The other day I posted in disgust a story about the video capturing Sheikh Jarrah Jewish inhabitants listening and dancing to a song praising the murderer Baruch Goldstein. My friends and colleagues on Jewlicious, ck and Rabbi Yonah, both voiced skepticism that the video was authentic.

Not being able to tell from the video itself whether it depicts a real moment or not, simply because just as the voice-over is dubbed, the music could be dubbed as well, I’ve been looking for clues. So far, I don’t have much to go on. Ynet credits “Ta’ayush” for the photo and video that it published, with a big splashy “exclusive” on the video.

What is Ta’ayush? They describe themselves thus:

We — Arabs and Jews, Israelis and Palestinians — live surrounded by walls and barbed wire: the walls of segregation, racism, and discrimination between Jews and Arabs within Israel; the walls of Apartheid, closure and siege encircling the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip; and the wall of war surrounding all inhabitants of Israel, so long as Israel remains an armed fortress in the heart of the Middle East.

In the fall of 2000 we joined together to form “Ta’ayush” (Arabic for “living together”), a grassroots movement of Arabs and Jews working to break down the walls of racism and segregation by constructing a true Arab-Jewish partnership. Together we strive for a future of equality, justice and peace through concrete, daily, non-violent actions of solidarity to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and to achieve full civil equality for all.

About Ta’ayush website

The activities and the activists of Ta’ayush were always concentrated on field work. Documentation (written or photographic) was and will continue to be secondary to this.

Okay, so they’re leftists whose views incline towards making Israel into a state that’s no longer a Jewish state. That doesn’t make them into liars, necessarily, although it also leaves them as less than objective observers, especially because Sheikh Jarrah has become a controversial flashpoint in recent weeks and they’ve been advocating against the families that have moved there.

That’s the first problem with the video. Now on to the second problem. Ta’ayush has a couple of filmmakers working with them, one of whom is Joseph Dana. Dana is a personal friend of our ck, and ck has actually posted one of his videos a video Dana had put up on his Facebook page. In fact, it is a video capturing an event at Sheikh Jarrah and ck posted it because at one point a Palestinian woman yells “Falasteene Bladna, al-Yahud klabna.” ck does us the favor of translating…and what she said was “Palestine is our country! The Jews are our dogs!”

The irony of posting a video intended to show the evils of the Jews but actually highlighting the absolute hate and peace-killing behavior of a Palestinian woman did not sit well with the videographer, Dana, probably because he belongs to an organization claiming that Palestinians and Israelis can live in harmony in one country. He criticized ck for not posting the “reality” of Sheikh Jarrah.

By the way, one of Dana’s complaints was that leftist protesters at Sheikh Jarrah were treated unjustly by the police, a position agreed to yesterday by Israel’s courts. On the other hand, in the video the protest leaders make false statements about the Palestinian “owners” of the homes into which the Jewish “settlers” had moved. The Palestinians weren’t owners, they were renters who didn’t pay their rent for years and the “settlers” are not settlers because east Jerusalem is annexed to Israel.

Dana also partners with Max Blumenthal as reporters and they gained notoriety, which we covered and discussed at some length on Jewlicious, when they posted a video that went viral about American Jews in Jerusalem who were saying horrendous things about Obama. Blumenthal and Dana defended their work, which really was nothing more than a hack job, on grandiose grounds. Dana wrote:

As a resident of Jerusalem, I can say that the people represented in this video are not members of a fringe group or simply drunk college kids. These people reflect the sentiments shared by many people in this country and this city. These people and their families are the core of the opposition to meaningful peace between Israel and her neighbors. This is what Obama is up against.

I call bullshit. That video represents nothing more than a bunch of kids half drunk and trying to be cool. That debate can be read on our post so I won’t get into it again. However, I do believe it represents impoverished journalism that is political in its nature and is far from objective, reasonable or fair. This is why I also believe that while the video may accurately depict this group of kids, it is used in a dishonest manner to score political points.

All of this brings us back to the Sheikh Jarrah – Baruch Goldstein video by Ta’ayush to which Dana and Blumenthal are contributors. That Ta’ayush are political and their politics are on the opposite side of the spectrum from the Jewish residents of Sheikh Jarrah can’t be disputed. That their view of the conflict is heavily distorted because of their politics also can’t be disputed – and the same holds true for the extremists on the right, just so we are clear.

