who was wearing a talit and was carrying the Torah, was seized by police.

I was pushed into a nearby police station and transferred to the main police station at Yaffo Gate, she said.

About 40 women who attended the prayer formed a procession and followed the police and Frenkel through the Old City to the Yaffo Gate where they congregated and sang songs until Frenkel was released.

The Jewish headlines are helping to divide an already divided people desperate for some kind of unity to face external threats.

Fear and loathing in hechsher land!
By Heshy Fried of Frum Satire

I set foot into kosherfest and immediately I was overwhelmed, it kind of felt like my first time in Las Vegas, only here, I was actually into what was being delivered to my senses whereas in Vegas I had no interest in gambling – it was just sensory overload. Kosherfest is the worlds largest Kiddush, it’s a building full of free food in Kiddush size portions that the manufacturers and distributors are almost forcing you to try, it’s a food lovers dream, and many of them get to come while on the clock.

The 21st annual Kosherfest was held in the Meadowlands Expo center this year and when I got to the event I realized that parking wasn’t going to be easy, it reminded me of Boro Park on Friday afternoon, cars were double parked everywhere, while the inhabitants of those vehicles were schmoozing with someone they saw walking whom they think they knew, it was so bad I sucked it up and parked across the street at Wal Mart, I figured I was safe because I saw many black hat and wig wearing individuals piling out of minivans in the same parking lot, making it look like some sort of Wal Mart parking lot Exodus.
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“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” – St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 12th century.
By Lyon Roth
Globes Magazine

Today, most political roads seem to lead to Washington DC. Once there, you will also discover that nearly every letter of the alphabet enjoys a real road or street named after it in one or more of the four quadrants of the city. Poor letter J does not have any street named after it in any quadrant. However, it now adorns the name of a new lobby that, according to its web-site, purports to be the “political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement.”

J Street founder Jeremy Ben-Ami emphasizes passionately that the organization “is so clearly pro-Israel, is grounded in and based in Jewish values and a Jewish desire to support the State of Israel.” It also boasts its own political action committee to fund candidates who endorse the group’s objectives. Unfortunately, many legacy pro-Israel advocates, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confused. Perhaps trying to be all things to all people, J Street disregards what is still a rather complex matrix of issues arising from the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Ben Ami stresses that J Street rejects the “us versus them” thinking, opting instead for a non-partisan approach to the vexing dilemmas plaguing the Middle East. Sadly, however, its Pollyanna notions of regional peace neither conform to the practical realities confronting the parties who will have to achieve such peace, nor recognize certain partisan positions that remain diametrically opposed.

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Charred coins my ass

While digging wantonly under Al Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s 3rd holiest religious site, the Zionists usurpers conveniently claim to have discovered a trove of approximately 70 allegedly Jewish coins dating from the time of the 2nd Temple – you know, the one that never really even existed?

NPR reports:

About 70 coins were found in an excavation at the foot of a key Jerusalem holy site. They give a rare glimpse into the period of the Jewish revolt that eventually led to the destruction of the Second Jewish Temple in A.D. 70, said Hava Katz, curator of the exhibition… The Jews rebelled against the Roman Empire and took over Jerusalem in A.D. 66. After laying siege to Jerusalem, the Romans breached the city walls and wiped out the rebellion, demolishing the Jewish Temple, the holiest site in Judaism… The coins sit inside a glass case, some melted down to unrecognizable chunks of pockmarked and carbonized bronze from the flames that destroyed the Temple.

Hava Katz is SUCH a liar! So she scorched up a bunch of coins. So what? Everyone knows that there was no temple in Jerusalem 2000 years ago because all the Jews where in Khazaria. And they weren’t even Jews yet. This is just another provocation by the Zionist Apartheid regime meant to justify their destructive digging under Haram Al Sharif which threatens the foundations of the mosques, and justifies the further dispossession of eternal Palestinian rights extant from time immemorial. Should you find yourself in the Zionist entity, and wish to witness this hoax for yourself, you may do so at the Davidson Center, adjacent to the entrance to the so called “Wailing Wall.” I’ll show you a wailing wall you rotten Zionists.

Some of you may recall our celebration of French journalistic standards which permitted “The Invention of the Jewish People,” a sad, ideologically bent book by Shlomo Sand to win the Aujourd’hui Award, “given to the best non-fiction political or historical work from French journalists.”

