Route 17:  Hey George, Tell Me About Obama




Barack Hashem Obama's followers still don't get it, beside showing themselves to be as humorless as Satmar and easily the most paranoid and thin-skinned political operators since Richard Nixon.


Some of the Obama people fancy him as a new Kennedy but both John and Bobby Kennedy's campaigns sparkled with self-deprecating humor. The Kennedy camp never took such an elitist offense to jokes and cartoons the way the Obama people have jumped up and down taking offense over the  cartoon on The New Yorker's cover. Of course, by the logic of the Obamaphiles, I can't say what was on the cover because that might add to the smear every bit as the cartoon itself added to the smear. So I silence myself.


The contempt and elitism that Obama showed for religious working-class Americans in his "bitter" remarks during the Pennsylvania primary is echoed in the contempt for Americans that his followers, in and out of the media, exhibit when they insist that most Americans are too stupid to "get" The New Yorker cartoon.


Americans have a great tradition of mass populist political humor, from late night talk shows to newspaper cartoons (from Herblock to Doonesbury) to stand-up comedians that have skewered, smeared and exaggerated politicians in a distorting fun-house mirror from Lincoln to both Roosevelts to Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. Somehow the Republic survived. Suddenly when a cartoon is about Obama, Americans are too stupid to understand the incredibly difficult concept of a political cartoon.


When, during a time of black-chasidic tension (I won't say black-Jewish tension because few secular Jews acted like it was their fight, only their embarrassment) The New Yorker had a similar cover cartoon, equally circulated, about a chasidic man smooching with a black woman. Plenty of chasidim took offense but you didn't see liberal Jews lining up to say Americans were too stupid to get it, only that chasidim ought to lighten up and see the brilliance. Only when the satire is in the vicinity of Obama do liberal Jews think Americans need George to explain about the rabbits.


Two of the most self-flattering fantasies of liberal American Jews is that there is such a thing as a black-Jewish alliance and that Jews have a sense of humor, a great tradition of comedy. The black-Jewish alliance, based on Freedom Riders in a flicker of time in the early 1960s, has become as much of an old man's fantasy, as much of a one-sided alliance as the Jewish-Spanish alliance in the 1930s when Communist Jews in New York signed up for the Lincoln Brigade in Spanish civil war. Now we see that the great Jewish tradition of satire and wisecracks is just as meaningless and antiquated, rendered unfit for service in the Jewish sycophantic phalanx that has been set up to protect the "Negro" from what is made out to be a satirical lynching.


In the Obama administration prepare to see enemy lists of the sort that Nixon had. Except that Nixon's enemy list was comprised of real people with real names who really hated Nixon. The Obama enemy list is being comprised of anonymous e-mails and even liberal and creative people at The New Yorker who actually like Obama. And of course, the infantry troops for Obama's enemy list will be the progressives, those who love the First Amendment until the other guy - even a liberal cartoonist -- gets protected by it, too.


The Obama people, the professional offense-takers, really see themselves as the good guys, and many of them are good guys. But it is ironic, if irony is still permitted, that after these good guys hurled around the word "fascist" to describe every conservative policy of the last 40 years, we'll be seeing some very real repression in the next four, from attempts to shut down conservative talk radio, to making Reichstag fires out of anonymous, unsourced e-mails. All in the name of progress, in the name of being liberal.


George Carlin once said that fascism won't come to America in jackboots, it will come wearing a smiley face. A smiley face that doesn't like cartoons.

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Route 17: Number One With A Bullet

When Jews talk dictators, we're talking the 1930s and '40s, the great heyday of dictators. But now the great dictator action has shifted from Europe to the African, Asian and Arab world - yes, that "world" before whom we should feel ashamed because of how we treat prisoners and conduct foreign policy.

The good news is that clarity of language is ascendant. After years in which journalists preferred to call dictators by the honorarium of  "chairman" or  "president," let alone Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (Yasser Arafat), the word "dictator" is making a comeback,  particularly by the antics of Zimbabwe's Bobby Mugabe.

Slate recently asked, "Who's Africa's Worst Dictator?"  Not Mugabe. They fingered Teodor Obiang of Equitorial Guinea.

Then (June 30) Times columnist Nicholas Kristof blogged, "Who's The World's Worst Dictator?" . He nominates North Korea's Kim Jong-il, Sudan's Omar Al-Bashir, and Than Shwe of Burma. Kudos to Kristof for calling Burma by it's rightful name - Burma - not Myanmar.

Myanmar is only used by progressives so progressive they live in fear that somebody, somewhere, might say Barack Hashem Obama's ineffable middle name. Burma's name was changed to Myanmar by its military dictatorship. To call Burma "Myanmar" is like calling Patty Hearst "Tania," her nom de guerre while kidnapped.

Earlier this year, Parade, the Sunday newspaper supplement, ran what has become an annual list, "The World's Worst Dictators,"  a nice  interactive feature. (Alert: Parade calls Burma…)

Parade's ranking:

1: Kim Jong-il, North Korea
2: Omar Al-Bashir, Sudan
3: Than Shwe, Myanmar
4: King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia
5: Hu Jintao, China
6: Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe
7: Sayyid Ali Khamenei, Iran
8: Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan
9: Islam Karimov, Uzbekistan
10: Isayas Afewerki, Eritrea
11: Muammar al-Qaddafi, Libya;
12: Bashar al-Assad, Syria;
13: Teodoro Obiang Nguema, Equatorial Guinea;
14: King Mswati III, Swaziland;
15: Meles Zenawi, Ethiopia; 
16: Aleksandr Lukashenka, Belarus;
17: Hosni Mubarak, Egypt;
18: Raul Castro, Cuba;
19: Choummaly Sayasone, Laos;
20: Idriss Deby, Chad.

Next time you ask, "What would the world say?" look over that list. That's what the world looks like.

Unlike Slate, Parade has Obiang only at number 13. Israel is doing all it can to sign a treaty with number 12. The Bush administration really likes number 4, and the recipient of the most American foreign aid (after Israel) is number 17. Meanwhile, I'm constantly getting e-mails offering me banking transactions from the land of number 20.

Of course, "it can't happen here." But on a Sunday in 1917, with our boys fighting "over there," you could have read this headline in The New York Times Sunday magazine with your morning coffee: "NEED OF DICTATOR URGED BY HARDING; Republican Senator from Ohio Favors Absolute Power for President, Even If He Is a Democrat."

The article begins: "What the United States needs and what it must have if it is to win the war is a supreme dictator with sole control of and sole responsibility for every phase of war activity, and this today means practically every phase of Government."

Only until the war is over, added Harding.

"My own conviction," said the senator, "is that the world is aflame and we have a republic to save."

In fairness to Harding, he was talking in 1917, the dead ball era, before the great sluggers of the 1930s redefined the genre. But it is nevertheless remarkable that Harding's calling for a dictatorship did not stop the American public from electing him chief executive in 1920.

I would have voted for him, after Wilson got us into that horrific, wasteful war, with its thousands of dead soldiers, and his delusion of "making the world safe for democracy," that solved nothing except creating more terrorists, like Germany's Corporal Hitler.

What really would have been important to me in 1920 was that Harding was "good for  the Jews." When he was running for president,  he condemned the "barbarity" of European pogroms and anti-Semitism "in many lands, even sometimes in our own." The Jews, said Harding, have "commanded my admiration by their genius, industry, endurance, patience and persistence, the virtue and devotion…"

Okay, you can stop, I'm flattered! I can hear the Jewish leaders saying, Harding really is a friend of the Jews!

And he supported Zionism! Harding said he hoped that Jews "will be restored to their historic national home," surely he must have been thinking of Hebron and a united Jerusalem, "and there enter into a new and yet greater phase of their contribution to the advance of humanity."

Teapot Dome? What's Shabbos without a teapot?

So what if he had a middle name? He was the best friend Israel ever had.

Until Coolidge.

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Route 17: No Big Bad Wolf In This Housing Crisis

The housing crisis we keep hearing about is being reported almost entirely from the vantage point of speculators and sellers. But if you are a young couple starting out in life, seeking to buy your first apartment or home, why is it a crisis if the housing market is in a recession, prices dive and you can suddenly afford to buy?

