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 murderers 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 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 at one point 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, "Tangled Up In Rav Kook," that was prefaced with this verse from Dylan.

"Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me,
Written by an Italian poet from the thirteenth century.
And every one of them words rang true and glowed like burnin' coals,
Pourin' off of every page like it was written in my soul
From me to you,
Tangled up in blue."

I heard the song on the car radio as I was "writing" (writing in my head) the column was about a man whose life was entangled by his passion for Rav Kook's poetry. His ex-wife had first given him a Rav Kook anthology for his birthday. As I was writing, I "heard" Dylan's line about the "Italian" poet as "Hebrew" poet.

When I used the verse in preface to the column, I included the verse as I heard it in my mind, placing it in hard brackets [written by a Hebrew poet from the 20th century] to differentiate it from the correct lyrics.

A friend from the inner sanctum of the very Orthodox Agudath Israel of America, who previously had e-mailed me positively for a reference to the Grateful Dead, this time  e-mailed, "Blasphemy!" How dare I play around with Dylan's lyrics! It was much too unorthodox of me, he was right, and he was Orthodox enough to care.

There is a word - a "mondegreen" for hearing one verse but imagining another. A mondegreen is a literary phenomenon, coined by Sylvia Wright in an article of her own in Harper's, several decades ago. She recalls being a child, and someone read a poem to her, a 17th century ballad, "The Bonnie Earl O' Murray," whose last verse goes:

"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
  Oh, where hae ye been?
  They hae slain the Earl O'Murray,
   And Lady Mondegreen."

Not quite. But that's how Sylvia Wright heard the final line, "And laid him on the green." And so she coined the "mondegreen," for all those times you actually hear one set of words but imagine it as another.

"Tangled Up In Blue" also includes one of the more frequent Dylan mondegreens. The actual line is "split up on a dark, sad night, both agreeing it was best."

But many people know the line as its incorrect mondegreen: "split up on the docks that night, both agreeing it was best."

Perhaps the most famous mondegreen is "Jose, Can You See," for the first line of the "Star Spangled Banner." I'm told that once on "Friends," Phoebe heard Elton John's "Hold me closer, Tiny Dancer," as "Hold me closer, Tony Danza." Some gays hear Jimi Hendrix, "Excuse me while I kiss the sky," as "Excuse me while I kiss the guy." Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle does a column every few months on mondegreens he has known.

Before the popularity of radio, television and hand-held tape recorders,  more than a few journalists made mistakes when the reporter wrote what he thought he heard, not what was actually said. One can only wonder how many news stories and reports of famous speeches were mangled by mondegreens.

Lou Gehrig's "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth" farewell at Yankee Stadium, July 4, 1939, offers a wonderful example of this, as we have the film of the speech (not easily seen at the time) to cross-check with what reporters from The Washington Post and The New York Times thought they heard. (The Gehrig ceremony took place between games of a Yanks-Senators doubleheader, which is why the Washington Post was there,)

The speech is considered baseball's Gettysburg Address.

The Washington Post reporter in the Yankee Stadium press box that day was  Shirley Povich, a child of Jewish immigrants and the father of TV's Maury Povich. Povich, whose immigrant parents must have heard that Shirley was a Jewish name, so why not for their son, was later given the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, the highest honor given to baseball writers, bringing with it a plaque in baseball's Hall of Fame.

Povich was a first-rate writer and reporter for more than fifty years. And here's how he reported what Gehrig said:

"For weeks, I have been reading in the newspapers that I am a fellow who got a tough break. I don't believe it. I have been a lucky guy… Mine has been a full life."

Not quite.

According to John Drebinger of The New York Times, another winner of the Spink Award, here's what Gehrig said:

"You've been reading about my bad breaks for weeks now. But today I think I'm the luckiest man alive.  I now feel, more than ever, that I have much to live for."

Wrong again. Both first-rate journalists were there at the stadium when Gehrig said he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth and neither man correctly reported the quote right in the next day's paper.

Click on to the online American Rhetoric site of great American speeches (where you can read and listen to what Gehrig actually said) :

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about a bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth… I might have been given a bad break but I've got an awful lot to live for."

Scroll down that page and you can hear the version spoken by Gary Cooper in "Pride of the Yankees." The movie's screenwriters came up with a mangled version, too.

Some of my fellow media watchers presume that all mistakes by journalists are acts of malice ("Go ask Alice") rather than modegreens that happen to us all.

Gentle reader, if you ever catch me in a blasphemy, just e-mail me on a dark, sad night and I'll meet you on the docks.

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Route 17:  The High Cost Of Holy Days

If there’s one thing Jews and Moslems can dialogue about…

Excuse me. I apologize for using a word like “dialogue.” No one uses that word but rabbis who talk like clergy, the kind of clergy who say “phylacteries” instead of tefillin, and “repast” instead of food. It’s a word for rabbis who like to be called “dynamic.” (Someone ought to figure out how it is that the more rabbis we have who think they’re dynamic, the more Jews we have who say they are bored with shul. Maybe they’re not so dynamic. Maybe they’re too dynamic.)

Why can’t these rabbis use a word like “conversation” instead of “dialogue”? Even rabbis who use the word “dialogue” don’t use  “dialogue” in private conversation. I can’t believe that a woman rabbinical student ever told a lousy boyfriend, “I think we ought to have a dialogue about our relationship.” (It’s usually not the guy who wants to have that kind of dialogue).

Anyway, if there’s one thing Jews and Moslems can have a conversation about it is the tendency of the Children of Abraham to rip each other off before holidays.

Jews know all about the high price of Jewish holidays, but Jews might be interested in knowing that Ramadan is an extortionist’s delight in the Arab world.

Last October (when Ramadan fell), the Gulf News reported out of Abu Dhabi, “the prices of sweets and baking ingredients have risen sharply, despite the Ministry of Economy penalizing 41 retailers last week for unjustified hike in prices during Ramadan.”

In September, according to the Associated Press,  “violent protests over the cost of bread prompted the Moroccan government to annul a 30 percent price increase that would have taken effect just before Ramadan.

“In Lebanon, prices of meat, chicken, vegetables and fruits rose sharply during Ramadan,” said Lebanese daily An-Nahar.

In Egypt, said the AP, the Al-Ahram newspaper reported that Ramadan consumers were “shocked" by the spikes in prices for groceries.

Agence France Presse quoted a school teacher in Jordan saying, “I have five children and had to borrow money to cope with a sudden jump in food prices during Ramadan… Greedy merchants have increased the prices without mercy. I love the holy month, but they have spoiled our joy."

The problem led Jordan’s King Abdullah to ask his government to crack down on the holiday price gouging. “We must protect the people,” said the king.

Hey, all you dynamic rabbis, who’s protecting the Jewish people?

During Sukkot, almost all shuls are part of the lulav/esrog cartel, artificially keeping prices in multiples of chai ($36, $72, $360), which is voodoo economics if ever there was. Why are those prices any less outrageous than gas at $4 a gallon?

