The Written Word

Jordan Farmar and the Jewish future

2009-04-22T21:27:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

It’s the second night of Passover, and Jordan Farmar is warming up under the bright lights of Staples Center. His teammates have already slipped into the locker room to decompress before taking the court against the Denver Nuggets. Farmar is still taking shot after shot.

Peeling off imaginary screens, pulling up as he’s running down the court, stepping to the free-throw line. Swish. Swish. Swish.

Alone on the court before the sell-out crowd arrives for one of the last home games of the regular season, Farmar looks as dominant as he did when he led Woodland Hills’ Taft High School to the city title, as flawless as he did in an NCAA run that took UCLA to the championship game. It’s difficult to remember that in his third year playing pro, all with the Los Angeles Lakers, Farmar hasn’t been so splendid: surgery, limited playing time, a diminished role.

Farmar finished the season poorly, and in Sunday’s playoff opener against the Utah Jazz he played just under four minutes, registering zero points and one assist. Lakers fans have started to trash the once-popular back-up point guard who last year showed so much promise.

But Farmar is only 22 and has “nothing but time.” He knows he’ll get his chance and that he cares too much to let it pass by.

And despite the struggles, Farmar already is a well-known name among basketball followers. His “brand,” as he calls it, has been bolstered by playing for two of the most storied teams in college and professional basketball history and by an oddity that would have been unfathomable 50 years ago: Jordan Farmar is the only dual Member of the Tribe and the National Basketball Association.

Indeed, a sport once dominated by Jews now counts only one MOT at the highest level. And Farmar, who doesn’t celebrate Jewish holidays and considers himself spiritual but not religious, is no Sandy Koufax. At the same time, though, Farmar doesn’t shy away from his Jewish heritage, from the mixed racial and ethnic identity to which it contributes or from the pride that many Jews take in having their own hoop hero.

“People see me as somebody they can relate to,” said Farmar, whose mother is Jewish and father, who is black, is Christian. “It’s not something I even think about. It’s more them relating to me; just me representing them and their people and what they believe and stand for. I don’t make a big deal about it. I don’t deny it or don’t stress it. I just live my life and be who I am.”

Jordan Robert Farmar was born Nov. 30, 1986, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to Damon and Melinda Farmar. He didn’t come out of the womb clutching a basketball, but he might as well have. His father was a minor league baseball player and his godfather is former major league all-star center fielder Eric Davis. Farmar quickly learned to love sports. He started playing basketball at age 4 and never wanted to do anything else.

Like many Jewish identities, Farmar’s is complicated. His parents — black and white, Christian and Jew — divorced when Farmar was 3, and he went to live with his mom, who soon met a Jew far more observant than she had been.

Yehuda Kolani had been in Los Angeles on vacation. He told Farmar’s mother not to fall in love, and that he wasn’t going to go native. After he returned to Tel Aviv, Melinda followed and brought him back to Los Angeles. They soon married, adding another tint to Jordan Farmar’s multicultural experience.

“I was born in a Christian family,” Farmar said recently. “And then my mom and dad got divorced and she married an Israeli. He was Orthodox when he was in Israel. He came over here and really reformed a lot. He wanted to have a family and treated me like his son. Everything after that was being raised in a Jewish household. Doing Shabbat dinner, celebrating the holidays and all that.”

Farmar is seated on the couch of his Redondo Beach home. It was Saturday evening and Farmar spoke as he watched North Carolina thump Villanova in the NCAA semi-final game. Over the next hour, he talked about improving his play, building his brand and whether it was more painful to miss out on an NCAA title in 2006 or NBA championship ring last year.

“College,” he said. “I was playing a lot and felt like what I did every night would make or break what happened with our team.”

He shared vaguely the details of his Jewish upbringing, largely because his experiences were limited. Farmar attended Hebrew school at Temple Judea in Tarzana and became a bar mitzvah. From his days playing at the YMCA through high school, Farmar would invite his teammates over for Shabbat dinner. He would bless the wine; his younger half sister, Shoshana, would take care of the bread.

“And that is about it,” Melinda Kolani said in a later interview. “We have friends from all nationalities and all races and all religions, so [being Jewish] is not the major focus.” But, she added: “I’m proud of being Jewish, and I want my kids to know what it is to be Jewish and to have their heritage.”

Perhaps the most apparent legacies of Farmar’s upbringing are his deep commitment to family — he has, after all, never lived outside Los Angeles County — and his appreciation for the value of money, which contributes to his entrepreneurial spirit.

Farmar grew up in a 1,500-square-foot house in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. The Van Nuys neighborhood of his childhood is pleasant, tree-lined and clearly middle class. It’s a lot further removed from his mother’s upbringing in Bel Air than the 10 or so miles that separate the two. But it was home, and it was a good home.

“We didn’t have a lot,” Melinda Kolani said. “We didn’t have abundance. But we were happy.”

Making $1.08 million this year and set to earn $1.9 million next year, Farmar is still living relatively modestly. His Redondo Beach bachelor pad, about two miles from the Pacific and three blocks from Chabad of the Beach Cities, is spacious and luxurious but far from extravagant. He drives a Mercedes and a Cadillac Escalade hybrid, and also bought Benzes for his longtime girlfriend and his mother, but has avoided the trappings that ensnare so many professional athletes. (Sports Illustrated reported last month that within five years of retirement, 78 percent of professional football players and 60 percent of basketball players are broke.)

“I make a lot of money, but if I had to stop today, I would have to work just like everybody else,” he said. “You never know what is going to happen with your career. I could get hurt tomorrow and never be able to play again.”

That maturity — the awareness that God-given gifts and talents are blessings that can be God-taken without warning — has been present in Farmar for years.

“He had this combination of high IQ, period — not just basketball — and was conscientious and a ridiculous worker and just motivated,” said Derrick Taylor, the varsity basketball coach at Taft High School. “He had the whole package.”

While starring at Taft — Farmar averaged 27.5 points with 6.5 assists per game his senior year and led the school to its first Los Angeles City title — he was already being recognized as a Jewish player. Often, this suckered opponents into underestimating him.

“I’ve seen many games, just a countless amount of times, when guys would be like, ‘What’s you got white boy?’” Taylor said. “Oh boy, that would light a fire under him and he would destroy them. He could just bring it.”

By the time Farmar arrived at UCLA in the fall of 2004, the Jewish community had discovered a star they could call their own.

“Everybody knows Jews can’t play basketball.” Or so Eric Cartman, the infamous anti-Semite on Comedy Central’s “South Park,” opined when his classmate Kyle, the fourth grade’s lone Jew, tried out for the Colorado state basketball team.

While humorous and more than a bit bigoted, this statement seems painfully true today. In 2009, notable American Jewish basketball players are the exception. But a century ago they ruled.

The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame includes a handful of Jews. Arnold Jacob “Red” Auerbach, the legendary Celtics coach who won nine NBA titles in 11 years and helped integrate the game; Nat Holman, a visionary playmaker who was widely considered the greatest player of the 1920s; and Barney Sedran, who at 5-foot-4 is the shortest member of the hall. Moses Malone, though a Hall of Famer, was not among the renowned Members of the Tribe.

“Consider this,” said Dolph Schayes, another Hall of Famer who starred at New York University in the mid-1940s, “our greatest rival was St. John’s, which was a Catholic institution, and two of their best players were Hy Gotkin and Harry Boykoff. Every college in New York wanted Jewish players. Jews dominated the sport.”

Back then basketball was, in many ways, a different sport. “Today if the fans saw motion pictures of our play, they would laugh probably because the game was played below the basket, not above it,” said Schayes, who went on to be a 12-time NBA All-Star for the Syracuse Nationals and Philadelphia 76ers and the NBA’s 1966 coach of the year.

Speed and intelligence and precision took precedence over strength and size and athleticism. Not surprisingly, some found cause to denigrate Jewish basketball success.

“The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background,” the sports editor of the New York Daily News, Paul Gallico, wrote in the 1930s, “is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart-aleckness.”

In fact, Jewish excellence on the hardwood had more to do with sociology than biology. Like boxing, which Jews also excelled at, basketball was a favored sport of the inner city, and in the first half of the 20th century, few areas were more urban than New York’s Lower East Side, where Jews were so poor they often rolled up newspaper for their ball and used a fire escape ladder as their basket. The neighborhood was a factory for basketball talent.

Indeed, of the 110 inductees to the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Commack, N.Y., about one-third were basketball players, coaches or commentators.

“This is heritage in a way you don’t think about it,” said Alan Freedman, who, as the hall’s director, travels the country and talks to children about the Jewish sports stars of the last 100 years. “If someone had done this for me, I probably would have gone to Hebrew school and not cut so much.”

Implicit in Freedman’s quip is what many at the time saw as an irreconcilable tension: sports or scholarship. Poor Jewish immigrants wanted their children to grow up to be doctors and lawyers; that left no time for mindless sports.

But Jews would find that they could excel both in class and on the court. And while basketball was in constant conflict with Jewish identity — “There is nothing more American than sports,” said Jeffrey Gurock, author of “Judaism’s Encounter With American Sports” — it also helped strengthen Jewish communities.

“Basketball played such a huge part in the Jewish community and was almost a centerpiece of social life,” said David Vyorst, executive producer of “The First Basket,” a 2008 documentary that explores basketball’s Jewish roots. “In fact, that’s how I ended up joining my JCC. I was playing in a basketball league there and I ended up taking a Torah class. It still works that way today.”

It’s just that Jews now live more comfortably and much more commonly in the suburbs. They still play basketball, but no longer develop their talent in the Petri dish of the inner city. And they can afford to, and are allowed to, play more bourgeois sports.

“The era of Jews being predominant in basketball is a bygone era,” said Gurock, who is also a professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. “It isn’t only a function of being Jewish. It is a function of being middle-class Americans and having other interests that attract them. They’ve outgrown it socially and economically.”

Basketball, too, has changed.

In 1946, when the league that would become the NBA held its first game, four of the New York Knicks’ five starters were Jewish. One of them, Ossie Schectman, scored the league’s first points. But by the time Dolph Schayes’ son, Danny, was drafted in 1981, only two Jewish players, Ernie Grunfeld and Joel Kramer, remained in the NBA.

“Basketball has always been colorblind, religion blind. It’s one of the most neutral experiences: you can play or you can’t,” Danny Schayes said. “Basketball is basketball. Being there to be part of the Jewish community was just the bonus part.”

Although he didn’t see himself as a Jewish symbol, Schayes was embraced by some fans simply because he was Jewish. A journeyman center who played for eight teams in 18 years, including the Lakers, he remembers being cheered on several times in New York and Los Angeles by young Jewish fans waving yarmulkes.

He retired in 1999, and until Farmar was taken by the Lakers with the 26th pick of the 2006 draft, the NBA was Jew free.

The small Jewish athlete corps has given way to an at-times searing spotlight for those fortunate enough to have made it. Top Jewish sports stars, past and present, tend to be household names: Mark Spitz and Dara Torres in swimming; Hank Greenberg, Sandy Koufax, Shawn Green, Kevin Youkilis and Ryan Braun in baseball; Benny Friedman in football; Barney “Pride of the Ghetto” Ross and Benny “Ghetto Wizard” Leonard in boxing; Schayes, Sedran, Holman and Auerbach in basketball.

Maybe someday Farmar, too.

The added attention often poses unique challenges. Athletes appreciate the built-in stable of supporters, but there is an expectation that comes with it.

Braun, who is known as the Hebrew Hammer and in two years playing left field for the Milwaukee Brewers has been National League Rookie of the Year and an All-Star, has been willing to carry the flag. But he didn’t ask to be a spokesman. Never was this more apparent than during last summer’s All-Star weekend.

During a press conference, Braun was asked whether he thought an off-the-cuff comment that Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson had made over the weekend was anti-Semitic. Too much was being made of too little, and, as the JTA staff quipped on its blog, “Poor Ryan Braun is expected to play Abe Foxman instead of left field.”

Braun, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and attended Granada Hills High School, tried his best to neither offend baseball’s Mr. October nor anyone at the Anti-Defamation League.

“Obviously, it would be disappointing,” Braun said, “but until I’ve actually had a chance to see the comment I couldn’t really respond to it.”

Mike Bauman, a columnist for MLB.com, remarked at the time, “A player who wasn’t Jewish would never get this kind of question. If some prominent person made, for instance, an anti-Protestant remark, the Presbyterian and Lutheran players would not be quizzed about it. But Braun gets the difference.”

Braun realizes that he’s not just another ballplayer. He’s a Jewish ballplayer. Even though hitting home runs and knocking in runs and securing wins are the most important part of his job, he can’t avoid being what others need him to be.

“I think that it’s something that comes with the territory,” Braun added. “There aren’t too many Jewish athletes at the highest level. It’s something that I certainly embrace. But there are times when people expect me to be aware of issues, like that specific example.

“I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.”

In this realm, Farmar and Braun have a lot in common. When asked what he thought about President Obama’s so-called Jewish problem during his campaign last year, Farmar, who introduced Obama at a Newport Beach fundraiser, said he hadn’t heard anything about it. Indeed, today’s top Jewish athletes, whether deeply committed or only distantly observant, prove just how remarkable Koufax, possibly the greatest Jewish athlete since King David, was when he refused to pitch Game One of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

“I wish people wouldn’t say — and I’ve heard this from others — don’t think of me as a Jewish ballplayer or African American or whatever. But that is the way we look at it,” said Freedman, the Jewish hall of fame director. “We all have that feeling of pride when we hear Adam Sandler’s ‘Chanukah Song.’ We are looking at them and put this pressure on them. I look at Ryan Braun and say that Ryan Braun is a great left fielder and a great home-run hitter and he’s Jewish.”

Farmar has picked the spots to blend his identities as athlete and Jew. Last September, he joined the star-studded Chabad Telethon and shot free-throws as a fundraiser.

“Jordan is a real mensch,” said Rabbi Chaim Cunin, executive producer of the telethon and CEO of Chabad of California. “He raised $66,600 in 90 seconds. How many people can say that? He made 37 free throws in 90 seconds. That is a lot of mitzvahs, as we say.”

Before that, in August, Farmar had made his third visit to the Jewish state. But this trip to Israel wasn’t to travel with family. Instead he spent a week leading a basketball camp for Israeli and Palestinian children, getting them to play on the same team and to, at least for a few moments, leave all their differences aside.

“I wasn’t trying to convert anyone or change anyone’s beliefs. I was just trying to open their eyes to just being kids rather than thinking about religion or war or anything like that,” Farmar said.

“For me it doesn’t make any difference one way or another who is in control of that area or whose region it really is or belongs to,” he added. “Like I said, I don’t practice religion like that, so it doesn’t matter to me. But to see people affected by it, it’s unfortunate. Being a kid from a multicultural background, I know that different cultures and different races can coexist and make things happen and work.

“It’s just that their beliefs are completely opposite, and Middle Eastern people are very stubborn. They’ll do anything for their beliefs. They’ll die for it,” he said. “So I don’t know if it will ever end.”

In addition to those endeavors, last summer Farmar started Hoop Farm, a basketball camp he leads at UCLA that also encourages kids to be eco-friendly, and this summer he is hosting the first annual Jordan Farmar Celebrity Golf Classic at Sherwood Country Club in Thousand Oaks. The proceeds from the golf tournament will benefit the Jordan Farmar Foundation, which is run by his mother and primarily helps at-risk youths and children undergoing cancer treatment at Mattel Children’s Hospital UCLA.

Successful as these efforts are, they won’t change the fact that what’s most important when Farmar steps on the court is how he performs.

“The bottom line is he will be judged for the merit of his play,” Danny Schayes said. “One thing you learn in sports is there is no residual benefit outside of your play. It’s not something where you get additional kudos because you have a foundation or you are the only Jewish player — you can play or you can’t.”

And in that arena Farmar has been hindered this year by the first serious injury of his career, a tear of the lateral meniscus in his left knee that required surgery and sidelined him for a month. He’s struggled since returning, putting up weaker numbers (6.4 points per game) and getting less playing time (18.3 minutes per game) than he did last year. He hit his roughest skid in the last week of the regular season and fans have begun piling on, writing enough disparaging questions to the Los Angeles Times last week to fill out a “Bash Jordan Farmar Q&A.”

“Is it me or is Phil Jackson tightening his reins on Jordan Farmar’s sloppy play?” one fan asked. “His playing this year has been pretty bad, and I could not consider him to be the Lakers’ future starting point guard.”

“No, Roger, it’s not just you. It’s Phil also,” the Times sportswriter responded. “Take the last five regular-season games as an example. Jackson has used Farmar less, playing him 15 minutes, 14, five (all in the first half against Portland), 13 and 17. And Farmar hasn’t been productive. He has scored 12 total points during that five-game span. He has made only 17.3% of his shots, 22.2% of his three-pointers, over that time.”

Farmar is clearly frustrated. “He expected more of himself and a bigger year this year,” Taylor, his high school coach, said. “He thought he was turning the corner.”

But as the Lakers continue their playoff series tonight, April 23, against the Utah Jazz, Farmar is looking to reclaim his spot as their point guard of the future and to show that he can star alongside the best players in the world.

“It’s been up and down trying to stay levelheaded and consistent and continue to improve and help this team however I can. I’m still only 22, but this is my third year and I wanted to be farther along. Starting or close to it, definitely playing a lot of minutes,” Farmar said. “I have no concerns it’s going to work out for me. I care too much and I work too hard. Hopefully, we’ll be able to come home with a championship this year.”

Lakers fans and more than a few Jews are pulling for him.

Why blame the Jews?

2009-04-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Henry Lehman left Bavaria in 1844 for a peddler’s life in rural Alabama. Within a year he had saved enough money to open a dry goods store in Montgomery, and a few years later he was able to send for his brothers, Emanuel and Mayer. The firm, Lehman Brothers, expanded, moved into cotton trading and in 1958 opened a New York office, where their prestige grew as international financiers and members of the German Jewish royalty. For the next century the holdings company, one of Wall Street’s most storied investment banks, always was led by a Lehman and, regardless of staff demographics after that, always identifiably Jewish.

All that ended Sept. 15, 2008 — the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, the United States economy fell off the cliff it had been marching toward and anti-Semitism received a powerful shot in the arm.

“Yes all the jews ... you are all complicit in being a blight on the community ... money money money ... it’s the only song the jews sing and the only thing they eat ... what they won’t do for money….” a reader from New York, identified as Shawna Murray, commented on The God Blog on this newspaper’s Web site, after reading an Oct. 8 post about the spike in anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semites have long fed off fallacious claims that Jews drink the blood of gentile financial calamity. And, reality be damned, they wasted little time before lobbing such attacks this go-around.

Given the anonymous nature of the Internet, it’s impossible to know whether such sentiments signified a new surge in hatred of Jews or were simply a sign of increased efforts by an angry few. But it appears that more than just the usual suspects have bought into the conspiracy theories and abject anti-Semitism. In February, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported 40 percent of Europeans in seven countries — Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland and Spain — believe Jews have too much power in business and nearly a third blame Jews for the economic crisis.

“Jews run the world,” Draskovics Andras, a leader in the right-wing Hungarian Guard movement, said in remarks televised on Hungarian TV last month. Jews “need only 2 billion people for their tricks, and the rest of mankind will be executed.”

Though less socially acceptable in the United States, anti-Semitic attitudes appear to be just as common.

In January, Neil Malhotra, an assistant professor at Stanford School of Business, and Yotam Margalit of Columbia University set out to determine just how much blame Americans were assigning to history’s favorite scapegoat. And though the ADL regularly finds that fewer than 20 percent of Americans harbor anti-Semitic attitudes regarding Jewish business practices, Malhotra and Margalit’s study suggests that the historic urge to outsource blame is bringing in at least a few new faces.

Primed with news articles related to the crisis, including one about Bernard Madoff, the macher who made off with billions from the American Jewish community and admitted to running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, study participants were asked the question: “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” They then had to choose between “a great deal, a lot, a moderate amount, a little and not at all.”

“Among non-Jewish respondents,” Malhotra told The Journal, “a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blanketly blamed ‘the Jews’ a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 percent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.”

The campaign against the Jews began shortly after Lehman’s collapse. On Oct. 2, a rumor, based on insinuation and wishful thinking, began circulating on anti-Semitic blogs that before going belly-up Lehman had diverted $400 billion — that’s billion with a “b” — to accounts in Israel.

The origin of this claim was a Bloomberg article reporting that before the company’s collapse, its assets fell from $500 billion to less than $100 billion — a drop of $400 billion. A Lehman trustee attributed this to a “proverbial run on the bank.” The article contained no mention of Israel or Jews or any recipient of these billions, but anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists knew the only answer for the money’s disappearance was Jewish clannishness and trickery.

“The reality is irrelevant. Anti-Semites and bigots and people who accept stereotypes have nothing to do with reality. Facts don’t matter. They create their own,” Abraham Foxman, national director of the ADL, said in an interview.

“Sometimes in bigotry you use a modicum of facts to build your conspiracy,” Foxman said. “If the economy was not in crisis, bigots could not use the economy as a platform on which to operate. Lehman, Bear Sterns, the current Fed chairman, the previous Fed chairman — but that assumes a classic anti-Semitic canard that all these people are in these positions because they are Jewish and therefore act out their Jewishness.”

This is familiar territory for the Jewish people. From poisoning the well to plunging Weimar Germany into desperate poverty, Jews have often been blamed for otherwise explainable tragedies (such as poor sanitation and war reparations).

Anti-Semites looked to the business pages and found Jewish names being mentioned in almost inverse relation to the stock market’s decline.

They turned to Washington and found Jewish economists being blamed for policies that precipitated the crisis and labeled as Jews several policymakers who aren’t, such as former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and his successor Timothy Geithner.

And then in early December, anti-Semites received an early Christmas gift: Bernard Madoff.

Never mind the culpability of the policies of President Bush and President Clinton, the mortgage lending practices of the likes of Countrywide’s Angelo Mozilo — let alone the conspicuous consumption of the American consumer.

Anti-Semites prefer to discount the facts and cling to convenient Jewish names and faces.

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“I am actually grateful for this opportunity to publicly speak about my crimes, for which I am so deeply sorry and ashamed,” Bernard Madoff told a U.S. District judge in New York on March 12. “As I engaged in my fraud, I knew what I was doing [was] wrong, indeed criminal.”

With this statement, Madoff, the biggest con man in American history, plead guilty to 11 counts of fraud and accepted the fact that he almost certainly will die in prison.

On top of stripping billions from Jewish nonprofits and their megadonors, Madoff confirmed every ugly stereotype anti-Semites tend to promulgate about Jews. Crooked. Wicked. Consumed by a lust for mammon to the point of moral bankruptcy. Madoff was a walking stereotype — as Foxman said, “a cherry on the top for bigots.”

But Madoff, 70, did not cause the economic collapse. In fact, if the stock market hadn’t plunged about 35 percent between mid-September and mid-November, he and the so-called mini-Madoffs now coming to light likely would have continued their fictitious businesses and have kept robbing Peter to pay Paul. Far from a cause of the recession, the wreckage brought on by Madoff — “scoundrel of scoundrels,” in the words of Nobel Peace laureate Elie Wiesel, one of his multimillion-dollar victims — was a consequence of it.

There were, however, plenty in legitimate corners of the financial services industry who deserve their share of blame. It’s just that their mistakes have nothing to do with their identities as Jews.

Shortly after news of the economic crisis broke, NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” aired a sketch that poked fun at people the comedy show’s writers thought were getting rich on taxpayer money. In a skit depicting a press conference on the federal government’s $700 billion bailout, an actor impersonating George Soros, the billionaire Holocaust survivor, said in a thick accent that he had pocketed the government’s money, which he converted to Swiss francs because he was shorting on the U.S. dollar. Yuppie speculators and “deadbeats” who were approved for loans without credit or jobs also were pilloried. Herbert and Marion Sandler got the worst of it.

The Sandlers had sold Golden West, a savings and loan reportedly filled with bad assets, to Wachovia Bank for $24 billion in 2006. “Actually, we’ve done quite well. We’re very happy,” Marion Sandler said in the sketch, as the screen subtitles identified her and her husband as “people who should be shot.”

Whether these caricatures were anti-Semitic or simply satirical has been a point of debate, in this newspaper and others. Regardless, the Sandlers certainly weren’t pleased.

“I have been listening to this crap for two years,” Sandler told the Associated Press the morning after the SNL sketch. “We are being unfairly tarred. People have been telling us to speak out for some time, but we didn’t think it was appropriate. That was clearly a mistake.”

“Unfairly tarred” is another point of debate. By September, Wachovia had become so fiscally troubled, in part because of Golden West’s toxic assets, that the bank had to be saved by Wells Fargo. Sandler did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but NBC apologized and has edited the Sandlers out of the version of the sketch that can be seen at NBC.com and Hulu.com, the latter of which is partially owned by NBC.

To be sure, there are people who happen to be Jewish who deserve blame for their role in the financial crisis. And many would argue that the Sandlers are among those topping the list. But it’s hard to argue that their actions, like those of former Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld or former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, have anything to do with being Jewish.

These were decisions made as banking executives and economic policy leaders, and not at the diabolical direction of the Elders of Zion.

In fact, the genesis of the global economic malaise was as American as Chevy trucks and apple pie.

The collapse began as a crisis in credit markets, which had been contaminated by the U.S. housing market, which had been precariously propped up by bad lending practices and rabid real estate speculation. All the while, consumers kept spending more and more. Dismal salary increases were no deterrent for homeowners. There was plenty of cash stashed inside that exponentially appreciating home for a new motorcycle or boat or Hawaiian vacation.

The profits weren’t real, but homeowners spent as if they were. Bankers were all too eager to keep supply in line with demand. And Washington politicians gladly looked the other way.

Indeed, economists say the meltdown had too many moving parts — speculative home buying, lax financial regulations, low interest rates, etc. — to pinpoint one clear catalyst.

“The current problem is one of certain confusion by so many people; there are so many fingerprints on this thing,” said Roy C. Smith, a professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business. “We don’t have an answer to who the culprit really is.”

“I’m not willing to say that person or that agency is to blame,” said Mark Thoma, an economics professor at the University of Oregon who writes the Economist’s View blog. “There were several faults, any one of which if it wasn’t there would have made a big difference.”

But what’s clear, economists agree, is that the colossal downturn was not the work of just Jews — no matter how anyone manipulates the evidence.

In a Time magazine list of 25 people to blame for the financial crisis, six Jews were among the culpable parties. The ratio is about 10 times Jews’ representation in the general population, but it is unclear whether that measure is different from that of Jewish involvement in the financial industry. What is known, though, is that while Jews are prominent and prevalent, they do not dominate the financial industry. In fact, not a single CEO of the 10 largest commercial banks, as of Sept. 30, was Jewish.

How is it then that Jews came to be so strongly identified with Wall Street and the world of international financing?

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Long before 23 Dutch Jews arrived in the colony of New Amsterdam in 1654, moneylending was one of a few professions open to European Jews, who often weren’t allowed to own land or join the guilds. Moneylending was prohibited of Christians by the Catholic Church; Jews were familiar with businesses built on large amounts of risk and preferred jobs that endeared them to those in power. The glove fit — for some, a bit too well. In some cases exorbitant interest rates led many Christians to believe that Jews were more intent on destroying their debtors than on making money. The most infamous depiction, of course, is Shakespeare’s Shylock, a fictional character who has done more to color the Jewish people than just about anyone in literature — biblical or otherwise.

“The more Jews became involved with commerce, the more non-Jewish society associated them with commerce and finance, the more they became negatively stigmatized by it and the more they were excluded from noncommercial activities, such as agriculture,” said Jonathan Karp, an associate professor in Jewish studies at State University of New York, Binghamton, and author of “The Politics of Jewish Commerce: Economic Thought and Emancipation in Europe, 1638-1848.” “There was an element of a vicious cycle or a self-fulfilling prophecy that pushed Jews more and more into these activities.”

The art of charging interest was passed from father to son and so on, and though the church’s restriction eventually faded, Jews had the experience and a leg up. This would pay a pretty penny for a handful of German Jews who immigrated to the United States in the mid-to-late 1800s. Here they found a proven formula for success that was rooted in the ingenuity necessary for diaspora life and their Old World familiarity with moneylending: from rural peddlers to international financiers in a matter of only a handful of years.

It began with the Our Crowders — those aristocrats of post-Civil War New York, the Lehmans and Seligmans, the Loebs and Schiffs, the Goldmans and Sachses. “The New Crowd,” as Judith Ehrlich and Barry Rehfeld dubbed the next arrival of Jews on Wall Street in a 1989 book by that name, took over in the hyper-aggressive, private-equity days of the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these business leaders still work on Wall Street today; no longer is it a profession of necessity.

“I don’t think Jews are predominantly drawn to finance anymore. Jews are drawn to a whole variety of prestigious and lucrative professions,” said Derek Penslar, a visiting professor at Columbia University and author of “Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe.” “They have been drawn to banking and the stock market; to medicine and law; to academia. I think Jews are simply attracted to pursuits that require higher education and promise good money or a prestigious reputation. They are oriented toward brainwork, but not toward finance.”

It should be said, too, that the financial crisis — just as rough on the Jewish community as the broader American public — certainly has not been good for the Jews. Charities supporting Jewish causes have been hammered. Jewish megadonors have lost substantial chunks of their wealth and have tightened the purse strings. And professions with heavy Jewish representation have been decimated: the financial industry, real estate and construction, law and, not to be forgotten, media.

Looking forward, Jews have landed on both sides of the debate over the recession’s cause and course of action. While many worked for the banks that leveraged themselves beyond belief, and in some cases out of existence, and many worked for the government agencies that could have reigned-in an economic bubble built on low interest rates and an out-of-control housing market, many others were sounding the alarms during the years that preceded the current crisis.

This reality was replayed last month on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” when, hours after Madoff plead guilty, Jewish host Jon Stewart coolly excoriated the also-Jewish CNBC personality Jim Cramer for his network’s “cheerleading” the inflated economy and for the frenetic nature of the stock advice he belts out on “Mad Money.”

“We’re a big network. We’ve been out front, and we’ve made mistakes,” an unusually contrite Cramer said. “We’ve got 17 hours of live TV a day to do. But I —”

“Maybe you could cut down on that,” Stewart quipped.

Then in defending the advice he dishes on “Mad Money,” Cramer said, “The show has evolved as the market got tougher.”

To which Stewart offered a correction: “I think evolved might be a strong word. Mutated.”

The six-minute interview — or interrogation — became an immediate moment of cultural catharsis. Comedy Central also uploaded unaired portions of the interview onto one of its blogs, Indecision Forever, which quickly was peppered with more than 3,500 comments, the vast majority of them thanking Stewart for calling Cramer on the carpet.

Anyone who saw “The Daily Show” on March 12 — the show’s audience of 2.3 million was second in 2009 only to Inauguration Day — understood the differences between these two small-statured, big-brained, larger-than-life Jews from quite similarly modest backgrounds:

Hero and villain.

Watchdog and booster.

Prophet and king.

It didn’t matter that Cramer wasn’t responsible for the mania in home buying or irresponsibility in bank lending, that he was simply a TV personality who shouts commands to buy and sell certain stocks. It didn’t matter that, as Megan McArdle wrote for The Atlantic, “Going after Jim Cramer is like trying to fix your marriage by getting new drapes.”

Though he admittedly had offered some bad advice since Wall Street collapsed six months ago, Cramer became the fall guy for just about anything that’s wrong with the economy.

You could even call him a scapegoat.

But lost in all the scapegoating — often the case when Jews are blamed for someone else’s problems — is the crucial lesson of the U.S. and global financial crises: Most Americans and many in industrialized countries got drunk on money that didn’t exist and comfortable with lifestyles they couldn’t afford. Now the world is suffering a pretty nasty hangover.

Madoff and the LA Jewish community

2008-12-23T23:22:00.000-08:00

From: The Jewish Journal

The stock market had been hammered for more than a year, but the Jewish Community Foundation (JCF) was doing relatively well, David Polak, chair of the JCF's investment committee, told the board of directors early this month.

The JCF's common investment pool, which manages the endowments for some of Los Angeles Jewry's biggest social service agencies, was down for the year -- but only by about 19 percent. Its performance could be attributed, at least in part, to one of the investment pool's money managers. Polak didn't identify this apparent financial all-star, which in terrible economic times had managed this year to produce almost a double-digit return on investment.

But less than 10 days later, everyone knew the name: Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities.

Last week, as the largest Ponzi scheme in history claimed hundreds of millions of dollars from Jewish organizations and institutions, the JCF reported it had lost an $18 million investment that had grown to $25.5 million on paper. Overnight, 9 percent of the money some L.A. Jewish nonprofits use to generate cash for their programs vanished.

"No one is happy, including us," said Marvin Schotland, JCF president and CEO. "But there has been an enormous amount of understanding about the unique set of circumstances that caused this to occur that could not have been foreseen or expected. It's a testament to the strength of the community, at least with respect to donors who have funds with us."

"They have not been engaged with blaming," he said. "They have not been happy, but they have understood this is an aberration."

Such a scandal -- any scandal -- had not touched the JCF before. But, then again, a Ponzi scheme on this scale had never occurred anywhere before.

The fraud has cut deep into not only Los Angeles' Jewish community but throughout the country and internationally. The list of victims has only grown since Madoff's arrest on Dec. 11.

The Jewish Community Centers Association of North America reported losses of as much as $7 million; American Technion Society no longer has $72 million. Hadassah is out $90 million and the Minneapolis Jewish community lost an estimated $100 million.

Revelations about Madoff's middlemen -- key money managers and machers across the country and the world who took a commission for directing investments to him -- have raised questions about how apprised individuals were of their investments and how knowledgeable these "fund feeders" were about Madoff's house of cards.

Stanley Chais, a Beverly Hills investment adviser, is clearly one victim. His family foundation, which annually gave $12.5 million to Jewish causes, suffered a fatal blow in the fallout. But now, Chais finds himself and his Brighton Co. the subject of a $250 million class-action lawsuit that accuses him of being not an innocent victim but a victimizer who mismanaged his clients' savings by investing with Madoff.

This is just one of many anticipated lawsuits that will likely drag on for years. Now, said Gary A. Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research, "comes the inevitable search for the guilty."

The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission has already chided his staff, charged with regulating the U.S. financial securities industry, over "apparent multiple failures" in addressing all the red flags Madoff raised during the past decade.

Locally, the JCF has created a special committee to pursue the recovery of funds and investigate what procedures led the organization to invest in Madoff and whether those should be reformed. The committee includes JCF Chair Cathy Siegel Weiss and Lorin Fife, who will assume the chairmanship next month, as well as Richard Sandler, vice chair of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, which lost $6.4 million and has a nonvoting seat on the JCF board.

"When something goes wrong, everybody has a thousand theories as to who did what wrong," Sandler told The Journal last week. "I've been watching all these congressional hearings for the last few months. Too much of the focus of the hearings was about who to blame instead of what to do now. I think that is a mistake."

"Obviously," he continued, "we could blame this guy Madoff. But when you look at the investment list, it is really hard to pick out a person. I am a great believer of the statement, 'But for the grace of God, there goes I.'"

The JCF made its first investment with Madoff in 2004. At the time, Madoff's fund was akin to the financial world's holy of holies -- divinely sanctified and even more exclusive. Getting in required a good connection, often from another financial titan.

Polak, chairman emeritus of L.A.-based NWQ Investment Management Co., opened that door and brought the proposal to the investment committee. They decided to invest $12 million. Two years later, in 2006, another $6 million was directed there from the common investment pool.

"We've all been surprised. The whole world has been surprised," said Polak, who stepped down last week from the investment committee. "But I'm under instructions as a member of the board from Cathy Siegel and Marvin Schotland to refer all questions to Marvin."

Schotland said the committee, whose membership hovers between eight and 10, made the decision after an "extremely robust discussion." They employed, he said, the same caution they use for each of the JCF's investments.

It is unclear whether the JCF's outside investment advisers, Cambridge Associates, recommended using Madoff. The firm was not hired until a few months after the first investment was made.

Schotland declined to speak for Cambridge, whose officials did not return calls for comment. The previous advisers, Consulting Services Group, also could not be reached.

Meanwhile, nonprofits have been re-evaluating how they will spend their money next year.

Organizations like Jewish Family Service (JFS) had already been wracked by an economy in turmoil. The California Legislature this year cut $700,000 from JFS' funding, and more state cuts are expected. While JFS' losses in the Madoff affair were relatively modest, about $425,000, they will remove another $25,000 in interest-generated revenue from the agency's budget -- an expense JFS can't afford.

"It's a convergence of factors all at once: The government is unraveling, the economy is hurting our supporters and now you have not only the decline on Wall Street but also this fraud. It's a perfect storm," said Paul Castro, JFS executive director and CEO. "We are hopeful, but it is going to be a big challenge. We are focused in on raising the dollars we can just to keep existing operations going."

Like many of the local Jewish nonprofits ensnared in the Madoff mess, JFS is a participant in the JCF common investment pool. The pool's roster has not been released, but Schotland said communal organizations, from The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles to Valley Beth Shalom, account for about 38 percent of the funds.

Family foundations exclusive from JCF's donor-advised funds, which account for about 70 percent of JCF's managed assets and were unaffected by the investor fraud, constitute another 6 percent. One percent of the pool comes from miscellaneous sources. And the bulk, 55 percent, belongs to the JCF and is used for grants.

In an e-mail, president Andrew Hyman of Valley Beth Shalom told the congregation that the synagogue had lost about 8 percent of its endowment, although he did not disclose the full value. The loss, he wrote, "will not have any significant negative impact on the endowment or its continuing support for the synagogue." But that doesn't mean the impact will not be significant and negative.

"It's tragic. And it has to be understood beyond one rotten apple," said Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis of the Encino synagogue. "You have to look at the barrel. We are living in a culture, and have been living in a culture of greed, of success at any price, and we have allowed that scene in the movie, 'Wall Street,' to become reality -- greed is good, and you know that as long as money comes in it is justified."

If there was any good news for Beit T'Shuvah, the Culver City-based Jewish drug and alcohol rehab center, it was that a little more than half of its $8 million endowment was withdrawn from the JCF's common investment pool earlier this year, when the agency was considering buying a halfway house, and that money hadn't been reinvested, limiting the organization's exposure to $3.6 million.

"But I think the damage is greater than the numbers -- the damage in people's trust and the damage in the whole philanthropic ideal and the fact that this hit on top of the economy are making people not want to part with their money," said Harriet Rossetto, the center's founder and CEO. "We haven't seen the extent of the damage here. It is going to keep being a domino effect -- things people haven't even thought of yet."

The next domino to fall may occur when supporters of Jewish social service agencies that lost money with Madoff realize that they no longer have the discretionary income to contribute to their regular charities.

"We have seen reported in the media the names of some people and charitable bodies who are based out here and been contributors to us. We feel bad about them and that their ability to support things we do may be reduced or eliminated," said John Fishel, Federation president. "We have not heard as of yet any impact on a larger group of donors. That is not the case in some communities on the East Coast and down in the Southeast."

Indeed, a few significant donors have already told the New York-based Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, of which Schulweis is the founding chairman, that they will no longer be contributing. Madoff himself had given in previous years.

While some donors were completely insulated from Madoff, others were acutely exposed. Everyone, though, is feeling the pinch of a tumbling economy. And this, nonprofit leaders and experts said, remains a much bigger concern than this onetime loss in funds.

"We have really had here a tsunami of economic crisis and distrust as a result of the crisis in the nonprofit sector and more specifically the Jewish communal system," said Steven Windmueller, dean of the L.A. campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and an authority on the federation system.

Still, the Madoff scandal has shaken the very core of Jewish philanthropy, threatening a key component of giving -- a donor's ability to trust that the money will be put to good use. To restore that, Windmueller said, organizations should ask a lot of questions about who is making investment decisions, what safeguard to add to the process and whether stricter investment guidelines should be self-imposed or government regulated.

"All of this is about trust, all of this is about confidence -- but before you even go through these new initiatives we are going to have a period of handwringing, the ability to take apart what happened and who's responsible."