Is the video real or not?

Well, ck knows Dana personally and Dana works for Ta’ayush. An email should be enough to have them meet for a coffee with the filmmakers who captured this event and it should be easy for those filmmakers to show ck the unedited, raw footage.

I look forward to the report.

Comedian Lizzy Cooperman at Jewlicious 6.0 (photo by David Miller in The Forward)

Yonah and their gang had a very good time at Jewlicious 6.0 held in Long Beach last week. The LA Jewish Journal has covered it, and included an interesting clip of WBC world welterweight boxing champion (and rabbinical student?) Yuri Foreman giving a brief boxing lesson to the tall and fit Matisyahu at this year’s festival.

From Ryan Torok’s Jewish Journal article:

His [Matisyahu's] 45-minute set was the final performance of the festival, though he had made surprise appearances over the weekend. On Saturday, he joined comedian Smooth-E for a parody of “King Without a Crown.” He could also be seen walking with his family in the main hallway, gym, auditorium and the several event rooms of the JCC.

During the concert, one of Matisyahu’s children, dressed in a Superman costume, went up to the stage and said, “Hi, Daddy.” To which his famous father replied: “Hi, Superman,” a simple, normal exchange that captured the spirit of the weekend.

Adam Weinberg, music director for the festival, reinforced that there should be no preaching at the festival—that attention, instead, should be on the music. “I think music should speak for music’s sake,” Weinberg said.

Weinberg, also a musician, accompanied Matisyahu on acoustic guitar, as did Dave Holmes, a member of Matisyahu’s band.

Matisyahu spoke afterward about how strongly the performance resonated with him. “When you have an audience listening, taking the journey with you, it’s pretty special,” he said. “For some reason, we seem to be having these kinds of performances at Jewlicious shows.”

There’s also some more coverage in The Forward, where Gordon Haber finds some flaws with the festival, but still asks to be invited back next year…which perhaps tells us a little about just how flawed it really was. Our own Rabbi Yonah, co-founder of Jewlicious Festivals, responded to and corrected some of Haber’s assumptions, but I found Yonah’s report on the survey of the people attending Jewlicious 6.0 more fascinating. Here are the details he provided about the make-up of the 900 or so people in attendance:

How do you define your Jewish affiliation?

Unaffiliated 8.3%
Other 9.7%
Reform 30.6%
Conservative 34.7%
Orthodox 16.7%

Seems fairly representative of the Jewish community at large, if one excludes the unaffiliated which make up about half of American Jewry these days.

UPDATE: More Jewlicious 6.0 videos from Jewish Journal

Hi, it’s me again.  I’ve been away, but now I’m back.  I blame Jersey Shore.

Here’s a review I wrote for one of the movies I saw in the DC Jewish Film Festival in December, but it’s still relevant because Gad Elmaleh’s still hot.

I don’t think there’s anything more awesome about DC than being able to go to Le French Embassy for a Jewish Film Festival (you can read about the last movie I saw here, and please note that I was compensated with free tickets for the festival, but as always, I don’t endorse anything that’s lame). I did just that last week. Can you tell I was excited by my tweets?

There, we saw the short film 10 Weizman Street, which turned into the feature, Comme ton Pere (Father’s Footsteps in English.)

I wish everyone could see both movies. Fortunately, I’ve found 10 Weizman Street on YouTube.

It takes place in 1991, somwhere in Tel Aviv, amongst abandoned back streets. It is the Gulf War and three Soviet immigrants-a father, mother, and daughter and straight from Ben Gurion, lugging their suitcases in hand and Soviet, stiff, mothball-filled clothes looking extremely out of place in the shimmering dry dust of the Holy Land of Florentin. The daughter is weaing a Soviet school uniform. They struggle with all the things that immigrants struggle with when they put on the new uniform of their adoptive homeland. All of a sudden, an air raid siren sounds, signaling that they have 45 seconds to get to a miklat (bomb shelter)-it’s Saddam Hussein and the SCUD missiles, and alien people wearing gas masks run through the street.