The great Jewish renaissance on the Upper West Side that began in the 1960s and '70s was, to a large  extent, the result of a depression in the West Side housing market. Young people, fresh out of college and graduate school; artists; writers; academics; young marrieds; and civic servants were able to move into large apartments on West End Avenue and its side streets at very low rents. These were the people who formed the core of Lincoln Square Synagogue in its heyday, who gave Shlomo Carlebach the congregation he deserved on 79th Street, who revived Anschei Chesed, who developed what was arguably the most creative, religiously and intellectually stimulating Jewish neighborhood in New York City in the last century or any other century.

What we're seeing in New York City is not a crisis but a correction, the first price declines in a decade. According to a recent article in The Sun, "The slowdown spells trouble for next year," said an appraiser for Prudential Douglas Elliman. "Unless the credit crunch lessens… it will have the effect of  tempering prices."

Whose "trouble" is that? If you're selling, it's trouble. If you're buying, it would have been trouble if prices kept rising as dramatically as they had  been.

Again, according to date acquired by The Sun, "the average sales price of condominiums and cooperative apartments fell between 1% and 3% versus last quarter, but jumped between 25% and 36% from a year ago." That inflation was a crisis for buyers. Who cried for them?

According to the Associated Press, the National Association of Realtors reported that in May, "Sales went up 2 percent… The median sales price, however, fell to $208,600, down 6.3 percent from a year ago. That was the fifth biggest year-over-year price decline in records that go back to 1999."

That's right, based on records that go all the way back, um, less than a decade. "Fifth biggest" in a decade seems to be just about right, Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold. Exactly how would this be a crisis in a non-election year?

The Wall Street Journal noted (June 26) that Rep. Barney Frank, author of Congress's $300 billion housing bailout, said, "Having Bank of America buy up Countrywide is a good thing for America."

The Democrat from Massachusetts may be right about Bank of America's better management, said the Journal's editors, "but there's no doubt his legislation is very good for both Countrywide and B-of-A. Thanks to this bailout that is now on the Senate floor, taxpayers could end up on the hook for more than $25 billion in loans originated by Countrywide."

Whose crisis is that, except those whose taxes will pay for the bailout?

Before you cry for those apartment owners in Manhattan who might be suffering through a housing crisis that might shave a few thousand off a price in the high six-figures, even seven-figures, check out this piece in the Times to see what co-ops were being sold for just thirty years ago.

The Upper West Side became one of the greatest Jewish neighborhoods ever -- pre-war Europe and modern Israel included - because rents were in free fall. The Zionist revival got going because JNF "blue box" nickels and dimes were able to buy up what is now the State of Israel at depressed prices. Every crisis has its blessing. To twist the Grateful Dead, one man's touch of grey is another's silver lining.

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Route 17: Potiphar's Wife & The Spiritual

History is written by the winners, and so is the Torah. Korach is depicted as a bad guy, when an honest reading of the last three-and-a-half books of the Torah suggest that Moses was a singularly uninspiring leader, a less poetic speaker than most any prophet that followed, and just begging for a challenge from Korach or anyone else. Whatever Korach's failings, the tragedy of the Korach story is that a more suitable challenger to Moses was surely intimidated into silence by the heavy-handed obliteration of Korach.

I trust the Torah's version of things, and that it always works out for the best, but as much as I would have been sinfully sympathetic to Korach, if I were around in Egypt, during the final chapters of Bereshit, I'd have told Joseph to sleep with Potiphar's wife. Looking at the story, Joseph owes nothing to Mr. Potiphar, his slave master. I'd have pointed out that Judah's relationship with Tamar was considerably more ethically challenged than sleeping with Potiphar's wife, and yet the child from Judah and Tamar is destined to be Moshiach. Abraham's convincing Sarah to pretent they weren't married when they went into Egypt was also more unseemly than the goings on between Joseph and Lady Potiphar, and that incident doesn't hold Abraham back from his elite place in our hearts and history.

I figure Joseph never have had a girlfriend before being sold into slavery -- and here was Potiphar's wife. If God didn't excommunicate and disinherit the slave-selling brothers from the Children of Israel, then exactly what crime would Joseph be committing that could threaten his Biblical standing? 

If a depressed slave, abandoned by God's chosen family, could find a few hours of affection with Madame Potiphar; if young, rejected Joseph could experience even the illusion of love (if not the real thing) then, really, what would be the harm?

There's even a chasidic interpretation that absolves Potiphar's wife; she had a vision of who Joseph was to become, and that her children were to be a part of it, she wanted to be a part of it. Though her vision was not understood entirely correctly, as visions are prone to misinterpretation, she was on to something that was more holy than not. 

There was no apparent reason for Joseph to say no. Instead, Joseph became the first person in the written chronicles of Judaism to walk away from something that could have been personally satisfying simply because he was convinced it was wrong; simply because it would be wrong in God's eyes, even if no other eyes would have known.

What had me thinking of Joseph's slave days was an item on NPR's "Speaking of Faith," the most consistently intelligent venue for religious conversation on the national airwaves. The host, Krista Tippett, was re-running an old interview with the late Joe Carter, the great singer of black spirituals, about the religious sensibility of the spiritual (there are some 5,000 spirituals in the canon) born of the American slave experience, often filtered through biblical themes and verses in Psalms.

"The thing we find," Joe said of the slaves, "is that in the midst of all of the most horrible pain, some of these powerful individuals lived transcendent, shining lives. They were able to be loving and forgiving in the midst of it all. Mammy was taking care of master's baby. She could have smothered that child. But she loved the child like it was her own child, because there was something in her faith that said, 'You're supposed to be loving, you're supposed to be kind, you're supposed to be forgiving - and there's no excuse if you're not.'"

Like Joseph, the Mammy owed nothing to anyone, and yet - by all Southern accounts - did the right thing by white children, simply because, like Joseph, there was an awareness of what would be the right thing in God's eyes, even if no other eyes were watching.

You can catch the interview with Carter here .

Some other worthwhile "Speaking of Faith" programs available online are a pair of conversations with Yossi Klein Halevi,here and here , and a conversation with JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen on Abraham Joshua Heschel, here.

I'd love to hear a conversation of my own with Joseph and Potiphar's wife.

Their chapter in Bereshit is as incomplete, unconvincing and inconclusive as any in the Holy Book, perhaps because their chapter was unfinished. There's a mystical tradition that various star-crossed lovers in Tanach had successful conclusions later in history. Dina and Shechem were reincarnated as Cosbi and Zimri, only to fail again as lovers, returning yet again as Rabbi Akiva and the kindly wife of a Roman general, Turnus Rufus, as you can see here,   centuries after their earlier fiascos.

Joseph and Potiphar's wife may not yet have written their final chapter either, several millennia later. It's why we tell the stories of the Torah in the present tense. Because their stories, like ours, are never over. Even after we   seem to be gone, the story is never over.

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Route 17:  Cooperstown, Carousels And Torah Arks / By Jonathan Mark

All good Americans, at some point, ought to visit Cooperstown,  a most beautiful village rightfully known for baseball's Hall of Fame, but if you're planning a visit, consider an excursion to Cooperstown's Fenimore Art Museum, about a mile north of the Hall.

This summer, the Fenimore is presenting "Gilded Lions And Jeweled Horses," celebrating the Eastern European Jewish woodcarvers who not only created the classic shul artistry of a previous century but who were the woodcarvers behind many of the classic American carousels.

I'm sorry I didn't get to this exhibit when it was in New York City at the American Folk Art Museum, but the American Folk people put together a terrific online exhibit, right here, that explains and displays the journey of these Jewish woodcarvers from shtetl shuls to Coney Island carousels. Turn up the volume because when the online exhibit gets around to the carousel display there's some fine calliope carousel music that plays along with it.

And click here  to see more on what's going on at the Fenimore.

Suddenly the wide-eyed, nostril-flaring lions carved on an old Aron Kodesh or flanking a shul's Ten Commandments will be seen in a new light, as first cousins to the wide-eyed, nostril-flaring horses and lions that are still running in circles from Rye Playland to the Orange County Fair, just off Route 17.

The Orange County Fair, in Middletown, N.Y. (July 16-27), is the closest cattle-and-carousel traditional large-scale county fair to New York City. A much smaller fair, quaint and worth visiting if you're already in the mountains, is Sullivan County's 129th Grahamsville Little World's Fair, Aug. 15-17.