Getting Jewish with Jesus

2008-11-07T11:29:00.000-08:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Benyamin Cohen is not someone you'd expect to find at church.

The son of an Orthodox rabbi, the founding editor of the now-defunct American Jewish Life magazine, Cohen committed to marrying within the faith to the point that during his 20s, which preceded JDate, Cohen flew from his home in Atlanta to the deeper Jewish dating pool of New York twice a month.On a scale of Yiddishkayt, Cohen was a super Jew.

And yet there he was one day, projected 20-feet-tall, for all to see, on "Jesus' JumboTron."

"Oh, God," Cohen thought, "forgive me."

This scene, which took place at a black megachurch in Atlanta, opens Cohen's just-released memoir, "My Jesus Year: A Rabbi's Son Wanders the Bible Belt in Search of His Own Faith" (HarperOne, $24.95), named by Publishers Weekly as one of 2008's best religion books. Cohen's experience on the first Sunday of his year-long spiritual quest makes clear that he won't just be able to blend in as he visits Baptist churches and Pentecostal revivals and Christian wrestling events.

His story is also laden with Jewish guilt, a theme that runs throughout Cohen's Jewish journey, as if hell hath a special place for wandering Jews.

Cohen, 33 (the "same age as Jesus when he died"), never thought he would find himself worshipping God with the help of a gospel choir. Yet all his life he had been tantalized by Christianity, gazing from the outside at the seemingly easier lives that Christian children led. While Cohen observed the Sabbath, his Christian neighbors played baseball; while he kept kosher, they ate bacon cheeseburgers; while he said a blessing after using the bathroom, they just washed their hands.

"I am, for better or worse, burdened for all eternity by my religion," Cohen writes.

And over time it began to feel it was for worse. Judaism's rules and ritual left Cohen feeling a bit crazy. Attending synagogue, praying, worshipping God, all these things had become rote, stripped of value. Cohen felt spiritually suffocated by tradition.

"What kind of religion was it that worshiped minutiae over meaning?" he writes. "Don't get me wrong. There are brilliance and beauty in this faith. I just haven't found them yet."

Jesus, as you can imagine from the book's title, helped Cohen find that brilliance and beauty. Cohen kept his journalistic guard up and didn't drink the Jesus juice, though he did take communion. But by spending a year with Christians, Cohen's own faith was invigorated.

"Stepping outside my comfort zone and hanging out with other people gave me a fresh perspective," said Cohen, who will be on a panel and sign copies of his book on Sunday as part of the Celebration of Jewish Books at American Jewish University.

In a phone interview, he told The Journal that his journey got out of his system what had been gnawing at him for years. "I finally got to taste the forbidden fruit. I think that was always a hurdle in my spiritual growth. No matter what, I was always looking across the street at the Christians. I was finally able to experience that, and I learned the grass isn't always green at the church across the street. And I learned to appreciate my own Judaism."

His Jewishness was, in essence, born again.

"I'm getting a fresh start and being reborn," Cohen writes a little more than halfway through his journey. "At the Georgia Dome, among forty thousand Christians, on Easter, the day of resurrection."

I had looked forward to reading Cohen's memoir -- written in the Jewish tradition of A.J. Jacobs' "The Year of Living Biblically," Mark I. Pinsky's "A Jew Among the Evangelicals" and Daniel Radosh's "Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture." Cohen's tale seemed particularly poignant for me because it was, at heart, a mirror image of my own travels.

I joined The Jewish Journal last year for reasons that were as personal as they were professional. It wasn't until I became a journalist that I learned more than the most basic details of Judaism and Jewish history -- this despite three Jewish grandparents and a face that can't evade the advances of Chabadniks.

On my own Jewish journey, I've learned a lot about my family history, but I've also learned how to be a better Christian; not by pretending to keep kosher or observe the Sabbath -- not through some Messianic hybrid -- but by applying Jewish cultural values to Christian observance and appreciating the common ground between two faiths that worship the same God.

Cohen's experiences have been quite different from mine, but the life lesson -- that Christians and Jews can learn a lot about their own faiths from the other -- is the same.

Cohen's interest is not in celebrating "Jon Stewart Judaism," though he worships in that temple every night. Cohen wants to engender, or at least encourage, excited-to-be-observant Jews. And, after 52 weeks spent going to church and to Christian rock concerts and even to confession, Cohen found that Christianity can reveal many secrets to the Jewish kingdom.

In the way Christians use pop culture, such as the cartoon "VeggieTales," to teach biblical stories and spread the gospel; in the way megachurches are so welcoming to newcomers -- even being greeted by a stranger with a kiss made Cohen feel uncomfortable -- and in the way Christians get big organizations, like the Atlanta Braves, to target them with Faith Night at the ballpark.

"We shouldn't take their theology," Cohen said, "but just from a marketing perspective, there is so much we can learn from Christianity."

Near the end of the book, Cohen thanks Jesus for changing his life, for breathing new life into an ancient faith that's been in his family since Aaron. And he sounds a lot like a Christian in free-form prayer.

"Thank you, Jesus, for making me less of a cynic," Cohen writes. "Thank you for teaching me that prayers can be recited in many ways and in many languages, and that God listens anyway. Thank you for miracles, even those of the golden dental variety. Thank you for small synagogues. For big churches. For gospel choirs. For holidays. Thank you for gratitude. For sickness and health. For repentance. For the lessons gleaned from death and loss. And, most of all, thank you for rebirth."

More at The God Blog

Obama or McCain: The fight for the Jewish vote

2008-10-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Gov. Sarah Palin was effusive during the vice presidential debate when given the chance to express her affinity for Israel. Given the chance, Sen. Joe Biden, her Democratic counterpart, was quick to point out that he loved Israel too. In American politics, most people do.

But in this presidential election, American Jews have not been convinced that Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain, the Democrat and Republican headliners, are equal when it comes to the future of Israel. McCain has been painted as a hawk willing to wage war with Israel's enemies, Obama a naïve peacemaker who would rather talk things out.

Viral e-mails, based on half-truths and un-truths, have furthered fears about Obama. They claim he's a Muslim; he Hamas' choice; he's not who he claims to be. (He's not; he isn't; and who is?) Recently, the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) has aimed attack ads -- including "Barack Obama's Friends: Pro-Palestinian. Anti-Israel. Hostile to America." -- at Israel-first voters.

The combination has taken its toll.

Jewish voters are the evangelicals of 2008, the holy grail of the electorate, and an ungodly amount of news ink has been spilled on Obama's "Jewish problem."

Back in the spring, it seemed more like media groupthink than plausible pitfall. But the reality is that only one Democratic nominee since the Jewish political realignment under FDR has received less than 60 percent of the Jewish vote (President Jimmy Carter in 1980) -- and polls from Gallup and the American Jewish Committee show Obama struggling to achieve even that minimum level of support.

"If Barack Obama doesn't become the next president of the United States, I'm gonna blame the Jews," comedian Sarah Silverman says in a public service announcement for The Great Schlep, which last weekend sent about 100 Jews from around the country to Florida to convince their bubbes and zadies to vote for Obama. (See story page 18.)

While oddsmakers say they expect Obama to be at least on par on Election Day with past Democratic candidates -- if not receiving the 80 percent of the Jewish vote of Gore-Lieberman, certainly 70 percent or above -- many Jews, Republicans and Democrats, leaders and laypeople, remain unconvinced.

"It terrifies me," said Rabbi Sharon Brous, spiritual leader of IKAR and one of the 300 members of Rabbis for Obama.

Brous' fear is shared by many Obama supporters. Talk with the candidate's backers about the election, and you hear optimism tinged with terror, their hope for a new American future bridled by a tight presidential race and anxiety at the possibility of another four years with a Republican in the White House. Many of McCain's supporters, by contrast, can't imagine a United States led by a liberal who would, as Palin repeated several times recently, "pal around with terrorists."

The contest has split the country and the Jewish community. Feelings of anger and division have only intensified as the tactics of the campaigns, and their proxies, have gotten nastier.

"One of the most depressing developments from the past months has been the barrage of negative information I am getting from both sides of the Jewish community," a middle-age man said during a town hall discussion of the election at Temple Israel of Hollywood on Yom Kippur. "It's just which hot-button issue is going to scare people to action. Not only is this not enlightening, but it speaks incredibly poorly to what the Jewish strategists think of the Jewish community."

To be sure, the Jewish vote, like any other group, cannot be counted on to vote as a bloc, but reading the tea leaves this year has become more difficult because of the unknowns of race, let alone the economy.

Obama supporters have said that at least some Jews supporting McCain do so because they can't bring themselves to vote for a black man. McCain backers have said their liberal co-religionists are putting domestic issues, on which McCain is to the right of the non-Orthodox Jewish community, ahead of Israel and, by extension, national security.

"This is not an election where Jews feel they can wholeheartedly embrace either candidate," said Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. "I've had this conversation numerous times, particularly with older people. But at some point you have to make a decision, and I doubt Jews will sit out this election."

So how will they vote? Plenty of predictions have been made -- Sarna anticipates Obama getting a "strong majority"; Michael Berenbaum, an adjunct professor of theology at American Jewish University, guarantees 70-30 favoring the Democrat, at worst. A few doubt the incumbent Republican Party can escape the election without losing voters angry about the plummeting economy, and even Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol has said McCain's presidential hopes are probably doomed.

But, of course, it's all a betting game until Nov. 4.

S
helly Mandell's endorsement was a surprising one. Mandell, a Westside attorney, is the Los Angeles president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the leader in feminist activism, and there she was at a Carson rally on Oct. 4, introducing Republican vice presidential nominee Palin.

"This," Mandell said, "is what a feminist looks like."

Booed when she identified herself as a lifelong Democrat, Mandell continued by stating that Palin "is a reformer who will break up that ol' boys network" and expressing hope that she might be able to change Palin's mind regarding Roe v. Wade.

The move was not appreciated by NOW's national office. Its political action committee had endorsed Obama a few weeks before. Mandell's endorsement, though, was indicative of the traditionally Democratic voters who aren't inspired by their party's candidate this year.

For her part, Palin really didn't need an introduction.

Few people had heard of the Alaskan governor when McCain tapped her to be his running mate Aug. 29. But she immediately became a preferred story subject, from her teenage daughter's pregnancy and conservative Christian worldview to her political experience and press-shy blunders. She also breathed new life into "Saturday Night Live," bringing her doppleganger, Tina Fey, back to that show's cast.

There has been hand-wringing since the get-go about whether she would be good for the Jews, not least because Palin is a self-styled Mrs. Joe Six-Pack.

Officials with the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) spoke glowingly of Palin, noting that the only flag in her governor's office is a small Israeli flag.

"She keeps that flag in her office because she keeps Israel in her heart," said Matthew Brooks, RJC executive director. "She, like John McCain, understands how to stand by Israel and support Israel and get a comprehensive peace agreement in the region."

But questions persisted.

Palin had been in the audience of her church only two weeks before joining McCain, when the national director of Jews for Jesus, David Brickner, said terrorist attacks in Israel were God's "judgment of unbelief."

"When a Palestinian from East Jerusalem took a bulldozer and went plowing through a score of cars, killing numbers of people," Brickner said, "judgment -- you can't miss it."

And people began to wonder about Palin's real view of the Jews. (She hasn't spoken about Jews, only Israel, though Larry Greenfield, RJC's California director, asserted the day Palin was selected that she was "close to the Frozen Chosen!")

The McCain campaign responded by saying Palin did not agree with Brickner's remarks. But that brouhaha was quickly followed by news that Palin's speech at the Republican National Convention used direct passages from the writings of the notorious anti-Semite, Westbrook Pegler, a mid-century columnist for the Hearst newspaper chain who once wished, in print, for the assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Like Obama, Palin also was immediately plagued by a handful of untrue rumors: That she backed Pat Buchanan for president in 2000 (she supported Steve Forbes); that she moved to ban books from the Wasilla library (she asked "what if?"); and that she is a secret secessionist (she was never a member of the Alaskan Independent Party).

Amid all this noise, a few people also raised concerns about Palin's politics.

"Some of the hostility and mocking of Gov. Palin," Greenfield said, "is simply anti-Christian bigotry and discomfort with this common sense sort of Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington kind of leadership that she offers."

T
he acrimony surrounding Sen. Hillary Clinton's long goodbye from the Democratic presidential primary left a terribly sour taste in her supporters' mouths. This, in turn, led to much worrying that these folks would, in anger, vote for McCain. And that was before he picked a woman as his running mate.

One of Clinton's biggest backers, Lynn Forrester de Rothschild, made the move last month.

"I believe that Barack Obama, with MoveOn.org and Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, has taken the Democratic Party -- and they will continue to -- too far to the left," she told the Associated Press. "I'm not comfortable there."

Rothschild, who has resigned from the Democratic National Committee's planning committee, said she feels McCain would run a "centrist" government.

But Rothschild has been the exception to the rule. For an indication of just how difficult it's been for Clinton supporters, look to Daphna Ziman.

Ziman was one of Clinton's bundlers here in California. She and her husband, Richard, hosted several fundraisers for Clinton at their Beverly Hills home. And Ziman was terrified about what Obama might mean for her native Israel.

"I don't really know what he is going to do for Israel. It is a big question mark," she said in a January interview. "And we can't afford the risk."

But Ziman recently changed her tune, and this month she co-hosted with Clinton a fundraiser for Obama in downtown Los Angeles.

Why? Reproductive rights.

McCain has expressed a desire to see Roe v. Wade overturned; Palin is even more passionately pro-life. For Ziman, who founded the charity, Children Uniting Nations, which mentors inner-city kids, voting for a conservative who would likely replace at least three Supreme Court justices was out of the question.

"When I look at Islamofascism across the Muslim world, it is based on the lack of women's rights, and the ability to sacrifice that in an election is not an option for me," Ziman said.

As for Israel, Obama's selection of Biden as a running mate calmed, though it did not allay, those fears. Other prominent Los Angeles Jews have felt no discomfort regarding Obama and Israel.

Stanley P. Gold, chairman of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles and a substantial giver to the Democratic Party, had backed Clinton. Now, he's known to be supporting Obama. (Gold declined to comment because of his role as the Federation's lay leader.)

Additionally, several luminaries in the L.A. rabbinate are among the leaders of Rabbis for Obama -- the first time rabbis have banded together to endorse a candidate. The organization's co-chair is Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector at American Jewish University.

"Sen. McCain has voted for President Bush's policies 95 percent of the time, and he promises to continue those policies if elected president," Dorff said when he introduced Obama in a conference call last month with 900 rabbis. "That, though, is disastrous. Absolutely nothing is better now for our country than it was eight years ago."

"Obama, by contrast," Dorff continued, "offers us intelligence, caring, individual rights; well thought out programs for improvement in education and health care; programs to stimulate American productivity and to develop alternative sources of energy; respect and honesty in dealing with our fellow citizens and our allies -- and, yes, wise and firm support for Israel and for peace in the Middle East."

Like many, Carmen Warschaw, a matriarch of L.A. Jewry, needed no convincing. She's been in Obama's camp all along.

Back in June, her home was filled with a coterie of Hollywood's who's who -- including Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of DreamWorks Animation, and Michael Lynton, chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures. The mission of the Obama Los Angeles Jewish Community Leadership Committee, organized by the campaign, was to convince Jews that Obama should get their vote.

But other well-known L.A. Jews, like Ozzie Goren, the 86-year-old former Federation president, haven't been moved by Obama's message.

"Obama is a brilliant speaker. But does he say anything? Nope," Goren said. "It's just 'hope' and 'change' and 'my time.'"

One media macher you wouldn't have found at Warschaw's Beverly Hills home is Harry Sloan.

As chairman and CEO of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Sloan is an anomaly. It's unusual for Jews to be Republicans -- only about 17 percent of Jews identify as such, according to the American Jewish Committee -- but it's almost unheard of for a Hollywood insider.

He twice held fundraisers at his home for McCain, first in January 2007 and again last January. On Oct. 1, he introduced Cindy McCain at a fundraiser at the Century Plaza Hotel that brought in $3.5 million from business folks and a few Hollywood stars, including, Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer.

Sloan, a lifelong Republican, said in an interview that, like most Americans, he is frustrated with where our country is now and headed in the future. He doesn't lay the blame squarely on the Bush administration but disperses it over all of Washington's insiders. And McCain's willingness to stand his ground when convinced of the correct course -- with unpopular immigration reform or the surge in Iraq, for example -- is exactly what he believes Washington needs.

"He is not Mr. Congeniality because he tries to make changes. We have a country that seems to be on the wrong course," Sloan said. "I don't really think he is afraid to take on anybody."

Certainly not with Iran. That's one distinction between the candidates that has highlighted the differences between hawks and doves, of varying degrees, in the Jewish community.

Both candidates have said Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons; on this there is no disagreement. But Obama seems more interested in talking softly, while McCain wants to wield a big stick.

Contrary to what is commonly repeated, Obama has said he would be willing to talk with leaders of rogue nations but never said he would meet with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who denies the Holocaust and wants to see Israel wiped off the face of the Earth. Indeed, Ayatollah Khamenei is actually the head of Iran .

Not surprisingly, both sides have spun their candidate's position as being in the best interest of Israel.

"I believe that to some degree this election is a referendum on what are the most important issues of our time," said Rabbi Isaac Jeret of Congregation Ner Tamid. "To my mind, the security of the State of Israel, the security of our own country, our financial wherewithal, are the major issues of the day."

"Who selects which Supreme Court is less my immediate issue," Jeret continued, "Is the environment our national priority, for many people it is. But I want to be around for many years to address those issues, and there are many existential issues for our country and the State of Israel that are at hand."

A
bout 150 liberal-minded Jews were standing in the backyard of a massive house located just down the street from the mayor's official residence in Windsor Square. Projected onto the side of the house was the world premiere of a pro-Obama video readymade for YouTube that its producers hoped, and likely everyone knew, would soon go viral.

"If you knew that visiting your grandparents could change the world, would you?" Silverman asked in the opening of the video. "Of course you would."

In the four-minute short, Silverman goes on to argue that young Jews have more power to rock the vote in Florida by convincing their grandparents to vote for Obama than by staying home and simply voting for Obama in a blue state like California or New York. And so, she says, they should remember Al Gore's fate in Florida and join The Great Schlep, an effort organized by JewsVote.

Characteristic of the tit-for-tat actions of Republican and Democratic Jews this year, the RJC responded with a two-minute video from Jackie Mason, a Jewish comedian from a very different generation and caste.

Mason took issue with Silverman's insinuation that every Jew who doesn't vote for Obama is a racist -- in the video she uses her characteristic wry humor to explore how much elderly Jews and young black men have in common: they love track suits, Cadillacs, their grandkids and bling, and "all their friends are dying" -- her claim that elderly Jews don't like Obama "because his name sounds scary; it sounds Muslim, which he is obviously not."

To which Mason replied: "You're not a bigot and don't let her convince ya you are. She's a sick yenta for mentioning it."

The schleppers aren't the only Jews heading to battleground states in hopes of making a difference as Nov. 4 gets closer.

Writer Sharon Rosen Leib will head with her friend, Karen Gross, both 45, to West Palm Beach for the final days before the election. With their husbands in charge of their kids back home, they'll be staying at a friend's house and spending every waking minute promoting Obama.

On Election Day, Leib said, they plan to use their rental car as a voting booth shuttle for those who can't or don't want to drive. After all, the election could hinge on Florida, which could swing on the smallest margin of votes, and Leib needs to know she did all she can for her candidate.

"There is just too much at stake this election," Leib said, "and I felt powerless sitting at my computer, watching all the e-mails go back and forth."

Indeed, there seems to be an even greater awareness of what Berenbaum, the adjunct professor of theology, told The Journal in January:

"The last four years of the Bush administration have been disastrous. If we don't get ourselves squared away, it could be the end of the American Century and the end of the way the American Jewish community has been American in this era."

"We are voting as if our lives and futures depend upon it," he continued. "Not because we fear someone is going to come out and kill us, but because we fear that if we don't get this right, our children and their children will not enjoy the privileges this generation has enjoyed as Americans -- the economic opportunity, the prosperity, the education, all of those elements that have characterized our existence and our flourishing.

"After Florida in 2000, everybody knows that every vote absolutely counts."

More at The God Blog

A Christian makes teshuvah

2008-10-15T11:34:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

My first mistake was arriving when the Yom Kippur morning service at Valley Beth Shalom was scheduled to begin. The flier said 7:45 a.m. and, this being my virgin voyage, I didn't want to be late.

Naive? Certainly. I didn't realize Jews attend High Holy Days services like Dodgers fans frequent Chavez Ravine: arriving in the third inning and leaving in the seventh.

The first hint of my folly came when, after poking my head into a nearly empty Niznick Sanctuary, I returned to my car, parked a half-mile away, and bumped into one of the temple's main rabbis.

The morning rush, it turned out, was about two hours away.

It may be surprising that a reporter at The Jewish Journal named Greenberg wouldn't know the standard practices of synagogue attendance on the holiest day of the Jewish year, but this ignorance hints at a more complex story of guilt, confusion and married identities.

I wasn't raised Jewish. Both my grandmothers were, and so too was my paternal grandfather. But my mother was raised Catholic down south and my father as a non-religious Jew here in Los Angeles. (You may know a few like him.)

When I was young -- 6 or 7 -- my parents both began attending a non-denominational Protestant church. Soon they were baptized, and, as a teenager, so was I.

My sister and I identified as Jewish in name only, or, more aptly, by our name: When it comes to anti-Semitism, it's not about whether you consider yourself Jewish but whether others do -- and others did.

I still go to church most Sundays, but though I'm not with Jews for Jesus or a Messianic -- that's worth emphasizing -- I've become increasingly interested in my Jewish cultural history. Yom Kippur, it seemed, was something I should experience.

So I selected three synagogues where I thought I would feel comfortable and find something meaningful to take home: IKAR, where Rabbi Sharon Brous has been recognized for her alternative, spiritually engaging community; Valley Beth Shalom (VBS), to hear Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis, one of the leading voices of Jewish conscience from the last half century; and Temple Israel of Hollywood because, well, I have a screenplay to sell.

I didn't anticipate a problem blending in.

"The High Holy Days," a friend had remarked before Rosh Hashanah, "is the time of the year when secular Jews pretend to believe in God and religious Jews pretend to believe them."

The High Holy Days draw the biggest crowds of the year, and, just like Christmas and Easter services, you can hear the outreach from the bimah.

"To the privatized Jew, hell is other people," Schulweis said during his morning sermon, paraphrasing the philosopher Sartre.

Yes, he said, huddling close causes pricks and pain, but so does remaining alone outside of a community.

"This is the porcupine's dilemma. This is the human condition," Schulweis said, soon adding, "Judaism depends on Jews being Jewish.... In Judaism, believing means belonging. For we are a family."

At that moment, I felt a part of this family, the Tribe. I was praying and singing in Hebrew, wearing tallit and a kippah, and at 5:30 p.m. on erev Yom Kippur I had begun my fast, which I might have completed had I not driven past Pita Kitchen en route from VBS to Temple Israel of Hollywood. (They make a ridiculous lamb shawarma.)

Guilty? Maybe a little. But the day before I read on Ynet that only 63 percent of Israeli Jews planned to fast. And, besides, I'd already achieved a greater level of observance than at any point in my life.

Temple Israel hammered home what Schulweis had spoken of. I had been bored at VBS; tired from little sleep, with falling blood sugar, and, most importantly, no one to chat with in the surprisingly social hallways. But at Temple Israel I recognized people from the moment I walked into an afternoon breakout session on the presidential election -- friends, sources, current and former colleagues.

As the time, spent in community and talking about shared concerns, passed quickly by, I several times reflected on my experience the night before, when I celebrated Kol Nidre at IKAR.

I felt strikingly comfortable in a packed gym at the Westside JCC. It might have been a shvitz because of a broken air conditioner, but when I looked around I saw a packed, spiritually moved house of Jews, many who looked a lot like me: Chuck Taylor sneakers, thick plastic glasses, the curly hair that always has reminded me of my family's story.

When we prayed, I told myself the room was praying to my God, that I was praying to my God. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The God of the Exodus. The God of all creation.

Of course, there was no mention of Jesus, but the sermon was one I have heard in one form or another in churches all my life:

God is good. People are not. But we can do good, we can fulfill God's will on Earth by stepping outside ourselves, by feeding the hungry and sheltering the homeless and helping the helpless -- by, in two words, tikkun olam.

Faith is not bad, Rabbi Brous said, specifically taking aim at anti-god avenger Bill Maher, whose new movie "Religulous" ridicules godly observance. Yes, man has used God for his own selfish gain, Brous said, but we can change the course.

"It's nice to see you here," a friend said to me as I digested Brous' sermon. "You should come for Shabbat."

I wondered: Could I? Could I be part of a religious Jewish community without practicing Judaism, with -- and there's no other way to put this -- believing in something that was a heretical outgrowth of Judaism?

Probably not.

Maybe I could just come around on the High Holy Days. I hear people do that.

Bill Maher's battle against religion

2008-09-24T17:09:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Bill Maher is on his soapbox, looking like a lunatic and holding court in London's Hyde Park. A crowd forms around the American talk show host, who is disguised in glasses and a funny hat as he preaches that aliens have infected our souls and only Scientology provides the answer.

"Xenu brought us here 75 million years ago, stacked us around volcanoes and blew them up with an H-bomb. You have to rid yourself of the implants from the extraterrestrial dictators," Maher says, imploring folks to use an e-meter, Scientology's primary tool, to measure their Thetan level and determine the imprint of these aliens.

This scene appears in Maher's new documentary, "Religulous," and it prompted roars of laughter from an audience at a screening last month. But it is just the setup. Maher's punch line, which comes from a comedy club clip, has nothing to do with the 55-year-old religion -- often called a cult -- that's turned Tom Cruise into such a weirdo.

"Jesus with the virgin birth and dove and snake who talks in a garden -- that's cool," Maher says. "But the Scientologists, they're the crazy ones."

Comedian and political commentator Maher, host of HBO's "Real Time With Bill Maher" and before that "Politically Incorrect" on ABC and Comedy Central, has become known for attacking drug laws, organized religion and PC sensibilities.

On Oct. 3, his biggest battle -- Maher v. God -- will hit theaters.

It's not a mockumentary, but some of the real-life religious folks in "Religulous" could well have been in "This Is Spinal Tap."

The film is a series of interviews, often more debates than conversations, tied together with Maher's reflections as he travels between locations. With a talk show host's benefit of always getting the last word, Maher outwits, outquips, outthinks and outperforms his victims. And his subjects -- the evangelical Christian who directs the Human Genome Project, a U.S. senator, an anti-Zionist rabbi and a Muslim rapper who loves suicide bombers -- are the victims here.

Maher's bias is clear even in his title's marriage of "religious" and "ridiculous."

"What I am saying is if you are religious at all, you are an extremist," Maher said in a phone interview last week, later adding, "There is no doubting that there are brilliant people who are religious.... People find ways to wall off areas of their mind -- that is why I use that phrase, 'neurological disorder.'"

So why did Maher's subjects sit down with him? It's difficult to imagine any religious person familiar with his politics and godlessness actually agreeing to an interview.

The fact is, nobody knew whom they were dealing with until it was too late.

"We never, ever used my name," Maher told the L.A. Times' Patrick Goldstein of how the interviews were arranged. "We never told anybody it was me who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it 'A Spiritual Journey.'"

This art of deception is only one of the very evident fingerprints of director Larry Charles, who mastered this skill as director of "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan." "Religulous" avoids Eastern religions, worrying only about fanaticism in the Abrahamic faiths -- Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Maher considers himself a former member of two of the three.

His father was Irish Catholic, and that was how Maher was raised as a child. "It wasn't relevant to my life," Maher says in the film, "Superman was relevant, and baseball cards." In his teens, Maher discovered why his mother never joined the rest of the family at church: She was Jewish.

"I never even knew I was half-Jewish until I was a teenager," he said on "Larry King Live" in 2002. "I was just so frightened about the Catholics and everything that was going on there in the church -- and I was never, you know, molested or anything. And I'm a little insulted. I guess they never found me attractive. And that's really their loss."

Irreverence is Maher's trademark. In the film, he calls Jesus "nuts" and Moses "cuckoo." He considers himself a contemporary, though much younger, of the late George Carlin, founder of frisbeeterianism. (When I asked readers of The God Blog for any questions they had for Maher, a career church leader wanted to know whether "he's always been a douche bag, or is this a new look and feel for him.")

"I always felt religion was a giant elephant in the room of comedy gold and that people don't laugh at it simply because they are used to it," he said.

This is what could make "Religulous" so difficult for the God-fearing: It is positively entertaining.

Maher visits the Creation Museum in Hebron, Ky., and Orlando's Holy Land Experience; he tongue-ties the brilliant geneticist Francis Collins and walks out of an interview with Rabbi Dovid Weiss of Neturei Karta International -- "Never again, rabbi."

His religious journey takes him from the Valley of Armageddon in Israel to the Trucker's Chapel in Raleigh, N.C. An interview with a Muslim minister in Amsterdam is interrupted by the imam's cellphone ringtone, which is Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir."

When Maher asks Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) how people who believe in the Bible's creation story could be helping to run the most powerful country in the world, the senator plays into his hand: "You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though," Pryor responds.

At times, Maher's interviews are frightening, like when the Muslim rapper Propa-Ghandi defends the 19-year-old fatwa against Salman Rushdie for "The Satanic Verses" and argues that his music, which praises suicide bombers, shouldn't be censored.

The so-called New Atheists -- bestselling authors who appeal to science, logic and intellectual elitism -- typically preach only to the choir.

"I don't like the term atheist because, to me, that is as rigid as religion is," Maher said. "I preach the doctrine of 'I don't know.' I don't know and I don't think it should matter. I don't think people should be so obsessed. Give yourself a break. You don't have to worship something, you don't have to worship something that is really just in your head, that you made up."

But Maher avoids two of these major trappings -- he can't help the high-minded snobbery -- and sticks to what he is good at: comedy.

"I think Jesus was probably an awkward teen -- big Jewfro, bad at sports," he says in the film, at which point a clip of Jonah Hill from "Superbad" flashes on the screen: "Here I am!"

And what better way to discredit something than to make belief in it laughable?

With his Catholic and Jewish backgrounds, Maher should feel guiltier than anyone about such heathen humor. But instead, the religious moviegoer is the only one worrying about God's forgiveness.

"Religion comes off as looking at best ridiculous in Bill Maher's new film 'Religulous.' But the early buzz has also been correct: Brilliant," I wrote on The God Blog the day after seeing a screening. "And so I've spent the past 13 hours wondering if there was something wrong with my enjoying the movie."

But quickly my feelings of guilt faded into an understanding that the film is a guilty pleasure. "Religulous" is hilarious and poignant because it pokes fun not just at things that bother Maher, but that bother countless among the faithful: violence in God's name, seeing science as a religious bogeyman, End Times theology.

"The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not arrogant certitude, but doubt," Maher says in the film's closing five-minute monologue, which shifts the tone to dead serious.

"The plain fact is, religion must die for man to live," he says.

For being anti-religious, he sure is preachy.

Economy puts pressure on Jewish community

2008-07-25T14:54:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

The food pantry would not open for another 40 minutes, but already about a dozen people were waiting in the parking lot, many holding umbrellas to shield themselves from the blistering San Fernando Valley sun. Before day's end, more than 100 people, Jews and non-Jews alike, many coming on foot or by bus, would visit SOVA's Van Nuys pantry to apply for food stamps, register with a dietician and, most certainly, receive the groceries they need -- literally -- to put dinner on the table.

So began a regular day at one of the three pantries SOVA Community Food & Resource Program operates throughout the city, evidence of an experience that has become familiar for a growing number of indigent families across Los Angeles.

These are tough times for all Americans. The drama working its way through the economy -- surging gas and food prices, crises in the housing and financial markets, climbing unemployment rates and a dismal overall outlook -- has been written into the American Jewish story, too. That much is abundantly clear from a trip to SOVA.

Monthly traffic at the food banks has more than doubled since 2002, to about 5,600 client visits in June, the busiest month since Thanksgiving. Only about 10 percent of those who come are homeless; the overwhelming majority are unemployed or, increasingly, underemployed.

This is, of course, exactly the need SOVA exists to fill. But these days there is no way its 15-person staff can fully compensate for the swelling demand on resources and the shriveling of public and private support.

"You are really talking about a perfect storm in the social service world of not being able to raise private dollars to make up for the sagging or lagging public dollars," said Paul Castro, executive director and CEO of SOVA's parent, Jewish Family Service (JFS).

The scariest reality for many organizations is how unclear the future remains. So far, many charities report that fundraising is on pace with last year, but at the same time, officials admit the situation could go south in a hurry if the economy doesn't improve. The demand for resources continues to climb each month for many, but social service organizations' financial health won't be fully known until donors write their final checks for 2008.

Already there are signs of belt-tightening: Last month, when SOVA's executive director left for another job, she was replaced by Joan Mithers, JFS' director of community programs and staff training. Mithers new role was blended with her old, and that position was frozen. More trimming is expected as soaring food costs continue to push SOVA's $1.5 million budget upward. And that is assuming end-of-year fundraising can live up to budgeted expectations.

That story could be told this summer over and over throughout the world of philanthropy in general and Jewish communal service specifically.

"It's really a catch-22," said Jay Soloway, director of career services for Jewish Vocational Service, which through June this year has seen a 50 percent spike in referrals from SOVA and an increasing number of clients holding master's degrees.

At the same time, in May, United Jewish Communities (UJC), the umbrella organization for North American federations, adopted a $37 million budget that was $3.2 million lighter than the previous years and included the reduction of 32 jobs.

Last month, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) announced that it would cut 60 jobs, including 52 in Israel, to deal with a $60 million budget deficit, due, in large part, to the dollar's dropping value and the rising cost of work abroad.

And locally, Steven Windmueller, dean of the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said the Reform college is evaluating the practicality of shaving a day off the workweek. Windmueller said other institutions and organizations are doing the same.

"The question [nonprofits] have to come up with," Windmueller said, "is whether this is viable for their operations, for meeting state law with hourly earners and whether the expectations of their donors and members and clients can be met in the context of a four-day workweek."

Some organizations will choose to borrow heavily to sustain programming, while many will cut back services and reduce staff, said Stacy Palmer, editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Others will choose to collaborate or merge with another organization, and a few will likely call it quits.

Nevertheless, a broad survey of Jewish schools, synagogues and social service agencies big and small -- from the JDC to Project Chicken Soup -- depicts a mosaic of caution and pragmatic optimism, an awareness that the sky is not yet falling, but it very well could.

"We all have to proceed forward knowing that there is this ambiguity, there are a lot of pieces of a complex puzzle which are not filling in the gestalt of the communal reality," John Fishel, president of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, said in an interview last week. "I start from a premise of 'let's be practical; let's assume the best, but be aware that the best may not be able to be achieved.'"

That perspective is a reflection of just how jarring the decline in the American economy has been during the past 12 months.

Inflation nationwide was up 5.5 percent in June from the previous year. California's jobless rate climbed to 6.9 percent. Stocks have fallen sharply, with the S&P 500 off about 22 percent last week from its October peak.

Home prices are dropping fast, too, the result of a combination of prices artificially inflated by speculators, fraudulent or high-risk mortgage lending and some resultant mass hysteria. New construction, a huge source of labor in California and nationally, has stalled; lenders are struggling to stay afloat, with IndyMac leaving the loan business and laying off 3,800; the government is considering how to secure Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; and, according to PropertyShark.com, Los Angeles County foreclosures spiked to 14,505 in the second quarter, almost quadruple the number during the same period in 2007.

Bad news has been coming even from places that report the news -- the Los Angeles Times last week began its latest round of cuts, about 250 employees, including 17 percent of the newsroom. Questions about whether the United States is in a recession or on the cusp of one have been pretty much settled.

The query now -- tantamount to both individuals wrestling with life changes and the organizations seeking to help them -- is: for how long?

"The effects of the housing contraction and of the financial headwinds on spending and economic activity have been compounded by rapid increases in the prices of energy and other commodities, which have sapped household purchasing power even as they have boosted inflation," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke told the House Committee on Financial Services last week.

"As events in recent weeks have demonstrated," he added, "many financial markets and institutions remain under considerable stress, in part because the outlook for the economy, and thus far credit quality, remains uncertain."

For Avi Edery, a 35-year-old Israeli native living in Woodland Hills, "sapped purchasing power" began a breakneck decline in the fortune of his home-improvement business.

"This winter was really bad," Edery, said. "Beforehand, we could just go into a house, and people would pull off money from their equity, whatever they wanted, and just roll with it. Now, nobody."

Edery and his wife fell behind on their rent. His credit was poor and their savings small. Traditional borrowing wasn't much of an option.

But Jewish Free Loan Association, with an interest-free emergency rental loan for up to $3,000, offered enough to stem the tide. Edery applied last month and was quickly approved.

"It's not a lot of money," he said. "But every penny helps when you are in need."

And who isn't in need when Jewish life can be so expensive? Synagogue dues, Hebrew school, summer camp, kosher food, the occasional trip to Israel -- the individual costs of Jewish involvement -- can significantly tap into "the discretionary income of practically every middle-class Jewish family in America," said Gary A. Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research in San Francisco.

When times are tight, some families look to congregational membership and Jewish education as significant expenses they can cut.

"A year ago, people still had savings, and they did not think it would take a year for them to find another place of employment," said David Brook, executive director of Temple Aliyah in Woodland Hills, a congregation heavy with real estate professionals. "Now we are seeing those same people come in, and they have not found employment, so they are either starting their own business or going into a new industry. We as a synagogue have to be there to help them. These are families that have children in our religious school and our preschool, and we will not deny a Jewish education to any of them."

Life was precarious enough last year for many congregants at Temple Aliyah, which budgeted about $50,000 for members needing dues reductions. These members, some paying as little as $180 for an annual membership that a family of four would ordinarily pay as much as $2,500 for, accounted for about 5 percent of the temple's 900 families.

"Seventy-five percent of the congregants who were asking for dues reductions were Realtors. And we also had two open administrative assistant positions, and we had Realtors applying for those," Brook said. "Then midway through the year, we had another open position, and we had Hollywood people applying because of the strike."

The temple budgeted 10 percent more for dues relief this year but won't know just what is needed until membership renewals roll in as the school year and High Holy Days approach. Unfortunately, Rabbi Stewart Vogel said, there are bound to be some who can no longer afford membership, but rather than ask for assistance, they will disappear from the synagogue community.

"I've had families who I tell, 'This is the job of the synagogue,'" Vogel said, "and they still don't take the help, because it makes them uncomfortable."

At Shalhevet School, where a Modern Orthodox high school education runs about $23,000 a year, one-third of students receive financial aid, Rabbi Elchanan J. Weinbach said. There has been an increase in scholarship applications from middle-class families.

"The wealthier families, thank God, can afford the cost, and the families at the bottom are the easiest to get assistance for," said Weinbach, who took over as head of school last month. "It's really the families who are somewhere in the middle that become the most painful cases."

In an effort to expand Shalhevet's scholarship fund, the school has been reaching out to affluent members of the community who have the means to increase their giving. Shalhevet, however, is not the only Jewish institution or organization turning to this community of higher-earning, committed Jews.

"In these kinds of troubles, there are some people who reach back and become more generous," Tobin said. "In every war Israel has fought, for example, people reach back. The capacity to do so is there. It's a matter of leadership and will."

When the real estate market was piping hot two years ago, friends courted him to build new homes on two parcels they had bought in Woodland Hills. They told Doustan the plans had been finalized and approved, and they offered $250,000. He bit.

But there were problems, and those only got worse as the market cooled. The plans hadn't been approved, and the partners' construction loan application had been denied. Doustan's payment was C.O.D., so the longer the project lagged, the more he had to tap into his savings, and the more he felt compelled to finance building expenses himself.

"After I got all the plans approved -- building, soil report, everything -- and I am already short $70,000," Doustan said, "they applied for a construction loan."

It was approved this time around in April 2007, but then the credit market soured, and the loan was cancelled before being administered.