Passover price hikes are modest compared to Sukkot, but mainly because the Department of Consumer Affairs got involved, and only because more Jews (who aren’t used to the year-round Jewish price gouging and are therefore capable of being shocked) observe Passover and not Sukkot.

Where do all the dynamic rabbis (with their lifetime contracts and synagogue-purchased  homes) go when it’s time to get dynamic over the high price of being Jewish?

What do we need to do to get their attention, ask for a dialogue?

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Route 17: Obama And Father Coughlin

When Father Charles Coughlin, the most incendiary anti-Semitic preacher of the 1930s, supported Huey Long, do you think Jewish Democrats rolled over and charged that there some unpleasant preachers supporting Alf Landon, too, or do you think Jews in the 1930s had more dignity than that?

Let’s pretend: If Herbert Hoover was a member and financial supporter of Father Coughlin’s church for 20 years, would liberal Jews have said, hey, I’ve been to shuls where I disagreed with the rabbi, too?

Remember, a few months ago, when left-wing Democrats told us how terrible it was that candidate Mike Huckabee was preaching from a pulpit during his campaign? What exactly did Huckabee ever say that made you feel more uncomfortable than the word of God as preached by Barack Obama’s mentor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright? Now that Huckabee is out of the race it is suddenly a smear to bring up candidates and their pulpits.

Isn’t it ironic that it now matters less that Obama’s father was a Moslem but it matters more that his father-figure is a Christian, Rev. Wright? Oh, I’ve been warned by Obama supporters that it is “a smear” to say Obama’s father was Moslem. Is it now a smear to bring up Obama’s Christianity? What else can’t we discuss?

Just a few weeks ago, in December, Rev. Wright, who is even more toxic than Father Coughlin, and whose toxic views were already well known, certainly by Obama, was appointed by Obama to Obama’s Religious Leadership Council before the heat got too hot. Let’s assume the preposterous notion that Obama wasn’t in church any time Father Coughlin, uh, Rev. Wright poured gasoline on his congregants’ attitudes toward Jews and the United States. But do you think Obama reads the church bulletin? How about when the July 10, 2007 bulletin that featured a major article on Obama? Do you think the politician checked it out, to see what was said about him, as any politician would?

Do you think Obama would have seen the viciously anti-Semitic article that directly preceded the one about him?

Wasn’t that what the so-called black-Jewish alliance was supposed to be about, good men refusing to take their time when it was past time to stand up to evil? Or was that alliance only a one-way street, demanding dignity for blacks but not demanding dignity for Jews, demanding that you be an obsequious sycophant if the evil being talked about is you, the Jew? Shouldn’t we be terrified about a world in which good men won’t stand up against anti-Semitism, or can only Obama and his mentor speak of the last 200 years?

Hey, am I smearing anybody or do I get a pass, like Jeremiah Wright, because of my unhappy childhood, knowing my relatives were slaves in Egypt and Poland?

It is June 10, 2007. You’re walking down 95th Street in Chicago and step into the Trinity Church. One of the ushers hands you the weekly bulletin and program (read it here).  On Page 8, you can read the Pastor’s Page, written this week by Ali Baghdadi, a rank anti-Semite, with Pastor Wright’s obvious approval. The Pastor’s Page will tell you how and why the Jews are worse than Nazis; how the Jews worked on “an ethnic bomb that killed blacks and Arabs.” Then, on Page 12, you can read about how the media – as far back as last summer -- was trying to smear Obama by linking him to his own church.

Is that a smear?  The one thing I learned from Obama and his Jews is that it’s okay to smear everyone – Obama’s grandmother, Evangelicals who support Israel and McCain, rabbis who support Likud and are therefore supposedly like Wright – you can smear everyone except Obama. You can say the worst things about everybody; you can drag Avi Weiss into this -- comparing him to Jeremiah Wright, as some of Obama’s Jewish journalists have done (see this link). Obama’s writers’ can smear Avi Weiss’ name but I can’t even say Obama’s middle name. Terrific, the way they have it all worked out.

I don’t want to hear any more from Obama’s Jews about smears.

I don’t want to hear any more from Obama’s Jews about why I’m supposed to be afraid of Evangelicals.

Go ahead. Read Obama’s favorite church bulletin for yourself. Make up your own mind. Do you think it’s like anything you’ve ever seen in any place where you ever prayed or is it closer to Der Sturmer?

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Route 17:  YU and March Madness

With March Madness upon us, a Jewish soul wonders what it would be like to see Yeshiva University in the national mix. Maybe YU, saddled with a dual curriculum, plays a schedule that's too demanding. Maybe a religious school can't be tough enough. Here are some teams I'd like to see in a Heavenly Invitational: the North Carolina Wesleyan Bishops; St. Joseph College Monks; Oklahoma Baptist Prophets; Penn Quakers; Meredith College Angels; Kenyon College Lords; Alvernia Crusaders; Bloomfield College Deacons; New England College Pilgrims; and the Lincoln Christian Preachers.

The YU Maccabees might suprise in the first round.

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Route 17: Surrender, Dorothy

Robert E. Lee got a better deal at Appomattox than Israel got at Annapolis.

The South got to keep its land, its guns and its mules.

Israel will have to give most of the Old City of Jerusalem, give up access to holy places in Judea and Samaria, acquiesce to apartheid rules that preclude  Jewish residence on the West Bank, give guns to Fatah, and send all kinds of goods and services (reparations, you might say) into Gaza.

Robert E. Lee came away with his dignity.

At Annapolis, Arab leaders wouldn't shake the hands of Israeli leaders, or even enter through the same door as they did. Prime Minister Olmert left Annapolis with no dignity at all, if indeed he had any going in.

Lee looked at the situation. He couldn't stop the burning of Atlanta, or the burning of other Confederate cities, with the military options at the Confederacy's disposal. By surrendering the Confederacy's principles of state's rights and the right to secede, he bought quiet, a cessation of death and terror, and a chance to move on.

Israel refuses to surrender its principles (the oft-ignored principle of refusing to negotiate with terrorists) and negotiate with Hamas. At the same time, with the military options at its disposal (as Israel understands it) Israel can't stop Hamas rockets that land every few hours in Sderot or Ashkelon. Israel can't prevent, under the status quo, Jews dying and their limbs being amputated. Israel didn't have the will or the wherewithal to fight the rocket launchers in Gaza for more than two days. Israel didn't have the will or the wherewithal to fight Hezbollah for more than a few weeks.

Israel has already surrendered the safety of its citizens in Sderot. Israel has already surrendered its principle of not negotiating with terrorists by negotiating with Yasser Arafat, the granddaddy of Palestinian terrorism, and now they negotiate with the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas, the "good Palestinian," who sits in his office under a large photograph of Arafat. Abbas, the good one, broke off negotiations with Israel last week when Israel went into Gaza for 48-hours to fight Hamas and the rockets. That sure makes Abbas seem like he's more aligned with Hamas than with Israel.