Rest assured, the Grahamsville Little World's Fair has absolutely nothing to do with the world beyond Grahamsville; nothing to do with anything at all that existed before July or will exist again after August, except in memory.

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Route 17: The Latest Jerusalem Massacre

I'm as sympathetic as the next guy to the idea of a "united" Jerusalem but I love Jews more than I love Arab neighborhoods and meaningless municipal boundaries that have zero historic validity. It's time to keep those parts of Jerusalem that Jews actually live in and visit, and throw the rest overboard. 

What's the point in having a security fence up and down the West Bank if Israel won't have one in Jerusalem because Israel is more interested in proving a Zionist point about a united Jerusalem than Israel is in saving Jewish lives?

What's the logic in not allowing bloodthirsty Palestinians from Nablus to cross a fence but allowing bloodthirsty Palestinians from East Jerusalem to freely cross the street and perpetuate massacres at the Rav Kook yeshiva in March, and now downtown?

"To our regret the attackers do not cease coming up with new ways to strike at the heart of the Jewish people here in Jerusalem," said Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski.

Hey, mayor, come up with your own "new ways" of dealing with these attacks before Jerusalem turns into Baghdad. Extend the security wall across the Arab neighborhoods where these last two mass murderers came from, and revoke all work permits from those neighborhoods, giving them the status of Nablus. That's their de facto status anyway. If any of them have reason to enter Jewish Jerusalem, make them wait for hour after humiliating hour at checkpoints. It ought to be more humiliating to Zionists, after seven years of rockets, murders, maiming and amputations, that Israel doesn't have a clue how to protect the Jewish people. That's humiliating. The security fence is a clue. Put it up tomorrow in Arab Jerusalem.

If Israel refuses to protect the Jewish people under its flag, than Israel should be man enough to tell tourists to stay home in America, and not send our children to post-graduation programs in a Jerusalem whose politicians refuse to make a distinction between a Jew and a jihadist.

Now some Honesdale Moshava Zionists may say to me, "Hey pal, you ought to keep quiet because you're in America." I say in return, I keep seeing Israelis jump through hoops, risking and losing Jewish lives, because of "pressure from America," because "what will the world say?" Well, I'm part of the world so I'll tell Israel what to do just like everybody else.

I can give a pretty good list of American Jews that were murdered in Israel while Israel was worrying about Condi Rice or Madeline Albright. Those dead American Jews give me the right. When Israel completes its transition from a Jewish State to Canaan, I'll keep quiet. In the meantime, I want to see a wall and I want checkpoints in Jerusalem.

You're worried about the Arab street? Start worrying about the Jewish street.

Will long and humiliating checkpoints make Palestinians more radical? How could you tell? 

And here's a question for you, dear reader: Why don't dead Jews in the street make you more radical?

Let me present two witnesses from the left, B'tselem and Haaretz, radicalized by events.

Many of the most leftist columnists love quoting B'tselem, the self-appointed "information center" for the "occupied territories" when it comes to making Israel look bad. Suddenly, no columnists are quoting B'tselem when B'tselem says this about the lastest mass murder:

"Intentional killing of civilians is a grave breach of international humanitarian law and is considered a war crime that can never be justified, whatever the circumstances may be. The main justification raised by Palestinian organizations for attacks on Israeli civilians is that 'in the struggle to end foreign occupation and achieve independence, all means are legitimate.' This argument is baseless and undermines the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, which requires that civilians remain outside the sphere of hostilities, and therefore stipulates that a distinction must be made between combatants and civilians and that intentional attacks on civilians are prohibited. These rules are part of international customary law and apply to every state, organization, and person. The Palestinian organizations must immediately stop attacks on civilians…. Since the attack was carried out by Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority has the obligation to prosecute the persons responsible for planning and carrying it out."

And this, from Bradley Burston in the leftist Haaretz: "The attack came after the latest in a series of attempts by groups in the states, some of them atheist/anarchist, some of them Muslim, some of them Jewish, to lobby Protestant churches and respected universities to divest from Caterpillar, because the IDF uses its bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes.

"I would like to hear them now. Just once. I would like them to divest from terrorism. Not understand it as the natural outgrowth of the crimes of occupation. For once, I would like my sisters and brothers on the left to be every bit as hard on their comrades the Palestinians for taking a bulldozer and crushing Jews, as they are on Israel for bulldozing homes. Write a letter to Ismail Haniyeh, to Mahmoud Zahar, to Sami Anu Zuhri. Protest in your own communities, for once, calling terrorism what it is. Intentional, brutal, premeditated, immoral. Murder.

"What's a decent person to think when Palestinian groups fall over one another trying to claim the bulldozer attack? … I, for one, would like to ask for proof of what it is that Palestinians really want. I no longer believe that it's as simple as wanting statehood. This is what I don't yet want to admit: that for all these years, in 2008 no less than in 1902, what a critical mass of Palestinians want most, perhaps even more than statehood, may be as simple as the vile thrill [of] seeing Jews dead and gone."

It's time for another wall in Jerusalem, a lifesaving wall that will be every bit as sacred as that other wall in the Old City.

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Route 17:  Tania Grossinger's Book

Summer's here and there's a new book in the bookstores, "Growing Up At Grossinger's" (Skyhorse Publishing), by Tania Grossinger that turns out to be an old book, a reprint of what she first published in 1976, that has almost nothing to do with the hotel that many of us remember and miss. Considering that the hotel closed after the original publication, one could have hoped for a serious autopsy, but that would be hoping for too much.

Her autobiography - awkwardly self-centered, even for the genre -- is about life as a second-class Grossinger cousin, a self-described "hotel brat" in the 1950s. Summer may be timeless but Tania's summers are more dated than most. She tells us what it was like when Eddie Fisher worked and flirted there, and when he brought Debbie Reynolds there, and then Elizabeth Taylor. Tania's book has cameos by Kim Novak, Jackie Robinson, Rocky Marciano, Jayne Mansfield, Milton Berle, and how Tania liked one of the pool boys, and how she didn't particularly like the guests, not that any of the guests are anything more than shadowy, stick-figures that are rarely given names, let alone life.

In other words, gentle reader, her book has nothing to do with you.

And when I think Grossinger's I think of you, not a Cindy Adams column from the Korean War years.

I miss those Catskill venues where New York's Jews could be with each other in a way we no longer can.

Anyone who ever spent time in the Catskills knows that the celebrities and entertainers were the sideshow; the guests, like you, were the main attraction. Any journalist who tells you otherwise probably wasn't there, or wasn't paying attention. The guests were the story, which is why I'd rather read a book about the Pine View Hotel, or any of a hundred other hotels, where the comedians and entertainers were less famous than Eddie Fisher or Milton Berle but were considerably more interesting and entertaining; where the staff and owner-families were  socially integrated with the guests; and where a Jewish milieu was created that was as enchanting, as magical, as anything by Chagall or the best Yiddish writers - or anything found in Israel, for that matter.

I'd rather be in the Pine View tearoom one more time than in a suite at the King David or some generic seaside joint in Tel Aviv. I'd rather sit in the Grossinger's lobby at two in the morning than listen to politicians address the Israel lobby in some D.C. ballroom.

I can watch Kim Novak and Elizabeth Taylor on late-night TV movies, but there is no channel that could show me you on the Grossinger's lawn on Shevuous when the sky opened at midnight (K'tonton fans) in 1979. If I wanted A-list entertainment I could go to Vegas. I'd rather watch, in my mind's eye, old men in winter coats walking around and around the empty Grossinger's pool on a cold day on Pesach than interview Tania Grossinger about how she got to know the "stars," but she never got to know you.

Readers wanting to see some photo and postcard galleries spanning the entire "mountains," along with wonderful Catskills musings, may enjoy a visit to both the Catskills Institute,  a project of Brown University, and Classic Catskills,  photos and columns from the files of the Times Herald-Record, the upstate daily that may be the best non-urban newspaper in the country. The Times Herald-Record also is a superb source for news coverage of current Jewish life in "the country," from Kiryas Joel to Sullivan County.

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Route 17: A Strained Clash

Just hours, really, into the Hamas-Israel truce, rockets flew out of Gaza and landed in Israel.

"Gaza truce strained by rocket fire," headlined Reuters (June 28). Strained? Sending rockets into another country is an act of war. What would the Palestinians of Gaza have to do to advance this beyond strained?