That version of Sand’s book, published originally in Hebrew, was the French language version. Unfortunately, the English speaking world is now in possession of this ode to hatred of the Jewish people and it is on sale in England and the US. It’s actually ranked in the mid-2000s on Amazon, which means books are selling.

What kind of person is Shlomo Sand? He is the kind of person who compares Israel in an interview to a child born of a rape.

“Most Israeli Jews believe in a historical right. If there is no such right, what justifies our existence here? Arabs also ask me, after writing this book, how can I justify the existence of Israel. I say to them that even the son of a rape has the right to live. It was a kind of rape in 1947 and ’48 and the Palestinian tragedy continues. But you can say the same about the USA and Australia.”

…“I think Israel belongs to the Israelis, not the Jews. We have a language, a culture, a theatre, a literature, our jokes our football and our politics. We are a people but we are not just a Jewish people. I want to change the borders and definition of the state. I want to make it a more civil nation — to separate religion from its existence, to normalise and democratise Israel. I think that Israel has to belong to all its citizens, not just the Jewish ones. People call me radical but from a democratic perspective this is not so radical.”

Therefore, we glean that he’s a scholar working at an Israeli university which affords him the freedom to attack his country and society viciously and then have his ideas travel the world with him so he can call the country subsidizing his salary, the child of a rape.

And you can imagine he has serious support from the anti-Israel crowd, Jewish especially.

In our previous post, we brought in some scholarly attacks that decimate his book, but my favorite new critique of his book is by prolific and popular historian, Simon Schama, definitely not an intellectual slouch.

Schama writes:

Sand’s self-dramatising attack in The Invention of the Jewish People is directed against those who assume, uncritically, that all Jews are descended lineally from the single racial stock of ancient Hebrews – a position no one who has thought for a minute about the history of the Jews would dream of taking.

…

But, he argues, there actually was no mass forced “exile” so there can be no legitimate “return”. This is the take-away headline that makes this book so contentious. It is undoubtedly right to say that a popular version of this idea of the exile survives in most fundamentalist accounts of Jewish history. It may well be the image that many Jewish children still have. But it is a long time since any serious historian argued that following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Romans emptied Judea. But what the Romans did do, following the Jewish revolt of AD66-70 and even more exhaustively after a second rebellion in AD135, was every bit as traumatic: an act of cultural and social annihilation – mass slaughter and widespread enslavement. But there was also the mass extirpation of everything that constituted Jewish religion and culture; the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina, the obliteration of the Temple, the prohibition on rituals and prayers. Sand asserts, correctly, that an unknowable number of Jews remained in what the Romans called Palestina. The multitudes of Jews in Rome had already gone there, not as a response to disaster but because they wanted to and were busy proselytising.

All this is true and has been acknowledged. But Sand appears not to notice that it undercuts his argument about the non-connection of Jews with the land of Palestine rather than supporting it. Put together, the possibility of leading a Jewish religious life outside Palestine, with the continued endurance of Jews in the country itself and you have the makings of that group yearning – the Israel-fixation, which Sand dismisses as imaginary. What the Romans did to the defeated Jews was dispossession, the severity of which was enough to account for the homeland-longing by both the population still there and those abroad. That yearning first appears, not in Zionist history, but in the writings of medieval Jewish teachers, and never goes away.

There are many such twists of historical logic and strategic evasions of modern research in this book. To list them all would try your patience.

…

His assumption that the Jewish state is an oxymoron built on illusions of homogeneity is belied by the country’s striking heterogeneity. How else to explain the acceptance of the Beta Israel Ethiopian Jews or the Bene Israel Indians as Israeli Jews? Certainly that acceptance has never been without obstacles, and egregious discrimination has been shown by those who think they know what “real jews” should look like. Sand is right in believing that a more inclusive and elastic version of entry and exit points into the Jewish experience should encourage a debate in Israel of who is and who is not a “true” Jew. I could hardly agree more, and for precisely the reason that Sand seems not to himself embrace: namely that the legitimacy of Israel both within and without the country depends not on some spurious notion of religious much less racial purity, but on the case made by a community of suffering, not just during the Holocaust but over centuries of expulsions and persecutions. Unlike the Roman deportations, these were not mythical.

Sand would counter that such a refuge for the victims could have been in China, or on the moon, for all that Palestine had to do with the Jews. But since his book fails to sever the remembered connection between the ancestral land and Jewish experience ever since, it seems a bit much to ask Jews to do their bit for the sorely needed peace of the region by replacing an ethnic mythology with an act of equally arbitrary cultural oblivion.