Now Israel stopped fighting in Gaza and is talking with Abbas again. They might as well surrender and talk to Hamas directly.

In return for nothing, Israel has already surrendered the ability of Jews to safely visit Joseph's Tomb and the Temple Mount. Israel has surrendered the tranquility of Jewish pilgrimage to Mother Rachel in Bethlehem and our family plot in Hebron. Israel is unable to stand up to President Bush - who allegedly pressured an end to the foray into Gaza -- at a time when Bush is as lame as a lame duck can be.

At the same time that Congress voted 404-1 (House Resolution 951) in support of Israel's right to defend itself against rockets, Israel won't defend itself against rockets.

By surrendering to Hezbollah in the last war, and surrendering the lives of the two captives, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, Israel stopped the rockets on the northern front.

Israel has surrendered its dignity and its decency with every falling rocket on the southern front. It's time to surrender and negotiate a cease-fire with Hamas, even if it lasts a week. At least it would be a better week for the Jews of Sderot than the last 250 weeks. The Jews of Lodz, in 1850, lived in greater peace than do the Jews of this Israeli town in 2008.

Look at Robert E. Lee. He surrendered and a century later is loved in the South. He epitomizes dignity and self-respect. He is remembered for loving his soldiers and loving his country - both of them, the Confederacy and the United States, a two-state solution if there ever was one.

Olmert long ago surrendered his dignity and has done everything but lower the flag over that part of Israel where the rich won't live and the poor can't escape. His years have turned back the Zionist clock a century, convincing Jews that we are helpless, at the mercy of the world's scolding. In a mockery of Zionism, Jews are scared of shadows, the shadows of rockets, while walking in Zion.

After 4,000 rockets and no sustained or successful military or diplomatic effort to stop it, let's admit as much: Israel, for all of its Zionist bluster, is a Cowardly Lion, roaring at scarecrows but surrendering Sderot. Israel would only be surrendering to reality if it negotiated with Hamas.

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Route 17: Bad Day For Smear Police

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Route 17: The Islamic Vote

A month is a lifetime in an election year, but this survey (released Jan. 30) is the most recent information I could find on American Muslim political preferences, and an interesting snapshot all its own.

Apparently U.S. Muslims didn’t get the e-mails linking Barack Obama to Islam. The poll, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), reveals that American Muslims prefer Hillary Clinton for president, although more are undecided (45 percent) than support Clinton (24 percent) and Obama (20 percent) combined.  (Read the full survey here.)

The survey indicated that Ron Paul (2 percent) was the preferred Republican, slightly ahead of John McCain. Regarding party affiliation, 49 percent considered themselves Democrat, 8 percent Republican, with the rest independent.

The CAIR report said, “it is not clear” why Hillary was leading, but Paul was favored among Republicans because he was “fair minded.”

Asked about what issues mattered to American Muslims, Israel-Palestine was said to be  “important” by 90 percent (71 percent said it was “very important”), but Israel-Palestine is not the dominant issue for American Muslims. Twelve other issues were considered more important, and nine other issues ranked higher on the scale of “very important.” Education, civil rights and health care policies were the issues that mattered most.

Only 75 percent said brokering the Israel-Palestinian problem would improve America’s reputation in the Arab world, (I say “only” because we’ve been led to believe that this is the universally accepted antidote for America’s reputation.) Only 74 percent were against waterboarding (simulated drowning) as an acceptable interrogation technique when dealing with terrorists. (I say “only” because it is surprising that so many -- 26 percent—would approve of a torture technique that has been so roundly condemned in the media and among candidates).

I’d be curious to see a story, or poll, that could tell us if American Muslims resent, or are sympathetic, to Obama’s distancing himself from his father’s Islamic roots. How do American Muslims like it when Jews shout that it is a “smear” to mention an Islamic dad? Do American Muslims think Obama is a self-hater, the way certain American Jews would in an analogous situation, if a candidate (a practicing Christian whose father was Jewish) swore up and down that he had nothing to do with Judaism? A candidate who in some biographical material admits that he prayed in a mosque (or shul) as a child but whose official website insists he never did? How will this affect the American Islamic vote in November, or their relations with Jews after that?

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Route 17: Iraq Disappearing

You can decide if this item is indicative of how politically unbalanced the national network newscasts are, or if this is item is simply indicative of how “local” the national newscasts have become. (When I say “local” I mean the fact that late-night local TV news is infatuated with fire and murder stories, and bringing cameras to dramatic and chaotic scenes, rather than the more thoughtful stories you might hear on NPR that almost never deal with crime but with ideas and trends in American life).

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Route 17:  Debating Illegal Immigration

The other week, CNN’s Lou Dobbs called the Anti-Defamation League “a joke” for its stance on illegal immigration.

Is the ADL a joke? On this subject alone, one can make the case that they have been inflammatory, distorting the discussion rather than elevating it. For example, at the end of 2007, when the ADL released its annual “Top Issues Affecting Jews” list, here is how they framed the issue.

(I’ll quote in full): “Immigration Debate in the Spotlight: The national debate over immigration remained as divisive as ever and was a central issue in the presidential campaign.  A number of mainstream anti-immigrant groups resorted to the tactics and rhetoric of racist and anti-Semitic groups, using hateful stereotypes and outright bigotry to demonize immigrants, particularly Hispanics.  A number of media personalities in television and radio, as well as political leaders, adopted the same language when discussing immigration issues in this country.”

That paragraph is dishonest for the simple reason that the debate is not over “immigration” but over “illegal immigration.” No one is lifting pitchforks against decent people who apply legally to become immigrants, people who want to enter honestly and through the front door. Notice that the ADL doesn’t use the word “illegal” once in that paragraph. Instead, they use the most inflammatory words in their arsenal: “racist,” “hateful,” “bigotry,” “demonize” “divisive,” “stereotypes,” and “anti-Semitic” to tar the honorable and entirely reasonable debate over American border security and immigration policies.

There is also an increasing problem in cherry-picking opponents whose deficiencies anchor your argument. We see this in articles that draw sweeping conclusions about e-mails or blogs that go unnamed, or in this case, unnamed anti-immigrant groups, unnamed media personalies, conveniently making the problem seem more ominous, more shadowy, and all the while distracting from sober critiques made by those with names and addresses that aren’t as easily dismissed.

The ADL is trying to do nothing less than confuse and conflate criminal immigration with legal immigration. They are trying to do nothing less than sabotage all reasonable discussion. There is no other way to read that paragraph.

There have been numerous reports about Hezbollah training camps in South America. Should they have a free pass across the Rio Grande? Did the pattern of entry and residence in the United States by the perpetrators of 9/11 give us any right to even discuss who gets into this country and how long and in what capacity are they allowed stay?