When John Wilkes Booth fired shots at Lincoln, did that strain his  relationship with Mrs. Lincoln? If a man consistently beats a woman up, does that strain their relationship or does it end it? Of course, Israel is very much like a battered woman, she sees the good in the Palestinians. She calls the cops, every now and then, but she won't press charges  or go to "war," as divorce lawyers call it. She wants peace, says the battered woman.

If Israel bombed Gaza City, B'tselem and Rabbis for Human Rights would call it a war crime, not something strained. When rockets fly from Hamas into Israel, no one calls it very much of anything, certainly not a reason for a massive retaliation. The battered woman loves peace, you see.

Speaking of strained language, we saw an item the other day that the saintly black-Jewish coalition "clashed" in Crown Heights in 1991. That's what too many journalists like to call it, a clash, which implies an equity of complaint. It was a clash the way a rock hitting glass is a clash, the rock complaining that the broken window hit him first.

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Route 17:  AIDS and  Insincerity

My uncle, Michoel Shmuel, died of AIDS a while back, murdered by a blood transfusion given to him in a Bronx hospital, so I take the AIDS issue seriously and with some measure of resentment.

Back when he died, in the late 1980s, AIDS was the equivalent of global warming -- partially science, partially politics, partially hysteria. My uncle was neither gay nor a drug addict, the two constituencies from whence the spread of AIDS primarily originates. Yet, it was politically correct for even doctors to say that AIDS would quickly move into the heterosexual community, as well. It didn't, other than scattered deaths, such as my uncle's.

We were all threatened, supposedly, even if we were neither gay nor needle-users. AIDS predictions from the 1980s now sound as ridiculous as Barack Obama already sounds when he promises that his presidency will be "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow."

He must have been watching "Atlantic City," when Burt Lancaster's old-timer looks at the ocean and says, "You should have seen it in the old days, kid. It was something."

A 1987 Time cover story, "How Heterosexuals Are Coping With AIDS," told us: "The numbers as yet are small, but AIDS is a growing threat to the heterosexual population. Straight men and women in some cases do not believe it, in some cases do not want to believe it," just as some of us do not want to believe that the "rise of the oceans" are about to cover the Throgs Neck Bridge. But it was the skeptics about the "political" science and probability of AIDS that proved to be correct.

Even in 2008, AIDS activists still prefer to say that "all" of us are in danger even though "all" of us are not.

This past week, The New York Times front-page headlined (June 26):  "Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All." This is like saying that terrorism is best fought by strip-searching elderly Jewish ladies at the airport instead of profiling young Islamic men.

According to the Times, "The New York City health department plans to announce… an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx." That can only mean the health department thinks its limited resources is best spent by testing Rabbi Mordechai Willig and the morning minyan at his Young Israel of Riverdale, and then taking blood from old Jewish guys in the Amalgamated co-ops near Van Cortlandt, before wrapping up the day by setting up a table outside Glatt Shop on Johnson Avenue.

When the health department says "all" it means all. But why not tell the truth about who in the Bronx really needs testing, and where health officials could really be doing some good and perhaps even save some precious lives?

This is akin to another front-page story, a few months ago, in the Times (March 12) headlined: "Sex Infections Found in Quarter of Teenage Girls."

There are tens of thousands of teenage girls in Kiryas Joel, Flatbush, Crown Heights, Borough Park, and another two dozen Orthodox neighborhoods where teenage Jewish girls are taught tzniut, modesty in clothes and behavior. Make fun of them all you want, but do you think sex infections are found in a quarter of those teenage girls?

All the comedians and journalists who love taking shots at religious hypocrisy in the name of "honesty" ought to be honest as to which community is raising its girls to be a "quarter" infected and which community is not.

Since so many Jews are infatuated by the phantom black-Jewish coalition, this is an interesting stat: The Times reports, "Nearly half of the African-Americans in the study of teenagers ages 14 to 19 were infected with at least one of the diseases monitored in the study - human papillomavirus (HPV), Chlamydia, genital herpes and trichomoniasis, a common parasite.  The 50 percent figure compared with 20 percent of white teenagers." And what's the percentage of white teenagers who go to Orthodox schools? The modern Orthodox and chassidic school systems would be the fifth largest in New York State if Orthodox New York was measured as a single city. How many of these kids have sexual infections? I'll bet you not many kids at all.

When it comes to AIDS testing, "It's not about one group doing it, it's about everybody doing it," said Dr. Sweeney of the health department.

No, not everybody. Not that there is "nobody" infected in the Orthodox world, but let's give these rabbis, parents and most of all, our teenage girls, some credit. Maybe if everyone wasn't so obsessed with the "unaffiliated" we could spend more time looking at this "affiliated" community to see what works and why.

It was George Orwell's birthday (June 25) this week, and the great prophet once warned, "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns ... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Our health officials, our politicians, even some journalists forsake clear language for insincerity when it comes to fingerpointing exactly where the sexual health crisis exists, where terrorism exists, where danger exists, and where it doesn't.

If Obama could hear Bush speak of appeasement in the appeasement-infested Knesset and be so sure Bush was talking about him on the other side of the globe, maybe a lot of politicians and "social activists" can read that Orwell quote and guess if it applies, just the same.

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Route 17: Fenway, Crosley And 770

For a number of years, cynics would get a good laugh out of the fact that Kfar Chabad, the Lubavitch town in Israel, built a duplicate
of the rebbe's headquarters, 770 Eastern Parkway .

The duplicate 770 was said to be indicative of how crazy and messianist the Chabadniks were, they must have been expecting the rebbe to drop in, pretty funny. Only a chasid could be so nuts, right?

Wrong. I'm not a chasid and I understand completely. When I went to Epcot I got a kick out of the recreations of town squares in Paris and Morocco, and the animatronic presidents in the Magic Kingdom. I like seeing the duplicate Statue of Liberty on a rooftop near Lincoln Center.

Any Jewish soul with a sense of history would be understanding of an Israeli chasid's natural longing to be reminded of a place so beautiful, historic, and evocative of perhaps the greatest Jewish story of the 20th century -- second only to the rebirth of Israel -- the rebbe's campaign to find, love and serve every single Jew on the planet, from the Congo to Kansas.

Baseball fans have built replicas of Fenway's Green Monster.

After the Cincinnati Reds abandoned Crosley Field, those who loved it built a duplicate in Blue Ash, Kentucky, with 600 of the original seats. You can see the outfield wall here , here and here .

The new Yankee Stadium will attempt to replicate the original, the way it was before it was redone in 1976.

Last week, The New York Times (June 15) ran a front-page photo, with an accompanying story, about a beachfront hotel in Turkey,
designed to appeal to Russian tourists. The Kremlin Palace Hotel's buildings are replicas of the Kremlin and the onion domes of St. Basil's Cathedral .

This summer, thousands will be visiting Williamsburg, Virginia to see the recreations. Williamsburg, Brooklyn, attempts a spiritual recreation of Satmar in the Carpathians.

A few days ago, I was in Crown Heights, at the original 770, for a wedding in the alley - an alley just big enough for a chuppah, and ten flanking rows of folding chairs -- between 770 and the Chabad library.

After the ceremony I touched the outer bricks; touched the brick fountain that's gone dry in the small yard in the rear; walked through the old hefty front door into 770's hallway where the rebbe used to stand;  and down the narrow, twisting stairway into the great block-long  fabrenegen hall.

In 1979 it seemed much larger, the size of a football field, or the Temple Mount's plateau. It now seems the size of a shul, or yeshiva study room.

Were there some signs and stickers about Moshiach? Yes. Did it matter? No more than a visit to Jerusalem's Wall would be disturbed by seeing foxes or Palestinians on the Temple Mount. It wouldn't matter anymore than it would to see bumper stickers for McCain and Obama, evidence of mortals and lesser men, in Jefferson's Monticello. What the rebbe did here goes far beyond anyone's poor power to add or detract.

There was holiness in 770, such as tourists would spend thousands of dollars in airfare to see on heritage tours to the Polish woods or  the Ukrainian countryside. In Brooklyn, you can see it - the real thing - for the price of a subway token.

I closed my eyes and ran my fingers over the bricks like a blind man running his fingertips over the face of a beauty queen from some year before I was born.