Be sure to read the entire article in the Financial Times.

Very soon, expect to hear on campuses, in news programs on the radio and occasionally in TV programs that the Jewish people are a myth. This stuff used to be said by the neo-Nazi loonies who inhabit this world, but now we have a Jewish, son of Holocaust survivors, professor from an Israeli university, ideologue whose ideology so blinds him to the basic identity of the Jewish people that he has put this lie into the mainstream.

The problem with his argument is that HE’S the one who is touting the biological issue. It is clear to most Jews that their identity stems from our thousands of years of common heritage and that heritage is directly linked to our past in Judea and Israel. It isn’t material whether my genes are directly connected to those of some Jerusalemite from 2000 years ago – although they might well be – it’s that their ideas, beliefs, practices and lives have filtered down to our time and resonate with our identity. They define who we are, and not because of a couple of 19th Century historians, but precisely because our traditions, our shared histories, our literature and even the enduring hatred we’ve suffered, are a part of every Jew. If a prayer was being said 2000 years ago, and then 1000 years later a Jew who descends from a convert says the same prayer and teaches it to his children, and that prayer is repeated 500 years later and again a thousand years later by Jews, even if they are descended from converts to Judaism, that does not lessen their connection to the place where that prayer, language and culture originated. It does not change the fact that they faced Jerusalem when praying and wished that they could visit it and even live there upon the messiah’s arrival.

Whether Sand approves or not, these ideas that form us exist because our ancestors – and here I may mean biological and I could mean ancestry in terms of ideas, faith and religious practice – lived in Jerusalem and Hebron and Shechem and Judea and Samaria.

If his problem is that Israel, a state defining itself as a Jewish state, exist on disputed land that the Palestinians claim as theirs, then that’s an entirely different issue and question. Trying to use questionable history to address this complex situation is reprehensible.

If Walt & Mearsheimer’s “The Israel Lobby” wins TheMiddle’s “21st Century Protocols of the Elders of Zion” Award, Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” wins the “Temple was Never Here, It Was in Nablus” Upside Down History Prize, which I dedicate to Yasser Arafat.

(photo is from this article about the Beit She’arim site)

Larry is one of the 1000 faces of Jewlicious Festival.

Larry Forman from Louisville, Kentucky, raises money locally each year to fund his trip to Jewlicious — which he has done the with friends for the last two years. Larry is a leader of Jewish student life in Louisville, and was representing at the GA.

Tickets for Jewlicious Festival go on-sale sometime Monday evening at www.brownpapertickets.com

While it’s been rewarding to see some of my ideas in publications reporting about the latest Palestinian maneuvers, there have also been some doubters. One of the key criticisms has been of the prediction that the Palestinians are planning to stall for time as they push for an eventual single state from the River to the Sea. How can I predict this, they ask, while the Palestinians appear to be planning to establish a state and are actually threatening to do this with American approval and a visit to the UN Security Council?

My response has been that the threat of declaring a state is a win-win for the Palestinians. It causes fear for Israelis and their leaders and strengthens the Palestinian bargaining position in the event they don’t declare a state. If they end up having to somehow actually go through with a declaration of statehood, then if they do have the blessing of the UNSC and especially if they modify UNSCR 242 and 338, then according to international law, east Jerusalem would become East Jerusalem and the official Palestinian capital. However, I qualified that if this were to happen, the Palestinians would build in some mechanism that allows them to continue to seek the remainder of the land between the River to the Sea. In other words, it’s just another stop-gap in their master plan.

Today I came across the Palestinian National Authority’s two-year plan for statehood. This is the plan the Palestinian PM, Salam Fayyad, put together and has been pitching to Western governments. When this plan was announced, it was received positively across the board. However, as the leaks about potential unilateral statehood declarations began to reach newspapers, the next days brought about criticism from…the office of Mahmoud Abbas. Well, within hours of this criticism, Fayyad’s office issued a denial that it had been negotiating some sort of end-run around the Israelis and potential unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.