I know a wonderful Jewish surgeon who arrived here legally and who may be forced to leave on a technicality because groups like the ADL have so muddied the debate that few bother to distinguish anymore between who ought to be here and who ought not.

If anything is anti-Hispanic it is to say that illegals do the work that legals won’t. Union men such as Cesar Chavez have long opposed farm bosses who undercut the minimum wage salaries of agricultural workers by hiring illegals who will work without benefits and below standard wages, claiming that the hardworking illegals are doing the work that the spoiled American citizens won’t. Illegals are easily exploited, taking jobs from farm workers and factory workers. When illegals start taking the jobs of their white-collar champions, watch how fast they’ll lose their cheerleaders.

Was there something “hateful” in the criticism of Gov. Spitzer’s plan that would have allowed illegal immigrants to get driver’s licenses, which would have been license for voter fraud? I know, only Republicans are capable of voter fraud, but according to the National Voter Registration Act, anyone getting a license could be registered to vote just by inking a box. And federal privacy laws, promoted by many of the same people who want to give illegals a free pass, don’t allow checking that against immigration records. Is it “bigotry” to bring this up? Or is voter fraud cool if it helps your guy?

Former Mayor Ed Koch sent out an e-mail a few days ago in which says, “I am for legal immigration and expanding it, but I am not for ‘open borders.’  No country in the world has open borders. I believe we should double or triple the numbers of legal immigrants if that is what we need… . No one in his or her right mind suggests rounding up the illegal aliens in massive lockup efforts.  What rational people suggest is that U.S. employers knowingly hiring illegal aliens be subject to mandatory prison terms.  If there are no jobs, the illegals will go home on their own.  Indeed, we should pay their way.  I believe my opinion on this matter represents the majority opinion in the country.”

How is that bigoted, racist, divisive or hateful?

The ADL, of all groups, ought to be able to discuss an issue without name-calling -- names far worse than being called “a joke.”

There’s a right way and a wrong way to have a conversation. There’s a right way and a wrong way to enter the country.

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Route 17: Weatherman Says A Storm is Coming

There is a peculiar beauty to summer places out of season. Wooden floors are cold in empty bungalows and bunks. Swimming pools are drained down to the aqua paint. Small country shuls are hibernating. In the skies above the Catskills and upper Hudson valley, the bald eagle has returned.

According to the Times Herald-Record -- the wonderful upstate newspaper that does a terrific job covering everything from Satmars in Kiryas Joel to the onion farms and wildlife in the woods along Route 17 - New York State was down to one nesting pair of eagles in 1976.

Wayne Hall writes that the Department of Environmental Conservation just banded two baby eagles in nest 124. A mid-winter survey, conducted from helicopters, found about 200 eagles high above the Hudson and Delaware rivers, above the Mongaup pond and reservoirs, above the empty hotels and camp grounds.

Naturalist Tom Lake, according to the Times Herald Record, saw one wild pair of eagles "shadow each other over the ice with loop-de-loops and wing touches. At the apex of a long arc in the sky they locked talons -- one turned on its back in the air, the other mirrored from above -- and went into free fall for 100 feet before releasing and flaring out over the ice."

You can also see them, we're told, above the railroad, leaving Beacon.

On the ground, or rather on the ice of White Lake, 400 folks recently competed in the Catskill's annual "King of the Ice" winter fishing contest.

Nathan Mayberg, of the Times Herald-Record, tells us the fishermen battled an all-day rain, hail and biting cold, angling for a $500 prize - and ceremonial cape and crown - given for the largest fish. Out of the icy waters, reports Mayberg, came pickerel, walleye, blue gills, perch and trout. The winner, Wayne Quick, arrived at White Lake pre-dawn, drilled a hole in the ice, and at 7:30 a.m. snagged a three-and-a-half pound pickerel.

There are men who live in the mountains and this is what they know: A storm is coming. Snow will be general over hills and hollows. Eagles swoop in cast-iron skies, trout and pickerel swim under the ice, bear and deer share a winter forest, and God is in the quiet.

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Route 17: Valentines Day At The Checkpoints / by Jonathan Mark

After the Six Day War, Shlomo Carlebach suggested that Israel give free plane tickets to several thousand hippies; they'd go with Shlomo to every Palestinian, handing out flowers, offering hugs, playing guitars…

It never quite worked out.

Why didn't anyone think it would have been a great idea to go around Germany in 1932 (before it got really ugly), handing out flowers, and offering hugs? The answer is simple. Jews are Western, we think of Germans as grown-ups and we infantilize Arabs. Even in 1932, Jews knew the Germans would slap them upside the head if the Jews tried hugging them. On the other hand, to Jewish neo-colonial eyes, the Palestinians are not grown-up Europeans but childlike and so we can be childlike with them; we can teach them not to hit; we can win them over with daisies.

If The Jewish Week was Esquire, Helene Aylon would be one of the "Women We Love." Helene, a provocative installation/performance artist (heleneaylone.com), e-mailed me the other day with some suggestions for Israel's checkpoints. She warned me that the suggestions "may be fanciful but reality doesn't work. So why not try utopia?"

Helene is not a total utopian. She writes, "I always sense a bias when the checkpoints and the wall are equated as an evil with the evil of terrorism by many people on the far left. I, too, feel bad about the need for checkpoints and the wall but I understand that they are necessary as they have reduced terror attacks."

Nevertheless, she wonders, reminding me of Shlomo, imagine if at the checkpoints "there would be delicious Israeli and Arabic food and drink for those detained on lines… There should be gorgeous music, Arabic and Israeli musicians playing together as people wait. (Soldiers are paid; why not musicians?) There should be toys for the young children, and chairs for the mothers," books she said, for someone to read to the children, books to be exchanged for the anti-Semitic books Palestinian kids grow up with. "And therapists to talk to as frustration needs to be spoken out to someone."

Why not try utopia? Utopians believe that what Teddy Roosevelt really meant was, "Speak softly and, well, speak softly." Their favorite foreign policy question is: "Why do they hate us?" That question reminds me of battered wives wondering what they did to so enrage their husbands. Why do they hate us? It's the West Bank turned "West Side Story," "this boy don't need a judge he needs an analyst's care."

Someone, writes Helene, should teach "nice manners to Israeli soldiers." After all, at the checkpoints "there is the volatile issue for the Arabic population of being insulted and humiliated."

I envy the Palestinians for feeling insulted and humiliated. They can feel. It tells me they're alive.

I wonder, dear Jewish reader, are you ever insulted and humiliated by 4,000 rockets falling on Sderot -- blowing the leg off a Jewish boy the other week -- while we weigh the cost of amputated limbs against the shtetl-like fear that somebody, somewhere, might scold us if we fought back as men would in any other family, protecting our young?

The other day, the Israel Government announced that it would allow "quick and efficient passage through the checkpoints" because of "the upcoming Christian holidays in the month of February."