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Route 17:  Sholom Aleichem's Phone Number

The other week, a local Jewish elementary school put on a heckuva production of "Fiddler On The Roof," but totally corrupted the ending, having Tevye and his family move from Anatevka to Israel, rather than to America. Now isn't that Zionist of the school; Zionism being so noble that even a creaky old musical must corrupt itself as homage to corruption in Olmert's government.

Of course, most Russian Jews didn't move to Kedumim in the early 1900s, they moved to New York City. Mendel Beilis, arrested for killing a Christian kid, Yuschinsky, to make matzahs in 1913, ended up in the Bronx. His daughter, Raya, lives near Tremont - at least, I hope she does. I had a great conversation with her in 1999 (you can read it here), but she was well over 90 when we lost touch and if anyone knows of her whereabouts, please e-mail.

Albert Maysles, the great documentary filmmaker ("Gimme Shelter" and "Grey Gardens") called a while back and said he was thinking of doing a documentary on Beilis. Is there anyone left, along with Rae Beilis, who can speak in first-person about the most pivotal blood libel trial of them all?

Sholom Aleichem, whose stories were the basis for "Fiddler," and who wrote letters on behalf of Mendel Beilis, didn't move to Israel, either. He moved to the Bronx, also. You'd think the day school, which is in the Bronx, too, could find a way to learn about Sholom Aleichem and Bronx Jewish history, if "Fiddler" had to be educational and not simply entertainment.

I once saw Sholom Aleichem's 'business' card, of all things, and I copied it down, as if I could look him up, or call him up, on some magical Bronx night.

According to his card, he lived at 968 Kelly Street. Maybe the "March of the Living" guys could take some yeshiva kids there. I once drove deep into the Bronx to find 968 Kelly Street, and I learnt that Sholom Aleichem lived a few doors down from the trestles of the elevated subway. He, who wrote about Jewish dairy farmers coaxing their cows on dirt roads, also knew what the New York City inner borough streets looked like when forever in the shadows of the tracks.

My friend Sholom Aleichem's phone number (I consider him a friend) is IN(tervale)-2-215, according to his business card. There was one less digit in phone numbers then, and (for all you kids) all phone numbers commenced with the first two-letters of a phone exchange, like BUtterfield-8.

I shouldn't have to explain this history, but there are kids tonight who think Mottle Kamzoil spent the year after high school "learning" in an Israeli yeshiva.

Never listen to anyone who tells you "there's nothing to see" in shtetls or Bronx neighborhoods. I once went "back" to Ciechanow, my grandfather's hometown that the Nazis did a job on before the first snows of World War II. (You can check out Ciechanow's absolutely riveting Yizkor Book here, and look up my old uncle, Benjamin Malina.

So I go back to Ciechanow and this is what I see in a place where there was nothing to see: I see a red sun sinking over trees on a short Friday, exactly what I could have seen in 1833; I see the river, with overhanging willows, where they went for Tashlich; I see the same City Hall that was there in 1839 and 1939, and the nobleman's castle on the edge of town; I pay a couple of kopeks for a ticket to a one-ring circus that pulls into town, with gypsies and fantastical circus wagons and a canvas tent, surely every bit as rickety and charming as the circus must have looked in 1895. I see and hear little dirty-faced Ciechanow children clapping and whistling for a lady in sequins sewn into a worn-out dress, balancing atop a galloping horse going in circles around the ring.

And I saw all that in a town where everyone told me there was nothing to see.

You can see plenty on Kelly Street, too, but you need eyes that see in the dark.

There was a wonderful piece in The New York Times from 1916, a couple of days after Sholom Aleichem was buried in Queens. The Times did a long article on his final goodbyes, advice and instructions to his children, what some  people today might call "an ethical will."  It is as compelling as anything in the genre.

The hefty headline and subheadlines: "Aleichem Begs To Lie With The Poor; Will of Noted Writer Says His Ambition Is to Rest Among Plain Jewish Laborers; Wants Works As Monument; Humorist Makes Touching Appeal For Family And Provides Funds for Yiddish Authors."

You can read the article here.

Don't let anyone tell you that Tevye would move to Ashdod when his friend had a place on Kelly Street.

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Route 17: Sympathy For The Devil

"I shouted out 'Who killed the Kennedys,' when after all
it was you and me."

   -- Rolling Stones, "Sympathy for the Devil"

With all the dust kicked up after Hillary dared mention the assassination of Bobby Kennedy the other week, let's remember one thing. It wasn't you and me that killed the Kennedys, or at least it wasn't me. A pair of leftists killed the Kennedy's: JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald, a defector to the Soviet Union and a "Fair Play for Cuba" guy; RFK by Sirhan Sirhan, a fair play for Palestinian guy from the West Bank.

Go throuh The New York Times archives, or even the archives of most Jewish newspapers, and you'll find more references to Yigal Amir being Orthodox than you will to Sirhan Sirhan being Palestinian; even though the newspapers have had 26 more years to write about the Sirhan  shooting than about the Amir shooting; even though you'd think American newspapers would be more curious about a Kennedy assassination than an Israeli one.

When a politically active, affiliated leftist kills a Kennedy, we're told the assassin was a "lone gunman."

When a lone gunman kills Yitzhak Rabin, we're told the assassin was Orthodox.

Yes, Amir acted alone, said Israeli Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz.

Even most American Jews have been drilled to believe that Amir embodied and embraced all the hopes and darkest dreams of Orthodoxy - even though the Israeli AG declared in 2005 that Amir acted alone. You can read the Yediot article reporting the attorney-general's statement that there was "no proof" of Orthodox incitement right here.

It's not that Amir wasn't exposed to vile bitterness and contempt for the prime minister from a rabbi or two, but no more so than Oswald and Sirhan were exposed to vile bitterness and contempt for the United States from their fellow Communists and Palestinians.

If Bar-Ilan University or pro-settlement yeshivas can be indicted for Yigal Amir, City College can be indicted for the Rosenbergs selling the bomb to the Russians.

When Islamic fascists flew four jets into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, there were news anchors who told us we shouldn't judge Islam. Even Colin Powell said, the very next day, that the attacks "should not be seen as something done by Arabs or Islamics; it is something that was done by terrorists."

The enlightened ones absolve Islam for September 11, 2001, but indict Orthodoxy for November 4, 1995.

It is incredible that in the same week of the anniversary of Kennedy being killed by a Palestinian terrorist, Mike Lupica, in his memoriam to Jim McKay in the Daily News (June 8), writes that McKay "will be remembered best for Munich in 1972 and what was really the beginning of terrorism, real and public terrorism, with the murder of Israeli athletes in the Olympic Village by the Black September group."

No, the killing of Bobby Kennedy by a Palestinian terrorist was "really the beginning of terrorism" for America.

Lupica's confusion exemplifies the free pass that the Palestinians get for killing Bobby, the greatest persistent example of selective media amnesia in the past generation.

The left would have you believe that Bobby was killed because of his "Abraham, Martin and John" civil rights liberalism. In fact, Bobby's murder had nothing to do with civil rights. It had nothing to do with Bobby "walking over the hill" with Abraham, Martin or John because they freed "a lotta people."

No, Bobby was killed in June 1968, on the first anniversary of the Six-Day War because a Palestinian terrorist perceived Kennedy to be unsympathetic to the almost-Final Solution one June earlier. And so, the Palestinian arranged a Final Solution for Kennedy.

Sirhan was not just anti-Zionist, he was anti-Semitic. Evan Thomas, in his 2000 book, "Robert Kennedy: A Life," reports that as the race for the 1968 California primary was drawing to a close, "an olive-skinned, bushy-haired Palestinian-American named Sirhan Sirhan, who had seen an earlier TV report of Kennedy wearing a yarmulke outside a synagogue, bought a box of ammunition for his .22-caliber pistol."

Kennedy putting on a yarmulke was the final straw for Sirhan.

Never has an American tragedy been so mourned, its importance reverberating for generations, and yet so poorly reported or understood.

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Route 17:  The Invulnerable Amazing Grace

Not that long ago, we were talking with Sherwood Goffin (see story here), the wonderful chazzan at Lincoln Square Synagogue, about the problem of amateurs who, when leading services, freely staple niggunim (spiritual melodies), or beautiful popular Israeli songs, such as Erev Shel Shoshanim, or even Puff The Magic Dragon, to verses of the davening without any regard to how appropriate the particular tune might be to the verse.

