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.

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.

I retrieved my press pass, was sent right through the underpaid security guards with those wands that always seem to go off when they hover over your crotch and I was in. I had a strategy based on last years Kosherfest and I stuck to it, I would only eat fleishigs (meat products) after I was sure I had covered all my dairy bases. One of the problems with Kosherfest is keeping away from meat until the time is right, I had overheard enough conversations that started “Oh darn, I just ate one of those baby franks…” and I didn’t want to deny myself of any of the goodness that was to come. Of course my friend just gave me this evil smile as he plucked cheese samples and beef jerky into his mouth at the same time.

This years Kosherfest was much more crowded than last year’s, it also appeared that there were many more civilians, regular folks that weren’t in the food industry but wanted some free food and booze. It seemed that all of Boro Park had cleared out for some free food samplings and I made a mental note of how this was one of the only times I saw Charedim and regular folks in non-riot mode.

As expected the wine sampling tables were crowded with smiling folks readily accepting free Dixie cups of wine and asking for seconds, Galil Mountain was the only wine company that had real wine glasses. Royal Wine Corp had this pyramid of wines and liquors, but only a few to taste.

No matter how many times I walked around sampling and asking questions of the different vendors, I would still hit vendors that I didn’t see before; one of the reasons for this is that hardly anyone just walks down an aisle. When you find something that you want to taste again you make a mental note of it and keep making your way down to that item, but that throws you off balance and makes for one zigzagging kind of event. For instance I found that the Macabee booth had these wonderful mozzarella sticks that were being given away in little plates that worked perfectly with different sauce vendors. So I would go pick up some cheese sticks and then find different sauces I wanted to try with the sticks rather than the crackers so many of them provide. I found this one particular booth with a plethora of Italian sauces like pesto, putanesca and bruchetta, although after my third visit he got a little teed off at me.

After a few times around and several pounds of samples I noticed that everyone was being rather cheap with their samples and giveaways. There really weren’t many giveaways, in fact many vendors felt the need to wrap their displays so people couldn’t just grab “samples” that were clearly marked display only. It was sad, but several folks I spoke to told me it was necessary in this economy. For instance, last year, upon entering the main hall of Kosherfest, one was to find baskets of free Jerky samples, they were rather large and I took an entire bag full. This year, one Jerky company was offering single strips about the size of your thumb as samples. The Holy Cow Beef Jerky folks were offering some sizeable samples in a napkin and their Sweet and Spicy Jerky was phenomenal and going quick, I also really liked their Teriyaki Jerky.

I expected to see more organic and trendy products than there were, I figured that Jewish companies must have got on the “green” bandwagon, but to my dismay they hadn’t. There was a company called Natures Select which had just come out with these cookies that were made with some crazy vegetables, like the chocolate chip that was made with corn, squash and sweet potato, or the cookies made with beets, spinach and other items you would never expect to find in cookies. The cookies were soft chewy and very tasty, which led me to ask myself, how on earth do we know if these things are actually in the cookies? The two ladies who invented the products (wasn’t there a recent lawsuit over this same thing involving Jerry Seinfeld’s wife?) ?

Brain Toniq, which is the worlds first organic, kosher, botanical-based, non-caffeinated think drink specifically designed for those who need more mental focus and clarity, was getting a lot of traffic to their booth, I was there because, frankly I was having a little brain fog as they call it, from eating too much. Not only is Brain Toniq non-caffeinated it also contains no sugar, using agave nectar instead – but I couldn’t help but notice my head fog wasn’t cleared up and that I still had no idea what head fog was. Maybe that was their way of saying fatigue. I was impressed with the taste, and had a good talk since the company is from Boulder, Colorado where my brother lives and I frequently visit.

Judging by the amount of junk food vendors, one may think that the kosher consumer doesn’t care much about healthy foods. Baked goods reigned king with dozens of booths featuring donuts, rugalech, rainbow cakes and black and white cookies for the politically correct baked goods eaters. There was a girl dressed up in some sort of green Irish outfit giving out these amazing vanilla rugalech, before I moved to Rockland county, I didn’t know rugalech could be vanilla, it just seemed too modern and rugalech to me were such a frum food, but they come in more flavors than just chocolate and cinnamon.

Angels bakery from Israel was giving out samples by the boatload, either they weren’t hit by the economy, or they just really liked giving away baked goods, as well as borekas and knish’s which are only classified as baked goods in Israel.

As with any trade show there were many non-food vendors, I really liked the guy marketing the tefillin shirt, which is a generic white button down shirt that has a zipper on each arm so the wearer can roll up the sleeves easily to make room for his tefillin. I suggested that he invent something that could prevent my tzitzis from falling in the toilet or getting stuck in my fly, he said he’ll think about it.

Then there were these people who had come up with the simple idea of making reusable plastic containers that had dairy, meat or parve on them, Kosherkeepers.com even had color coded lids which I found to be nice, they were also nice about giving me samples.