Doustan finally cut his losses -- 60 years old and single, he became the suddenly unemployed owner of a $457,000 two-bedroom Woodland Hills townhouse, in which he sunk another $50,000 in upgrades and has since watched it fall in value roughly 20 percent.

"I had a very good business; I have been living on my savings," Doustan said. "It's almost reached the end, because everything has a limit. I haven't been paid in two years."

"The worst thing for me is I am not doing anything," Doustan said, eating baba ganoush during lunch last week at the Green Cottage Persian restaurant. "I feel restless. In New York, I used to work seven days a week. I feel worthless."

Doustan now finds himself in the place that many recent college grads do: He doesn't know what he wants to do for a living or how to search for a job, having never even drawn up a resume. But unlike the typical career virgin, Doustan has a healthy home mortgage.

So, four months ago, he turned to Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) after seeing an ad in The Jewish Journal. A career counselor helped him draft a resume and enrolled him in a four-week JVS course at the New JCC at Milken for seniors being pressured back into the workforce, as well as a logistics-training program at Santa Monica College. The counselor also is assisting Doustan with the job search.

"I am not financially desperate," Doustan said. "But I am desperate to do something."

The notion that a butterfly in Singapore could cause a tornado in Kansas seems an accurate parallel for the relationship between the health of industry and charity. When fortunes cool, donors, from the largest corporations and private foundations to the humblest of wage earners, have less money to give away. Soon, so, too, do governments. Eventually, reductions in prosperity trickle down to nonprofits.

"At our dinner last year, there were a number of financial service companies that had historically been big supporters, and when they are firing CEOs and laying off workers, one of the first things that gets cut is charitable donations," Mitch Kamin, executive director of Bet Tzedek Legal Services, said shortly after the organization's new fiscal year began July 1, on the eve of its big annual fundraiser, last Saturday's Justice Ball.

"Our overall fundraising numbers were not down, but I'm concerned about this coming year as companies and major donors and foundations are all looking at the impact of the economy on their giving," Kamin said. "It's not that people are walking away, but funders are cautious about what they support right now and how much they support."

At Project Chicken Soup, which delivers kosher meals two Sundays a month to 105 people in the county living with HIV/AIDS, slightly fewer volunteers have been participating lately. This partly is a symptom of summer, President Paul Chitlik said, but also could be tied to the cost for volunteers of commuting in and delivering the meals. What is clear is that donations, which usually increase this time of year, are flat. Food prices, on the other hand, are "spiraling."

"We have to do more fundraising to cover that," Chitlik said of the charity, which has a budget of about $100,000 and one 30-hour-a-week employee.

December represents the zero hour, the time for assessing just how close nonprofits came to their fundraising targets. This often is the case, but during a downturn in the economy it is especially so. A significant amount of supporters who commit in the first three quarters don't write their charitable checks until after Thanksgiving; many smaller-fund donors don't give at all until reviewing their year-end finances as New Year's Day approaches.

The Federation through mid-July, for example, was outstripping last year's fundraising, receiving donations and pledges of $35.1 million from donors who last year gave $30.3 million to a $49.8 million campaign. But Chairman Stanley Gold said in January he wants to increase fundraising this year by at least 10 percent, and the $14.7 million needed to equal last year's campaign isn't a gimme.

"We are going to be hopeful and just continue to push until Dec. 31, and then do the calculations on what we have," Fishel said.

Many organizations are now evaluating the easier decisions: prioritizing programming, paring travel expenses through reductions in staffing and frequency, looking for ways to work with other agencies. But there is no simple solution to the overall problem, and nobody knows how long the economic turmoil will last.

"Anybody who tells you they know the answer to that question is someone you should turn tail and run away from, because nobody knows," Tobin said. "This is one of those cases where you plan for the worst, and hope for the best."

The professor anti-Semites love

2008-05-08T19:48:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Kevin MacDonald had just completed the first in a series of books that would come to define him. Awaiting feedback from his publisher 15 years ago, MacDonald sent his manuscript to a colleague in the psychology department at California State University Long Beach (CSULB). The feedback was not encouraging.

"What troubles me most is that your criticism of Jews may be taken seriously by groups and individuals who both fear and hate Jews," Martin Fiebert wrote in a 12-point reply. "Your manuscript, unintentionally perhaps, reinforces the stereotype that all Jews, be they assimilated or not, are clannish, deceptive, and exploitive. I'm sure you would be dismayed to find that your book has a treasured place in the bookcases of neo-Nazis along with 'Mein Kampf' and the 'Protocols of Zion.'"

How prophetic Fiebert's insight turned out to be.

MacDonald, 64, has been deemed America's "foremost anti-Semitic thinker" by civil rights experts. A tenured psychology professor who lent his expertise to Holocaust denier David Irving, MacDonald has suggested restricting college enrollment and increasing taxes for Jews to mediate what he perceives as inequities with non-Jewish whites.

His three-volume critique of Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy" -- known collectively as "The Culture of Critique" and published by Praeger in 1994, 1998 and 1998 -- claims the religion discourages inclusion, eggs on anti-Semitism and uses study of Talmud to thin the reproduction of less intelligent members. The books have become sacred scripture for white supremacists, and a growing number of MacDonald's colleagues have urged the university to denounce his writings.

"He is repackaging traditional anti-Jewish beliefs in contemporary pseudo-scientific language," said Jeffrey Blutinger, a history professor leading the push against MacDonald. "If you think of classic anti-Jewish tropes of Jews as clannish, conspiratorial, opposed to Christendom, a threat to the nation, using contemporary ideas as a way of undermining traditional beliefs -- all of these show up in his writing."

These are strange credentials for a man who in person seems every bit a slice of Midwest Americana. Part German, part Scottish, raised to be a traditional Catholic, though he is now agnostic, MacDonald was reared in a small Wisconsin town best known for the children's clothes that carry its name.

"Oshkosh was a great town to grow up in," MacDonald said in a recent conversation. "There weren't any Jewish families at all. I guess there was one; I knew one Jewish kid in high school. Nobody talked about Jews. There was no anti-Semitism in town. It was an unknown."

He first discovered his future research subjects as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He had a few Jews as roommates, and many more were fellow travelers in the anti-war movement. Almost three decades later, when MacDonald began connecting Jewish power and success to evolutionary strategies, he would identify his leftist years as the first time Jews used his gentile face to promote what he considered their group agenda. It wasn't until the '90s that MacDonald began to see Jewish communities as inimical entities slowly destroying their hosts.

"Jews are inevitably going to be an elite," he said. "They are smart; they are well organized. The problem, from my point of view, is that there is a hostility there, a fear and hostility, that over the past 40 years has resulted in some changes that have not been in the interest of people like me. As simple as that."

MacDonald's core complaint is Jewish influence on immigration laws. He blames passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished national origin quotas and made immigration easier for non-Westerners, on a Jewish desire to oust European Americans from the majority.

"European people in this country will be a minority in a few years," MacDonald said. "I don't think that would have happened if we had had a sense of ourselves as a culture worth defending. Now, everything is up for grabs."

He sat for the first of two interviews in his cramped office on campus. Tall and lanky, with white hair and a disarming smile, MacDonald hardly looks like America's scariest academic. He is affable, even in light of the vilification he's received, much of it from -- and this shouldn't surprise -- Jewish peers and organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

"Everybody who crosses them, they are going to have a price to pay," MacDonald said. "People won't be seen with me; they won't talk to me; they won't have lunch with me. I am pretty much a nonentity around here."

Until 2000, MacDonald was largely unknown on campus. Testifying for Irving in a lawsuit against Jewish historian Deborah Lipstadt attracted a flurry of attention. But then the storm quieted, and MacDonald was left alone to develop and detail his theories on Jewish strategies to "destroy" Western culture, typing out page after page in his office on the fourth floor of CSULB's 1970s-era psych building.

"He is not the type of guy who is going to dress up in a KKK outfit or swastika armband. The truth is that with his Ph.D and this veneer of respectability, he's very dangerous," said Heidi Beirich, who directs SPLC's research and special projects.

"The Nazi types are reading his stuff like it is the Bible," Beirich continued, "and they're using it to say why Jews should be exterminated, why they should be thrown out of the country -- because he says Jews are responsible for all this immigration that is destroying white culture. His books are like the new Bible of the movement."

Last spring, Beirich wrote a scathing profile of MacDonald for SPLC's magazine, Intelligence Report, and the local chapter of the ADL became more active in raising awareness. Then earlier this year, the ground ruptured beneath MacDonald when a few uneasy colleagues from a range of academic departments coalesced and began to urge CSULB President F. King Alexander to distance the school from its infamous academic.

Alexander so far has declined all such requests on the basis of academic freedom.

"Despite the fact that I personally disagree and even find deplorable some beliefs and opinions expressed by a few individuals on our campus, particularly those ideas that are hurtful of certain groups, I believe as Thomas Jefferson stated, that 'errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it,'" Alexander, who declined to be interviewed, said in a written statement.

"Universities should always ensure that good ideas always outweigh bad ideas," he continued. "Universities should also be firmly committed, even at times when it is against popular opinion, to freedom of thought, and when we act to restrict opinion from the far right or the far left, then it will not be long before we can no longer call ourselves a university."

But the pressure from the academic community to condemn MacDonald continues. During the past six weeks, the anthropology and history departments, as well as the Jewish studies program, all have issued statements denouncing MacDonald's work as "professionally irresponsible and morally untenable"; the psychology department voted to disassociate from his writings because of their popularity with "extremist groups."

"His approach to historical investigation is antithetical to our discipline in that he selects only those materials that support his preconceived thesis, while ignoring all evidence to the contrary," the history faculty's statement said. "MacDonald's misuse of historical methodology would be unacceptable in an undergraduate history paper; how much more disturbing, therefore, is the fact that in these writings he is identified as a professor at CSULB."

MacDonald's intellectual pursuits began innocently. In 1990, he'd been at Cal State Long Beach five years, teaching and researching child psychological development, when he read an article in the Los Angeles Times about the tight-knit 19th century Jewish community of Cheyenne, Wyo.

"They came with a distinct culture, community activities and forms of cooperation, and they practiced their religious rituals even in the most isolated conditions," the Times reported. "One child tells how before there was a rabbi in Cheyenne, his father dressed meat in the kosher tradition in the back of his furniture store."

The article made MacDonald think of animals.

He had graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1966 with a degree in philosophy and dreams of being a jazz musician. When reality sank in, MacDonald entered graduate school at the University of Connecticut in the mid-'70s, earning a master's in biology and then, four years later, a doctorate in biobehavorial science.

His research focused on the personalities of wolves, and by the time he left UConn in 1981 to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois, MacDonald was convinced that, like the lab wolves he'd studied, human behavioral tendencies also led back to specific genetic blueprints. And that is where his mind wandered when he read about Cheyenne's Jews.

"My adviser, Benson Ginsburg, wrote an article saying that wolves would be a better model for human behavior than chimpanzees, because of social bonds and their acting like a family," MacDonald said. "They have to police the boundaries and police in-group behavior; you can't have freeloaders. My earliest research on the behavior of Jews focused on that, and you see wolf packs do that."

MacDonald began to think of Judaism as the vehicle through which an evolutionary strategy was mechanized. He decided to read Paul M. Johnston's "A History of the Jews" and the Tanakh, or as MacDonald knew it, the Old Testament, and within short order, he was mentally outlining "A People that Shall Dwell Alone."

The book became the first in his series, "The Culture of Critique." "A People that Shall Dwell Alone" lays the foundation for MacDonald's theory of Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy and briefly discusses other groups that he believes employ similar strategies: Gypsies, the Amish, Chinese living abroad.

Jews, he pointed out, are taught they are different -- God's chosen -- and they are encouraged to live lives that benefit other Jews. They also marry within the Tribe, and more often their neighbors within their extended family, MacDonald wrote. Focusing on the Ashkenazim of Central and Eastern Europe, he argued that competition for resources benefited Jews who chose niche businesses, like trading and banking. And in one of his most controversial claims, MacDonald wrote that, over time Jews have grown increasingly successful because of a eugenics program built into the religion -- Talmud study, which helped determine which men got the prettiest wives, the best business opportunities and the most children.

"These documents contain a vast amount of material for which there are no practical functions at all," MacDonald wrote. "The incredible elaboration of Jewish religious law in these writings suggests that this mass of material is the result of intense intellectual competition within the Jewish community and that the resulting Torah then provided an arena for intellectual competition within the Jewish community."

The second volume, "Separation and its Discontents," offers an evolutionary explanation for anti-Semitism, from the late Roman Empire to modern Diaspora life, and discusses Jewish strategies for combating discrimination. The most controversial portion of this book, Chapter 5, compares Nazism to Judaism.

"The National Socialist movement in Germany from 1933-1945 is a departure from Western tendencies toward universalism and muted individualism in the direction of racial nationalism and cohesive collectivism.... It may be usefully conceptualized as a group evolutionary strategy that was characterized by several key features that mirrored Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy."

MacDonald concluded that Nazi ideology "may well have been caused or at least greatly facilitated by the presence of Judaism as a very salient and successful racially exclusive antithetical group strategy within German society."

His final volume in the series, "The Culture of Critique," focuses on Judaism as a culture of belittling non-Jews and makes broad claims about Jewish dominance in media and the social sciences, identification with radical leftist politics and influence over immigration laws. He argues in the preface to the paperback edition (2002) that Jewish intellectuals and influentials have discovered, and are committed to, the best strategy for "destroying Europeans": convincing them of their own moral bankruptcy. "And thus," he wrote, "the intense effort among Jewish intellectuals to continue the ideology of the moral superiority of Judaism and its role as undeserving historical victim while at the same time continuing the onslaught on the moral legitimacy of the West."

MacDonald's newest addition to this library, "Cultural Insurrections," was published last month by Occidental Press. The book is a compilation of his essays from the past few years, with topics ranging from "Stalin's Willing Executioners" to "What Makes Western Culture Unique." In the book's final essay -- "Can the Jewish Model Help the West Survive?" -- MacDonald embraces Jewish "hyper-ethnocentrism" as a strategy to fight the "onslaught" of immigration that he believes has increased ethnic competition for resources and threatens white European American culture.

"We already see numerous examples in which coalitions of minority groups attempt to influence public policy, including immigration policy, against the interests of the European majority. And we must realize that placing ourselves in a position of vulnerability would be extremely risky, given the deep sense of historical grievance harbored by many ethnic activists toward Europeans," MacDonald wrote.

"This is especially the case with Jews, and of course Jews have shown a tendency to become part of the elite in Western societies. We have recently seen reports in the press of religious Jews spitting on Christian symbols in Israel, thereby resurrecting an age-old Jewish practice. Indeed, hatred toward all things European is normative among a great many strongly identified Jews."

In fact, there were reports from Ha'aretz and Christianity Today in 2004 of a spate of spitting incidents in Jerusalem, in which ultra-Orthodox Jews allegedly assaulted Christians. However, spitting, like the blood libel that claims Jews ritually slaughter Christian children and bake their blood into matzah, is not and never has been an "age-old Jewish practice."

Most of the essays for "Cultural Insurrections" appeared in The Occidental Quarterly, a Mount Airy, Md.-based journal that "unapologetically defends the cultural, ethnic, and racial interests of Western European peoples." In 2004, the journal awarded MacDonald a $10,000 prize.

"MacDonald's 'racism' is nothing more than the idea that European-descended peoples have as much right as any other people, including Jews, to preserve their people and their culture," Virginia Abernethy, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Vanderbilt University and, like MacDonald, an editorial adviser to The Occidental Quarterly, wrote in the book's foreword.

MacDonald's research rests on the assumption, based on interpretations of intelligence tests, that Jews are born with superior brains. The intelligence quotient sits on a sliding scale, with the average IQ at 100. The average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews, however, is a whopping 107 to 115, at the median higher than 70 percent of people, according to a few contested, though oft-cited, studies by Margaret E. Backman (1972), Julius S. Romanoff (1976) and Richard Lynn (2004).

The results have been dramatic: Freud, Einstein, Dylan. In the second half of the 20th century, Jews received 29 percent of the Nobel Prizes, while accounting for only 13 million of the world's 6 billion inhabitants -- about two-tenths of a percent.

"The profile of disproportionately high Jewish accomplishment in the arts and sciences since the 18th century, the reality of elevated Jewish IQ, and the connection between the two are not to be denied by means of data," Charles Murray, co-author of the controversial 1994 book, "The Bell Curve," which discussed the socioeconomic consequences of racial differences in intelligence, wrote in Commentary magazine last year. "And so we come to the great question: How and when did this elevated Jewish IQ come about?"

There is no accepted explanation. Some researchers have attributed higher IQ to medieval persecution, others to Jewish identity as the People of the Book and a few, maybe flippantly, to the fruits of being God's chosen.

But how researchers answer that same question depends heavily upon what school of thought they come from. Evolutionary psychologists like MacDonald credit better Jewish genes, while traditional biologists argue heightened IQ is the result of nurture, not nature.

"Jews may have been able to actualize their intelligence differently than other groups because we have an enormous, 5,000-year cultural history prizing learning and achievement," said Richard M. Lerner, a critic of MacDonald who directs the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development at Tufts University. "There is no innateness."

Few people would deny that Jews number strongly among the American elite, but very few American Jews want to talk about it. Among those who will is J.J. Goldberg, author of the authoritative 1996 book, "Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment."

"A lot of the politics of Jewish advocacy, minority advocacy in general, is victimhood," Goldberg said in an interview. "You can't do that if you are not actually a victim. There are some people who think Jews are powerless and others, like Kevin MacDonald, think that Jews control everything. In fact, the truth is somewhere in the middle."

Another journalist eager to discuss this topic is Philip Weiss, who writes the blog, Mondoweiss, and, unlike Goldberg, is an anti-Zionist who can be a brutal critic of his co-religionists. In December, MacDonald mentioned Weiss on his Web site, kevinmacdonald.net, where he links to his articles about Jews and Western culture and writes lengthy responses to critics. MacDonald praised Weiss as a fellow traveler. On his own blog, Weiss quickly rejected the embrace.

"He is trying to examine some important ideas. I just wish he wasn't racist about it," Weiss said in an interview, adding, "There was scrutiny of Jewish power in Central Europe when the Nazis arose. Therefore there is no ability to scrutinize Jewish power now because it makes you a Nazi. But I think that it is a legitimate intellectual and journalistic exercise to scrutinize Jewish power. I know MacDonald is engaged in that, and I respect that. But it is his generalizations about Jews that I find disturbing."

Broad brushing, a central criticism of MacDonald's work, is a professional hazard in evolutionary psychology, a field of study whose legitimacy has been fiercely contested. For its advocates, it is scientific research that applies Darwinian principles to human behavior. Opponents liken it to Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories, " which explained contemporary phenomena with fantastic ontological accounts that traced the maze backward.

Nevertheless, MacDonald was once a respected member of this community. His first book was fairly well reviewed, though the second less so and the third almost not at all. From 1995 to 2001, he served as the elected secretary-archivist of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. That organization's president would come to repudiate MacDonald as an "embarrassment."

"The theoretical viewpoint expressed in MacDonald's books stands in the most extreme contradiction to nearly every contentful core claim of evolutionary psychology," said John Tooby, co-director of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC Santa Barbara and a pioneer in the field.

Tooby's comment, which appeared on Slate.com, was prompted by MacDonald's decision on Jan. 31, 2000, to enter a British courtroom as an expert witness on Jewish behavior. On that day, MacDonald explained his belief that Jewish activists conspire against individuals who threaten the group interest, a model he alleged had been used to suppress, after publication, Irving's biography of Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

"Yes, I think that anti-Semitism is, you know, a perennial problem, and Jewish organizations have developed very sophisticated ways of dealing with it," MacDonald said, in what ended up being a very short testimony. "This is one way of dealing with it. Anti-Semitism or any anti-Semitism is fought very, very intensely. They take it very seriously, and they do quite a job, obviously, of suppressing it, yes."

That statement surprised Irving, who didn't like being called an anti-Semite in court, and those few minutes have dogged MacDonald since. On his Web site and that of the Institute for Historical Review (IHR), a Holocaust-denying organizatin based in Newport Beach, MacDonald presented a lengthy explanation for why he agreed to testify.

He claimed that Lipstadt, following a pattern of Jewish activism, had "attempted to prevent the publication of writings conflicting with their constructions of reality" and exaggerated Irving's Holocaust denial. MacDonald also appealed to the academic importance of Irving's book, "Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich."

"He had access to original documents in the Soviet Union that nobody knew about. It was the kind of thing that any historian would have to read. And yet it was rescinded; they actually took it off the shelf. I thought that was ridiculous, just activism stuff," MacDonald added in an interview. "It was just suppression of free speech."

In Lipstadt's memoir, "History on Trial," she recalled the surprise of learning an expert on anti-Semitism would be a witness against her.

"I could not fathom," she wrote, "how a specialist on anti-Semitism would voluntarily testify on Irving's behalf, unless, I thought -- facetiously -- somehow he's for it."

Cal State Long Beach's Jewish studies program is located about 100 yards from Psych 417 on the second floor of a collection of history and sociology offices that looks 70 years old and smells older. The program is identified by a corkboard adjacent to the office of co-director Jeffrey Blutinger, who teaches Jewish intellectual and cultural history and post-communist Holocaust memorialization. Waiting outside, visitors are entertained by the printed phrases of "Jewish Buddhists" -- "If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?" and "Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis." -- and satirical headlines from a backdated issue of The Onion -- "Furher's Slaughter of Millions Blamed on Serious Self-Esteem Issues."

Blutinger's office is stuffed with six bookcases full of Jewish history, from Heinrich Graetz to pioneer Jews of the American West. And lumped on a pile of binders beneath the Encyclopedia Judaica lay first editions of MacDonald's first two books, checked out from the university library, and borrowed copies of "The Culture of Critique" and "Understanding Jewish Influence," an Occidental Quarterly monograph containing three MacDonald essays.

A former lawyer who joined the faculty four years ago, Blutinger has emerged as a leader in the battle against MacDonald, urging colleagues across campus to join the fight and authoring the Jewish studies' program statement denouncing MacDonald's research and the appended 18-page explanation.

"It's important that we take a stand," Blutinger said. "I teach the Holocaust every fall, and the thing I always end the course with is that, God willing, we will never have to make the choice people did back then, but all of us face the choice between what's right and doing what is easy or convenient. I tell them that I hope they will do what is right."

"If we are not willing to stand up when the risks are small," he continued, "why would we be willing to take a stand when the risks are big?"

Unpopular as MacDonald's views are, there appears little the university can do. He is protected by his status as a tenured professor, which he achieved in 1994, the year the first book in his "Culture of Critique" series was published. MacDonald also received a distinguished faculty award in 1995, and there is no record of any student complaint about anything MacDonald has said in 23 years, the administration, ADL and Hillel all reported.

Cal Sate Long Beach has been down this road before.

Nearly 30 years ago, Reinhard K. Buchner, a physics professor who from 1980 to 1983 was an editorial adviser for IHR's now-defunct Journal of Historical Review, drew protests from the ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center. The journal carried such Buchner essays as "The Problem of Cremator Hours and Incineration Time," which argued, using time-space calculations, that the number of Jews who possibly could have been killed at Auschwitz has been exaggerated.

Buchner eventually returned to Germany, but a former colleague on the editorial board, Arthur R. Butz, remains in American academia. A long-time associate professor of engineering at Northwestern University, Butz was an early Holocaust denier. In 1976, he wrote "The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry."

Many other tenured scholars, from the lowest to highest levels of academia, use their position to share unsavory opinions. The issue is one of academic freedom, designed to encourage bold research by protecting faculty from the political whims of capricious administrators. And even as it promotes experimental research in every discipline, it also frequently puts universities in uncomfortable positions.

MacDonald has publicly warned Cal State Long Beach administrators, responsible for the second-largest student body (population: 37,000) in the country's largest university system (23 campuses scattered from Arcata to San Diego), that the school could expect a lawsuit if he was terminated without just cause.

This is why faculty statements have urged only that the university distance itself from his theories about Jews and his support for ethnostates that create a haven for European American interests. Each of the four departmental statements professed a belief in his freedom to write about whatever he wants.

"We wish to make it clear that we do not seek to impede Kevin MacDonald's First Amendment rights," proclaimed the statement from the anthropology department, released April 28. "However, just as he has rights, we have the right, if not the obligation, to denounce his writings on race, ethnicity and intelligence that promote intolerance, as not only inaccurate, but as professionally irresponsible and morally untenable."

In the second of two recent interviews, MacDonald said he is not a fan of anti-Semitism. But he also described his opinions on a Palestinian American TV news program in 2005 as "rational" anti-Semitism and has joked that being branded a Jew hater was a "badge of honor," the knee-jerk reaction of a scared Jewish establishment.

The chief concern over MacDonald's writings about Jews is directed at his fan base: white supremacists like Stormfront.org and Vanguard News Network -- whose motto is "No Jews. Just Right." The members of these online communities have become his loudest defenders, often in language that is as offensive as possible.

"So the goddam Kikes are getting their way yet again, putting the thumbscrews to a White scholar whose ass they are not worthy to lick.... At least this oppression proves that Prof. MacDonald's great work is hitting the scum hard," a Vanguard commenter wrote in February below a republished story about MacDonald from CSULB's student paper.

"How much more of this humiliation is our race going to take? How long before this motherf---ing plague of repulsive, hook-snouted ticks is given a real Zyklon fumigation, as opposed to the fairy tale one?"

MacDonald repudiated such rhetoric as "crazy stuff" but said he supports the ideology behind it.

"White people have legitimate ethnic interests. To the extent that that is all they believe, then we are on the same page," he said. "I don't like to use words like white supremacists. You could say that Koreans in Korea are Korean supremacists if they want to maintain their culture. It is kind of a loaded word; it is a politically charged word of the left, basically, to pathologize any sense of having an ethnicity and culture by people like me. I reject that."

"I certainly reject the tactics and the rhetoric of these people. It's very crude," MacDonald added. "But to the extent that David Duke is trying to advance a white ethnic interest and so on, I don't have any problem with that."

For more information, visit The God Blog.

The saga of Daphna Ziman and Rev. Lee

2008-04-18T19:30:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal
"My entire reputation has been damaged," the Rev. Eric P. Lee said Monday, little more than a week after Jewish philanthropist Daphna Ziman sent an irate e-mail calling him an anti-Semite to her friends and members of the media.

"This has really taken its toll on me. I've taken the brunt, and it seems there is no question about whether Ms. Ziman inaccurately heard, and I was misinterpreted. It has just been really rough to me and my family," said Lee, president and CEO of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), in a phone interview while on a trip to Sacramento.

What Ziman says she heard in a keynote speech made by Lee, just after she was honored April 4 by a historically black fraternity for her work with foster children, was a rant that echoed one of the key strategies outlined in that century-old fabrication, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

"The Jews have made money on us in the music business, and we are the entertainers, and they are economically enslaving us," Ziman's e-mail quotes Lee saying.

Lee emphatically denies saying this or harboring such views. And after The Journal reported online April 9 that Ziman's e-mail was spreading through the community like wildfire, Lee sent an apology to Ziman for "any misunderstandings" and "unequivocally" denounced anti-Semitism.

The blaze, however, continued. At press time Tuesday, it loomed over a black-Jewish seder organized by the American Jewish Committee (AJCommittee) and the SCLC, among others, scheduled for April 17 at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, and it has forced leaders in both communities to acknowledge that more bond-building needs to occur.

"We need to build bridges not just with the African American community," said Stanley P. Gold, chairman of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, "but with all other ethnic and religious communities so we can avoid these kinds of flare-ups in the future."

The black-Jewish coalition was once a staple of Los Angeles politics, the formula that helped make Tom Bradley the city's first black mayor, but it dissipated over the years and now lies largely dormant. Nevertheless, Los Angeles synagogues and churches, albeit in small numbers, have continued working together.

"The relationship between the black community and the Jewish community is not only historic, but it is a necessity because both have, metaphorically, been to Egypt," said the Rev. Cecil "Chip" Murray, who led First AME Church for 27 years before retiring in 2004. "There have been tensions, yes," said Murray, who now teaches at USC. "Subgroups in the community create tensions. But over several centuries, Jews and blacks have bonded through the struggle for human dignity."

A native of Israel, Ziman and her husband, Richard, are major charitable and political contributors, locally and nationally, and are well known and respected by community leaders.

Ziman also is close with Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and has co-chaired fundraisers for her presidential campaign. Because Ziman made a connection in her e-mail between Lee and the now-notorious Rev. Jeremiah Wright -- blaming Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for not opposing Wright's anti-Semitic and anti-American tirades during two decades as a member of his church -- some are accusing Ziman of twisting an isolated incident for political gain.

"Daphna has a tendency to be over dramatic," said former Rep. Mel Levine, a friend of Ziman's who serves on Obama's Mideast team. "If the issue was dealing with the reverend, one could pick up the phone and talk to him and try to have a constructive dialogue -- rather than make an argument, however strange, that this has something to do with Barack Obama, when it had nothing to do with him."

Ziman denied such motivations in multiple interviews last week. She and Lee have not spoken since the fraternity gala, but last Friday, through the regional office of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Ziman sent Lee a letter thanking him for his apology.

"It is my intention for our communities to move towards a place of tolerance, mutual support, and unity," Ziman wrote. "I hope that we all rise above the negativity and take the responsibility to give our children the opportunity for a better future."

Lee, however, wasn't pleased.

"What I issued an apology on was her misunderstanding, not what I said. I didn't say anything wrong," he said.

The seeds of the conflict began on the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who founded the SCLC and was a great friend of Jews and Israel.

As founder of Children Uniting Nations, a charity that helps foster kids through school, Ziman was to be honored with the Tom Bradley Distinguished Citizen Award at the annual regional conference for Kappa Alpha Psi. Other recipients included L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

After the awards were presented, Lee, the gala's keynote speaker, spurred the black community to ensure its children succeed, playing off the event's theme, "Leaving an Inheritance to Our Kids and Our Communities." Toward the end of his speech, Lee mentioned a conversation with a rabbi about rejuvenating the relationship between blacks and Jews.

That much is agreed on. What came next, however, can't be confirmed, and event organizers say no recording was made.

Whatever Lee said, Ziman fled the banquet hall in tears, creating enough of a stir that some fraternity members apologized afterward. Her guests followed her out, and three of them, including a friend and two of her employees, corroborated Ziman's story.

"He said that the African American community is not going to bridge any gaps because the Jewish community is responsible for the defamation of African Americans on the silver screen," said Branka Gonzales, Children Uniting's chief financial officer. "His feelings were that nothing is going to change until those things change, until the Jewish community stops its ways."

Others in attendance -- from a state assemblyman to a civil rights attorney to the event's organizers, who invited Ziman -- said they didn't listen carefully enough to the speech to confirm or deny her account.

"I vaguely remember hearing something about a conversation he had with a rabbi and dealing with the media," said the evening's emcee, Damon M. Brown, head of the Los Angeles alumni of Kappa Alpha Psi, which has also issued a general apology "where any speaker gives pain to another." "I don't recall hearing anything that was offensive to me, and then again, I'm not Jewish, so I don't know if there are some sensitivities one would have."

Curtis R. Silvers Jr., head of the fraternity's Western Province, also said he heard nothing offensive. Like Brown, he said he was preoccupied and paid Lee's keynote only intermittent attention.

Assemblyman Mike Davis, a Los Angeles Democrat who has been supported by the Zimans, said the same: "I can't say I was tuned into what he was saying, but I do know people make errors."

Ziman's e-mail, however, captured everyone's attention.

"After I spoke and thanked the fraternity and their members, Rev. Eric Lee, pres. and CEO of Southern Christian Leadership Conference of greater Los Angeles, was introduced as the key note speaker," Ziman wrote, not minding a few typos in her e-mail:

"He began his speech by thanking Jesus for Obama, who is going to be the leader of the world. He continued by referring to other leaders Like Dr. King, being that this was the moment of celebrating Dr. King's spirit on the anniversary of his assassination, and Malcolm X. It was right after the mention of Malcolm X that he looked right at me and started talking about the African American children who are suffering because of the JEWS that have featured them as rapists and murderers. He spoke of a Jewish Rabbi, and then corrected himself to say "What other kind of Rabbis are there, but JEWS". He told how this Rabbi came to him to say that he would like to bring the AA community and the Jewish community together." NO, NO, NO,!!!!" he shouted into the crowd, we are not going to come together."

The rabbi Lee mentioned was Steven Jacobs, rabbi emeritus for Kol Tikvah in Woodland Hills, who was not at the April 4 gala but attended a dinner with black and Jewish leaders last month at a home across from First AME. Jacobs said when he asked how blacks and Jews could restore their relationship to its level in the days before King was killed, Lee said a requisite should be an effort to change the portrayal of blacks on TV and in movies.

"He raised the question of the power in Hollywood and brought it up as something we ought to discuss," Jacobs said. "It wasn't condemnation, and I must tell you I don't believe he is an anti-Semite."

While vehemently disputing Ziman's account last week, Lee said he had, in fact, discussed Jewish media influence.

"Black leaders have gone to black entertainment leaders and said, 'Take the "N" word out of your music, and take the "B" word out of your music,'" Lee said in an interview. "And so, my thinking is -- in building a relationship, and reconnecting, as it were, like when Dr. King was alive in the civil rights movement -- is that our friends and allies in the Jewish community who have influence in the entertainment community can help us in changing the depiction of African Americans."

Ziman's e-mail soon moved across the globe, aided by dissemination on April 9 on StandWithUs' 50,000-member listserv. Jewish organizations in Los Angeles heard from folks in Chicago and New York and the South, from Israelis and Europeans. It got additional attention when the Los Angeles Times reported the "rift" a week after it began. Many who shared the e-mail added their own commentary.

"It's no secret: the black community is riddled with Jew-hatred," Robert J. Avrech, a screenwriter who is Orthodox, wrote when posting the e-mail to his well-trafficked blog, Seraphic Secret. "And with so many apologists for Jeremiah Wright on the left and in the Jewish community, well, Jew-hatred has found a comfortable home not just in the black community but in the Democratic party."

Larry Greenfield, California director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, added a similar sentiment in bolded letters when he forwarded Ziman's missive: "Anti Americanism, Anti Zionism, Anti Semitism mark today's left."

In responding to the incident, many community leaders have had to traverse a minefield.

The mayor, Councilman Bernard Parks and state Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas had been present at the gala, but all left before Lee's address. In response to the controversy, Villaraigosa broadly condemned racism in any form and at any time. The AJCommittee and the ADL looked for a way to move forward regardless of what Lee had said.

"Unapologetic anti-Semitism has a much different feeling than this thing," said Amanda Susskind, the ADL's regional director, who has acted as a liaison between Ziman and Lee. "It doesn't mean that either side is right or wrong, or what he said or she said -- I wasn't there.... But I would say there is always room for more discussion, dialogue and sensitivity."

Ziman wants to organize a summit of rabbis and Christian ministers to discuss things that shouldn't be said "by people who are the voice of God" and spent last Thursday and Friday discussing this with The Federation's Gold and Uri Herscher, president and CEO of the Skirball Cultural Center, as well as friends in the black community.

"I'm hoping that the whole country will take notice, and no reverend will ever say anti-Semitic things in their sermons," Ziman said. "And I am hoping that the African American and Jewish communities will come together and understand that we have a lot more in common than differences and that we can help each other.

"I am more committed than ever to get members of the Jewish community to come with me into the inner city and the schools we work with. That way, the children will see that the Jewish community cares about them and wants to help. This is not about politics," she continued. "This is really about standing up to anti-Semitism."

For more info, check out The God Blog.

LA's defenders of Israel

2008-02-15T09:38:00.000-08:00

From: The Jewish Journal

The notice shocked Karen Klein, head of Students for Israel at Cal State Northridge: Norman Finkelstein, the much-maligned scholar who wrote "The Holocaust Industry" and has spoken glowingly of Hezbollah, had been invited by the provost to lecture for three days this week at her school.

Klein had grown up down the street from campus, followed her father and sister in attending CSUN, and she was concerned about the implications of inviting Finkelstein, whose lectures she assumed would include rants against the legitimacy of the State of Israel.

"The campus is very apathetic, and in the years I've been at CSUN, this is the first anti-Israel event that has happened," said Klein, a senior who plans to move to Israel after she graduates. "I wanted to make sure I handled it in the right way, because I want this to be the first and last instance of anti-Semitic activity at our university."

First she contacted Hillel, with which Students for Israel is affiliated, and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Then she called a group that since it began seven years ago in a Los Angeles living room has become an international leader in pro-Israel advocacy at colleges and universities.

StandWithUs national director Roz Rothstein jumped into action. She phoned Harry Hellenbrand, the provost and vice president who had invited Finkelstein, and explained the complaints her organization had. Hellenbrand wasn't surprised, and he asked StandWithUs to recommend speakers with a contrary perspective for a future lecture, a gesture he also made in a meeting with Klein. A list of 15 names was drawn up, and the drama was defused.

"That is exactly what we would want to have happen," said Hellenbrand, who said Finkelstein had been requested by faculty members who wanted to hear how his controversial scholarship had cost him tenure at DePaul University. "In a sense, our lives are made easier if we never have any controversial speakers at all. But that is not going to really happen. The ideal we have, but what rarely does happen, is that people come in and protest and write letters and ask us to support other speakers."

StandWithUs was born from death, given life by the grisly discovery of two Israeli teens, Kobi Mandel and Yosef Ishran, in a cave outside of the West Bank settlement of Tekoa on May 9, 2001.

"A rock the size of a computer rested on Kobi's smashed skull," Time magazine reported. "Both bodies were covered with stones. Blood smeared the walls, and the dirt floor was muddy with it. When the searchers rolled the rocks away, they didn't see faces but unrecognizable pulp."

Two of the more than 1,000 Israeli deaths from the Second Intifada, then still in its infancy, the murders spurred a small group of Jews half a world away. A week and a half later, Roz and Jerry Rothstein convened at their home the first meeting of the Israel Emergency Alliance. The group of about 50 rabbis and Jewish leaders, across partisan and denominational lines, would soon take the name StandWithUs, centered around the Web site www.standwithus.com, and within a year would establish itself as a trailblazing grass-roots organization, one of a few redefining what it means to be pro-Israel.

The group's ambitions started small: arranging a meeting with editors at the Los Angeles Times to discuss what they felt was the paper's pro-Palestinian bias in covering the conflict. They then turned to education, focusing on how to inform college students and journalists about other views of Israel than what was being shown in American media and identifying anti-Israel rhetoric on college campuses.

"My mother, who was a survivor, always told me that the Holocaust, as she watched it grow, began in the schools and the colleges. The hatred took hold in the youth," Roz Rothstein said in an interview last week. "We have a motto at this organization that education is the road to peace."

StandWithUs has grown from a small group of volunteers meeting at the Rothsteins' home to an international organization with offices in Los Angeles, New York and three other U.S. locales as well as Europe and Israel. With a staff of about 40, a budget of $3 million and a number of printed materials -- including a 43-page glossy guide, "Israel 101," and flyers comparing Walt and Mearsheimer's book "The Israel Lobby" with "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" -- StandWithUs acts, as Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz said, as an "intellectual Delta Force."

"StandWithUs may have started as a campus organization -- and they are our go-to group -- but their educational efforts have gone out to pre-university schools, to the community itself," said Gilad Millo, spokesman for the Israeli consulate in Los Angeles sponsor of the organization's annual conference, which this year included the Jerusalem Post's Palestinian affairs reporter, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Palestinian Media Watch's Itamar Marcus. "Their PR sense is brilliant."

StandWithUs, of course, has its critics, too, from those who think it is fighting the wrong battle -- hustling a pro-Israel information campaign instead of focusing on Jewish education -- to those who disagree with the organization's definition of "pro-Israel."

"It becomes a zero-sum game: If Israel did good, the other side must have done bad," said David N. Myers, a UCLA professor of Jewish history and director of its Center for Jewish Studies. "I would like to rethink the way we imagine pro-Israel to say it should also mean pro-Palestinian. The interests of Israelis and Palestinians meet at the point of freedom from occupation and self-determination for the Palestinians.... I find troubling the practice of defending every Israeli action. The fact of the matter is there is no country in the world whose every action is defensible. Robust practicing democracies undertake actions that merit scrutiny, Israel too. And that is not part of the mission of StandWithUs. What concerns me is the very polarized way they see the world, which is represented in the very name StandWithUs, which implies that anyone else is against us."