Some parts of davening are best left alone. Dare I say it, all of us would hope that no chazzan would, when singing Kol Nidrei, try to do something clever with it.

These mistakes are often heard in summer camps, where davening is almost always led by teenagers who rarely have been educated about the "inside baseball" of nusach. The problem has been exacerbated by the explosion of "Carlebach minyans," which has convinced some folks that davening is a campfire at which to sing your favorite songs, a greatest hits concert, which is never how Shlomo Carlebach himself led davening.

It was a serious conversation with Cantor Goffin but I now bring it up just for fun. We are not alone. It has become a running joke in some (Protestant) Christian camps to see how many rock songs, or silly sing-a-long songs, you can fit to the most serious of hymns, such as "Amazing Grace." That august hymn, it turns out, can be mangled around the campfire to "House of the Rising Sun" or "Stairway to Heaven." Try it. (To yourself, please).

On Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor pointed out that "Amazing Grace" could be sung, with some help, to the "Mickey Mouse Club March."

Try it:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
Amazing Grace (Amazing Grace!)
Amazing Grace (Amazing Grace!)
Forever let us hold our banner high (high, high, high)
A-M-A-Z
I-N-G
G-R-A-C-E"

Some wise guys have even sung "Amazing Grace" to the theme from "Gilligan's Island."

Try it:

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
was blind but now I see.
'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
and grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
the hour I first believed.

Now try to get the original majestic melody back in your brain.

Of course, as is the case with all prayer, the words - said to have been based on a prayer by King David-are immune from the ravages of summer camp and can be simply read in the quiet of a soul or a subway car.

Yes, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease;
I shall possess, within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.

There's no way to ruin a prayer when you really mean it. All that's lost will, in the end, be found; all fears, at last, relieved.

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Route 17: The Israel Parade, Again

The Salute To Israel Parade is back in town this Sunday, and it's terrific in a multitude of ways, which begs the question: Why does just about every  Jewish day school lack confidence in the appeal of this parade, so much so that have to make attendance at the parade "mandatory"?

Kids naturally love parades, and most yeshiva kids love Israel, so why is everyone so sure kids won't come to this parade without a whip and chair?

It's not all that different from rabbis deciding, like some Captain Von Trapp, that the shofar won't blow on Yom Kippur because it is mandatory that congregants stay for Ma'ariv. As if we wouldn't. As if it matters if anyone leaves.

As if it matters that 50 less kids will march in many of the groups. So the parade will last five hours instead of seven. I got news for you, the coverage on the evening news and in the morning paper won't be any different. No one will write that the Yeshiva of Pottersville had 90 kids marching and last year they had 112.

Why do organizers and principals treat this parade like Nurse Ratched running a group therapy session in "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," something schoolmarmish, medicinal and hygienic? A parade has to be organized, sure, but where's the room for the spontaneous joy one can see, say, at the West Indian parade on Eastern Parkway? Why are we the only ethnic group that treats this parade like a school assembly?

If it is so "important" for Jews to attend this parade, why do organizers insist the parade be at the one place in Manhattan - Fifth Avenue, between 59th street and 79th street -- where there is no affordable parking and no subways? The parade used to be on Riverside Drive, one block from the West Side Highway, the Broadway local and express, and dozens of places to eat, drink and take a break. But Riverside Drive or any other address is not slick enough for the parade organizers who care more about a slicker zip code than getting and keeping a crowd. Why not revolve this parade through different Jewish neighborhoods and counties?

If "a million people" show up, as the organizers often claim, that would mean each of the 20 blocks of the parade route must average the attendance at a Yankees game - 50,000 people. That's right, a million people means a full Yankee Stadium on each block. If you believe that…

Be honest. How many of you who are going to the parade plan to leave immediately after seeing your kid's school go by and then picking up your kid? People don't bail out early on the Thanksgiving Day parade or a Fourth of July parade. But people leave as soon as they can from the Israel parade because remaining at the parade after your kid's school goes by can feel like standing in the back of an auditorium for an  assembly in a school your kid doesn't go to. Albeit with more balloons.

Some people leave early just to beat the extortionist parking rates, or the logistical nightmare of getting out of that neighborhood.

The parade is good for seeing some old friends. I'll give it that.

I know too many people who have the attitude that once their kids are no longer marching, once it is no longer mandatory, they won't go. Why do you think that is, Nurse Ratched? I'll give you a clue. A parade is supposed to be fun. A parade is supposed to be like the circus coming to town. When you take attendance, when you scold people that it is "mandatory," the natural response is that people don't want to do it the minute they no longer must.

If you treat the parade not like homework but  like "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" you'll have all the crowds you ever dreamed of, singing "Twist and Shout" to a pretty little country that just turned 60, and to a pretty good looking crowd along the sidewalks, too.

I think I saw you at the parade. You know you look so good (look so good).

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Route 17:  Obama Backer: Zionists Wanted Holocaust

That sure was terrible, what Rev. John Hagee said about the Holocaust, that it was God's way of sending the Jews back to Israel. Almost as bad as what Hamas says about the Holocaust and Jews.

Hagee, of course, was a major supporter of John McCain, until this fuss led McCain to reject Hagee' endorsement, and Hagee to withdraw his endorsement after McCain's rejection.

And Obama has rejected his endorsement by Hamas.

Have you ever heard of a rabbi linking God's will, the Shoah and the founding of Israel? You've heard dozens of rabbis do that.

Let's be honest. No one takes Hagee's theology seriously, not McCain and not the many Jewish journalists who are all over the Hagee story.

The main goal for too many journalists on this story is that it is a chance to hurt McCain by balancing out the flack over Obama's crazy preacher and his other crackpot supporters.

Hey, you see, McCain has a nutty preacher, too, so there. (Even if McCain didn't sit in his pew and write him checks for 20 years).

Of course, some of the same Jewish journalists who are chasing down every angle of Hagee did next to nothing to chase down the Jeremiah Wright embarrassment (until that story was too big to ignore) and did nothing to chase down the Hamas endorsement of Barack Obama and nothing about what Hamas has been saying about Jews and the Holocaust almost every week.

Let's see, it's politically incorrect to say Obama's middle name, his father's religion, his childhood education, his wife, his radical Palestinian supporters in his home district, his association with former terrorists from the Weathermen underground, and now we can't bring up the Hamas endorsement - all official "smears." For the first time in American history, a candidate's unauthorized bio is off-limits. And too many journalists, usually so quick to defend and revere the media's crucial role in informing the public, so quick to defy any repression, go meekly along with Obama's censorship because, well, some of them want Obama to be president, simple as that. Nothing that might embarrass Obama is important, just a coincidence.

It's just a tremendous coincidence that when an endorser of McCain says something embarrassing, it's a huge story, and when Hamas endorses Obama and that could embarrass Obama, it's ignored for weeks.

Just two weeks ago, The Jewish Week published an editorial against "Guilt By Association,"  encouraging readers not to presume Obama's guilt because of his many troubling associations. Presumably, Obama supporters who cheered the wisdom of that editorial will not make a big deal about McCain's association with Hagee.

Yeah, right.

And since the Jewish media is so concerned with what Hagee said about Jews and the Holocaust, here's what Obama's Hamas supporters say about Jews and the Holocaust, because clearly it is very important what endorsers say about Jews and the Holocaust: Obama's supporters in Hamas say that Ben-Gurion and the Zionists were OK with the Holocaust as a way to get rid of the elderly Jews and the weak Jews that the new Jewish State didn't want or need.

You can see a video clip from Hamas television here , read it here , and here.

You want another good clip? How about this TV clip from Al-Jazeera
 showing how radical Palestinians have put together a sophisticated (albeit unofficial) campaign office for Obama in Gaza?

I'm told that I should be sacred of McCain's Christian Zionist supporters but I should not be scared of Obama's anti-Zionist Islamic supporters.

But the guys in Hagee's church don't want to kill me.

The guys on Al-Jazeera do.

I bet some guys in Wright's pews wouldn't mind, either.

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Route 17: Camelot And Demographics

James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” column at Wall Street Journal Online once suggested a perfect Broadway show tune for the global warming nannies who want to legislate (or dictate) our response to the rumored change in the weather.