The film is only 13 minutes long, but in a way, it sums up the whole of the post-Soviet immigrant experience in Israel-the fear, the frustration, the completely new laws of the West. And, although the episode is surreal, it happened hundreds and thousands of times, in slight variations, for thousands of immigrants in the same way. All in all, a completely subtle, quiet, and extremely powerful film. Here it is:

Part I

Part II

Everything in the short resonated completely with me, especially as a single girl child of Soviet immigrants who went through much the same process over a longer period of time.

And then, there is Comme on Pere. The scene below showcases one of the things I loved most about it-the period outfits.

The next movie, Father’s Footsteps, or Comme ton pere in French, was also a jewel. The showing was prefaced with an introduction by the director, Marco Carmel, who sought to recreate the story of his childhood in France with a father who he originally thought was larger than life. In the movie, Marco as Michel, is the youngest of two sons of Algerian immigrants to Israel who have decided to go to France to experience the world in the early 1970s. He sees his father, played by even hotter than Clive Owen talented thespian and Moroccan-born Jew Gad Elmaleh, as a superhero. Instead, Elmaleh, while well-meaning and extremely concerned about -

-where was I? Oh, yes. Elmaleh’s character, Felix, falls in with the wrong crowd while selling antiques at a market in Paris and-

-em. Elmaleh’s character falls in with a bad crowd and eventually resorts to crime with his partner, an older Jewish gangster from the same town in Algeria as he is, Gabes, leaving his family broken and his youngest son, Michel, devastated and without a solid base.

This movie is about so many things, and all of the actors in it are skilled on so many levels. Not only does Elmaleh carry the movie as a family man and a gever gever, but his wife, played by Yael Abecassis (who also did an excellent job in Lech, Lechi in 2006), also has excellent on-screen presence that is subtle but just right as she struggles to raise two teenage boys and rise above the circumstances. The relationship between Elmaleh and Abecassis is most touching because, although it is flawed in many ways by Felix’s schemes, it is a relationship between husbands and wives that you don’t see too much anymore-one built on clearly-defined roles but also admiration, and, most evident, class. In the background are the beginnings of the Arab-Israeli conflict as it is currently playing out in France and the Yom Kippur War, all shot in a backdrop of brilliant 70s clothes and hairdos and a combination of Sephardi North African culture that is so foreign to me as an Ashkenazi and that I found fascinating.

The movie is essentially wrapped up as a jewel with an amazing, and ultimately warming plotline, yet one that doesn’t feel saccharine at all, and also at the same time gives us a peek at how people lived in Paris in the 1970s. With this movie, you can really tell that the director was trying to write down his story for absolution so he could move on to other projects. I loved it. Both of them are 100% worth your time.

Marcus Freed’s Website Hacked :

My website has been hacked by an incompetent pro-Iranian Anti Semite! http://www.marcusjfreed.com/gigs/ – although he has only hacked two pages on the *old* website that is badly due for a relaunch. I’d like to thank the hacker for thoughtfully keeping with my black-background colour scheme, although I much prefer the… muted green in his palette as opposed to the lurid flourescent 80’s tone. Watch this space – in a few days my web wizard Simon is going to HACK THE HACKER and mash-up the site!!! Look out for pictures of the Ayatollah Kho-Freedy coming soon….

Here is the stuff the Iranian Hackers left on the Jewish Yogi’s site:

Our belligerence is religious and does not own any borders, thus we are here as long as atheism and blasphemy exist. We do know that effrontery of blasphemy to Imam Khomeini is what that only you can do. This is just a warning to your governmental sites!

Marcus is taking it in stride. After all, he is on another world tour, and will be in LA for the Night of Unity, and Jewlicious Festival!

I just started using MySpace again after a very long long time. I found some msgs in my inbox of people that really had questions. MySpace is the only social network they use.

So I updated my profile and my info, and so forth, and am pleased to say that MySpace has become a better medium for social networking.

When we started Jewlicious Festival way back in 2005 – there was no Facebook. We created a profile for the Festival as it was called back then “Jewlicious @ The Beach” - http://www.myspace.com/jewlicious_at_thebeach.

I asked our veteran of MySpace on the JF Team to please update the profile, and look into changing the unfortunate vanity name that was put up, namely, the old name of the fest.