Security is relaxed for St. Valentine's Day?

I see the utopian point: If, as Israel says, security can be maintained while allowing "quick and efficient passage" through the checkpoints on Christian holidays, why can't security be maintained, quickly and efficiently, when there are no Christian holidays?

Reality doesn't work, so why not try utopia? Put up the grill and buy some toys. Make an "Islamofascist," and the kid he drives in with, have to slow down and sit through a schoolmarm with an Israeli accent reading "The Very Hungry Caterpillar." Bring in musicians. Send in the clowns.

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Route 17: Obama And Intermarriage

Barack Obama’s Jewish supporters are being somewhat unfair when they say it is a “smear” to even discuss the fact that Obama might be something of a Moslem because his father was. This wouldn’t be happening if Obama had been in the public eye for decades but he hasn’t. Most voters, even Obama voters, couldn’t write 250 words about his life. If a virtual unknown chooses to run, well, good people aren’t going to roll over and just take his official campaign biography as gospel. They’re not even going to take his Jewish supporters’ word for it, Jewish supporters who’ve been wrong about plenty.

In this decade of jihad there’s a reason – several thousand dead reasons -- why good folks sit up and pay attention when a child of Islam is running for president, even if Obama is the son of a secular Islamic father, a father assimilated enough to intermarry with a white Christian from Kansas. I’m not afraid of some Islamic guy who’d marry Auntie Em. I’m convinced that Obama is Christian, the religion of his mother that the young boy honestly came to as a man. But let’s look this from a liberal Jewish perspective:

Hundreds of Jewish leaders (yes, we have hundreds and hundreds of “leaders”) say that a Jewish baby born of intermarriage—Jewish father, Christian mother—ought to be counted as a Jew by demographers. Reform Judaism recognizes a child of a Jewish father and Christian mother to be Jewish. Tens of thousands of secular Russian Jews, religiously illiterate and Jewishly ignorant, born of Christian mothers and Jewish fathers, sometimes with only a Jewish grandfather, are Jewish enough for the Soviet Jewry movement to congratulate itself for bringing them to Israel, so these half-Jews – no, full Jews, say pluralists—can vote on matters vital to the future of the Jewish State.

There isn’t a newspaper in this country that doesn’t run articles every December insisting that a child of intermarriage can and should experience the religious heritage of both his parents -- Christian mom, Jewish dad -- no matter how dubiously Jewish that one parent may be. Jewish newspapers, including The Jewish Week, thrill to the existence of Jewish ballplayers and Hollywood entertainers, even if only their fathers were Jewish, their mothers not, and Christmas trees decorate their home.

Who, even in yeshiva, doesn’t understand and get a kick out of Adam Sandler’s Chanukah song: “Paul Newman’s half-Jewish, Goldie Hawn is too…” Last summer, Jewish newspapers proudly covered “Jewish” Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers being voted “Rookie of the Year,” even only his father is Jewish and Braun doesn’t care about Judaism. Newspapers, Jewish and non-Jewish, did articles on the Jewish roots of Madeline Albright, John Kerry, even Hillary Clinton, with far less reason to connect them to Judaism than to connect Obama to his father.

Millions of us insist that children born of only Jewish fathers be given bar mitzvahs, be given membership in synagogues, be brought to Israel for free with Birthright trips, and be allowed to attain leadership positions in Jewish organizations. To say out loud that these children of a Jewish father alone are about as halachically Jewish as Obama would evoke indignation from the Reform movement, and plenty of indignation in the Conservative movement, too.

But if some of these Jews then turn around and suggest in a casual e-mail that Obama is a Moslem because of his father – woe to the speaker for “smearing” Obama. If that is a smear, a foul to even suggest, than the last 500 articles on intermarriage in The Jewish Week were a fraud. It is all of one piece.

If a modern Jew wonders if Obama, even with a secular Moslem father, might be open someday to rediscover his Islamic roots, if not someday become an Islamic “baal teshuvah,” that is fully consistent with modern Jewish belief about the children of intermarriage and what we say is the power of one’s roots.

Look at it this way: If Obama’s father was a secular Jew, even if that father was out of his life, and Obama spent some brief childhood time in an Israeli yeshiva, even if he was now a practicing Christian, Jewish newspapers would be positively giddy about that Jewish father. We’d be filled with pride. He’d be someone to acknowledge and write stories about; we’d be laughing that, wouldn’t you know it, the first Jewish president will be black. He’d be the stuff of High Holiday sermons across the country; rabbis would try to “outreach him.” Would discussing Obama’s Jewishness under the same circumstances be a smear? Why, then, is it a smear when the candidate is Moslem?

Unless, of course, Democrats really believe that Islam is something that could give liberal Democratic voters pause. Democrats say that it the Republicans who play the fear card but this Islamic fear “smear” was thought to be useful in swaying Democrats in a Democratic primary, not a general election. Clearly, we live in times when Democrats are afraid, too, even if they’re afraid to admit it.

Perhaps this is all innocent, Jews just wondering about someone they know very little about.

If we are to be understanding and tolerant of other cultures, let’s be tolerant of modern Jews whose first instinct – and liberal instinct – is to believe that a father is enough to determine identity, even if the child never met the father.

That isn’t a “smear.” That’s the Jewish thing to do.

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ROUTE 17: Questions For Israel’s Next Best Friend

For all the interrogation of Barack Obama over his connections to either Islam or Christianity (his membership in a church whose pastor praised Farrakhan), why isn’t anyone asking Hillary Clinton about her membership in the United Methodist Church that recently announced it is divesting from Israel? And—same church, different pew—why is no one asking Pres. Bush about this, he being another proud United Methodist?

Why is Mitt Romney pressed on every nuance of Mormon history and theology, a church that isn’t on the warpath against Israel, but no one is pressing those political “friends of Israel” whose Methodist church has taken Israel to the woodshed? In the fashion of recent politics, Hillary has protested on numerous occassions that she is just as proud of her church as Christian Republicans are of theirs, and that she is more religious than folks think.

Why isn’t she on the griddle? After all, her experience includes being married to the man who had no idea that peace talks at Camp David 2000 could turn into the second intifadah. (Which is not to say, don’t get me wrong, that Bill Clinton wasn’t “the best friend Israel ever had,” as Jewish leaders assured me.)

More to the point on Obama, it’s easy for him to be asked about Farrakhan. He didn’t praise Farrakhan, his friend did. He never campaigned with Farrakhan, as Jesse Jackson once did. Obama can rightly say that he and Farrakhan never shared a table. But Obama did attend a fundraiser, when he was an Illinois legislator, hosted by Rashid Khalidi, now at Columbia University, one of the most notorious anti-Zionists on any American campus. Obama was photographed at that fundraiser sitting at the same table with Edward Said, another one of the most notorious anti-Semites when he was at Columbia, and a  member of the pro-Arafat Palestinian National Council before his death in 2003.