Most of the organization's resources are dedicated to providing materials and strategic support to college students, particularly at embattled campuses such as UC Irvine. But StandWithUs has received broad attention for two other efforts -- joining Dershowitz and others in opposing Finkelstein's bid for tenure at DePaul University and waging an ad war against a pro-Palestinian organization that placed posters in Washington's subways showing Israeli tanks.

The subway ads were indicative of StandWithUs' hard-line brand of truth telling. One of the posters showed an Arab toddler in the right arm of his father, who was wearing fatigues and a bandana and was resting an automatic rifle on his left shoulder. "This Child Could Grow Up to Be A" the poster stated, offering three options: doctor, teacher or terrorist. The terrorist box contained a checkmark.

Such pro-Israel advocacy didn't exist in Los Angeles before StandWithUs came along, and the organized Jewish community has rallied around it. The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles has given a number of small grants along the order of the $10,000 gift for November's "Israel in Focus" conference, and the Jewish Community Foundation has given $305,000, including a Cutting Edge grant of $210,000 in 2006 to provide "teaching tools and classroom materials for public high school teachers to use to effectively teach about Israel."

"Through this breakthrough work, StandWithUs strengthens the fabric of our local Jewish communities by instilling knowledge and understanding of Zionism and Israel," Marvin I. Schotland, president and CEO of The Foundation, said. "It's tantamount to a two-for-one payoff for a supporting organization such as ours."

But this support has also raised questions. While StandWithUs professes to be a non-partisan advocate on behalf of Israel -- one whose board bears many shades of the political spectrum and refrains from commenting on the policies of the Israeli government -- progressive Jewish leaders consider the organization to be their ideological inverse.

"A number of very good progressive Jewish organizations have applied, in some cases repeatedly, for funding from The Foundation, and they have been denied," said Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance (PJA). "This would seem to suggest that there is particular support in the Jewish Community Foundation for the brand of Israel advocacy that is put forth by StandWithUs, which is a particularly hard-line, conservative version."

The seminal moment in the transformation of pro-Israel advocacy occurred in the summer of 1993, when the Oslo accords were finalized, and then signed, on the White House lawn.

"The Jewish community essentially had trained itself in one direction and was being asked to turn around immediately," said Michael Berenbaum, an adjunct professor of theology at American Jewish University. "It had advocated that the enemy was the PLO, and the question was, if all of the sudden [the PLO] are friends, they felt betrayed."

It was at this moment that the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) broke a decades-old code and criticized the Israeli government. While most Jewish American organizations got behind the landmark peace agreement, ZOA President Morton A. Klein predicted the accords would not only fail, but that they would empower Yasser Arafat and endanger Israelis.

"They were completely wrong and we were completely right," Klein said last week. "Peace is impossible."

Seven years and 300 murdered Jews after Oslo, the Second Intifada broke out, rupturing the ground beneath American Jewry. Within one more year, 19 Muslim terrorists would hijack four American planes and inflict the worst domestic attack in U.S. history; Jews and the West found a common enemy in the Muslim world, and the crack in the Jewish community severed into two pieces -- hawks and doves, hardliners and peaceniks, right and left.

In Los Angeles, the American Jewish Congress had dissolved its local office in 1998 and reformed the following year as the PJA, a liberal organization concerned mostly with domestic issues related to social justice. But the AJCongress reopened here in 2000, bearing little resemblance to its former self.

"People who believed that we could have peace with the Palestinians were shaken out of their misguided view and realized they had no desire for peace," said Gary P. Ratner, the group's western region executive director. "Their goal was what they stated openly: The destruction of Israel, whether through the violence of groups like Hamas or through negotiations, that will weaken Israel. I think some of us woke up to the fact that Oslo was a disaster and the peace process would only lead to the destruction of Israel."

The Jewish state was under attack with no partner for peace; the old model of resolving conflict through compromise had failed. With climbing anti-Israel rhetoric on American campuses and the perception that international media had joined liberal Christians in taking up the Palestinian cause, the hardliners quickly captured the upper hand among Jewish groups in the debate on what it meant to be pro-Israel.

"It's a painful moment in Jewish life, because there isn't a place for honest and open discourse," Gerald Bubis, founding director of the Irwin Daniels School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, told this paper in a 2002 article titled "The Silencing of the Left?" "People can have very strong differences of opinion about where to go and how to resolve things, but that discourse does not have a place right now. Rather, there is a vituperative argumentation and excoriation."

Amid this climate, major Jewish organizations slid into the shadows, abdicating their leadership.

"Whatever they said would upset somebody," Jonathan D. Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, said. "As a result, Jews who were frustrated, who wanted to defend Israel and didn't really know how or didn't have the ability, they gravitated toward The David Project and its sort of counterpart in StandWithUs."

The David Project first made headlines in 2004 with a documentary, "Columbia Unbecoming," which alleged faculty intimidation of pro-Israel students at the Ivy League school.

"We have lost a generation. The Jewish leadership failed to understand the situation we were in. We thought that people who were our enemies would be thugs yelling 'kike,' instead of soft-spoken college professors saying Israel is an apartheid state," Charles Jacobs, president of the Boston-based David Project, said. "In the West today, most people don't hate the Jews because we are Christ-killers and we are racial vermin, but they hate Jews because they see us supporting what has been unfairly described as the cruelest of nations."

Just how serious the crisis on college campuses is, how deeply Israel is being vilified, how under attack Jewish students feel, is a source of great debate. Many schools, including USC, UCLA and CSUN, seem mostly immune from the anti-Israel rhetoric 51 weeks of the year. But then Palestinian Awareness Week draws tension between Muslims and Jews at UCLA, or a controversial speaker is invited to any one of those universities and concern crests. More troubling are campuses plagued by frequent protests against Israel, like one at Concordia University in Montreal six years ago that resembled a pogrom.

"There isn't as much happening on campuses as people think," said Amanda Susskind, the ADL's regional director. "But where it is happening, it is happening worse than people can imagine."

Among the schools most afflicted by Israel-bashing has been UC Irvine, where students frequently march against Israel holding signs that say "Smash the Jewish State" and "Israel, the 4th Reich." Several times a year since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, radicals like Muhammad Al-Asi and Amir Abdel Malik Ali have been invited by the Muslim Student Union to praise suicide bombers as "freedom fighters" and accuse "the Zionist-controlled media" of distorting the human-rights record of "the apartheid State of Israel," a country that is "a monkey on the American back" and "a cancerous presence."

"There is great racism against Jewish students on college campuses within the Muslim student organizations. The speakers, the programs, the handouts are all indicative of a deep hatred of Israel and, in my opinion, of a very deep racist ideology," Rabbi Yonah Bookstein, associate rabbi of UC Irvine's interfaith center, said. "I have been -- just this last week actually -- the victim of that racism by Muslim students at UC Irvine. I was heckled when I was trying to speak to a group of high school students about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was on Thursday; it was on campus. There is just a wave of hatred and racism directed at Jewish students by Muslim students. It literally permeates everything they do."

Anti-Israel attacks have appeared across the country, most often where unaffiliated speakers have been invited by pro-Palestinian campus groups. (A 44-minute StandWithUs documentary, "Tolerating Intolerance," focuses on a handful of these speakers, including Al-Asi, Malik Ali and Finkelstein.) The crisis, however, is not endemic. And even at large universities where the problem seems to be acute -- places like San Francisco State a few years ago -- many Jewish students report no problems.

"Even at San Francisco State and even in the heat of this," said Seth Brysk, who was the Hillel director there and is now executive director of the American Jewish Committee's L.A. chapter, "I had Jewish students say to me, 'Why are you making such a big deal about this? I've never had a problem with anti-Semitism.'"

Roz Rothstein doesn't believe an unstoppable crisis is racing across academia. But she thinks a pro-Palestinian agenda in favor of the end of the Jewish state is simmering below the surface. And she wasn't willing to wait until it was too late.

"We are not the victims, and we do not want to be the victims. We are strong enough to say 'never again,'" Rothstein said. "I didn't create bus bombings. I was minding my own business before 2000. I was raising a family; I wasn't working for the Museum of Tolerance or the ADL. This isn't about anti-Semitism. This is about radical Islam creating a society of little fundamentalists that have radical intentions."

Rothstein, 55, sat in her undecorated L.A. office on the second-floor of an industrial building, a location the group doesn't disclose for fear of violence. A handful of boxes were stacked on top of, and in front of, three large bookcases and a smaller one filled with multiple copies of "The Israelis" by Donna Rosenthal, "Exodus" by Leon Uris, "Myths & Facts: A Guide to the Arab-Israeli Conflict" by Mitchell Bard and "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Jewish History & Culture." These aren't part of Rothstein's personal collection -- that shelf includes Steven Emerson's "American Jihad" and Jimmy Carter's "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" -- but are used to seed libraries with books that positively represent Israel -- more than 3,500 locations so far.

Her focus is divided between disseminating pro-Israel information in the Western world and opposing what she called "the hate training of the Palestinian children." Strongly influenced by the fact that both parents and her stepfather were survivors, Rothstein draws parallels between indoctrination of Arab children and the Hitler Youth.

"How did they do it? They did it with the same cartoons and hate training that we see today in Arab countries," she said, using her computer to log onto standwithus.com. She pulled up a flyer comparing anti-Semitic cartoons in Nazi Germany with those found in Arab papers -- a giant spider bearing the Magen David, a child being slaughtered in ritualistic baking, a grotesque Jew being kicked off a cliff.

"How do you get people to hate? Use things that were successful. The Nazis got Europe to hate the Jews," she said. "So they use their model and they do it all over."

Rothstein is not only the public face of StandWithUs, but its core energy. She started the organization with her husband and Esther Renzer, a like-minded woman who serves as the board president, and is widely credited with its meteoric rise, something admired by both critics and supporters.

"Their success, in no small part, is a testament to the dynamic leadership of Roz Rothstein, who is a creative and entrepreneurial executive, not to mention zealous in her love and advocacy of Israel," said Schotland, of the Jewish Community Foundation.

She is motivated by a deep conviction that avoiding conflict is the worst strategy for the Jewish people. In summer 2006, Rothstein joined the campaign to strip an L.A. County Commission on Human Relations award from Maher Hathout, a founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who had called Israel an "apartheid state" run by "butchers." Though Hathout got to keep the award after a month of contentious public hearings and news articles probing the Egyptian immigrant's past, Rothstein said she was proud of their efforts.

"If you Google him, then you will not see that he received an award he shouldn't have, but that he was a controversial guy who attended Hezbollah rallies and told Muslims they should not communicate with Israel," Rothstein said.

"Two years ago," she said, "the Presbyterian Church nearly voted to pull $7 billion in investments out of Israel -- $7 billion. Do you know why that happened? Neglect. Our neglect of the defamation of Jews or Israel will never amount to anything good."

Read Brad A. Greenberg's The God Blog for the latest on Finklestein's local reception committee -- including the Jewish Defense League.

Jews and the great election of '08

2008-01-31T20:42:00.000-08:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein had barely slept in days.

A senior at Beverly Hills High School, he'd spent long hours rallying support for Barack Obama, and as the results from the Iowa caucuses poured in, as fellow Obama supporters packed the presidential candidate's California campaign office in Koreatown, Spitzer-Rubenstein turned jubilant, his enthusiasm mashing together with exhaustion into euphoria.

"Yeah!" he shouted, jumping up and down in a corner where he was hawking T-shirts, bumper stickers and buttons for the Illinois senator. "Obama! Obama! Obama!" he chanted with the crowd. "Fired up! Ready to go! Fired up! Ready to go! Let's go change the world!"

Then his cell phone rang. It was one of the many high school volunteers he oversees as the L.A. teen director.

"Hi, Amy," Spitzer-Rubenstein, 17, said. "So it looks like we did it. It's awesome. You helped make this happen. Yeah, every little bit matters."

One down, 49 to go, which means many more hours of lost sleep for Spitzer-Rubenstein. Far from alone in volunteering for the candidate he thinks holds the key to a better America, Jews are planted throughout most of the presidential front-runners' campaigns, from top advisory levels to grassroots street teams.

So much excitement hasn't surrounded a presidential primary season in 40 years, not since Bobby Kennedy was in the race. And for the first time in at least as long, California's primary will matter. Until now, only six states have cast their votes for party nominations, with Florida's vote Tuesday terminating the campaigns of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Maine's residents will vote Friday and then on Feb. 5, 22 states, including California, Illinois and New York, will go to the polls on what has been dubbed "Super-Duper Tuesday" and "Tsunami Tuesday." Meanwhile, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an Independent and a Jew, continues to play presidential footsie, presumably waiting to see how the field thins.

With the contest still up for grabs -- three Republicans and two Democrats still with a realistic chance of getting their party's nod -- Tuesday's race is expected to determine the ballot for the general election. And already quite a few Jews have been writing checks, working phones or simply spreading their candidate's gospel in an effort to court the deciding votes.

Julie Shapiro, a young lawyer for Universal and volunteer for Hillary Clinton, last week started an effort to get other female lawyers fired up about the New York senator. David Slomovic, a father of three, spent recent Thursday evenings opening his commercial real estate office for phone banking for Giuliani. And Dr. Joel Geiderman, co-chair of the emergency medicine department at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and vice chair of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Council, has spent his free time encouraging lifelong Democrats to switch sides.

"The two visions of America the parties offer could not be any more different," Geiderman said.

Jews in real estate and Hollywood were quick to get involved, too -- support had been strongest for Clinton and Obama, Giuliani and John McCain -- endorsing early, opening their homes for fundraisers and crisscrossing the country in support.

"We took our family holiday in Iowa this year," said Sony Pictures Chairman and CEO Michael Lynton, who hosted Obama at his home last summer and went with his wife and kids to the Jan. 3 caucuses.

Tonight, MGM chief Harry Sloan will host his second fundraiser for McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona. Obama will attend one at the Avalon. And Hillary Clinton will be at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a fundraiser organized by the likes of Peter Lowy, Haim Saban, Barbra Streisand and Daphna and Richard Ziman.

"All of us believe this is an absolutely critical election," said Michael Berenbaum, an adjunct professor of theology at American Jewish University. "The last four years of the Bush administration have been disastrous. If we don't get ourselves squared away, it could be the end of the American Century and the end of the way the American Jewish community has been American in this era.

"We are voting as if our lives and futures depend upon it. Not because we fear someone is going to come out and kill us, but because we fear that if we don't get this right, our children and their children will not enjoy the privileges this generation has enjoyed as Americans -- the economic opportunity, the prosperity, the education, all of those elements that have characterized our existence and our flourishing. After Florida in 2000, everybody knows that every vote absolutely counts."

Republican or Democrat? There used to only be one real answer to that. Jews believed in three velts -- Yiddish for "world": die velt (this world), yene velt (the next world) and Roosevelt. And since the New Deal, American Jews have identified so strongly with the Democratic Party that supporting its policies, particularly its domestic agenda, has been part of being Jewish.

"Like most Brooklyn Jews, I was raised a Democrat, voted Democrat for years and years, and believed, absolutely, that Republicans were evil," screenwriter Robert J. Avrech wrote a few years ago for the Jewish Press in an article titled "Help! I'm a Hollywood Republican." "That's what we were taught from birth, right? Democrats are for the poor and the oppressed, and Republicans are for rich people and big corporations. Who questioned such sophisticated political analysis?"

An increasing number of Jews seem to be. Though the proportion voting for a Republican presidential candidate has never been as high as it was in 1956 for President Dwight D. Eisenhower -- 40 percent, according to "Jews in American Politics," (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) -- the percentage has increased in each presidential election since 1992, going from 11 percent to 16 percent to 19 percent, until finally 24 percent of Jews voted to reelect President Bush in 2004.

"Whether it is the economy or the environment or education or healthcare, we think we are bringing new and fresh ideas to the conversation," Larry Greenfield, state director of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in opening remarks during a debate at Congregation Ner Tamid of South Bay with the leader of Democrats for Israel. "There is a broadening of the Jewish conversation as some of your kids and grandkids come home from college and say, 'Mom, Dad, I'm a Republican.'"

Greenfield has been traveling up and down the state trying to convince voters that Republicans really are good for the Jews. He's won some converts over the past few years, growing his membership from about 1,500 to 8,000. And the key selling point, the policy issue he repeats over and over, is that Republicans just do national defense better. That means, he argues, we will be safer, and Israel will be safer, with a Republican in the White House.

"There are obviously some lifelong Democrats who are not going to shift," he said as he sat down for an interview after the debate. "But I hear all the time that they could vote for a Republican."

"McCain is the only Republican I could vote for," Marilyn Kritzer, one of those lifelong Democrats and the organizer of the debate and luncheon, chimed in.

Certainly there has been enthusiasm in the Jewish community for McCain, a hawk on defense who has a long record of stiff support for Israel. He earned the endorsement of Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), a centrist with foreign policy views similar to his own, and quite a bit of fantasizing was indulged in December at the Orthodox Union's West Coast Torah Convention when talk show host Michael Medved entertained the possibility of a McCain-Lieberman ticket.

Other Republican Jews have gotten behind the candidacy of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, whom RJC took on a tour of Israel last year.

"Most Republicans care about shared values, and he has very strong values," Charlie Spies, CFO and general counsel for Romney for President, said of the Mormon candidate. "Whether you are an Orthodox Jew, conservative Catholic or evangelical, we have much more in common than divides us."

But the person that was being spoken of most effusively by California's Republican Jewish leadership -- though not officially because they don't endorse until after the primaries -- was Giuliani.

"I've saved the best for last," Greenfield said during the debate at Ner Tamid. "Rudy Giuliani, who has been fighting Palestinian terrorism for 30 years. He is the most hands-on, most closely aligned-with-the-Jewish-community candidate I have ever seen."
Giuliani ended his campaign Wednesday afternoon, a few hours before the Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, and threw his support behind McCain. Republican Jews were drawn to Giuliani largely because of his performance on Sept. 11, 2001, and his subsequent tough talk on terror. Of the remaining Republicans, McCain is the closest comparison and should have control of the Republican Jewish vote.

"People don't want to talk about Sept. 11, but that image is burned into my mind, and I remember what he did and what he said when all hell broke loose in New York," said David Slomovic, who changed his voter registration in December and volunteered for Giuliani's campaign. "I remember watching with my wife him speaking, staying calm, giving it to us straight. I remember him ensuring New Yorkers that New York would be there tomorrow, that they would be strong, and they would be an example to Americans and the world that they would not be defeated by terrorism. He was the voice of America to me."

Slomovic sat at his desk in an office surrounded by pictures of his family, Giuliani promotions and a poster of the movie "300." "I've got three beautiful kids, a beautiful wife, and that's why I'm here: The future."

He is exactly the type of voter the RJC was trying to convert: a guilt-filled liberal who was fiscally conservative and, above all else, shares their opinion that Islamic terror is the most important issue of our time.

Slomovic wore a light blue shirt rolled to the sleeves, with a white long-sleeve shirt running down to his wrists, and the baggy eyes of a long day. He was polite, if a bit stiff, as he dialed bit by bit through a ream of phone lists.

Once the frontrunner in California, Giuliani watched his popularity plummet. Only 13 percent of Republicans planned to vote for him, according to an L.A. Times/CNN/Politico poll released this week. McCain, who is leading the pack in California, has 39 percent support, making Slomovic's cold calls that much more frustrating.

"Hey David, what if it's 'I'm not a Republican?" a volunteer named Gary Klein asked.

"That's not a sin," Slomovic responded.

Another volunteer disagreed. "Tell him, 'F--- you,'" he said, and then left for the night.

It is an unusually personal story for politics, but it's one that indebted Daphna Ziman to then-first lady Hillary Clinton.

In the early 1990s, Ziman was touring a homeless mission when a 5-year-old girl captivated her. She had been abused, and after the girl was treated at a hospital, she was put in Ziman's foster care. But then a parental hearing was held. "The judge said he was going to give the crack mom parenting classes and then return this little girl. I said, 'Over my dead body.'"

Ziman decided to appeal to everyone she knew in Washington, and even some she didn't. One of those people was Hillary Clinton, who advised Ziman on what she should do. In a Talmudic sense, it felt to Ziman, who adopted the girl as her daughter, as if Clinton had saved the world.

"She didn't know me from a bar of soap," said Ziman, who was inspired by the process to found Children Uniting Nations. "When people ask me, 'How come you can give so much and do so much?' -- If the first lady of the United States, who is so overloaded everyday, can do that to save one child, it is the least I can do."

A decade and a half later, this debt has translated into trips across the country to promote Clinton among various Jewish communities and hosting discussions at her home between members of Los Angeles' Jewish community and Madeleine Albright, former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo). (Bill Clinton is expected to make a trip out, too, Ziman said.)

"I've had to take a huge chunk of time to support Hillary, and I am happy to do that for two reasons: One is Israel and the other is children at risk," she said. "That is it. I honestly and truly to the depth of my being believe I can trust in the future of my children if Hillary is going to be in the president's office," she said. "It's the most important election, and the most indescribable and the most incomprehensible election, we've ever been through."

Clinton had a 17-point lead over Obama in the L.A. Times poll. Edwards, the former senator from North Carolina, was running in third. His support from the Jewish community had been much smaller than Clinton's and Obama's.

"The biggest problems I have with Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama don't have to deal with their policies and positions. It's about electability," Coby King, a public affairs professional who held a fundraiser for Edwards at his West Valley home last summer, said before his candidate dropped out Wednesday.

"But should Sen. Clinton or Sen. Obama be the nominee, I will be enthusiastic about their candidacy and do whatever I can to make sure they are elected president of the United States. More than the differences between any of the Democratic candidates, the country has a huge choice between Democrats and Republicans, and we obviously need a huge change in direction."

Clinton and Obama have proven so popular among Jews because of what they represent.

Clinton is not only a Clinton -- a plus for many Jews -- she is also the first viable female candidate for the presidency. But Obama also would be a barrier-breaker, and in many ways he personifies what so many Jews fought so hard for during the Civil Rights movement. A Kenyan father and a Kansan mother, of humble means and superior education, Obama's story is a familiar one.

"The options here are unbelievably forward from where we've ever been. And that is a great thing," said Abby Leibman, a management consultant who co-founded the California Women's Law Center and is a Clinton fan. "But I don't have the same excitement about an African American man because I am not one."

Supporters of each senator have been casting the other as a bad choice for Israel. The rhetoric, however, appears to be political fear mongering.

"What I have seen with Clinton and Obama maybe more than the others -- though I don't want to say there isn't an appreciation with the others -- is a desire to see a peace process that is based on a premise that Israel can't be the one that is always taking the initiatives," said former Ambassador Dennis Ross, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who has given both candidates advice.

"Israel can't be the only one to compromise. Palestinians have to live up to the commitments they've made, and the Arab world has to assume responsibility and can't just sit on the sideline. They are both in favor of having a much more active peace process, which I am. But if you have an active peace process, it has to be grounded in reality."

Obama, though, has faced another challenge. An Internet rumor campaign has accused him of being an uncover Muslim and a veiled anti-Semite. He's taken these attacks so seriously that Monday, even after a number of Jewish organizational leaders signed an open letter condemning the smears and seven Jewish senators penned another, Obama held a conference call with reporters from Jewish publications to reiterate his support for Israel and his affinity for American Jewry.

"My strong and deep commitment and connection to the Jewish community should not be questioned," he said.

It's anybody's guess how the Jewish vote here will split between the two. But there are certainly plenty of people trying to shape it.

In November, Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) endorsed Clinton. Three weeks ago, his colleague, Rep. Adam Schiff, (D-Pasadena) opted for Obama. And former Congressman Mel Levine, who left office 15 years ago, joined Schiff at a City Hall press conference, adding his name to the growing list of supporters.

"I must confess that I have become emotionally excited about the prospect of a President Obama and what that means to America's image throughout the world," said Levine, who has been working with the senator's foreign policy team. "This man is a uniter. He reaches out, and he clearly respects the views of people on all sides of an issue, and that is critically important in intractable conflicts, such as Israel-Palestine."

"I should be a poor American and a poor Catholic alike if I injected religious discussion into a political campaign." Alfred E. Smith, the great New Yorker, wrote those words little more than 80 years ago as he campaigned for the presidency amid rumors and slanders that his Catholic worldview would imperil Americans. How the times have changed.

In 2008, presidential candidates not only inject religious language into their campaigns, but also at times seem to fully infuse their stump speeches with it, "thumpin' it," as Jacques Berlinerblau dubs the strategy in a book by that name (Westminster John Knox, 2007).

While Joe Lieberman was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in 2000 for going overboard in his references to the God of Abraham, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister who in January said we need "to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards," certainly seems to be missing the mark with Jewish voters.

Zero percent -- that's a bagel -- of New York Jews favored Huckabee over the other Republican front-runners in a mid-January poll by Siena College. And a completely unscientific search here in Los Angeles didn't yield better results. (Huckabee's press office did not respond to a request for info on any Jewish volunteers in California; Greenfield also was unaware of any supporters.) The only prominent Jew who has backed Huckabee was Bill Kristol, the neoconservative scion and Weekly Standard editor who spoke effusively of the man from Hope in his first weekly column for The New York Times.

"Jews have been conditioned to play it close to the vest and keep their religious sentiments to themselves," said Berlinerblau, an associate professor of Jewish civilization at Georgetown University. "It is so viscerally in our cultural DNA, I don't think we are very comfortable with public faith-and-values talk. Especially when it is coming from a Christian spokesperson."

Thanks to Bush's success at monopolizing the vote of evangelical Christians by casting conservatism as God's Ol' Party, religious incantations has become an integral part of presidential campaigning. Complete with faith strategists, spiritual language this year has been mixed into the Democrats' stump speeches, resulting in newspaper profiles that focus specifically on what Methodism means to Clinton and just exactly what religion Obama practices. ("I never practiced Islam," Obama said Monday. "I was raised by my secular mother. I have been a member of the Christian religion and an active Christian."). Still, the growth in God-talk has missed the point for many liberal Jews.

"Progressives need to find a way to refocus religious issues, and what better time to do that then election season, when the whole world is watching?" Margie Klein, an editor of a new book that is designed to start a movement, "Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice" (Jewish Lights, 2007). "We need to reframe the debate so that when people think how should they vote, they don't think, 'Morality. OK. Anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage.' Which we know is not correct."

It is clear that progressive politics don't mean as much to Jews as they did in the early days on the Lower East Side. Jewish politics have broadened, and, like most Americans, Jews are primarily worried about the economy. Really worried. Their next ranking political concerns are healthcare reform, the war in Iraq and the threat of terrorism, according to the American Jewish Committee's 2007 survey.

Jews contribute more heavily to political campaigns than other Americans on average; they vote with greater regularity and, largely by accident, are clustered in a few big states -- California and New York -- and a few crucial swing states -- Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Ohio. That's why federal politicians often are quick to reach out to the Jewish community. Obama, Clinton, Giuliani and Romney have this connection built in by virtue of the locales they have represented or still do; McCain has a much smaller Jewish constituency in Arizona, but is appreciated for his years of supporting Israel, which is, for most, the key foreign policy issue.

More campaign talk has been directed Israel's way during the past 60 years than any other small strip of coastal desert. So it surprised Amanda Susskind, regional director of the ADL, when, at a recent campaign forum at The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, none of the candidates' representatives needed the extra time she offered them to talk about plans for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians and promises for protecting the survival of the Jewish state. They stuck to their allotted 90 seconds, giving equal time to the discussion of the future of Israel as to hate crimes and healthcare.

And that is because there really is no discussion on the campaign trail. Save each party's fringe candidate -- Dennis Kucinich on the left and Ron Paul on the right -- there is substantial support not only for Israel, but also for its right to defend itself against hostile neighbors and to negotiate a peace agreement that does not relent too much, or too prime, territory. Even the Democrats have talked tough, with Clinton saying Jerusalem should not be divided and Obama authoring the Iran Sanctions Act.

"All of the frontrunners, both Republicans and Democrats, are extremely supportive of Israel," said Howard Welinsky, former chair of The Federation's Jewish Community Relations Committee. "I don't think if you took a magnifying glass you can perceive any significant difference on the important issues of a two-state solution, supporting Israel's security, dealing with Iran -- whether it is McCain, Giuliani, Clinton, Obama or Edwards -- they are all extremely supportive of Israel. They are all very knowledgeable; they care. So then it becomes: What are the differences?"

Jewish (and all film and TV) writers on strike

2007-11-08T16:26:00.000-08:00

From: The Jewish Journal

"Are you Jewish?"

With some discomfort, I asked that question repeatedly of the 300-plus picketers in front of CBS Studio Center in Studio City on

Monday, the first day of the strike by the Writers Guild of America.

It was an awkward query not because I feared dismissal -- after accounting for noses and facial hair and eyeglasses, I was able to reduce uncertainty to about 20 percent -- but because I knew these TV and film writers did not see a connection between Yiddishkayt and the failed contract negotiations that spurred some 12,000 members of the WGA to go on strike at 9:01 p.m. Sunday.

"What's the Jewish angle?" Andrew Jacobson, a co-writer of "Not Another Teen Movie," asked me. "I don't see one except in the most stereotypical sense. This is an issue that affects people regardless of religion or race or gender. It's writers united."

Indeed, "Hollywood writer" is among the most Jewish job descriptions anywhere, which is why, as this long-anticipated strike approached, my editors asked me to report the news through a Jewish lens. The difficulty, however, is that this really isn't a Jewish story. It's a business story that just happens to deal with an industry built largely by Jewish immigrants and sustained by their successors.

Both sides of this fight count many Jews among their fold, and both claim the moral high ground -- the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers accuses "irresponsible" writers of endangering the entertainment industry and the L.A. economy; writers say they simply want their fair share of a hugely profitable business, as well as a the livelihood for middle-class scribes who spend most years out of work.

"The Jews have such a history of fighting for the worker, and there is certainly some beautiful text material for one to draw on in fighting a fight like this," said David N. Weiss, an observant Jew and WGA vice president. "But I would hate to have it characterized as a Jewish struggle. That would be just off the mark."

In the end, this story is about money.

"There is an ethical component, but this is business," said Robert J. Avrech, an Orthodox Jew who wrote "The Devil's Arithmetic." "I don't understand why people need to bring in a moral, ethical argument. This is about business, about our share of the profits. Why is anything more needed?"

The last writers strike, in 1988, was a 22-week affair that cut deep into the pocketbooks of Hollywood scribes, and many felt it ended with few gains. Observers expect this strike to be long and bitter, with the WGA pushing for increased payment on DVD sales and for residuals for original and recycled content played on the Internet.

"We live off the residuals, and if people are watching reruns on the Internet, it's going to change retirement plans for a lot of writers," said Eric Lapidus, a consultant on "Two and a Half Men."

Lapidus, who was picketing Monday in front of the main gate at the CBS lot, also has a lot to worry about right now. His journalist wife recently left the editorship at Angeleno magazine to give birth to their daughter and is now freelance reporting; he could be out of work for a long time. Fortunately, he said, the strike was anticipated, and he and his wife did what they could to prepare.

"Hopefully this will end soon," Lapidus said, rejoining the picket line after a brief break. "And if not, I'm going to get in good shape."

The writers marched in a circle. Young and old, successful writers and laboring grinders, wearing either blood-red union shirts or sweaters or cheap Ts with blue jeans and sneakers -- always sneakers -- picketed alongside each other. During the afternoon shift, children joined their parents on the line. Aiden Lewis, the 11-month-old son of TV writer Meghan McCarthy, sat smiling in his stroller, on which had been taped a sheet of paper that stated, "My mom's not greedy, she just wants to feed me."

This scene was repeated in four-hour shifts at 14 locations in Los Angeles and others in New York. This week, guild members were expected to spend 20 hours participating in the strike, either by picketing or volunteering at headquarters for WGA, West, at 7000 W. Third St.

"There are more Jews here than at my Hebrew school," said Alan Marc Levy, who wrote the TV movie, "Searching for David's Heart." "It's just that is who is swimming in the writing pool."

Read more at The God Blog

New Jewish Federation leader 'gonna make it relevant'

2007-10-20T00:58:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Stanley P. Gold wastes few words describing the status of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.

"It is largely irrelevant," he said last week.

What makes Gold's remark so stark is that on Jan. 1, the sharp-tongued and fast-paced Gold, a 65-year-old self-described "monomaniac on a mission," will take over lay leadership at The Federation as chairman of the board.

"I'm gonna make it relevant," he quickly added. "Gonna make it relevant to the donor community. Gonna make it relevant to the Los Angeles community. And gonna make it relevant to most of the Jewish community. The alternative is a slow dissipation. I'm not going to let that happen."

"It is not so much about Stanley Gold," he said, making clear he recognizes the arrogance behind his ambition and that he's not the first to try to reform the 96-year-old institution. "It is changing the culture; it is changing the way they do business; it is changing their focus. I think once I get them off in the right direction, there are probably people better than Stanley Gold on how to run it in the future. The value I would hope to bring is midcourse change."

Gold is known for being as proactive in his volunteer work as he has been professionally. He got his name saving the Walt Disney Co. from corporate raiders in the 1980s and has held onto his reputation for success with Shamrock Holdings -- an investment company that is the Diaspora's largest private-equity player in Israel. He's chaired the board of trustees at USC since 2002 and has served throughout the Jewish community. As The Federation's chair, he will have just two years to set in place the mechanisms he believes will make it a better-run not-for-profit.

It's no secret that The Federation's role in the community has slipped, following a trend affecting the nationwide network of umbrella organizations that have long been the lifeblood of Jewish social services. Increased assimilation coupled with a move toward directed giving, a jump in the percentage of charity given by Jews to non-Jewish causes and an under-50 demographic that doesn't view the mission of local federations with the same appreciation that their parents did are chipping away at the vitality of these organizations large and small. (See related story.)

In Los Angeles, add to that litany the decimated staff and reduced visibility of The Federation's Jewish Community Relations Committee (JCRC) and the national prominence of largely independent organizations, and it's no wonder The Federation's annual campaign in 2005 was $47.3 million, less than a million above what it was in 1990 -- and about 33 percent lower when accounting for inflation.

"They know all this stuff is true. They just don't want to talk about it; you don't find this on the agenda of most federations," said Gary A. Tobin, president of the Institute for Jewish & Community Research. "Whether the L.A. Federation is doing slightly better or slightly worse than other federations really misses the point: The annual campaign is in trouble everywhere, both in terms of how much they raise and the fact that there is a declining donor base."

Gold's focus is threefold: He wants The Federation to become the preeminent program provider in L.A.-Israel relations; he wants to reinvest in community relations; and he wants to increase leadership development. For Gold, everything else is secondary, even unnecessary, particularly those programs in which The Federation competes with other Jewish service providers.

"If they are doing it better, we ought to support them -- and certainly not be second or third best," Gold said.

And the change will mean cuts, Gold made clear, though without specifics: "There is going to be some pain in the self-evaluation, in some of the eliminations, in some of the changes that are going to occur. It is wide open. I am sure there will be changes in personnel and programs. I'm not prepared to tell you which today, because I don't know."

News of Gold's appointment has been met with hopeful surprise.

"Stanley's success has been taking undervalued companies and making them more effective. The Federation is an undervalued business, and somebody with Stanley's passions and talents and vision could really turn around the Jewish community," said Jay Sanderson, CEO of JTN Productions, on whose board Gold's wife once served and his daughter now does.

He will not be the first bigwig to lead The Federation. Preceding him are Ed Sanders, once President Jimmy Carter's Jewish community liaison; Bruce Hochman, a respected tax attorney and the first UCLA School of Law alumnus to pass the California Bar; and Barbi Weinberg, founding president of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and wife of Larry Weinberg, a former American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) president. But Gold may have the most-rounded experience, from his love affair with the Jewish people to his experience running massive nonprofit organizations and for-profit enterprises.

"We are at a juncture in the life of The Federation that we are looking for somebody who has directed organizations, who can engage donors and has an experience in complex organizations -- in this case, both for-profit organizations and not-for-profits -- and is also Jewishly committed," said Federation President John Fishel, with whom Gold will work closely. "He seems to have it all."

Stanley Phillip Gold grew up in what was South Central Los Angeles, not far from USC. The son of first-generation American Jews, Gold was raised in a working-class neighborhood with equal parts Asians, blacks and whites, and he was taught to be proud of that heritage, a directive he clearly heeded.

"There is no one in the world who has a more visceral attachment to the Jewish people, the State of Israel and Jewish values than Stanley Gold," said Rabbi David Ellenson, president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). "It is inherent in his very being."

When Gold was a teenager, his parents moved to the San Fernando Valley, and there he ran track at Van Nuys High School before heading off to start his undergraduate studies at UC Berkeley.

"In college, he didn't have any money. I was rich. I had a Volkswagen Beetle," said Mike Shaub, Gold's Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity brother. "In college, he borrowed it to go into San Francisco with [his then-girlfriend] Ilene. He couldn't even pay the toll; he had to write a check to cross the Bay Bridge.... Everything he has, he has earned. Nobody gave it to him."

From the shadows of Dorsey High to the flatlands of Beverly Hills, Stanley and Ilene Gold now reside in an 8,200-square-foot colonial brick home that is as tasteful as it is massive, the reward of 40 years of hard work, in particular the past 30 as Roy E. Disney's most trusted adviser.

Gold scheduled an interview for this article at his home on the morning before Yom Kippur, immediately after the rumors that he would chair The Federation were made official. I pulled through the gate and parked behind a pair of Porsches, a Cayman and a Cayenne; 10 more of the German sports cars, from a few 911s to the �ber-limited 959, were housed in a backyard garage. When I asked Gold which was his favorite, he pointed to a Porsche poster on the wall: "It's like children, you can't understand until you've had one."

We met inside for the first of two interviews, seated on couches in a study the size of a two-bedroom apartment. A bookcase covering the expanse of a side wall was filled with a fraction of Gold's art collection, but in the middle of it were some of his priceless treasures: a few dozen encased baseballs signed by some of the best who ever played the game.

"To my pal, Stanley -- Babe Ruth."

Another's from Stan Musial: "To Stan the Man, from the other Stan the Man."

Gold wore a checked blue shirt, navy tie and suit sans coat and circular steel-rim glasses. His wavy, black hair was slicked back. He chomped on and twirled an unlit cigar as a spoke, adding meaning to an office throw pillow that quoted Mark Twain: "If I cannot smoke cigars in heaven, then I shall not go."

"I have a deep -- I want to say desire but it's almost an obligation -- to help the Jewish people," Gold said, explaining why he accepted the chairmanship of The Federation. "I find myself having lived an enormously fortunate life, having grown up in this community at a time when Jews were really being accepted into all walks of life. So I got the best out of America."

His tone of gratitude appears genuine. He first assumed his obligation of repayment while a young partner at the entertainment law firm of Gang, Tyre & Brown (now Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown), when founding partner Martin Gang paid an unusual visit to Gold's office.

"How's everything?" Gang asked. "Wife? Kids? You making enough money?"

"Yeah. Sure," Gold responded.

"OK. Good. It's time for you to give back to the community."

Gang set Gold up with leaders at HUC-JIR, and a month later, Gold joined the board of overseers for its L.A. campus. From 1991 to 1996, he served as chairman of the Reform college's national board of governors, and in 2001, Gold gave $500,000 to establish the Martin Gang Scholarship Fund for students at the L.A. campus.

Since that call to service, Gold has joined the board of trustees at USC, where this June he will complete his sixth and final term as chairman; he's also led The Federation's Israel and Overseas Committee and served on the board of the Israel Policy Forum, a counterbalance in ideology, though not influence, to the AIPAC. Add to that the countless speaking engagements for issues affecting one part of the Jewish world or another, such as the address he gave last month at the Beverly Hilton.

"The old adage that to make a small fortune in Israel you need a large one is simply not true anymore," Gold said, speaking alongside the director general of Israel's Finance Ministry to about 100 Southern California businesspeople.