“A law was made a distant moon ago here:
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there's a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot.
The winter is forbidden till December
And exits March the second on the dot.
By order, summer lingers through September
In Camelot.
… The snow may never slush upon the hillside.
By nine p.m. the moonlight must appear.
In short, there's simply not
A more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here
In Camelot.”

Actually, I wanted to write something about Israel, but global warming got me thinking: The idea that Israel is doomed by Arab demographics has become the most over-hyped scientific theory since global warming – a theory based on statistical possibility that hysterics have confused with an incontrovertible decree, as if the statistics are fate, incapable of reversal without massive legislation.

We have to trust Al Gore more than we can count on God to fix global warming. After all, the Ice Age and the original global warming that melted the glaciers happened on God’s watch, so what does He know? Instead, we decide to be like the Three Little Bears, the weather can't be too cold, the weather can't be too hot, the weather must be juuuuust right. Or panic.

God even decides how many babies are born, so demographics start with Him, too. He hardens hearts and He softens hearts, and from softened hearts come babies. Demographic statistics are about people: People change, parents are blessed, baby booms come and go, fertility rates rise and fall, no reason to panic. I trust God on that sort of thing.

Of course, leftists revel in the demographic threat, not the least because it is the logic behind the demand that Israel has to promptly surrender all Jewish presence on the West Bank (if not the Galilee) or risk losing her Jewish character -- eventually. The left sees demographics as a battle in which Israel can’t be saved by her economic and military advantages, her defeat is pre-ordained.

One can make the case that leftists are as obsessed with apocalyptic End of Days scenarios as are the extreme Christians with their “Left Behind” series. The left just sees the End of Days coming from a different direction, not Jesus rising but a rising thermometer; a rising Islamic birth rate.

In fact, Jewish mothers in Israel (religious and secular) are now having more children (per mom) than anywhere else in the Western world, and more children than in parts of the Arab world.

Even the Arabs are expressing their own doubts regarding their demographic destiny.

In Al-Hayat (April 14), a Lebanese paper, Elias Harfoush asks, “Shall we give birth to our children to turn them into new numbers on the lists of martyrs? Is this the fate we prepare our new generations for while the children of the world go to schools and universities, seeking knowledge and specialization? …. [Is] this reproduction machine, now the only source of ‘our pride,’ limited to the Palestinians alone? Are the Israelis, especially those religiously committed, not ‘working’ in the same way? … Consequently, assuring victory in this bedroom race cannot be guaranteed and may lead us to a new catastrophe if we rely on it to achieve ‘victory’ just as the case was in our political and war races.”

But Harfoush believes the Arab birth rate can still “contribute to the destruction of the Jewish state [every bit as much] as Ahmedinejad’s nuclear project,” but “there is no pleasure involved in Ahmedinejad’s project, whereas our project involves nothing less than full pleasure, and this may be its best advantage and its best raison d’Ítre!”

Well. Two can play that game, and several million Israelis are.

The Cold War had its arms race but is this how the Middle East will end, not with a boom but a baby boom?

For another way to see things, check out this piece in Hong Kong’s Asia Times Online, referred to in this week’s Media Watch, in which Israel is not only projected as the ultimate winner in the demographic sweepstakes but Israel is crowned “the happiest country on earth."

The “happiest country on earth?” Come to think of it, didn't most of us find it a most congenial spot? The weather’s great, the way you’d figure in a land where “the sun stood still, the moon stayed in place,” [Joshua 10:13], and summer lingers through September.

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Route 17:  The Four Sons Of Pesach Sheni

Today (May 19) is Pesach Sheni, the best holiday nobody ever heard of, the day when there are no sins, only second chances (read the Jewish Week story here )

Was there ever a greater Pesach Sheni than in 1945? Like so many others, my Uncle Zisha was a Nazi slave on Pesach, 1945. He was liberated April 11. Two weeks later, on Pesach Sheni, Zisha had his seder.

This Pesach, Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion (April 19), on the night of the seder, featured a beautiful version of Adir Hu, gentle as a hymn, and a rollicking Daynenu (is there any other kind? Was there ever any other niggun?) by “The Guy’s All-Star Shoe Band.”

If you missed it, on Pesach Sheni (or any time) you can hear it by clicking here  (and scrolling to the show’s third segment).

We Jews are a lesser people than we were in 1973. That year we were profoundly offended by the cold infamy of Egypt’s attack on Yom Kippur, an attack against holiness itself. In 2008, I didn’t hear one person – not one – speak of the infamy of Hamas rockets being fired into Israel on seder night. As we slink away, deeper into exile, who even notices anymore?

The seder-night rockets and silence (beyond Sderot) surely were inscribed in the Book of Chronicles that will be read aloud in Heaven during the Days of Awe when the world is judged.

Miki Goldwasser, mother of captive Ehud Goldwasser, wrote a letter to her son that was published in an Israeli newspaper (and reprinted, surely, in the Book of Chronicles) before the seder. If you didn’t see it on Pesach, let it be in our Haggadah for Pesach Sheni:

She writes:

“Udi, my child,

“A second Pesach is here. Do you even know that the seder will be held Saturday night? Can you smell the spring? The scents of flowers blossoming, which you love so much? Can you hear the singing of the
birds that you photographed so often?

“My son, my heart bleeds for you. My arms turn to stone when they cannot embrace you. I know that you know. After all, I can feel you flowing through my body.

“Udi, I would like to tell you how in this country, which you went out to protect with the love and dedication that is so typical to you, thousands of people are joining the call to free you and free Eldad and Gilad.

“You know, at the beginning of the struggle I thought that only we, the families, would have to fight against an indifferent government…. Yet slowly we are discovering that thousands upon thousands are joining the fight…. Udi, an entire nation, including its Diaspora, are sending their feelings to you, Eldad, and Gilad. They are sending their hope to see you soon, at home.

“We shall place an additional glass of wine next to the glass of Eliyahu HaNavi, and may you, our abducted sons, enter through the open door.

[signed] “Mom, dad, your Karnit, and your brothers, who all miss you.”

Tonight, and soon, may Ehud, Eldad and Gilad have their seder as Zisha once did -- the Four Sons of Pesach Sheni.

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Route 17:  Pollard, The Chinese Spy

The recent arrest of an Israeli spy, Ben-Ami Kadish, brings Jonathan Pollard to mind, and one of the weakest, most infuriating arguments on Pollard's behalf: "He spied for a friendly nation," Israel.

As DeGaulle once said, nations don't have friends, they only have interests.

There is no such thing in any legal system - halachic, Israeli or American - allowing for greater leniency for crimes committed against a friend. Most murders are committed by someone who knows you, ostensibly a friend, not a stranger. Many murders are  even committed by "a lover." Is that better? If I steal my friend's wallet, is that better than if I steal my enemy's wallet? If anything, it is more indecent to hurt and steal from a friend, not less.

Another thing for Pollard defenders to keep in mind when debating his sentence is the fact that you, dear defender, have no idea exactly what Pollard stole, how much he stole, where that information ended up, or the magnitude of the damage.

There is no leniency for "friendly flag" spying because all governments presume that once a spy steals and sells secrets, those secrets are thoroughly compromised, public information, known to friend and foe alike. There have often been times when enemy governments have found it convenient to utilize a spy with a "friendly" passport.

The idea that spying or criminal activity by a "friendly flag" deserves a break is something that is considered very clever at Shabbos tables and very naïve anywhere else.

Just because Pollard started off spying for Israel, and most Jews think Pollard was spying only for Israel, a new report from the Department of Defense,  Changes in Espionage by Americans: 1947-2007," lists China, on Page 108, as a beneficiary, alongside Israel, of Pollard's espionage.

Are Pollard's defenders now going to say that spying for China is spying "for a friend," a harmless Zionist prank? Israel has interests, and apparently those interests included sharing U.S. defense secrets, stolen by Pollard, with China.

In the season of Passover, here's a more spiritual, even a mystical, indictment of Pollard: When the Jews were slaves in Egypt, and it was time for the Ten Plagues, God told Moses to have Aaron, not Moses, be the one to turn the Nile into blood. It would be spiritually indecent for Moses, whose life was saved by the Nile, to lift his hand against the river that saved him, even when the purpose was as noble and undeniable as freeing Israelites from the most brutal oppression.