What did Obama and Said talk about at that table? Why would Khalidi host a fundraiser for him? If these are the people Obama once called allies, why isn’t his switch to AIPAC-approved politics not seen as a cynical career-advancing flip-flop every bit as much as those flip-flops that other candidates have to answer for? I’d rather know about Obama’s history with Said and Khlaidi – choices that Obama made as an adult – rather than the religion of the father that Obama said goodbye to in childhood.

Too many Jewish leaders, and Jewish journalists for that matter, seem to be too concerned with demonstrating how tolerant we are; how Peter, Paul & Mary of us it would be to support a black president; how much better we are than the crank e-mailers; how we are such good Black-Jewish alliance types that we dare not press Obama for answers about a part of his past that actually might reveal his truest self. 

Think about it. Obama is solidly on the left of every issue. It strains credulity that that on the singular topic of Israel he is suddenly not a leftist but Jabotinsky. I greatly admire Obama but, really, does this not seem a convenient campaign conversion, even if it flatters?

Rest assured, dear voter, whoever wins will be annointed by Jewish leaders as “the best friend Israel ever had.” I know. I can hear it already. I hear it about our president still. But my new best friends, Hillary and Barack, John and Mitt, have some questions still to be answered.

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Route 17: Obama Through Arab Eyes

For months we've been listening to commentators speculating about how Barack Obama's is "good for Israel," or "good for the Arabs." A problem, though, is that this debate has been almost entirely filtered through non-Arab voices. We thought it might be interesting to look at what Arab-Americans have been saying within the confines of Arab media.

The first item is excerpted from a piece in Lebanon's relatively moderate Beirut Daily Star (Jan. 8), "Whom Should Arab-Americans Vote For," by Arab-American commentator Ghassa Rubeiz. The second item is from The Electronic Intifadah, "How Barack Obama Learned To Love Israel," by Ali Abunimah, who lives in Obama's state senate district in Illinois.

This latter piece is more dated (March 4, 2007) but it is nevertheless revealing how a sophisticated online Palestinian political magazine -- as vehemently anti-Israel as its name,  Electronic Intifadah, would have you believe-anticipated Obama's candidacy. The writer, Abunimah, is co-founder of The Electronic Intifadah.

If it needs to be said, readers should keep in mind that these commentaries do not represent all Arab-Americans anymore than Jewish columnists represent all Jews, but they wouldn't have the outlets they do if they represented no one at all. Over the course of the campaign we'll try to keep our eyes open for other Arab commentaries on the candidates.

The Beirut Daily Star: "When compared to Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, the two rival front runners on the Democratic side, Obama looks better [from the Arab perspective] on issues of justice in the Middle East. However, one has to be realistic: Arab-Americans, and Arabs in general, do not have many close friends among popular American politicians. Israeli policy experts rate Obama as a moderate supporter of Israel and they place Edwards and Clinton significantly ahead of the Illinois senator in sensitivity to the needs of the Jewish state.

"Obama knows relatively little about the suffering of the Palestinians and their need for a viable state. But when he is in the White House he would be in a better position to place the US in the position of honest broker in the peace process.

Among the candidates, "there is more variety of opinion on Iraq than there is on the Palestinian question. The reason is that Israel has won the public relations battle over the Arab-Israeli conflict. But public sentiments may change in America with new evidence and a new president."

Arab-Americans "should not expect a radical change in American foreign policy in the Middle East, regardless of who wins the 2008 elections. However, if Barack Obama wins, there is hope that he will be more open on the matter of Middle East justice than other front-runners in the presidential race. The Obama factor includes many advantages: an international perspective, compassion for minorities, and sensitivity to issues of health care, poverty, and climate change. And finally, Obama has a vision for serious change in domestic and foreign policy."

Electronic Intifadah: Abunimah noted that Obama promised AIPAC to fund work on the Arrow and related missile systems to help Israel "deter missile attacks from as far as Tehran and as close as Gaza," said Obama.

Disparaging the fear that Obama was addressing, Abunimah writes: "As if the starved, besieged and traumatized population of Gaza are about to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles."

[What the writer doesn't say, of course, is that at the time Abunimah was writing his column, more than 3,000 Qassam rockets had already been into Israel from Gaza; rockets that precipitated Israel's recent military action, even if the rockets weren't ballistic.]

Abunimah adds, "While constantly emphasizing his concern about the threat Israelis face from Palestinians, Obama said nothing about the exponentially more lethal threat Israelis present to Palestinians." Obama had said that Hezbollah launched thousands of rockets in an unprovoked attack, "but it's a complete distortion. Throughout his speech he showed a worrying propensity to present discredited [Israeli] propaganda as fact."

Over the years, writes Abunimah, "I met [Obama] about half a dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in Chicago, including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was forthright in his criticism of U.S. policy and his call for an even-handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

"The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing. As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, 'Hey, I'm sorry I haven't said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front.' He referred to my activism, including columns I was contributing to The Chicago Tribune [that were] critical of Israeli and U.S. policy [and said], 'Keep up the good work!'

"But Obama's gradual shift into the AIPAC camp had begun as early as 2002 as he planned his move from small time Illinois politics to the national scene..... If disappointing, given his historically close relations to Palestinian-Americans, Obama's about-face is not surprising. He is merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected and he will continue doing it as long as it keeps him in power."

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Route 17:  Yom Hashoah Has A Rival

Most Jews don't know it yet, but next week's Jan. 27 is shaping up as the new Yom Hashoah, Holocaust memorial day. The old Yom Hashoah (usually in April, Nisan 27) hit an iceberg of indifference and is taking on water.

There is nothing more dramatic, or ritually more inspired, than Israel's Yom Hashoah siren that stops the country in its tracks, but here in the United States the keepers of the flame have done the one thing that almost defies discussion in polite company: They have made the Holocaust boring.

After 50 years of observance, the observance lacks widely accepted ceremony or structure.

The day itself is inherently boring. Unlike other holy days (the Temple actually burnt on the 9th of Av), nothing in particular happened on the 27th of Nisan.

The Holocaust has no shortage of memorable dates. Kristallnacht happened on November 9; Auschwitz was liberated on January 27; the war started on September 1; the Warsaw uprising began the eve of Passover, April 19; but nothing happened on Yom Hashoah that didn't happen the day before or six months after. If a camel is a horse by committee, Yom Hashoah is Judaism by committee, a Knesset committee. Back in 1951, when Yom Hashoah was created, the Warsaw Ghetto lobbyists wanted to link Yom Hashoah to the day of the uprising but the religious lobby -- speaking for most Israelis -- didn't want Yom Hashoah to collide with the Passover seder, and other lobbies had other days. So the committee selected a date that signified nothing but could win a vote.

Yom Hashoah now falls five days after Passover, which means most people have just lost several days of work and personal time to the holiday and have no interest, so soon, in yet another public  ceremonial situation, particularly one that is theologically and communally incoherent.