If that isn’t enough evidence, then the plan itself contains the missing proof. I’ve highlighted the key elements of this section:

The majority of the Palestinian people are refugees and displaced persons living in the Palestinian territory and abroad. Most refugees live under oppressive and harsh conditions, lacking their most fundamental human rights, foremost of which is the right to live on their homeland. Though the issue of refugees will be addressed in the final status negotiations, it is certain that no political settlement can be accepted by Palestinians without a just and agreed solution to this fundamental issue in accordance with international resolutions, including UN General Assembly Resolution 194.

The refugee issue will remain under the jurisdiction of the PLO, through its Department of Refugees’ Affairs. The Government affirms its full commitment to all PLO decisions in relation to this issue. Within limits of its jurisdiction, without derogation of PLO’s responsibility, and in a manner that does not exempt the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) from its responsibilities, the Government emphasizes that it will do all within its power and authority to bolster on the legal rights and living conditions of refugees in the occupied territory, particularly in refugee camps, including the provision of all the resources it can afford to support and alleviate the suffering of refugees in all aspects of their lives.

Translation:
We are never going to accept any conclusion to the conflict without acquiring a right for all Palestinians to move into Israel. In order to avoid this appearing to be messy or part of our aggression as a newly formed government, we’re going to remove this issue from our government.

Now if one reviews their plan, there are 32 new ministries, authorities and bureaus listed. Thirty two government agencies are going to function in the new, never-before seen state of Palestine, but the refugee problem is handed off to the PLO. Why would they do that if they thought the achievement of statehood would be sufficient? They wouldn’t. The PLO is going to be the address for those things that a “state” couldn’t and wouldn’t do. Any fighting that takes place, any attacks, any language that is deemed too aggressive will be blamed on the PLO, and of course “refugee rights,” not the new state of Palestine.

They also are demanding that UNGA 194, the so-called “right of return” resolution which the Arabs rejected when it was first presented 60 years ago, become the governing rule for the Palestinian refugees. UNGA is a Trojan Horse, code for the desire to recreate demographics so that Israel could stop being a Jewish state. It is a desire to return not to 1967/1949 lines, but a desire to return to 1920 lines.

As for Israel, what can it do to counter this new diplomatic onslaught by the Palestinians?

Their solution is a simple one. Offer the Palestinians what Barak offered at Taba in 2001, without any delineation of sovereignty over any part of the Temple Mount. Make it public that this peace plan is on the table. Do it loudly and do it everywhere. In the worst case scenario, the Palestinians will accept, in which case Israel will have peace. That’s a pretty good worst case scenario! In the best case scenario, the Palestinians will reject this offer as they do every offer. That’s a lousy best case scenario, but it’s the best way to come out of this set of traps the Palestinians are trying to set for Israel.

Relevant Jewlicious Posts:

The Palestinians Think They Are in the Endgame

The Palestinian Endgame Enters High Gear

Details of the Taba Plan

Fresh on the heels of their ground-breaking Jews can sometimes be cool story, CNN tackles the thorny, often contentious issue of whether or not criticizing Israel equals Anti-semitism. Titled “Anti-semitism revival,” the piece begins by exploring a Swedish journalist’s allegations that the IDF murdered Palestinians in order to harvest their organs (Donald Bostrom was speaking in Israel) and then continues with statements from Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and interviews with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Itamar Marcus from Palestinian Media Watch and Gideon Levy from Ha’aretz.

Talk about a non-story! No. Not all criticism of Israel is motivated by anti-semitism, though some of it is. And just as some try to hide their anti-semitic agenda by calling it anti-Israel, others try to deflect legitimate criticism of Israel by automatically labeling it as anti-semitic. Duh. Thanks CNN. Yawn.

We knew it and now the rest of the world does, too. Well, almost. As ck already noted, our own Rabbi Yonah takes the title of “game changer” in the 2009 Forward 50. Mazal tov, Rabbi Yonah.

But now that we’ve got the full report from the Forward, we can add video to the announcement! This list of leaders, innovators and gangstas (???) includes the man who reportedly “donned fake peyes to perform alongside the character puppet made famous by ‘The Tonight Show’ — Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog — at this year’s Chabad Telethon.”

Fake peyes? Who ever said they were fake?!

And if that weren’t glory enough, Rabbi Yonah’s search to replace a busted sedan was also covered this past calendar year on Vanity Fair’s Web site. Not once, but twice.

“If we are supposed to honor Torah scholars,” he told the site’s columnist, “then we should honor them with nice wheels, right?” Right!