Gold would know. Over the past two decades, he has directed more than $1 billion in Shamrock investments to the Jewish state, and over that time, he's seen an average annual return of 31 percent.

"I came to Israel as a committed Jew," Gold said, "and returned home as a committed capitalist."

Asked years ago how such a champion of capitalism could also be a gospel-sharing socialist, Gold sounded like Ralph Waldo Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Indeed, having a little mind is not among Gold's shortcomings. After transferring from Berkeley to UCLA to complete his undergraduate degree, Gold attended USC Law School and Cambridge University and then began his career in 1968 at Gang, Tyre. He quickly made partner, and then met Roy Disney, for whom he created Shamrock Holdings, to invest the fortune of Walt's nephew and his family. By the late '70s, Gold was transitioning from entertainment lawyer to boardroom dealmaker.

"Anybody who's called 'full of crap' in The Wall Street Journal, by no less a person than William Buckley, has arrived," Stanley's wife, Ilene, reportedly remarked after Shamrock's leveraged purchase of Starr Broadcasting Group drew an attack on Gold's credibility by the conservative author and founder of National Review magazine. Buckley was Starr's largest shareholder.

Gold's friends and business associates, while praising him in ways that might be expected, also offered more candid assessments of his strengths and weaknesses.

"He's extremely loyal and generous. Insightful. A good partner. He tolerates different viewpoints and enjoys being challenged and challenging other people," said Gene Krieger, Shamrock's vice chairman and chief operating officer. "He's intellectually curious, a quick study. Decisive. Sometimes to a fault. And a lot of confidence, a lot of self-confidence, but not to the degree he doesn't accept advice or counsel."

At some point, Gold also became a trusted counselor. Steven B. Sample, who as president of USC has dramatically raised the private university's reputation, considers his board chairman a personal "mentor." And Rabbi Steven Z. Leder of Wilshire Boulevard Temple, on whose board Stanley and Ilene Gold have served, describes him as a bit of a sage.

"When I have a serious issue to think through, when I have some kind of intellectual or moral dilemma that involves the greater community, he is one of the very few people that I will turn to that I know will be forthright and instructive," Leder said. "He is one of my go-to guys and always will be."

Just before 11 a.m. on Aug. 10, 1999, a tranquil day in the San Fernando Valley turned to tragedy, when Buford O. Furrow stormed into the North Valley Jewish Community Center and unloaded some 70 rounds from an Uzi. He had picked the JCC because Furrow, a white supremacist from the Northwest, hated Jews, and security at the community center was a lot lighter than his three initial targets -- the Museum of Tolerance, the Skirball Cultural Center and the American Jewish University (AJU), formerly known as the University of Judaism. Furrow wounded a receptionist, a teenage counselor and three children and later that day killed a Filipino American postal carrier.

All five Jewish victims recovered, but the community's psyche was severely wounded. The Federation responded by providing counseling for victims and securing the JCC facility. Nevertheless, that a rally organized by The Federation and other Jewish organizations at Cal State Northridge days after the shooting was attended by only 1,000 people still stings almost a decade later for Michael Berenbaum.

"I would have thought that given the attack on the JCC, and how many people have kids, and how many people routinely drop kids off at the JCC, I would have thought that we would have had 50,000 people show up. I was horrified by how low a turnout it was," said Berenbaum, who'd moved to Los Angeles a year before, after creating the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

"That was 10 years ago, but they did not succeed in mobilizing the community for an event in which there had been shots fired at our kids. I was saying to myself, 'How is that possible?'" he continued. "It said something about Los Angeles, and it said something about the lack of community. I've never gotten over that."

"Jewish life in Los Angeles is flourishing," added Berenbaum, a writer and adjunct professor at AJU, "but it is flourishing with decentralized initiatives that don't feel a need to consult The Federation. That says The Federation is not central or pivotal. Clearly we have a community with wealth and a community with commitment but not a community that seems to be talking with each other and dreaming great visions of the community together."

To be sure, The Federation is not dead. But with the successes of organizations like the Simon Wiesenthal Center, with its larger-than-life leader, Rabbi Marvin Hier, and with the rise of voices like those of the Jewish World Watch, Progressive Jewish Alliance and StandWithUs, which receive some Federation support and have filled the public-advocacy gap left by the decline of the JCRC, many observers fear The Federation's leadership role is fading.

"Way back in '67, when there was the war, it was the rallying point for that and every crisis since then, even last year in the war in Lebanon," said Richard Sandler, a big-idea guy who sits on the boards of AJU and the Milken Institute and who will be joining Gold in January as The Federation's vice chair. "It's always been the focal point of the Jewish community, yet every year I think we all see the fact that more and more organizations that do fantastic work in the community do their own fundraising. The Federation doesn't seem to this generation -- now, I'm old -- to have the same anchor position in the community."

At 59, Sandler is not actually that old. But a native of Los Angeles with a history of service at The Federation that dates to his father, Raymond, Sandler remembers days when more people gave to The Federation out of enthusiasm, not obligation.

Together, he and Gold hope to return that enthusiasm by elevating The Federation's role for Los Angeles Jewry.

What exactly could happen at The Federation's headquarters? Well, to start, Gold wants to make 6505 Wilshire Boulevard the premiere Los Angeles address for Israel relationships.

In this vein, Gold can build upon a solid foundation. The Federation's 10-year-old Tel Aviv-Los Angeles Partnership, with an annual budget of $1.5 million, has created relationships between 18 local Jewish schools and 18 in Israel; it's provided a channel for Israeli writers, producers and actors to communicate with their counterparts in Hollywood, and supported the exchange of students between Tel Aviv University and UCLA.

"I want to expand not just the partnership, but the functionality of our relationship with Israel to being superb," Gold said. "I want every organization in Los Angeles to see us as their travel agent, as their tour guide, as their introduction to social, culture, religious, political counterparts in Israel. We can do it. We have half a leg up on that."

His second focus is leadership training, regardless of whether the grooming results in more Federation volunteers, Gold said. "If they go on and become leaders of AJC or HUC or the new American Jewish University or 100 other organizations, that is fine with me. They are making a contribution at that level, and we ought to take great pride in that, and we ought to help them along."

Gold's third area of interest, community relations, will likely be the most challenging. Jewish activists have been sharply critical of the downsizing of the once-vibrant Jewish Community Relations Committee, which prior to the mid-1990s spoke out on behalf of L.A. Jews on controversial issues, ranging from Proposition 187 to the nomination of Robert Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court. But it's been mostly reduced to one program, KOREH L.A., a successful literacy program that provides volunteer tutors at public schools.

"It is going to be very difficult for The Federation to effectively re-engage community relations. The JCRC doesn't have any staff. It is basically one person," said Michael Hirschfeld, who spent 24 years with the department before Fishel fired him as executive director in 2003. He's now president of Jewish Communal Professionals of Southern California. "First thing they have to do is hire more employees. Then they have to figure out how they can be more effective in a community relations arena and not alienate major donors, and that is a tough job."

Fishel has held that times have changed, and public advocacy is no longer necessary for The Federation. Gold, too, said he is not interested in The Federation taking positions on public policy, but he wants to strengthen ties with immigrant communities, particularly Latinos.

"As Jews, we are going to live in this community as a minority. We have been very blessed -- this goes back to my good luck -- and I think that part of having a Jewish soul is repaying the contributions people have made to us to others who are lower on the socioeconomic scale," Gold said.

Just what that means for The Federation is unclear. If it is relationships that Gold seeks with other minority groups, former U.S. Rep. Mel Levine said, The Federation will not be able to remain silent on political issues, whether the topic is immigration legislation or public education.

"The big stumbling block has been that we only want to be involved with these communities when we need their support, and not when they need ours," said Levine, who spent a frustrating two years as JCRC chair. "Stanley is a sophisticated, smart, thoughtful, talented person who understands that these alliances only work when they go both ways."

Cynical or realistic, a few veterans of The Federation's inner workings were skeptical about the likelihood of Gold -- or anyone -- reshaping the organization.

"Stanley Gold is not a pushover, but how much hands-on will he have at The Federation?" asked one board member. "John Fishel tends to put people in places where they are yes-men. Is John going to be telling Stanley what they're going to do, and he is just going to be a rubber stamp?"

Fishel said that is not his plan.

"Change is never easy, but sometimes change is absolutely necessary to change your future viability," The Federation's president said. "There, Stanley is going to play a vital role because he is going to force us to ask some hard questions."

Regardless of what obstructions or challenges arise, Gold seems unwilling to be stifled. A visit to 1984 helps demonstrate why.

The Magic Kingdom was under attack. Corporate raiders were attempting a hostile takeover of the Walt Disney Co., lusting for control of the company so they could strip mine its studio and real estate holdings and hang onto the profitable theme parks. Stock prices plummeting, it was the end of innocence for Disney -- some would say an allegory for the United States -- and somehow the man who had long been known around the office as "Walt's idiot nephew" got a chance to be the hero.

At Roy Disney's behest, Gold began buying hundreds of thousands of Disney shares to add to the 1.1 million his boss already owned. Then he and the brain trust, a roundtable of Roy Disney and his advisers, began working to ward off the raiders and quell Wall Street's anxiety.

It was obvious the current CEO had to go; Disney had just made it's first profitable live-action film, "Splash," since "The Love Bug" was released in 1968 -- 16 long years before. But Disney's board of directors, which included Gold and Roy Disney, couldn't agree on who should replace him.

Gold's selection to run the company -- a combination of Paramount No. 2 Michael Eisner and former Warner Bros. chief Frank Wells -- was opposed by 10 of the board's 13 members. As autumn approached, Gold had a week to convince four directors to support his candidates. He was told it couldn't be done; even members of the brain trust were beginning to worry.

"We're going to run it my way," Gold told Mark Siegel, a partner at Gang, Tyre and member of the brain trust, according to John Taylor's book, "Storming the Magic Kingdom," the definitive account of the affair. "We're going to run it right down the middle of the street, where they're uncomfortable and where I'm comfortable. We're going to put on a political campaign right out there where everybody can see us. I'm tired of being told to be quiet because somebody's feelings are going to be hurt."

By Saturday morning, Gold's men were voted the new heads of Walt Disney Productions. He celebrated by ordering vanity license plates that said "10-3." Two decades later, Gold and Roy Disney proved just as formidable when, fed up with Eisner's management, they resigned as directors of the company and single-handedly led a shareholder revolt that resulted in Eisner's resignation.

"The most important thing to know about me," Gold said when I asked if he was worried about spinning his wheels at The Federation, "is I don't get ulcers. I give ulcers."

Read more at The God Blog

God & Grades

2007-09-28T00:55:00.000-07:00

From: UCLA Magazine

Brandon Kuiper arrived at UCLA with a strong Christian faith and an inquisitive scientific mind. He didn't believe in evolution, but he was intent on studying neuroscience. Something was bound to give, but the biggest spiritual crisis in Kuiper's 20 years came not from South Campus but from studying the philosophy of Voltaire and Hobbes and Kant and Freud.

"I was reading that stuff and I thought, ‘This makes so much sense.' I had to stop and evaluate why I am a Christian and what I believe," he recalls. "I remember thinking, ‘What if I've been wrong all along?' "

Kuiper, now the student chaplain for the Christian fraternity Alpha Gamma Omega, is not the first Bruin — and he certainly won't be the last — to question everything he believed. For many students, that's just part of college.

But, unlike most places in the nation, religion and science are not locked in mortal combat. At least at UCLA, the search for truth often leads to a middle path where student seekers find a way to live and learn comfortably from both textbooks and holy books.

There's certainly no shortage of seekers. A study by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) found that three-fourths of freshmen are "searching for meaning/purpose in life" and that half are either "seeking" or "doubting" their spiritual understanding of the world. Forty percent said it was very important they follow a set of religious teachings.

"It is the nature of the beast of people that age. It's just part of being a college student," says Alexander Astin, co-leader of the "Spirituality in Higher Education" study and an emeritus professor of higher education. "College students are on a developmental adventure."

For many students, there is a decline in ritualized religion, in attending services, in studying scriptures. This, Astin says, can be attributed to leaving the parents' nest, to being around a more diverse peer group and, no surprise, to "social liberation," a.k.a. partying. But that doesn't translate to a significant decline in faith, Astin says.

"That really got me set in my faith," Kuiper says of his philosophy course. "I've never been a stronger Christian."

The implications of this national survey of 112,000 entering freshmen in 2004 — a follow-up analysis of the same students as juniors this past spring will be published this fall — are, well, eternal, not to mention political, social and medical. Students with high levels of religious engagement are politically conservative three times as often as liberal, and they exhibit moderately better physical health.

Though there are more than two dozen Christian groups on campus, more than any other faith, UCLA has something for everybody. The prevalence and diversity of religion is most apparent at the start of each quarter, when scores of spiritual groups hawk literature and recruit from tables along Bruin Walk.

When the outreach coordinator for the Secular Student Alliance entered this gauntlet last fall, he found non-religion a tough sell — even though there is a Bruin Alliance of Skeptics and Secularists that has existed since 2002 and currently has 15 members. After two hours, he packed up and left, having spoken with only six students, none of whom were interested.

This is L.A., where congregations from more than 100 different religious groups worship. Sure, there have been instances of religious tension. Last year, for example, someone tagged swastikas on a bathroom stall in Kerckhoff Hall; there also was the flare-up when the student group L.O.G.I.C. — Liberty, Objectivity, Greed, Individualism, Capitalism — held a forum to display the controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. But UCLA generally is a place where young adults learn to appreciate diverse worldviews and where they strive for understanding.

Rupa Lalchandani arrived at UCLA having spent the previous decade attending Bal Vihar, she says, "which is like Sunday School for Hindus." During her first two quarters, though, the only education she received was on campus. "There was a religious void in my life."

So she began seeking. She found the Hindu Students Council, for which she currently helps plan weekly discussions. She also started attending church each Sunday with a close friend. And she began hanging out at Hillel with Jewish friends. Next year, she says, she wants to visit a monastery.

"Religion centers me. College life is so fast. It is always one thing after another, especially in Los Angeles ... I wanted time to think about what I was doing with my life," the fourth-year psychobiology student says. "Everyone is on a spiritual quest, whether or not we realize it. It's a lifelong process."

Across the country, students are on that quest. Fifteen years ago at Harvard University, a group of graduate students started the Veritas Forum for others seeking meaning in the Christian tradition. The forum has spread to 80 campuses in six countries, including UCLA from 2001 to 2004, and, through a Christian lens, helps students wrestle with the mysteries of existence.

"Generally, seeking students, or Christian students, they find one another, and they live in a kind of para-academy where they are creating a culture within their own friendships — but one that does explore the big questions," Kelly Monroe Kullberg, one of the Harvard founders, says. "Questions like: What does it mean to be human? What are our origins? It seems like the Big Bang and DNA point to a creator who speaks things into existence; why is no one talking about that in the academy?"

Still, the Spirituality in Higher Education study claims that universities generally do little to support these journeys. Astin said that is because colleges, particularly public institutions, don't want to be perceived as promoting sectarianism.

"But from our perspective, that is a problem, because students feel they have to contend with these questions and they are not getting support doing it," Astin says. "And these are questions that certainly affect their studies and choice of career, so colleges would be wise to pay attention to that."

UCLA does not have a dean of religious life and, until 1995, the College of Letters & Science lacked its interdepartmental Center for the Study of Religion. But Janina Montero, vice chancellor of student affairs, says the faculty and administration are taught to recognize the role religious development plays in students' college experience.

"The important thing," she says, "is to be able to support and encourage exploration and outreach to that part of a student's experience, to encourage them to engage either with their religious traditions or engage with their church or synagogue or temple at home, to maintain those ties."

That was easy for Naqib Shifa. He grew up only 15 miles away in the San Fernando Valley, and when he arrived at UCLA in September 2005, his cousin, Reshad Noorzay '06, was already involved with the Muslim Students Association (MSA). Shifa joined and last year was managing editor of the Muslim student paper, Al-Talib.

"MSA has been my family away from my house in the Valley. Just being around that environment, being with other people who have the same focus you do, is something to treasure about college," says Shifa, who is majoring in geography and environmental studies. "Just talking with them, sitting with them, doing projects with them, I've learned a lot. It has definitely helped increase my faith and nurture my faith."

Shifa's faith could first be differentiated from his parents' when he was in 10th grade. "Since then I have been wholeheartedly devoted to living my life according to the Quran and being pious," he says.

While the Spirituality in Higher Education study found many students with high spiritual involvement and commitment just like Shifa, plenty of collegians aren't actively pursuing the greater mysteries of life. And that bothers Shifa.

"Little thought is given to this subject," he says. "While we are trying to pursue a degree in biology or microbiology, people are giving little thought to why we suffer in this world, why some people are oppressed, why we live 60, 70 years and just die. There has to be more to life than just that."

Another surprise, albeit more pleasant, Shifa said, is that while on campus he has not felt like a member of a minority religion. When he took History 4, the popular history of religions course (see sidebar, page 23), Professor Scott Bartchy, a Christian, would always follow the Prophet Muhammad's name with "and peace be upon him."

In the Jewish history courses Professor David N. Myers teaches, he's found that Muslim students are not only respectful of Jewish history, but eager to learn from it. "They are interested in learning about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations and about the ways that Jewish history might offer lessons for how Muslims can exist as minorities in Western society."

In fact, Muslims have some of the highest rates of spiritual quest. That's why on any given Friday a few dozen Muslim students can be seen doing the afternoon prayer in Kerckhoff's Grand Salon or Ackerman's Viewpoint conference room.

Jewish students, on the other hand, "are the most secular religious group," says Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, director of the Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA. "They are outstanding; they are champions in religious disbelief."

But don't tell that to Marco Gonzalez, an international development studies and political science student. Gonzalez, who is Jewish, emigrated six years ago from Mexico with little understanding of Jewish culture or tradition. So he added a weekly class to his course load. Only, it wasn't offered through the university, but at the Chabad House on Gayley Avenue.

On a Wednesday night, Gonzalez enters the upstairs classroom at Chabad and pulls out his textbook, Jewish Essentials: A Spiritual Guide to Jewish Life & Living.

"In the last couple of classes, we learned about the paramount importance of the Torah," Rabbi Dovid Gurevich, the Chabad campus co-director, says. "The Torah was received at Mt. Sinai, and the next holiday we celebrate, Shavuot, reminds us of that. That is very nice, but we have to make it practical and real ... We have to learn ways to make it real in our daily lives."

Tonight Gonzalez and three other students learn about the mezuzah (a sacred parchment hung on door posts to make holy the room inside) and tefillin (the boxes containing passages of the Torah and the leather straps Orthodox Jews use for prayer).

On college-ruled paper, Gonzalez takes detailed notes. "I want to be able to pass on these traditions to my children," he says. "I want to know what I'm talking about, so that when they have questions I don't have to say, ‘Ask a rabbi.' "

Gonzalez departs about 9:30 and heads straight to Powell to finish studying for a midterm the next day on international relations of the Middle East. But he doesn't mind staying up late and getting up early if it means not missing the time at Chabad.

"I would rather go to Chabad and learn it and enjoy it there, and just put in some extra time into my classes," Gonzalez says. "I've been taking the class at Chabad, and it's almost like having another class for school. But it's a more important subject. It is the subject of our lives."

Life under a canopy of Qassams

2007-08-23T16:36:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Moments before we met, Mayan Bar-On bolted for the center of her family's home on Kibbutz Nir-Am along the Gaza border.

Away from the windows, away from the doors, in a hallway underneath a red-tile roof that couldn't withstand a Qassam strike, she and her 9-year-old brother, Gabi, huddled and waited for the boom.

Now, though, the 12-year-old girl is partaking in a more peaceful ritual. She lights the Shabbat candles and prays

Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech haolam. Asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tzivanu l'hadlik ner shel Shabbat.

"Shabbat Shalom," her father, Uzi, says.

Everyone shares the sentiment and begins to pass the dinner plates, knowing that at any moment, with only a few seconds warning from a public intercom, they may have to drop everything and again -- again and again -- take cover.

Six seconds: That's all the time residents of Kibbutz Nir-Am have to react.

Six seconds: Less time than it took to read this paragraph ... Boom! And after they hear the boom, they know it's safe to return to life, at least for now.

This is fast becoming tradition on the frontier of Israeli society. Between the rocket-launching Gaza fields of Beit Hanoun and the primary target town of Sderot, Nir-Am has been constantly under fire for the past six years. More than 6,000 Qassam rockets have been launched at Israeli cities and villages since September 2001, and hundreds have landed in this community of about 350.

It's difficult to imagine the effect of this terror on daily life. It's even more challenging to comprehend why a sensible person would stay here. But for the Bar-Ons and thousands of other families, living under a canopy of Qassams is simply their life station.

"You never get used to it, but you learn to live with it, you learn to compensate, you learn to do things: Teach the children what to do when this happens, keep them as close as possible to some kind of shelter that they can run to. But it's a nightmare," says Marcell Bar-On, Mayan's mother. "You are really torn between trying to keep your children safe and getting them out of a situation which is terrible and being in a place where your home is and where your heart is and where everything is."

It takes about an hour and a quarter to drive the 90 kilometers from Jerusalem to Sderot. It's a relatively short journey, but the two communities' realities are worlds apart.

In Jerusalem, the economy is booming and the population is soaring. In Sderot, 370 of 450 small businesses have closed shop during the past 18 months, and even some of the most stalwart residents have lost faith; those who could leave, for the most part have.

In Jerusalem the last terrorist attack was in early 2004. In the Sderot region, it likely was within the past few minutes.

Even the northern border with Lebanon, the site of last summer's war with Hezbollah, appears way ahead of its southern sibling in the return to terror-free normalcy. Travel to Metula, west of the Golan Heights and within sniper distance of Klea, and you see comfortable suburban homes and picturesque farmlands.

"You can see the parched hillsides. That is the most lasting reminder of what was here last summer," Jacob Dallal, spokesman for the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI), told a group of American Jewish journalists brought to the region this month to see how donations to the United Jewish Communities (UJC), through local federations, have helped rebuild the region through small-business loans, counseling centers and after-school programs.

But to the south, the region of the western Negev that includes Sderot and surrounding kibbutzim and moshavim, where $6.5 million in donations from the UJC's Israel Emergency Campaign have been similarly allotted, the bombardment continues.

And that is the big difference between recovery in the north and the south.

Cities like Nahariya and Haifa and Kiryat Shmona were given a reprieve from military conflict after last summer's month of intense attacks. The war ended, even if no one believes it's over for good, or even for long.

Around Sderot, by contrast, the threat continues to crest, with no break in site.

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As an agent of death, Qassam rockets are a bad selection. Since 2001, those fired from Gaza have killed 11 people. That's only about one death per 550 rockets. But as a tool of terror, the homemade missles, packed with 1 to 5 kilograms of gunpowder and with a range of 10 to 12 kilometers, are very effective.

The emotional toll piles up when children are forced to think about where they can hide from incoming rocket fire each time they go outside; just waiting for the bus seems like a game of Russian roulette; and going to work means spending eight hours wondering if that morning was the last time you will have seen your kids.

The Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma found that about 11 percent of adults and 16 percent of toddlers in Sderot have full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder. Another study reported that as many as 33 percent of children between ages 2 and 6 show symptoms of PTSD.

It should be no surprise then that one of the most popular places in town is the city's trauma center, an unreinforced one-story building with a handful of beds and blast walls protecting the front door. Here the distressed come to calm down after a Qassam has rattled the house next door or shaken the ground under their feet or simply frayed their nerves to a frenzy.

"Once you have experienced a rocket landing nearby, you are absolutely sure that when the next siren goes off, that rocket is headed directly for you, even if it is aimed a few kilometers away," said Noam Bedein, a 25-year-old college student who lives in Sderot and is director of the Sderot Information Center of the Western Negev, which has heightened awareness on its Web site, www.sderotmedia.com.

More than 2,000 trauma cases were opened just in the past 12 months. Some patients stay at the trauma center only long enough to get a cold drink and some comforting conversation; others need medication and a few days' attention.

"You can't give people what they really need: security," said Aharon Polat (pictured), a social worker at the center. "You can be a great psychologist or you can be a great social worker, but if you speak with someone and one minute later there is an alarm for a Qassam, he doesn't breathe well. It comes again and again and again, and it is very difficult to make people learn to live with it. What can I say to them? 'Don't worry?'"

"It can hurt everyone every hour," he continued. "When there is one or two days without a Qassam, people feel much, much better. You can see they are happy. They are almost normal. But then a Qassam comes again, and it breaks them. It's very hard to live with this. You can't stop thinking something will happen to you or your child."

Polat lives just outside of Sderot on Kibbutz Karmia, where he is raising his two children. He said he takes some comfort in the mundane. But it is a pragmatic sense of peace, not an idealistic one.

"When I breathe, I enjoy breathing, and when I eat, I enjoy eating, and when I run, I enjoy running. I enjoy life for whatever I can. I try to hold life together," he said. "I have a problem with sorrow and a problem with pain and with angriness and with what will be of this country -- will Israel continue to exist in 20 years? Will they be free? -- but I can function."

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Less than a mile from what was once the refugee community of Gaza, Sderot took shape in the early 1950s as a tent city for new Israelis. Its name means "broadways" in Hebrew, a fitting selection for an outpost in the western Negev that continues to be a point of entry for immigrants from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. (The influx of Russian speakers doubled the city's population during the '90s to a total of about 24,000; the tally has ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 since the escalation of attacks in May.)

Far from ever being a metropolis, Sderot was an outpost of pre-1967 Zionism, a settlement of Jews within the Green Line that stood as a citadel against Egypt. Following the unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, when the settlements were razed and the Israeli army left, Sderot's role in defending Jewish statehood returned.

"There is no more Jewish act than living in Sderot," said Los Angeles Councilman Jack Weiss, who visited last summer. "They are truly on the front lines of our entire people. Sure, people want to move out of the range of the missiles, but all that will prove is that the existence of the State of Israel and the existence of the Jewish people is just a function of range. So the simple defiant act of staying there is so awesome and so impressive."

"Sderot" has become a catchphrase for the region under fire in the western Negev. Due west of Sderot, just before you reach Beit Hanoun, lies Kibbutz Nir-Am.

Asher and Rachel Bar-On moved to this former patch of sand and hardscrabble desert -- now fecund with citrus groves and sunflowers and wheat fields -- in 1943. They came by way of northern Israel after fleeing Eastern Europe at the start of World War II, and the Bar-Ons were among the founding families of the kibbutz, the oldest in this region.

Twelve years later, Rachel gave birth to Uzi, whom she named for a doctor who helped when the kibbutz was getting shelled during the War of Independence. Back then, the border with Gaza was an open field, and as a child, Uzi tended cattle out in the pasture. There he befriended a young Palestinian shepherd with whom he still speaks almost daily. (Until the outbreak of the second intifada, Uzi and his family traveled regularly into Gaza to see friends and eat seafood. No longer.)

Today, Uzi is the logistics manager at Michsaf, a tableware manufacturer run by Nir-Am residents. He, Marcell, Mayan and Gabi live in a four-bedroom stucco house with yellow walls and a red roof; two older daughters, Kelly, 21, and Dana, 20, live in separate housing on the kibbutz.

The Bar-On's front door leads into what used to be the veranda, but, thanks to the addition of two mostly windowed walls, is now the living room. The ceiling is rich cherry oak and the floor smooth brick. This is where Mayan and Gabi sit on plump, blue leather couches and watch Nickelodeon, and from where they run when they hear the "color red" warning of an incoming rocket -- "tveza adom."

"If we're sitting in here with the air-conditioning on and the windows closed and the TV on, we can't hear the siren. What does it matter if we can hear it or not?" Marcell asks, growing exasperated. "What can we do? We're going to go where there are not windows, but we are still not protected."

For that reason, when the rocket attacks are heavy, like they were for the last two weeks of May, when 293 rockets were launched from Gaza after a six-month cease-fire broke down, the Bar-Ons often sleep on the concrete floor of a communal bomb shelter about 50 meters from their house.

"I like this one because it is underground," Marcell says, walking down the stairs in the dark. "It's something extra. It's really, really safe."

"Ooh, it smells terrible," she says, before flipping the light switch and revealing a red picnic bench, tile floor and wine cellar décor. About 15 feet by 20 feet, the room is stuffed with upwards of a dozen people on busy nights.

Fortunately, the previous few weeks have been "quiet." Marcell uses that term several times and usually follows it with a grimace, as if the Sderot region has been experiencing the calm before the storm.

Quiet, anyway, doesn't mean silent. It still means three to four Qassams coming their direction each day.

Last month, Uzi and Marcell saw one of the rockets fly above them as they swam in the pool after dinner.

"We knew that Gabi was playing soccer and that Mayan was in bed. We were totally helpless in the middle of the pool, and we saw this bomb fly right over our heads," Marcell recalls. "We jumped out of the pool to see where Gabi was, to see if he was still alive."

He was. But the rocket tore off a room in an elderly couple's home. That direct hit followed the Qassam that landed on the kibbutz restaurant, Fauna, and burned the structure to the foundation, which followed the bomb that tore through one of the dorms rented to students at Sapir College. Amazingly, each time, no one was hurt.

"We have," Marcell adds, "so many stories like that ...."

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The political sentiment in Sderot is easy to gauge. As you approach the area, just read the wooden signs with painted red Hebrew messages that appear on the side of the highway:

"We are staying here because we are connected to the soil. But shortly we will be buried inside. Thank you, Olmert."

In a meeting with journalists last month in Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Jerusalem office, before which the group was told that Olmert's comments were on the record but couldn't be quoted, the prime minister said the attacks from Gaza, which seem even more problematic since Hamas' forceful expulsion of Fatah government officials in June, require continuous and meticulous intervention but not a comprehensive military response.

A major operation, Olmert said, would not entirely end the attacks, and he believes it would come at too great a cost to Israel. He declined to comment on future plans for dealing with Gaza.

In May, this paper reported that most military experts believe that only a major ground operation would eradicate the threat. But they echoed Olmert's sentiment. It would cause, they said, significant "Israeli military casualties, Palestinian humanitarian suffering, [negative] international opinion and economic losses."

"Everything is waiting," IDF Reserve Brig. Gen. Shalom Harari said at Sapir College before a tour of the Gaza border. "Now, you ask me, what will decide about the timing of such an operation? That is what is called the 'strategic Qassam.'"

"The Qassam that will fall on a synagogue in Sderot and kill 10," said Harari, a senior research fellow at the Middle East Media Research Institute. "Or the Qassam that will fall on a kindergarten and kill, I hope not, God hopes not, 10 children. Or the Qassam that will fall here and kill 10 students. That will be the igniting point."

There are countless stories of near-massacres that could have been such a catalyst -- the gasoline tanker that left the station moments before a rocket blew a crater in the driveway, the Qassam that flew through the roof of a synagogue office while congregants were in the sanctuary on Shabbat, the bomb that fell on the playground of Gabi's school the day all the parents kept their kids home in protest.

For now, the Israel Defense Forces have been instructed to target Hamas and Islamic Jihad members who are orchestrating or participating in the Qassam attacks. This past Monday, an Israeli jet fired a missile at a car in the Gaza Strip that was carrying six Hamas operatives involved in rocket launches hours before. All were killed. On Tuesday, three more were killed in a separate airstrike.

"Once you target the head of that area and the head of that zone, the organization is damaged and it limits their ability to carry out the terrorist activities against Israel in the future," IDF Maj. Avital Leibovitch said shortly after the Monday mission.

But many in the western Negev say the government could be doing a lot more. Ari Shavit, a columnist for the liberal newspaper Ha'aretz, lamented in late May that denizens of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and the rest of Israel's core had forgotten Sderot.

"Suddenly, the feeling is that perhaps it has really happened: Perhaps Sderot has been broken," Shavit wrote. "But Sderot has still not been broken. If the rocket attacks cease, most people will return. Without security, without hope, without happiness -- a depressing return to no choice.

"So the basic fact remains: Sderot 2007 is a city that seems cursed. A frontier city with no home front. A frontier city with no aura of heroism. A frontier city that the government should protect, but isn't protecting. A frontier city that the nation should be standing behind, but is not. A frontier city abandoned by the center of the country."

But Sderot has not been forgotten. Thanks to people like Bedein, who keeps the region's story in the news; to Israeli philanthropists like Arcadi Gaydamak, who gives freely to whatever the need is in the region, and to American Jews, who indirectly support Sderot through donations to the UJC's Israel Emergency Campaign and other programs.

UJC, through programs administered by JAFI and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, has reinforced buildings, provided trauma counseling, financed summer camps outside the Qassam range for the region's 8,200 children ages 6 to 17 and supported a senior center where elderly residents attend daily continuing education courses in a large bomb shelter furnished as a classroom.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles earmarked $20,000 for new equipment for a youth center computer room. And after matching funds with Temple Isaiah, The Federation sent $35,000 for the Etgarim program for at-risk teens.

"For us and all of those who love the State of Israel, it is essential that we get the things we need so people don't leave Sderot," said Shimon Peretz, the city's director-general. "If we leave, Sderot will be the first to fall, and following Sderot will be Ashdod and Ashkelon."

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Smaller than a walk-in closet, the white bomb shelter with the blue door trim is stocked with two small beanbag chairs, a flannel blanket, a pillow and a pink-and-blue "My Own Beauty Vanity."

Immediately outside the portable shelter stands a netless soccer goal. This patch of browning grass rimmed by houses is the only place children are allowed to play soccer now, the larger field fenced off because it was too far from emergency cover.

"It's a sh—ty life," Marcell says. "That's not the way it's supposed to be. But it's life."

Everybody struggles differently with the reality.

Dana struggled to sleep, lost 20 pounds and developed low blood iron after a Qassam landed a few meters away while she was lying out by the kibbutz pool.

When Kelly was in the army last year, she didn't want to come home on the weekends and started sleeping under her bed when she got out.

And Gabi, for two weeks this summer, woke up most nights sprinting for the center of the house. Marcell found him there one morning about 2 a.m., curled into a ball with a sheet over his head.

"Gabi," she asked, "what are you doing?"

"There was a tzeva adom. There was a tzeva adom."

There hadn't been, but such fears are fomented by an existence so precarious that people are afraid to close their eyes lest they slumber through a rocket warning. Showers and sex also are problematic: No one wants emergency workers discovering their bruised bodies naked in the bathroom or cleaved to a lover. And under such circumstances, who's going to hear the alarm?

"One day, I walked into the shower and I heard 'tzeva adom,'" says Sigal Yisrael, a teacher at Gabi's school, Shaar HaNegev Elementary. "I had to decide real fast to go out or to stay in. I just covered myself with a towel and looked down at my legs to make sure they were shaved."

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Why then does anyone stay in Sderot?

Like many in this area, the Bar-Ons have tried leaving. They skipped from kibbutz to kibbutz, even fled to Marcell's native South Africa for a few months. But, at the end of the day, they're stuck in the area like most everyone else here.

Property values have tanked for homeowners -- who would want to buy a home in an area where predictability has become so unpredictable? And for those on the kibbutzim, homeownership is a misnomer. As members of a cooperative community, families like the Bar-Ons "own" their house as long as they remain part of the kibbutz. But the title is not truly theirs, and if they were to leave, they would receive a payout from the kibbutz and have little equity to start over.

"I used to watch the news during the Bosnian War, and I'd see these guys running to work with briefcases, trying to avoid the snipers," Marcell says. "I used to think, 'How can people allow themselves to live like that?' And now I'm doing the same thing, and I understand: It's a lack of choice."

For more, check out The God Blog

What Olmert thinks of American Jewish money

2007-08-08T23:34:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

JERUSALEM, Aug. 8 -- "You are not to directly quote the prime minister," Ehud Olmert's press handler told a group of American Jewish journalists I've been traveling with this week.

This directive came today as we sat in a conference room in Olmert's Jerusalem offices. It seemed a ridiculous rule, but the prime minister's fears made more sense once the meeting was over.

When Olmert walked confidently into the conference room, he shook some hands, said 'Shalom' and posed for a photo with a few journalists. Dressed in a navy suit and red tie, he sat tall, speaking in fluent English as he cracked jokes and invited our questions -- and that's when the meeting went south.

Asked about the hundreds of millions of dollars sent by American Jews to help Israel during and after last summer's war with Hezbollah, Olmert responded that the donations were very important -- but he stopped short of calling it "necessary."

If a giver wants to give and the receiver wants to get, Olmert said, God bless that situation.

And as we've seen this week, God -- or human resourcefulness -- has blessed a quick reconstruction of northern Israel. But Olmert's comments seemed particularly ungrateful because he spoke not only to the American journalists, but also to some top officials of the United Jewish Communities (UJC).

Through the UJC's Israel Emergency Campaign last summer, North American federations sent $360 million to Israel. UJC is also the sponsor of this media trip, which was designed to show reporters and editors how American donations have been used. UJC officials have shuttled our group, including editors and writers from major Jewish publications in Washington, New York, Philadelphia and L.A., to show us the pain inflicted by war.

They arranged this forum with the prime minister to allow him to speak to the most philanthropic Diaspora community -- and this is what he says?

Nachman Shai, senior vice president and director general of UJC Israel, wouldn't directly respond. "UJC is extremely proud of the work we have done with our partners and the government of Israel both during and after the war," he said in a statement prepared after the meeting.

It could be that Olmert didn't want to show Israel's hostile neighbors any sign of weakness by suggesting that the country cannot survive without Diaspora money. But given the past 60 years of American Jewish support for Israel Bonds and emergency aid during wartime, this was probably not the best audience for such high-handedness.

Olmert's popularity already is insanely low. Last month, the newspaper Yediot Ahronot reported his approval rating among Israelis has fallen to 8 percent, next to which President Bush looks like the coolest kid in school. Olmert has been heavily criticized for myriad mistakes in last summer's war, and even now, 12 months after the ceasefire, he appears oblivious to the situation on the ground.

I've spent the past three days in Northern Israel, near Haifa, Nahariya, the Galilee - and most everyone I've met has talked at some length about the lingering and traumatic affects of having been bombarded by Katyusha rockets for 34 days last summer.

Take, for instance, Shiri Havkin, who lives in the town of Rosh Pina. Havkin runs a small business, Drora's Herb Farm, out of her home; it was started by her mother, the Israeli singer Drora Havkin, and the younger Havkin took over when her mother died in 1995. She nearly lost it all last summer when tourism stopped -- her savings shriveled and she bounced so many checks the bank froze her activity.

She only stayed afloat thanks to a low-interest loan from a small-business development center that was supported by UJC. Another war, though, might be enough for Havkin to give up on the Galilee.

"If there will be another war, I will have to sell my house," she said. "I'm sorry to say but I cannot stand another war."

Olmert dismissed such sentiments as isolated and insignificant.

There is no trauma, he said: Nothing is collapsing; the north is booming; income is higher than ever; employment is higher than ever.

And, in fact, his claims are partially true. Israel's economy is once again going gangbusters. People have returned to the north, and the most visible remnants of war are a few blackened trees on the hillsides close to the border. Nahariya's streets and boardwalk are filled day and night with young revelers.

But that doesn't account for the emotional wreckage inside many Israelis.

Numerous psychologists and social workers told our group that post-traumatic stress disorder is a public-health crisis in northern Israel. One to-be-published study by Rami Benbenishty of Hebrew University found that 10 percent to 11 percent of children in Nahariya are in "critical, immediate need" of psychological treatment. They suffer not from war fatigue, but concussion paranoia. Debilitating fear is literally a sneeze away for some.

But what did the leader of Israel say when told many psychologists would not agree with his analysis of how war has affected his citizens?

He said it was time to change the psychologist.

Interview with a serial blogger

2007-08-03T20:09:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Luke Ford loves gossip.

He loves to dish dirt on rabbis suspected of sleeping around and on pornographers stealing from their customers.

The blogger likes playing the role of the outsider journalist, the little guy willing to fight back, more nimble than those dinosaurs we call newspapers. He is -- to quote Luke Ford himself -- "more a kid who likes to throw manure."