One of my biggest issues with the Kosherfest setup was the lack of non-alcoholic beverages in easy to reach areas. There were several juice people, but all of them were located at the ends of the hall, which made it a trip to get to every time. Elite Natural Juices had the best juices and were the only juice not filled with additives or sugar. I tried their Honeydew Melon Juice 100% juice no water added and fell in love with it, too bad it’s $9 a bottle retail, it was so good.

“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.

For example, the Palestinian insistence on a right of return for refugees is fundamentally incompatible with Israel’s essential identity as a Jewish state. These can’t be preserved simultaneously any more than one can be both Jewish and Christian simultaneously. J Street isn’t convinced. According to Ben Ami, Israel need not be referred to as a “Jewish state.” Rather the label “Jewish, democratic home in the state of Israel” ought to suffice.

All this reminds me of another faction pretending to advocate –with neither authority nor mandate — the genuine best interests of its “constituents.” Jews for Jesus was founded by Moishe Rosen in 1973. Born Jewish, Rosen converted and became a Baptist minister. His organization seeks to convert Jews who have not yet embraced the enhanced version of their theological beliefs. The group’s efforts have been overwhelmingly rejected by all Jewish denominations. While its evangelical activities may be perfectly appropriate for Christians, aside from using a few Yiddish and Hebrew expressions, they have nothing to do with Judaism.

So, as Israelis like to say, “we’ve been in this movie before.” Much as Jews for Jesus distorts the definition of membership (Jews) in order to expand its tent of adherents, J Street similarly manipulates the definition of “pro-Israel” to achieve its peculiar goals. And, like most distortions, it winds up resembling a bad movie. Some call the J Street version a comedy. Others think it’s a horror film. To me, it’s still mostly a mystery — on multiple levels.

For starters, we have the burgeoning list of unanswered questions: How much of J Street’s funding is actually contributed by Arab sources? First we heard 3%. A few weeks later, it was adjusted to 10%. What will the numbers be next month? Are there five major Arab donors, as initially reported, or over 30 major Arab donors, as recently disclosed? Does it matter? In my view it does.

When an organization receives hundreds of thousands of dollars from entities that are historically hostile to Israel’s existence, all sorts of motive-related questions need to be addressed. Has founder Jeremy Ben Ami severed his ties to Fenton Communications, his former Washington lobbying firm, whose client, the Qatari government, retained the company this past March to spear-head an 18-month anti-Israel campaign on college campuses? Is that connection in any way related to J Street’s abject refusal to criticize the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, a pre-packaged anti-Israel screed that is blatantly short on facts, sloppy on law, and unilateral in its condemnations? What is the real motivation behind J Street’s decision to fight Israel’s efforts to secure US sanctions against Iran?

One question that has been answered already is why J Street pulled the “pro-Israel” prefix from its messaging to students. It learned that several potential new recruits were turned off by that emphasis, so it’s been reduced to “pro-peace.” Moreover, much of the debate at the student sessions within J Street’s recent conference focused on whether divestment initiatives should be directed only against products from the Israeli settlements or against all Israeli merchandise.

The deeper one digs, the sillier this gets. Designating J Street as a pro-Israel lobby seems as logical as having Michael Jackson, while he was alive, serve as the spokesperson for all Caucasians or nominating Renee Richards as the poster child for female tennis players. Theo Epstein, the manager of the Boston Red Sox, doesn’t seek advice from the New York Yankees when reviewing next year’s draft picks. Pepsi doesn’t consult Coca Cola on branding new products. India doesn’t cooperate with Pakistan on defense procurement strategies. These entities compete with each other on the field, in the marketplace, and in battle. Any organization that sees moral equivalence between Hamas raining thousands of lethal rockets on Israeli towns for eight years and Israel’s Gaza incursion to disable those batteries all the while insisting on an immediate Israeli ceasefire — simply doesn’t get it.

Therefore, as one might expect, nearly all Israelis and most American Jews who see themselves as pro-Israel have never heard of J Street and certainly don’t subscribe to the J Street agenda. Furthermore, while Ben Ami and friends remain frustrated that it is taking so long for Jews and Muslims to resolve their issues like good Christians, my thought is that if it doesn’t look like a duck, doesn’t walk like a duck, and doesn’t talk like a duck, it isn’t a duck.

To date, J Street doesn’t look like a pro-Israel lobby, it doesn’t walk like a pro-Israel lobby, and it certainly doesn’t talk like a pro-Israel lobby. It merely quacks along a street leading nowhere.

Lyon (Lenny) Roth is a senior executive at an international wealth management firm, a member of Ben Gurion University’s Board of Governors and the Jewlicious Board of Directors.

© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2009

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.

Beit She'arim Menorah - you know, just a little like the one we light 2000 years later because of our vivid imaginations

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