You can read about all the Forward 50 here and a few words about Rabbi Yonah’s other achievements, which are actually much more significant than those described above. Mazal tov again to Rabbi Yonah and his 49 comrades, including G-dcast Queen Sarah Lefton, presenter at Jewlicious 2009 and uh, Bernard Madoff… what’s he doing there?!

Anybody who has ever needed to motivate a group of people and get them to work as a team knows that one of the easiest ways of achieving just that is to make out a common enemy.

AFP reports via Yahoo news:

Residents of the Israeli town of Shfaram were seeking on Friday to make the world’s largest tabbouleh salad, hoping to bring reconciliation after violent Christian-Druze clashes.

“We are trying to get the Guinness record,” said event organiser Ala Khuria as residents were busy chopping 700 kilos (1,540 pounds) of tomatoes as well as other ingredients that should make up a more than four-tonne salad.

But more important than surpassing the 3,557 kilos (7,825 pounds) some 300 Lebanese chefs stirred into a giant bowl in October, is bringing together the town’s Muslims, Christians and Druze, Khuria told AFP.

“We are doing it for the union of the town,” he said.[Full article]

Yeah right. Just for the union. Not for the ego. Not to mock anybody.

I suppose a 5-ton latke just wouldn’t have created the same feeling of unity. Or a 3-metre diametre matzoh ball. Or a pool full of chicken soup.

Folks, grow up.

Yuri Foreman becomes first Israeli world champion

Yes, my friends. Right after Parshat Toldot was read for Mincha, and we learn how Yakov got the blessing from Yitzhak instead of Esau the Defender, fans gathered around the country and paid $15 cover charges or $35 table fees, to see Yuri Foreman, The Lion of Zion, the FSU born, Haifa raised boxer and rabbinical student, the Kosher Krusher, Hebrew Hand Grenade, and Dreidel of Destruction win a unanimous decision over a hefty Santos for the WBA middle welter weight title in Las Vegas. Mazel Tough. No plans for a Foreman Grille, but how about a Foreman Falafel Maker.

From the LA Times (where I also got the pic on the right):

Foreman (28-0, 8 knockouts) knocked Santos (32-4-1, 23 KOs) down in the second round, had him pinned against the ropes in the third then appeared to hurt the champion with a flurry of punches near the end of the fourth round… Santos made a final desperate charge in the 12th and final round, knowing he needed a knockout to win. But he was far too weary by then, stumbling to the canvas again with less than a minute left in the fight.

From Yahoo:

Foreman was the slicker fighter throughout. His jab, fighting out of a southpaw stance, puffed up Santos below his right eye. Santos eventually suffered a cut on the edge of the eye in the eleventh round. Foreman suffered a cut over left eye early in the fight but his corner did a nice job of managing the wound … Foreman’s story can be described as the American dream. Born into poverty in Belarus, he moved to Israel as a child and then New York as a 19-year-old. Five years ago, he began studying to be a rabbi on the advice of his girlfriend, who is also a professional boxer.

This morning, I awoke in Manhattan to my own personal Jewish film festival. The screens are filled, this week, with films of Jewish and Israeli interest. How so? Well, we have documentaries on the assassination of Kasztner; the life of Attorney William Kunstler; and the Catskills bungalow lives of a group of Holocaust survivors. There are also films from the “Other Israel” film festival, and the opening of The Messenger, a film by Oren Moverman. There is also “A Serious Man” by the Coen Brothers. And if this is not enough, one can also take the Megabus for $5 to Boston for the Boston Jewish Film Festival.

“THE MESSENGER,” which stars Woody Harrelson, Ben Foster, and Samantha Morton, is directed by Oren Moverman and premiered at Sundance. Moverman was born and raised in Israel and moved to the US after his army service. Harrelson and Foster play two soldiers affected and scarred by their army service, and are currently working towards redemption as “messengers” who must inform the next of kin of soldiers that their loved ones have been killed in action.

Moverman, who co-wrote Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic, “I’m Not There,” took on the directorial duties of the film after Ben Affleck bowed out. Alessandro Camon developed the idea for the story in response to the lack of information on the messengers who bring the consequences of the war to the families of soldiers. It was especially poignant that the opening occurs just a week after Fort Hood. They wanted to see the process from the point of view of the messengers. Moverman said the script was a way to deal with his own “military experience demon” from Israel, where he was aware of casualty notifications, but never experienced it.