Meanwhile, the few other countries that cared started to accept Jan. 27, Auschwitz liberation day, as the defacto Yom Hashoah. The old Allies are proud of that day. The old survivors cherished that day all along. In 2005, the United Nations designated Jan. 27 as the international day for Holocaust memorials.

Even Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial authority, is falling in line, sending out press releases announcing that Yad Vashem "will be marking the third annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day in a variety of ways," which is Yad Vashem's way of telling Yom Hashoah, I like you as a friend but we ought to see other people.

Yom Hashoah was established to lead the parade. Now it's playing catch-up.

The United Nations, of all places, has figured out what the Jewish guardians of the Holocaust never could: a memorial day only has power if it's a day worth remembering.

I care about my dead parents but I don't light candles for them on dates they didn't die.

The community would quake if anyone suggested moving  Chanukah to July, or Thanksgiving to April. But admit it, dear reader, you wouldn't be disturbed in the least if Yom Hashoah moved to January, and that tells you all you need to know about how Yom Hashoah had its day - and lost it.

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Route 17: A Trend Since 1934

Newsweeklies have, over the years, increasingly looked to religion for trend stories, even cover stories, and as a religious Jew I happen to like it; it flatters me. Unfortunately, religion as a media genre is so unsophisticated that these articles often disappoint.

If a baseball reporter were to tell you there’s been a return to the stolen base as an offensive weapon, you can be sure the reporter and editor would be familiar with the different eras in which that was the case, such as the dead-ball era and the 1960s, as well as those eras when the stolen base was fairly dormant, and why. A sports writer would be too embarrassed to write a trend story if he only had a hunch about how baseball was played prior to the 21st century.

Nevertheless, in U.S. News & World Report (Dec. 13), “A Return to Tradition,” one can read about that trend without any indication about how traditional Jews were in 1970 or 1930 – or now.

Even when writing about tradition, journalists are infatuated with the new. The article tells us, “Even while drawing on deep traditional resources, many participants are creating something new within the old forms.”

So instead of examining why Jews attracted to tradition – defined by the dictionary as “the transmission of customs and beliefs from generation to generation,” and practiced in Agudah-oriented shtiebles, chasidic and neo-chasidic minyans, classic Young Israels—U.S. News & World Report mentions only two Orthodox synagogues by name and example: the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale “where you will see things that push the limits of Orthodoxy,” and Ohav Shalom, in Washington D.C., a synagogue whose rabbi apprenticed at that same Hebrew Institute.

So in all of the United States, the two Orthodox synagogues that we’re told exemplify the “return to tradition” both prefer to brand themselves as being as untraditional as they can be.

Now I happen to have a vast affection for Hebrew Institute, it’s my hometown shul. Despite what the article claims, “pushing the limits of Orthodoxy” is not even the shul’s greatest charm. But within a five-minute walk are three shuls – the Young Israel of Riverdale, the Riverdale Jewish Center, and a Chabad – that are rightfully successful, every bit as crowded on Shabbat and far more traditional. So why was Hebrew Institute chosen by the newsweekly as the embodiment of a national “tradition” trend when it doesn’t even claim to be the most traditional shul in its own neighborhood? Does even a story on tradition have to seek out the cutting edge instead of deciphering the allure of the old faithful?

And why are religious trend stories so singular in examining what young people are doing? The middle-aged can be religiously lost and found as well as anyone, and just as fluid in the religious choices. Regret, the onset of aches, and looming death provokes the soul more easily among the aging and the wounded than among the young.

Aside from general newsweeklies, even in Jewish newsrooms most journalists couldn’t identify trends beyond their personal experience, let alone into the “dead ball” era. Political writers, for example, can easily relate a New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 insurgency. Religious writers often don’t know history in quite the same way.

This week we celebrate Tu B’Shvat and JTA reports (Jan. 12), “Quite recently, young Jews in their 20s and 30s have seized upon the holiday, running Tu B’Shevat seders that are more explicit both in their call to environmental activism and their reliance on Jewish text.”

I went to those exact Tu B’Shvat seders more than 35 years ago, seders just as environmental and reliant on text, just as crowded with other “young Jews in their 20s and 30s.”

How can something at least 35 years old, and reported in newspapers in the 1970s, be declared a phenomenon discovered “quite recently,” except for the insistence on justifying almost all coverage of religion (other than fights and politics) by calling it a trend?

We’re told there’s a large gap between Jewish leadership and the masses and charitable federations are “not the unifying influence” they claim to be since they have only a “comparatively small number of contributors.”

That trendy observation is from The New York Times, May 30, 1934 (“Religion Among Jews Found To Be Waning”). Two days later, a gentleman named Sidney Simon wrote a letter to the editor asking whether those who determine Jewish trends had access to “such pertinent facts” as the synagogue attendance of young Jews, and their interest in Jewish studies, “say, thirty years ago, for comparison with the current situation?”

I wonder who remembers 1978. Mr. Simon wondered, in 1934, who remembers 1904?

“In New York and in other large cities today (1934) there are rapidly growing groups of young men and women who are attaching themselves to the synagogues,” he writes. “Already, their number far exceeds that of the young men and women who attended the synagogue thirty years ago.”

According to Mr. Simon, there was a return to religious tradition, back in Roosevelt’s first term.

It was 1934, hard times, and the letter-writer tells us that Young Israel’s employment office in lower Manhattan received “more than 10,000” applications” from young Jews who “in spite of the present economic situation will not accept work unless the employer will allow them to keep the Sabbath.”

Mr. Simon asks, “Does this indicate a waning of religious feeling?”

It indicates to me that a lack of memory among religious experts is a tradition all its own.

It reminds me that the old people I see on Bronx avenues, preparing for Sabbath, were young and unsure in 1934, many of their fathers without jobs, knowing what was happening in Germany  (reported in the 1934 papers), not knowing if the Depression would last forever, or that war was on the way.

Those 10,000 unemployed, among others, had a Sabbath, traditional or not, after six days of soup lines and filling out job applications when there were no jobs.

I’d like to think they were invited for Sabbath meals; a tradition, even then.

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Route 17:  Who's Juicing The Agunah Numbers? /  Jonathan Mark in New York

It was recently reported that the United Nations AIDS agency overestimated the size of the AIDS epidemic by a whopping six million cases, a big percentage of the worldwide actuality (33.2 million).

You'd think AIDS advocates would be happy, but no. The New York Times said that AIDS advocates were concerned that they now wouldn't raise as much money as they hoped.

As politicians know, fear is good for business.

It is remarkable on how many issues, such as agunot (women who are denied a Jewish divorce by their husbands), Jewish journalists and academics simply guess at the numbers involved, without any statistical certainty. Sympathy for the feminist cause in most newsrooms likely has Jewish journalists overcooking the estimates of how many agunot there are. Or else, journalists are taking advocates' guesses as gospel. The agunot issue has become the BarryBonds of Jewish statistics: Juiced and pumped beyond credibility.   