Sarah has been trying now for two weeks to get the name changed and keeps getting back the same generic email.

Hello,

Thanks for contacting MySpace.

We apologize however, a MySpace user’s URL/web address is permanent and cannot be changed or edited.

Sincerely,
The MySpace Support team

For assistance with all MySpace services please visit:
http://help.myspace.com

We want to give these guys at NewsCorps MySpace one more chance. Please – change the name of our Festival Page. We are starting to feel that you don’t really care about the individual user, the small not-for-profits, the college students, the unemployed recent grads, the Jews, the list goes on. It seems you just care about the million dollar ads, the overwhelming promotions that interrupt constantly, Black Eyed Peas, Lady Ga-Ga and reality tv shows. Oh MySpace, purveyor of media overload, please show us some love?
MySpace – Take Down That Name! Please. Pretty please?

Tweets in reverse chronological order during Q&A after Jewish community screening of Inglourious Bastards, hosted by The LA Jewish Journal, the Consulate General of Israel, and the Board of Rabbis of Southern California. Q&A With: Lawrence Bender, producer of “Basterds,” producer of all Quentin Tarantino’s films as well as the Academy Award-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Good Will Hunting.” Christoph Waltz received the Best Actor Award at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Nazi Col. Hans Landa. Rob Eshman, Jewish Journal Editor led the Q&A. Session filmed by Weinstein Company. [Note: I updated the spelling of Inglourious Basterds -- which I had spelled Inglorious Bastards in my Tweets.]

Got to see my son killing Hitler — Bear Jew’s Dad at Inglourious Basterds screening

Audience loves Waltz, Tarantino!

Tarantino references tons of classic WWII films. He must have seen then all.

The level of suspense on a 30 minute sequence in German. Not been done before Inglourious Basterds. — Tarantino

Movie is only fantasy when story veers from history. In WWII language was a matter of life or death. — Tarantino

Had my characters existed, it could have happened. — Tarantino

Until they kill Hitler at end, it’s not fantasy. All the WWII films have imagination. — Tarantino

Thought they might not find an actor for lead actor of Lada, the lead Nazi. Without Waltz no Inglourious Basterds. –Bender

Audience loves Tarantino.

Tarantino did a ton of research — powered by his imagination. Would make up stuff, and look it up and find he was right.

Inglourious Basterds has many many parallels to things that happened in real life. — Tarantino

“Once upon a time in occupied France.” It’s a fairy tale. Says Tarantino re Inglourious Basterds

Tarantino attending! Seems the whole cast but Brad Pitt is here.

There is a propaganda movie inside Inglourious Basterds.

Inglourious Basterds will get more people interested in the holocaust. — Bender

What does it say that this is the Holocaust film of our era? And the Blurring of history and fantasy? — Michael Birenbaum

The survivors start taking — Inglourious Basterds would have never happened. Jews didn’t take revenge.

Christof’s son wants to be a Rabbi.

@rabinkos a ton of violence but surreal.

Tarantino and Bender visited Israel, Yad VaShem. Theater went nuts when at end of film we see The Face of Jewish Revenge.

Could a German or Jew have made it? It needed Tarantino — Waltz

Discussing Nazi. How was Inglourious Basterds received in Germany and Israel? http://yfrog.com/373gqij

I am having flashbacks to working on the set of The Pianist

How did Inglourious Basterds hit Jews on the gut level?

Is Inglourious Basterds “good for the Jews?” — I guess that is why we are here.

At Q&A w/ Christoph Walz and Lawrence Bender after Inglourious Basterds screening w/ Jewish Journal’s Rob Eshman

Special screening of Inglourious Basterds (@ The Landmark – West LA in LA) http://bit.ly/6EfOrw

He used to be such a hottie. Funny what time and 30+years of bitter, gutwrenching hostility can do to a man, habibi.

[Sidenote: for a COMPLETE list of Middle Eastern hottie/dead leaders, see this link.]

I am concerned. Muammar Gaddafi doesn’t have a place to sleep during his stay in the United States, having been denied by the Dirty Zionist town of Englewood, New Jersey,possibly denied by Jewish conspirator Donald Trump, and turned down at a number of major New York hotels.