While driving to the homes of the dead soldiers’ next of kin, and between notifications, these two men form a bond that will hopefully return them to “normalcy.” Moverman said the roles of these soldiers are among the toughest jobs in the army and likened them to “two angels of death.” The film is not about the casualties, but the people who must continue living their lives after a loved one is killed in action. Audience members who watch closely will notice that one of the families that are notified of a husband‘s death in Iraq display a large mezuzah on their front door.

“KILLING KASZTNER: The Jew Who Dealt with Nazis,” is a documentary by Gaylen Ross about Reszo Rudolph Kasztner, a mostly forgotten, rarely discussed, Hungarian Jew who negotiated to save 1,684 Jews during the Holocaust. He paid the SS $1000 a head for them. After saving them, he emigrated to Israel, scraped by with a government job, and was later accused of being a Nazi collaborator by an controversial Israeli pamphleteer and Irgun member. It was more of an attack on Ben Gurion’s party, like saying that Obama employs America-haters. The government sued; Kasztner was later cleared in 1958, but in 1957, he was assassinated in Tel Aviv by Ze’ev Eckstein, who appears in the film. This doc explores the story and asks whether or not Kasztner was a hero, and why Israel needed martyrs in the Fifties and not someone who appeared to collaborate.

For more information, you can read “Kasztner’s Train: The True Story of an Unknown Hero of the Holocaust,” or the forthcoming
“Emissary of the Doomed: Bargaining for Lives in the Holocaust.”

“WILLIAM KUNSTLER: DISTURBING THE UNIVERSE,” is a documentary by his two youngest daughters: Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler. William Kunstler was one of America’s most loved, and to many, the most hated, civil rights, anti-war, and criminal defense attorneys of the late 20th century. This documentary is an exploration of his life and the events that generated the love and hate, as well as an attempt to learn more about his life by his daughters who were born after his most celebrated cases. The film’s title derives from a T.S. Elliot poem, in which Alfred J. Prufrock wonders if he “dare disturb the universe.”

The film, which received some of its funding from the National Foundation of Jewish Culture, shows Kunstler as a paradigm of the great Jewish prophetic tradition of radical action. The film explores his life as a staid practitioner in suburban New York, who found his greater calling when he took on civil rights cases, and in 1961, represented Freedom Riders, and later, Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago Eight. Some said he was a self hating Jew. But he would reply that that was impossible, since anyone who knew him. knew that he was Jewish, and that he loved himself. Plus he loved to eat tongue on rye. He kept a picture of Michaelangelo’s statue of David over his desk, slingshot nearly at the ready, and used it as an example of why people must choose action over inaction when faced with what he perceived to be unlawful exercises of government power. In his later years, perhaps he was addicted to the theater of the courtroom, his clients were the some of the most sensational and vilified accused rapists, murderers, assassins, and mobsters. In the film, Attorney Alan Dershowitz, politely calls him “inconsistent” in his later years.

“FOUR SEASONS LODGE” is a documentary based on a story that appeared in The New York Times. It is about a group of Holocaust survivors that settled after the War in New York and since 1979, have spent Summers in a bungalow colony in the Catskills Mountains. Now older and with some illnesses, some want to sell their homes and the colony, and others want a different fate. Even if not for the story, you should see it for the cinematography. It has proved to be so popular this week, and sold out, that the IFC Theater has upgraded it to a larger capacity theater.

This week, THE OTHER ISRAEL film festival, began its third year. In addition to screening episodes of Israel’s Sesame Street, which includes an Israeli Arab muppet, its weekend films include a work in progress documentary on the history of Arab characters in Israeli films; a panel on participating in Israeli productions with Filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, and hip hop musician Sameh Zakout, and Mahmood Shalbi; a documentary on Sayed Kashua, the Israeli Arab writer; Badal, a film about the tradition of a brother and sister in one family marrying the sister and brother of another, and what happens when one couple divorces; Laila’s Birthday; the Cannes favorite, Jaffa; and two episodes of ID Blues.

In Boston? Check out the comedy, Hey, Hey, It’s Esther Blueburger; or The Tale of Nicolai and the Law of Return by David Ofek; or Within the Whirlwind by Oscar winning director Marleen Gorris.

In Miami? Check out the Miami Book Festival, which features dozens of authors, including: Stuart Weisberg on Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman; Ariel Sabar on My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq; Sadia Shepard on The Girl from Foreign; Michael Rosen on What Else But Home; Rich Cohen on Israel is Real; Joel Schalit on Israel vs. Utopia; Dan Senor on Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle; and more.