Bari Weiss, in The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 24), argues that in Israel "there are 10,000 women refused divorces, but in the U.S., Orthodoxy has no centralized legal body, so the number of agunot is impossible to calculate." Actually it is possible to calculate. There are a finite number of major Orthodox organizations. There are a finite number of rabbinical courts. They keep records.

If there are 10,000 agunot in Israel, there ought to be at least several thousand in the United States. But that doesn't sound right. Think about your own synagogue, if you live in a major population area. There might be hundreds of families who are members of your local synagogue. How many agunot have there been in your community, out of those hundreds?

Rabbi Yona Reiss, of the Rabbinical Council of America's Bet Din, told me that RCA court -- the largest Orthodox court in the United States - for the past five years handled "approximately 350" divorces each year. "I went through all our logs," said the rabbi, "and checked how many cases were still unresolved or outstanding, and if I recall, there were five to ten cases that hadn't been resolved after three or more years."

That's "five to ten," not "thousands."

This is not unlike the Jewish journalistic fad in the 1970s that insisted, in dozens of articles, that young Jews were joining cults by the thousands. In the wake of the 1960s, parents were afraid. To Nixonian minds, the whole idea of the "counterculture" seemed like a cult. I began to wonder: How is it possible that I had been living in two heavily populated Jewish neighborhoods (Riverdale and the Upper West Side), and I knew only one Jew - just one -- who actually joined the Moonies, or any cult for that matter?

How come, with all of my professional and personal acquaintances in the Jewish community, surely more than a thousand people, I wasn't on a first name basis with even two women who have ever been agunot? How can that be if there are thousands of them out there? I'm inclined to believe Rabbi Reiss. The numbers were low. That ought to be good news. After all the conferences, that ought to be a front page story. But it's not. Maybe Jewish feminists, like the AIDS advocates, would rather you not know the truth.

What numbers there are can be warped by advocates who twist criteria to their advantage. We have to know the length of time in which a divorcing couple can haggle before a woman becomes an agunah, since every divorce involves haggling and that has to be considered normative, not a reflection on the unique inequity of Jewish divorce law. But some advocates say a woman can be an agunah if there is even a one-day negotiation, or even several weeks, a shorter time period than most civil divorces can possibly take, even without religious complications.

I believe intermarriage statistics. They tell me that intermarriages are near 50 percent and I'm familiar with dozens and dozens of intermarriages. The statistics sound right.

But on too many Jewish issues, there are too many Jewish journalists and too many advocates who are bluffing.

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Route 17: The Hobbits Of Chabad / Jonathan Mark in New York

The messianists of Chabad are harmless, the equivalent of theological hobbits. They are more of a phenomenon than they are significant. They are still in mourning for the one they loved; more to the point, the only one from whom they felt such love. One would think the etiquette of the more enlightened among us might indulge a depression masquerading as eschatology. Yes, they are an annoyance and embarassment for mainstream Chabad, but they seem to have a "Kick Me" sign on their back that brings out the bully in others, particularly those who are messianists themselves, albeit messianic Zionists.

In the modern religious world that makes a fetish of pluralism, and welcomes any fetish into the pluralist's big tent, why the venom?

A few week's ago in Israel, a non-Jew who apparently studied with a Chabad messianist, attempted to convert to Judaism under the auspices of an Israeli rabbinical court. The court's judges are believers in religious Zionism - the belief that the State of Israel itself has messianic implications.

Israel is surrounded by enemies. Rockets are landing daily. Terrorists are conniving to get a nuclear bomb. And the rabbis had one last question for this émigré from the old Soviet Union who wanted to share the fate and destiny of the Jewish people.

It was like the question that got Arlo Guthrie -- litterbug in "Alice's Restaurant" - rejected by his draft board: "Kid, you ever been arrested?"

Kid, you believe the rebbe is Moshiach?

The wannabe Jew said "yes." After all, who cared about this poor guy back in Russia? A rebbe who never saw him, sending emissaries to teach him, even feed him, who promised him redemption.

"Yes," said the yearning soul.

"No," said the court, conversion rejected. The poor guy stays a goy until Israel's chief rabbi, another messianic Zionist, hears the case on appeal.

How many in Chabad actually believe the rebbe is the Messiah? You'd think with all the experts around, we could get a number.

In a story on the rejected conversion, Arutz Sheva (Jan. 3) estimated "several thousand." Whose estimate? They don't say.

The Jewish Week (Jan. 11), in its infinite editorial wisdom, reports that messianists only consitute a "segment" of Chabad, a definition that avoids placing a number on something that no demographer or pollster has ever determined with any respectable methodology.

David Berger, professor of Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University, and the biggest, meanest, anti-Chabad hunter of them all, wrote in Dei'ah V'Dibur (July 12, 2006) that "a substantial majority" of Lubavitchers are messianist.

In Dec. 2005, Samuel Heilman, a professor of Jewish Studes at Queens College, in an interview with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, does not say there is a substantial majority, only a "split" within Chabad; shluchim (rabbinic "emissaries" at Chabad Houses around the world) are "much less messianist," than the others, says Heilman.

At the last several gatherings of American and international shluchim in Crown Heights that I've covered, there was not a single verbal, visual or even veiled reference to the rebbe as moshiach.

But for years now, on the very same weekend as the international shluchim banquet, there has indeed been a split. Each camp has a dinner for itself. A few hundred attend the messianist  dinner; more than 4,000, including almost every emissary, the top financial backers such as Lev Leviev, and the top Chabad leadership, attend the non-messianist dinner. For a Chabad Kremlinologist, that says "a substantial majority" is not messianist at all.

Berger's Yeshiva University is the epicenter of messianic religious Zionism. YU's graduates are foremost among those who say one ought to say Hallel on Yom Haatzmaut; that it is a borderline sin not to spend  a year in Israel after high school, let alone the alleged obligation of aliyah.

On Shabbat they say the Prayer for the State, a messianic prayer proclaiming that the State of Israel is the beginning of the redemption.

Why is it such a problem that Chabad messianists sing a rebbe-messianist song at the end of prayer services and it is not a problem that one Zionist messianic Orthodox shul has dumped the singing of Adon Olam on Shabbat morning and replaced it with Hatikvah -- substituting Israel worship for God worship during davening? (Aside from eliminating God, here's the "church-state" problem: When Hatikvah is a national anthem, sung outside of a prayer service, it is a political statement that allows for democratic dissent; when it is part of davening, it is in a realm that has no dissent.)

What ought to be more problematic: A chasid believing a dead man is the messiah and doing nothing of any consequence about it, or religious Zionists giving a messianic imprimatur to the very flawed, sometimes corrupt, very earthly Israeli political system? (A messianism, of course, that Israel's founding fathers never claimed, even going out of their