To help him feel a little more at home in his Bedouin tent cum traveling Ringling Brothers Flying High Top as he continues to bring the Haterade on America (and Israel), I’ve graciously come up with a list of locations should feel free to use.  You can thank me later, Mo Mo.  Preferably by giving me my own AK-47.

1.  Newark, New Jersey-Its crime rate has plummeted to only 60% shootings every day!
2.  My home hood near Susquehannah Univesity, Pennsylvania, where there’s only a slight chance he’ll get cancer
3.  Clearfield, Pennsylvania, where he could possibly choke to death/die of cholesterol poisoning from a 5 lb burger
4. Some place in New York where there is a very small chance he could get run over by an epliplectic lorry driver (WTF is a lorry?)
5.  And the most obvious place?  An actual Bedouin Tent! Granted, it’s a restaurant and probably they could stick him near the sink or something, but still.  Duh, MoMo.  Think on your feet.  How did you ever stay in power so long.  You should just hire me to do all your major decisions for you.  First decision Ouiki would make? (yes, that’s right.  There’s no V in Arabic, so you have to substitute with a U.  No wonder Lybia never got anywhere.  How retarded is that? Oueri.)

A while ago, I revealed that Mr. B and I would be going on a mini-Birthright for him.  Except it wasn’t free.  Because it’s kind of awkward for married people to go on Birthright.  Since I’ve already been, and I’m not a big fan of him walking drunk down Ben Yehuda Street asking Israeli girls to “show him their weapons.”  Plus, married people are lepers and we, like, aren’t really supposed to mingle with single people. Is there a Birthright for married people? Beshertright?  (Note: I’ve never called Mr. B my beshert in all my life.  Usually just my tsuris.)

Anyway, long story short, I gave him the Birthright rundown of Israel over the past two weeks.

Here is us, jetlagged to hell in historic Yafo with the historic Tel Aviv behind us and some historic German tourists (meaning they were old as hell) taking our picture.   What you don’t know is that we have also just taken 5 doses of acid in order to smile after landing at 5:00 am and hitting the ground running.  Zionism is hard, people.

Here’s us, stirring up some bidness at the Dome of the Rock, which Mr. B noted was “not as shiny as I expected,” and “was highly disappointed in the whole thing.”

And here’s me with some guy that was roaming the mean streets of Jerusalem that knows the best humusiyot in on every Jerusalem hill.  You can never be too careful out there.

]]> http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/09/back-from-israel-quick-taglitfortwo-sponsor-our-next-flight/feed/ 6 http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/08/jews-back-in-ukraine/ http://www.jewlicious.com/2009/08/jews-back-in-ukraine/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:14:28 +0000 vicki http://www.jewlicious.com/?p=9969

I bet you’ve been wondering where I was.  Well, I’ll give you a hint.

No.  Not with Amy Winehouse.   I was at a Russian Jew wedding.  Eight hours away.  So, I’ve been all discombobulated, especially since we are leaving next week for Eretz Nehederet.  So, I’m cheating a little bit.

Here’s a post about Ukraine or something.

So, you know how ck recently had a post about the UJC Community Heroes?   I’m over it.  You know why?  A certain Genia Brin.  Not only is she the mother of Sergey Brin, who I totally could have married and now been Beemin’ up and down Mountain View, but also she decided to spearhead HIAS’s MyStory project, which is a social network for ex-Soviet Jews to share their immigration story.

She does not know that she has led me to drink and despair (and Nutella binges)

This network totally ruins my chances of writing the Great American Novel about how Hard it is to be all Russian Jewish and immigranty and angsty, when thousands of other people have had the same experience, and can now chronicle it ON A SOCIAL NETWORK.  They are giving away all my trade secrets of immigrant sorrow. I mean, it’s true that there’s Gary Shteyngart and Emil Draitser and Eugene Mirman and Sana Krasikov and Mark Budman , but whatevs!  If I wrote a book, wouldn’t you be shocked to know that, for example, my earliest memory is of my mom breaking my shovel on a frozen lake in Yaroslavl, Russia?  I cried for at least forty minutes.  Well, that’s touching and all, but HOW CAN I TOP BEING IN A GHETTO IN MINSK?  I can’t.

Time to accidentally hike into Iran or something. I gotta up my game.