The son of a Seventh-day Adventist evangelist, Ford is named after the gentile physician who wrote one of the Gospels and he shares his last name with one of the most infamously anti-Semitic Americans in history. But that's not why mentioning the contentious Internet journalist, who converted to Judaism 15 years ago, gives some Jews the sensation of nails scraping across a chalkboard.

"He's a lashon hara monger," said one community leader, who like many agreed to speak only anonymously. "He comes up with the most outrageous conclusions and puts them up on his Web site, passing them off as truth. If a rabbi stands up on the pulpit and says something, by Saturday night it is on [Ford's] Web site, twisted, with his perverted insights, as if it is fool-proof truth."

But sometimes, Ford is right. And therein lies this tale: what happens when gossip, roundly despised in Jewish law and tradition, turns out to be true and important? What is the difference between making gossip and breaking news? And how, in the brave new world of blogging, do we answer these questions?

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa might be wondering the same thing. It was Luke Ford who on his blog broke the news that the mayor's marriage had failed. Los Angeles has thousands upon thousands of niche bloggers, and Ford is nowhere near the most read. But he got the ball rolling, and he didn't relent after Villaraigosa vehemently denied the claim.

Eventually, Ford's reporting at LukeFord.net was vindicated, and the Villaraigosa revelation led to radio appearances and regular mentions on notable blogs like Slate.com's Kausfiles and LAObserved.com. Last week, the Los Angeles Times invited Ford to debate blogging and journalism ethics with KTLA reporter Eric Spillman at LATimes.com.

"I'm 41 years old," Ford said over coffee last week, "and it is just so obvious to me that the only thing I am good at is blogging.... As a blogger, I have to pick up the crap; I pick up the droppings that polite reporters don't want to touch."

LukeFord.net is now getting about 4,000 page views per day, according to Blogads, which tracks traffic for advertisement pricing. That's double the eyeballs Ford attracted before the mayor confirmed in June that he and his wife had separated.

And Ford's run is continuing: Last Friday he reported L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca was divorcing his wife; by Monday other media outlets had picked up on it.

But to Ford's critics, the value of such scoops doesn't justify the less savory aspects of blogging in general, and LukeFord.net specifically. After all, Ford has had a handful of breakthrough stories before, and then returned to obscurity.

"People who act that way can and do get lucky and therefore some credibility is given to them," one Jewish critic said. "It's like B.F. Skinner said about variable reinforcement schedule: If you don't give the rat a pill every time they push the bar, but you give it every third time or every fifth time or at an interval, the rats keep pushing the bar like crazy. And that is what some of these blogs do."

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Many Jewish leaders are disgusted by Ford. They say they have befriended him and been betrayed. Who knows what he might catch them saying, or what he might publish somebody else saying about them? Multiple rabbis contacted by The Journal declined to comment; not only that, they didn't even want to be named as having declined comment.

Few sins are as serious as that of lashon hara, the evil tongue, though the severity of gossip and negative speech wasn't widely understood until Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan came along in the late 1800s and published his famous book, "Chofetz Chaim."

There are 31 commandments regarding lashon hara. The gist is that it's not only sinful to gossip about someone, but to say negative things at all, even if true, unless there is a compelling reason.

If a person knows their friend is getting involved romantically with a scoundrel or professionally with a crook, they should dish the dirt -- privately, said Rabbi Avrohom Stulberger, a local Orthodox expert on lashon hara. That's different from making a broad-brush PSA.

"When it is put out in the open like that on the Internet, it almost never becomes acceptable," said Stulberger, principal of Valley Torah High School. "If there is a situation where you have factual clear knowledgeable information and you needed to warn a wide spectrum of people because you couldn't get to everybody personally, I suppose there could be a scenario where it would be justified. But certainly if it is haphazard, if it isn't researched properly, if you haven't thought through the repercussions -- there are so many variables that the Chofetz Chaim talks about, it would be a rare, rare day that something like that would be justified."

Stulberger wasn't familiar with LukeFord.net, but it's hard to imagine the blog fitting the Chofetz Chaim criteria. Though the site is loaded with insightful interviews and

Brad adds (4:48 PM, 8/03/2007):

As expected, Luke Ford has been blogging about this profile.

To see the continuing dialog and some of my other musings on the cowboy blogger, visit The God Blog.

profiles of local and national Jewish leaders, the blog does little to distinguish between rumor and reportage.
"Whether blogging about Jews, porners, Australian fauna, my mental health, my dad Desmond and myriad topics, I've never been one to rigorously check my facts before posting," Ford wrote in April. "And I've misused the English language quite regularly. The speed of the Internet doesn't allow for fact checking or being clear when I write. I'm a blogger, mates, and I play by [my] own rules."

The outcome is a mosaic of phone conversations, e-mails, reader comments, personal reflection, questions, opinion and fiction.

"Is New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg Gay?" a July 10 headline asked. "His mannerisms scream gay to me but maybe he's just a perfect gentleman," Ford wrote.

That is not news reporting; it is Ford posting a question in hopes that it will lead him to the answer. (An Associated Press story Sunday about a sexual harassment lawsuit Bloomberg settled in 2000 with a female executive of his financial company ran on LukeFord.net under the headline, "Guess This Answers My Question About Mayor Bloomberg.")

Ford argues that gossip is morally neutral. The benefits of gossip balance out the negatives, he says. But even Ford's favorite Jewish journalist doesn't agree with that.
"I looked up your Web site and have to admit to being troubled ... by the lashon harah aspect of your work," Yossi Klein Halevi, a contributing editor to The New Republic and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, wrote Ford in a July 2004 e-mail, quoted in Ford's book "Yesterday's News Tomorrow: Inside the World of Jewish Journalism." "It's not at all as straightforward as you put it -- especially the notion midah k'neged midah [measure for measure], which is not in our hands but in God's hands to do."

To which Ford replied: "If we held by the Chofetz Chaim, most of your work, as well as mine, would be forbidden."

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Ford got his online start in 1997 after producing and directing an adult film, "What Women Want" -- not to be confused with the Mel Gibson movie -- and acting in a few pictures. (He says he never appeared naked or had sex on camera. Others confirmed this; I was not diligent enough to roll back the tapes.) He had just written "A History of X: 100 Years of Sex in Film," and his curiosity about the business was at a high.

Within months, www.LukeFord.com (a porn blog he sold in 2001) broke the biggest crisis to rock the adult industry in years. HIV had infected five adult performers, and Ford was the only one pushing the story, naming "patient zero" and the infected actresses.

"People were saying, 'He's lying. He's wrong. He can't be trusted.' And he was right. He was way out in front of everybody else on this HIV story," said former New York Times reporter Nick Ravo, who turned to Ford as an industry insider.

Ford was not only ahead of the curve on the HIV story, but on the power of the Internet in general. Before newspapers began worrying about the coming circulation crisis, the Internet savvy of people like Ford was hastening it. With little training and even less money, Ford was uncovering stories about HIV, Mafia ties to the business and pay-for-porn scams with a cheap computer and an inquisitive mind.

His techniques were unorthodox, and not simply because he kept kosher and Shabbat while profiting from pornography. Trading in rumor and innuendo, lawsuits became part of the gig because he was willing to publish one-source stories and anonymous accusations as fact.

"There are three reasons why people come into the adult industry and two of them are wrong. The first is sex, which is mechanical, and the second is money, which is incidental. The primary reason is for the glory, and Luke has made himself glorious," said Bill "Papa Bear" Margold, once dubbed "the renaissance man of porn" by Playboy. "He is the first site you go to see what is going on. Even if he doesn't know what is going on, you go there to see that he doesn't know what is going on."

But his notoriety as an adult-industry blogger complicated Ford's search for a spiritual home in Los Angeles' Orthodox community. The first shul to give him the boot was Aish HaTorah in 1995 for being too antagonistic and again in 1998 when Rabbi Moshe Cohen discovered Ford's double life as a porn journalist.

"He was one of the Torah weirdos," said Rabbi Aryeh Markman, the shul's executive director. "You get all sorts of people showing up in shul and we bust them. 'I'm happy you're looking for a place to daven. But this isn't one of them.' And you throw them out. ... The antithesis of Torah is porn."

Ford journeyed down Pico Boulevard and created a new life for himself at Young Israel of Century City, going by his Hebrew name Levi Ben Avraham. He remained there for three years before being ousted.

About the same time, he was tossed from the Rabbinical Council of California's conversion program for "deceit and deception," administrator Rabbi Avrohom Union said. "Don't take anything he says at face value."

Ford sold LukeFord.com in 2001 for $25,000 and started his personal site, LukeFord.net. In 2004, he also returned to adult-industry blogging at www.LukeIsBack.com. Still, Ford has found a place to daven. The one condition for his cooperation on this article was that the shul not be named, although its identity is an open secret in the community.

Back in January, Tony Castro had a sexy story to sell: Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa had stopped wearing his wedding ring and hadn't been seen with his wife in months. Castro, a reporter for the L.A. Daily News, knew he'd hit gold. He dug deeper, verified what he'd heard and pitched it for page one. Only, his editors -- who at the time also were my editors -- weren't buying it. They didn't think the story qualified as much more than glorified gossip, even if it was about Los Angeles' most vocal family man. The story appeared destined for a journalistic coma.

But on Jan. 29, while interviewing Ford for the Daily News' series on porn in the Valley, Castro mentioned the mayor's marital troubles. He knew Ford would get the story out. Before the phone conservation was over, Ford had posted this headline at LukeFord.net: "Antonio Villaraigosa's Marriage Kaput."

"The mayor and his wife Corina haven't been seen together in public in about 10 months (since the president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, visited in May 2006)," Ford wrote. "Villaraigosa no longer wears his wedding band (not since the first week of September 2006). His wife does not live with him in the mayor's mansion (I don't think she's ever lived there with him)."

This apparently prompted an L.A. Times reporter to pay an unexpected visited to the Getty House, the mayor's official residence, and prod about the mayor's nuptials. Villaraigosa was adamant that his marriage wasn't over.

"Absolutely not true," he said. "We are not separated."

But then in June, something peculiar happened: Villaraigosa came clean. He and Corina were having serious problems and had separated. The next day, she filed for divorce.

Ford's reporting was not only exonerated but exalted.

Previously, Ford's non-porn reporting was most notable for his profiles of film producers and Jewish journalists and for publishing allegations of people who said they had been sexually harassed or assaulted by Jewish leaders.

Last year, Rabbi Aron Tendler, then the pulpit rabbi at Shaarey Zedek in Valley Village, stepped down after Ford and a few other blogs published accusations of inappropriate sexual relationships with women and girls at Yeshiva of Los Angeles (YULA), as a teacher and later principal there between 1980 and 1999.

"A few years ago, Ford irritated administrators of American Jewish University, then known as University of Judaism, when he published pages upon pages of documents from a former rabbinic student's lawsuits for assault, battery, negligence, sexual discrimination and retaliation. Ford interviewed the former student, Marsha Plafkin, and published the 39-page transcript of her accusations as fact. (The court ruled in AJU's favor on the assault, battery and negligence lawsuit, and dismissed the second case without prejudice; university President Robert Wexler declined comment for this article.)"

Ford has long been famous for two things: his spartan lifestyle and his propensity for turning gossip into news, thanks to the ever-present digital recorder he uses to capture scuttlebutt at journalism parties and porn functions.

"I didn't realize just how irresponsible we normally are in everyday private conversations until I encountered L.A. blogger Luke Ford," Mickey Kaus of Kausfiles wrote in a 2003 article for Slate.com titled "The Case Against Editors." "Ford goes around to parties and immediately posts snatches of his conversations on the Web. His reporting is impeccable. He has faithfully quoted me libeling dozens of people on two separate occasions."

Kaus, like most of Ford's media connections, was a friend of National Review Online columnist Cathy Seipp. Ford repaid Seipp, who died in March, by eulogizing her on his blog as a "bulldozer" and an unrepentant adulteress who "had an unshakable belief in her own righteousness."

It was classic Ford, throwing stones at the people who would save him from drowning, which is a tale he tells often about falling off a pier as a child after throwing rocks at his sister and she coming to his rescue.

He has no qualms with castigating those who have propped him up in life.

Ford credits his Jewish conversion to the wisdom of talk-radio host Dennis Prager, whom he heard speaking about Judaism when Ford was bed-ridden with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome after dropping out of UCLA. The two began talking regularly by phone, but then Ford bought the domain www.DennisPrager.net and used it to lambast the man he loved like a father. (That info has all been moved over to LukeFord.net.)

Prager has since completely distanced himself.

"He was neither a pupil nor a friend," Prager said in a brief interview. "I think I appealed to something good in him at some point, and I hope I did. But I don't know."

While Seipp's college-age daughter still converses with Ford and he says Kaddish for her every day at shul, most in that circle have written off their friendships with the blogger-without-boundaries.

"I'm barely even an armchair Ford watcher, but it seems like every time there's a brouhaha like this (i.e., every month or so), the conversation turns to whether this time, this time!, he's gone too far, whether it might finally, finally!, be time to write the Vulcan porn gossip out of polite society," Tim Cavanaugh, Web opinion editor of the L.A. Times, wrote on the paper's site. "I suspect the reason he always comes back can be found in this recent defense of a Seipp family enemy. If he were just some amoral jerk who constantly turned on his friends, they would drop him without further thought. But Ford always has some elaborately worked-out justification for doing the wrong thing -- and even if the morality is understood only by Ford himself, there's something compelling in the amount of thought and ethical self-torment that goes into the decision."

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Shortly before sundown last Thursday, Ford updates a story about an aide to Villaraigosa who's leaving City Hall. He's seated at his desk in his home south of Pico Boulevard. This is where he spends day and night, only leaving once or twice most days to walk to shul or to get some exercise. Three of four days, he says, he doesn't leave the hood.

He lives in a guesthouse occupying half a converted garage. In a narrow room smaller than a college dorm, a few blankets -- Ford's bed -- lay on the ground between his desk and the bathroom door, against which two white pillows rest. A bookshelf is lined with Judaica items and books on the Talmud, Jewish history and English literature; most of the books he reads come from the library.

There is a fridge and microwave; cassette tapes of recorded phone conversations are piled on the floor, a smorgasbord of bottled vitamins and medication cover a white dresser with gilded accents. "The Hovel," as Ford endearingly refers to it, feels dank and smells worse, but for $600 a month, it's home.

Ford posts the story, slips into the bathroom to wash his hands, then locks up and begins the half-mile schlep to shul.

"This is a good place," an elderly man says to a teenage boy as Ford reads a Talmud commentary before a minyan has arrived. "You're welcome here. You can come in the morning; you can come in the evening. You will feel good here."

Certainly, that is true for Ford. This is the place that gives his life structure and purpose and stability. This is the only shul that's let him continue davening there after discovering the depraved world within which he works. Judaism is not about a personal relationship with God, and without an accepting community there is no religious observance. For a convert like Ford, there is no Jewish identity absent Judaism.

"Orthodox Judaism in general, not just going to shul, gives me much needed structure," Ford says after the service ended. "I have no core. I'm way too flexible on the things I do. This gives me some structure, and it's important for me to bounce off the same people everyday.... It gives my life meaning, it gives my life rhythm, it gives my day a beginning and end. And it reminds me that there is a God."

He returns home and hops in his van -- a distinctly dented and rusted old GTE work van -- and heads out to the Valley. He's got a porn party to infiltrate.

What Hollywood does for the Jewish community

2007-07-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles www.jewishjournal.com

This is what Hollywood's old-school Jewish philanthropy looks like: 900 Jews worried about anti-Semitism sitting inside the International Hall of the Beverly Hilton.

Holocaust survivors sit side-by-side with some of entertainment's biggest big shots. Onstage, the American and Israeli flags hang together, with "Rush Hour" director Brett Ratner saying the Hamotzi; Rabbi Meyer H. May singing the national anthem and Hatikvah; talk show host Larry King telling jokes and introducing household names, like Queen Latifah, that aren't necessarily Jewish.

It's the 30th anniversary of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the internationally recognized human rights organization and operator of the Museum of Tolerance located a mile and a half away, and the men behind this June 20 gala are Jewish entertainment chieftains —Time Warner President and COO Jeff Bewkes, Universal Studios President and COO Ron Meyer and, specifically, Jeffrey Katzenberg, a center trustee and CEO of Dreamworks Animation.

No. 40 on the list of wealthiest Angelenos, according to the Los Angeles Business Journal, Katzenberg has given millions to philanthropies ranging from the Motion Picture & Television Fund to AIDS Project Los Angeles to the American Jewish Committee. For the past 15 years, though, his favorite Jewish cause has been the Wiesenthal Center.

"When I took my first tour, the sensation was almost overwhelming -- a combination of anger, sadness, hope and resolve to support this institution in any way possible," Katzenberg tells his $125-a-plate guests in opening remarks.

This is a familiar sight, one steeped in tradition. The Wiesenthal Center may only be 30 years old, but Jewish entertainment leaders have been deeply involved in Jewish nonprofits since before Hollywood became synonymous with the motion-picture business.

First it came from the fathers of film, Carl Laemmle, the Warner brothers and Samuel Goldwyn; the second take was of "The Last Mogul" Lew Wasserman and game-show host Monty Hall; next came Sherry Lansing, Steven Spielberg, Katzenberg and a few others. Soon, that task will fall to a new generation that is now in its 20s, 30s and early 40s. But who will step forward as tomorrow's Katzenbergs or Wassermans or Warners?

That is a difficult question to answer because most of today's Jewish philanthropists are cut from a different mold than their predecessors.

On the one hand, no longer feeling the insularity and even paranoia that led them to support only their own, many of today's Hollywood's Jews -- notables include David Geffen and Michael Eisner -- are increasingly giving to causes that have nothing to do with Israel or the Jewish community directly.

At the same time, some organizations have found that appealing to the singular Jewish community isn't the only way to go: Jewish World Watch, a decidedly Jewish organization founded by a rabbi and designed to provide relief to people under genocidal attack, has had great success partnering with black actors, even more so than Jewish ones.

And then there are those who pick and choose their causes specific to their own personal development. Peter Spears, as just one example, came to Hollywood for his work, but recently found himself on a mission to Israel's film industry, which helped him to rediscover his Jewish self in the process.

This is Hollywood Jewish giving ... Take 4 ...

The perception that Hollywood doesn't do squat for the Jews may be as much a part of Jewish belief as monotheism. It's hyperbole, but a disconnect does exist between many Hollywood Jews and the greater Jewish community. Some of it can be attributed to the phlegmatic nature of Los Angeles, some to the city's geography and transient nature of its denizens and some to the growing trend away from Jewish giving.

David Lonner, co-head of the motion picture department at the William Morris Agency -- who has been described in this paper as "the kind of agent whom stars thank by name, along with God, from the Oscar podium" -- has wrestled with these forces as he's tried to engage his colleagues in issues he finds important to the Jewish community, both by taking them to Israel on trips he funds and by serving at one point as the volunteer president of The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles' Entertainment Division.

"In the '60s and '70s you had people from that generation who were very affected by those two gigantic earthquakes in Jewish history," said Lonner, 45, referring to the Holocaust and the creation of a Jewish state. "Now you've got an assimilated, prosperous society who is also focused on what affects their lives directly. It is not that they are shunning Jewish causes; it is just that they are removed."

To be sure, this phenomenon is affecting young Jews across the country, not just in Hollywood. Recent studies -- by Brandeis University, Reboot, sociologist Steven Cohen, Hillel -- have found young Jews are conflicted about how to express their identity. They are proudly Jewish -- some more "Jew-ish" -- and cherish the culture, but they have little attachment to Judaism and reject the idea of remaining part of an insular tribe. In terms of charity, or tzedakah, they want to heal the world, but they aren't so comfortable doing it the way their parents did.

"It is an acknowledgement that one's responsibility is to the broader community," said Dan Adler, a former talent agent and vice president of business development at Walt Disney Imagineering, now working on an Internet venture. "Whether it is Darfur or poverty, or whether it is any cause it might be, the Jewish community is doing a great job of honoring those broader pillars of Judaism, whether you want to frame it in tikkun olam or frame it in a responsibility to the broader community."

But what has this meant for Los Angeles' Jewish community?

It is no secret that Jews built Hollywood, but less widely known is that Hollywood helped build L.A. Jewish life. The American Jewish Committee's local chapter and the ancestors of The Federation have their roots in the entertainment industry. So do prominent synagogues like Temple Israel of Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevard Temple. Sixty years ago, about a third of the annual contributions to The Federation's predecessor, the Jewish Welfare Fund, came from the entertainment industry. In 2005, the proportion of The Federation's total from the industry was between 8 and 10 percent.

That generation was less concerned with Jewish education or culture or benevolent services than with telling the story of Jewish assimilation and affluence in America, said Gerald Bubis, founding director of the Irwin Daniels School of Jewish Communal Service at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

"Their efforts were not altruistic," Bubis said. "They were concerned about what would gentiles think about Jews. The bulk of what they did in the Jewish community was focused on how to protect the good name of the Jews, not to help Jewish people in need."

Some, like talent head William Morris, preferred to support Jewish efforts that dropped the word "Jew" from fundraising literature. And others, like David Selznick, wanted nothing to do with Jewish causes regardless of how they were framed.

"I am not interested in Jewish political problems," Selznick told screenwriter Ben Hecht, according to Hecht's memoir "A Child of the Century," when he was raising money for Jews in Palestine during World War II. "I'm an American and not a Jew. I'm interested in this war as an American. It would be silly of me to pretend suddenly that I'm a Jew, with some sort of full-blown Jewish psychology."

For those not at the top, there was plenty of pressure to give. The United Jewish Welfare Fund circulated a magazine that listed how much Jewish entertainers had given, and the constant demand for money, often coming from studio higher-ups, was enough to drive some crazy.

"Jack Warner demanded that his Jewish employees donate a percentage of their salary to the United Jewish Welfare Fund," Neil Gabler wrote in "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. "During a fundraising drive, he would call them into the studio commissary.

"'When we were all assembled,' screenwriter Alvah Bessie remembered, '[Warner] marched in and -- to our astonishment -- brandished a rubber truncheon, which had probably been a prop for one of the anti-Nazi pictures we were making. He stood behind his table and smashed the length of the rubber hose on the wood, and then he smiled and said, "I've been looking at the results of the Jewish Appeal drive, and believe you me, it ain't good." Here he paused for effect and said, "Everybody's gonna double his contribution here and now -- or else!" The rubber truncheon crashed on the table again as everyone present reached for our checkbooks.'"

Historically, though, Hollywood was considered a dry well for all charitable causes. But a decade ago that trend started to shift, marked by a 1997 New York Times article that stated, "In Hollywood, a new generation of philanthropists is being born -- and not a moment too soon."

The report largely focused on people making sizable contributions to improve L.A. culture -- David Geffen giving $5 million to the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood and Michael Eisner committing $25 million from his then-media empire, the Walt Disney Company, for downtown's Disney Concert Hall -- but also noted people like Spielberg who were donating millions to enrich specific communities.

"For all their glitzy wealth and self-promotion, residents of Los Angeles, particularly members of the entertainment industry, have been relatively stingy when it comes to charity," the paper reported.

Compare that to this turn of phrase by The Hollywood Reporter in its annual philanthropy issue this month. "These days, executives themselves are as likely to be found rolling up their sleeves for charity as they are posing for paparazzi at posh dinners. Indeed, the people at the top can be a nonprofit's best friend."

The shift in Hollywood's attitude toward philanthropy can be partially attributed to a sort of economic enlightenment, said Alan J. Abramson, director of the nonprofit sector and philanthropy program at the Aspen Institute. Hollywood gets that conspicuous acts of charity can be a good investment.

"Celebrities are like corporations, so philanthropy has the same attraction," he said. "It gives them a chance to get their names out there associated with a humanitarian cause that might go down well with the public, and so the public might think better about celebrities like they would about corporations doing philanthropy in the U.S. and the world.

"It is good to better the world, " Abramson said. "But it also makes good business sense."

Hollywood Jews have gotten more involved, too, and they aren't limiting their support to organizations building schools in Israel or fighting anti-Semitism in Europe.

Howard Gordon, executive producer of "24," and his wife, Cami, contribute heavily to both University Synagogue and the Stroke Association of Southern California. They also give to the "I Have a Dream" Foundation, which, among other things, provides college scholarships to inner-city children who maintain good grades.

"Helping someone help themselves is the greatest form of giving," Howard Gordon said. "It was not a Jewish charity, per se, but it is based on Jewish values."

Such enlightenment has put Jewish organizations in fundraising competition with those searching for a cure for breast cancer or trying to slow the pace of global warming. "Or," The Federation's Meredith Weiss said, "whatever the sexiest cause is."

Right now, that would be Africa.

The entire July issue of Vanity Fair, guest-edited by U2's Bono, was dedicated to issues affecting Africa. A front-page Sunday story in the Washington Post last month followed Drew Barrymore up the Capitol steps as she lobbied on behalf of the U.N. World Food Program for African child-feeding programs. George Clooney just filmed the documentary "A Journey to Darfur," Brad Pitt helped start the One Campaign to Make Poverty History after visiting Ethiopia and South Africa, and his love interest, Angelina Jolie, is a goodwill ambassador for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Within this milieu, only a short jaunt over the Santa Monica Mountains, Jewish World Watch began three years ago at Valley Beth Shalom and has since received international recognition for its efforts to end the slaughtering in Darfur. The organization receives most of its support from synagogues and schools, public and private, Jewish and Christian.

Jewish World Watch has not set out to court celebrities, though it has caught some of their attention. Actors Danny Glover and Forest Whitaker attended its Seder for Darfur and Don Cheadle, who starred in "Hotel Rwanda," just filmed a public-service announcement promoting the Encino-based organization's Solar Cooker Project, which fits refugee camps with solar heating and protects women from the dangers of leaving the camp for firewood.

The organization has not asked Hollywood Jews and been rejected, said JWW President and CEO Janice Kamenir-Reznik said. It simply hasn't asked. To date, only a few Hollywood Jews have gotten involved, chiefly actress Monica Horan Rosenthal and her husband Phil Rosenthal, creator of the sitcom "Everybody Loves Raymond."

"We can't turn a blind eye on things of a horrific global nature," said Horan Rosenthal, who was raised Catholic and converted to Judaism before marriage. "The worst genocide of all time was the Holocaust, and from that I think the Jewish people have taken on that we are never going to let that happen again."

Across the nation, though, Jews are increasingly giving to non-Jewish causes. The Institute for Jewish & Community Research found that between 1995 and 2000, only 6 percent of the money given away by Jewish mega-donors went to Jewish causes.

In 2002, the year before the study was published, David Geffen, the movie and music mogul, was the fourth-most generous donor in the country, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. But of the $206.2 million he donated or pledged, $200 million was for the UCLA School of Medicine and $5 million the Geffen Playhouse, leaving at most 0.5 percent of his charity for Jewish causes. The year before, when his foundation reported $2 million in charitable contributions, $110,000 went to Jewish organizations.

But that does not mean Jewish philanthropy has gone wrong. Jews have long cared about the arts and about medicine, about creating a better world, whether it's the world of Jewish life or the whole globe.

"What's best is the person who is not saying, 'I will care for the whole world at the expense of the Jews,' or 'I will care about the Jews at the expense of the world,'" said Bubis, the Jewish communal service expert. "A wholesome and fulfilled Jewish philanthropist is one who finds opportunities and outlooks and bridges those two into the fusion. That is why for me a Jewish World Watch is a healthy fusion of something universally mindful out of a sensitivity of what a Jews is supposed to care about as a human being based on what Jewish texts teach. It is not either/or."

These are better days for Hollywood Jews. They no longer need to change their names -- sometimes not even their noses. Orthodox screenwriters like David Sacks of "The Simpsons" and "Malcolm in the Middle" find producers more understanding of Shabbat. Young stars like Natalie Portman, Sacha Baron Cohen and Seth Rogen make it cool to be Jewish.

But a chasm remains between Jewish identity and Jewish institutions. One reason has as much to do with geography and economy as it does with generational shift. The problem in Los Angeles is not simply that young Jews aren't interested in Jewish organizations. The problem, in part, is Los Angeles.

"There is plenty of blame to go around. Some of it is Los Angeles, some of it is the Jewish community, some of it is the lack of appeal to younger people," said Donna Bojarsky, an adviser to Hollywood figures. "In the Los Angeles Jewish community, most people didn't grow up here. You don't have those communal ties that sometimes facilitate engagement. The Jewish community itself, therefore, is perceived as your mother's or grandmother's Jewish community, so it doesn't seem as interesting to younger Jews."

Scott Halle's story makes the case for the importance of communal continuity. A 28-year-old native of the San Fernando Valley, Halle grew up attending the shul his grandparents help start -- Valley Beth Shalom -- and watching his parents in volunteer leadership at The Federation.

"I can see my stepfather running around at the West Valley JCC on Super Sunday, talking on his walkie-talkie. He always looked happy."

So when Halle returned in 2002 from the University of Wisconsin, volunteering at The Federation would have to fit into his schedule somewhere between co-founding a production-management company and participating in the AIDS Walk.

"I always knew I was going to be involved in Jewish causes," he said.

For Keren Markuze, who arrived in the Fairfax District from Montreal without a thread of attachment to the Jewish community surrounding her, getting philanthropically plugged in was much more challenging.

She eventually discovered the Progressive Jewish Alliance, which hooked her up with a victim-offender mediation program, and once she decided she was going to stay in Los Angeles a while, she called Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters. For the past three years, the 30-year-old documentary TV writer -- Markuze's main work has been scripting medical programs for Discovery Health -- has spent a few hours every other week with her 11-year-old little sister.

"One of the most important aspects of my Judaism is the sense of love thy neighbor as you love thyself," Markuze said. "That is where I draw a lot of my identity from in terms of giving back. If you look at tradition and ritual, a lot of the things we do are ultimately about how our actions can benefit our community and society."

The Federation has created a feeder for both the Halles and Markuzes in the form of its Entertainment Division. The division, which has been around longer than officials can remember, has been recently re-energized by director Meredith Weiss, who left Creative Artists Agency last year after five years in its entertainment-marketing group. It operates a yearlong leadership institute, organizes industry socials and facilitates missions to Israel.

"The goal of this is to get them to start believing in philanthropy now so it is a part of their being as they grow in their careers and professional development," Weiss said.

In a place where time is money -- and the young have no time to spare and even less money -- donating energy and enthusiasm is how many young Jews choose to give back.

"In Israel, you did Milu'im, which is reserve duty, and officers do it between 30 and 42 days a year. If you live in America, you don't have to do that. The least I could do is volunteer for the community and help people less fortunate than us," said Amotz Zakai, vice president of Echo Lake Productions.

Zakai, 34, who moved from Israel to Los Angeles 12 years ago, volunteered for five years with The Federation and ran a youth program at Temple Israel of Hollywood that planted trees, cooked for AIDS patients and visited women's shelters.

"We really live in this bubble, especially in Hollywood. There is no connection to the real world. It is like this magical wonderland," he said. "Think about it: We do jury duty for one or two days here, and we get upset about it. In Israel, you serve in a reserve unit in the Gaza Strip and you might die."

Cynical. Pessimistic. Lazy. Uninspired. Gen-Xers may be the most maligned generation since the Gilded Age, but they also learned a lot more about charity at a younger age than their parents. That's become increasingly the case with Generation Y, or the Millenialists.

"What I am getting from the people who come to me -- the agents and celebs and whoever else comes through -- is this, and this is refreshing," said Michelle Kleinert, executive director of the Lastfogel Foundation at William Morris. "'I don't want to just write a check. I write a lot of checks. I want to get involved. I don't have a lot of time, but I want to do something I am passionate about.'"

For Brad Fuller, producer of "The Hitcher" and "The Amityville Horror," that meant delivering Shabbat meals to homebound Jews and getting involved with the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and its annual dinner at which an entertainer -- the past three were Barry Meyer, Amy Pascal and Joe Roth -- is given the Dorothy and Sherrill C. Corwin Human Relations Award, which is named for Fuller's maternal grandparents, who owned Metropolitan Theaters.

"It is my responsibility to continue the tradition of my grandparents," said Fuller, 41. "If you can, it is a blessing to be able to give back. I was taught to do it. I was raised doing it. I don't know anything else."

The AJC reported that last fall's dinner brought in $1.5 million for the national organization. A lot of that is thanks to having a name like Meyer's, the chairman and CEO of Warner Bros., on the program. This is an advantage of being a household name in Hollywood: Your involvement with charities doesn't so much demand that you dig into your pocket as it creates the expectation you'll inspire others to reach into theirs.

And when words speak louder than actions, an entertainer's message often means more than their money. That is why the Consulate General of Israel recently created a special consul liaison to Hollywood. And that is why Sam Nazarian, a young Persian Jew, whose company SBE Entertainment owns several nightclubs and produced the film "Mr. Brooks" this spring, held a fundraiser last October at his Sunset club Privilege for victims of Hezbollah rocket fire in Israel's north.

"People in Hollywood are often viewed as trendsetters," Nazarian said, "and that is an important role when translated to charity."

Spielberg, in particular, wields unfathomable influence; in May, he told the Chinese government that he was ready to meet with President Hu Jintao to urge Beijing to help stop genocide in Darfur.

But Tinseltown is a fickle place, and even Spielberg's popularity as a supporter of Jewish causes has ebbed and flowed. After directing "Schindler's List," founding the Shoah Foundation to record the stories of Holocaust survivors and creating the Righteous Persons Foundation, to which he has contributed about $70 million, predominantly for Jewish causes, Spielberg's social capital took a significant blow two years ago with the release of his film "Munich" -- criticized as "an anti-Zionist epic" and "a politically correct 'Mein Kampf' for our time."

"It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian," Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer griped.

Less than a year later, with Israel at war with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, Spielberg was exalted as a hero when his Righteous Persons Foundation donated $1 million for Israeli relief. The money was significant, but his philanthropic adviser said the gesture was more so.

"Having someone like Steven Spielberg back a cause provides a seal of approval, a mark of credibility, for much of the Hollywood community," Andy Spahn told The Journal last August.

Israel has traditionally been taboo for Hollywood philanthropy, too politically charged for the image-conscious. Sure, Joshua Malina had no problem speaking out during the Second Intifada on behalf of Israel and Jason Alexander wasn't punished for joining a few other actors on the Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative One Voice. But such cases have been the exception, not the rule -- until a few years ago, and not just for Jews but non-Jews, too.

Last summer, 84 celebrities signed a letter than ran as a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times urging the world to support Israel's fight against Hezbollah, Hamas and terrorism. Jews and non-Jews joined hands, including Sylvester Stallone and Sumner Redstone, Nicole Kidman and Haim Saban to state: "If we do not succeed in stopping terrorism around the world, chaos will rule and innocent people will continue to die."

There is, however, another emphasis for entertainers concerned about supporting the Holy Land -- giving a leg up to Israel's burgeoning picture business.

"The Jewish mentality and the Jewish sense of the importance of art and the importance of culture is now exploding out of Israel," said Joan Hyler, founder of Hyler Management. "And thank god we have something to talk about, except for the other explosions out of there that have haunted us for the past 10 years."

In May, not long after the Israeli Film Festival came through town, Hyler, another talent agent and an actor/writer/producer went with The Federation to Tel Aviv to teach a three-day class titled "Hollywood 101." On the third day, Peter Spears shared his journey from Kansas country boy to producer of the new HBO series "John From Cincinnati."

"This is your moment," Spears told a crowd of actors and writers, according to The Federation's newsletter. "Hollywood is looking at Israel right now."

This was the first time Spears, 40, had been to Israel and the second time he had gotten involved with The Federation. The first experience was volunteering to help the elderly after noticing a flier for the organization at an audition. To his pleasure, he was connected with a nonagenarian who made a name in silent films, Loyal Lucas.

"I'd only been out here several years, not a long time, and trying to do this whole Hollywood thing. And here was somebody who had been there in the beginning of Hollywood," Spears said.

Spears' second involvement -- the sojourn to Israel -- so moved him that he had his bar mitzvah at the Western Wall. Coupled together, the experiences taught Spears the importance of getting personally involved.

"It is easier to write a check, but you don't get as much back from the experience as you do when you do it in person," he said. "I wouldn't have the fond memories of going to Israel or spending time with Loyal. I only have a vague recollection of it during tax time. And then you get kind of solicited by them for eternity. That one-on-one thing is really great. Twice now in my life it has been an amazing experience The Federation has afforded me. And if they called me again, I wouldn't hesitate to do whatever it was they asked."

When asked to compare the next generation to the legends of show biz, Bruce Ramer, the high-powered entertainment lawyer and honorary national president of the AJC, said it couldn't be done.

"Wasserman was supportive and active in ways and respects that were appropriate to that day and age," Ramer said of his late friend. "I don't think one can indulge and say he did it better than others. We continue to have exceedingly generous and great people who are leaders. I'm not sure I can compare them; that was a different time.

"Different times, different styles, different methods, different technology, different concerns."

In other words, Hollywood will continue to have Jewish leaders who care about more than themselves, who give time and money to Jewish organizations and secular ones too. The times will change. So will the methods and expressions of charity. But the values remain the same.

Cut!

For more on Hollywood Jewish giving, check out The God Blog

Holocaust 'revisionism' in Ventura County

2007-07-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

The way Jews in the Conejo Valley describe it, Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the propaganda proffered as academic discourse at the Goebel Senior Adult Center last month. That's when John Bravos, a commissioner of the publicly funded facility, focused a lecture in his comparative religion series on the Holocaust. The first question asked by a flier for the event was: "Did it happen?"

When about a dozen seniors showed up, Bravos began by talking about deniers who use the phrase "so-called Holocaust," comparing the atrocities of World War II to other genocides and saying that far fewer Jews were murdered by the Nazis than historians have long believed.

"I was devastated and irate and just very insulted and offended," said Honey Bencomo, a 67-year-old Jewish woman from Agoura Hills who attended the lecture with her husband, who is Catholic. "He was talking about something that is a very significant part of Jewish history and was saying it didn't happen."

Word of the June 19 lecture spread slowly through the Jewish community of eastern Ventura County at first, and then gathered momentum last week after Thousand Oaks resident Dina Adler heard what happened and notified local and national Jewish organizations. On Friday night, Rabbi Ted Riter of Temple Adat Elohim in Thousand Oaks, a shul where Bravos once lectured on being involved in counter-intelligence during World War II, noted from the pulpit that some contradictory information regarding the lecture was swirling around.

Many Jews already have branded Bravos, a veteran of the Allied Forces, with the distinctions of being a Holocaust denier and an anti-Semite.

"To live long enough to see your family's suffering and martyrdom spat upon to your face, it is really something that -- I mean, we can talk about it, but I don't think we can understand how painful that really is," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

But what's unclear is whether a sincere but ill-prepared teacher found his words taken out of context by what one attendee called "a lynching mob," until -- thanks to e-mail blasts and a furious game of telephone -- one awkward lecture became a cause celebre.

In a phone interview, Bravos, who said he worked as a Nazi-hunting spy after the war, said he has long been a friend of Israel and of the Jewish people.

"This is just like the McCarthy era," the 81-year-old retired social anthropologist said, "where people call you a name and tarnish you with mud for the rest of your life."

Some of Bravos' Jewish friends -- like Rhoda Vestuto, whose Hungarian parents lost much of their family in the Shoah -- have come to his defense.

"I hadn't talked to him in a long time, and I called him because I was so upset with peoples' self-righteous indignation. There is no way he was calling the Holocaust imaginary, that it didn't happen," said Vestuto, 78, of Thousand Oaks. "He is not an anti-Semite."

The Conejo Recreation and Park District, which runs the Goebel center, is now scrambling to figure out what happened. The district launched an investigation to learn exactly what Bravos said, and to determine who approved it beforehand.

At a specially called public meeting Tuesday, recreational supervisor Steve Wiley apologized for the lecture and, more specifically, the incendiary flier that asked whether the Holocaust happened, if it constituted "ethnic cleansing or mass-murder" and what its "moral dilemmas" were.

"The first question -- did it happen? -- is the one I need to apologize for. We all know that it happened," Wiley said at the contentious meeting, which was attending by more than 200 people, including representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, the Wiesenthal Center and local synagogues.