What film shall I see?? Umm… actually I am headed to a literary fest in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn instead.

Muffti is glad they got him. What a strange story. The man was granted the right to carry a handgun despite suspicion of murder. He confessed to murders in 2000 but the shin-bet claimed it wasn’t him that did the shooting. He managed to smuggle in a hand gun by plane.

Muffti believed in the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, but dude did claim in court that ‘it was my pleasure and honor to serve God…I have no regrets’. Here is the story from Jpost.

The state on Thursday filed a 25-page indictment against US-born, alleged Jewish terrorist Ya’acov Teitel, which included two counts of premeditated murder and three counts of attempted murder and involved 14 separate incidents between 1997 and 2008.

The indictment was filed and will be heard in Jerusalem District Court.

Teitel’s lawyer, Adi Keidar, told the court he needed one month to study the evidence before his client would be ready to answer the charges.

The state’s representative, Saguy Ophir, told the court the indictment was based on Teitel’s confession and on forensic evidence based on a DNA sample that was found at the scene of one of the crimes.

As he walked into the courtroom, Teitel more or less confessed that he was guilty of the acts for which he was charged.

“It was my pleasure and honor to serve my God,” he declared. “God is proud of what I have done. I have no regrets.”
(more…)

By Shimon Peres (from Ha’aretz).

South African jurist Richard Goldstone lambasted President Shimon Peres on Thursday for a personal attack on him, which the president launched in response to a damning report he compiled on the Israel’s winter offensive in Gaza.

“I would say that the President’s comments are specious and ill-befitting the Head of the State of Israel,” Goldstone said in an interview with Haaretz.

….

The jurist was referring to comments Peres made on Wednesday to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a meeting in Brasilia.

Peres told his Brazilian counterpart that, “Goldstone is a small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence.”

It’s not okay for Israel’s president to speak that way about Goldstone. Even if Goldstone made serious errors, including the serious mistake of taking on leadership of this inquiry and then maybe letting Israel’s avoidance of his commission anger him when he should have been entirely impartial, this criticism by Peres is over-the-top and unwarranted. It’s one thing to say, “I disagree with the way he went about this as well as his conclusions,” and it’s entirely different to personally attack him as somebody with no sense of justice or jurisprudence.

It’s also stupid to attack him this way because it takes away attention from valid criticism of the Report and Goldstone’s choices in the report and turns that attention to whether people are insulting Goldstone unfairly or not.

Peres should apologize so the world and Israel can deal with the critical issues at hand.

Other Jewlicious articles on Goldstone:

Dore Gold and Richard Goldstone Debate

Goldstone interviewed by Moyers

It’s About Time Somebody Said Something – things that might be of interest to Goldstone

Forward editorial about Goldstone

Goldstone on the Media Trail

Ken Roth of HRW dukes it out with international jurist Irwin Cotler

Goldstone Report Released

Why the Goldstone Commission is Tarnished

If you are anything like me, you hate pretty much all Israeli t-shirt designs that you see at Shuk HaKarmel.   I think the one I hate the most is

Don’t worry.  Benji Lovitt, from What War Zone,   is remedying the situation by selling his own wittily-captioned t-shirts based on some content from his blog and Israeli life in general, which you can buy here and which are wittier than anything currently available on Ben Yehuda.  I should take this opportunity to mention that Benji is my favorite Israeli comedian, aside from Avigdor Lieberman.

My favorite shirt is this one :

But he has a bunch of great shirts available, so check them out and support!

The sadness we all felt at the news that Rabbi Yonah had not won the Jewish Community Heroes contest was significantly mitigated today with news that our Hero had been selected as a member of this year’s Forward 50 (!!). The exclamation points are there because I had no clue this was even a possibility. I had to find out about it after receiving a cryptic IM from Dan Brown of e-Jewish Philanthropy who then pointed me to his post on the subject.

In the decade and a half since, the dramatic shift in Jewish leadership mirrors larger trends in our society. Just as we no longer go one place for our news, we no longer look to only one powerful person in a position of authority for leadership. This year, in particular, we’ve seen some of the most established organizations questioned from the outside and challenged from within, while those who are creating and innovating seem to have history’s wind at their backs.

Neat-o.