Aaron, not Moses, was even the agent for the second and third plagues, frogs and kinim (gnats) that were also considered river-based plagues.

For American Jews from immigrant families, such as Pollard's, the United States was our Nile. It took us in and saved us when Jews were oppressed in the Egypt of czarist Russia and Nazi Europe. If Israel needed something done and the only way it could get it done was espionage against the United States, let an Israeli "Aaron" do it, not an American Jew. If it was indecent for Moses, a child of the Nile, to lift his hand against the Nile, even when Jews were still slaves in Egypt, it is all the more indecent for an American Jew to lift his hand against the United States, the opposite of Egypt, the kindest country Jews have ever known.

All the more indecent when the beneficiary is a tyranny - China -- oppressor of not only her own people but the people of Tibet, Darfur, and a threat to the United States, the only real and consistent "friend" Israel ever had.

If assisting China and going against the United States is really in Israel's best interest, well, get Aaron to care, not me. 

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Route 17:   Carter And Cocoa For Hamas

I think Jimmy Carter is every bit the anti-Zionist, perhaps even the anti-Semite, that many Jews think he is.

And yet, as a father, I liked the idea of Carter talking to Hamas.

There have been denunciations of Jimmy Carter from coast to coast, attacking Carter for speaking to Hamas in defiance of requests not to from the American and Israeli governments. But in none of the editorials, columns and sermons that I've seen, I didn't see anyone imagining what it would be like to be Noam Shalit.

Noam is the father of Gilad Shalit, held for nearly two years in a private Hamas Treblinka somewhere in Gaza. Israel has done nothing successful to free him. If anything, Israel is appeasing Hamas more than Carter is, sending the kidnappers 500,000 tons of cocoa, jam, tea, halava, hummus, and a lot of other treats that are hardly "humanitarian" necessities.

Here's a partial list of the Hamas take-out orderat a time when Shalit is in shackles.

Once Israel sent soldiers in the night to rescue Jews in Entebbe. Now, Israel sends terrorists cocoa and jam.

What's the point in doing that and not talking?

If it was my kid that might die, I'd talk to anyone. If it was your kid that might be killed, you'd talk to anyone, too. It's Noam Shalit's kid.

Jimmy Carter met with Noam Shalit before he met with Hamas. You can bet the father was fine with Carter talking to Hamas.

This is Yom HaShoah week so here's a Shoah story. In 1944, in the heat of the Holocaust, Rudolf Yisroel Kastner, a Zionist leader of the Hungarian Relief and Rescue Committee, held talks with top Nazi Adolf Eichmann, the man in charge of deportations to concentration camps. They smoked cigarettes together, cigarettes drawn  from silver cigarette holders, and conversed with ice cold calculation. In exchange for Kastner's coming up with a ransom of gold, cash, stocks and military equipment,  Eichmann allowed a "Kastner train" to take 1,684 Jews to Switzerland-and life. Another 20,000 Jews were saved by being diverted to labor camps instead of death camps.

Eichmann needed the money for his post-war getaway. Another Nazi in on the deal, SS officer Kurt Becher who handled the payoff, needed a post-war alibi. Kastner testified in Becher's successful defense at the preliminary heaings to the Nuremberg trials. Becher was not indicted.

Some Jews thought Kastner was worse than Carter. Kastner, who became active in Israeli politics after the war, was assassinated in 1957 by a Holocaust survivor who accused Kastner of collaborating with Nazis, and not warning the remaining Hungarian Jews that they were bound for Auschwitz. (According to Yad Vashem, Kastner did the best he could under the circumstances.)

If I was a Hungarian Jew in 1944, and the most anyone was doing for me was waving a placard at a rally, I'd have been fine with Kastner talking to Nazis.

If I was Gilad Shalit, or his parents, or if I was living in Sderot and no one could stop the Hamas rockets, I'd be fine with anyone talking to Hamas, even if nothing came of it.

The problem isn't talking to Hamas. The problem is not being prepared to fight Hamas to the death, like the Allies were fighting Germany while Kastner was talking to Eichmann.

You might remember that the Iranian hostage crisis ended the very day that Carter was replaced by Ronald Reagan, the man the Iranians knew was willing to fight, not just talk. A top leader of Hamas recently endorsed Barack Obama for president, the candidate everyone knows is the least likely to fight.

The first Kastner train left Budapest in June 1944. Eighteen Junes later, in 1962, Eichmann was hanged in Jerusalem.

The leaders of Hamas will get theirs yet.

In the meantime, as long as our gun is loaded, let's talk to Hamas. As we learn from "The Godfather," it's not personal. It's business.

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Route 17:  Stories For A Shiva

As we say during Passover's Prayer for Dew, "With His consent, I shall speak of mysteries."

The death by lightning's fire of Scarsdale's Rabbi Jacob Rubenstein and his wife, Deborah, in the midnight hours of Shabbat April 12, were strangely a reminder of how wonderful this world is.

I, and all of us, must surely know at least a dozen fathers or mothers or children who died before their time. We know of natural disasters, fatal accidents and murders. We know, at least intellectually, that both you and I are tragedies in slow motion, doomed to die (too young, no matter the age). But this world is so invigorating, our spirits so resilient, our lives so rarely disrupted, that we're shocked to hear of unexpected death, as if we can't be hearing right.

I wasn't always so resilient. Once, as a teenager, on a long-ago Friday evening, not yet dark but after candles, I heard fire engines and sirens go by my window. The phone began ringing incessantly, it was Shabbos, I didn't pick up and when I picked up a voice said there was a fire in my grandparent's apartment, down the block, a fire from Shabbos candles. My grandfather's robe caught a spark. My grandmother tried to smother it with an embrace.

I'd been there only 20 minutes before, my grandmother reciting a favorite couplet, my grandfather readying for prayer, soup on the stove, the challah veiled.

After the ambulances left, the apartment was peaceful, almost nothing out of place. There was a silver candlestick lying on its side, a sooty handprint on the wall, soup on the stove, the challah veiled.

Did I just say the world was wonderful, a few paragraphs ago? I didn't know the world was wonderful at the time, let alone that death was so ordinary; sadness so happenstance. And what of the theology of it, death by Shabbos candles? Surely some young kids in Scarsdale are wondering how lightning could kill their rabbi and rebbetzin; "lightning will strike you" being almost a parody of God's anger.

I knew Rabbi Rubenstein in only the most peripheral, casual way. If we'd have met a few weeks ago on Weaver Street, we'd have said, most casually, "Wonderful day, aint it? What are you doing for the seders?"

Some things aren't for the living to know.

All of us have only a limited number of seders left; we can almost count them. And yet, like the angel touching our lips at birth, giving us the gift of forgetting, the seders fill us with wonder, and we'll be shocked anew when the phone call comes in the night. Such is the gift of angels, perhaps a parting gift from the Angel of Death.
 

To be honest, running into Rabbi Rubinstein would not have meant any more or less to me than running into any other casual acquaintance that I saw on the day of his funeral - on the avenue, at the Little League, at an engagement party, at the grocer.

It's interesting how much love can be felt for even a casual acquaintance when looking through the eyes of goodbye.
 

You might know someone only casually - someone you'd never call on the phone, someone with whom you'd rarely, if ever, share a confidence -- and yet, for shiva, we can walk into each other's home without knocking. People you'd never think will come, will come. Untold others will want to come, but can't, but they're thinking kindly of you. Most of us are loved and cared about far more than we suppose.

Some conversations are too awkward for the living. I see people in the park, acquaintances from over the years, we'll be sorry to see each other go. They mean something to me, but I'll never say so.

I'll tell their kids and next of kin when it's time to walk in without knocking.

I regret that during my grandparents' shiva I hadn't yet made the acquaintance of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy. If I could go back in time I'd give my younger self a short story of his (not so short, actually, it's a Russian story, after all) from 1881, "What Men Live By." With this link I give it to you.  It's for anyone who ever asked, what are you doing for the seders?; for those in hospital vigils, falling asleep in chairs by the bed; for those of you who may be in a vigil for yourself; for those who love with resilient spirit. With your consent, we'll speak of mysteries.

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Route 17: A Dark, Sad Night In Mondegreen Alley

A few weeks ago, I did a column, "