"That was a question intended to spur interest. It wasn't intended to deny that the Holocaust happened. ... I don't think there was any malice intended on the instructor's part," Wiley said.

What is known is that Bravos has volunteered for years at the Goebel Center and throughout the Conejo Valley and this spring was leading a series called "comparative religion." The first lecture focused on the origin of deistic worship. Discussing Islam dominated the second and third classes, and then Bravos was asked to dedicate the fourth session to the Holocaust.

"So I created a flier, that said, 'The Holocaust, did it happen? How many people died? Who did it?'" he said. "I wanted to get some of these naysayers to come into the class, so I put this on the flier, because I don't think we can ever talk enough about the Holocaust. It is 60 years old, but it's still a horrific event."

Bravos began the meeting by talking about deniers and then read a definition of the word "holocaust" and asked why Jews used that term when others had suffered, as well. Discussion was limited and a few in attendance left shortly after the lecture began.

Regardless of whether Bravos is a sincere philo-Semite who is sorely misinformed or a veiled Jew hater, the scope and highlights of his lecture bear a resemblance to tactics used by Holocaust deniers, particularly saying that atrocities did occur, but that they weren't as bad as succeeding generations were told.

Holocaust deniers, who prefer to be called "revisionists," play the part of truth-seekers, pseudo-academics on a quest to uncover the fallacies of history. But revisionism has become an important and powerful tool for anti-Semitism.

Bravos didn't claim Jews weren't killed during World War II. But he insisted that a major statistic historians agree upon -- that the Nazis exterminated about 6 million Jews -- has been proven wrong by recent research, information he said he found through a Google search.

"For 60 years, we knew those numbers; now new numbers are out," he said. "Based on the information I read, they said 3.5 million were killed in the Holocaust, which is still horrible."

For more info, check out The God Blog

Orthodox Jews packing heat, getting mugged leaving shul

2007-06-08T19:47:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

Fifteen years ago, Mordechai Naor walked to Congregation Shaarei Tefila in the Fairfax district with a handgun as his companion. Six years after moving to the Pico-Robertson neighborhood and leaving those fears of mugging behind, Naor is considering re-kindling an old relationship.

"Since we moved over here, I always felt safe," said Naor, 60. "It's not extreme to go armed again, but I never even thought to worry about who was walking behind me."

His new sense of vulnerability stems from a recent spate of attacks against Jews in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood.

As dusk turned to dark on the first night of Shavuot, one rabbi, who asked not to be named, was mugged at knifepoint on Rodeo Drive near Olympic Boulevard as he was walking home after services. Eight hours later, five Orthodox men were walking down Pico Boulevard near Sherbourne Drive when a van pulled up and two men jumped out waving handguns. Less than a week later, another Jewish man was mugged in Beverlywood.

"All we want to do is be left alone and be able to go to shul and spend time with our families," said Cliff Alsberg, who handles security at Aish Los Angeles. "But these people are coming in and disrupting our lives."

Los Angeles police have attributed 11 robberies of about 30 people -- including many non-Jews -- to three teams of suspects. Five people, comprising two of the teams, have been arrested and charged; three men believed to be members of the third team have been arrested but not yet charged.

"The Jewish community was not the intended target," said Lt. Ray Lombardo of the West L.A. station. "They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when these suspects drove by."

But the apparently connected robberies have heightened fears throughout the Orthodox community. Los Angeles Councilman Jack Weiss organized two meetings in the past three weeks with Jewish leaders and police. Synagogues responded with blast e-mails telling members to be more cautious when traveling to shul; to pay attention to their surroundings, whether during the day or at night, and to walk in groups.

"But I'm not stopping any of my activities," said the mother of a 17-year-old boy who was jumped at gunpoint while walking home from a Friday night celebration of a newborn boy -- known as a shalom zachor -- in March. "And when my son went to another shalom zachor, he still walked home, but he went with a neighbor."

The robberies have evoked memories of what Naor and his family witnessed when they lived in the Fairfax District in the early 1990s. Observant Jews were targeted as easy marks, because they walked at night, sometimes alone, and even though they didn't carry cash, they often wore expensive jewelry.

"It was like an epidemic," said Isaac Naor, Mordechai's son. "Every week, somebody else was getting mugged. Everybody was walking to shul with a gun."

Among those attacked was the then-president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, Rabbi Jack Simcha Cohen, who also was the leader of the Naor's synagogue.

On Shabbat, Cohen was walking near his home with his son when two strangers approached, one asking for directions.

"Before I knew what was going on," Cohen said, "he put me in a stranglehold and started banging my right arm across the sidewalk. Just kept smashing it and snapped it."

The attack, which Cohen thinks was aggravated by the fact he had nothing to give the men, sent a shockwave through the community. People were afraid to go to synagogue without protection Cohen said. Shalom zachors were rescheduled from Friday nights to afternoons.

"I really didn't want to go out at night anymore," said Cohen, now the spiritual leader of Aitz Chaim in West Palm Beach, Fla. "People who really wanted me to be at their home for a celebration at night, they would send a guard to escort me."
Carrying a gun on Shabbat is problematic for a few reasons.

"I've always had the feeling that the people with guns don't know how to use them," Cohen said. "I always felt that they would probably shoot themselves."

There also are nonreligious legal qualms about Jews carrying weapons to shul.

Except for the few people who qualify for a concealed weapon permit, carrying a gun is illegal.

"If people are carrying them, they are doing so at their own peril, because it is against the law," Alsberg said. "But one of these days, they are going to rob the wrong person, and it will cost them their lives, and that will be the end of the crime spree."

Another suggestion, posited before, would be for Jews to stuff a small amount of cash in their sock or hatband, with which they could appease a mugger. The late Rabbi Moshe Feinstein said this would not violate the Sabbath.

"He had ruled that one would be permitted to carry on the Sabbath things which normally would be forbidden to carry," said Rabbi Basil Herring, executive vice president of the Rabbinical Council of America. "This being a case of life or death, that would be permissible."

But Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein, the chair in Jewish law and ethics at Loyola Law School, said it would be better for Jews to travel to shul in large groups or simply stay home than to carry money or a gun.

"There are other ways for making sure people aren't as easy marks, rather than looking as first recourse for ways of bending the laws of Shabbat," he said.
Already, the frequency of street robberies has fallen.

"We don't live in a dangerous neighborhood, thank God, and we have to be very careful before we project that it is a panic situation," said Rabbi Elazar Muskin of Young Israel of Century City.

"You don't want to create public hysteria."

Read more about yids with guns at The God Blog

Make love, not war, on porn

2007-06-07T21:50:00.000-07:00

From: LA Daily News

LAS VEGAS -- If Craig Gross considers Jesus Christ his best friend, why is his arm around porn's leading man?

"We are the world. We are the children," Ron Jeremy sings as he and Gross draw a circus crowd at the Adult Entertainment Expo here.

During the past few years, the two -- a conservative Christian who considers masturbation a sin and a secular Jew who has performed in 1,900 porn flicks -- have grown close and, despite diametric career choices, have come to respect and appreciate each other.

"I have nothing against Ron Jeremy," says Gross, an ordained minister who leads the anti-porn crusade XXXChurch.com "I love this guy. I love hanging out with him."

Oh, how the war on porn has changed. The days of Christian groups prominently lobbying against obscenity are over. Enter the era of extending love and consolation to the adult industry and those touched by it.

Members of a Chatsworth church pray for the end of pornography and the healing of those it has harmed. Christian men gather to confess their Internet-fueled addiction. Rehab centers in Colorado and Kentucky provide short-term and months-long escapes more commonly used to treat drug abuse.

In the adult industry, it seems every dark corner has a ministry. The former strippers of JC's Girls. Hookers For Jesus. And XXXChurch, the Web's "#1 Christian porn site."

XXXChurch, which runs a Web site where people confess their struggles and offers free anti-porn software, has made the biggest splash, using gimmicks at adult conventions -- like Wally the Wiener, a 25-foot inflatable penis -- to lure eyes, and hopefully minds, away from depictions of depravity.

The message is simple: porn separates husbands and wives, defiles teenagers' minds and breeds lies. A tool of the devil, it can only be cured by God.

"People are blind to the consequences of this. They don't realize the problems this will cause down the line," Gross says, handing out Bibles. "This is a lie. This is not reality. Girls aren't like this."

`Not harmless fun'

In three decades, pornography has moved from a red-light industry reliant on seedy theaters and throw-away magazines to a multibillion-dollar enterprise piped into millions of American homes.

"I don't think America is 100 percent ready for porn. We're still a really puritanical society," actress Tera Patrick said. "But the business itself has definitely gotten a lot more popular in the five years I've been in it."

The daughter of an English-Jewish father and a Thai mother, the 5-foot-9 star with the DD chest and long black hair looks like a beauty queen. With her actor-director husband Evan Seinfeld, she owns the production company Teravision and is one of several stars credited with making the business mainstream. Last year, Patrick became the first porn star to grace the cover of FHM and also wrote a porn how-to column for the men's magazine.

But before there was Teravision, there was a cultural crisis, culminating in the mid-1980s with the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, which had been ordered by President Ronald Reagan.

``Under other circumstances,'' said commission member James C. Dobson, the conservative Christian who founded Focus on the Family, ``one would not willingly devote a year of his life to depictions of rape, incest, masturbation, mutilation, defecation, urination, child molestation and sadomasochistic activity.''

The 1,960-page report was rife with warnings about the negative social effects of pornography and allegations of adult-film stars being raped, kidnapped and tortured by employers.

But government pressure on the industry plunged when President Bill Clinton entered office in 1993, with then-Attorney General Janet Reno only concerned with child exploitation. Since then, the Department of Justice has struggled to confront Internet pornography, which has made it impossible for individual communities to keep out products they deem obscene.

``No one is seriously advocating the legalization of cocaine or heroin, but somehow the pornography industry has convinced a large segment of the population that viewing porn is not just harmless fun, but is also a fundamental right,'' Daniel Weiss, senior analyst for media and sexuality at Focus on the Family, said at a 2005 summit.

``By not calling pornography what it is -- highly addictive and destructive material -- we are heading for troubled times.''

Porn's pull

In six years of marriage, Kyle Paulson had kept his promise to abstain from watching pictures of naked women.

But work had been stressful and, over the course of 10 days, he surreptitiously visited pornographic Web sites.

``It ripped her heart out,'' Paulson, 41, of Westlake Village said of his wife's discovery five years ago.

He responded by installing filters on his computer and asking a friend to hold him accountable. Finally, Paulson confessed his struggles to the men at his church and started a Bible study for others like him.

``I didn't feel like I was addicted,'' he said. ``But I was afraid because it had such a powerful pull on me.''

Last summer, a poll by the online Christian marketplace ChristiaNet found that 50 percent of Christian men and 20 percent of Christian women are ``addicted'' to pornography. Christian ministers speak vaguely of surveys indicating 70 percent of men look at porn monthly.

But Nielsen/NetRatings detected only 42 million unique American visits to adult sites in November -- at most 14 percent of Americans.

XXXChurch claims worldwide porn sales top $70 billion, more than the gross domestic product of all but 54 nations. But Forbes magazine reported in 2001 that adult-entertainment industry annual revenues exceed no more than $4 billion, while other analysts have pegged it as an $11 billion or $12 billion business.

``Whether it is Christians talking about pornography or the media talking about pornography, the statistics talking about pornography consumption are the least reliable I have ever seen,'' Weiss said.

Anecdotally, though, anti-porn crusaders tell countless stories of men leading secret lives, of husbands learning to lie to their wives, of adults sacrificing their families to self-gratify.

``Pornography is intense pleasure, and when a man becomes addicted to intense pleasure, nothing else will satisfy him,'' said Steve Gallagher, president of Pure Life Ministries, a so-called sexual rehabilitation center in Kentucky.

``So what happens over time is he just becomes hollowed out as a person and he loses interest in interaction with other people -- wife, kids.

``He just becomes a zombie.''

Critics warn that porn glorifies extramarital sex, can be violent and can appeal to fetishes, to things God didn't design us to enjoy.

And it can be deadly, they say.

``Pornography, especially on the Internet, has become the crack cocaine of sexual addiction,'' said Ted Roberts, an Oregon pastor and author of ``Pure Desire: Helping People Break Free From Sexual Struggles.''

``Internet pornography takes someone from zero to full-blown addiction in two months.

``The implications are the disintegration of family, the loss of financial resources and, for a Christian man, it is the absolute craziness of him believing one thing and doing something else. It sets up a wrenching situation in the man's spiritual life.''

At Pure Life in Kentucky, self-enacted stays last six to nine months for men who feel enslaved by homosexual experiences, prostitute liaisons and pornography.

`A bondage to sin'

``It is a bondage to sin,'' Gallagher said. ``If it is a bondage to sin, only God has the power to break that bondage and replace that empty spot in their hearts. That really is what happens here. In simple terms: Their love for pornography and sex diminishes and their love for God increases.''

On a frigid Sunday morning in Chatsworth, two hours before the first service at The Church at Rocky Peak, a small group of prayer warriors treks to the property's apex.

This is a common occurrence, repeated the second Sunday of each month since January 2003. It began after Neil Johnson, the church's director of men's ministries, returned from a mission trip to Peru, where, he said, 700 people accepted Jesus as their savior.

Johnson was told that before his mission team's arrival, a group of women hiked to the mountains to pray for a spiritual awakening. That explanation made sense. In the Bible, the children of Israel often communicated with God from the mountaintops.

Why not, Johnson thought, do the same in a pocket of Los Angeles synonymous with sex?

With a panoramic view of the San Fernando Valley, the group members face the sun as it rises and sing praises to God, praying for their church, for spiritual revival below and for the end of pornography.

``Lord, we pray right now that we will be able to reach out to people in the adult(-entertainment) industry, that we will be able to love them, that we will tell them we love them but not what they do,'' Johnson's wife, Lynn, says.

``Lord, we pray right now for the marriages that have been pulled apart by pornography. Lord, we pray for restoration, we pray for healing.''

`Are you a sinner?'

At the four-day Adult Expo in Las Vegas, Gross and his XXXChurch carried the porn-ministry baton.

XXXChurch's booth was on the main floor, next to Gourmet Videos' 10-foot-wide poster board featuring 120 movie covers, from ``Tons of Fun'' to ``Over 50.''

Twenty feet away, fans posed with a 6-foot-1 transvestite in fishnet stockings, a pink bikini and 6-inch stilettos.

Nearby, actress Penny Flame, wearing a cut shirt that said ``Naughty American'' and tiny red boy shorts, collected money for breast cancer awareness by selling foam breasts signed by her, Patrick and other adult entertainers.

``Are you a sinner? Do you need redemption?'' Flame bellowed through a sheaf of papers rolled into a bullhorn. ``For $5, you can be redeemed.''

Fans surveyed the countless booths hawking niche films, erotic toys and photos with their favorite porn stars. Confusion was common when they passed XXXChurch and were handed the word of God.

The pocket-size Bible, written in contemporary language, is yellow and fuchsia with three stars, bubble lettering that states ``Jesus Loves Porn Stars'' and a sketched face that, with its aviator sunglasses, pencil-thin mustache and shaggy hair, most mistake for porn legend John Holmes.

``That might go against what you've heard, but it's true,'' the back of the Bible states. ``Jesus loves porn stars as much as he loves pastors, soccer moms, liars, thieves and prostitutes. We're all the same to Jesus. We're all just people who need God to save us from the mess we're in and lead us to a better way.''

Gross is an odd breed -- too much of a fundamentalist for liberal Christians and too provocative for theological conservatives. He sees himself as a minister cut from the same cloth as Jesus, someone unafraid to reach down into the gutter.

At a convention celebrating sin, porn patrons and performers not only accept the Bibles handed to them but ask for extra copies.

``What have we here?'' asked Adam Gilad, a fan from L.A.

``This is the real New Testament,'' J.R. Mahon, a XXXChurch pastor, responded.

``This is how you reach out?'' Gilad asked.

``We're not about shutting down the industry. We're about helping people,'' said Mahon.

``So you're real Christians? They're real Christians,'' Gilad said in a gee-whiz way.

He stuffed the Bible in his bag of adult toys and walked away.

Long Beach MSA leader supports suicide bombings

2007-06-01T19:43:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Ahmed Billoo is the product of an upper-middle-class Alhambra home. He grew up going to the local mosque on Fridays and holidays, playing sports with friends and enjoying the blessings of a comfortable American childhood.

Twelve months from completing a business degree at Cal State Long Beach, Billoo, 22, is fully Muslim and American, the two locked hand in hand.

And yet, he believes the righteousness of suicide bombers needs to be evaluated on a "case-by-case basis."

"Muslim or not Muslim, we all fear death. Blowing yourself up is not something everyone can do or something that everyone has the courage to do," said Billoo, the outgoing president of Long Beach's Muslim Student Association. "But don't get me wrong: I'm not saying we should all go around America doing that; Palestine is a different situation. There is a huge difference between saying we should do it and saying I'm going to be a suicide bomber. I just think it is something that Islam justifies."

He is far from alone, according to a report last week by the Pew Research Center. In its first nationwide survey of Muslim Americans, about 26 percent of American Muslims ages 18 to 29 share Billoo's sentiment to varying degrees.

"I would have to say it's actually like 60 or 65 percent of the youth," Billoo added. "It's very rare that I meet someone who says suicide bombings in Palestine are not justified."

When Pew asked respondents whether "suicide bombing and other forms of violence against civilian targets are justified in order to defend Islam from its enemies," 78 percent of all U.S. Muslims flatly condemned such attacks; 9 percent declined to answer or said they didn't know. But 8 percent of all Muslims -- and 15 percent of younger Muslims -- said attacks on civilians were justified "often" or "sometimes."

While a chasm separates such sympathies from actual martyrdom -- a leap Billoo said he wouldn't be willing to make -- news of the report has affirmed a deeply held fear: That the radical strain of Islam that has swept through Europe may be infecting this country.

"What you have is a low-wage jihad taking place, but people are not paying attention to it," said Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum. "These sentiments are seething, and at any time might erupt."

Overall, however, the survey of 1,050 Muslims was encouraging.

The Pew survey, conducted through telephone interviews from January through April, estimated 2.35 million U.S. Muslims -- far fewer than the 6 million to 7 million numbers many Muslim organizations use. Two-thirds of respondents are foreign born and are strong believers in the American way of life.

The majority think of themselves as American Muslims, not Muslim Americans; believe women are treated better here than in Muslim nations, and are worried about Islamic extremism. And 61 percent said Israel and Palestinian rights could coexist -- compared to 67 percent of the general American public.

"What the survey overwhelmingly shows is that the Muslim community is the one that we at PJA have experienced. It is not the one that some people have heatedly claimed constitutes a fifth column in this country," said Daniel Sokatch, executive director of the Progressive Jewish Alliance, which recently created with the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) the interfaith dialogue, NewGround.

Muslim American leaders have highlighted these positive findings -- "mainstream and middle class and not monolithic," as MPAC Executive Director Salam Al-Marayati put it.

They said reported sympathies for suicide bombings sounded an alarm, but, as Hussam Ayloush of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) noted, they weren't any more extreme than the 24 percent of Americans who, according to a recent poll by the University of Maryland's Program on International Public Attitudes, believe attacks against civilians are "often or sometimes justified."

"The word suicide bombing is very loaded and creates images of terrorism," said Ayloush, executive director of CAIR's Los Angeles area chapter. "A lot of the young people, what I hear from them, it is not something that relates to our American scene, but it is a view about a people under occupation responding to an occupation, and it is not the civilians but the occupier."

Despite Middle Eastern fatwahs to the contrary, the Quran explicitly prohibits any transgressions against civilians, said Khaled Abou El Fadl, an Islamic law professor at the UCLA School of Law. These limitations range from torching a noncombatant's tree to killing a rival warrior's wife.

But some Muslims miss this point, Abou El Fadl said, "because they confuse politics and ethics."

"Human beings have the remarkable ability to reach results that they want to reach," he said. "In the case of Islam, the argument goes something like this: Yes it is true that our prophet has all these prohibitions; yes it is true that our prophet acted in a fashion that respected the sanctity of civilians at war; yes it is true that the Quran prohibits transgressing, but -- and this is a big but -- we have a rule that says that in the case of dire necessity, what is prohibited becomes permissible."

Since before Sept. 11, 2001, prominent Muslim American leaders have repeatedly condemned terrorist attacks. Last summer, in response to accusations that one of MPAC's founders was a closet extremist who had referred to the "butchers" of Israel, the organization bought an ad in the Los Angeles Times that affirmed "we condemn terrorism in all forms, regardless of the identity of the victim or of the perpetrator."

But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict bends black and white into shades of gray, because many Muslims don't consider Israelis, particularly aggressive settlers, to be civilians.

"Islam believes life is precious, but we also believe in justice. We are not just going to let someone come into our house and kick us out. We are allowed to fight back," said Billoo, who is of Pakistani descent. "Obviously, the more conventional combat is preferred. But suicide bombings is a last resort."

The God Blog

2007-05-29T22:03:00.001-07:00

Check out The God Blog.

A marijuana raid and a mezuzah

2007-05-25T19:38:00.000-07:00

From: The Jewish Journal

Alex Grabiner was not a particularly religious Jew, but when he and a few friends opened a medical marijuana pharmacy last year in the San Fernando Valley, they invited an Orthodox rabbi to install three mezuzot in hopes that God would bless their business.

"We wanted to create a place where there was a drastically different energy inside than there was outside," said Grabiner, a 22-year-old Boston transplant.

"That is what the mezuzah symbolizes: That this is a house of people who believe."

But last month, the Karma Collective, as the pharmacy near Van Nuys Airport is known, was burglarized. The thieves didn't take much -- a few hundred dollars, no drugs -- but they cut through a steel security gate and knocked down the front door and another door that opened from the lobby to the cannabis shop.

The mezuzot were still hanging when the police arrived, Grabiner said. After the police were done, a mezuzah was on the ground, its sacred parchment removed from its plastic shell and from the safety wrapper.

Between those points in time, a burglary investigation turned into a narcotics raid, and Karma's Diana Hahn was placed in the back of a black-and-white over allegedly possessing illegal drugs. (The 23-year-old is now out on $100,000 bond; the district attorney was given an extension Tuesday to file charges by June 5.)

It's unclear what happened to the mezuzah. Grabiner and his colleagues -- they're hush-hush about titles and ownership of the pot pharmacy, which continues to operate -- claim Los Angeles police intentionally defiled the mezuzah. However, Capt. Jim Miller of LAPD's Van Nuys Division said, "To the best of my knowledge, whatever happened to that happened before our investigation."

"We don't just wantonly go through places and destroy property, and there is no reason we would have for destroying religious items," said Miller, who joined his officers at the Karma Collective investigation April 26. "If we had information that we believed narcotics was stored within an object and it was necessary for us to damage that object to recover the product, that would be fully documented -- and that didn't happen."

Whatever the case, Karma's tale underscores the broader reality that 11 years after California voters passed Proposition 215, implementation of the Compassionate Use Act, which legalized marijuana for medical purposes, remains mired in confusion.

Most cities and counties have done nothing to regulate cannabis clubs, which in Los Angeles have multiplied more than fourfold in the past year. While police are not proactively investigating the pharmacies, Miller said, they wouldn't overlook illegal activity of which they are made aware. In the case of Karma, he said, that was the sale of marijuana baked into edible cookies and chocolates, which Miller said are not protected by state law. The pharmacy contends that baked goods are protected by state law and continues to sell them, as do most clubs.

Additionally, the federal government does not recognize Proposition 215 or subsequent state legislation protecting medical marijuana and in January federal agents raided 11 L.A. cannabis clubs. Because of marijuana's purported lack of medicinal value -- last year, the Food and Drug Administration stated "no scientific studies supported medical use of marijuana," the Drug Enforcement Administration considers marijuana a Schedule I narcotic, as dangerous as heroin. Cocaine is a Schedule II.

But a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, found marijuana helpful in easing symptoms for certain cancer and AIDS patients, particularly those having problems eating.

Other studies have found cannabis eases chronic pain, relaxes muscle spasms, calms chemotherapy-induced nausea and promotes hunger in AIDS patients who are physically wasting away.

"Whether it is addictive, whether it has a negative effect on the mind -- all those things are irrelevant if you are talking about someone who is dying. What you are trying to do is alleviate pain," said Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector of American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism) and co-chairman of its bioethics department. "So the question about medical marijuana from a Jewish perspective is a slam dunk."

That might explain why Jews have been at the forefront of advocating the overhaul of marijuana laws. Many of Los Angeles' so-called "pot docs" are Jewish; so, too, is the local head of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. And one of the most prominent proponents of medical marijuana has been the Bay Area's self-styled "ganja guru," Ed Rosenthal.

A secular Jew who has spent the past four years fighting federal felony charges for running an Oakland pot club, Rosenthal's been convicted, seen his case overturned and is now being re-tried. Though authorities have agreed Rosenthal won't serve prison time if convicted, he at one point faced a possible lifetime prison sentence and millions of dollars in fines. All the while he has maintained not just his innocence but his moral obligation.

"When I was asked by the city of Oakland to become an officer to the city, I felt it was my duty, not just a civil duty but a biblical duty," he told the San Francisco Jewish newsweekly j. in 2003; he repeated the comment in a phone interview last week. "Not doing it would have been a sin of omission."

Laura McGee believes that. Growing up, the Santa Clarita Jewish girl was plagued by panic attacks so accute, she said that at times she was hospitalized almost monthly. Doctors tried Prozac and Celexa and Klonopin and more drugs than she can remember. Some helped, but not without inducing unbearable mood swings.

When she graduated last year from New Community Jewish High School in West Hills and moved from her family home, the walls closed in. Her mother tried what she considered her last resort and took McGee to a pot doc. It seemed to work. On a recent visit to the Karma Collective, McGee, who now works there and lives in Karma's Woodland Hills commune, was calm and articulate and yet indignant about the difficulty of legal access.

"Life and saving your own life and saving another life is the most important thing in Judaism. So I don't understand how this could be wrong," said McGee, 18. "It allowed me to live a normal life. To be happy. I never thought I would reach this point."

Fears of Islamophobia

2007-04-11T10:04:00.000-07:00

NORTHRIDGE - The Muslim university student was listening to his biology professor when the lecture sharply digressed from evolution.

"Don't talk to Muslims about religion," the California State University, Northridge, teacher reportedly said. "Because they turn to a different animal."

The unidentified student reported the incident to CSUN's Muslim Student Association, which sent a letter to university President Jolene Koester, demanding that the teacher apologize and that the university conduct sensitivity training.

"The school needs to provide a safe environment for our students' education," said Zabie Mansoory, Muslim association president. "It is a biology class, for God's sake. Religion shouldn't be anywhere close to a biology class."

The incident last month, which CSUN is investigating, illuminates a broader concern among the United States' estimated 5 million Muslims. With increasing frequency, Muslims are talking about an "Islamophobic" culture that is inciting violence and discrimination - more than five years after 9-11.

In February, a hacker entered the Web site for the council that oversees Southern California mosques and wrote a hateful obscenity aimed at Muslims on the mosque-finder page.

Three times in the past two months, the Islamic Center of Upland in San Bernardino County has been vandalized.

And in December, Keith Ellison, who was about to be sworn in as Congress' first Muslim, was widely criticized for wanting to take the oath on the Quran.

Hate crimes against Muslims have constituted about 11 percent of religious-bias incidents since 2002 - after spiking to 26 percent in 2001 from only 2 percent in 2000, according to the FBI. But religious-discrimination complaints filed with Muslim organizations have been climbing.

And some worry that could lead to broader problems. Marginalized Muslims in France rioted two years ago, bombed subways and buses in London, and bombed a train in Madrid.

"Islamophobia is a root cause of radicalization," said Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council.

"As we are trying to counter extremism, we are coming up on Islamophobia as a major barrier to integration of Muslim Americans into the larger society."

Biology digression

At CSUN last month, biology lecturer Haig Kopooshian had been talking about evolution when he digressed into discussing religious perspectives on science.

An Armenian Christian who lived most of his life in Lebanon, Kopooshian said his discussion of humans as the "most complex animals" caused him to unconsciously refer to Muslims as animals.

"I don't know what the problem is. You are an animal and I am an animal," he said, adding that he immediately apologized in case he had offended anyone in the class.

While Kopooshian said he harbors no ill feelings toward Muslims, plenty of Americans do.

In the film "Borat," a Virginia rodeo organizer asks Borat, whom he thinks is a Kazakh journalist, whether he is Muslim.

"I see a lot of people," the organizer says, "and I think, `There's a dadgum Muslim. I wonder what kind of bomb he's got strapped to him."'

Prejudicial feelings

It's an uncomfortable moment because while Borat is a film character, John Saunders, the rodeo organizer and assistant director of the Salem Civic Center, is a real person.

Last summer, a USA Today/Gallup Poll found that 39 percent of Americans have "at least some feelings of prejudice against Muslims" and 34 percent said Muslims living in the United States were "sympathetic" to al-Qaida.

"There are elements of truth (to that)," said Daniel Pipes, a Middle East expert and visiting professor at Pepperdine University. "That is not to say it is a broad-brush indictment of all Muslims. But there is a segment of Muslims who are alienated from the United States.

"Were Muslims unequivocal and consistent in condemning not just terrorism but the perpetrators and the ideology that support terrorism, the American public would feel much more confident."

The term "Islamophobia" was coined in 1997 by the British think tank Runnymede Trust. But before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, it had little use in the American lexicon.

Kevin J. Hasson, president of the Washington-based Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said growing suspicion of Muslim Americans isn't surprising.

"It isn't surprising people were fearful of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and it isn't surprising they decided to put them in internment camps," he added. "But it's still appalling."

Media voices blamed

Muslim leaders blame Islamophobia on voices in the media such as syndicated columnist Ann Coulter and politicians such as Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Virginia, who criticized Ellison's use of the Quran for taking the oath of office.

"The underlying issue is the growing anti-Islamic sentiment that is being fueled by the industry of hate in America," said Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an organization that has been accused of having links to terrorist groups, most recently in The New Republic.

"It's an industry that benefits financially and otherwise from policies of war, policies of division and policies of demonization of American Muslims."

But Ayloush also added: "America has its way of eventually accepting and integrating all segments of the population. It is just a matter of how long it takes. We are, as American Muslims, fully committed to integrating through dialogue and creating trust, no matter what attacks we are subjected to."

Pastors feel the pressure on Easter morning

2007-04-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

The senior pastor of Shepherd of the Hills hasn't been seen in two weeks.

Cell-phone mailbox full, voice silent to the 10,000 who attend his Porter Ranch megachurch, the Rev. Dudley Rutherford had escaped Los Angeles for deep prayer in the desert.

On Sunday, though, he will return triumphantly to a packed Pauley Pavilion at UCLA, where he will preach of Jesus Christ's death and resurrection during his church's relocated Easter service.

"It's a scary thought," he said in a phone interview from Rancho Mirage. "You know what is at stake: There will be someone in that arena making a spiritual decision for which the consequences are eternity. You multiply that one person by 13,000 people, and it is overwhelming."

So goes the pressure of being a Christian pastor at Easter, one of two days each year when pews swell with people who haven't seen an altar in months.

While Christianity couldn't exist without Christmas, which celebrates the birth of Christ, the faith's foundation is found in Easter.

On the heels of Holy Week, a time that drags Christians through the agonizing last days of Jesus' life and his death, pastors lead the celebration of the resurrection, which reminds Christians of their hope of eternal life.

"It is a journey through despair, meaninglessness, hopelessness, evil and the principalities of this world to some sense that God is still alive in this world," said John S. McClure, a professor of homiletics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "It's a big challenge."

It's not unusual, McClure said, for pastors to take a brief retreat, to collect their thoughts away from the clutter of daily life and the demands of leading a church. Others opt to stay at home but purposely adjust their schedule.

"My preparation is first of all through prayer," said Bishop Gerald Wilkerson, head of the San Fernando Pastoral Region of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. "You've got to slow yourself down, let go of all these things and stop for a moment."

As a bishop, Wilkerson no longer endures the long hours he did as a parish priest - visiting the sick, speaking at Catholic school services, spending hours upon hours in the confessional box and celebrating special Masses for each day from Thursday through Sunday.

But he does still prepare a homily for Easter Mass, which he will celebrate at St. Finbar Catholic Church in Burbank.

Most pastors prepare weeks, if not months, in advance. With some churches putting on big Holy Week productions - Passion plays, services for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday - those ministers know that if they don't at least outline their sermon by Palm Sunday, they will be drowning in research and prayer the following Saturday night.

"There is a modicum of pressure, but it is not unbearable pressure. It is natural pressure," said Jim Tolle, senior pastor of The Church on the Way in Van Nuys, who preaches three Easter services on Saturday and eight on Sunday. "A woman giving birth has pressure. A man closing a big business deal has pressure. An athlete entering a championship game has pressure.

"But, truly, the Jesus Christ I serve carries the burden for us."

As of Thursday, Rutherford said he was 80-90 percent done. And that was after a period of study that would make a doctoral student blush.

Last week, he drove to Rancho Mirage, a resort community near Palm Springs, taking with him a basket of books, news articles, Scripture and anything else he found during the past year that involved the resurrection.

He rose early each morning, often before the sun, and pored through his notes, shaving the 2-foot-tall stack of books and papers into a 3-inch-thick sheaf of notes. Next, he honed in on the 20th chapter of the Gospel of John, identifying a few points from the text to highlight.

"Then, I take that three inches of material and I fill in all the blanks," he said.

"It is the most important topic of the year," he later added. "You've got one shot at some of these people. This is the only time they go to church all year. And I've got one shot at getting them to come back."

'People are ready for this'

2007-03-17T10:06:00.000-07:00

CAMARILLO -- When Bill Lowe preaches his first sermon as a Catholic priest in May, he will be the only clergyman in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles with his wife, children and grandchildren listening from the pews.

Lowe, 68, is about to become the first married priest in the history of the country's largest Roman Catholic diocese.

"People are ready for this. They are ready for some married clergy," said Lowe, who retired in 2001 after 29 years as an Episcopal priest and unexpectedly converted to Catholicism soon after.

Lowe does not represent a sea change for the centuries-old requirement that priests remain celibate. Instead, he is the benefactor of an obscure order that Pope John Paul II issued in 1980.

That Pastoral Provision has allowed about 80 married men, all former Episcopal priests, to continue utilizing their gift for pastoral ministry after Catholic conversion. (Married former Lutheran pastors also have been permitted through a different provision.)

"We see it as a gift, his coming to the Catholic Church," said Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who leads the Santa Barbara Pastoral Region, which includes Ventura County. "He has a lot of experience. He's ministered to a lot of people for a long time, and he's bringing all of that to the Catholic Church."

Growing up in a fundamentalist Baptist home in Pasadena, Lowe decided at 15 he would become a priest.

"No matter how miserable the day at the parish, I always felt like I was doing what I should be doing," said Lowe, who was known in Massachusetts as the "burying parson" because of his gift for consoling the bereaved.

Rethinking celibacy

As an assistant pastor at Blessed Junipero Serra Catholic Church in Camarillo, Lowe will again be able to use his gifts for comforting and preaching.

Some priests and parishioners, however, hope Lowe brings more than experience -- that his ordination will help fuel the discussion about whether celibacy should be optional, as it was for the church's first 1,000 years.

"This move is not only historic but prophetic," Monsignor Padraic Loftus, pastor of St. Mel Catholic Church in Woodland Hills, wrote in his parish's Feb.18 bulletin. "Having a married priest in our midst must surely make us pause and reconsider, at this time of rapidly diminishing priests, why this privilege given to this couple could not be more widely granted."

Since 1985 -- for various reasons not limited to celibacy -- the number of active U.S. priests has plummeted from 57,317 to 41,794, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University.

One proposed solution, rejected by the Vatican, is to drop the celibacy mandate. After John Paul died two years ago, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll found 63 percent of U.S. Catholics thought priests should be able to marry.

Rule to protect land

The biblical basis for celibacy comes from the Gospel of Matthew: "Others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it."

But in the 12th century, when the Catholic Church adopted a celibacy requirement, it was as much about protecting property as it was committing priestly intimacy to God, said the Rev. Thomas Rausch, a Jesuit professor of theology at Loyola Marymount University.

"The church was worried about church property going to the descendents of priests," he said.

The internal drive against the celibacy requirement dates to at least the Reformation.

Celibacy has caused thousands of priests to leave ministry since the end of the Second Vatican Council 42 years ago, according to Corpus, an organization that pushes for priesthood reform.

"I am a married priest," said Russ Ditzel, the organization's president.

But to marry, Ditzel had to leave ministry in 1978, though he technically remains an ordained priest. Others, he said, have surreptitiously married and remained behind the altar -- "leading a double life."

Though Lowe agrees change is needed, he said he doesn't want to be a cause celebre. He just wants to get back to his calling.

'Where God wants us'

Lowe's journey began in early 2001, after retiring from the 100-family Parish of the Messiah in Newton, Mass.

Lowe and his wife, Linda, began celebrating Mass with friends at various Catholic churches. The liturgical experience was familiar, but he noticed the parish pews overflowing with Catholics, something he had not experienced in the shrinking Episcopal Church.

"I said to Linda, 'This is where it is happening,'" Lowe recalled.

And then, around Easter of that year, Linda told her husband they needed to make the switch official.

"We don't think of it as a conversion because we weren't changing. We were growing into something," said Linda, 66, who grew up in Glendale and was raised Presbyterian. "We feel very much now that this is where God wants us to be."

About that time, Lowe was finding retirement a bore. So, in 2002, he scheduled a meeting with Cardinal Bernard Law of the Archdiocese of Boston, whose nomination he sought for the Pastoral Provision.

But three days before the meeting, the Boston Globe broke the clergy sex-abuse scandal. That slowed the process for Lowe, as did his family's decision to return to California to care for Linda's ailing parents.

Pursuit of priesthood

They moved to Camarillo and joined Junipero Serra Church, which is known as Padre Serra Parish. Lowe continued his pursuit of the priesthood, which included reading 50 books in seven theological areas -- including ethics, church history and dogmatic theology -- a daylong psychological exam and an all-day oral exam.

"It was like getting a doctorate," he said.

On Dec. 1, he joined the church staff as a lay employee handling bereavement and counseling. Last month, amid much celebration, Curry ordained him a deacon.

"Everybody was grinning from ear to ear," said Anne Hansen, a two-decade parishioner of Padre Serra.

On May 6, Lowe's five-year pilgrimage from retirement to the priesthood will conclude when he is ordained by Cardinal Roger Mahony.

"It's finally happening," Lowe said, standing in his cramped office at Padre Serra, a Southwestern-style parish adjacent St. John's Seminary. "It is getting back to work and doing what I love to do.

"Yesterday, for example -- going to a funeral, to a hospital, visiting a baby, writing a sermon. It's getting back to what I love to do."

Higher calling

2007-02-27T00:25:00.000-08:00

From: Los Angeles Daily News
www.dailynews.com (video posted)

HOLLYWOOD - The Rev. Craig X Rubin read aloud a passage from 1 Kings as the sun set and his congregation prepared for the Sabbath.

Flicking a lighter to the lone candle atop the podium, Rubin burned a bud of marijuana on the flame. He puffed it out, walked to each of the eight members sitting in the pews and waved the smoldering cannabis around them.

This, Rubin proclaims, carries the prayers of Temple 420 to God.

That's the God of Isaac and of Jesus, because members are Christians and Jews. That makes the congregation Rubin founded last summer unique.

But what really sets it apart - and the reason Rubin will be in court Friday - is the temple's use of marijuana as a religious sacrament.

"I am willing to preach the Bible and go to jail if it means getting my message out there," the 41-year-old Panorama City man said. And he knows how strange that sounds.

"I'm a Jewish kid from Beverly Hills who went to UCLA. I could have been a lawyer making $250 an hour like the rest of my friends, or a TV producer. Instead, I'm teaching the Bible, selling weed on Hollywood Boulevard, facing seven years in jail - of course I'm crazy."