First Soupy, and now Carl. Carl Ballantine, born Meyer Kessler, was the Dean of Comic Magicians, and influenced both comics and magicians, from Steve Martin to David Copperfield, passed away in Los Angeles this week at the age of 92. He got his start in Chicago, the vaudeville circuit and the Catskills hotels, and was a staple on early television variety shows. He played a magician with tricks that never actually worked. In one trick he would tear up a newspaper in order to magically restore it, but then get sidetracked reading the Help Wanted classified ads. In one incarnation of his act, he would come out on stage in a tux and top hat and tell his audience that in case he died during his act, he was already dressed for his funeral.

He was famous to an American generation of baby boomers and their parents when he appeared as Navy Seaman Lester Gruber, with the bumbling Tim Conway, in the tv series, McHale’s Navy.

On Saturday evening in Las Vegas, as the slots get played and Havdalah ends the Sabbath, a rabbinical student, weighing in at about 154 pounds, hailing from the Belarus by way of Haifa, will get his chance at a boxing title. As a teenager, Foreman, known as the “Lion of Judah” to his current fans, won the Israeli boxing championship three times for his age and weightclasses, one of which was won just weeks after his mother had passed away. Due to the lack of a boxing gym in Haifa, he trained at one in the primarily Arab town of Kfar Yasif.

Yuri Foreman, 29, a mazel toughie, a boxer and rabbinical student in Brooklyn NY, with 27 wins and no losses will face off against three time world champion and World Boxing Association super welterweight champ, Daniel Santos, who is a southpaw with 32 mins, 3 losses and 1 tie, and an amazing 23 knockouts. Their bout is on the Pacquiao-Cotto and will be broadcast in North America from the MGM Grand Garden Arena on HBO Pay Per View at 9 PM East Coast time. Santos, 34, who hails from Puerto Rico, won the bronze medal at the 1996 Olympics. Santos is repped by Don King, the famed ex-con American boxing promoter. Foreman is repped by some Jewish businessmen: Al Cohen, Al Roth, and Murray W.

Santos defeated Akmed Kotiev for the title and defended it against former world champion Luis “Yori Boy” Campas, Antonio Margarito, and Joachim Alcine. On the other hand, Foreman’s favorite food is Russian ravioli and Gefilte Fish. So it sounds like an even match up to me.

Jewlicious Festival founder, Rabbi Yonah (2nd from right), with some other Jewish Community Heroes of the Year and the Project Leader at the GA 2009 in Washington DC. The project expected 100,000 votes to be cast. They received over 570,000 votes. They expected 10,000 people to leave their email addresses; they got 40,000. Ari Teman (2nd from left) of JCorps was named the overall Hero.

Congratulations to Ari Teman and JCorps for winning the UJC Heroes contest! Rabbi Yonah, the top vote getter, got nearly 20% of all the votes and the Jewlicious community kicked ass and took no prisoners, but lets not be sad! We were in very august company, Rabbi Yonah got great visibility, we all had a brilliant opportunity to show him and Rachel and the whole Bookstein clan some love, and really, next to that, $25,000 is chump change! Now fuck that noise and lets get ready to ruuuuumble! Jewlicious Festival 06 is coming up – February 19th in Long Beach California. See ya there!

The Israeli governemnt launched a full court press for blurb control today before meeting with President Obama in Washington DC. Ehud Barak, in DC for the GA2009, said that Israel is doing all it can to restart peace talks. At the same time, speaking before the General Assembly 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for an immediate restart of peace talks with the Palestine Authority.

Netanyahu, who was interrupted for just a moment by a woman with a cloth sign who shouted about Gaza, quipped that he got a better reception at the United Nations than he did at the GA. Later in his speech, he said that his government was eager to achieve peace with Israel’s neighbors and had a sense of urgency. He called for a permanent agreement with the Palestinians without any preconditions. He called on Mahmoud Abbas to stop trying to negotiate how to negotiate, and said, “Let’s move. Let’s get on it… let us begin talks immediately,”

With regard to settlements in the West Bank of the Jordan, Netanyahu said that no previous Israeli government has been as willing as his “to restrain settlement activity as part of an effort to relaunch peace talks.” The Prime Minister also praised the U.S. and Canadian goverments for their support, the U.S. armed forces for the 1400 American soldiers that participated in joint exercises recently with Israel, and he criticized the U.N. report on Gaza which should be “firmly rejected.”