The temple's problems actually began as a poisoning investigation performed by homicide detectives. One day last fall, a delivery driver and a security guard were given baked goods from Temple 420, said police spokesman Kevin Maiberger. Both became violently ill and almost died.

No charges came of that, but a few weeks later, on Nov. 3, an undercover officer joined Temple 420. Five days later, at 4:20 p.m., police raided it.

The temple's assets were seized, as were Rubin's. He, his 18-year-old son and another man were charged with one count each of selling or transporting marijuana and one count of possessing marijuana for sale.

"They were trying to set it up under the guise of a religious right and then be able to sidestep marijuana laws," Maiberger said. "The deal was for a $100 initiation fee and $100 annual fee, you could buy all the pot you wanted for quote-unquote `religious purpose.' That's bull----."

Rubin, however, continues to distribute marijuana six days a week to the temple's members - there are more than 400 who have paid the initiation and annual dues - for a "requested donation" of $60 for an eighth of an ounce.

He continues to burn marijuana as a sacrament at Friday night services and preaches on the weekends - Old Testament on Saturdays, New Testament on Sundays, always at 4:20.

His defense relies on his insistence that God wants people to enjoy cannabis - for recreation, religion and industry - and his belief that federal and state laws protect his religious practices.

"It's not a laughable argument," said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA School of Law professor and religious freedom expert. "It's just an uphill argument."

Temple 420 would need to demonstrate that its beliefs are sincere and that marijuana use is not the foundation of the religion but part of a broader ethical system, Volokh said.

Also, the organization would need to prove that its practices don't come at the expense of a compelling government interest.

"But it's not open and shut," Volokh said.

In 1996, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rastafarians, who believe marijuana is a sacrament, could use federal law to defend their use of the drug, but not to defend distribution or possession with the intent to distribute.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that a small religious group in New Mexico could use a hallucinogenic drug in its services.

Groups often opposed to each other - from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Association of Evangelicals - had supported O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal in its defense against the government.

But the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, cited in the Rasta and O Centro cases, doesn't apply at the state level, and that's where the charges against Rubin will be heard.

California has not passed a law similar to the federal one, and the state Supreme Court has not clearly defined whether the state constitution provides greater religious protection than the First Amendment.

And, of course, there are plenty of Temple 420 skeptics.

"I would inherently be suspect ... of someone attempting to use the Bible as a justification of their desire to smoke marijuana," said Brad Dacus, founder and president of the Pacific Justice Institute, a legal defender of Christian values. "It's not unusual for people to try to use religion as a pretext for purposes of carrying out their pleasures."

Temple 420's tenets stem from Rubin's Jewish childhood, conversion to Christianity and experience taking peyote in American-Indian sweat lodges.

A pro-pot Republican partial to dark suits and red ties, Rubin hangs the American flag behind his podium and gushes about Ronald Reagan. He has been a marijuana activist since his days at UCLA in the early '90s.

A "roper" - who believes hemp is a medicinal marvel and a panacea for fiber, food and fuel shortages - and a "doper," Rubin was dubbed "Hollywood's Wizard of Weed" by High Times magazine and was a consultant on Showtime's hit "Weeds" for two seasons.

While undergoing a family crisis three years ago, Rubin began studying the Bible and, he claims, God revealed to him cannabis' status as the tree of life.

Last year, after the Supreme Court ruled on O Centro, Rubin reasoned he could openly practice his new beliefs, which he describes as "Judeo-Christian" and "Bible based."

In August, Scott Linden, a Pasadena attorney who has helped open several medical-marijuana dispensaries in the San Fernando Valley, filed paperwork with the Secretary of State's Office that registered Temple 420 as a religious corporation.

The organization, however, did not file for tax-exempt status, said Franchise Tax Board spokesman Patrick Hill.

Religious services began Aug. 26, and Craig Roberts, who added the X to his name after studying Malcolm X and changed his last name back to that of his Jewish grandfather, started going by "reverend."

Rubin did not attended a seminary but was ordained in 1990 by the Universal Life Church, an interfaith organization that offers "Free Instant Online Ordination."

"Using sacrament as a way to elevate my spirituality blew me out," said temple member Evan Goding, 29, of Orange, who drives to Hollywood each week with his Jewish girlfriend. "I was like, no way. It just clicked. It made so much sense.

"I've always believed that the world as a whole would be better if most people would just try marijuana. It brings out the better in people. And I'm sorry it's not legal; I'm sorry I can't use it for my religious beliefs without being persecuted."

Temple 420 is located in a strip mall at the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, next door to an H&R Block and across the street from a Christian Science Church. Fifteen to 30 people stop by most days to pick up pot, said the cashier, who wouldn't give his name.

Rubin gets his stash from the same guys who sell it to medical-marijuana dispensaries, but he charges about 20 percent less per eighth of an ounce. Income goes to pay salaries and support the temple, he said.

He insists he turns away about half the people who try to join; new members must sign an agreement professing, among other things, that "the God of the Bible created cannabis ... for the healing of all nations."

"There are six medical-marijuana clubs within walking distance of here," Rubin said. "If you're a liar, you don't need to come here. Pretend you are sick."

But it is clear some of Temple 420's members aren't interested in the religious services. The sanctuary seats about 40. Some members have never attended.

"For me, it was worth it," David Donahue, 37, of West Hollywood said of joining the temple. "If I didn't get it through him, I would get it through one of my friends' dealers - and I don't know anyone here.

"Two hundred bucks, to some people, it's a lot. It's a lot to me, don't get me wrong. But we pay for convenience."

Ownership of Torah scrolls disputed

2007-02-19T10:09:00.000-08:00

From: LA Daily News

Torah scrolls are the centerpieces of Jewish religious services. The written word of God, they are kept in arks like the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai and are revered above all Jewish symbols.

But for the past decade, Beth Midrash Mishkan Israel in Sherman Oaks has been "praying on stolen Torahs," said Rita Pauker, whose late husband, Rabbi Norman Pauker, lent the Orthodox synagogue four Torahs in the late 1990s.

Since her husband died in 2002, Pauker has repeatedly implored Rabbi Samuel Ohana to return the Torahs so she can give them to two nephews, rabbis in Florida and New York.

Ohana has refused, saying the scrolls belong to the congregation. In a brief phone interview Monday, he said Rabbi Pauker gifted the Torahs years after he closed his North Hollywood synagogue, similarly named Congregation Mishkan Israel, in 1994.

"He called me in front of his wife and he said, `Rabbi, I cannot bear having these Torahs gathering dust in my garage. Take them. Please,"' he said.

Ohana said he would return the Torahs if Pauker's widow could prove she was going to give them to another synagogue and not sell them. Three of them are likely worth about $10,000 to $20,000 each.

The dispute, deadlocked for the past two years, seems ripe for civil court. But it likely won't go there.

The only attorney Pauker can afford is Jeffrey Bohrer, a longtime member of her husband's synagogue (and coincidentally a former yeshiva student of Ohana's). But Jewish law prohibits Bohrer from bringing a lawsuit regarding a religious article in secular court.

Pauker could take the case to beis din, a rabbinical court, but neither she nor Bohrer has faith in the tribunal process.

"It has been my experience that the beis din is more interested in compromise than in the word of Jewish law," Bohrer said. "... The truth is the beis din probably is going to split the baby. Rabbi Ohana has no claim to these, and Rita has all claim. So it is unfair for Rita to settle for half."

Lending a Torah to a synagogue is a common way Jews fulfill a mitzvah, or a good deed, said Rabbi Nachum Sauer, who teaches Torah studies at Yeshiva University High Schools of Los Angeles. "It is on long-term loan to their synagogue, but he still owns it," Sauer said.

"It would be the same as lending any property to anybody else," added David Olivestone, spokesman for the Orthodox Union. "It would be like lending a book to a synagogue. If I wanted it back, it would still be mine. Or if I lent a chair. There is no real difference."

Except Torahs are worth much more, literally and physically, than common books.

When a scroll is damaged and can't be restored, it must be buried. The focal point architecturally and liturgically of Jewish services, said Elliot Wolfson, professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University, "the Torah is described in rabbinic literature as the Princess of God."

New Torahs take nine months to a year to ink and cost from the high $20,000s to high $40,000s, said Avrom Fox, owner of AllTorahScrolls.com, an online retailer. Containing 304,805 letters and 245 columns of God's word on roughly 60 sections of parchment, Torahs are made with varying degrees of decoration and aesthetics.

Rabbi Pauker's Torahs were originally donated decades ago by his sister to Young Israel of the Bronx. When the organization closed, the scrolls were given to Pauker.

Toward the end of his career, his congregation began to shrink. At least once, it joined with Ohana's for High Holy Days services at Valley Cities Jewish Community Center near Valley College.

When he retired in 1994 and closed his synagogue, Pauker transferred ownership of most of the assets to Ohana, including the ark, prayer shawls and religious books.

But the Torahs, according to a handwritten contract between Pauker and Ohana, were to be loaned for two years. At the bottom of the page is Ohana's signature.

However, Ohana said the contract was for insurance purposes, and five years later Pauker asked him to take the Torahs and put them to good use.

"He is disrespecting everything Jewish," was Rita Pauker's response. "He is operating on a lie. It's all a lie."

Golden Rule

2007-02-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

(This is an article I wrote for the December issue of Malibu Magazine.)

This was almost another cliché Cinderella story borne on card-table felt: Total unknown gets hooked on poker; enters the World Series of Poker for the first time; has an unfathomable run of cards and wins $2.5 million, $5 million, $7.5 million or, in Jamie Gold’s case, $12 million. The Malibu man and entertainment executive even added a heart-warming touch when he pledged during the tournament to use the money to make his father, who has Lou Gehrig’s Disease, as comfortable as possible. “I’m so lucky. I’ve had the greatest parents, and to be able to give back to them is the ultimate win,” Gold told ESPN during the tournament, which ended Aug. 10.

But the fairly tale faded in a flash. For the first time since the World Series was inundated with amateurs four years ago and practically became a $10,000-a-ticket lottery, people were saying far worse things about the world champ than that he just got lucky.

First, the gossip website Defamer claimed the former talent agent had padded his Hollywood resume. “Lies, lies, lies,” according to a post by Defamer Special Correspondent on Onetime Agents Who May Have Bluffed About Their Client Lists. “He was an ASSISTANT, and then a very very junior agent at a small agency in the early 1990's who MIGHT have taken messages from some of these people, before forwarding them to their real agent. He is a classic Hollywood liar - other people's successes become his own, and his own failures become somebody else's. He has always had a pathological relationship with the truth … which makes him ideal for poker.”

Gold’s former colleagues vouched for his experience and success, and, though openly annoyed, he brushed it off. “It is so funny to me that somebody would think that after winning the tournament that I would then go and rewrite history,” he said. “What do I have to prove to anybody? I could just be the champion of poker. Why do I need to say I even had a life before that?”

But 11 days after the $12 million win, Gold encountered a far bigger problem – a $6 million problem.

A struggling TV producer named Crispin Leyser sued Gold in Nevada for half of the massive poker prize. The two had met in Las Vegas in early August through Leyser’s wife and had begun talking shop. (Gold had recently become head of production for a new boutique studio, and Leyser had some reality TV ideas to sell – for instance, “Mrs. Robinson,” a dating show where older women would seduce younger men).

At some point, the lawsuit claims, Gold told Leyser that Bodog.com, a Costa Rican-based gambling site, had offered to buy Gold’s seat into the World Series if he got celebrities to wear Bodog gear during the tournament. He offered to split his winnings if Leyser secured a few Hollywood stars, the lawsuit claims, which he did in the form of Matthew Lillard and Dax Shepard.

But then Gold won, and he refused to transfer $6 million to Leyser. The poker world buzzed with gossip that Gold couldn’t play by gamblers’ rules regarding verbal agreements – generally good as gold (little “g”). It appeared legal exoneration might not be enough to spare the world champ a leper’s treatment.

“The operative words here, of course, are ‘as a matter of law,’” the blog Wicked Poker Chops remarked in response to a comment Gold’s lawyer gave The New York Times. “Because if it was ‘as a matter of Jamie’s word,’ or ‘as a matter of principle,’ or ‘as a matter of not f---ing with poker’s longstanding tradition of handshake deals,’ then Crispin Leyser would likely have his half, and we’d be able to watch the Main Event on ESPN with at least some sense of enjoyment and a modicum of respect for Jamie Gold’s confident table talk and spectacular big stack play (and yes, his fortunate flops).”

Then in early November, Gold’s attorney filed a response, arguing Leyser wasn’t entitled to any of the $12 million purse. No surprise. The shocker was this: Gold had promised Leyser a share of the winnings.

“I’m not worried. I always do the right thing – and I’m doing the right thing in this situation,” Gold told me in late September, when I met him in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel, across from the Beverly Center.

Other than those words, Gold didn’t want to talk about his legal problems. He had just returned from Johnny Chan’s invitational tournament in the Turks and Caicos Islands, where he finished 17 out of 163 pros. He wore blue jeans, a tan, untucked dress shirt and a black Bodog cap that read “Play Hard.”

Gold planned to remain at the Sofitel for a week. Afraid to return to Malibu after winning the World Series, he spent at least six weeks hotel hopping around Los Angeles. “I was getting a little too much attention. There is no problem now,” Gold said. “I wasn’t worried: Things were happening. When people are lurking outside my home and banging down the door at five a.m. and taking pictures like paparazzi, taking pictures of my ex-girlfriend when she is driving out of our place.”

His safety concerns began during the tournament when a friend warned Gold to watch his back; instead he asked Bodog to hire two burly bodyguards to stand by while he played. “I was the only thing in the way of everyone winning $12 million,” Gold told me. “Think about the Tonya Harding situation – and poker players are not known to be the most secure, stable community.”

He’s still adjusting to the new attention, albeit mostly benign or even enjoyable. People who see him (baseball stars past, Reggie Jackson, and present, Alex Rodriguez, to name a few) are excited to meet him, and every amateur poker player he crosses wants to beat him. The night before our interview, Gold threw the first pitch at a Dodgers game. And daily he had been taking calls from media outlets big (USA Today, The New York Times, CNBC) and small (a Jewish student newspaper). Twice he made the cover of Card Player magazine. “I don’t remember a day without interviews or appearances, and it doesn’t seem it is going to slow down,” he said.

Now 37, Gold grew up in Paramus, N.J. He was fond of magic, good at tennis and participated in Olympics of the Mind. “He was really superior in math,” his mother, Jane, said. “His teacher would complain that he didn’t know the steps to getting math, but that his mind just worked like a computer and he would get the answers.” Along with the family’s intelligence came an interest in card playing. Jane Gold’s father was a masterful gin rummy player, and her son learned to count 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-jack-queen-king-ace. “He was like a prodigy,” said cousin Dr. Glenn Eisen, a gastroenterologist. Gold claimed that at his mother’s urging he took the PSAT in fifth grade. He told me he scored in the 1200s and told ESPN.com he got a 13 something – compared to the average Pepperdine freshman’s 1240 as a high school upperclassman.

Gold’s childhood dream, though, was not to be a gambler but a Hollywood agent. Throughout college at the State University of New York at Albany, he interned for J. Michael Bloom, a high-profile New York agent, and he moved to L.A. three days after graduating. Within a year he was a full agent for Harter Manning Woo, soon representing the likes of Felicity Huffman, James Gandolfini and Jimmy Fallon. He became friends with his clients, and Fallon slept on Gold’s couch in Malibu for six months.

Gold had arrived beachside in 1993, two years after moving west. Cruising PCH with his college fraternity president, Gold saw a “for rent” sign where Coastline Drive hits the beach. “And I’ve never left,” Gold said of the two-bedroom townhouse with a 40-foot balcony perfect for watching the sunset.

Early this year, when it seemed time for a career change, Gold went into TV development as president of production for BuzzNation, a small firm completing the yet-to-be-purchased “Hottest Mom in America.” But before that, he had set out to become a part-time poker pro. He began at the $200 no-limit tables at Commerce Casino, then moved up to the $400 and $600 tables, and notched a few tournament wins in L.A., including a $54,000 payout at the Bicycle Casino in spring 2005. Before going to Las Vegas for the World Series, he was part of a weekly home game in Beverly Hills with a $10,000 buy-in – hardly an excuse for beer and peanuts with the boys.

“I took it really serious. I was playing 30 to 40 hours a week. Every moment I was awake basically that I wasn’t working I was playing poker,” he said.

Along the way, Gold got some help from Johnny Chan, the poker pro known as the “Orient Express,” who won back-to-back World Series titles in 1987 and 1988. In exchange for Gold working with Chan to develop a poker TV show that never caught on, Chan helped refine Gold’s poker chops. “He’s smart. He’s got a killer instinct. And he wants to win every tournament that he plays,” said Chan, who has called Gold the “Malibu Express.”

A more fitting nickname during the World Series would have been “Gold Rush.” Down early to half the $10,000 in chips he started with, Gold went on a tear, accumulating more than $100,000 by the end of Day 1 and taking the tournament lead at the end of Day 3, something he didn’t lose for the final seven days of the Texas hold ‘em main event.

Chan was there throughout the last hand, acting like a boxing manager. After Gold would play a hand, particularly after winning, he would return to the rail to boast to Chan and get some encouragement. “From the third day on. I treated those chips like my chips and I told him what needed to be done,” Chan said.

But etiquette was something Chan may have neglected to share. In addition to his hyper-confident table-talk, common of younger poker players, World Series commentators at times criticized Gold for trying to negotiate deals with his opponents. On one occasion late in the tournament, Gold raised the bet pre-flop with ace-jack and his buddy, Lee Kort, called with queen of diamonds and jack of hearts; the flop came four-jack-seven, all diamonds, giving Gold the best hand and Kort a flush draw. Kort acted first and moved all-in. Gold moaned, “Oh Lee, come on man. I’ve got top-top,” meaning he had top pair with the best kicker. Kort responded: “Me too.” Gold called the all-in bet thinking they had the same hand and would chop the pot, pardoning Kort for at least one more hand. Gold looked mortified when he saw he was about to knock his friend out of the tournament. “You said top-top. I wouldn’t have called you,” Gold said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you said we were chop-chop.”

Gold joined the final table Day 10 with $26.65 million in chips, almost 50 percent more than his nearest opponent. At 10:52 that morning, according to Leyser’s lawsuit, Gold left Leyser a message about the prize money. “Hey, it’s Jamie. Thank you for your message. I slept pretty well, so we should be fine. … I promise you – you can keep this recording on my word – there’s no possible way you’re not going to get your half … after taxes … You’ve trusted me the whole way, you can trust me a little bit more. I promise you there’s no way anybody will go anywhere with your money.”

Sixteen hours later, after Gold had pummeled his opponents hand after hand, he and his ex-girlfriend mugged for the camera in front of a cool $12 million. Entering the picture with their arms around them were Crispin Leyser and his wife, Jules – no doubt wanting a photo with the mound of cash they believed was half theirs.

But now, determining who deserves what is an order for Clark County District Court. In Gold’s response seeking dismissal of Leyser’s lawsuit and the release of the $6 million being held by the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, Gold claims, through proof of his contract with Bodog, that he was not obligated to secure celebrities for his sponsor. He only offered to share his winnings with Leyser because he felt sorry for his new friend, who had told Gold he was going to lose his house in Los Angeles and another home in his native Britain. After Gold took the chip lead, Leyser began hounding him and pressuring him to sign a contract about their agreement, which Gold denied. On the last day of the tournament, the harassment had pushed Gold to a breaking point, so he left Leyser the message about getting “half … after taxes.” But even half of $12 million minus Uncle Sam’s was not enough for the eagerly rich Leyser, who insisted on $6 million and no less. Once Leyser filed the lawsuit, Gold decided, according to his legal response, that he didn’t want to give a non-obligatory “gift” to such an ungrateful chum.

For Gold, it remains to be seen if those talent agent skills that have been so valuable on the poker felt – the ability to read his opponents, to protect his assets, to bluff, to befriend and bisect – could prove golden yet again.

“Sometimes the best plays I have ever made are plays where I have lost the hand but I’ve just lost the minimum,” Gold told me, explaining his poker intuition. “Sometimes it’s not how much you win when you win but how little you lose when you lose. I think that is the mark of a great player.”

Well, maybe he’ll settle.

Throwback Christians

2007-02-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

From: Los Angeles Daily News
www.dailynews.com

SIMI VALLEY - The twenty-somethings trickle into the tiny apartment.

They laugh loudly and share the previous week's stories about their spiritual struggles. Two slide into the bedroom to hash out a disagreement while the host busily places snacks on the table. Then the group gathers in the living room to pray.

This scene is not unlike a typical Bible study. No altar, no stained-glass windows, no pastor in a purple robe - simply the message of Christ in a small-group format.

But this is not Bible study. For these eight refugees of traditional Christianity, this Tuesday night is like Sunday morning. This is their sanctuary. This is where they pray and sing and study and take Communion.

This is house church.

"You walk into church and people are like, `Hey, how are you? God bless, man.' Really, inside, you could be completely dead, dying, rotting inside. But you are never going to share that because there is no authenticity about doing life with people in mainstream church," said Mike Dickran, 25, of Camarillo.

"What is so exciting about doing small-group house church is just the chance to be real."

At a time when megachurches are blooming, when the yardstick for success seems to be the fullness of pews and the weight of offering plates, a growing number of Christians are casting aside institution for intimacy and gathering weekly in homes, apartments, parks or wherever the Spirit moves them.

"It's not about where we meet or how big the sound system is or even how many seats we fill," said Chris Burton, a former college pastor at Calvary Community Church in Westlake Village who left seven years ago to begin a Simi Valley house church that has grown into five separate gatherings, including the one Dickran attends.

"Those things are not indications of success for us - rather, personal commitment to the Lord and life transformation."

House churchers view themselves as throwback Christians. They express a nostalgia for pre-Nicean Christianity, before the canons and creeds and clergy.

The most oft-cited depiction of first-century Christians comes from the New Testament book of Acts, Chapter 2:

"Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved."

Just how quickly house churches are multiplying is a source of debate.

A Ventura-based Christian polling organization reported last summer that house-church attendance had grown about tenfold during the past decade, to 20 million, or 9 percent of Americans, up from about 1 percent in 1996.

"More believers are going back and looking at the early church, looking at the book of Acts and seeing these people who had such a vibrant faith," said George Barna, founder of the Barna Group.

"There were no positions, there were no salary scales, there were no programs. It was just people meeting in living rooms."

The Center for Missional Research, with the help of Zogby International, followed with its own study that found that most people who attend weekly house gatherings also attend traditional churches. Only 1.4 percent of those surveyed attended house church only.

Although registered house churches are tracked by various Web sites, countless others operate under the radar. They are structured to spin off new groups as they grow beyond about 20 members.

Observers agree the house-church movement is spreading, thanks largely to what they call a post-modern Christianity that has left behind the confines of church walls and traditions.

"It is going to be around for a long time and may provide an example for institutional Christianity," said Todd M. Johnson, director of the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts. "But it's not going to take over."

Long the norm in Asia, Africa and Soviet-era Russia - where Christians met in homes out of necessity - only recently has house church (also dubbed "home church" and "simple church") become an American phenomenon.

"It is about authenticity," said Brian McLaren, a post-modern Christian leader and author of "A New Kind of Christian." "Church services have succeeded at being more characterized by excellence, but one of the consequences of that excellence is artificiality and the feeling that everything is produced and that it is a show."

House church is one of a number of alternatives to traditional church services. It raises questions about the long-term spiritual health of members, said Eddie Gibbs, professor of church growth at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena and co-author of "Emerging Churches."

"This kind of doing your own little thing means you are separated from Christian tradition and wisdom over the centuries," Gibbs said. "Who is it you are gathering into these groups? Are you gathering malcontents or are you genuinely reaching out to your neighbors and friends who never got involved in the church?"

There also is a lack of accountability to outside leadership, critics say. And groups are prone to implosion if leaders burn out or fail.

In Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks, the groups spawned by Burton and Adam Finlay gather two Saturdays a month to remain connected and accountable and meet separately each week for church services.

With a bachelor's degree in theology from The King's College, a small Pentecostal school in Van Nuys, Finlay planned to be a professional minister. Instead, the 27-year-old newlywed said, God guided him to installing home-entertainment systems by day and leading a house church Tuesday nights.

After reading through the Gospels, the church at Finlay's - he intentionally doesn't call it his church - began studying Acts.

Finlay led a recent discussion, but everyone was encouraged to add his or her own religious experience and theological understanding.

"Um, if I can just interject something real quick," Dickran said before drawing a parallel between God's selection of the Apostle Paul for a specific mission and the divine calling of modern-day Christians to certain tasks.

This is one of the benefits of house church. Another Barna study, published last month, reported that house churchers are dramatically more satisfied than traditional churchgoers with their group's leadership, faith commitment, level of personal connectedness and spiritual nurturing.

"I really can't think of anything that is lacking here that a larger church has because of the intimacy and close fellowship," said Jeff Savage, 28. "So I really couldn't say I miss anything about a large church."

Smells like an onion ...

2007-02-10T01:54:00.000-08:00

From: Los Angeles Daily News
www.dailynews.com

NORTH HILLS - The Onion is peeling.

The Sepulveda Unitarian-Universalist Society, long a voice for peace and against war, is at war with itself.

The society - recognizable by its bulbous sanctuary - voted last fall to sell about half its property to a developer of senior artist colonies. The congregation's board and minister envisioned harmony between young and old and a solution to the Onion's dire finances.

With only 96 members and 4.84 acres on Haskell Avenue, Meta Housing Corp.'s offer to pay at least $3 million for the Onion's parking lot and vacant land behind it seemed like a perfect fit.

"I wasn't looking to be rescued," said Gloria Burr, congregation president. "I was looking to do something that would fulfill a vision - to help others and to utilize the land."

But after the congregation voted 36-15 to approve Meta's offer last October, a few members took a closer look.

They didn't like what they saw.

The contract allows Meta to decide whether to enact Plan A on 2.4 acres or Plan B on about 2. Plan A would absorb the entire parking lot and force the Onion to build a new one on the front lawn.

Opponents also worried the construction of about 130 apartments would drag on for years and disturb their spiritual lives.

"We were simply aghast at the amount of land that was being taken by Meta, and we felt the Congregation was not allowed to be aware of this when the vote was take(n)," Ida Hurt, who has attended since 1966, wrote in a letter to the board. "Now that we have read the contract, we consider it completely one-sided and unfair."

That led to another congregational meeting on Sunday, when members voted 39-30 against the contract.

"Quite frankly, I'm not only not optimistic it will go through," board member Don Ordway said of the development he supported. "I'm not optimistic the congregation will survive as anything more than a shadow of what it is."

Uncertain future

It's unclear what will happen next. Burr, a 26-year member, warned the congregation that breaking its contract could result in penalties of $250,000 - something the Onion can't afford.

"They did not rescind the contract," said the Rev. Bob McDill, the congregation's minister. "They cannot. The contract has been signed. It is a done deal."

Meta has been widely recognized for its senior-housing developments, particularly the award-winning Burbank Senior Artists Colony, which landed laudatory New York Times coverage in September.

Thirty percent of those units are designated as below market, which appealed to McDill and the Onion's board. So did the idea of encouraging artistic expression of aging minds and the aesthetic pleasantry of Meta's landscaping.

"The toughest first battle we had - who knows what the next will be - was the idea of whether the congregation wanted to sell their valuable piece of property," said Meta President John Huskey. "We were able to convince them at least some of our mission is to provide activities that will keep people healthy longer."

Huskey was unaware of the turmoil being caused by the land sale.

The strife has spread into spirituality. McDill's reaction to last Sunday's vote has opponents of the land sale complaining that the minister, a retired Presbyterian pastor used to more top-down church governance, is ignoring the pleas of the people.

"He was the king of the roost in his last church and everybody had to do what he said," said Mike Dickson, the Onion's newsletter editor. "But it's not that way in the Unitarian Church, where the people decide."

Several moves

The Onion traces its history to 1943, when a small group of religious free-thinkers met in a Van Nuys house. The United Liberal Church of the San Fernando Valley moved several times before buying ranch property at 9550 Haskell Ave.

In 1964, architect Frank Ehrenthal, who had slept for two weeks in the homes of the congregation's members, completed a truly unique sanctuary - large and round, with no corners where people could hide, and a tall, pointed roof.

"The Onion is not a building, but a state of mind, a philosophy of life, an attitude toward people," Muriel Lustica wrote in a short, comb-bound history of the early years.

Unitarianism and Universalism both came to the United States in the 1700s with those who settled in New England.

Those churches considered themselves descendents of Protestantism but with profound doctrinal differences: They believed in God but not the divinity of Jesus and in the salvation of all humans, regardless of their saviour.

As the liberal religions, which merged in 1961, spread across the country, they increasingly sloughed their Christian roots. Places like the Onion associate no more with Christianity than with Hinduism and Humanism. That's why it is a society, not a church.

With some 220,000 American members, the religious movement has been famous for its social activism - for fighting slavery and opposing the Vietnam War, for promoting suffrage and advocating gay rights.

In 1970, when students at University of California, Los Angeles, and California State University, Northridge, were prohibited from inviting William Kuntsler - a virulent anti-war protester who defended the Chicago 8 - to speak on campus, the Onion offered its arena.

Eleven years later, the North Hills congregation decided to spend $2,800 needed for a new roof to instead qualify a state ballot initiative calling for a "freeze" on basing U.S. nuclear missiles in Europe.

Membership, though, has been dwindling for years, down from 220 two decades ago.

The landscaping also has seen better days. The lush green lawn and beautiful flowers pictured on the "Save Our Onion" badges have browned and wilted.

"We don't have money to fix the sprinklers and we can't pay for the water," said McDill, a part-time staffer. "And the gophers are having a field day."

The Onion lacks air conditioning and hot water, and the religious education facilities are dismal, something the board hoped to solve with the influx of Meta's money.

"Unitarians are famous for splitting or going to another church," said Art Dell, a 81-year-old former congregation president. "And there probably will be some of that now, no matter what happens."

A History of Newsprint

2007-02-03T10:40:00.000-08:00

Here is an article I wrote for UCLA Magazine about the history of the Daily Bruin.

Eruv up there

2007-02-01T14:38:00.000-08:00

OAK PARK -- It seemed like a real mitzvah.

Chabad of the Conejo's 120 families would spend $20,000 on a religious structure that would benefit all local Jews.

Common in Los Angeles and most big American cities, the eruv -- a thin monofilament line strung from light pole to light pole to symbolically extend a Jew's private domain to everything within the loop -- would enable Jews to carry keys and push strollers on the Sabbath without violating Halacha, or Jewish law.

But the eruv, constructed in late December, was met by public disgust.

``Is it me or am I the only one that finds this strange?'' Carlos Bernal of Oak Park wrote in an e-mail to local officials. ``Why don't we install a crucifix at every stoplight? Or the picture of Muhammad at every pedestrian crossing?

``I'm not a religious guy and certainly don't have anything against the Jewish faith ... but this rubs me the wrong way.''

Jews were equally critical of the glistening wires that zigzagged across residential streets -- a threat to property values and unsuspecting birds.

``It is not some biblical thing that says, `Hang some fishing line.' It's an arbitrary man-made work-a-round,'' said Susan Flores, a Reform Jew who, like most, does not keep Sabbath.

``While you are making stuff up, why don't you make up something that is a little less obtrusive.''

So less than a month after the Conejo Eruv was erected in Agoura Hills, Oak Park and Westlake Village, its supporters tore down the Oak Park section.

On Friday, organizer Tom Block said the lines still up in Agoura Hills and Westlake Village, where they were properly permitted, would come down within the week because they serve no purpose if the eruv is incomplete.

``It is a dead issue at this point,'' Block said. ``The eruv is gone.''

Yet, despite the contrition of eruv committee member Eli Eisenberg at a heated public meeting last Tuesday, rancor has not subsided in this tight-knit bedroom community of 15,000 in eastern Ventura County.

Vitriol ran so high at the Municipal Advisory Council meeting, during which only one of about 30 speakers favored the eruv, that a Jewish reporter for the community paper left in tears.

``They can practice wherever they want,'' said Tom Hughes, president of the Morrison Estates Owners' Association, which threatened eruv organizers with legal action. ``But it is unreasonable to think they are going to string wires all over someone else's -- or their -- community where 99.9999 percent of people don't share their religion.''

Block, a 47-year-old real estate investor, sought permission to string the wire between Southern California Edison street lights two years ago.

Although he said the plan included Agoura Hills, Oak Park and Westlake Village, the paperwork identified it as the Agoura Eruv, and the permits applied only to Agoura Hills and Westlake Village -- something he said he didn't realize.

The Conejo Eruv -- pronounced A-roov -- was shaped like a Hershey's kiss. Using the Ventura Freeway as its base, it extended north on Kanan and Lindero Canyon roads until the two intersect, then continued on Lindero before meandering through the Morrison Estates -- 360 large homes with regal lawns and price tags approaching $2 million.

In a community where utilities are buried -- with only street lights and electrical lines along the road -- it didn't take long for residents to spot the thin wire 30 feet overhead.

Then people noticed the injured hawks.

In all, three red-tailed hawks were found lying in the road. They were taken to a wildlife center, and one had to be destroyed. Residents said they suspected the eruv.

``Such an injury could have been caused by a large number of obstacles, including monofilament line,'' wrote Duane Tom of the California Wildlife Center in a letter for Tuesday's meeting. ``However, it is impossible to know if such a line was indeed the cause of the hawk's injury.''

By then, about 80 people had called or e-mailed Ventura County Supervisor Linda Parks. When she asked the Public Works Agency why they approved the eruv, they directed her to Edison.

That's when she discovered the permits didn't exist, and Block agreed to dismantle the Oak Park section.

``I was on top of the world with it, happy about the whole thing two weeks ago,'' Block said. ``And it just crashed.''

The concept of enclosing a community so Jews can behave on the Sabbath as if they were within their own home stems from the 40 years Israelites spent wandering the desert after the Exodus. Jewish rabbis developed the rules when forming the Talmud centuries later.

Running a monofilament wire from post to post creates a series of ``door frames'' that, according to Jewish law, act like a wall.

Without it, Orthodox Jews cannot take a bottle of wine to a friend's house on the Sabbath, and those with small children have trouble attending synagogue. Driving a car is prohibited, regardless.

``I didn't understand it. I'm Jewish,'' said Todd Haines, chairman of the Municipal Advisory Council. ``Bad Hebrew school, I guess.''

In fact, all five members of the council are Jewish. None are Orthodox, and none were familiar with the high-wire loop.

Though only Orthodox Jews follow the laws regarding an eruv, they say that all Jews -- Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and secular -- benefit from having one in the community because it helps them subconsciously follow a stricter interpretation of God's law.

Chabad of the Conejo, which has five houses, is part of an Orthodox Jewish movement that began 250 years ago in the Russian town of Lubavitch.

Hasidic Jews are known for their black hats, long beards, evangelical outreach to less observant Jews and an anxious awaiting for the Messiah. (The voice mail greeting of Rabbi Yisroel Levine of the Oak Park Chabad ends, ``And, of course, we want Moshiach now. Bub-bye.'')

On Conifer Street, the Oak Park Chabad is a single-story house with a black mailbox, red-tile roof and four palms on the lawn. The only hint it might not be a home is the stucco wall where a garage door should be and a line that splits the driveway into two parking spots.

Often using residences, Chabads blend into neighborhoods as seamlessly as most eruvin -- plural for eruv.

Nationwide, at least 70 eruvin exist. The approval process often takes years, and many proposals have died amid unattainable requirements.

``Imagine getting a permit to open a restaurant. But the city says that there can be no chairs in this restaurant, because people could fall off them and hurt themselves. And there can be no silverware, because they could be used as weapons. Lastly, there shouldn't be food, because people could choke,'' the leader of a Jewish group in Palo Alto told the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California after abandoning its plans in 2000.

``Other than that, feel free to open a restaurant.''

In other communities, including L.A., eruvin have been erected with scant concern.

The Los Angeles Community Eruv, the largest in the world, encompasses everything within the Ventura Freeway, the Santa Monica Freeway, Vermont Avenue and the San Diego Freeway.

In the San Fernando Valley, an eruv runs from the Ventura Freeway to Sherman Way and from the San Diego Freeway to the Golden State Freeway. Against the cluttered city skyline, few ever notice.

``L.A. has a mentality of live and let live,'' said Rabbi Eliezer Eidlitz, who is involved with the Valley Eruv. ``A lot of people do things that are strange to other people, but they say, `Fine, you do your thing that is strange and I do my thing that is strange. We'll leave each other alone.'''

Bow down, party people

2006-12-30T14:01:00.000-08:00

From: Los Angeles Daily News
www.dailynews.com

PASADENA - It was three days until the big game, but Joe Cahn's RV was already in line Friday morning outside the Rose Bowl.

He'd been near the front since arriving late Thursday from the Pacific Life Holiday Bowl in San Diego, 15 hours before the parking lot would open for a weekend of tailgating for the Rose Bowl game between Michigan and USC.

Cahn does not bleed maize and blue, or cardinal and gold. He doesn't have a ticket for Monday's game - and he doesn't want one, either.

In the same way that David Stern isn't an ordinary basketball executive and William Bratton isn't simply a police officer, Cahn is not just another football fan.

"The first year after going to every stadium in the NFL," Cahn said of 1996, "I was declared the King of Tailgating."

By whom, he is asked.

"By myself."

Cahn goes by a different title now. Kings can be overthrown and presidents voted out, but commissioners are appointed for life.

And so Joe Cahn, a 58-year-old retiree who has tailgated at 44 collegiate and professional football games this fall - sometimes four in a weekend - has branded himself the Commissioner of Tailgating.

"I think every man would aspire to such a job, but there's only room for one. And I don't know if anybody could really fill Joe's shoes," said Bill North, one of Ford Field's "tubgaters" in Detroit. "He's too good at it for anybody else to try to compete with him."

Short, stocky and resembling actor-director Rob Reiner, the commish is a bit of a comedian. He promoted himself in 2004 as a write-in candidate for president.

"I felt the Republican Party is a good party and the Democratic Party is a good party, but there is no party as good as the Tailgate Party - because that is a party," he said.

"I'm still contesting the election. There were a lot of ballots smeared with mustard and barbecue sauce."

Cahn began his journey in 1996, a year after divorcing Karen Cahn, whom he is engaged to remarry next Nov. 16 - their original wedding date.

After visiting all 29 National Football League stadiums, Cahn found a calling. He's since become an ambassador for weekend warriors, a fan's favorite in scores of cities, big and small.

But his status in tailgating isn't universally known or accepted. A quick survey at the Rose Bowl demonstrated that much.

"Do you know how I know the Commissioner of Tailgating?" asked Alan Meda. "Because that is him right there."

Meda was referring to fellow University of Michigan alum Dave Moen. Meda reversed course, however, after being told of the man who drives the land in search of the best pre-game parties.

Cahn's nomadic nature has left him without a hometown.

His house on wheels is a 40-foot silver Country Coach. The top-of-the-line recreational vehicle is complete with slides that expand the coach's center into a spacious living room, with a couch on one side and a cherry-wood desk on the other. A plasma TV hooked to satellite and showing the NFL Network hangs above the leather captain's seats.

"In Southern California and New York, people say, `My God, it's bigger than my apartment,"' Cahn said.

He paid $250,000 for the RV last year and has driven it 72,000 miles; this year he's burned through 12,834 gallons of diesel fuel.

He doesn't like to talk money, but said he gets by on a few corporate sponsorships (Stanley Thermos bottles and the Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association), occasional speaking engagements (the upcoming Colorado RV Adventure Travel Show) and savings from the New Orleans School of Cooking, which he sold in 1993 for "well under $10 million - well under $10 million."

Surprisingly, he's attended only four games this year - 10 percent of those at which he's tailgated. Tickets are expensive and so is the food and beer.

Besides, Cahn views his role as a conservator of "the last great American neighborhood," which he finds on Thursdays and Saturdays and Sundays and Mondays on blacktops and grassy knolls.

"It is the job that everybody wants. Forget about the perks of being the commissioner of football," he said. "The perks of the parking lot are the best - the perks of family, food and football."